It was erected in 1558 by Thomas Lucy, who in 1578 was Sheriff of Warwickshire, who was elected to the Parliaments of 1571 and 1584, and who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1565. The porch to this building was designed by John of Padua. There is a silly ballad in existence, idly attributed to Shakespeare, which, it is said, was found affixed to Lucy's gate, and gave him great offence. He must have been more than commonly sensitive to low abuse if he could have been annoyed by such a manifestly scurrilous ebullition of the blackguard and the blockhead,—supposing, indeed, that he ever saw it. The ballad, proffered as the work of Shakespeare, is a forgery. There is but one existing reason to think that the poet ever cherished a grudge against the Lucy family, and that is the coarse allusion to the "luces" which is found in the Merry Wives of Windsor. There was apparently, a second Sir Thomas Lucy, later than the Sheriff, who was more of the Puritanic breed, while Shakespeare evidently was a Cavalier. It is possible that in a youthful frolic the poet may have poached on Sheriff Lucy's preserves. Even so, the affair was trivial. It is possible, too, that in after years he may have had reason to dislike the ultra-Puritanical neighbour. Some memory of the tradition will, of course, haunt the traveller's thoughts as he strolls by Hatton Rock and through the villages of Hampton and Charlecote. But this discordant recollection is soon smoothed away by the peaceful loveliness of the ramble—past aged hawthorns that Shakespeare himself may have seen, and under the boughs of beeches, limes, and drooping willows, where every footstep falls on wild-flowers, or on a cool green turf that is softer than Indian silk and as firm and elastic as the sand of the sea-beaten shore. Thought of Sir Thomas Lucy will not be otherwise than kind, either, when the stranger in Charlecote church reads the epitaph with which the old knight commemorated his wife: "All the time of her Lyfe a true and faithfull servant of her good God; never detected of any crime or vice; in religion most sound; in love to her husband most faithfull and true. In friendship most constant. To what in trust was committed to her most secret; in wisdom excelling; in governing her House and bringing up of Youth in the feare of God that did converse with her most rare and singular; a great maintainer of hospitality; greatly esteemed of her betters; misliked of none unless the envious. When all is spoken that can be said, a Woman so furnished and garnished with Virtue as not to be bettered, and hardly to be equalled of any; as she lived most virtuously, so she dyed most godly. Set down by him that best did know what hath been written to be true. Thomas Lucy." A narrow formalist he may have been, and a severe magistrate in his dealings with scapegrace youths, and perhaps a haughty and disagreeable neighbour; but there is a touch of manhood, high feeling, and virtuous and self-respecting character in those lines, that instantly wins the response of sympathy. If Shakespeare really shot the deer of Thomas Lucy the injured gentleman had a right to feel annoyed. Shakespeare, boy or man, was not a saint, and those who so account him can have read his works to but little purpose. He can bear the full brunt of his faults. He does not need to be canonised.
The ramble to Charlecote—one of the prettiest walks about Stratford—was, it may surely be supposed, often taken by Shakespeare. Many another ramble was possible to him and no doubt was made. He would cross the mill bridge (new in 1599), which spans the Avon a little way to the south of the church. A quaint, sleepy mill no doubt it was—necked with moss and ivy—and the gaze of Shakespeare assuredly dwelt on it with pleasure.
His footsteps may be traced, also, in fancy, to the region of the old college building, demolished in 1799, which stood in the southern part of Stratford, and was the home of his friend John Combe, factor of Fulke Greville, Earl of Warwick. Still another of his walks must have tended northward through Welcombe, where he was the owner of land, to the portly manor of Clopton, or to the home of William, nephew of John-a-Combe, which stood where the Phillips mansion stands now. On what is called the Ancient House, which stands on the west side of High Street, he may often have looked, as he strolled past to the Red Horse. That picturesque building, dated 1596, survives, notwithstanding some modern touches of rehabilitation, as a beautiful specimen of Tudor architecture in one at least of its most charming traits, the carved and timber-crossed gable. It is a house of three stories, containing parlour, sitting-room, kitchen, and several bedrooms, besides cellars and brew-shed; and when sold at auction, August 23, 1876, it brought £400. In that house was born John Harvard, who founded Harvard University. There are other dwellings fully as old in Stratford, but they have been covered with stucco and otherwise changed. This is a genuine piece of antiquity and it vies with the grammar-school and the hall of the Guild, under the pent-house of which the poet would pass whenever he went abroad from New Place. Julius Shaw, one of the five witnesses to his will, lived in the house next to the present New Place Museum, and there, it is reasonable to think, Shakespeare would often pause, for a word with his friend and neighbour. In the little streets by the riverside, which are ancient and redolent of the past, his image seems steadily familiar. In Dead Lane (once also called Walker Street, now called Chapel Lane) he owned a cottage, bought of Walter Getley in 1602, and only destroyed within the present century. These and kindred shreds of fact, suggesting the poet as a living man and connecting him, however vaguely, with our everyday experience, are seized with peculiar zest by the pilgrim in Stratford. Such a votary, for example, never doubts that Shakespeare was a frequenter, in leisure or convivial hours, of the ancient Red Horse inn. It stood there, in his day, as it stands now, on the north side of Bridge Street, westward from the Avon. There are many other taverns in the town—the Shakespeare, a delightful resort, the Falcon, the Rose and Crown, the old Red Lion, and the Swan's Nest, being a few of them,—-but the Red Horse takes precedence of all its kindred, in the fascinating because suggestive attribute of antiquity. Moreover it was the Red Horse that harboured Washington Irving, the pioneer of American worshippers at the shrine of Shakespeare; and the American explorer of Stratford would cruelly sacrifice his peace of mind if he were to repose under any other roof. The Red Horse is a rambling, three-story building, entered through an archway that leads into a long, straggling yard, adjacent to offices and stables. On one side of the entrance is found the smoking-room; on the other is the coffee-room. Above are the bed-rooms. It is a thoroughly old-fashioned inn—such a one as we may suppose the Boar's Head to have been, in the time of Prince Henry; such a one as untravelled Americans only know in the pages of Dickens. The rooms are furnished in neat, homelike style, and their associations readily deck them with the fragrant garlands of memory. When Drayton and Jonson came down to visit "gentle Will" at Stratford they could scarcely have omitted to quaff the humming ale of Warwickshire in that cosy parlour. When Queen Henrietta Maria was ensconced at New Place the general of the royal forces quartered himself at the Red Horse, and then doubtless there was enough and to spare of revelry within its walls. A little later the old house was soundly peppered by Roundhead bullets and the whole town was overrun with the close-cropped, psalm-singing soldiers of the Commonwealth. In 1742 Garrick and Macklin lodged in the Red Horse, and thither again came Garrick in 1769, to direct the Shakespeare Jubilee, which was then most dismally accomplished but which is always remembered to the great actor's credit and honour. Betterton, no doubt, lodged there when he came to Stratford in quest of reminiscences of Shakespeare. The visit of Washington Irving, supplemented with his delicious chronicle, has led to what might be called almost the consecration of the parlour in which he sat and the chamber (No. 15) in which he slept. They still keep the poker—now marked "Geoffrey Crayon's sceptre"—with which, as he sat there in long, silent, ecstatic meditation, he prodded the fire in the narrow, tiny grate. They keep also the chair in which he sat—a plain, straight-backed arm-chair, with a haircloth seat, marked, on a brass plate, with his renowned and treasured name. Thus genius can sanctify even the humblest objects,
"And shed a something of celestial light
Round the familiar face of every day."
To pass rapidly in review the little that is known of Shakespeare's life is, nevertheless, to be impressed not only by its incessant and amazing literary fertility but by the quick succession of its salient incidents. The vitality must have been enormous that created in so short a time such a number and variety of works of the first class. The same quick spirit would naturally have kept in agitation all the elements of his daily experience. Descended from an ancestor who had fought for the Red Rose on Bosworth Field, he was born to repute as well as competence, and during his early childhood he received instruction and training in a comfortable home. He escaped the plague that was raging in Stratford when he was an infant, and that took many victims. He went to school when seven years old and left it when about fourteen. He then had to work for his living—his once opulent father having fallen into misfortune—and he became an apprentice to a butcher, or else a lawyer's clerk (there were seven lawyers in Stratford at that time), or else a schoolteacher. Perhaps he was all three—and more. It is conjectured that he saw the players who from time to time acted in the Guildhall, under the auspices of the corporation of Stratford; that he attended the religious entertainments that were customarily given in the not distant city of Coventry; and that in particular he witnessed the elaborate and sumptuous pageants with which in 1575 the Earl of Leicester welcomed Queen Elizabeth to Kenilworth Castle. He married at eighteen; and, leaving a wife and three children in Stratford, he went up to London at twenty-two. His entrance into theatrical life followed—in what capacity it is impossible to say. One dubious account says that he held horses for the public at the theatre door; another that he got employment as a prompter to the actors. It is certain that he had not been in the theatrical business long before he began to make himself known. At twenty-eight he was a prosperous author. At twenty-nine he had acted with Burbage before Queen Elizabeth; and while Spenser had extolled him in the "Tears of the Muses," the hostile Greene had disparaged him in the "Groat's-worth of Wit." At thirty-three he had acquired wealth enough to purchase New Place, the principal residence in his native town, where now he placed his family and established his home,—himself remaining in London, but visiting Stratford at frequent intervals. At thirty-four he was heard of as the actor of Knowell in Ben Jonson's comedy of Every Man in his Humour† and he received the glowing encomium of Meres in Wits Treasury. At thirty-eight he had written Hamlet and As You Like It, and moreover he had now become the owner of more estate in Stratford, costing £320. At forty-one he made his largest purchase, buying for £440 the "unexpired term of a moiety of the interest in a lease granted in 1554 for ninety-two years of the tithes of Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe." In the meantime he had smoothed the declining years of his father and had followed him with love and duty to the grave. Other domestic bereavements likewise befell him, and other worldly cares and duties were laid upon his hands, but neither grief nor business could check the fertility of his brain. Within the next ten years he wrote, among other great plays, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and Coriolanus.
† Jonson's famous comedy was first acted in 1598, "By the then Lord Chamberlain his servants." Knowell is designated as "an old gentleman." The Jonson Folio of 1692 names as follows the principal comedians who acted in that piece: "Will. Shakespeare. Aug. Philips. Hen. Condel. Will. Slye. Will. Kempe. Ric. Burbadge. Joh. Hemings. Tho. Pope. Chr. Beston. Joh. Duke."
At about forty-eight he seems to have disposed of his interest in the two London theatres with which he had been connected, the Blackfriars and the Globe, and shortly afterwards, his work as we possess it being well-nigh completed, he retired finally to his Stratford home. That he was the comrade of many bright spirits who glittered in "the spacious times" of Elizabeth several of them have left personal testimony. That he was the king of them all is shown in his works. The Sonnets seem to disclose that there was a mysterious, almost a tragical, passage in his life, and that he was called to bear the burden of a great and perhaps a calamitous personal grief—one of those griefs, which, being caused by sinful love, are endless in the punishment they entail. Happily, however, no antiquarian student of Shakespeare's time has yet succeeded in coming near to the man. While he was in London he used to frequent the Falcon Tavern, in Southwark, and the Mermaid, and he lived at one time in St. Helen's parish, Aldersgate, and at another time in Clink Street, Southwark. As an actor his name has been associated with his characters of Adam, Friar Lawrence, and the Ghost of King Hamlet, and a contemporary reference declared him "excellent in the quality he professes." Some of his manuscripts, it is possible, perished in the fire that consumed the Globe theatre in 1613. He passed his last days in his home at Stratford, and died there, somewhat suddenly, on his fifty-second birthday. That event, it may be worth while to observe, occurred within thirty-three years of the execution of Charles the First, under the Puritan Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. The Puritan spirit, intolerant of the play-house and of all its works, must then have been gaining formidable strength. His daughter Susanna, aged thirty-three at the time of his death, survived him thirty-three years. His daughter Judith, aged thirty-one at the time of his death, survived him forty-six years. The whisper of tradition says that both were Puritans. If so the strange and seemingly unaccountable disappearance of whatever play-house papers he may have left at Stratford should not be obscure. This suggestion is likely to have been made before; and also it is likely to have been supplemented with a reference to the great fire in London in 1666—(which in consuming St. Paul's cathedral burned an immense quantity of books and manuscripts that had been brought from all the threatened parts of the city and heaped beneath its arches for safety)—as probably the final and effectual holocaust of almost every piece of print or writing that might have served to illuminate the history of Shakespeare. In his personality no less than in the fathomless resources of his genius he baffles scrutiny and stands for ever alone.
"Others abide our question; thou art free:
We ask, and ask; thou smilest and art still—
Out-topping knowledge."