The Guild Chapel, founded in 1296 and largely rebuilt by the generosity of Sir Hugh Clopton in the fifteenth century, is the chief of the Guild’s old buildings. It is not now of much practical use, but of venerable aspect and considerable beauty. The tower, porch and nave are Clopton’s work, the beautiful porch still displaying his shield of arms and that of the City of London, although greatly weathered and defaced. He did not touch the chancel, which had already been restored; and the exterior still shows by force of contrast the greatness of Clopton’s gift; his nave entirely overshadowing in its comparative bulk the humble proportions of the chancel. Frankness is at least as desirable a quality in a book as in the affairs of life, and so it may at once be admitted that the interior of the Guild Chapel is extremely disappointing. It is coldly whitewashed, and the ancient frescoes discovered a hundred years ago have faded away. They included a fine, if alarming to some minds, representation of the doom, a fifteenth-century notion of the Judgment Day. Alarming to some minds because of the very high percentage of the damned disclosed at this awful balancing of accounts. Illustrations of this, among the other frescoes, survive, and have a fearful interest. It is pleasing to see the towering mansions of the Blest on the left hand, with St. Peter waiting at the open door welcoming that, ah! so small band; but on the right, where green, pink and blue pig-faced devils with asses’ ears are tormenting their prey, whanging them with bludgeons and raking them in with three-pronged prokers, casting them into Hell’s Mouth, and finally roasting them in a furnace, the prospect is vile. Shakespeare must have been perfectly familiar with these horrific things, and Falstaff’s likening of a flea on Bardolph’s fiery nose to a “black soul burning in hell fire,” looks very like a vivid recollection of them. Some day, perhaps, when the Shakespearean cult at Stratford is more advanced (it is only in its youth yet) these frescoes will be renewed, from the careful records of them that have been kept.
The lengthy line of the Guild Hall and the almshouses of the Guild is one of the most effective things in the town. It dates from 1417. For many years, until 1894, the stout timbering was hidden away beneath plaster, and few suspected the simple beauty of the honest old oak framing hidden beneath. The plaster was spread over it to preserve the oak from the weather. Let us italicise that choice specimen of stupidity, not because it is unique or even rare, for it is found all over the country, and elsewhere in this very town of Stratford, and here and everywhere else it is at last being found out; but because the italics are needed somewhere, to drive home the peculiar dunderheadedness of it. I think perhaps, after all, plaster was coated over old timbering, not so much for the preservation of it as because generations had been born who could not endure the uneven lines of the old work. The woodwork of those later heirs of time was true to a hair’s breadth and planed down to an orderly smoothness: not riven anyhow from the logs. A conflict of ideals had arisen, and the new era was ashamed of the handiwork of the old.
There have been times when architects were also ashamed of their chimneys, and disguised them and hid them away, as though a chimney were an unnatural thing for a house and to be abated and apologised for. The only time to apologise for a chimney is when it smokes inside the house instead of out; and it is pleasant to see that whoever designed and built the long and lofty range of chimneys that rises, almost like a series of towers, from this roof ridge, had not the least idea of excusing them.
The hall of the Guild occupies almost half the length of the lower floor. The remainder forms the almshouses formerly occupied by the poorer brethren of the Guild and still housing the pensioners enjoying their share of the Clopton benefactions. They wear on the right arm a silver badge displaying the Clopton cross, a cross heraldically described as a “cross pattée fitchée at foot.”
The interior of the Guild Hall displays firstly that long ground-floor hall in which the Guild members met and feasted or transacted business, and where their morality plays and the entertainments given by their successors, the earlier town councils, were acted. Here such travelling companies as those who called themselves “the Earl of Leicester’s servants,” and other troupes of actors, occasionally performed. Shakespeare as a boy must have seen them, and thus probably had his attention first directed to the stage as a career.
From this long hall the room variously styled the “Armoury,” or the small Council Chamber or “’Greeing Room,” is entered. This Agreeing Room, perhaps for the inner councils of the Guild, was re-panelled about 1619, when the door leading from the hall was built; and as a sign of rejoicing, the royal arms were painted over the fireplace at the time of the Restoration of Charles the Second, in 1660. Here also at one time the arms of the town guard were kept.
The present School Library, overhead, occupies the room under the roof, formerly the large Council Chamber of the Guild. The heraldic white and red roses painted on the west wall, the red countercharged with a white centre and the white with red, were placed there in 1485, marking the satisfaction of the townsfolk at the marriage of Henry the Seventh with Elizabeth of York, and the union of the rival Houses of York and Lancaster.
Out of this room opens the Latin Schoolroom of the Grammar School. The first portion of it was once separate, and known as the Mathematical Room. Here we are on the scene of Shakespeare’s schooldays, the schoolroom where he learnt that “small Latin and less Greek,” with which Ben Jonson credited him; a room still used in the education of Stratford boys. He pictured the schoolboy of his own and every other time in the lines—