Stratford Upon Avon 2019

Wasn’t that Silver Swan amazing?  If you haven seen or read of it, go back to my last post and see.  As we left the area yesterday there was tremendous  lightening and thunder.  When you can see long distances across the fields the rain seems to be far away.  We saw the ruins of a Roman Temple that was destroyed in the 4 Th century.  Amazing to think the romans  were here during that time.

Tomorrow the Festival  of Quilts in Birmingham UK

We stayed the night in Sunderland in a light rain.  I will have a collection of road signs that I can see as some great modern quilt designs!  You will need to wait for those.  But one today said that we were only allowed to drive on that lane with an abnormal load.  I guess Juergen decided we were a pretty abnormal bunch .

Stratford upon Avon was the birthplace of William Shakespeare. The theater is in the part of town that floods by the River every few years. But it has been built up over the flood line.

In Shakespeare’s day there were no theaters outside of London. There were bands of traveling vagrants who might act a comedy but they were often run out of town as quickly as they had come in.  So in 1875 it wa decided to build a theatre in Stratford.  It ran for 51 years and then burned.  It was  restored in 1885 and named the Swan Theater.  Shakespeare was often called the Bard of Swans.

The fountain is a memorial to the 800th birthday of the town.  The Avon flows southwest to the Irish  sea making it an important shipping river.  It was a good holiday for families  to travel  by rented boat down the river and  back.  The river has a series of locks  that raise or lower the boats along the channel.  This allowed the boats to be pulled by either horses or people.  The people were cheaper to keep and hire. The footpaths ate still used today as riding , walking or jogging paths.

Shakespeare was borne in 1564 but near as anyone can determine from his baptism on 26 of April he may have been sort on April 23.   He died exactly 52 years later on 23 April 1616.  As the son of a rich merchant he was well educated.  He knew Latin, Greek, French, German, English and was versed in writing and rhetoric.

As a writer Shakespeare made a lot of money putting on his plays.  He was well respected and well liked. Still today we ar doing things like really creating his story of McBeth in the For or sour Lion King cartoons.