Stratford Quotes

Or, even worse, calling Sal a monster. It’s interesting to compare your reporting about Sal to your recent articles on the Stratford Strangler. He murdered five people and pleaded guilty, yet in your headline you referred to him as a “lovesick young man.” Is that because he’s white?

I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.

I'm not into those kind of rivalries. I remember standing out in front of Stratford, minding my own business. Carload of about eighty kids would pull up: 'STRATFORD SUCKS!' Am I supposed to run after these guys? I'd just stand there, you know. They'd back up. 'STRATFORD SUCKS! ...STRATFORD SUCKS!' I'd say, 'I know. I go there. You're wasting gas, man.

To be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality

The world is a fabric woven of mysteries, and a mystery is a provocation to our humanity that cannot be dissolved by googling a few more bits of information.

Tommy Stratford and Michael . . . something or other,” she says. “Are you worried I’ll like them better than I like you?” “That’s just not possible.” “Why? Because you’re so irresistible?” “No. Because you don’t like anyone.” Arsinoe snorts. “I do like you, Junior.” “Oh?” “But I have more important things to think about right now.

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

She decided at once that she and the boy were cut of the same bookish cloth, and could quite possibly become co-conspirators.

She fixed things that were broken, and then began fixing things that weren't broken, or broke things so they could be fixed in ways no one understood or found particularly convenient.

Should have upped his game,” Louis murmured as we stepped forward. “He took my magical design for Stratford and simply tweaked it in a few places. Worst case of fan fiction I’ve ever seen.

...Troy itself was disappointingly small. Like little more than your ordinary city block and a few stories in height, practically. Although now that I remember, everything in William Shakespeare's house at Stratford-on-Avon was astonishingly tiny, too. As if only imaginary people had lived there then. Or perhaps it is only the past itself, which is always smaller than one had believed.

Two of the few certainties of Shakespeare’s life are that his marriage lasted till his death and that he sent much of his wealth back to Stratford as soon as he was able, which may not be conclusive proof of attachment but hardly argues against it.

William Shakespeare: I have a wife, yes, and I cannot marry the daughter of Sir Robert De Lesseps. You needed no wife come from Stratford to tell you that, and yet, you let me come to your bed. Viola De Lesseps: Calf-love. I loved the writer and gave up the prize for a sonnet.

Damned woman. Ever since she’d dropped into his arms last night, he’d been tied in knots. On one hand, desire gripped him. On the other, the need to turn her over his knee until she admitted it was the same for her rode him. On the third hand, if he had a third hand, lay the question of who she was. Why had he never seen her out in society? But more important, why was he so conflicted over this rude, irritating girl? Hell, that was like five hands. He’d have to be Kali to decipher his response to Liliana Claremont. Geoffrey Wentworth, Earl of Stratford

The central idea of the present book is very simple. It is that education is not primarily about the acquisition of information. It is not even about the acquisition of ‘skills’ in the conventional sense, to equip us for particular roles in society. It is about how we become more human (and therefore more free, in the truest sense of that word). This is a broader and a deeper question, but no less practical. Too often we have not been educating our humanity. We have been educating ourselves for doing rather than for being.

Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one's conjectures privately, make one's notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, it its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself.

I remember that Stratford Library book clearly and with great affection. It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader’s spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us; how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.

Today, in a world with instant access to Google, we rely on the electronic web to supply everything we need, from historical facts to word definitions and spellings as well as extended quotations. All of us who use a computer are aware of the shock of inner poverty that we suddenly feel when deprived (by a virus or other disaster) of our mental crutches even just for a day or a week. Plato is right: memory has been stripped from us, and all we possess is an external reminder of what we have lost, enabling us to pretend to a wisdom and an inner life we no longer possess in ourselves.13

Maisie had never owned a book and couldn’t imagine rereading anything when time was so short and the libraries so full.

Riding in a carriage without an escort is modern. But traveling out and about unescorted is unheard of.

While the hyphenated name “Shake-speare” would appear frequently on title pages over the coming decades, it never appeared hyphenated in the Stratford man’s records.

I have never thought that the man of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays of Shakespeare.

England has her Stratford, Scotland has her Alloway, and America, too, has her Dresden. For there, on August 11, 1833, was born the greatest and noblest of the Western World; an immense personality, -- unique, lovable, sublime; the peerless orator of all time, and as true a poet as Nature ever held in tender clasp upon her loving breast, and, in words coined for the chosen few, told of the joys and sorrows, hopes, dreams, and fears of universal life; a patriot whose golden words and deathless deeds were worthy of the Great Republic; a philanthropist, real and genuine; a philosopher whose central theme was human love, -- who placed 'the holy hearth of home' higher than the altar of any god; an iconoclast, a builder -- a reformer, perfectly poised, absolutely honest, and as fearless as truth itself -- the most aggressive and formidable foe of superstition -- the most valiant champion of reason -- Robert G. Ingersoll.

It is immoral to question history and to take credit away from William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.” Immoral to question history—when inquiry is the very basis of the historical discipline!

They were pleased to eat more Nazis, although nervous about too many disappearances being noticed. More troubling, however, was the flavor. Nazis were nearly indigestible. The taste of hate was hard to swallow.

When capital has bumped up against limits to profit-growth in the past, it has found fixes in things like colonisation, structural adjustment programmes, wars, restrictive patent laws, nefarious debt instruments, land grabs, privatisation, and enclosing commons like water and seeds. Why would it be any different this time? Indeed, a study by the ecological economist Beth Stratford finds that when capital faces resource constraints, this is exactly what happens: it turns to aggressive rent-seeking behaviour. It seeks to grab existing value wherever it can, with clever mechanisms to suck income and wealth from the public domain into private hands, and from the poor to the rich, exacerbating inequality.

He always took his bicycle when he went into the country. It was part of the theory of exercise. One day one would get up at six o'clock and pedal away to Kenilworth, or Stratford-on-Avon—anywhere. And within a radius of twenty miles there were always Norman churches and Tudor mansions to be seen in the course of an afternoon's excursion. Somehow they never did get seen, but all the same it was nice to feel that the bicycle was there, and that one fine morning one really might get up at six.

I hate the way you talk to me, and the way you cut your hair I hate the way you drive my car. I hate it when you stare. I hate your big dumb combat boots, and the way you read my mind. I hate you so much it makes me sick; it even makes me rhyme! I hate it, I hate the way you’re always right. I hate it when you lie. I hate it when you make me laugh, even worse when you make me cry. I hate it when you’re not around, and the fact that you didn’t call. But mostly I hate the way I don’t hate you. Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.

When I was eight years old and was spending a weekend visiting my Aunt Libby Linsley at her home in Stratford on the Housatonic,” he wrote in his essay on Human Nature, “a middle-aged man called one evening, and after a polite skirmish with my aunt, he devoted his attention to me. At that time, I happened to be excited about boats, and the visitor discussed the subject in a way that seemed to me particularly interesting. After he left, I spoke of him with enthusiasm. What a man! My aunt informed me he was a New York lawyer, that he cared nothing whatever about boats—that he took not the slightest interest in the subject. ‘But why then did he talk all the time about boats?’ “‘Because he is a gentleman. He saw you were interested in boats, and he talked about the things he knew would interest and please you. He made himself agreeable.

Mile End Road and Bow Road to Stratford, then to Chigwell and Romford, right across Bethnal Green and Canonbury, through Holloway and Kentish Town and thus to Hampstead Heath, or else south over the river to Peckham and Dulwich or westward to Richmond Park. It is a fact that you can

And there on the piss-soaked cobbles, his back to the alley and his face to the wall, lay the object of their diplomatic mission: A sleeping drunk. Colt lay out his hand in a flourish. “Mr. Billings, may I introduce to you His Imperial Majesty Joshua Norton the First, Emperor of the United States of America and Protector of Mexico.

Your mum wrote that girls can do whatever," Ada continued. "Education. Profession." Mary, now fully engaged, put down her book. "My dear Ada, my mother wrote about how things ought to be, not how they are." Ada continued looking displeased, which made Mary go on. "Of course, how are things to be the way they ought, unless we make them so?

Nor can we be entirely confident how he pronounced his name. Helge Kökeritz, author of the definitive Shakespeare’s Pronunciation, thought it possible that Shakespeare said it with a short a, as in “shack.” It may have been spoken one way in Stratford and another in London, or he may have been as variable with the pronunciation as he was with the spelling.

Mathematics is the language of science-- but it is also the hidden structure behind art… and its basis is the invisible Logos of God.

Pardon?

Lindsay’s right,” Izzy says, collecting the leftovers. “Billie Jean is coming back for her. With a little help from his friends.” “So . . . so is this a horror movie now, or a teen comedy?” Brittney says. “It’s an afterschool special,” Izzy says, Hoddering her head over to study Billie Jean. “Know what the take-home message is? Don’t fuck with Izzy Stratford.

When Elizabeth Winkler wrote the Atlantic piece about other authorship, she received more hate mail than she ever had in her life. Shakespeare is not just a playwright; he’s practically a religion. Despite the gaps in his history, many highly intelligent people are still not willing to entertain any other explanation except that the man from Stratford wrote those plays solo.

the important thing, the real goal of study, is the ‘development of attention.’ Why? Because prayer consists of attention, and all worldly study is really a stretching of the soul towards prayer.

This is one of many reasons why it is such a shame to deprive children of exposure to the greatest writers in the English language. In the great writers one can see how words are charged with meaning.

When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man—whoever he was.

If education is about the communication of values, or meaningful information, and of wisdom and of tradition, between persons and across generations, it is important to know that it can only take place in the heart; that is, in the center of the human person. A voice from the lungs is not enough to carry another along with the meaning of our words. The voice has to carry with it the warmth and living fire of the heart around which the lungs are wrapped.2

No! I had too many variables! Two of those variables were actually the same variable, so I revised the equation and then it all made perfect sense!" Ada was truly excited. "You seem truly excited, Lady Ada," said Anna cautiously.

There were equally fine, and many more, country houses built in the 18th century in Virginia, by members of the 100 leading families—Byrds, Carters, Lees, Randolphs, Fitzhughes, and so on—of which many, such as Westover, Stratford, and Shirley, survive. Drayton Hall, built 1738–42, on the Ashley River in South Carolina, a good example of the way local American architects used classical models, is based on Palladio’s Villa Pisani, happily survived the Revolutionary and Civil wars and is now part of the American Trust for Historical Preservation.

It is a modern mistake to think that great personalities can grow without being rooted in the rich soil of the past, in the memory of great deeds and in fidelity to promises made across the generations. Civilization is founded on covenants that cannot be broken without consequence.

While it does seem odd to found a religion in an ancient Egyptian Starbucks with a group of Jews debating Greek philosophy, this is precisely where our story begins: in the Paris-in-the-’20s of the ancient world, with artists and initiates inhaling the erotic perfume of dangerous ideas.

William Shakespeare. She knew him. They were,the three of them-Lucinda,Daniel,and Shakespeare-friends. There had been a summer afternoon when Daniel had taken Lucinda to visit Shakespeare at his home in Stratford. Toward sunset,they'd sat in the library,and while Daniel worked on his sketches at the window, Will had asked her question after question-all the while taking furious notes-about when she'd first met Daniel, how she felt about him, whether she thought she could one day fall in love. Aside from Daniel,Shakespeare was the only one who knew the secret of Lucinda's indentity-her gender-and the love the players shared offstage. In exchange for his discretion,Lucinda was keeping the secret that Shakespeare was present that night at the Globe. Everyone else in the company assumed that he was in Stratford, that he'd handed over the reins of the theater to Master Fletcher.Instead,Will appeared incognito to see the play's opening night. When she returned to his side,Shakespeare gazed deep into Lucinda's eyes. "You've changed." "I-no,I'm still"-she felt the soft brocade around her shoulders. "Yes, I found the cloak." "The cloak,is it?" He smiled at her, winked. "It suits you.

was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

The Christian story is both mythological and historical. That is because it concerns the historical incarnation of the One whom all myths represent. Thoth, Hermes, Apollo, and a hundred other gods are images of the Logos or Mediator whom Christians believe was born as a human child, died on a Cross, and rose from the dead two thousand years ago. 'By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God' (1 John 4:2-3). Nor does a 'literalist' belief in historical incarnation render imagination and the use of symbolism redundant - if anything it legitimizes them.

« -...sono andato nella Londra del 1610 e ho scoperto che Shakespeare era solo un attore con un secondo lavoro potenzialmente imbarazzante come ricettatore a Stratford. Nulla di strano che lo tenesse nascosto - lo farebbe chiunque. -Chi li ha scritti allora? Bacon? Marlowe? -No, è insorto un problemino. Vedi, nessuno ha mai sentito parlare di quelle opere, figuriamoci averle scritte. Non capivo. -Cosa vuoi dire? Non ci sono? -Proprio così. Non esistono. Non sono mai state scritte. Né da lui, né da altri. -Scusate- si intromise Landen, che ne aveva abbastanza -ma abbiamo visto il Riccardo III sei settimane fa. -Certo- disse mio padre -Il tempo è scardinato alla grande. Naturalmente bisognava intervenire. Ho portato con me una copia delle opere complete e le ho date all'attore Shakespeare nel 1592 perché le distribuisse secondo uno schema preciso. Questo soddisfa la tua domanda? »

La popolazione era presa costantemente d'assedio dalla tubercolosi, dal morbillo, dal rachitismo, dallo scorbuto, da due tipi di vaiolo (confluente ed emorragico), dalla scrofola, dalla dissenteria e da un vasto, amorfo assortimento di flussi e febbri (febbre terzana, febbre quartana, febbre puerperale, febbre navale, febbre quotidiana, febbre a macchie) così come di «frenesie», «mali impuri» e altre curiose malattie di vaghi e numerosi tipi. [...] Meno di tre mesi dopo la nascita di William, la sezione sepolture del registro parrocchiale della chiesa di Holy Trinity di Stratford riporta le sinistre parole: Hic incepit pestis, qui comincia la peste, accanto al nome di un bambino chiamato Oliver Gunne. L'epidemia del 1564 fu terribile. [...] In un certo senso, la più grande conquista di William Shakespeare non fu quella di aver scritto l'Amleto o i Sonetti, ma semplicemente di essere sopravvissuto al suo primo anno di vita.

A veneração que a grande massa culta reserva ao gênio é da mesma espécie da que os crentes dedicam aos seus santos, ou seja, degenera facilmente num culto pueril às relíquias. A casa de Petrarca em Arquà, a suposta prisão de Tasso em Ferrara, a casa de Shakespeare em Stratford com sua cadeira, a casa de Goethe em Weimar com sua mobília, o velho chapéu de Kant, bem como os respectivos autógrafos, são fitados com atenção e respeito por muitos que nunca leram suas obras, do mesmo modo como milhares de cristãos veneram as relíquias de um santo cuja vida e doutrina não chegaram a conhecer, e como a religião de milhares de budistas consiste muito mais na veneração a Dahtu (dente sagrado), até mesmo a Dagoba (Stupa), que o encerra, ou ao sagrado Patra (gamela), ou ainda à pegada petrificada, à árvore sagrada que Buda semeou, do que no conhecimento profundo e no exercício fiel da sua sublime doutrina. De fato, tais pessoas não são capazes de outra coisa a não ser ficar boquiabertas.

some people since the mid-nineteenth century have argued that William Shakespeare could not have written the plays that bear his name. These persons have put forward some dozen names as more likely authors, among them Queen Elizabeth, Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere (earl of Oxford), and Christopher Marlowe. Such attempts to find what for these people is a more believable author of the plays is a tribute to the regard in which the plays are held. Unfortunately for their claims, the documents that exist that provide evidence for the facts of Shakespeare’s life tie him inextricably to the body of plays and poems that bear his name. Unlikely as it seems to those who want the works to have been written by an aristocrat, a university graduate, or an “important” person, the plays and poems seem clearly to have been produced by a man from Stratford-upon-Avon with a very good “grammar-school” education and a life of experience in London and in the world of the London theater. (Folger Shakespeare)

1595, Richard Field, fellow-alumnus of the King Edward grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon, printed The lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, compared together by that grave learned philosopher and historiographer, Plutarke of Chaeronea: translated out of Greeke into French by James Amiot, abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, one of the Kings privie counsell, and great Amner of France, and out of French into English, by Thomas North. This was the book that got Shakespeare thinking seriously about politics: monarchy versus republicanism versus empire; the choices we make and their tragic consequences; the conflict between public duty and private desire. He absorbed classical thought, but was not enslaved to it. Shakespeare was a thinker who always made it new, adapted his source materials, and put his own spin on them. In the case of Plutarch, he feminized the very masculine Roman world. Brutus and Caesar are seen through the prism of their wives, Portia and Calpurnia; Coriolanus through his mother, Volumnia; Mark Antony through his lover, Cleopatra. Roman women were traditionally silent, confined to the domestic sphere. Cleopatra is the very antithesis of such a woman, while Volumnia is given the full force of that supreme Ciceronian skill, a persuasive rhetorical voice.40 Timon of Athens is alone and unhappy precisely because his obsession with money has cut him off from the love of, and for, women (the only females in Timon’s strange play are two prostitutes). Paradoxically, the very masculinity of Plutarch’s version of ancient history stimulated Shakespeare into demonstrating that women are more than the equal of men. Where most thinkers among his contemporaries took the traditional view of female inferiority, he again and again wrote comedies in which the girls are smarter than the boys—Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Rosalind in As You Like It, Portia in The Merchant of Venice—and tragedies in which women exercise forceful authority for good or ill (Tamora, Cleopatra, Volumnia, and Cymbeline’s Queen in his imagined antiquity, but also Queen Margaret in his rendition of the Wars of the Roses).41

Non esito dunque a dichiarare che reputo Tolstòj (eppure è un russo!) un ingegno creativo tra i più grandi che siano mai apparsi sulla terra; che onoro Anatole France (un francese!) come uno degli spiriti più alti del nostro tempo e come un narratore di primissimo ordine; che Maeterlinck (questo belga!) per me non ha perduto nulla della sua grazia e del suo incanto anche se veramente avesse scritto sulla Germania quelle strane cose che i giornali hanno fatto circolare sotto il suo nome. E dovrei ancora, seriamente, esprimermi su Shakespeare (questo inglese, giacché è nato a Stratford!) e dire che per me Shakespeare rimane sempre Shakespeare, dovesse questa guerra durare altri trent’anni? Un giorno, quando ritornerà la pace, noi dovremo pur ricordare, con stupore e angoscia, che vi fu un tempo in cui eravamo costretti a far sapere oltre i confini che ciascuno di noi ha sì amato la propria patria, ma non ha per questo dimenticato la giustizia, il senno, la gratitudine; né ha mai perduto, neppure in questa epoca mostruosa di confusione, un po’ d’intelligenza. (Arthur Schnitzler)

Bell treated his friend and colleague Watson generously. Though he had no legal obligations to do so, he awarded Watson 10 percent of the company, allowing Watson to retire rich at the age of just twenty-seven. Able to do anything he wanted, Watson devoted the rest of his life to just that. He traveled the world, read widely, and took a degree in geology at MIT for the simple satisfaction of improving his brain. He then started a shipyard, which quickly grew to employ four thousand men, producing a scale of stress and obligation way beyond anything he wished for, so he sold the business, converted to Islam, and became a follower of Edward Bellamy, a radical philosopher and quasi communist who for a short period in the 1880s enjoyed phenomenal esteem and popularity. Tiring of Bellamy, Watson moved to England in early middle age and took up acting, for which he showed an unexpected talent. He proved particularly adept at Shakespearean roles and performed many times at Stratford-upon-Avon before returning to America and a life of quiet retirement. He died, contented and rich, at his winter home on Pass-Grille Key, Florida, just shy of his eighty-first birthday in 1934.

POEM – MY AMAZING TRAVELS [My composition in my book Travel Memoirs with Pictures] My very first trip I still cannot believe Was planned and executed with such great ease. My father, an Inspector of Schools, was such a strict man, He gave in to my wishes when I told him of the plan. I got my first long vacation while working as a banker One of my co-workers wanted a travelling partner. She visited my father and discussed the matter Arrangements were made without any flutter. We travelled to New York, Toronto, London, and Germany, In each of those places, there was somebody, To guide and protect us and to take us wonderful places, It was a dream come true at our young ages. We even visited Holland, which was across the Border. To drive across from Germany was quite in order. Memories of great times continue to linger, I thank God for an understanding father. That trip in 1968 was the beginning of much more, I visited many countries afterward I am still in awe. Barbados, Tobago, St. Maarten, and Buffalo, Cirencester in the United Kingdom, Miami, and Orlando. I was accompanied by my husband on many trips. Sisters, nieces, children, grandchildren, and friends, travelled with me a bit. Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, New York, and Hialeah, Curacao, Caracas, Margarita, Virginia, and Anguilla. We sailed aboard the Creole Queen On the Mississippi in New Orleans We traversed the Rockies in Colorado And walked the streets in Cozumel, Mexico. We were thrilled to visit the Vatican in Rome, The Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. To explore the countryside in Florence, And to sail on a Gondola in Venice. My fridge is decorated with magnets Souvenirs of all my visits London, Madrid, Bahamas, Coco Cay, Barcelona. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa How can I forget the Spanish Steps in Rome? Stratford upon Avon, where Shakespeare was born. CN Tower in Toronto so very high I thought the elevator would take me to the sky. Then there was El Poble and Toledo Noted for Spanish Gold We travelled on the Euro star. The scenery was beautiful to behold! I must not omit Cartagena in Columbia, Anaheim, Las Vegas, and Catalina, Key West, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Pembroke Pines, Places I love to lime. Of course, I would like to make special mention, Of two exciting cruises with Royal Caribbean. Majesty of the Seas and Liberty of the Seas Two ships which grace the Seas. Last but not least and best of all We visited Paris in the fall. Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Berlin Amazing places, which made my head, spin. Copyright@BrendaMohammed

Heart Speaks Unto Heart. This motto of the Blessed John Henry Newman, adopted from St Francis de Sales, contains the essence of a ‘philosophy of communication,’ which is also a philosophy of education. If education is about the communication of values, or meaningful information, and of wisdom and of tradition, between persons and across generations, it is important to know that it can only take place in the heart; that is, in the center of the human person. A voice from the lungs is not enough to carry another along with the meaning of our words. The voice has to carry with it the warmth and living fire of the heart around which the lungs are wrapped.2

We find this more cosmic aspect of the Marian archetype expressed in the person of Galadriel’s own heavenly patroness, Elbereth, Queen of the Stars, who plays the role in Tolkien’s legendarium of transmitting light from the heavenly places. It is to Elbereth that the Elves sing their moving invocation: O Elbereth! Gilthoniel! We still remember, we who dwell In this far land beneath the trees, Thy Starlight on the Western seas. Tolkien would have been familiar from his childhood with one of the most popular Catholic hymns to the Virgin Mary, the tone and mood of which are markedly close to that of Tolkien’s to Elbereth (see L 213): Hail, Queen of Heaven, the ocean star, Guide of the wand’rer here below: Thrown on life’s surge, we claim thy care— Save us from peril and from woe. Mother of Christ, star of the sea, Pray for the wanderer, pray for me. Starlight on the sea: for Tolkien a particularly evocative combination, as we have seen. Light shining in darkness, representing the life, grace, and creative action of God, is the heart of Tolkien’s writing.

Meanwhile, Matthew took the empty place beside Daisy’s. “Miss Bowman,” he said softly. Daisy couldn’t manage a word. Her gaze lifted to his smiling eyes, and it seemed that emotions sprang from her in a fountain of warmth. She had to look away from him before she did something foolish. But she remained intensely aware of his body next to hers. Westcliff and Matthew entertained the group with an account of how their carriage had gotten stuck in mire. Luckily they had been helped by a passing farmer with an ox-drawn wagon, but in the process of freeing the vehicle, all participants had been covered with mud from head to toe. And apparently the episode had left the ox in quite an objectionable temper. By the time the story was finished, everyone at the table was chuckling. The conversation turned to the subject of the Shakespeare festival, and Thomas Bowman launched into an account of the visit to Stratford-on-Avon. Matthew asked a question or two, seeming fully engaged in the conversation. Suddenly Daisy was startled to feel his hand slide into her lap beneath the table. His fingers closed over hers in a gentle clasp. And all the while he took part in the conversation, talking and smiling easily. Daisy reached for her wine with her free hand and brought it to her lips. She took one sip, and then another, and nearly choked as Matthew played lightly with her fingers beneath the table. Sensations that had lain quiescent for a week kindled into vibrant life. Still not looking at her, Matthew gently slid something over her ring finger, past the knuckle, until it fit neatly at the base. Her hand was returned to her lap as a footman came to replenish the wine in their glasses. Daisy looked down at her hand, blinking at the sight of the glittering yellow sapphire surrounded by small round diamonds. It looked like a white-petaled flower. Her fingers closed tightly, and she averted her face to hide a betraying flush of pleasure. “Does it please you?” Matthew whispered. “Oh, yes.” That was the extent of their communication at dinner. It was just as well. There was too much to be said, all of it highly private. Daisy steeled herself for the usual long rituals of port and tea after dinner, but she was gratified when it seemed that everyone, even her father, was inclined to retire early. As it appeared the elderly vicar and his wife were ready to return home, the group dispersed without much fanfare. Walking with Daisy from the dining hall, Matthew murmured, “Will I have to scale the outside wall tonight, or are you going to leave your door unlocked?” “The door,” Daisy replied succinctly. “Thank God.

If . . . the world is the effect of the Divine Word uttered at the beginning of time, then all of nature can be taken as a symbol of a supernatural reality. Everything that exists, in whatever mode, having its principle in the Divine Intellect, translates or represents that principle in its own manner and according to its own order of existence; and thus, from one order to another, all things are linked and correspond with each other so that they join together in a universal and total harmony which is like a reflection of the Divine Unity itself.

For Christians believed not only that the temporal world was an expression of God’s will and wisdom—in something like the way that pagans had believed that it was ruled and shaped by the gods, or that it was a shadow of the world of the Ideas—but that God had entered into that world, using its analogous resemblance to him in order to form it into a vessel for his actual presence.

We often talk about the “environmental movement,” or about a modern concern for the “environment.” It is worth noting that these terms are misleading, since they imply an opposition between humanity (or whichever species is under discussion) and its surroundings, reducing the rest of nature to a kind of backdrop—and at worst to a complex set of raw materials and mechanical forces.

The modern person feels himself to be disengaged from the world around him, rather than intrinsically related to it (by family, tribe, birthplace, vocation, and so forth). He is expected to forge his own destiny by an exercise of choice. He is concerned less with what is right than with what his rights are, or rather he grounds the former on the latter. The world for him is just a neutral space for his action, his free choice, and the greatest mysteries lie not outside but within himself.

A great deal was riding on this argument for Twain, for if the man from Stratford had indeed written the plays, Twain’s mostly deeply held beliefs about the nature of fiction and on how major writers drew on personal experience would be wrong.

in late sixteenth-century Stratford-upon-Avon, where malting was the town’s principal industry, anybody with a bit of spare change and a barn was storing as much grain as possible.

The memorials best befitting Shakespeare’s stature and accomplishments were in fact created and preserved by those who honoured his legacy: a monument and a gravestone in Stratford’s church; and, seven years after his death, a lavish collection of his plays, prefaced by commendatory verses and his portrait. At the time, no English playwright had ever been posthumously honoured with such a collection.

There have been many kinds of suitors: the early scholars who pored through the archives, searching for records that would illuminate his life; the founding fathers and men of letters who made pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon, slicing “relics” from his chair and falling on their knees to kiss the sacred ground; in later centuries, Stratfordians who wrote biographies, trying to solve the mystery of how he did it, and anti-Stratfordians who saw still different authors by different names.

Alexander Waugh suggests that “Sweet Swan of Avon” was purposefully ambiguous: “Jonson was allowing, and probably expecting, some of his readers—those of ‘seeliest Ignorance’—to think of Stratford-upon-Avon, home to the late Mr. Will. Shakspere.” Others—the discriminating few—would know better.

A monument to Shakespeare sits on the wall of the local church in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is not known with any certainty who erected it or when, but some version of it must have existed by 1623. It features a bust of a mustachioed man, with an inscription below exhorting passersby to slow down and “read if thou canst”; that is, to figure out its meaning. The inscription proceeds in two parts—a Latin couplet, followed by English verse—but it is notoriously opaque: IUDICIO PYLIUM, GENIO SOCRATEM, ARTE MARONEM, TERRA TEGIT, POPVLUS MæRET, OLYMPVS HABET STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST, READ IF THOV CANST, WHOM ENVIOUS DEATH HATH PLAST, WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE: WITH WHOME, QVICK NATURE DIDE WHOSE NAME, DOTH DECK TH[ I] S TOMBE, FAR MORE THEN COST: SIEH ALL TH[ A] T HE HATH WRITT, LEAVES LIVING ART, BVT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.

Knight, who visited Stratford to gather inspiration for his biography, used the Birthplace to build out scenes of the poet’s formative years—those “happy days of boyhood” for which no accounts actually exist. Never mind. Knight imagined them, conjuring the Shakespeare family’s cozy domesticity around an evening fireside: “The mother is plying her distaff, or hearing Richard his lesson out of the ABC book. The father and the elder son are each intent upon a book of chronicles, manly reading… and then all the group crowd round their elder brother, who has laid aside his chronicle, to entreat him for a story.

In Stratford, the custodians of the Birthplace milked this fixation, inviting tourists to sit in the chimney nook where Shakespeare once sat. They had it specially dusted every morning for this purpose.

Sir Stanley Wells. Wells is Britain’s leading Shakespeare authority, the one who declared it “immoral” to question history and “take credit away” from Shakespeare. For many years, he was professor of Shakespeare studies and director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, as well as chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the organization that oversees the Birthplace.

As legends and jokes circulated, devotees began making pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon to pay homage to the divine poet. Hoping to find “relics,” they flocked to Shakespeare’s large house on Chapel Street. They were particularly drawn to the mulberry tree in the garden, said to have been planted by the poet himself. In 1756 the home’s current owner, annoyed by the constant visitors snooping around his property, had the tree cut down. A local tradesman bought the logs and grew rich selling carvings from the tree, like pieces of the true cross.

The Immortal Shakespeare was born in this house.” Some skeptics suspected that the sign was part of a scheme devised by the town to bring visitors to Stratford. Others suggested that it was hung by an enterprising occupant of the house, eager to do a little business showing pilgrims the site of Shakespeare’s nativity. Whatever the provenance of the sign, it established the beginning of a tradition whereby the house on Henley Street came to be known as “The Birthplace”: a holy site, a shrine of pilgrimage and worship sanctified by the spirit of the poet.

Reported in newspapers throughout Europe, the jubilee cemented the connection between Shakespeare and Stratford and marked the formal beginning of the town’s tourist industry. No Shakespeare play was actually performed over the course of the three-day festival. In fact, not a single line of Shakespeare’s writings was spoken. The works were drowned out in the frenzy of national celebration. It was what “Shakespeare” signified—the veneration of Shakespeare as, in Garrick’s words, “blest genius of the isle”—that dominated the jubilee, for if the eighteenth century was an age of skepticism, it was also an age of rising nationalism.

In 1843 the publisher Charles Knight provided the nation with the first book-length biography of the national poet, William Shakspere: A Biography. (Nineteenth-century biographers tended to use “Shakspere,” consistent with the spelling on his baptismal and burial records.) The book was an extended Victorian fantasy—a “descriptive reverie,” as one critic at the time put it—freely fictionalizing Shakespeare’s life, blissfully untethered from scholarly citation or historical fact. Since Shakespeare could not be known through letters, journals, or other personal records, Knight found him in Stratford-upon-Avon—in the streets and village life, the surrounding fields and forests, and in the Birthplace itself. Stratford filled in the gaps—indeed, became Shakespeare’s biography. The Warwickshire countryside elucidated his love of nature; the half-timbered house on Henley Street, his idyllic childhood.

Readers advancing through Knight’s reverie would encounter many more happy visions in Stratford: a romantic scene of Shakespeare’s betrothal to Anne Hathaway; a pious scene of his Christian devotion before his death. The biography was closer to hagiography, to the lives of the saints, than to any documented historical truth. Critics faulted Knight for building “hypothesis upon hypothesis” and expressed their wish that he would “confine his fancy within the bounds.

For the truly devout, there is a waymarked footpath between London and Stratford, “Shakespeare’s Way,” intended to approximate the route he might have taken to and from his hometown.

wandered through Stratford, waiting to hear back. The main downtown area was small and pedestrian, centered on the local tourist industry. Most of the buildings were in the half-timbered Tudor style, lending an air of Renaissance authenticity to the town. Quaint street signs helpfully funneled bumbling tourists toward the attractions: “Shakespeare’s Birthplace” or “Holy Trinity Church and Shakespeare’s Grave.” On High Street, I passed the Hathaway Tea Rooms and a pub called the Garrick Inn. Farther along, a greasy-looking cafe called the Food of Love, a cutesy name taken from Twelfth Night (“ If music be the food of love, play on”). The town was Elizabethan kitsch—plus souvenir shops, a Subway, a Starbucks, a cluster of high-end boutiques catering to moneyed out-of-towners, more souvenir shops. Shakespeare’s face was everywhere, staring down from signs and storefronts like a benevolent big brother. The entrance to the “Old Bank estab. 1810” was gilded ornately with an image of Shakespeare holding a quill, as though he functioned as a guarantee of the bank’s credibility. Confusingly, there were several Harry Potter–themed shops (House of Spells, the Creaky Cauldron, Magic Alley). You could almost feel the poor locals scheming how best to squeeze a few more dollars out of the tourists. Stratford and Hogwarts, quills and wands, poems and spells. Then again, maybe the confusion was apt: Wasn’t Shakespeare the quintessential boy wizard, magically endowed with inexplicable powers?

Through the whole of Jonson’s eighty-line poem, he never actually mentions Stratford. But several shorter poems follow Jonson’s tribute, including one that refers to “thy Stratford Moniment.” “Shake-speare, at length thy pious fellowes give the world thy Workes,” writes the poet Leonard Digges,

The single most important text in the authorship debate is the First Folio, the authoritative collection of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1623, seven years after the Stratford man’s death. Until then, only half of the plays had been published, in individual, pamphlet-like editions called quartos. The Folio collected all thirty-six plays, half of which might have otherwise been lost, and set up Shakespeare as a figure of cultural prestige, hailing him in a series of prefatory pages as the triumph of Britain—a poet “not of an age but for all time!” Scholars argue that this praise of Shakespeare in the First Folio, seven years after his death, confirms the Stratford man’s authorship.

brothers William and Philip Herbert, the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, to whom it is dedicated. (A prefatory epistle explains that the earls showed “much favour” toward the author and his works, though the Stratford man had no documented relationship with them.) If the patrons or the printer did not approve of the portrait, they could have refused it and sought out a better one. They did not. The portrait of the idiot is apparently what they wanted.

Scholars have tried desperately to unravel the sonnets and identify the figures, publishing studies with titles like Shakespeare’s Sonnets Solved and The Secret Drama of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Unfolded, With the Characters Identified. But the sonnets remain opaque. Nothing in them fits the Stratford man’s life. “Shakespeare’s sonnets are an island of poetry surrounded by a barrier of icebergs and dense fog,” wrote the Harvard scholar Douglas Bush. But the fog itself is suggestive. It is the same fog that surrounds everything to do with Shakespeare.

It is my absolute honor and pleasure,” she said, meaning every word. She’d taken a gamble, and it had been the right one. It had all been worth it. This moment, this book, this writer, this city. Stratford-on-Odéon. Odeonia. Her very own mythical Ithaca.

How could this highly sophisticated, 1,194-line narrative poem, adapting Ovid’s Metamorphoses and written in polished stanzas of iambic pentameter, possibly be his first creative endeavor? Besides, the author had already written several anonymous plays. Skeptics see the workings of a carefully constructed pretense: a concealed author debuting as “Shakespeare,” making out that this is his first work. How the Stratford man came to meet the fashionable aristocrat, or why he dedicated the poem to him, is another mystery. Biographers tend toward the view that Southampton was Shakespeare’s patron, financing his early poetic endeavors. But no mention of Shakespeare has been found in Southampton’s papers, and there is no record of payment.

Harvey referred to the new “Venus in print” armed by the “bravest Minerva,” did he mean the new poem by Shakespeare? Noticeably, Harvey never says it is by William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. He does not mention the author’s name at all. Instead, he says that the poem is “armed with the complete harness of the bravest Minerva.” Protected, shielded, equipped with a weapon. His language emphasizes Minerva’s protective qualities—the complete military “harness”—and implies, perhaps, that the name “Shakespeare” itself is the armor, the shield.

Books and poems of the period are strewn with many more allusions, but amongst these allusions to the poet in his lifetime, “there is none,” to quote Professor Wells, “that explicitly and incontrovertibly identifies him with Stratford-upon-Avon.

New Brunswick, New Jersey, where I had to cut off two of its feet to get it upstairs to my third-floor office at 16 Stratford Place. There, for all I know, it remains to this day.)

In November 2003, for example, police raided Stratford High School in Goose Creek, South Carolina. The raid was recorded by the school’s surveillance cameras as well as a police camera. The tapes show students as young as fourteen forced to the ground in handcuffs as officers in SWAT team uniforms and bulletproof vests aim guns at their heads and lead a drug-sniffing dog to tear through their book bags. The raid was initiated by the school’s principal, who was suspicious that a single student might be dealing marijuana. No drugs or weapons were found during the raid and no charges were filed. Nearly all of the students searched and seized were students of color.

My eyes narrow. “You can call me Ms. Hill. Let’s get one thing straight, Professor Stratford. You can give me assignments in class, but you don’t control me outside that room.

Professor Stratford looks satisfied. “This is Advanced Comparative Analysis of Literature, ladies, gentlemen, and others. Agency. Control. Danger. Identity.” He pauses, and I feel the way he does not look at me so acutely it’s like passing beneath one of the large buildings—cold and dark. Shocking after the warmth of his regard. “Sex.

What else does 10 Things I Hate About You teach us?” “That the bad guy always gets the girl,” I tell her. “Patrick Verona is a duplicitous jerk to Kat Stratford for far too long. And we wonder why toxic masculinity thrives. We romanticize it!

Should Shakespeare have stayed home in Stratford-on-Avon to help rear his family and not have abandoned them for London, the city that made him?

No wonder the wireless is becoming so popular. It's capturing imaginations and holding them ransom.

But it wasn’t just Twain and Whitman whispering heresies into my ear, a whole ink spill of geniuses had staked their reputations on the argument that “Will Shake-speare” was one of the hyphenated pen names popular among Elizabethan satirists who didn’t fancy being disemboweled in public. The list of gadflies who questioned the official narrative of Shakespeare included Chaplin, Coleridge, Emerson, Gielgud, Hardy, Holmes, Jacobi, James, Joyce, Welles, and of late even Mark Rylance, the first artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Collectively they believed the Stratford businessman to be a front and a fraud. Whatever the truth, it’s fair to say the authorship debate had long been divided into two camps, artists vs. academics.

Everything about the Ashbourne spat in the face of the Stratford everyman myth. How in hell could anyone think, even for a moment, that this sitter had been raised milking cows in some dung-filled barn? “Here is a nobleman,” the portrait sang, and in fact even that dangling glove motif in English portraits had been created to distinguish rank from riffraff: only noblemen posed in that manner. The sitter’s face was ethereal, almost regal, as if he were mulling over a line of iambic pentameter or searching for an elusive rhyme.

A woman was hit and killed by a tram last night around 10:45 PM. There was no identification on her, but she looks to be in her mid-forties, with light brown hair and fair skin. She was wearing a purple coat and was barefoot. If you think you may know her or be able to identify her, please see Constable Stratford at Station Nine.

Following some initial criticism from the NPG’s Dr. Tarnya Cooper, their former director Sir Roy Strong lambasted the Cobbe’s legitimacy as fantasy. “Codswallop!” was how he phrased it. Then the formidable Katherine Duncan-Jones, whose writings on the sonnets are considered sacrosanct, weighed in by describing the Cobbe theory as “irrational.” But it didn’t matter what the experts said. This time the fix was in. Scholars no longer scored the fight, Google did. And because of this, the Cobbe’s debut, launched on Shakespeare’s birthday as part of a Stratford publicity stunt, proved a choreographed success that would redefine the playwright. A star is born: the prettiest Shakespeare of them all.

The portrait had been discovered in 1860 when Mr. William Oakes Hunt, the town clerk of Stratford, employed a visiting art expert named Simon Collins to examine a group of portraits long lodged inside the Hunt attic. These paintings were believed to have descended from the aristocratic Clopton family. Mr. Hunt recalled as a child using the portraits for archery practice, but by 1860 he’d become curious as to their value. When hired to appraise these attic portraits, Simon Collins had just finished the prestigious job of restoring Stratford’s world-famous funerary bust of Shakespeare that hovered like a putty-nosed wraith over the poet’s tomb in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church. Posed with pen and paper while sporting the pickdevant-styled pointy beard and up-brushed mustache popular from 1570 to 1600, the bust has long been championed as one of the most authentic likenesses of the poet; nevertheless, back in 1793 a curator named Edmond Malone had decided to whitewash the entire bust, which until then had been unique in portraying Shakespeare wearing a blood-red jerkin beneath a black sleeveless jacket.

Well, to start, goodbye Stratford-upon-Avon tourist industry and the millions it raked in annually. Goodbye Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Goodbye Stanley Wells and goodbye to some 367 well-imagined yet now highly comical Shakespeare biographies. Goodbye to the reputations of countless red-faced academics. And, last but not least, goodbye to the “I Think Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare!” T-shirt company.