Pope, Shakespeare and Literary Life at Billingbear

In August 1716 Alexander Pope wrote to his friend Thomas Dancastle that he was looking forward to returning to Binfield. He recalled the “quiet indolence, silence, and sauntering” of his life in Windsor Forest. Billingbear lay nearby, its historic enclosure extending into Binfield parish. The house still belonged to descendants of the ambassador Henry Neville.¹

A garden and a manuscript

On 7 October 1717, Thomas’s brother John Dancastle wrote to the poet’s father about white strawberry plants. His usual suppliers could not spare any, but he hoped to obtain some from “Mr. [Nevills ?] garden.” The brackets and question mark belong to the nineteenth-century edition of the letter. The Pope scholar Pat Rogers linked the name to the Nevilles of Billingbear, where Grey Neville had inherited the estate earlier that year.²

Thomas added a postscript telling the poet that his book was ready. Pope’s reply of 18 October asked for the fair copy of Book XIV of his Iliad, with Thomas to retain the original against loss, and acknowledged the strawberry plants. The same friends were helping his household and preparing his poetry for publication. The reply confirms receipt of plants but does not name the garden from which they came.³

Music also enlivened the Billingbear household. On 24 March 1706, the antiquary Thomas Hearne recorded that the recently married Grey Neville had engaged three musicians to entertain his wife at his father’s house for a fortnight or three weeks. One musician told Hearne of Sunday-night dancing and music lasting three or four hours. Hearne indignantly called this “chambering and wantonness”—a hostile account that nevertheless preserves a lively glimpse of the family’s entertainments.⁴

A Billingbear name in the Shakespeare edition

The subscriber list in Pope’s Shakespeare prints:

Henry Grey, Esq;

Henry Neville, Grey Neville’s younger brother, had adopted the surname Grey by Act of Parliament in 1707 under the terms of his maternal uncle’s will. He inherited Billingbear in 1723, two years before the edition appeared. The name and chronology fit, but the list gives no residence or other detail that would distinguish him from another Henry Grey.⁵

If this is the Billingbear owner, the entry would place a descendant of Henry Neville among the subscribers supporting Pope’s edition of Shakespeare. Establishing his identity would make this a direct connection with the edition, beyond the neighbouring households’ gardening exchange. It would not, by itself, establish that he supplied Pope with books or manuscripts.

Pope’s view of Shakespeare’s learning

Pope’s edition also deserves attention for what he wrote about the author. Its title advertised a text “Collated and Corrected by the former Editions.” In his preface, Pope challenged the familiar picture of an unlearned Shakespeare:

There is certainly a vast difference between learning and languages. How far he was ignorant of the latter, I cannot determine; but ’tis plain he had much reading at least, if they will not call it learning.⁶

He made the breadth of that knowledge explicit:

Nothing is more evident than that he had a taste of natural philosophy, mechanics, ancient and modern history, poetical learning and mythology: we find him very knowing in the customs, rites, and manners of antiquity.⁷

His Roman examples were particularly precise:

In Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, not only the spirit, but manners, of the Romans are exactly drawn; and still a nicer distinction is shown, between the manners of the Romans in the time of the former, and of the latter.⁸

Pope also rejected a double standard in judging Shakespeare’s use of classical sources:

The speeches copied from Plutarch in Coriolanus may, I think, as well be made an instance of his learning, as those copied from Cicero in Catiline, of Ben Jonson’s.⁸

For Pope, the reputation for ignorance partly arose from rivalry between the two writers’ admirers:

It is ever the nature of parties to be in extremes; and nothing is so probable, as that because Ben Jonson had much the most learning, it was said on the one hand that Shakespeare had none at all.⁹

Pope also questioned the report that Shakespeare scarcely blotted a line. He cited the differing versions of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V and Hamlet as evidence of revision. His editorial method compared earlier printed texts, recorded variant readings and marked passages he admired; passages he suspected were interpolations could be moved to the bottom of the page.¹⁰

Poems of the Billingbear Oak Walk

Billingbear’s grounds had their own place in poetry. John Whaley’s “Verses Wrote in the Oak-Walk at Billingbear in Berkshire,” published in 1745, opens:

Thou ever verdant, venerable shade,
Ye sacred oaks, by Time thus charming made,
More blest than those, the favourites once of Jove,
Eternal offspring of Dodona’s grove.¹¹

Edward Coxe returned to the Oak Walk in his Miscellaneous Poetry (1805). Dedicating the collection to Lord Braybrooke, he recalled that his first poems had been encouraged by “Mr. Neville, your late excellent Father” and that several early pieces were written at Billingbear. His “Inscriptions for the Grotto, At the end of the Oak Walk, at Billingbear” imagines woodland spirits among its ancient trees:

Then fancy sees, or seems to see,
Beneath each venerable tree,
Dryads and Hamadryads rove,
Along their consecrated grove:

Their song names the family as protectors of the grove:

For here the Nevilles and the Greys
Protection to the wood-nymphs raise;
Who hail the blest auspicious hour,
When first they chose this sacred bower.

It ends by promising further poetry:

And though ye can recall no more
Your Druid Bards’ prophetic lore,
Ye still the Poet shall inspire,
And harmonize the British Lyre!¹²

Pope’s chair at Audley End

The family’s later collection also included a chair attributed to Pope. In 1844 the Reverend Thomas Ashley, curate of Binfield, presented it to the third Lord Braybrooke at Audley End. An illustrated account published in 1860 reports a brass plate stating that Pope had given it to the nurse who attended him during his illness, and that Ashley obtained it from her descendants. The chair thus entered the Braybrooke collection a century after Pope’s death, carrying a local tradition of his ownership.¹³