THE HOME OF JOHN SHAKESPEARE—SNITTERFIELD
The wayfarer coming into Stratford for the first time to pay his mute tribute to the poet who seems destined to live as long as our civilisation, will enjoy a pleasant impression if he chance to have chosen a fine day and to have reached the town by the road. Stratford lies on the right bank of the river Avon, a beautiful river whose waters flow peacefully over the level land on their way from Naseby to the Severn. The town was happily planned of old time, and owed its inception to the establishment of a monastery shortly after the Anglo-Saxon began to take an interest in Christianity. It is clear that Stratford enjoyed three centuries of comparative peace, if not of substantial progress, before Norman William and Saxon Harold met at Senlac; echoes of that fray could not have pierced to the little town on Avon's banks. Nor have the subsequent centuries done much to disturb its natural seclusion.
The hand of the builder has raised streets of prosperous shops and new-built villas; small hotels abound; there is a bustling railway and a sleepy canal. A Memorial Theatre overlooks the river, and cyclists pass, not singly but in battalions, along peaceful roads leading to Birmingham or Warwick. Throughout the summer season Stratford-on-Avon becomes a metropolis "whereunto the tribes of men assemble." To "do Stratford" is an article of faith with American visitors, even if they have no more than a week in which to master the wonders of Great Britain and Ireland. Germany sends many admirers, for nowhere is Shakespeare's genius more widely recognised, more highly esteemed, than in that country. London and the big midland towns of England send visitors daily.
Let it be suggested, with all due respect to those who think otherwise, that there is no reward for those who seek to discover Shakespeare's land in the course of a few hours' hurried travel. They will see Shakespeare's alleged birthplace, and the room in which he is said, without much authority, to have been born. They will pass through the Museum, Library, and Picture Gallery; they may even admire the rather poor monument in Holy Trinity Church, and perhaps a few other sights that the town affords; and then, with a welter of confused impressions, will return whence they came. There is no reward for this frenzied exercise; it is impossible to gather any impression of the scenes in which the poet passed his early and later days, from a hurried scamper through the town and a frank acceptance of local traditions, concerning which some of our leading Shakespearian scholars have much destructive critical comment to offer. He who wishes to establish some manner of association with the poet must enter Stratford as the poet left it—by the road. He should leave the railway and walk in from Warwick, find quiet lodgings, of which there is no lack, in the town, and visit in turn the highways and by-ways of Stratford, Snitterfield, Wilmcote, Aston Clinton, Shottery, Wotten Wawens, Charlecote, and a dozen other points of interest, of which he will learn when he has definitely left the ranks of excursionists and has made friends among the people of Shakespeare's countryside. He will not add a jot to our knowledge of country or people—a hundred pens have said all there is to say—but he will come away with a measure of appreciation and recognition that will make the significance of the poet, as an interpreter of a life that never changes, far more vital and true. Here is no small reward for a truly delightful holiday in country full of the best traditions of rural England. And the intelligent visitor will be one with the great lovers of Shakespeare, living and dead, from Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, and Milton down to Matthew Arnold and our own contemporaries, even though his contribution to the poet's praise be no more than a little note in a private diary. His journey will open a fresh field of literary research, if he be not already a student of Elizabethan literature. He will be enrolled on the long and unexhausted list of pilgrims to the shrine of the country's greatest poet, the man whose thoughts have lost nothing of their depth and beauty in the slow passage of three eventful centuries.
CHAPTER II
THE POET'S YOUTH
In these days, when biographies of nobody in particular are as the sand upon the seashore for multitude, and the demand for personal paragraphs is seemingly well-nigh as great as the supply, we have some occasion to regret the absence of similar craving in the spacious times of Queen Elizabeth. If there had been a daily, weekly, or monthly publication that submitted famous men to the ordeal of the interview, we might pardon the glut of our latter day. Unhappily for our desire to know what manner of man Shakespeare was, the available records are exceedingly scanty, or are at least insufficient for our legitimate needs, and we are face to face with the initial difficulty that in the sixteenth century Shakespeare's name was quite common. From Cumberland down to Warwickshire there was probably no county in which a William Shakespeare could not have been found for the searching, and this fact is accountable for many curious mistakes that have been made by students and biographers. In Warwickshire alone there were more than a score of families bearing the surname in the sixteenth century, and half as many again in the following century, when the name was one to conjure with. The poet's father, John Shakespeare, who was a native of Snitterfield and moved to Stratford in the middle of the sixteenth century, to carry on what would seem to have been the business of a big store-keeper, applied for a right to bear arms towards the century's close, and made certain claims on behalf of ancestors. But the opinion of competent critics is that John Shakespeare was as capable of drawing the long-bow as he was of selling general stores, and that he was closely connected, from a mental standpoint, with the successful tradesmen of our day who, having proved fortunate business men, seek to confer upon themselves such advantage as a dubious pedigree may assure. We cannot, then, accept the version of his family history that satisfied the complaisant Heralds' College.
The chief difference between our modern Arms-seekers and John Shakespeare is that they are moneyed tradesmen and he was not. The early days of his commercial career were comparatively prosperous, and he found time to serve the borough of Stratford in many offices, including those of ale-taster, burgess, petty constable, borough chamberlain, and chief alderman. He married Mary Arden of Wilmcote near Stratford, the marriage taking place in Wilmcote's parish church at Aston Clinton, and William was the third child of the union. The poet's registration in the parish records at Stratford is dated April 26, 1564. The place of his birth is generally assumed to be the house in Henley Street purchased by John Shakespeare a year before his marriage, and we are told that he was born in a certain room on the first floor. Here again contemporary criticism may make some people regret the loss of the sixpence that was demanded before the scene of the birth could be surveyed; but, after all, there is much saving grace in a tradition, and whether the place be all it is alleged to be or less, little harm is done. Suffice it that thousands, gifted with faith and sixpences, have visited the room, ceilings and windows bear countless traces of the desire that besets the most commonplace people to deface walls with their uninteresting names. Shakespeare's alleged birthplace is a charming little residence enough, with dormered roof and penthouse entrance, and sixpence is a small price to pay for a pleasant illusion.