Hullo blokes! Sorry for the delay in blog posts. My last two weeks in England and Egypt turned out to be rather hectic. However never fear! Although summer is almost over, you still have a few more posts coming up to entertain you at work or in class…
The first weekend of August my sister and I traveled to Stratford Upon Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace. As I am taking a Shakespeare class this semester, it seemed like the perfect trip. To truly capture the English spirit, we stayed at a quaint bed and breakfast, the Moonraker Inn. For my fellow James Bond fans out there, yes, it is indeed named for the excellent installation in the 007 saga. Decorating the walls were two sketches, one of Pierce Brosnan and another of Sean Connery. The rooms of the Inn are named for characters from Shakespeare plays. Our room was the Oberon suite (Oberon being the Fairy King from A Midsummer Night’s Dream). How the proprietor decided upon a combination James Bond/Shakespeare bed and breakfast I have no idea, but I stamp the business with my seal of approval.
Over the course of the weekend we visited a number of sites associated with the Shakespeare Trust, starting with Shakespeare’s Birthplace. In 1564, Shakespeare was born in a moderately sized cottage in Stratford Upon Avon. Inside, the building is furnished with furniture from the time period. For instance, the beds were quite small, as Shakespeare was born into a family of midgets. Well, that is what they thought for a while, until they exhumed the graves and discovered average sized (by today’s standards) skeletons. Now historians believe that the 4 foot long beds meant that everyone slept sitting up for safety reasons. One of my favorite features of the house was the “wallpaper”: something like a cross between paper and a tapestry, it consists of linen that was hung and then painted by hand. Unlike modern wallpaper, it is not stuck on or mass produced in a factory. I guess that makes each one a collector’s item. (Even more so if it is from Shakespeare’s home.) Further along in the house was Shakespeare’s father’s workroom where he produced leather gloves and purses. Unfortunately my sister who is bound for Parson’s Fashion Design School in New York became overly excited and commandeered my camera to take pictures of every glove and purse in the room while babbling about purses on belts. “Let’s go to another house…” I said.
Next we ventured to New Place, appropriately named as it was where Shakespeare lived from 1597 until his demise in 1616. New Place featured many assorted period pieces in museum fashion, as well as a trivia section. One question asked: “Is Shakespeare the most translated author in the world?” Of course, I thought. Who else would it be? L. Ron Hubbard (the founder of Scientology) apparently. I do not wish to know if this is accurate as I would rather pretend it is a disturbing piece of misinformation. In the courtyard of New Place there was an archeological dig taking place. Hey! I did one of those! I should talk to the excavators and show off my knowledge of archeology, I thought. So I wander up to some of the guys doing screen tests and sorting cultural materials and inquire which size screen they are using. “Um…I dunno, we’ve never done this before,” they respond. Maybe I could have gotten a job excavating Shakespeare’s homestead. Dang. Across the street from New Place was the church in which Shakespeare was buried and where he and his children were baptized.
Both Hall’s Croft and Anne Hathaway’s House featured lovely gardens. The Hall’s Croft was the home of a physician who Susanna Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s eldest daughter) married. On the dining table were vials of yellow bile, black bile, and blood. Usually I expect salad dressing, salt and pepper, olive oil, hot sauce…but I guess it was a different time. The back garden was filled with various medicinal plants used by Susanna’s husband to treat patients. Anne Hathaway, for those not familiar with the elusive life of William Shakespeare, was his beloved wife. Interestingly, Shakespeare impregnated Anne and the two were wed in what may have been a shotgun wedding, but without the shotgun as such technology did not exist at the time. Her home was nice, but the ceilings were a tad low. However the accompanying grounds and gardens made up for the lack of headroom. Here we wandered through the Shakespeare garden, complete with a maze and an orchard of every tree mentioned in a Shakespeare play along with a plaque featuring the quote in which said tree name was used. This really helped to explain the quotes, for instance “Those thoughts to me were oaks, to thee like osiers bowed” from “Love’s Labour Lost.” The osier leaves are long and thin and seem to bow to the onlooker. My sister got mad at me for taking pictures of all the trees and their respective plaques. “It’ll come in handy for my Shakespeare class,” I retorted.
Apart from the homesteads, we also saw three plays in three days. The first was in London on the way to Stratford, Kevin Spacey’s Richard III at the Old Vic. I had never thought of Kevin Spacey as a Shakespearean actor, however he absolutely nailed the performance. It was a revised version of the original set in an ambiguous but generally modern time period. The script was largely unchanged, but the settings were altered. The opening scene was Richard sitting in a chair watching the news on a flat screen TV. Whenever the “general public” was featured, they were all holding onto the ceiling-mounted hand rails in the Underground and reading newspapers. Spacey’s performance, going from passive to manic in seconds, and the entire re-envisioning of the play were phenomenal. The next day we say the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Macbeth. Again, there were some interesting changes made. Gone were the famous witches and the “bubble, bubble, toil and trouble” lines, replaced by creepy small children lowered in on nooses, eerily calling out “Macbeth! Macbeth!” Macbeth by RSC and Spacey’s Richard III were definitely the most fantastic plays I have ever seen, ranking up there with the Globe Theatre productions I saw earlier this year. Finally, we saw a very campy production of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Neither my sister nor I had read the novel or seen a play or movie of the work. I was thus very surprised about the drug overtones regarding the potion which Dr. Jekyll takes. Furthermore, I did not expect such a heavy influence of prostitution in the story. That is all I will give away for the sake of those readers who may want to check out this classic piece of literature in some form. Although not as highbrow as the previous plays we had seen that weekend, it was a nice break to see a campy production in a small venue.
Also in at the Royal Shakespeare Company theater was a few fun exhibits. One featured various art pieces such as a page of PDFs titled after Shakespeare’s plays, a vibrant multi-colored creation with caricatures of Johnny Rotten and Richard III saying “Same Thing,” and a picture of the Globe Theater as if it is being constructed of popsicle sticks. A different room in the theater complex is currently being covered in icing creations to commemorate the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 50th birthday. This display was pretty sweet. Get it?
Tune in soon for more adventures including the conclusion of my Cambridge program, more plays, and Egypt…until then have a wonderful last week or so of vacation, and stay classy.