Summer Days in Shakespeare Land

by Charles G. Harper

We take these and all other signatures on trust, for they are nearly every one terrible scrawls, and are all so extremely crowded together, and the plaster is so dirty, and the glass so nearly opaque that with this and with that they are hardly ever legible.

In a back room hangs an oil portrait of Shakespeare: the so-called “Stratford” portrait, bought in 1860 by William Hunt, the town clerk, together with the old house in which it then hung. It has been cleaned and restored and elaborately framed, and it will be observed that it is further guarded by being enclosed in a steel safe: extraordinary precautions in behalf of a work which is almost certainly spurious.

And so we descend and sign the visitors’ book. A very bulky volume is filled in less than a year, and still the number grows. There were 27,038 visitors in 1896, and 49,117 in 1910. The extremely fine and lengthy summer of 1911 did not, as might have been supposed, bring a record return. On the contrary, the numbers fell in that year to 40,300.

Returning to the kitchen, where in the yawning chimney-place a bacon cupboard will be noticed, we leave by the garden at the back. But meanwhile the Birthplace Museum has been left undescribed. Visitors who have sprung a sixpence for that are taken through from the front room, the living-room. Here are kept many and various articles more or less associated with Shakespeare, and some that have no connection with him at all. The most interesting are the documents relating to this house; the original letter written by Richard Quincy to Shakespeare in 1598; and a deed with the signature of Shakespeare’s brother Gilbert, who was a draper or haberdasher in London, dated 1609. A desk from the Grammar School, the chair from the “Falcon” at Bidford, in which Shakespeare is supposed to have sat, portraits, prints; a perfect copy of the 1623 First Folio edition of the plays, purchased at the Ashburnham Sale in 1898, and other rare editions, make up the collection, together with a sword said to have been Shakespeare’s, and an interesting gold signet-ring, with the initials “W. S.” entwined with a true-lover’s knot, found in a field outside the town, near the church, early in the nineteenth century. It is said to have been Shakespeare’s ring, but scarcely sufficient stress seems to be laid upon the undoubted authenticity of it. Shakespeare’s will, drafted in January 1616, originally bore the concluding words: “In witness whereof I have hereunto put my seale,” but this was afterwards altered to “hand,” the assumption being that it was the loss of this signet ring which necessitated the alteration.

Haydon, the painter, wrote to Keats in 1818, about the discovery, “My dear Keats, I shall go mad! In a field at Stratford-on-Avon, that belonged to Shakespeare, they have found a gold ring and seal with the initials ‘W.S.,’ and a true-lover’s knot between. If this is not Shakespeare’s whose is it? I saw an impression to-day, and am to have one as soon as possible: as sure as you live and breathe, and that he was the first of beings, the seal belonged to him, O, Lord!”

Among the exhibits in the Museum are the town weights and measures, the sword of state, and altogether some fine miscellaneous feeding for the curio-fancier.

The cellars under the building are not shown, nor is the western part of it, where the town archives are stored.

The garden at the back is laid out in beds planted with the flowers mentioned by Shakespeare in his works, and in the middle of the well-kept gravelled path is the base of the ancient town cross which formerly stood at the intersection of Bridge Street and High Street. It is a pleasant place, and its present condition is the result of care, the outcome of much pious thought. But we may declare with all the emphatic language at our command, that when William Shakespeare and his brothers Gilbert, Richard and Edmund, and his sister Joan played out here in the back yard, it was very little of a garden, and not at all tidy unless they were angel-children, which we have no occasion to suppose. It seems to have been originally an orchard, but no doubt Mr. John Shakespeare put it to some use in connection with the several trades he followed.

The piety is undoubted, but it is a little overdone, and everything is in sample. They are not very good specimens of marigolds we see here, but still they are obviously marigolds, and we do not—no really we don’t—need the label that identifies them and the other flowers. We can quite easily recognise the winking Mary-bud, that beautiful flower whose golden eyes are among the loveliest blossoms in an old-fashioned garden; we know the rose, the jasmine, the gillyflower, the sunflower, the stock, the ladysmock, and the whole delightful posy, and wonder who and what those folk may be who cannot recognise them, and require these cast-iron labels for their information.