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This Saturday marks the start of England’s week long celebrations honoring Shakespeare, who would have turned 444 on April 23. Since I can’t make it out to Stratford this year, I hope to join one of this weekend’s Sonnet Walks in London, which highlight the Tudor history of the city in the accompaniment of twelve sonneteers.
I’m also excited about the 2008 theatre season kicking off at the Globe with Wednesday’s performance of King Lear. If you haven’t already got your hands on tickets to the season’s sold-out inaugural show, you can still join in the pre-performance birthday celebrations alongside the Thames, where a miniature Elizabethan theatre will be floating down the river before docking in front of the Globe.
But the ideal place to celebrate the bard’s birth is his Warwickshire birthplace of Stratford upon Avon, where an annual parade sets off next Saturday morning from his birthplace (pictured above) and culminates with the laying of floral tributes on the dramatist’s grave in Holy Trinity Church. Throughout the weekend, the town takes on the atmosphere of a lively Elizabethan carnival as musicians and members of “Shakespeare Live” stroll the streets performing scenes from the Bard’s repertoire.
Even if you can’t visit during the celebrations, Stratford is a must-see at any time of year because of its amazingly well-preserved Tudor architecture and its four Shakespeare-related properties. My favorite is Anne Hathaway’s cottage, an enchanting thatch-roofed dwelling surrounded by hollyhocks and climbing roses. It was in this fairytale setting where the bard wooed his future wife.
“We are in a snug little cottage keeping house,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote of the five-room bungalow he lived in for three years in the Bronx in what was then a rural township north of New York City. The humble cottage, home to the writer from 1846-1849 and where his 25-year-old wife died of tuberculosis, has been moved across the street from its original location to what is now Poe Park. It’s a surreal site to see the 200-year-old dwelling — the writer’s last residence — situated in the midst of urban sprawl.
Poe is well-remembered with four literary landmarks, and in recent months I’ve been on the writer’s trail. In addition to the cottage in the Bronx, I paid a visit to the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in Baltimore, where the items on display include his traveling writing desk, and the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, which contains the eerie basement and fireplace featured in the short story “The Black Cat” (candlelight tours of the house are given in October).
Next on my Poe itinerary is the Poe Museumin Richmond, which has an exhibit speculating on possible causes of the 40-year-old writer’s unsolved demise. Poe died several days after being found disoriented and roaming the streets of Baltimore, uttering the final words, “Lord, help my poor soul.” In his novel The Poe Shadow, Matthew Pearl — who wrote the Foreword to Novel Destinations — delves into the mysterious circumstances surrounding Poe’s death. –Shannon McKenna Schmidt
