WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616), the national poet of England, the greatest dramatist that modern Europe has produced, was born in April, in the year 1564, at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. The known facts of the poet’s personal history are comparatively few, and before giving them in order we purpose considering in some detail the larger educational influences which helped to stimulate his latent powers, to evoke and strengthen his poetical and patriotic sympathies, and thus prepare and qualify him for his future work. In dealing with these influences we are on firm and fruitful ground. We know, for example, that Shakespeare was born and lived for twenty years at Stratford-upon-Avon; and we can say therefore with certainty that all the physical and moral influences of that picturesque and richly-storied Midland district melted as years went by into the full current of his ardent blood, became indeed the vital element, the very breath of life his expanding spirit breathed. We know a good deal about his home, his parents, and his domestic surroundings; and these powerful factors in the development of any mind gifted with insight and sensibility must have acted with redoubled force on a nature so richly and harmoniously endowed as that of the Stratford poet. It would be difficult indeed to overestimate the combined effect of these vital elements on his capacious and retentive mind, a mind in which the receptive and creative powers were so equally poised and of such unrivalled strength. This review of the larger influences operating with concentrated force during the critical years of youth and early manhood will help to connect and interpret the few and scattered particulars of Shakespeare’s personal history. These particulars must indeed be to some extent connected and interpreted in order to be clearly understood, and any intelligible account of Shakespeare’s life must therefore take the shape of a biographical essay, rather than of a biography proper. We may add that the sketch will be confined to the points connected with Shakespeare’s local surroundings and personal history. The large literary questions connected with his works, such as the classification, the chronology, and analysis of the plays, could not of course be adequately dealt with in such a sketch. It is the less necessary that this wider task should be attempted as the main points it embraces have recently been well handled by competent Shakespearian scholars. The best and most convenient manuals embodying the results of recent criticism and research will be referred to at the close of the article. Meanwhile we have first to look at the locality of Shakespeare’s birth, both in its material and moral aspects.

Warwickshire was known to Shakespeare’s contemporaries as the central county or heart of England. It was the middle shire of the Midlands, where the two great Roman roads crossing the island from east to west and west to east met,—forming at their point of junction the centre of an irregular St Andrew’s cross, of which the arms extended from Dover to Chester on the one side and from Totnes to Lincoln and the north on the other. The centre in which these roads—Watling Street and the Fosse Way —thus met was early known from this circumstance as the High Cross. Being the most important Midland position during the Roman occupation of the country, several Roman stations were formed in the neighbourhood of this venerable Quatre Bras. Of these Camden specifies the ancient and flourishing city of Clychester, represented in part by the modern Clybrook, and Manduessidum, the memory of which is probably retained in the modern Man-cettar. Important Roman remains have also been found within a few miles of Stratford, at Alcester, a central station on the third great Roman road, Ricknild Street, which runs from south to north across the western side of the county. In later times, when means of communication were multiplied, the great roads to the north-west still passed through the county, and one of them, the mail road from London through Oxford to Birmingham, Stafford, and Chester, was the “streete” or public way that crossed the Avon at the celebrated ford spanned in 1483 by Sir Hugh Clopton’s magnificent bridge of fourteen arches. Immediately beyond the bridge rose the homely gables and wide thoroughfares of Shakespeare’s native place.

In Shakespeare’s time Warwickshire was divided by the irregular line of the Avon into two unequal but well-marked divisions, known respectively, from their main characteristics, as the woodland and the open country, or more technically as the districts of Arden and Feldon. The former included the thickly-wooded region north of the Avon, of which the celebrated forest of Arden was the centre, and the latter the champaign country, the rich and fertile pasture-lands between the Avon and the line of hills separating Warwick from the shires of Oxford and Northampton. Shakespeare himself was of course familiar with this division of his native shire, and he has well expressed it in Lear’s description of the section of the kingdom assigned to his eldest daughter Goneril,— “Of all these bounds,—even from this line to this, With shadowy forests and with champains rich’d, With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads,— We make thee lady.”

No better general description of Warwickshire could indeed be given than is contained in these lines. Taking the Roman roads, Watling and Ricknild Streets, as boundaries, they vividly depict the characteristic features of the county, including its plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads. The old and central division of Arden and Feldon is clearly embodied in the second line, “with shadowy forests and with champains rich’d.” This distinction, practically effaced in modern times by agricultural and mining progress, was partially affected by these causes even in Shakespeare’s own day. The wide Arden, or belt of forest territory which had once extended not only across the county but from the Trent to the Severn, was then very much restricted to the centre of the shire, the line of low hills and undulating country which stretched away for upwards of twenty miles to the north of Stratford. The whole of the northern district was, it is true, still densely wooded, but the intervening patches of arable and pasture land gradually encroached more and more upon the bracken and brushwood, and every year larger areas were cleared and prepared for tillage by the axe and the plough. In the second half of the 16th century, however, the Arden district still retained enough of its primitive character to fill the poet’s imagination with the exhilarating breadth and sweetness of woodland haunts, the beauty, variety, and freedom of sylvan life, and thus to impart to the scenery of As You Like It the vivid freshness and reality of a living experience. In this delightful comedy the details of forest-life are touched with so light but at the same time so sure a hand as to prove the writer’s familiarity with the whole art of venery, his thorough knowledge of that “highest franchise of noble and princely pleasure” which the royal demesnes of wood and park afforded. In referring to the marches or wide margins on the outskirts of the forest, legally known as purlieus, Shakespeare indeed displays a minute technical accuracy which would seem to indicate that in his early rambles about the forest and casual talks with its keepers and woodmen he had picked up the legal incidents of sylvan economy, as well as enjoyed the freedom and charm of forest-life. Throughout the purlieus, for instance, the forest laws were only partially in force, while the more important rights of individual owners were fully recognized and established. Hence it happened that Corin’s master, dwelling, as Rosalind puts it in a quaint but characteristic simile that betrays her sex, “here in the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat,” could sell “his cote, his flock, and bounds of feed,” and that Celia and Rosalind were able to purchase “the cottage, the pasture, and the flock.” It may be noted, too, that, in exchange for the independence the dwellers in the purlieus acquired as private owners, they had to relinquish their common right or customary privilege of pasturing their cattle in the forest. Sheep, indeed, were not usually included in this right of common, their presence in the forest being regarded as inimical to the deer. When kept in the purlieus, therefore, they had to be strictly limited to their bounds of feed, shepherded during the day and carefully folded every night, and these points are faithfully reflected by Shakespeare. Again, only those specially privileged could hunt venison within the forest. But if the deer strayed beyond the forest bounds they could be freely followed by the dwellers in the purlieus, and these happy hunting grounds outside the forest precincts were in many cases spacious and extensive. The special office of a forest ranger was indeed to drive back the deer straying in the purlieus. The banished duke evidently has this in mind when, as a casual denizen of the forest, he proposes to make war on its native citizens :— “Come, shall we go and kill us venison? And yet it irks me, the poor dappled fools, Being native burghers of this desert city, Should, in their own confines, with forkèd heads, Have their round haunches gor’d.”

And the melancholy Jacques, refining as usual with cynical sentimentalism on every way of life and every kind of action, thinks it would be a special outrage “To fright the animals, and to kill them up, In their assign’d and native dwelling place.”

Not only in As You Like It, but in Love's Labour's Lost, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and indeed throughout his dramatic works, Shakespeare displays the most intimate knowledge of the aspects and incidents of forest life; and it is certain that in the first instance this knowledge must have been gained from his early familiarity with the Arden district. This, as we have seen, stretched to the north of Stratford in all its amplitude and variety of hill and dale, leafy covert and sunny glade, giant oaks and tangled thickets,—the woodland stillness being broken at intervals not only by the noise of brawling brooks below and of feathered outcries and flutterings overhead, but by dappled herds sweeping across the open lawns or twinkling in the shadowy bracken, as well as by scattered groups of timid conies feeding, at matins and vespers, on the tender shoots and sweet herbage of the forest side. The deer-stealing tradition is sufficient evidence of the popular belief in the poet’s love of daring exploits in the regions of vert and venison, and of his devotion, although in a somewhat irregular way perhaps, to the attractive woodcraft of the park, the warren, and the chase. The traditional scene of this adventure was Charlecote Park, a few miles north-east of Stratford; but the poet’s early wanderings in Arden extended, no doubt, much further afield. Stirred by the natural desire of visiting at leisure the more celebrated places of his native district, he would pass from Stratford to Henley and Hampton, to Wroxall Priory and Kenilworth Castle, to Stoneleigh Abbey and Leamington Priors, to Warwick Keep and Guy’s Cliffe. The remarkable beauty of this last storied spot stirs the learned and tranquil pens of the antiquaries Camden and Dugdale to an unwonted effort of description, even in the pre-descriptive era. “Under this hill,” says Camden, “hard by the river Avon, standeth Guy-cliffe, others call it Gib-cliffe, the dwelling house at this day of Sir Thomas Beau-foe, descended from the ancient Normans line, and the very seate itselfe of pleasantnesse. There have yee a shady little wood, cleere and cristall springs, mossy bottomes and caves, medowes alwaies fresh and greene, the river rumbling here and there among the stones with his stream making a milde noise and gentle whispering, and besides all this, solitary and still quietnesse, things most grateful to the Muses.” But the whole of the circuit was richly wooded, the towns, as the names indicate, being forest towns,—Henley-in-Arden, Hampton-in-Arden,—while the castles and secularized religious houses were paled off within their own parks and bounds from the sylvan wilderness around them. Some, like the celebrated castle of the Mountfords, called from its pleasant situation amongst the woods Beaudesert, having been dismantled during the Wars of the Roses were already abandoned, and had in Shakespeare’s day relapsed from the stately revelry that once filled their halls into the silence of the surrounding woods. At every point of the journey, indeed, as the poet’s eager and meditative eye embraced new vistas, it might be said, “Towers and battlements it sees Bosomed high in tufted trees.”

On the southern margin of the Arden division, towards the Avon, small farms were indeed already numerous, and cultivation had become tolerably general. But the region as a whole still retained its distinctive character as the Arden or wooded division of the county. Even now, indeed, it includes probably more woods and parks than are to be found over the same area in any other English shire.

While parts of the Arden district were in this way under cultivation, it must not be supposed that the champaign or open country to the south of the Avon, the Feldon division of the county, was destitute of wood; on the contrary its extensive pastures were not only well watered by local streams overshadowed by willow and alder, but well wooded at intervals by groups of more stately trees. The numerous flocks and herds that grazed throughout the valley of the Red Horse found welcome shelter from the noonday heat and the driving wind under the green roofs and leafy screens that lined and dotted their bounds of feed. And, although even the grazing farms were comparatively small, almost every homestead had its group of protecting elms, its outlying patch of hanging beech and ash, or straggling copse of oak and hazel. This is still reflected in such local names as Wood Park, Shrub Lands, Ockley Wood, Furze Hill, Oakham, Ashborne, Alcott Wood, Berecote Wood, and Radland Gorse. These features gave interest and variety to the Feldon district, and justified the characteristic epithet which for centuries was popularly applied to the county as a whole, that of “woody Warwickshire.” And Shakespeare, in passing out of the county on his London journeys, would quickly feel the difference, as beyond its borders he came upon stretches of less clothed and cultivated scenery. As his stout gelding mounted Edgehill, and he turned in the saddle to take a parting look at the familiar landscape he was leaving, he would behold what Speed, in his enthusiasm, calls “another Eden, as Lot the plain of Jordan.” While the general aspect would be that of green pastures and grassy levels, there would be at the same time the picturesque intermingling of wood and water, of mill and grange and manor house, which gives light and shade, colour and movement, interest and animation, to the plainer sweeps and more monotonous objects of pastoral scenery.

On the historical side Warwickshire has points of interest as striking and distinctive as its physical features. During the Roman occupation of the country it was, as we have seen, the site of several central Roman stations, of which, besides those already noticed, the fortified camps of

Tripontium and Praesidium on the line of the Avon were the most important. A Roman road crossed the Avon at Stratford, and radiating north and south soon reached some of the larger Roman towns of the west, such as Uriconium and Corinium. Between these towns were country villas or mansions, many of them being, like that at Woodchester, “magnificent palaces covering as much ground as a whole town.” The entire district must in this way have been powerfully affected by the higher forms of social life and material splendour which the wealthier provincials had introduced. The immediate effect of this Roman influence on the native populations was, as we know, to divide them into opposed groups whose conflicts helped directly to produce the disastrous results which followed the withdrawal of the Romans from the island. But the more permanent and more important effect is probably to be traced in the far less obstinate resistance offered by the Celtic tribes of Mid Britain to the invading Angles from the north and Saxons from the south, by whom themselves and their district were eventually absorbed. Instead of the fierce conflicts and wrathful withdrawal or extermination of the conquered Britons which prevailed further east, and for a time perhaps further west also, the intervening tribes appear to have accepted the overlordship of their Teutonic neighbours and united with them in the cultivation and defence of their common territory. The fact that no record of any early Angle conquest remains seems to indicate that, after at most a brief resistance, there was a gradual coalescence of the invading with the native tribes rather than any fierce or memorable struggle between them. Even the more independent and warlike tribes about the Severn repeatedly joined the Saxon Hwiccas, whose northern frontier was the forest of Arden, in resisting the advance of Wessex from the south. And for more than a hundred years after the establishment of the central kingdom of the Angles, the neighbouring Welsh princes are found acting in friendly alliance with the Mercian rulers. It was thus the very district where from an early period the two race elements that have gone to the making of the nation were most nearly balanced and most completely blended. The union of a strong Celtic element with the dominant Angles is still reflected in the local nomenclature, not only in the names of the chief natural features, such as rivers and heights, —Arden and Avon, Lickey, Alne, and Thame,—but in the numerous combes and cotes or cots, as in the reduplicative Cotswold, in the duns, dons, and dens, and in such distinctively Celtic elements as man, pol, try, in names of places scattered through the district. The cotes are, it is true, ambiguous, being in a majority of cases perhaps Saxon rather than Celtic, but in a forest country near the old Welsh marches many must still represent the Celtic coet or coed, and in some cases this is clear from the word itself, as in Kingscot, a variation of Kingswood, and even Charlecote exists in the alternative form of Charlewood. This union of the two races, combined with the stirring conditions of life in a wild and picturesque border country, gave a vigorous impulse and distinctive character to the population, the influence of which may be clearly traced in the subsequent literary as well as in the political history of the country. As early as the 9th century, when the ravages of the Danes had desolated the homes and scattered the representatives of learning in Wessex, it was to western Mercia that King Alfred sent for scholars and churchmen to unite with him in helping to restore the fallen fortunes of religion and letters. And after the long blank in the native literature produced by the Norman Conquest the authentic signs of its indestructible vitality first appeared on the banks of the Severn. Layamon’s spirited poem dealing with the legendary history of Britain, and written at Redstone near Arley, within sight of the river’s majestic sweep amidst its bordering woods and hills, is by far the most important literary monument of semi-Saxon. And, while the poem as a whole displays a Saxon tenacity of purpose in working out a comprehensive scheme of memorial verse, its more original parts have touches of passion and picturesqueness, as well as of dramatic vivacity, that recall the patriotic fire of the Celtic bards. A hundred and fifty years later the first great period of English literature was inaugurated by another poem of marked originality and power, written under the shadow of the Malvern Hills. The writer of the striking series of allegories known as Piers Plowman's Visions was a Shropshire man, and, notwithstanding his occasional visits to London and official employments there, appears to have spent his best and most productive years on the western border between the Severn and the Malvern Hills. In many points both of substance and form the poem may, it is true, be described as almost typically Saxon. But it has at the same time a power of vivid portraiture, a sense of colour, with an intense and penetrating if not exaggerated feeling for local grievances which are probably due to the strain of Celtic blood in the writer’s veins. Two centuries later, from the same district, from a small town on an affluent of the Severn, a few miles to the west of the river, came the national poet, who not only inherited the patriotic fire and keen sensibility of Layamon and Langland, but who combined in the most perfect form and carried to the highest point of development the best qualities of the two great races represented in the...