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No, Shakespeare’s house is not for sale. But the Bard of Avon and his real estate have still made the headlines.
Or rather, his wife’s real estate. Or rather, a patch of land near his wife’s real estate.
In Shottery, England, near Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust agreed to sell a 5-acre parcel of land behind the Tudor farmhouse of Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare’s wife, not the “Devil Wears Prada” star).
To the horror of Shakespeare enthusiasts everywhere, the buyers are developers who want to build a road linking two housing estates, with a total of 800 homes, to Stratford-upon-Avon. The road would be just 250 yards from the house, reports the U.K.’s Daily Mail. Protesters had campaigned against the sale, but it’s now a done deal.
Would there be any such uproar for American literary homes?
We’re not so sure. For one thing, we don’t have the equivalent of Shakespeare here—and if anyone proposed such a thing for, say, Washington Irving’s house, the objections would more likely be about disrupting the Hudson riverfront land than disturbing the place where he wrote “Sleepy Hollow.” And it would be impossible to build a road on the land of Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, MA—the lot is just too tiny.
For another thing, as a nation, we’re less attached to literary homes: They sometimes come with baggage, and their former residents aren’t always a draw. J.D. Salinger’s sweet and historic house in New Hampshire house has been on the market for almost two years. Thomas Mann’s magnificent estate in Santa Barbara, CA, was originally listed for $35 million, then delisted after an almost 50% price cut.
Of course, the Hathaway home will most likely never be on the market. The trust bought it in 1892, and in 1950 it also purchased the land around it, ostensibly to protect the property from unwanted development. It has spent more than $150,000 opposing the developers’ wishes to transform the fields into this road, but finally ran out of steam (and likely money). A condition of the sale was permanent protection for the Hathaway home.
That doesn’t make those who opposed the decision to sell any happier.
“We have been accused of being ‘nimbys,'” one resident told the Daily Mail. “But this road will literally be built in the back garden of Anne Hathaway’s cottage.” In the words of the poet himself, “Something wicked this way comes…”
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