Shakespeare the countryman. We have abundant evidence of Shakespeare the countryman in his works, and of the Warwickshire man some evidences, too. In the splendid speech of the Duke of Burgundy, in Henry the Fifth, he makes the Frenchman talk with an appreciation of agricultural disaster which only an English farmer, and a Warwickshire or Gloucestershire farmer, too, could show. In the miseries of France, worsted by war, the Duke speaks thus—
Bacon would not have made a Frenchman speak with so English a tongue, in the way of the Midlands, nor could he if he would, for he knew no more than the real Burgundy could have known, those details of agricultural life; and he certainly could not have identified a “kecksie,” or a “keck,” as the Warwickshire children still call the hemlock, of whose dried stems they make whistles. In his plays Shakespeare follows the year all round the calendar and touches every season with magic. You feel convinced, from the sympathy, the joyousness, and the intimate touches, of his country scenes that he was a rustic at heart, and that he must have longed, during those many years when he was winning success in London, to return not only to his native place—to which the heart of every one turns fondly—but to the meadows, the cornfields, the hills and dales and the wild flowers around the town of Stratford-on-Avon. There again, when spring was come, to hear “the sweet bird’s note,” whether it were “the throstle with his note so true,” “the ousel cock so black of hue, with orange tawny bill,” “the wren with little quill;”
or better still the mad joyous outbursts of the skylarks’ songs (“And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks”) in those wide horizons in May: these, you are certain, were Shakespeare’s ideals. Of all the seasons, although he writes sympathetically of every one, Shakespeare best loved the spring. He is not exceptional in that, for it is the season of hope
Thus the pages sung in the Forest of Arden; and Shakespeare, be sure, put something of himself into the character of Autolycus the pedlar, who after all was a man of better observation, judging by his song, than rogues of his sort commonly be—
Shakespeare, we like to think, had the tenderest feeling for those same daffodils with which Autolycus begins his song; for in lines that are among the most beautiful he ever wrote, he makes Perdita speak of—
He does not care so ardently for the rose, although he seems, rather indifferently it is true, to admit that it is the queen of flowers. But it delays until summer is upon us. It does not dare with the daffodil. He returns again and again to the more idyllic simple flowers of nature that the gardener takes no account of. He paints the cowslips in a few words of close observation. They are Queen Mab’s pensioners—
And in every cowslip’s ear the fairy hangs a pearl, from her harvest of dew-drops. Shakespeare’s Warwickshire was rich—and it is so still, although it is a very much more enclosed countryside than in his day—in wild-flowers; the gillyflower, the wallflower that loves the nooks and crannies of ruined walls as much as does the jackdaw; the candy-tuft, the foxglove that still stands like a tall floral sentinel in many a hedgerow around Snitterfield; with many another.
The “flowers,” however, mentioned in that quotation are, with one exception, herbs. Such as they grace and make fragrant the old gardens of many a cottage the casual tourist never sees. There they have grown for generations, in great clumps and beds; not in meagre and formal patches, as in some “Shakespearean gardens” The ragged-robin that blooms later in every hedge; the “crow-flower” as Shakespeare names it; the “long purple,” otherwise the wild arum; pansies—“that’s for thoughts”—some call them “love-in-idleness”; all figure in Hamlet, where you find a good deal of old country folklore in Ophelia’s talk. “Rosemary, that’s for remembrance”; fennel and columbines: “there’s rue for you; and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays;—you may wear your rue with a difference.” There is sometimes an almost farmer-like practical philosophy underlying his observation, as where Biron says, in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “Allons allons! sow’d cockle reap’d no corn”; and in King Lear, in the reference to—
The corn-cockle is of course better known as the “cornflower,” whose beautiful blue is so contrasting a colour But the greater the study we give to Shakespeare and his treatment of flowers, the more evident it becomes that his sympathies were all with the earlier, springtime blossoms that dare, not quite with the daffodils, but soon after the roaring ides of March are overpast. Thus, he makes Perdita resume, with—
The “daisies pied,” the “lady-smocks all silver-white,” that is to say, the white arabis which the Warwickshire children of to-day call “smell-smocks,” and the “cuckoo buds of yellow hue,” otherwise the buttercups, out of which the cuckoo is in old folklore supposed to drink, he tells us, all “paint the meadows with delight.” He could never have written those lines with care and thought and in cold blood: he must have seen those meadows with all the delight he expresses, and the words themselves must needs have been penned with enthusiasm. This is a thesis easily susceptible of proof. The lovely cuckoo-song at the close of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which with a charm unmatched tells us of those flower-spangled meads, has no bearing upon the action of the play: it is written in sheer enjoyment, and it is in the same spirit that his other allusions to the fields and hedgerows and woodlands, the “bosky acres” and the “unshrubbed down,” are conceived. Ariel, that tricksy sprite of The Tempest, is a true countryman’s fancy, as clearly to be seen in the lines—
Such an instance, among many, is Oberon’s speech to Puck, in Midsummer Night’s Dream—
For these lines and such as these Shakespeare risked the brickbats, the cat-calls and the obloquy that awaited the dramatist whose action dragged. There is no excuse for them—except that of their beauty, and that to the groundlings was less than nothing. That bank whereon the wild-thyme grew must have been, I like to think, somewhere in The Dingles, a curious spot just north-east of Stratford, to the left of the Warwick road, as you go up to Welcombe. I think there are no “dingles” anywhere nearer London than the midlands; none in name, although there may be many in fact. By a “dingle” in the midlands a deep narrow vale, or natural gully is meant. The word is especially well known in Shropshire and the Welsh borders, where such features, between the enfolding hills, are plentiful. Here The Dingles are abrupt and deeply winding gullies, breaking away from the red earth of the Welcombe uplands: a very tumbled and unspoiled spot. Elms look down from the crest of The Dingles, doubtless, formed in Shakespeare’s mind the site of Titania’s bower. Perhaps you may find it yourself, if you seek there, somewhere about midsummer midnight, in the full of the moon, when possibly her obedient fairies will be as kind and courteous as of old to that gentleman who has the good fortune to discover the magic spot, and may—
If these adventures do befall you, tell no one; for you will not find belief, even in this same Shakespeare land. It is, however, much more likely that your walk will be solitary, and that for the apricots and grapes you will have to wait until you have returned to your hotel in the town. The last two years of Shakespeare’s life were concerned with a heated local question: none other than that of the proposed enclosure of the Welcombe common fields, including The Dingles, by William Combe who had by the death of his father become squire of Welcombe and had at once entered into an agreement with the lord of the manor and other landholders to enclose the land. The corporation and townsfolk of Stratford were bitterly opposed to this encroachment. Shakespeare’s interest in the matter appears to have been only that |