D'Avenant was little more than ten when Shakespeare died,
and his direct intercourse with him was consequently slender; but
D'Avenant was a child of the Muses, and his slight acquaintance with
the living Shakespeare spurred him to treasure all that he could learn
of his hero from any who had enjoyed fuller opportunities of intimacy.
To learn the manner in which the child D'Avenant and his brothers came
to know Shakespeare is to approach the dramatist through oral tradition
at very close quarters. D'Avenant's father, a melancholy person who
was never known to laugh, long kept at Oxford the Crown Inn in Carfax.
Gossip which was current in Oxford throughout the seventeenth century,
and was put on record before the end of it by more than one scholar of
the university, establishes the fact that Shakespeare on his annual
journeys between London and Stratford-on-Avon was in the habit of
staying at the elder D'Avenant's Oxford hostelry. The report ran that
"he was exceedingly respected" in the house, and was freely admitted
to the inn-keeper's domestic circle. The inn-keeper's wife was
credited with a mercurial disposition which contrasted strangely with
her husband's sardonic temperament; it was often said in Oxford that
Shakespeare not merely found his chief attraction at the Crown Inn in
the wife's witty conversation, but formed a closer intimacy with her
than moralists would approve.
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