The Warwickshire Man
Shakespeare and Stratford-upon-Avon
“The Will of all Wills was a Warwickshire Will”- so wrote David Garrick in a song composed for the Jubilee celebrating the bicentenary of Shakespeare’s birth - which came five years too late, in 1769 when it should have been 1764. This was when the cult of Shakespeare and indeed the idea of his birthplace as a shrine, a place of pilgrimage, really began. Garrick continued: