{"id":63,"date":"2014-01-17T11:38:25","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T11:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=63"},"modified":"2014-01-17T11:38:42","modified_gmt":"2014-01-17T11:38:42","slug":"shakespeares-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/?p=63","title":{"rendered":"Shakespeare’s Birthday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Post 3 Shakespeare\u2019s Birthday<\/strong><\/h1>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>April 20th<\/sup> 2013<\/em> From Shakespeare\u2019s Verona to Shakespeare\u2019s Stratford. Today it\u2019s the Birthday Procession, to mark the Bard\u2019s 449th<\/sup> Birthday, and so I\u2019m togged up in my doctoral gown and picking up a bouquet of flowers to place on Shakespeare\u2019s grave in Holy Trinity Church. The Procession is rooted in the 1760s when David Garrick, the famous actor-manager, brought London aristocratic society up to Stratford for his Jubilee, designed to celebrate Shakespeare\u2019s birthday with a costume ball, a breakfast, a horse-race, a concert, a specially commissioned Ode, and a procession of costumed characters from the plays which was to march from the Birthplace (where Garrick had identified the \u2018birthroom\u2019) to the grave in Holy Trinity Church. In 1762* the Procession was rained off, but today it is beautiful.<\/p>\n

We start at the Mayor\u2019s reception \u2013 in the ballroom in the Town Hall, which is filled with Shakespeareana, including, to my amusement, a statuette I\u2019d never registered before, a replica of Juliet\u2019s statue in Verona.\u00a0 I talk with the deputy ambassador from Japan, the representative of the American embassy, and the Irish ambassador, along with the current triumvirate at the top of the Shakespeare Theatre heap — Greg Doran, Anthony Sher, and Simon Russell Beale. The procession includes schoolboys, Olympic volunteers, Stratford organisations of every sort, scholars of Shakespeare (including myself), clergy, the Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire, the Bishop of Warwick. It marches round the streets, unfurls flags, carries flowers to the church. As a scholar of literary commemoration, including this one, what interested me most was one particular innovation introduced last year\u2014\u201cthe quill moment\u201d. Described as a \u2018cameo pageant\u2019 in my ambiguous written instructions, this involves a school-group going to the Birthplace where last year\u2019s Head Boy of Shakespeare\u2019s school is presented with a quill, cut from a goose-feather from Mary Arden\u2019s Farm. This is meant to symbolise, I suppose, the birth and youth of the writer and conveniently also suggests flight and transcendence. Anyhow, the ex-Head Boy then marches through the streets with the quill held aloft all the way through the town to the church where the procession lays down its floral offerings. He did it very prettily, but his arm must have ached horribly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Post 3 Shakespeare\u2019s Birthday \u00a0April 20th 2013 From Shakespeare\u2019s Verona to Shakespeare\u2019s Stratford. Today it\u2019s the Birthday Procession, to mark the Bard\u2019s 449th Birthday, and so I\u2019m togged up in my doctoral gown and picking up a bouquet of flowers … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/65"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/literarytourist\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}