Comment on Anne Hathaway's Cottage
I have a particular artistic and personal connection to Anne Hathaway's Cottage as I have performed my original one-woman show "Mrs Shakespeare, Will's first & last love" for many years. I've been to the Cottage about four times, researching, talking with the guides, walking around what would been called "Hewlands Farms" in Anne's lifetime. Even more than the other Shakespeare properties in Stratford, the Cottage is for me a place for imagination--imagining the life of a farmer's daughter who meets a witty young man only to stay behind while he becomes a succesful writer and theatre owner in London. My visits always raise more questions and prompt more research. How did people manage to live in the times of such fires and plague? What was Anne made of that she could sustain a working life of homemaking and caring for three children? I imagine and create a story of her life for audiences, drawing from the writing of her husband to inform their story of wooing and wedding. I most often perform in historic places, places that have their own stories, but it is often Anne's Cottage that's in my mind on stage, part of a performance a continent away. "The house in Shottery had but one hearth and no chimney," she says, and wonders how her husband could buy New Place, one of the town's great houses. The Cottage is charming, but it was foremost a home full of the orphaned siblings Anne helped to raise, a home full of work and dreams.
Comment on Anne Hathaway's Cottage posted 2007-10-25 by Yvonne Hudson from Annapolis, Maryland, USA
Comment on Anne Hathaway's Cottage
I have an original drawing of Anne's cottage which was drawn around 1920-1925. I was wondering if this has any value, for the purpose of insurance.
Comment on Anne Hathaway's Cottage posted 2008-09-03 by Lissa from USA