Obrázky na stránke
PDF
ePub

would therefore have to him a family as well as a local interest. Burton, the historian of Leicestershire, who was born about ten years after William Shakspere, tells us "that his great-great-grandfather, John Hardwick, of Lindley, near Bosworth, a man of very short stature, but active and courageous, tendered his service to Henry, with some troops of horse, the night he lay at Atherston, became his guide to the field, advised him in the attack, and how to profit by the sun and by the wind."* Burton further says, writing in 1622, that the inhabitants living around the plain called Bosworth Field, more properly the plain of Sutton, "have many occurrences and passages yet fresh in memory, by reason that some persons thereabout, which saw the battle fought, were living within less than forty years, of which persons myself have seen some, and have heard of their disclosures, though related by the second hand." This "living within less than forty years would take us back to about the period which we are now viewing in relation to the life of Shakspere. But certainly there is something over-marvellous in Burton's story to enable us to think that William Shakspere, even as a very young boy, could have conversed with "some persons thereabout" who had seen a battle fought in 1485. That, as Burton more reasonably of himself says, he might have "heard their discourses at second-hand" is probable enough. Bosworth Field is about thirty miles from Stratford. Burton says that the plain derives its name from Bosworth, "not that this battle was fought at this place (it being fought in a large flat plain, and spacious ground, three miles distant from this town, between the towns of Shenton, Sutton, Dadlington, and Stoke); but for that this town was the most worthy town of note near adjacent, and was therefore called Bosworth Field. That this battle was fought in this plain appeareth by many remarkable places: By a little mount cast up, where the common report is, that at the first beginning of the battle Henry Earl of Richmond made his parænetical oration to his army; by divers pieces of armour, weapons, and other warlike accoutrements, and by many arrow-heads here found, whereof, about twenty years since, at the enclosure of the lordship of Stoke, great store were digged up, of which some I have now (1622) in my custody, being of a long, large, and big proportion, far greater than any now in use; as also by relation of the inhabitants, who have many occurrences and passages yet fresh in memory." + Burton goes on to tell two stories connected with the eventful battle. The one was the vision of King Richard, of "divers fearful ghosts running about him, not suffering him to take any rest, still crying 'Revenge.'" Hall relates the tradition thus:-"The fame went that he had the same night a dreadful and a terrible dream, for it seemed to him, being asleep, that he saw divers images like terrible devils, not suffering him to take any quiet or rest." Burton says, previous to his description of the dream, "The vision is reported to be in this manner." And certainly his account of the fearful ghosts "still crying Revenge" is essentially different from that of the chronicler. Shakspere has followed the more poetical account of the old local historian; which, however, could not have been known to him :

[blocks in formation]

Did Shakspere obtain his notion from the same source as Burton-from "relation of the inhabitants who have many occurrences and passages yet fresh in memory?" King Henry is crowned upon the Field of Bosworth. According to the Chronicler, Lord Stanley "took the crown of King Richard, which was found amongst the spoil in the field, and set it on the Earl's head, as though he had been elected king by *Hutton's "Bosworth Field."

From "Burton's Manuscripts," quoted by Mr. Nicholls.

the voice of the people, as in ancient times past in divers realms it hath been accustomed." Then, "the same night in the evening King Henry with great pomp came to the town of Leicester," where he rested two days. "In the mean season the dead corpse of King Richard was as shamefully carried to the town of Leicester, as he gorgeously the day before with pomp and pride departed out of the said town."

Years roll on. There was another conqueror, not by arms but by peaceful intellect, who had once moved through the land in " pomp and pride," but who came to Leicester in humility and heaviness of heart. The victim of a shifting policy and of his own ambition, Wolsey, found a grave at Leicester scarcely more honourable than that of Richard :

"At last, with easy roads, he came to Leicester,
Lodg'd in the abbey; where the reverend abbot,
With all his convent, honourably receiv'd him;
To whom he gave these words:- O, father abbot,
An old man, broken with the storms of state,
Is come to lay his weary bones among ye;
Give him a little earth for charity !'

:

So went to bed where eagerly his sickness
Pursued him still; and three nights after this,
About the hour of eight, (which he himself
Foretold should be his last,) full of repentance,
Continual meditations, tears, and sorrows,
He gave his honours to the world again,

His blessed part to heaven, and slept in peace."*

Wolsey is the hero of Shakspere's last historical play; and even in this history, large as it is, and belonging to the philosophical period of the poet's life, we may trace something of the influence of the principle of Local Association.

[merged small][subsumed][ocr errors][merged small]
[ocr errors][ocr errors]
[graphic]

104

WILLIAM SHAKSPERE: A BIOGRAPHY.

[graphic][merged small][subsumed][merged small][merged small]

were

"High towers, fair temples, goodly theatres,
Strong walls, rich porches, princely palaces,
Large streets, brave houses, sacred sepulchres,
Sure gates, sweet gardens, stately galleries,
Wrought with fair pillars and fine imageries;
All these, O pity! now are turn'd to dust,
And overgrown with black oblivion's rust.'

[ocr errors]

SUCH is Spenser's noble description of what was once the "goodly Verlam." These "The Ruins of Time." But within sixteen miles of Stratford would the young Shakspere gaze in awe and wonder upon ruins more solemn than any produced by "time's decay." The ruins of Evesham were the fearful monuments of a political

revolution which William Shakspere himself had not seen; but which, in the boyhood of his father, had shaken the land like an earthquake, and, toppling down its "high steeples," had made many

"An heap of lime and sand,

For the screech-owl to build her baleful bower."

Such were the ruins he looked upon, cumbering the ground where, forty years before, stood the magnificent abbey whose charters reached back to the days of the Kings of Mercia.

The last great building of the Abbey of Evesham is the only one properly belonging to the monastery which has escaped destruction. The campanile which formed an entrance to the conventual cemetery was commenced by Abbot Lichfield in 1533. In 1539 the good abbot resigned the office which he had held for twenty-six years. His successor was placed in authority for a few months, to carry on the farce which was enacting through the kingdom, of a voluntary grant and surrender of all the remaining possessions of the religious houses, which preceded the Act of 1539 "for dissolution of abbeys." Leland, who visited the place within a year or two after the suppression, "rambling to and fro in this nation, and in making researches into the bowels of antiquity." ""* says, "In the town is no hospital, or other famous foundation, but the late abbey." The destruction must indeed have been rapid. The house and site of the monastery were granted to Philip Hobby, with a remarkable exception; namely, "all the bells and lead of the church and belfry." The roof of this magnificent fabric thus went first; and in a few years the walls became a stonequarry. Fuller, writing about a century afterwards, says of the abbey, "By a long lease it was in the possession of one Mr. Andrewes, father and son; whose grandchild, living now at Berkhampstead in Hertfordshire, hath better thriven, by God's blessing on his own industry, than his father and grandfather did with Evesham Abbey; the sale of the stones whereof he imputeth a cause of their ill success."+ All was swept away. The abbey-church, with its sixteen altars, and its hundred and sixty-four gilded pillars, its chapter-house, its cloisters, its library, refectory, dormitory, buttery, and treasury; its almory, granary, and storehouse; all the various buildings for the service of the church, and for the accommodation of eighty-nine religious inmates and sixty-five servants, were, with a few exceptions, ruins in the time of William Shakspere. Habingdon, who has left a manuscript "Survey of Worcestershire," written about two centuries ago, says, "Let us but guess what this monastery now dissolved was in former days by the gate-house yet remaining; which, though, deformed with age, is as large and stately as any at this time in the kingdom." That gateway has since perished. Of the great mass of the conventual buildings Habingdon states that nothing was left beyond "a huge deal of rubbish overgrown with grass." One beautiful gateway, however, formerly the entrance to the chapter-house, yet remains even to our day. It admits us to a large garden, now let out in small allotments to industrious inhabitants of Evesham. The change is very striking. The independent possession of a few roods of land may perhaps bestow as much comfort upon the labourers of Evesham as their former dependence upon the conventual buttery. But we cannot doubt that, for a long course of years, the sudden and violent dissolution of that great abbey must have produced incalculable poverty and wretchedness. Its princely revenues were seized upon by the heartless despot, to be applied to his unbridled luxury and his absurd wars. The same process of destruction and appropriation was carried on throughout the country. The Church, always a gentle landlord, was succeeded in its possessions by the grasping * Wood, "Athenæ Oxon." "Church History." Dugdale's "Monasticon," ed. 1819, vol. ii., p. 12.

[ocr errors]

106

WILLIAM SHAKSPERE: A BIOGRAPHY..

creatures of the Crown; the almsgiving of the religious houses was at an end; and then came the age of vagabondage and of poor-laws.

[graphic]

[Chapter-House Gateway.j

The sense which we justly entertain of the advantages of the Reformation has accustomed us to shut our eyes to the tremendous evils which must have been produced by the iniquitous spoliations of the days of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. The religious houses, whatever might have been their abuses, were centres of civiliza66 There was no town at Evesham before the foundation of the tion. Leland says, abbey." Wherever there was a well-endowed religious house, there was a large and a regular expenditure, employing the local industry in the way best calculated to promote the happiness of the population. Under this expenditure, not only did handicrafts flourish, but the arts were encouraged in no inconsiderable degree. The commissioners employed to take surrender of the monasteries in Warwickshire "that in this town were then forty-four reported of the nunnery of Polsworth, "Nor is it a tenements, and but one plough, the residue of the inhabitants being artificers, who In another place Dugdale says, had their livelihood by this house."* little observable that, whilst the monasteries stood, there was no act for relief of the poor, so amply did those houses give succour to them that were in want; whereas in the next age, namely 39th of Elizabeth, no less than eleven bills were brought into the House of Commons for that purpose."+ We have little doubt that the judicious encouragement of industry in the immediate neighbourhood of each monastery did a great deal more to render a state provision for the poor unnecessary succour to those who were in want." The benevolence of than the accustomed " the religious houses was systematic and uniform. It was not the ostentatious and improvident almsgiving which would raise up an idle pauper population upon their own lands. The poor, as far as we can judge from the acts of law-makers, did not become a curse to the country, and were not dealt with in the spirit of a detestable severity, until the law-makers had dried up the sources of their profitable industry. Leland, writing immediately after the dissolution of the Abbey of Evesham, says of While the abbey the town that it is "meetly large and well builded with timber; the market-sted is fair and large; there be divers pretty streets in the town."

[ocr errors]

Dugdale's "Warwickshire," p. 800.

† Ibid., p. 803.

« PredošláPokračovať »