Читать книгу Shakespeare the Boy - W. J. Rolfe - Страница 13

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Stratford lies on a gentle slope declining to the Avon, whose banks are here shaded by venerable willows, which the poet may have had in mind when he painted the scene of poor Ophelia's death:—

"There is a willow grows aslant a brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream."

The description could have been written only by one who had observed the reflection of the white underside of the willow-leaves in the water over which they hung. And I cannot help believing that Shakespeare was mindful of the Avon when in far-away London he wrote that singularly musical simile of the river in one of his earliest plays, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, so aptly does it give the characteristics of the Warwickshire stream:

"The current that with gentle murmur glides,

Thou know'st, being stopp'd, impatiently doth rage;

But when his fair course is not hindered,

He makes sweet music with the enamell'd stones,

Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge

He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;

And so by many winding nooks he strays,

With willing sport, to the wild ocean.

Then let me go, and hinder not my course:

I'll be as patient as a gentle stream,

And make a pastime of each weary step,

Till the last step have brought me to my love;

And there I'll rest, as, after much turmoil,

A blessed soul doth in Elysium."

The river cannot now be materially different from what it was three hundred years ago, but the town has changed a good deal. I fear that we might not have enjoyed a visit to it in that olden time as we do in these latter days.

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.

Stratford, however, was no worse in this respect than other English towns. The terrible plagues that devastated the entire land in those "good old times" were the natural result of the unwholesome habits of life everywhere prevailing—everywhere, for the mansions of noblemen and the palaces of kings were as filthy as the hovels of peasants. The rushes with which royal presence-chamber and banquet-hall were strewn in place of carpets were not changed until they had become too unsavory for endurance. Meanwhile disagreeable odors were overcome by burning perfumes—of which practice we have a hint in Much Ado About Nothing in the reference to "smoking a musty room."

But away from these musty rooms of great men's houses, and the foul streets and lanes of towns, field and forest and river-bank were as clean and sweet as now. The banished Duke in As You Like It may have had other reasons than he gives for preferring life in the Forest of Arden to that of the court from which he had been driven; and Shakespeare's delight in out-of-door life may have been intensified by his experience of the house in Henley Street, with the reeking pile of filth at the front door.

His poetry is everywhere full of the beauty and fragrance of the flowers that bloom in and about Stratford; and the wonderful accuracy of his allusions to them—their colors, their habits, their time of blossoming, everything concerning them—shows how thoroughly at home he was with them, how intensely he loved and studied them.

Mr. J. R. Wise, in his Shakespeare, His Birthplace and its Neighbourhood, says: "Take up what play you will, and you will find glimpses of the scenery round Stratford. His maidens ever sing of 'blue-veined violets,' and 'daisies pied,' and 'pansies that are for thoughts,' and 'ladies'-smocks all silver-white,' that still stud the meadows of the Avon. … I do not think it is any exaggeration to say that nowhere are meadows so full of beauty as those round Stratford. I have seen them by the riverside in early spring burnished with gold; and then later, a little before hay-harvest, chased with orchises, and blue and white milkwort, and yellow rattle-grass, and tall moon-daisies: and I know nowhere woodlands so sweet as those round Stratford, filled with the soft green light made by the budding leaves, and paved with the golden ore of primroses, and their banks veined with violets. All this, and the tenderness that such beauty gives, you find in the pages of Shakespeare; and it is not too much to say that he painted them because they were ever associated in his mind with all that he held precious and dear, both of the earliest and the latest scenes of his life."