Stratford, Sicilia, and Shakespeare: Exit, Pursued by a Bair

Bright and early on Thursday morning the entirety of the London Dramatic Academy, including Richard Digby-Day and Michael Winter, boarded a coach and began our 2.5 hour pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon. LDA had rented for us one of those tourist travel-coaches that look like airplanes inside, are very conspicuous and awkward on the road and are fitted with a microphone, a feature taken full advantage of by Richard. During the 2.5 hours, about half that time was filled with Richard lecturing about Stratford, Kenilworth Castle (our first stop on the trip), Shakespeare and “A Winter’s Tale” (the show we were seeing in Stratford that night). When we finally arrived at Kenilworth Castle we were certainly ready to have a good run around castle ruins and English countryside.
Kenilworth Castle is a ruined castle a few miles outside of Stratford which had a very interesting history through the English Civil War and then, as Richard explained, “it more or less has become very boring since then.” Originally built by William the Conqueror, the most interesting part of its history was when it belonged to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and where Dudley apparently made his grandest and most obvious attempt to impress and woo Queen Elizabeth I. As we were looking at the one restored area of the ruins, the Elizabethan gatehouse, Michael Winter crept up behind me and my friend Anne, tapped us on the shoulder and said “did you see the fireplace downstairs? I touched that. Queen Elizabeth must have touched that when she was here. Go along, go touch it!” And we did.
Around noon we all returned to the bus and finally drove into Stratford. The town of Stratford (upon the Avon river) is a strange one—some sections are a very nice, normal, English country town, other parts are like a Shakespeare theme park. Everything in the center of Stratford has a Shakespeare-y name: Othello’s restaurant, Falstaff Towers flats, If Music Be the Food of Love café. The street with Shakespeare’s birthplace is filled with these sorts of restaurants, Shakespeare bookstores, and occasionally actors dressed in Elizabethan garb wandering the street performing famous scenes. After lunch we were split into two groups, one led by Richard and mine led by Michael, for a walking tour of Stratford.
Michael Winter is the greatest and best of all men, and he LOVES Shakespeare and reading Shakespeare and thinking about Shakespeare and imagining what his life was like. In Shakespeare class, he always tells us what his best guess is to which role in each play Shakespeare wrote for himself. So, it wasn’t surprising that the route that Michael chose to tour us through Stratford was what he believed to be the walk Shakespeare would have taken to school everyday. Starting from Shakespeare’s birthplace we saw Shakespeare’s school, his church, the location of the home he bought for himself (torn down a few centuries ago over some sort of tax dispute) and we ended by seeing his grave. We then walked along the Avon to where the Royal Shakespeare Company would be performing “A Winter’s Tale” that night.
I’d never seen or read “A Winter’s Tale” so I was excited to see what the RSC would do. Unfortunately, it was just not a good production. Michael and Richard hated it, and kept falling asleep. It’s really an amazing play, but the script—which calls for a baby, and bear, a satyr dance, and a statue coming to life all on stage—is very difficult and needs good direction and clear use of the language to make any sense of all. The best part of the play actually was the bear, which wasn’t real as Michael supposed the one in the original production would have been since there was a bear-bating ring next to the original Globe, but was a massive and amazing puppet. Some of my fellow students complained that this production changed Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear” (the character wasn’t so much pursued as eaten on stage) but I didn’t mind.
After the show we got back on the bus for a long ride home, arrive at 12:30am, and then we were back to classes at 9:30 the next morning. It was a delightfully Shakespeare filled day for one and all.