RURAL

HAUNTS OF SHAKESPEARE

IN THE

VICINITY OF STRATFORD.

SHOTTERY AND LUDDINGTON.

"By heaven, I do love; and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy; and here is part of my rhyme, and here my melancholy. Well, she hath one o' my sonnets already; the clown bore it, the fool sent it, and the lady hath it; sweet clown, sweeter fool, sweetest lady." - SHAKESPEARE, --Love's Labour's Lost, Act 4.

In estimating the attachment certainly felt by Shakespeare to Stratford and its vicinity, we are not to consider so much the actual claims of the scenery itself to general regard, as the associations it would present to Shakespeare's mind from early recollection and intimate acquaintance with all the bosky glens of the country around. Shakespeare's mind was brimful of rural and sylvan images, and all the flowers that adorn the vernal and summer English landscape were blowing in his mind, ever ready to beautify the poetical paths he trod; but he wrote for the entertainment and instruction of the world-not the natives of Warwickshire only, and hence he localizes no description-the Avon and Stratford he never mentions. Yet let us gather his notices of natural scenery from any of his plays, we shall find that in general the colours all apply pretty faithfully to what may be seen in the present day in the neighbourhood of Stratford. Witness Ophelia falling into the stream from her willow, hundreds of which tree may be seen in every variety of form and age on the verdant banks of the Avon, and some impending over the river, or actually with broken branches as here described:

"There is a willow grows ascaunt the brook,

That shows bis hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
Therewith fantastick garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long-purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke."

Now, all the flowers mentioned above are common vernal flowers, and the "long-purple," or orchis, (orchis mascula,) still answers to what Shakespeare has averred respecting it of plain-speaking rustics, and "cold maids." The crow-flower is the butter-cup, the nettle the white-flowered "dead-nettle" most probably. The "daffodil that comes before the swallow dares," and the other vernal flowers that "paint the meadows with delight" are all of genuine Warwickshire growth, and it would not require much necromancy to find such a spot as the following near the Avon's soft stream, without going to fairy-land for it:

"I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet blows,
All over canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk roses and with eglantine."

Even the birds that so sweetly sing in our Shakespeare's pages are all of the Warwickshire breed; the bird "with orange-tawney bill," and the "lark that tirra lirra sings," as well as the nightingale, may all be heard any fine morning in May, in the Weir Brake overhanging the Avon in sylvan pomp on the opposite side of the river, below Stratford Church. Shakespeare had the pictures of his youth always before him in his mind, and hence fully to enjoy and understand him, let the pilgrim not merely look on Stratford for a day, but roam about its rural scenes for a week. Mine host of the Red Horse can accommodate him with "Washington Irving's Sceptre" at his pleasure, or the Golden Lion has a mouth ever open to receive him.

We have previously traced Shakespeare from his Birth-place to the Grammar School, and we shall now glance at his career as a lover, and in so doing propose a pleasant walk of a short mile to Shottery, a rural hamlet in the parish of Stratford, where Anne Hathaway resided, to whom the Bard became affianced at a very early period in his life. As we saunter along the footpath which the future "Immortal" trod, and note the verdant elms and distant Ilmington hills, it may be well to descant a moment on the intervening period. It is admitted on all hands that the Poet remained in Stratford until after his marriage with Miss Hathaway, but what he did or how he was occupied is quite uncertain. We cannot dispel the cloud, and can only mention the suppositions that have been hazarded.

It has been stated by some that he was apprenticed to a butcher; by others that he assisted his father generally in agricultural affairs, and he himself alludes to the tarring of sheep in one of his plays as if he was familiar with the operation.* A Mr. Beeston told Aubrey that Shakespeare had been in his younger years a schoolmaster, (if so, perhaps as an assistant in the Grammar School); and the Bard in various plays seems so familiar with the law that we cannot but suspect he was employed at one time in an attorney's office. However this may have been, he got acquainted with the Hathaways at Shottery, and somehow or other, the fair Anne found her way into the excitable Poet's heart when he was only eighteen years of age. There is nothing to wonder at in this but that the bonny maiden herself whose witchery had thus been at work was twenty-six. Their marriage took place in the latter part of 1582, but as there is no record of it in the Stratford register, it must have taken place elsewhere. There is a retired little hamlet called Luddington, in a picturesque spot on the banks of the Avon below its confluence with the Stour, about two miles below Stratford, where a chapel once existed, and it is conjectured that here the marriage took place, for which perhaps there were reasons rendering privacy prudent.

It has been suggested that Shakespeare's union with Anne Hathaway was not a peculiarly happy one. The Poet having then wisdom to learn, not only "sighed like furnace" but was quite as hot as one in his love, and hence, notwithstanding the stress that has been laid upon his having "plighted his troth" to Anne Hathaway, it appears pretty clear that the marriage itself was forced upon him rather earlier than he intended. The marriage bond yet remains carefully preserved in the office of the Worcester Registry, and from this it appears that two stout husbandmen of Shottery, Sandels and Richardson, were bondsmen on the occasion; and Mr. Halliwell says that "the bride's father