I guess I should be more excited about Shakespeare’s home, but I’m not. Maybe because the whole place really does feel very touristy. We visited Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, which is where Shakespeare’s future wife grew up. Shakespeare grew up in a house somewhere a short walk away, he would have traipsed around the whole area laying woo on Ms. Hathaway. Or something like that.

This place was once a Tudor cottage, now it’s a bigger Tudor cottage, since I think the Hathaways’ came into some money after Shakespeare got famous (though maybe not for a related reason) and expanded the house quite a bit. To begin, the gardens were lovely; with an orchard, a small lavender maze, and these interesting sort of giant teepee shaped huts constructed out of vines (Is there a real name for this?). Inside one of them was a speaker system with celebrities reading you Shakespeare sonnets. That was pretty great.

Inside the cottage was kind of trippy. In that the floors and stairs were so uneven you were likely to trip. JK. JDespite being very well preserved, you could definitely tell this was a really old house and that was very cool. The rooms were tight and cramped and the windows were tiny with wavy glass, and yeah, the wood floors were old and way uneven. On the second floor you could see in between the cracks in the floorboards WAY more often than I was comfortable with.

I think my favorite part of the tour might have been finally learning about thatched roofs, which we see all over the place here, but I know nothing about. Here’s the parts I remember, most of them are probably around 5 or more feet thick and when they are replaced they usually only replace the top 2ish feet. Even at that it costs an actually fortune. Like £25,000. Seriously. But, you only have to do it about every 20 years depending on where in England you live. Other bits of note, the Tudor style houses were generally painted white all over, including the beams, unlike we usually think of them here with the white plaster and dark beams. Painting the beams dark is a decorative tradition that only dates back to the Victorian (?) era. Although, I read somewhere else that in parts of England they did paint the beams with tar to protect from the weather, so the black and white contrast may have been inspired by an actual historical precedent.  Although, I read somewhere else that in parts of England they did paint the beams with tar to protect from the weather, so the black and white contrast may have been inspired by an actual historical precedent. The walls in between the wooden frame would have been filled with clay, mud or plaster made with lime mixed with straw (this is called daub) and the tour guide claimed that the expression ‘here’s mud in your eye’ may have originated from the builders having to try not to fling dirt in each other’s faces as they put up the wall from opposing sides of it. Of course, I have no idea if it’s true and google claims a whole bunch of different things on the subject. Still, kind of a fun thought.

More to come.

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