On my recent but 40-year delayed proper tour of Stratford (I grew up in Warwick just a few miles away), I went on a walking tour of the town.
Hearing stories about Shakespeare and his family made me mindful of the passing of history and my lifelong quest of trying to work out what time really is, and does it actually exist!?
One of the soundtracks to my life when I was visiting Shakespeare country as a young adult was ‘Time’ by Pink Floyd.
“And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death”
These lyrics resonated with me as much back then as they do now, not in a morbid way. Quite the opposite really, they remind me to seize the day.
Tours of place and time seem to seek out the materiality of existence so we can somehow find our place on that map. So the pure physicality of buildings can help us to connect with the places Shakespeare was known to have spent his days, what he did there, what he might have been experiencing at the time.
The guide reminded us of the vastness of the over 400 years since the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet by explaining that it is not known exactly where he was buried in the churchyard of the Holy Trinity because the ground moves on with its deaths.
How lovely of Maggie O’Farrell to honour Hamnet and his twin sister Judith by planting a Rowan tree and plaque in the churchyard.
If you have read Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, you will get a sense of his life, his dad’s life, and the connection to Hamlet. I love that how regardless of death, of burials, words live on, how so many of us have since been inspired by the written works of Shakespeare, how the cycle of inspiration and response continues through time between writer and reader, reader, and writer.
