THE SHAKESPEARE TWINS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 31 October 1925, Page 20

THE SHAKESPEARE TWINS.

AND TH E FAIRIES. Bast the green meadows and pleasant hamlets of historic old England flows the little river Avon. On tnis river is a town which will never be iorgotten to the end ot time —Stratford ; and in Stratford-upon-Avon was born the greatest writer ol‘ plays the world lias ever known—William Shakespeare. Ho it was who wrote “Julius Caesai,

“King Lear, ’ “Jlamlet, ’ “Othello,’ “Macbeth,” “Twelfth Night,” “As iou Like It,” and many more delightful plays —“King John,” “King Henry,” anti “King Richard,” and the beautiln! story of “Romeo and Juliet,” When you are older you will perhaps read all of these aml see many of them played; even now you may have enjoyed the stories of some of them if you have read Ctharles and Mary Lamb’s “Tales front Shakespeare. ’ These stories were written a long time ago for children isuch as you. But the play I am going to tell you most about in this story is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” for in it you will learn about the fairies. With the fairies, T must tell you of the twins, the two younger children of Shakespeare. These twins were born tn the same little house in Stratford where their father liad come into the work! before them. They went wandering about the same fields and played on the banks of the beautiful little river Avon just as he had done when he was a hoy. 'The twins were the best or companions, a boy and a girl. The boy s name was Haniuet-,- and the girl s was Judith. A merry, happy pair they were, and their father was very proud of them. —especially .of his only son, who was clever at games, and quick to learn. Judith was bright, too, but it was not the fashion to send girls to school in Shakespeare’s time, and the sister gained all her book knowledge, if ‘she had any, at second hand from her brother. This did not prevent her, however, from seeing things even more quickly than the boy, and they led a wonderful life in the fields and meadows and mill-lands that lay about peaceful little Avon. Here it is that the fairies come mto our story, for they seem to haunt the old mill and the shadowy fields and to come to life naturally and dance to the music of the river Avon. William Shakespeare, the twins’ father, knew a great deal about men and things, but lie had also a vivid imagination. .He often told in his works about those small creatures that were like real people to him —the spirits of the woods and fields, called fairies. In “A Midsummer Night s Dream,” he made these spirits seem so real that even the grown-ups believed in them. There is little doubt that when the father came home to Stratford from his theatre in London, where he often acted in his own plays, he sometimes took his o-irl and boy of a, summer afternoon for "a holiday. Far out beyond the Clopton bridge into the fields they would go and he would talk to them of the strange airy creatures who danced so enchantingly among the shadowy as evening drew near. There is little doubt, too, that while their father was; telling these weird, fantastio tales, imaginative 10-year-old Hamnet and his sister Judith really believed that they saw bright eyes peering at them from among the cowslip flowers and grasses and heard footsteps tripping it just out of sight. These are the fairies that Shakespeare wrote about and that have shown themselves so often on the stage in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” : Titania comes first, for she was the Queen of the Fairies who led the hosts of these dancing little beings through the shadowy ways along the Avon, farout of sight in the mists of the evening. The next- comes Oberon, the king of "the fairies, capering at the head of all his airy clan over the grasses wet with dew. And there is Fuck, or Rob-in-Go-od fellow, a small imp with a grotesque face, great flopping ears, and -n elfish smile. He is the clown of tlso fairies in “A Midsummer Night's Dream’’ and is called a tricksy spirit. Can you not see the big auburnhaired father, William Shakespeare, as he sat in the shadow out beyond Cloptori bridge on a bank of cowslips, with two little figures drawn very close to him as he talked? He was as much of a child as either Hamnet or Judith, telling merry tales about the tricksy Puck —how he played pranks on the housewives or the dairy maids if they forgot to set out his bowl of curds or otherwise failed to please him. There was also a spirit quite different from Puck, the dainty drill, who came flying in from another of Shakespeare s plays —“The Tempest.” These two imaginative children must have glimpsed this little creature as he dashed in, seated upon a gold and velvet-black hee, and riding at full speed into a cowslip’s bell. For William Shakespeare makes him say: Where the bee sucks there suck T;

In a cowslip’s bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry On the bat’s back I do fly After summer, merrily;

Merrily, merrily, shall I live now. Under the blossom that hangs on the bough. Can we not imagine how happy these ahihlren must have been, spending a summer afternoon holiday with a father who could tell such wonderful tales? But, happy as they were, there came a sudden end. Little Hamnet, the only son of this great man, lived only until his eleventh year. He was laid to rest in the silent old churchyard of Stratford, leaving twin sister Judith to cross the Olopton bridge alone and to talk with the fairies by herself. Judith lived many years after this and was married to a youth of her native town. But strange as it may seem, to girls of this day, she was never able to read a hook, not even the wonderful poetry of her father. She could not write her own name—thus did little girls grow- up without the knowledge even' of reading and writing, in the time of William Shakespeare.