The structure on Waterside is older than the licence. Three separate fifteenth-century buildings, originally distinct, were gradually combined into the rambling timber-framed pub of today. The first of them became a pub in 1738 -- the date now treated as the establishment's founding. A house next door was absorbed in 1866. A third property was added in 1937. The result is a labyrinth of small rooms, oak beams set at various heights, narrow doorways requiring polite ducking. There is no logical floor plan, because there was no plan -- just three buildings that grew into each other over two centuries.

The Dirty Duck stands about a hundred metres from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre stage door. The proximity has shaped its character more than any architectural decision ever could. Since the days of Frank Benson's company in the early twentieth century, the cast and crew of every RSC season have used the pub as their unofficial bar. The Daily Telegraph once called it 'the unofficial licensed extension of the Royal Shakespeare Company'. Laurence Olivier drank here. So did Richard Attenborough. So did every Hamlet, every Macbeth, every Lear of the past century who passed through Stratford. The walls are plastered with signed photographs -- some are now faded almost beyond recognition, others as new as the most recent season's company. The crush after a Friday night curtain is a particular kind of literary geography: theatre critics squeezed against working actors, RSC apprentices crowded next to the Sir Ian McKellens of the world.

The Black Swan name probably has more than one origin story, and nobody knows which is correct. One theory traces it to local brewery families who played darts here in the eighteenth century, possibly under a swan-themed darts league emblem now lost to history. The American GI story for the Dirty Duck rings true -- there were US military camps along the Avon during the war, and the Waterside pub would have been a short walk for off-duty soldiers. What is unusual is the dual licence. Most British pubs operating under nicknames continue to be officially listed under their original names. The Dirty Duck went further: at some point in the post-war era, the brewers persuaded the licensing authorities to formally record both names on the licence itself, making it the only English pub legally trading under two names at once. The Black Swan and The Dirty Duck are not the same pub, exactly. They are the same pub depending on who you ask.

The pub has accumulated literary debris in the way only theatrical pubs do. Most of it is ephemeral -- gossip, anecdotes, late-night verses scrawled on napkins. One piece survived: a poem called 'Stratford Ale', composed inside the pub by Len Parish, an actor with Frank Benson's company in the years before the First World War. Parish was a working journeyman of Edwardian theatre, the kind of supporting actor whose name appears in cast lists but rarely in headlines. His poem about Stratford ale is doggerel, by most measures, but it is also the kind of small literary artefact that pubs preserve when nobody else does. Stratford Ale has been quoted in pub guides ever since. Parish is otherwise almost completely forgotten.

On any night during the RSC season, the front terrace fills with theatregoers in the hour before curtain and the hour after. The garden at the back, which slopes gently toward the river, takes the overflow. The food has improved over the past two decades. The beer was always good. The actors who once mostly came to drink now sometimes have to share their corner with tourists who recognise them from television -- a development they bear with varying levels of patience. Between productions, in November or January, the Dirty Duck reverts to a quieter Warwickshire town pub: locals at the bar, ploughman's lunches, the slow rain on the Avon outside. Both modes are real. The pub has been doing this for a very long time.