Comedy of Errors.
Little William, already in the days when he went “with his satchel and shining morning face creeping like a snail unwillingly to school,” had ample leisure and opportunity to gaze admiringly at the many signs which adorned the narrow streets of the quiet little town on the Avon. The memory of them still lives in some of the Stratford hotels. The landlady of the “Golden Lion,” for instance, remarks on her bill: “Known as Ye Peacocke Inn in Shakespeare’s time 1613.” Even the “Red Horse,” to-day extremely modern and uninteresting-looking, goes back to these old days. In Washington Irving’s time the place probably looked more quaint and cozy, if we may believe his praise of the old inn in his “Sketch-Book”: “To a homeless man, there is a momentary feeling of something like independence and territorial consequence, when, after a weary day’s travel, he kicks off his boots, thrusts his feet into slippers, and stretches himself before an inn fire.”
This picture gallery of the street signs was still more magnificent in London, where even the theaters had their signs out, as “The Globe,” “Red Bull,” “A Curtain,” “A Fortune,” “Cross Keys,” “The Phenix,” “The Rose,” “The Cockpit,” and we may be sure that they made quite an impression on the lively mind of the young actor. The word “sign” occurs frequently in his vocabulary. Inclined to see below the surface, he does not seem to trust the glittering of the sign, as the words of Iago indicate:—
“I must show out a flag and sign of love,
Which is indeed but sign.”
The signs of his birthplace were probably rather poor-looking things, since he uses the word in his early drama, “Titus Andronicus,” contemptuously:—
“Ye sanguine, shallow-hearted boys!
Ye white-lim’d walls! ye ale-house painted signs!”
The sign of the “Falcon” was not yet hung out on the old house of Scholar’s Lane and Chapel Street in those years of 1571 to 1578, when little Shakespeare went to the Grammar School, in which the traveler to this day may see the chair of the pedagogue who first introduced him to the secrets of literature. But the circle of life led him back to the same narrow street, and opposite the stately building, which now is the “Falcon,” Shakespeare died. The mortuary house has disappeared and the ground has been transformed into a garden. Here we are infinitely nearer to the poet’s soul than in the tiny birth-chamber disfigured by a huge bust, where the guide drowns all our thoughts in a flood of empty words. Here in this garden the genius of the poet seemed to reveal himself most charmingly. Where once the house stood in which he died we found a little child peacefully sleeping—all alone, unguarded, but the gentle rose of youth blooming on his cheeks—under the perfumed shadow of flowers; a symbol of eternal life conquering death.
