My first introduction to William Shakespeare was through As You Like It, a play that was set as coursework for Class 8. The OG romantic comedy, in which Rosalind disguises herself as a man, Orlando pins love poems on trees, and the Forest of Arden becomes a stage for mistaken identities, wit, and ultimate reconciliation, was the only bright spot in an educational schedule dominated by trigonometry in mathematics, equations in chemistry, numericals in physics, and long-drawn-out wars in history.
As You Like It — as I liked it — offered a way out: into a world where language sparkled, where love was playful, and where the forest definitely felt freer than the classroom.
Shakespeare’s endless day
April 23, 2026, marked 410 years since Shakespeare’s death, a date that is also, curiously and fittingly, celebrated as his birthday.
Born in April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s exact date of birth is not recorded, but his baptism took place on April 26 at Holy Trinity Church. Given the custom of baptising infants within days of birth, April 23 has come to be widely accepted as his birthday.
That he also died on April 23, in 1616, at the age of 52, lends the date a near-mythic symmetry, an entry and exit on the same day seems as though the playwright had quietly arranged his own final act.
A town that became a pilgrimage
To return to Stratford-upon-Avon today is to encounter not just a town, but a living literary landscape. At its heart stands Shakespeare’s Birthplace, the half-timbered house on Henley Street where he was born in 1564 and spent his early years. The rooms are modest, the wooden beams low, but the pull is unmistakable. Nearby lies Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, the thatched home of his wife, whom he married at 18. A short walk away, the River Avon curves gently past the church where he is buried, its waters reflecting centuries of visitors who have come searching for something of the man behind the words.
The idea of Stratford as a literary destination did not emerge organically. As Tiffany Stern, Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, points out, it can be traced back to 1769, when David Garrick staged the Stratford Jubilee. “He taught Stratford to market Shakespeare,” she says, noting that what began as self-promotion evolved into a model for literary tourism.
Today, that legacy is visible in everything from carefully preserved heritage sites to playful shopfronts echoing Shakespearean wordplay.
But the pull of Stratford runs deeper than tourism. “Stratford fulfils people’s need for pilgrimages in a world in which religion is on the decline,” Stern explains. Visitors come not just to see, but to feel, to stand where Shakespeare stood, to imagine the textures of his life, and to try and get closer to his artistry.
The life behind the language
That artistry was shaped by a life rooted in both the ordinary and the extraordinary. Shakespeare was born to John Shakespeare, a glove-maker who rose to civic prominence, and Mary Arden, who likely introduced him to stories, fables, and the language in his early years. He would have sat in the local grammar school, working through Latin texts like Virgil and Ovid, whose rhythms and stories would surface, years later, in his plays and poems.
There’s no record of him ever going to university, which set him apart from the more credentialled playwrights of his day, Christopher Marlowe among them. It didn’t seem to matter much. By 1592, he had established himself in London as a playwright and actor, and his reputation continued to grow.
As a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men under King James I, he produced an average of two plays a year. His output remains among the most prolific in literary history: around 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and several poems.
Yet London was never his only home.
In 1597, he bought New Place, the largest house in Stratford, which said something about both his bank balance and where his heart remained. He seems to have shuttled between Stratford and London for much of his working life, a journey that could eat up three days each way. Anne and the children stayed put: Susanna, Hamnet, and Judith, rooted in the town while their father’s name grew larger elsewhere.
The mystery of the man
And yet, for all the records, Shakespeare remains mysterious. The years between 1585 and 1592 are almost entirely undocumented, a gap that has kept historians, romantics, and conspiracy theorists busy ever since. He may have been teaching. He may have fled Stratford after poaching deer from a local estate. Nobody really knows. Somehow, the not-knowing only makes him more interesting.
Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford, suggests that this openness extends into his work itself. She describes his writing as possessing a quality of “gappiness”, a sense of being unfinished or incomplete, inviting interpretation. “Shakespeare was never directly writing about his own place and time,” she explains, and this distance allows his works to be continually reimagined.
In recent years, this has led to a shift away from strict biography towards more creative engagements with his life. As Stern notes, Shakespeare is increasingly “popular for things he didn’t do or say”, with works like Hamnet reimagining his personal story through fiction. Each generation, it seems, reshapes Shakespeare in its own image.
A day in Stratford
If there is no single way to understand Shakespeare, there are ways to experience him. Stern suggests that even a day in Stratford can offer meaningful connections. “Crossing Clopton Bridge and walking along the River Avon to Holy Trinity Church, that’s an experience Shakespeare will have had,” she says. Inside the church, visitors can encounter features that would have been familiar to him, such as the intricately carved misericords in the choir stalls.
Another route leads to the Welcombe Hills, where traces of medieval ridge-and-furrow fields remain. Shakespeare himself once hoped to enclose these lands, linking him not just to literature, but to the economic and agricultural life of the town.
Part of what makes Stratford appealing is this layering, the sense that the past isn’t cordoned off but is still being reinterpreted and performed. The Royal Shakespeare Company has a lot to do with that. Shakespeare here isn’t a relic; he’s still in repertory.
The enduring text
None of Shakespeare’s original manuscripts survive, not a single one. What we have instead is an act of friendship. After his death, his fellow actors gathered his plays together and published the First Folio. Without them, Macbeth and The Tempest, among others, might simply have vanished.
That the plays didn’t vanish, that they’ve only multiplied, says something about what’s in them. It isn’t just the language; it’s that the plays are flexible. They’ve been staged in every conceivable form, translated into languages Shakespeare couldn’t have imagined, set in times and places far from Elizabethan England, and somehow, they hold. The sonnets, too, keep finding new readers. People who pick them up expecting museum pieces often find something that seems to know them.
Lines such as “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em”, from Twelfth Night, continue to circulate far beyond their original context, embedded in everyday speech.
Where it all comes together
And yet, for all this global reach, Stratford-upon-Avon remains central. It is here, in Holy Trinity Church, that Shakespeare is buried. His gravestone is plain, almost austere, but it carries a curse on anyone who dares move his bones.
Even in death, he got the last word.
Maybe that’s what keeps people coming to Stratford. The town holds Shakespearean fragments together: the house where he was born, the stage where his words still land, the grave where it ended.
Four centuries on, Stratford-upon-Avon is not just a place that remembers Shakespeare, but one that continues to keep him alive. And April, the month that marks both his beginning and his end, is always the perfect time to return to it.
Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle.
