Читать книгу Shakespeare the Boy - W. J. Rolfe - Страница 6

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The county of Warwick was called the heart of England as long ago as the time of Shakespeare. Indeed, it was his friend, Michael Drayton, born the year before himself, who first called it so. In his Poly-Olbion (1613) Drayton refers to his native county as "That shire which we the heart of England well may call." The form of the expression seems to imply that it was original with him. It was doubtless suggested by the central situation of the county, about equidistant from the eastern, western, and southern shores of the island; but it is no less appropriate with reference to its historical, romantic, and poetical associations. Drayton, whose rhymed geography in the Poly-Olbion is rather prosaic and tedious, attains a kind of genuine inspiration when, in his 13th book, he comes to describe

"Brave Warwick that abroad so long advanced her Bear,

By her illustrious Earls renowned everywhere;

Above her neighboring shires which always bore her head."

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.