Thus Shakespeare could now improve the quality of his own fruit by that process of grafting which Polixenes had so lately taught Perdita in the Winter's Tale. He could now, as did the gardener long ago in Richard II, bid his assistants bind up the dangling apricots and prop the bending branches.
He had planted the famous mulberry-tree with his own hand, and it stood until the Rev. Francis Gastrell, who owned New Place in 1756, cut it down in a fit of exasperation with the crowds who requested admission to see it. Any one who has visited Stratford knows of the endless pieces of furniture and little boxes which were made from its wood. Garrick, who revived Shakespeare upon the stage, sat under it in 1744; and when, in 1769, he was presented with the freedom of the city, the casket in which the charter was enclosed was made from a portion of the tree. In the same year, when, on the occasion of Shakespeare's Jubilee, he sang his song, Shakespeare's Mulberry-Tree, he held in his hand a goblet made from its wood.
A serious attempt was made in Shakespeare's time to introduce the breeding of silkworms at Stratford, and the planting of the mulberry-tree may have had some connection with this experiment.
Not even the ruins of New Place are in existence to-day, but only the site where the house once stood, and the old well in the yard, which is so overgrown with ivy that the windlass looks like a handle of greenery. The foundation-stones of the boundary wall are covered with earth and grass, and form a sort of embankment towards the road. The gardens, however, are much as they were in Shakespeare's day; the larger is spacious and beautiful. Wandering there of an autumn afternoon, when the leaves are beginning to turn faintly golden, a strange feeling comes over one—a feeling belonging to the place, from which it is very difficult to tear oneself away.
One seems to see him walking with grave stateliness there, clad in scarlet, with the broad white collar falling over the sleeveless black tunic. We see the hand which has written so many ill-understood and insufficiently appreciated masterpieces binding up branches or lopping off stray tendrils, while the sunlight sparkles on the plain gold signet ring with its initials, W.S., which is still in our possession.
The numerous portraits and the famous death-masque discovered in Germany are all forgeries. The only genuine likenesses are the bad engraving by Droeshout prefixed to the first Folio and the poorly executed coloured bust by the Dutchman Gerhard Johnson on the monument in the Church of the Holy Trinity, which was probably done from a death-masque. It may be added that a painting was discovered at Stratford eight years ago, which purports to be the original of Droeshout's engraving, and the genuineness of which is still a matter of dispute.[2]
It holds us captive, this head with the healthy, full, red lips, the slight brownish moustache, the fine, high, poet's brow, with the reddish hair growing naturally and becomingly at the sides. The expression is speaking; Shakespeare must surely have looked like this. Even if the painting should prove a forgery, an imitation of Droeshout's work instead of its original, it will still retain an artistic and psychological value possessed by none of the other portraits. As he looks out at us from the canvas, we seem to see him as he was in those last years at Stratford, chatting with the townsfolk and "cultivating his garden."[3]
[1] "Witty above her sexe, but that's not all, Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall, Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse."
[2] In the Halliwell-Phillips collection of Shakespearian rarities, stored at the Safe Deposit, Chancery Lane, there was a copy of the print which, according to the catalogue of the collection, is in its original proof condition, before it was altered by "an inferior hand." As traces of what is called the "inferior hand" are to be found in the painting, it would seem that the latter was copied from the print. (See John Corbin: Two Undescribed Portraits of Shakespeare. Harpers New Monthly Magazine.)