On the way we met a sophisticated donkey, who, waggling his ears, asked in Bottom's name for a gratuity of "good sweet hay"; and a bevy of children scampered up, as we neared Anne Hathaway's cottage, to thrust upon us their wilted sprigs of lavender and rosemary. They were merry little merchants, however, and giggled understandingly when we put them off with "No, thank you, William," "No, thank you, Anne." We arrived a minute after six, and the cottage was closed for the night, though a medley of indignant pilgrims pounded at the garden gate and took unavailing camera shots through the twilight. But we were content with our dusky glimpse of the timber-and-plaster, vinegrown walls and low thatched roof. In former years we had trodden that box-bordered path up to an open door and had duly inspected fireplace and settle, Bible and bacon-cupboard, and the ancient bedstead. What we cared for most this time was the walk thither, coming by that worn footway toward the setting sun, as Shakespeare would have come on his eager lover's visits, and the return under a gossamer crescent which yet served to suggest the "blessed moon" that tipped
"with silver all these fruit-tree tops"
for a rash young Romeo who would better have been minding his book at home.
The next morning we spent happily in revisiting the Stratford shrines. Even the catch-shilling shops bore witness, in their garish way, to the supremacy of that genius which brings the ends of the earth to this Midland market-town.
The supposed birthplace is now converted, after a chequered career, into a Shakespeare Museum, where are treasured more or less authentic relics and those first editions which are worth their weight in radium. Built of the tough Arden oak and of honest plaster, it was a respectable residence for the times, not unworthy of that versatile and vigorous citizen who traded in corn and timber and wool and cattle, rose from the offices of ale-taster and constable to be successively Chamberlain, Alderman, and High Bailiff, and loomed before the eyes of his little son as the greatest man in the world. The house, whose clay floors it may have been the children's task to keep freshly strewn with rushes, would have been furnished with oaken chests and settles, stools, trestle-boards, truckle-beds, and perhaps a great bedstead with carved posts. Robert Arden, a man of property and position, had left, among other domestic luxuries, eleven "painted cloths"—naïve representations of religious or classical subjects, with explanatory texts beneath. His daughter may have had some of these works of art to adorn the walls of her Stratford home, and, like enough, she brought her husband a silver salt-cellar and a "fair garnish of pewter." Her eldest son, whose plays "teach courtesy to kings," was doubtless carefully bred,—sent off early to school "with shining morning face," and expected to wait on his parents at their eleven o'clock breakfast before taking his own, though we need feel no concern about his going hungry. Trust him for knowing, as he passed the trenchers and filled the flagons, how to get many a staying nibble behind his father's back.
We wandered on to the Grammar School, still located in the picturesque, half-timbered building originally erected, toward the end of the thirteenth century, by the Guild of the Holy Cross. Here once was hospital as well as school, and in the long hall on the ground floor, even yet faintly frescoed with the Crucifixion, the Guild held its meetings and kept its feasts. Henry VIII made but half a bite of all this, but the boy-king, Edward VI, eleven years before Shakespeare's birth, gave the ancient edifice back to Stratford. Then the long hall was used for the deliberations of the Town Council, and sometimes, especially when John Shakespeare was in office, for the performances of strolling players,—three men and a boy, perhaps, travelling in their costumes, which, by a little shifting and furbishing, might serve for an old-fashioned morality or a new-fangled chronicle, or, should the schoolmaster's choice prevail, for something newly Englished from the classics. "Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light." The school, thenceforth known as Edward VI Grammar School, was permanently established in the top story, where it is still in active operation. Here we saw the Latin room in which another William than Mistress Page's hopeful was taught "to hick and to hack," and the Mathematics room where he learned enough arithmetic to "buy spices for our sheep-shearing." He was only fourteen or fifteen, it is believed, when his father's business troubles broke off his schooling, but not his education. Everywhere was "matter for a hot brain." And he, who, since the days when he "plucked geese, played truant, and whipped top, ... knew not what 'twas to be beaten," would have borne up blithely against this seeming set-back. Nature had given him "wit to flout at Fortune," and these, too, were the red-blooded years of youth, when he was ever ready to "dance after a tabor and pipe" and pay his laughing court to many a "queen of curds and cream."
"But, O, the thorns we stand upon!"
The mature charms of Anne Hathaway turned jest into earnest and sent prudence down the wind. There was a hasty wedding, nobody knows where, and John Shakespeare's burdens were presently increased by the advent of three grandchildren. It was obviously high time for this ne'er-do-well young John-a-Dreams—"yet he's gentle; never schooled, and yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly beloved"—to strike out into the world and seek his fortune.
Next to the Guild Hall stands the Guild Chapel, whose former frescoes of the Day of Judgment must have made deep impression on the "eye of childhood that fears a painted devil"; and over the way from the Guild Chapel is New Place. On this site in the time of Henry VII rose the Great House, built by a Stratford magnate and benefactor, Sir Hugh Clopton,—he who gave the town that "fair Bridge of Stone over Avon." In 1597 Shakespeare, who could hardly have been in London a dozen years, had prospered so well, albeit in the disreputable crafts of actor and playwright, that he bought the estate, repaired the mansion then in "great ruyne and decay," and renamed it New Place. Yet although it was his hour of triumph, his heart was sorrowful, for his only son, his eleven-year-old Hamnet, "jewel of children," had died the year before. At least another decade passed before Shakespeare finally withdrew from London and settled down at New Place with the wife eight years his senior, a plain country woman of Puritan proclivities. In his twenty years of intense creative life,
"The inward service of the mind and soul"