Shakespeare is said to have taken his idea of Ophelia from Margaret Clopton, who in the misery of disappointed love is supposed to have drowned herself in a well in the gardens in 1592. A Charlotte Clopton, too, is supposed to have been buried alive in the Clopton vault in Stratford church in 1564, when the plague visited the neighbourhood, and thus to have given Shakespeare a scene in Romeo and Juliet. But it is only fair to say that the stories are legendary and not sustained by any known facts in the Clopton family history.
From Clopton we will retrace our steps to Stratford, and thence set out anew, to visit some outlying villages of interest, better reached from the road to Alcester.
The Alcester road is the least interesting road out of Stratford. It leads past the Great Western Railway station, and thence up Red Hill, reaching Alcester, the Roman Alauna, in seven and a half miles. There is little joy or interest to be got out of Alcester, which is a pleasant enough little town of 3500 inhabitants and a manufacture of needles, but not thrilling. There is still some unenclosed land along this road, on the left, a rather wild upland common—the “unshrubb’d down”; and it is a tumbled up and down country on the right, where Billesley stands. Billesley is a parish, with a parish church and an ancient manor-house, but no village. I can imagine the tourist—the cyclist, of course, who is a more enterprising person than most—saying, as he sees Billesley on the map, “I will put up there,” and I can imagine him, further, getting there under circumstances of night and rain and wind, and finding it to be the most impossible of places to stay at. For there is no inn, and not the slightest chance of hospitality. But it is well enough if you come to it in daytime, for it has the charm of singularity: the strangeness of the old manor-house behind its lofty enclosing garden-walls and the weirdly rebuilt eighteenth-century church at the end of a farm-road which you dispute with porkers and cluttering fowls. Billesley church is one of the claimants for the honour of witnessing Shakespeare’s marriage, but on what evidence the claim rests no one can tell, and, in any case, it was entirely rebuilt afterwards. The tradition is probably only a hazy association with the marriage of his grand-daughter, Elizabeth Hall, whose wedding took place in the former building in 1639. Little belief, either, can be given to the panelled room in Billesley Hall, said to have been a library in Shakespeare’s youth, in which he was allowed to study.
Downhill and to the right, and you come to Wilmcote, the home of Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden. It was in her time merely a hamlet of Aston Cantlow, but is now a separate ecclesiastical parish, with an uninteresting church. Wilmcote is not a particularly inviting place, and not one of a number of boys playing cricket could tell me where was the home of Shakespeare’s mother. However, in a place like Wilmcote it does not take long to solve such a point, even if it were to come to a house-to-house inquiry. The home of the Ardens, yeomen-farmers, seems to modern ideas quite a humble house. It is one of a row of ancient timber-framed and plastered cottage-like houses, with a large farmyard at the back.
Rambling, low-ceilinged rooms with ingle-nooks in the fireplaces form the interior. Some day, I suppose, when the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has ceased to expend much money in the collection of rare editions and in paying fat pensions to its super-annuated servants, it will seek to purchase the Arden home, and show to Shakespearean travellers the house in which Robert Arden, a sixteenth-century yeoman of some standing and some pretensions to gentility, yet sat at table with his farm-servants in the old way, just as in the remoter parts of the West of England is still done.
It is generally supposed that Wilmcote is the place referred to by Shakespeare in the induction to the Taming of the Shrew as “Wincot.” The name is locally pronounced in that way, as it would be when we consider the difficulty in ordinary rustic speech of twisting the tongue round “Wilmcote.” But reasons are given on p. 169 for identifying it with Wincot in Quinton. There is, however, another place which claims the honour; the unlovely Wilnecote, a brick and tile-manufacturing settlement on the Watling Street, over twenty-five miles distant. It also is locally “Wincot,” and in Shakespeare’s time brewed a famous tipple. Sir Aston Cokain, whose verses were published as near Shakespeare’s own day as 1658, had no difficulty in identifying it. Writing to his friend, Mr. Clement Fisher, who resided at Wilnecote, whom he addresses “of Wincott,” he says
“Shakespeare your Wincot ale hath much renown’d
That fox’d a beggar so by chance was found
Sleeping that there needed not many a word
To make him to believe he was a lord.
But you affirm (and in it seem most eager)
’Twill make a Lord as drunk as any beggar,
Bid Norton brew such ale as Shakespeare fancies,
Did put Kit Sly into such lordly trances;
And let us meet there for a fit of gladness,
And drink ourselves merry in sober sadness.”
It is quite evident, among other things, that Sir Aston Cokain wrote pretty bad verse, but the point to be emphasised is that there were certainly in Shakespeare’s time three “Wincots,” any one of which might have served his turn. But the vanished ale-house of Wincot in Quinton is the place more particularly meant by him.
