ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the best-known sites of tourist pilgrimage – Stratford-upon-Avon and William Shakespeare's Globe in London – to examine what, historically, has been at stake when people encounter Shakespeare as tourists. It provides the centuries-old history of tourism in Stratford, especially at Shakespeare's Birthplace, while considering the opportunities for contemporary visitors to reflect upon their own participation in rites that sustain Shakespeare-related properties as pilgrimage sites. The chapter discusses how the anxiety extends to the reception of early Globe performances, when reviewers dismissed the venue's cultivation of interactive theatre as coarsely touristic and visiting foreign companies' Shakespeare productions as inauthentic. The urge to ascribe Shakespearean significance to Stratford's architecture and history, so important to subsequent literary pilgrimage there, is connected to late seventeenth-century efforts to create a national literary canon founded on biographical criticism. Actor David Garrick's 1769 Jubilee celebrating the playwright is seen as a landmark in establishing Stratford-upon-Avon as the centre of Shakespearean tourism.
