In which we visit five Shakespeare sites in one day : New Place

Fittingly, the buildings which can be seen from the bottom of the New Place Garden are the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

Reconstructions of Elizabethan-era clothing as Shakespeare and his wife Anne might have worn -- except made, fascinatingly, of Tyvek.

The site of New Place, from a window in Nash's House.

The Guild Chapel, just across Chapel Lane from New Place.

New Place was the home that Shakespeare bought in 1697 for the grand sum of £60 -- impressive at the time, as was the house, said to be the finest in Stratford -- it had by that time an impressive five-gabled front, ten fireplaces, and extensive gardens containing an orchard and two barns.  After the death of Shakespeare in 1616 the house passed to his daughter Susanna Hall and thence to his granddaughter Elizabeth, by then Lady Barnard.  Upon her death in 1670, because she had no children the house was sold to descendants of the original owners, the Clopton family, one of whom, John Clopton remodeled the house in 1702 to more current fashions.  In 1759, the then-owner Francis Gastrell, apparently tired of pilgrims knocking at his door to see "Shakespeare's house" -- which it wasn't really by then anyway, having been so drastically altered by John Clopton -- had the place demolished completely.

The site of New Place, as well as next-door Nash's House, the house of Elizabeth's first husband Thomas Nash, were acquired by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in the middle of the 19th century, and Nash's House became the museum and visitors' center for the New Place site.  Recent archaeological investigations have prompted new theories about what New Place looked like in Shakespeare's time, although the physical evidence is not as extensive as one might have wished.  It must have been a splendid place!