We found the “Golden Lion” quite a comfortable hotel, and had a first-class tea there in the company of an actor from London, who, like ourselves, was exploring the country hereabouts, though perhaps from a different point of view, and who had a lot to tell us about Shakespeare and his plays.  He had been to a village named Bidford a few miles away where there was an old-fashioned inn, in the courtyard of which Shakespeare and his friends had acted his Midsummer’s Night Dream long before it appeared in London.  It was at that inn that Shakespeare on one occasion had too much to drink, and when on his way home to Stratford he lay down under a thorn tree to sleep off the effects; the tree was fenced round later on in memory of that rather inglorious event.  Although we were temperance men, we had to admit that the old inns where the stage-coaches stopped to exchange passengers and horses had a great attraction for us, and it was not without a feeling of regret that we found them being gradually closed throughout the country we passed through.  They had mostly been built after the same model, the gateway or door at the entrance being arched over and placed in the centre of the front of the hotel.  Through this archway the coaches, with passengers and luggage, could pass in and out, a door on each side of the entrance leading into different sections of the inn.  The yards of the inns were in the form of an oblong, generally roofed over, and along each side were the out-offices, storerooms, and stables, with a flat roof overhead, extending backwards as far as the bedroom doors, and forming a convenient platform for passengers’ luggage as it was handed on and off the roof of the coach.  The outside edge of the platform was sometimes ornamented with a low palisade, which gave the interior of the covered yard quite a pleasant and ornamental appearance.

[Illustration]

Such was the character of the inns that existed in the time of Shakespeare, and although sanitary regulations in later times required the horses to be provided for in stable-yards farther in the rear, very little structural alteration in the form of the inns had taken place.

The actor told us that in Shakespeare’s time nearly all the acting outside London and much within was done in the courtyards of these inns.  The actors travelled in two covered wagons or coaches, and when they arrived at the inn they were drawn into the inn yard, while two members of the party went out into the town or village vigorously beating a drum to announce the arrival of the actors, almost the entire resident population, men, women, and children, following them to the inn yard to listen to the play, which custom, he said, was referred to by Shakespeare in one of his plays in the passage: 

  The Actors have come and the rout are following!