Harvard and the Bard

Just imagine that you are a well-to-do Elizabethan butcher and Puritan sympathiser living in Stratford-upon-Avon. After fires gut the town, you build yourself a smart, three-storey timber frame house at 26 High Street. You pay craftsmen to decorate the oak exterior with fine carvings of what look like a hunting dog and a woman’s face. You cut your initials into the wood over the door. A year later, a fellow townsman and London commuter named William Shakespeare buys a house 100 metres away and becomes your neighbour. There’s one more detail: your daughter marries a London butcher and has a son who will turn out to be even more of a Puritan zealot than you are and go on to found – or rather fund – Harvard University. Sound like fiction? It all happens to be fact.

Tucked away on High Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, the town of Shakespeare’s birth, is a narrow and perfectly preserved timber frame Tudor house. The exterior does feature elaborate carvings, along with the date, 1596, when the house was built. The owners, Thomas and Alice Rogers, whose initials are inscribed into the wood, actually were Shakespeare’s neighbours. They also had another claim to fame: they were the grandparents of John Harvard, the first benefactor of the university that bears his name. In other words, Harvard House, at 26 High Street, serves a dual purpose: it is the best surviving example of a Tudor tradesman’s house in Stratford, and it also offers startling proof that America’s best-known Puritan extremist and England’s most tolerant humanist shared roots on the same street.

John Harvard is more commonly associated with the London Borough of Southwark, where he was born in 1607. This area just south of the River Thames was where the Globe Theatre was built (and is where the FT’s headquarters are based today). It is said that Harvard got his Puritan sympathies from his father, who was a radical alderman at the local church (now Southwark Cathedral). In 1637, after losing five family members to the plague, and picking up a degree from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Harvard boarded a ship bound for Massachusetts. He died just a year after he arrived, though fortunately for the university, he managed to verbally will 400 books and half of his estate to a two-year-old religious college nearby. (It was promptly renamed.)

America’s best-known Puritan extremist and England’s most tolerant humanist shared roots on the same street

However, the money that helped found Harvard College, now celebrating its 375th anniversary, was actually made possible by funds left to John Harvard by his mother, Katherine Rogers Harvard. She grew up at 26 High Street in Stratford – a stone’s throw from Shakespeare’s New Place, bought just a year after Harvard House was built and known as “the second-largest house in town”.

Harvard House was once a substantial property. It was rebuilt after fires in 1594 and 1595 destroyed both sides of High Street. The earlier structure was wider: it originally joined the neighbouring houses at 27 and 28, but was split into its own separate building almost a century after it was completed. Connecting doors were stuffed with a mixture of straw and mud, and a new front door was added. “We can tell Harvard House was separately lived in by the 1670s by looking at the hearth-tax returns,” says Robert Bearman, editor of the recently published Minutes and Accounts of the Stratford-upon-Avon Corporation, 1599-1609.

Unlike the façades of nearby buildings, Harvard House is relatively unchanged from its original state. The house was the only structure on High Street to escape the fashionable brickwork, plastering and stucco render that smothered so much of Stratford’s Tudor architecture throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

The outer woodwork of the house, says Bearman, “is unique to the town. It’s the only house that has studwork of this detail.” The ornate carvings are mostly intact. A bull’s head identifies the original homeowner’s trade. And the vivid face above the entrance is framed by what look like wooden curls. The face is now mutilated, but it is believed to have once resembled Elizabeth I.

Inside, much of the interior architecture is also authentic. Supporting oak beams on the ceiling and side walls retain their gloss. The ground floor is a single area, although it is likely that it was once used as the commercial part of the property and divided into two separate rooms. “The front part was probably used as the shop. The living quarters would have been at the rear,” says Bearman. Upstairs, a front parlour room features original wooden panelling. Over the fireplace is an overmantel, which is decorated with plaster emblems that include a lion and a Tudor rose. “It’s all very patriotic. I think this is a piece of original and crude Tudor plastering. It’s not terribly skilled,” explains Bearman. Would the interior plasterwork in Shakespeare’s house, New Place, have been more elaborate? “We don’t know. Shakespeare’s house no longer exists. At the moment, it’s the site of an archaeological dig.”

New Place did not age gracefully. After Shakespeare’s death in 1616, the building had several owners, one of whom decided to tear down the building in the 1750s after becoming irritated by hordes of visiting Shakespeare fans. But no pilgrims turned up at Harvard House. Its origins remained anonymous and it was nicknamed the “Ancient House” due to its successful avoidance of High Street makeovers.

Marie Corelli, the bestselling Edwardian novelist and Stratford resident, picked number 26 out of obscurity in 1907, convincing a Chicago businessman, Edward Morris, to renovate and donate the house to Harvard University (which had long since softened its mission of churning out religious hard-liners). At the same time, work began along High Street to try and recreate the original Tudor flavour. Brick and plaster were stripped away in search of authentic exteriors; timber fronts and gables were constructed to reclaim the architectural unity. By then Stratford had become a shrine to Shakespeare, whose actual birthplace was just around the corner on Henley Street.

Given the proximity of their houses, did the Rogers (and then the Harvards) know Shakespeare? “I’m sure they would have known each other as you would expect of any prominent figures in a small town,” says Bearman. “Rogers was a leading townsman and so was Shakespeare. There is no evidence, though, of personal friendship.”

Still, the records reveal some fascinating ties. John Harvard’s parents were married in 1605 in the same Stratford church, Holy Trinity, where Shakespeare was buried 11 years later; a witness to the Harvard marriage was also a witness to Shakespeare’s will. According to John Benson, collections archivist at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, “Katherine Rogers was baptised in the church three months before William and Anne’s twins Judith and Hamnet.” There are also intriguing south London links. Philip Henslowe, a colleague of Shakespeare and co-owner of the Globe Theatre, was an alderman at Southwark Cathedral at the same time as John Harvard’s father. And John Harvard’s baptism was recorded in the same church just months after the death of Shakespeare’s brother Edmund. Some have even suggested that the Shakespeare brothers introduced John Harvard’s father – a Southwark butcher – to Katherine Rogers, the daughter of a Stratford butcher. They all certainly came from the same commercial class.

Yet just as likely as neighbourly warmth was some hostility, at least on the part of the Rogers and Harvards, towards Shakespeare’s profession, the theatre. In 1602, the Stratford Corporation banned all plays from the Stratford premises: “At a time when the London Puritans were clamouring for the closing of theatres, the Stratford Corporation issued a ban on performances,” says Benson. The initial fine of 10 shillings shot up to an extraordinary 10 pounds in 1612. “It was a lot of money,” says Benson, “about £1,000 in today’s value.” As a member of the Corporation, John Harvard’s grandfather “probably voted for it,” says Bearman.

So why did Shakespeare stay on in Stratford, with its budding Puritanism? “His family was there,” says Bearman. “He also bought more than 100 acres of land outside of Stratford and a share in church tithes that alone would have brought him 60 pounds a year, three times the annual wage of the schoolmaster.” Would disapproval from the neighbours have bothered Shakespeare? “It probably wouldn’t have upset him too much. As a man of substance, there is also evidence of his being courted by the Corporation for town projects. He was a likely property investor.”

Annie Maccoby Berglof is a trustee of Harvard House, which is owned by Harvard University and maintained by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

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High Street today

Like Harvard House, the timber frame Tudor buildings on High Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, were built after fires destroyed many of the buildings in the mid-1590s. The houses usually included ground floor shops and shared building materials.

“They are green oak-framed buildings,” says Chris Edwards, a London-based construction expert. “Builders would have cut down the oak locally, put in big timber pegs and mortise and tenon joints. They would have filled in the external walls with wattle and daub – a mixture of straw, clay and horsehair that gave substance to the walls and insulated the buildings. Exteriors were often left unpainted which gave them a natural look.”

When early 20th-century restorers stripped off the brick and plaster that had covered the Tudor timber, they turned up surprising details: at 2324, now a pizza restaurant, builders unearthed a large, weird- looking face. Some exteriors, like the one at Garrick Inn at 25, were completely recreated to ensure the Tudor look.

Many High Street structures, however, are authentic, with ground floor commercial areas still in use 400 years later: 17 and 18 host an outdoor adventure shop; at 30 is an electric goods store; and at 2728, once part of Harvard House, is the restaurant Foxy Browns.

This article is subject to a correction and has been amended