AUTUMN OF 2025 : Trysts with two famous bards

Bob & William

October and November 2025 brought some memorable moments in my life. Post Durga Puja, we were at our son’s place in Nottingham. There we experienced two lifetime journeys, both fortunately and coincidentally connected with famous litterateurs spaced vastly apart over five centuries in time. Visit one of the greatest English playwrights’ birthplaces, and be amidst the spectators in a live concert by a Nobel laureate in literature at Coventry.

AT COVENTRY

Bob Dylan

The Bob Dylan Show was a surprise birthday gift from my son Arjun. For me, it was a first-time mega show in an indoor concert hall (Coventry Building Society Arena, November 13 2025), packed with over a thousand spectators. The ‘Minstrel Boy’ performed for two hours at a stretch without any break. He began with ‘I’ll be your baby tonight’ and finished with ‘Every grain of sand’. Both are highly contrasting in nature. Dylan's poetry transitioned from a direct and transparent intention of comfort, closeness, and reassurance to a more intentionally cryptic nature, which developed with experience and age. The only transformation in his more than sixty-year singing career was that he began performing while seated at the piano and played the harmonica in four of his songs, while the guitars were handled by his band. There was no change in the tonal quality of his voice that sixty years back rendered his famous composition ‘Blowing in the Wind’. His voice is recognisably higher than a baritone, caused by his nasal resonance, which boosts his upper frequencies. And that is what he amazingly sustains today.

AT STRATFORD-UPON-AVON

William Shakespeare

This time, after a couple of unsuccessful attempts during our previous visit to England, we could finally make inroads on a place that was high on our desired list. Stratford-upon-Avon. In the morning, we drove into the town, which was cold and windy, with sometimes sprinkles of drizzle. Keeping the River Avon on the left, we walked towards Henley Street, where William Shakespeare was born in 1564. This marketplace, which came into being in the early twelfth century with the permission of King Richard I, developed into a buzzing market town by the early sixteenth century. The bard’s father, John Shakespeare, was a prosperous businessman who processed and sold leather gloves. During the Tudor era, gloves were a high-status fashion accessory. Alongside, he followed a steady career ladder in local government, eventually reaching the highest office, equivalent to mayor, from a humble beginning as an ale taster. A window in his half-timbered house, which faced the cobbled market street, was the selling outlet of the gloves. The house, with uneven stone floors and furniture, beds and kitchen utensils are same as it was during Shakespeare’s time. We saw two bedrooms – one where Shakespeare was born and the other where William and his seven siblings huddled together on a small bed, and lofts carved out of the walls. In fact, the entire space in and around the house and marketplace has been so ingeniously curated since the nineteenth century that, together with the sun playing hide-and-seek with the clouds over the cobbled road, it created a surreal sense of wandering through sixteenth-century England. Inside, the air seemed to resound with Shakespeare’s famous lines from Macbeth: “Out, out, brief candle! ... Life’s but a walking shadow…” Outside, on street corners, various characters from Shakespeare’s plays, such as Portia and Shylock from 'The Merchant of Venice', Lady Macbeth from 'Macbeth', etc., were enacted with attire from respective periods—a lively attraction for visitors

For lunch, Arjun took us to a popular eatery, ‘Loxley’s Restaurant and Wine Bar’ on Sheep Street. Since I am fond of pork, I had ordered one of their signature dishes: barbecued pulled pork Benedict, poached hen egg, Hollandaise sauce, and English muffin, along with beer. After lunch, we hired a taxi to take us to the beautiful Anne Hathaway’s cottage in Shottery village, about 2 km from the town centre. The cottage is a 12-roomed farmhouse and the family home of the Hathways for almost thirteen generations. It continued as a working farm till the late 19th century. This half-timbered Tudor-style home with a thatched roof belonged to the Hathways, who were prosperous sheep farmers. Before letting us inside the cottage, an elderly lady dressed in 16th-century Shakespearean attire narrated to us a brief history of the cottage and how Shakespeare, about 8 years younger than Ann, used to walk down from the town centre to the cottage to court Ann before marrying her. Inside, the beds and furniture lay intact without any signs of decay over the centuries. Outside, the gardens and the orchards were very pretty sights.

From Hathways cottage, we hired a taxi for Stratford town centre. We got down at Shakespeare’s new house, which he bought and stayed for the final two decades of his life. He also wrote many of his later masterpieces. This house had 20 to 30 rooms and 10 fireplaces. Known as ‘New Place’, the house was a grand purchase in those days and reflects the wealth Shakespeare acquired at the height of his success in London. But, apart from a garden, Shakespeare’s writing desk and a chair, we could not see any other remains of the house. What we learnt was something of a tragic history of the house. One Francis Gastrell had bought the property in the 18th century. In 1756, Gastrell became so annoyed by tourists peeking over his wall to see a mulberry tree reportedly planted by Shakespeare that he chopped it down. In 1759, after a heated dispute with the town council over taxes, he demolished the entire house in a fit of rage. The local townsfolk got so infuriated with his dastardly acts that they literally chased him out of Stratford forever. Since 2016, the site has been transformed into a stunning memorial garden managed by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. The gardens are filled with contemporary artworks and sculptures representing his famous plays (like a bronze ship for The Tempest). We also saw some preserved 15th-century foundations of the house.

While walking down the old quarters, we came across a four-hundred-year-old hotel named 'The Shakespeare Hotel', almost diagonally opposite the 18th-century Town Hall. Though the hotel was closed, we later learnt that the hotel would reopen in 2026 after refurbishment.

Pics*: Arundhati Sengupta

*(A photo essay. However, no photos were allowed inside the Coventry Concert Hall.)