Much Ado About Nothing 7/9

We spent the day in Stratford-Upon-Avon, which is, for those of you who were not paying attention in Freshman English, the home town of Mr. William Shakespeare. It was a three hour bus ride from London, which was less than pleasant, but it was a really gorgeous day when we got to Stratford, sunny and warm, without being overly hot.

Stratford had a lot of really cute shops, like one dedicated to Beatrix Potter, or another to organic teas. We also found what to us seemed like a knock-off Harry Potter store (All England is Harry Potter), Magic Alley, but according to some of the people who visited it later, I guess it had an assortment of fun magic stuff? We didn’t see it that way.

We didn’t do the tour of Shakespeare’s house, though I did photograph the outside, and we did visit the gift shop, where we found that not everyone spell checks.




Then we protolibrarians decided to visit the Stratford upon Avon Library and Information Centre. I was hoping to get some information about their early children's literacy programs for my paper. Unfortunately, there wasn't a children's librarian working at the time. I did take the time to review the collection. Fun fact: it’s exactly like ours. It's a small collection, but I saw the same popular children's books at Stratford that we have at Green Hills, just with the UK covers. I did check out their programming, and in addition to storytimes for toddlers and young children, they also advertise the Bookstart Bear program. I did get to speak with the working reference librarian, and she told us that they have limited funds for programming, so what they do is mostly through partnerships in the community. She seemed excited to talk to a bunch of visiting librarians, and we all ended up buying the library's really cute tote bags.

We then decided to visit Shakespeare’s grave, which was, you know, gravelike, though it has a fun curse on it. After grabbing dinner from a place called the Lazy Cow, we spent the rest of our afternoon in the park next to the river, enjoying the beautiful weather.

That evening, we went to the Swan theater, to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of “As You Like It.” It was a really great performance, and it had an interesting style choice, because the script was all pure Shakespeare (with the exception of some fun crowd work done by

Touchstone), but the costumes and props were all modern. It was really fun to see them lean into the minifridge and pop open a beer in the middle of a passionate soliloquy. At one point, Touchstone walked in with his stuff in a Sainsbury’s bag. The play was wonderful, but by the time it ended, it was late, and we were tired.

We then proceeded to get turned around trying to find where the bus was parked. All of Stratford pretty much shuts down at 5:30, and it was around 11 pm, as we wandered the dark and abandoned town. We luckily ran into a couple, and asked them to direct us to Shakespeare’s house. This elucidated a confused, “Shakespeare?” which was hilarious. Kate wisely asked them to direct us to the location of the jester statute, which was unmistakable. Even then, though, their directions were really inexact, though we finally managed to get to the bus.

Finally crawled into bed that night around 2 am, and I think I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.