Critical Survey

According to actor Nick Asbury, Stratford-upon-Avon is ‘a wonderful, strange, old place … a place of dreams’. As the site of literary pilgrimage since the eighteenth century, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the topic of hundreds of imaginary portrayals, Stratford is ripe for analysis, both in terms of its factual existence and its fictional afterlife. The essays in this special issue of Critical Survey consider the various manifestations of the physical and metaphorical town on the Avon, across time, genre and place, from America to New Zealand, from children’s literature to wartime commemorations. We meet many Stratfords in this collection, real and imaginary, and the interplay between the two generates new visions of the place. The essays in this collection, summarised in Nicola Watson’s afterword, begin to write a history of these imagined Stratfords.

The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon opened on 23 April 1879 with a performance of Much Ado About Nothing; sixty-five year old Helen Faucit, long semi-retired from the stage, played the role of Beatrice. This essay explores the cultural politics informing the event from the perspective of Faucit's involvement, exploring her significance to the performance and the performance's significance to her through a series of textual lenses - including theatre reviews, Faucit's personal correspondence, her critical work On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters and Sir Theodore Martin's posthumous biography of his wife. From a public perspective, Faucit endowed the supposedly provincial town of Stratford, its festival and its new theatrical institution with national stature; from the actress's private perspective, the event was both a professional engagement and a community celebration among old and new friends, bringing together the different facets of her long personal engagement with Shakespeare.

In a number of recent novels for the young, Stratford serves as location for at least part of the action, its landmarks invested with both narrative and thematic significance. These versions appear influenced by aspects of contemporary scholarship, particularly new data about visits from theatre companies to Stratford, and revival of critical interest in Shakespeare and religion, especially his relationship with Catholicism, while the Stratford origins of Shakespeare's creativity are explored through plots, allusions or characters that mirror his plays. The myth of Stratford as Shakespeare's loved or rejected home is well suited to youth fiction, where the idea of lost, re-found or substitute homes is so often a central theme or plot device. Shakespeare's hometown takes on varying characteristics, prominence and gendered associations, just as Shakespeare himself is present or absent to different degrees. Although Stratford often represents home, family and security, it also reveals a darker, death-haunted, secret life: both the nostalgic rural idyll embodied in the concept of 'Shakespeare country' and a site in which the violent politics of religion are played out.

There is much current interest in walking as a social and physiological practice in disciplines from literature to geography, from anthropology to performance studies. 'Walking Studies' impact Shakespearean scholarship and in particular work relating to Shakespeare-freighted sites such as Stratford-upon-Avon, where the loaded discourses of tourism and personal encounter are predominant in the practical experience of visitors. This article asks what it might mean, either for the individual or the collective, to 'walk with Shakespeare' and whether the 'Shakespeare' that we locate in these experiences is always already a construct, fashioned to feed the demands of a national economy and the gross national product by drawing millions of visitors to an otherwise fairly nondescript Midlands market town. It explores the possibility that walking with 'Shakespeare' may mean walking with an available icon but not with the complex textual, performative, and historical Shakespeares at the heart of academic scholarship.

The presence of Americans and American interests in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, stretches beyond the Shakespeare Memorial Fountain in Market Square. In the course of mapping this presence, this article reveals how the bond between America and Stratford, mostly forged by Victorian and Edwardian visitors and benefactors, rests on contradictory, ambivalent symbols. As so often happens in rites of remembrance, in which the commemorators often commemorate themselves, American presence in Stratford celebrates Shakespeare and asserts national identity at the same time. American commemoration of Shakespeare in Stratford works in two opposite directions, strengthening bonds with Shakespeare's England while simultaneously asserting self-determination and memorialising independence from the nation that gave birth to Shakespeare. While exploring these issues, this article unpacks the links between one of Stratford's iconic tourist destinations (Holy Trinity Church) and one of America's foundational myths, Plymouth Rock, which are jointly construed as sites of remembrance and symbols of origin in a late-Victorian stained glass window erected with money from American donors in Shakespeare's church. By arguing that the link between Shakespeare's Stratford and the Pilgrim's Rock is possible through the erasure of historical evidence, this article shows how communities remember and how communities choose to forget.

This essay considers the phenomenon of non-Warwickshire cities and towns that have imported the name of Stratford for their locales, and the later ramifications of this inescapably Shakespearean place name. My aim is to explore why citizens around the world have chosen 'Stratford' as a name for their locale, what connotations they were hoping to evoke and to import, and how the choice of place name has affected the subsequent development of the space. The various imported Stratfords discussed in this essay, from America to New Zealand, suggest the complex associations between the name of 'Stratford' and its most famous original resident, from evoking a sense of tradition, stability and history; to the complicated relationships between national identities. This often tumultuous partnership is indicative of the shifting values and meanings behind both 'Stratford' and Shakespeare, from the nineteenth century to the present, and in various geographical locales and economic circumstances.

This response piece comments on the essays in this volume in relation with one another and sets them in the context of previous scholarship on the history of Stratford as 'Shakespeare's town', before offering a conspectus of work still to be done. It concludes with a brief overview of the material reality of Stratford-upon-Avon in 2012, and some analysis of the trend within the town and the Shakespeare properties towards constructing this site of literary pilgrimage as a ground of future creativity.

In Lilac Time Raymond Earl by MICHAEL W. THOMAS

Lindbergh Class by MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS

Notes on contributors