Book description
Anyone who has paid the entry fee to visit Shakespeare's Birthplace
on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon-and there are some 700,000 a
year who do so-might be forgiven for taking the authenticity of the
building for granted. The house, as the official guidebooks state, was
purchased by Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, in two stages in
1556 and 1575, and William was born and brought up there. The street
itself might have changed through the centuries-it is now largely
populated by gift and tea shops-but it is easy to imagine little Will
playing in the garden of this ancient structure, sitting in the
inglenook in the kitchen, or reaching up to turn the Gothic handles on
the weathered doors.
In Shakespeare's Shrine Julia Thomas reveals just how
fully the Birthplace that we visit today is a creation of the
nineteenth century. Two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, the
run-down house on Henley Street was home to a butcher shop and a pub.
Saved from the threat of an ignominious sale to P. T. Barnum, it was
purchased for the English nation in 1847 and given the picturesque
half-timbered façade first seen in a fanciful 1769 engraving of the
building. A perfect confluence of nationalism, nostalgia, and the easy
access afforded by rail travel turned the house in which the Bard
first drew breath into a major tourist attraction, one artifact in a
sea of Shakespeare handkerchiefs, eggcups, and door-knockers.
It was clear to Victorians on pilgrimage to Stratford just who
Shakespeare was, how he lived, and to whom he belonged, Thomas writes,
and the answers were inseparable from Victorian notions of class,
domesticity, and national identity. In Shakespeare's Shrine she
has written a richly documented and witty account of how both the Bard
and the Warwickshire market town of his birth were turned into
enduring symbols of British heritage-and of just how closely
contemporary visitors to Stratford are following in the footsteps of
their Victorian predecessors.
Julia Thomas is author of several books, including Pictorial
Victorians and Victorian Narrative Painting, and is Director of the
Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research at Cardiff University.
