Stratford upon Avon

On Wednesday, July 13th, our class spent a day just wandering around Stratford upon Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare and home to the Royal Shakespeare Company. To start off the day, a couple of  friends and I visited the Stratford upon Avon public library. We perused their stacks and looked at everything the library had to offer, which was pretty good considering the size of the town. As you walked into the library, there was a large room with public computers for Internet usage, some books to browse, and four RFID self-service check out stations. There were separate rooms for films, fiction, childrens materials, and non-fiction. There was also a room for local history and family history research. There were very few service desks within the library--I only saw two, one on each of the floors of the library. We didn't talk to any of the librarians when we were there as they seemed to be a bit busy; the library is next to the Shakespeare Birthplace and Trust, so it was very busy on a nice summer afternoon.


We had some time to kill between our visit to the library and the play we were seeing that evening, so we went and rode around on a hop on, hop off bus, which took us around to the countryside surrounding Stratford, including Anne Hathaway's Cottage and Mary Arden's Farm where Shakespeare would have visited his grandparents in the 16th century. The tour was informative, not only about Shakespeare's life, but about what was happening in the time period. We then perused, shopped, and ate at a local pub before going to see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Cardenio, which is a lost, reimagined Shakespeare comedy about long-lost lovers. The highlight of the day was definitely the play, which was extremely well done; the actors were wonderful and the story was also quite fun. There were some elements that poked fun at Shakespeare's tragedies, which are quite comedic at times; there were some dark parts to the play and I expected people to start dying, but everything happily remained comedic. On a side note: Russ Feingold, the former senator from Wisconsin, was in the first row of the theatre, and this distracted me for a good ten minutes, trying to tell if it was actually him or not. All in all, it was a long but good day in Stratford upon Avon.