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 facade 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.
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