Mystery · Grendon Underwood · Legendary
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Did a Bucks lawman inspire the Bard's funniest fool?
Private, don't visit
Shakespeare Farm is a private house and not open; the village and its church of St Leonard can be visited, but nothing marks the story. Check before you go.
Grendon Underwood: a village constable here may have made Shakespeare laugh, and ended up immortal on the stage.
Grendon Underwood lay on the road from London to Stratford, and local tradition says William Shakespeare stayed more than once at the Ship Inn, the timber-framed house later called Shakespeare Farm. The story rests on the seventeenth-century gossip John Aubrey, who wrote that Shakespeare picked up the humour of the constable in A Midsummer Night's Dream at Grendon, and that the constable himself was still alive around 1642. There is no constable in that play, so historians suspect Aubrey meant Dogberry, the bumbling watchman in Much Ado About Nothing. Whether Shakespeare ever slept here cannot be proved.