Isn't J S F clever?

Shakespeare’s Parrot’s Parrot’s Parrot’s Parrot’s Parrot’s Parrot’s Parrot’s Parrot’s Parrot’s Parrot’s Parrot. 1942–? Striped West Indian Parrot, approx. 14 x 5 in. Museum purchase.

Little is known of the man who is widely considered the greatest writer in history. The best insight into who he was may lie in the parrot perched before you, a tenth-generation descendant of the parrot given to Shakespeare in 1610 as a gift by his friend and fellow poet Michael Drayton. The Bard was exceedingly fond of the bird, and would speak to her as one might write in a journal – to chronicle, reflect and confess. When he died of fever six years later, Anne Hathaway kept the parrot, and introduced into its cage a younger parrot, to learn what the older could teach it. She never spoke to either of them, and forbade guests from speaking in their presence. A line of Shakespeare’s parrots was raised in the painstaking silence of her love, and when she died, our reverence. And so we ask you not to speak while in this sound-proof room, but only to listen. We ask you not to compromise the ever-weakening but direct line from this parrot to Shakespeare. And when it begs you, ‘Talk to me,’ as it has the habit of doing, we ask you not to give it the company of your voice – it is not the parrot, remember, who begs to be talked to, and while Shakespeare may reach us through the parrot, it will never work in the other direction.