William Shakespeare as He Lived: An Historical Tale

by Henry Curling

On the Surrey side, the aspect of the Thames and its banks would have yet more surprised a modern eye, since there the wind still sighed amongst the reeds and long grass of centuries. On Lambeth Marsh stood the palace and church, together with some two dozen straggling edifices. But the Oxen's low was heard along the whole of that over-crowded part, so well known to the Londoner of the present day, and now so teeming with a squalid and overwhelming population. All along the banks on this side, trees and gardens, with an occasional row of houses, a goodly edifice, or a countryfied hostel were to be seen until the passenger came to Winchester Place, St. Mary Over, and London Bridge, with the gate-houses, towers, and multitudinous buildings, built all along it. Nay, the spectator, standing upon the top of one of the towers of the bridge and looking beyond the great blackened wall of Old London, beheld a large tract called the Spital Fyelds, in which the sheep fed beneath the shade of tall trees. Bishopgate Street, too, with its one long straggling thoroughfare, seemed a trifling village. In Finsburie Fyeld stood the windmill, and the kennel for hounds. Clerkenwell seemed but a single church with its surrounding wall. Gray's Inn Lane appeared a remote thoroughfare, leading to the open country, and Broad St. Jiles was a trifling village; whilst in Convent Garden, then completely surrounded by a high and massive wall, stood a single edifice—the Convent, from which it took its name, and beyond it green meadows studded with trees.

Such, then, were the environs of London, at the period of which we write. Its interior we shall perhaps again have occasion to speak of during the progress of our story.

It was on the afternoon of the fifth day from his leaving Stratford-upon-Avon, that William Shakespeare, standing upon Hampstead Hill, looked upon London for the first time. The spot on which he stood (albeit it has now, like others we have mentioned, become one vast region of brick and mortar) was then studded with oaks, which had perhaps witnessed the gathering of the knightly and the noble for the Crusades. Immediately on his right, was the massive buttressed wall, inclosing the grounds of a half castellated and moated residence, a country seat of the Earl of Southampton.

As Shakespeare stood thus and gazed down upon the metropolis, he beheld many of those time-honoured edifices, yet remaining, which he had read of whilst studying the history of his native land.

Long did the future poet gaze upon the scene before him, and the setting sun was pouring down his softened glories, and bathing tower, and steeple, and wall, in a flood of molten gold, as he entered the suburbs. Suburbs which the traveller of the present day would have likened more to a row of hucksters' shops, or temporary buildings run up for a fair, than the outskirts of a great city.

Far as the eye could reach were to be seen those pent-house stalls, which, projecting into the highways, displayed the different articles of the different trades and occupations of the indwellers, and which being relieved by innumerable signs, tubs, long benches, stalls, smiths' forges, and quaint-looking inns or hostels, gave a most picturesque and diversified appearance to the whole.

It must have been a singular sight to behold that friendless young man, wending his way along the suburban streets of Old London. The dust of many miles upon his worn shoes, his spirits weary, and, like his own Touchstone, his legs weary too, and not a cross in his pocket. He was in London now, and the hard selfishness of the citizen he found somewhat different from the good-natured hospitality of the cottager. His last coin had been spent that morning, and he was weary and hungry withal. Yet still the first sight of the streets of London, as he gradually got into the interior, so much interested him, that he forgot both hunger and weariness and kept wandering on.

To the right he turned, now stopping to admire some relics of the days of the Plantagenets; and then to the left, now looking up at some edifice whose beetling stories, projecting over the street above, so nearly met a corresponding edifice on the opposite side, that the inhabitants might almost have shaken hands out of the upper floor windows. The increasing bustle of the great town he was every step becoming more involved in, he at first disregarded, being wholly taken up with the buildings he passed, and the curiosities every moment presented to his view. Occasionally, too, his attention was arrested by a group of cavaliers, dressed in all the magnificence of the period, as they rode gallantly through the streets. Then again, the furtive glance of the merry-eyed citizen's daughter, and which she threw at the exceeding handsome, though somewhat country-clad young man, as she tripped down some narrow passage, arrested him.

These matters caused Shakespeare ever and anon to stop and consider curiously, and, as he gazed around, the continual passers as constantly interrupted the current of his meditations.

Then he was rudely thrust from the causeway, as a swaggering party, ruffling and rustling in "unpaid-for-silks," and attended by a whole retinue of followers, passed on towards the court-end of the town, talking loud, swearing gallantly, and even singing snatches of songs as they progressed; elbowing the men from, and thrusting the females as unceremoniously to, the wall. Their huge trunks and short cloaks fluttering in the wind, their chains and various ornaments glittering in the sun, and the feathers in their high-crowned hats brushing the overhanging stories of the houses as they walked.