Shakespeare in Love – the play

A scene from the stage version of Shakespeare In Love

A scene from the stage version of Shakespeare In Love

This evening, 23 July, is the official opening of the new London West End play Shakespeare in Love, Lee Hall’s new version of the much-loved 1998 film of the same name. Rumours have been circulating about this play ever since it began in preview a couple of weeks ago and the Daily Telegraph and a couple of others have got their reviews in already. The reviews are great – the Telegraph called it “the best British comedy since One Man, Two Guvnors and deserves equal success” and gave it five stars. Here’s the trailer.

A still from the film Shakespeare In Love, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes

A still from the film Shakespeare In Love, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes

Shakespeare in Love is one of my all-time favourite films, with a great cast and brilliant screenplay by Tom Stoppard, one of the cleverest writers around. This article from the New York Times explains how a few years ago Tom Stoppard was persuaded to rewrite the film as a play, that was subsequently scrapped, and looks at how they approached the adaptation of such a successful movie.

Despite the departure of the man who wrote the screenplay, the stage version remains a faithful adaptation: About 90 percent of the film script — full of witty banter and words of love — has been retained, Mr. Hall said. (The dialogue-heavy play is a relatively rare instance of a recent movie adaptation that isn’t a musical.) But in other ways the play feels a world apart from the film. Not only are there 30 minutes of added dialogue, lifted from Shakespeare,  written by Mr. Hall (a Tony winner for the book for “Billy Elliot the Musical,” another screen-to-stage work), but also an abundance of imaginative staging choices by the director, Declan Donnellan.

Lee Hall’s adaptation was created by closely working with Declan Donnellan and  designer Nick Ormerod, the great Cheek by Jowl partnership. The original film was very much about the business of getting a play into the theatre and they’ve carried this idea even further. Here’s a link to a video about designing the play, and another to an interview with the director about staging it.

It’s probably a sign of confidence that they’re opening the play in the West End without a provincial run first, and with a cast of twenty-eight, an almost unheard-of number in recent years. The cast is led by Lucy Briggs-Owen as Viola De Lesseps and Tom Bateman as Shakespeare. Anna Carteret plays Queen Elizabeth. Taking a cue from the film there is even a dog called Spot.

Booking is now open until 25 October. I’ve got my tickets already but a word of warning: if you want to buy tickets, get them from the official Delfont Mackintosh site rather than the very expensive ticket agency.

And if, like me, you’re a great fan of the film, here’s a link to the information about it on the Internet Movie Database. Whatever the stage play is like, there will always be the film to enjoy.

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HyperHamlet

Hamlet from the Gower Memorial

Hamlet from the Gower Memorial

Hamlet has got to be the most frequently quoted or alluded to work of literature ever written. People may not even realise they are quoting from the play when they say “Neither a borrower or a lender be”, “more in sorrow than in anger”, or “frailty, thy name is woman”. The play has supplied countless titles for books of all kinds, and it is quoted or alluded to in many plays, films and TV programmes, as well as interviews and news reports.

At the recent British Shakespeare Association conference Sixta Quassdorf from the University of Basel introduced us to a new project which she is working on in her paper : HyperHamlet – A database of Quotations from and Allusions to Shakespeare’s Most Famous Tragedy.

hamlet-vermicompostingThe database contains references to Hamlet from over four centuries, with 10,000 entries written by well over 3000 different writers. A huge variety of sources has been scoured for data including annotated editions, allusion books, and the work of writers like Dickens. It includes modified quotations, verbal and acoustic echoes. You can search by work, by author, by language or by period, or you can just scan the text and see what comes up. A full explanation is given here.

hamlet catAlthough Sixta used some images in her presentation, sadly the database doesn’t include pictures. But perhaps that’s just as well: as well as cartoons like the one above advertising the latest thing in worm composting they would have to include ones like this sour-faced cat.

So famous are the lines, the story line and images such as Hamlet with the skull, that it can be used for just about anything. I bought the teapot pictured below on Ebay some years ago. Shakespeare’s head is the lid of the pot, and the scroll is the spout. I was particularly taken by the label on the base that warns the owner not to use it as a teapot, and that the line which appears on it, “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well Horatio” is a misquotation. Both useless and wrong, brilliant!

Shakespeare teapot

Shakespeare teapot

To go back to the database: it is a lot of fun, but there is a more serious aim, which is to gather empirical evidence relating to Shakespeare’s influence over other writers over the centuries. Are some lines more popular at different times, or in different parts of the world? It hopes to provide material for future research, asking what has Shakespeare contributed to the work of other creative writers and to the language itself.

Best of all, the team at Basel are encouraging people to contribute quotations and allusions that they find for themselves. I have no idea of the source of the story, but in a paper I heard about David Garrick’s performance of Hamlet the lecturer explained it was so popular that young men would greet each other exclaiming “Angels and ministers of grace defend us” and do an impression of Garrick’s famous pose that he struck when the Ghost appeared to him on the battlements. Garrick so wanted to make a big impact at this moment that he used a mechanical device concealed in his wig to make it appear that his hair was standing on end. I have no evidence for either of these extraordinary bits of stage history except that I’ve heard respectable academics state them (so they must be true). I can’t help feeling that they should be represented somewhere on the HyperHamlet database though!

I’ve found it fascinating to read some of the quotations on the site – many by authors I’ve not even heard of. Do take a look at the website and if you know of a reference they’ve missed, the instructions for how to contribute are given on the site.

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W B Yeats and Stratford-upon-Avon

Frank Benson as Richard II

Frank Benson as Richard II

For the Spring Festival in April 1901 in Stratford-upon-Avon F R Benson put on a cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays that quickly became known as the Week of Kings. England’s turbulent history must have been a subject of great interest following the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January after a 63-year reign during which the country enjoyed decades of growth, reform and social improvements. Coming at the start of a new century it was also a time for looking forward.

The cycle consisted of six of Shakespeare’s plays, performed in historical sequence, at the time an ambitious programme that attracted a good deal of attention.

Among the interested visitors in April 1901 was the celebrated Irish poet and leading literary figure W B Yeats He came to see the Week of Kings, staying in the comfort of the Shakespeare Hotel. He wrote two essays for The Speaker describing his impressions of both Stratford and the performances, reprinted later as a single essay In Stratford-on-Avon. Click the link for the full essay.

W B Yeats

W B Yeats

Yeats was seduced by the whole experience. He disliked almost nothing in Stratford, and just now, in high summer, while the town and its river are looking particularly lovely, it’s interesting to read an extract of the essay considering how much has changed, yet how some things still remain:
One passes through quiet streets, where gabled and red-tiled houses remember the Middle Age, to a theatre that has been made not to make money, but for the pleasure of making it, like the market houses that set the traveller chuckling; nor does one find it among hurrying cabs and ringing pavements, but in a green garden by a river side.

Inside I have to be content for a while with a chair, for I am unexpected, and there is not an empty seat but this; and yet there is no one who has come merely because one must go somewhere after dinner. All day, too, one does not hear or see an incongruous or noisy thing, but spends the hours reading the plays, and the wise and foolish things men have said of them, in the library of the theatre, with its oak-panelled walls and leaded windows of tinted glass; or one rows by reedy banks and by old farmhouses, and by old churches among great trees.

It is certainly one’s fault if one opens a newspaper, for Mr. Benson gives one a new play every night, and one need talk of nothing but the play in the inn-parlour, under the oak beams blackened by time and showing the mark of the adze that shaped them.  

I have seen this week King John, Richard II, the second part of Henry IV, Henry V, the second part of Henry VI, and Richard III, played in their right order, with all the links that bind play to play unbroken; and partly because of a spirit in the place, and partly because of the way play supports play, the theatre has moved me as it has never done before.

That strange procession of kings and queens, of warring nobles, of insurgent crowds, of courtiers, and of people of the gutter has been to me almost too visible, too audible, too full of an unearthly energy. I have felt as I have sometimes felt on grey days on the Galway shore, when a faint mist has hung over the grey sea and the grey stones, as if the world might suddenly vanish and leave nothing behind, not even a little dust under one’s feet. The people my mind’s eye has seen have too much of the extravagance of dreams, like all the inventions of art before our crowded life had brought moderation and compromise, to seem more than a dream, and yet all else has grown dim before them.

Frank and Constance Benson as Henry V and the Princess of France in the wooing scene from Henry V

Frank and Constance Benson as Henry V and the Princess of France in the wooing scene from Henry V

It is certainly still possible to feel that sense of immersion in Shakespeare that Yeats describes, conveyed powerfully by Frank Benson and his company. Looking at photographs of him in action, and even a short clip of silent move, it can be hard to take Benson’s acting seriously. He never had the star quality of Irving, and carried on playing leading roles much longer than he should have. But in 1901 he was performing well, and in a letter written at the same time as his essay, quoted in J C Trewin’s book Benson and the Bensonians, Yeats compared the Benson Company with their contemporaries:
They speak their verse not indeed perfectly, but less imperfectly, than any other players upon our stage, and the stage management is more imaginative than that of other companies…I thought Mr Benson’s Henry the Fifth nearly as good as his Richard the Second, and admired how he kept that somewhat crude King, as Mr Waller did not, from becoming vulgar in the love scene at the end when the language of passion has to become the instrument of policy.

So much did Yeats approve that later that year Benson’s company was to stage Yeats’ play Diarmuid and Grania, co-written with George Moore, at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. It was a story from Irish mythology, its dramatic scenes, some found, reminiscent of Wagnerian opera. A transfer to London had been intended, but after four performances the play was quietly dropped.

While it may have been appropriate for English actors to perform Shakespeare in Ireland, the time was past when they could present a tale so central to Irish culture. In 1904 Yeats co-founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Many years later in his history of the Abbey Theatre Gerard Fay noted that the play “had a place in Irish theatre history – that it was the last time Dubliners had to call in English actors before they could see a production of an Irish play.”

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Shakespeare and the Digital World

shakespeare and the digital worldAnd now, a plug. Last month saw the publication by Cambridge University Press of Shakespeare and the Digital World, Redefining Scholarship and Practice, edited by Christie Carson and Peter Kirwan, to which I have contributed one of the seventeen individual chapters. I’ve not had time yet to read most of the essays, but looking at the book as a whole my first thought was that Shakespeare is being given a book all to himself (as so often).  The way we do almost everything is being changed in the digital world, so what makes him a special case? Fortunately in their excellent introduction Carson and Kirwan begin by addressing this issue, suggesting that “The sheer volume of material that is published online or in print that refers to Shakespeare makes it a verifiable and distinct cultural entity of considerable weight [that]…positions it as a leader for other areas of the humanities.”  The editors also consider, when looking at the other element of the title “digital”, that in the area of Shakespeare studies, perhaps more than others, there is a battle going on between “strong established practice and innovation”.

One factor, then, is the amount of material, and this certainly led academics to bring the organisational power of the computer to Shakespeare studies. I’m a librarian rather than an academic, and one of the first computer projects I was aware of was a reference book, Marvin Spevack’s 1973 Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare,  listing alphabetically each word used by Shakespeare, giving the line in which it appears and a reference to where it occurs in the words. The Shakespeare concordance was by no means a new idea, but the computer made it reliable: for most people the printed concordance has now been replaced by a searchable online edition. One of Shakespeare’s other advantages for those wishing to undertake digital projects is that not only have Shakespeare’s original folios and quartos never been subject to copyright, many editions of his work, early critical studies, artistic and musical interpretations, are out of copyright. This frees up swathes of material work that isn’t available for more modern authors.

In my career as a librarian I worked on several projects that involved the digitisation of analogue material including artwork and photographs from the Shakespeare Centre Library. As it happens some of these were led by two of the contributors to Shakespeare and the Digital World. Christie Carson’s King Lear CD-ROM project and her later online Designing Shakespeare project used large numbers of images from the performance collections.  Meanwhile Peter Holland had worked on a commercial online site featuring material including designs and playbills documenting the history of Shakespeare’s plays. My own contribution to the book relates my experiences moving from being a “gamekeeper”, managing the commercial and intellectual exploitation of the collections, to a “poacher”, an independent blogger wanting, often, to discuss Shakespeare in the context of materials in collections. Organisations have to overcome difficult issues, but in the two years since I wrote my chapter several have opened up access to large image collections, including the British Library and Getty Images. It’s being realised that opening up offers potential benefits in increasing visibility for both the collection and the organisation as a whole. For both organisations it’s only a partial opening of the door: each retains its commercial licensing operations. Jonathan Jones has written a provocative article about this process,  and here’s an article on Getty Images.

Carson and Kirwan’s introduction on the physical nature of the book as opposed to the website leads Erin Sullivan, one of the contributors, into a discussion on her own experience transforming the website A Year of Shakespeare into the book of the same name. Converting a website into a book is a fairly unusual concept in its own right, and in her 7 July post on her Digital Shakespeares blog, Technology and the book,  she makes interesting observations about the difference between browsing the book in its linear order rather than the more random organisation of a website.

She has been given the responsibility of ensuring that the website is archived, and I have been interested to read about her experiences. Archiving a book, she notes, is easy, because once it’s published the content is unchangeable. But books take ages to get into print. The book Shakespeare and the Digital World has taken two years to publish, during which time there was a real possibility that articles would become out of date. A website would have published articles as soon as they were written and been updated as new developments occurred. But as she comments, “The website … was faster and more responsive in its publication, but has been quicker to deteriorate”. Information professionals will probably not be surprised to read that in order to ensure that the website was properly archived “our archiving process has, perhaps paradoxically, involved printing out all of the website’s contents into a hard copy, and saving as much non-textual material as possible to CDs. In the process of doing so we’ve been surprised by how many of the website’s links, plug-ins, and videos have been broken or died in the 18 months since I stopped maintaining it regularly.” At the Society of Archivists conference in 2005 one speaker suggested digital files were a time-bomb, with problems of redundant formats and file corruption meaning that files had to be regularly recopied and updated to current formats. It was a sobering thought then, and remains so now, that the cost of archiving digital files makes buying physical books look cheap.

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From Warwick Pageant to theatre of war: the boy Shakespeare

The programme for the Warwick Pageant

The programme for the Warwick Pageant

In my post on 30 June I wrote about the Warwick Pageant, an extravaganza that took over the town of Warwick for a week in July 1906. It had taken months of planning, costume-making, and rehearsing, and around 1500 people appeared in the pageant.

As I mentioned in the post, the young Shakespeare was a key figure in the pageant, appearing in the episode showing Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Kenilworth, and rounding off the whole performance. In the official programme, which kept all the performers anonymous, the player of this role is listed as “A boy from Stratford”. I was intrigued: who was this boy “of eight summers”?

The boys of Warwick School taking part in the pageant

The boys of Warwick School taking part in the pageant

I went to the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive to look up records of the pageant, and I found a collection of items that had belonged to Mrs Flower (of the Stratford brewing family). She had asked for a list of the Stratford people participating in the pageant, and the handwritten list is tipped in to the programme. The writer was Mr G W Everard, who I mentioned in my previous post, was himself a Stratford man, playing John Shakespeare. Among the items was a photograph of Mr Everard with the boy Shakespeare, on the back a pencilled note: M Bland. Who was he? He wasn’t listed among the pupils at KES, and although the archivist at Warwick School came up with the delightful fact that ALL the boys at Warwick School took part in the pageant, he was unable to help. I checked the Stratford Herald’s report of the Pageant. Referring to the boy Shakespeare it noted “Little Master Gordon Bland takes this part exceedingly well”. Stratfordians named Bland were few and far between, and as he didn’t appear on Mr Everard’s carefully-compiled list, maybe he wasn’t from Stratford at all?

I tried using online resources. The free Births Marriages and Deaths Online index found Malcolm Gordon Bland born in the Warwick district in the third quarter of 1898.  Census indexes found a Gordon Lyon Bland and his young family living in Leamington, but no child called Malcolm or Gordon.

The British Newspaper Archive’s free search supplies a tantalising line or two of content for each article, enough to show that Gordon Lyon Bland had been a wealthy brewer, part-owner of Lucas & Co. in Leamington. Mayor twice while in his thirties, he died in 1913 aged only 45. The description of the pageant itself names some of the participants, including, in the Kenilworth episode, Mrs Bland, the boy’s mother, a comforting presence for her son. Gordon Lyon Bland’s father James made a fortune in Liverpool importing timber, and built a mansion called Quarry Bank, later converted into a school attended by John Lennon, hence the name of his first group, The Quarrymen. So many distractions…

The chapel at Charterhouse School

The chapel at Charterhouse School

The 1911 census showed Malcolm Gordon Bland, from Warwickshire, living in Sussex. Was this the same boy, and what was he doing there? Then on a Google search I found a reference to the great public school Charterhouse, and a list of all the boys from the school who were killed in WW1. There was Malcolm Gordon Bland. It was a chilling find, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted “the boy Shakespeare” to be Malcolm Gordon Bland.

To establish the facts I took out a 14-day free trial of Ancestry, and the information flowed. His christening record confirmed the names of his parents. The images of the census returns for 1901 showed the indexes were wrongly transcribed and he was there after all, age 2. The 1911 census showed him at Wellington House in Sussex, a prep school that specialised in training boys to shoot, with one of his brothers and a cousin. And an image of his army record showed that he had been a 2nd Lieutenant in the first battalion of The King’s Royal Rifle Corps, killed on active service on 23 March 1918. The document includes the name and address of his widowed mother who would receive the awful news of his death.

The War Memorial at Arras

The War Memorial at Arras

He’s remembered at the Chapel at Charterhouse, in Surrey, one of nearly 700 pupils who died in the Great War, and his name is inscribed on the great Arras Memorial in France.

Malcolm Bland had gone to France in August 1917, just after his 19th birthday. Just a few months later he was killed, probably at the Battle of St Quentin. There are very few records of his life, because it had barely started. He must have been a precocious child, performing in front of thousands at the Pageant at just eight. He had received the best education money could buy, and had he lived would probably have followed his father to university in Cambridge before pursuing a career in one of the professions. But being born into a wealthy, privileged family was no protection in wartime.

Malcolm Gordon Bland, The boy Shakespeare

Malcolm Gordon Bland, The boy Shakespeare

His name does not seem to be on any local war memorial, and in the official records of the famous Warwick Pageant he remains anonymous. A few days ago I was sent information about the Royal British Legion’s Every Man Remembered project which aims to ensure that “every single man and woman who fell in the First World War [should be] … remembered by someone alive today.” Participants can return a poppy, with a tribute, which will be planted in Mons, Belgium, on 23 August commemorating 100 years since the first British man of the First World War was killed.

I’m going to be writing my tribute to Malcolm Gordon Bland, who may not have been “a boy from Stratford” but whose short life should still be remembered.

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Stirling Castle’s links to Shakespeare

Stirling Castle

Stirling Castle

On my recent trip to Stirling for the British Shakespeare Association conference I made a point of visiting the city’s historic castle. Although I knew of its importance at a strategic spot overlooking the crossing of the River Forth, I was unaware of its history and in particular its Shakespeare connections.

I didn’t realise, for instance, that this castle was lived in by so many Scottish monarchs. Much of the castle has been gorgeously restored following years of neglect, and is now decorated as it might have been around the time of James V’s death in 1542. In 1538 he began to turn Stirling Castle into a glorious Renaissance palace like those he had seen in Europe. He was the father of Mary Queen of Scots, the mother of the Scottish king best known to Shakespeareans, King James VI, who became James 1 of England in 1603. Shakespeare and his company became the King’s Men, and many of his plays are known to have been performed before him.

The castle had always contained a chapel, but, as it became clear that Elizabeth would bear no children, James VI was her most obvious successor. When his son was born, the old Chapel Royal was demolished and rebuilt in only six months in order to provide a chapel fit for the baptism. This child was christened Henry (a reference to the English kings of that name). The chapel was lavishly decorated with pictures, tapestries, sculptures and a golden ceiling, with the font occupying the centre of the space. The baby was carried into the chapel through the new triumphal arch by the English Ambassador, and the event was so significant that James had an account of the baptism published in both London and Edinburgh. From his birth, then, Henry was seen as the heir to the throne of England, so his death at the age of 18 must have been truly devastating.

Unfortunately little remained to show what the gorgeous ceiling might have been light, but the decorative frieze in the chapel has been painstakingly restored to its appearance when it was first added for the expected coronation visit of Charles 1. The frieze was painted in 1628-9, but Charles’s visit did not occur until 1633.

DSC04758unicornThe internal decoration of the castle has been restored to something like its appearance during the reign of James V. As well as being sumptuously painted, other decorative features are being installed or re-created. An inventory of 1539 records that the castle contained two sets of tapestries telling the story of the mythical Unicorn. In an extraordinary project, a set of sixteenth-century Unicorn tapestries now in New York are being copied using traditional techniques. It’s a great privilege to see the painstaking and skilful work of the weavers in a special workshop. Each tapestry takes between two and four years to complete: several are already in place and the final one will be finished by the end of this year. Their detail and brilliant colours remind you of why these tapestries were so hugely expensive to produce.

Stirling heads: Hercules and the Nemean lion

Stirling heads: Hercules and the Nemean lion

The other special internal features are the Stirling heads, carved wooden bosses, brightly painted, that cover the ceiling of the King’s Inner Hall. The ones in situ are all modern copies, but in a special exhibition many of the originals are beautifully displayed. There’s a real variety of subjects from portraits of known members of the court, through representations of the Nine Worthies (a truncated, comic version of the pageant of the Nine Worthies is staged in Love’s Labour’s Lost, showing what a popular subject this was), and several showing Hercules, the ultimate moral man, with whom James V associated himself.

Stirling heads: the jester

Stirling heads: the jester

One of the heads represents the court jester, a popular entertainer. James IV had a jester, as did James V, John Bute, known as ‘gentil John ye Inglise fule’. Archibald Armstrong became James VI’s jester who remained in royal service into the reign of Charles 1.  Touchstone in As You Like It and, particularly, the fool in King Lear are outspoken court fools who have an influence in Shakespeare’s plays.

It’s not spectacular like the state rooms or the Great Hall, but the Prince’s Tower is an important part of the Castle. It was built around 1500 and was traditionally the nursery of Scotland’s monarchs. From the time of James 1 of Scotland onwards, royal children were raised in the safety of Stirling Castle and seven successive monarchs began their reigns as children.

The Prince's Tower, Stirling Castle

The Prince’s Tower, Stirling Castle

The Prince’s Tower is where James VI was taught by the Protestant scholar George Buchanan, and Henry, his son, also received his education here before his father was declared king of England. James left the castle, and Scotland, in 1603, returning only once, in 1617. It’s said that he found he could rule Scotland from London, so found no need to go back to his native country.

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Remembering Sir Laurence Olivier

The statue of Laurence Olivier outside the National Theatre, London

The statue of Laurence Olivier outside the National Theatre, London

Friday 11 July 2014 is the 25th anniversary of Laurence Olivier’s death in 1989. By chance I was in the RST that evening and before the performance artistic director Terry Hands delivered an onstage tribute to Olivier. At the end of his speech, Hands suggested that rather than stand for the usual minute’s silence, the entire audience should give Sir Laurence a standing ovation. It was an appropriate response to the extraordinary achievements of Olivier as an actor and director.

At the Victoria and Albert Museum on 11 July, at 18.30, there will be a talk by biographer Philip Ziegler, who will speak about some of the highlights of Olivier’s career while actors Maureen Lipman and Ronald Pickup, will recall their experiences of working with him.

Laurence Olivier as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, 1922

Laurence Olivier as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, 1922

It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole quarter of a century. Other actors of his generation have dropped out of popular consciousness, but Olivier’s name is still famous. His first performance in Stratford was as a 14-year old schoolboy in 1922 when he appeared at Kate in The Taming of the Shrew in a production featuring the boys of All Saints School in London. It received much attention and the praise of Ellen Terry and Sybil Thorndike, who described him as “the best Shrew I ever saw – a bad-tempered little bitch”.

His professional acting career began early, with a couple of seasons at that great cradle of talent, the Birmingham Rep. London soon beckoned, and although the energy and charisma of his performances were praised he was often unfavourably compared with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, both great stage actors. His career took him to Hollywood as well as London and he became the most famous and glamorous of English actors.

After the war he continued to cement his reputation, but was aware that theatre needed to move in new directions. In 1956 Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger shook the theatre world, but even before that Olivier had been involved in a minor revolution in the unlikely setting of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. In 1955 he joined forces to perform Titus Andronicus, directed by the young and revolutionary  Peter Brook. It was the only play in the accepted Shakespeare canon that had not been produced in Stratford, and when it had been performed at the Old Vic in London the horrors had provoked laughter. Brook sought to ensure this would not happen. Unsettling sounds were played, and in this bloodiest of plays there was no stage blood. Olivier’s own performance, though, was mesmerising. In his review Kenneth Tynan described his performance:

“Titus enters, not as a beaming hero, but as a battered veteran, stubborn and shambling…A hundred campaigns have tanned his heart to leather, and from the cracking of that heart there issues a terrible music; not untinged by madness. One hears great cries, which, like all this actor’s best effects, seem to have been dredged up from an ocean-bed of fatigue. One recognised, though one had never heard it before, the noise made in its last extremity by the cornered human soul”.

The programme for The Entertainer

The programme for The Entertainer

Olivier realised he could be left behind by the fundamental changes that were sweeping London theatre. Following this success this most heroic of actors chose to play Archie Rice, a failing music hall performer, in John Osborne’s play The Entertainer.

Two years later though he seemed to take a step back by appearing in Stratford in Coriolanus, in a season that deliberately celebrated the past with a host of famous older actors: himself, Edith Evans, Harry Andrews, Paul Robeson, Charles Laughton. But Peter Hall’s appointment as the new artistic director of the Memorial Theatre had been announced at the end of 1958, so the 1959 season was inevitably viewed as the swan song of the Tony Quayle and Glen Byam Shaw years. Hall had already gained a reputation for working with daring writers like Samuel Beckett, and was producing fresh and successful Shakespeares. He directed the Coriolanus, described by Sally Beauman: “His Coriolanus is remembered by all who saw it for Olivier’s electric, arrogant performance in the title-role, with its extraordinarily daring death-fall at the end.”

In 1962 Olivier became the first Director of the National Theatre, and when the current theatre was build in the 1970s the largest auditorium in the building carried his name.  The Society of London Theatre gave him their Special Award in 1979, and in 1984 he agreed to their awards being renamed the Olivier Awards.  He had been knighted in 1947 and received a Life Peerage in 1970, the first actor to do so. On his death in 1989 he was interred in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, a rare honour for an actor. There’s a full biography here.

Laurence Olivier as Richard III

Laurence Olivier as Richard III

Olivier made several notable films of Shakespeare, the most famous being his 1944 Henry V. He made film history by being the first performer to win the Academy Award for best actor for a film he also directed, Hamlet. But if you want to see one film to remind you of the sheer brilliance of his acting take a look at his Richard III, released in 1955. Daniel Rosenthal describes how “stressing the darkness in Richard’s soul, Olivier is repeatedly shown as a humped shadow, limping across the floor”, and “Even when outlining his machinations to camera in conspiratorial soliloquy, Olivier can retreat into the background knowing that his extraordinary voice will still command the screen”. His delivery of the opening speech was famously parodied by Peter Sellers to the words of the Beatles’ song A Hard Day’s Night. Olivier was nominated for Best Actor Award by the Academy for it and although it now seems wildly over-acted, there’s still much to admire in his flamboyant performance.

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Outdoor Shakespeare

CL Rep Company performing their version of Hamlet in the Dell

CL Rep Company performing their version of Hamlet in the Dell

This weekend just gone has been a great one for outside events: Wimbledon, the Tour de France in Yorkshire, and in Stratford the now-annual River Festival. Amazingly, the sun shone on them all. The Guardian recently published an article about the increasing number of outdoor theatre performances as a legacy of Danny Boyle’s spectacular Olympics opening ceremony, looking at issues about cultural value and funding.

Outdoor Shakespeare performances have also been multiplying. Here in Stratford The Dell, part of Avonbank Gardens that overlook the river, near Holy Trinity Church, has become a popular destination for outdoor daytime performances of Shakespeare. Visiting companies from all over the country perform in this informal of settings. This year there will be performances by the Royal Navy Theatre Association and companies from Gloucestershire, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Yorkshire will be included.

With fingers crossed that the weather will stay good, here are links to some of the outdoor Shakespeares in the UK that you might like to see this summer:

The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival has been going for 27 years, performing over 8 weeks each year to audiences totalling 25,000. It’s a real plus that performances take place in the gardens of Cambridge Colleges.

Permenently Bard's poster for A Midsummer Night's Dream

Permenently Bard’s poster for A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Permanently Bard, in association with Fuller’s Inns, is performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a series of pub gardens in the London area and south of England over the summer. You can order your own Elizabethan picnic basket and enjoy not only being outdoors, but having “a pint of Ale or a glass of wine on a sultry summer’s night”. They promise “an in-your-face, on-your-lap adaptation”.

For many people Regents Park Open Air Theatre IS outdoor Shakespeare, having been doing it for over 80 years, but this year is only offering Twelfth Night among its four-play repertoire, re-imagined for a young audience.

The Festival Players are performing The Comedy of Errors on a GB tour including Scotland, Wales, and even the Isles of Scilly over the summer months.

Oxford Shakespeare Company is putting on an outdoor production of As You Like It in the beautiful surroundings of Wadham College.

Other venues are playing host to touring companies:

The Minack Theatre, Porthcurno, Cornwall

The Minack Theatre, Porthcurno, Cornwall

The Minack Theatre in Porthcurno, Cornwall has a unique setting on a cliff overlooking the sea, and this year plays host to three Shakespeares, The Tempest, Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s DreamThis blog explains the venue’s attractions.

Also in the south-west, the Bristol Shakespeare Festival shows off lots of visiting companies in a number of different venues.

The Guardian article points out that a lot of street theatre is now of a high quality, and accessible to all. The Arts Council talks about ” great art for everyone… and everyone is pretty well covered by outdoor and street theatre. It is unique in dissolving the barriers between audiences and performers, daily life and fiction, and at its very best reclaims public space for us, encourages us to break the rules and break out of daily routines, and makes us look at the familiar world around us through different eyes.”

In another article Lyn Gardner writes about free theatre, challenging the idea that “free must be less worthwhile than a show that sells its tickets”. She cites a show Kadogo, Child Soldier that was performed in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Part in London and many of the events at the Edinbugh Festival as evidence that “the lack of an admission price doesn’t correlate to a lack of ambition or risk”. Going to the theatre is always a bit of a gamble, no matter how much you’ve paid for the tickets. And the price of theatre tickets is certainly an issue. As she says:
I suspect that lack of critical coverage is one reason why free is treated with suspicion. Free seldom gets reviewed. But with a recent ticketing survey in the Stage finding that tickets to top shows in the West End have trebled over the past decade, and that premium seats are now nudging the £100 mark, there is an awful lot to like about free theatre. So do share your experiences of free shows and whether you felt the lack of an admission price compromised quality, or whether – like me – you think free is a fine way to go.

Free may be a fine way to go, but in terms of outdoor Shakespeare, the only one of the venues listed above that is free is the RSC’s Dell, and that, of course, is land owned by a company that receives a large Arts Council grant.  Lyn Gardner doesn’t offer an explanation of how the companies offering free entrance can afford to run their buildings or pay their performers, administrative staff and technicians. The Arts Council grants just announced certainly didn’t give much encouragement to theatre companies, with Propeller, for one, losing all its state funding.

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Shakespeare, performance, emotion and memory

University of StirlingThis week I have been attending the British Shakespeare Association’s conference at the University of Stirling. What follows is the text of my paper:

The idea for my project Listening to the Audience began when, at an international Shakespeare conference in 2012, I noticed how many of the people presenting papers referred to their personal memories of theatre productions (mostly by the RSC) as inspiration for their ideas. After the conference most of those memories would be lost, leaving only the “official” records, the reviews produced by professional writers, for people to consult in the future.

In his foreword to the book Shakespeare, Memory and Performance, Stanley Wells explains how performances we never saw, like those of Sarah Siddons, “reverberate in our imaginations” because of what people have written. But “these performances have passed through the transfiguring power of the imaginations…of those who witnessed them”. The writer, or the academic, is using his experience to create a subjective, selective work of art just as a painter does.

Wells is talking largely about critics from past centuries, but his point applies to modern writers who are just as subjective, and just as likely to be “interested in coining a flashy phrase rather than recording objective truth”. In fact this subjectivity can be an advantage. He writes: ” We should gain no impression of the impact of the performances…if they did not…tell us…something of the emotional and intellectual impact that they had upon their creators and which is the fundamental source of the value we place upon theatre”.

These published opinions have authority because theirs are the only voices heard. But I wanted to record the opinions of people who were not professional reviewers, but were just members of the audience. I had worked for decades with the RSC’s archives and met hundreds of people who had vivid memories. Were they not valid too?

Initially I thought I would be making it possible to fill in gaps in the record: some productions did not receive many reviews, and video only became routine in the 1980s. I expected to ask about specific moments in early productions. I very quickly found that I wanted to record some practitioners: many retired theatre professionals live locally and they are all getting older. And I looked around for other projects with similar aims.

The main one was the British Library’s Theatre Archive project, which records people talking about the period 1945-1968 when censorship was removed.

I already knew about the Stratford Society’s Oral History recordings that had interviewed a range of people about their lives and work in Stratford.

I discovered Helen Freshwater’s 2009 book Theatre and Audience, which looks at theatre’s ability to influence, illustrated by examples of performances with active audience involvement.

During 2012 the BBC Listening Project began to be broadcast on Radio 4, conversations of ordinary people talking about something important to them.

Locally in Stratford this has spawned the new Stratford Listening Project, a community project aimed at bringing people together to discuss the past, encouraging creativity through artwork, soundscapes and song.

This project linked up with the existing Warwickshire Reminiscence Action Project that stresses the social and health benefits of reminiscence, removing social isolation, bringing history alive, and improving self-esteem and confidence. It’s a project that works with the NHS, often including people with dementia.

The RSC itself has recorded VoxPop interviews immediately after performances under the title What the Audience Thinks.

And just recently I’ve found out about an organisation of theatre professionals and academics, the British Theatre Consortium who have just completed an AHRC project under its Cultural Value programme. “Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution”, looking at audience engagement, and interviewing audiences up to a year after the performance, which will be reporting soon.

The projects I’ve listed approach memories in very different ways, from being therapy for the very old to providing material for school history lessons. Some are seen as being of value for the listener as much as the interviewee, some are purely archival.

In the introduction to his edited book Shakespeare, Memory and Performance, Peter Holland notes that memory has become a fashionable academic topic, moving across boundaries from the humanities and social sciences to the scientific study of the brain and medicine where health can be improved through a combination of physical, mental and social wellbeing.

The neuroscientist James McGough, in his recent book Memory and Emotion, “explores how memories are made and preserved; why some experiences fade and disappear with time; how stress hormones affect the consolidation of memory…and what studies of extraordinary memories and disorders tell us about the workings of the brain”.

Erin Sullivan has recently noted that “No fewer than four major international centres of the study of the history of emotions have emerged in about as many years” in London, Germany and Australia. She calls this an “emotional onslaught”.

The Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions defines its purpose “to provide a focus for interactions between social and cultural historians of the emotions on the one hand, and historians of science and medicine on the other. It also seeks to contribute both to policy debates and to popular understandings of all aspects of the history of emotions”.

The Australian Centre states “Emotions power performance”, and examines how “emotions were performed and expressed through art, music and theatre…and connects them with a modern audience”.

I’ve become very interested in the link between performance, emotion and memory. Certainly the idea that we remember best events that are the most emotional is not new. Francis Bacon, in The New Organon, published in 1620, wrote “memory is assisted by anything that makes an impression on a powerful passion, inspiring fear, for example, or wonder, shame or joy.”

Audiences respond emotionally to theatre, and Shakespeare’s plays provoke the full range of emotions listed by Bacon. Hamlet hopes the play performed before Claudius will provoke him to proclaim his malefaction, and Thomas Heywood, in An Apology for Actors, 1612, tells as fact the stories of people who did just that.

In my recordings, I can’t say I’ve found anyone who responded to performance quite that strongly, but here are three clips of memories of Shakespeare in performance at the theatre in Stratford.

This woman was 17 or 18 when she saw David Warner’s Hamlet in 1965.

What I like about her recording is that she remembered almost nothing except David Warner, and couldn’t even describe his performance in any detail. What she did remember was her response – knitting herself a red scarf and wearing it to the show. And she admits that the performance might not have been very good – but that wasn’t important.

This woman recalls Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V in 1984, and Michael Sheen’s some 10 years later. She was 34 at the time.

Notice that she admits her memories might be inaccurate, might be hindsight. And when she talks about Kenneth Branagh and Michael Sheen, she paraphrases their thoughts as Henry, interpreting their actions in her own mind.

This man recalls Peggy Ashcroft playing Cleopatra in 1953, 61 years ago, yet as you will hear, it’s fresh in his mind. He was 18.

He can still “see” Peggy Ashcroft erotically rolling on a tiger skin rug – what an impression it made on his 18-year old mind. But he knows he’s probably exaggerating. He also can clearly “hear” her voice, mimicking “Can Fulvia die?”.

“Emotion powers performance”. I started wanting to supplement the official record, to lessen the authority of the reviewer in favour of the democratic views of the audience. I am still interested in specific detail, but after reading about memory, and interviewing people, I’ve found that it’s the emotion they remember – that may or may not link to a particular event. Details may be misremembered, but that’s not important. For an emotionally powerful performance you need to generate intensity, to allow the audience to focus, great plays, and great performances.

These three recordings are about great performances, though to be fair two of the three did also recall other people in the production. But I’ve yet to hear much about the sets, though costumes are often remembered. The other thing that is stressed is the speaking of the verse.

Stanley Wells suggested that we place value on theatre because of its emotional and intellectual impact. What is different about theatre that makes this more likely than watching films or TV? Is it powerful because it’s live, because it’s shared?

And modern research into health indicates that the value of emotional experiences may have much more long-term impact and value. Theatre offers audiences a safe way of experiencing emotion, so for theatre to have real value, maybe it needs to provide big memorable experiences. You can hear in the voices of those interviewees how they enjoy the process of revisiting their memories. Does the act of remembering a performance, years later, benefit our physical and emotional well-being, and if so, does this mean that theatre really is good for us?

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Symbols of honour: heraldry at the Folger Shakespeare Library

The Edward IV heraldic scroll

The Edward IV heraldic scroll

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, has just opened a new exhibition on the subject of heraldry, entitled Symbols of Honour: Heraldry and Family History in Shakespeare’s England.

We think of coats of arms as belonging only to the most noble and royal families, and to organisations, but in Shakespeare’s time, according to Nigel Ramsay, co-curator of the exhibition, it was a “flourishing, live world”, and coats of arms could be awarded to “up and coming merchants and gentry, people lower down the social scale”, just like Shakespeare.

The Folger Shakespeare Library has in its collection much that does not directly link to Shakespeare, including more than a hundred heraldic manuscripts. These have not often been examined, but among them is ” the oldest copy in the world of the first English book of genealogies, Pedigrees of some Noble Families, from no later than 1525″.

As well as drawing on its own holdings, the Library has borrowed items from other sources. The pedigree scroll of Edward IV, from the Free Library of Philadelphia,is, according to Ramsay, “one of the most splendid pedigree rolls there is.” It dates back to the 1460s, and has “a late medieval form of beauty: crude, vigorous, and bright,” he says. “And it belonged to a king. It’s very rare to be able to say that.”

The draft grant of arms to Shakespeare

The draft grant of arms to Shakespeare

From London, the College of Arms has lent its three drafts of the Shakespeare Coat of Arms. Two of these were on display in the Searching for Shakespeare exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery in 2006. Both were produced by the Garter King-of-Arms, Sir William Dethick in 1595, and its thought the fee paid almost certainly by William, though in the name of his father John, was between £10 and £20, a substantial amount of money. The grant was confirmed in 1596.  The third document dates from three years later when a further application was made to quarter the Arden arms with the Shakespeare arms, though this seems never to have been used.

The other document relating directly to Shakespeare (which was also in Searching for Shakespeare) is one that is in the Folger’s collection, dating back to 1602. It is the York Herald (Ralph Brooke)’s complaint against William Dethick. Brooke was critical of Dethick’s laxity in granting coats of arms to people who were not of sufficiently high social standing. This is the famous document in which “Shakespear ye Player” is dismissively written under a sketch of the coat of arms. By this time John Shakespeare was dead and William was the head of the family. Brooke did not single the Shakespeares out: he complained about twenty-three cases including “Dunyan Clarke a plasterer” and “Smith an innkeeper in Huntingdon”. In response Dethick argued that the grant to Shakespeare was justified  because John had been a man “of good substance and habilitie”, as well as being a Justice of the Peace and his wife had come from the distinguished Arden family.

The Shakespeare coat of arms

The Shakespeare coat of arms

There’s a real human side to the items in the exhibition. Heather Wolfe, the other co-curator, has enjoyed examining these “working papers that show the heralds as human beings. I’m excited about any manuscript that gives you a sense of the personalities”. The Heralds appear to have been a strong-minded group, among whom disagreements were not uncommon. For an insight into William Dethick see the blog post by Nigel Ramsay on The Collation, entitled William Dethick and the Shakespeare Grants of Arms.

As well as the exhibition itself there is a magnificent section on the subject on the Folger’s website, including an image gallery and insights from the curators (from which I have lifted some of the quotations in this post). I do recommend taking a look at the site if you’re at all interested in finding out more. The exhibition is on from July 1 to October 26, and is free. It’s supported by events including, on 17 July, a free talk by Kathryn Will entitled Shakespeare’s Coat of Arms and the Early Modern Heraldry Wars.

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