Stratford existed before Shakespeare, of course, though it was a much smaller place. Anglo-Saxon settlers founded a village here in the seventh century beside a shallow ford across the Avon, on the line of an old Roman road that linked the Fosse Way to Icknield Street. The settlement's name combines straet -- the Old English word for a paved road -- with ford, the river crossing, and avon, a Celtic word for river. The Bishops of Worcester owned the land until the sixteenth century. In 1196 John of Coutances, then Lord of the Manor, redesigned the place. He laid out a grid of streets stretching north toward the river crossing, granted a charter from King Richard I for a weekly market, and let burghers rent property in standard quarter-acre 'burgage' plots they could pass to their heirs. The town has celebrated this 1196 charter ever since. In 1996 it threw itself an eight-hundredth birthday party.

John Shakespeare moved from the village of Snitterfield to Stratford in 1551 to make his fortune as a glover. By the 1560s he had married into the Arden family of the local gentry, had a thriving glove business, and had become a senior figure in town politics -- eventually serving as bailiff, the medieval Stratford equivalent of mayor. He and Mary Arden had eight children. William, born in 1564, was the third. He attended the King Edward VI School in the upstairs room of the medieval Guildhall on Church Street, married Anne Hathaway in 1582, fathered three children, vanished into London for two decades, and returned a wealthy man, buying the second-largest house in town. He died in Stratford on what was probably his fifty-second birthday in April 1616. His grave is in Holy Trinity Church, beneath a flagstone that warns -- in his own words -- against disturbing his bones.

Stratford had been quietly proud of its famous son for a century and a half before anything resembling modern Shakespeare tourism began. The pivotal moment came in 1769, when the actor David Garrick staged the Shakespeare Jubilee -- a three-day extravaganza of pageants, processions, banquets, and bardic recitations. Garrick built a temporary wooden rotunda by the river. He commissioned a statue of Shakespeare. He arranged for the corporation to grant him the freedom of the borough in a box made from wood of Shakespeare's own mulberry tree. Torrential rain destroyed the rotunda within forty-eight hours, but the publicity had done its work. Bardolatry -- the worship of Shakespeare as a national, almost religious figure -- had a launch event. Visitors began arriving and never stopped.

Geography helped. The Avon was made navigable through Stratford in 1639, connecting the town to the River Severn and the Bristol Channel. The poet Daniel Defoe, passing through in the eighteenth century, described 'a very great Trade for Sugar, Oil, Wine, Tobacco, Iron, Lead' moving up and down the river. Brewing grew up alongside trade. Edward Fordham Flower opened a large brewery on Clopton Road in 1831, and the Flower family eventually used the wealth to fund the original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1879. Glove-making, which had been Stratford's main trade in Shakespeare's day, faded. Tourism filled the gap. By the late nineteenth century, the railway connected Stratford to the national network, and the rest is theatre programmes, gift shops, and coaches from Heathrow.

Strip away the literary pilgrimage and Stratford is still a working Warwickshire market town. The 2021 census recorded 30,495 residents, a steady increase from 22,338 in 2001. The big employers include NFU Mutual Insurance, Pashley Cycles, and the supermarkets that anchor every English town. The Royal Shakespeare Company is one of the largest cultural employers in Britain. The Avon still floods in wet years, sometimes catastrophically. Bancroft Gardens by the river still fills on summer afternoons with picnicking families, narrow-boat traffic on the canal, jugglers and fire-eaters performing for spare change. Across the river, the open-top tour buses run their loops. The Dirty Duck pub on Waterside is still the unofficial green room of the RSC, with photographs of generations of actors plastering the walls. Stratford is at once one of the most performed places in the world and a Warwickshire town that quietly gets on with itself between performances.