“Can’t we go at once to Southwark while it’s all fresh in my mind?” urged Betty. “I should like to see how that part of London where we’ve just seen Shakespeare, looks now.”
“Very well. We can’t have the car out again, but we’ll go on the top of an omnibus that runs over London Bridge, and you shall see all that remains to be seen, of the Southwark Shakespeare knew when he lived there.”
Rather more than half an hour later as they approached the south end of the bridge, Godmother pointed to the right. “That’s where you saw the Globe and the Rose theatres, and farther down the river, you remember we saw in the distance Paris-Gardens.”
“Oh, how different it is now!” Betty said, looking at the crowded warehouses and dingy houses along the waterside. “There’s nothing of it left.”
“Nothing but the names of streets. Come down this one, now called Park Street. Look. That turning is Rose Alley.”
“Then here was the Rose Theatre?” Betty exclaimed, glancing up the dingy, grimy little road.
“Now look at the tablet on this brewery which tells us that here stood the Globe Theatre. It may have done; though some people think it is not the exact site.”
They walked farther along by the river’s edge, towards the next bridge, till Betty saw painted up at the entrance to another dingy street, Bear Gardens.
“From that name you know that you are on the spot where some of the poor bears were baited,” said Godmother, “and having so recently seen Southwark as it was, you can in imagination sweep away all these dreary streets and see the green fields and gardens round each of the separate buildings. Now we’ll go back to London Bridge, and walk straight on from it up what is now called the Borough High Street in Southwark.
“This,” she explained when they reached the crowded thoroughfare, “as you remember, was the country road along which, in the fourteenth century, the pilgrims passed on their way to Canterbury. Look on the left of the street for names of turnings which will bring the line of inns back to your memory. Here,”—she stopped at a turning called Talbot Yard—“was the Tabard you visited in Chaucer’s day, and as it was standing when Shakespeare lived here, he too must often have visited it.”