When our train arrived at Stratford station, it was still early in the morning. About 150 kilometers northwest of London, in the Warwickshire county of England, sits the market town of Stratford-upon-Avon on the River Avon. A big bronze statue of a jester would elegantly greet us at one end of Henley Street, which is now pedestrianized and where we will be in less than ten minutes. As is well known, court jesters were prevalent in medieval Europe and frequently appeared in Shakespeare’s plays. This statue is of Touchstone, Duke Frederick’s court jester from the play “As You Like It.”

According to the sculptor, James Butter, the Jester represents the precarious balance of life: “My point being that we dance through life finely balancing optimism above us, but tragedy lurks behind.” Numerous cafes on both sides of Henley Street are prepared to provide tourists with refreshments. I found the cafe “As You Like It,” to be the most intriguing. Our destination is William Shakespeare’s birthplace, a restored 16th-century half-timbered house that is now a small museum referred to as “a mecca for all lovers of literature.” And how fascinating was it to discover a bust of another poet in the garden as we were leaving Shakespeare’s house from the backyard?

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“Rabindranath Tagore – Poet, Painter, Playwright, Thinker, Teacher – The Voice of India” is the inscription on the York stone plinth. There is a backstory behind this, though. In 1964, during the quarter centennial celebrations of Shakespeare’s birth, the Calcutta Art Society handed an ivory tablet of Tagore’s poem on Shakespeare during a ceremony held at the newly opened Shakespeare Centre. Thirty years later, when Dr. L.M. Singhvi, the Indian High Commissioner to London at the time, saw this tablet on the occasion of the visit to the Shakespeare Centre Library of the VicePresident of India.

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Dr. Singhvi, whose own passion for Shakespeare had been sparked by Tagore’s poem while he was an undergraduate at Allahabad in the 1950s, planned for a permanent monument to Tagore at Shakespeare’s birthplace that the annual influx of........

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