After landing in London we took the train to Stratford upon Avon to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform. I visited Stratford 15 years ago as a student on study abroad. At the time I visited Shakespeare's boyhood home as well as the childhood home of his wife, Anne Hathaway. But luckily for me I have a terrible memory and so it was mostly all new to me! I really loved the Anne Hathaway home.
The cottage is picturesque and has some fun stories for visitors. My personal favorite was about the first tours of the house. Apparently the cottage was passed down within the family until the mid 1800's. We were told that in the early days of tourists to the house an entrepreneurial descendant used to sell visitors pieces of a bench she claimed as the bench where Shakespeare wooed Anne during their courtship. Apparently there was no evidence for this claim, but many a tourist was duped into paying for a scrap of wood from some bench. These days you can no longer hack off parts of the bench but they do point it out to you on the tour.
I loved the gardens surrounding the cottage as well. There are flower gardens, a vegetable garden, and further off from the house there is a sculpture garden and even a hedge maze where we saw two little kids about the ages of our two, wandering around and around. The older brother was trying to find his little sister's pencil that she had dropped while running through the maze.
Later on we headed back in to Stratford for dinner and then King Lear at the RSC.
The cottage is picturesque and has some fun stories for visitors. My personal favorite was about the first tours of the house. Apparently the cottage was passed down within the family until the mid 1800's. We were told that in the early days of tourists to the house an entrepreneurial descendant used to sell visitors pieces of a bench she claimed as the bench where Shakespeare wooed Anne during their courtship. Apparently there was no evidence for this claim, but many a tourist was duped into paying for a scrap of wood from some bench. These days you can no longer hack off parts of the bench but they do point it out to you on the tour.I loved the gardens surrounding the cottage as well. There are flower gardens, a vegetable garden, and further off from the house there is a sculpture garden and even a hedge maze where we saw two little kids about the ages of our two, wandering around and around. The older brother was trying to find his little sister's pencil that she had dropped while running through the maze.
Later on we headed back in to Stratford for dinner and then King Lear at the RSC.
Comments