Henry Wallis’s “The Room in Which Shakespeare Was Born.” On the floor, apparently.
Wednesday, April 30th, 2014
The English Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Wallis (1830-1916) painted “The Room in Which Shakespeare Was Born” in 1853. It now hangs at London’s Tate Gallery. The Shakespeare home on Henley Street was described in an 1843 biography by Charles Knight (1842), who commented on “the mean room, with its massive joists and plastered walls, firm with ribs of oak.” Wallis also took to heart Knight’s passage describing “hundreds amongst the hundreds of thousands by whom that name is honoured have inscribed their names on the walls of the room.” Apparently, however, the bard must have been born on the floor. Motherhood was hard in those days.
