SECTION 15 - Shakespeare in North Warwickshire

Summary

But why Polesworth rather than Stratford? Of one place, as of the other, there is no mention in anything that Shakespeare wrote. At least we know that at Stratford he was born, for some time lived, and there died. Take Stratford out of the story and, apart from London, what remains?

‘Patient investigation,’ says Sir Sidney Lee, ‘which has been in progress for more than two hundred years, has brought together a mass of biographical detail which far exceeds that accessible of any poet contemporary with Shakespeare.’ Is it even so? Is our knowledge of Sidney, Spenser, Jonson, so small? Investigation has indeed laid bare to us in profusion the conditions of bourgeois life in Stratford. Quite respectable monographs might be, and have been, written on the lives of Stratford citizens who were neighbours and possible acquaintances of the William of Henley Street or Shakespeare in North Warwickshire the Shakespeare of the New Place. I suppose that there is no town in England which affords more ample witness of the manners and daily doings of its ordinary inhabitants in the days of Elizabeth and James. But though the picture is so full and vivid, the one figure which should dominate it is missing. In that lively scene there is as little chance of detecting the Poet-Dramatist as there is of discovering a portrait of Milton in a Teniers group of drinking boors.