Stratford Upon Avon - Part One: A Shakespearean dissapointment.

Stratford-upon-Avon is a Warwickshire town dominated by the ghost of one man. William Shakespeare looms over everything, and there is perhaps a danger that the whole place will become a bit of a Shakespeare theme park. This would be a shame, because it's a rather beautiful place, with pretty Elizabethan streets and some esoteric little shops that would be worth a visit even if the Bard of Avon had hailed from somewhere else. Still,  I guess there are worse things for a town to base its economy on - although as you'll see, personally I think that might be a mistake.

I remember visiting Stratford as a young child, and thinking about it we must have been in the old two birth caravan that my dad had adapted to sleep four, although I can't for the life of me remember where we stayed on that occasion. I can't remember much about the town either, save for a vague image of a lot of timber framed houses. My first introduction to Stratford as an adult was driving through late on a Saturday afternoon trying to find somewhere to buy a telly*, and I quickly came to a couple of conclusions.

Firstly, in common with a lot of very old towns and cities (York and Warwick spring immediately to mind) Stratford was not designed for cars. Clearly that's largely because the street layout was decided on a long time before the automobile was invented but I think it's also true to say that there hasn't been much effort made to accommodate vehicular traffic in the years since the internal combustion engine became widespread.

Secondly, if you don't know the area finding anything is nigh on impossible. I'd been promised a "big Tesco, open 24 hours" where I was pretty sure I'd be able to find a small TV for a reasonable price. You would think that such a thing was easy to find - I mean, a massive superstore with its name emblazoned in huge red letters is a pretty tough thing to hide, wouldn't you think? Well, tough to hide it might have been, but the good people of Stratford seem to have managed it, because in the five nights we were in the area, I never did manage to track it down.

Still, as I took what appeared to be another wrong turn, I spotted a sign bearing the legend "Retail Park" and pointing in the direction I was already going, so I followed it and found a pretty big retail park sporting all of the usual massive chain stores. There I did indeed manage to find a small TV which I bore back to the caravan in triumph. I'm sure a proper travel writer would tell you the name of the retail park, and give you all some idea about where exactly on the edge of Stratford it might be located, but since I didn't note the name and was unable to find it again, I've begun to think of it as the "Brigadoon Retail Park". Besides, this blog isn't supposed to be giving you shopping tips.

Anyway. That was my first glimpse of Stratford itself. It wasn't until a couple of days later that we went in for a closer look. I don't know why, but I was expecting parking to be difficult. We arrived mid-morning having made a moderately late start - we were on holiday, after all! I figured that any parking that might be available in the centre of town would get snapped up early on, but we were very pleasantly surprised. Having done a couple of loops around the town to suss out where the car parks were, we decided to have a go at the Marina car park, by the side of the river a mere stone's throw from the Royal Shakespeare Company's theatre.  Six pounds covered the whole day, which seemed cheap enough** so we grabbed our stuff and set out to explore.

Stratford is, without question, really rather pretty. It is also rather compact, so walking around the centre of the town doesn't actually take very long and if you walk around Stratford for long enough you're going to end up outside Shakespeare's Birthplace on Henley Street. So it was with us. The house itself occupies rather a long frontage, and predictably sits directly opposite a souvenir shop.  the house is a rather imposing timber framed wattle and daub affair, of the type that would have been common back in the fifteen sixties when Shakespeare was born.

The entrance to the house, where Shakespeare grew up but did not live as an adult, is not through the doors that callers would have used when the Shakespeare family lived there. No, the Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust have built a new building alongside which, appropriately enough, put me in mind of the foyer of a modern theatre. We stood outside for a few minutes debating whether to fork out the obscenely high admission fee. We've had a discussion during the writing of this entry as to whether it was twelve pounds per person or fourteen pounds per person. We can't remember, and the website doesn't appear to tell you, so for the purposes of this blog I'm going to round the figure down to "too bloody much!"

We eventually concluded that visiting Stratford and not looking at at least one Shakespeare property would be silly, and starting at the beginning, with the birthplace, seemed to make sense. So, we took a deep breath, stepped inside and bought tickets for the grossly overpriced and massively disappointing attraction.

Damn, I've given away our verdict, haven't !?

To be fair, I don't know what I was expecting. I mean, when all's said and done, it's just a very old house. It's not even infused with the genius of his writing, nor could the walls tell of meetings between the Bard of Avon and the great actors of his day. Shakespeare's playwriting and acting career didn't really kick off until after he'd quit Stratford for London, and when he returned, rich and successful, he didn't go back to his birthplace, he had a swanky new house ("New Place", about which more later) built a few minutes' walk away.

The house on Henley Street was Shakespeare's Dad's house, and can tell us far more about how middle class merchants and artisans like John Shakespeare lived that it ever will about the glove maker's son. That shouldn't be a problem, mind you. I mean yes, the life and times of the greatest writer of his - and perhaps any - generation would be interesting, but the lives of ordinary people are interesting too.

The exhibition you must walk through to actually get to the house is well aware of its audience though, and mentions little about John Shakespeare and the larger Shakespeare clan. You start by gathering in a large alcove around a TV screen which seems to be showing "great moments from Shakespeare at the movies". I ground my teeth a little.

For a start I hate being told what I have to look at in a museum, and the reason you have to huddle around the telly in a little group is the fact that the doors to the next section of the exhibition are firmly closed, and won't re-open until the TV section has finished.  Seriously. There we were, grown adults blessed with reasonable intelligence, but we're not allowed to look at anything else until we've seen some out of context clips from some other people's interpretations of some Shakespeare plays.

The clips were of well known actors taken from excellent film versions of the well known Shakespeare plays, and they delivered them as brilliantly as you might expect. But by presenting them in this "famous quotations from Shakespeare" manner the museum reduces Shakespeare to nothing more than a "quote generator". This debases Shakespeare's work and by taking  away the context of the story reinforces the idea that if you can spout off the occasional one-liner, you "know" Shakespeare in some way.

Shakespeare is about story. Take that away and it's meaningless***.

Still. Eventually the montage of random clips came to an end and the we were permitted to proceed, past what was perhaps the only really interesting thing in the room, a case holding a small gold ring, found nearby and engraved with the initials WS. Could that ring have once adorned the hand of William Shakespeare? We will of course never know, but you can't help being tantalised by the possibility of a physical connection between then and now.

You then move through into another room which features some artefacts associated with the domestic life of the Shakespeare family, and wider life in Stratford, including the base of the old market cross where John Shakespeare might have stood to sell gloves. Then the next set of doors opens and you move on to a third room, where you are treated to a video presentation about Shakespeare's life, times and work narrated by (I think) the noted Shakespearean actors Dame Judi Dench and Patrick Stewart. It's not at all bad, and best of all there's a copy of the First Folio in a case below the screen.

Finally, at long last, the final set of doors open and you step out into the garden, and then into the parlour of John and Mary Shakespeare's house. It's a small room, with an uneven flagged floor, a few sticks of furniture and a helpful guide who welcomed us to Shakespeare's birthplace and explained a bit about what we would see while we were there. At least, I assume that's what he did. If I'm honest I don't remember a single thing he said - I was paying attention, I really was, but none of it stuck.

So, we moved on, down a rather narrow corridor into a spacious and well lit room with a work bench in one corner, many animal pelts and hides, and a small, quietly spoken little man wearing Elizabethan dress in the corner.  His job was to explain a little bit about the art of glove making, and the way business would have been conducted in John Shakespeare's day. I have to say, he was just a little bit creepy - I think it was the way he didn't appear to blink even once during his presentation. We moved on, venturing up a narrow wooden staircase - which the nice young man in the parlour had told us was original**** - and began to explore the upper floors.

There were three rooms upstairs. One, which would originally have been the bedroom for the Shakespeare girls (because it was furthest away from the fire...) was dedicated to a sort of timeline display which detailed the history of the house as a tourist attraction. It seems that the building was revered by many even while it was a private house. I couldn't help wondering what the tenants who followed John and Mary made of it all. The centrepiece of this room is the window that used to reside in the room where Shakespeare was actually born. In days past, when vandalism was more derigour, it seems to have been the fashion to scratch your name into the glass - presumably because visitors felt the house should have a souvenir of them. A kind of reverse gift shop, I suppose. Close inspection rewards the visitor with a veritable who's who of nineteenth century letters. Dickens, Twain, Wordsworth, they're all there. The cult of Shakespeare has deep roots, it would seem.

 The middle upstairs room is the room where the Shakespeare boys would have slept, although I'm going to hazard a guess that the walls looked considerably different then, because if young William and his brothers had the decor currently installed there is no way they got any sleep. The very helpful guide in the room explained that the walls had been covered with painted canvas fabric to a design that was contemporary with the house. Basically the fabric had been painted white, and then designs from mythology had been painted on in black. The result was, well, I think I'm going to go with "striking". The guide explained that the design was based on fragments of decoration that had been discovered in an Elizabethan pub, which explained a lot. She also opined that in her view such a design would have been hung not in the bedroom, but in the parlour as a talking point. "Far too expensive for a bedroom" she declared, although she was quick to add "of course, that's just my opinion" - presumably in case the archaeology police were listening. We were inclined to agree with her, mind you. Her theory made much, much more sense.

And so we moved on, into the final upstairs room. The master bedchamber. The room where William Shakespeare was born. And presumably conceived, if you think about it. The room seemed to me to be long and thin - almost corridor like. There was a fire - which we were informed in Shakespeare's day had to be doused to embers at eight every evening, in common with all domestic fires in Stratford, such was the Elizabethan fear of fire. Such fear made perfect sense of course, densely packed towns made mostly of wood and thatch catch fire with remarkable ease.

There was also a small crib, and a bed - small by modern standards but which in the 1560s would have qualified as a double, and a sort of pallet bed that slotted neatly underneath it and would have been used by whichever Shakespeare children were too big for a crib but not yet old enough to be trusted with an unsupervised candle. It was all rather strangely Ikea. There was no mention by the guide as to whether this was the famous "second best bed" that Shakespeare left to his wife in his will, but I suspect that it was not. This, after all, was not his house...

From the bedroom we descended another staircase into the gardens of the house. There we found a pair of actors who, at some mysterious but presumably prearranged signal would introduce a short passage of Shakespeare's work, and then perform it to whichever members of the public happened to be passing. I was in two minds. I mean the actors were good enough at what they did, and unlike the pointless video soundbites at the entrance to the museum they did at least try to put their speeches into context. It was still an oddly sterile environment for the work of the Bard, and if I'm honest, it did not seem that the actor's hearts were in it.

A quick turn around the gardens, which were nice, but nothing really remarkable, led us to the exit turnstile, which led up not into the freedom of Henley Street, but into the house next door, which also happened to be the Museum gift shop. We spent a few minutes poking through the predictable tat, and found nothing worth buying. An so, finally, we stepped back onto Henley Street feeling mildly miffed. It's not that the Shakespeare's Birthplace Museum was awful - it wasn't. But it did all seem a little, well, uninspiring. Add to that the fact that as a couple we'd spent as much on visiting this museum for a couple of hours as we had on visiting Warwick Castle  - just a few miles down the road - all day, well. Ultimately it was weighed, it was measured, and it was found wanting. I certainly wouldn't bother going again.

At that moment of course, we had more pressing matters to concern ourselves with. It was lunchtime, and we needed food. More on that - and the rest of the afternoon in Stratford in the next post. Suffice to say that the day improved, a good lunch was eaten and another of Shakespeare's houses made amends for the place of his birth.

See you next time!

*There were special circumstances. More on that in a future post.

**Now, I know I made a fuss about paying exactly the same charge for parking at Warwick Castle in an earlier post, but this is different. Nobody was going to charge us for walking around Stratford.

***Sorry about the rant. In my day job I'm an English teacher in a large urban secondary school. I love Shakespeare, but am firmly of the believe that if you're not going to do his work properly - which requires the context of the story at the very least - it's better not to bother.

****It's the only thing I can remember him saying.