Shakespeare's Birthday - catch up #3

Wednesday was 23rd April and also happened to be Shakespeare's 450th birthday.  The girls were keen to go to Shakespeare's Birthplace.  After breakfast P went off to see her mum, and the girls and I took S & Megan to the catch a train from Evesham home to Oxford, before heading to Stratford.

Last time we were at the Birthplace, there had been work going on to the entrance part of the museum, and it was now finished.  K & M agreed that they preferred how it used to be, although they did like that you no longer have to wait for the audio-visual presentations to end before doors opened to let you through to the next section.  Another thing that they definitely didn't like was the new Shakespeare Giant Wallbook.  We have the other wallbooks, but this one was far too gory and one glance was enough for K & M to decide that they didn't want to look at it at all (there are severed limbs depicted, admittedly in cartoon form, but that's more than enough to put K & M off).

Some things that they did like included the dressing up...

Tudor K.

And daft M!

 ...and of course watching and chatting with the Shakespeare Aloud actors.

As part of the birthday celebrations they had a herald with a fanfare trumpet to play on the hour and we chatted to him for while and M and I both had a go on his trumpet.  There was also a short talk about midwifery and birth in Tudor times every hour by one of the guides, K & M weren't sure whether they wanted to come to listen to that, so we spoke to the lady who was giving it beforehand to ask if there was much unpleasantness in it and she reassured us that there were only a couple of bits, but that she could give K & M a signal to put their fingers in their ears for those parts, which is what she did and it worked very well. 

After that we headed off to get some lunch and while we were having it we decided that it was about time to compose another sonnet (see here - below the limericks - and here for others).  M was quite keen to help and came up with some good suggestions and found rhymes for me ('both myth and fact' was one of her phrases) and K helped a little bit too.  This is what we came up with:

The twenty third of April is this day
We celebrate the birth of Will, our bard
Balloons and candles on a cake - hooray!
So here's a sonnet for his birthday card.
We love to come to see the players act
The garden by his place of birth their stage
They like to tell the tales, both myth and fact
That come from Shakespeare and the Tudor age
Some people like the funny things he wrote
Thought others find the histories more their thing
You may prefer a tragedy to quote
Or with some music lift your voice and sing
Will Shakespeare, as we know, is dead and gone
But he'll live forever, through his work, live on.

After lunch we returned to the Birthplace and gave Richard, one of the Shakespeare Aloud actors a copy of the sonnet to share with his colleagues and he read it aloud to one of them who was also there.  A man with a video camera was there and asked if he could film him for stratfordtv.com and with a bit of persuasion (they don't want to be famous, you see) K & M agreed.  Yesterday I found the result here - use the right arrow on the video at the top until you get to a man in Tudor dress with a girl in a red coat next to him and click to play.

Mary Arden's Farm wasn't yet open (it closes for the winter) last time we were at my parents', so K & M were keen to go back.  We had a wander around, watched the birds of prey for a while and watched the blacksmith and a mate melting pewter and talking about the use of it in Tudor times (it polishes up really nicely, so you can pretend it's silver and that you're better off than you are!).  We also saw a rather unusual sight - a sheep being milked.

Milking a sheep!

After Mary Arden's Farm, we headed more back to Granny's for tea and more Ruby Redfort.