Part 5 (1/2)
_Comedy of Errors._
Little William, already in the days when he went ”with his satchel and s.h.i.+ning morning face creeping like a snail unwillingly to school,” had ample leisure and opportunity to gaze admiringly at the many signs which adorned the narrow streets of the quiet little town on the Avon.
The memory of them still lives in some of the Stratford hotels. The landlady of the ”Golden Lion,” for instance, remarks on her bill: ”Known as Ye Peac.o.c.ke Inn in Shakespeare's time 1613.” Even the ”Red Horse,” to-day extremely modern and uninteresting-looking, goes back to these old days. In Was.h.i.+ngton Irving's time the place probably looked more quaint and cozy, if we may believe his praise of the old inn in his ”Sketch-Book”: ”To a homeless man, there is a momentary feeling of something like independence and territorial consequence, when, after a weary day's travel, he kicks off his boots, thrusts his feet into slippers, and stretches himself before an inn fire.”
This picture gallery of the street signs was still more magnificent in London, where even the theaters had their signs out, as ”The Globe,”
”Red Bull,” ”A Curtain,” ”A Fortune,” ”Cross Keys,” ”The Phenix,” ”The Rose,” ”The c.o.c.kpit,” and we may be sure that they made quite an impression on the lively mind of the young actor. The word ”sign”
occurs frequently in his vocabulary. Inclined to see below the surface, he does not seem to trust the glittering of the sign, as the words of Iago indicate:--
”I must show out a flag and sign of love, Which is indeed but sign.”
The signs of his birthplace were probably rather poor-looking things, since he uses the word in his early drama, ”t.i.tus Andronicus,”
contemptuously:--
”Ye sanguine, shallow-hearted boys!
Ye white-lim'd walls! ye ale-house painted signs!”
The sign of the ”Falcon” was not yet hung out on the old house of Scholar's Lane and Chapel Street in those years of 1571 to 1578, when little Shakespeare went to the Grammar School, in which the traveler to this day may see the chair of the pedagogue who first introduced him to the secrets of literature. But the circle of life led him back to the same narrow street, and opposite the stately building, which now is the ”Falcon,” Shakespeare died. The mortuary house has disappeared and the ground has been transformed into a garden. Here we are infinitely nearer to the poet's soul than in the tiny birth-chamber disfigured by a huge bust, where the guide drowns all our thoughts in a flood of empty words. Here in this garden the genius of the poet seemed to reveal himself most charmingly. Where once the house stood in which he died we found a little child peacefully sleeping--all alone, unguarded, but the gentle rose of youth blooming on his cheeks--under the perfumed shadow of flowers; a symbol of eternal life conquering death.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THEFALCON INCHESTER]
If we enter the ”Falcon,” Shakespeare's words greet us from the wall: ”Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used, exclaim no more against it.” The gentle invitation of the blinking sign to enter and to share joy and sorrow with friendly comrades, Shakespeare himself has often followed. A French critic, Mezieres, went so far as to call him ”un habitue de la taverne,” politely adding that ”he never lost his self-control and never contended himself with the light joys of the flying hour.”
The ”Red Lion” in Henley-on-the-Thames once owned a window pane--recently by mistake packed in the trunk of a confused traveler--into which Shenstone scratched the much-quoted words:--
”Whoe'er has traveled life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn.”
They are of true Shakespearean spirit and remind us of Speed's words in the ”Two Gentlemen of Verona” (II, v):--
”I'll to the alehouse with you presently, where, for one shot of five pence, thou shalt have five thousand welcomes.”
It would seem hardly necessary further to urge such an enthusiastic lover of the tavern, but Launce thought differently.
_Launce._ If thou wilt go with me to the alehouse, so; if not, thou art an Hebrew, a Jew, and not worth the name of a Christian.
_Speed._ Why?
_Launce._ Because thou hast not so much charity in thee as to go to the ale with a Christian.
We are not surprised to hear the final question, ”Wilt thou go?”
promptly answered, ”At thy service.”
Most of the tavern names Shakespeare mentions are true products of the Renaissance times when cla.s.sical studies were extremely popular. ”The Centaur,” ”The Phenix,” ”The Pomegranate,”--an ornament we find so often in the brocades of the sixteenth century,--all are signs of his own time, simply transplanted from London he knew so well to Genoa or Ephesus, places he had never put his eye on. ”The Pegasus,” by the man in the street called ”The Flying Horse,” decorated still in the year 1691 the house of a jeweler and banker in Lombard Street. In pa.s.sing, we may remark that all the signs which to-day surprise the traveler in this busy street are more or less happy reproductions of the old signs, hung out there by the great banking firms for King Edward's coronation.
In our wanderings through England we occasionally cross the path Shakespeare went with his company of actors. The court in the ”George Inn” in Salisbury, to-day transformed into a pleasant little garden, was once the scene where the ”Strolling Players” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used to give their performances, and here Shakespeare himself acted when he visited Salisbury. A police ordinance allowed only in the ”George” theatrical amus.e.m.e.nts, and demanded that all plays should be ended by seven o'clock in the evening. This George Hotel was first mentioned in 1401 as ”Georgysyn.” Oliver Cromwell slept here October 17, 1645, on his way to the army. The old beams which carry the ceiling of the parlor, and which a shrewd landlord has discovered in other rooms and freed from the hiding plaster, are the delight of American travelers, who refuse to sleep in rooms without beams. In the days of Pepys it was an elegant hostelry. In his ”Diary,” in which he praises Salisbury as ”a very brave place,” he puts down the following remarks: ”Come to the George Inn where lay in a silk bed, and very good diet.” Less pleased he was with the bill, which he thought ”so exorbitant that I was mad and resolved to truble the mistress about it and get something for the poor; and came away in that humour.” The result of his protest was not great. After paying 2 5_s._ 6_d._ for the night he gains just two s.h.i.+llings for the poor (one for ”an old woman in the street”). Similar privileges for theatrical performances had the ”Red Lion” in Boston, the little English mother of her big American daughter, and the ”Mayde's Hede” in Norwich. The closed s.p.a.ce of these old innyards, with its staircases leading to the surrounding gallery, was thoroughly fitted for the theatrical representations, and it is quite possible that this gallery of the innyard influenced the architecture of the later theaters. Few of these innyards have survived, unfortunately, but we have still a wonderful example in the charming court of the so-called ”New Inn” in Gloucester. It was new in the fifteenth century. How enchanting a Shakespeare play would be in the frame of its verdure!
In the First Part of ”Henry IV,” the poet himself has introduced us into such an innyard. It is very early morning and everything still dark. Carters come to look after their goods and to harness their horses, exchanging remarks in plain language: ”I think this be the most villanous house in all London road for fleas”; or, ”G.o.d's body!
the turkeys in my pannier are quite starved. What, ostler! A plague on thee! hast thou never an eye in thy head?”--a master scene of realistic observation in the style Lessing and Goethe admired so much, and Voltaire hated so that he proclaimed: ”Shakespeare was a remarkable genius, but he had no taste, since for two hundred years he has spoiled the taste of the English nation.”
How important the s.p.a.cious enclosure of the innyard was for the farmers coming to town with their loaded wagons is shown by the fact that still to-day many a hotel in Germany is simply called ”Hof”