then as now, by the hedges in the orchards and in the shade of the Weir-brake just below Stratford mill, where, so says tradition, the scene of the “Midsummer Night‘s Dream” was laid. In the Weir-brake, too, and in all the woods about their home, the Shakspere boys must have gone nutting—that most delightful harvest of the year, when you bend down “the hazel twig,” so “straight and slender,” and fill baskets and pockets with the sweet nuts in their rough, green husks, and crack them all the way home like so many happy squirrels.
All the hedge-rows were full then, as they are to this day, of wild pear-trees, wild apples, and “crabs,” as crab-apples are called in England. Roasted ‘crabs’ served with hot ale were a favorite Christmas dish in Shakspere’s time. And I doubt not that the boys rejoiced at the house in Henley street as the time of year came round “when roasted crabs hiss in the bowl.”
How snug the “house-place” in the old home must have looked with its roaring fire of logs, on winter evenings, when the two little boys of nine and seven, and Joan and Anne, the little sisters, huddled up in the chimney-corner with baby Richard in his cradle, while the mother prepared hot ale and “roasted crabs” far her gossips. Will, I warrant, as with twinkling eyes he watched Mrs. Hart or Mrs. Sadler or Mrs. Hathaway, from Shottery, thought that it was Puck himself, the very spirit of mischief, who had got into the bowl “in very likeness of a roasted crab.”
It must have been a recollection of those winter evenings that made little Will, in later years, write his delightful “Winter Song”;
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blond is nipp’d and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw
And birds sit brooding in the snow
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.”
