In the City of London

Posted on October 30, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Sharon Little, Freeman of the City of London, with her certificate and officials

Sharon Little, Freeman of the City of London, with her certificate and officials

This week I visited London’s Guildhall where my niece was granted the Freedom of the City of London. I hadn’t realised that about 1800 Freemen are admitted each year by the Clerk to the Chamberlain of the City of London, and “whilst the Honorary Freedom is indeed a recognition of lifetime achievement or high international standing, the Freedom of the City of London is open to a much wider section of society, and include many who have achieved success, recognition or celebrity in their chosen field….gained through membership of a livery company or by direct application suitably supported by a suitably qualified proposer and seconder.”

It was very special to attend this historic ceremony at which those receiving the Freedom read the oath and sign the register before being given their certificate. This ritual dates back to 1237, and nowadays it takes place in a room containing amazing memorabilia including Horatio Nelson’s glorious Freedom and the box that contained Florence Nightingale’s certificate.

DSCN9650guildhall londonThe Guildhall was built between 1411 and 1440 during the reign of Henry IV, and although now dwarfed by skyscrapers the Great Hall is still a magnificent building where events of national significance are held. The roof of the building has been rebuilt at least twice, after the Great Fire of 1666 and again after the Blitz. It’s the only non-ecclesiastical stone building to have survived, and below ground the medieval crypt still exists.

The medieval trade guilds wielded great economic and social power and their members took the most important positions in the community: the burghers, aldermen and the Lord Mayor came from their ranks. The guilds became official Livery Companies, named after the uniforms they wore for ceremonies. The arms of the twelve great Livery Companies of the City of London: the Mercers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant Tailors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners and Clothworkers, are still represented in the Great Hall today and there are now over 100 Livery Companies.

Many historic trials have taken place in the Great Hall, including that of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1553, of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a friend of the poet Thomas Wyatt in 1547, and of Henry Garnet, implicated in the Gunpowder Plot in 1606. Garnet was waiting at Coughton Court, just a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, when the news of the plot’s failure was brought from London.

DSCN9607shakespeare guildhallThere are of course Shakespearean associations. A bust of Shakespeare stand outside the Guildhall Art Gallery, honouring his achievement (though the City frowned on the public theatres where Shakespeare made his name). In the plays themselves there are a number of references: during the Cade rebellion of Henry VI Part 2 Cade declared himself Lord Mayor of London and held a sham trial at the Guildhall at which The Lord High Treasurer was condemned and later executed.  In Henry VIII, the Lord Mayor of London attends the coronation of Anne Boleyn. After Henry V’s successful battles in France, the Chorus tells us
How London doth pour out her citizens.
The Mayor and all his brethren in best sort,
Like to the senators of th’antique Rome
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in.

Probably the most memorable mention of the Lord Mayor of London is in Richard III, where Richard tries to get the City’s support for his claim to the throne. Richard tells Buckingham to meet the Mayor and citizens at the Guildhall. Buckingham reports back: instead of cheering in favour of Richard the citizens remained silent. The Mayor then spoke, and “when he had done, some followers of mine own/ At lower end of the hall, hurl’d up their caps”. The Mayor, a rather ineffectual figure, is eventually persuaded to endorse Richard’s claim.

A detail of the current Lord Mayor's coach

A detail of the current Lord Mayor’s coach

In the medieval period the Lord Mayor of London rivalled the power of the King, and it was important that each new Mayor swore allegiance to the crown. The Lord Mayor’s Show, a procession from the City to Westminster and back has its origins in this ceremony.  Shakespeare must have seen this grand piece of pageantry: William Smith, a haberdasher, described the procession in 1575:

The day of St Simon and St Jude the Mayor enters into his state and office. The next day he goes by water to Westminster in most triumphant-like manner. Next before him goeth the barge of the livery of his own company, decked with their proper arms; and then the Bachelors’ barge and so all the companies in order every one having their own proper barge with the arms of their company. And so passing along the Thames he landeth at Westminster, where he taketh his oath in the Exchequer before the judge there: which done he returneth by water as aforesaid and landeth at St Paul’s Wharf where he and the rest of the Aldermen take their horses and in great pomp pass through Cheapside.

This year, 2015, is the 800th procession taking place on 14 November. It will be a magnificent piece of pageantry, the three-mile procession taking an hour to pass, and the river Thames still playing its part: at 9am the Lord Mayor will arrive in the city in the Queen’s state barge.

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Anthony Burgess’s Shakespeare

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Anthony Burgess's Shakespeare, published by the Folio Society

Anthony Burgess’s Shakespeare, published by the Folio Society

It’s been a good many years since I looked at Anthony Burgess’s 1970 biography Shakespeare. While working in the library at the Shakespeare Centre I always favoured Samuel Schoenbaum’s Documentary Life, so safely based on verifiable facts. Burgess was a great writer, but like Shakespeare he sometimes wasn’t very respectful of his sources when they got in the way of a good story. Nowadays it’s much easier to lay your hands on those documents (virtually or in print), so it’s exactly the right moment for the Folio Society to bring out a new edition of Burgess’s “speculative biography“.

Unlike the more scholarly biographies, Burgess’s book is highly personal, and eloquently written. He claims “the right of every Shakespeare lover who has ever lived to paint his own portrait of the man”. Although based on the facts where they exist, Burgess also uses his own inventive imagination to fill in the gaps, charmingly disarming potential criticism with his honesty. “The reader will recognise the fiction writer at work and, I hope, will make due allowance”.

In his chapter on Marriage he comments on the lack of evidence before writing “I propose to indulge myself in an onomastic fancy that the hard-headed reader is welcome to ignore”. After a digression on the subject of the names of Shakespeare’s children he writes “The whole of this paragraph is very unsound”.

Frustrated by the lack of descriptions of Shakespeare on stage, Burgess writes his own. Chapter 15 imagines the first performance of Hamlet, with Shakespeare, naturally, appearing as the Ghost. As you would expect from Burgess, it’s masterfully-written. He sets the scene: “It is broad daylight and the autumn sun is warm, but words quickly paint the time of night and the intense northern cold…Then the ghost appears, Will Shakespeare, the creator of all these words but himself, as yet, speaking no words”. The chapter on Drama eloquently digresses into a consideration of the history of theatre and plays from the Greek and Roman period onwards.

Since at least the early 1970s Burgess has been best known as the author of the disturbingly violent novel A Clockwork Orange, published in 1962 and turned into a cult movie by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. Sandwiched between these two events Burgess spent much of his time thinking and writing about Shakespeare. He first wrote a novel, Nothing Like The Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love Life, published on 23 April 1964, bang on the quatercentenary. As a result he was commissioned to write a musical on the same subject, intended to become a Hollywood film. When the idea was dropped Burgess instead recycled the music into a ballet suite, Mr WS, that was broadcast on BBC Radio. Then he wrote his biography Shakespeare.

Anthony Burgess in 1989

Anthony Burgess in 1989

Later on he continued to write about him. Shakespeare appeared as a character in two short stories and in A Dead Man in Deptford, a novel about Christopher Marlowe, published in 1993, the year Burgess died of lung cancer.

There is much information about Burgess’s prolific career on the International Anthony Burgess Foundation site.   This page includes a link to an early recording of Burgess talking about Shakespeare.

He identified himself with Shakespeare. In an essay on the IABF website Victoria Brazier notes that “where many writers would seek inspiration for their work from Shakespeare’s plays, Burgess rather makes assumptions about Shakespeare’s life by examining his own”. She also notes that Burgess, whose real name was John Burgess Wilson, harboured a hope that he was related to an actor in Shakespeare’s company. “Jack Wilson was one of the company of players to which Shakespeare belonged, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. (Jack being what Oscar Wilde’s Gwendolen would call dismissively ‘a notorious domesticity for John’.) Through some mistake of printing or transcription, Jack Wilson’s real name is inserted into the First Folio’s version of Much Ado About Nothing rather than that of his character, Balthazar. A stage direction in the second act reads, ‘Enter Prince, Leonato and Jacke Wilson’.

The final words of the book illustrate how for Burgess, Shakespeare was everywhere: “We need not repine at the lack of a satisfactory Shakespeare portrait. To see his face we need only look in the mirror. He is ourselves, ordinary suffering humanity, fired by moderate ambitions, concerned with money, the victim of desire, all too mortal. To his back, like a hump, was strapped a miraculous but somehow irrelevant talent. It is a talent which, more than any other that the world has seen, reconciles us to being human beings, unsatisfactory hybrids, not good enough for gods and not good enough for animals. We are all Will.”

Like all books published by the Folio Society, the book is a pleasure to hold, and handsomely produced. It also features a new introduction by Professor Stanley Wells who notes that the book has stood the test of time and will continue to do so “because of its interaction between the imagination of a major novelist and the life and work of the greatest of poetic dramatists”. The book may not be a sober assessment of all the facts about Shakespeare’s life, but it’ll tell you more than most biographies about Shakespeare the human being.

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Agincourt at 600

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
A reconstruction of the Battle of Agincourt

A reconstruction of the Battle of Agincourt

Today, 25 October 2015 is the day history and Shakespeare-lovers have been waiting to celebrate: the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. Here again is the website that is coordinating today’s activities.   Here’s Dan Spencer’s account of what actually happened on the day.

On Thursday 29th October at 12 there will be a service of remembrance at Westminster Abbey, details here.

Getting back to Shakespeare’s version of events, Radio 4’s Today programme on 24 October broadcast an interview with Anne Curry, professor of Medieval History at the University of Southampton and co-chair of the Agincourt Committee, and Adrian Noble, theatre director and chief executive of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1990 to 2003. Noble reminisces about Kenneth Branagh’s first performance of the role in Stratford in 1984, and the piece features Branagh doing the “Once more, unto the breach” speech. Being pernickety, I should mention that this speech isn’t actually delivered at Agincourt, but at the siege of Harfleur.  The interview begins about 1 hr 20 minutes in.

Enjoy the day, however you choose to celebrate it!

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Shakespeare Jubilees

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Shakespeare's Birthday Celebrations 1907

Shakespeare’s Birthday Celebrations 1907

And now, a fanfare. Earlier this week I received my contributor’s copy of a new book entitled Shakespeare Jubilees: 1769-2014, edited by Christa Jansohn and Dieter Mehl, and published in Germany. More details of the publication, including the contents list, are here.

This is the description “The essay collection ranges from the elaborate celebrations in Shakespeare’s hometown to more modest festivities elsewhere; from ambitious, theatrical, and politically loaded demonstrations to nationally coloured, culturally distinct and idiosyncratic commemorations. The variety of ways in which geographically distant countries have remembered Shakespeare has never before been the object of a comparative study.  We hope that the essays in this collection will throw new light on Shakespeare as a shared international heritage.”

My own contribution is a chapter co-written with Dr Susan Brock on the subject of the history of celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday in Stratford-upon-Avon, one of four concentrating on the ways in which Shakespeare has been celebrated in Britain. The book had its starting point in the 450th anniversary celebrations of Shakespeare’s birth in 2014, in particular at the international conference in Paris in April that year.  When the book moves outside the British Isles and looks at Shakespeare on the world stage it becomes much more diverse and for me anyway, more interesting. There are several chapters about European celebrations, mostly in France and Germany, but also further east in Hungary and Bulgaria. Three chapters cover North American celebrations, another looks the less well-known commemorations in Latin America, one at New Zealand, and one each at Japan and China.

Shakespeare's statue in Weimar

Shakespeare’s statue in Weimar

As yet I’ve had a chance for only a brief glance at this collection of essays. In Christa Jansohn’s own chapter Celebrating and Commemorating Shakespeare in Germany, she steps back for a moment to consider why humans need to celebrate, quoting Odo Marquand who wrote that man “is that eccentric being that cannot live without celebration”.  Marquand considered the celebration of anniversaries “offer an ideal backdrop for … sketching the model of the self one wants to present to the world”.  They serve to commemorate “the past”, and give “significance to the present” and the future.

The further question then, especially for non-English speaking countries, is “Why celebrate Shakespeare?” Germany in particular has many literary heroes of her own, but Jansohn lists a whole series of Shakespeare-themed events with a political or social aim. In the divided Germany, the German Shakespeare Society was also split into the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft in Weimar and Deutsche-Shakespeare Gesellschaft West based in Bochum. In 1964 the two societies, celebrating the Quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth, felt themselves to be in competition. The political edge seems to have been particularly strong in East Germany where, as well as putting on several Shakespeare productions and publishing a special Shakespeare stamp, the Town Council of Weimar renamed one of its streets “William-Shakespeare-Strasse”. Jansohn notes that since the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, enthusiasm has been waning. “Do Shakespeare and the German Shakespeare Society have a future in Germany and in Goethe’s Weimar in particular?” she asks. Interestingly, though, she notes that in 2013 the town council of Weimar unanimously decided to support the German Shakespeare Society to the tune of 20,000 Euros per year for 2014-2018.

Commemorative speech in Weimar, 2014

Commemorative speech in Weimar, 2014

Choosing to commit such a large amount of public money to support a society promoting a foreign writer seems extraordinary for a local council. The German Shakespeare Society still aims “to keep the memory of the poet alive”, seeing this as helping to make “a considerable contribution to the international prestige of our City of Culture”.

The motives for celebrating Shakespeare anniversaries have probably never been straightforward. Going back to 1769, Garrick’s main aim was self-promotion. But it’s good to hold Marquand’s aim of commemorating the past and giving significance to the present and the future in mind. I’m very much looking forward to reading about the festivities and motivations of other Shakespeare celebrations worldwide in Shakespeare Jubilees 1769-2014.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Shakespeare

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey

Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey

21 October is the anniversary of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s birth in 1772. Born in Devon, he spent much of his life in the West Country including the little village of Nether Stowey where the cottage he lived in can still be visited. While living there, he wrote some of his best-known poetry, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. He lived a fairly nomadic existence, travelling to Germany, and spending time in the Lake District where he undertook some early mountaineering and could be close to Wordsworth, with whom he wrote Lyrical Ballads. He spent his last years in Highgate in London, where he died in 1834.

The statue of the Ancient Mariner in Datchet

The statue of the Ancient Mariner in Watchet

 

For most of his life he suffered from ill-health and was addicted to opium, probably contributing to the fabulously imaginative quality of Kubla Khan. There’s a tribute to Coleridge and his poetry at the harbour in the Somerset town of Watchet, which could have inspired scenes in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The magnificent seven foot-high statue of the Mariner was created by Alan B Herriot and unveiled in 2003 and it catches the haunted expression and gaunt body of the Mariner, compelled to tell his awful story, the dead albatross hanging round his neck.

Coleridge is less well-known for his published prose works Biographia Literaria and Literary Remains, both aimed at a more serious audience than his poetry. These works made him admired as a critic, but his thoughts on Shakespeare, mostly delivered as lectures, were never gathered together during his lifetime. Coleridge was aware of the requirements of a number of different audiences for his varying literary output: he writes of the need to keep his audience at a lecture entertained. Fortunately many sources still exist: lecture notes, newspaper reports, notes taken by members of the audience, mentions in letters. Editing these fragments has been a challenging job ever since.

The lectures took place between about 1808 and 1819, and as well as Shakespeare he spoke on a variety of philosophical and literary subjects. Talking of Shakespeare, though, he focused on a handful of plays: Hamlet, The Tempest, Richard II, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Macbeth, and with the narrative poems. He admired King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, but hated Measure for Measure:
“This Play, which is Shakespeare’s throughout, is to me the most painful, say rather the only painful part of his genuine works. The comic and tragic parts… the one disgusting, the other horrible; and the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claim of Justice (for cruelty, with lust and damnable Baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of) but it is likewise degrading to the character of Woman.”

He took a surprisingly modern view of the need to put Shakespeare into historical context: “so as to see and be able to prove what of Shakespeare belonged to his Age and was common to all the first-rate men”, and often compared Shakespeare to other writers such as Spenser and Milton.

He’s extraordinarily observant about how Shakespeare works as a dramatic writer. “In his mode of drawing characters… from the whole course of the play, or out of the mouths of his enemies of friends.” He takes Polonius as an example “which actors have often misrepresented: Shakespeare never intended to represent him as a buffoon. It was natural that Hamlet, a young man of genius and fire, detesting formality,…should express .himself satirically; but Hamlet’s words should not be taken as Shakespeare’s conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character arose from long habits of business; but take his advice to Laertes, the reverence of his memory by Ophelia, and we shall find that he was a statesman”.  On The Characteristic  Excellencies of Shakespeare’s Plays, 1813.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

While Shakespeare’s plays had been plundered for the stage, being rewritten, cut, added to, endlessly adapted, Coleridge returned to a close study of Shakespeare’s works as poetry, the work of the imagination, that “reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete, the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects”.

Rather than finding fault with Shakespeare for his wildness or lack of attention to the classical unities, Coleridge suggested Shakespeare’s plays had their own “organic regularity” an idea expressed by Wordsworth who wrote that Shakespeare’s plays “constitute a unity of their own, and contribute all to one great end”.

For Coleridge “The Shakespearean drama appealed to the Imagination rather than the senses.. and …the poet…acquires the right and privilege of using time and space…obedient only to the laws which the imagination acts by”. The Tempest is “a species of drama…in which errors in chronology and geography, nor mortal sins in any species, are venial, or count for nothing”.

Although Coleridge was often profoundly serious, he had a nice line in self-mockery, including the reported sentence: “I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so”. Perhaps he hoped to be seen as a man of “genius and fire, despising formality”. In Wordsworth’s opinion, he was  “the most wonderful man he had ever known”, with an original, inquiring spirit and a unique voice.

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Stratford and “the sere, the yellow leaf”

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Autumn at Welcombe

Autumn at Welcombe

It’s that time of year when everything feels as if it’s shutting down. Days get shorter, nights colder, and once they’ve had their brief blaze of colour, leaves are gone from the bare branches.

The sense of things coming to an end is particularly strong this year with the passing of several Stratfordians I’ve known for years, including Patricia, one of Dr Levi Fox’s twin daughters, and more recently Pete Silver, the caretaker and security man at the Shakespeare Centre who remained devoted to Dr Fox and his family after retirement. Dr Fox, as Director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, was responsible for many initiatives designed to protect the town’s Shakespearian heritage.

It’s been challenged many times over the past 400 years. For the first two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death nobody took a lot of care of buildings associated with him. In my researches into the town’s Shakespeare Club, founded in 1824, I’ve found that the Club quickly realised that they could not celebrate his the man’s achievement unless they also took responsibility for the environment in which he’d lived. Members promoted the building of the town’s first purpose-built theatre in the town in 1827, but its first major restoration project, the repair of the chancel and Shakespeare’s tomb in the church followed in the 1830s. They then moved on to the Birthplace which had been allowed to deteriorate. The Club took a leading role in the Committee that ensured the building’s survival in 1847.

The Guild Hall undergoing conservation

The Guild Hall undergoing conservation

Looking at the town just now, tourists must be puzzled by the number of Shakespeare-related sites obscured by scaffolding and hoardings. Having completed work on its North porch, Holy Trinity Church is adding a vestry and toilet facilities on the south side. King Edward’s School is restoring the Guild Hall and the ancient schoolroom above. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is doing major work to redisplay the site of New Place, and the RSC is restoring the Swan Wing dating from 1880. It’s no coincidence that all these projects are going on now: all are intended to be completed during 2016, the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death.

Next year then we can look forward to seeing all these projects come to fruition and real improvements in the town centre. But this year there has been unease concerning the green spaces that surround the town. In early summer Rowley Fields on the edge of the Welcombe Hills hit the headlines when Stratford’s Town Trust revealed that they intended to sell the land for development. Although this particular area was not owned by Shakespeare, the hills are strongly associated with him and after a vigorous opposition campaign the Trust backed down. The land behind Anne Hathaway’s Cottage has been under discussion for years, and recently the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust announced its decision to sell Briar Furlong. This will allow a road to go through, and two housing estates will be built on adjoining land. This land was purchased by Dr Fox specifically to retain the Cottage’s rural setting and although I know there was logic behind the decision, to me it still feels wrong.

A riverside scene

A riverside scene

Elsewhere, an Avonside meadow just downstream from the church may be turned into a marina for several hundred boats. The path across the meadow and over Cross o’the Hill has existed since before Shakespeare’s time and several of the earliest views of the town were painted from it. And although it has no Shakespearian associations, the Greenway is a popular walking and cycle track taking people into the countryside that would be lost if it were turned back into a railway line, as is proposed. It’s harder to quantify the value of Stratford’s green spaces, though they give the town much of its character and the countryside of this area inspired Shakespeare’s love of nature.

But before while feeling life had “fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf”, as Friday afternoon was fading I was taking a walk through Avonbank gardens when I came across two young women. They had visited the church where they had found themselves in tears at Shakespeare’s monument. One was from New Zealand, the other from Brazil, and both had just spent a month at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. They had been part of an international group of young people working on Shakespeare’s plays, and towards the end of their time they had performed extracts: one had played Juliet, the other Lady Macbeth. They had had the time of their lives, and the culmination of the month was a pilgrimage to Stratford to see where the man who had brought them together had lived and died.

Shakespeare spirit isn’t only to be found in the buildings we so carefully preserve, but in “this dear dear land”. We need to remember to tread softly in this place that is still the stuff of dreams.

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Shakespeare lost in translation?

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Theatre

Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Theatre

A week or so ago the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the oldest and largest US Shakespeare festivals, announced they have commissioned “translations” of 39 Shakespeare plays into contemporary English in order to make them accessible to the public. I first spotted the argument on the US website SHAKSPER, the Global Elctronic Shakespeare Conference, where a number of comments have been posted, mostly deploring this move.

I wasn’t aware that this story had gone beyond the world of academia until Monday morning when Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today featured it with an interview with Andrew Dickson, author of Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe, and Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It begins 2hrs 26 minutes in.

It was an interesting, and rather surprising discussion, Andrew Dickson actually regretting that as he has not experienced Shakespeare in modern English. “I’ve never encountered Shakespeare as a contemporary”, by contrast with people from other countries for whom Shakespeare always speaks with a modern voice.

Doran took a different view, counting himself lucky to be able to read and understand Shakespeare’s language as it was written. Although Shakespeare is “robust enough” to stand up to being translated, Doran is, not surprisingly, unconvinced. “Translation gets the sense and there’s so much more going on” in Shakespeare’s dense language. With translation a choice has to be made between “meaning, pace and poetry” and modern versions are in “flat, banal, everyday English”.

Both men talked about performance: Doran suggested that it was worth taking the trouble to learn Shakespeare’s language, but that many of the difficulties could be erased if the plays were performed by skilled and experienced actors. Dickson suggested that every performance was in its way a translation because of the thousands of choices made by directors when interpreting Shakespeare’s works.

Royal Shakespeare Company production of HENRY V by William Shakespeare directed by Gregory Doran

Royal Shakespeare Company production of
HENRY V
by William Shakespeare
directed by Gregory Doran

I happened to go to Doran’s production of Henry V later on the same day, and couldn’t help thinking about what had been said. Doran’s productions always put stress on the language rather than the visuals, and this time he’s often chosen to leave his actors alone on stage with nothing but the words, as with Henry’s speech to the Governor of Harfleur. In order to persuade the Governor to submit and admit the besieging English army, Henry usually surrounds himself with his commanders who put on a show of force and back up his threats of violence.

Not this time: Henry, quite alone, has nothing but his words. The audience has to listen to his threats, that don’t sit comfortably with the idea of Henry as a noble leader, and decide what to make of them:
What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?

The Chorus, Oliver Ford-Davies, ambles on to address us like an elderly academic. His are some of Shakespeare’s finest speeches and as Doran suggests, in Ford-Davies’s hands it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to substitute modern language for this magnificent stuff:
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.
Into a thousand parts divide one man
And make imaginary puissance.
Think, when we  talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’th’ receiving earth.
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings.

Royal Shakespeare Company production of HENRY V by William Shakespeare directed by Gregory Doran

Royal Shakespeare Company production of
HENRY V
by William Shakespeare
directed by Gregory Doran

Going back to SHAKSPER, one of the contributors to the debate was none other than James Shapiro, who I can only think must have written his article en route between Stratford and Washington DC.

Shapiro’s diagnosis: “The problem is not the often knotty language; it’s that even the best directors and actors — British as well as American — too frequently offer up Shakespeare’s plays without themselves having a firm enough grasp of what his words mean.” He suggests that translations will be in some ways more difficult for actors to work with: “To understand Shakespeare’s characters, actors have long depended on the hints of meaning and shadings of emphasis that he embedded in his verse. They will search for them in vain in the translation: The music and rhythm of iambic pentameter are gone. Gone, too, are the shifts — which allow actors to register subtle changes in intimacy — between “you” and “thee.” Even classical allusions are scrapped. Shakespeare’s use of resonance and ambiguity, defining features of his language, is also lost in translation.”

Finally, what’s needed is more emphasis on the words: “Shakespeare borrowed almost all his plots and wrote for a theater that required only a handful of props, no scenery and no artificial lighting. The only thing Shakespearean about his plays is the language. I’ll never understand why, when you attend a Shakespeare production these days, you find listed in the program a fight director, a dramaturge, a choreographer and lighting, set and scenery designers — but rarely an expert steeped in Shakespeare’s language and culture.”

If you’d like to read the rest of Shapiro’s case it’s there on the SHAKSPER site,  and for the sake of balance, here’s another view.

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Remembering the Battle of Agincourt

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
The Battle of Agincourt

The Battle of Agincourt

The 600th anniversary of one of the most famous British military victories is being celebrated this month. The actual date is the 25th October 1415, the event the Battle of Agincourt when Henry V, with an outnumbered and outclassed army, defeated the mighty French troops with astonishingly small loss of British lives. The battle became legendary, chroniclers writing down and embroidering the facts and Henry V becoming renowned as the greatest and most heroic of monarchs.

Shakespeare’s play has ensured that the circumstances surrounding the battle are well-known, though still controversial. The anniversary of Agincourt is being marked all round the country, the Agincourt 600 website coordinating events that are happening over a period of several weeks. I’m writing this two weeks before the day itself because so much will be happening in advance.

Here are a few of the astonishing array of things being lined up all over the country (for more information see the Agincourt 600 website): Starting in Wales, there will be an exhibition relating to the Welsh input to the battle at Brecon Castle, and on the day itself a talk by Juliet Barker at Monmouth Museum, while at Caldicot Castle in Monmouthshire there is to be an Agincourt Banquet and a weekend of re-enactments including archery displays, knights in full armour, music and dancing.

In London there will be a lecture at the Society of Antiquaries on 27 October and an exhibition at the Royal Armouries. This is the blog post from the Royal Armouries on Shakespeare’s interpretation of the history.  The Wallace Collection is putting on a display entitled The Sinews of War: Arms and Armour from the Age of Agincourt, featuring weapons and armour from the early 15th century, as well as rare books that explore the way the battle has been remembered over the centuries.

Further north, there is to be an all-female production of the play in York.

Laurence Olivier as Henry V

Laurence Olivier as Henry V

In Stratford-upon-Avon the RSC’s current production of the play will be broadcast live to cinemas on 21 October.  Also in Stratford, the Orchestra of the Swan are giving a concert on 20 October featuring William Walton’s music for Laurence Olivier’s 1943 film. In Bidford-on-Avon, just a few miles from Stratford, they are making a weekend of it with a lecture on Friday 23rd by Professor John Buckley on the Agincourt campaign followed on the 25th itself by a concert by English Serenata, with the English Serenata singers and RSC actor Sam Alexander. This too will feature Walton’s music and readings from Henry V as well as extracts from Richard III and As You Like It.

Moving back south again, on 19 October Curator Roy Porter will lead a tour of Porchester Castle where Henry V prepared for the campaign in France, under the title Agincourt and the Southampton Plot. There will also be a talk at Canterbury Cathedral, an Agincourt evening at Highclere village hall and a gala ball at Titchfield.

The site of the battle of Agincourt today

The site of the battle of Agincourt today

It’s great to see so much activity from organisations of all sizes. Many of the events highlight the gap between the facts and the reality, and if you want to find out more sign up for FutureLearn’s two-week free Massive Open Online Course Agincourt-Myth and Reality, coming from the University of Southampton and beginning on 19 October.

Among so much celebrating it’s easy to forget that Shakespeare’s play is not simply a bit of gung-ho. Modern productions of the play have often stressed the barbarism of battle, and even come over as anti-war. Shakespeare wrote for Henry some of his most brilliant speeches. Here is part of the most famous one, where he addresses his troops before they go into the battle they were expected to lose:

First quarto of Henry V, 1600

First quarto of Henry V, 1600

This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

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Retelling the stories of the world’s favourite playwright: the Hogarth Shakespeare

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Sylvia Morris

gap of timeShakespeare’s plays have been adapted, rewritten, altered, reimagined for centuries, beginning just forty years or so after he died. These revisions keep Shakespeare fresh, giving the stories a modern flavour. Shakespeare himself borrowed stories from many other sources. As time has passed the plays have been turned into whatever kind of output was fashionable at the time: musicals, paintings, ballets, operas, movies and novels.

Now the Hogarth Press, the publishing company founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1917, is launching a series of Shakespeare-inspired novels. These are to be written by bestselling and acclaimed authors, beginning with Jeanette Winterson whose take on The Winter’s Tale under the title The Gap of Time has just been published in over twenty countries.

It’s an ambitious publishing project. The press release from the Hogarth Shakespeare explains: “The time is ripe for a dedicated series of stand-alone retellings that will form a covetable library as well as a celebration of Shakespeare for years to come. The Hogarth Shakespeare will be a unique series to delight existing Shakespeare lovers and bring the world’s favourite writer to a new readership, young and old….The novels will be published simultaneously across the English-speaking world in print, digital and audio formats.”

The website gives further details of what’s coming up: “A further three novels will be published in the series …in 2016: Howard Jacobson’s The Merchant of Venice in February, Anne Tyler’s The Taming of the Shrew in June and Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest in October. The first four in the series will be joined by Tracy Chevalier’s Othello, Gillian Flynn’s Hamlet, Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth and Edward St Aubyn’s King Lear.”

The Cheltenham Literary Festival features a couple of events relating to the series. Jeanette Winterson’s has already gone, but on Sunday 11 October 2015 at 10.30, in Reimagining Shakespeare, writers will discuss the creative processes behind retelling Shakespeare. Along with Tracy Chevalier, who is working on Othello for the project, there will be Iqbal Khan who has directed Othello for the RSC this year and Jane Smiley, Pulitzer Prize winner whose books include A Thousand Acres, based on King Lear.

This video has several of the authors talking about the project and why they selected their particular plays.

And this sound recording features Howard Jacobson and Jeanette Winterson discussing the project.

 

Turning to Jeanette Winterson’s book specifically, the award-winning author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit describes The Winter’s Tale as a “talismanic text” for her. The jacket description links the story to the mystical elements of the play:
‘I saw the strangest sight tonight.’
New Bohemia. America. A storm. A black man finds a white baby abandoned in the night. He gathers her up – light as a star – and decides to take her home.
London. England. After the financial crash. Leo Kaiser knows how to make money but he doesn’t know how to manage the jealousy he feels towards his best friend and his wife. Is his newborn baby even his?
New Bohemia. Seventeen years later. A boy and a girl are falling in love but there’s a lot they don’t know about who they are and where they come from”.
The Gap of Time vibrates with echoes of the original play but tells a contemporary story of betrayal, paranoia, redemption and hope…however far we have been separated, whatever is lost shall be found.

Here, too is a sound recording of an extract from the book:

Winterson weaves skilfully between the universal timelessness of Shakespeare’s play and the modern story, setting dreamy, poetic descriptions within it. Here’s a short piece about the abandoned baby, Perdita:
“That night, storm and rain and the moon like a mandala when the clouds parted, it was the moon that made him know. The baby had lain like the visible corner of a folded map. Traced inside her, faded now, were parents she would never know and a life that had vanished. Alternative routes she wouldn’t take. People she would never meet. The would-be-that-wouldn’t-be.
Because her mother or her father, or both, had left the map of her folded on the table and left the room.
It was a map of discovery. There were no more North Poles or Atlantic Oceans or Americas. The moon had been visited. And the bottom of the sea”.

Shakespeare’s play is never far away: one section is called “The spider in the cup”, and the man who adopts Perdita uses the money he finds with her to buy a bar called The Fleece. And at the end of the book Winterson moves seamlessly from the story into a few pages about her own feelings about Shakespeare’s play. “I wrote this cover version because the play has been a private text for me for more than thirty years. By that I mean part of the written wor(l)d I can’t live without; without, not in the sense of lack, but in the old sense of living outside of something.

It’s a play about a foundling. And I am. It’s a play about forgiveness and a world of possible futures – and how forgiveness and the future are tied together in both directions. Time is reversible”.
It’s a terrific start to a series that celebrates Shakespeare’s continuing influence and should introduce his plays to a new generation of readers across the world.

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Shakespeare and Black History Month 2015

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
John Blanke among Henry VIII's trumpeters

John Blanke among Henry VIII’s trumpeters

With October comes Black History Month, and as ever a number of Shakespeare-related events are taking place. While it was once thought that Shakespeare might have seen Africans only very occasionally, in recent years close study of documentary evidence has revealed that this was not the case. Miranda Kaufmann is giving a series of lectures on the history of Africans in Early Modern Britain: on 14 October she’s speaking at Eastbury Manor House in Barking, and will explore the lives of some of them including John Blanke, Henry VIII’s black trumpeter and Mary Phyllis the Moroccan basket-weaver’s daughter.  There is a link here to the story about John Blanke on the National Archives website.

On 21 October Dr Kaufmann will be talking part in a discussion at Manchester Metropolitan University with Professor Alan Rice and Marcia X on Black History Month. She’ll be offering a historical perspective to the issue of Africans in Tudor and Stuart Britain. Outside of the month itself she’ll be taking part in the Len Garrison Memorial Lecture at the Institute of Historical Research in London on 12 November. She will be helping to fill the gaps in Black British History with David Olusoga, producer and presenter of the BBC series Forgotten Slave Owners and historian and writer Marika Sherwood.

In this article from Tudor Society’s website, Conor Byrne notes that the study of black people in Tudor Britain has become a popular subject in its own right. “The Tudor period was significant for black settlement in England. Katherine of Aragon arrived at Plymouth in October 1501 with a multinational entourage that included Moors, Muslims and Jews. The Iberian Moor Catalina de Cardones was one member of Katherine’s entourage, and served her for twenty-six years as Lady of the Bedchamber. She eventually married ‘Hace Ballestas’, a crossbowman who was also of Moorish origin”.

One of the comments to his article suggests that “the prevalence of people of color in Western Europe was far greater than most people, including historians, are aware of.”. Historian Catherine Fletcher notes that in Italy, “we think Alessandro’s (de’ Medici) mother – a servant in the Medici household – was mixed-race, of African descent. People often assume early modern Europe was all-white but that’s a long way from the truth.”

Call Mr Robeson

Call Mr Robeson

As well as lectures, there are also a few performances to enjoy: Tayo Aluko’s play Call Mr Robeson continues to win over enthusiastic audiences. The play gives an account of Paul Robeson’s remarkable life as an actor, singer and political activist. Robeson performed as Othello as a young man to Peggy Ashcroft’s Desdemona and then, in 1959, in Stratford-upon-Avon. Performed by Nigerian-born Aluko with piano accompaniment by Phil Blandford, it features famous songs including Ol’ Man River. It’s been staged at New York’s Carnegie Hall, in the West End and was recently performed in seventeen venues in Australia and New Zealand. It’s currently on a UK tour before revisiting North America. You can catch it during October in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Leeds, Hounslow, Swindon, Bristol, Barnard Castle and London.

Another great black actor who played many of Shakespeare’s roles including King Lear as well as the more obvious Othello and Aaron was Ira Aldridge, and there is a full profile of him on the Black History Month site.

Aleksandrs Antonenko as Otello in Verdi's opera

Aleksandrs Antonenko as Otello in Verdi’s opera

A few weeks ago an intriguing, and rather surprising news story broke about the debate about whether or not opera singers should black-up in order to perform the role of Otello in Verdi’s opera. For the first time the singer will not black up for the production at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. This article quotes Naomi Andre, co-editor of the book Blackness in Opera. “I do not know of a black singer singing Verdi’s Otello in a major opera house ever.” She suggests that the music is “wickedly difficult” so the role is tricky to cast. By tradition the role has been played by a white singer (in this case Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko) who has used black make-up. But director Bartlett Sher said: “Our cultural history in America is profoundly marked by our struggles with race and the questions of race…And it seems to me, as an artist growing up in America, that there’d be no way on Earth I could possibly figure out how to do it with that kind of makeup and that it just seemed like an obvious choice.” So no black make-up on stage, then, but Antonenko did have his skin darkened for the publicity shots. The production, incidentally, is receiving an Encore screening at Warwick Arts Centre on 21 October.

Metropolitan Opera Manager Peter Gelb comments that the Met has a colourblind casting policy, but black women have had an easier time landing top opera roles than have black men. Naomi Andre suggests that even now “Seeing a black male singer onstage with a white female heroine — there would be anxiety a lot of people could feel in the days of segregation, even in post-segregation times but where racial tensions are still very much around.” It’s a story that highlights the continuing contradictions and social unease surrounding colour in the USA and Europe, even in the civilised setting of the opera house where music is an international language.

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