Summer Days in Shakespeare Land

by Charles G. Harper

The Memorial Fountain rather misses being stately, and it would be better if the quarter chimes of its clock did not hurry so over their business, as if they wanted life to go quicker, and time itself to be done with. Amity is the note of Mr. Childs’ fountain, and the “merry songs of peace” are the subject of one of the carved quotations: that is why the British Lion and the American Eagle alternate in effigy at the angles, supporting their respective national shields of arms. The British Lion looks tame and the American Eagle is a weird fowl wearing the chastened “dearly beloved brethren” expression of a preacher at a camp meeting.

The Shakespeare Memorial by the riverside is the partial realisation of a project first considered in 1769, at the jubilee presided over by Garrick, revived in 1821 and again in 1864. This was an idea for a national memorial, to include a school of acting: possibly with Shakespeare’s own very excellent advice to actors, which he placed in the mouth of Hamlet, set up in gilded words of wisdom in its halls. The school for actors has not yet come into being, but at the annual festivals, when Shakespearean companies take the boards in the theatre which forms a prominent part of the Memorial, you may witness quaint new readings of the dramatist’s intentions.

The great pile of buildings standing by the beautiful Bancroft gardens, in fine grounds of its own beside the river, “comprises,” as auctioneers and house agents might say, the theatre aforesaid, a library, and picture gallery. It was built 1877–79 from funds raised by a Memorial Association founded by Mr. Charles E. Flower of Stratford-on-Avon, and very widely supported. The architect, W. F. Unsworth, whose name does not seem to be very generally known, has produced a very imposing, and on the whole, satisfactory composition, whose shape was largely determined by that of the original Globe Theatre of Shakespeare’s own time in Southwark. It is of red brick and stone, and a distinct ornament to the town and the riverside, although its gothic appears to have here and there a rather Continental flavour. A little more pronounced, it might seem almost Rhenish. But let us be sufficiently thankful the Memorial did not take shape in Garrick’s day, when it would certainly have assumed some terrible neo-classic form. There are some particularly good and charming gargoyles over the entrance, notably that of Puck carrying that ass’s head with which Bottom the Weaver was “translated,” in Midsummer Night’s Dream. A sketch of it appears on the title-page of this book. I do not think a description of the theatre, the library, or the picture gallery would serve the object of these pages, and I do not propose to describe the monument designed, executed and presented by Lord Ronald Gower, because that is done in every guide-book, and because I do not like that extremely amateurish and flagrantly-overpraised work: may the elements speedily obliterate it!

Quick-growing poplars have reached great heights since the buildings were first opened, and the Theatre and Memorial is being rapidly obscured by them. It looks its best from the Clopton Bridge, and combines with Holy Trinity church to render the town, viewed from the other side of the Avon, a place of considerable majesty and romance.

Crossing either that ancient bridge to the “Swan’s Nest” inn which has become subdued to the poetry in the Stratford air and has abandoned its old name, the “Shoulder of Mutton,” we may roam the meadows opposite the town. Or we may equally well cross the river by the long and narrow red brick tramway bridge, built in 1826 for the purposes of the Stratford-on-Avon and Shipston-on-Stour Tramway: an ill-fated but heroic project that immediately preceded steam railways. The Great Western Railway appears to have some ownership in the bridge, and by notice threatens awful penalties—something a little less than eternal punishment—to those who look upon—or cycle upon—it.

Somehow we reach those free and open meadows over against the town where the Avon runs broad and deep down to the mill and the ruined lock, just opposite the church. It is from these meadows that the accompanying drawing of the church was taken. The breadth of the river between the Clopton Bridge and the church is exceptional, and gives a great nobility to the town. Both above and below these points it becomes much narrower, and the navigation down stream is a thing of the past. The Avon down to Binton and up beyond Charlecote is, in fact, rendered impassable by difficulties created by the Lucy family of Charlecote, and by the Earl of Warwick. Private ownership in navigable or semi-navigable streams is an ancient and complicated affair concerned with rights of fishing, of weirs and mill-leets, and other abstruse and immemorial manorial privileges, and it has furnished the lawyers with many a fat brief. It has cost the Corporation of Stratford-on-Avon £700 in recent years, in a dispute about this ruined lock and the impeded access to the river past the church and the mill, to the other decayed lock at Luddington. The Lucys gained the day, and that is why we cannot go boating down the river from Stratford.

We may cross the stream just below this point, by a footbridge, and come into the town again past the big corn-mill whose ancient ownership caused all this trouble. The present building is only about a century old, but it is the representative of the original mill that stood on this spot over a thousand years ago, and belonged then and long afterwards to the Bishops of Worcester. The exquisite humour of the manorial law ordained not only that the people of Stratford were under obligation to have their corn ground here, but that they were also made to pay for it. And as competitive millers were thus barred, there can be no doubt but that corn-milling was an expensive item. The old churchmen loved eels, useful for Friday’s dish, and the Bishops of Worcester were sometimes accustomed to take consignments of them in place of money payments for use of the mill.

The possibilities of the Avon in the matter of floods are very eloquently set forth on the walls of this mill: the astonishing high-water marks of floods for a century past being marked. Scanning them, it seems strange that mill and church and a good part of the town itself have not been washed away.