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In the afternoon they walked over the fields to Shottery to see Anne Hathaway's cottage. Jean walked in a dream. On just such an April day, when shepherds pipe on oaten straws, Shakespeare himself must have walked here. It would be different, of course; there would be no streets of little mean houses, only a few thatched cottages.
And there have been times when this tall brown-haired young person has seized his hand, as if she too had moments of rebellion, and the two have run away away from the swains and the would-be sweethearts, the Latin grammar and the scoldings, to wander about the river banks and the lanes. So this afternoon Will tramped off to Shottery.
Saying this, Gertrude led to the street, and the party drove to Shottery, a pretty village a mile away, where is Ann Hathaway's thatched cottage. "Here the beardless William often came," said Gertrude, "and told his love to the English maiden. Ann Hathaway was older than William, she was twenty-six, but they were married, and had three children.
It was an age of beauty, and the walks round Stratford remain beautiful to this hour, despite the growth of villadom and the advent of the railway line. We can follow the roads that Shakespeare knew, to the woods of his poaching exploits, and the meadows over which he passed to thatched, half-timbered Shottery, where the village inn was still standing when men, now middle-aged, were born.
He went his own way, and may be supposed to have lived a somewhat free life, for before he was nineteen he appears to have found himself compelled to marry one Anne Hathaway of Shottery in the parish of Old Stratford.
The ground floors of the house, are covered with flagstones broken in varied forms, as accident would have it, while the rough massive timbers of the floors above stand out unpainted and unplastered. Shottery, "a genuine country village, consisting of a few straggling farm-houses and brick and timber cottages, standing apart from each other in their old gardens and orchard-crofts.
It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight returning from Shottery and from her arms. Both satisfied. I too.
He must have heard Stratford and Shottery calling to him in the heart of the town, for when his name was made and his future assured, he came back to home, wife, and little ones to enjoy the "poor remains" of life.
Very early they set out to walk "across the fields to Anne." The little village of Shottery, where stands the cottage known all the world over as "Anne Hathaway's," is only about a mile distant from Stratford, and our party gayly took the path through the fields, perhaps the very one over which Shakespeare trod when he was Anne's lover.
STRATFORD ON AVON, with SHOTTERY, where Ann Hathaway was courted by Shakspeare and CHARLECOTE, the residence of the Sir Thomas Lucy whom the poet immortalised as Justice Shallow, are all within ten miles of Leamington. On all these so much has been written that we will not venture to "pile up the agony" any higher.
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