Stratford-upon-AvYawn and Oxford

Excuse the pun in the title but our trip to Stratford-upon-Avon was quite the bore. A two-hour ride north of London, the town of about 20,000 has so little going on, it’s no wonder that Shakespeare hightailed it to London as soon as he could. The ride up wasn’t too bad, I got some reading done, and we stayed at a nice little hostel not too far from the center of town but that really isn’t saying much.

We only had about an hour before we had to head to the theatre to watch the Royal Shakespeare Company’s performance of Romeo and Juliet so we headed towards the theatre and looked for a place to grab a quick bite. We thought a little fish and chips shop would provide a quick and tasty meal, we were wrong on both counts. Save Rob, who was enamored with his fried fish, most of us agreed that it was one of the poorer meals we had had while in England. Unsatisfied we made our way to the theatre for the play, taking our seats way up in the nosebleeds. I am not really all that big of a Shakespeare fan but I can appreciate his plays, especially when they are well performed. I did not appreciate this play. I found most of the acting to be unnecessarily over the top and the director’s decision to add some modern elements, such as Romeo and Juliet in modern clothing, was rather arbitrary and added nothing but pretention to the play. When we got back to the hostel, the actor who played Mercutio sat and talked to us, which could have been interesting except for the fact that he seemed to be coked out of his gourd.

The next day we were scheduled to take a tour of Stratford and hit up all the major Shakespeare hotspots but I quickly came to realize that a tour of London’s Shakespeare hotspots would have been much more interesting and informative. Since so little is known about Shakespeare’s early life, the places we went to were underwhelming and the tour guides had nothing to say apart from “… and this is a chair we think Shakespeare might have sat on at one point” or “… we think Shakespeare once used this plate.” While the trip to Shakespeare’s gravesite wasn’t so bad, the curse he put on his tomb was funny to me but taken very seriously by the Brits, I was quite disappointed with the whole ordeal and was happy to get on the bus and head to Oxford.

While our trip to Stratford was a disappointment, the time we spent in Oxford was quite enjoyable and I wish we could have spent more time there. Grown from the university, the town of Oxford is quite lively and seems to blend quite seamlessly with the prestigious institutions that inhabit it. Oxford University is actually a federation of 40 separate, self-governing colleges and being one of the world’s oldest universities, the tour we took was twice as interesting and informative as anything we did in Stratford. We made it to a few of the individual colleges and walked around the grounds of one of them, Exeter. Although not quite on the same academic level as JMU, it was nice to be on the familiar surrounds of a campus after spending months in various large cities.

After our tour, we had some time to kill so we went to get a pint at a local pub called The Eagle and Child. This pub is well known, as it was the main hangout of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis while they were students at Oxford. Legend has it that the two of them flipped a coin to decide what the theme of their next story would be, either space or time. Tolkien got time and created Lord of the Rings while Lewis got space and came up with the Chronicles of Narnia. Hanging out in the same pub that these two literary giants did was a great way to end our time in Oxford.