ABSTRACT
Located some seventy miles from Welsh border towns such as Knight on and on some of the drovers' routes used to move livestock from Welsh farms to London markets, Stratford was indeed one of a number of regional magnets in the Midlands for Welsh migration, and marriages between Welsh women and English men were by no means uncommon in sixteenth-century Warwickshire. Framing Shakespeare's relationships to Wales and Welshness and the dramatic representations that stemmed from them in terms of the intimacies of everyday small-town life and familial heritage, Harries argued that Shakespeare owed his genius to the 'Celtic strain in his blood' derived from his paternal grandmother, a Welsh woman called Alys Griffin. This association of Wales with a mystical Celtic femininity that provides organic continuity with the cultural traditions of the past is undoubtedly at one level a response to Shakespeare's dramatic representations of Welsh locations and people in similar terms.
