Loitering in Pleasant Paths. Marion Harland
in 1569; and in 1571—his son William being then seven years of age—chief alderman of Stratford, standing in the street-door chatting with a respectful fellow-townsman; Mary his wife, passing from dresser to hearth, and, upon a stool in the chimney corner, the Boy, chin propped upon his hand, thinking—“idling,” his industrious seniors would have said.
We had hardly passed the door of communication when sister No. 1 having transferred the rest of the visitors to No. 2, and sent them up-stairs, reappeared. The same professional dip of the starched figure; the manufactured smile, and, mistaking us for fresh arrivals, she began, without variation of syllable or inflection:
“After the removal of the Shakspeare family from this humble tenement, it was leased to a prosperous butcher, who occupied this room as a shop. That was, indeed, a sad desecration—”
We fled to the upper story. The stairs give upon an ante-chamber corresponding with the back-kitchen. Against the rear-wall, in a gaudy frame, and, itself looking unpicturesquely new and distinct, is the celebrated “Stratford Portrait”—another restoration. It is not spurious, having been the property of a respectable county-family for upwards of a century, and there is abundant documentary testimony of its authenticity. It shows us a handsomer man than do the other pictures of the Great Play-Wright. In fact, it is too good-looking. One could believe it the representment of the jolly, prosperous wool-factor, complacent under the shower of municipal honors. It is difficult to reconcile the smooth, florid face, the scarlet lips, dainty moustache and imperial, with thoughts of Lear, Hamlet, and Coriolanus.
“The room in which Shakspeare was born” was quite full of pilgrims—quiet, well-bred and non-enthusiastic, exclaiming softly over such signatures as Walter Scott’s upon the casement-panes, and Edmund Kean’s upon the side of the chimney devoted to actors’ autographs. They indulged in no conversational raptures—for which we were grateful. But the hum of talk, the rustle and stir were a death-blow to fond and poetic phantasies. We gazed coldly upon the scrawlings that disfigure the walls and blur the windows; incredulously upon the deal table and chairs; critically at the dirty bust which offered still another and a different image of the man we refused to believe came by this shabby portal into the world that was to worship him as the greatest of created intellects. Such disillusions are more common with those who visit old shrines in the rôle of “passionate pilgrims” than they are willing to admit.
I wanted to think of Shakspeare’s cradle and the mother-face above it; how he had been carried by her to the casement—thrown wide on soft summer days like this—and clapped his hands at sight of birds and trees, and boys and girls playing in the street, as my babies, and all other babies, have done from the days of Cain. How he had rolled and crept upon the floor, and caught many a tumble in his trial-steps, and fallen asleep at twilight in the warm covert of mother-arms. I had thought of it a thousand times before; I have been all over it a thousand times since. While on the hallowed spot, I saw the low room, common and homely, with bulging rafters and rough-cast sides, the uneven boards of the floor, brown and blotched—the vulgarity of everything, the consecration of nothing.
The museum in an adjoining room caused a perceptible rise in the spirits, dampened by our inability to “realize,” as conscience decreed, in the birth-chamber. The desk used by Shakspeare at school looked plausible. There were realistic touches in the lid bespattered with ink and hacked by jack-knife. The hinges are of leather. We believed that he kept gingerbread, sausage-roll, toffey, green apples, and cock-chafers with strings tied to their hind legs, in it. We did not quibble over Shakspeare’s signet-ring, engraved with “W. S.” and a lover’s knot. He might have sat in the chair reputed to have been used in the merry club-meetings at the Falcon Inn, the sign of which is to be seen here. His coat-of-arms, a falcon and spear, was proof that his father bore, by right, the grand old name of “gentleman.” One of the very tame dragons in charge of the premises bore down upon us while we were looking at this.
“It is a singular coincidence, too remarkable to be only a coincidence”—her tones a ripple of treacle—“that the falcon should be the bird that shakes its wings most constantly while in flight. Combine this circumstance with the spear, and he is a very dull student of heraldry who cannot trace the derivation of the name of the Immortal Bard.”
Caput set his jaw dumbly. It was Dux, younger and less discreet, who said, “By Jove!”
The crayon head exhibited here is a copy of the “Chandos Portrait,” taken at the age of forty-three. It also is reputed to be an excellent likeness, and resembles neither the bust in the church nor the famous “Death Mask,” of which there is here preserved an admirable photograph. After studying all other pictures extant of him, one reverts to the last-mentioned as the truest embodiment of the ideal Shakspeare we know by his works. The face, sunken and rigid in death, yet bears the impress of a loftier intellectuality and more dignified manhood than do any of the painted and sculptured presentments. The only letter written to Shakspeare, known to be in existence, is preserved in this museum. It is signed by one Richard Quyney, who would like to borrow thirty pounds of the poet. One speculates, in deciphering the yellow-brown leaf that would crumble at a touch, upon the probabilities of the writer having had a favorable reply, and why this particular epistle should have been kept so carefully. It was probably pure accident. It could hardly have been a unique in the owner’s collection if the stories of his rapid prosperity and the character of the boon-companions of his early days be true.
As we paused in the lower front room to strengthen our recollection of the tout ensemble, leaning upon the sill of the window by which the child and boy must often have stood at evening, gazing into the quiet street, or seen the moon rise hundreds of times over the dark line of roofs, custodian No. 1 drooped us a professional adieu, and dividing the wire-and-pulley smile impartially between us and a fresh bevy of pilgrims upon the threshold, commenced with the automatic precision of a cuckoo-clock:
“After the removal of the Shakspeare family from this humble tenement it was leased to a prosperous butcher, who occupied this room as a shop. That was, indeed, a sad desecration—”
“Eight day or daily?” queried Lex, as we walked down the street.
We lingered for a moment at the building to which went Shakspeare as a
“Whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping, like snail,
Unwillingly to school.”
It is “the thing” to quote the line before the gray walls capped by mossy slates, of the Grammar-School founded by Henry IV. The quadrangle about which the lecture-rooms and offices are ranged is not large, and is entered by a low gateway. Over the stones of this court-yard Shakspeare’s feet,
“Creeping in to school,
Went storming out to playing.”
Boy-nature, in 1574, was the same, in these respects, as in 1874, Shakspeare and Whittier being judges.
Stratford-on-Avon is a clean, quiet country town, that would have dwindled into a village long ago had not John Shakspeare’s son been born in her High Street. Antique houses, with peaked gables and obtrusive beams, deep-stained by years—(Time’s record is made with inky dyes, and in broad English down-strokes, in this climate)—are to be seen on every street. Every second shop along our route had in its one window a show of what we would call “Shakspeare Notions;” stamped handkerchiefs, mugs, platters, paper-cutters and paper-weights, and a host of photographs, all commemorative of the town and the Man.
“New Place” was purchased by Shakspeare in 1597, and enlarged and adorned as befitted his amended fortunes. We like to hear that, while he lived in London, not a year elapsed without his paying a visit to Stratford, and that in 1613, upon his withdrawal from public life, he made New Place his constant residence, spending his time “in ease, retirement and the society of friends.” In the garden grew, and, long after his death flourished, the mulberry-tree planted by his own hands. In the museum we had seen a goblet carved out of the wood of this tree, and, in a sealed bottle, the purple juice of its berries. New Place did not pass from the poet’s family until the death of his granddaughter, Lady Barnard. It is recorded that, in 1643,