Shakespear’s Birthday Celebrations In Stratford-upon-Avon: HISTORY, TRADITION, CONTEMPORANEITY
Authors:   Zaporizhzhia National University, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, TORKUT Nataliya 
Published: December 2024

Background. The idea of this publication is based on the author's personal experience of participating in Shakespear’s Birthday Celebrations 2023 in Stratford-upon-Avon and is determined by the need for interdisciplinary analysis and dissemination of the experience of modelling public memory about a national genius whose scale of greatness transcends geographical and chronological boundaries. This shapes the peculiar form of the author’s narrative, with publicists and analytical components interacting, and the essayistic passages are accompanied by historical and literary excursuses.

The article aims to comprehend the role of the tradition of the annual Shakespeare Celebrations as a ritual communication, which is a way of organizing, supporting and transmitting cultural memory. In the process of Shakespeare's commemoration, which, in fact, began with the installing the tombstone and the monument in Holy Trinity Church and the publication of the First Folio (1623), a rather extensive list of forms of honouring the great poet was developed; moreover, a field of collective memories shared by the global cultural community has been created. The relevance of the article is determined by the fact that the unique Stratford experience is of undeniable interest both in theoretical and pragmatic aspects, because commemorative practices are always correlated not only with history in its traditional sense (systematic knowledge of the past), but also with shaping identities.

Methods. Analytical reflection, historical and literary excursions, interdisciplinary studies on the phenomenon of memory (W. Ernst, P. Nora, A. Assman) and cultural identity (E. D. Smith, M. Dobson, P. Redman).

Results.The author of the article singles out two major strategies for forming shared ideas about the artist's image. The first one is intuitive-suggestive, which is based on writing and actualizes the broad possibilities of constructing an implicit author. The second one is rational-pragmatic, which tends to fix the traces of the biographical author's presence in the space of real history, their intellectual and logical arrangement into a coherent narrative of memories.

Conclusions.What is unique about the Stratford Celebrations is that within them, these two approaches complement, feed and reinforce each other. Every aspect of the Shakespeare festival ( academic symposia, new book issues presentations, topical museum exhibitions, parade to lay the flowers on the poet’s grave, Shakespere Birthday Luncheon with Pregnell Prize award, the Shakespeare Service in Holy Trinity Church) is organically woven into a coherent fabric of ritual communication which organizes, supports and transmits cultural memory of William Shakespeare.

At the same time, the presence of such diverse components allows the organizers (Shakespear’s Birthplace Trust, the Town Hall, the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Pregnell Award Committee) to use the cognitive, symbolic, axiological and aesthetic resources of all three memory sources (place, image, text). A key role in the Stratford celebrations is played by Holy Trinity Church being a living place of eternal remembrance and sacred place of William Shakespeare memories.