1. Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 2 vols., 6th ed. (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1886), 1:386–7Google Scholar.

2. Samuel Winter, Map of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, ca. 1759, Folger Shakespeare Library ART Vol. d74, fol. 1a. See also Folger Maps S83a 3 and 5.

3. Davies, Thomas, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq., 2 vols. (London, 1780), 2:216Google Scholar.

4. Hodgdon, Barbara, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances & Appropriations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 194Google Scholar.

5. Major sources containing transcriptions of historical documents include Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (1881); Chambers, E. K., William Shakespeare: A Study of the Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930)Google Scholar; and Schoenbaum, Samuel, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (London: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. Of the seventy-nine surviving manuscript documents naming Shakespeare that were produced during his lifetime, only his will mentions the property now known as the Birthplace. See Shakespeare in the Public Records, PRO Handbook No. 5 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1964)Google Scholar; and Bearman, Robert, Shakespeare in the Stratford Records (Phoenix Mill, England: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1994)Google Scholar.

6. Fox, Levi, “The Heritage of Shakespeare's Birthplace,” Shakespeare Survey 1 (1948): 79–88; quote at 82Google Scholar.

7. Holderness, Graham, “Bardolatry; or, The Cultural Materialist's Guide to Stratford-upon-Avon,” in The Shakespeare Myth, ed. Holderness, Graham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 2–15; quote at 5Google Scholar.

8. Ibid., 3.

9. Though largely presentist in focus, Hodgdon's The Shakespeare Trade reveals how the Birthplace attempted to suture the gap between Shakespeare's time and ours, fantastically pretending that nothing has happened between the yesterday when Shakespeare lived there and the today when we arrived on the doorstep looking for him (191–205). Similarly, Julia Thomas explains in Shakespeare's Shrine that the experience of visitors to the Birthplace today is a nineteenth-century invention, coincident with and expressed by restoration of the site undertaken between 1857 and 1862. Thomas, , Shakespeare's Shrine: The Bard's Birthplace and the Invention of Stratford-upon-Avon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)Google Scholar. See also Watson, Nicola J., “Shakespeare on the Tourist Trail,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Shaughnessy, Robert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 199–226CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Digges, Leonard, “To the Memorie of the deceased Authour Maister W. Shakespeare,” in Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies: Published according to the True Originall Copies, ed. Heminge, John and Condell, Henry (London: Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount, 1623)Google Scholar, B1r. Apart from the Folio editions, early couplings of Shakespeare and Stratford can be found in A Banquet of Jests; or, Change of Cheare (1632[?]), Edward Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum (1675), and the dedication of John Banks's Virtue Betrayed (1682).

11. Ben Jonson, “To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us,” in Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies, ed. Heminge and Condel, A4r.

12. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust now owns both properties and the original 1597 deed of conveyance for New Place. For a summary of the title documents, see Chambers, Facts and Problems; and Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard, An Historical Account of the New Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, the Last Residence of Shakespeare (London: J. E. Adlard, 1864)Google Scholar.

13. Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon and Other Records 1553–1620, ed. Savage, Richard and Fripp, Edgar I., 6 vols. (Oxford: Dugdale Society, 1930), 4: 96Google Scholar.

14. See, e.g., Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard, New Evidences in Confirmation of the Traditional Recognition of Shakespeare's Birth-Room A.D. 1769–1777 (Brighton, 1888)Google Scholar.

15. Last Will and Testament of William Shackspeare of Stratford upon Avon in the countie of warr gent, 25 March 1616, in Chambers, 2: 172. No one outside the family seemed to know of the will's existence until 1737, when George Vertue observed that the elderly Shakespeare Hart, Joan Hart's great-grandson, possessed a copy; see British Library MS Portland Loan 29/246, fol. 19.

16. Halliwell-Phillipps, Historical Account of the New Place, 95; Chambers, 1: 171. The commercial half of the Birthplace, the Maidenhead Inn, was then rented to Lewis Hiccox, who probably acquired the lease from Shakespeare soon after he inherited the property in 1601. See Jones, Jeanne E., “Lewis Hiccox and Shakespeare's Birthplace,” Notes and Queries 41 (1994): 497–502; and Bearman, 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. The fullest history of Shakespeare biography is Schoenbaum's, SamuelShakespeare's Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)Google Scholar. A helpfully succinct account can be found in Bevington, David, Shakespeare and Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

18. Important later studies on this topic include Lipking, Lawrence, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Pask, Kevin, The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and Kewes, Paulina, Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Moryson, Fynes, An Itinerary written by Fynes Moryson, gent . . ., 3 pts. (London: John Beale, 1617), pt. 1, 118Google Scholar.

20. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 178.

21. Anthony à Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, an Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education at the University of Oxford . . . , ed. Philip Bliss (1691; reprint, London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1820), 2: 485.

22. See, for example, Urry, John, The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage, 1990)Google Scholar; and Craik, Jennifer, “The Culture of Tourism,” in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Rojek, Chris and Urry, John (London: Routledge, 1997), 113–36Google Scholar.

23. Rowe, Nicholas, “Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear,” in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear; in Six Volumes (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1709), 1: iGoogle Scholar.

24. Ibid., 1: xxxv. The problem facing Shakespeare's first biographer was that everyone who could have shared intimate details about the poet was dead—in London, colleagues such as John Heminges and Henry Condell, the compilers of the First Folio; in Stratford, his sister Joan Hart and his elder daughter Susanna Hall. The poet's younger daughter Judith (1585–1662) and his granddaughter Elizabeth Barnard (1608–70) survived into the Restoration, but no one sought them out. Archival records lay buried and unvisited, biding their time until sleuthing historians like Malone brought them to surface more than a century later. As is well known, Shakespeare himself left behind not a single testament to his private thoughts or beliefs. Plenty of references to him were recorded while he was alive, but they were more about his work than about the circumstances of his life. The materials available to Rowe constituted a haphazard mixture of fact, anecdote, and legend, each not easily discernable from the other. He was assisted by the veteran actor Thomas Betterton, the greatest Hamlet in living memory, who was dispatched to Stratford “to gather up what Remains he could of a Name for which he had so great a Value” (Rowe, 1: xxxiv). No antiquary, Betterton brought back more than a few errors and untrustworthy anecdotes. John Aubrey's minimally researched account of Shakespeare in his Brief Lives, compiled around 1681, would have interested Rowe had he known about the random manuscript notes in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum.

25. Gildon, Charles, The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (London, 1699), 126Google Scholar. Gildon contributed some new material, including the anecdote about Shakespeare, to what was essentially an expanded version of Gerard Langbaine's An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (London, 1691).

26. “The top of his Performance was the Ghost in his own Hamlet”; Rowe, 1: vi.

27. The biographer's desire to place Shakespeare the working dramatist at his Stratford home survives to this day. “We know little about the contents of New Place,” Stanley Wells observes, “but my guess is that it contained a comfortable, book-lined study situated in the quietest part of the house to which Shakespeare retreated from London at every possible opportunity.” Wells, , Shakespeare: For All Time (London: Macmillan, 2002), 37–8Google Scholar. Adopting a more London-centric approach, Peter Ackroyd proposes that Shakespeare “wrote where he was, close to the theatre and close to the actors.” Ackroyd, , Shakespeare: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), 257Google Scholar.

28. Theobald, Lewis, “Preface,” in Works of Shakespeare: In Seven Volumes (London, 1733), 1: xii–xivGoogle Scholar.

29. Ibid., 1: iv.

30. For transcriptions of relevant legal documents, see Halliwell-Phillipps, Historical Account of the New Place, 170–90.

31. If true, Garrick and Macklin were the first London actors to visit to Stratford since Betterton at the turn of the century.

32. Santesso, Aaron, “The Birth of the Birthplace: Bread Street and Literary Tourism before Stratford,” English Literary History 71.2 (2004): 377–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote at 378.

33. Rojek, Chris, “Indexing, Dragging and the Social Constructions of Tourist Sights,” in Touring Cultures, ed. Rojek, and Urry, , 52–74Google Scholar, quote at 53.

34. “Pedigree in the hand of Robert Bell Wheler of the Shakespeare and Hart families of Stratford,” 1813–14, MS S.b.123, Folger Shakespeare Library.

35. Elizabeth Barnard executed a deed on 18 April 1653, confirmed subsequently in her will dated 29 January 1669, stipulating that New Place should be sold if she and her husband, Sir John, died without issue, as was the case. See Halliwell-Phillipps, Historical Account of the New Place, 160–1, 163. The entail as defined in Shakespeare's will would not necessarily have ended on the death of Elizabeth Barnard without heirs. In that eventuality, Shakespeare had asked that his estate pass to his unspecified “right heirs.” The Harts may well have believed that this referred to them. I am grateful to Robert Bearman, former head of archives and local studies at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, for explaining this ambiguity in Shakespeare's will to me.

36. Shakespeare Hart's widow, Ann, bequeathed the Birthplace to George Hart in her will dated 24 April 1754: “I Ann Hart . . . being Advanced in years but of Sound Mind and Understanding . . . [do] give and donate unto my kinsman George Hart . . . All those my several Messuages or Tenements Situate . . . in a Certain Street there called or known by the name of Henley Street.” Register of Wills and Probates of the Parish of Stratford-upon-Avon, Peculiar, 1699–1849, MS W.b.272, Folger Shakespeare Library. The Harts began renting out the Birthplace in 1794, when they moved to Tewksbury. They sold it in 1806 to Thomas Court, whose widow lived there until her death in 1846. At an auction the following year, the house was purchased for the nation. See Wheler, Robert Bell, An Historical Account of the Birth-Place of Shakespeare (1824; reprint, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1863), 11–15Google Scholar.

37. Interestingly, some modern biographers have proposed that Shakespeare, Anne Hathaway, and their children may well have lived at the Henley Street property until he left for London sometime in the late 1580s. See, e,g,, Fripp, Edgar I., Shakespeare's Stratford (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 23Google Scholar; and Duncan-Jones, Katherine, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 22Google Scholar.

38. Gastrell, who was quickly cast as the villain in the story, might have thought only that he was tearing down a decaying tree that had grown so large that it overshadowed the windows of his house, keeping out sunlight and warmth. See Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1: 411–12. Whether Shakespeare himself actually planted the tree must remain a matter of speculation, for there is no written evidence of the mulberry tree's existence before it was cut down in 1756.

39. Wheler, History and Antiquities of Stratford-upon-Avon, 136.

40. “Then was built a handsome brick house. by. and now in possession of the Cloptons.” Vertue, quoted in MS Portland Loan 29/246, fol. 19, British Library. See also the testimony of the retired Stratford shoemaker Richard Grimmitt (b. 1682), “Account of New Place by Joseph Greene, 1767,” MS S.a.115, Folger Shakespeare Library.

41. Brown, Ivor John Carnegie and Fearon, George, Amazing Monument: A Short History of The Shakespeare Industry (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1939), 61Google Scholar.

42. And thus New Place began to be overlooked by pilgrims journeying to Stratford. In 1815, when Washington Irving visited, he marveled at the “extraordinary powers of self-multiplication” enjoyed by Shakespeare's felled mulberry tree but took no interest whatsoever in the place where the tree had been planted. Irving, , The Sketch Book (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1843), 304Google Scholar.

43. “Extract of a Letter from a Lady on a Journey at Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire,” Gentleman's Magazine 30 (1760), 308Google Scholar.

44. “Letter from the Place of Shakespear's Nativity,” British Magazine; or, Monthly Repository for Gentlemen and Ladies 3 (1762): 301–2Google Scholar.

45. “An old walnut-tree, which flourished before the door of Shakespeare's father at Stratford upon Avon, at the birth of that poet, having been lately cut down, several gentlemen had images, resembling that in Westminster-abby, carved from it.” The Annual Register  . . . for the Year 1765, 4th ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1784), 113Google Scholar. The tree could not have stood “before the door” because the house abutted the pavement; it must have been planted in the back garden.

46. Defoe, Daniel, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain  . . . continued by the late Mr. Richardson ..., 4 vols., 7th ed. (1724–7; London: J. Rivington et al., 1769), 3: 329–30Google Scholar.

47. See B. Cole's engraving based upon Richard Greene's drawing, Gentleman's Magazine 39 (July 1769), following 344. Richard Greene's original watercolor of the Birthplace, later owned by Halliwell-Phillipps, is now in the Folger Shakespeare Library (ART Vol. d75 [27c]). Greene was the brother of the headmaster of the Stratford grammar school.

48. As Julia Thomas has shown, the Birthplace was reconstructed in the nineteenth century to make it look like the structure depicted in Greene's drawing, which was itself supposed to indicate what the house might have looked like in Shakespeare's time. See her essay “Bringing Down the House: Restoring the Birthplace,” in Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, ed. Watson, Nicola J. (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 73–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. Gentleman's Magazine 39 (July 1769): 344–5. This is the earliest known reference to the “undoubted tradition” that Shakespeare was born at the Henley Street property.

50. This and the following quotation: ibid., 344.

51. Scholarship on the Jubilee is vast, but two works are notable: Deelman, Christian, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (London: Michael Joseph, 1964)Google Scholar; and Dobson, Michael, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

52. Garrick, David, An Ode upon Dedicating a Building and Erecting a Statue to Shakespeare, at Stratford upon Avon (London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1769)Google Scholar, 1; Bate, Jonathan, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), 82Google Scholar.

53. Boswell, James, “A Letter from James Boswell, Esq., on Shakespeare's Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon,” London Magazine 38 (September 1769): 451–4Google Scholar, quote at 453.

54. Dodd, James Solas, “A Detail of the Whole Diversions of the Jubilee at Stratford upon Avon,” in Dodd, Essays and Poems, Satirical, Political, Moral and Entertaining (Cork: Eugene Swiney, 1770), 278Google Scholar.

55. By the end of the century, as is well known, open deception was being practiced in order to enhance the Birthplace's claim as Shakespeare's authentic ancestral home, most notoriously by the poet and Stratford historian John Jordan (1746–1809), who in 1792 memorably duped Samuel Ireland, who was then preparing his Picturesque Views on the Warwickshire Avon (1795), into purchasing fraudulent relics. See, for example, Jordan's, Original memoirs and historical accounts of the families of Shakespeare and Hart ... with drawings of their dwelling houses, and coat of arms ... (1790; reprint, London: T. Richards, 1865)Google Scholar.

56. Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 23Google Scholar.

57. Samuel Vince, “A tour through part of England and North Wales in the summer of 1777,” MS M.a.208, fol. 30, Folger Shakespeare Library. The manuscript once belonged to Halliwell-Phillipps. Seven years later, George Augustus Walpole's published account was virtually the same, though he noted the poverty of Thomas Hart (1729–93) and his family: “Three doors from this inn [The White Lion] is the house in which Shakspere was born, and here is shewn his chair, in which he sat in the chimney-corner: it has been pretty much cut by different visitors, who have been desirous of preserving a relic of something belonging to the immortal bard. The people who live in the house say they are his next relations; they are poor.” Walpole, The New British Traveller ... (London: Alex Hogg, 1784), 151.

58. Bennett, Susan, “Shakespeare on Vacation,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, eds. Hodgdon, Barbara and Worthen, W. B. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 494–508, quote at 498Google Scholar.

59. Bennett, Susan, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 17, 35Google Scholar.

60. Kennedy, Dennis, “Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism,” Theatre Journal 50.2 (1998): 175–88, quote at 182CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61. Ibid., 186.

62. Furnivall, F. J., “Shakespere's Will, Tomb, and Descendants,” in Furnivall, F. J. and Munro, John, Shakespeare: Life and Work (London: Cassell, 1908), 199–216, quote at 208Google Scholar.

63. Worthen, W. B., Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64. See, e.g., Kiernan, Pauline, Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (London: Macmillan, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Escolme, Bridget, Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.