It didn’t take too long for us to get to Stratford-upon-Avon, but it felt far enough away to be a vacation. This was another weekend-long trip, and a neighbor had offered to watch our puppy for us. We had no worries and hardly anything in our backpacks. I can see this being the way we travel for another year or so. Many little trips.
Stratford-upon-Avon is a market town south of Birmingham. And for those of you who don’t know—it’s the birthplace of Shakespeare. But more than that, he lived and wrote there for most of his life.
His birthplace has been preserved well. It’s a large house, and one room is filled with gloves that have yet to be sewn together, made up as if it were a small, glove-making workshop, because his father was a glove-maker, which brought them wealth and allowed Shakespeare to go to school at a time when education was for a very small minority.
I don’t know why I’d never considered this. I’d never asked myself how Shakespeare came to be educated. I’d never realized how obvious it was, how obvious it should have been to me, that he came from a position of wealth.
His father eventually got greedy, for even more wealth, and he began trading in wool without a license. He was caught and lost everything. By then, Shakespeare was a wealthy man in his own right. There was never a time that they experienced poverty. Which was not to say they didn’t experience hardship.
With medicine lacking, and The Little Ice Age in full swing, it was a difficult time in history whether you had money or not. Shakespeare lost his son, Hamnet, when Hamnet was 11 years old. And after Shakespeare’s death, his daughter, Judith, lost her three sons, one in infancy and two as children.
I didn’t know most of this until I read the little placards throughout the houses and museums. As someone who’s read all of his sonnets and many of his plays (and seen many more), I was again surprised at how little I’d actually thought about him. What had he meant to me?