Too often, travellers to England are prejudiced against a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon, the storied town of William Shakespeare's birth, by its ill-gotten reputation as a tourist trap for Americans with more dollars than literary appreciation.
They sniffily assume the town is overrun with that undesirable class of people who think that The Taming of the Shrew was a clever re-imagining of the classic high-school romantic comedy Ten Things I Hate About You in an English medieval milieu, and consider Romeo + Juliet proof of Baz Luhrmann's scriptwriting prowess.
But these snobs are missing out on a unique experience — the opportunity to step back in time and slip on Shakespeare's shoes for a day by walking through the town's delightful, practically untouched streets.
Someone I read in high school, so probably Shakespeare, once said 'The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.' Well, whoever that was clearly hadn't been to Stratford-upon-Avon (so on second thoughts maybe it wasn't Shakespeare).
Because in this beautiful town, you can visit the past without a visa or a passport or a phrasebook. All you need is some walking shoes, and an (extremely) open mind. As one peruses the quaint shops and houses and supermarkets and ATMs of Stratford-upon-Avon, one cannot help but speculate as to the links between Shakespeare's works and what must have been the commonplaces of his everyday life.
It's easy to imagine, for instance, the Bard striding down the Harry-Potter-themed Magic Alley, just off the town's main road. I caught myself imagining him working up a first draft of the 'Double, double, toil and trouble' scene from Macbeth as he sipped one of the Butterbeer® beverages sold at the Leaky Cauldron with a friend.
A pleasant few minutes' walk from Magic Alley, the curious Shakespeare enthusiast will come across the cavernous Poundland superstore, which occupies a prime corner lot right across the road from Shakespeare's house (a very faithful reconstruction, apparently).
A short perusal of that store's wares, where, incredibly, everything costs exactly one pound, will make it clear to all but the densest reader of The Merchant of Venice that Shylock's famed request for a pound of flesh was inspired by the usurious demands for a pound of cash in exchange for items of worthless plastic junk that the proprietors of Poundland make on a daily basis.
"As you lustfully eye off those vendors' fabulously-priced hot dogs, you will suddenly understand how Shakespeare was able