From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton, 8 vols. (London: Moulton Publishing, 1901), 1: 447-54.
[This section was prepared and proofread by Deborah Hill.]
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
1564-1616
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. Born, at Stratford-on-Avon, 22 or 23 April 1564. Educated at Stratford Grammar School, 1571-77 (?). Perhaps apprenticed to his father (a butcher), 1577. Married Ann Hathaway, 1582. To London, 1586, acted and wrote for stage. Plays probably written between 1591 and 1611. Bought New Place, Stratford, May 1597. Bought a house in Blackfriars, 1613. Died, at Stratford-on-Avon, 23 April 1616. Buried in Stratford Church. Works: The following are known to have been printed in Shakespeare's lifetime: "Venus and Adonis, " 1593; "Lucrece," 1594; "Richard III.," 1597; "Richard II.," 1597, "Romeo and Juliet," 1597, "Henry IV., Pt. I.," 1598, "Love's Labour's Lost," 1598: "Henry V.," 1600, "Midsummer Night's Dream," 1600; "Merchant of Venice," 1600, "Henry IV., Pt. II.," 1600; "Much Ado about Nothing," 1600, "Titus Andronicus," 1600 "Merry Wives of Windsor, " 1602, "Hamlet," 1603, "King Lear, " 1608, "Sonnets, " 1609; "Troilus and Cressida, " 1609. His "Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, " ed. by J. Heminge and H. Condell, were first published in 1623, his "Works, " ed. by N. Rowe (7 vols.), 1709-10. -- SHARP, R. FARQUHARSON, 1897, A Dictionary of English Authors, p. 253.
PERSONAL
GOOD FREND FOR IESVS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HEARE:
BLESTE BE Ye MAN Yt SPARES THES STONES,
AND CVRST BE HE Yt MOVES MY BONES.
-- Inscription on the Tablet over Shakespeare's Grave, April 25, 1616.
Base minded men al three of you, if by my miserie ye be not warned: for unto none of you (like me) sought those burres to cleave: those Puppits (I meane) that speake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they al have beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all have beene beholding, shall (were ye in that case that I am now) be both at once of them forsaken? Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he isas well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owns conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie. O that I might intreate your rare wits to be imployed in more profitable courses: & let these Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions. I know the best husband of you all will never prove an usurer and the kindest of them all wil never proove a kinde nurse: yet, whilst you may, seeke you better Maisters, for it is pittie men of such rare wits, should be subiect to the pleasures of such rude groomes. -- GREENE, ROBERT, 1592, A Groats-worth of Wit.
About three moneths since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers in sundry Booke sellers hands, among other his Groats-worth of wit in which a letter written to diuers playmakers, is offensiuely by one or two of them taken, and because on the dead they cannot be avenged, they wilfully forge in their conceites a liuing author: and after tossing it to and fro, no remedy, but it must light on me. . . . With neither of them [i.e., Marlowe and Shakespeare] that take offense was I acquainted, and with one of them [i.e., Marlowe] I care not if I neuer be: the other [i.e., Shakespeare], whom at that time I did not so much spare, as since I wish I had, for that as I haue moderated the heate of liuing writers, and might haue vsed my owne discretion (especially in such a case) the author being dead, that I did not, I am as sory, as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because myselfe haue seene his demeanor no lease ciuill than he exclent [sic] in the qualitie he professes: besides, diuers of worship haue reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty and his facetious grace in writting, that aprooues his art. -- CHETTLE, HENRY, 1592, Kind-Hart's Dreame, ed. Rimbault, Preface, p. iv.
Players, I love yee, and your Qualitie,
As ye are Men, that pass time not abus'd:
And some I love for painting, poesie,
And say fell Fortune cannot be excus'd,
That hath for better uses you refus'd:
Wit, Courage, good shape, good partes, and all good,
As long as al these goods are no worse us'd,
And though the stage doth staine pure gentle bloud,
Yet generous yee are in minde and moode.
-- DAVIES, JOHN, OF HEREFORD, 1603, Microcosmos, ed. Grosart.
Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh
To learned Chaucer; and rare Beaumont, lie
A little nearer Spenser; to make room
For Shakespeare in your three-fold four-fold tomb:
To lodge all four in one bed make a shift
Until Doomsday; for hardly will a fift,
Betwixt this day and that, by fate be slain
For whom your curtains may be drawn again.
But if precedency in death doth bar
A fourth place in your sacred sepulchre
Under this carved marble of thine own,
Sleep, rare tragedian, Shakspeare, sleep alone:
Thy umnolested peace, unshared cave,
Possess as lord, not tenant, of thy grave;
That unto us and others it may be
Honour hereafter to be laid by thee.
-- BASSE, WILLIAM, 1616 ?, Epitaph on Shakspeare.
This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut;
Wherein the Graver had a strife
With Nature, to out-doo the life:
O, could he but have drawne his Wit
As well in Brasse, as he hath hit
His Face; the Print would then surpasse
All, that was ever writ in Brasse.
But, since he cannot, Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.
-- J(ONSON), B(EN), 1623, Facing Droeshout's portrait of Shakespeare prefixed to the First Folio Edition of his Works.
Mellifluous Shakespeare whose enchanting quill Commanded mirth or passion was but Will. -- HEYWOOD, THOMAS, 1635, The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels.
Shakspear had but two daughters, one whereof Mr. Hall, the physitian, married, and by her had on daughter married, to wit, the Lady Bernard of Abbingdon. I have heard that Mr. Shakspeare was a natural wit, without any art at all; hee frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every year, and for itt had an allowance so large, that hee spent att the rate of 1,0001. a-year, as I have heard. Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson, had a merie meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespear died of a feavour there contracted. Remember to peruse Shakespeare's plays; and bee much versed in them, that I may not bee ignorant in that matter. Whether Dr. Heylin does well, in reckoning up the dramatick poets which have been famous in England, to omit Shakespeare. -- WARD, REV. JOHN, 1648-78, Diary, ed. Severn, p. 183.
William Shakespeare was born at Stratford on Avon in this County [i.e., Warwick]; in whom three eminent Poets may seem in some sort to be compounded. 1. Martial, in the warlike sound of his Surname (whence some may conjecture him of a Military extraction) Hastivibrans, or Shake-speare. 2. Ovid, the most naturall and witty of all Poets, and hence it was that Queen Elizabeth, coming into a Grammar-School, made this extemporary verse,
"Persius a Crab-staffe, Bawdy Martial, Ovid a fine Wag."
3. Plautus, who was an exact Comedian, yet never any Scholar, as our Shake-speare (if alive) would confess himself. Adde to all these, that though his Genius generally was jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet he could (when so disposed) be solemn and serious, as appears by his Tragedies; so that Heraclitus himself (I mean if secret and unseen) might afford to smile at his Comedies, they were so merry; and Democritus scarce forbear to sigh at his Tragedies, they were so mournfull. He was an eminent instance of the truth of that Rule, "Poeta non fit, sed nascitur;" one is not made, but born a Poet. Indeed his Learning was very little, so that, as Cornish diamonds are not polished by any Lapidary, but are pointed and smoothed even as they are taken out of the Earth, so Nature itself was all the Art which was used upon him. Many were the Wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great Gallion and an English Man of War: Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in Learning, solid, but slow, in his performances. Shake-speare, with the English Man of War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention. -- FULLER, THOMAS, 1662, The Worthies of England, ed. Nichols, vol. II, p. 414.
Mr. William Shakespear was borne at Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick. His father was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he kill'd a calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher's son in this towne that was held not at all inferior to him for a naturall wits, his acquaintance and coetanean, but dyed young. This William being inclined naturally to poetry and acting, came to London, I guesse, about 18, and was an actor at one of the playhouses, and did act exceedingly well (now B. Johnson was never a good actor, but an excellent instructor). He began early to make essayes at dramatique poetry, which at that time was very lowe, and his playes tooke well. He was a handsome, well-shap't man: very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt. -- AUBREY, JOHN, 1669-96, Brief Lives, ed. Clark, vol. II, p. 225.
He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and, amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and, in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him. And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that decree, that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London. -- ROWE, NICHOLAS, 1709, Some Account of the Life of William Shakespeare.
Thou, soft-flowing Avon, by thy silver stream
Of things more than Mortal sweet Shakespeare would dream,
The fairies by moonlight dance round his green bed.
For hallow'd the turf is which pillow'd his head.
.................................................
Flow on silver Avon, in Song ever flow
Be the swans on thy waters whiter than snow,
Ever full be thy stream, like his name may it spread
And the turf ever-hallow'd which pillows his head.
-- GARRICK, DAVID, 1769, Ode to Shakespeare.
The tomb of Shakspeare is in the chancel. The place is solemn and sepulchral. Tall elms wave before the pointed windows, and the AVON, which runs at a short distance from the walls, keeps up a low perpetual murmur. A flat stone marks the spot where the bard is buried. There are four lines inscribed on it, said to have been written by himself, and which have in them something extremely awful. If they are indeed his own, they show that solicitude about the quiet of the grave which seems natural to fine sensibilities and thoughtful minds.... As I crossed the bridge over the Avon on my return, I paused to contemplate the distant church in which the poet lies buried and could not but exult in the malediction which has kept his ashes undisturbed in its quiet and hallowed vaults. What honor could his name have derived from being mingled in dusty companionship with the epitaphs and escutcheons and venal eulogiums of a titled multitude? What would a crowded corner in Westminster Abbey have been, compared with this reverend pile, which seems to stand in beautiful loneliness as his sole mausoleum! -- IRVING, WASHINGTON, 1819 - 48, Stratford- On-Avon, Sketch Book.
It was not without some pleasurable imaginations that I saw Stratford-upon-Avon, the very hills and woods which the boy Shakespeare had looked upon, the very church where his dust reposes, nay, the very house where he was born, the threshold over which his staggering footsteps carried him in infancy; the very stones where the urchin played marbles and flogged tops. . . . It is a small grim-looking house of bricks, bound, as was of old the fashion, with beams of oak intersecting the bricks which are built into it and fill up its interstices as the glass does in a window. The old tile roof is cast by age, and twisted into all varieties of curvature. Half the house has been modernised and made a butcher's shop. The street where it stands is a simple-looking, short, everyday village street, with houses mostly new, and consisting, like the Shakespeare house, of two low stories, or rather a story and a half. Stratford itself is a humble, pleasant-looking place, the residence as formerly of woolcombers and other quiet artisans, except where they have brought an ugly black canal into it, and polluted this classical borough by the presence of lighters or trackboats with famished horses, sooty drivers, and heaps of coke and coal. It seems considerably larger and less showy than Annan. Shakespeare, Breakspeare, and for aught I know sundry other spears, are still common names in Warwickshire. I was struck on my arrival at Birmingham by a sign not far from Badams's, indicating the abode of William Shakespeare, boot and shoe maker, which boots and shoes the modern Shakespeare also professed his ability to mend "cheap and neatly." Homer, I afterwards discovered, had settled in Birmingham as a button maker. -- CARLYLE, THOMAS, 1824, Letter to John Carlyle, Life, ed. Froude, vol. I. p. 191.
Of William Shakspeare, whom, through the mouths of those whom he has inspired to body forth the modifications of his immense mind, we seem to know better than any human writer, it may be truly said that we scarcely know any thing. We see him, so far as we do see him, not in himself, but in a reflex image from the objectivity in which he was manifested: he is Falstaff and Mercutio and Malvolio and Jaques and Portia and Imogen and Lear and Othello; but to us he is scarcely a determined person, a substantial reality of past time, the man Shakspeare. The two greatest names in poetry are to us little more than names. If we are not yet come to question his unity, as we do that of "the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle, " an improvement in critical acuteness doubtless reserved for a distant posterity, we as little feel the power of identifying the young man who came up from Stratford, was afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear, as we can give a distinct historic personality to Homer. All that insatiable curiosity and unwearied diligence have hitherto detected about Shakespeare serves rather to disappoint and perplex us than to furnish the slightest illustration of his character. It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his name, that we seek. No letter of his writing, no record of his conversation no character of him drawn with any fulness by a contemporary, has been produced. -- HALLAM, HENRY, 1837-39, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, vol. II. pt. ii, ch. vi, par. 34.
I can vouch, for the following form, all taken from writings of nearly the poet's own age.... Schaksper, Schakesper, Schakespeyr, Shagspere, Shaxper, Shaxpere, Shaxpeare, Shaxsper, Shaxspere, Shaxespere, Shakepere, Shakepear, Shakspeere, Shackspeare, Shackespeare, Shackespere, Shakspeyr, Shakesper, Shakespere, Shakeseper, Shakyspere, Shakespire, Shakespeire, Shakespear, Shakaspeare. They are all manifestly of the same type; and to these varieties others might be added. In two instances I have met with the name written Saxpere. Shakespeare or Shakespear kept its ground as the received and proper orthography of the poet's name till the time of the two very eminent commentators Steevens and Malone. ... A contemporary critic of inferior note in 1785 introduced another variation. In his hands the name became Shakspere, with the object, no doubt, of bringing back the orthography to the form in which the name is said to be found traced by the poet's own hand in his will and in other writings. -- HUNTER, JOSEPH, 1845, New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare, vol. I, pp. 4, 5.
As there is hardly a page in his writings which does not shed more light upon the biography of his mind, and bring us nearer to the individuality of the man, the antiquaries in despair have been compelled to abandon him to the psychologists, and the moment the transition from external to internal facts is made, the most obscure of men passes into the most notorious. For this personality and soul we call Shakespeare, the recorded incidents of whose outward career were so few and trifling, lived a more various life -- a life more crowded with ideas, passions, volitions, and events -- than any potentate the world has ever seen. Compared with his experience, the experience of Alexander or Hannibal, of Caesar or Napoleon, was narrow and one-sided. He had projected himself into almost all the varieties of human character, and, in imagination, had intensely realized and lived the life of each. From the throne of the monarch to the bench of the village alehouse, there were few positions in which he had not placed himself, and which he had not for a time identified with his own. -- WHIPPLE, EDWIN P., 1859-68, The Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, p. 33.
In April, 1664, it was a hundred years since Shakespeare was born. England was occupied in cheering loudly Charles II., who had sold Dunkirk to France for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling, and in looking at something that was a skeleton and had been Cromwell, whitening under the north-east wind and rain on the gallows at Tyburn. In April, 1764, it was two hundred years since Shakespeare was born: England was contemplating the dawn of George III., a king destined to imbecility, who, at that epoch, in secret councils, and in somewhat unconstitutional asides with the Tory chiefs and the German Landgraves, was sketching out that policy of resistance to progress which was to strive, first against liberty in America, then against democracy in France, and which, only under the ministry of the first Pitt, had, in 1778, raised the debt of England to the sum of eighty millions sterling. In April, 1864, three hundred years since Shakespeare's birth, England raises a statue to Shakespeare. It is late, but it is well. -- HUGO, VICTOR, 1864, William Shakespeare, tr. Baillot, p. 324.
The moral humility of Shakspere is equal to his intellectual grandeur. Mental wealth without pride such is the example that he presents, both in theory and practice, to the most favoured son of genius. -- HERAUD, JOHN A., 1865, Shakspere, His Inner Life as Intimated in His Works, p. 66.
To Stratford-on-the-Avon -- And we passed
Thro' aisles and avenues of the princeliest trees
That ever eyes beheld. None such with us
Here in the bleaker North. And as we went
Through Lucy's park, the red day drops i'the west;
A crimson glow, like blood in lovers cheeks,
Spread up the soft green sky and passed away;
The mazy twilight came down on the lawns,
And all those huge trees seemed to fall asleep;
The deer went past like shadows. All the park
Lay round us like a dream; and one fine thought
Hung over us, and hallowed all. Yea, he,
The pride of England, glistened like a star,
And beckoned us to Stratford.
-- LEIGHTON, ROBERT, 1869? Stratford-on-Avon.
Of Shakepeare all came from within -- I mean from his soul and his genius; external circumstances contributed but slightly to his development. He was intimately bound up with his age; that is, he knew by experience the manners of country, court, and town he had visited the heights, depths, the middle regions of the condition of mankind; nothing more. For the rest his life was commonplace; the irregularities, troubles, passions, successes through which he passed, were, on the whole, such as we meet with everywhere else. -- TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English Literature, tr. Van Laun, vol. I, bk. ii, ch. iv, I. 297.
The manner of his death is uncertain. His will, still preserved in the Prerogative Office, is dated March 25, 1616. The poet's handwriting, never very good, if we may judge from the few signatures that have been preserved, and fifty years more antiquated than that of Sir Thomas Lucy is feeble, shaky, and imperfect; very little like what might have been expected from one whose practice in writing must have been considerable, and who had in his time filled many reams of manuscript. His death did not occur until the 23rd of April following. It would seem, therefore, that his death was far from sudden; and this alone would suffice to invalidate the tradition, circulated forty-five years after, that the poet died of a fever contracted at a merry meeting with Drayton and Ben Jonson. His bust in Stratford Church, his portrait by Droeshout prefixed to the first folio edition of his works, and the whole tenour of his life, contradict altogether the supposition that the poet was intemperate. If the opinion of competent judges may be taken, the bust was executed from a cast taken after death. It was certainly coloured after life, and until it was painted over by Malone -- a greater crime to Shakspeare's memory than Mr. Gaskill's destruction of the famous mulberry tree -- it represented the poet exactly as he appeared to his con- temporaries. The eyes were a bright hazel, the hair and beard auburn, the doublet was scarlet, covered with a loose black sleeveless gown. As in Droeshout's portrait, the forehead is remarkably high and broad; in fact, the immense volume of the forehead is its most striking feature. The predominant characteristic of the whole is that of a composed, self-possessed, resolute, and vigorous Englishman, of a higher intellectual stamp than usual, but not so far removed from the general national type as we should have been inclined to expect from his writings. -- BREWER, J. S., 1871-81, English Studies, ed. Wace, p. 235.
As in his dramatic world he embraces the widest variety of human experience, so in his personal character he may be said to have combined in harmonious union the widest range of qualities, including some apparently the most opposed. He was a vigilant and acute man of business, of great executive ability, with a power of looking into affairs which included a thorough mastery of tedious legal details. But with all his worldly prudence and foresight he was at the same time the most generous and affectionate of men, honored and loved by all who knew him, with the irresistible charm that belongs to simplicity and directness of character combined with thoughtful sympathy and real kindness of heart. And while displaying unrivalled skill, sagacity, and firmness in business transactions and practical affairs, he could promptly throw the whole burden aside, and in the exercise of his noble art pierce with an eagle's wing the very highest heaven of invention. That indeed was his native air, his true home, his permanent sphere, where he still rules with undisputed sway. He occupies a throne apart in the ideal and immortal kingdom of supreme creative art, poetical genius and dramatic truth. -- BAYNES, T. SPENCER, 1886, Encyclopoedia Britannica, Ninth ed., vol. XXI, p. 803.
The folk who lived in Shakespeare's day
And saw that gentle figure pass
By London Bridge, his frequent way --
They little knew what man he was.
The pointed beard, the courteous mien,
The equal port to high and low
All this they saw or might have seen --
But not the light behind the brow!
The doublet's modest gray or brown
The slender sword-hilt's plain device,
What sign had these for prince or clown?
Few turned, or none, to scan him twice
Yet t'was the king of England's kings!
The rest with all their pomps and trains
Are mouldered, half-remembered things --
'Tis he alone that lives and reigns!
-- ALDRICH, THOMAS BAILEY, 1890, Guilielmus Rex.
His literary practices and aims were those of contemporary men of letters, and the difference in the quality of his work and theirs was due not to conscious endeavour on his part to act otherwise than they, but to the magic and involuntary working of his genius. He seemed unconscious of his marvellous superiority to his professional comrades. The references in his will to his fellow-actors, and the spirit in which (as they announce in the First Folio) they approached the task of collecting his works after his death, corroborate the description of him as a sympathetic friend of gentle, unassuming mien. The later traditions brought together by Aubrey depict him as "very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit," and there is much in other early posthumous references to suggest a genial if not a convivial, temperament, linked to a quiet turn for good-humoured satire. But Bohemian ideals and modes of life had no genuine attraction for Shakespeare. His extant work attests his "copious" and continuous industry, and with his literary power and sociability there clearly went the shrewd capacity of a man of business. Pope had just warrant for the surmise that he
For gain not glory winged his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite.
His literary attainments and successes were chiefly valued as serving the prosaic end of providing permanently for himself and his daughters. His highest ambition was to restore among his fellow-townsmen the family repute which his father's misfortunes had imperilled. Ideals so homely are reckoned rare among poets, but Chaucer and Sir Walter Scott, among writers of exalted genius, vie with Shakespeare in the sobriety of their personal aims and in the sanity of their mental attitude toward life's ordinary incidents. -- LEE, SIDNEY, 1898, A Life of William Shakespeare, p. 278.
That must have been a momentous day in Shakespeare's life on which, after giving up his house in London, he mounted his horse and rode back to Stratford-on-Avon to take up his abode there for good. . . . Life lay behind him now. His hopes had been fulfilled in many ways; he was famous, he had raised himself a degree in the social scale, above all he was rich but for all that he was not happy. The great town, in which he had spent the better part of a lifetime, had not so succeeded in attaching him to it that he would feel any pain in leaving it. There was neither man nor woman there so dear to him as to make society preferable to solitude, and the crowded life of London to the seclusion of the country and an existence passed in the midst of family and Nature. . . . The journey from London to Stratford took three days. He would put up at the inns at which he was accustomed to stay on his yearly journey to and fro, and where he was always greeted as a welcome guest, and given a bed with snow-white sheets, for which travellers on foot were charged an extra penny, but which he, as rider, enjoyed gratis. The hostess at Oxford, pretty Mistress Davenant, would give him a specially cordial greeting. The two were old and good friends. Little William born in 1606, and now seven years old, possessed a certain, perhaps accidental, resemblance of feature to the guest. . . . It was the quietude of Stratford which attracted him, its leisure, the emptiness of its dirty streets, its remoteness from the busy world. What he really longed for was Nature, the Nature with which he had lived in such intimate companionship in his early youth, which he had missed so terribly while writing "As You Like It" and its fellow-plays, and from which he had so long been separated. Far more than human beings was it the gardens which he had bought and planted there which drew him back to his native town the gardens and trees on which he looked from his windows at New Place. -- BRANDES, GEORGE, 1898, Wiilliam Shakespeare, A Critical Study, vol. II, pp. 389, 390, 392.
The Birthplace, as it is called, is a cottage of plaster and timber, two stories in height, with dormer windows, and a pleasant garden in the rear -- all that remains of a considerable piece of land. It stands upon the street, and the visitor passes at once, through a little porch, into a low room, ceiled with black oak, paved with flags, and with a fireplace so wide that one sees at a glance what the chimney-corner once meant of comfort and cheer. On those seats, looking into the glowing fire, the imagination of a boy could hardly fail to kindle. A dark and narrow stair leads to the little bare room on the floor above in which Shakespeare was probably born. The place seems fitted, by its very simplicity, to serve as the starting-point for so great a career. There is a small fireplace, the low ceiling is within reach of the hand; on the narrow panes of glass which fill the casement names and initials are traced in irregular profusion. This room has been a place eagerly sought by literary pilgrims since the beginning of the century. The low ceiling and the walls were covered, in the early part of the century, with innumerable autographs. In 1820 the occupant, a woman who attached great importance to the privilege of showing the house to visitors, was compelled to give up that privilege, and by way of revenge, removed the furniture and whitewashed the walls of the house. A part of the wall of the upper room escaped the sacrilegious hand of the jealous custodian, and names running back to the third decade of the last century are still to be found there. Other and perhaps more famous names have taken the places of those which were erased, and the walls are now a mass of hieroglyphs. Scott, Byron, Rogers, Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens, have left this record of their interest in the room. No new names are now written on these blackened walls: the names of visitors are kept in a recordbook on the lower floor. -- MABIE, HAMILTON WRIGHT, 1900, William Shakespeare, Poet, Dramatist, and Man, p. 35.
Links to other sites on the Web
Get your own Free Home Page