CHAPTER III

SHAKESPEARE'S COUNTRY

THE England of Shakespeare's boyhood and youth was not only dramatic in feeling but spectacular in form; the Queen delighted in those gorgeous pageants which symbolized by their splendour the greatness of her place and the dignity of her person. Her vigorous Tudor temper was thrown into bold relief by her intensely feminine craving for personal loyalty and admiration. One of the keenest and most adroit politicians of her time, her instincts as a woman were sometimes postponed to the exigencies of the State, but they were as imperious as her temper. Denied as Queen the personal devotion which as a woman she craved, she fed her unsatisfied imagination on flattery and imposing ceremonies. In the summer of 1575, when Shakespeare was in his twelfth year, the Queen made that memorable visit to Kenilworth Castle which has found its record in Scott's brilliant novel. Four years earlier, the royal presence at Charlecote (Sir Thomas Lucy, the future Justice Shallow, playing the part of host) had brought the Court into the immediate neighbourhood of Stratford. Kenilworth is fifteen miles distant, but the magnificent pageants and stately ceremonies with which Leicester welcomed the Queen were matters of general talk throughout Warwickshire long before the arrival of Elizabeth.

The Queen's visit was made in July, when nature supplemented with lavish beauty all the various art and immense wealth which Leicester freely drew upon for the entertainment of his capricious and exacting mistress. Pageants and diversions of every kind succeeded one another in bewildering variety for ten days. The Queen was addressed by sibyls, by giants of Arthur's age, by the Lady of the Lake, by Pomona, Ceres, and Bacchus. There was a rustic marriage for her entertainment, and a mock fight representing the defeat of the Danes. Returning from the chase, Triton rose out of the lake and, in Neptune's name, prayed for her help to deliver an enchanted lady pursued by a cruel knight; and straightway the lady herself appeared, with an escort of nymphs; Proteus, riding a dolphin, following close behind. Then, suddenly, from the heart of the dolphin, a chorus of ocean deities sang the praises of the great and beautiful Queen. The tension of these splendid mythological and allegorical pageants was relieved by the tricks of necromancers, the feats of acrobats, and by fights between dogs and bears. The prodigality, semi-barbaric taste, and magnificence of the age were illustrated for a royal spectator with more than royal lavishness.

On a summer day the way from Stratford to the Castle lies through a landscape touched with the ripest beauty of England; a beauty not only of line and structure, but of depth and richness of foliage, of ancient places slowly transformed by the tender and patient and pious care of centuries of growth into masses of greenness so affluent and of such depth that it seems as if fountains of life had overflowed into great masses of foliage.

The summer days were doubtless long and wearisome to the boys in the Grammar School in the quiet village. The nightingale had ceased to sing along the Avon; the fragrance was gone from the hedges with their blossoms; midsummer was at its height; there was the smell of the new-cut grass in the meadows, touched here and there with the glory of the scarlet poppy. Whether the coming of the Queen was made the occasion of granting a holiday it is much too late to assert or deny; that the more adventurous took one is more than probable. In those days even the splendour of the wandering players paled before that of the Queen. She had been seventeen years on the throne. She had all the qualities of her family: the Tudor imperiousness of temper, and the Tudor instinct for understanding her people and winning them. The Armada was thirteen years in the future, and the full splendour of a great reign was still to come; but there was something in the young Queen which had already touched the imagination of England ; something in her spirit and bearing which saved the poets of the time from being mere flatterers. Elizabeth was neither beautiful nor gracious; the romantic charm which captivated all who came into the presence of her unhappy contemporary Mary Stuart was not in her. But what she lacked as woman she easily possessed as queen; she had the rare gift of personifying her rank and place. The sense of sovereignty went with her. In a time of passionate energy and lust of life she was not only the centre of organized society, but the symbol of unlimited opportunity, fortune, and greatness.

Where the Queen was, there was England; she was not only its ruler, but the personification of its vitality and force. When she came into Warwickshire, the whole country was stirred with the sense of the presence of something splendid and significant. Stories of the preparations at the Castle had been carried by word of mouth across the countryside. There were no newspapers; no means of rapid communication with the outer world ; there were, for the vast majority of people, no books; most men never went out of their native shires ; travellers from a distance were few. Tales of Leicester's honours and emoluments were told and listened to like modern fairy stories; his rapid advancement lent a kind of magic to the splendour of his state; and the Queen was the magician whose touch made and marred all fortunes. In the time of Elizabeth as in that of Victoria, the Queen personified the English State and the majesty of the English race. Through this kind of symbolism a deep and formative educational influence has been silently put forth and unconsciously received. The Queen was in many ways the incarnation of the spirit of Shakespeare's time, and her coming into Warwickshire was like the advent of the world-element into a life which had felt only local influences.

Chief among those influences was that of the lovely scenery by which the poet's young imagination was enfolded. Whether he was one of the throng which waited for the Queen on some old-time highway, or stood with the eager crowd who gathered about the Castle gates on the great day of the royal visit, is of no consequence : it can hardly be doubted that the imaginative boy of eleven did not lose that splendid spectacle ; what is certain is his familiarity with the Warwickshire landscape — that fortunate landscape beautiful in itself and appealing to every imagination because it was Shakespeare's country.

There are more striking outlooks than those which are found between Kenilworth and Stratford; there are more fertile and garden-like stretches of country; but there is nowhere in England happier harmony of the typical qualities of the English country: gentle undulation of wold and wood, groups of ancient trees, long lines of hedges, slow rivers winding under overhanging branches and loitering in places of immemorial shade; stately homes rich in association with men and women of force or craft, or possessed of the noble art of gentleness in ungentle times; a low, soft sky from which clouds are rarely absent, and an atmosphere which softens all outlines, subdues all sounds, and works magical effects of light and distance. These qualities of ripeness and repose are seen in their perfection from the ruined Mervyn's Tower, in which Amy Robsart was imprisoned. As far as the eye can reach, the landscape is full of a tender and gracious beauty. Nothing arrests and holds the at