Stratford-Upon-Avon, Warwickshire, United Kingdom
Shakespeare’s Birthplace I realise even as I write this that I too often proclaim that somewhere I’ve visited is not somewhere that I wanted to go. But here we go again. Shakespeare’s House is actually an assembled group of his birthplace, Mary Arden’s, Anne Hathaway’s House (and if I need to tell you who that is, you have no business going there), Nash Place/New House (on the grounds where the house stood in which Shakespeare died) and Hall’s Croft.
We spent almost all of our time in his birthplace and in Anne Hathaway’s cottage, and in truth it was very informative and highly enlightening. Of course I had read Shakespeare and knew the basics, but coming to Stratford in general, and especially to these two homes, gives you more of a perspective of him as man and how that shaped him into the artist we know and revere today.
Anne-Hathaways-Cottage
For me, it brought to life the context of the time period in which he wrote and how very forward thinking his writings were at the time.
His cheekiness in this aspect was enough on its own to endear him to me further, and in fact motivated me to re-read many of his works I had many years ago dismissed. Oddly these two houses are my favourite parts of the Shakespeare aspect of Stratford, but one word to the wise: it is not a place for small tired children. At one point whilst upstairs in his birthplace I heard a lady shout, only to look over and see that my small son had climbed behind the rope and into the cot in which Shakespeare himself was said to have slept as a baby.
Busy, busy, busy