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Shakespeare's favourite places

Published on April 23rd, 2016

To mark the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death, we share with you this special selection of images from The Francis Frith Collection of Stratford-Upon-Avon and other places he loved.

‘All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts…’

(From ‘As You Like It’ by William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616)

William Shakespeare was born in April 1564, in a house in Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire. In his day, the building was really two houses, one where the family lived, and the other where his father John Shakespeare worked as a glover and wool merchant. Over the centuries there were many changes to the family home, which eventually became a butcher’s shop, and John Shakespeare’s wool shop became an inn. Even so, it is thought that the timber framework, the stone floors, cellars and several internal walls remained unaltered from William’s day. In 1848 the buildings were purchased for restoration into a style representative of the period when the Bard was alive, and today the west part of the house is furnished in a late 16th- to early 17th-century style appropriate to a well-off family. The very early photograph S21601 was taken before the house’s restoration was completed in 1857. One of the things missing from the restored building of Shakespeare’s birthplace is the muck heap that was outside the front door in his time. Apparently John Shakespeare was fined on a number of occasions for not having the evil-smelling mound cleared away.

Photo: Stratford-Upon-Avon, Shakespeare's Birthplace Before Restoration c.1850.


Regarded by many as the greatest poet of the English language, William Shakespeare was described by Ben Jonson as ‘honest, and of an open and free nature’, and by John Aubrey as ‘a handsome, well-shaped man, very good company, and of a very ready smooth wit’.

Photo: Stratford-Upon-Avon, William Shakespeare (1564-1616).


This photograph shows the low-ceilinged room in which William Shakespeare is said to have been born. Shakespeare was lucky to survive his childhood - within a few weeks of his birth in April 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon was struck by an outbreak of plague. The doors of houses were marked with red crosses and daubed with the words ‘Lord have mercy on us’, but between 30th June and 31st December of that year there were 238 recorded deaths in the town.

Photo: Stratford-Upon-Avon, Shakespeare's Birthplace, Birthroom 1892.


This beautiful farmhouse at Wilmcote near Stratford was built in the 16th century. It was in 1789 that it was first given the name of Mary Arden’s House, reflecting a local tradition that it had been the home of Shakespeare’s mother Mary before her marriage. The house was acquired by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 1930 and furnished as it would have been in Mary’s day. Millions of tourists have visited it since. It was only in recent years that it was discovered that it had never been Mary Arden’s house after all - she had lived next door at Glebe Farm. Fortunately, that also belonged to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and was already open to visitors, promoted as a historic farm with a Victorian interior.

Photo: Wilmcote, Mary Arden's House (Now Palmer's Farm) c.1955.


Stratford-upon-Avon’s affairs were dominated in medieval times by the Guild of the Holy Cross. The Guild’s power was destroyed in 1547 when it was disbanded on the orders of King Henry VIII. The town was then placed under the control of a bailiff; one holder of this office was none other than John Shakespeare, William’s father. The timber-framed building in this view, next to the Guild Chapel, was the Guild Hall, which was erected 1416-18. The ground floor of the building was the Guild Hall proper, and the upper floor was known as the Over Hall. The upper hall of the Guild Hall was first used as a grammar school in 1553. The young William Shakespeare was educated at the grammar school that was housed there in the mid 16th century, and was perhaps recalling his schooldays when he later wrote of ‘the whining schoolboy, with his satchel, and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school’.

Photo: Stratford-Upon-Avon, Guild Chapel And Grammar School 1892.


The Lucy family owned the Charlecote estate near Wellesbourne in Warwickshire from c1200 until 1945 when they gave it to the National Trust. The present house was begun in the mid 16th century by Sir Thomas Lucy, but has been much altered since. Tradition says that the young William Shakespeare was caught poaching deer on the estate and Sir Thomas Lucy exacted a harsh punishment on him, but Shakespeare had his revenge in later life when he used Sir Thomas as the model for the character of Justice Shallow in several of his plays.

Photo: Charlecote, Charlecote Park, From Upper Gardens c.1884.


Bidford-on-Avon is six miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. The 16th-century Falcon Inn at Bidford seen in this view from 1901 was once the scene of a drinking competition between the young William Shakespeare and his Stratford friends and a group of local lads known as the Bidford Sippers. The Stratford boys lost the bout and were too drunk to make the journey home, spending the night sleeping off the session under a crab-apple tree. The Falcon Inn has since been converted into private homes.

Photo: Bidford-on-Avon, The Old Falcon Inn 1901.


The village of Shottery, just one mile from Stratford-upon-Avon, is where Shakespeare went to do his courting as a young man. His wife, Anne Hathaway, was the eldest of three daughters of John Hathaway, a farmer. She was eight years older than William, who was only eighteen when they married, and their daughter Susanna was born six months after the wedding. The Hathaway family home at Shottery, called ‘Anne Hathaway’s Cottage’ in this photograph, is somewhat misnamed. It is not a cottage, but rather a spacious twelve-roomed Elizabethan farmhouse, and Anne Hathaway herself never owned it. The Hathaways continued to live in the cottage until 1892, the year this photograph was taken, when it was purchased by the Trustees and Guardians of Shakespeare’s Birthplace for preservation. The cottage was badly damaged in a major fire in 1969, but was subsequently restored with great care. William Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway produced three children, Susanna, born in 1583, and boy and girl twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. Susanna is buried inside Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-upon-Avon close to her father, and Judith lies in the churchyard in an unmarked grave, but the location of the grave of Hamnet, who died at the age of 11, is unknown.

Photo: Shottery, Anne Hathaway's House 1892.


In 1597 William Shakespeare purchased a large house in Church Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, known as New Place. He retired there in 1609 at the age of 45, and it was there that he died on 23rd April 1616, on his 52nd birthday, of a fever which was said at the time to have been the result of a ‘merry meeting’ with his fellow poets Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton, at which they all drank too much. Shakespeare left the house to his eldest daughter Susanna. New Place was demolished in 1759 by the then owner, the irascible Reverend Francis Gastrell, after a row about the rates. The foundations of the house have been uncovered in recent years, and now form part of the garden beside Nash’s House in Chapel Street, the splendid timber-framed house on the right-hand side of this view, which now houses the town museum; this was once the home of Thomas Nash, who married William Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth Hall; her mother was Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna. (The death of the childless Elizabeth in 1670 brought William Shakespeare’s direct line of descent to an end.)

Photo: Stratford-Upon-Avon, Chapel Street 1922.


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