Queen Elizabeth’s record-breaking reign

Posted on September 9, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Queen Elizabeth II leaving Shakespeare's Birthplace on her first visit to Stratford as reigning monarch, 1957.

Queen Elizabeth II leaving Shakespeare’s Birthplace on her first visit to Stratford as reigning monarch, 1957.

On 9 September 2015 Queen Elizabeth II becomes officially the longest-reigning British monarch in history, having survived for over 63 years, just longer than Queen Victoria. The Queen has refused to mark the day in any way, but the press are going to town printing supplements and selling commemorative knick-knacks. In what has been dubbed “the most patriotic village in England”, Ilmington, just a few miles from Stratford, a Glyndebourne-style concert Long to Reign Over Us will be staged on Saturday evening.

The Queen has had a long association with Stratford and Shakespeare, first visiting the town as reigning monarch in 1957, then opening the Swan Theatre in 1986 and reopening the RST after its extensive transformation in March 2011. It is the Royal Shakespeare Company after all! In between she opened the elegant Swan water Fountain on the Bancroft in 1996 to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the town of Stratford-upon-Avon being granted borough status in 1196.

Our present monarch can’t be said to be a great theatre-lover, or Shakespeare-lover, while Prince Charles is President of the RSC and a frequent attender of performances in the Stratford theatres.

Queen Victoria, painted by George Hayter

Queen Victoria, painted by George Hayter

Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Victoria have between them clocked up 125 years on the throne. Victoria was a more regular theatregoer, and in her biography Helen Rappaport notes that she liked both Charles Macready and Charles Kean. She noted that she enjoyed Shakespeare’s King John and Richard III, but she really preferred the less weighty melodrama and light comedies. The Merry Wives of Windsor was too coarse for her, and it seems probable that it was really Prince Albert who was the Shakespeare fan. He was a member of the Committee formed to buy Shakespeare’s Birthplace in 1847. During the 1840s they visited the Theatre Royal Haymarket and Kean gave a number of command performances at Windsor, including The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet and Macbeth.

In 1848, a year of revolutions in many European countries, Victoria and Albert were criticised among other things for preferring foreign plays to those written by English authors. Their response was a number of high profile visits to London theatres in an attempt to show solidarity with their subjects. In the 1850s they often visited Charles Kean’s Princess’s Theatre where he staged spectacular revivals of Shakespeare. Their approval helped to make theatregoing respectable.

Before Victoria’s day King George IV associated himself with Stratford and Shakespeare, pledging money in the early 1820s to the building of a mausoleum to Shakespeare (an project that failed), then in 1830 granting the Shakspearean Club the right to call itself The Royal Shakspearean Club, a title they continued to use for some years.

Shakespeare himself wrote many of his plays knowing they would be performed before the monarch. In Shakespeare’s First Folio Ben Jonson commented that both Queen Elizabeth 1 and King James enjoyed his plays.
Sweet swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appeare,
And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our James!

When James became King of England in 1603 one of his first actions was to adopt Shakespeare’s company as the King’s Men, and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare had already written an oblique compliment to Queen Elizabeth 1:
That very time I saw …
Cupid all arm’d: a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loos’d his love-shaft smartly from his bow
As it should pierce a hundred-thousand hearts: B
ut I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation fancy free.

Shakespeare was said to have written The Merry Wives of Windsor in direct response to a request from the Queen to see Falstaff in love.

Time and again Shakespeare wrote about the failings of successive monarchs from the vanity of Richard II and the ineffectiveness of Henry VI to the evil of the king who butchered his nobles and even members of his own family, Richard III. Many of his Kings were tormented: Henry IV guiltily worried that he deposed his predecessor, and found himself in a similar situation “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”.

The Queen arriving to open the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, March 2011

The Queen arriving to open the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, March 2011

Our Queen might feel, like Shakespeare’s Henry V:
What infinite heart’s-ease
Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy!
And what have kings, that privates have not too,
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?

Nobody would suggest that hers has been an easy job. For over sixty-three years she’s welcomed heads of state, held meetings with twelve different prime ministers, and carried out endless public duties, always smiling and waving, never able to say what she really thinks. In all that time this remarkable woman has hardly put a foot wrong. She is now said to be the most famous woman on the planet, and the stability of this country is symbolised by the continuity of her reign. Nobody alive today “will look upon her like again”.

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Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, and the refugee migrants

Posted on September 7, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Banksy's 2014 take on immigration

Banksy’s 2014 take on immigration

The story of the week: in fact the story of the summer, has been the displacement of people from war-torn and impoverished parts of the Middle East and Africa to Europe. It’s been described as the biggest refugee crisis since World War 2. Britain has a long tradition of helping people fleeing their own countries: since 1930 there have been the Kindertransport of children from Nazi Germany, refugees from Hungary, the Vietnamese boat people and Ugandan Asians.

It has been going on much longer than that, as a new website with its own online database reveals. Englands Medieval Immigrants has found evidence of over 64000 named individuals known to have migrated to England between 1330 and 1550, during the period of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation.

The evidence they have uncovered shows that the people entering England come from many locations, including distant countries. “It is also clear that these people were drawn from a far broader variety of social and economic backgrounds than just the upper echelons on which modern research has concentrated.” What sources have they used to find this out? “The greatest, and most valuable, is undoubtedly the records of taxes paid by the alien population of England from the mid-fifteenth century onwards. From 1440, a series of specific taxes, known as the ‘alien subsidies’, were levied upon first-generation immigrants resident in most parts of England”.

It’s been estimated that aliens made up around 1% of the population, more like 6% in London. In one year alone, 1440, the names of 14,500 individuals were recorded at a time when the population of England was only two million. The records revealed “a relatively wide geographical dispersion of the immigrant population, with individuals appearing not only in the major towns, ports and other economic centres, but in villages and smaller settlements across the country.” Most people, wherever they lived, probably had some direct contact with these foreign nationals, and the project is revealing how much they integrated or clashed with English people. Professor Ormrod, who has been involved in the project, said “The research provides a deep historical context for modern debates about the movement of peoples and the state’s responsibilities to regulate immigration.”

The Sir Thomas More manuscript, kept at the British Library

The Sir Thomas More manuscript, kept at the British Library

The play The Book of Sir Thomas More contains a series of scenes covering the events of the May Day riots of 1517, within the period covered by this project. Immigrants from Lombardy in Northern Italy are being threatened by Londoners who accuse them of taking jobs and money from the locals, and want them to be deported back to where they came from. The same arguments were being put forward at the time the play was written, with respect to Huguenot migrants. The play was never completed and exists in manuscript form in the British Library. In a series of speeches written by Shakespeare, Thomas More makes the argument for the humane treatment of those forced to seek asylum by being expelled from their home land. It’s surely never been made more persuasively.
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another….
Say now the king
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity. 

Here is Sir Ian McKellen, who once played the part of Sir Thomas More, delivering these speeches. If you do not wish to hear his explanation and preamble, the speech begins around 2 mins 30 seconds in.

For those receiving this post by email, to see the video go to the full blog, to which you will find a link at the end of the post.

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The divine Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet

Posted on September 5, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt

On Radio 4 Francine Stock is currently investigating the concept of charisma. This week in Pinning down the Butterfly: the It Factor, she looked at an actress whose fame spread across Europe and North America, the divine Sarah Bernhardt.

Bernhardt was born in 1844 and made her stage debut in 1862. Although she made her name in her native France playing roles such as Phedre in Racine’s intense drama, she loved Shakespeare and appeared as Cordelia in King Lear and Lady Macbeth. In 1899 she played Hamlet in a French adaptation of the play in twelve scenes. She carried on playing physically demanding roles until 1905 when she damaged a knee onstage, struggling on in increasing pain until having the leg amputated in 1915. Still a great star, the operation made front-page news. When she died in 1923, her funeral procession, seen in this footage, brought Paris to a standstill. [Recipients of the blog by email may need to go to the blog itself to view film clips. A link is at the end of the post.]

 

The production of Hamlet was brought to the Adelphi Theatre in London during 1899. The duel scene (heavily cut) was specially staged and filmed at the time.

 

Actress Elizabeth Robins published a full account of Bernhardt’s performance the following year. Even at the age of 55, “Madame Bernhardt’s assumption of masculinity is so cleverly carried out that one loses sight of Hamlet in one’s admiration for the tour de force of the actress… She gives us…a spirited boy; doing it with an impetuosity, a youthfulness, almost childish.” In giving advice to the players she was “a precocious young gentleman, who…thoroughly enjoys laying down the law to plodding professionals”. And in the play scene, “with something a little reminiscent of an urchin swarming over an orchard wall, [Hamlet] crawls up to the throne, till his eyes, not sombre and horror-stricken, but keen and glittering, are on a level with the King’s. When he has surprised the guilty terror there, this Hamlet actually bursts out into peal on peal of laughter. His clever trick has succeeded, his Schadenfreude overflows. ”

The Graphic, June 17 1899. Bernhardt as Hamlet with Marthe Mellot as Ophelia

The Graphic, June 17 1899. Bernhardt as Hamlet with Marthe Mellot as Ophelia

After performing in London, Bernhardt and her company gave one performance at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, a matinee on Thursday 29 June 1899. On 16 June the Stratford Herald reported that she was performing in Stratford “to gratify her desire to play here”, and had made an advance visit. The day of performance was to be most exciting. A special train brought the company up from London, and both the railway station and the principal streets were decorated with flags and streamers. Marie Corelli met the train, presenting Mme Bernhardt with “a magnificent bouquet with tricolour ribbons, bearing greetings in French”. Most of the extensive news coverage concentrated on her reception more than her performance, but the Birmingham Post commented on Bernhardt’s “intense dramatic power” while complaining that the prose of the French version “seemed out of character in the poet’s Birthplace”.

The Birmingham Gazette ventured some criticism: “too short a time the philosopher and too much the man of wrath and vengeance”. “Mme Bernhardt…puts his passion in the foreground, and every monologue becomes a diatribe. Her Hamlet is a man in constant frenzy, possessed with the one thought of avenging his father’s death. He is not mad, but maddened”.

In her book Rosemary for Stratford, Ursula Bloom tells what happened when Sarah Bernhardt visited Shakespeare’s tomb without any prior warning. The appearance of the great star who spoke no English threw some of the staff into a panic. It was my grandfather, William Tompkins, sub-sacristan at the church, who “came to the rescue” with schoolboy French. “The imperturbable Tompkins…stepped forward and bowed deeply to the lady. “Madame, bon apres-midi,” said Tompkins, with an elegant gesture of the hand which he supposed also to be French.”

“Sarah Bernhardt greeted him with an almost embarrassing exuberance. He had not a clue as to what she said, but there seemed to be a great deal of it. He led her up the aisle to the choir stalls, his black cassock brushing the pews as he went. Then, coming to a standstill, again he waved his hands. “A la tombe, a la monument,”, said he.”

Bernhardt’s Hamlet was very different from what English theatregoers were familiar with. In Stratford, earlier in 1899, Frank Benson had given the entire Folio Hamlet, performed over an afternoon and evening in what came to be known as the “eternity” revival. Benson’s Hamlet, performed several times over the previous ten years or so, “had developed acute melancholia”, acted at “a tardy pace”.

Johnston Forbes-Robertson as Hamlet, 1897

Johnston Forbes-Robertson as Hamlet, 1897

Another famous Hamlet was that given by Henry Irving. Performed in London in 1874 it was triumphantly revived with Ellen Terry as his Ophelia in 1878. Irving’s biographer, Brereton, described his Hamlet as having a “troubled, wearied expression”, a man “of a highly nervous and sensitive disposition; The terrible events which occur have the effect of unhinging the man’s mind, but …nothing can alter the inherent disposition of Hamlet. He must always be a gentleman..”

Londoners of the 1890s would probably have had most in mind Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s “heaven-born Hamlet”. He was a “sweet prince”, “affable” and “genial”, eminently sane but at times filled with a gentle melancholy. Some missed Hamlet’s wildness, but Forbes-Robertson has gone down as one of the greatest of Hamlets, though perhaps without Sarah Bernhardt’s undoubted charisma.

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The story of Shakespeare’s brooch

Posted on September 3, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
The history of Shakespeare's brooch

The history of Shakespeare’s brooch

On Tuesday 8 September 2015 the new season of meetings of Stratford’s Shakespeare Club will begin.  Following the AGM to be held at 7.15 the subject of the evening’s talk will be Shakespeare and Jewellery. It will be given by David Roberts, Executive Dean of Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University. Birmingham has been a centre of jewellery making for centuries with its own Jewellery Quarter. Dr Roberts will be examining Shakespeare’s references to jewellery and precious metals, and will also look at the developments in the industry during his lifetime.

Shakespeare often mentions rings and chains, and rings play a crucial part in some of his plays such as Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice. I’m sure it’s going to be a fascinating start to the season.

Maybe Dr Roberts will mention the gold seal ring rumoured to have been Shakespeare’s that was found in Stratford in 1810. While there’s no actual proof that it belonged to Shakespeare, the story has never been disproved, and the ring now receives serious attention. There is, however, another piece of jewellery which just might have belonged to Shakespeare.

Details of the brooch, coloured by my grandfather

Details of the brooch, coloured by my grandfather

This is a little brooch, and its history is some ways mirrors that of the ring. Like it, it was found by a poor workman, this time in 1828. Like it, the brooch was examined by antiquarians in Stratford and proclaimed to be genuine. The full story is told in leaflets that were published in 1883 and 1884, entitled The History of Shakespeare’s Brooch and A Lecture on Some Portraits of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s Brooch. Both were reprinted from newspapers.

The man who found the brooch, Joseph Smith from Sheep Street, in 1864 made a statement on oath: “in the year one thousand eight hundred and twenty-eight I found the Brooch now shown to me, and having the name “W Shakespeare” engraved at the back thereof, upon a heap of rubbish brought out of, and laid in front of, New place, in Stratford-on-Avon aforesaid, during alterations being made in those premises. The said Brooch is made of silver, set with imitation stones, in the form of a harp (heart), with a wreath on top”.

James Saunders' pictures of the brooch, published 1829

James Saunders’ pictures of the brooch, published 1829

Captain Saunders offered Smith £7, which he refused, having been told it was worth more, and already having it on show in his house. Saunders, convinced of the brooch’s authenticity, wrote a piece for the Mirror of Literature on 26 September 1829 including his own illustrations: “This brooch is considered by the most competent judges and antiquarians in and near Stratford, to have been the personal property of Shakespeare”. Robert Bell Wheler, Stratford’s other leading antiquarian, also tried unsuccessfully to acquire it. In the 1830s, as a result of his poverty, Smith lost possession of the brooch and it was shown at the Stratford Arms in Henley Street, another attraction for those visiting the Birthplace. While there, the brooch was broken and roughly soldered together which accounts for some of the differences between Saunders’ images and later ones. In 1864 the brooch was examined by a specialist of the South Kensington Museum, and by one of the most eminent firms of jewellers in Birmingham and London, who suggested the way the stones were cut was in the pre-Restoration fashion. “The brooch has every appearance of an antiquity bringing it at least as early as the time of Shakespeare”. The lettering was examined and claimed to be compatible with being of Shakespeare’s period, in particular the interlacing of the W and the way the H, A and K of the name are joined, a detail Saunders missed. If Saunders had been gullible, so were many other people. By 1883 John Rabone of Birmingham had acquired the brooch, and wrote both the pamphlets. The lecture contains additional information.

One of the illustrations of Luckenbooth brooches from Rabon's lecture

One of the illustrations of Luckenbooth brooches from Rabone’s lecture

The Birmingham Natural History Society visited the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, in Edinburgh where they came across a display of “Luckenbooth brooches, 16th century”, mostly French, imported when relations between France and Scotland were close. Many, it was noted, are similar to Shakespeare’s brooch. Online information about Luckenbooth brooches is not very great. There is a page here, and to the National Museum of Scotland

Unhappily for those trying to make the case for the brooch, Luckenbooth brooches became popular love-tokens in Scotland just around the time this one was found, making it likelier to be dismissed. Rabone’s carefully-researched lecture, concluding that “it seemed beyond doubt that it was once Shakespeare’s, and was to be treasured with his signet ring as one of the very few of his personal belongings which have been preserved to us”, fell on deaf ears.

The brooch was also found at a time when relics, real or fake, were a source of local income, so the chances of it being fully authentic are remote indeed.

I first came across these pamphlets years ago among my father’s books, but heard no more until I recently searched the SBT’s website for items relevant to Shakespeare Club history. There was an entry for the brooch, with a photo, a relatively recent acquisition. The brooch is currently part of the Tudor Courtship display at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. The caption, reading Heart-shaped brooch, made in the style of the 1500s: once thought to have belonged to William Shakespeare, but now believed to be a Luckenbooth brooch, conceals a complex story that could deserve further investigation.

One final thought: on the brooch, Shakespeare’s name is spelled as we would expect, but though Shakespeare himself used this spelling for The Rape of Lucrece, and it is used on the First Folio, this spelling has not always been used. In particular, at the time of the brooch’s discovery Shakspeare was the usual spelling. Might this lend weight to the idea that the brooch is earlier in date?

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Australia’s Shakespeare

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
The Bell Shakespeare's production of Macbeth

The Bell Shakespeare’s production of Macbeth

It’s easy, living in Stratford-upon-Avon, to get stuck in English and particularly RSC Shakespeare, so I’m indebted to Sally McLean and Elizabeth Schafer for bringing to my attention the vibrancy of Shakespeare on the other side of the planet, in Australia.

Australia has a long history of interest in Shakespeare: there were Shakespeare societies in both Adelaide and Melbourne in the early years of the twentieth century and many Australians have distinguished themselves in Shakespeare: actors Robert Helpmann, Cate Blanchett and Keith Michell, director Gale Edwards and designer Loudon Sainthill, to name just a few.

Many people will have heard of the Bell Shakespeare Company, founded by John Bell in 1990, based in Sydney, and just now performing The Tempest. John Bell, after leading the company for twenty-five years is, at the age of 75, handing over its direction to his co-director Peter Evans. Bell’s is an extraordinary achievement, and it’s to be hoped that the company will continue to thrive under its new leadership.

The Australian Shakespeare Company is based in Melbourne, performing accessible and contemporary productions. They are best known for the outdoor Shakespeare in the Park, but that’s not all they do. Their youth ensemble Bravehearts is for instance engaging young audiences by putting on a version of Romeo and Juliet later in September in Williamstown.

Another Melbourne-based project, just getting under way, is Shakespeare Republic. Their aim is to bring some of Shakespeare’s works to the small screen in a way that shows how relevant he is to modern life. You will find their trailer on their website and on their YouTube channel. They will be building a series of stand-alone episodes, each one featuring one of Shakespeare’s monologues or sonnets, with a slightly modern twist. As it’s all online we can all get a flavour of Shakespeare in Australia. From the look of the trailer it’s going to be a sophisticated twenty-first century series with its own particularly Australian flavour.

Publishing shot of Geoffrey Rush as King Lear

Publishing shot of Geoffrey Rush as King Lear

Later this year one of Australia’s best-known actors, Geoffrey Rush (Shakespeare in Love, The King’s Speech), will be playing King Lear with the Sydney Theatre Company from 24 November 2015 to 9 January 2016. It will be, it is claimed, “a King Lear like no other”. He’s no stranger to the play, but has been reading it with fresh eyes. In this interview Rush talks about how he sees the play “Lear… is a brilliant microcosm of a family that has become completely dysfunctional. They just happen to have the head of state as the father… The arrogance of leadership and the unchallengeable sense of authority. Lear is a kind of man who probably has no understanding of himself… The bigger metaphor is quite intriguing….It’s something that echoes the kind of torture and ruthlessness that we’re seeing going on diplomatically around the planet.”

In a piece she wrote for Shakespeare at the Centre back in 2007, Dr Elizabeth Schafer wrote about how what makes Australian Shakespeare distinctive is that it is “haunted by land rights”.

“Because European Settlement of Australia began …when Shakespeare was already a British national icon, Shakespeare, his thinking, his poetry, his politics, can be seen to have contributed to first contact. And this is why Simon Phillips’ production of The Tempest, for the Queensland Theatre Company…was so challenging. Casting Ariel and Caliban as indigenous added a painful poignancy to most of the action. Similarly any play dealing with land can become newly charged in Australia – whether this be King Lear directed by Gale Edwards and John Gaden, where the division of the kingdom begged the question of who actually owned that land, or As You Like It directed by Neil Armfield, with an …indigenous Rosalind, escaping to Arden, just like her dispossessed father. This distinctive take on the plays can serve as a useful reminder that Shakespeare knew about the lure of land ownership, the temptation to dispossess, and to enclose common land.”

Tom E Lewis as Lear in The Shadow King

Tom E Lewis as Lear in The Shadow King

In the last couple of years these questions have been brought even more to the fore with The Shadow King, “after William Shakespeare”, based on King Lear. Originally performed at the Melbourne Festival in 2013 it was described in this review as “fascinating, ultimately shattering theatre”.

It has since toured to Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane. This was the description when the production reached Adelaide: “Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy King Lear is an unmatched epic of connection, country, land, justice and despair. Now skillfully redefined as The Shadow King, this contemporary retelling speaks to the tangled legacy of Indigenous Australia in a sprawling combination of modern English, Aboriginal languages, Kriol, music and dance. A majestic performance.”

The English Guardian also reviewed it while in Melbourne, commenting on the central theme of land ownership: “After descending into madness and being cast adrift in the wilderness, Lear is reminded by Cordelia that he belongs to the land. As the red dust swirls and Lear dances and sings, the audience journey with him as he becomes healthy and whole again. Juxtaposed with destructive wealth generation and evil plotting, and Lear’s other daughters and Edmund, this scene has great resonance.”

It’s great news that this exciting theatrical event is being brought to the Barbican Theatre in London in 2016. Booking is already open.

 

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Last call for Magna Carta at the British Library

Posted on August 29, 2015 by Sylvia Morris

magna-carta_624x351v22015 has been the eight-hundredth anniversary of the great document Magna Carta, one of the world’s most famous documents, which is still controversial. Is it, as the British Library’s website asks, the “foundation of democracy or rallying cry for modern rights?” The website includes lots of information about the document.

This summer the British Library has mounted a major exhibition about its history and long-term significance: Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy has received rave reviews, but closing on Tuesday 1 September you have only the long Bank Holiday weekend to see it. Even if you miss it, though, this site includes information about some of the treasures on display.

This website takes you to a zoomable copy of the document, a transcription in the original Latin and translation into English.

King John from Shakespeare's First folio

King John from Shakespeare’s First folio

One of the items in the exhibition is a copy of Shakespeare’s 1623 First Folio, open at a page in the play King John. Although the creation of Magna Carta is the most famous event of King John’s reign Shakespeare, famously does not mention the document at all. Perhaps in order to satisfy audiences who came expecting to see it dramatized, or in order to provide an opportunity for pageantry and display, Herbert Beerbohm Tree inserted a scene in which King John was shown granting Magna Carta to his barons. A painting of Hubert Beerbohm Tree playing the role in 1899-1900 is also included in the exhibition, and this blog post includes an explanation of Shakespeare’s omission of the event.

All these great resources accompany the exhibition but are also a reminder of the significance of Magna Carta, a document that began its life as a “practical solution to a political crisis” before becoming “an international symbol of freedom”.

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Shakespeare and the Book of Common Prayer

Posted on August 27, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer

Archbishop Thomas Cranmer

On Radio 4 on 26 August 2015 Quentin Letts asked “What’s the point of the Book of Common Prayer?” This little book, written by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, was originally published in 1549 during the brief but emphatically protestant reign of King Edward VI. For centuries it was universally used in the Church of England, providing not just prayers but the orders of service for baptisms, marriages and communion. In the last fifty years or so it has been mostly superseded by versions written in modern English. Letts’ programme acknowledges that it tends to attract “people who don’t much care for the modern world”, but those who love it are not simply clinging to the past. In the eighteenth century Dr Samuel Johnson commented that is “the genuine language of piety impregnated by wisdom”, and in the programme writer and theatre director James Runcie claimed “You don’t understand English literature without the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible and Shakespeare”. The words of the Book of Common Prayer have gone deep into the minds of many writers.

There have been a number of attempts to define Shakespeare’s own debt to this little book. Every time he attended church he would have heard Cranmer’s prose, and like most people he probably knew the book by heart, having heard it repeated throughout his life.

Daniel Swift's book Shakespeare's Common Prayers

Daniel Swift’s book Shakespeare’s Common Prayers

In his 2012 book Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age, reviewed here, Daniel Swift agrees that the book’s influence has been neglected… “neither the Bible nor the Book of Common Prayer are mentioned in Bullough’s six-volume collection of Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare” or other books looking at Shakespeare’s sources. “For Bullough, as for the generations of literary scholars who have relied on his invaluable resource, the sources of Shakespeare are specifically nondevotional”. Bullough reproduces whole narratives: “here are these old stories, they say, waiting for the magic of his touch. The source not only precedes the play: it is transformed and improved by it”. Swift calls for “a messier and more engaged definition of a source”.

Others who have looked at the subject include Margot Thompson whose booklet The Prayer Book, Shakespeare and the English Language has been published by the Prayer Book Society which also has a page on the subject containing a link to a programme by Melvyn Bragg that looks at the book’s importance.

For Shakespeare, then, the importance of the book is subtle rather than obvious. This review suggests “There’s a vast amount of truth to the claim of debt… Swift attempts to trace that debt through the echo-chamber of Shakespeare’s plays, sifting everything for an echo here, a purloined catechism there. “Perhaps the only final proof of all that I have written here,” he tells us, somewhat unnecessarily, “would be if we were to discover Shakespeare’s own annotated copy of the Book of Common Prayer.”

A tantalising copy of the Book of Common Prayer is owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. The copy contains the 1559 edition of the book together with the psalms that first appeared in 1594, and the whole book was printed in 1596 by Christopher Barker, the official printer to Queen Elizabeth. What makes the copy special is that it contains two signatures by W Shakespeare or William Shakespeare. A post was written by Pete Hewitt on the SBT’s Finding Shakespeare blog a few years ago that sadly concludes these signatures are almost certainly forged, perhaps from the hands of the infamous forger William Henry Ireland (1775-1835). There is also a mention of the book on the SBT’s Treasures page.

One of the pages of "Shakespeare's Prayer Book"

One of the pages of “Shakespeare’s Prayer Book”

Zoomable photographs of this fragile volume are on the Windows on Warwickshire website, as are photographs of many other fascinating items relating to Shakespeare.

It’s maybe not, then, the book that Daniel is hoping to find, but another of the many forgeries that demonstrate the desperation of some at the end of the eighteenth century to find Shakespeare memorabilia. The little book, heavily worn and clearly much used, is still a treasure, demonstrating how important the liturgy was to people, heard on their weekly visits to church and part of their everyday lives. People for whom the book was, to quote Quentin Letts, the “popular poetry of the English language”, its rhythms and phrases known by heart.

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Outdoor Shakespeare

Posted on August 25, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Open air Shakespeare at the Dell

Open air Shakespeare at the Dell

The summer of 2015 has been mostly chilly and often damp, with just the occasional hot days. These conditions must have been trying for all those companies that now put on outdoor theatre productions in the UK. Many of them include at least one Shakespeare play, and no wonder: Shakespeare wrote his plays knowing that some of the time they would be performed outside, in a variety of touring conditions. It’s been another cold, rainy day, but the weather looks as if it may improve for the Bank Holiday weekend at the end of August. There are still a few opportunities to grab some outdoor Shakespeare even if you would be well advised to bring along a blanket and waterproof.

In Stratford, the Dell near Holy Trinity Church will see afternoon performances of As You Like It by BMH and Twelfth Night by Combat Veteran Players on Saturday and Sunday.

The Illyria Theatre Company are still on tour with The Taming of the Shrew and will be in Winchester and Newbury over the weekend.

Creation Theatre, Oxford

Creation Theatre, Oxford

Creation Theatre are performing their production of As You Like It in the gardens of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, until well into September.

Handlebards are performing Hamlet in Scotland, taking their Secret Shakespeare to another level as the audience are expected to get on their bikes and ride five miles during the show.

The Festival Players continue their tour of As You Like It and Henry IV at various venues including Glastonbury.

Open air theatre at Arundel Castle

Open air theatre at Arundel Castle

The GB Theatre Company are performing the final nights of their Twelfth Night on 28 and 29 August in the spectacular setting of Arundel Castle in Sussex.

If you need some encouragement to think about outdoor Shakespeare, you might like to try Andrew Muir’s delightful study of the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare in Cambridge. It makes a refreshing change from some of the rather dry academic studies of Shakespeare on stage. The author remembers to mention Cambridge’s early connections with Shakespeare. Performances of Hamlet were staged in the city: the 1603 Quarto tells us the play “hath beene diverse times acted …in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford.” Around the same time the student dramas, the Parnassus Plays, were put on by the students at St John’s College. These contain references, although somewhat cryptic, to Shakespeare as both actor and writer. He also points out that Francis Meres, one of the first to praise Shakespeare in print, was educated at Pembroke College Cambridge.

But the main part of the book, and what makes it such a pleasure to read, is Muir’s obvious love for Cambridge’s Annual Shakespeare Festival. Quite simply, he says “The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival (CSF) has changed my life. Not only has it come to dominate my every summer, but, more importantly, it has challenged and refocused my views of Shakespeare’s plays while reinvigorating my appreciation of them”.

Shakespeare in Cambridge by Andrew Muir

Shakespeare in Cambridge by Andrew Muir

Muir’s account of how the open air productions at CSF help to demonstrate the workings of Shakespeare’s plays would be a clear and readable account for anyone coming to the subject for the first time:
All the companies prior to, and in, Shakespeare’s time were obliged to change their productions to suit whatever locations and conditions they found themselves in. …With its almost total lack of scenery, other than what nature provides, its varied venues and its small casts, the CSF is at the mercy of the same exigencies… It sounds from all this as though the productions, both back then and now at the CSF, suffer from terrible constraints but, paradoxically, the opposite is true. The release from any obligation to provide naturalistic stage productions is liberating, and the absence of such cluttering distractions affords a total concentration on the words. These words, the greatest ever written, are designed to paint in our minds, if we let them guide us, all the scenery necessary for this and other worlds.

The liberation is boundless: the plays can move anywhere or any time via words, gestures, and symbols… The actors move, and the audience with them, simply by someone saying, “we are in a forest”, or an orchard, a castle, or “we are in Rome”, now Egypt and now Rome again. They can go from room to room, upstairs to downstairs, inside a house to out in the street, they can cross the street to enter a tavern or be held deep in a dungeon, all through language only. Even though, in reality, they are physically occupying the same bare stage, be it the thrust stage of the Globe, an Elizabethan courtyard inn or a spot of grass in a Cambridge college garden. 

The Cambridge Shakespeare Festival is still running this week with its final performances of Timon of Athens ending on 29 August in Robinson College Gardens. This weekend is pretty well your last chance of seeing some outdoor Shakespeare for another year, so make the most of it.

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“To be or not to be”: Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet. Photo by Johan Persson

Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet. Photo by Johan Persson

So Benedict Cumberbatch, playing Hamlet in Lyndsey Turner’s production of the play at the Barbican Theatre in London, has bowed to pressure by moving “To be or not to be” from the beginning of the play to its usual place. It’s not unusual for changes to be made in preview, but it’s a pity that a decision made for artistic reasons has been changed because of pressure from those who have seen the play before its official opening next week.

Theatre practitioners have now criticised the media for “hysteria” and “contempt”. Every comment on the play I’ve seen has focused on either the placing of this speech or on Cumberbatch’s plea for the audience not to photograph or record the live performance, which was itself shown on TV news. Nobody seems very interested in the performance itself.

As I understand it, the idea of placing the speech at the start of the play was to explain Hamlet’s state of mind at the beginning of the play, though his first soliloquy “Oh that this too too sullied flesh would melt” actually expresses his desperation and loneliness pretty fully.

Most journalists and audiences haven’t spotted the irony of the decision to move this speech around, but one of the many textual questions academics have discussed is where Shakespeare originally meant this speech to appear. In the first printed edition, the 1603 “Bad Quarto”, thought to be based on early theatrical practise, the speech appears in Act 2 Scene 2. Claudius and Gertrude have offered to pay Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for information about Hamlet, and Claudius and Polonius have also plotted to “loose” Ophelia to Hamlet while the two of them “mark the encounter” from behind an arras. With Hamlet being so comprehensively spied on, the speech shows him at his most vulnerable.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet

Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet

The conventional place for the speech is in Act 3 Scene 1, after Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have reported their failure to get anything out of Hamlet, and immediately before the nunnery scene with Ophelia. As well as getting the better of his old friends, Hamlet has by this time encountered the players and come up with the scheme to make Claudius give himself away by presenting on stage a scene like the murder of his father. After this, the speech about suicide seems out of place, but this is where the second Quarto, published in 1604 and thought to be a kind of official version, puts it.

In her commentary on the play in the Penguin Edition, Anne Barton commented that the Q1 placement “may well indicate stage practice in early productions. Some modern directors have found that placing the soliloquy there, at a low point in Hamlet’s despair, is more effective than it is here, just after his vigorous decision to test Claudius. The placing of the soliloquy here may indicate an afterthought – not altogether successful – influenced by the fact that including it in II.2 gives the actor a very long period on stage.”. As she suggests, sometimes these decisions are made for purely practical reasons.

Alex Jennings as Hamlet, 1997. Photo by Malcolm Davies, copyright Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

Alex Jennings as Hamlet, 1997. Photo by Malcolm Davies, copyright Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

Moving the speech around, and experimenting with the opening of the play, is therefore nothing new. Apparently the Lyndsey Thomas production has also toyed with the idea of Hamlet sitting on stage alone at the beginning of the play, listening to (presumably melancholy) music. In the RSC’s 1997 production, directed by Matthew Warchus, the play opened with a black and white home movie of a young boy playing with his father in the snow. Alex Jennings, as Hamlet, stood at the front of the stage holding a casket, from which he emptied his father’s ashes. The scene moved immediately to a noisy party and the court scene, at which Hamlet seemed even more out of place than usual. The whole of the first scene, in which the ghost appears, was cut so the opening of the play focused not on the avenging of a murder but on the tragedy of a son losing his father. This was a much more radical opening than the one that has been seen in London: the first scene in Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most dramatic opening and contains speeches which it’s thought he might have written for himself as the Ghost.   This piece by Andrew Dickson looks at some of the many changes that have been made to Hamlet over the years, and asks “Does it matter?”

Collectors of Hamlets in all their variety may then be disappointed to miss this unusual and much-discussed bit of staging, but it’s likely that we’ll see it again. Now let’s hope that on the 25th the critics will concentrate on the quality of the production and the performances.

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Shakespeare and the British Renaissance

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
James Fox

James Fox

James Fox’s three-part documentary series A Very British Renaissance has just finished on BBC 4. It was first shown in 2014, and having missed it first time I’m very pleased to have caught up with it. The presenter, an art historian, has found some wonderful and unfamiliar items representing the British Renaissance from 1500 to the 1640s that make the series very much worth watching.

Fox’s premise is that the British had its own Renaissance, and although the resulting arts were “a bit rough around the edges” they were significant and should be better recognised. Unfortunately his insistence on mentioning the Renaissance kept bringing to my mind visions of Michelangelo’s David, the Sistine Chapel, and Titian’s glorious paintings. I’d have preferred to celebrate the artistic achievements of this country and the wonderful collections documenting them.

The tomb of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey

The tomb of Henry VII, Westminster Abbey

His first example was the tomb of Henry VII and his queen in Westminster Abbey, dating from after Henry’s death in 1509. The gilt bronze effigies, by Italian sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, are behind a grille, so it was a treat to see them and the chubby cherubs which Fox claims define this work as the first of the English Renaissance. In this programme he looked at how foreign artists imported Renaissance ideas, and examined the work of Hans Holbein, a real star of Henry VIII’s court, beginning with the immensely popular National Gallery painting, The Ambassadors, then moving on to stunning portrait sketches in the Royal Collection. It was worth watching the whole programme just for these. English artists took inspiration from the Europeans: Thomas Wyatt in poetry and Thomas Tallis in music. Tallis apparently wrote Spem in Alium, his choral work written in 40 parts in response to an Italian motet. It apparently beat the Italian piece hands down.

Holbein's sketch of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Holbein’s sketch of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

The second programme looked at “the development of artistic ideas in Elizabethan England. An age obsessed with secrets, with poets writing in code and artworks and buildings concealing hidden messages.” Many of these hidden messages related to the religious upheavals of the time, when the country moved from Catholic to Protestant, back to Catholic and finally back to Protestant within a few dizzying decades. With the consequences of being on the wrong side possibly being a horrific execution it is hardly surprising that people concealed their feelings. Architecturally he looked at the buildings created by Thomas Tresham, the triangular Lodge at Rushton and the unfinished Lyveden New Bield which subtly reveal their builder’s strong Catholic faith.

The programme also examined the British hunger for exploration and discovery. I’m not sure that mathematician, astrologer and mystic John Dee was really responsible for Queen Elizabeth’s decision to explore and conquer foreign countries and create a British Empire, but Fox combined the two elements of secrecy and exploration when talking, inevitably, about Shakespeare. In its energetic, emotional and hugely popular homegrown drama, Britain has no need to feel second-rate compared with Europe. Fox chose to focus, again, on John Dee, suggesting he might have been the model for Prospero in The Tempest. Aged over 80, Dee had died shortly before the play was written, but in his time he had been known throughout Europe. It’s not impossible, but Shakespeare needed no real-life inspiration for his god-like magician.

Inigo Jones's copy of Palladio

Inigo Jones’s copy of Palladio

The third programme looked at how, around the time of Shakespeare’s death, tensions grew between the real world and the world of the royal court. The man whose work symbolised this split was architect Inigo Jones. Fox examined another amazing treasure kept at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Jones’s own heavily annotated copy of Andrea Palladio’s The Four Books of Architecture. Jones’s first building in the Palladian style was the glorious Queen’s House in Greenwich, which promised much for the future. But while Robert Burton was unlocking the secrets of the mind in his Anatomy of Melancholy, and Gabriel Harvey was working out the circulation of the blood, the court commissioned the talented Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones to create vastly expensive court masques, entertainments that had nothing to do with the lives of ordinary people. In the end, this divergence led to the Civil War of the 1640s.

British culture went underground during the period of the Commonwealth, with every artistic activity banned. Fox’s point is that we tend to ascribe the artistic flowering of the country to the period after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660s. In the series, he’s demonstrated that, in fields other than drama, Britain had its own renaissance before that date, that “changed British culture forever”. For Shakespeare-lovers, it provides an insight into the culturally shifting world he inhabited.

A couple of reviews of the series from its first airing by The Guardian and the Telegraph. It’s now available to watch on the BBC IPlayer here , and even if you don’t watch the whole thing, do take a look at the clip of the Holbein sketches.

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