Why Stratford-upon-Avon is still the centre of Shakespearean tourism

Arriving at Stratford-upon-Avon on the morning of Good Friday this year, I was filled with apprehension that the day trip my friends and I had planned was going to be a washout. Storm Dave was building up over northern England, Wales and Scotland, threatening to dampen Easter with showers and windy conditions. Like Trinculo, a character in Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, I muttered under my breath: “another storm brewing; / I hear it sing in the wind.” I was reminded of how the first-ever jubilee in Shakespeare’s honour was washed away by a storm. In 1769, the London-based actor David Garrick agreed to a proposal by Stratford-upon-Avon’s municipal officers to organise a jubilee in honour of William Shakespeare.

The playwright was born in the small town, about 150 km northwest of London, in 1564. Though his exact date of birth is unknown, it is celebrated on 23 April, three days before his baptism at Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church on 26 April. Garrick had earned his reputation by performing in adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, and he drew upon jubilees and fairs common in 18th-century London to plan the Stratford event. “The programme included the composer Thomas Arne presiding over a performance of his oratorio Judith,” write cultural geographers John R. Gold and Margaret R. Gold in their book Festival Cities: Culture, Planning and Urban Life (2020), adding that the programming also comprised “cannonades, pealing bells, fireworks, a horse race for the Jubilee Cup, a ball, festive meals, masquerade, display of transparencies (lantern-lit allegorical illuminations), and a procession of 200 costumed Shakespearean characters.”

Stratford, however, was ill-equipped to host such a celebration: With only about 2,200 inhabitants, it did not have sufficient infrastructure. (Its current population is about 28,000, as per the 2021 UK Census). The town had only one inn, The White Lion, which hosted rural visitors for agricultural fairs. Stratford did not have a functioning sewage or drainage system, and its roads were unmetalled and poorly lit. The Jubilee’s organisers constructed a wooden rotunda to host events and whitewashed all the houses, but also added an “if weather permits” clause to the invitation cards, which would prove to be prophetic. The Jubilee started on Wednesday, 6 September 1769, with “the roaring of thirty canons ranged upon the banks of the Avon,” writes Shakespeare scholar Isabel Roome Mann.

Garrick was appointed Steward of the Jubilee by the municipal corporation. There was a public breakfast, the performance of the oratorio, dinner, fireworks, and an evening ball that went on till 3am. On the second day, Garrick’s ode was performed but by the time of the masquerade started in the evening, the weather intervened, and the Avon started to overflow its banks, flooding the streets of Stratford. The third and final day was a complete washout. The horse race had to be held on a flooded track, and the fireworks were a disappointment. The pageant of Shakespearean characters through the town streets had to be cancelled and many guests departed. Others found that there was no transport to take them back to London. The diarist James Boswell wrote: “After the joy of the Jubilee came the uneasy reflection that I was in a little village in wet weather and knew not how to get away.”

However, the Jubilee did serve the purpose of converting Shakespeare into a national symbol. As literature scholar Kate Rumbold writes in a 2012 paper, in narratives about the Jubilee, both by observers and commentators since then, “Shakespeare is elevated to an ethereal, transcendent place, seemingly beyond adequate description.” It gave rise to what the playwright George Bernard Shaw would derisively describe as “Bardolatory” — an excessive worship of Shakespeare.

For an English literature student like me, a trip to Stratford is an essential pilgrimage, and inclement weather was no dissuasion. The tickets we had purchased online allowed us entry into three of Shakespeare’s homes — his birthplace at Henley Street, the house he built after becoming rich and famous, and the cottage that belonged to his wife Anne Hathaway’s family. Tour guides at the first location informed us that Shakespeare’s father, John, was a successful glovemaker who also served in various civic roles — ale-taster, constable, alderman and high bailiff (equivalent to mayor). Visitors to the Tudor-era building on Henley Street where Shakespeare was born can visit various rooms on the two floors, including John’s shopfront, the kitchen, and bedrooms where the poet would have played with his siblings.

In the mid-19th century, the novelist Charles Dickens led a public campaign to buy the house in an auction, saving it from being purchased and shipped off to the US by showman P.T. Barnum. I was drawn to the bust of Rabindranath Tagore in the garden, which is engraved with both the Bengali script and the English translation of a poem Tagore wrote on Shakespeare in 1916.

Shakespeare s New Place, a five-minute walk from his father’s home, was a building he bought for £120 in 1597 when he was an established playwright in London. As the guide informed us, it was the largest house in town when he bought it, with 20 bedrooms. The house was torn down in 1702. Acquired by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 1876, the site now has elaborate gardens and sculptures. Paul Edmonson, Kevin Colls and William Mitchell chronicle the archaeological excavations carried out at the site in their 2016 book, Finding Shakespeare’s New Place: An Archaeological Biography. A study of smoking pipes found on the site shows traces of cannabis, sparking speculation that the Bard consumed marijuana. “Stratford-upon-Avon is still the centre of biographical Shakespearean tourism…,” Robert Ormsby and Valerie Clayman Pye write in Shakespeare and Tourism. “

This quest for the historical writer is arguably a form of time-travelling that expresses nostalgia for a bygone rural England in which the Shakespeare that visitors pursue is a young man in love who becomes a family man preoccupied with domestic affairs.” The town attracted nearly 2.5 million tourists before the pandemic, and though the numbers dipped slightly soon after, they have returned to pre-pandemic levels. By the time we started walking towards Anne Hathaway’s cottage in the neighbouring village of Shottery, the wind had picked up again. A short stroll through an open field became an exacting task. To keep up the spirit of my companions, I started telling them about Shakespeare’s literary feud with his contemporary, the writer Robert Greene.

In his 1592 pamphlet Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance, Greene advised his fellow playwrights (Christopher Marlowe, Robert Peele and possibly Thomas Nashe) against “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers… supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.” In recent years, scholars have expressed scepticism about Green’s pamphlet referring to Shakespeare at all. However, such stories are as much a part of the Shakespeare experience as the legendary mulberry tree that was given to him by King James I. Garrick was apparently presented with a wand from the wood of that tree, which attracted tourists even in the 17th century. In Stratford, myth and memory dissolve into each other, and nostalgia and scholarship exist side by side, as visitors retrace the well-trodden paths on which Shakespeare may have walked all those centuries ago.

Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist.