Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Right. Some of you will have already recognised that we're at the corner of Chapel Street
on Stratford-on-Avon.
Just over there, dead opposite us, is the Guild Hall, which houses the Grammar School,
King Edward VI Grammar School, where Shakespeare learned his Latin. That's the Guild Chapel,
that church on the corner, which did have a nice catholic painting of the Last Judgement.
Various souls going to Heaven on one side and going to Hell on the other. And it was
actually Shakespeare's father, when he was Alderman, who had the job of whitewashing
it over when all that catholic stuff was abolished.
But the reason we're standing here is that just over there, that hole is possibly where
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. That's the site of New Place. The great big house which Shakespeare
bought it 1597 and which was his main residence. The one that he invested in most heavily for
the rest of his life and the one where he died.
Now, if you look a bit further back up the street that way towards the High Street, you'll
see another gabled building there which gives us some idea of what New Place was like.
It had five gables out here. And you can just see a gabled scar on the wall of the survibving
house - Nash's House that's next door to it. And along that top floor, our social architectural
historian Tara Hamling thinks that Shakespeare possibly made a gallery - a long room - where
you could walk up and down when it was raining and display pictures. And it's interesting
that in one of his last plays, Shakespeare has such a gallery in The Winter's Tale.
Anyway, he buys this house in 1597, the year after his son dies. His son, Hamlet. Now,
a lot of you have mentioned on the comment pages how nice it would be to think that Shakespeare
called Hamlet, Hamlet, to commemorate the death of his son. But of course the story
of Hamlet was already called the story of Hamlet, long before Shakespeare had christened
his son.
His son was the twin of Judith and there are a couple called Judith and Hamlet - saddlers
who were friends of the Shakespeares in Stratford - so I think that's more likely to be where
the son got his name from. Anyway, he no longer has a son, he has two daughters. He gets his
father's coat of arms done and his own coat of arms of course and buys a whopping great
house. If he's not going to have a lineage, at least he's going to have a kind of estate.
And it was here.
Unfortunately, a mid-18th century retired vicar living in the house which by then had
been much remodelled anyway, had it demolished because he got fed up with the increasing
number of tourists who wanted to see around the garden and get hold of bits of the mulberry
tree that was rumoured to have been planted by Shakespeare.
So we don't have it anymore, but the University of Birmingham's been doing lots of archaeology
there and we know much more about it than we did.
Closet. That's the real reason I'm standing in the middle of the street talking about
Elizabethan domestic architecture this afternoon. A lot of you, we've been talking about the
closet scene obviously with Abigail and talking about Oedipus, I'm sure we're all fed up with
hearing about Freud, but there we are, you can't really avoid it around Hamlet.
The closet. As Abigail says, lots of directors insist on having a bed in that scene. But
actually, a closet in Elizabethan usage is not a bedroom. It's a kind of private office,
possibly off a bedroom, but nonetheless, it's actually an office. It's where you keep your
private papers, your letters and recipe books. Things like that. It's where Gertrude would
keep her private accounts. It's a great place for a private business-like interview about
your son's attitude. But there might be a bed nearby, but it's not going to be actually
in the closet.
The other thing that's happening this afternoon and I just mention this is this. The student
drama society of the Shakespeare Institute are about to perform The Spanish Tragedy and
Martin Wiggins is giving a free lecture about it over tea quite soon. So that's where I'm
going to go. But thanks for coming with me to this crowded street in the middle of Stratford
close to the famous Shakespeare Institute which if we look back up the street towards
some more innocent bystanders, it's just up there on the right.
Good. See you on the course later on.