When Shakespeare saw Kenilworth Castle he did not, indeed, see it as it now is, a picturesque mass of ruins,—the wreck made by Cromwell’s soldiers about 1643-45,—but as a stately structure, at once a fortress and a palace. Warwick Castle, on the contrary, was the same imposing structure to him that it is to the observer of today. In the modern part of that castle now the visitor is shown a sumptuous collection of paintings, including Van Dyck’s famous equestrian portrait of King Charles I, and such suggestive relics as the helmet and the death-mask of Cromwell; but those things impress the mind much less than does the building itself. That Shakespeare entered the Castle is not known; but that he saw it cannot be doubted, for Cæsar’s Tower—one of the older parts of it—which dominates the region around Warwick now has been grandly conspicuous there for more than 400 years, and in the poet’s time it must have been familiar to all inhabitants of Warwickshire. Kenilworth, Coventry, and Warwick figure in some of his historical plays, and his particular knowledge of all the surroundings of Stratford, and, indeed, of the whole of central England, through which the Wars of the Roses raged, is manifested in those dramas. He had ample opportunity of acquiring that knowledge.
The first twenty-one or twenty-two years of his life were passed by him in his native town. The next twenty-seven years he passed in London, visiting Stratford once a year. In his closing years, from about 1613 to his death in 1616, he dwelt in Stratford, in his house called New Place, bought by him in 1597, where he died. The traveler who visits the Shakespeare Country, viewing it exclusively with reference to its associations with the poet, should bear in mind these divisions of time. The larger part of Shakespeare’s work was done in London. It is mostly as a youth, though a little as a veteran, that personally he is connected with Stratford.
THE RED HORSE HOTEL, STRATFORD-UPON-AVON
WASHINGTON IRVING PARLOR IN THE RED HORSE HOTEL
BLACKLOW HILL AND GUY’S CLIFF
In the course of the drive from Warwick to Stratford (either way) the traveler passes Ganerslie Heath and Blacklow Hill, places said to be haunted. On Blacklow Hill the corrupt Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, unworthy favorite of that weak king, Edward II, was beheaded, June 20, 1312, by order of Guy, tenth Earl of Warwick, whom he had opposed and maligned, calling him “the Black Dog of Arden,” and some of the peasantry of the neighborhood entertain to this day an old superstitious notion that dismal bells have been heard to toll from that hill at midnight. The scene of Gaveston’s decapitation is marked by a monument. Another place of interest to be seen in the course of the drive is Guy’s Cliff, a secluded residence, beside the Avon, traditionally associated with an ancient, fabled Guy, Earl of Warwick, who, after performing prodigies of valor, retired to that place and lived and died a hermit. Camden, the antiquary, Shakespeare’s contemporary, whose “Britannia” (1586) he probably knew, thus happily describes it:
“There have ye a shady little wood, cleere and cristall springs, mossy bottomes and caves, medowes alwaies fresh and greene, the river rumbling here and there among the stones with his streame making a mild noise and gentle whispering, and besides all this, solitary and still quietnesse, things most grateful to the Muses.”
