William Shakespeare as He Lived: An Historical Tale

by Henry Curling

On the skirts of the county of Warwick (saith a modern author), situated on the low meadowy banks of a river, there is a little quiet country town, boasting nothing to attract the attention of the traveller but a fine church and one or two antique buildings with elaborately carved fronts of wood or stone, in the peaceful streets. There would seem to be little traffic in that place, and the passing traveller, ignorant of the locality, would scarcely cast a second look around. But whisper its name into his ear, and, hand in hand with his ignorance, his apathy will straightway depart. He will stop his horse; he will descend from the saddle; he will explore those quiet streets, he will enter more than one of the houses in that little town; he will visit that old church, he will pause reverentially before its monuments; he will carry away with him some notes—perhaps some sketches; and remember what he saw and what he felt that day to the very close of his life. Indeed you will seldom fail to see, even in that quiet little town, small groups of people on whose faces and in whose demeanour you will recognize the stranger stamp. There is something to see in those unfrequented streets; and they have come a long way to see it. What wonder! The town is Stratford-upon-Avon.

Such is indeed Stratford-upon-Avon at the present time. But in the sixteenth century it presented a somewhat different aspect.

The different towns in England, at this latter period, were just beginning to emerge from their state of primitive rudeness and irregularity, and the houses to be distinguished for a style of architectural beauty and comfort as dwellings, which has not since been improved or exceeded.

The various contentions and intestine jars which had, almost up to the reign of Elizabeth, drained the population, and kept men from all peaceful occupations and improvements, and in consequence of which the squalor of their dwellings and tenements were but one degree improved from the rudeness of the Norman period, was now to give place to a style which, if but one tenement remain to us in a town of the present age, we look at it with delight and admiration. Stratford-upon-Avon then, in the year 1584, might be said to partake largely of both these styles. In some parts were to be seen those irregular ill-built wooden tenements, little removed from the hut of the Norman citizen. These standing apart, and without regard to streets, formed the abode of the poorer sort of inhabitants, and chiefly constituted the suburbs; whilst several regular streets were to be found composed of handsome, strong-built, heavily-timbered, and substantial dwellings, having their shops encroaching into the streets; their beetling storeys above; their long passages running backwards, with ample yards and gardens in rear; and their low-roofed wide-chimneyed, secluded, and comfortable rooms, secured by massive iron-studded doors, and accommodated with heavy cumbrous articles of furniture.

Here and there too, in the midst, were to be seen the mouldering remains of some dark monastic building of a former day. The walls of edifices, built in the dark ages of monkish intolerance, whose grated windows and low-arched doors told of the Saxon and the Dane, when, save the splendour of religious architecture, there was nothing between the hut and the castle.

Nothing could be more rural and picturesque than Stratford-upon-Avon on a bright summer's day. Its streets, as we have before partially described, and (as was mostly the case in unwalled towns at this period) were, except in the very centre of the town, composed of houses detached at irregular intervals, many of the edifices being partially screened by the luxuriant trees which shadowed their fronts, and grew in the gardens in rear: added to this, in the suburban thoroughfares of this town, it was not uncommon to find a clump of tall elms or oaks growing in the very centre of the road, beneath whose boughs the rude bench, the horse-trough, and the creaking sign proclaimed the immediate vicinity of the smaller hostel.

If the traveller looked from the town, he beheld the high road he was to traverse on leaving it, o'ercanopied by the forest scene without, whilst on entering the suburbs, the sloping roof, gable ends, and heavy chimneys were only here and there to be caught sight of amongst the living verdure in which they were embosomed.

Besides this, as he proceeded, the picture was added to by the various signs of the several trades, which proclaimed the occupation of the indwellers, and before many of the houses were placed long benches on which, in fine weather, the townsfolk were to be found seated, conversing cozily together in their quaint-cut doublets and steeple-crowned hats. Large tubs of water also, by order of the chief magistrate, were placed beside each dwelling, as a precautionary preventative against the spread of fire amongst these stout-timbered edifices. The highways, however, even in the outskirts of the town, were by no means so well cared for as in our own times, and in foul weather, in place of a well-paved or Macadamized thoroughfare, the road was knee-deep in mud, and cut up fearfully with cart wheels and other traffic of the time.

In what would now be called a small and somewhat mean-looking dwelling, but which in the reign of Elizabeth constituted the habitation of a good substantial citizen, resided John Shakespeare, a dealer in wool in Stratford-upon-Avon. The house itself had nothing in its outward appearance to recommend it, except the strength of its build and the stoutness of its timbers.

It was neither "a goodly dwelling or a rich." Its rooms were both stinted to space and somewhat low in roof. But little did its inmates suspect that from the mere legend of one of its indwellers having first drawn breath beneath its roof, that house would create more interest in the world than the most magnificent palace the world contained, and that in after-ages the four corners of the earth would send forth votaries to see, to worship, and to offer adoration at its shrine. And still less did its occupants imagine that in the person of one of their own children they possessed a treasure, whose very name, unthought of and slightly regarded as he then was, would prove dearer than Pluto's mine, more rich than gold.