Shakespeare’s Birthplace—Restoration, of sorts—The business of the Showman—The Birthplace Museum—The Shakespearean garden.

To Henley Street most visitors to Stratford-on-Avon first turn their steps; a little disappointed to discover that it is by no means the best street in the town and must have been rather a poor outskirt at the time when John Shakespeare came in from Snitterfield, to set up business in a small way. There is, as the sentimental pilgrim will very soon discover for himself, a plentiful lack of sentiment nowadays in the business of showing Shakespeare’s Birthplace. For it is a business, and conducted as it is on extremely hard-headed lines, yields a considerable profit; a profit disposed of strictly according to the terms on which the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust is defined in its Parliamentary powers. Enough has already been said to show the sensitive soul that his sensibilities are apt to be extremely tried when he comes this way; but then, to be sure, there can be but a small proportion of such among the 40,000 persons who annually pay their sixpences (and another to see the Birthplace Museum next door). Sometimes, when the dog-star rages and tourists most do gad about, a solid phalanx of visitors, each provided with his ticket from the office down the street, will be found lined up, waiting, like the queues outside the London theatres, for earlier arrivals to be quickly disposed of. The bloom of sentiment, as delicate as that upon a plum or peach, is rudely rubbed off by these things, by rules and regulations and the numbered ticket; but the very fame of Shakespeare and the increasing number of visitors who have, or think they have—or at the very least of it think they ought to have—an intelligent interest in a great man’s birthplace brings about this horrid nemesis of the professional showman.

Shakespeare’s BirthplaceIf you be a little exacting, and would keep the full freshness, the sweetest savour of hero-worship, be content not to see the Birthplace, and especially not that garden at the back of it. It was not, you know it quite well, in the least like this when John Shakespeare lived here and had his wool-store next door, where the Birthplace Museum is now, and sometimes bought and sold corn or carried on the trade of glover. The place has had so many changes of fortune, the appearance of the exterior itself has been so utterly changed and so conjecturally restored, that the thinking man loses a good deal of confidence. And the interior: the rooms without furniture or sign of habitation are like a body whence the soul has fled.

The building did not, for one thing, stand alone as it does now, the houses on either side having been pulled down after it was purchased in 1848; with the, of course, entirely admirable idea of the better lessening its risk from fire. The effect, and that of the hedges with their hairpin railings, is to give the place the very superior appearance of a private house. If old John Shakespeare could be summoned back and taken for a walk along Henley Street, he would be surprised at many things, but by none more than by the odd disappearance of every man’s midden and the altered appearance of his own house. He would wonder what had become of his shop, and assume no doubt that the occupier had made his fortune and retired into private life. He would not know that it is still a place of business, and among the best-paying ones in Stratford, too.

William Shakespeare succeeded to the property of his father, and in his turn willed this Henley Street dwelling-house to his sister, Joan Hart, for life. She had become a widow a few days only before his death, but herself survived until 1646. The woolshop—now the Museum part—he left to his daughter Susanna, who on the death of her aunt came into possession of all the building. At her decease, being the last descendant of her father, she willed it to Thomas Hart, the grandson of her aunt, Joan Hart. From him it descended to his brother George, who in his own lifetime gave it to his son, Shakespeare Hart, whose widow passed it on to another George Hart, nephew of her late husband. In 1778 George was gathered to his fathers and Thomas, his son, reigned in his stead; in 1793 leaving what had been the woolshop to his son John and the Birthplace to his son Thomas, who three years later made over his share to his brother John. On the death of this person in 1800 the property passed to his wife for the remainder of her life, and then to his three children, as co-partners. Since early in the eighteenth century it had been mortgaged up to the hilt, and the three partners were practically obliged to sell in 1806. Thus the last remote link with Shakespeare’s kin was severed. Thomas Court, the purchaser, died in 1818, and on the death of his wife in 1847 the house was purchased by public subscription, on behalf of the nation. This transaction was completed in the following year, at a cost of £3000, the purchase being in 1866 handed over to the Corporation of Stratford-on-Avon, who held it in trust until the incorporation of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 1891.

In all this time the structure suffered many changes, the former woolshop being opened as an inn, the “Maidenhead,” even in Shakespeare’s own time, 1603. Later it became the “Swan and Maidenhead,” and had its front new-faced with brick in 1808. Meanwhile, the Birthplace had in 1784 become a butcher’s shop, hanging out the sign board “The immortal Shakespeare was born in this house.” In the course of these changes the dormer windows had disappeared, about 1800, and the whole was in a very dilapidated state. The restoration work of 1857–58, renewing the vanished dormers in the roof, pulling down the brick front and reinstating a timber-framed elevation, and generally placing the building again in a weather-proof condition, cost nearly a further £3000.

Photographs scarcely give a correct impression of the exterior as thus restored. They reproduce the form, but not the true tone and quality of the timber and plaster, and in truth they make the house look better than it is. The quality of the exterior materials is not convincing and makes the house look very unauthentically new. The timbers and the plaster may be even better than they were in John Shakespeare’s time, but we do not wish them to be, and there is a spruceness and a kind of parlourmaidenly neatness about the place which we feel quite sure the man who was fined for having a muck-heap in front of his house, and for not keeping his gutter clean never knew. Painted woodwork, mathematically true, and the kind of plaster facing we see here were unknown in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Roughly split oak formed both interior and exterior framing to John Shakespeare’s house, and the houses of his neighbours, and it was only in Victorian times that the neatness and the soullessness expressed here became the obsession of craftsmen. In short, they do these things much more convincingly to-day at Earl’s Court.

Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who is a very much greater person than Columbus and discovered America in the monetary sense, while Columbus only added to his geographical knowledge and not to his wealth, has also discovered Stratford-on-Avon, and has generously given the town a public library and the Trustees of the Birthplace two old cottages, all in Henley Street. At the offices you purchase tickets for the Birthplace and the Birthplace Museum, and may well, before doing so, look into that public library, formed out of one of those ancient timber-framed houses Stratford is fortunate enough to possess in profusion. It is a charmingly remodelled building, very well worth inspection.

The Kitchen, Shakespeare’s Birthplace

But let us to the Birthplace. At the door we are met by a caretaker. If it be late in the day he will be a little, or possibly very, husky. In any case he is hurried. He hastens us into a stone-floored room in which a multitude of people are already waiting. They look as if they were attending an inquest, or, at the best of it, a seance, and expected every moment to be called upon to view the body, or to hear knockings or see ghostly shapes. He shuts the door. It is a solemn moment, and in the passing of it we do actually hear knockings, loud and impatient—but they are not spirits from the vasty deep: only other and impatient visitors who have paid their sixpences. But they must wait.

“This is the house where Shakespeare was born. You will be shown presently the actual room where he was born, upstairs.”

“It became a butcher’s shop afterwards, didn’t it?” asks some one. The showman looks grieved: the interruption throws him out of gear, like a bent penny in a slot machine. Besides, it isn’t in the programme. “You must excuse me, sir, and not keep people waiting. This was the living room. The chimney corner remains exactly as it was when Shakespeare was a boy. Have you tickets for the Museum? Those who have will go through that door to the right. This room at the back is the kitchen. If you will ascend the staircase, you will be shown the birth-room. Mind the step.”

A dark steep climb, and a narrow passage leads into the former front bedroom. It is almost entirely bare, only an old chair or two and an old coffer emphasising its nakedness. The rough plaster walls and the ceiling are appallingly dirty; Mrs. Shakespeare would be thoroughly ashamed of it, if she could but revisit her home. A plaster cast of the inevitable Shakespeare bust stands in the room, sometimes on the coffer, and sometimes on a spindly-legged table, and looks with serene amusement upon the proceedings. The old person who used to show the birth-room has apparently been superseded. She used to patronise the bust, and afforded some people much secret amusement. “Plenty room ’ere for the mighty brain,” she would say, drawing her hand across that broad and lofty brow; “there will never be more than one Shakespeare, sir.”

The Room in which Shakespeare was born

The present attendants have less time for that kind of thing, and hurry on with their mechanical tale. Why don’t the Trustees economise, and get a gramophone? “This is the room where Shakespeare was born. The furniture you see does not belong to his time. Some of the glass in the window is original; you can tell it by the green tint. Them laths, sir, in the ceiling? They’re iron, and put up to preserve the original ceiling. No one is allowed in the room above. The ceiling and the walls, as you will observe, are covered with names. Before visitors’ books were provided, visitors were invited to write their names here. You will see that they have fully availed themselves of the privilege, and those who had diamond rings have scratched theirs on the window-panes. Here you will see the signature of General Tom Thumb, who visited the Birthplace with his wife. His name was Stratton. Its position, not very much higher than the skirting-board, shows his height. Helen Faucit’s name appears on the beam overhead. Sir Walter Scott’s name, and Thomas Carlyle’s will be seen on the window.”

We take these and all other signatures on trust, for they are nearly every one terrible scrawls, and are all so extremely crowded together, and the plaster is so dirty, and the glass so nearly opaque that with this and with that they are hardly ever legible.

In a back room hangs an oil portrait of Shakespeare: the so-called “Stratford” portrait, bought in 1860 by William Hunt, the town clerk, together with the old house in which it then hung. It has been cleaned and restored and elaborately framed, and it will be observed that it is further guarded by being enclosed in a steel safe: extraordinary precautions in behalf of a work which is almost certainly spurious.

And so we descend and sign the visitors’ book. A very bulky volume is filled in less than a year, and still the number grows. There were 27,038 visitors in 1896, and 49,117 in 1910. The extremely fine and lengthy summer of 1911 did not, as might have been supposed, bring a record return. On the contrary, the numbers fell in that year to 40,300.

Returning to the kitchen, where in the yawning chimney-place a bacon cupboard will be noticed, we leave by the garden at the back. But meanwhile the Birthplace Museum has been left undescribed. Visitors who have sprung a sixpence for that are taken through from the front room, the living-room. Here are kept many and various articles more or less associated with Shakespeare, and some that have no connection with him at all. The most interesting are the documents relating to this house; the original letter written by Richard Quincy to Shakespeare in 1598; and a deed with the signature of Shakespeare’s brother Gilbert, who was a draper or haberdasher in London, dated 1609. A desk from the Grammar School, the chair from the “Falcon” at Bidford, in which Shakespeare is supposed to have sat, portraits, prints; a perfect copy of the 1623 First Folio edition of the plays, purchased at the Ashburnham Sale in 1898, and other rare editions, make up the collection, together with a sword said to have been Shakespeare’s, and an interesting gold signet-ring, with the initials “W. S.” entwined with a true-lover’s knot, found in a field outside the town, near the church, early in the nineteenth century. It is said to have been Shakespeare’s ring, but scarcely sufficient stress seems to be laid upon the undoubted authenticity of it. Shakespeare’s will, drafted in January 1616, originally bore the concluding words: “In witness whereof I have hereunto put my seale,” but this was afterwards altered to “hand,” the assumption being that it was the loss of this signet ring which necessitated the alteration.

Shakespeare’s Signet-Ring

Haydon, the painter, wrote to Keats in 1818, about the discovery, “My dear Keats, I shall go mad! In a field at Stratford-on-Avon, that belonged to Shakespeare, they have found a gold ring and seal with the initials ‘W.S.,’ and a true-lover’s knot between. If this is not Shakespeare’s whose is it? I saw an impression to-day, and am to have one as soon as possible: as sure as you live and breathe, and that he was the first of beings, the seal belonged to him, O, Lord!”Among the exhibits in the Museum are the town weights and measures, the sword of state, and altogether some fine miscellaneous feeding for the curio-fancier.

The cellars under the building are not shown, nor is the western part of it, where the town archives are stored.

The garden at the back is laid out in beds planted with the flowers mentioned by Shakespeare in his works, and in the middle of the well-kept gravelled path is the base of the ancient town cross which formerly stood at the intersection of Bridge Street and High Street. It is a pleasant place, and its present condition is the result of care, the outcome of much pious thought. But we may declare with all the emphatic language at our command, that when William Shakespeare and his brothers Gilbert, Richard and Edmund, and his sister Joan played out here in the back yard, it was very little of a garden, and not at all tidy unless they were angel-children, which we have no occasion to suppose. It seems to have been originally an orchard, but no doubt Mr. John Shakespeare put it to some use in connection with the several trades he followed.

The piety is undoubted, but it is a little overdone, and everything is in sample. They are not very good specimens of marigolds we see here, but still they are obviously marigolds, and we do not—no really we don’t—need the label that identifies them and the other flowers. We can quite easily recognise the winking Mary-bud, that beautiful flower whose golden eyes are among the loveliest blossoms in an old-fashioned garden; we know the rose, the jasmine, the gillyflower, the sunflower, the stock, the ladysmock, and the whole delightful posy, and wonder who and what those folk may be who cannot recognise them, and require these cast-iron labels for their information.