A tale of two Stratford houses associated with Shakespeare
SHAKESPEARE’S HOUSE
A window onto his life and legacy
RICHARD SCHOCH
200pp. Arden Shakespeare. £25.
THIS IS A TALE of two houses: New Place, the grandest house in Stratford, bought by Shakespeare in 1597; and the Birthplace (as it is now known), the three small properties on Henley Street that comprised John Shakespeare’s family home-cum-glover’s workshop flanked by, respectively, an inn and a two-room cottage. The central figure in Richard Schoch’s Shakespeare’s House is Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Barnard. Childless, she left both properties to cousins. New Place was to be sold, its proceeds benefiting five Hathaway cousins; and Henley Street was bequeathed to the Harts, descendants of Shakespeare’s sister Joan, who were already renting the cottage.
This was a strategically thoughtful bequest. As Schoch points out, the female Hathaways (four of them unmarried) needed cash, not real estate, whereas the Harts, who needed both, could continue to live in the property as owners and rent out the inn. But it was also a move with far-reaching consequences. In one of the book’s several “what if” moments Schoch considers what might have happened had Elizabeth Barnard bequeathed New Place rather than “her second-best house” to Thomas Hart. How the Birthplace (rather than New Place) became the shrine for Shakespeare pilgrims is instead the focus of this gripping and entertaining narrative. Elizabeth’s decision kept the Birthplace in the family until the early nineteenth century, after which (in a Victorian drama, if not melodrama, documented here) it was saved for the nation.
Schoch has a gift for archival details and their complement: anecdotes and traditions. He places the demolition of New Place by its “dyspeptic” eighteenth-century owner, Francis Gastrell, in context. The house’s previous owner, the “genial” Sir Hugh Clopton (a descendant of the Clopton who built it), was happy to welcome visitors to this Shakespeare site. It was assumed that Gastrell would do the same. But for him the house was a holiday home – synonymous, as now, with freedom from interruption. His first act was to destroy the famous mulberry tree, allegedly planted by Shakespeare. This tree surgery was probably undertaken for bona fide arboricultural reasons, as Schoch details. But Earth – and the nascent Shakespeare industry – felt the wound. Subsequent disputes with the Stratford corporation over land ownership and second-home taxation led to the “ultimate taxavoidance scheme”: an angry Gastrell demolished New Place. Nature gave a second groan.
A
