Stratford Revisited

‘Shakespeare and Englishness’ uses Andy Cadiff’s 2008 film A Bunch of Amateurs to extrapolate and assess contemporary meanings of ‘Stratford-upon-Avon’, from prestigious national arts centre to inaccessible rural backwater. Within the horizons of these different paradigms, Holderness returns to the culture wars of the 1980s to analyse Stratford’s constitutive position inside the ‘Shakespeare industry’ targeted at that time for hostile critique by cultural materialism. Adopting a more contemporary perspective, this paper argues that this critical dislike of Stratford was to a large extent misplaced, and that with its rural location, picturesque ambience, ‘village’ culture and Shakespearean saturation, the town of Stratford is capable of offering a powerful image of imagined national community.