Amanda and I went to Stratford in early January 2020. We were getting some work done on our campervan in the Midlands, so thought we’d spend a few days looking around Shakespeare’s old town. I had only been to Stratford once before, despite teaching Shakespeare on and off for over 30 years. We had a great time visiting the birthplace, the other houses and the schoolroom (see The Schoolroom, Stratford in this section). With Christmas over, the town was quiet, so we had the buildings pretty much to ourselves, and nobody hurried us along. I felt myself trying to engage with Shakespeare in some way, trying to imagine him there. Then a visit to The Guild Chapel next door to New Place, where he died in 1616, triggered this poem. I wrote most of it in the Hotel Indigo bar with a clear view of the empty site where New Place once stood, until it was pulled down in a fit of spite by its owner in 1759. I dreamed and wrote, sitting by a blazing, open fire and drinking beer. I think Shakespeare would have approved.
The Guild Chapel, Stratford
On your right as you go in,
behind organ panels, late Victorian,
sad-eyed, distinctly Asiatic,
the Whore of Babylon,
a medieval image of the exotic,
tied around her waist a chain
tethered to a devil with a grinning groin,
in one hand the riches of the world in coin,
the other holds the golden cup
of finance, trade and other fornications,
the dirty business deals between the nations,
and then, to back her up, a Dance of Death,
now also covered over, Pope and pauper,
all the classes in between,
hand in hand with skeletons,
‘I am what you will be,
I was what you are now’,
and, finally, to rub it in, the skull and bones,
the body bundled like a sack of wheat,
tied at the head, tied at the feet.
Outside, empty space
marks the site of New Place.
A tourist walks by and doesn’t look,
an absence can’t be photographed,
can’t be put on Facebook.
January sun lights up Chapel Street,
but what you’re seeking isn’t there,
not in the places he had been,
not in the things he might have touched or seen,
and not just for all the time that’s passed,
because what you’re trying to uncover
is who is at the end of your own tether,
and how might you yourself appear
after more than four hundred years,
and not in some painted afterlife
of Judgement Day before the throne,
in other words, an answer to the koan
that he puzzled at, of how to join the dots
between what it means to be,
and what it means to be not.