NOW I am in LOVE with London.... because it is only two hours away from heaven: Stratford Upon Avon. My pilgrimage into Shakespeare Country was via the overland train from Marylebone Station (a short tube ride from home). I was moved to tears by the beautiful moist sheep-speckled pastures in arrays of brilliant greens -yes I realise the lush vibrance is the result of all that bloody rain, but I'm in love. I want a house in the country with a herb garden, a puppy dog (as well as the 5 cats)... And then I'll just have to take a short stroll in to work at the RSC...
Hedge-lined paddocks with splatterings of butter-yellow flowers, bushes of bursting blossoms, cute cottages in tudor style, overflowing gardens and friendly homely people. Perfect.
A 10 minute bus-ride out of central Stratford, I settled into the youth hostel, a gorgeous old Georgian manner called Hemmingford House, with happy-to-help staff, decent rooms and good breakfasts included (scrambled eggs and croissants). Then I headed out to roam about the rurality. Once in town, I had a quick coffee at Mistress Quickly's on Henley Street - Shakespeare's street!, tasted some "traditional" fudge, then hopped on the city sightseeing tour to get my bearings, and a running commentary to go with it. I do enjoy the cute extra tid-bits the tour bus guides add to general information of places. I'm not sure they're all true, but I'll include a few here, unverified, because I like 'em.
The name Stratford Upon Avon comes from the Latin Strat (street) crossing Ford (river), and Avon is Celtic for river. And so you have a street crossing a river on a river. In fact, the bridge over the river is actually the original bridge built in 1490 (scary when you are in a big tour bus). Oh but Stratford Upon Avon is sooo much more than that!
As we drove through the quaint town it was noted that only one building within the town centre still has a thatched roof, aptly named the Old Thatch Tavern, which somehow escaped the ban on thatch rooves because they posed a serious fire-hazard, but more on thatch later...
First stop, at Will's birthplace house on Henley Street, I took a slow walk through the Shakespeare museum absorbing as much as possible. This is all looked after by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Amongst many wonderful preserved artifacts from the man himself and his life and times, there was a displayed glass-panel window- the original window. It was replaced in the wall at some point during restoration on the house, but kept for posterity. It bears the signatures of hundreds (maybe thousands?) of other visitors who earlier made a similar pilgramage to mine in visiting the origins of the great Bard. The clear-glass was cluttered to a frost appearance by the squiggles of the likes of poets and writers John Keats and Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and the great actress Ellen Terry (thinking of you Emily!) to name but a few. A sign below the window indicated that the glass also beheld the scratching mark of my great ancestor (WARNING: name-dropping ahead) the famous Shakespearian actor, Sir Henry Irving, but I could not find his signature amongst the multitudes. So I asked the room attendant/guide if she knew which one it was and if she might be able to point it out to me. She promptly began to tell me that FAR more important people had been to this holy Shakespeare shrine than little old insignificant Sir Henry. And that he hardly impacted on the birthing room's historical fame. There was impressive back-pedalling when I explained I simply was hoping to see Uncle Irvings handwriting...
Hmph.
On to Anne Hathaway's House... Anne at 26 and 3 months pregnant married the 18-year-old William Shakespeare. Go Anne with her younger man! Their families were friends for some time. In the parlour we were shown the small bench where Will and Anne would have sat during courtship, and no doubt Shakespeare spoke beautiful poetry to woo her and clinched the deal with a perfect rhyming couplet. The guide in Anne Hathaway's kitchen explained how the term curfew came about - meaning cover the fire; It was the woman's job to cover the fire of an evening so that the house, thatch roof and all, didn't catch alight in the night. A man was entitled to beat his wife if she failed this duty so long as the beating stick was no thicker than his thumb. This being the rule of thumb. The term pot luck came from the standard daily meal of stew in the Elizabethan kitchen to which each day, random veges or meats were added to top it up. This could continue for over a week or so, all being stirred through, thus your dinner could be a rabbit bum from last friday or a fresh potato of the day, depending on pot luck. This scrumptious stew was served with bread at a board propped up on trestles. This board had a polished side for display but was turned to the rough side for dining. It was a multipurpose board, used for farming and other business meetings overseen by the chairman of the board, for playing cards where hands had to be kept above board, and several houses would drag their boards outside to create a makeshift stage for travelling players to tread the board... Are you board of this? Okay, I stole that last cheesy joke from the guide too.
The gardens around the house were fabulous, and apart from the visual pleasure they gave, they also probably helped to drown out the human stench, as the Elizabethans only bathed once a year. They apparently had a fear of water somehow associating it with witches, I can't remember this one exactly.. but I am inclined to believe they were just too darn cold. Anyway, this tardyness in hygiene led to the pretty tradition of brides holding bouquets on their wedding day, clearly to sweeten the marital rights.

A few miles out of town at the stunning Mary Arden's house (Shakespeare's mum), the thatched roof was under repair as we pulled up in the big red tour-bus. These thatch roofs, like modern roof, don't last forever and required fixing or replacing sometimes. They often had little patterns on the tops of them which were the thatchers signature. These thatchy shelters are, apparently, responsible for the invention of the four-poster bed. The cover over the top of the bed supposedly prevented rats from dropping through the roof on to you as you slept. I guess they also stopped rats' droppings from raining down on you aswell. Or to protect from raining cats and dogs...
The Forests of Arden (famous in As You Like It) were at the edge of the property owned by Mary's father, Robert Arden, and it is from them the family name was derived. They are now largely depleted because of the building of houses. And thatched rooves. The branches of the Arden Forests were collected by the workers of the town; whatever they could reach and pull down with their farming impliments by hook or by crook, they were allowed to keep.
Because I had a matinee to attend, my tour of Mary's house was in fast forward, which was a shame as their was heaps to see there on the two functional farms, including a falconry display, and the staff were all dressed in period costume and actually operating the farms in period manner. Candles had been made of pork fat as beeswax was rare and expensive in the era, and I even missed out on seeing a rabbit being traditionally prepared for consumption. Damn. I skipped the maze-garden too, as I didn't want to get lost and be late for the RSC. I also didn't have time to meet the farm's bull, King Lear. Or was it King Leer? Next time.

Another particularly gorgeous building I saw in the town was Mason's Court (good name too) which is one of the oldest residential houses in Stratford, having been there since the 1400s. There was apparently less windows on houses in Shakespeare's time than there are today as there was once a tax on windows for some mad Elizabethan reason, so many were bricked up, giving rise to the term daylight robbery. Hall's Croft is another 'Shakespearean' house I didn't enter so will have to visit when next in town (or when I'm living down the road). Dr John Hall was married to Shakespeare's daughter, Susannah. They gave birth to Shakespeare's only grandaughter, Elizabeth.
One of Dr John Hall's remedies as a medical practitioner of his time would have been to treat patients with sore throats by dangling a frog down the afflicted's throat. More afflicted- the poor frog, in panic, would hiss and spit (wouldn't you?) and the spit it would release contained antiseptic. Hence the saying having a frog in your throat I like that one). Shakespeare's school still remains by the Guild Chapel, and the site of Will Shakespeare's retirement house called New Place is attached to the still standing Nash House, which belonged to wealthy property owner Thomas Nash, who married Elizabeth. Nash House is also on the to-do list for next time/ when I live there.

Shakespeare died of fever on April 26, 1616 aged 52. Legend has it that he actually died of drink. Under the weather with a fever, he still felt inclined to celebrate his birthday so hit the town hard with his mates.. and passed away three days later.
I cried tears of gratitude at the burial place of the Bard. Beautiful architecture and stain-glass windows, Shakespeare's grave is 17 feet below the Holy Trinity Chapel. The site has a curse on it to scare off anyone planning to move his bones: Coffin recycling was common practice in Will's time but he didn't want a bar of it. As depicted in the famous gravedigger scene in Hamlet "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio", old bones like Yorick's skull, were removed from a coffin to make room for a fresh corpse. The bones were then burnt on a bone-fire or bonfire.
Unfortunately the plague hit Stratford around the time of William's birth. Believed to have begun in the Garrick Inn, the words were inscribed on it's door: hic incepit pestis "here is the beginning of the plague" in July 1564 when Will was 3 months old. When one died from the plague, their body was wrapped in a bag and dumped in the street, while the house where it came from was locked from the outside for the proceeding 40 days to contain what plague-germs were still amongst the household. Those dead in the street were gathered by some poor soul in the middle of the night, or in the dead of the night, and taken to be dumped in the Plague Pits and covered with lime.
When someone had died -and I'm talking about from causes other than the plague now- the body was laid on a table in the centre of a room while friends and family ate and drank around it over a couple of days, just in case the person was only sleeping heavily and decided to awake. Indeed, they held a wake. (wait, it gets better...) Sometimes they hadn't waited long enough before putting the body to rest in the earth. This was realised when the aforementioned coffin-recyclers discovered finger-nail scratches on the internal walls of the coffins, the marks of desperation from those who'd awoken to find themselves buried alive! So the Elizabethans instigated the practice of tyeing a string from the wrist of the assumed dead person to a bell which would sit above ground at the grave site. If heard ringing by whomever was on the graveyard shift, one was able to be saved by the bell (told you).