Mature Life Features

. . .was not impressed

when he asked me

what I was feeding my dying plants

and I told him it was their favorite:

root beer.

= = = = =

Bard’s Spirit

Still Alive in

Avon ‘s Stratford

By Silvia Shepard-Lobanov, Mature Life Features

STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England –- The “Sweet Swan of Avon,” Ben Johnson’s honorific for William Shakespeare, is reflected best in Nature’s choreography as the stately curvaceous creatures carve their way over the surface of this world-famous waterway. When you visit here, chances are you will find a place where a swan, in Wordsworth’s words, “floats double, swan and shadow” and fluttering its feathers while skimming noiselessly upon the water.

The Avon, like many English waterways, has a series of locks designed to let the water flow evenly across the countryside. Their dimensions determine the length and width of the long boats that carry visitors and others on relaxing cruises. Row, motor, and small boats of every sort ply these waterways. In summer, the setting becomes a liquid raceway with rafts, canoes, and home-made craft “struggling,”as the locals say, down the river in complete disarray.

The town’s largest venue where the Bard’s words are given substance is the Royal Shakespeare Theater that opened in 1932. The Other Place Theatre, 100 yards up the road, also houses themed medieval events as well as lectures and debates. Other local sights of interest include dwellings that played a part in Shakespeare’s life.

In 1582, at age 18, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, and sired three children, Susan, Hammett and Judith. Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, where she grew up, is open to visitors. It’s a 12-room farm house with timbered walls and lattice windows and a signature piece of Elizabethan homes: the thatched roof is made of straw piled high without wood planks underneath.

The thatching was the only place where animals could get warm, so all the village‘s cats and dogs lived in the roofs. When it rained, the thatch became slippery and sometimes the animals would fall off the roof. Hence the saying, “It’s raining cats and dogs.”

Stratford, which is less than 100miles northwest of London on the M-40 motor way, breathes Shakespeare. You can see his bed, the dishes he used, and other elements of his life. And on his gravestone in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church the epitaph on the stone, supposedly written by the Bard himself, reads:

“Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,

To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blessed be the man that spares these stones,

And cursed be he that moves my bones.”