REESE LIBRARY

19

THE

THE HOUSE WHERE SHAKSPERE WAST

UNIVERSITY

its own poet. And just as spinning-machines were the necessity of the eighteenth, so was Shakspere the inevitable outcome of the sixteenth century. The energy of that age must be revealed, not alone in defeating Spanish Armadas or in Reformations, but in some æsthetic shape.. And in the drama Shakspere luckily found ready made to hand the materials on which he so impressed the patriotism and the high feeling of his day that they will live to all time. If we do not understand this, we do not understand Shakspere.

Renowned Spenser ! lie a thought more nigh
To learned Chaucer, and, rare Beaumont ! lie
A little nearer Spenser, to make room

For Shakspere, in your threefold, fourfold, tomb.

THE next spot to which we instinctively turn, after the birthplace of Shakspere, is the parish church of Stratford. Very beautiful is it, with its avenue of limes and its great

elms by the river-side, their topmost boughs now red in the April sun, and the rooks cawing and building in the branches, and the Avon flowing close by, with the sound of its splashing weir. It is a spot where any poet might wish to be buried. And Shakspere lies in the chancel close to the river, where, if any sounds reach the dead, he might hear the noise of its weir. It is pleasant to think of him resting here side by side with his wife, and his favourite daughter and her husband. It never makes me sad to look at their graves. His was a lot which any one might envy-to be laid with those in death whom they loved dearest in life. And those lines on his grave

stone

Good frend, for Jesus' sake, forbeare

To digg the dust encloased heare;

Blest be the man that spares thes stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones;

which have for so long passed as unmeaning doggrel, are to me inexpressibly beautiful. I do not for one moment suppose that Shakspere wrote them; but I do think that whoever wrote and placed them there, felt he was expressing, to the best of his powers, Shakspere's own feelings on the subject. They are in accordance with all we know of the man—a simple prayer to be left alone in peace where some day the dust of all that he best loved would

be laid with him. It is the same entreaty that his fellow poet, Spenser, utters in the Fairy Queen—

O dearest God! me grant, I dead be not defouled.

B. I., Canto x. 42.

And as I before noticed how much happier than Milton's and Spenser's was Shakspere's lot to be born in the country, so, too, do I think it far happier for him to be buried in the quiet church of Stratford than, like them, in the bustle and roar of London. No poet, perhaps, rests so happily as Shakspere. This is better than being buried in Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's, to lie at peace amongst your own. Goethe rests beside a royal duke and Schiller; but I think Shakspere's a far happier lot. Dante sleeps in a marble tomb far away from his native Florence, “parvi mater amoris," as he bitterly said; but Shakspere rests here under the plain gravestones, amongst his own friends and kindred.

Let us mark also some of the other inscriptions, particularly that to Shakspere's favourite daughter Susanna, the wife of Dr. Hall:

Witty above her sexe; but that's not all—
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall;
Something of Shakspere was in that, but this

Wholly of Him with whom she now's in bliss.

It is not too much to conjecture that this gentleness

and goodness of spirit made her Shakspere's favourite daughter. And it is pleasant to know that she placed the inscription to the memory of her mother, who lies on her husband's right hand, and to know, further, that they both earnestly desired to be buried with Shakspere.*

But it always makes me sad, as I read the date on the monument on the wall, to think that almost in the prime of life the poet was snatched away, and what Hamlets and Lears the world has missed. I hope the old tradition is true, that the last play he wrote was the Tempest, with its creations "on the skirts of human nature dwelling." Above all others this play is built upon the firm foundations of spirit, and derives a tragic interest from the fact that the poet himself was so soon to be called away to that spirit-land. Nor let us forget the bust, with its face looking so calm and quiet; and though perhaps it does not realize Shakspere's countenance to us, still there is about it a certain quietness and gentleness that accords with all that we know of him. "Here is a

man who has struggled toughly," I always think of Shakspere, as Goethe said of himself; and the smooth, unmeaning portraits we have of him, give me not the

* From a letter written in 1693, from Mr. Dowdall to Mr. Edward Southwell, and published under the title of Traditionary Anecdotes of Shakspere, London, 1838.