Ferdinand Street (Stratford)

The tradition of naming streets in Stratford after the works of William Shakespeare began as soon as the town was established. The Pātea River was said to look so much like England’s River Avon that the name Stratford-on-Pātea, in homage to the bard’s birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon, was officially adopted on 3 December 1877, but the town eventually became known simply as Stratford.

Ferdinand Street was created in 1952 and named after a character in one of Shakespeare’s last plays, The Tempest. The son of Alonso, King of Naples, Ferdinand is cast up on an island after a shipwreck and falls in love with Miranda, daughter of the magician Prospero. The play is set on an island in the Mediterranean but Shakespeare was inspired by recent discoveries in the New World, including stories of shipwrecks in Bermuda and encounters with the indigenous peoples of South America.

The Tempest has the honour of being the most performed Shakespeare play in the history of BBC radio broadcasting, with a record 21 productions, and has been the inspiration for 46 operas. The members of Stratford’s Shakespearian reading club certainly enjoyed it in 1924, describing it as “that ever charming play” in the Stratford Evening Post. It’s also one of Shakespeare’s shortest plays at a mere 17,233 words, some of them brand new – he coined a huge number of words and phrases in his works, with The Tempest giving us “into thin air”, “brave new world”, “in a pickle”, “sea change”, abstemious, baseless, eyeball, leaky and watchdog.

A photograph of the “attractive street lights” on Ferdinand Street appeared in the Taranaki Herald on 13 August 1965, with the caption claiming they were “believed to be the first of their kind” in the region. It also said that “this new look subdivision in Stratford… is unique in that all telephone and electricity cables are underground.”

A small dark moon orbiting Uranus has also been named after the character of Ferdinand. It was discovered in 2001 and orbits alongside another moon named Miranda.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.