Category: 2012 – England and Scotland

This morning, I’m standing in front of William Shakespeare’s birthplace on Henley Street, waiting to buy a £21 ticket for all five properties in town run by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, including Hall’s Croft, Nash’s House and New Place, and two sites farther afield—Anne Hathaway’s Cottage and Mary Arden’s Farm—for which there’s a hop-on, hop-off sightseeing bus.

Shakespeare was born in a half-timber frame building with tan plaster walls, pointed gables, and diamond-paned windows—not terribly impressive in its own right in a city awash in Tudor homes, but because of its literary connection, this has been a tourist destination for more than 250 years, visited by the likes of Charles Dickens, John Keats, Thomas Hardy, and, of course, Washington Irving, who wrote of his visit during a “poetical pilgrimage” to Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1820. Even then, it was a “small mean-looking edifice of wood and plaster,” but one that was undoubtedly, he said, “a true nestling-place of genius.”

Irving was hardly the first to write about his visit. When the city of Stratford erected a statue to Shakespeare during a Jubilee celebration in 1769, the playwright David Garrick penned these fanciful lines in a lengthy “Ode”:

The fairies by moonlight dance round his green bed
For hallow’d the turf is which pillow’d his head.

The bed is indeed draped in a green coverlet to this day, but as I wander from room to room, it occurs to me that the house says more about those who admire Shakespeare than it does about the Bard himself; more, it would seem, about his reputation after death, than about his earliest years of life. Of that we know remarkably little, aside from the register of his baptism at Holy Trinity Church. Instead, what stands out here is the original window from what is traditionally thought to be the birthing room (in all honesty, historians have no idea in which room Shakespeare was born). The tiny panes of glass were covered with so much graffiti through the years—with so many etched names of ordinary visitors, as well as literary giants such as Sir Walter Scott and Alfred Lord Tennyson—that it had to be removed for safekeeping.  

Shakespeare is credited with coining a great many words and phrases in the English language, including these: “A plague upon both your houses,” “All that glitters is not gold,” and “As dead as a doornail,” later used so memorably by Dickens to describe old Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol. Standing here among the relics, I am reminded—just a bit—of a line from As You Like It: “Too much of a good thing.”

Outside in the garden, things are less hallowed, but far more lively. There are two actors performing scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and there is a small crowd of school kids dressed like characters in a Harry Potter book, with black jackets and red and yellow striped ties. When one of the men asks a question and a young girl raises her hand to answer, I’m reminded of Hermione Granger and think: “Five points for Gryffindor!”

The younger of the two actors has a sweet voice and tuft of ginger hair, and he turns and says:  

 If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding than a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And if I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friend,
And Robin shall restore amends.

We all applaud appreciatively. It’s a fitting cue to leave, so I walk to the corner and grab the sightseeing bus to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, which is just a ten minute ride down the road. This is the childhood home of Shakepeare’s wife and it’s a decidedly romantic place with climbing roses and a thick, thatched roof, and there is a sea of flowers spilling out across the yard. Oddly enough, I recognize it immediately because of a blue and white china plate I once bought at a small antique shop. For years, I used it every day for lunch until it finally broke.

Inside, the cottage is cramped and cozy, with a large open fireplace and a low-hanging ceiling supported by dark oak beams. In the hallway on the way out, there is a corkboard where visitors can leave a note behind that reflects on their visit. It reminds me of Juliet’s house in Verona, Italy, and I wonder if it’s covered with similarly inane commentary. It is! One slip of paper reads: “Zip, zip. Wisconsin, USA” and another, “Where is all the Batman stuff?” But my personal favorite is: “I am cool like sausages.” This one makes me burst out laughing. I suspect that William Shakespeare would turn over in his grave to see how we waste the English language today.

I hop back aboard the sightseeing bus and ride on to Mary Arden’s Farm and the adjacent Palmer’s Farm, where I break for lunch. I look over the menu and because I have no idea what it is and it intrigues me, I order the “Bay & cider infused pot roasted hot hog & pippin bap, sage seasoning with old English slaw.” I am somewhat disappointed to see it’s simply a hot pork sandwich with potato chips and rather conventional looking coleslaw, but it’s warm and satisfying nevertheless.

The farm is a lovely place to be, even on a dreary day. There’s a woman playing a flute, the heavy smell of charcoal embers, and a bevy of farm animals under foot—pigs, goats, sheep, chickens and geese. Nearby, a Falconer is demonstrating her technique with a barn owl. There’s even a group of schoolchildren roaming about in Tudor costumes. It feels as though I’ve stepped back in time.

I finish the afternoon back in Stratford-Upon-Avon with brief visits to Hall’s Croft, the home of Shakespeare’s daughter, Susannah, and her husband, and to Nash’s Hall, which rests alongside the foundations of New Place, the excavated site of Shakespeare’s final home on Chapel Street, long since demolished. Then, I wander down to the RSC and ride the elevator to the top of the tower to survey the town and the surrounding countryside. From here, I can spot the Legacy Falcon Hotel and the adjacent Guild Chapel, and when I look past the swans and the weeping willows along the River Avon, I see the spire of Holy Trinity Church rising high above a forest of green.

With some time left before dinner, I decide do a little shopping and buy a tiny silver mirror embossed with angels for my Mom at the Stratford Antique Centre on Ely Street. Then I make a loop, darting in and out of shops, and walk back along Henley, where there’s a street musician singing “In the Summertime.” You know the song. “Sing along with us, dee dee dee dee dee. Da da da da da, yea we’re hap-pap-py.” For the second time today, I actually laugh out loud. Why? Because it’s freezing cold in Britain, despite what the calendar says, and this poor woman is strumming her guitar while wearing a winter coat, hood, hat, and gloves! I drop a one pound coin into the open case at her feet. Surely, she’s earned it.

I explore some menu boards posted outside by local restaurants before selecting Vintner on Sheep Street for dinner. The breast of chicken I order is roasted in lime butter with mango and spinach, covered in a mild curry sauce, and served over basmati rice. It’s my best meal of the trip so far, and as I eat one delicious bite after another I thumb through a cute little book of Shakespearean insults I bought for my nephew in the gift shop at Nash’s House. It’s called The Bard’s Guide to Abuses and Affronts.

“Thou art as loathsome as a toad.”
“The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes.”
“Out of my sight! Thou dost infect my eyes.”
“I was searching for a fool when I found you.”
“I do desire we may be better strangers.”

I think about those lines later as I sit in the lounge of The Legacy Falcon and try in vain to connect my iPad to the hotel’s wireless router so that I can upload some pictures from the day’s events. There is no signal in my room and this has been an ongoing source of frustration. I talk to the clerk at the front desk. She is surly and seems to have heard the complaint before, but she insists that the hotel doesn’t advertise internet access, therefore I haven’t been deprived of anything I was promised.

Feeling challenged, I stomp back to my room and return with a printed copy of my reservation and point to where it says, very clearly: “Free! Wi-fi is available in the entire hotel and is free of charge.” She is unrepentant. She shrugs mildly and says nothing.

I doubt I could deliver a line with the same flourish as those actors in the garden this morning at Shakespeare’s birthplace, but perhaps with a little practice and small amount of daring, I might just say:

“There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune.”

I don’t, obviously. But I wish I had.