nation at large. The purchase for the public of the Birthplace, the New Place property, and Anne Hathaway's Cottage was not primarily due to local effort. Justly enough, a very small portion of the necessary funds came from Stratford itself. The British nation may therefore take credit for having set up at least one fitting monument to Shakespeare by consecrating to public uses the property identified with his career in Stratford. Larger funds than the trustees at present possess are required to enable them to carry on the work which their predecessors began, and to compete with any chance of success for books and relics of Shakespearean interestsuch as they are empowered by Act of Parliament to acquire when these memorials chance to come into the market. But a number of small annual subscriptions from men of letters has lately facilitated the performance of this part of the trustees' work, and that source of income may, it is hoped, increase.

At any rate, the ancient objection to the erection

1 Nor is this all that has been accomplished at Stratford in the nineteenth century in the way of the national commemoration of Shakespeare. While the surviving property of Shakespearean interest was in course of acquisition for the nation, an early ambition to erect in Stratford a theatre in Shakespeare's memory was realised-in part by subscriptions from the general public, but mainly by the munificence of members of the Flower family, three generations of which have resided at Stratford. The Memorial Theatre was opened in 1879, and the Picture Gallery and Library which were attached to it were completed two years later. The Memorial Buildings at Stratford stand on a different footing from the properties of the Birthplace Trust. The Memorial institution has an independent government, and is to a larger extent under local control. But the extended series of performances of Shakespearean drama, which takes place each year in April at the Memorial Theatre, has something of the character of an annual commemoration of Shakespeare by the nation at large.

THE NATIONAL MEMORIAL AT STRATFORD 225

of a national monument in London, which was based on the absence of any memorial in Stratford, is no longer of avail. In 1821, in 1847, and in 1864, when the acquisition of the Stratford property was unattempted or uncompleted, it was perfectly just to argue that Stratford was entitled to have precedence of London when the question of commemorating Shakespeare was debated. It is no just argument in 1906, now that the claims of Stratford are practically satisfied.

Byron, when writing of the memorial to Petrarch at Arquà, expressed with admirable feeling the sentiment that would confine outward memorials of a poet in his native town to the places where he was born, lived, died, and was buried. With very little verbal change Byron's stanza on the visible memorials of Petrarch's association with Arquà is applicable to those of Shakespeare's connexion with Stratford:—

They keep his dust in Stratford, where he died;
The midland village where his later days

Went down the vale of years; and 'tis their pride

An honest pride-and let it be their praise,

To offer to the passing stranger's gaze

His birthplace and his sepulchre; both plain

And venerably simple, such as raise

A feeling more accordant with his strain

Than if a pyramid form'd his monumental fane.1

Venerable simplicity is hardly the characteristic note of Shakespeare's "strain" any more than it is of Petrarch's "strain." But there can be no just quarrel with the general contention that at Stratford, where Shakespeare gave ample proof of his characteristic modesty, a pyramidal fane would be out of harmony with the environment. There his 1 Cf. Childe Harold, Canto IV., St. xxxi.

birthplace, his garden, and tomb are the fittest memorials of his great career.

V

It may justly be asked: Is there any principle which justifies another sort of memorial elsewhere? On grounds of history and sentiment, but in conditions which demand most careful definition, the right answer will, I think, be in the affirmative. For one thing, Shakespeare's life was not confined to Stratford. His professional career was spent in London, and those, who strictly insist that memorials to great men should be erected only in places with which they were personally associated, can hardly deny that London shares with Stratford a title to a memorial from a biographical or historical point of view. Of Shakespeare's life of fifty-two years, twenty-four years were in all probability spent in London. During those years the work that makes him memorable was done. It was in London that the fame which is universally acknowledged was

won.

Some valuable details regarding Shakespeare's life in London are accessible. The districts where he resided and where he passed his days are known. There is evidence that during the early part of his London career he lived in the parish of St Helen's, Bishopsgate, and during the later part near the Bankside, Southwark. With the south side of the Thames he was long connected, together with his youngest brother, Edmund, who was also an actor, and who was buried in the church of St Saviour's, Southwark.

In his early London days Shakespeare's profes

SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE IN LONDON

227

sional work, alike as actor and dramatist, brought him daily from St Helen's, Bishopsgate, to The Theatre in Shoreditch. Shoreditch was then the chief theatrical quarter in London. Later, the centre of London theatrical life shifted to Southwark, where the far-famed Globe Theatre was erected, in 1599, mainly out of the materials of the dismantled Shoreditch Theatre. Ultimately Shakespeare's company of actors performed in a theatre at Blackfriars, which was created out of a private residence on a part of the site on which The Times office stands now. At a few hundred yards' distance from the Blackfriars Theatre, in the direction of Cannon Street, Shakespeare, too, shortly before his death, purchased a house.

Thus Shakespeare's life in London is well identified with four districts-with Bishopsgate, with Shoreditch, with Southwark, and with Blackfriars. Unhappily for students of Shakespeare's life, London has been more than once remodelled since the dramatist sojourned in the city. The buildings and lodgings, with which he was associated in Shoreditch, Southwark, Bishopsgate, or Blackfriars, have long since disappeared.

It is not practicable to follow in London the same historical scheme of commemoration which has been adopted at Stratford-on-Avon. It is impossible to recall to existence the edifices in which Shakespeare pursued his London career. Archæology could do little in this direction that was satisfactory. There would be an awkward incongruity in introducing into the serried ranks of Shoreditch warehouses and Southwark wharves an archæological restoration of Elizabethan playhouse or private residence. Pictorial

representations of the Globe Theatre survive, and it might be possible to construct something that should materialise the extant drawings. But the genius loci has fled from Southwark and from Shoreditch. It might be practicable to set up a new model of an Elizabethan theatre elsewhere in London, but such a memorial would have about it an air of unreality, artificiality, and affectation which would not be in accord with the scholarly spirit of an historic or biographic commemoration. The device might prove of archæological interest, but the commemorative purpose, from a biographical or historical point of view, would be ill served. Wherever a copy of an Elizabethan playhouse were brought to birth in twentieth-century London, the historic sense in the onlooker would be for the most part irresponsive; it would hardly be quickened.

VI

Apart from the practical difficulties of realising materially Shakespeare's local associations with London, it is doubtful if the mere commemoration in London of Shakespeare's personal connexion with the great city ought to be the precise aim of those who urge the propriety of erecting a national monument in the metropolis. Shakespeare's personal relations with London can in all the circumstances of the case be treated as a justification in only the second degree. The primary justification involves a somewhat different train of thought. A national memorial of Shakespeare in London must be reckoned of small account if it merely aim at keeping alive in public