the butcher-occupant, some thirty years ago, having an eye to every gainful attraction, wrote up, "WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE WAS BORN IN THIS HOUSE. N.B.-A HORSE AND TAXED CART TO LET." It ceased to be used as a butcher's shop, but there were the arrangements for a butcher's trade in the lower room-the cross beams with hooks, and the window-board for joints. In 1823, when we made our first pilgrimage to Stratford, the house had gone out of the family of the Harts, and the last alleged descendant was recently ejected. It had been a gainful trade to her for some years to show the old kitchen behind the shop, and the honoured bed-room. When the poor old woman, the last of the Harts, had to quit her vocation (she claimed to have inherited some of the genius, if she had lost the possessions, of her great ancestor, for she had produced a marvellous poem on the Battle of Waterloo), she set up a rival show-shop on the other side of the street, filled with all sorts of trumpery relics pretended to have belonged to Shakspere. But she was in ill odour. In a fit of resentment, the day before she quitted the ancient house, she whitewashed the walls of the bed-room, so as to obliterate the pencil inscriptions with which they were covered. It was the work of her successor to remove the plaster; and manifold names, obscure or renowned, again saw the light. The house had a few ancient articles of furniture about it; but there was nothing which could be considered as originally belonging to it as the home of William Shakspere. The engravings exhibit John Shakspere's houses in Henley Street under two aspects. The upper one is from an original drawing made by Colonel Delamotte in 1788. The houses, it will be observed, then presented one uniform front; and there were dormer windows connected with rooms in the roof. We have a plan before us, accompanying Mr. Wheler's account of these premises, which shows that they occupied a frontage of thirty-one feet. The lower is from an original drawing made by Mr. Pyne, after a sketch by Mr. Edridge in 1807. We now see that the dormer windows are removed, as also the gable at the east end of the front. The house has been shorn of much of its external importance. There is a lithograph engraving in Mr. Wheler's account, published in 1824. The premises. as there shown, have been pretty equally divided. The Swan and Maidenhead half has had its windows modernized, and the continuation of the timberframe has been obliterated by a brick casing. In 1807, we observe that the western half had been divided into two tenements;-the fourth of the whole premises, that is the butcher's shop, the kitchen behind, and the two rooms over, being the portion commonly shown as Shakspere's House. Some years ago, upon a frontage in continuation of the tenement at the west, three small cottages were built. The whole of this portion of the property has been purchased for the nation, as well as the two tenements. Was William Shakspere, then, born in the house in Henley Street which has been purchased by the nation? For ourselves, we frankly confess that the want of absolute certainty that Shakspere was there born, produces a state of mind that is something higher and pleasanter than the conviction that depends upon positive evidence. We are content to follow the popular faith undoubtingly. The traditionary belief is sanctioned by long usage and universal acceptation The merely curious look in reverent silence upon that mean room, with its massive joists and plastered walls, firm with ribs of oak, where they are told the poet of the human race was born. Eyes now closed on the world but who have left that behind which the world "will not willingly let die, "have glistened under this humble roof, and there have been thoughts unutterable-solemn, confiding, grateful, humble-clustering round their hearts in that hour. The autographs of Byron and Scott are amongst hundreds of perishable inscriptions. Disturb not the belief that William Shakspere first saw the light in this venerated room. "The victor Time has stood on Avon's side * Prologue for the Shakspere Night, Dec. 7, 1847, by C. Knight. • We shall postpone, until nearly the close of this volume, a description, not only of the most recent condition of the premises in Henley Street, but of the garden of New Flace, which, has also been acquired by public subscription. (See Book II. chapter 10.) THE poet in his well-known Seven Ages' has necessarily presented to us only the great boundary-marks of a human life: the progress from one stage to another he has left to be imagined : "At first the infant Muling and puking in the nurse's arms." Perhaps the most influential, though the least observed, part of man's existence, that in which he learns most of good or of evil, lies in the progress between this first act and the second: : filled up by a mother's education. Let us see what the home instruction of the young Shakspere would probably have been. There is a passage in one of Shakspere's Sonnets, the 89th, which has induced a belief that he had the misfortune of a physical defect, which would render him peculiarly the object of maternal solicitude : " 'Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault, Again in the 37th Sonnet : "As a decrepit father takes delight To see his active child do deeds of youth, These lines have been interpreted to mean that William Shakspere was literally lame,* and that his lameness was such as to limit him, when he became an actor, to the representation of the parts of old men. We should, on the contrary, have no doubt whatever that the verses we have quoted may be most fitly received in a metaphorical sense, were there not some subsequent lines in the 37th Sonnet which really appear to have a literal meaning; and thus to render the previous lame and lameness expressive of something more than the general selfabasement which they would otherwise appear to imply. In the following lines lame means something distinct from poor and despised : "For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit, Or any of these all, of all, or more, Entitled in thy parts do crowned sit, I make my love engrafted to this store: So then I am not lame, poor, nor despis'd, : Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give." Of one thing, however, we may be quite sure-that, if Shakspere were lame, his infirmity was not such as to disqualify him for active bodily exertion. The same series of verses that have suggested this belief that he was lame also show that he was a horseman.† His entire works exhibit that familiarity with external nature, with rural occupations, with athletic sports, which is incompatible with an inactive boyhood. It is not impossible that some natural defect, or some accidental injury, may have modified the energy of such a child; and have che * "Malone has most inefficiently attempted to explain away the palpable meaning of the above lines; and adds, ‘If Shakspeare was in truth lame, he had it not in his power to halt occasionally for this or any other purpose. The defect must have been fixed and permanent.' Not so. Surely many an infirmity of the kind may be skilfully concealed; or only become visible in the moments of hurried movement. Either Sir Walter Scott or Lord Byron might, without any impropriety, have written the verses in question. They would have been applicable to either of them. Indeed the lameness of Lord Byron was exactly such as Shakspeare's might have been; and I remember, as a boy, that he selected those speeches for declamation which would not constrain him to the use of such exertions as might obtrude the defect of his person into notice.”— Life of William Shakspeare, by the Rev. William Harness, M.A. † See Sonnets 50 and 51. 35 |