February 13th: Windsor Castle and Antony and Cleopatra

Two classmates and I in front of a portion of windsor Castle

Friday our entire group met at the Waterloo train station to take an hour long train ride to Windsor Castle. Windsor Castle is the oldest and largest occupied castle in the world. You can read more about the history and importance of the castle here. Once we had gone through security and received our (free and very informative) audio guides we were able to tour both the state and semi-state apartments. The State Apartments were very formal and very elaborate. It was easy to imagine royalty both conducting official business and hosting extravagant balls in the rooms. Each of the rooms boasted dozens of famous paintings – Holbein, daVinci, Rembrant, Van Dyck – that were hung on the walls or painted on the ceilings.

However, without a doubt, my favorite part of the castle was the chapel. St. George’s Chapel was started in 1475 and finished fifty years later by Henry VIII. It’s awe-inspiring to see such a beautiful place of worship and to think of all of the people who have worshipped God in this gorgeous gothic chapel through out hundreds of years. In addition to being the Chapel of the Most Noble Order ofthe Garter (which you can read about here), it is the burial place of ten monarchs, most notably Henry VIII. Henry VIII (d. 1547) was buried, in the choir of the chapel, next to his favorite wife, Jane Seymour, who died ten years earlier giving birth to Henry’s only son. Tudor England has always fascinated me – it’s certainly one of my favorite periods to read about – so I find it especially exciting to see Tudor homes or chapels or graves!  As beautiful and historic as the castle is, I forgot that it is actually one of the Queen’s favorite residences until we walked outside the castle and saw the Royal Standard flying where the Union Jack had been an hour before, signaling that the Queen was now on the premises.

After the tour we walked down the hill (it’s on a high bluff overlooking the Thames River – very defensible, as all good castles should be) and walked across the river into Eton. There wasn’t much to see in Eton besides the college and the Lancastrian counterpart to St. George’s.

Monday began our first full week of classes. Mondays I have Shakespeare, UK Politics and Empire, so it’s a pretty full day. We also have our meeting on Mondays to talk about upcoming events and receive our theater tickets for the week. After my last class I took the tube with some of the girls to Covent Garden for dinner and then to the Novello Theatre for RSC’s production of Antony and Cleopatra, staring Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter. It was a good production; more traditional than the Propeller’s Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night (which we’ll see this Wednesday).

This week should be full of classes and theater but will culminate with a trip to Stonehenge and Bath of Friday!