Stratford Upon Avon Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

the story of a flatus research project carried out by the extremely appropriately named Colin Leakey, at a food science facility in Chipping Campden, near Stratford-upon-Avon.

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.

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.

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!

In 1612 he testified as a witness in a lawsuit in London, where he was identified not as the famous writer but merely as a “gentleman” of Stratford-upon-Avon.

there was no recorded notice of the celebrated writer’s passing. No elegies. No great London funeral. No burial at Westminster Abbey alongside Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and Britain’s other literary dead. On April 25, he was buried quietly at the local church in Stratford-upon-Avon. The only trace of this event is the church’s burial register, which reads simply, “Will Shakspere gent.

between 1586 and 1607, the historian William Camden wrote that the “small market-town” of Stratford-upon-Avon owed “all its consequences to two natives of it. They are John de Stratford, later archbishop of Canterbury, who built the church, and Hugh Clopton, later mayor of London, who built the Clopton Bridge across the Avon.” Camden was clearly aware of the poet Shakespeare—he referred to him elsewhere as one of “the most pregnant wits of our time”—but he apparently did not regard Stratford as the poet’s origin.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lily Samson, The Switch, Outtakes & Quotes, shameless manipulation of. A one minute reading test I am dog --Dog, Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans, 2007 Allergies disclaimer: One must stress that this book is not intended for the unwashed masses: I delayed showering after the last switch. I’ve created a Pavlovian response: he must associate its floral sweetness with sexual fulfilment. Adam has a “Pavlovian” reaction to Elena’s BO? Bribes her with cake to lessen the wrath when asking Elena to wash? He frowns, seeing that I’m silent and trembling. ‘My perfume was weak; hers much stronger.’ I say, my temper flaring. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the usual wasteman chatting up yours truly in Sarf London would probably assume that a big phat slice of Marks & Spencer’s Strawberry Pavlova will get him into the lady’s knickers. Nope, she’s allergic to stupid. A merengue dessert will hardly cause a rash, but a moron makes her skin crawl. A female of the human species displayed an unconditioned response: shoved cream cake into the courting male’s face. Requested a substantial meal of Shchavel Borscht with hard boiled egg --Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russian Cookbook for Love, Romance, and mating behaviours: Humans, 1904 Ding-dong! --Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Neutral Triggers & Conditioned Responses: Canines, 1907 It is I! I make the best Byzantine shchi to entice a female. --Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Dead Souls, Notebook (1841-1844), The Nose and other short stories Right! She turned her nose up at his advances: Idiot! I hate strawberries! --Seraphima Vasilievna Karchevskaya Pavlova, Mrs, My Husband and I – Memoirs The lady did not have a sweet tooth. Man didn’t do his research. This is a cleverly written book. So some of you, keen aspiring readers, please have your Oxford fictionary handy. Just saying! In the words of our hero: Bloody pricey...But God, it is a nice smell. Don’t you like it? And then he “squirts onto her wrist, playfully.” Shhhh.. Doctors Pavlov & Chekhov are not amused. Shall we shuffle the deck with these random quotes? One minute! Plenty of time is a full minute for a skilled bullshit dealer to shuffle themselves out of a gloomy Russian medical clerical predicament. Not tricky when Lily Samson gives treats: All around us are dog walkers, their expensive breeds racing about, barking and sniffing each other’s genitals. ..thinking it all through those awful dog ornaments she hated... feisty feminist...she simply hates them. Men are so stupid! And then.. She took another whiff and yet another. She sniffed him up and down like a dog before realizing what it was: the aroma of a woman’s cunt. --Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Gratuitous use of one particular French vulgarism nested in the English language since the Norman conquest of 1066 is well demonstrated by this Milan Kundera translation. One has to wonder if the original 1984 edition contained the word “pizda”? It is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock. --Scholar Germaine Greer But of course a cunt, in French, as much as el coño in Spanish does not carry near enough as much uncouth weight as in English. The English language doesn’t exist. It’s just badly pronounced French. --Bernard Cerquiglini Quelle conne! Un con reste un con! --William Shakespeare, Last Words, Holy Trinity Church, Gropecunt Lane, Stratford upon Avon, April 23rd 1616

When she was a child, she'd often wondered about the old manor. Some said the place was haunted, but she thought it mysterious. Sometimes when she was a girl, she would wander through the wrought-iron gate along Ladenbrooke's stone wall. The fragrance from flowers on the other side captivated her along with the beauty of the gardens. The butterflies reminded her of the fairies she'd loved as a child and, when she was older, of the fairies dancing through the magical garden in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' Shakespeare was born forty miles from here. In Stratford-upon-Avon. Perhaps the gardens in the Cotswolds inspired him as they once inspired her.

William Shakespeare was baptized and buried at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. April marks the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.

Britain's geography is odd. Peterhead is the eastern-most point of mainland Scotland although that puts it further west than Stratford-upon-Avon, which is on the western side of the British Midlands. It's sometimes difficult to believe that east coast Edinburgh and Dundee are both farther west than west coast Bristol.

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)