Stratford-on-Avon—It has its own life, quite apart from Shakespearean associations—Its people and its streets—Shakespeare Memorials. Stratford-on-Avon would be an extremely interesting town, both historically and scenically, even without its Shakespearean interest. It does not need association with its greatest son to stand forth easily among other towns of its size and command admiration. It is remarkably unlike the mind’s eye picture formed of it by almost every stranger. You expect to see a town of very narrow streets, rather dull perhaps and with little legitimate trade, apart from the sale of picture-postcards, fancy china, guide-books, miniature reproductions of the inevitable Shakespeare bust, and the hundred-and-one small articles that tourists buy; but Stratford-on-Avon is not in the least like that. It is true that with a singular lack of humour there is a “Shakespeare Garage,” while we all know that Shakespeare never owned a motor-car; that the bust is represented in mosaic over the entrance to the Old Bank, founded in 1810, upon which Shakespeare could never, therefore, have drawn a cheque; and that the Shakespeare Hotel not only bears the honoured name, but also a very large copy of the bust over its porch, and names all its rooms after the plays. Honeymoon couples, I believe, have been given the room called Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Cymbeline, Midsummer Night’s Dream and many another will astonish the guest at that really very fine and ancient hotel. I forget if there be They gave me As you Like It, and it was sufficiently comfortable: I liked it much. On the other hand, Macbeth makes one fearful of insomnia. “Macbeth does murder sleep.” Not poppy nor mandragora—well, let it be. It is also true that the old market-house, a quaint isolated building of late eighteenth or early nineteenth century standing at the junction of Wood and Henley Streets with Bridge Street, and now a Bank, has for weather-vane the Shakespeare arms and crest of falcon and spear; and it is no less undeniable that the presiding genius of the place has his manifestations in many other directions; but all these things, together with the several antique furniture and curio shops where the unique articles—of which there is but one each in the world—you purchase to-day are infallibly replaced to-morrow, are for the benefit of the visitor, the stranger and pilgrim. “I was a stranger and ye took me in,” I murmured when the absolute replica of the unmatched article I had purchased was unblushingly exposed for sale within a day or two. The Stratfordian notices none of these things: they are there, but they don’t concern him. You think they do, and that if a suggestion were made that the town should be renamed “Shakespeare-on-Avon” he would adopt it and be grateful; but you would be quite wrong; he would not. If you caught a hundred Stratford people, flagrante delicto, in the pursuit of their daily business and haled them into the Guildhall or other convenient room and set them an examination paper on Shakespeare, no one would pass with honours. Why should any of them? They have grown up with Shakespeare; Chapel Street, Stratford-on-Avon Stratford would lose a very great deal if the world in general were to become as indifferent to the Swan of Avon; but it would still be a prosperous market-town, dependent upon the needs of the surrounding agricultural villages. Agriculture has ever been the mainstay of Stratford, and as far as we can see, ever will be. All around in the Avon valley stretch those rich pastures that still “lard the rother’s sides,” and on market days there come crawling into the streets, among the cattle and the sheep, carriers’ carts from many an obscure village, with curious specimens of countryfolk who have not lost the old habit of looking upon Stratford as the centre of the universe. So much the better for Stratford. “’Tain’t much as I waants,” said one to the present writer, “an’ I rackon I can get it at Stratford ‘most as good as anywheer else. Besides, I du like to come to town sometimes, an’ see a bit of life.” One can, in fact, see a good deal of life in the town, but the liveliest time—quite apart from the Shakespeare Festival, which is exotic and mostly for visitors—is the Mop Fair, much more familiarly known as “Stratford Mop.” This annual event is held somewhat too late for the average visitor’s convenience; on October 12th, I think the average visitor might not, after all, be pleased with Stratford Mop, which is in some ways a very barbarous affair; the chief barbarity of course being the roasting of oxen whole in the streets; a loathly spectacle, and not one calculated to increase respect for our ancestors, whose great idea of fit merry-making for very special occasions was this same roasting of cattle whole and making the public conduits run wine. The last sounds better, but from the accounts preserved of the wine dispersed at such times we know that the quantity was meagre and the quality exceedingly poor. But the vast crowds resorting to Stratford for the Mop see nothing gruesome in the spectacle. Special trains run from numerous places, and all the showmen in the country seem to have hurried up for the event. The streets of Stratford are broad and pleasant, with a large proportion of ancient houses still left; half-timbered fronts side by side with more or less modern brick and plaster, behind which often lurks a rich old interior, unknown to the casual passer-by. Sometimes a commonplace frontage is removed, revealing unexpected beauty in an enriched half-timber framing which the odd vagaries in taste of bygone generations have caused to be thus hidden. There is in this way a speculative interest always attaching to structural alterations in the town. In this chance fashion the fine timbering of the so-called “Tudor House” was uncovered in 1903, and other instances might be given. But the mention of Bridge Street is a reminder that here at any rate a great change has been made. It is the widest of all the streets, and is in fact a very wilderness of width. All the winds that sport about the neighbourhood seem to have their home in Bridge Street. Your hat always blows off when you turn the corner into it, and the dust and homeless straws go wandering up and down its emptiness, seeking rest in the Avon over the Clopton Bridge, but always blown back. Now Bridge Street was not always like this. In Shakespeare’s time, and until 1858, when the last of it was cleared away, a kind of island of old houses occupied part of this roadway. It was called “Middle Row.” Such a collection of houses was the usual feature of old English towns. There was an example in London, in Holborn, with exactly the same name; but it disappeared somewhat earlier than its Stratford namesake. Pictures survive of this Bridge Street landmark. I think a good many Stratford people regret it, but regrets will not bring it back. We think of the irrevocable, and of Herrick’s witch—
It was a very picturesque old row, with the “Swan” inn hanging out its sign; and perhaps, in these times of reconstructions, it may even yet be rebuilt, after the evidences of it that exist. In Bridge Street is another landmark in the way of literary associations. The “Red Horse” hotel has a large, dull and uninteresting plaster front, but American visitors find the house attractive on account of Washington Irving’s stay there about a hundred years ago, when he was writing of Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s country. The sitting-room he occupied is kept somewhat as a shrine to his memory, and the chair he fancifully called his “throne” is still there, but you may not sit in it. It is kept under lock and key, in a cupboard with glass doors. The poker he likened to his sceptre is kept jealously in the bar. Citizens of the United States ask to see it, and it is reverently produced and unfolded from the many swathings of “Old Glory” in which it is enwrapped: “Old Glory” being, it is necessary to explain to Britishers, the United States flag, the “stars and stripes.” Gazing upon it, they see that it is engraved with a dedicatory inscription by another citizen of the U.S.A. If you proceed down Bridge Street you come presently to the Clopton Bridge that crosses the Avon, and so out of the town. The bridge is one of the many works of public utility and practical piety executed, instituted, or ordained in his will by Sir Hugh Clopton, the greatest benefactor Stratford has known. A scion of that numerous family, seated at Clopton House a mile out of the town, he went to London and prospered as a mercer, becoming Lord Mayor in 1492. Leland, The bridge was widened in 1814. I do not think that great benefactor of Stratford intended that tolls should be charged for passing over his bridge, but in the course of time, such charges were made, and the very large and imposing toll-house that remains shows us that it is not so very long since the bridge has been freed again. There are many who consider the Harvard House to be the most delightful piece of ancient domestic work in the town, and it is indeed a gem. The history of it is absolutely clear. It was built in 1596 by one Thomas Rogers, alderman. His initials and those of his wife Alice, together with the date are still to be seen, carved It is not long since the Harvard House was restored and dedicated to the public, and particularly to the use of Harvard students; in October 1909, to be precise. It had passed through various hands, and finally was offered for sale by auction. The biddings failed to It is a place of very great seclusion, for Harvard students (who mostly study the more lethal forms of football and baseball nowadays) are rare; and I guess if you want to track the Americans in Stratford, you must go to the Shakespeare Hotel, anyway, or to the “Red Horse.” The house was in the occupation of a firm of auctioneers and land agents until the purchase. The “restoration” of the exterior has been very carefully and conservatively done, and the interior discloses some particularly beautiful half-timbered rooms. From time to time it seems good to amiable and well-meaning persons to set up “Shakespeare memorials” in Stratford, and it is equally amiable in the town to accept them. Thus we see in Rother Street an ornate gothic drinking-fountain and clock-tower, the “American Memorial Fountain,” given in 1887 by that wealthy Shakespearean collector, George W. Childs, proprietor of the Philadelphia Ledger. It includes also the function of a memorial of the first Victorian Jubilee. Shakespearean quotations adorn it, including the apposite one from Timon of Athens: “Honest water, which ne’er left man i’ th’ mire.” But Shakespeare serves the turn of every man, and if you like your beer, you can set against this the equally Shakespearean quotation, “A quart of ale is a dish for a king.” The Memorial Fountain rather misses being stately, The Shakespeare Memorial by the riverside is the partial realisation of a project first considered in 1769, at the jubilee presided over by Garrick, revived in 1821 and again in 1864. This was an idea for a national memorial, to include a school of acting: possibly with Shakespeare’s own very excellent advice to actors, which he placed in the mouth of Hamlet, set up in gilded words of wisdom in its halls. The school for actors has not yet come into being, but at the annual festivals, when Shakespearean companies take the boards in the theatre which forms a prominent part of the Memorial, you may witness quaint new readings of the dramatist’s intentions. The great pile of buildings standing by the beautiful Bancroft gardens, in fine grounds of its own beside the river, “comprises,” as auctioneers and house agents might say, the theatre aforesaid, a library, and picture gallery. It was built 1877–79 from funds raised by a Memorial Association founded by Mr. Charles E. Flower of Stratford-on-Avon, and very widely supported. The architect, W. F. Unsworth, whose name does not seem to be very generally known, has produced a very imposing, and on the whole, satisfactory composition, whose shape was largely determined by that of the Quick-growing poplars have reached great heights since the buildings were first opened, and the Theatre and Memorial is being rapidly obscured by them. It looks its best from the Clopton Bridge, and combines with Holy Trinity church to render the town, viewed from the other side of the Avon, a place of considerable majesty and romance. Crossing either that ancient bridge to the “Swan’s Nest” inn which has become subdued to the poetry in the Stratford air and has abandoned its old name, the “Shoulder of Mutton,” we may roam the meadows opposite the town. Or we may equally well cross the river by the long and narrow red brick tramway bridge, built in 1826 for the purposes of the Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon Somehow we reach those free and open meadows over against the town where the Avon runs broad and deep down to the mill and the ruined lock, just opposite the church. It is from these meadows that the We may cross the stream just below this point, by a footbridge, and come into the town again past the big corn-mill whose ancient ownership caused all this trouble. The present building is only about a century old, but it is the representative of the original mill that stood on this spot over a thousand years ago, and belonged then and long afterwards to the Bishops of Worcester. The exquisite humour of the manorial law ordained not only that the people of Stratford were under obligation to have their corn ground here, but that they were also made to pay for it. And as competitive millers were thus barred, there can be no doubt but that corn-milling was an expensive item. The old churchmen loved eels, useful for Friday’s dish, and the Bishops of Worcester were sometimes accustomed to The possibilities of the Avon in the matter of floods are very eloquently set forth on the walls of this mill: the astonishing high-water marks of floods for a century past being marked. Scanning them, it seems strange that mill and church and a good part of the town itself have not been washed away. Passing through Old Town into Church Street, the fine Elizabethan three-gabled residence seen on the way, on the right hand, is Hall’s Croft, the home of Dr. John Hall, Susanna Shakespeare’s husband, before they removed to New Place following upon Shakespeare’s death. The old mulberry-tree in the beautiful garden at the back of the house is said to have been planted by her. |