Not Shakespeare, and not Blackfriars

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Andrew Marr interviewing Trevor Nunn

Andrew Marr interviewing Trevor Nunn

It’s always tempting to speculate on what might have happened if things had been different, and in the Artsnight programme Not Shakespeare, broadcast on 19 June Andrew Marr looked at the world of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, and what we might now make of the playwrights of the time if Shakespeare had not existed.

Quoting the programme description “Andrew Marr…wants to champion some great Renaissance dramatists whose stories have been neglected because they worked at the same time as William Shakespeare. Andrew believes our obsession with the Bard of Avon has fatally distorted our view of the Tudor and Jacobean period.”

Edward's Boys production of The Lady's Trial

Edward’s Boys production of The Lady’s Trial

Those coming under discussion were John Webster, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and John Ford. It’s a good moment for this investigation as productions of their work are currently on stage, or in preparation. John Ford, in particular, has  been the subject of The Ford Experiment at Shakespeare’s Globe. On 26 September a study day takes place where scholars and theatre practitioners share thoughts about Ford, culminating in The Lady’s Trial being performed at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse by Edward’s Boys from King Edward’s School in Stratford-upon-Avon (also on 27 September).

Another play by John Ford, Love’s Sacrifice, has its last performances at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon this week, so you’ll have to hurry to catch it. Marr’s programme includes an interview with Catrin Stewart who plays Bianca in this production, talking about the strength of Ford’s heroines. His interest in women and psychology have often been compared with Shakespeare’s.

Marr also interviews Trevor Nunn, under whom the Swan Theatre opened in 1986 with the specific aim of investigating “Non-Shakespeare” plays. Nunn’s production of Ben Jonson’s Volpone is in preparation. Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta is currently playing at the Swan Theatre, but Marr seems obsessed by Marlowe’s death, promoting the completely unsubstantiated idea that he might have faked his death and gone on to write plays under the pseudonym of Shakespeare. Thankfully Justin Audibert the director of the current production of The Jew Of Malta pointed out the enormous differences in style and substance between Marlowe and Shakespeare.

Eion Price has written a thoughful post on the programme on his Asidenotes blog. He notes that in spite of the aim, Marr’s programme did little to remove Shakespeare from the equation (though it did at least ask the question). Much of the discussion centred around the personalities of the different writers as seen in their work.: Marlowe the brilliant maverick, living fast and dying a violent death while still in his twenties, and Jonson the abrasive Londoner with a chip on his shoulder, always drawing attention tot his intellectual superiority. These comments shed light on Shakespeare’s own character: gentler, more countrified, less obsessed with the minutiae of everyday life, but commenting on big events in a subtle way. And, it has to be said, writing it in words that stick in the mind and speak to the heart.

Another “what if” question about the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres has come under examination in Chris Laoutaris’s book Shakespeare and the Countess: the Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe. Laoutaris recently addressed the Hay Festival on the subject of the book, attracting new attention.

Elizabeth, Lady Hoby, nAe Elizabeth Cooke (1528-1609), Late 18th cent.. Artist: Bone, Henry (1755-1834)...DE718R Elizabeth, Lady Hoby, nAe Elizabeth Cooke (1528-1609), Late 18th cent.. Artist: Bone, Henry (1755-1834)

Elizabeth, Lady Hoby, nAe Elizabeth Cooke (1528-1609), Late 18th cent.. Artist: Bone, Henry (1755-1834)…DE718R Elizabeth, Lady Hoby, nAe Elizabeth Cooke (1528-1609), Late 18th cent.. Artist: Bone, Henry (1755-1834)

Laoutaris’s research over several years investigated the role played by the elderly, belligerent widow Lady Elizabeth Russell, who succeeded in preventing Shakespeare and his company from moving into the Blackfriars Theatre in 1596. She appears to have done so by sheer force of personality, intimidating many of the right people. The Lord Chamberlain’s men were left in the position of having no secure home for their company, hence their building in 1599 of the Globe Theatre. Intriguing questions are raised by the book: what would have happened if the company had moved into an indoor theatre so much earlier? How would it have affected Shakespeare’s writing, and that of other playwrights such as Jonson if the Globe had never existed? And how would it have affected the finances and status of Shakespeare and his fellows?

Russell was a Puritan, and although her main motive was NIMBYism, she would have been happy to see the players disappear completely. Their move across the river to the south bank, home of bear-baiting pits and brothels, enlarged this centre of entertainment. Most interestingly, the innovative way the Globe was funded made Shakespeare a wealthy man. To quote Laoutaris’s article, “To fund the enterprise the Burbage brothers hit on an entirely unprecedented business model. They offered a larger interest in the venture to Shakespeare and four other actor-sharers than had ever before been negotiated. Each paid £100 towards the cost of completing the playhouse. In exchange they became part-owners of the Globe, able to reap 10 per cent of the profits. Elizabeth Russell had unwittingly secured Shakespeare’s long-term success and his indelible association with the Globe.”

There’s a full discussion of the book in this review from last year, and this link is to an article on the book by Laoutaris himself in April 2015.

 

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John Gerarde’s History of Plants and other herbals

Posted on June 19, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
SIL30-05-002, 3/9/04, 11:25 AM, 8C, 3912x5768 (2016+1119), 100%, WILKES, 1/50 s, R41.3, G27.2, B41.0

John Gerarde, in the Herball

A valuable aspect of the debate about the proposed new lifetime portrait of Shakespeare is the interest it has raised in John Gerarde’s Herball.

The previous Director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Roger Pringle, and his wife Marian (Senior Librarian then Special Collections Librarian)  built up the Trust’s already significant holdings of herbals. They reflect Shakespeare’s clear interest in gardening and plants as well as the professional expertise of his son in law Doctor John Hall, who used plants in many of his medicines. More than two dozen early herbals and books about gardening are now held in the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, including no fewer than five original copies of Gerarde’s Herball.  After reading the articles by Mark Griffiths in Country Life, I went to look at some of them.*

Illustration from The Grete Herball

Illustration from The Grete Herball

The earliest is The Grete Herball  from 1529, and although it’s in English it’s mostly a translation from the French Le Grand Herbier. Printed in Gothic or Black Letter, it’s (at least for us) difficult to read and its crude woodcuts don’t identify the plants, though the book has a lovely title page illustration showing an industrious couple harvesting their grapes while to the side Adam and Eve stand awkwardly before their banishment from Eden.

Gerarde has often been criticised for simply translating the Herbal written by Robert Dodoens. Dodoens published several books on plants and his work was made available in Dutch, French, Latin and English. The SCLA has a copy of the 1578 translation by Henry Lyte, and other books on plants from 1553, heavily annotated in Latin and English, perhaps by the Robertus Cockram who signed them in 1600. It’s interesting to see how much and for what the books were valued by their readers. Next to the entry for Wild Germander is the note that it “is good to be layd to the bytings of venemous beasts”.

The first Herbal to be written and published in England was by the Doctor of Physic, William Turner, in 1568, and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. Turner’s book, including many illustrations, was a serious attempt to make information about plants and their uses more widely known.

John Gerard, The Herball (London, 1597) Oats

John Gerard, The Herball (London, 1597) Oats

John Gerarde’s Herbal was published almost thirty years later, and in his introduction he acknowledges “that excellent Worke of Master Doctor Turner” as well as Lyte’s translation of Dodoens. But what a difference there is in the appearance of Gerarde’s book. Printed using a clear Roman font, with around 1800 high quality engravings that show what the plants look like, this book has much more immediate appeal than Turner’s.  And although Gerarde may have taken details from Dodoens, his additions are readable and entertaining. For Gerarde, plants are to be enjoyed:
Talke of perfect happinesse or pleasure, and what place was so fit for that as the garden place wherein Adam was set to be the Herbarist? Whither did the Poets hunt for their sincere delights, but into the gardens of Alcinous, of Adonis, and the Orchards of the Hesperides?…Easie therefore is this treasure to be gained, and yet pretious…nothing can be confected, either delicate for the taste, dainty for smell, pleasant for sight, wholsome for body, conservative or restorative for health, but it borroweth the rellish of an herb, the savor of a flour, the colour of a leafe, the juice of a plant, or the decoction of a root.

Gerarde modestly acknowledges the book’s inaccuracies and hopes that others would improve it. And although I don’t go along with the idea that Shakespeare helped write it, there are phrases in the introduction reminiscent of his work:
Lastly my selfe, one of the least among many, have presumed to set forth unto the view of the World, the first fruits of these myne owne Labours, which if they be such as may content the Reader, I shall thinke my selfe well rewarded… The rather therefore accept this at my hands (loving Country-men) as a token of my goodwill, and I trust that the best and well minded will not rashly condemn me… But as for the slanderer or Envious I passe not for them, but return upon themselves any-thing they shall without cause either murmur in corners, or jangle in secret.

I particularly like the way that Gerarde gives as much room to weeds as to more refined garden plants. Walking last week along part of the Camel Trail in Cornwall where dozens of species of grasses and wild flowers flourish, I was reminded of Cordelia’s speech about how the mad Lear is found, crowned with the commonest of plants:

John Gerard, The Herball (London, 1597). Couch Grass

John Gerard, The Herball (London, 1597). Couch Grass

Alack, ’tis he!
Why, he was met even now
As mad as the vex’d sea, singing aloud,
Crown’d with rank fumiter and furrow weeds,
With harlocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo flow’rs,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.  A century send forth.
Search every acre in the high-grown field
And bring him to our eye.

The illustrations on this page are from a beautifully coloured copy held at the University of Oklahoma.

*Microfiche copies are available to all readers, but access to the originals is restricted.

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David Suchet, Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
David Suchet as Lady Bracknell

David Suchet as Lady Bracknell

Next week a production of Oscar Wilde’s most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opens in the West End of London. The production stars one of best-loved actors, David Suchet, in the leading role of Lady Bracknell. A few days ago I caught the production at the last stop on its tour, the Theatre Royal in Bath.

The theatre is an ideal venue for this brightly-polished, very funny play. The three-act structure fits perfectly, the velvet curtains rising to reveal to the audience the elegant sets designed by Peter McKintosh. Wilde wrote the play for just such a stage and it was normal for the leading actors to “get a round” from the audience on their first appearance. There’s a nod to this theatrical tradition when Suchet sweeps in for his first entrance through a pair of double doors upstage centre, above a short flight of steps. Particularly for those used to seeing him on TV as Hercules Poirot, his transformation alone merits the round of applause with which he is greeted.

Suchet already had a thriving career before Poirot, and he has continued to act in other roles throughout the twenty or so years in which he has played Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective. I first saw Suchet playing the small but striking role of Pompey in Peter Brook’s 1978 Antony and Cleopatra, and remember being impressed by him even then. I next saw him at the Aldwych in 1979 playing a range of lighter roles: Sir Nathaniel the curate in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Petruchio’s servant Grumio in The Taming of the Shrew and Glogauer in Once in a Lifetime. Later roles in Stratford included Bolingbroke in Richard II in 1980, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in 1981, and Iago in Othello in 1985. His Bolingbroke in Richard II was a man shaken by the prospect of banishment:
O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?

David Suchet as Timon

David Suchet as Timon

He also memorably played Timon in a modern dress production directed by Trevor Nunn at the Young Vic. No wonder that, as he recounted in Poirot and Me, his reaction to being offered the role was not positive: “I was astounded. Me, the serious Shakespearean actor, portrayer of men with haunted souls, playing a fastidious, balding detective?”

Watching him playing Lady Bracknell it occurred to me: surely I’d seen David Suchet playing a woman before? In the prologue to The Taming of the Shrew did he not play the unfortunate servant who has to dress up as Sly’s wife? The part is often played by a slim young man but in this case Suchet was a well-built “wife” who came near to punching Jonathan Pryce’s Sly when he became too amorous.

The comedy then depended on the fact that Suchet was such an unlikely woman, and his Lady Bracknell is not a female impersonation in the Mrs Doubtfire mould. It’s a lovely performance that picks up the social demarcations within the play. One of her most famous lines is “Never speak disrespectfully of society, Algernon – only people who can’t get into it do that”. Her admission that she married money rather than inheriting any of her own is the mistake of an unguarded moment, and Suchet stifles a laugh at the idea of Jack being found in a handbag, but is outraged by his being left in a public cloakroom.

The play’s a frothy confection, as full of famous quotations as one of Shakespeare’s plays, like Gwendolen’s “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train”. The young foursome are a sparky group, though Imogen Doel’s eccentric Cecily often steals the scene.

As a Shakespeare-obsessive I couldn’t help noticing moments that might have been inspired by Shakespeare. The quartet of lovers reminded me of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in particular when Gwendolen and Cecily swear affection to each other one moment and hate each other the next. Then there are the mistaken identities, the two boys discovered to be brothers after several unlikely coincidences. I was struck by the scene in which the learned Miss Prism (Michele Dotrice) and Canon Chasuble (Richard O’Callaghan) talk in the garden rather as Holofernes the schoolteacher and Sir Nathaniel the Curate do in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Wilde wrote about Shakespeare’s work in The Critic as Artist and in his essay The Portrait of Mr W H. The play was hotly anticipated and its first performance in 1895 did not disappoint, but not long afterwards Wilde was convicted of homosexuality. The play was never performed again in his lifetime. It has since become one of the most-quoted of English plays owing to Wilde’s brilliant writing and the creation of Lady Bracknell, one of the best-loved roles for actors of both sexes, rather, again, like Shakespeare’s.

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British Shakespeare Association Education Network

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Sylvia Morris

bsaIt’s been a while since I wrote about the British Shakespeare Association, and in particular its Education Network. Membership of the Association usually drops a bit between the organisation’s biennial conferences (the 2016 conference will be at the University of Hull).  But the organisation continues to be active, and I’ve recently been catching up on the very varied posts to the Education Network blog in the extremely capable hands of Dr Sarah Olive of the University of York. The following refer to just some of the recent blog posts that have appeared on the site.

How-to-teach-childrenA series of short reviews of books on the subject of Shakespeare in education have appeared. Teaching Shakespeare, particularly in school, is found particularly challenging, so it’s a great idea to suggest how useful books might be for those who have to deliver it. So the blog includes a review of Adrian Noble’s book How to do Shakespeare, a very brief one on Liam Semler’s book on Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe, and another by Ken Ludwig on How to Teach your Children Shakespeare aimed at parents and those who teach small groups.

There’s a discussion of Lyn Gardner’s Guardian article unfavourably comparing the RSC’s provision aimed at younger audiences with that of Sadler’s Wells, raising questions about what sort of educational offerings theatres should be making to audiences of the future.

There’s news of a workshop being held at the University of York on Saturday 27 June, on the teaching of two plays popular in schools, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. It will look at human rights issues raised by the plays and offer some active approaches to teaching the plays. The workshop is free to members of the British Shakespeare Association and just £5 for others.

It feels a long way ahead, but there has been a call for papers for a conference being held in April 2016 at the University of Brighton. RSC Education and the Cambridge Schools Shakespeare will be taking part and the subjects under discussion are wide-ranging. Abstracts for consideration have to be submitted by the second week of July 2015.

Finally for those of you interested in the live relays of theatre performances one of the blogs is a report of the discussion on the subject by RSC Chief Gregory Doran and John Wyver. This was part of the conference that marked the conclusion of the AHRC-funded research project “Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television”, held in London during February 2015. It’s a very full account written by Dr Sarah Olive who is in overall charge of the BSA Education Blog, and the post itself includes additional links.

All of the above posts have been posted within the last few months and show off the range of the BSA Education Network’s interests. For the rest of the 2014-5 academic year (not long now) membership of the BSA is free for primary and secondary teachers. Although aimed at teachers the Education Network blog contains lots of material that anyone with an interest in Shakespeare would enjoy, and is freely available for anyone to access. It’s a great resource and I’d recommend signing up for it to pop into your email inbox.

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The James Shirley Marathon

Posted on June 11, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
James Shirley

James Shirley

Next week, beginning on 15 June, the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon is embarking on another marathon reading of the complete work of a playwright of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Last year it was Thomas Heywood, the year before it was John Fletcher, but this year it is the turn of James Shirley. Dr Martin Wiggins is in charge again, and quoting from the website, “The exercise enables us to observe, in concentrated form, the development of a single dramatist’s imagination and technique, and to experience a large number of neglected plays by a significant talent of the Shakespearian era”.

John Fletcher and Thomas Heywood are already well-known, but this is your opportunity to get to know more about this neglected playwright and his varied plays. The following profile is also from the Institute’s website: “Shirley was the most substantial professional dramatist of the generation after Shakespeare.  He was born in 1596, at around the same time as Shakespeare was writing The Merchant of Venice, and he began writing plays nine years after Shakespeare’s death, initially doing so part-time in parallel with his day-job as a schoolmaster. In the late 1630s he was the principal dramatist for the first commercial theatre in Dublin, and in 1642 his last full-length play, The Court Secret, was being prepared for its London premiere when the outbreak of Civil War closed the theatres; but he continued writing shorter work for private performance during the Interregnum, and The Court Secret was eventually revised for production after the theatres reopened in 1660.”

Hyde Park title page

Hyde Park title page

James Shirley dominated the last generation of English Renaissance drama with an industrious fluency unapproached by any other playwright during the reign of Charles I. Others, notably John Ford, wrote plays of greater power and more enduring interest; Shirley’s taste was too sure to attempt anything as memorable or extreme as ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. His instinct for experiment and innovation was slight, and the general ethos of his plays is the official gentility of the Caroline court: cleverly risqué but fundamentally conservative in its sophisticated decorum. But by the same token, none of Shirley’s thirty-odd plays fall below a high level of artful competence. The capable heir to greater predecessors, he absorbed their lessons into a skillful conventionality that showed how natural a certain kind of theatrical deftness had become for the English stage.

The Poetry Foundation describes him as “Cleverly risqué but fundamentally conservative”, and he lived during, and survived, one of the most turbulent periods of English history. He took holy orders at the age of 24, and five years later converted to Roman Catholicism. He began writing plays in 1625, the year of the accession of Charles 1, and became a leading dramatist of the Caroline stage, moving to Ireland for a time before becoming the main playwright for the King’s Men in 1640. He lived to see the monarchy restored and the theatres reopened under Charles II, but wrote no new plays, though some of the older ones were revived. He continued to live in London and it is said that he died in 1666 of fright and exposure following the Great Fire of London.  There’s a fuller biography here on the Luminarium site.

It’s been noted that his plays often feature stronger female characters than those of his contemporaries, anticipating the change to the theatre post-1660 when women appeared on stage for the first time. The Luminarium site comments: “in his time he was considered a significant exponent of “cavalier” drama; he wrote for court audiences and developed a new kind of comedy which suited that clientele, something both intellectual and refined. Shirley is a comedian of wit, and may be thought of as a precursor to the great age of Restoration comedy”.

Charles Lamb, writing in the early eighteenth century, suggested that Shirley was the last of his kind: Shirley “claims a place among the worthies of this period, not so much for any transcendent genius in himself, as that he was the last of a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language and had a set of moral feelings and notions in common.”

Currently a ten-volume edition of Shirley’s plays is being prepared, to be published by Oxford University Press, and the Marathon is taking place with the cooperation of the editors. The edition is the main outcome of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded James Shirley project, directed by Prof. Eugene Giddens, Dr Teresa Grant, and Prof. Barbara Ravelhofer. Others have commented on just one aspect of Shirley’s work, but Barbara Ravelhofer describes him as “An innovative dramatist specializing in tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, masque, pastoral, entertainment, morality, and neo-miracle… Critics still appreciate his elegant craftsmanship, his fast-paced, witty dialogues, and his detached portrayal of social manners.” The James Shirley Marathon will be an interesting investigation into the work of this neglected playwright.

Anyone is welcome to attend the readings, but members of the public not already known to the Institute should make arrangements in advance by contacting Dr Martin Wiggins (m.j.wiggins@bham.ac.uk).  The complete list of plays being read is as follows:

Monday 15 June

2.30: The School of Compliment

7.00: The Maid’s Revenge

Tuesday 16 June

10.30: The Wedding

2.30: The Witty Fair One

Wednesday 17 June

10.30: The Contention for Honour and Riches

2.30: The Grateful Servant

Thursday 18 June

2.30: The Traitor

7.00: The Humorous Courtier

Friday 19 June

10.30: Love’s Cruelty

2.30: The Changes

Saturday 20 June

10.30: Hyde Park

2.30: The Ball

Monday 22 June

2.30: The Bird in a Cage

7.00: The Young Admiral

Tuesday 23 June

10.30: The Gamester

2.30: The Triumph of Peace & The Example

Wednesday 24 June

10.30: The Opportunity

2.30: The Coronation

Thursday 25 June

2.30: The Arcadia

7.00: The Lady of Pleasure

Friday 26 June

10.30: The Duke’s Mistress

2.30: The Royal Master

Saturday 27 June

10.30: The Constant Maid

2.30: The Politician

Monday 29 June

2.30: St Patrick for Ireland

7.00: The Gentleman of Venice

Tuesday 30 June

10.30: The Doubtful Heir

2.30: The Imposture

Wednesday 1 July

10.30: The Brothers

2.30: The Cardinal

Thursday 2 July

2.30: The Sisters

7.00: The Court Secret

Friday 3 July

10.30: Honoria and Mammon & The Triumph of Beauty

2.30: Cupid and Death & The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses

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Anticipating Macbeth on film

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Sylvia Morris

Macbeth_2015_posterIt doesn’t often happen that a Shakespeare film is dubbed “The “Most Anticipated Film” of the year, but this is how the adaptation of Macbeth directed by Justin Kurzel and starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard has been described. The film was previewed at the Cannes Film Festival a few weeks ago in May 2015 and since then the internet has been buzzing with articles, most of which have also received many comments and shares.  The film is scheduled for release in the UK on 2 October. No date has been finalised for release in the USA, but it is likely to be some time in the fall.

The Australian director is best known for his first feature film, Snowtown, based on the true story of the Snowtown murders. Michael Fassbender has had a varied career in films from action movies to an adaptation of Jane Eyre and the award-winning historical drama 12 Years a Slave, and Marion Cotillard has a distinguished reputation in both French and American films. Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays and this film, although heavily cut (all the humour has been removed), does follow the plot of the play and uses Shakespeare’s words. Fassbender’s name alone is likely to guarantee a hit, but it isn’t just the cast or the reputation of the play that has got people excited.

macbeth filmThe film is variously described as a “grim and bloody adaptation”, a “jaw-dropping vision” and “a hell of a film”, set in “a blasted netherworld of feral violence.” Here’s an extract from the BBC’s preview: “Obliterating any trace of stage-bound stuffiness, he replaces it with the mud and gore of an anti-war movie and the stylised immediacy of a graphic novel: the slow-motion blood-spurting recalls a previous Fassbender film, 300, except with jagged wounds in place of washboard stomachs. Kurzel does whatever he can do make every scene more nightmarish, whether that means including a procession of zombies (you read that correctly), or giving an inspired, apocalyptic twist to the Birnam Wood prophecy. At times, it seems as if he has shifted the action to a forbidding alien planet: Duncan and the royal court favour Jedi-like dressing gowns, while the witches’ cosmetic facial scarring makes them appear half-Klingon.”

In case you’re groaning at this description, you might like to note that several eminent Shakespeare academics have come out in the film’s favour, based on a viewing of the trailer. The Washington Post includes interviews with Stephen Greenblatt and James Shapiro. Greenblatt said: “The trailer seems in touch with several features that make the play attractive to contemporary audiences: lots of blood and gory battle scenes; a strong, erotically charged relationship at its center; an intense interest in the costs of masculinity; a way of imagining the link between sex and violence.”

Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender in Macbeth

Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender in Macbeth

And Shapiro commented: “The play is full of special effects, and theater directors have to struggle to convey the spectral presence of daggers, the ghostly presence of the slain Banquo, and the play’s sheer murkiness. These are a lot easier to convey in a film…The trailer — which hints at a battle scene that’s a cross between ‘Braveheart’ and ‘Game of Thrones’ — makes use of technology that was simply unavailable to Shakespeare. If he had it, he would have used it.”

If you’d like to take a look at a range of stills from the film, this article from Mail Online contains lots of images.

Macbeth has been adapted for film many times, memorably by Orson Welles in 1948 and Roman Polanski in 1971. Polanski’s film, reviewed here when it was released on Blu-ray in 2014, was also more violent and bloody than many viewers expected, but expectations have changed. This new film is clearly drawing comparisons with the realities of modern warfare: Scottish castles are replaced with tented encampments, for instance, and the Daily Mail article referred to above describes Fassbender’s Macbeth as a “traumatized war-hero”.

Mike D’Angelo’s review notes that no film adaptation alters the meaning of Shakespeare’s play, and suggests “Macbeth has been adapted for the screen a number of times since 1971, but not memorably; we’re long overdue for a contemporary version by a major director.” By the end of October we’ll know if this is it.

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Shakespeare Conferences

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Sylvia Morris

britgrad 2015Summer has arrived right on cue in Stratford-upon-Avon, with blue skies and warm temperatures encouraging people to picnic on the grass and take out boats on the Avon. Walking by the river late on Thursday afternoon I watched people learning to juggle, playing with frisbees, sitting and talking about theatre performances and celebrating birthdays.

It’s also conference time in Shakespeare’s town. I had spent the afternoon at the Shakespeare Institute where the Britgrad Conference was under way, helping raise funds for the victims of the Nepal Earthquake by selling cakes to the conference delegates.

Billed as “The seventeenth annual British Shakespeare Conference for Graduate Students, by Graduate Students” Britgrad has become a bit of an institution, and long may it continue. With the emphasis on students and academics at the start of their careers the conference has a lovely informal atmosphere, From our stall in the conservatory I could see students lunching on the grass in the beautiful garden, watched over by the bust of Shakespeare surrounded by peonies. The main business of every conference goes on within the lecture halls and seminar rooms, but the breaks between the papers are where the networking goes on.

Every two years the Shakespeare Institute hosts an international conference of a very different kind, to which only 200 or so invited delegates are admitted. Many of the world’s most eminent Shakespeare academics gather together at these conferences at the height of summer. They’ve been going on for well over sixty years, but next year, 2016, there’s to be a change.

wsc2016-logo1For the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death the World Shakespeare Congress is to hold its conference in Stratford and London over a week in July and August 2016.

The Conferences are organised by the International Shakespeare Association, founded at a congress held in Vancouver in 1971. From the organisation’s website, “The first ISA World Shakespeare Congress took place in Washington in 1976 as part of the American bicentennial celebrations.  Since the Washington meeting, the ISA has continued to stage World Congresses at five-year intervals: “Shakespeare, Man of the Theatre” (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1981); “Images of Shakespeare” (Berlin, 1986); “Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions” (Tokyo, 1991); “Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century” (Los Angeles, 1996); “Shakespeare and the Mediterranean” (Valencia, 2001); “Shakespeare’s World/World Shakespeares” (Brisbane, 2006); “Renaissance Shakespeare: Shakespeare Renaissances” (Prague, 2011)”. The 2016 Congress will be on the subject “Creating and Recreating Shakespeare”. Registration has recently opened at an Early Bird rate, and a list of the seminars and workshops finalised so far has been released.

In Stratford, morning plenaries will be held at the 1000-seater Royal Shakespeare Theatre, after which I note there will be an opportunity for “refreshment and networking”. Other venues will include Shakespeare’s School, the Shakespeare Centre and the Institute. After the first three days delegates will be bussed to London for events at the British Library, Shakespeare’s Globe, the new Sam Wanamaker Theatre at the Globe, and Guy’s Campus at King’s College London.

The two-centre conference will offer a contrasting week, moving from the intimate, rural town to the metropolis, just as Shakespeare did himself. In Stratford delegates will be able to see and even hold discussions of his work in some of the actual buildings he knew. Then in the hopefully warm summer evenings they’ll be able to walking by the river, making an even closer connection to the “Sweet Swan of Avon”.

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Burghley, Gerarde and Shakespeare examined again

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
The title page of Gerarde's Herball, 1597

The title page of Gerarde’s Herball, 1597

Last week the second of Mark Griffiths’ pieces about Gerarde’s Herball and its connections with Shakespeare was published in Country Life, and I’m grateful to friends for lending me copies of both. They’ve made interesting reading: Griffiths is  extremely knowledgeable about the history of plants and their allegorical significance, and his analysis of the Gerarde 1597 title page is worth reading whether or not it has anything to do with Shakespeare.

The second essay, entitled “A Country Controversy” harks back to May 1591 when Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley, entertained the Queen and her court at his house in Hertfordshire, Theobalds. The event went on for 10 days and cost him a fortune. It was successful, however, in reasserting Cecil as the Queen’s chief minister and launching his son Robert’s political career. During the event a short allegorical dialogue was staged between “The Gardener” and “The Molecatcher”, in which the Queen is asked to adjudicate between them over a jewel box which has been dug up in Robert’s garden. The Gardener has created order in the garden, “to do all things that may bring pleasure and profit”, and the Molecatcher  acts as policeman: “Good clerks told me that moles in fields were like ill subjects in commonwealths” says the Molecatcher.

This quaint device, hardly a play, is anonymous, so has Griffiths uncovered any evidence that it’s by Shakespeare? Sadly it’s all internal evidence: the metaphor of the country as a garden, often used by Shakespeare, the use of some legal language, and some words used by him. I’d feel happier if Griffiths’ tone was less confident: “Its star turn, however, would never be matched again. He was not a guest, but a hired hand, a 27-year-old actor and writer in the throes of the most important career launch in theatrical history”.  Accepting this as an early work by Shakespeare depends entirely on the first essay’s success in connecting Shakespeare, Gerarde and Burghley.

Detail from the 1597 title page of Gerarde's Herball

Detail from the 1597 title page of Gerarde’s Herball

I’ve very much enjoyed reading the first piece: beautifully-illustrated, the essay is 17 pages long and concentrates on decoding the title page of the 1597/8 first edition of Gerarde’s Herball. In so doing, he uncovers details which he says haven’t been noticed before. The oval panel at the bottom of the page represents Burghley’s garden at Theobalds, and the couple walking in it are the Queen and Gerarde. The identification is confirmed by the Tudor rose, the eglantine (associated with Elizabeth), and an olive tree (associated with Burghley). At least some of the men of the page are both figures from the bible or classical antiquity as well as contemporaries, so the figure at top left is both Adam, the first gardener, and Gerarde himself. Below him stands the figure of Solomon, or Burghley, to whom the volume is dedicated. The plants held by the men are significant, but this is where the identification of the mystery man in the bottom right becomes strained. One of his plants is sweetcorn or maize which has no particular link with Shakespeare. The cipher on the plinth on which the man stands could only read “Shakespeare” if the person reading it knew that the Shakespeare coat of arms, only granted a year before, had a golden ground (OR).

Following  Griffiths’ own suggestions, the page can be read as a compliment to the Queen, Burghley and Gerarde. What would Shakespeare, a young man in a profession that was barely respectable, and almost unknown, be doing in such distinguished company?

Griffiths speculates about Shakespeare’s role: “Shakespeare began working for Burghley and Gerard started supplying him with information about plants and horticulture…[Gerard] wished to include scores of quotations from Latin and Greek poetry in The Herball accompanied by verse translations..Working closely with him, Shakespeare moulded the results into verse piecemeal between 1591 and 1597”. Appealing though this is, there is no evidence of this relationship.

Gerarde himself actually contradicts it: in “to the courteous and well-willing readers”,  he writes: “Faults I confesse have escaped, some by the Printers oversight, some through defects in my selfe to perform so great a work, and some by means of the greatnesse of the Labour, and that I was constrained to seeke after my living, being void of friends to beare some part of the burthen.” In other words, he didn’t have any assistants, so there was no reason to put Shakespeare on the title page.

As I write, academics are examining the page afresh and entering in the discussions. To me, the young man bearing newly-discovered or recently-imported plants seems to symbolise the world of exploration. He looks out of the page not because, as Griffiths suggests, he’s an actor, but because he’s looking to the future, and the discoveries the reader will find when the turns the pages of the book. And it would be appropriate for the printer, John Norton, who must have undertaken a huge amount of work to create this massive book, to be acknowledged on the plinth.

Mark Griffiths’ book on Burghley, Gerarde and Shakespeare will be published in 2016, and he is also working with Edward Wilson from Worcester College Oxford on an edition of the Theobalds entertainment and the verse translations in the Herball.

If you’d like to follow this up here are some links:

There is some lovely stuff on early herbals here.

Here’s another suggestion for the meaning of the cipher

The TLS blog has hundreds of comments on the controversy.

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Rosalinds in Arden

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Michelle Terry as Rosalind and Simon Harrison as Orlando at Shakespeare's Globe 2015. Photo by Tristram Kenton

Michelle Terry as Rosalind and Simon Harrison as Orlando at Shakespeare’s Globe 2015. Photo by Tristram Kenton

Michelle Terry is blasting her way through Shakespeare’s forthright heroines. Having spent the winter playing Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, both for the RSC in Stratford, she is now taking on Shakespeare’s most “feisty female protagonist”, Rosalind in As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe, to great acclaim.

On paper, As You Like It sounds like a blandly pretty pastoral romance with its shepherds and shepherdesses and comic rustics. It’s true that not a lot happens in the play in the dramatic sense, but I’ve always loved it for what goes on under the skin of the characters, and Arden rises above being just a pretty forest into a place where anything is possible. Susannah Clapp, in her Guardian review, describes the play as “St Crispin’s Day for girls”.

Radio 4’s Front Row on Monday 25 May looked at As You Like It from the viewpoint of three Rosalinds: Michelle Terry, Juliet Stevenson and Niamh Cusack. Stevenson and Cusack played the role for the RSC in Stratford in 1985 and 1996 respectively. Towards the end of the 1980s Carol Rutter interviewed a group of women who between them had played most of Shakespeare’s young women, in her book Clamorous Voices. My favourite chapter is the one about As You Like It, which focuses on that 1985 production, and most of the quotes that follow are from it. Stevenson described Arden as “a metaphor, a landscape of the imagination and a realm of possibility, a place where gender definitions can be turned on their heads”. The Court of the first few scenes is “structured around traditionally male values, …a place where the idea of having a good time is …to watch two men bashing the life out of each other, [where] … violence …characterises many of the relationships”.

Juliet Stevenson as Rosalind, Fiona Shaw as Celia, RST 1985

Juliet Stevenson as Rosalind, Fiona Shaw as Celia, RST 1985

Then the girls, Celia and Rosalind, escape to Arden. “In Shakespeare, whenever you go into the country you’re going into an anarchic territory where social structures don’t apply….Anything can happen there”. In 1985 “Our Arden didn’t have trees or logs. It had mirrors, a clock that didn’t tick – because time is suspended there – and swags of white silk that could be used in many ways, to create many images. It was a place that allowed for chaos”…”almost like the projected imagination”.

In her interview, Stevenson notes that the setting wasn’t always helpful, and I remember the visual metaphors occasionally being a bit strained, but it allowed Stevenson’s cheeky Rosalind, dressed in a baggy white suit, to take off, and for an examination of the core of the play. Juliet Stevenson again: “I’d always suspected that there’s a much more dangerous play in As You Like It. A subversive play, one that challenges notions of gender, that asks questions about the boundaries and qualities of our “male” and “female” natures”. One of the great bonuses was the relationship between Rosalind and Celia (Fiona Shaw). “I had never seen this friendship fully explored”. It’s the “greatest female friendship in all of Shakespeare”. Stanley Wells, in his book Sex and Shakespeare, supposes that “Lesbians might be especially interested in the relationship between Celia and Rosalind in As You Like It“, but there’s no suggestion of an erotic relationship in it or in any of those female friendships: Beatrice and Hero, Helena and Hermia. It’s acutely observed, right down to the way in which Celia feels betrayed by her friend as she falls in love. Carol Rutter’s chapter quotes Sinead Cusack as Celia in 1980. “She’s leaving me; that closeness and that intimacy are going, and I don’t want it to. I’m hurt”. Celia, more dominant at the start of the play, becomes a spectator. In 1985 the two became friends in real life “The only way to do this play was to do it together”, comments Fiona Shaw.

Liam Cunningham as Orlando, Niamh Cusack as Rosalind, RST 1996

Liam Cunningham as Orlando, Niamh Cusack as Rosalind, RST 1996

Their relationship is just one of the forms of love within the play. Juliet Stevenson again: “The love of an old shepherd for a young shepherd. The love of one girl for another. The love of a poet for a shepherdess. The love of an old servant for his master, and his master for him. It’s about all those people”. It’s most, though, about the love between Rosalind and Orlando. Both Niamh Cusack and Juliet Stevenson have described Rosalind as their favourite Shakespeare role, and in Front Row they separately picked out the same few lines as the ones they most enjoyed performing:
O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.

Over at Shakespeare’s Globe, according to the Guardian review, “At its big, beating, skittish heart is Michelle Terry’s winning Rosalind, who walks about in a daze and is lost as soon as Simon Harrison’s Orlando removes his shirt for the wrestling match.” It goes on to describe her Rosalind’s “emotional recklessness” and “unaffected openness”: it sounds like an unmissable performance of this terrific role.

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More matter for a May morning: Gerarde’s Herball and Shakespeare

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Sylvia Morris
Detail from the 1597 title page of Gerarde's Herball

Detail from the 1597 title page of Gerarde’s Herball

After a few days away out of reach of the internet I returned home to find a new Shakespeare controversy had erupted. Country Life, not normally known for its Shakespeare content, had published a “Special Historic Edition” on 20 May 2015. An article by historian Mark Griffiths proposes that the title page of John Gerarde’s Herball dating from 1597 contains a portrait of William Shakespeare.

Country Life regularly contains articles about gardening, books, and art, so this isn’t completely out of their usual subject area. But the editor must know that there’s nothing like a story claiming to have discovered something new about Shakespeare, particularly if it includes the solving of a four-hundred-year-old mystery by the unpicking of clues and ciphers.

Now I haven’t read the full article, though I have read several accounts of it from The Guardian on 19 May, 20 May, and 22 May, and Country Life itself has published three online articles over the past few days. The first contains a video explaining the article, the second puts forward more evidence, and the third includes extra details. Each of these articles contain many comments on the claims of the article and, often, further explanation by Mark Griffiths.

Reactions have been predictable. Shakespearean experts have been patronising and often downright rude towards Mr Griffiths, who has spent years researching this subject. His articles, and the responses to comments received online show that although he may not be an academic he has examined in considerable detail many title pages of books, printers’ marks and other early modern works. Oxfordians and traditionalists are having their own arguments about the subject, ignoring Mr Griffiths’ protestation that the portrait is definitely not the Earl of Oxford.

The title page of Gerarde's Herball, 1597

The title page of Gerarde’s Herball, 1597

So what is all this about? Mark Griffiths has been working on a biography of John Gerarde, whose Herball is one of the best-known of botanical works. The first edition, published in London, bears a richly ornamental allegorical title page dated 1597 and Mark Griffiths decided to try to unravel the meaning of this page including the identity of the four male figures on it. One of these, he believes, is an early portrait of Shakespeare. He links the plants held by this figure, his Roman costume, his laurel wreath, and the cipher beneath him, to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Titus Andronicus, and to his own name.

It would be lovely to believe that Shakespeare did work with Gerarde: the book is largely a translation of an earlier book by Dodoens and Griffiths suggests he might have helped translate it into English. It would fit with Shakespeare’s love of plants, and we could imagine Shakespeare visiting the older man at the College of Physicians’ physic garden in Chelsea or at his garden in Holborn.

A later title page, supposed to be identical to that from Dodoens, 1583

A later title page, supposed to be identical to that from Dodoens, 1583

But without any evidence for this relationship, there’s no explanation for the existence of a portrait of Shakespeare on this title page. Griffiths has suggested that all the evidence points towards Shakespeare, and only Shakespeare, but many of the comments posted on the Country Life site have suggested alternatives. The solution may have been suggested by James Wallace: ” Gerard’s source, the 1583 Antwerp Latin translation of Dodoens, provides a clear, labelled identification for each man”, and he quotes this description, though I’m not sure of its source: “This ornate title-frame depicts the biblical figures of Adam and Solomon (famous for naming plants), and, at their feet, the most famous ancient botanists: Theophrastus and Dioscorides… The title-frame had been bought by Plantin from the widow of the Antwerp printer Jan van Loe and had initially been used by Plantin for Rembert Dodoens’ Stirpium historiae pemptades sex, sive libri XXX published at Antwerp in 1583”. Other commentators are currently trying to verify this description: if nothing else this story shows how effective (and annoying) the internet can be as a tool for researchers.

The story isn’t over yet. This week’s issue, due out on 27 May, will contain another article by Mark Griffiths revealing a new play by Shakespeare. More bumpy rides lie ahead, and whatever the outcome Country Life‘s circulation, encouraged by their prominent half-price subscription offer, must have rocketed.

PS Many thanks to eagle-eyed Mairi Macdonald who has alerted me to Stanley Wells’ article in the Spectator suggesting an alternative for the bearded fourth man on the Gerarde title page.

AND Matthew Lyons’ excellent blog also considers this article: Matthew’s book on Ralegh, The Favourite, gives him particular insight into this title page.

 

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