Summer Days in Shakespeare Land

by Charles G. Harper

The hamlet of Shottery, now growing a considerable village, is but one mile from the centre of Stratford. You come to it most easily by way of Rother Street, and at the end of that thoroughfare will observe a signpost marked “Footpath to Shottery.” The spot is not inspiring, and one could well wish Shottery, the home of Anne Hathaway and the scene of Shakespeare’s wooing, had not been so near the town. Stratford is a pleasant place, and as little bedevilled with modern unhistorical suburbs as any town of its size; but there is a red rash of new and quite typically suburban villas on these outskirts. I feel quite sure the sanitation is perfect and that there are baths and hot and cold water laid on to every one of these “desirable residences”; and no one would breathe upon the obvious respectability of the people who live in them. Respectable? Most certainly; why, by the evidence of one’s ears in passing, every house appears to have a piano; and the possession of one would seem in these times to be by far a better-accepted criterion of respectability than the ownership of a gig; which Carlyle in his day noted as the ideal. Now, it is quite certain that none of the houses Shakespeare ever dwelt in had any sanitation at all; if he ever took a bath, he was as exceptional in that matter as in most other things, and quite unlike his generation. New Place had neither hot nor cold water laid on, and never had a piano. Judged by modern standards Shakespeare could scarcely have been respectable: his era did not even know the word in its present meaning, which is a terrible thought; let us pause to contemplate the deficiencies of our ancestors.

Well, we will not, at any rate, stay to look longer at these developments, but, like that rogue, Autolycus, “jog on the footpath way,” a little disillusioned perhaps, because it presently leads to a level railway-crossing which was not here when Shakespeare went across the fields in the summer evenings to see Anne Hathaway. Thence coming upon allotment gardens, where we more or less “merrily hent the stile-a,” we arrive at Shottery by way of some tapestry works and a book-bindery.

Shottery, it is at once seen, has been spoiled, utterly and irredeemably, unless the recent doings are levelled with the ground and wholly abolished—which we need not expect to be done. Deplorable activity has lately been manifested here, in the building of rows of small, cheap cottages. The bloom has been rudely rubbed off the peach, and the idyllic place which the hero-worshipper fondly expected has ceased to be. Yet parts of it are good. You may turn your back upon these things and see a very charming double row of old cottages, the Post Office among them, as ancient and rustic and half-timbered as the rest, with a very noble group of trees for background, and by way of foreground a red brick and timber barn belonging to Shottery manor-house, whose old stone dovecote stands yet in the garden. I have sketched these old cottages, in an attempt to show you how charming the scene really is.

It has been suggested that the roomy loft beneath the roof of the manor-house was used as a secret Roman Catholic place of worship when that religion was proscribed, and that the mystery of Shakespeare’s marriage is to be explained by the ceremony having taken place here. But, ingenious although the suggestion may be, it has no shred of evidence to support it, nor would it appear from anything we know of Shakespeare’s religious beliefs, that he was a Roman Catholic at all, much less a fanatical one, as such a proceeding would argue.

Anne Hathaway’s cottage should certainly stand in this, the better part of the village, but it is situated at the extreme further end; and the hapless artist who seeks to sketch the scene already described will find himself acting as a kind of honorary signpost to it. The tragedy of his fate is that the best point of view happens to be from the middle of the road, and that the interruptions from motor-cars, largely carrying Americans, who invariably ask, “Saay, is this the waay to Anne Hathawaay’s cottuj?” are incessant.

The famous cottage, which is really more than a cottage and part of a farmhouse, comes into view as you round a corner and cross a small brick bridge over Shottery Brook. The bridge is so overhung and shut in by trees that you scarcely notice it to be a bridge at all; but if these be early summer days and the season not exceptionally dry, the brook can be heard hoarsely plunging beneath, over a quite respectably large weir. When Mistress Anne Hathaway lived at the farmhouse now called her cottage—which is an entirely wrong use of the possessive case, for it never belonged to her—Shottery Brook was to be crossed only by a watersplash for vehicles, and a plank footbridge for pedestrians; but progress and the prosperity of the county funds have changed all that. I wish they had not: it would be all the better if one came to the place just in the way Shakespeare used.

The rustic cottage, still heavily thatched, comes before one’s gaze with that complete familiarity which is the result of numberless illustrations. It stands at right-angles to the road, with a large garden in front of it. I would be enthusiastic about that garden if I honestly might, but truth forbids me to compete with the exaggerated praise of it commonly lavished by writers upon this scene. It is just a pleasant rustic garden, partly used for growing beans, cabbages, potatoes and the usual cottager’s produce; with the customary borders and beds of old-fashioned flowers. A stone-paved path leads up to the door. Hundreds of such gardens beautify the old cottages of the Warwickshire villages and hamlets; and many of them, I declare it, are very much better. The house itself is built in the customary local manner, on a rough blue lias foundation, with thick walls partly of the same material, here and there varied by red brick, and framed with ancient timbering. Latticed windows light the various rooms. It is a building of rather late in the fifteenth century, and appears to have been first tenanted by the Hathaways in 1556, when one John of that name, described as an archer, was living here. “Hewlands” was then the name of the farm. The Hathaway family did not actually possess it until 1610, when Bartholomew, Anne’s eldest brother, purchased the property.

Anne Hathaway was the eldest of the three daughters of Richard, who died in June 1582. His four sons, Bartholomew, Thomas, John, and William, were provided for, and the daughters were left £6 13s. 4d. each. Anne, or “Agnes,” as she is described in the will, the names being in those times interchangeable, was to receive hers on the day of her marriage; her sister Catherine on the like occasion; and Margaret was to receive her share at the age of seventeen. Anne was married in a hurry to William Shakespeare at the close of November in the same year. The Shakespearean connection with the cottage at Shottery is thus not altogether so intimate or so continuous as would at first be supposed.