text: Intermediate 
  The world shares him and London claims him but Stratford-upon-Avon intends to spend 2016 celebrating William Shakespeare as their man: the bard of Avon, born in the Warwickshire market town in 1564, who died there 400 years ago.
  Stratford remained hugely important during Shakespeares life, says Paul Edmondson, the head of learning and research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. People often see Shakespeare as someone who turned his back on Stratford and his family, went to London to earn his fortune and only came back to die, he said. But Stratford is where he bought land and property, where he kept his library, where he lived and read and thought. We are going to spend the year re-emphasizing the importance of Shakespeare, the man of Stratford.
  The anniversary of the death of the man from Stratford, the most famous and the most performed playwright in the world, will be celebrated across Britain and the globe. Macbeth will open in Singapore, Romeo and Juliet in Brussels. Shakespeares Globe is completing the  rst world tour in the history of theatre. It has taken Hamlet to every country except North Korea. In London, they are also creating a 37-screen pop-up cinema, one screen to showcase each of Shakespeares plays.
  The National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and nearly every other theatre production company in the country will celebrate the anniversary. Interpretations of the plays will range from the highly traditional to the experimental. There will also be hundreds of lectures, recitals, international academic conferences,  lms, concerts, operas and major exhibitions.
  For a man famous in his own lifetime, there is little documentary evidence for Shakespeares life and times. The plays would probably not have survived if his friends and fellow actors had not gathered together every bit of every play they could  nd  drafts, prompt scripts, scribbled actors parts and 17 plays not known in any other version  into the precious First Folio published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeares death.
  The actor Mark Rylance has called it his favourite book in the world and most of the surviving First Folios will be on display  including those belonging to the British and Bodleian libraries, and a tattered copy recently discovered in France. Some of the most precious surviving documents will be collected together in an exhibition at Somerset House in London, including four of his six known signatures, which are all slightly different.
  The exhibition, By Me, William Shakespeare, will include his will, the court papers relating to the audacious move when Shakespeare and his fellow actors dismantled a theatre on the north side of the Thames and rebuilt it as the Globe on the South Bank, and accounts showing payments from the royal treasury for Boxing Day performances for James I and Queen Anne.
  The director of the Globe, Dominic Dromgoole, recently jokily claimed Shakespeare was a true Londoner. Stratford, however, will be insisting that the town made and educated Shakespeare. They are restoring his old school room. It will open as a permanent visitor attraction.
  Shakespeare bought the splendid New Place, the second best house in the town, where he died, according to literary legend, on St Georges Day, 23 April, the same day as his birth. You dont buy a house like New Place and not live there, Paul Edmondson said. The general public and many academics have consistently underestimated the importance of Stratford to Shakespeare.
  Edmondson believes that, after Shakespeare bought the house in 1597, all his thinking time was spent there and that the late plays, including The Tempest, were at least planned in his library and probably written there. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust describes New Place as the jewel in the crown of the 400th anniversary celebrations.
  However, Shakespeares house was demolished 300 years ago and the house that replaced it was demolished in 1759 by a bad-tempered priest, Francis Gastrell, in an argument over taxes. He had already cut down Shakespeares mulberry tree, under which the writer is said to have sat and worked, because he was irritated by all the tourists peering into his garden.
  The gap where the house was has never been  lled. But the news that Shakespeares kitchen had been found in the partly surviving cellars went round the world. The whole site is being displayed for the anniversary, with the oundations marked and the garden restored. Without Stratford, Edmondson said, there would have been no Shakespeare.