Books: Our Old Home
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> Our Old Home
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The spire of Shakespeare's church--the Church of the Holy Trinity--begins
to show itself among the trees at a little distance from Stratford. Next
we see the shabby old dwellings, intermixed with mean-looking houses of
modern date; and the streets being quite level, you are struck and
surprised by nothing so much as the tameness of the general scene, as if
Shakespeare's genius were vivid enough to have wrought pictorial
splendors in the town where he was born. Here and there, however, a
queer edifice meets your eye, endowed with the individuality that belongs
only to the domestic architecture of times gone by; the house seems to
have grown out of some odd quality in its inhabitant, as a sea-shell is
moulded from within by the character of its innate; and having been built
in a strange fashion, generations ago, it has ever since been growing
stranger and quainter, as old humorists are apt to do. Here, too (as so
often impressed me in decayed English towns), there appeared to be a
greater abundance of aged people wearing small-clothes and leaning on
sticks than you could assemble on our side of the water by sounding a
trumpet and proclaiming a reward for the most venerable. I tried to
account for this phenomenon by several theories: as, for example, that
our new towns are unwholesome for age and kill it off unseasonably; or
that our old men have a subtile sense of fitness, and die of their own
accord rather than live in an unseemly contrast with youth and novelty
but the secret may be, after all, that hair-dyes, false teeth, modern
arts of dress, and other contrivances of a skin-deep youthfulness, have
not crept into these antiquated English towns, and so people grow old
without the weary necessity of seeming younger than they are.
After wandering through two or three streets, I found my way to
Shakespeare's birthplace, which is almost a smaller and humbler house
than any description can prepare the visitor to expect; so inevitably
does an august inhabitant make his abode palatial to our imaginations,
receiving his guests, indeed, in a castle in the air, until we unwisely
insist on meeting him among the sordid lanes and alleys of lower earth.
The portion of the edifice with which Shakespeare had anything to do is
hardly large enough, in the basement, to contain the butcher's stall that
one of his descendants kept, and that still remains there, windowless,
with the cleaver-cuts in its hacked counter, which projects into the
street under a little penthouse-roof, as if waiting for a new occupant.
The upper half of the door was open, and, on my rapping at it, a young
person in black made her appearance and admitted me; she was not a
menial, but remarkably genteel (an American characteristic) for an
English girl, and was probably the daughter of the old gentlewoman who
takes care of the house. This lower room has a pavement of gray slabs of
stone, which may have been rudely squared when the house was new, but are
now all cracked, broken, and disarranged in a most unaccountable way.
One does not see how any ordinary usage, for whatever length of time,
should have so smashed these heavy stones; it is as if an earthquake had
burst up through the floor, which afterwards had been imperfectly trodden
down again. The room is whitewashed and very clean, but wofully shabby
and dingy, coarsely built, and such as the most poetical imagination
would find it difficult to idealize. In the rear of this apartment is
the kitchen, a still smaller room, of a similar rude aspect; it has a
great, rough fireplace, with space for a large family under the blackened
opening of the chimney, and an immense passageway for the smoke, through
which Shakespeare may have seen the blue sky by day and the stars
glimmering down at him by night. It is now a dreary spot where the
long-extinguished embers used to be. A glowing fire, even if it covered
only a quarter part of the hearth, might still do much towards making the
old kitchen cheerful. But we get a depressing idea of the stifled, poor,
sombre kind of life that could have been lived in such a dwelling, where
this room seems to have been the gathering-place of the family, with no
breadth or scope, no good retirement, but old and young huddling together
cheek by jowl. What a hardy plant was Shakespeare's genius, how fatal
its development, since it could not be blighted in such an atmosphere!
It only brought human nature the closer to him, and put more unctuous
earth about his roots.
Thence I was ushered up stairs to the room in which Shakespeare is
supposed to have been born: though, if you peep too curiously into the
matter, you may find the shadow of an ugly doubt on this, as well as most
other points of his mysterious life. It is the chamber over the
butcher's shop, and is lighted by one broad window containing a great
many small, irregular panes of glass. The floor is made of planks, very
rudely hewn, and fitting together with little neatness; the naked beams
and rafters, at the sides of the room and overhead, bear the original
marks of the builder's broad-axe, with no evidence of an attempt to
smooth off the job. Again we have to reconcile ourselves to the
smallness of the space enclosed by these illustrious walls,--a
circumstance more difficult to accept, as regards places that we have
heard, read, thought, and dreamed much about, than any other
disenchanting particular of a mistaken ideal. A few paces--perhaps
seven or eight--take us from end to end of it. So low it is, that I
could easily touch the ceiling, and might have done so without a
tiptoe-stretch, had it been a good deal higher; and this humility of
the chamber has tempted a vast multitude of people to write their names
overhead in pencil. Every inch of the sidewalls, even into the
obscurest nooks and corners, is covered with a similar record; all the
window-panes, moreover, are scrawled with diamond signatures, among which
is said to be that of Walter Scott; but so many persons have sought to
immortalize themselves in close vicinity to his name, that I really could
not trace him out. Methinks it is strange that people do not strive to
forget their forlorn little identities, in such situations, instead of
thrusting them forward into the dazzle of a great renown, where, if
noticed, they cannot but be deemed impertinent.
This room, and the entire house, so far as I saw it, are whitewashed and
exceedingly clean; nor is there the aged, musty smell with which old
Chester first made me acquainted, and which goes far to cure an American
of his excessive predilection for antique residences. An old lady, who
took charge of me up stairs, had the manners and aspect of a gentlewoman,
and talked with somewhat formidable knowledge and appreciative
intelligence about Shakespeare. Arranged on a table and in chairs were
various prints, views of houses and scenes connected with Shakespeare's
memory, together with editions of his works and local publications about
his home and haunts, from the sale of which this respectable lady perhaps
realizes a handsome profit. At any rate, I bought a good many of them,
conceiving that it might be the civillest way of requiting her for her
instructive conversation and the trouble she took in showing me the
house. It cost me a pang (not a curmudgeonly, but a gentlemanly one) to
offer a downright fee to the lady-like girl who had admitted me; but I
swallowed my delicate scruples with some little difficulty, and she
digested hers, so far as I could observe, with no difficulty at all. In
fact, nobody need fear to hold out half a crown to any person with whom
he has occasion to speak a word in England.
I should consider it unfair to quit Shakespeare's house without the frank
acknowledgment that I was conscious of not the slightest emotion while
viewing it, nor any quickening of the imagination. This has often
happened to me in my visits to memorable places. Whatever pretty and
apposite reflections I may have made upon the subject had either occurred
to me before I ever saw Stratford, or have been elaborated since. It is
pleasant, nevertheless, to think that I have seen the place; and I
believe that I can form a more sensible and vivid idea of Shakespeare as
a flesh-and-blood individual now that I have stood on the kitchen-hearth
and in the birth-chamber; but I am not quite certain that this power of
realization is altogether desirable in reference to a great poet. The
Shakespeare whom I met there took various guises, but had not his laurel
on. He was successively the roguish boy,--the youthful deer-stealer,--
the comrade of players,--the too familiar friend of Davenant's mother,--
the careful, thrifty, thriven man of property who came back from London
to lend money on bond, and occupy the best house in Stratford,--the
mellow, red-nosed, autumnal boon-companion of John a' Combe,--and finally
(or else the Stratford gossips belied him), the victim of convivial
habits, who met his death by tumbling into a ditch on his way home from a
drinking-bout, and left his second-best bed to his poor wife.
I feel, as sensibly as the reader can, what horrible impiety it is to
remember these things, be they true or false. In either case, they ought
to vanish out of sight on the distant ocean-line of the past, leaving a
pure, white memory, even as a sail, though perhaps darkened with many
stains, looks snowy white on the far horizon. But I draw a moral from
these unworthy reminiscences and this embodiment of the poet, as
suggested by some of the grimy actualities of his life. It is for the
high interests of the world not to insist upon finding out that its
greatest men are, in a certain lower sense, very much the same kind of
men as the rest of us, and often a little worse; because a common mind
cannot properly digest such a discovery, nor ever know the true
proportion of the great man's good and evil, nor how small a part of him
it was that touched our muddy or dusty earth. Thence comes moral
bewilderment, and even intellectual loss, in regard to what is best of
him. When Shakespeare invoked a curse on the man who should stir his
bones, he perhaps meant the larger share of it for him or them who should
pry into his perishing earthliness, the defects or even the merits of the
character that he wore in Stratford, when he had left mankind so much to
muse upon that was imperishable and divine. Heaven keep me from
incurring any part of the anathema in requital for the irreverent
sentences above written!
From Shakespeare's house, the next step, of course, is to visit his
burial-place. The appearance of the church is most venerable and
beautiful, standing amid a great green shadow of lime-trees, above which
rises the spire, while the Gothic battlements and buttresses and vast
arched windows are obscurely seen through the boughs. The Avon loiters
past the churchyard, an exceedingly sluggish river, which might seem to
have been considering which way it should flow ever since Shakespeare
left off paddling in it and gathering the large forget-me-nots that grow
among its flags and water-weeds.
An old man in small-clothes was waiting at the gate; and inquiring
whether I wished to go in, he preceded me to the church-porch, and
rapped. I could have done it quite as effectually for myself; but it
seems, the old people of the neighborhood haunt about the churchyard, in
spite of the frowns and remonstrances of the sexton, who grudges them the
half-eleemosynary sixpence which they sometimes get from visitors. I was
admitted into the church by a respectable-looking and intelligent man in
black, the parish-clerk, I suppose, and probably holding a richer
incumbency than his vicar, if all the fees which he handles remain in his
own pocket. He was already exhibiting the Shakespeare monuments to two
or three visitors, and several other parties came in while I was there.
The poet and his family are in possession of what may be considered the
very best burial-places that the church affords. They lie in a row,
right across the breadth of the chancel, the foot of each gravestone
being close to the elevated floor on which the altar stands. Nearest to
the side-wall, beneath Shakespeare's bust, is a slab bearing a Latin
inscription addressed to his wife, and covering her remains; then his own
slab, with the old anathematizing stanza upon it; then that of Thomas
Nash, who married his granddaughter; then that of Dr. Hall, the husband
of his daughter Susannah; and, lastly, Susannah's own. Shakespeare's is
the commonest-looking slab of all, being just such a flag-stone as Essex
Street in Salem used to be paved with, when I was a boy. Moreover,
unless my eyes or recollection deceive me, there is a crack across it, as
if it had already undergone some such violence as the inscription
deprecates. Unlike the other monuments of the family, it bears no name,
nor am I acquainted with the grounds or authority on which it is
absolutely determined to be Shakespeare's; although, being in a range
with those of his wife and children, it might naturally be attributed to
him. But, then, why does his wife, who died afterwards, take precedence
of him and occupy the place next his bust? And where are the graves of
another daughter and a son, who have a better right in the family row
than Thomas Nash, his grandson-in-law? Might not one or both of them
have been laid under the nameless stone? But it is dangerous trifling
with Shakespeare's dust; so I forbear to meddle further with the grave
(though the prohibition makes it tempting), and shall let whatever bones
be in it rest in peace. Yet I must needs add that the inscription on the
bust seems to imply that Shakespeare's grave was directly underneath it.
The poet's bust is affixed to the northern wall of the church, the base
of it being about a man's height, or rather more, above the floor of the
chancel. The features of this piece of sculpture are entirely unlike any
portrait of Shakespeare that I have ever seen, and compel me to take down
the beautiful, lofty-browed, and noble picture of him which has hitherto
hung in my mental portrait-gallery. The bust cannot be said to represent
a beautiful face or an eminently noble head; but it clutches firmly hold
of one's sense of reality and insists upon your accepting it, if not as
Shakespeare the poet, yet as the wealthy burgher of Stratford, the friend
of John a' Combe, who lies yonder in the corner. I know not what the
phrenologists say to the bust. The forehead is but moderately developed,
and retreats somewhat, the upper part of the skull rising pyramidally;
the eyes are prominent almost beyond the penthouse of the brow; the upper
lip is so long that it must have been almost a deformity, unless the
sculptor artistically exaggerated its length, in consideration, that, on
the pedestal, it must be foreshortened by being looked at from below. On
the whole, Shakespeare must have had a singular rather than a
prepossessing face; and it is wonderful how, with this bust before its
eyes, the world has persisted in maintaining an erroneous notion of his
appearance, allowing painters and sculptors to foist their idealized
nonsense on its all, instead of the genuine man. For my part, the
Shakespeare of my mind's eye is henceforth to be a personage of a ruddy
English complexion, with a reasonably capacious brow, intelligent and
quickly observant eyes, a nose curved slightly outward, a long, queer
upper lip, with the mouth a little unclosed beneath it, and cheeks
considerably developed in the lower part and beneath the chin. But when
Shakespeare was himself (for nine tenths of the time, according to all
appearances, he was but the burgher of Stratford), he doubtless shone
through this dull mask and transfigured it into the face of an angel.
Fifteen or twenty feet behind the row of Shakespeare gravestones is the
great east-window of the church, now brilliant with stained glass of
recent manufacture. On one side of this window, under a sculptured arch
of marble, lies a full-length marble figure of John a' Combe, clad in
what I take to be a robe of municipal dignity, and holding its hands
devoutly clasped. It is a sturdy English figure, with coarse features, a
type of ordinary man whom we smile to see immortalized in the
sculpturesque material of poets and heroes; but the prayerful attitude
encourages us to believe that the old usurer may not, after all, have had
that grim reception in the other world which Shakespeare's squib
foreboded for him. By the by, till I grew somewhat familiar with
Warwickshire pronunciation, I never understood that the point of those
ill-natured lines was a pun. "'Oho!' quoth the Devil, ''t is my John a'
Combe'"--that is, "My John has come!"
Close to the poet's bust is a nameless, oblong, cubic tomb, supposed to
be that of a clerical dignitary of the fourteenth century. The church
has other mural monuments and altar-tombs, one or two of the latter
upholding the recumbent figures of knights in armor and their dames, very
eminent and worshipful personages in their day, no doubt, but doomed to
appear forever intrusive and impertinent within the precincts which
Shakespeare has made his own. His renown is tyrannous, and suffers
nothing else to be recognized within the scope of its material presence,
unless illuminated by some side-ray from himself. The clerk informed me
that interments no longer take place in any part of the church. And it
is better so; for methinks a person of delicate individuality, curious
about his burial-place, and desirous of six feet of earth for himself
alone, could never endure to be buried near Shakespeare, but would rise
up at midnight and grope his way out of the church-door, rather than
sleep in the shadow of so stupendous a memory.
I should hardly have dared to add another to the innumerable descriptions
of Stratford-on-Avon, if it had not seemed to me that this would form a
fitting framework to some reminiscences of a very remarkable woman. Her
labor, while she lived, was of a nature and purpose outwardly irreverent
to the name of Shakespeare, yet, by its actual tendency, entitling her to
the distinction of being that one of all his worshippers who sought,
though she knew it not, to place the richest and stateliest diadem upon
his brow. We Americans, at least, in the scanty annals of our
literature, cannot afford to forget her high and conscientious exercise
of noble faculties, which, indeed, if you look at the matter in one way,
evolved only a miserable error, but, more fairly considered, produced a
result worth almost what it cost her. Her faith in her own ideas was so
genuine, that, erroneous as they were, it transmuted them to gold, or, at
all events, interfused a large proportion of that precious and
indestructible substance among the waste material from which it can
readily be sifted.
The only time I ever saw Miss Bacon was in London, where she had lodgings
in Spring Street, Sussex Gardens, at the house of a grocer, a portly,
middle-aged, civil, and friendly man, who, as well as his wife, appeared
to feel a personal kindness towards their lodger. I was ushered up two
(and I rather believe three) pair of stairs into a parlor somewhat humbly
furnished, and told that Miss Bacon would come soon. There were a number
of books on the table, and, looking into them, I found that every one had
some reference, more or less immediate, to her Shakespearian theory,--a
volume of Raleigh's "History of the World," a volume of Montaigne, a
volume of Lord Bacon's letters, a volume of Shakespeare's plays; and on
another table lay a large roll of manuscript, which I presume to have
been a portion of her work. To be sure, there was a pocket-Bible among
the books, but everything else referred to the one despotic idea that had
got possession of her mind; and as it had engrossed her whole soul as
well as her intellect, I have no doubt that she had established subtile
connections between it and the Bible likewise. As is apt to be the case
with solitary students, Miss Bacon probably read late and rose late; for
I took up Montaigne (it was Hazlitt's translation) and had been reading
his journey to Italy a good while before she appeared.
I had expected (the more shame for me, having no other ground of such
expectation than that she was a literary woman) to see a very homely,
uncouth, elderly personage, and was quite agreeably disappointed by her
aspect. She was rather uncommonly tall, and had a striking and
expressive face, dark hair, dark eyes, which shone with an inward light
as soon as she began to speak, and by and by a color came into her cheeks
and made her look almost young. Not that she really was so; she must
have been beyond middle age: and there was no unkindness in coming to
that conclusion, because, making allowance for years and ill-health, I
could suppose her to have been handsome and exceedingly attractive once.
Though wholly estranged from society, there was little or no restraint or
embarrassment in her manner: lonely people are generally glad to give
utterance to their pent-up ideas, and often bubble over with them as
freely as children with their new-found syllables. I cannot tell how it
came about, but we immediately found ourselves taking a friendly and
familiar tone together, and began to talk as if we had known one another
a very long while. A little preliminary correspondence had indeed
smoothed the way, and we had a definite topic in the contemplated
publication of her book.
She was very communicative about her theory, and would have been much
more so had I desired it; but, being conscious within myself of a sturdy
unbelief, I deemed it fair and honest rather to repress than draw her out
upon the subject. Unquestionably, she was a monomaniac; these
overmastering ideas about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, and the
deep political philosophy concealed beneath the surface of them, had
completely thrown her off her balance; but at the same time they had
wonderfully developed her intellect, and made her what she could not
otherwise have become. It was a very singular phenomenon: a system of
philosophy growing up in thus woman's mind without her volition,--
contrary, in fact, to the determined resistance of her volition,--and
substituting itself in the place of everything that originally grew
there. To have based such a system on fancy, and unconsciously
elaborated it for herself, was almost as wonderful as really to have
found it in the plays. But, in a certain sense, she did actually find it
there. Shakespeare has surface beneath surface, to an immeasurable
depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present
many phases of truth, each with scope large enough to fill a
contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover,
provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various
interpretation of his symbols; and a thousand years hence, a world of new
readers will possess a whole library of new books, as we ourselves do, in
these volumes old already. I had half a mind to suggest to Miss Bacon
this explanation of her theory, but forbore, because (as I could readily
perceive) she had as princely a spirit as Queen Elizabeth herself, and
would at once have motioned me from the room.
I had heard, long ago, that she believed that the material evidences of
her dogma as to the authorship, together with the key of the new
philosophy, would be found buried in Shakespeare's grave. Recently, as I
understood her, this notion had been somewhat modified, and was now
accurately defined and fully developed in her mind, with a result of
perfect certainty. In Lord Bacon's letters, on which she laid her finger
as she spoke, she had discovered the key and clew to the whole mystery.
There were definite and minute instructions how to find a will and other
documents relating to the conclave of Elizabethan philosophers, which
were concealed (when and by whom she did not inform me) in a hollow
space in the under surface of Shakespeare's gravestone. Thus the
terrible prohibition to remove the stone was accounted for. The
directions, she intimated, went completely and precisely to the point,
obviating all difficulties in the way of coming at the treasure, and
even, if I remember right, were so contrived as to ward off any
troublesome consequences likely to ensue from the interference of the
parish-officers. All that Miss Bacon now remained in England for--
indeed, the object for which she had come hither, and which had kept her
here for three years past--was to obtain possession of these material and
unquestionable proofs of the authenticity of her theory.
She communicated all this strange matter in a low, quiet tone; while, on
my part, I listened as quietly, and without any expression of dissent.
Controversy against a faith so settled would have shut her up at once,
and that, too, without in the least weakening her belief in the existence
of those treasures of the tomb; and had it been possible to convince her
of their intangible nature, I apprehend that there would have been
nothing left for the poor enthusiast save to collapse and die. She
frankly confessed that she could no longer bear the society of those who
did not at least lend a certain sympathy to her views, if not fully share
in them; and meeting little sympathy or none, she had now entirely
secluded herself from the world. In all these years, she had seen Mrs.
Farrar a few times, but had long ago given her up,--Carlyle once or
twice, but not of late, although he had received her kindly; Mr.
Buchanan, while Minister in England, had once called on her, and General
Campbell, our Consul in London, had met her two or three times on
business. With these exceptions, which she marked so scrupulously that
it was perceptible what epochs they were in the monotonous passage of her
days, she had lived in the profoundest solitude. She never walked out;
she suffered much from ill-health; and yet, she assured me, she was
perfectly happy.
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