I. Newett’s afore-specified birthday, he long since out to pasture from Academia and his wife enjoying a last well-earned sabbatical leave before her own retirement, the couple treated themselves to their first-ever cruise-ship cruise: eight days on the Baltic and North Seas (Stockholm/Copenhagen/Dover, with intermediate stops and shore excursions) followed by a week ashore in England and culminating, on G.’s birthday, in our first-ever visit to William Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. Motives obvious, over and above much-needed respite from the reassembly of our storm-smashed lives: couple of long-time English profs, both of whom routinely included bits of the Bard in their undergrad lit-survey courses (George mainly the plays, Amanda the sonnets, neither of us with scholarly authority, but both with the appreciative awe of fellow languagefiddlers). Add to that the Stratford/Avon connection: Our joint employer, as you may have heard, is a thriving two-century-old liberal arts college in the even older colonial-era customs port of the same name in Avon County, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, where the towns and counties have English names (Salisbury, Cambridge, Oxford, Stratford, Chestertown, Dorchester, Talbot, Cecil, Avon, Kent) and the numerous tidal waterways are still called by names predating the Brits’ arrival: Chesapeake, Nanticoke, Choptank, Sassafras, and Stratford’s own winding Matahannock.
