W. J. Rolfe

“ Chambers (small cannon) would be fired at daybreak, and great shouts of 'Saint George!' would drown the echoes of their explosions. The Master of the Guild, its schoolmaster (a truly learned man) , with the monitors and scholars of the Grammar School in their long blue gowns and flat caps, with the priests of the Guild Chapel, would all walk in the procession, with their Guild brothers and sisters, with representatives of the trades practised in the town, and even with the old Almshouse people, smiling and chattering and wagging their ancient heads. ”

“ Warwickshire is the heart of England, and the country within ten miles or so of the town of Warwick may be called the heart of this heart. On one side of this circle are Stratford and Shottery and Wilmcote—the home of Shakespeare's mother—and on the other are Kenilworth and Coventry.
In Warwick itself is the famous castle of its Earls—"that fairest monument," as Scott calls it, "of ancient and chivalrous splendor which yet remains uninjured by time." ”

“ How happily it brings Shakespeare before us, mixing with his Stratford neighbors at their sheep-shearing and country sports, enjoying the vagabond peddler's gammon and talk, delighting in the sweet Warwickshire maidens, and buying them 'fairings,' opening his heart afresh to all the innocent mirth and the beauty of nature around him! ”

“ The festival of Easter would generally come before Saint George's day. When Shakespeare was a boy the Reformation had somewhat mitigated the ancient rigor and austerity of Lent, but Easter was none the less a joyous and jubilant anniversary.
"Surely," as Mr. Charles Knight remarks, "there was something exquisitely beautiful in the old custom [173] of going forth into the fields before the sun had risen on Easter-day, to see him mounting over the hills with a tremulous motion, as if it were an animate thing bounding in sympathy with the redeemed of mankind. ”

“ Knight remarks: "At the joyous Fair-season it would seem that the wealth of a world was emptied into Stratford; not only the substantial things, the wine, the wax, the wheat, the wool, the malt, the cheese, the clothes, the napery, such as even great lords sent their stewards to the Fairs to buy, but every possible variety of such trumpery as fills the pedler's pack,—ribbons, inkles, caddises, coifs, stomachers, pomanders, brooches, tapes, shoe-ties. ”

“ The bells in the church and chapel tower would be ringing out right jovial peals. Then would come the town trumpeters marching before the High Bailiff, Aldermen, and Chamberlains, with their long furred [171] scarlet robes, their chains of office, and the newly-gilded maces borne before them.
"Then, riding on horseback, his armor and drawn sword flashing back the rays of a fitful sun, would be seen the living representative of Saint George, with his great white plume floating from his white helm, as the soft, sweet, playing wind tossed it to and fro. ”

“ The young barbarians of Shakespeare's time thought it fine sport to pull the feathers from a live goose. If they sometimes got whipped for it, we may suppose that it was solely for the mischief done to private property. When their elders were fond of bear-baiting, cock-fighting, and other brutal amusements, the boys would hardly be punished for torturing a domestic animal unless its value was lessened by the ill-treatment. ”

“ When Shakespeare was writing that early play, with its scenes in fairy-land, what more natural than that this youthful visit to what must then have seemed veritable fairy-land should recur to his memory and blend with the creations of his fancy?
COVENTRY.
The road from Warwick to Kenilworth is one of the loveliest in England; and that from Kenilworth five [15] miles further on to Coventry is acknowledged to be the most beautiful in the kingdom; yet it is only a different kind of beauty from the other, as that is from the beauty of the road between Warwick and Stratford. ”

“ We infer, from certain passages in the plays, that Shakespeare had read Scot's book; and we have good reason to believe that, like Scot, he was far enough in advance of his age to see the absurdity of the popular faith in magic and witchcraft. In his boyhood we may suppose that he believed in them, as his parents and everybody in Stratford doubtless did; but when he became a man he appears to have regarded them only as curious old folk-lore from which he could now and then draw material for use in his plays and poems. ”

“ The bagpipe and the morris bells
That they are not far hence us tells.'
From out of the leafy Arden are they bringing in the May-pole. The oxen move slowly with the ponderous wain; they are garlanded, but not for the sacrifice. Around the spoil of the forest are the pipers and the dancers—maidens in blue kirtles, and foresters in green tunics. Amidst the shouts of young and old, childhood leaping and clapping its hands, is the May-pole raised. But there are great personages forthcoming—not so great, however, as in more ancient times. ”

“ Robert Heron, writing in 1793 of his travels in Scotland, says: "Cattle are subject to be injured by what is called an evil eye, for some persons are supposed to have naturally a blasting power in their eyes, with which they injure whatever offends or is hopelessly desired by them. Witches and warlocks are also much disposed to wreak their malignity on cattle.... It is common to bind into a cow's tail a small piece of mountain-ash wood, as a charm against witchcraft." ”

“ The young poet [Shakespeare] might have joined his simple neighbors on this cheerful morning, and yet have thought with Sir Thomas Browne, 'We shall not, I hope, disparage the Resurrection of our Redeemer if we say that the sun doth not dance on Easter-day.' But one of the most glorious images of one of his early plays [Romeo and Juliet] has given life and movement to the sun ”

“ The first of May was in the olden time one of the most delightful of holidays; but its harmless sports were an abomination in the eyes of the Puritans. Philip Stubbes, in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583) says: "Against May, every parish, town, and village assemble themselves together, both men, women, and children, old and young, even all indifferently: and either going all together, or dividing themselves into companies, they go, some to the woods and groves, some to the hills and mountains, some to one place, some to another, where they spend all the night in pastimes ”

“ But their mother called to their mind that there was security far more to be relied on than charms of herb or horseshoe—that there was a Power that would preserve them from all evil, seen or unseen, if such were His gracious will, and if they humbly sought Him, and offered up their hearts to Him in all love and trust. ”

“ His poetry in this, as in all other great essentials, is like the operations of nature itself; we see not its workings. But we may be assured, from the very circumstance of its appearing so accidental, so spontaneous in its relations to all external nature and to the country life, that it had its foundation in very early and very accurate observation. Stratford was especially fitted to have been the 'green lap' in which the boy-poet was 'laid.' The whole face of creation here wore an aspect of quiet loveliness. ”

“ If she flew with the wind behind her, she seldom returned. If therefore a hawk was for any reason to be dismissed, she was let down the wind, and from that time shifted for herself and preyed at fortune, or at random. ”

“ It is not pleasant to learn that the poet's father was fined for maintaining a sterquinarium, which being translated from the Latin is dung-heap, in front of his house in Henley Street—now, like the other Stratford streets, kept as clean as any cottage-floor in the town—and we have ample evidence that the general sanitary condition of the place was very bad. John Shakespeare would probably not have been fined if his sterquinarium had been behind his house instead of before it. ”

“ Stories such as these, preserved amidst the wreck of time, were to that youth like the seeds that are found in the tombs of ruined cities, lying with the bones of forgotten generations, but which the genial influence of nature will call into life, and they shall become flowers, and trees, and food for man. ”

“ Ascham urged that attention should be paid to training the young in archery; "for children," he said, "if sufficient pains are taken with them at the outset, may much more easily be taught to shoot well than men," because the latter have frequently more trouble to unlearn their bad habits than would suffice to teach them good ones.
One of the statutes of Henry VIII. forbade any person who had reached the age of twenty-four years from shooting at a mark less than 220 yards distant; and a writer of 1602 tells of Cornish archers who could send an arrow to a distance of 480 yards. ”

“ A mighty man rides into the Fair who scatters consternation around. It is the Queen's Purveyor. The best horses are taken up for her Majesty's use, at her Majesty's price; and they probably find their way to the Earl of Leicester's or the Earl of Warwick's stables at a considerable profit to Master Purveyor. The country buyers and sellers look blank; but there is no remedy. There is solace, however, if there is not redress. The ivy-bush is at many a door, and the sounds of merriment are within, as the ale and [203] the sack are quaffed to friendly greetings. ”

“ Hawking, or falconry, the art of training and flying hawks for the purpose of catching other birds, was a sport generally limited to the nobility; but Shakespeare's many allusions to it show that he was very familiar with all its forms and its technicalities. He doubtless saw a good deal of it in his boyhood rambles in the neighborhood of Stratford. ”

“ London has perhaps this carol yet, among its halfpenny ballads. A man who had a mind attuned to the love of what was beautiful in the past has pre [192] served it; but it was for another age. It was for the age of William Shakespeare. It was for the age when superstition, as we call it, had its poetical faith....
"Such a night was a preparation for a 'happy Christmas.' The Cross of Stratford was garnished with the holly, the ivy, and the bay. Hospitality was in every house; but the hall of the great landlord of the parish was a scene of rare conviviality. ”

“ This house, the finest example of Elizabethan architecture in Stratford, and one of the best in England, was built in 1596 by Thomas Rogers, whose daughter, Katherine, married Robert Harvard, a butcher in the parish of St. Saviour in London, and became the mother of John Harvard, the early benefactor of Harvard College from whom it took its name. The house of Thomas Rogers was nearly opposite [245] New Place, the residence of Shakespeare in his later years; and Mr. Rogers and his daughter doubtless knew the dramatist as a famous neighbor of theirs, and may have seen him on the stage. ”

“ All the leading colleges now require one or more plays of Shakespeare as part of [254] the preparation in English, and Julius Cæsar is almost invariably included for every year.
If two plays can be read, the Merchant and Julius Cæsar may be commended; or either of these with As You Like It, or with Macbeth, if a tragedy is desired. Macbeth is the shortest of the great tragedies (only a trifle more than half the length of Hamlet, for instance) , and seems to me unquestionably the best for an ordinary school course. ”

“ The verse catches something of the music of the throstle and the lark, of the woosel "with golden bill" and the nightingale with her tender strains, as he tells of these Warwickshire birds, and of the region with "flowery bosom brave" where they breed and warble; but in Shakespeare the same birds sing with a finer music—more like that to which we may still listen in the fields and woodlands along the lazy-winding Avon. ”

“ Alehouse-keepers, of whom there were thirty in Shakespeare's time, were kept strictly under the council's control. They were not allowed to brew their own ale, or to encourage tippling, or to serve poor artificers except at stated hours of the day, on pain of fine and imprisonment. Dogs were not to go about the streets unmuzzled. Every inhabitant had to go to church at least once a month, and absences were liable to penalties of twenty pounds, which in the late years of Elizabeth's reign commissioners came from London to see that the local authorities enforced. ”

“ No map of Stratford made before the middle of the 18th century is known to exist. The one here given in fac-simile was executed about the year 1768, and, as Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps tells us, "it clearly appears from the local records that there had then been no material alteration in either the form or the extent of the town since the days of Elizabeth. It may therefore be accepted as a reliable guide to the locality as it existed in the poet's own time, when the number of inhabited houses, exclusive of mere hovels, could not have much exceeded five hundred." ”

“ Thomas Hunt, who was master during the most important years of William's school course, became vicar of the neighboring village of Luddington. "In the pedantic Holofernes of Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare has carefully portrayed the best type of the rural schoolmaster, as in Pinch he has portrayed the worst, and the freshness and fulness of detail imparted to the former portrait may easily lead to the conclusion that its author was drawing upon his own experience." ”

“ Yea, many times the better nature is sorely punished; for, if one, by quickness of wit, take his lesson readily, another, by hardness of wit, taketh it not so speedily, the first is always commended, the other is commonly punished; when a wise schoolmaster should rather discreetly consider the right disposition of both their natures, and not so much weigh what either of them is able to do now, as what either of them is likely to do hereafter. ”

“ There was Æsop's fable of the old lark and her young ones, wherein 'he prettily and aptly doth premonish that hope and confidence of things attempted by man ought to be fixed and trusted in none other but himself.' There was the story, most delightful to a child, of the bondman at Rome, who was brought into the open place upon which a great multitude looked, to fight with a lion of a marvellous bigness ”