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Grose Educational Media

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Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

On the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth stamps of this design
picturing the playwright with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon
in the background were issued by twelve British colonies .


(based on original map found at Map Library of the University of Texas.)


The Shakespeare Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon
(Grose Educational Media Photos)
The house conventionally accepted as "Shakespeare's Birthplace" is, according to Peter Levi's
account of The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, one of two adjacent houses that John
Shakespeare owned on Henley Street. The other house, demolished long ago, is, according
to Levi, as likely to have been Shakespeare's birthplace as the existing house. (12)

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the grassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come,
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples . . .
 
In Shakespeare's Life and Stage, S.H. Burton argues that Shakespeare felt a strong attachment
to Stratford and was often influenced in his writing by his hometown, its surroundings and
events that occured there. He notes that when the playwright was fifteen, more than twenty
years before he wrote Gertrude's speech describing Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet, a girl by the
name of Katherine Hamlet had drowned in the Avon in one of the villages near Stratford. (11)

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