Shakespeare at the spa

The man waiting on the checkout line at the supermarket in Stratford-upon- Avon was hard to miss. His long tangled hair was tied back in a loose knot, the kind of coif you usually see sprouting from the head of a Botticelli archangel, and his casually disassembled wardrobe -- the billowy cotton shirt, the linen pants -- had clearly been artfully assembled. He looked like the village boho, someone who was probably on the verge of leaving the English market town for his luminous future, or maybe his disappointing one, in London.

I didn't think much about it until I saw him again later that evening. This time though he wasn't counting out spare change for a pack of hair gel. He was dancing around draped in something resembling a drooping adult diaper on the thrust stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, his drenched hair (the gel?) unfurled and flying as he bellowed his poetic lines. The shopping boy had become Edgar, King Lear's crazed son, and clearly his future in London was assured.

The leap from pedestrian to the highest lyrical drama is something quintessentially English and that, of course, is why I had come to Britain. In fact part of what drives a true Anglophile, and I'm a dedicated one, is the way every other English backroad and village, and sometimes just passing encounter, can evoke a masterwork of art or literature.

I've trekked up the long road in Haworth to the Brontë parsonage, which is circled by such a massive cemetery -- row after row of moss-covered, sadly tilting tombstones -- that the house seems to pop up from a village of the dead. I've made the requisite pilgrimage to Jane Austen's cottage, where it's hard to imagine how she wrote those thumping big books on that puny writing table. And I have spent an afternoon in St. Ives, staring as the sun set behind Virginia Woolf's lighthouse, still looking as transcendental as ever, as the beacon seemed to burst into golden flames in the middle of the sea.

But I had never come to Shakespeare's birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon, which is the true homecoming for Anglophiles, and my timing was perfect. That's because 2011 is the year that the Royal Shakespeare Theatre -- home to the Royal Shakespeare Company -- has fully unveiled its massive renovation. And it may also go down as the year Stratford, and its surroundings, came to exemplify a newly stylish kind of English country idyll. Call the area's metamorphosis a three-act play.

Act 1: The renovation

Showcasing England's favorite son's literary legacy, the theater is the very emblem of pedigreed English culture, and its transformation is the biggest drumroll of an event in England in recent years (aside from, you know, that wedding).

The whole gleaming complex, officially inaugurated this spring by Queen Elizabeth, is reaching for full gravitas this year with a high-power season of major productions (partly a celebration of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 50th birthday). Filling out the A-list roster: "Macbeth," "Romeo and Juliet," "The Merchant of Venice" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

When I arrived in Stratford in late February, though, "King Lear" was playing, the first work to be performed after the new doors opened. Lear has never been my favorite Shakespeare play. OK, it's my least favorite. It seems too windy and sadistic, lacking in Elizabethan camp and cross-dressing, driven by too much flat-out insanity and bathos, even for the king of morbidity. But this was the performance that helped change my mind. The thrust theater brought the grim action almost too close for comfort and the actor playing Lear started out so quietly, almost mumbling his lines, that when he did start barking the explosion was a clap of theatrical thunder and ultimately heartbreaking. My friend from the grocery was good, too.

Act 2: Seaweed wraps

At the same time it has relaunched Shakespeare, the English Tourist Board is financing a campaign to pitch the country as hipster central again (the predictable pitchmen include Jamie Oliver, Rupert Everett, et al.). And this time, the talk doesn't center just on London. The style revolution that transformed London in the '90s has long since seeped out into the shires, and the home counties are now full of boutique bolt-holes, locavore restaurants and the inevitable spas that allow visitors to have it both ways. That means even a country pastoral can turn trendy. You choose: "Hamlet" or a seaweed wrap.

The sense of choice was eminently obvious in Stratford. In fact RST's new rooftop bar, offering views across Bancroft Gardens and the River Avon, was as busy with bright young things as any Soho club, and the Rooftop Restaurant served the kind of spot-on meal that equaled anything I had sampled the week before in London. Forget those hoary old clichés about nursery room puddings (which actually were always good; there's nothing better than a sticky toffee pudding) or the kind of beef Wellington you have to cut with a buzz saw and chisel. The Rooftop's celeriac and apple soup and sea bream with brown shrimp and parsley risotto were each a study in supernal, zealously sourced contemporary cuisine. Just across the street from the theater, the recently revamped Arden Hotel flaunted its own glossy bar and restaurant and newly polished guestrooms dressed up with marble bathrooms and jewel-toned shams.

The 16th-century half-timbered house where the playwright was maybe born (though this, like everything regarding Shakespeare, is disputed and debated) doubled as his father's glove workshop and the elegantly furnished little manor-turned-museum exudes a sheer sense of style. So did the dandified buttery leather gloves that John Shakespeare produced, turning the house into something of a design boutique. In fact you could call the whole fashion-forward family (Shakespeare's brother-in-law was a hatter) foppish style-setters, an early prototype for all the Alexander McQueens and mod trendies to come, a pioneering Elizabethan template of Cool Britannia.

Or maybe they were just overreaching provincials. The judgment call is up to you and that's the point of the bipolar British country tour; you can find what you want. Just don't limit yourself to Stratford. One of the town's great advantages as a first stop or a pastoral base camp is its heart of England location; it is within easy striking distance of the Cotswolds, Oxford and the Thames Valley, all prime areas of the newly urbane country idyll.

Act 3: Beyond Stratford

I wanted to followed my Stratford immersion with something that Shakespeare could have recognized so I headed first to Chipping Campden, which sits just 12 miles south of Stratford-upon-Avon. Called one of the loveliest Cotswolds wool towns, the village is so twee you expect Mr. Chips, Mrs. Minniver and Winnie the Pooh wearing a fascinator to come strolling down the High Street, arms locked, munching scones. The town, aside from the one drunk in the old market hall, was elegantly quiet as I walked up and then down that High Street, past the bakery selling crumpets and a bookstore stocked with actual books and all the honey-colored, luminous limestone housefronts.

At the end of the street and around a curve, by the quintessential village church, was the East Banqueting House, a Jacobean beauty capped with barley sugar twist chimneys and framed by a gateway sprouting two pepperpot lodges that we had rented several years ago, from the Landmark Trust, at a bargain price (it ended up costing less, split between five of us, than the chintziest B&B).

The stone fireplaces and wood beams in the guest rooms play nicely with the flat-screen TVs and neutral palette. The manor's Potager Restaurant dishes up both a classic tea (clotted cream to finger sandwiches) and a delicately contemporary locavore dinner (carpaccio of beetroot with goat cheese mousse; fennel-cured salmon with cucumber jelly and crème fraiche; Cotswold lamb with cassoulet and sweetbreads; plum crumble tart).

And while Shakespeare wouldn't have known what to make of the private cinema with pink leather seats, he probably would have appreciated the aromatherapy treatments in the full-service spa. Granted, it's hard to picture him padding around the garden in a terry cloth bathrobe and spa slippers. But the master sensualist is the one person who would have managed to find lyricism in a rose water wrap, and who could have turned a foot massage and oatmeal facial into soaring poetry. Or at least, in the end, a very pretty midsummer sonnet.