Stratford's tribute to their local boy

THIS WEEK I celebrated our national poet's birthday in appropriate fashion at Stratford-upon-Avon, where ceremonies were held to commemorate the 414th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth.
I had been invited to speak at the annual luncheon by Dr Levy Fox, who for many years has organised impeccably the rejoicings, and I found the whole day stimulating and rewarding.
Shakespeare certainly died on St George's Day, 1616, for we have the Stratford records to prove it, but whether he was actually born on April 23, 1564, is rather more open to doubt. But does it really matter? When one is of sufficient eminence — like Shakespeare or the Queen — one is entitled to an official birthday, and this is what in fact we were celebrating. At 11 o'clock in the morning last Saturday a gaggle of distinguished guests — ambassadors, writers, actors and the like — set off from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre clutching posies of flowers to their bosoms and preceded by the town beadle (a splendid figure in scarlet) and the band of the Warwickshire Yeomanry.
When the procession reached the centre of the town, the flags of the various nations were unfurled and then the little procession moved on through Shakespeare's birthplace to his
tomb in the parish church.
There the posies and flowers were laid in tribute (11 contributed a bunch of red roses) and we then adjourned for an excellent lunch in a marquee set up in the theatre grounds.
In the evening a special performance of "The Taming of the Shrew" (alas, my least favourite Shakespeare play) was given by the theatre company, and the following morning a sermon was preached in honour of Shakespeare by Patrick Garland.
What was so pleasant about the event was that it was enjoyed by the local townspeople who attended all the ceremonies and lined the route of our progress in large slumbers.
The cynical could say they were looking after their interests — tourism brings in literally millions of pounds each year to Stratford — but I like to think that they turned out for the fun and to show pride in their local boy who has become one of the most famous people of all time.
Shakespeare was a very
English writer, so it is appropriate that he should have come from the county that lies at the heart of England. The leafy oaks and elms of Warwickshire arc justly famous, although the latter have been recently decimated by the horrible Dutch elm disease, and its green lanes are refreshing and beautiful.
Shakespeare's plays are full of the Warwickshire countryside, which in his imagination stretched to Illyria and beyond. "This England", writes Bagehot, "lay before Shakespeare as it lies before us all, with its green fields, and its long hedgerows, and its many trees, and its great towns, and its endless hamlets, and its motley society, and its long history, and its bold exploits, and its gathering power, and he saw that they were good. "To him, perhaps more than any one else, has it been given to see that they were a great un ity, a great religious object; that if you could only descend to the inner life, to the deep things, to the secret principles of its noble vigour, to the essence of character, to what we know of Hamlet and seem to fancy of Ophelia, we might, so far as we are capable of so doing, understand the nature which God has made."
Shakespeare was above all a man of the theatre: his plays don't read as if they were
written in a study but in a playhouse. In this he is like
Scott. A cavalry charge in a Scott novel, someone has written, sounds as though it had been written on horseback.
It is appropriate, then, that
the theatre should be so flourishing in Stratford. The Royal Shakespeare Company has recently brought off one of its highest achievements, the performance of all three parts of Henry VI, which can now be seen in London, and is one of the wonders of contemporary English acting.
And we should give thanks too for the National Theatre, a. foundation of which any other nation than our own would be inordinately proud but about which so many people arc nigglingly critical. The commercial theatre too is doing well! where else in the world is there such a variety of theatrical performances as in London?
People are depressed about our economic failures since the war, and rightly so because we have consistently fallen below the level of our own potentialities and past achievements; but in some spheres we have had outstanding success and nowhere greater than in the theatre.
The roll-call of English dramatists is as impressive today as any in previous period: Ayckbourne, Pinter, Stoppard, Wesker, Osborne — and so I could go on. English drama is the product of a strong but suppressed imagination which cares about the show: after my visit to Stratford I felt encouraged that the English genius is still there and that there are further glories to come.