There may be hope after all...

A couple of years ago we ran a Winterim trip to Italy, and our first stop on that journey was the small town of Assisi and the Basilica of San Francesco... Saint Francis, as he may be better known. On that tour we learned that before Saint Francis was called by Jesus to "save my church" (in so many words), Francis was a rabble-rousing juvenile delinquent. His dad was a wealthy fabric merchant, and on one occasion, Francis stole and sold his dad's best stock in order to carouse with his buddies. In fact, when something went missing in Assisi or trouble was afoot, the locals often remarked that it must have just been Francis and friends again. After Francis's literal "come to Jesus moment", he changed the way the Catholic Church functioned in the Middle Ages; the focus became less about how one achieved glory in heaven and more about serving one's fellow man on earth. In this edition of Winterim, we traveled today to the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon to visit the hometown of another teenager who made some ineffective life choices and turned out pretty OK.

There is just a ton of stuff scholars don't know about Shakespeare, but we do have some pretty salacious details about his marriage to Anne Hathaway. To make an incredibly long story short, Shakespeare married a woman nine years his senior (he was eighteen; she was twenty-seven) which was scandalous in it own regard, but Shakespeare's first daughter was born a few months short of nine, if you catch the drift. Shakespeare did not yet have a home of his own, so Anne, William, and baby Judith moved back into Shakespeare's parents house. The family often visited the Hathaway family farm outside of Stratford, but basically Shakespeare was an unemployed teenager living in his parents' basement (OK, probably not, but it fits the modern archetype) with his family. There's about six or seven years of Shakespeare's life for which we don't have much historical record; many scholars believe that he abandoned his family during that time, but the prevailing thought in Stratford is that he just worked around town making money to support his young family. So, if two of the most influential figures in the Western world could overcome some tricky teenage years, anyone can.

In the late 1800's, England (under the pressure of such writers as Charles Dickens and T.S. Eliot) created an organization with the goal of preserving the personal history of arguably its most well-known native son. Stratford is a lovely English country town, unique in the presence of many old buildings ranging back almost 450 years in age. The town was able to keep those buildings around through the establishment of the Shakespeare Charitable Trust, and your students had the opportunity to walk on the same floorboards and paving stones at the Hathaway Cottage and Shakespeare's original home that he trod centuries ago. In addition to visiting those locations, we all had the opportunity to visit his grave at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. After our tour (led by another gifted Blue Badge guide, Alan), students had free time in the town center before heading back to London for our dinner of Indian food and our last show of the week, The Phantom of the Opera.

Tomorrow we get our second dose of Shakespeare with a visit to the reconstruction of the Globe Theatre and a lecture from one of their docents. We haven't quite decided what we are doing with our last free afternoon; the students have fallen in love with the city and have many ideas, and Nancy, Carl, and I will do our best to honor as many of them as we can.

Have a great Friday!