Boris Karloff - Shakespeare's Hometown

An anthology series presenting tales of suspense and the supernatural, often featuring the host in chilling narratives.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is Boris Karloff speaking. I'm here with a story
for you. From the files of the Reader's Digest. This
is the story of William Shakespeare's home town from October
to April. Life in this ancient market town of Stratford
on Avon flows as gently as the river itself, but

(00:21):
comes the spring and business booms. Long lines of pilgrims
pay their shillings to see the house where Shakespeare was born,
his mother's girlhood cottage, the property he bought when he
returned as the local ne're do well who had made good.
Stratford on Avon is now second only to London, the

(00:41):
chief dollar making tourist haunt in Britain. But it took
Stratford two hundred and fifty years to wake up with
Shakespeareian opportunities. In his day, Shakespeare's fellow citizens regarded him
as a rather dubious blessing to them. The theater was
a den of vice for almost a century and a half.

(01:03):
The only outsiders interested in Stratford were occasional scholars, and
he wasn't until seventeen sixty nine that a local landlord
was able to rally his townsmen to a public celebration
of Shakespeare's anniversary. That year, the Great David Garrick came
from London to organize a festival with cannon salvos, public

(01:25):
breakfasts and fireworks. There was everything except a Shakespearean performance.
For a hundred years this kind of celebration prevailed. Local
business men made a little bit of pocket money out
of the visitors, but the town seemed destined to remain
a big, dull village. It was saved from this fate

(01:46):
by a bearded giant of a brewer named Charles Edward Flower.
It started when, back in eighteen seventy, the local folk
wanted to erect a monument to Shakespeare. Said Flower, Shakespeare
means plays, good ones. The monument we want is a
theater where people can come and see those plays. Flowers

(02:09):
coward England to raise money for a theater, but the
London press and the big wigs snubbed him. They called
Strapford dull, forsaken and said that its citizens were nobody's.
Flower roared back, We've waited nearly three hundred years for
the somebodies to do something. Now we'll show what the
nobodies can do. He built a theater with his own money,

(02:32):
and Stratford was on its way. Other local citizens went
to work to remake their once sleepy community, and they
stripped from their homes, shops, and inns the ugly plaster
fronts added in later centuries to reveal the fine timbered
facades that lined the streets when Shakespeare lived. Fireplaces, cupboards, panels, beams,

(02:55):
all the handsome Elizabethan details have been restored, and now
the entire town is a living monument to William Shakespeare,
shared by the plain folk of Stratford with the people
of the whole world. I found the story of Stratford
on Avon in the Reader's Digest back files, but in
the current December issue of the magazine there's the story

(03:18):
of another small city with a big list of visitors.
The city of this story is in France. The attraction
not a man, but a cathedral. The cathedral was built
many centuries ago by the whole town. Men and women
pitted the slight strength of their bodies against the heartless

(03:39):
weight of stone to bring heavy limestone blocks from the
quarries seven miles away into the town. Stone by stone,
year by year, the church rose. The style in which
it grew was new then the soaring style of the
pointed arch and the flying buttress, which to day we
call Gothic. The town Shat, the whole story of the

(04:03):
Miracle of Shat, the building of the Christmas Story in Stone,
appears in the December issue of The Reader's Digest. I'll
be joining you soon again with more transcribed stories, but
until next time, this is Boris Karloff saying good bye.