The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Thirty-Four What Shakespeare saw when he looked under Clopton Bridge

My friend the player Weston used to say in support of his Polesworth conjecture that Shakespeare never mentions Stratford in any of his writings. But that's not true.

If you stand on the eighteenth arch of Clopton Bridge (the one nearest the point where the road goes off to London), and if you watch the River Avon below when it is in flood, you will see a curious thing that Shakespeare saw.

The force of the current under the adjoining arches, coupled with the curve there is at that strait in the riverbank, produces a very queer and swirling eddy. What happens is that the bounding water is forced back through the arch in an exactly contrary direction.

I have seen sticks and straws, which I have just watched swirling downstream through the arch, brought back again as swiftly against the flood.

The boy Will saw this too. Here's how he describes it:

As through an arch the violent roaring tide

Outruns the eye that doth behold his haste,

Yet in the eddy boundeth in his pride

Back to the strait that forc'd him on so fast,

In rage sent out, recall'd in rage, being past:

Even so his sighs, his sorrows, make a saw,

To push grief on and back the same grief draw.

That's from The Rape of Lucrece, lines 1667-73. How many times must he have watched it, perhaps with tears in his bright eyes?

You can see the river behave like this at Stratford even on a calm day, but if you want to observe the full force of that saw-like eddy then choose a day with a violent roaring tide. At all events, here, my dears, we have something very particular and peculiar and right in the heart of his home town that William Shakespeare noticed.