Bard Clicks in Sticks

Under a warm sun, Stratford-upon-Avon was stirring to life last week. White swans and yellow punts rippled on the gentle blue Avon, and along its turfy banks, lovers lolled and plum trees flowered. But for the Warwickshire town's 13,000 citizens there was a surer sign of the season: the wheels were turning again in Stratford's $3,000,000-a-year tourist industry.

To Will Shakespeare's home town flocked the first arrivals of the 150,000 money-bearing pilgrims from some 75 countries who are expected to come, gawk, worship and spend before the first leaves fall. The hardier Bardolators (as one London critic calls them) will swarm for "Bed, Bard and Breakfast" to Stratford's 45 hotels and 47 guest houses. They will also get their fill of the master's works-- eight plays a week in the $1,000,000 riverside Shakespeare Memorial Theater.

Hot Joints, Iced Highballs. Already sold out through June 11, the annual Shakespeare Festival opened last week with Macbeth, starring Godfrey Tearle and Cinemactress Diana Wynyard. Among the season's brand-new productions: John Gielgud's Much Ado About Nothing, Tearle's Othello, Tyrone Guthrie's Henry VIII. By October, the theater management reckons that it will have taken in something close to $250,000.

Other canny Stratfordians will also cash in. Just inside the Merry Wives Gift Shoppe is inscribed: "Make Bold With Your Money--Merry Wives of Windsor" This blunt advice* from the best source prompts thousands of tourists to buy knickknacks ranging from ashtrays to souvenir pillows stamped "Stratford," "Avon" or "Shakespeare." All Stratford merchants are aware of what's in a name. Samples: the Hathaway Tea Rooms, the Shakespeare Garage, Shakespeare's Doorstep Woolens Shop, Shakespeare Pearce's Restaurant ("Hot Joints Daily").

In pasting classical labels on contemporary commerce, the Shakespeare Hotel shoots the works: the management has named its bedrooms "Romeo and Juliet," "The Taming of the Shrew," its bathrooms "The Tempest," "King Lear," the bridal suite "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the dining room "As You Like It," and the bar "Measure for Measure." As the largest hotel in town, the Shakespeare entertains enough Americans to have become one of the few English hostelries where guests can get tomato juice for breakfast, and ice in their highballs.

200,000 Postcards. The sale of 200,000 postcards a year (in 100 varieties) supports a local printing plant, one of the largest of its kind in England. Shakespeare recordings are snapped up in the town's music stores. Booksellers do a whopping business. Says one: "Everybody wants to buy an edition of Shakespeare so he can write 'Bought in Stratford-upon-Avon' on the flyleaf." The Bardolators also pay admission to Shakespeare's birthplace, to Anne Hathaway's cottage, and to the church where Shakespeare was baptized and buried.

Stratford tries to remember that the shrine is more important than the shilling; recently it gave its borough council wider powers to punish flagrant exploiters of the sacred name. But the townsfolk point out that things could have been worse if, for example, their fathers had taken up P. T. Barnum's offer to buy the birthplace and ship it to the U.S. Says a local official: "But for the grace of God and the farsightedness of our predecessors, the birthplace would be in Brooklyn under a tent."

*More faithful to the letter than to the spirit. Says Falstaff to Master Brook (Act 2, Scene II): "I will first make bold with your money . . ."

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