Safeguarding the “first rough draft of history”

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
"The first news boy"

“The first news boy”

Newspapers are a relatively new invention: no character in a Shakespeare play ever reads one, news being conveyed by messenger or letter. In The Merchant of Venice Tubal brings a personal account to Shylock of the misfortunes of Antonio’s ship “I spoke with some of the sailors that escaped the wrack”, and later a letter from Antonio to Bassanio brings the bad news. Bassanio quizzes the messenger for more information:
But is it true, Salerio?
Hath all his ventures failed? What, not one hit?
From Tripolis, from Mexico and England,
From Lisbon, Barbary and India,
And not one vessel scape the dreadful touch
Of merchant-marring rocks?

Elsewhere news is spread by rumour, brought to life “painted full of tongues” at the beginning of Henry IV Part 2.
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.

The first news of the outcome of the Battle of Shrewsbury is brought to Northumberland, leading him to hope his son Hotspur has triumphed. These false hopes are quickly dashed by a second and third report, but it’s the eye-witness account that convinces: “These mine eyes saw him in bloody state”.

No wonder the relatives of passengers on the Malaysian Airlines plane that disappeared over the southern Indian Ocean are struggling to come to terms with their loss, without any evidence of the fate of the place let alone an eye-witness account.

We have become used to seeing visual evidence of catastrophic events, but the humble newspaper has been our method of getting news of events beyond our own experience for centuries. Before newspapers there were broadsheets, and the illustration above is from the Cambrai Chansonnier, a manuscript song-book created for a wealthy inhabitant of Bruges, dated 1542. The picture has informally been called “The first paper boy”.

In England it took a while for newspapers proper to emerge. The first London newspaper, the Corante, was published in 1621, but the first regular daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, dates from 1702.  If you’d like to follow it up there’s a history of papers here.

Governments attempted to prevent information being made widely available, putting a tax on newspapers in 1712. Inevitably people found ways of getting round it, by clubbing together, hiring a paper for an hour or visiting an alehouse which kept newspapers, even old ones. But the tax did restrict the number of newspapers published. This situation continued until 1855 when the law was changed to reduce this tax, and papers that cost 4d each became available for 1d. Newspapers were suddenly affordable and smaller places were able to print their own. Before 1860 Stratfordians had to rely on papers with a larger geographical coverage: between 1806 and 1860 The Warwickshire Advertiser was the nearest thing there was to a local newspaper. Then came the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald which is still published today and an enormously valuable resource for anyone studying the history of the town. Here’s an article on the subject.

Newspaper volumes at Colindale

Newspaper volumes at Colindale

For many years the Newspaper Library at Colindale, in London, was the place to go  for British Newspapers. But no more, as it closed in November 2103. Now the newspapers are being transferred to a new location:
The NSB, or Newspaper Storage Building, is the British Library’s new home for newspapers. Situated at our second site in Boston Spa, Yorkshire, it is not where users will be able to read our print newspapers – that will be in the Newsroom at St Pancras, when they become available once more in Autumn 2014 – but it is where they are starting to be stored, in optimum preservation conditions.

A condition report found that the newspapers are some of the most fragile and threatened items held by the British Library, and no wonder, since they have never been intended for long-term keeping, and their large size often makes them difficult to handle. There is another post here about how they are preserving the originals while making microfilm or digital copies available for use.

The new BL newspaper storage facility

The new BL newspaper storage facility

The new building, however, is almost scarily high-tech. The NSB is completely automated:
It is essential for the long-term preservation of the print newspapers that they be kept at optimum temperature and humidity-controlled conditions, and in the dark. Inside the NSB the temperature is being maintained at 14⁰C,  with relative humidity at 55%, and the oxygen level 14-15%, eliminating any risk of fire. So it is great for newspapers, but not so great for humans. Instead the process of ingest, shelving and retrievable is all undertaken by fully-automated machinery – appropriately robotic for a spaceship. – See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/thenewsroom/2014/03/checking-out-the-nsb.html#sthash.cwaH1CJ1.dpuf 

It will still be possible to go an read the originals at the British Library itself, and there’s a guide here.

In addition there are ambitious plans to digitise the millions of pages of newsprint, making them available for all at the British Newspaper Archive site.

Access to the site has to be paid for, but for most the convenience of having the newspapers available on their desktops will be easily preferable to making a trip to the Library. And even more people will be able to explore what’s often been called “the first rough draft of history”.

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Thomas Wyatt, Hilary Mantel, and the art of poetry

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
Thomas Wyatt

Thomas Wyatt

Hilary Mantel’s novel Bring Up the Bodies documents the life of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister. History has judged Cromwell harshly for ruthlessly masterminding the downfall of Anne Boleyn, but without backing away from this, she makes him a sympathetic and even sensitive man. One of the ways she does this is through Thomas Wyatt, a diplomat and poet who had been associated with Anne Boleyn, but escaped execution largely because Cromwell liked and admired him.

On pages 412-414 of the book, Mantel writes persuasively about the connection between the skills of the politician, the diplomat and the poet. Cromwell is in conversation with Call-Me-Risley (Wriothesley) about Wyatt.
He leaves us all behind. He writes himself and then he disclaims himself. He jots a verse on some scrap of paper, and slips it to you, when you are at supper or praying in the chapel. Then she slides a paper to some other person, and it is the same verse, but a word is different. Then that person says to you, did you see what Wyatt wrote? You say yes, but you are talking of different things. Another time you trap him and say, Wyatt, did you really do what you describe in this verse? He smiles and tells you, it is the story of some imaginary gentleman, no one we know; or he will say, this is not my story I write, it is yours, though you do not know it. He will say, this woman I describe here, the brunette, she is really a woman with fair hair, in disguise. He will declare you must believe everything and nothing of what you read. You point to the page, you tax him: what about this line, is this true? He says, it is a poet’s truth. Besides, he claims, I am not free to write as I like. It is not the king, but metre that constrains me. And I would be plainer, he says, if I could: but I must keep to the rhyme”.
“Someone should take his verses to the printer”, Wriothesley says. “That would fix them”.
“He would not consent to that. They are private communications”.
“If I were Wyatt”, Call-Me says, “I would have made sure no one misconstrued me. I would have stayed away from Caesar’s wife”.
“That is the wise course”. He smiles. “But it is not for him. It is for people like you and me”.

bring up the bodiesMantel continues, describing the poet’s skill, and Cromwell’s dream-like memories:
When Wyatt writes, his lines fledge feathers, and unfolding this plumage they dive below their meaning and skim above it. They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive, and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor. Now, if a man’s subject is deception, you are deceived if you thing you grasp his meaning. You close your hand as it flies away. A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. A quill, sharpened, can stir and rustle like the pinions of angels. Angels are messengers. They are creatures with a mind and a will. We do not know for a fact that their plumage is like the plumage of falcons, crows, peacocks. They hardly visit men nowadays. Though in Rome he knew a man, a turn-spit in the papal kitchens, who had come face to face with an angel in a passage dripping with chill, in a sunken store room of the Vatican where cardinals never tread; and people bought him drinks to make him talk about it. He said the angel’s substance was heavy and smooth as marble, its expression distant and pitiless; its wings were carved from glass.

Reading this section before the RSC’s day-long event Cromwell’s Court, my husband pushed the novel over to me – do you think she’s writing about Shakespeare?  At the event Wyatt was much discussed, and the section is about him. But Mantel’s description of the creative process, of the need for the poet to conceal himself, surely relates to any writer (including herself). It certainly can be seen to relate to Shakespeare, the writer who more than any other, seems to disappear into his plays and poems.

Here is Wyatt’s subtly crafted poem that is often taken to refer to Anne Boleyn, and which Mantel references in that mention of Caesar’s wife. Here is an article about it from the Guardian. and here’s the poem itself:

Whoso list to hunt

Whoso list to hunt? I know where is an hind!
But as for me, alas! I may no more,
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore;
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer; but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt
As well as I, may spend his time in vain!
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about;
“Noli me tangere; for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame”.

Wyatt’s considerable diplomatic skills meant he escaped execution though he spent time in the Tower of London twice. Most of his poems were on the subject of love, but only a few were published during his lifetime and it’s only in the last hundred years or so that he has been recognised as a major poet. He is often called, with Surrey, “the father of the English sonnet”. Shakespeare knew his sonnets: many of them were published in the 1557 collection Tottel’s Miscellany. He died in 1542 aged only 39. There is much information about him, including many of his poems, on the Luminarium site.

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Veteran Shakespeare actor, Jeffery Dench

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Sylvia Morris

jeffery denchI’ve just heard the sad news that veteran Royal Shakespeare Company actor Jeffery Dench has died. He will be remembered fondly, and greatly missed, by thousands who saw him play a mind-boggling range of roles on the RSC’s stages.

His career with the RSC began in the 1960s when he was in the company’s landmark Wars of the Roses, followed by the David Warner Hamlet. He quickly established himself in comedy roles such as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night and Master Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

He had a particular talent for playing old men: one of the first things I saw him play was Adam in As You Like It in 1977/8, opening the play by getting in some wrestling practice with his Orlando (Peter McEnery/James Laurenson), despite his apparent age. Again in Merry Wives, he played Justice Shallow in both 1992 and, his last performance, in 2006. Both these have Shakespearean resonance: the faithful old servant Adam is supposed to have been a role written by Shakespeare for himself, and Shallow is involved in the discussions that might relate to the Lucy family of Charlecote. In one of the Histories, he also played a character called Thomas Lucy.

There was plenty of non-Shakespeare too: the Troll King to Derek Jacobi’s Peer Gynt in 1982, and the Water Rat in at least one of the revivals of Toad of Toad Hall.

One of the conspirators in the 1979 Julius Caesar

One of the conspirators in the 1979 Julius Caesar

It wasn’t all comedy: in 1974/5 he played Gloucester in Buzz Goodbody’s adaptation of King Lear, and as well as Pistol in Henry V he played a multitude of lords and soldiers in Terry Hands’ magnificent cycle of all three parts of Henry VI in 1977/8.

I came to live in Stratford in 1979 and saw all the plays repeatedly. He seemed to be in everything. As well as Brabantio in Othello and Cinna the conspirator in Julius Caesar he played Cymbeline in the play of the same name, his sister Judi playing his daughter Imogen. His most enjoyable performance of the year for me, though, was the doubling of Antiochus and the Pander in Pericles at The Other Place. In charge of the brothel where the innocent heroine Marina is held he was both frighteningly grotesque and blackly comic.

In the back row, as so often, Jeffery Dench as one of the company in Nicholas Nickleby

In the back row, as so often, Jeffery Dench as one of the company in Nicholas Nickleby

As part of the 1979 Stratford company he automatically became part of the company for what for me has been the RSC’s outstanding achievement, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, staged initially at the Aldwych in 1980-81, subsequently in New York, and filmed for Channel 4. Like almost everyone in the case he played many characters, though again most memorably the repellent old suitor Arthur Gride.

When not playing grotesque old men, he brought humour, warmth and integrity to  his parts. As a member of the audience, seeing Jeffery Dench’s name on the cast list was a guarantee of quality. Shakespeare did write brilliant leading roles for Burbage and others, but he also wrote for a known company of talented professionals. The RSC has been fortunate to have among its regulars a number of high-quality actors, safe hands that could carry the plays along with distinction. Jeffery Dench was one of those, and if there were to be a late twentieth-century version of the page in the First Folio “The Names of the Principal Actors in all These Plays”, his name would be on the list.

Full details of his RSC career can be found by searching by name on the RSC Performance Database

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Celebrating Shakespeare at 450 – updated

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Sylvia Morris

shakespeare birthday celebsWith less than a month to go, celebrations for the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth are getting into gear, and will continue right into the summer. A special website pulls together all the activities going on in Stratford over the weekend of 26/27 April, the nearest weekend to the actual day, 23 April. After a slightly low-key couple of years, several of the traditional elements are re-appearing including the use of New Place Garden for the procession to assemble and the return of the great marquee for the luncheon which will feature speeches from, among others, novelist Hilary Mantel and the retiring head of the National Theatre, Sir Nicholas Hytner. Quoting from the site,
Crowds will be lining the streets of this Elizabethan market town to see actors, foreign diplomats and civic dignitaries lead the 1,000-strong grand Birthday Procession from 10:30am on Saturday 26 April. They will be followed by a lively community pageant, street entertainers and the Stratford Morris Men.  Local people and visitors can join in too and walk with the pageant through the town to lay flowers on Shakespeare’s grave in the Holy Trinity Church.

But even before the birthday several big academic events are taking place. After several days celebrating Othello, on 10 April the British Institute of Florence is organising the 6th edition of the Shakespeare Graduate Conference on the theme  Forms of Nationhood, in collaboration with the Italian Association of Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies and the University of Florence

At the same time, from 10-12 April the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, a great gathering of Shakespearians not just from North America, takes place in St Louis. Here’s the program.

logo_Shake-450_teteseuleThe big event taking place in Europe to celebrate the 450th anniversary will be the Shakespeare 450 conference in Paris from 21-27 April, organised by the Societe Francaise Shakespeare. Not just European in scope there are sessions on Asian Shakespeare, Global Shakespeare, and Shakespeare in Brazilian Popular Culture as well as Shakespeare and Voltaire, Shakespeare in the Great War, Shakespeare in Cold War Europe, and the opening session entitled Pourquoi Shakespeare?

Not an academic conference, but for light relief you might like to read about another event, or even to enter it. The St Paul Pioneer Press is holding a contest to celebrate Shakespeare’s 450th birthday. This will take place in April and it’s the 45-second Shakespeare Film Festival Contest. There’s a video here to explain   and here is the website where you can enter and watch the videos.

After the birthday itself, conferences continue. Not actually Shakespeare-focused, the Malone Society conference is sure to attract Shakespeare scholars. It will take place on 17 May at Oxford University. The Society was established in 1906 for the  unfashionable purpose of producing accurate copies of the best editions of early plays. It’s rather wonderful that the Society is now finding that having spent years publishing and discussing the most obscure of texts its work is becoming mainstream as collaboration becomes more and more popular as a topic. This year they’re going to be looking at the anonymous play The Fair Maid of the Exchange.

On 3 June there will be a one-day symposium at De Montfort University, in Leicester, entitled Reforming Shakespeare: 1593 and After. This will look at “the kinds of alteration that have occurred  to Shakespeare’s writing as it has made its journey from author to readers and playgoers. ‘Reforming’ may take the sense of being given new shape as authorial or non-authorial adaptation, rewriting, borrowing or allusion and arguments about any of these processes… ‘Reforming’ can also suggest correction and improvement, including censorship, editing, and tidying up of text to make it conform to new conditions of reception.” There’s more on the flyer.

From 5-7 June attention shifts back to Stratford-upon-Avon for the Annual BritGrad conference taking place at the Shakespeare Institute. This covers many areas of Shakespeare and Renaissance studies. There’s lots more information here.

Then the British Shakespeare Association Conference will be taking place at the University of Stirling from 3-6 July 2014. Full details haven’t been released yet, but the conference will centre on questions of authority in Shakespeare. Here’s the website.

NEWS!
Since I first sent out this post I’ve been contacted by the Victoria and Albert Museum to remind me of their very extensive 450 celebrations. The information that follows gives details, and some links. Do enjoy these great events!

Our festivities will run throughout April – May, with special emphasis on the Festival Fortnight, 21 April – 4 May. The programme will include a huge range of talks, performances, screenings, tours, workshops, special activities and themed events for all ages. Most activities are free of charge.

A full programme can be found here:  some highlights include:

Conducting Shakespeare
Scenes from Shakespeare, with a twist. The programme will be ‘conducted’ in direct response to the emotional responses of volunteers from the audience (detected by a series of bio-sensors monitoring brainwaves, heart-rate, perspiration and muscle tension).

Propeller Professional Development Workshops
Set design, 3 May:  Sound, 28 April: Performance, 28 April:

The Bookshop Band
2 May, 19.30 and 20.45
Folk trio perform new songs inspired by the Bard
In addition, the V&A has produced a special Shakespeare Trail map, showing a journey through the Museum, visiting a range of objects related to Shakespeare.

The exhibition Shakespeare: Greatest Living Playwright is also on display in the Theatre and Performance galleries until 28 September 2014.

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Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
"Juliet's Balcony" in Verona

“Juliet’s Balcony” in Verona

Over the past few weeks a lively discussion has been going on at the Shakespeare noticeboard SHAKSPER under the title “Balcony”. The so-called balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet is probably Shakespeare’s most famous single scene, and no wonder as it’s the one where Romeo and Juliet, at night, passionately declare their love for each other and resolve to marry in spite of the feud between their families.

The discussion on SHAKSPER was triggered by an enquiry from Lois Leveen at the end of February who wondered “why/how the idea of “the balcony scene” developed and proves so persistent in the popular imagination. Why is the balcony so impressed upon the collective consciousness, when no character in the play, and nothing in the stage directions, refers to it as such?”

This was a follow-up comment to remind SHAKSPER contributors of the original question, as responses had gone off at a bit of a tangent, as these things do. For several weeks there have been a variety of posts. Some started discussing arrangements at The Globe, until others pointed out that with the first quarto being published in 1597 Shakespeare didn’t write the play for the Globe, and nobody is sure about the relationship of the second 1599 quarto to the Globe either. Despite evidence of the play’s popularity on stage and in print, there are no records of the play’s performance during Shakespeare’s lifetime.

c Walter Hodges illustration of the balcony scene

c Walter Hodges illustration of the balcony scene

Further posts have suggested a whole series of solutions to the issue of how the balcony scene was staged: a gap in the wall of the tiring house, a stage balcony that might also have been used by musicians, an elevated playing space, a temporary, portable structure, even a descent machine. I have long admired C Walter Hodges’ beautiful illustrations showing how different scenes might have been staged, and this one is for the balcony scene.

Incidentally, there is indeed no stage direction at this point, nor any mention of the word “balcony”. It’s one word that we might have expected Shakespeare to invent, but no. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to 1618.  Almost immediately after the initial enquiry was made Professor Peter Holland came up with a great response to at least part of it, suggesting that the balcony, as a stage direction in Romeo and Juliet, is “first used in Thomas Otway’s adaptation, The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1680), p.18, in the marginal stage-direction “Lavinia in the Balcony.”

Looking at the source of the play, Brooke’s 1562 poem Romeus and Juliet, Brooke too has Juliet appearing at her window:
Impacient of her woe, she hapt to leane one night
Within her window, and anon the Moone did shine so bright
That she espyde her love.

Romeo and Juliet 1599 quarto

Romeo and Juliet 1599 quarto

There’s another little curiosity regarding the scene: at some point in the history of editing, the Balcony scene has been divided up from Act 2 Scene 1 and called Act 2 Scene 2.  Looking at the illustration of the second quarto text from 1599, it’s clear that Shakespeare conceived it as a continuation, and that this is how it was performed (and still is). With no stage direction, Romeo says “But soft, what light from yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun”. The RSC edition is one of few that prints the scene all in one.

As Lois Leveen suggested, the balcony scene has entered the collective consciousness, so much that a balcony in Verona has become the centre of a kind of Juliet cult.

This website acknowledges that “the two main characters never really existed and William Shakespeare never went to Verona”, but :
Juliet’s house (Casa di Giulietta) is one of the main attractions of Verona with the most famous balcony in the world. Every day crowds of people make their way through the narrow archway into the courtyard to admire and photograph the famous balcony. Couples of all ages swear eternal fidelity here in memory of Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet”.

The statue of Juliet in the courtyard in Verona

The statue of Juliet in the courtyard in Verona

Apparently, because of the demands of tourists to see the place where the action of the play really happened,
the city of Verona bought today’s house of Juliet from the Dal Capello family in 1905. Due to the similarity of their names they declared the house to be the family residence of the Capuleti family – a new tourist sensation was created!

Those who enter the courtyard of Juliet’s house for the first time will be struck by the thousands of small scraps of paper which cover the floor to the ceiling. All who write down their love vows to their partner and stick them on the wall will – according to the popular belief – stay together with their partner for the rest of their lives and will be very happy. Even touching the right breast of the bronze statue of Juliet in the small courtyard will bring luck to all who are trying to find their true love.

The Juliet mailbox

The Juliet mailbox

I visited the site a few years ago the walls were covered in graffiti. I gather than in recent years they removed the graffiti and now have hung panels on the wall onto which messages are allowed, though it sounds as if messages are still written on scraps of paper and stuck on with chewing gum.

In addition The Juliet Club receives over 6000 letters a year addressed to Juliet in Verona from heartbroken or lonely people (mostly girls). Each is individually answered, and the letters are kept in a special archive. A strange phenomenon, and testament to the power of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy.

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Shakespeare in and out of the classroom

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Sylvia Morris

shakespeare weekShakespeare is universally agreed to be “a good thing” for people of all ages, and recently there have been many opinions about the best was of introducing him to children.

One of the good news stories of the week (and how we have needed one) is the success of Shakespeare Week, a terrific idea by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. The biggest barrier in schools has been the expectation that Shakespeare’s going to be boring. It’s to try to counter this idea that Shakespeare Week has been set up. Running from 17-23 March, the SBT is coordinating the efforts of  “schools, theatres, historic sites, museums, galleries, cinemas and libraries all over the UK. Together, we’re giving every child the chance to be inspired by Shakespeare’s stories, language and heritage.”

In the planning for around a year, the idea has proved a huge success:
Teachers in more than 2,500 primary schools across the UK have embraced the opportunity to introduce Shakespeare into their classrooms.  To date more than 20,000 free resources have been downloaded from the Shakespeare Week website for use in every subject, from scientific experiments and nature studies, to preparing a Tudor banquet, film-making and acting out scenes from one of the bard’s plays, the most popular being Macbeth.

A slightly different view has been put forward by Mark Powell of Salisbury Playhouse in an article suggesting we should “Kill Bill“. He’s actually identifying exactly the same problem the SBT is trying to address, that teenagers find Shakespeare boring unless they begin with a positive experience. Coming from a theatre background, Powell sees theatre skills as the key. And he makes some good points. Outings to theatres have become too costly and too complicated to administer, so children stay in school. To be successful, classroom teaching needs to be given by people with the necessary drama teaching skills, rather than by teachers of English who tend to pick apart the words. He suggests:
Let’s give English teachers a break, give drama teachers a boost and give young people an important sense of equality. You don’t need an expensive education to understand the words, but you do need the luxury of time, space and specialism to put his words on their feet and try them out.

Powell echoes the words and sentiments of the RSC’s Stand Up for Shakespeare campaign that launched in 2008. 15000 people signed up to their manifesto, the aims of which were that children should do it on their feet, see it live, and start it earlier.

The RSC Education campaign

The RSC Education campaign

In September 2013 Gregory Doran, RSC Artistic Director, was interviewed in The Spectator. He repeatedly focused on the need to involve young people, as the interviewer puts it to get Shakespeare “into the veins of the UK’s youth”. As well as using the RSC’s energetic Education Department to involve children in Stand Up for Shakespeare, Doran hopes the RSC’s main theatre offerings will appeal to them. “What I really want to do above all is generate some excitement”, he says, and his method of doing this it to bring in top-class actors who really want to play the roles, adding some glamour and making the RSC a place where audiences can expect to see great performances. The current six-year project to produce each of Shakespeare’s plays will encourage children at senior school to “collect” all the productions. Doran himself got the Shakespeare bug by attending a production in Stratford as a schoolboy and he hasn’t forgotten that if you catch them early, you may get them for life.

Other recent articles have included this one by teacher Genevieve White who explains the commonest reasons given by teachers for not wanting to teach Shakespeare – and why they’re wrong. As a teacher herself, and a reluctant Shakespeare learner, she includes this account of her introduction to Shakespeare at school:

I can still vividly remember the crushing boredom I experienced reading The Merchant of Venice as a fifteen-year-old high-school student. My classmates and I took it in turns to read aloud in a mumbled monotone, while our teacher dozed in her chair (occasionally waking up to summarise in simplified English). It was an uninspiring introduction to Shakespeare’s work. Sadly, I suspect it was not an unusual one.

And actor and educator Ben Crystal gives his opinion in a recent article about some of the best ways of involving children in Shakespeare.

Trevor Nunn

Trevor Nunn

All these people agree it’s worth the struggle of introducing Shakespeare to the young, not least because his work continues to speak to people throughout their lives. Eminent director Trevor Nunn is another person who came from a working-class background. In this Daily Telegraph interview he stated that Shakespeare is more relevant than the Bible. “Shakespeare has more wisdom and insight about our lives, about how to live and how not to live, how to forgive and how to understand our fellow creatures, than any religious tract.”

The statement is reminiscent of John Lennon’s famous 1966 line “We’re more popular than Jesus now”, which in the USA provoked the public burning of Beatles records and saw members of the Ku Klux Klan picketing Beatles’ concerts. Many people will disagree with Trevor Nunn, but are unlikely to be so extreme in their reactions. After all, Shakespeare often used the Bible for inspiration.

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John Lyly’s Galatea by Edward’s Boys

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Sylvia Morris

galateaGalatea is the first full play by Lyly that Edward’s Boys, the schoolboy troupe from King Edward VI School in Stratford, have performed, and I’d guess that it won’t be the last.

Nowadays Lyly is largely remembered as one of the prime influences on Shakespeare, particularly in his early comedies. I’d never seen a play by Lyly before, and was expecting to hear speeches full of the formal verbal flourishes used by Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but the style of Galatea is direct, witty and energetic. It was a bit of a revelation.

Lyly’s play was written in the late 1580s and was performed before Elizabeth 1 on New Year’s Day, probably in 1588.  In her programme note Dr Farah Karim-Cooper of Shakespeare’s Globe remarks “Their performances attracted members of elite society, the wealthy patrons in their finery who expected to see beautiful costumes and to hear melodious songs, fine music and the well-tuned voices of the boy actors”. It was the adult performers who were disreputable. The homoerotic overtones of last year’s production of Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage made for uneasy viewing, but this, with several of the same boys playing leading roles, has a very different feel.

Here there’s a real sense of freshness and enjoyment from the whole ensemble, and I would rather not single out individual performers. As usual with Edward’s Boys, there’s much physical inventiveness, as in the group of boys who metamorphose into the tree beneath which action takes place. Most of the strongest characters in the play are female, and putting teenage boys into women’s clothes wouldn’t seem to be the most obvious way of getting them to enjoy themselves. Struan Leslie is the Movement Director for the play, and comments “A crucial fact about being a member of Edward’s Boys: at some point you will play a girl”.

The title page of Galatea, 1592

The title page of Galatea, 1592

Leslie finds that in fact the boys relish it: “Boys bring to these plays an openness that is more fluid and unfettered than an adult company when men are portraying women…You never know where you are with boys”. I was surprised how much space there is within the play for individual interpretation, and how many of the boys grasp the opportunity. As well as the sweetly sincere heroines Galatea and Phyllida, girls who are dressed as boys by their fathers in order to avoid being sacrificed to Neptune, female roles include the deliciously haughty Diana, eyes flashing wildly on every appearance, followed by her gaggle of nymphs, and Venus, goddess of love.

Other roles are played with just as much gusto, such as the trio of north-country brothers (I still don’t know why the action takes place in Lincolnshire), who every now and then appear with a cheerful blend of good humour and song. The trident-bearing Neptune huffs and puffs, threatening dire consequences if the most beautiful virgin doesn’t get offered up to the sea-monster Agar. Cupid, possibly having the most fun of any of the performers, is first revealed as other actors melt away, in his characteristic pose balanced on one foot, bow drawn. On every possible occasion he cheekily mocks the pomposity of the goddess Diana.

With Diana an unmistakeable parallel to Elizabeth 1, would the queen have laughed at herself, played by a boy, in that performance at court? It seems likely that she would. There are many laugh out loud moments in the play, which builds up to the big dramatic scene in which the third-prettiest girl is offered up to Neptune. This difficult scene contains a long, heartfelt speech by the girl who accepts the necessity of her sacrifice only to find herself rejected because she isn’t beautiful enough. It’s a beautifully-written speech, moving between tragedy and comedy, containing long, static silences which the actor performed admirably. Eion Price’s blog post about the production focuses in particular on this scene, and the whole play has been reviewed on The Bardathon.

A scene from Galatea by Edward's Boys

A scene from Galatea by Edward’s Boys

The play does, then, have serious moments, and always there in the background is a question that would have resonated with Queen Elizabeth and her court: Can it ever be right for an individual to put their desires above the good of society as a whole?

Edward’s Boys are the ordinary pupils of a grammar school in a small Warwickshire town, not the highly-trained choristers for which the play was written. To emphasize this fact a number of boys appear in school uniform. But this company, led by Perry Mills, is doing something very unusual by performing plays written for boys, by boys. Their obvious exuberance, a quality Lyly must have wanted to bring to the fore, makes the performance a delight. The company’s reputation has been steadily building and on Sunday evening the audience included a clutch of Shakespeare academics and educators.

It’s a triumph for Edward’s boys, but also for John Lyly, proving that his plays deserve to be performed in their own right rather than just as footnotes to Shakespeare. Galatea still has two performances to go, in April, one at the Playbox Theatre in Warwick and one at the new Sam Wanamaker Theatre at Shakespeare’s Globe as part of the study day John Lyly and the Children’s Companies’ Repertoire on 27 April. If you don’t have your ticket yet, get one – it’s not to be missed.

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Falstaff and the loss of Merrie England

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
Eduard von Grützner: Falstaff, 1896

Eduard von Grützner: Falstaff, 1896

This week Sir Antony Sher takes on the role of one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters, Sir John Falstaff, in the first of the Henry IV plays, for the RSC. It’s a role that has attracted many of the greatest actors of their day, in particular in the last seventy years or so, and it’s now seen as the key role within this pair of plays that say much about the state of England itself.

In the middle of the twentieth century Falstaff became the focus of attention in a series of productions and films of the Henry IV plays. One of the greatest was Ralph Richardson, who took the role for the Old Vic Theatre Company at London’s New Theatre in the autumn of 1945. It came during the second year of a three-year run at the New, dominated by an alliance between Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, two of the most important actors of their time. While Richardson took Falstaff, Olivier played the heroic role of Hotspur in part 1 and the elderly, rambly Justice Shallow of part 2. The Shakespeare Institute in Stratford is celebrating these productions with an exhibition in their library that includes Olivier’s acting script for Hotspur, in which he made a few sketches of himself in the role. It’s a real treat to see this great item which will be on view until the end of March 2014. There’s a blog post with all the details here.

Ralph Richardson as Falstaff, New Theatre 1945

Ralph Richardson as Falstaff, New Theatre 1945

The Times suggested that Olivier had the “curious power of being at the centre of every picture”, but the greatest success of the productions was Richardson’s Falstaff. According to the Evening Standard, Richardson “made of Falstaff so much more than a mere buffoon, coward, liar and glutton that our hearts went out to him”, and went on “surely it is great acting when a man can win us to the cause of hypocrisy and align us against virtue”.

Years later, Peter Hall wrote a piece in the Guardian of 31 January 1996 on this production which he saw as a fifteen-year old. “The moment that gave me goose-bumps was the way Richardson did the Honour Speech. Although what he was saying was immoral he was desperately human. It was not a spectacular moment, just one of simple human realism: a bit soiled, a bit dirty and questionable – like life itself”.

A few years later, in Stratford, the Festival of Britain in 1951 was celebrated by a history cycle consisting of Richard II, both parts of Henry IV, and Henry V. The theatre was led by Anthony Quayle, who took the central part of Falstaff. Michael Redgrave played Richard II, Hotspur and the Chorus in Henry V, Harry Andrews played Bolingbroke in Richard II who becomes Henry IV, and rising star Richard Burton played Hal in both parts of Henry IV and Henry V. Quayle’s direction was a triumph, forcing critics to look afresh at some of Shakespeare’s best-known plays. Robert Speaight wrote “It is now possible to say that Shakespeare is better performed at Stratford than anywhere else in the world”.

Anthony Quayle as Falstaff, Henry IV, SMT 1951

Anthony Quayle as Falstaff, Henry IV, SMT 1951

According to The Times on 9 May, Anthony Quayle “deliberately presents a Falstaff who is scarcely likeable…There is always a shifty and calculating look in his eye”, though the News Chronicle on the same day was inclined to be indulgent: Quayle “has a mischievous twinkle in his roving old eye, a wicked old smile playing over his round mouth”. William Dobell’s painting of Quayle as Falstaff shows an unlikeable, disreputable, but vigorous man, unlike the cheerful, portly gent portrayed in the nineteenth-century painting at the top of the post.

Quayle himself felt that Falstaff was “a monster. he’s a desperate character and infinitely lovable”. And Richard David, in Shakespeare in the Theatre, suggests “As Falstaff, Anthony Quayle commanded the two absolutely essential qualities: a wholly winning gusto, and real, unpardonable wickedness”. Over two decades later Quayle played the part again in the BBC/Time Life versions of the plays. Seeing this, it’s tantalising to imagine how his younger self might have played it.

Orson Welles as Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight

Orson Welles as Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight

The third impressive interpretation of the role was Orson Welles, who was obsessed by the role for many years. He played it on stage in his own adapted versions before filming Chimes at Midnight which focuses on Falstaff and his relationship with Prince Hal. Filmed in 1964 it was released between 1965 and 1967.  Welles had always downplayed the comedy in the role, and said the core of the film was “the betrayal of friendship”. For him, Falstaff was “the greatest conception of a good man, the most completely good man, in all of drama”.

Writing of the Richardson/Olivier production, in the immediate aftermath of the Second world war, the Sunday Graphic called the Henry IV plays “a great and terrific outpouring of the English spirit”. After seeing the Quayle productions, Kenneth Tynan wrote ” for me the two parts of Henry IV are the twin summits of Shakespeare’s achievement… great public plays in which a whole nation is under scrutiny and on trial”.  And Orson Welles wrote of Chimes at Midnight: “the film was not intended as a lament for Falstaff, but for the death of Merrie England. Merrie England as a conception, a myth which has been very real to the English-speaking world… It is more than Falstaff who is dying. It’s the old England dying and betrayed”. Quite something for the new productions of Henry IV to live up to.

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Shakespeare’s sonnets

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
The 1609 Sonnets title page

The 1609 Sonnets title page

I’ve only occasionally written in this blog about Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and then mostly about possible biographical references in them, for instance to Anne Hathaway or to the death of his son Hamnet. These are hard to avoid: for hundreds of years now people have attempted to make a coherent story from the sequence of poems that received their unauthorised publication in 1609. Was there really a Dark Lady and a Fair Youth who were involved in a triangular relationship including Shakespeare? Hundreds of books must have been written trying to establish their identity. Then there is the intriguing nature of the publication itself. Was it authorized by Shakespeare? (It’s assumed not). What role was taken by Thomas Thorp (named as TT on the title page)? And who is the “onlie begetter”, Mr W H?

The title page of the 1640 edition of the sonnets

The title page of the 1640 edition of the sonnets

Questions abounded, and weren’t helped by subsequent publication history. The second, 1640 edition of the sonnets omitted some, re-ordered them, sometimes combining two sonnets into one, made them more acceptably by occasionally making “he”, “she”, and giving them titles such as “The glory of beauty”. There’s an examination of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copies of this edition here.

No critical edition of the sonnets was available until Malone’s was published in 1780, so many readers encountered these poems only in the 1640 format. It was in the Romantic period that the idea of the sonnets being autobiographical took hold, Wordsworth famously claiming “with this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.”  Opinions varied. Nicholaus Delius, in the middle of the nineteenth century, called them “the free outcome of a poetic imagination,”  and William Minto, some years later, regarded many as “exercises of skill, undertaken in a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of the commonplace.”

schalkwykEarlier this week Professor David Schalkwyk gave a lecture to the Stratford Shakespeare Club on the subject of the sonnets. He insists of looking at them as poetry rather than concealed autobiography. He has written many times about the sonnets, including his 2002 book Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays, Shakespeare, Love and Service, published in 2008 and 2013’s book The conceptual investigations of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Professor Schalkwyk began by asking who is the “I” in the sonnets? Whose voice are we hearing, and who is “you” or “thou”?  These personal pronouns are non-specific and can be appropriated by anyone. Shakespeare assumes the persona of the poet, who in his turn plays, as he was to say elsewhere, “many parts”. There’s always someone else there, and the situation for virtually all the sonnets is a discussion or argument. The relationship between these people varies, from the authoritarianism of parent and child, master and servant, or the equality of friends, the uncertainty of lovers.

In his book The Genius of Shakespeare Jonathan Bate suggests the poems are persuasive because of what they leave out. “Since the poems imply a plot without actually spelling it out, there is room for readers to step in with their version of affairs. As the plays leave interpretive space for the audience …so the sonnets drop hints to draw the reader into their implied narrative”.

Both Bate and Schalkwyk made this connection between Shakespeare as writer of plays and the ways in which the sonnets work. He gives us the emotion of a siutation, and we are free to imagine an infinite number of appropriate scenarios. As Bate puts it, “This, then, is the genius of the sonnets: their power to generate readings”.

David Schalkwyk took as a powerful example sonnet 116, the sonnet frequently read at weddings. I’ve always felt uneasy at this, because the first four lines are awkwardly phrased, full of unsettling negatives. He suggested that rather than a confirmation of perfect love, it can be read as part of a lovers’ row, where one partner is threatening to leave a relationship and the other is determined to win the argument. His angry delivery was very persuasive. In his opinion, it’s definitely not suitable for a marriage. Here it is:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

The mystery of the sonnets remains. It isn’t even known when they were written, though the high point for sonnet sequences was the 1590s when Philip Sidney’s posthumously published Astrophel and Stella was followed by sonnets written by others including Fulke Greville and Edmund Spenser. Professor Schalkwyk has found that of the 154 Shakespeare’s sonnets, only 26 are collected into modern verse anthologies. This may be only 15% of them, but it’s considerably more than we remember of any of the others, and they’re remembered for their excellence as poems, not for what they might or might not reveal about Shakespeare’s life.

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The future of education for Shakespeare? MOOCs in action

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Sylvia Morris

The second of the two Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs)s on Shakespeare is now under way, and in case you fancy trying it out, is still open for enrolment. The first, the Shakespeare Institute’s Hamlet MOOC, has finished, though it’s to be hoped that it will run again. I found it thoroughly enjoyable. After an introduction with videos by Professor Michael Dobson, Fellows from the Shakespeare Institute took a week each to talk about their specialist subjects and how they relate to Hamlet. There were also sessions with actors, and I particularly liked actress Pippa Nixon’s close examination of the “To be or not to be” speech.

Jonathan Bate in Shakespeare and his World

Jonathan Bate in Shakespeare and his World

The current MOOC, Shakespeare and his World, is rather different in feel, created by the University of Warwick fronted by Professor Jonathan Bate, and designed to make use of the collections of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.  Bate has extensive experience of these materials and uses them in a very direct way to engage his virtual students with the subject under discussion.  His approach could offer an interesting model of how Museums, Libraries and Archives might really open up their collections.

I have to confess I’m already behind: so far I’ve only watched the opening sections on Shakespeare’s life, relatively easy to talk about using real objects like the Parish Church’s register. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the approach works with the plays themselves.

BBC’s Radio 4 has recently broadcast a series on the impact of technology on education, entitled My Teacher is an app.  There’s a link to the third programme here, in which, as it happened, Jonathan Bate featured.  It’s a debate between participants representing different points of view such as traditional education and the Open University. Both the Shakespeare MOOCs are by the company FutureLearn, a collaboration between more than a dozen of the top universities in the country with the exceptions of Oxford and Cambridge. The participants represented all shades of opinion, classicist Mary Beard suggesting that MOOCs could undermine traditional education, while the Open University commented that they have been using innovative technology for teaching for forty years. All agreed that there is no substitute for small-group teaching and discussion “eyeball to eyeball”, and that great teachers always have and always will make a difference.

As well as watching videos, and reading, students are encouraged to write their own comments and occasionally to complete a piece of written work. With the course being free, and perhaps thousands signed up, a range of methods of assessment are being tried, including the idea that students in groups assess each other’s work. This is the idea that’s most revolutionary about MOOCs: after all, videos and podcasts of professors’ lectures are hardly new. It’s going to be very interesting to see if they can make this valuable to students. There’s an article here on the latest in MOOC providers, and on the idea of collaborative working in teams.

One of the criticisms that has been levelled at MOOCs is that the percentage of students completing any course is very low, but of course a small percentage of a large number is still a lot. In any case who is to say that it’s necessary to complete a course, if it’s free and the person taking it isn’t interested in gaining a qualification? Katy Jordan of the Open University has just published this paper on initial trends in enrolment and completion.

A version of Richard III, one of the items discussed in Shakespeare and his World

A version of Richard III, one of the items discussed in Shakespeare and his World

Jonathan Bate pointed out that MOOCs aren’t all about university education anyway. The first person who signed up for his course was 89 years old. Many people will like the possibility of learning something new using in a structured course that’s not too much like being back at school. The FutureLearn site already includes courses on Ecosystems,  Moons, Roman history as well as practical subjects like Dentistry.

Just recently Donald Clark wrote an article looking at MOOCs, or VOOCs (Vocational Open Online Courses):
This is not about institutional learning, it’s about lifelong learning. The mistake is to take the concept of dropout from an institutional context and apply it to online courses, where one can sign up without too much commitment. There’s nothing wrong with trying a few MOOCs out to see if they’re at the right level or suit your needs.

We’ve gone for a solution that taps directly into subject matter expertise – experienced practitioners, experienced course designers and a delivery mechanism that goes straight to potential learners. That’s really what the  ‘Napsterisation’ of learning is all about, the democritisation, decentralisation and disintermediation of learning.

There’s lots of potential for organisations like U3A to run their own discussions around these courses, or for others to pick a few videos and incorporate them into their own work. Once you move away from the idea that MOOCs are all about tertiary education it becomes a much more interesting concept. The big question, that I have no answer to, is, “Who pays for it?”

But Shakespeare is, of course, a perfect subject. Even if you’ve seen every play in the theatre, read some biographies, attended some lectures, there are certain to be things you will enjoy in these MOOCs. And the current one will bring a new perspective through its use of Museum, Library and Archives objects. I’ve spent over thirty years being surrounded by items relating to Shakespeare’s works and I’m thrilled that it’s now possible for them to be brought to the attention of so many.

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