S

I.

FROM STRATFORD TO LONDON.

(From the Cornhill Magazine, Jan., 1877.)

EEING our dearth of information about Shakespeare is

so great, nothing that may be of the slightest value ought to be neglected; and so it may be worth while to consider what scenes and sights may have been familiar to him in his journeyings to and fro from Stratford to London. The transit can be accomplished now in four or five hours; but it was no such light matter in the Elizabethan age. The distance is some 100 miles (by Oxford 94), and probably under ordinary circumstances would occupy four or five days to traverse, though no doubt, under pressure, a less time might suffice. These periods would certainly form notable epochs in the poet's life. What a change from "the smoke and uproar and riches of Rome"! No doubt he would seldom travel alone. Perils from robbers were too common and too serious to encourage that practice. But yet he would often be lonely enough; and many a thought afterwards embodied in immortal shape must have occurred to him during these long hours. It would make a fine picture -the author of Hamlet, his "season" over, amidst the

B

woody solitudes of the Chilterns, or slowly wending his way through some lowland marsh. We may be sure he was not idle at these times. The rough rude simple life he saw around him would not be unsuggestive. There is a tradition, as we shall see, that he "studied" his Dogberry in some village he passed through. His tablets must often have been called into requisition. And when the days were fair, and all the landscape wore the beauty of the sunshine, many a "session of sweet silent thought" must have been holden. We cannot doubt that in those long quiet journeys his spirit found for itself nurture and strength. The true poet is like that "bright flower, whose home is everywhere." Often travel-tired, he would find rest for himself in contemplating the face of nature and the humours of men. Indeed, with all their discomforts and annoyances, these may have been precious times for him; and he may have arrived at his destination a wiser, if a weary, man.

There are two or three sonnets in which he speaks of journeys, possibly of these journeys. The following may have been written at Stratford, at the close of one of them :"Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,

The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind when body's work's expired;
For then my thoughts (from far where I abide)
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,

And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see;
Save that my soul's imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,

Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,

Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.

So thus by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee and for myself no quiet find."

In others we see him in the midst of a journey, weighed

down with that strange sorrow whose history seems likely to remain inscrutable :

"How heavy do I journey on the way,

When what I seek-my weary travel's end—
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say,

• Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!'
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know

His rider loved not speed, being made from thee.
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,
Which heavily he answers with a groan
More sharp to me than spurring to his side;

For that same groan doth put this in my mind,
My grief lies onward, and my joy behind."

There are others in which he speaks of absences from his friend. Of course Shakespeare made other journeys, besides between Stratford and London; occasionally he "strolled " with his company; but in any case these sonnets may be of assistance in picturing him to us as he passed along the roads that we propose to specify. We can see that it was not without knowledge he made Autolycus sing:

"A merry heart goes all the day;

Your sad tires in a mile-a."

II.

We need scarcely remind our readers that facilities of locomotion in the Elizabethan age were scanty enough. They are probably well aware how scanty such facilities were a century later, and even a century later still. It was much worse in the Elizabethan age. Public coaches did not begin to run, or to stick fast, till nearly half a century after

Shakespeare's time. The art of road-making was not yet known; Metcalfe and Telford, and their worthy biographer Mr. Smiles, belonged to a far distant posterity. What they were pleased to call roads then were mere deeply-rutted tracks, almost or altogether impassable in bad weather; wide-spreading sloughs with no Mr. Hope at the further edge to lend the splashed and mired traveller a hand. The country was still generally unenclosed; and all that could be done when the ruts became too deep for endurance was to essay a fresh track by the side of the old one. Some statutes indeed had been passed in the reign of Henry the Eighth, designed to improve certain thoroughfares of notorious badness, and an Act of a more general application had been passed in the reign of Queen Mary; but little or nothing had come of them. The description given in the preamble of the statute of 1555 remained still true : Highways are now both very noisome and tedious to travel in, and dangerous to all passengers and carriages." We have not yet learnt to control our rivers, and it is still possible sometimes to see wide lakes extending over the land: but this was a common Elizabethan spectacle. Often then, and many a time after, locomotion was completely intercepted by floods. Not so very seldom might it be said that the "contagious fogs"

66 Falling in the land,

Have every pelting river made so proud

66

That they have overborne their continents:
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;

The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men's morris is filled up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable."

At such times one's journey could only be pursued by the help of skilful guides, and even so at some risk. To take a late illustration, Thoresby, who died in 1715, tells us in his diary how the rains had "raised the washes upon the road near Ware to that height that passengers from London that were upon that road swam, and a poor higgler was drowned, which prevented me travelling for many hours; yet towards evening we adventured with some country people who conducted us over the meadows, whereby we missed the deepest of the wash at Cheshunt, though we rode to the saddle-skirts for a considerable way, but got safe to Waltham Cross, where we lodged."1

Such being the roads-so "founderous," as someone calls them-what would the vehicles be?

2

Carriers' carts of a sort did struggle along; but for the most part movement was accomplished on foot or on horseback, and conveyance of goods by pack-horses. Horselitters were occasionally used. Coaches are said to have been introduced by Boomen, Queen Elizabeth's own coachman; but they were little better, as Mr. Smiles remarks, than carts without springs, the body resting solid upon the axles. And those who used them paid a bitter penalty for the luxury. At one of the first audiences which the Queen

1 See Smiles' Lives of the Engineers: Metcalfe and Telford, p. 19, ed. 1874.

2 Fynes Morison speaks (temp. James I.) of "carriers who have long covered wagons, in which they carry passengers from place to place; but this kind of journeying," he adds, "is so tedious, by reason they must take wagon very early and come very late to their inns, that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in this sort."

3 See a picture of this invention in Mr. Roberts's Social History of the Southern Counties. Perhaps those who have known what it is to be hauled in a bathing-machine across a fine shingly beach can best appreciate the delights of such a means of locomotion.