Chapter III: Staffordshire (2)

The supposed birthplace is now converted, after a chequered career, into a Shakespeare Museum, where are treasured more or less authentic relics and those first editions which are worth their weight in radium. Built of the tough Arden oak and of honest plaster, it was a respectable residence for the times, not unworthy of that versatile and vigorous citizen who traded in corn and timber and wool and cattle, rose from the offices of ale-taster and constable to be successively Chamberlain, Alderman, and High Bailiff, and loomed before the eyes of his little son as the greatest man in the world. The house, whose clay floors it may have been the children's task to keep freshly strewn with rushes, would have been furnished with oaken chests and settles, stools, trestle-boards, truckle-beds, and perhaps a great bedstead with carved posts. Robert Arden, a man of property and position, had left, among other domestic luxuries, eleven "painted cloths"--naïve representations of religious or classical subjects, with explanatory texts beneath. His daughter may have had some of these works of art to adorn the walls of her Stratford home, and, like enough, she brought her husband a silver salt-cellar and a "fair garnish of pewter." Her eldest son, whose plays "teach courtesy to kings," was doubtless carefully bred,--sent off early to school "with shining morning face," and expected to wait on his parents at their eleven o'clock breakfast before taking his own, though we need feel no concern about his going hungry. Trust him for knowing, as he passed the trenchers and filled the flagons, how to get many a staying nibble behind his father's back.

We wandered on to the Grammar School, still located in the picturesque, half-timbered building originally erected, toward the end of the thirteenth century, by the Guild of the Holy Cross. Here once was hospital as well as school, and in the long hall on the ground floor, even yet faintly frescoed with the Crucifixion, the Guild held its meetings and kept its feasts. Henry VIII made but half a bite of all this, but the boy-king, Edward VI, eleven years before Shakespeare's birth, gave the ancient edifice back to Stratford. Then the long hall was used for the deliberations of the Town Council, and sometimes, especially when John Shakespeare was in office, for the performances of strolling players,--three men and a boy, perhaps, travelling in their costumes, which, by a little shifting and furbishing, might serve for an old-fashioned morality or a new-fangled chronicle, or, should the schoolmaster's choice prevail, for something newly Englished from the classics. "Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light." The school, thenceforth known as Edward VI Grammar School, was permanently established in the top story, where it is still in active operation. Here we saw the Latin room in which another William than Mistress Page's hopeful was taught "to hick and to hack," and the Mathematics room where he learned enough arithmetic to "buy spices for our sheep-shearing." He was only fourteen or fifteen, it is believed, when his father's business troubles broke off his schooling, but not his education. Everywhere was "matter for a hot brain." And he, who, since the days when he "plucked geese, played truant, and whipped top, ... knew not what 'twas to be beaten," would have borne up blithely against this seeming set-back. Nature had given him "wit to flout at Fortune," and these, too, were the red-blooded years of youth, when he was ever ready to "dance after a tabor and pipe" and pay his laughing court to many a "queen of curds and cream."

"But, O, the thorns we stand upon!"

The mature charms of Anne Hathaway turned jest into earnest and sent prudence down the wind. There was a hasty wedding, nobody knows where, and John Shakespeare's burdens were presently increased by the advent of three grandchildren. It was obviously high time for this ne'er-do-well young John-a-Dreams--"yet he's gentle; never schooled, and yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly beloved"--to strike out into the world and seek his fortune.

Next to the Guild Hall stands the Guild Chapel, whose former frescoes of the Day of Judgment must have made deep impression on the "eye of childhood that fears a painted devil"; and over the way from the Guild Chapel is New Place. On this site in the time of Henry VII rose the Great House, built by a Stratford magnate and benefactor, Sir Hugh Clopton,--he who gave the town that "fair Bridge of Stone over Avon." In 1597 Shakespeare, who could hardly have been in London a dozen years, had prospered so well, albeit in the disreputable crafts of actor and playwright, that he bought the estate, repaired the mansion then in "great ruyne and decay," and renamed it New Place. Yet although it was his hour of triumph, his heart was sorrowful, for his only son, his eleven-year-old Hamnet, "jewel of children," had died the year before. At least another decade passed before Shakespeare finally withdrew from London and settled down at New Place with the wife eight years his senior, a plain country woman of Puritan proclivities. In his twenty years of intense creative life,

"The inward service of the mind and soul"

must have widened beyond any possible comprehension of hers, nor can his two daughters, unlettered and out of his world as they were, have had much inkling of the career and achievements of "so rare a wonder'd father." His parents were dead. Their ashes may now mingle with little Hamnet's in some forgotten plot of the elm-shadowed churchyard. Of his two daughters, Susanna, the elder, had married a Stratford physician, and there was a grandchild, little Elizabeth Hall, to brighten the gardens of New Place. As I lingered there,--for the gardens remain, though the house is gone,--my eyes rested on a three-year-old lass in a fluttering white frock,--no wraith, though she might have been,--dancing among the flowers with such uncertain steps and tossing such tiny hands in air that the birds did not trouble themselves to take to their wings, but hopped on before her like playfellows.

The deepest of the Shakespeare mysteries is, to my mind, the silence of those closing years. Were nerves and brain temporarily exhausted from the strain of that long period of continuous production? Or had he come home from London sore at heart, "toss'd from wrong to injury," smarting from "the whips and scorns of time" and abjuring the "rough magic" of his art? Or was he, in "the sessions of sweet silent thought," dreaming on some high, consummate poem in comparison with which the poor stage-smirched plays seemed to him not worth the gathering up? Or might he, taking a leaf out of Ben Jonson's book, have been in fact arranging and rewriting his works, purging his gold from the dross of various collaborators? Or was some new, inmost revelation of life dawning upon him, holding him dumb with awe? We can only ask, not answer; but certainly they err who claim that the divinest genius of English letters had wrought merely for house and land, and found his chief reward in writing "Gentleman" after his name.

"Sure, he that made us with such large discourse
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To rust in us unus'd."

Shakespeare had been gentle before he was a gentleman, and had held ever--let his own words bear witness!--

"Virtue and cunning were endowments greater
Than nobleness and riches."

The gods had given him but fifty-two years on earth--had they granted more, he might have probed and uttered too many of their secrets--when for the last time he was "with holy bell ... knoll'd to church." It was an April day when the neighbours bore a hand-bier--as I saw a hand-bier borne a few years since across the fields from Shottery--the little way from New Place down Chapel Lane and along the Waterside--or perhaps by Church Street--and up the avenue, beneath its blossoming limes, to Holy Trinity.

Here, where the thousands and the millions come up to do reverence to this

"Dear Son of Memory, great Heir of Fame,"

I passed a peaceful hour, ruffled only--if the truth must out--by the unjustifiable wrath which ever rises in me on reading Mrs. Susanna Hall's epitaph. I can forgive the "tombemaker" who wrought the bust, I can endure the stained-glass windows, I can overlook the alabaster effigy of John Combe in Shakespeare's chancel, but I resent the Puritan self-righteousness of the lines,--

"Witty above her sexe, but that's not all,
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in that but this
Wholly of him with whom she's now in blisse."

Yes, I know that Shakespeare made her his heiress, that she was clever and charitable, that in July of 1643 she entertained Queen Henrietta Maria at New Place, but I do not care at all for the confusion of her bones when "a person named Watts" intruded into her grave fifty-eight years after she had taken possession, and I believe she used her father's manuscripts for wrapping up her saffron pies.

We spent the earlier half of the afternoon in a drive among some of the outlying villages of Stratford,--first to Wilmcote, the birthplace of Shakespeare's mother. We dismissed a fleeting thought of "Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot," and sought only for "Mary Arden's Cottage." Gabled and dormer-windowed, of stout oak timbers and a light brown plaster, it stands pleasantly within its rustic greenery. Old stone barns and leaning sheds help to give it an aspect of homely kindliness. Robert Arden's will, dated 1556, is the will of a good Catholic, bequeathing his soul to God "and to our blessed Lady, Saint Mary, and to all the holy company of heaven." He directed that his body should be buried in the churchyard of St. John the Baptist in Aston-Cantlow. So we drove on, a little further to the northwest, and found an Early English church with a pinnacled west tower. The air was sweet with the roses and clematis that clambered up the walls. It is here, in all likelihood, that John Shakespeare and Mary Arden were married.

We still pressed on, splashing through a ford and traversing a surviving bit of the Forest of Arden, to one village more, Wootton-Wawen, with a wonderful old church whose every stone could tell a story. Somervile the poet, who loved Warwickshire so well, is buried in the chantry chapel, and the white-haired rector told us proudly that Shakespeare had often come to service there. Indeed, Wootton-Wawen may have meant more to the great dramatist and done more to shape his destinies than we shall ever know, though Shakespeare scholarship is beginning to turn its searchlight on John Somervile of Edstone Hall, whose wife was nearly related to Mary Arden. Papist, as the whole Arden connection seems to have been, John Somervile's brain may have given way under the political and religious troubles of those changeful Tudor times. At all events, he suddenly set out for London, declaring freely along the road that he was going to kill the Queen. Arrest, imprisonment, trial for high treason, conviction, and a mysterious death in his Newgate cell followed in terrible sequence. Nor did the tragedy stop with him, but his wife, sister, and priest were arrested on charge of complicity, and not these only, but that quiet and honourable gentleman, Edward Arden of Park Hall in Wilmcote, with his wife and brother. Francis Arden and the ladies were in course of time released, but Edward Arden, who had previously incurred the enmity of Leicester by refusing to wear his livery,--a flattery to which many of the Warwickshire gentlemen eagerly stooped,--suffered, on December 20, 1583, the brutal penalty of the law,--hanged and drawn and quartered, put to death with torture, for no other crime than that of having an excitable son-in-law and a sturdy English sense of self-respect. A sad and bitter Yule it must have been for his kinsfolk in Wilmcote and in Stratford. There was danger in the air, too; a hot word might give Sir Thomas Lucy or some zealous Protestant his chance; and there may well have been graver reasons than a poaching frolic why young Will Shakespeare should have disappeared from the county.

FOOTNOTE:

[6] From the account given by Sir William Dugdale, the celebrated antiquary, who was born at Shustoke, eight miles west of Nuneaton, in 1605, and educated at Coventry. "The Antiquities of Warwickshire" he published in 1656. He died in 1686, and his tomb, with his own inscription, may be seen in the chancel of Shustoke Church.

THE COTSWOLDS

Late in the afternoon we started out from Stratford for a peep at the Cotswolds, swelling downs that belong in the main to Oxfordshire, although, as our drive soon revealed to us, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, and even Worcestershire all come in for a share of these pastoral uplands. It is in the Cotswolds, not far from the estuary of the Severn, that the Thames rises and flows modestly through Oxfordshire, which lies wholly within its upper valley, to become the commerce-laden river that takes majestic course through the heart of London.

We were still in the Shakespeare country, for his restless feet must often have roved these breezy wilds, famous since ancient days for hunts and races. "I am glad to see you, good Master Slender," says genial Master Page. And young Master Slender, with his customary tact, replies: "How does your fallow greyhound, sir? I heard say he was outrun on Cotsol." Whereupon Master Page retorts a little stiffly: "It could not be judged, sir," and Slender chuckles: "You'll not confess; you'll not confess." Why could it not be judged? For one of the delights of the Cotswold hunt--so hunters say--is the clear view on this open tableland of the straining pack. Shakespeare knew well the "gallant chiding" of the hounds,--how, when they "spend their mouths,"

"Echo replies
As if another chase were in the skies."

Here he may have seen his death-pressed hare, "poor Wat," try to baffle his pursuers and confuse the scent by running among the sheep and deer and along the banks "where earth-delving conies keep."

Still about our route clung, like a silver mist, Shakespeare traditions. In the now perished church of Luddington, two miles south of Stratford, the poet, it is said, married Anne Hathaway; but the same bridal is claimed for the venerable church of Temple Grafton, about a mile distant, and again for the neighbouring church of Billesley. Long Marston, "Dancing Marston," believes its sporting-ground was in the mind of the prentice playwright, a little homesick yet in London, when he wrote:

"The Nine-Men's Morris is filled up with mud;
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable."

At Lower Quinton stands an old manor-house of whose library--such is the whisper that haunts its folios--Will Shakespeare was made free. A happy picture that--of an eager lad swinging across the fields and leaping stiles to enter into his paradise of books.

We were well into Gloucestershire before this, that tongue of Gloucestershire which runs up almost to Stratford-on-Avon, and were driving on in the soft twilight, now past the old-time Common Fields with their furlongs divided by long balks; now over rolling reaches, crossed by low stone walls, of sheep-walk and water-meadow and wheat-land, with here and there a fir plantation or a hazel covert; now through a strange grey hamlet built of the native limestone. Our road was gradually rising, and just before nightfall we came into Chipping Campden, most beautiful of the old Cotswold towns. We had not dreamed that England held its like,--one long, wide, stately street, bordered by silent fronts of great stone houses, with here and there the green of mantling ivy, but mainly with only the rich and changeful colouring of the stone itself, grey in shadow, golden in the sun. Campden was for centuries a famous centre of the wool trade; the Cotswolds served it as a broad grazing-ground whose flocks furnished wool for the skilful Flemish weavers; its fourteenth century Woolstaplers' Hall still stands; its open market-house, built in 1624 midway of the mile-long street, is one of its finest features; its best-remembered name is that of William Grevel, described on his monumental brass (1401) as "Flower of the Wool-merchants of all England." He bequeathed a hundred marks toward the building of the magnificent church, which stood complete, as we see it now, in the early fifteenth century. Its glorious tower, tall and light, yet not too slender, battlemented, turreted, noble in all its proportions, is a Cotswold landmark. As we were feasting our eyes, after an evening stroll, upon the symmetries of that grand church, wonderfully impressive as it rose in the faint moonlight above a group of strange, pagoda-roofed buildings, its chimes rang out a series of sweet old tunes, all the more poignantly appealing in that the voices of those ancient bells were thin and tremulous, and now and then a note was missed.

The fascinations of Campden held us the summer day long. We must needs explore the church interior, which has suffered at the hands of the restorer; yet its chancel brasses, wrought with figures of plump woolstaplers, their decorous and comely dames, and their kneeling children, reward a close survey. I especially rejoiced in one complacent burgher, attended by three wimpled wives, and a long row of sons and daughters all of the same size. There is a curious chapel, too, where we came upon the second Viscount Campden, in marble shroud and coronet, ceremoniously handing, with a most cynical and unholy expression, his lady from the sepulchre. There was a ruined guildhall to see, and some antique almshouses of distinguished beauty. As we looked, an old man came feebly forth and bowed his white head on the low enclosing wall in an attitude of grief or prayer. We learned later that one of the inmates had died that very hour. We went over the works of the new Guild of Handicraft, an attempt to realise, here in the freshness of the wolds, the ideals of Ruskin and Morris. We cast wistful eyes up at Dover's Hill, on whose level summit used to be held at Whitsuntide the merry Cotswold Games. "Heigh for Cotswold!" But it was the hottest day of the summer, and we contented ourselves with the phrase.

Other famous Cotswold towns are "Stow-on-the-Wold, where the wind blows cold"; Northleach in the middle of the downs, desolate now, but once full of the activities of those wool-merchants commemorated by quaint brasses in the splendid church,--brasses which show them snugly at rest in their furred gowns, with feet comfortably planted on stuffed woolpack or the fleecy back of a sheep, or, more precariously, on a pair of shears; Burford, whose High Street and church are as noteworthy as Campden's own; Winchcombe, once a residence of the Mercian kings and a famous shrine of pilgrimage; Cirencester, the "Capital of the Cotswolds," built above a ruined Roman city and possessing a church of surpassing richness. How we longed for months of free-footed wandering over these exhilarating uplands with their grey settlements like chronicles writ in stone! But Father Time was shaking his hour-glass just behind us, in his marplot fashion, and since it had to be a choice, we took the evening train to Chipping Norton.

I regret to say that Chipping Norton, the highest town in Oxfordshire, showed little appreciation of the compliment. It was not easy to find lodging and wellnigh impossible to get carriage conveyance back to Campden the next day. It is a thriving town, ranking third in the county, and turns out a goodly supply of leather gloves and the "Chipping Norton tweeds." The factory folk were, many of them, having their holiday just then; their friends were coming for the week-end and had one and all, it would seem, set their hearts on being entertained by a Saturday drive; the only victoria for hire in the place was going to Oxford to bring an invalid lady home; altogether the hostlers washed their hands--merely in metaphor--of the two gad-abouts who thought Chipping Norton not good enough to spend Sunday in. Before we slept, however, we had succeeded in engaging, at different points, a high wagonette, a gaunt horse, and a bashful boy, and the combination stood ready for us at nine o'clock in the morning.

Meanwhile we had seen the chief sights of this venerable town, whose name is equivalent to Market Norton. Its one wide street, a handsome, tree-shadowed thoroughfare with the Town Hall set like an island in its midst, runs up the side and along the brow of a steep plateau. A narrow way plunges down from this central avenue and passes a seven-gabled row of delectable almshouses, dated 1640. Indeed, no buildings in these Midland counties have more architectural charm than their quaint shelters for indigent old age. The abrupt lane leads to a large grey church, square-towered and perpendicular, like the church of Chipping Campden, but with a few Early English traces. Its peculiar feature is the glass clerestory,--great square windows divided from one another by the pillars of the nave. The sexton opened the doors for us so early that we had leisure to linger a little before the old altar-stone with its five crosses, before St. Mary's banner bordered with her own blue, before the warrior pillowed on his helmet and praying his last prayer beside his lady, whose clasped hands, even in the time-worn alabaster, have a dimpled, chubby, coaxing look; and before those characteristic merchant brasses, the men in tunics with close sleeves and girdles, one of them standing with each foot on a woolpack, the women in amazing head-dresses, "horned" and "pedimented," and all the work so carefully and elaborately wrought that the Cotswold brasses are authorities for the costume of the period.

One of the main objects of this expedition, however, was the drive back over the hills with their far views of down and wold to whose vegetation the limestone imparts a peculiar tint of blue. We deviated from the Campden road to see the Rollright Stones, a hoary army with their leader well in advance. He, the King Stone, is across the Warwickshire line, but, curiously enough, a little below the summit which looks out over the Warwickshire plain. This monolith, eight or nine feet high, fantastically suggests a huge body drawn back as if to brace itself against the fling of some tremendous curse. The tale tells how, in those good old times before names and dates had to be remembered, a petty chief, who longed to extend his sway over all Britain, had come thus far on his northward march. But here, when he was almost at the crest of the hill, when seven strides more would have brought him where he could see the Warwickshire village of Long Compton on the other side, out popped an old witch, as wicked as a thorn-bush, with the cry:

"If Long Compton thou canst see,
King of England thou shalt be."

On bounded the chief--what were seven steps to reach a throne!--but the wooded summit, still shutting off his view, rose faster than he, and again the eldritch screech was heard:

"Rise up, stick! stand still, stone!
King of England thou shalt be none."

And there he stands to this day, even as the spell froze him, while the sorceress, disguised as an elder tree, keeps watch over her victim. The fairies steal out from a hole in the bank on moonlight nights and weave their dances round him. No matter how securely the children of the neighbourhood fit a flat stone over the hole at bedtime, every morning finds it thrust aside. We would not for the world have taken liberties with that elfin portal, but if we had been sure which of the several elder trees was the witch, we might have cut at her with our penknives and seen,--it is averred by many,--as her sap began to flow and her strength to fail, the contorted stone strain and struggle to free itself from the charm. And had we seen that, I am afraid we should forthwith have desisted from our hacking and taken to our heels. As it was, the place had an uncanny feel, and we went back into Oxfordshire some eighty yards to review the main body of the army,

"a dismal cirque
Of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor."

These mysterious monuments, which in the day of the Venerable Bede were no less remarkable than Stonehenge, have been ravaged by time, but some sixty of them--their magic baffles an exact count--remain. Grey Druid semblances, heathen to the core, owl-faced, monkey-faced, they stand in a great, ragged circle, enclosing a clump of firs. Deeply sunken in the ground, they are of uneven height; some barely peep above the surface; the tallest rises more than seven feet; some lie prone; some bend sideways; all have an aspect of extreme antiquity, a perforated, worm-eaten look the reverse of prepossessing. But our visit was ill-timed. If we had had the hardihood to climb up to that wind-swept waste at midnight, we should have seen those crouching goblins spring erect, join hands and gambol around in an ungainly ring, trampling down the thistles and shocking every church spire in sight. At midnight of All Saints they make a mad rush down the hillside for their annual drink of water at a spring below.

The antiquaries who hold that these strange stones were erected not as a Druid temple, nor as memorials of victory, nor for the election and inauguration of primitive kings, but for sepulchral purposes, rest their case largely on the Whispering Knights. This third group is made up of five stones which apparently once formed a cromlech and may have been originally covered with a mound. They are some quarter of a mile behind the circle,--a bad quarter of a mile I found it as I struggled across the rugged moor knee-deep in rank clover and other withering weeds. Just before me would fly up partridges with a startled whirr, hovering so near in their bewilderment that I could almost have knocked a few of them down with my parasol, if that had appealed to me as a pleasant and friendly thing to do. For this was a "cover," destined to give a few of Blake's and Shelley's countrymen some autumn hours of brutalising sport.

"Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain doth tear.
A skylark wounded in the wing;
A cherubim doth cease to sing."

The Five Knights lean close together, yet without touching, enchanted to stone in the very act of whispering treason against their ambitious chief. They whisper still under the elder tree, and often will a lass labouring in the barley fields slip away from her companions at dusk to beg the Five Knights to whisper her an answer to the question of her heart. I walked back, having hit on a path, in company with a rustic harvester, whose conversation was confined to telling me five times over, in the stubborn, half-scared tone of superstition, that while the other elders are laden with white berries, this elder always bears red; and the collie wagged his tail, and the donkey wagged his ears, in solemn confirmation.

The wagonette gathered us in again, and soon we passed, not far from the fine Elizabethan mansion known as Chastleton House, the Four-Shire Stone, a column marking the meeting-point of Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, and Worcestershire. Our route lay for a while in Gloucestershire. As our shy young driver refreshed our skeleton steed, which had proved a good roadster, with gruel, that favourite beverage of English horses, at Moreton-in-the-Marsh, another little grey stone town with open market-hall, we noted a building marked P. S. A. and learned it was a workingman's club, or something of that nature, and that the cabalistic initials stood for Pleasant Sunday Afternoon. We changed horses at Campden, did our duty by the inevitable cold joints, and drove up to Fish Inn, with its far outlook, and thence down into the fertile Vale of Evesham. We had not been ready to say with Richard II,

"I am a stranger here in Glostershire;
These high wild hills and rough uneven ways
Draw out our miles, and make them wearisome,"

but we found a new pleasure in the smiling welcome of gardened Worcestershire. The charming village of Broadway, beloved of artists, detained us for a little, and at Evesham, even more attractive with its beautiful bell-tower, its Norman gateway and cloister arch--pathetic relics of its ruined abbey--and with its obelisk-marked battlefield where fell Simon de Montfort, "the most peerless man of his time for valour, personage, and wisdom," we brought our driving-tour in the Midlands to a close.

OXFORD

Shakespeare's frequent horseback journeys from London to Stratford, and from Stratford to London, must have made him familiar with the county of Oxfordshire. He would have seen its northern uplands sprinkled over with white-fleeced sheep of the pure old breed, sheep so large that their mutton is too fat for modern palates: a smaller sheep, yielding inferior wool, is fast supplanting the original Cotswold. He would not have met upon the downs those once so frequent passengers, the Flemish merchants with their trains of sumpter mules and pack-horses, bound for Chipping Campden or some other market where wool might be "cheapened" in the way of bargaining, for by Shakespeare's day the cloth-making industry in the valley of the Stroud Water, Gloucestershire, had attained to such a flourishing condition that the export of raw material was forbidden.

It is not likely that his usual route would have given him the chance to refresh himself with Banbury cakes at Banbury and, profane player that he was, bring down upon himself a Puritan preachment from Ben Jonson's Zeal-of-the-land-Busy; but Shakespeare's way would almost certainly have lain through Woodstock. This ancient town has royal traditions reaching back to King Alfred and Etheldred the Redeless, but these are obscured for the modern tourist by the heavy magnificence of Blenheim Palace, the Duke of Marlborough's reward for his "famous victory." The legend of Fair Rosamund--how Henry II hid her here embowered in a labyrinth, and how the murderous Queen Eleanor tracked her through the maze by the clue of a silken thread--Shakespeare, like Drayton, could have enjoyed without molestation from the critical historian, who now insists that it was Eleanor whom the king shut up to keep her from interfering with his loves. Poor Rosamund! Her romance is not suffered to rest in peace here any more than was her fair body in the church of Godstow nunnery. There she had been buried in the centre of the choir, and the nuns honoured her grave with such profusion of broidered hangings and burning tapers as to scandalise St. Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, who, on visiting the nunnery in 1191, gave orders that she be disinterred and buried "out of the church with other common people to the end that religion be not vilified." But after some years the tender nuns slipped those rejected bones into a "perfumed leather bag" and brought them back within the holy pale. The dramatist, who seems to have done wellnigh his earliest chronicle-play writing in an episode of the anonymous "Edward III," may have remembered, as he rode into the old town, that the Black Prince was born at Woodstock. But whether or no he gave a thought to Edward III's war-wasted heir, he could hardly have failed to muse upon that monarch's poet, "most sacred happie spirit," Geoffrey Chaucer, whose son Thomas--if this Thomas Chaucer were indeed the poet's son--resided at Woodstock in the early part of the fifteenth century. And still fresh would have been the memory of Elizabeth's imprisonment in the gate-house during a part of her sister Mary's reign. It was here, according to Holinshed, on whom the burden of pronouns rested lightly, that the captive princess "hearing upon a time out of hir garden at Woodstock a certaine milkemaid singing pleasantlie wished herselfe to be a milkemaid as she was, saieing that hir case was better, and life more merier than was hirs in that state as she was."

Charles I and the Roundheads had not then set their battle-marks all over Oxfordshire, and Henley, now famed for its July regatta as far as water flows, was still content with the very moderate speed of its malt-barges; but Oxford--I would give half my library to know with what feelings Shakespeare used to behold its sublime group of spires and towers against the sunset sky. This "upstart crow," often made to wince under the scorn of those who, like Robert Greene,--the red-headed reprobate!--could write themselves "Master of Arts of both Universities," what manner of look did he turn upon that august town

"gorgeous with high-built colleges,
And scholars seemly in their grave attire,
Learnèd in searching principles of art?"

Here in the midst of the valley of the Thames, Oxford had already kept for centuries a queenly state, chief city of the shire, with a university that ranked as one of the "two eyes of England." The university, then as now, was made up of a number of colleges which owned, by bequest and by purchase, a considerable portion of the county, though they by no means limited their estates to Oxfordshire. Almost all those "sacred nurseries of blooming youth" which delight us to-day were known to the dust-stained traveller who put up, perhaps twice a year, perhaps oftener, at the Crown Inn, kept by John Davenant, vintner. Apart from the painfully modern Keble, a memorial to the author of "The Christian Year," and the still more recent roof-trees for dissent, Congregational Mansfield and Unitarian Manchester, what college of modern Oxford would be utterly strange to Shakespeare? Even in Worcester, an eighteenth-century erection on the site of the ruined Benedictine foundation of Gloucester College, search soon reveals vestiges of the old monastic dwellings. Not a few of the very edifices that Shakespeare saw still stand in their Gothic beauty, but in case of others, as University, which disputes with Merton the claim of seniority, boasting no less a founder than Alfred the Great, new buildings have overgrown the old. Some have changed their names, as Broadgates, to which was given, eight years after Shakespeare's death, a name that even in death he would hardly have forgotten,--Pembroke, in honour of William, Earl of Pembroke, then Chancellor of the University. Already venerable, as the poet looked upon them, were the thirteenth-century foundations of Merton, with its stately tower, its library of chained folios, its memories of Duns Scotus; and Balliol, another claimant for the dignities of the first-born, tracing its origin to Sir John de Balliol, father of the Scottish king, remembering among its early Fellows and Masters John Wyclif the Reformer; and Hart Hall, where Tyndale was a student, the Hertford College of to-day; and St. Edmund Hall, which has been entirely rebuilt. Another thirteenth-century foundation, St. Alban Hall, has been incorporated with Merton.

The fourteenth-century colleges, too, would have worn a weathered look by 1600,--Exeter and Oriel and Queen's and New. The buildings of Exeter have been restored over and over, but the mediæval still haunts them, as it haunted Exeter's latest poet, William Morris, who loved Oxfordshire so well that he finally made his home at Kelmscott on the Upper Thames. Oriel, which, as Shakespeare would have known, was Sir Walter Raleigh's college, underwent an extensive rebuilding in the reign of Charles I. To Oriel once belonged St. Mary Hall, where Sir Thomas More studied,--a wag of a student he must have been!--and now, after an independence of five hundred years, it is part of Oriel again. Queen's, named in honour of Philippa, the consort of Edward III, has so completely changed its outer fashion that George II's Queen Caroline is perched upon its cupola, but by some secret of individuality it is still the same old college of the Black Prince and of Henry V,--the college where every evening a trumpet summons the men to dine in hall, and every Christmas the Boar's Head, garnished with the traditionary greenery, is borne in to the singing of an old-time carol, and every New Year's Day the bursar distributes thread and needles among its unappreciative masculine community with the succinct advice: "Take this and be thrifty."

New College, unlike these three, has hardly altered its original fabric. If Shakespeare smiled over the name borne by a structure already mossed and lichened by two centuries, we have more than twice his reason for smiling; indeed, we have one excuse that he had not, for we can think of Sydney Smith as a New College man. Old it is and old it looks. The very lanes that lead to it, grey and twisted passages of stone, conduct us back to the mediæval world. The Virgin Mary, the Archangel Gabriel, and, no whit abashed in such high company, Bishop Wykeham, the Founder, watch us from their storm-worn niches as we pass under the gateway into the majestic quadrangle. Here time-blackened walls hold the gaze enthralled with their ancientry of battlements and buttresses, deep-mullioned windows and pinnacle-set towers. Beyond lie the gardens, still bounded on two sides by the massive masonry, embrasured, bastioned, parapeted, of the old City Wall,--gardens where it should always be October, drifty, yellow, dreamy, quiet, with wan poplars and aspens and chestnuts whispering and sighing together, till some grotesque face sculptured on the wall peers out derisively through ivy mat or crimson creeper, and the red-berried hollies, old and gay with many Christmases, rustle in reassuring laughter. Meanwhile the rooks flap heavily among the mighty beeches, whose tremendous trunks are all misshapen with the gnarls and knobs of age.

Of the fifteenth-century foundations, All Souls, "The College of All Souls of the Faithful Departed," and especially of those who fell in the French wars, retains much of its original architecture; in the kitchen of Lincoln, if not in the chapel, Shakespeare would still find himself at home; and for him, as for all the generations since, the lofty tower of Magdalen rose as Oxford's crown of beauty. Magdalen College is ancient. The very speaking of the name (Maudlin) tells us that, all the more unmistakably because Magdalen Bridge and Magdalen Street carry the modern pronunciation. But Magdalen College, with its springing, soaring grace, its surprises of delight, its haunting, soul-possessing loveliness, has all the winning charm of youth. Its hundred acres of lawn and garden, wood and park, where deer browse peacefully beneath the shade of giant elms and where Addison's beloved Water Walks beside the Cherwell are golden with the primroses and daffodils of March and blue with the violets and periwinkles of later spring, are even more tempting to the book-fagged wanderer than Christ Church Meadow and "Mesopotamia." It is hard to tell when Magdalen is most beautiful. It has made the circle of the year its own. On May Day dawn, all Oxford, drowsy but determined, gathers in the broad street below to see--it depends upon the wind whether or no one may hear--the choir chant their immemorial hymn from the summit of the tower. When the ending of the rite is made known to the multitude by the flinging over of the caps,--black mortar-boards that sail slowly down the one hundred and fifty feet like a flock of pensive rooks,--then away it streams over Magdalen Bridge toward Iffley to gather Arnold's white and purple fritillaries, and, after a long and loving look at Iffley's Norman Church, troops home along the towing-path beside the Isis. Shakespeare may himself have heard, if he chanced to be passing through on St. John Baptist's Day, the University sermon preached from the curiously canopied stone pulpit well up on the wall in a corner of one of the quadrangles, while the turf was sweet with strewn rushes and all the buildings glistening with fresh green boughs. But even in midwinter Magdalen is beautiful, when along Addison's Walk the fog is frosted like most delicate enamel on every leaf and twig, and this white world of rime takes on strange flushes from the red sun peering through the haze.

Of the six Tudor foundations, Trinity occupies the site of Durham College, a thirteenth-century Benedictine institution suppressed by Henry VIII; St. John's, closely allied to the memory of Archbishop Laud, is the survival of St. Bernard College, which itself grew out of a Cistercian monastery; Brasenose, associated for earlier memory with Foxe of the "Book of Martyrs" and for later with Walter Pater, supplanted two mediæval halls; and Jesus College, the first to be founded after the Reformation, endowed by a Welshman for the increase of Welsh learning, received from Elizabeth a site once held by academic buildings of the elder faith. Only Corpus Christi, where Cardinal Pole and Bishop Hooker studied to such different ends, although it is, as its name indicates, of Catholic origin, rose on fresh soil and broke with the past, with the mediæval educational tradition, by making regular provision for the systematic study of Latin and Greek.

The great Tudor foundation was Christ Church, built on the sacred ground where, in the eighth century, St. Frideswide, a princess with a pronounced vocation for the religious life, had erected a nunnery of which she was first abbess. The nunnery became, after her death, a house of canons, known as St. Frideswide's Priory. Cardinal Wolsey brought about the surrender of this priory to the king, and its prompt transfer to himself, some fifteen years before the general Dissolution. His ambition, not all unrealised, was to found as his memorial a splendid seat of the New Learning at Oxford to be called Cardinal's College. He had gone so far as to erect a magnificent hall, with fan-vaulted entrance and carved oak ceiling of surpassing beauty, a kitchen ample enough to feed the Titans, "The Faire Gate" and, in outline, the Great Quadrangle, for whose enlargement he pulled down three bays of the Priory church, when his fall cut short his princely projects. His graceless master attempted to take over to himself the credit of Wolsey's labours, substituting the name of King Henry VIII's College, but on creating, a few years later, the bishopric of Oxford, he blended the cathedral and college foundations as the Church and House of Christ. The cathedral fabric is still in the main that of the old Priory church. Of the several quadrangles, Canterbury Quad keeps a memory of Canterbury College, which, with the other Benedictine colleges, Gloucester and Durham, went down in the storm. Christ's Church--"The House," as its members call it--is the aristocratic college of Oxford. Noblemen and even princes may be among those white-surpliced figures that flit about the dim quads after Sunday evensong. Ruskin's father, a wealthy wine-merchant of refined tastes and broad intelligence, hesitated to enter his son as a gentleman commoner at Christ's lest the act should savour of presumption. Yet no name has conferred more lustre on "The House" than that of him who became the Slade Professor of Fine Arts, waking all Oxford to nobler life and resigning, at last, because he could not bear that the university should sanction vivisection.

Wadham College, though the lovely garden with its hoary walls starred by jasmine and its patriarchal cedars casting majestic shadows--a garden that rivals for charm even those of St. John's and Worcester and Exeter--has such a venerable air, is the youngest of all these. Its first stone was laid, on a site formerly occupied by a priory of Augustinian Friars, only six years before Shakespeare's death. In his later journeys he would not have failed to note the progress of its erection.

But if Shakespeare saw, as he rode through Oxford, almost all the colleges that may now be seen, he also saw much that has crumbled away into an irretrievable past. Not only were the various colleges, halls, priories, and friaries of the monastic orders still in visible ruin, but the great abbeys of Osney and of Rewley, the former one of the largest and richest in all England, still made the appeal of a beautiful desolation. No wonder that Shakespeare compared the naked branches of autumn, that wintry end of the season

"When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,"

to

"bare, ruined choirs."

If, as seems probable, the Arden sympathies lingered long with the Mother Church, if Shakespeare did not forget, even in those closing years when his homeward trips brought him to a Puritan household and an ever more Puritan town, the bitter fate of his kinsmen of Wilmcote and Wootton-Wawen, he must have been keenly alive to these ravages of the Reformation. Yet he had been some twenty years at the vortex of Elizabethan life, in the very seethe of London; he had witnessed many a wrong and many a tragedy; he was versed to weariness of heart in the "hostile strokes" that befall humanity, in all the varied

"throes
That nature's fragile vessel doth sustain
In life's uncertain voyage";

and he knew, no man better, that Right is not of one party, nor Truth of a single creed. He must have mused, as he took the air in Oxford streets after Mistress Davenant had served his supper, on the three great Protestant Martyrs of whose suffering some of the elder folk with whom he chatted had been eyewitnesses. The commemorative cross that may now be seen in front of Balliol, near the church of St. Mary Magdalen whose tower was a familiar sight to Shakespeare's eyes, displays in richly fretted niches the statues of "Thomas Cranmer, Nicolas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Prelates of the Church of England, who near this spot yielded their bodies to be burned." Most of all, his thought would have dwelt on Cranmer, that pathetic figure whose life was such a mingled yarn of good and evil. He had won the favour of Henry VIII by approving the divorce of Queen Catherine. He had beheld--and in some cases furthered--the downfalls of Sir Thomas More, of Anne Boleyn, of Wolsey, of Cromwell, of Catherine Howard, of Seymour, and of Somerset. He had stood godfather to Elizabeth and to Edward. He had watched over the death-bed of the tyrant; he had crowned that tyrant's frail young son as Edward VI. When by his adherence to the cause of Lady Jane Grey he had incurred sentence of treason, he was pardoned by Queen Mary. Yet this pardon only amounted to a transfer from the Tower of London to the Bocardo in Oxford, that prison-house over the North Gate from whose stone cells used to come down the hoarse cry of cold and hunger: "Pity the Bocardo birds." There were those still living in Oxford who could have told the dramatist, as he gazed up through the moonlight (for who does not?) to the pinnacled spire of St. Mary-the-Virgin, all the detail of those April days, only ten years before his birth, when Cranmer, with Ridley and Latimer, was brought into the church and bidden, before a hostile assemblage of divines, to justify the heresies of the new prayer-book. On the Tuesday Cranmer pleaded from eight till two; Ridley was heard on the Wednesday, and on the Thursday the aged Latimer, a quaint champion as he stood there "with a kerchief and two or three caps on his head, his spectacles hanging by a string at his breast, and a staff in his hand." On the Friday all three were condemned. After a year and a half of continued confinement, Archbishop Cranmer, whose irresolution was such that, from first to last, he wrote seven recantations, was made to look out from his prison window upon the tormented death of his friends. Then it was that the stanch old Latimer, bowed with the weight of fourscore years, but viewing the fagots undismayed, spake the never-forgotten words: "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." Cranmer's own end came six months later, on March 21, 1556. He was first brought to St. Mary's that he might publicly abjure his heresies. But at that desperate pass, no longer tempted by the hope of life,--for hope there was none,--his manhood returned to him with atoning dignity and force. Prison-wasted, in ragged gown, a man of sixty-seven years, he clearly avowed his Protestant faith, declaring that he had penned his successive recantations in fear of the pains of death, and adding: "Forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be first punished; for if I may come to the fire, it shall be the first burnt." And having so "flung down the burden of his shame," he put aside those who would still have argued with him and fairly ran to the stake,

"Outstretching flameward his upbraided hand."

The university church, this beautiful St. Mary's, has other memories. From its pulpit Wyclif proclaimed such daring doctrines that Lincoln College was founded to refute them,--Lincoln, which came to number among its Fellows John Wesley and to shelter those first Methodist meetings, the sessions of his "Holy Club." In St. Mary's choir rests the poor bruised body of Amy Robsart. The spiral-columned porch was erected by Laud's chaplain, and its statue of the Virgin and Child so scandalised the Puritans that they pressed it into service for one of their articles of impeachment directed against the doomed archbishop.

What could the thronging student life of Oxford have meant to the author of "Hamlet"? Of his careless young teachers in stage-craft--so soon his out-distanced rivals--Lyly and Peele and Lodge would have been at home beside the Isis and the Cherwell, as Greene and Nash and Marlowe by the Cam; but Shakespeare--did those fluttering gowns, those gaudy-hooded processions, stir in him more than a stranger's curiosity? The stern day of that all-learned Master of Balliol, Dr. Jowett, who stiffened examinations to a point that would have dismayed Shakespeare's contemporaries, save, perhaps, the redoubtable Gabriel Harvey, was still in the far future; the magnificent New Schools, with their dreaded _viva voces_, had not yet come; the Rhodes Scholarships were beyond the dream-reach of even a Raleigh or a Spenser; but academic tests and academic pomps there were. The Old Schools Quadrangle, not quite complete, had been building in a leisurely way since 1439 and was in regular use, though the Divinity School, whose arched, groined, boss-studded roof is one of the beauties of Oxford, had nearly suffered wreck, in the brief reign of Edward VI, at the hands of that class of theological reformers who have a peculiar aversion to stained glass. The exercises of the _Encaenia_ Shakespeare would have heard, if he ever chanced to hear them, in St. Mary's, but half a century after his death they were transferred to the new Sheldonian Theatre. In St. Mary's, which was not only "Learning's receptacle" but also "Religion's parke," these exercises, the _Acts_, naturally took the form of disputations concerning "wingy mysteries in divinity." When they passed out from the church to an unconsecrated edifice, political and social themes, still treated in scholastic Latin, were added, but even so the entertainment was of the dullest. Professional fun-makers, successors of the mediæval minstrels, had to be called in to enliven the occasion with a peppering of jests, but these became so scurrilous that the use of hired buffoons was forbidden by Convocation. Then the resourceful undergraduates magnanimously came forward, volunteering to take this delicate duty upon themselves, and manfully have they discharged it to this day. These young Oxonians have developed the normal undergraduate gift for sauce into an art that even knows the laws of proportion and restraint. The limits allowed them are of the broadest, but only twice in living memory has their mischief gone so far as to break up the assemblage.

The threefold business of the annual _Encaenia_ is to confer honorary degrees, to listen to the prize compositions, and to hear an address delivered by the Public Orator in commemoration of Founders and Benefactors, with comment on current events. On the one occasion when I was privileged to be present, the hour preceding the entrance of the academic procession was the liveliest of all. The lower galleries were reserved for guests, but the upper, the Undergraduates' Gallery, was packed with students in cap and gown, who promptly began to badger individuals chosen at whim from the throng of men standing on the floor.

"I don't like your bouquet, sir. It's too big for your buttonhole. If the lady wouldn't mind--"

The offending roses disappeared in a general acclaim of "Thank you, sir," and the cherubs aloft pounced on another victim. The unfortunates so thrust into universal notice usually complied with the request, whatever it might be, as quickly as possible, eager to escape into obscurity, but a certain square-jawed Saxon wearing a red tie put up a stubborn resistance until all the topmost gallery was shouting at him, and laughing faces were turned upon him from every quarter of the house.

"Take off that red tie, sir."

"Indeed, sir, you don't look pretty in it."

"It doesn't go well with your blushes."

"_Will_ you take off that tie, sir?"

"It's not to our cultured taste, sir."

"It's the only one he's got."

"Dear sir, _please_ take it off."

"It gives me the eye-ache, sir."

"Have you paid for it yet?"

"Was there anybody in the shop when you bought it?"

"Are you wearing it for an advertisement?"