Victoria (BC), Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, and Nostalgia for "Merry Olde England"
Please join us for the first presentation in the 2024-25 Arts & Humanities Colloquium Series.
On Friday, 20 September, Dr. Sarah Crover (English) will present Shakespearean Neverwheres: Victoria (BC), Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, and Nostalgia for "Merry Olde England"
Victoria, BC, has had a love affair with England since colonization. A big part of its self-fashioning has been centred around recreating a fantasy of Old England. This impulse extends to appropriating the cultural capital that was most toted by the empire as it extended its grasp across the globe: in other words, the celebration of and insistence upon the superiority of the English literary canon. From streets in his name to festivals of his works, Victoria has long participated in the adoration of one of the literary cannon’s most lionized members: Shakespeare. It is not surprising then, in the wake of WWII, in a young capital city anxious to solidify its distinct Canadian-British identity, that some local enthusiasts recreated the Bard’s principal home and marketed it as a tourist attraction. They arranged for the grand opening, in 1959, to coincide with a royal visit by Elizabeth II. For fifty years, Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, an exact replica of the thatched original and its gardens, was a fixture in Victoria – a must-see on the tourist circuit. This talk explores how, rather than engage with its own violent colonial past and attempt meaningful social reparations, citizens mobilized Shakespeare and a sanitized vision of Merry Olde England, to paper over the fault lines between white settler, "foreigner," and Indigenous communities, and imagine a venerable, harmonious English city.
