later work as a dramatist, in that it gave him some of his remarkable insight into the elements of human nature. On special occasions he must have made visits to the home of his Aunt Margaret (née Arden), who had married Alexander Webbe, and with six children, his first cousins, was living in his grandfather's old house at Snitterfield. Sometimes, too, he must have visited the home of his Uncle Harry Shakespeare at Snitterfield, and the more pretentious home of his Aunt Joan, who had married Edmund Lambert of Barton-on-the-Heath. But these were mere incidents in the long-drawn-out years of boyhood, and most of his early experiences were associated with the village of his birth. At this time Stratford was a small and very quiet country town lying open to the fields, without turreted walls, or monasteries, or moated castles. It was peopled not with noble families, but with simple honest folk, who plied their trades, and rarely bothered their heads with matters that lay beyond their horizon. For the most part they were unable to read or write; yet they possessed native shrewdness, and exhibited, no doubt, strongly marked personalities, including such types as Dogberry, Sly, and Bottom the weaver. Butchers, haberdashers, grocers, woolen-drapers, glovers were elected to posts of the highest honor in the civic government, and constituted the aristocracy of the village. The streets were narrow and winding, and, as the records show, often polluted with trash and standing pools of water. The houses were crazy affairs, built of stucco with timber beams showing, and covered with thatched roofs. To us they would seem picturesque, to the Elizabethans they were merely commonplace and unworthy of a second glance. The old Clopton Bridge of solid masonry with its fourteen arches, the pretentious village church with its high steeple of wood, and the fine old Guild Chapel with its curious frescoes, were objects of special pride to the citizens. But beyond these features there was nothing to excite the interest of a sixteenth-century traveler 1 — unless he took a second look at the shallow, slow-flowing Avon with its milldam, which added a touch of pastoral beauty to the scene. In this quiet country town the young William probably led the typical life of a village lad. Through allusions in his plays we catch glimpses of him as he "played at pushpin with the boys," or "ninemen's-morris," or "more sacks to the mill," or "hoodman blind," or led the game of "hide fox and after all," "whipped top" with the most expert, and on occasions more than one "troubled with unruly" pranks the sedate citizens. In "Avon's winding stream" he could find endless sources of pleasure. There, for instance, was the cool swimming-pool, the haunt of all the barefoot lads. We can imagine him as at first venturing on the water timidly, "like little wanton boys that swim on bladders," later, "like an unpractis'd swimmer, plunging still with too much labour," and at last, boldly challenging his comrades, as Cassius did Brutus, to leap in "and swim to yonder point." In the river, too, he could discover innumerable quiet places in which to "betray the tawny-finned fishes." Only one who had learned the sport as a boy, and had actually experienced the joy of a swift strike, could in the turmoil of a busy life in London have written: "The pleasantest angling is to see the fish cut with her golden oars the silver stream and greedily devour the bait." 2 Furnivall, who is second to none in a sympathetic understanding of the poet, has attempted to characterize the youthful Shakespeare in words that are probably not far 50. 1 See, for example, Leland's Itinerary, 1535-43, ed. by L. T. Smith, ii, 48– * See H. N. Ellacombe, Shakespeare as an Angler, 1883. |