A Girl...

A Shakespearean Tragicomedy: Act III

Resuming...

The one touristy thing we did that afternoon in Stratford was visit Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare and his family are buried, and we just so happened to be walking into the yard as the bells were ringing, which mean it was time for the Evensong service. Yay! And gulp. I'm not a religion person and, frankly, church services of any kind pretty much skeeve me right out, but man, it was Holy Trinity. And Shakespeare--what was left of him, anyway--was IN THERE. And maybe I'd benefit from some laying on of hands to cure my sinus infection. Anglicans lay hands, don't they?

There were about thirty people at that Evensong service: a bunch of old people clustered near the front, about six tourists. There was singing, there was praying, there was a lot of standing up and sitting down and standing up and sitting down, and I wondered if it were just a clever way of getting the elderly to do their daily calesthenics. Because the church was hosting performances of Henry VIII during the evening (we caught a performance of Romeo and Juliet in the park just outside the courtyard), the nave was set up with inward-facing bleachers, whose seats clacked loudly whenever the congregation stood. The sound of a sick girl rifling through her purse to find a tissue and a package of Starbursts also echoes really well in a thirteenth-century stone cathedral.

The service was okay as services go, and yes, I could see Shakespeare's grave back behind the red cordon in the far corner, so that was pretty awesome. Funny that a guy like him would want to be buried in a place like that, though; I can't believe he'd kiss his mother with a mouth like that let alone take communion with it (do Anglicans take communion?), but whatever. After church, we went outside and did something that's a bit of a family tradition for me--look at gravestones. When I was eleven or twelve, we spent Mother's Day in a Colorado mining town looking at, as my father said, "some dead muthas" and reading epitaphs about cave-ins and explosions and typhoid. And here's an old entry about a trip to visit the most impressive bunch of dead folks I've ever come across.

Anyway, here are some photos from outside Holy Trinity, since I wasn't about to take pictures inside during the Ave Maria. Simon took a bunch of these too.