“Violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses
That die unmarried ere they can behold
Bright Phœbus in his strength.”
The “daisies pied,” the “lady-smocks all silver-white,” that is to say, the white arabis which the Warwickshire children of to-day call “smell-smocks,” and the “cuckoo buds of yellow hue,” otherwise the buttercups, out of which the cuckoo is in old folklore supposed to drink, he tells us, all “paint the meadows with delight.” He could never have written those lines with care and thought and in cold blood: he must have seen those meadows with all the delight he expresses, and the words themselves must needs have been penned with enthusiasm. This is a thesis easily susceptible of proof. The lovely cuckoo-song at the close of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which with a charm unmatched tells us of those flower-spangled meads, has no bearing upon the action of the play: it is written in sheer enjoyment, and it is in the same spirit that his other allusions to the fields and hedgerows and woodlands, the “bosky acres” and the “unshrubbed down,” are conceived. Ariel, that tricksy sprite of The Tempest, is a true countryman’s fancy, as clearly to be seen in the lines—
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I,
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry,
On the bat’s back I do fly.”
Here, as often elsewhere, the dramatist and the poet are at odds. Shakespeare the actor-playwright, with every necessity of the stage—its entrances and exits, and the imperative need for the action of the play to be maintained—halts the story so that the other Shakespeare, the idyllic poet, the lover of nature, shall picture some scene for which he cares everything, but which to the Greeks—for Greeks here read the London playgoers of his time—must have meant foolishness.
Such an instance, among many, is Oberon’s speech to Puck, in Midsummer Night’s Dream—
“I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows;
Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania.”
For these lines and such as these Shakespeare risked the brickbats, the cat-calls and the obloquy that awaited the dramatist whose action dragged. There is no excuse for them—except that of their beauty, and that to the groundlings was less than nothing.
That bank whereon the wild-thyme grew must have been, I like to think, somewhere in The Dingles, a curious spot just north-east of Stratford, to the left of the Warwick road, as you go up to Welcombe. I think there are no “dingles” anywhere nearer London than the midlands; none in name, although there may be many in fact. By a “dingle” in the midlands a deep narrow vale, or natural gully is meant. The word is especially well known in Shropshire and the Welsh borders, where such features, between the enfolding hills, are plentiful. Here The Dingles are abrupt and deeply winding gullies, breaking away from the red earth of the Welcombe uplands: a very tumbled and unspoiled spot. Elms look down from the crest of them, and ancient thorn-trees line their sides. It seems quite a sure and certain thing that Shakespeare when a boy knew this spot well and frequented it with the other Stratford boys of his age; catching, perhaps the “earth-delving conies,” and I am afraid—for all boys are cruel except those in the Sunday-school books, and they are creatures in the nature of sucking Galahads imagined by maiden aunts—I am afraid, I say, also birds’-nesting.
The Dingles, doubtless, formed in Shakespeare’s mind the site of Titania’s bower. Perhaps you may find it yourself, if you seek there, somewhere about midsummer midnight, in the full of the moon, when possibly her obedient fairies will be as kind and courteous as of old to that gentleman who has the good fortune to discover the magic spot, and may—
“Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries.”