1 Introduction

Son of Stratford
Each year, on the Saturday nearest to 23 April, the otherwise unremarkable English
Midlands town of Stratford-upon-Avon hosts a birthday celebration in honour of its
most renowned former inhabitant. In 2009, this began at 9.45 a.m. with a reception at the
Shakespeare Centre adjacent to the property known as Shakespeare's Birthplace, hosted
by the President of the Shakespeare Birthday Celebrations, the veteran Shakespearean actor
Sir Donald Sinden. At 10.30 a.m., a procession departed from the steps of the Birthplace,
led by Sir Donald and featuring amongst its numbers Stratford civic dignitaries,
representatives of Birmingham, Warwick, London, Oxford and Cambridge Universities,
pupils from local schools, members of the theatre profession and delegations from around
the world that included the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, the High Commis-
sioner for the Bahamas, the Political and Press Secretary for Ireland, and the Ambassadors
of Kazakhstan, El Salvador, Serbia and China. It fell to the last of these to carry out
the task of addressing the several hundred guests in attendance at the Birthday Luncheon,
an event lasting nearly four hours, on the topic of Worldwide Appreciation of
Shakespeare.
The parade proceeded along Henley Street and down Bridge Street, where it paused for
the ceremony of the unfurling of the flags of the nations, institutions and interest groups
represented by the parade. Onwards, with each member of the parade clutching floral tri-
butes that ranged from single stems to lavish wreaths, the procession wound its way past
bemused Stratford townspeople, up Sheep Street, along Chapel Street and past the site of
the house that Shakespeare bought in 1597, New Place. It passed the King Edward VI
Grammar School and Mason Croft, home of the University of Birmingham's postgraduate
outpost, the Shakespeare Institute, down Old Tow, alongside Hall's Croft (home of Shake-
speare's daughter, Susanna), finally to arrive at the Holy Trinity Church. Here members of
the procession were invited to add their flora and assorted greenery to a growing pile at the
base of the monument to the figure in whose memory the whole event had been orche-
strated. Reminiscent simultaneously of a christening. a wedding and a funeral (for this
birthday is also a day of death), the celebration traces commemoration as a collective
pedestrian act, for one day a year transforming the sites of shopping and sauntering into
what is both a mobile shrine and a cradle of possibilities, and into a biographical narrative
which begins and ends with the gift of flowers, an act in Shakespeare associated both with
the furthest reaches of madness (Ophelia, Lear) and profoundly redemptive grace (Perdita):
There's rosemary, that's for remembrance (Hamlet, 4.5.173); 'Here's flowers for you'
(Winter's Tale, 4.4.103).