In the early days of the war, when Hitler was threatening to invade England, the authorities blanked out the names on signposts, to confuse German paratroopers. So about a mile from Stratford there was a large sign that read as follows:

YOU ARE APPROACHING

XXXXXXXXX

UPON

XXXX

THE

BIRTHPLACE

OF

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Some cameraman with an eye for a laugh filmed this, and a year later I sat in an American cinema and listened to the giggles that spread through the audience as they got the point. I wondered then what other sign could provide such amusement. XXXXXXXXXXX the birthplace of the Buddha? Or XXXX the birthplace of Beethoven? We might feel a certain snobbish satisfaction in supplying the missing KAPILAVASTU or BONN; but there would be no joke to share.

I have lived nearly all my life in England, and Stratford was no more than fifty miles from my home. Yet when I was a child, Stratford was as far away as the moon — farther, indeed, for I could see the moon. To me, Stratford was the place of William Shakespeare, the burly, fancy-dress man, with the hambone frill that made such a display of his face. He was the man of the richly bound book found in every house, respected but not opened very often. He was a frequent figure in the curious half-world of children’s books, the Lamb’s Tales, the Children’s Encyclopaedia.

His stories did not impress. They were not as brisk and telling as those of the brothers Grimm, I thought; and I see now that this was because his plots were watered down until they became nothing but straight fights between goodies and baddies, and tragedy, therefore, nothing but an example of cosmic injustice. In the badly drawn and brightly colored pictures, he sat demurely by Anne Hathaway, or held horses, or bowed from the buttocks before an idealized Elizabeth. I did not care for him much. But then I came on a song from A Midsummer-Night’s Dream and stumbled over the words:

To anyone as frightened of spiders as I was and am, this was sheer magic. I did not understand poetry but I loved incantation, whether it meant anything or not. Soon I had a store of detached lines and phrases which I treasured like seashells or fossils or stamps:

and

and

And the magician himself was born in Stratford fifty miles away. Nothing else had ever happened in Stratford before or since. Stratford was still there, frozen in time, just as illustrated. Gables leaned inward over cobbled and muddy streets. There were many horses, people in fancy-dress; it was noisy, smelly, medieval, a place of brutality and poetry.

So when I was thought roadworthy and acquired a bicycle, I rode off towards this innocently conceived picture. There was much less traffic in those days, and some of the lanes — for I took the direct rather than the main route — were little more than earthen paths between dog roses and honeysuckle. Up and down went my road, through the vale of the White Horse and over the Cotswolds, past houses and churches whose stones were weathered into the likeness of natural rock. Young, foolish, unawakened, I rode toward the revelation for all the world as though I might find the man himself leaning over his own fence, or knock on his door and be asked in.

There was sunset and then twilight, and I came to macadam and street lighting. I wheeled my bicycle between rows of houses, the Laurels, Bide-A-Wee and Mon Repos, passed a garage and petrol pumps. There were bungalows, too, each withdrawn behind a privet hedge that proclaimed private ownership without insuring privacy. Cars hooted, a train whistled and a tramp stopped me and asked for the price of a bed. I remembered how I stood, still in my innocence, and looked at a notice that said this was Stratford-upon-Avon, and how suddenly I felt shaken, dreary, and a long way from home.

Stratford has grown so much in the last fifty years that most of the approaches are encased in ribbon building. Apart from its fortune as the birthplace of Shakespeare, the town has an undistinguished history. But it is a place where people have lived for countless generations; a place where patterns of living have been trodden deep.

There were Stone Age men who fished in the Avon, and it is not impossible that we still call the river by the name they gave it. The Romans set up a villa here, and the Saxons who came after them fought on the hillside and left a cemetery behind them. But the fordable bend of the Avon drew settlers, and for hundreds of years nameless Englishmen, serfs for the most part, clustered by the bank and fought the patch of gravelly flood-plain and the encroaching forest to a stalemate.

They hung on, in a town doubtful whether it might not be a village, or even a hamlet. It did not seem to be joined to anything, for when the river flooded, the rickety skeleton of logs and planking that passed for a bridge was awash. The town looked inward, minding its own little business, a very local affair, owned and nursed by the church; and the church gave it buildings: a Guild Chapel, a Guildhall, and a great Collegiate church where the people might worship and the local worthies be buried.

Hugh Clopton put Stratford on the map. He was a native who made good, and when he became Lord Mayor of London he remembered the wooden bridge and knew there was only one way to keep in touch. He built a strong stone bridge of fourteen arches, and immediately Stratford was connected with all the highways of the kingdom. That was 450 years ago. Clopton thought the London traffic would go over it; and now all the world goes over it. The span is simple, lasting and beautiful. If Shakespeare had never been born only a few hundred yards away, some people might still go there just to look at Clopton Bridge. It was the other great thing that happened in Stratford.

Indeed, whoever you are and whatever you come for, there is plenty to see in Stratford. It is a small gridiron of streets, separated from the river by lawns and the Theater. You can walk around the old part of the town in a few minutes and learn the layout in a quarter of an hour. The show places are obvious — Shakespeare’s Birthplace, Hall’s Croft, where his daughter lived, and New Place, where he retired.

New Place is usually a disappointment, because nothing is left but the foundations. They are preserved in a special garden where you can find all the flowers mentioned by Shakespeare; though the ones you see have been changed by selection and breeding. He would have thought them wonderfully exotic.

One mile away is Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, improbably quaint, with thatch like a racehorse’s coat, and looking altogether as if it had been designed for Snow White by Walt Disney. There is also Harvard House, linked with the university; there is the Guild Chapel and the Guildhall. There is the fifteenth-century grammar school; and here we may feel firmer ground, since Shakespeare ‘almost certainly’ went there.

But he is so elusive and enigmatic! Very soon, among the thatch and the half-timber, the paneling and wattle, you begin to feel frustrated because these places, although connected with the name you know, illuminating nothing, put you in touch with nothing.

You move on to the church. Now at last, you think, we shall get somewhere — Holy Trinity Church, magnificent in its own right, is known around the world as the burial place of William Shakespeare. But even here the enigma pursues you. Was he ever buried here? And if he was, are his bones still here? The church had a Bone House. Grave diggers would pile there the bones they found in the graves and use the open hole for the next applicant, since burial ground was in short supply. Shakespeare would have known this. As a boy, he could well have peeped into the Bone House with a kind of horrified gusto. At any rate, he is said to be buried seven feet deep in the church, and certainly there is a curse inscribed on the slab:

 

A terse valedictory, one would think, from the world’s greatest master of words; though the Lake Poets thought the lines great poetry.

But granted the author of the plays was buried under the stone slab before the High Altar — are his bones still there? Did I read somewhere in a learned journal that the grave had been excavated and nothing discovered? I have looked for the article and cannot find it. I have asked guides and they were noncommital. Then perhaps I dreamed that, in the nineteenth century, archaeologists lifted the slab and dug down ten feet, until their spades were in the mud of the river, and found nothing.

An effigy looks out from a niche over the grave, and most people are agreed that this fat worthy cannot be the author of Hamlet. I do not follow this argument. No poet I have met has looked like the popular idea of one. Those who did were would-be poets who could never achieve anything. This effigy might be Shakespeare, though it looks dull, didactic and bourgeois.

So the tantalizing riddle goes with us even into the church. This is the trouble with Bardolatry and Shakespeareana. For even in Stratford there is nothing you can touch and be certain that he touched it. You cannot even tread the same earth as he did. Time raises the surface of an inhabited place with refuse and rubble, so that today, when you visit an Elizabethan house, you step down into it. To walk where Shakespeare walked you would have to dig a hole in the road. The very banks of the river have shifted. ‘Everything flows‚’ said Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, ‘and you cannot bathe twice in the same river.’ So Shakespeare lived on a plane unattainable to us — almost on another planet.

It is surely this sense of bafflement that has given rise to the luxurious crop of pseudo-Shakespeares — Bacon, Essex, Marlowe. It is a sense that can send the tourist off to the Stately Homes, all stricken by income tax and death duties, all full of real things to touch, see and admire. Or he will go to the thatched cottages of Broadway, or find another Cotswold village, full of flowers and gray stone, and sleeping in the sun like a cat.

But if you stay at Stratford for twenty-four hours, you can sample that quiet pause in the morning when the town gathers itself and prepares for what is coming. Then suddenly it seems as if the stones had given birth to people, for the streets grow crowded between one sip of coffee and the next. You find yourself speaking more loudly, since noise comes with the people, and does not stop until the last cars have drawn away from the Theater in the evening. A band plays somewhere, and the cars crawl hooting over Clopton Bridge. All at once you are aware of the faces outside the hotel window; black faces from Ghana over brilliant robes, delicate faces over rich robes from Pakistan and India, serious faces, tired faces, faces blank with too much seeing, excited faces, faces sour from cultural indigestion, faces listening, faces with mouths twisting, mouths beating the lips together in quick outlandish speech.

And if you come in the sweet of the year for the birthday, for the April celebrations, everything is even more so — more crowds, more color, more noise, more excitement. Bridge Street was two streets in Shakespeare’s time, but we’ve knocked down the middle row and there it is, a street wide enough for a festival. When the flags of twenty countries fly over it and their ambassadors move through it in procession and the town’s governing body, the corporation, marches solemnly and the band plays and the crowds swirl and babble, then, oh then, something is going on, whatever it is. You find yourself with one elbow in a Japanese rib and the other in an American, while French shoulders nudge you in the back and a Negro from West Africa splits his blackness in your face with a magnificent ivory grin.

There is a party of schoolgirls, uniformed and doing Yurrup, feverishly kept together and counted by some elegant dragon; there is the inevitable lost child crying Mamma while a red-faced copper kneels by her and tries to find out which language Mamma is likely to speak; there is the glitter of cars moving through the crowd; there are flowers and bunting and litter. Conversation multiplies into a surge and crash as of the sea, all talking, all laughing, all singing, all band-playing, all morris dancing — yes, in England!

There are Spaniards and Russians; Australians talking an expatriated Cockney; solemn New Zealanders, nervy Rhodesians, sinewy and defensive South Africans; touchy Canadians trying to be neither British nor American and indignant that this delicate status is so seldom recognized; cheerful Norwegians and impenetrable Swedes; Americans by the busload, festooned with cameras and regarding everything — the guides, the touts, the swans, the dancers, the helicopters, the effigies and postcards, the officials, actors, reporters, scholars, tourists — with the same excited reverence.

And of course the Germans. You cannot remain long in Stratford without meeting a German, for they were the earliest and most devout of European Bardolaters. In my times they were Wanderbirds, cropped men in shorts, who carried rucksacks of impossible weight. I remember one who was poor as I was; but he had a startlingly accurate grasp of the county administration. He had also a sort of triumphant dignity, the secret complaisancy of a man who knows that one day he will rule this bit of England as a district officer.

I wonder. Has he ever come back, prosperous and middle-aged, his dreams of imperial splendors trimmed down to the enjoyment of a bank balance? Should we talk this time without the latent antagonism that smoldered under our every remark? For we were going to fight each other one day, horribly. We knew it in our bones, though our mouths did not make the admission.

I wonder what the plays meant to him then.

 

Well, there were quotations enough to see him through, whatever he suffered in Tunisia, at Stalingrad or on the Rhine:

Odd that I should remember him out of so many. There were so many Wanderbirds, solemnly pursuing whatever it was, red knees and faces, guidebooks open, doing Stratford with cheap and merciless efficiency.

The flags flap, the band plays, the morris dancers caper, the guides talk themselves into tonsillitis. The crowd is everywhere, is endless. Why do they come? They cannot all get into the Theater. You would need Wembley Stadium to contain them. What have they come for? To see the room where Shakespeare may have been born, the foundations of the house where he may have died, or the cottage where he may have done his premarital necking? He escapes this blunt approach, he defies the quick attempt to get alongside. He cannot be bought, for what he left us is not on sale in the marketplace.

You can try. You can buy that broad, bald head, that fattening face and pointed beard, attached to almost anything. You can stub out your cigarette on him in brass, use him as a paperweight, as the handle of a bell or a shoehorn. He decorates a bookmarker, a pincushion, looks apprehensively at you from a row of brass door-knockers. You can stir your coffee or poke your fire with him. You can use him as a brush to sweep dust into him as a shovel. He looks with an awful fixity out of one shop — as well he might, because now he is a milk jug, the top of his head prized open, while the handle sticks out of one ear and the spout out of the other. As a last affront, you can buy his face on a tea towel, and dry the dishes with him.

Now move up in the spiritual scale and see how he fares in the bookshops. He fares almost too well. Unless you are used to books about books you will wilt at the prospect: Some Shakespearean Themes, The Shakespearean Ethic, Shakespeare’s Sources, Shakespeare’s Public, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, Shakespeare’s Birthday Book. In the chain-store bookshop there is half a ton of Omnibus Shakespeares stacked up like a truckload of bricks. In the bookshops, the antique shops, the trinket shops, the Show Places and Museums, his picture and relevant pictures are spread out by the acre. He stands in the Elysian Fields and beckons to a dying actor. He dies himself, and bare-bosomed Comedy and Tragedy help him toward heaven — but look as if they are lifting him over a stile. His authentic Portraits eye you luminously and derisively, for they are palpably portraits of different people. And lastly, a full-sized plaster replica of his tomb effigy glares out of a dormer window with white, blind eyes that are horrible.

These are the running signs of what has been called the Shakespeare Industry. It is perhaps my fault and your fault and Stratford’s fault; but certainly it is the fault of anyone who goes to Stratford only to say he has been there and to bring away the proof in his pocket. There is good in the Shakespeare Industry, a genuine reverence before the humanity of our most godlike man: but if anything is certain, it is that the heart of the approach, his precious legacy to us in this frightening world, can be nothing more than the moved experience of his poetry. Go to Stratford, as so many do, with the intention of not attending a performance in the Theater, and you offer a mortal insult to your own understanding.

Take the rest as an apéritif. The Shakespeare Industry becomes then a not-unwelcome setting to your enjoyment, even if the sillier manifestations of it are simply parasitic. For the industry is well organized. The bigger hotels are quaintly Elizabethan, genuinely old, and discreetly modernized. The food and the service are good; and so taut is the organization that the best way to insure getting tickets for the Theater is to book at one of the hotels, because they keep blocks reserved for their clients. Otherwise it is often impossible to get in, no matter how much you are prepared to pay. Despite the crowds that do not go, Shakespeare is still a box-office success, perhaps more so than ever before.

His plays are sometimes done better in other places, but no other place devoted to them has a standard so consistently high. A little while ago you could see Pericles, a collector’s piece. Last season you could see The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, The Taming of the Shrew, or taste the sumptuous cynicisms of Troilus and Cressida. If you intend only one visit, find out what play will be on, or you might be unlucky.

From the superb to the downright bad. For it is part of the enigma that so much is bad, jostling even with the superb bits; and yet so often, the whole is an imperishable magnificence. There is hardly a play without rant or fustian, ludicrous coincidence, a plot so broken-backed that the action sinks to earth in the middle. Time has staled the puns and obscured the allusions, turned accepted conduct into current cruelty. Today, however they are produced, his battles between six men a side are simply funny and embarrassing. We are used to Cinerama and Todd-AO, or black-and-white glimpses of the real, scarifying thing. We can no longer make this wooden ‘O’ the vasty fields of France. We know a better way.

And yet, with all this against him, Shakespeare conquers you if you give him the slightest chance. There come the high moments. It was toward these moments I wheeled my bicycle so many years ago, in the ignorance of faith, and found them better than I could have dreamed. There falls a stillness on the play. The words take off. They tower into realms of feeling that no one but he has ever known how to describe.

 

They are moments no more to be defined than taking a Sacrament or bearing a child, or falling in love. But they are what you come to Stratford for; and once experienced they put a crown on life.