Jeremy Irons and Shakespeare

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
Jeremy Irons as Henry IV in The Hollow Crown

Jeremy Irons as Henry IV in The Hollow Crown

Jeremy Irons is one of our most distinctive and charismatic actors, who has distinguished himself in a whole range of films and TV series. In recent years he’s helped to bring new audiences to Shakespeare with his depiction of Henry IV in the TV mini-series The Hollow Crown, and presented a programme on the Henry IV and Henry V plays in the Shakespeare Uncovered series. In this clip he performs the “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” speech from Henry IV Part 2. 

In a 2013 interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail Irons talked about his work, and the characters he chooses to play, “people who are covering pain, from childhood, relationships, whatever it may be, and getting on with it,” he says. “I’m attracted to characters who are covering. I’m not interested in characters who wear their hearts on their sleeves. I like the tension. I think of my characters as an advent calendar. The life is inside all those closed windows. Scene by scene you open and allow the audience to see in, just a little bit, and then you move on. That’s what I like to do.”
It’s easy to see why he agreed to play Shakespeare’s guilt-ridden, disappointed Henry IV.

Here too is a clip of him talking about the series, and another clip talking to him while on set filming The Hollow Crown.

He’s also been seen on our TV screens in the series The Borgias, and played Antonio in the 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino as Shylock. He has one of the most distinctive of voices and one of his best-known film roles was as Scar in the animated movie The Lion King, and apparently has provided voiceovers for several Disney World attractions.

He made his name in 1981 when he starred in the film of The French Lieutenant’s Woman opposite Meryl Streep, as well as appearing as one of the leading characters, Charles Ryder in the TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Within a year he was an established star. There’s a full biography on Wikipedia listing his many film and tv credits, and his numerous awards. He was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Awards for Best Actor for his role as Henry IV and has won BAFTAs and Golden Globe Awards.

Jeremy Irons in Richard II, 1986

Jeremy Irons in Richard II, 1986

He’s less well known for stage work, but in his early career he mixed TV work with theatre. He’s an accomplished musician, playing a variety of instruments: he did some busking before his career took off. One of his first successes was playing Judas in the musical Godspell that starred David Essex from 1971. I saw him in 1977 at the Piccadilly Theatre in London playing Harry Thunder in the RSC’s revival of John O’Keeffe’s joyous comedy Wild Oats, in a terrific cast that included Lewis Fiander as Rover, Norman Rodway, Zoe Wanamaker, Joe Melia and Lisa Harrow.

Then in 1986 he came to the RSC to play three roles: Richard II, Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, and Willmore in Aphra Behn’s The Rover.

Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack in The Rover

Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack in The Rover

I thought the one that showed him at his best was The Rover, a swashbuckling comedy in which he played opposite his real-life wife Sinead Cusack as well as the young Imogen Stubbs. Eric Shorter wrote “He sails through the amorous havoc and futility….with a beguiling swagger and a sense of ironical humour”, and Irving Wardle likened him to “an accident-prone Errol Flynn”. During the summer he and Sinead Cusack performed at Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival with a programme called Country Houses (obviously relating to Brideshead Revisited). I remember it being a tour de force, with Irons in particular making full use of his glorious voice, an impressive range of different accents and a terrific sense of humour.

Jeremy Irons is the President of the Stratford Shakespeare Club for the 2014-5 season, the Presidential Evening being on 11 November 2014 when he will be hosted by Roger Pringle who devised and directed the Poetry Festival programme mentioned above. The event is to be ticketed: members are guaranteed places and any tickets not taken will be available to buy on the night. It should be a wonderful evening. Details of membership are on the Club’s website

 

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Taking notes: Shakespeare and table-books

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
Edwin Booth as Hamlet

Edwin Booth as Hamlet

In the latest edition of Theatre Notebook, published by the Society for Theatre Research, June Schlueter* considers the connection between Hamlet’s “tables”, and the two exceedingly rare drawings that have come down to us showing us what the Elizabethan playhouse looked like, The De Witt drawing and the Peacham drawing.

She considers, first, what table-books were like, quoting an essay by Peter Stallybrass and others published in Shakespeare Quarterly in 2004. So completely have table-books disappeared from our world that the essay was necessary to explain how these once-common objects looked and were used. These were small pocket-sized notebooks, the pages waxed so that one could write or sketch using a stylus with a metal point. They were used for making notes while on the move – the contents would be transferred to a more permanent form later, when ink and paper, and something to lean on, were available. The wax surface could then be wiped over and made ready for re-use. Apparently one survives in the Folger Shakespeare Library, a rare survival.

A search for contemporary references yields many hits, including advice for a gentleman as he checked the state of his fields, to “take out his tables, and wryte the defautes” and an observation by John Aubrey that Sir Philip Sidney “was often wont, as he was hunting…to take his table-book out of his pocket, and write down his notions”. Hamlet, too, talks about how notes could be made in a table book and later erased once it had been copied:
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there…
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables! Meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

The Peacham drawing

The Peacham drawing

Hamlet’s is not the only mention of tables in drama: in Antonio’s Revenge for instance there is a stage direction “Balurdo drawes out his writing tables, and writes”.  Schlueter considers the role of the table-book in the evolution of the two drawings of the theatres. It’s been noted that the Peacham drawing does not illustrate an exact moment in Titus Andronicus, but so rare is it that the depiction of people wearing a blend of Elizabethan and Roman dress is taken as firm evidence for how actors were costumed. There are mysteries about the manuscript: the image appears above a passage from the play which does not match up with the 1594 quarto. Was it added later? The image, in ink, must have been copied either from memory or from a sketch made on the spot in a table-book. Henry Peacham who made the book made many drawings and even wrote a guide to how to draw.

The De Witt drawing

The De Witt drawing

The De Witt drawing has a convoluted history. The original, now lost, was made by De Witt, and the image we now have is a copy of it made by Van Buchell. It shows the Swan Theatre and there has been much discussion about its accuracy. Schlueter suggests again that De Witt may have made his first sketch while in the theatre on his table-book, transcribing it when he had writing materials available. De Witt too spent much time making sketches of antiquities and from the evidence of those it seems likely that he made a further copy that he sent to Van Buchell which his friend re-copied. While this complexity of this process removes the sketch even further from the existing copy it could also remove the possibility of De Witt’s memory playing him false by ensuring he had an accurate image made on the spot.

There is far more in June Schlueter’s thoughtful essay* that may help to explain the process by which we are still able to see these two early sketches of the Elizabethan stage and if you’re interested it’s worth chasing it up. Their survival is indeed something of a miracle given the fragility of the images, particularly if the first version of both was made on a wax tablet to be erased.

Hill's Commonplace book from the Beinecke Library

Hill’s Commonplace book from the Beinecke Library

The notes made on a table-book would have been transcribed, probably into a commonplace book, used for keeping all kinds of writings. Schlueter quotes one in the British Library that contains “autographs and dedications… a miscellany of jottings…[and] instructions on making inks of various colours”. In the last few days the Beinecke Library at Yale University has posted on Twitter an image from a wonderful commonplace book in the Osborn collection compiled by Englishman William Hill in the 1570s. This link leads you to the digitised images of this amazing survivor, battered and heavily-used. Hill used it for practicing different kinds of handwriting as well as for keeping verses and mottoes. He seems to have favoured proverbs that reminded him of the transience of life. One reads “And whosoe withered is with yeares/ may not be yonge againe”, a sentiment that Shakespeare would have agreed with.

*June Schlueter. “Drawing in a Theatre: Peacham, De Witt, and the Table-book”. Theatre Notebook 68 (2014): 69-86.

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Two American Shakespeareans: James Hackett, father and son

Posted on August 13, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
James K Hackett

James K Hackett

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre contains a little memorial that has always interested me. Just by the fountain at the base of the spiral staircase is a plaque dedicated to The American actor James K Hackett, 1869-1926, “a generous benefactor to this theatre”. At the bottom it lists two performances, Macbeth, in London in 1920 and Othello, in Stratford in 1922.

The James Hackett that I recognise from engravings was an actor playing Falstaff: the image of him in The Merry Wives of Windsor is very well known. But these are of a comic actor dating from the middle of the nineteenth century.

 

James H Hackett as Falstaff

James H Hackett as Falstaff

James Henry Hackett was a well-known actor, famed for his Falstaff which he performed in the US and then in the UK on many occasions between 1833 and 1851. He was the first important American actor to be a success in England. He is also remembered because he made extensive notes about Edmund Kean’s performance of Richard III in around1828 and h notebook is a unique piece of evidence for Kean’s acting. Other Shakespearean roles included Hamlet, which he studied for several years. He entered into correspondence about the part with John Quincy Adams and was so proud of this connection with an American president that in 1863 he published their letters. At the age of 69, in 1869, he fathered a child who was aged only two when his father died in his native New York.

This son, James Katelkas Hackett was born in Ontario but lived mostly in New York. Early in his stage career he performed in Daly’s productions of The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night and later, at different times, played both Romeo and Mercutio. From 1896, he performed regularly on Broadway, assisted by his matinee idol looks. He starred in The Prisoner of Zenda, which subsequently became a silent film using the original cast. In 1914 he toured with a production of Othello and in the same year inherited well over a million dollars from his niece, giving him financial independence. For the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death in 1916 he planned to stage three of Shakespeare’s plays with himself in the lead: Macbeth, Othello and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The Macbeth received lukewarm reviews and he appeared in neither of the other plays. During the War (1917-18) he directed dramatic and musical entertainments for troops for the Catholic Knights of Columbus. Then in 1920 he made his London debut with a new production of Macbeth at the Aldwych Theatre with Mrs Patrick Campbell playing Lady Macbeth, and the following year played the same role at the Odeon in Paris for which he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur.

In 1922 he was offered the chance to play Othello at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. W Bridges-Adams’ letter, and Hackett’s reply, appeared in the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald of 21 April. Bridges-Adams suggested “You will be performing a valuable work in cementing still closer the bonds which unite the English-speaking races”, and Hackett accepted: “It will indeed be a great honour to essay Othello… on that hallowed ground”.

The plaque to James K Hackett at the RST

The plaque to James K Hackett at the RST

He pulled the American flag at the Birthday Celebrations, then gave just one performance, the matinee on Thursday 27 April. The play had already been performed in the Festival. Hackett’s wife played Desdemona and they were ably supported by Dorothy Green as Emilia and Baliol Holloway as Iago. The house was packed and “a great reception was accorded to the celebrated actor.” The Stratford Herald enthused “Mr Hackett is the possessor of a regal figure and noble presence. His voice is sonorous, mellow and of rich timbre, and is used with fine modulation – love, scorn and rage being all expressed without effort”. The Times agreed: “The great scenes are for him music to be played with every instrument at his command. His voice is rich and splendid: his every movement bold and full… [He gives] a full-blooded performance”.

The Birmingham Mail described how after half a dozen curtain calls for each of the principals, “Then the curtain rose once more to reveal the whole company grouped around the massive, picturesquely-garbed figure of Mr Hackett, who was supported also by Mr Archie Flower, chairman of the Memorial Governors, and Mr W Bridges-Adams, the director of the company. Mr Hackett carried two large wreaths of bay, while the arms of his wife (Miss Beatrice Beckley), were overladen quite with gorgeous bouquets… Followed a few moments of speech-making… during which the famous visitor remarked upon the consistent friendliness and appreciation extended to him in England”.

James K Hackett’s vocal prowess is remembered by The Department of Education of the City of New York which still awards the annual James K Hackett medal to a student who demonstrates “the greatest proficiency in oratory, either verse or prose”.

Hackett died in a Paris hotel in 1926 aged 57. It seems he used his inherited fortune  to make many bequests to the arts, including the University and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.

James K Hackett as Edward II on the Marlowe memorial

James K Hackett as Edward II on the Marlowe memorial

There’s another monument to James K Hackett in England: it’s the one to Christopher Marlowe in Canterbury, his birthplace, which was unveiled by Sir Henry Irving in 1891. The bronze figure represents the muse of Dramatic Poetry, and the niches were filled only in 1928 with four small bronzes of actors in roles in Marlowe’s plays: Irving as Tamburlaine, Johnston Forbes-Robertson as Faustus, James K Hackett as Edward II and Edward Alleyn as the Jew of Malta. Strangely, as far as I can tell none of the actors apart from Alleyn ever performed the role in which they are portrayed. If anyone knows what the connection between Hackett and Marlowe’s play was I’d love to hear from you.

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Harvest time in Shakespeare’s England

Posted on August 11, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
A detail from Breughel's The Hay Harvest

A detail from Breughel’s The Hay Harvest

For once the English summer hasn’t let us down and until the last few days we’ve enjoyed weeks of fine, warm weather. August is harvest-time. In The Tempest, Shakespeare writes of the “sunburnt sickle men, of August weary”, and tell them to “Make holiday! Your rye-straw hats put on”.

Francis Bacon, in Of Gardens, writes “In August come plums of all sorts in fruit, pears, apricots, barberries, filberts, musk-melons, monkhoods of all colours”, and Nicholas Breton, in Fantasticks, written about 1600, defines the month:
It is now August, and the sun is somewhat towards his declination, yet such is his heat as hardeneth the soft clay, dries up the standing ponds, withereth the sappy leaves and scorches the skin of the naked: now begin the gleaners to follow the corn cart, and a little bread to a great deal of drink makes the travailers dinner: the Melon and the cucumber is now in request: and the oil and vinegar give attendance to the sallet herbs: the Alehouse is more frequented than the Tavern, and a fresh river is more comfortable than a fiery furnace…and in the fair rivers, swimming is a sweet exercise…the Furmenty pot welcomes home the Harvest cart, and the Garland of flowers crowns the Captain of the Reapers… In sum, for that I find, I thus conclude, I hold it the world’s welfare, and the earth’s Warming pan. Farewell.

Bacon and Breton both clearly enjoy eating the produce that ripens at this time of year: Breton’s salad sound very much like our own, and I like the way he likens this time a year to a warming pan – it’s a lovely image.

But to get close to the life and experience of the working Tudor, you can’t beat Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandrie, written in sometimes painful verse.

August from a book of hours

August from a book of hours

Under “Good harvest points” he suggests:
Reape well, scatter not, gather cleane that is shone,
  binde fast, shock apace, have an eie to thy corne.
Lode safe, carrie home, follow time being faire,
  gove just in the barne, it is out of despaire.

He offers advice about timing your harvest:
If weather be faire, and tidie thy graine,
  make speedily carrege, for feare of a raine:
For tempest and showers deceiveth a menie,
  and lingering lubbers loose many a penie.

Harvest is also a time for remembering the poor, who traditionally are allowed to glean or pick up grains that have been dropped in the field:
Corne carried, let such as be poore go and gleane,
  and after, thy cattle to mowth it up cleane.
Then spare it for rowen, till Mihel be past,
  to lengthen thy dairie no better thou hast.

And harvest is a time to be generous to all:
Once ended thy harvest, let none be begilde,
  please such as did help thee, man, woman, and child.
Thus dooing, with always such help as they can,
  thou winnest the praise of the labouring man.

Tusser’s book was published in 1573, and Geoffrey Grigson, in his introduction to the Oxford University Press edition sums up its charm: “We can, if pre-industrial country life interests us, savour the pure enjoyment of seeing how farms looked in these Tudor years, how farming and farmers’ wives proceeded. Here is the farmer sitting to his food, according to season…Allow our eyes a little extra vision and Tusser takes us to ploughing and fallowing, to weeding the growing crops in May and June, ridding them as much as the farmer can from poppies and corncockle and boddles (corn marigolds), from titchis (vetches), [and] bracken.

Iris’s speech in The Tempest comes to mind:
Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas
Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and pease;

And Lear, when mad, is found in fields full of ripening corn:
             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.

It’s harder for us to connect with these speeches than it would have been in Shakespeare’s day, but we’re helped by Tusser and the other writers describing the life and concerns of country folk.

NB Click here to go to the reference for the image of the Book of Hours above

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Stratford, the Shakespeare Revival and World War 1

Posted on August 8, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
Morris dancing on the Avon in The Shakespeare Revival

Morris dancing on the Avon in The Shakespeare Revival

I have on my shelves a book entitled The Shakespeare Revival: the Stratford-upon-Avon Movement, probably acquired by my father in a second-hand shop years ago.  It’s always puzzled me.

The book was published in 1911, and seems to expect the reader to know about something known as the Stratford-upon-Avon Movement, and to understand why Shakespeare needed a revival. But even after years of being surrounded by Shakespeare in Stratford it was a mystery to me. What was this movement, and what happened to it? And who was the author, Reginald R Buckley? As I’m researching the history of Shakespeare celebrations in Stratford I felt this was the moment to find out.

The book’s and message is evangelical. The introduction is written by the Director of the Shakespeare Festivals, F R Benson, in which he outlines his dream for the Stratford festival: “On to the green of the Bancroft dance the singing children of Stratford and the neighbouring villages. Young and old to the number of some thousands follow after to see the final ceremony, to tune their hearts to the rhythm of the final dance, and carry back to their homes the human harmony of the final song”.

He imagines Stratford becoming the centre of world reconciliation, based on Shakespeare and the Anglo-Celtic race. “the discipline of the Teuton, the primitive vigour of the Slav, the enterprise of the Scandinavian, the mystic reverence of the Oriental”.  The main part of the book is a section by Buckley entitled “The Nature of Drama”, with chapters on such subjects as “The Spirit of Shakespeare”, “A Temple of Dreams: a personal reverie”, “Wagner and his relation to Shakespeare”, and “Choral art and the Theatre”. The final section is by Mary Neal with chapters on The Stratford-upon-Avon Festival Movement and its Developments and The Revival of Folk Art. The book ends with advice on “How to take part in the Movement”.

Dedicated to the governors of the SMT it appears to have been a plea for them to throw their weight behind the movement. I consulted a recently-published book, The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare’s Wake, by Adam Putz, that suggests Buckley had a very political aim, based on the socialist ideas of Ruskin and Morris. Indeed Frank Benson’s foreword says as much, without actually mentioning politics: “I am very proud to be asked to write a Foreword to a work published by a firm so long associated with the name of John Ruskin. Proud that our work at Stratford should be regarded… as part of that campaign against the unloveliness of modern life”.

Putz also suggests that both Benson and Buckley use the language and celebration of Shakespeare to promote an “image of Britain’s imperial supremacy”. Benson certainly draws on the idealised image of Stratford as part of old England: “through a frame of rush and willow, yew and cedar and elm, the spire of the church looks down on the mill where Celt, Roman, Saxon and Dane, Norman and Englishman for centuries have ground their harvest”.

Since 1905 folk traditions had been part of the Benson’s Shakespeare festivals, with Elizabethan dancing, Morris men, Maypole dancing and wrestling. They reached a peak in 1911, the same year the book was published. A month-long Summer School of Folk-song and Dance took place between under the direction of Cecil J Sharp between 22 July and 19 August. Over two hundred participants came to Stratford from Scotland, France, Canada, England, the USA and Holland. The participants’ days were spent learning and performing folk songs and dances, listening to lectures, and exhibitions were given by a number of participants.

Rutland Boughton

Rutland Boughton

Searching for information about Buckley, I discovered he was a poet and author who often worked as a librettist with the socialist composer Rutland Boughton. Together in 1908 they co-wrote a book, The Music Drama of the Future and, much influenced by the Wagner and the Bayreuth festivals they collaborated on a choral drama entitled The Birth of Arthur. They first discussed setting up a theatre in Letchworth Garden City, and the Rutland Boughton Music Trust still exists. Their website contains a great deal of information about Boughton who was one of the most prolific of English composers, dying in 1960.

Stratford, with Benson’s enthusiasm for the folk movement and allied Celtic Revival, was another possible venue, hence The Shakespeare Revival. It appears, though, that Stratford-upon-Avon did not warm sufficiently to these ideas, and in 1914 Boughton instead founded the first ever Glastonbury Festival which continued annually until 1926, supported by Edward Elgar and George Bernard Shaw. Although Glastonbury didn’t then have its New Age reputation it was already a magnet for those interested in Arthurian legend. There is to be a celebration of the centenary in Glastonbury at the end of August.

Glastonbury Tor

Glastonbury Tor

The biggest success of the Glastonbury Festival was The Immortal Hour, first performed just after war had been declared, on 26 August 1914. In 1922 the opera received 216 consecutive performances and was restaged in New York a few years later. In London the opera launched the career of the young Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies who went on to be a memorable Juliet in Shakespeare’s play. It’s a fantasy, in which magic and spirits play important parts. Fairies are not the mischievous imps of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but proud, immortal demigods. The Finborough Theatre in London is currently staging a centenary production of The Immortal Hour that will run between 10 and 26 August.

And remembering that this week we are commemorating the start of the First World War, here is a link to a poem by Reginald Buckley which he published on 13 August 1914, days after war had been declared.

And finally, since posting this I’ve been informed about two other books: Michael Hurd’s Rutland Boughton and the Glastonbury Festivals, and a book due to be published soon by Roger Savage on twentieth century music dramas.  I hadn’t realised when I began this post how much active interest there is in this subject.

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Early American visitors to Stratford-upon-Avon

Posted on August 6, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
The birthplace in the early nineteenth century

The birthplace in the early nineteenth century

Americans have visited Stratford on the Shakespeare trail since the very earliest days. Many thousands visited in the years between the Garrick Jubilee that began the popularisation of Stratford and the purchase of Shakespeare’s Birthplace in 1847. Between 7 and 11 April 1786 two men who were to become presidents of the USA, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, made a journey together from London to the Midlands, passing through Oxford and Blenheim before reaching Stratford. According to his wife, Mr Adams fell on the ground and kissed it when he reached the Birthplace: Jefferson, always careful with his money, thought the entrance fee to the Birthplace too high.

Jefferson and Adams were both in Europe on diplomatic and trade business. Adams was well known for his interest in Shakespeare and passed it on to his son, another future president, John Quincy Adams. The Folger Shakespeare library’s website contains a fascinating page detailing the many links between American presidents and Shakespeare.

Another famous early American visitor was writer Washington Irving, feted on both sides of the Atlantic. He lived in Europe from 1815 to 1832, publishing The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. between 1819 and 1820. In these essays he paid tribute to Shakespeare, and described his visits to Stratford where he stayed at the Red Horse Hotel (Marks and Spencer retains its frontage).

During this period, between 1769 and about 1850, there were no permanent organisations to care for the town’s Shakespearean heritage. The Shakespearean Club set up in 1824 began to change this, originally formed to arrange celebrations of Shakespeare’s birthday, within a few years it took on more responsibilities and looked to attract funds to pay for improvements. The Birthday celebrations needed to bring in acts and personalities to attract a wider audience. Expensive costumes were hired from London theatres, and high-profile entertainers were brought in. The first American to take part in Birthday celebrations was “Mr Blackmore (the American) of the Royal Gardens, Vauxhall” who in 1830 was to “perform an astonishing ascent to the enormous height of near 80 feet, on the Tight Rope”.

George Jones

George Jones

In 1835 the young American actor George Jones, always known as “The American Tragedian” attended the dinner celebrating Shakespeare’s Birthday. A toast was proposed to him as a representative of the American theatre. His response, reported in the Warwick Advertiser, was pretty pedestrian stuff, but Jones must have impressed because in 1836 he was invited to deliver the First Annual Jubilee Oration. The speech went on for two hours, the published text being fifty-two pages long. It was delivered at the Theatre in Chapel Lane, the boxes being reserved for Ladies,  followed by dinner at Shakespeare’s Hall (at which Ladies were not allowed).

In his speech Jones suggested that America’s greatest asset is the language of Shakespeare, inherited from England: she “hath within  her heart a secret pride, which she would not exchange for any, in visionary thought, or stern reality: – it is a pride posterity will find within her laws; penned within her archives; and traced upon the tablet of her fame. – It is a pride breathing through her very language”.

The high-profile aim of the Club was to raise funds to repair the chancel of Holy Trinity Church and its memorials to the Shakespeare family, for which is set up the Shakespearean Monumental Committee, with a London counterpart. For Jones’s oration, the National Standard of the United States flew above the stage alongside the Union Jack, and Jones donated the American flag to Stratford for it to be flown in future at the Birthday. There must have been a hope that this would encourage donations from the United States. As far as I’ve found, this was the first time the American flag was flown in Stratford: it was not until 1907 that foreign flags were flown on Shakespeare’s birthday, though in 1896 the US Ambassador attended the Birthday luncheon.

The 1836 poem The Pilgrim of Avon (written by Jones under the pseudonym Leigh Cliffe) imagines a pilgrim falling asleep in the birthroom. A footnote to the poem reads “my valued and enthusiastic friend, Mr George Jones, actually passed the night of the 25th of April 1835, on the oaken floor of the room in which the Bard was born; being, I believe, the first person that has ever done so since the room has been shewn”. The custodian seems to have thought it unusual, but not irregular, and presumably Jones paid well for the privilege. Just a couple of nights before, Jones had taken part in that dinner at Shakespeare’s Hall.

The auction for the Birthplace. Jones is the tall man near the back on the left

The auction for the Birthplace. Jones is the tall man near the back on the left

George Jones liked to be provocative, and was not a reliable friend to Stratford. The story above is told in Julia Thomas’s book Shakespeare’s Shrine, as is the story that at  the time of the sale of the Birthplace in 1847 Jones organised a “People’s Central Committee ” to raise money to buy the house. His attempt to raise funds by appealing to the working classes was mocked, and Jones was seen as a showman. He formed an alliance with American circus-owner P T Barnum who proposed taking the Birthplace to the USA, though it is never clear whether this was a serious challenge. At the auction of the house in September 1847 Jones retaliated, attempting to disrupt proceedings by calling on the auctioneer to prove that Shakespeare had been born in the house.

In spite of Jones’s tactlessness, Americans have always been welcome and generous visitors. Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to be looking at other contributions made by Americans to Shakespeare’s Stratford.

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Children at war

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
Lyse Doucet with Daad, one of the children she followed

Lyse Doucet with Daad, one of the children she followed

Lyse Doucet’s recent BBC2 documentary, Children of Syria made gruelling viewing. She had spent six months following several displaced children in Syria. The children spoke with dignity and maturity beyond their years: all were aware that their childhoods have been lost, their lives changed forever by the country’s civil war. This was the Guardian’s review of the programme.

Maybe the timing of the documentary, just a week before the commemoration of the outbreak of WW1, was deliberate: close enough to provide food for thought without detracting from the centenary itself. When they scheduled it though they couldn’t have known how the conflict in Gaza would intensify, with United Nations-run schools being bombed, greatly increasing the number of civilian casualties especially children.

Children are always casualties of war.  In WW1 some children signed up (I believe the youngest was 13), but at least in the UK those who were affected were indirect casualties, mostly the children of servicemen who were killed or injured. On the continent children must have been displaced when their towns became war zones.

Constance and Arthur from Shakespeare and Company's 2005 production of King John

Constance and Arthur from Shakespeare and Company’s 2005 production of King John

Shakespeare shows us many children affected by war. In King John, Arthur is a pawn of the conflicts between warring adults, his life threatened because he is politically useful –  he could be put on the throne by the faction against the King. He’s an indirect casualty of the adult conflict, and his mother Constance speaks of her loss:
  …therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.

In the final part of Shakespeare’s great trilogy about civil war, Henry VI Part 3, two children are used in a tit for tat battle. In revenge for his father’s death at the hands of York, Clifford in turn kills York’s youngest son, Rutland. When York is captured and brought before Queen Margaret, in one of the cruellest scenes of this desolate play she taunts him with a cloth soaked in the blood of his son:
And if thine eyes can water for his death,
I give thee this to dry thy cheeks withal.

York responds:
O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!
How could thou drain the life-blood of the child,
To bid the father wipe his eyes withal,
And yet be seen to bear a woman’s face?

Later, in retaliation for her action, Margaret’s son Prince Edward is stabbed to death before her eyes. She accuses his killers:
Butchers and villains! bloody cannibals!
How sweet a plant have you untimely cropp’d!
You have no children, butchers; if you had,
The thought of them would have stirr’d up remorse:
But if you ever chance to have a child,
Look in his youth to have him so cut off
As, deathsmen, you have rid this sweet young prince!
The cycle of violence continues.

And in Henry V, amid the battles, the non-combatant boys are brought into the conflict. During the battle of Agincourt the French attack the English camp and kill the boys. Fluellen, always one for playing strictly by the rules, is outraged: “Kill the boys and the luggage! ‘Tis expressly against the law of arms”.

Unlike the other boys killed in war, who hardly have time to establish themselves as characters, the boy in Henry V has become familiar to the audience. Back in London he had announced the Falstaff’s final illness, and he’s associated with Mistress Quickly and the other low-life characters.  In France he shows himself to be more grown-up than Bardolph, Pistol and Nym who he serves, and like the children of Syria, adult before his time: “As young as I am, I have observed these three swaggerers. I am boy to them all three, but all they three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me, for indeed three such antics do not amount to a man”. They encourage him to steal “which makes much against my manhood”.

Doucet’s documentary is heartbreaking, and a worthy contribution to the  current commemorations of war. While we honour those who gave their lives and fought for what they hoped was a noble cause, we should also remember that war continues to bring tragedy to the lives of civilians and children. If you want to see her documentary, it is still available on IPlayer until the end of Monday 4 August.

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Folgerpedia: a new resource for Shakespeare

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
Folger Shakespeare Library

Folger Shakespeare Library

Washington D C’s Folger Shakespeare Library has just announced an exciting new initiative.   “Folgerpedia is the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collaboratively-edited encyclopedia of all things “Folger.” Articles address each topic as it relates to the Folger and the Folger collection. Folgerpedia began in 2014, and runs on the MediaWiki platform (the same software as Wikipedia).”

This blog post explains in more detail, and here are a couple of extracts from the post that explain a bit more about how you can join in:
Folgerpedia presents a source for information generated by you: readers, researchers, scholars, and Folger friends who wish to share your knowledge, your research process and its results, data you have generated using our collections, and more. We encourage you to share information on your favorite topics and to collaborate with others who share your interests while also learning from users who generate content on Folgerpedia….

Along with providing strong scholarly content, Folgerpedia acts as a repository for the Folger’s past performances and special events, exhibitions, seminars, colloquia and conferences. We have archived past programs from Folger Theatre, Folger Consort, O B Hardison Poetry Series, Folger Institute, and much more in Folgerpedia.

Folgerpedia-The articles on these topics in Folgerpedia grant access to information that has long needed a useful home. Now, researchers of all types—from casual visitors, undergraduates, Institute attendees, docents, staff members, and advanced scholars—can approach and work with the Folger in an entirely new way.

It’s a great idea: organising and describing the varied materials within a collection is difficult enough: organising information relating to items within the collection is another challenge. Catalogues aren’t the place to put information about how different items link to each other, or where a particularly elusive bit of information was found. At the Folger, expert staff have created masses of material to build exhibitions, write lectures, deliver education programs or answer enquiries. Nobody should ever have to do all that work again. My own blog has been a place for me to put some of the knowledge I’ve gleaned over the years, and to find and pull together linked information on particular subjects using the internet. But blogs are organised in a linear way, and linking by subject is clumsy: an encyclopaedia format like Wikipedia where articles can change over time is much better. And allowing readers to contribute significant information themselves means that it can grow quickly. For anyone who’s done any work on Wikipedia (and I’ve done a little), the editing process will be similar but Folgerpedia contributors will have to be approved before they get going.

And having worked in another major Shakespeare collection, I know that there is a lot of crossover between collections. I’m aware, for instance, that the Folger has much material from the nineteenth-century antiquarian Halliwell-Phillipps including a set of research notebooks on the plays related to those kept in Stratford and a set of detailed sketches made to show the restoration work on the Birthplace, that it has American impresario Augustin Daly’s set of volumes relating to his Shakespeare productions, while he presented a similar set to the theatre in Stratford, and that the Folger has recently acquired the Gordon Goode photographic archive relating to RSC productions in the 1960s.

Researchers at the Folger have often done research at other major Shakespeare collections: the British Library, Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, Birmingham Shakespeare Library, Shakespeare Institute Library, V&A Library, Dulwich College Library and many others. There’s tremendous potential to bring knowledge of the collections together. But even if all you want to do is look, do follow the links above to find the resources that are already available.

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Shakespeare’s mulberry and New Place

Posted on July 31, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
Shakespeare's mulberry

Shakespeare’s mulberry

My current research on the development of celebrations for Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon has really focused my attention on the importance of the historic mulberry tree and the site of New Place in the story of the preservation of Shakespeare’s town.

Both the original tree and the house were destroyed in the 1750s. The story is well known. The Reverend Francis Gastrell who lived at New Place became increasingly impatient with “pilgrims” wanting to see the mulberry tree which, by tradition, Shakespeare himself had planted in his garden. Eventually Gastrell was so fed up that he had the tree cut down and sold the wood  to the entrepreneurial Thomas Sharpe who turned it into many souvenirs. Items made from the tree almost assumed the status of holy relics: goblets and cups of mulberry wood continued to be used for toasts during the annual birthday dinners up to the 1840s.

Then Gastrell got into an argument with the local council over taxes. Gastrell’s response to anything he didn’t like seems to have been to destroy it. And so Shakespeare’s last home, or what remained of it (his actual house had already been replaced in about 1700), was knocked down.

I’ve always been rather sceptical about the story that Gastrell was drummed out of town following this action: the house stood almost next door to the Guild Hall where Council meetings were held: if feeling ran so high why wasn’t the demolition stopped? But I’ve been surprised to find the fate of the mulberry tree and New Place mentioned as a source of shame and as a warning to townspeople about the need for them to protect Shakespeare’s heritage against exploitation.

Garrick's mulberry wood casket

Garrick’s mulberry wood casket

Only a few years later the town built an impressive new Town Hall, a symbol of its aspirations. In order to show its loyalty to Shakespeare it invited the great Shakespearean actor David Garrick to donate a statue to decorate it. To woo him, he was offered the freedom of the borough, presented in a box made of the wood of the sacred mulberry tree. Garrick ran away with the idea and created the famous three-day Jubilee in 1769.

The tree itself was replaced by a “scion” or cutting of the original tree, and this still stands in New Place Garden. References to it begin to appear when the celebrations of his birthday began in earnest. It was an essential part of the 1830 “Temple of Shakespeare” which was set up “embracing and canopying his Mulberry tree within his garden of New Place”. This structure was compared with the elegant pleasure gardens of Ranelagh and Vauxhall.

In 1833 the Warwickshire Advertiser announced that there were to be celebrations in Stratford again: “Several of the gentlemen of the neighbourhood, as well as several visitors from Warwick, Birmingham and other towns, with a few admirers of Shakespeare from the metropolis, mean to join the townspeople of Stratford”. Marking the day was almost a religious duty: “The worthy Mayor, Thomas Mills, Esq. [is] …one who remembers the sacrilegious down-cutting and up-rooting of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree…and his younger fellow-townsmen will need no exhortation from us to support him”. The tree-felling to which it refers had happened 70 years previously.

The following year Dr Conolly made a passionate speech linking the mulberry tree with the issue of honouring Shakespeare’s memory in his town.
The ruin of Shakespeare’s house, that house in which he lived and died, the sacrilegious destruction of his Mulberry Tree, the loss of almost every relic of him… are all melancholy proofs that for a long time after his death there was either an indifference to his immortal memory, or the want of a Shakespearean Club to concentrate individual regard and give it an honorable utility. You cannot raise his mansion from the dust, nor restore the original colours of his monument, you cannot make the mulberry tree put forth the green leaves and crimson fruit once more, but his works, his unrivalled works remain… they flourish with a perpetual spring, and of their precious fruits men will gather to the end of time. 

By 1835 the Shakespearean Monumental Committee had been set up chaired by Dr Conolly. The immediate aim was to preserve the chancel of Holy Trinity Church with its Shakespearean graves, but the Committee was already thinking beyond that “even to the purchase of the site of New Place…a spot which, being yet unencroached upon, they are most desirous of guarding from new erections and consecrating to the memory of him whose name has rendered it in their estimation, hallowed ground”.

The site of New Place

The site of New Place

When the estate of New Place became available in 1861 historian Halliwell-Phillipps acquired it specifically in order to protect it.  He aimed to make the estate over to the Corporation of Stratford-on-Avon, laying down conditions that “the purchase [was to be] for the free use of the public for ever, of property which formerly belonged to Shakespeare …upon Trust, that the Public should for ever have free access, and that no building should ever be erected on it”.  As so often in the long story of the Shakespeare properties, it didn’t quite work out like this, and the property was made over to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 1875, after the small theatre that had been in the garden since 1827 had been demolished.

The site of New Place and its garden have indeed been left and remain almost unchanged. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is currently considering the future of the site. We may no longer see it as “hallowed ground”, but it is to be hoped that Halliwell-Phillipps’ intention to ensure the garden was  freely accessible to the public and the whole site clear of buildings will be honoured in this most atmospheric and historic corner of the town.

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Shakespeare and Stratford-upon-Avon in World War 1

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
Stratford's War Memorial

Stratford’s War Memorial

In Stratford, as in towns all over the UK, events are being held marking the beginning of the First World War. At Hall’s Croft, close to the peaceful garden containing the town’s War Memorial, a small exhibition has just opened that aims to connect memories of local events and people with Shakespeare, whose work was and still is used to encourage patriotic fervour, to rally troops in conflict, to comfort those in grief, and to bring harmony.

Among the sad photographs of young men in uniform, the medals, the telegram bringing the news of a soldier’s death, I was particularly struck by a book, Cecil Eldred Hughes’ 1904 compilation The Praise of Shakespeare. The book had belonged to Captain G P Tregelles, killed in action 1 July 1916. While an undergraduate, in 1912, the young man had visited Stratford and the Shakespeare Memorial Library where W Salt Brassington had shown him some of the “treasures” contained in the theatre’s collections. Captain Tregelles had left instructions that if he was killed, he wanted his book to be sent to the Library. He placed so much value on it that he wanted to ensure it would be enjoyed by others.

In his letter, his father summed up to terrible cost of war: “My boy had an active original mind and took a keen interest in literature… Had he lived he might have done some good work in that line”. So much promise, all lost.

Another Shakespeare book that had significance for soldiers in World War 1 was the Kitchener Shakespeare, a copy of which is also on display. After Lord Kitchener’s death in 1916 a fund was set up, the money raised to benefit those disabled during the war. Each man was to receive a collected edition of the works of Shakespeare, in the hope that they would be “a source of pride and satisfaction, a source of genuine and personal gratification, a source of genuine and personal solace”. It’s hard for us today to imagine how this could have seemed an appropriate gift.

The Dillen

The Dillen

George Hewins, a Stratford man who received a copy, was clearly not impressed. Handicapped after being seriously wounded in battle, and desperately short of money, he remembered the event years later: “He gave me a book: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: a book! Somebody had writ inside: “It is hoped that this will always keep you in mind of the true greatness and glory of the cause for which you have fought and suffered”.

My own strongest impressions of wartime Stratford come from the book I’ve just quoted, The Dillen. It began as an oral history project in which Angela Hewins and her husband, the grandson of George Hewins, interviewed the old man over three years in the late 1970s. Angela went on to shape this mass of material into a chronological account. It presented a completely unknown side of Stratford. Hewins had been born in the workhouse, and was one of the poorest people in Stratford, a town undergoing gentrification. George and his family lived a hand to mouth existence, though he became a skilled bricklayer able to support his eight children. This didn’t stop him being sent to the front where he fought and was hit by a shell.
There was going to be a big battle. We could smell it. We could smell the ammunition coming up….As soon as they started to bring up jars o’rum for us, we knowed that we’d be in it… Half-past-five under cover of a barrage, we went…It was busting everywhere. There was only about a hundred yards between us as Jerry… I moved quick. It was hand-to-hand fighting. We wasn’t drunk, but we was awkward. They’d given us enough rum to make us awkward.

The RSC poster for The Dillen

The RSC poster for The Dillen

On returning home George suffered terrible nightmares: “I fancied I was still in the trenches, with the rats running all over: swarms o’rats with yella eyes and big fat bellies… I used to get off the seat and crouch underneath it, eyes shut, hands over my ears”. When he finally managed to get a job his pension was severely cut leaving him as badly off as ever.

In the 1980s, following the publication of The Dillen the RSC decided to stage the book as a play, using the town itself as a backdrop. Ron Hutchinson’s brilliant adaptation was staged in 1983 and again in 1985. Beautifully directed by Barry Kyle, the stroke of genius was to use 200 townspeople to act as extras, binding the town to the theatre as it hadn’t been for decades. It began and ended at The Other Place, but in between the cast and audience moved around the oldest part of the town, encountering pea pickers in a field, a scene with Half-Pint Ginny on a disused railway track, a music hall scene that moved George on from being a carefree lad to father of eight. After the interval the audience huddled in a tent as we saw and heard the explosions of WW1 across darkened waste land. Then we formed a torchlight procession, walking through the quiet streets where costumed figures stood on doorsteps, and as we passed the war memorial the names of the fallen were read out. It was eerily atmospheric.

Ron Cook as George Hewins

Ron Cook as George Hewins

The cast was led by the always excellent Ron Cook, with Peggy Mount playing his aunt Cal. The production came just in time – the disused land has since become a housing estate and the town’s Southern Relief Road. But I can’t be the only person who would love to see a revival of The Dillen in some form.

If you would like to read more, I recommend Nicholas Fogg’s book Stratford, A Town At War, 1914-1918, and the Hall’s Croft exhibition Cry “havoc!” And let slip the dogs of war continues all summer.

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