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Posted Sunday, March 19, 2006; 10.31GMT
Get Thee to a Travel Agent
For centuries, Shakespeare has been one of Britain's most successful exports. In return, he brings in a steady supply of imports in the shape of holidaying tourists — a lot of them heading for Stratford-upon-Avon. The tiny town where Shakespeare was born, bred and buried is home to 23,000 people, and almost 25% of them work in the tourist trade, dealing with an annual influx of over 700,000 tourists. Visitors come to marvel at the childhood homes of Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway, take in a virtual-reality presentation at Shakespearience, maybe grab a bite at the Food of Love café. And to buy souvenirs. Anyone looking to bring the Bard back home could fill a bag the size of Falstaff's trousers with everything from fridge magnets to magnifying glasses, letter-writing sets (quill included) to Shakespeare-shaped cookies. Tourists spend around $300 million a year in the town and surrounding area.
Come April 23, Shakespeare's birthday, that figure is going to get a boost. That's when the rsc launches its Complete Works Festival, an unprecedented retrospective of all 38 Shakespeare plays and all his poems over the course of a year. With three theaters in Stratford-upon-Avon playing host to fans from all over the world, the rsc expects to sell over 700,000 tickets — ranging from $10 to $75. Hotels and B&Bs will see more business from enthusiasts staying several nights to catch more performances (instead of day-tripping in from larger cities, like they usually do). And most visitors to Stratford-upon-Avon come via London, so the capital will see some of that action, too.
But Britain isn't the only place that benefits. Cyprus, Egypt, Syria — Shakespeare set many of his plays far beyond his homeland's borders, and wherever Shakespeare's imagination went, the tourist dollar follows. It's doubtful he ever traveled to Denmark, but a globe-trotting friend might have told him about a visit to Kronborg Castle in Elsinore (also known as Helsingør). He made it Hamlet's home, and since the 1930s, people have flocked to the rugged sandstone castle to watch plays performed in its courtyard. Italy appears as a setting in at least a dozen Shakespeare plays, including All's Well That Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet. Italian tour groups take visitors to the cities mentioned in the plays and, in 2003, a theater modeled on the iconic O-shaped, open-air Globe Theatre — which Shakespeare wrote for and acted in when he lived in London — was built in Rome. That's seven years after the London Globe was reconstructed, itself beaten to the punch by a German Globe replica in Neuss, near Düsseldorf, opened in 1991. "It's a radical renewal of our stage conventions," says Neuss Globe actor and director Norbert Kentrup. "We now have the audience as an active, visible recipient. Given that we perform in daylight and can always see the theatergoers, the text will be new to me as an actor with every performance." And Poland is spending $9.6 million to reconstruct a 17th century theater in Gdansk that was based on the Fortune playhouse (a London theater that competed with the Globe when Will was working there), and staged Shakespeare productions until under communism it was razed to make way for a parking lot.
If these theaters sound like shrines, it's only fitting for a guy whose work many scholars refer to as quasi-religious texts. There's even a word for Shakespeare worship: bardolatry. As with any religion, there are the heretics, people who claim Shakespeare didn't write his own plays. Theories abound as to who did, and an offshoot industry of books, articles and documentaries dissects the "authorship debate." Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (who was familiar with the details of the Elizabethan Court), Christopher Marlowe (known to dabble with a quill, but would have had to fake his own death in 1593) and Queen Elizabeth I herself are all among the front-runners. Or maybe it was a roomful of monkeys with typewriters. It doesn't help that little is known about Shakespeare's life — nobody's even sure what he looked like. Modern images of Shakespeare are based on six portraits of him, all of them with the familiar receding hairline, small mustache and wide collar, but with slightly different details — one gives him bulging eyes, another a full beard, another an earring. A new exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery claims over three years' research has revealed that Shakespeare most likely only sat for one of those portraits, the so-called Chandos portrait, while in February a German academic claimed two of them are authentic.
If these theaters sound like shrines, it's only fitting for a guy whose work many scholars refer to as quasi-religious texts. There's even a word for Shakespeare worship: bardolatry. As with any religion, there are the heretics, people who claim Shakespeare didn't write his own plays. Theories abound as to who did, and an offshoot industry of books, articles and documentaries dissects the "authorship debate." Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (who was familiar with the details of the Elizabethan Court), Christopher Marlowe (known to dabble with a quill, but would have had to fake his own death in 1593) and Queen Elizabeth I herself are all among the front-runners. Or maybe it was a roomful of monkeys with typewriters. It doesn't help that little is known about Shakespeare's life — nobody's even sure what he looked like. Modern images of Shakespeare are based on six portraits of him, all of them with the familiar receding hairline, small mustache and wide collar, but with slightly different details — one gives him bulging eyes, another a full beard, another an earring. A new exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery claims over three years' research has revealed that Shakespeare most likely only sat for one of those portraits, the so-called Chandos portrait, while in February a German academic claimed two of them are authentic.
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