Shakespeare’s February face

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Sylvia Morris

winter treesAt the end of the week we can officially start looking forward to spring, with St Valentine’s Day on the 14th February. One of our regular readers at the Shakespeare Centre Library some years ago was a retired gentleman who would always remind us that we should really be celebrating the beginning of spring on St Bride’s Day, which he told us was the 13 February. St Bride, he said, was so pure that she could hang her cloak upon a rainbow, an image that I like because it blends the reality of the February weather with the idea of hope for the year to come. Before anyone tells me I’ve got this wrong, I’ve spent some time checking and have found that St Bride, more commonly known as St Brigid, is usually celebrated on 1 February, or possibly 2 February or even 14 February, before finding on this website that that the 13th is another possibility.  Nothing, it seems, is quite as simple as it appears.

snowdrops at WilmcoteSt Bride’s Day is, however, always in February, the shortest and probably most unpopular month of the year, with several weeks still to go before life really begins to return to the land. This year the UK has suffered the wettest winter in about 250 years, and thoughts of spring are particularly welcome. Snowdrops and celandines are already in flower and the buds of daffodils are getting ready to open. But not quite yet.

Though he mentions St Valentine’s, a day then as now for lovers, Shakespeare names February only once, at the end of Much Ado About Nothing, where Benedick is described as having “such a February face,/So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness”.  Perhaps he too wanted to forget about this dismal time of year.  But other artists have found some positives even in this month. Pietro Aretino, an Italian poet born in 1492 wrote of February “Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius”.

William Barton’s poem February Fill-Dike finds hope in the natural world:
February fills dikes, overflows fields
and streams, turns paths to slippery ooze.
Petulant winds crease the surface of the lake
and agitate the fast flowing river.
Hail and sunshine play follow-my-leader
across a shifting sky where lazy seagulls swing.

Gorse brags bright yellow flowers.
On hawthorn hedgerows, buds swell with red tips
and tight clusters of dark green leaves.
Daffodils force green shoots through layers of leaf mould.
Moss creeps and bark rots on fallen trees.
New stems and shoots glow red in the setting sun.

February Fill-Dyke

February Fill-Dyke

The saying “February fill dike, Be it black or be it white; But if it be white, It’s the better to like” is an old one. Thomas Tusser in 1557 writes something very similar.  In the visual arts, Benjamin Williams Leader’s 1881 landscape painting February Fill-Dyke is one of my favourites. As a child I was fascinated by it, hanging at the top of the stairs at the entrance to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. One the one hand it’s a desolate, sodden scene, but Leader also finds beauty, particularly in the late afternoon sky reflected in the muddy puddles and ruts. Smoke rises from the chimney of the little cottage, promising warmth even in the dingiest of days. Beneath the soil spring is waiting, rebirth is about to begin.

There are certainly plenty of Shakespeare-related  events getting under way this week, and all of them are free. First of all, there’s a one-off event happening on Wednesday 12 February from 6.30-8.30  when the British Council in London are hosting a lecture entitled Speaking the bright and beautiful English of Shakespeare with Ben Crystal. Even if you can’t get to it, you can still join in because there’s to be a live webcast. You can sign up for either here.

Also beginning on Wednesday is a series of lectures from the Kingston Shakespeare Seminar Spring 2014 on the subject of Shakespeare and Law. The lecture this week will be Martin McQuillan talking on Marx, Derrida, Shakespeare, and there are further lectures on 27 February,  13 March, 20 March, 10 April, 1 May and 8 May. During the series plays to be discussed will include King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV and The Merchant of Venice. All lectures are free and will be held at the Rose Theatre in Kingston-on-Thames. More information here.

Finally, The Victoria and Albert Museum in London opened a new exhibition on 8 February in their Theatre and Performance Galleries that will run until 28 September. Entitled Shakespeare: Greatest Living Playwright, it is celebrating the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, and examines “the enduring influence and popularity of the world’s most famous playwright”.  Quoting from the website,
Drawing together objects from the V&A collection and interviews with key contemporary practitioners, Shakespeare: Greatest Living Playwright examines how Shakespeare’s plays have travelled across centuries and continents to be used as a springboard for theatrical re-imaginings and interpretation. Dealing in universal truths, but offering generations of practitioners the creative freedom to explore new ideas, his works remain contemporary and relevant today.  And here’s a report on it.

february floodPlenty here, then, to keep Shakespeare-lovers going until Shakespeare’s favourite season, spring, begins in earnest and, we hope, the February floods begin to recede.

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Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Essex rebellion

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger

Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger

On this weekend in early February 1601 Shakespeare’s play Richard II was famously performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in advance of the treacherous Essex rebellion. Just a few days later Augustine Phillips, the spokesman for Shakespeare’s company the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was keen to distance them from the event when he was called to give evidence:
He sayeth that on Friday last, or Thursday, Sir Charles Percy, Sir Jocelyn Percy, and the Lord Mounteagle, with some three more, spake to some of the players in the presence of this examinant to have the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second to be played the Saturday next, promising to give them forty shillings more than their ordinary to play it. Where this examinant and his friends were determined to have played some other play holding that play of King Richard to be so old and so long out of use as that they should have small or no company at it But at their request this examinatant and his friends were content to play it the Saturday and had their 40 shillings more than the ordinary for it and so played it accordingly.

The plotters must have hoped to so convince the audience of the need to get rid of their ruler that they would support the Earl of Essex when, the following day, he marched on the city. Phillips was determined to make it clear that the players were not involved with the plot, and indeed resisted the idea of putting on this old play. On Sunday 8 February Essex and his supporters took the Lord Chief Justice hostage, but the play had failed to arouse Londoners so by the end of the day the rebellion was completely quashed.

In a way it would be nice to think that Shakespeare’s plays were so influential that they could have inspired a rebellion. The story always makes me think of Hamlet, who suggests that seeing an action played out on stage could make a guilty person confess:
I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions. .

The results of the play scene are much less clear. While Claudius reacts to the playing out of the murder of old Hamlet, calling for lights and leaving the hall, it’s possible that the question of his guilt remains ambiguous, at least to Hamlet and the court. In modern productions of the play Claudius, the ultimate politician, often manages to imply he is insulted by Hamlet’s insinuation rather than giving anything away.

There was no such ambiguity for the Earl of Essex. At his trial he defended himself by protesting he had been in fear of his own life, and grovelled at the feet of the Queen who had shown him so much favour before. On this occasion the Queen must have felt she had no choice, and Essex was executed. The Earl of Southampton, tried at the same time as Essex, was lucky to be imprisoned in the Tower. Shakespeare must have felt closely involved: Southampton had been his patron, to whom he dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

There’s another reason for thinking that Essex might have been right in thinking the play of Richard II would be inflammatory. The Kentish antiquarian William Lambarde reported that he had, in August 1601, a conversation with the Queen in which she had said “I am Richard II, know ye not that?”, which has been taken as evidence for the power of the theatre in Elizabethan England. The authenticity of the report has been called into question in recent years. It would be sad to think that truth might get in the way of such a good story.

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Cabinets of curiosity: Shakespeare’s the Thing

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
The wooden model of Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare, at the Folger Shakespeare Library

The wooden model of Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare, at the Folger Shakespeare Library

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, has just opened a new exhibition to celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. Called Shakespeare’s the Thing, the library is sharing “some of our favourite things” from their famous collections. Curated by head of reference Dr Georgianna Ziegler, the items have been selected by Folger staff. Beginning with four different versions of the Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare from folios, the exhibition goes on to show how William Shakespeare has touched every facet of our culture.

The items on display are indeed a wonderful mixture of objects, books and pictures: one of William Henry Ireland’s forged documents, a tea caddy with a portrait of Shakespeare, a wooden model of Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare, stage versions and costume designs, coming up to date with the video of 10 Things I Hate About You and The Play’s the Thing board game.

It’s not as random as it may sound: the exhibition’s organised by subject, with two cases of translations and another of Shakespeare portraits. It’s a great opportunity to take what they’re calling “a broad look at the bard”, and will be on until 15 June.

None of the items are quite as wacky as the locks of “the hair of the head of Shakespeare’s  when 16, and the year of his death”, which are located in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s collections, a hang-over, surely, from the period when spurious artefacts were displayed in the Birthplace. They too have their place in the story of Shakespeare’s growing popularity, and the almost-religious hunger for relics.

The idea that items are displayed for their interest value rather than because they fit in with the theme of a carefully-curated exhibition reminds me of the idea of the cabinet of curiosity that flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the fore-runners of museum collections. There is currently much interest in the idea of cabinets of curiosities, as explained in this recent Guardian article. In many of the installations curators respond to existing works of art, for instance at the Prado museum in Madrid “a dolphin skeleton now hangs from the dome of the museum’s sculpture court, casting its looming shadow over a massive marble Venus and her dolphin. ‘It’s jumping like a leviathan …as it prepares to swallow the goddess.’ ”

The Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum

The Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum

One of my favourite places is the permanent exhibition in the British Museum, Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century. The museum was founded in 1753 and to quote Neil MacGregor in his introduction to the book of the exhibition “it seeks …to examine the way people of the time looked at the natural and artificial curiosities being collected from all over the world by scholars and collectors, who then sought to make sense of their past and their present”. What I found exciting about the exhibition was that it conveys the sense that early collectors were trying to understand not just the objects but how they related to each other within the context of different cultures. The difficult issues of description and classification were being developed in all fields of knowledge. In the exhibition objects are presented in a different way from the rest of the museum and the feeling of the cabinet of curiosity is deliberately invoked.

some of the wall-cases in the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum

some of the wall-cases in the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum

In those cabinets of curiosity specimens of all kinds would be displayed together: mostly natural history, but also man-made objects like coins, illustrations  and books. In his chapter, Robert Huxley quotes a 1638 account of the collection owned by the great plantsmen the Tradescants. One cabinet contained “a piece of wood, an ape’s head, a cheese etc., all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ”.

These original cabinets of curiosities were a result of the urge to collect, almost randomly, and this description is a reminder that there was little distinction between art and science in the early modern period.

Does the new trend signal a change in what we want to get from visiting a museum? Rather less of the comprehensive, glossy exhibition in subtly-lit air-conditioned halls, and rather more of the quirky, individual collection resulting from a genuine fascination with the items, or a wish to find out? How much further could the idea of telling the story of Shakespeare’s growing and global cultural impact be developed beyond the Folger’s current exhibition?

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John Lyly onstage with Edward’s Boys

Posted on February 3, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
The title page of Galathea

The title page of Galathea

A new production of John Lyly’s play Galatea has just been announced. Performances of his plays are now a real rarity, but at his peak, in the 1580s, Lyly was the most fashionable dramatist in England. His plays were not aimed at the newly-opened popular open-air theatres such as The Theatre, but were intended for a more courtly audience at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre or at the Court itself.

There’s lots of information about Lyly on the SHALT website, including a video overview of Lyly’s place in the theatre, a performed extract from Sapho and Phao, and two interviews, with Andy Kesson and Lucy Munro.

Lyly was about ten years older than Shakespeare, and his writing style greatly influenced him. His plays are mostly in prose, full of elaborate, sophisticated wordplay, and the style’s effect on Shakespeare can be best seen in the early comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost. Here Lyly’s love of using Greek myths as stories comes out in the staging in Shakespeare’s play of the Nine Worthies. The idea of the witty love contest, used by Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing, can also be traced back to Lyly. In Love’s Labour’s Lost his influence can particularly be seen in the figure of Don Armado, and the pedantic discussions of Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel. Shakespeare both imitates it and takes the mickey. At the end of the scene between Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel, Constable Dull, representing the common man, claims not to have understood a word of their conversation. It’s easy to see why his plays haven’t stood the test of time, but it is great news that audiences will have the opportunity to see one performed.

The title page of Euphues, Lyly's first successful piece of writing.

The title page of Euphues, Lyly’s first successful piece of writing.

Lyly’s plays were intended to be played by boy companies, and Lucy Munro points out that Shakespearean comedy begins to take over at just the time when the boy players ceased. Shakespeare took advantage of interest in their style while also inventing something of his own, in particular the cross-dressing of his heroines as boys in plays like As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Sexual confusion is also a feature of Lyly’s plays, in particular in Galatea. Here the unlikely story begins with the situation that the god Neptune has unleashed a devastating flood in retaliation for an offence against him, and since then has demanded the sacrifice of a fair virgin in exchange for peace. To avoid their daughters being sacrificed, two fathers disguise them as boys. Set loose in a forest, each girl (Galatea and Phillida)  falls for the other who they think to be a boy. After a series of complications one of the girls is turned into a boy in order to bring about a happy end. For some reason the setting is in Lincolnshire. This may make sense when I see the play, but I can’t help thinking Shakespeare was right to set his comedies, at least nominally, in more exotic locations.

The parallels with Shakespeare are obvious: young people disguising themselves to avoid danger, falling in love with the wrong people, and needing supernatural intervention to make all well. And the idea that in order to make boys more plausible as girls you dress them as boys, was enthusiastically taken up by Shakespeare. This has a particular sexual dynamic in the modern theatre where women play their roles, but the new production of Galatea will feature a cast made up entirely of boys.

The new production is by Edward’s Boys, the schoolboy troupe from Shakespeare’s own school, directed by Perry Mills.  Performance dates are:
13 March Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
14 March Queen Mary’s Grammar School, Walsall
15-16 March Levi Fox Hall, King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon
25 April Playbox, The Dream Factory, Warwick
27 April Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe, London

More information is available here.

The performance in London is particularly exciting because it will be the first performance in the Globe’s new indoor theatre of a play performed by a boy’s company, in the sort of conditions Lyly’s plays were written for. It is the culmination of a study day John Lyly and the Children’s Companies’ Repertoire.  It promises to be a fascinating day including “public workshops and talks from actors, directors and leading Lyly scholars that will include Andy Kesson, Lucy Munro, Peter Saccio, Leah Scragg and James Wallace.”

Full information is available on the Globe’s website.

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W S Gilbert, Alternative Shakespeare, and charity

Posted on January 31, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
Iolanthe poster

Iolanthe poster

WS Gilbert is universally known for his partnership with Sullivan, creating the operas staged at the Savoy Theatre in London by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. G&S’s light, mostly comic operas such as The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe and many others have been performed over the past 130 years or so to the delight of audiences around the world.

But Gilbert only got together with Sullivan in the mid 1870s. Both men already had flourishing careers, Sullivan as a composer and Gilbert as a successful playwright. A lot of information about him is to be found on the W S Gilbert Society website.

I’ve only recently become aware of  Gilbert’s Hamlet spoof Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, which he wrote in 1874 just before the partnership really began. Now there is a chance to see this rarity performed at the Shakespeare Institute on Sunday 16 February at 4pm. RSC actors past and present are going to be giving a rehearsed reading of the play, as well as other delights, assisted by the Shakespeare Institute Players.

A scene from the original production of Gilbert's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

A scene from the original production of Gilbert’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

As is apparent in the G&S operas, Gilbert had a tremendous love of wordplay and comedy, which he exploits in this delightfully funny burlesque. In one of the most famous scenes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince gives his advice to the players who come to perform in Elsinore, and in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Gilbert can’t resist giving his Hamlet a similar speech about successful comic acting technique: “I hold that there is no such antick fellow as your bombastical hero who doth so earnestly spout forth his folly as to make his hearers believe that he is unconscious of all incongruity.”  Most actors and comedians today would agree with Gilbert’s analysis.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was considered for performance by Henry Irving, the leading Shakespearean actor of the day, but the play wasn’t actually performed until 1891. Its first performance was as a benefit matinee and a successful production followed, as did a production in New York City. WS Gilbert himself performed Claudius in several benefits, and the play has often been put on in support of charity.

This is the case, too, with the performance on 16 February. The serious purpose behind it is the aim to help raise money to help Jami Rogers, PhD (from the Shakespeare Institute), a US citizen, in her legal battle to remain in the UK. Her application was refused at the end of 2013 and she is now launching an appeal. The benefit performance will help demonstrate support for her as well as raising much needed funds. Admission to the event has been pitched at the low level of £10, for which, remember, you will have the pleasure of watching actors of the calibre of Edward Bennett, Katy Stephens and Claire Price. Even if you aren’t able to be there, please give whatever you can to help Jami’s appeal. Details of the performance, and of how to make a donation, are here.

It promises to be a delightful Sunday-afternoon treat, so I hope people will come along. Full details are on the Gilbert Benefit page of this blog.

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Shakespeare connections: Stratford-upon-Avon and Birmingham

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
The 1816 medal

The 1816 medal

During Shakespeare’s lifetime Birmingham was a town of a similar size to Stratford. But while Birmingham grew into a great centre of industry and innovation, Stratford remained a small country town. By 1851 nearly a quarter of a million people lived in Birmingham, just twenty miles away. The town had a high reputation for engineering, but it was also “the workshop of the world”, where quality metal items such as buttons, medals and jewellery were manufactured.

Back in 1769 a bronze medal had been struck by Westwood of Birmingham to celebrate the Garrick Jubilee in Stratford. In 1816 when the first celebration was held on Shakespeare’s birthday, a handsome bill proclaimed that “A beautiful medal… manufactured by Otley & Dowler of Birmingham, representing the Immortal Shakespeare was available in Stratford from Mr Ward. ” There were other links with Birmingham in the same year: the actor Mr Elliston offered the Stratford Corporation the services of his professional actors: “I shall have at that period a very respectable company at Birmingham”. Mr Bell Wheler replied “I am sorry that the Mayor and other Magistrates will object to theatrical performances at this time”. The implied reason for the rebuff is that the visit would not be financially viable, but was this old-fashioned Stratford’s stuffiness against go-ahead Birmingham’s enthusiasm?

Birmingham continued to supply medals to commemorate Shakespeare’s birthday celebrations, and several examples are shown on the Windows on Warwickshire website. Gentlemen from Birmingham were members of the Shakespearean Club, and took part in the annual celebrations held in Stratford. In 1830 fireworks were provided by Mr Ashley of Birmingham. By 1847, Stratford’s focus had shifted towards London. The purchase of Shakespeare’s Birthplace for the nation had been organised by committees in both Stratford and London, and the traditional dinners at Shakespeare’s Hall (the Town Hall) were taken over by high-profile guests from the metropolis. Locals, including tradesmen, were pushed back to the traditional home of the Shakespearean Club, the Falcon. One report commented ruefully that this included people from Birmingham who had attended the dinners for over twenty years. The two dinners continued to be held as pretty well the only celebration of Shakespeare’s Birthday until at least 1852.

The gathering outside Holy Trinity Church, 1853

The gathering outside Holy Trinity Church, 1853

Things changed in April 1853. The Illustrated London News reported “This year…a number of Birmingham gentlemen made arrangements for a “pilgrimage”… to be followed by two concerts, a series of orations, and a dinner in the evening. Unfortunately…they did not think proper to consult the influential residents of Stratford-on-Avon and its neighbourhood” The result was two separate celebrations. There was a dinner on the 23rd as usual, and the Birmingham contingent fixed on the 26th. “The weather was bright and smiling, but not so the Stratford people, who held aloof from the celebrations”. Omnibuses arrived at 11, and the Birmingham party set off from the One Elm to the Birthplace at 12. They entered the house, and Mr George Linnaeus Banks ascended a temporary platform in front of the house to deliver an oration “properly rebuking the apathy of the townspeople”. The procession continued to Holy Trinity Church “where the ‘sordid spirit’ was fully exhibited in the form of a placard, in large letters, stating that a gratuity would be expected for the clerk “. Outside the church Mr James Bennett, tragedian of the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, delivered an ode, as shown in the illustration. A concert, orations and a public dinner followed before they all got back in their omnibuses and departed. The gleeful report in the national Illustrated London News, must have been humiliating to say the least for Stratfordians.

Looking back, it now seems a pity that it was not possible for the burghers of Stratford to work alongside the energetic and wealthy Brummies, who seem to have decided to go their own way. In 1856 three inns in Birmingham held dinners to celebrate Shakespeare’s Birthday: The Red House, The White Horse, and the King’s Head. And Birmingham was soon to prove that it could celebrate the life and achievements of Shakespeare in a style that Stratford couldn’t match.

The bust of George Dawson that stands in the Library of Birmingham

The bust of George Dawson that stands in the Library of Birmingham

Mr Samuel Timmins, who was also on the Committee for Shakespeare’s Birthplace, first proposed the creation of a Shakespeare Memorial Library in Birmingham in 1858. In 1861 liberal reformer and preacher George Dawson publicly floated the idea: “I want to see founded in Birmingham a Shakespeare Library which should contain (as far as practicable) every edition and every translation of Shakespeare; all the commentators, good, bad and indifferent; in short, every book connected with the life or works of our great poet. I would add portraits of Shakespeare, and all the pictures etc., illustrative of his works”.

A committee was formed in 1863 and the Library was officially founded in 1864 on the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. It opened, as part of the Birmingham Reference Library, in 1868. Dawson’s address at the opening of the Reference Library indicates the importance of learning and culture to those who governed Birmingham: “a great town is a solemn organism through which should flow, and in which should be shaped, all the highest, loftiest, and truest ends of man’s intellectual and moral nature…; we have made provision for our people – for all our people”.

Birmingham was keen to be seen not just as a centre of industry, and its civic pride manifested itself in enthusiasm for Shakespeare, a Warwickshire man. Was Stratford piqued by the competition, or was the development of the Shakespeare celebrations and the founding of a theatre, art gallery and library down to the opportunities brought by the railway that linked the town to Birmingham from 1860?

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Thomas Cromwell from page to stage: Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Sylvia Morris
Holbein's painting of Thomas Cromwell. Frick Collection, New York

Holbein’s painting of Thomas Cromwell. Frick Collection, New York

The plays based on Hilary Mantel’s books Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies have been successful both at the box office and in the media. This period of history, Henry VIII’s courtship of Anne Boleyn, divorce from Catherine of Aragon and Anne’s fall from favour and execution, is endlessly popular and has been the subject of any number of plays, films and TV series including of course Shakespeare’s own play Henry VIII. Sometimes these have focused on the personal stories of Henry or Anne, but Mantel’s books focus on the politics of this turbulent time, in particular the part played by Thomas Cromwell. Often cast as the villain of the piece, he holds a fascination for Mantel. He was after all doing a job for a king who eventually turned on him too.

Michael Billington’s review in the Guardian, like most of the articles about the play, focuses on the business of turning a successful couple of novels into equally successful plays. Here are links to articles that have appeared in The Independent, and an interview with Mantel in the Daily Telegraph. Theatrevoice includes a video of Mantel talking with adapter Mike Poulton.

It’s no wonder that there’s such interest in this aspect of the work. Novels can take the reader into the interior life of the characters, and Mantel’s richly-layered books build up our view of the omni-present Cromwell, beginning with a section on his childhood. Onstage he’s not necessarily the focus of our attention: Mike Poulton could have added soliloquies to allow audiences to get closer to him, but instead he increased the closeness of Cromwell to his clerk, Rafe Sadler.

Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies.” Keith Pattison

Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies.” Keith Pattison

These are very long novels, and condensing one thousand pages into six hours must have been a tough job. Poulton concentrated on the main story, launching straight in and inserting a few references to Cromwell’s past as it goes along, as Shakespeare so often does. But it’s the performances themselves that make the production so successful. Michael Billington comments that Ben Miles “brilliantly conveys the watchful intelligence, the inner grief, the implacable isolation” of the man. This is achieved almost entirely without words, by the shorthand of  few glances and gestures. And other members of the cast are equally skilled at conveying character and relationships with very little to say.

There’s to be a weekend of sessions examining the books, the adaptations and the history on which they’re based on 22 and 23 March. The session on 22 March will be a discussion between Mantel and Poulton on how the books were adapted for the stage and 23 March, Cromwell’s Court,will be a day of talks exploring the context of the novels and the influence of Cromwell in Henry VIII’s Court.

I’m surprised to see the New York Times review describe the plays as “a bright, bustling political soap opera”, and prefer Michael Billington’s assessment as ” a gripping piece of narrative theatre”. Wolsey’s downfall in the first play is a preamble to the events that follow, leading ever more compellingly to the execution of a queen which Cromwell has engineered. We recognise our own world and Shakespeare’s in the meteroric rises and sudden downfalls of political figures. Cromwell’s early caution remind me too of lines by Shakespeare in Sonnet 48 about the importance of remaining in the background in dangerous times:
How careful was I, when I took my way,
Each trifle under truest bars to thrust,
That to my use it might unused stay
From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust!

Hilary Mantel winning the Booker Prize for Wolf Hall

Hilary Mantel winning the Booker Prize for Wolf Hall

By the end of Bring up the Bodies Cromwell is at the height of his power. Mantel is still working on third book which will chart his downfall, and it’s no wonder she has become so absorbed by his complex character. In the Daily Telegraph interview she talks about Cromwell:
“He’s still a work in progress, for me,” she confesses. “I don’t think it’s my job to come to a resounding conclusion. One question drives the whole thing – “What would I do in the same situation?” In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it’s Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it’s crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors.”

 Mantel has written a pen portrait of Cromwell which is to be offered for sale by the National Portrait Gallery as a fundraising initiative. There’s a preview here.

 

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T S Eliot and Shakespeare

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Sylvia Morris

 

Jeremy Irons reading T S Eliot

Jeremy Irons reading T S Eliot

Listening to Jeremy Irons’ reading of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets on Radio 4 last weekend reminded me of the power of Eliot’s poetry. The Poetry Foundation’s website includes some information about the reading, and here is an article about Irons’ love for Eliot published to coincide with his reading of the Four Quartets at Hay Literary Festival in 2013. If you want to listen to Jeremy Irons almost hypnotic reading, this is the link, but you have only until Saturday 24 January.

The Waste Land

The Waste Land

I then realised that Irons and Eileen Atkins had also read and recorded Eliot’s The Waste Land. This is now available to listen to here. I remember being introduced to this poem while still at school, but reading it this year as we mark the start of the First World War the references to the post-war world are especially strong. I remember appreciating its sense of loss and the emptiness of modern life, but being a bit irritated by its inclusion of so many quotations from other poems that it needed pages of notes. In the introduction to the reading Jackie Kay explains how this, the first modernist poem, takes everything that has gone before, breaks it down and brings it back together. It’s only by looking back that Eliot is able to take a massive leap forward into the modern world.

Shakespeare, inevitably, is one of the poets that Eliot quotes in The Waste Land, as well as many others. You can’t miss that puzzling reference to Ophelia’s mad scene at the end of the session in the pub “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night”, or the lines adapted from Antony and Cleopatra at the start of A Game of Chess:
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble,

before going on to describe a world so different from Cleopatra’s Egypt,  “I think we are in Rats’ alley/ Where the dead men lost their bones”.  He carries on this image of death later on, with a reference to The Tempest in The Fire Sermon:
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground.

One of Eliot’s clearest references to Shakespeare is in his earlier poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use.

T S Eliot

T S Eliot

Eliot did not think Hamlet a success. In his essay on the play published in the 1922 collection The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, he wrote: “We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. ”

Eliot instead praised the much less-highly regarded play Coriolanus. This article, considering the success of Ralph Fiennes film of the play, explains more and contains this quotation from Eliot:
“Coriolanus may be not as “interesting” as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success. And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the Mona Lisa of literature.”

Eliot lived through both World Wars as an adult, dying only in 1965. It’s not surprising that he was drawn to Coriolanus, a play with much to say about flawed leadership, war, and its consequences. In his unfinished 1931 poem Coriolan Eliot follows a list of the glamorous trappings of Roman war, the flags, the trumpets, the eagles, with another list, of the hardware used to such devastating effect in World War I. Heartless bureaucracy is condemned by Eliot’s use of the repeated word, “mother”, spoken by Shakespeare’s Coriolanus when his resolve to destroy Rome cracks under his own mother’s emotional pleas for mercy.
A commission is appointed
For Public works, chiefly the question of rebuilding the fortifications.
A commission is appointed
To confer with a Volscian commission
About perpetual peace: the fletchers and javelin-makers and smiths
Have appointed a joint committee to protest against the reduction of orders.
Meanwhile the guards shake dice on the marches
And the frogs (O Mantuan) croak in the marshes.
Fireflies flare against the faint sheet lightning
What shall I cry?
Mother mother

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Picturing Shakespeare’s characters

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Sylvia Morris

My last post was about processions of people dressed as Shakespeare’s characters, especially in relation to David Garrick’s The Jubilee. It’s as if they have a life independent of the plays, so nobody would be surprised to see Falstaff, Juliet or Shylock walking down the street. But artist have also imagined those characters and have also placed them outside the play in which they appear.

Thomas Stothard, Shakespearean Characters. Tate Gallery

Thomas Stothard, Shakespearean Characters. Tate Gallery

The 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s works, for the first time included illustrations of Shakespeare’s characters, as opposed to portraits of actors in costume. The first major exercise in creating paintings of Shakespeare’s characters was the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery that operated from 1789 to 1805. This major project allowed artists to interpret scenes from Shakespeare’s plays as well as imagining some of the scenes he described. The choice of characters and moments from the plays are often the most popular on stage: the ghost appearing to Hamlet, Falstaff being bundled into the buck basket. But sometimes the artists responded to Shakespeare’s descriptions of events such as the murder of the princes in Richard III and the horseback entrance into London of Richard II and Bolingbroke.

But I’ve come across other representations of Shakespeare’s characters from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that strongly remind me of David Garrick’s onstage procession in The Jubilee. The earliest was by Thomas Stothard, whose painting Shakespearean Characters, shown above, was exhibited in 1813. It’s in the form of a frieze, as is his most famous painting, The Pilgrimage to Canterbury, based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Stothard, born in 1755, would easily have been old enough to see Garrick’s spectacular piece The Jubilee when it was staged between 1769-1776, and he had already shown his interest in Shakespeare by contributing paintings to the Boydell Gallery.

Thomas Stothard, Shakespearean Characters, Victoria and Albert Museum

Thomas Stothard, Shakespearean Characters, Victoria and Albert Museum

This must have been extremely popular as several different versions still exist. The largest is the one at the Tate Gallery, over 2.5 metres long and nearly 1 metre high. The Victoria and Albert Museum has another, 1.4 metres long, and there’s also a watercolour version at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (no.D.38.1892).

The second painting I came across was Procession of Characters from Shakespeare’s Plays, dating from around 1840. This was formerly attributed to painter Daniel Maclise, who painted one of the most famous pictures of the play Scene from Hamlet. The actual painter is unknown, and the painting is at the Yale Center for British Art.

Procession of Characters from Shakespeare's Plays, formerly attributed to Daniel Maclise

Procession of Characters from Shakespeare’s Plays, formerly attributed to Daniel Maclise

Another similar painting that I spotted some time ago (illustrated below), was Sir John Gilbert’s The Plays of William Shakespeare, from 1849. Gilbert too did extensive work on Shakespeare, with his dramatic woodcuts decorating an 1858-1860 edition of Shakespeare’s plays.

The choice of characters indicates the relative popularity of the plays. Stothard, as in the Garrick procession, divides his characters into comedy and tragedy. From the left are characters from Twelfth Night including Olivia and Malvolio, then Falstaff and others from The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Rosalind and Celia from As You Like It, while on the right are Lear and Cordelia, Ophelia and Hamlet, and the Macbeths with the weird sisters. In the centre are Prospero and Miranda from The Tempest, no doubt because Prospero was thought to represent Shakespeare himself. The scenes are very atmospheric, with much use of light and dark.

By contrast the 1840 frieze is rather bland, with no sense of drama, none of the genteel characters doing anything that might upset or offend. On the left is a figure looking like the young Queen Victoria in her coronation robes, followed by characters from a large number of plays: Lady Macbeth, Launce and Crab from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, figures from Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello and Twelfth Night.

Sir John Gilbert's The Plays of William Shakespeare

Sir John Gilbert’s The Plays of William Shakespeare

Gilbert’s painting is full of dramatic action and a galaxy of characters. In the foreground there’s a sort of cradle to grave progression with the finding of baby Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, Hamlet and Ophelia, Shylock and Portia, and Lear in the storm with Poor Tom. Further back are Henry VIII and Wolsey, Falstaff and the merry wives (with the washing), Prospero, Miranda and Caliban. Launce and Crab appear again, and characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are rather strangely tucked away. Some of the characters are in famous poses, such as Henry VIII, straight out of a Holbein painting.

There must be many more images of Shakespeare’s characters, but the one I keep thinking of is George Carter’s The Apotheosis of Garrick. Painted in 1782, after Garrick’s death, it shows him being raised to Mount Olympus to be greeted by Shakespeare and the Muses of Comedy and Tragedy. Bidding him farewell are the actors, in character, known for appearing with him in Shakespeare’s plays, varying from the most popular like Hamlet and As You Like It to the less known Measure for Measure and Cymbeline. I know the painting well because it once hung in the RSC’s Picture Gallery. It’s now in store, but here’s the link to the BBC’s Your Paintings website where it can be seen. Looking at the painting now I wonder if it too refers to The Jubilee, when some of the actors portrayed must have appeared in that spectacular procession of Shakespeare’s characters.

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Taking to the streets with Shakespeare’s characters

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Sylvia Morris

The Procession at the Jubilee at Stratford upon Avon [London, 1769]. From the collections of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

The Procession at the Jubilee at Stratford upon Avon [London, 1769]. From the collections of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Shakespeare celebrations in Stratford have taken many forms over the past two and a half centuries. I’ve written before about the history of holding feasts, an essential component of any party. But what’s also notable is the tradition of characters from Shakespeare plays processing through the town.

The most famous illustrations of the subject are the two engravings of costumed characters published in 1769 for David Garrick’s Jubilee. This procession was planned to be a striking part of the three-day festival, but it had to be abandoned because of the torrential rain that would have ruined the theatre costumes. Presumably the prints were made in advance, in the hope of selling them as souvenirs, though it’s also possible they were published when The Jubilee was turned into a separate entertainment at DruryLaneTheatre in London a few weeks later. Garrick must have had an inkling that he had a hit on his hands when the competing theatre in London, Covent Garden, got in first and staged a pageant of Shakespeare characters before Garrick’s was ready. This competition seems to have encouraged him to turn the show into the spectacular it became.

In The Jubilee, Garrick gave his great ode, the focus of the Stratford celebrations, choirs sang the song from Stratford, and the procession was the climax of the performance. The little engravings of the planned Stratford procession show only 24 characters, but in the theatre it assumed a much larger scale. Garrick insisted that actors came on appropriately costumed in the roles for which they were well known. Garrick himself came on as Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing.

Continuation of the Procession of Shakespear’s Characters [London, 1769]. From the collections of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Continuation of the Procession of Shakespear’s Characters [London, 1769]. From the collections of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

This may explain one of the oddities of the engravings. Most of the characters are identified by a quote, but the second illustration prominently shows a couple who could be any of Shakespeare’s romantic couples. If the man is Garrick, the most famous actor of the day, as Benedick, he would have needed no explanation.

Vanessa Cunningham, in her book Shakespeare and Garrick, describes the “spectacular all-singing-and-dancing finale” on stage. “He used the processional entrance of the statue of Shakespeare, led by Apollo and supported by the Passions and surrounded by the seven muses with their trophies, to separate the groups of comedies and tragedies” Each play was identified with a banner and the actors held props appropriate to the character. She continues:

The impact of the spectacle must have been terrific. The Tempest featured not only drunken sailors, Ariel, Prospero and Miranda, but also a ship in distress sailing down the stage. Falstaff, Mrs Ford and Mrs Page were on horseback, and after Macbeth and Lady Macbeth came a burning cauldron drawn by four demons, Hecate and three witches following. Oberon and Titania rode in a chariot drawn by butterflies. The Comic and Tragic Muse each had her own chariot, and was appropriately attended: Venus and Cupid, satyrs and lovers for the former; furies, with Fame, Grief, Pity, Despair and Madness for the latter. Including dancers and singers, the script specifies entrances for at least 320 individuals, three horses and one dog (Crab). 

The Jubilee set a record for London productions, being performed 153 times between 1769 and 1776. Those little engravings don’t begin to do the London version justice, but if you’d like to find out more about them, there are two detailed posts on them in Kathryn James’ Remembering Shakespeare blogposts written on 2 and 3 May 2012.

The Mirror, May 1827

The Mirror, May 1827

When, after a gap of over fifty years, locals decided to put on major celebrations of Shakespeare’s Birthday in Stratford, it’s perhaps not surprising that they went back to Garrick’s Jubilee. The first time a procession of costumed characters walked through Stratford was in 1827. The Shakespeare Club had been formed three years before to organise the celebrations, and this was their first big day. Luckily, the procession caused such interest that an engraving was published in The Mirror: literature, amusement and instruction, on 5 May 1827.  This engraving from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collections can be examined in detail. We can see how it was influenced by Garrick’s Jubilee. Led by banners, first came a band, followed by Henry V and St George on horseback. The Tragic Muse on her chariot introduced among others King Lear, Richard III, Macbeth, and Hamlet, complete with gravediggers. Then the Comic Muse led characters from The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oberon and Titania in a chariot drawn by fairies rather than butterflies followed by Bottom with his ass’s head), The Merchant of Venice and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

The procession began from the Guild Hall and wound its way all round the town before ending up almost back where it had begun, in Chapel Lane, to lay the foundation stone for the town’s first purpose-built theatre. The costumes had been hired from London, and those taking part included professional actors as well as locals. The Warwick Advertiser reported on 28 April that St George had been “ably represented by Mr William Tasker, junior, of Stratford”. The procession was watched by thousands.

Charles Kean as Richard III

Charles Kean as Richard III

Three years later, in 1830, the procession was staged again. This was even grander than 1827. “Upwards of 75 of the more prominent characters of Shakespeare burst upon the sight at one view, with a vividness and splendour really astonishing.” “Thousands … blocked up the thoroughfare” and between 25,000 and 35,000 people were in Stratford-upon-Avon for “one of the grandest and most pleasant public spectacles ever got up out of the metropolis”. Professional actors and locals again took part. Twenty leading members of the Shakespeare Club rode in the procession on horseback and this time St George was personated by the twenty-year-old Charles Kean who later in the weekend played Richard III in the Chapel Lane Theatre. Kean went on to become one of the most important actors in the Victorian theatre.

These Stratford processions were, as far as I know, the first such outdoor processions featuring a writer’s characters, though I’d love to hear if not. Putting on these magnificent processions must have been a major undertaking for a small town with limited resources. Today processions rarely include Shakespeare’s characters, but the Birthday procession, the most integral part of the celebrations still attracts huge numbers of spectators and still poses a logistical challenge for the organisers.

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