The Early Residences of Mr. and Mrs. Shakespeare

August 30, 2008.  My daughter Pam and I are part of a Trafalgar tour of Britain, and our first major stop is the area about 80 miles northwest of London where William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway were born.  



The Henley Street house in Stratford Upon Avon where William Shakespeare was born and where he spent the early years of married life with Anne Hathaway.


Shakespeare was born in the Henley Street house in 1564.  When he was 18, he married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, and the couple lived there with Shakespeare's family.  Six months after the wedding, William and Anne's first child, a daughter, was born.  Two years later, they had twins, a boy and a girl.  Sometime between 1585 and 1592, Shakespeare went to London to seek work.  Once in London, Shakespeare returned to Stratford only occasionally until 1610 when he retired to Stratford and lived in a house that he had purchased for his family in 1597.  He lived there until his death in 1616.

Anne Hathaway was born and grew up about a mile from Shakespeare's birthplace in Shottery, Warwickshire.



Popularly known as Anne Hathaway's cottage, the house where Anne Hathaway was born and lived until her marriage, was part of a large farm owned by her father.


The grounds to the area, known as Anne Hathaway's Museum, are lovely and remind me of a favorite ecosystem back home.



The garden at Anne Hathaway's Museum is a profusion of color and growth in late August. With its chaotic look, the garden reminds me of prairies, one of my favorite ecosystems. 


The garden also gives me a warm reminiscence of childhood.


Hollyhocks bloom in the right foreground of the garden at the Anne Hathaway Museum.  As a child, I made a flower doll from hollyhocks by inserting the stem of a globular bud into the top of an inverted, bell-like bloom.  The bud served as head, and the bloom as the body wearing a flowing skirt.


The Museum grounds are so lovely that a photographer takes a picture of our tour group, which will give me a future memory of this day, this place, this trip to Britain.


Our tour group poses for a photo on the grounds of the Anne Hathaway Museum.  Of the 41 travelers on the tour, only four of us were from the US.  Most were from Australia and New Zealand, several from Canada, two from the UK, two from South Korea, and two from Malaysia.  With the exception of one person from Malaysia, everyone spoke English.  But what a riot of accents we heard from our tour mates. Also, the tour took us through quite a few different regions in Britain, which have different accents.  Despite hearing English all around us through the whole trip, Pam and I sometimes had trouble understanding our tour friends and the people servicing us. 

I am on the far right in the second row wearing a blue shirt.  Pam is right behind me.


As I visited the Shakespeare and Hathaway residences and learned more of Shakespeare and his family, I had an insight I'd never thought of before.  Although Shakespeare's father, a glove-maker, was town mayor for a time, both of Shakespeare's parents and his wife were illiterate.  Isn't it ironic that the family members closest to Shakespeare, the great purveyor of the English language, could not read and write the language?  Sounds like a plot for a tragedy or . . . a comedy.