THE COMMEMORATION OF SHAKESPEARE

I

THE public memory is short. At the instant the suggestion that Shakespeare should receive the tribute of a great national monument in London is attracting general attention. In the ears of the vast majority of those who are taking part in the discussion the proposal appears to strike a new note. Few seem aware that a national memorial of Shakespeare has been urged on Londoners many times before. Thrice, at least, during the past eighty-five years has it exercised the public mind. At the extreme end of the year 1820 the well-known actor, Charles Mathews, set on foot a movement for the erection of a national monument to the immortal memory of Shakespeare.' He pledged himself to enlist the support of the new King, George the Fourth, of members of the royal family, of 'every man of rank and talent, every poet, artist, and sculptor.' Mathews's endeavour achieved only a specious success. George the Fourth readily gave his 'high sanction' to a London memorial. Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Tom Moore, and Washington Irving were among the men of letters; Sir Thomas Lawrence, [Sir] Francis Chantrey, and John Nash, the architect, were among the artists, who approved the general conception. For three or four years ink was spilt and breath was spent in the advocacy of the scheme. But nothing came of all the letters and speeches. In 1847 the topic was again broached. A committee, which was hardly less influential than that of 1821, revived the proposal. Again no result followed. Fifteen years passed away, and then, in 1864, the arrival of the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth seemed to many men of eminence in public ife, in letters or in art, an appropriate moment at which to carry the design into effect. A third failure has to be recorded.

The notion, indeed, was no child of the nineteenth century which fathered it so ineffectually. It was familiar to the eighteenth. One eighteenth-century effort was fortunate enough to yield a little permanent fruit. To an eighteenth-century endeavour to offer Shakespeare a national memorial in London was due the cenotaph in Westminster Abbey.

II

The suggestion of commemorating Shakespeare by means of a monument in London has thus something more than a 'smack of age' about it, something more than a 'relish of the saltness of time; there are points of view from which it might appear to be already 'blasted with antiquity.' On only one of the previous occasions that the question was raised was the stage of discussion passed, and that was in the eighteenth century when the monument was placed in the Poets' Corner. The issue was not felicitous. The memorial in the Abbey failed to satisfy the commemorative aspirations of the nation; it left it open to succeeding generations to reconsider the question, if it did not impose on them the obligation. Most of the poets, actors, scholars, and patrons of polite learning, who in 1741 subscribed their guineas to the fund for placing a monument in Westminster Abbey resented the sculpturesque caricature to which their subscriptions were applied. Pope, an original leader of the movement, declined to write an inscription for this national memorial, but scribbled some ironical verses beginning:

Thus Britons love me and preserve my fame.

A later critic imagined Shakespeare's wraith pausing in horror by the familiar monument in the Abbey, and lightly misquoting Shelley's familiar lines:

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, . .
And long to unbuild it again.

One of the most regrettable effects of the Abbey memorial, with its mawkish and irrelevant sentimentality, has been to set a bad pattern for statues of Shakespeare, for posterity came to invest the design with some measure of sanctity.

The nineteenth-century efforts were mere abortions. In 1821, in spite of George the Fourth's benevolent patronage, which included an unfulfilled promise to pay the sum of 100 guineas, the total amount which was collected after six years' agitation was so small that it was returned to the subscribers. The accounts are extant in the Library of Shakespeare's Birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon. In 1847 the subscriptions were more abundant, but all was then absorbed in the purchase of Shakespeare's Birthplace; no money was available for a London memorial. In 1864 the expenses of organising the tercentenary celebration in London by way of banquets, concerts, and theatrical performances, seem to have left no surplus for the purpose which the movement set out to fulfil.

III

The causes of the sweeping failure of the proposal when it came before the public during the nineteenth century are worth studying. There was no lack of enthusiasm among the promoters. Nor were their high hopes wrecked solely by public apathy. The public interest was never altogether dormant. More efficient causes of ruin were, firstly, the active hostility of some prominent writers and actors who declaimed against all outward and visible commemoration of Shakespeare; and secondly, divisions in the ranks of supporters in regard to the precise form that the memorial ought to take. The censorious refusal of one section of the literary public to countenance any memorial at all, and the inability of another section, while promoting the endeavour, to concentrate its energies on one form of commemoration had, as might be expected, a paralysing effect.

'England,' it was somewhat casuistically argued in 1864, "has never been ungrateful to her poet; but the very depth and fervour of the reverence in which he is held have hitherto made it difficult for his scholars to agree upon any common proceeding in his name.' Neither in 1864 nor at earlier and later epochs have Shakespearian scholars always formed among themselves a very happy family. That amiable sentiment which would treat the realisation of the commemorative aim as a patriotic obligation-as an obligation which no good citizen could honourably repudiate-has often produced discord rather than harmony among Shakespearian scholars. One school of the past has argued for a work of sculpture, and has been opposed by a cry for a college for actors, or a Shakespearian theatre. 'We do not like the idea of a monument at all,' wrote The Times on the 20th of January, 1864. 'Shakespeare,' wrote Punch on the 6th of February following, 'needs no statue.' In old days it was frequently insisted that, even if the erection of a London monument were desirable, active effort ought to be postponed until an adequate memorial had been placed in Stratford-on-Avon. At the same time a band of students was always prepared to urge the chilling plea that the payment of any outward honour to Shakespeare was laboursome futility— was 'wasteful and ridiculous excess.' Milton's query, 'What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones?' has always been quoted to satiety by one section of the public whenever the commemoration of Shakespeare has come under discussion.

IV

Once again the question of a national memorial of Shakespeare in London has been revived in conditions not wholly unlike those that have gone before. Mr. Richard Badger, a veteran enthusiast, has

offered the people of London the sum of 3,500l. as the nucleus of a great Shakespeare Memorial Fund. The Lord Mayor of London has presided over a public meeting at the Mansion House, which has empowered an influential committee to proceed with the work. The London County Council has promised to provide a site. With regard to the form that the memorial ought to take, a variety of irresponsible suggestions has been made. Nothing has been authoritatively determined.

The propriety of visibly and outwardly commemorating Shakespeare in the capital city of the Empire has consequently become once more an urgent public question. The public is invited anew to form an opinion on the various points at issue. No expression of opinion should carry weight which omits to take into account past experience as well as present conditions and possibilities. If regard for the public interest justify a national memorial in London, it is most desirable to define the principles whereby its precise form should be determined.

In one important particular the consideration of the subject to-day is simpler than when it was debated on former occasions. Differences existed, then as now, in regard to the propriety of erecting a national memorial of Shakespeare in London, but almost all who interested themselves in the matter in the nineteenth century agreed that the public interest justified, if it did not require, the preservation from decay or demolition of the buildings at Stratford-on-Avon with which Shakespeare's life was associated. So long as those buildings were in private hands, every proposal to commemorate Shakespeare in London had to meet a formidable objection which was raised on their behalf. If the nation undertook to commemorate Shakespeare at all, it should make its first aim (it was argued) the conversion into public property of the surviving memorials of Shakespeare's career at Stratford. The scheme of the London memorial could not be thoroughly discussed on its merits while the claims of Stratford remained unsatisfied. It was deemed premature, whether or no it were justifiable, to entertain any scheme of commemoration which left the Stratford buildings out of account.

A natural sentiment connected Shakespeare more closely with Stratford-on-Avon than with any other place. Whatever part London played in his career, the public mind was dominated by the fact that he was born at Stratford, died, and was buried there. If he left Stratford in youth in order to work out his destiny in London, he returned to it in middle life in order to end his days there 'in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends.'

In spite of this widespread feeling it proved no easy task, nor one capable of rapid fulfilment, to consecrate in permanence to public uses the extant memorials of Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon. Stratford was a place of pilgrimage for admirers of Shakespeare from

early days in the seventeenth century-soon, in fact, after Shakespeare's death in 1616. But local veneration did not prevent the demolition in 1759, by a private owner, of New Place, Shakespeare's last residence, and that act of vandalism was long in provoking any practical resentment. Garrick, by means of his Jubilee Festival of 1769, effectively, if somewhat theatrically, called the attention of the English public to the claims of the town to the affectionate interest of lovers of the great dramatist. Nevertheless, it was left to the nineteenth century to dedicate in permanence to the public service the places which were the scenes of Shakespeare's private life in his native town.

Charles Mathews's effort of 1821 took its rise in an endeavour to purchase in behalf of the nation the site of Shakespeare's demolished residence of New Place, with the great garden attached to it, but that scheme was overweighted by the incorporation with it of the plan for a London monument, and both collapsed ignominiously. In 1835 a strong committee was formed at Stratford to commemorate the poet's connection with the town. It was called 'the Monumental Committee,' and had for its object, firstly, the repair of Shakespeare's tomb in the parish church; and secondly, the preservation and restoration of all the Shakespearian buildings in the town. Subscriptions were limited to 17., and all the members of the royal family, including the Princess Victoria, who two years later came to the throne, figured, with other leading personages in the nation's life, in the list of subscribers. But the subscriptions only produced a sum sufficient to carry out the first purpose of the Monumental Committee, the repair of the tomb. In 1847 the sale by public auction was announced of the house in which Shakespeare was born. It had long been a show-place in private hands. A general feeling declared itself in favour of the purchase of the house for the nation. Public sentiment was in accord with the ungrammatical grandiloquence of the auctioneer, the famous Robins, whose advertisement of the sale contained the sentence: 'It is trusted the feeling of the country will be so evinced that the structure may be secured, hallowed, and cherished as a national monument almost as imperishable as the poet's fame.' A subscrip tion list was headed by Prince Albert with 2501. A distinguished committee was formed under the presidency of Lord Morpeth (afterwards the seventh Earl of Carlisle), then Chief Commissioner of Woods and Forests, who offered to make his department perpetual conservators of the property. (That proposal was unhappily not accepted.) Dickens, Macaulay, Lord Lytton, and the historian Grote were all active in promoting the movement, and it proved successful. The property was duly secured by a private trust in behalf of the nation. The most important house identified with Shakespeare's career in Stratford was thus effectively protected from the risks that are always inherent in private ownership. The step was not taken with undue haste;