Acting companies and the ensemble

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

A couple of weeks ago Gregory Doran, the new Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was “In conversation” with Michael Dobson, the head of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. The session was recorded on video and is now generously available on YouTube. In addition to talking about his early influences he inevitably spoke about his plans for the RSC under his Directorship. One subject that came up was the idea of “Company” or “Ensemble”, and Doran suggested that these words can mean very different things to different people.

The first professional acting troupes formed companies under the protection of a nobleman whose name they took, such as Lord Strange’s Men. The “Names of the Principall Actors in all these Playes” are given their own page in Shakespeare’s First Folio, acknowledging the importance of actors to the plays. Their names have a particular magic: these men and boys were the first to create Shakespeare’s characters, and in some cases, like Richard Burbage’s, the roles were written for them. Shakespeare’s acting company wasn’t static, and both William Kempe and Robert Armin are named on the list. We know Kempe played the comic lead Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, but when he left The Chamberlain’s Men  he was superseded by Armin, a more subtle and musical actor for whom Feste in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear were written. It’s interesting to think that if this change of personnel hadn’t happened, Shakespeare’s plays might have been quite different.

The closest-knit companies have usually been those that  tour together, like the Crummles Company which Charles Dickens created in his novel The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, though Dickens uncovers the petty squabbles and jealousies created by the familiarity of the group. In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet the touring actors are a small, closely-knit group “the tragedians of the city”, that Hamlet has seen performing together many times.

By the late nineteenth century, most companies operated under the control of an actor-manager who took both most of the artistic decisions and the best parts. The most powerful was Henry Irving who led the Lyceum Theatre in London from 1878 to 1901, performing most of the leading roles. The reason for this was not simply vanity, but economic. Then as now, audiences came to see star performers, making it difficult for younger actors to progress.

The Saxe-Meiningen Julius Caesar

But in 1881 another way of performing was demonstrated to London theatregoers. The German Saxe-Meiningen Players visited Drury Lane Theatreand their performance of Julius Caesar created a sensation. The Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s theory was that all the actors should be drilled by a director, including the hundreds of supernumeraries (extras) who made up the Roman mob. Both Charles Edward Flower, the founder of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, and the young actor Frank Benson, went to see them perform. Flower wrote up his impressions in a hand-written essay on acting;

“It … carried everyone by storm in Julius Caesar. The acting throughout was of the first order, not only Brutus, Cassius and Antony, were acted by men of great power but all the other parts down to the smallest were well and intelligently played.”

It would be several years before Benson and Flower were to meet, but seeing the Saxe-Meiningen company increased Flower’s ambitions for the newly-opened Memorial Theatre and when Benson was engaged to run the Festivals he must have hoped that something similar would develop.

Frank Benson as Hamlet

For several years Benson indicated that he worked on Meiningen principles, but although he operated a semi-permanent ensemble there was never any question of who would play the lead. Actors in his company would sing:
The Meiningen system is nothing but rot;
Good-bye, poor actor, good-bye,
For Benson’s parts are the best of the lot;
Good-bye, fond actor, good-bye.

Gregory Doran explained that his view of ensemble is somewhat different from Michael Boyd’s. Boyd has done much to bring the whole organisation together. But Doran’s opinion is that Shakespeare wrote hierarchically, with actors taking particular types of parts, and it’s unlikely that the leading actors would have taken minor roles. Doran’s idea of ensemble doesn’t exclude bringing in leading actors for short seasons as he will with David Tennant playing Richard II next winter.

What then of the idea of a semi-permanent ensemble? Doran seems to believe if you provide the right environment it may happen. He said “you can’t cast an ensemble, you can only grow an ensemble”. If you want to spot this section on the recording it’s about 44 minutes in. Doran leads workshops with each company as they comes in, to help improve skills. And Doran’s working methods are designed to allow all the actors working on a play to feel a sense of ownership: for the first week of rehearsals the cast read the play around the table, getting a sense of the whole work rather than just their own parts. Interesting times ahead!

Share
Posted in Shakespeare on Stage, Shakespeare's World | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Acting companies and the ensemble

Richard III is found!

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

This morning Richard Buckley, head archaeologist at Leicester University, has stated that “beyond reasonable doubt”, they have reached the “sound academic conclusion” that they have found “Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England”. Richard’s death at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 has always been beyond doubt, but local tradition had held that his body had been thrown in a local river. For centuries nobody knew the truth.

In a long drawn-out press conference lasting nearly 40 minutes, a tableful of experts gave their evidence, culminating in the most hotly-awaited news, that the DNA did match. Who could blame them, or for celebrating at the end of the announcements?

The most compelling and gruesome evidence came from the forensic examination of the skeleton itself. It had ten wounds, eight on the head, including the fatal blow from a halberd or large bladed weapon to the base of the skull, and lesser injuries to the face. These, and two further injuries to the rib and the pelvis were, it’s thought, “humiliation injuries” made after death. It’s recorded that Richard’s body was stripped and thrown over the back of a horse, with which these would be consistent. It’s hard to imagine how any other body could have borne such savage injuries, though I didn’t hear any mention of the arrowhead which was said to have been found in the spine.

If you want to see the evidence, Channel 4 is screening “The King in the Car Park” at 9pm tonight 4 February. The remains will stay in Leicester, receiving a “lasting and dignified sanctuary” in the Cathedral. A temporary exhibition will be mounted in the Guild Hall within a few days, and a permanent exhibition will follow next year to coincide with the reinterment of the remains. The exhibition will surely look at Richard’s reputation and the part played by Shakespeare in demonising him.

But is Richard’s reputation Shakespeare’s fault? He didn’t invent the psychopathic figure of Richard III, taking much of the story from Holinshed’s chronicles, a piece of propaganda published at least partly to justify the rule of the Tudor dynasty.

Here is Holinshed’s description:
“He was little of stature, evil featured of limbs, crook backed, the left shoulder much higher than the right, hard favoured of visage, such as in estates is called a warlike visage, and among common persons a crabbed face. He was malicious, wrathful and envious… He was close and secret, a deep dissembler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly familiar where he inwardly hated, not letting to kiss whom he thought to kill, despiteous and cruel, not always for evil will, but more often for ambition and to serve his purposes, friend and foe were all indifferent, where his advantage grew, he spared no man’s death whose life withstood his purpose.”

Who could blame Shakespeare for taking this sketch and turning him into a full-blooded villain? Shakespeare did his job brilliantly. Richard is both attractive and devilish, energetically running rings round everybody else. As an audience, we’re all so entertained by him that it’s only late on in the play that we acknowledge he has to be stopped. On the night before he dies Richard is haunted by the ghosts of his victims. Shakespeare gives him a wonderful speech:
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain…..
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul shall pity me:
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?
Methought the souls of all that I had murder’d
Came to my tent; and every one did threat
To-morrow’s vengeance on the head of Richard.

We can’t be sorry that Shakespeare wrote his Richard, a part which has been the making of many famous actors from Burbage (the first Richard) to David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Henry Irving, Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen and Antony Sher.

The next question begged by this is whether the skeletons found at the Tower of London and buried in Westminster Abbey as the little princes, nephews of Richard who he wanted dead so he could take the throne, might also be tested for DNA. All that is known is that they disappeared. Identifying their bones wouldn’t explain why or even if they were killed, but would confirm that they died at the Tower.

Share
Posted in Legacy, Sources | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Shakespeare and Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

Title page of Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses

In 1598 the writer Francis Meres wrote that “the witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare”. And well he might: Shakespeare had already written his own version of one of Ovid’s tales, as well as borrowing stories and referring to them, many times within other work.

It was the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular that sparked Shakespeare’s imagination, a book which he would have read in the original Latin at school, which also became available translated into English by Arthur Golding in 1567. This English edition explains the aim of the book:
Of shapes transformed to bodies strange, I purpose to entreat,
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they wrought this wondrous feat)
To further this mine enterprise.

Ovid’s stories tell of magical transformations often involving the classical gods and their relations with humans. One of Shakespeare’s earliest debts is his most obvious, a direct reinterpretation of the story of Venus and Adonis, in which the goddess of love pursues a beautiful but unwilling youth who is gored to death by a boar.

In an early play, Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare uses Ovid’s story of Philomel, the ravished girl who is transformed into the bird with the most beautiful of songs, the nightingale. In the play Lavinia is ravished, her attackers removing both her hands and her tongue. So strong is Ovid’s influence that in this play a copy of Metamorphosis is brought on the stage and Lavinia is able to show her uncle what happened to her by finding the story of Philomel in the book.

The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is staged for royal entertainment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the mechanicals’ play doesn’t get as far as explaining that in Ovid’s story as a result of the tragedy mulberry fruit are stained the colour of the blood on Thisbe’s veil.

Bernini’s statue of Apollo and Daphne

Shakespeare’s borrowings are seen elsewhere, for example again in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Helena chases her love Demetrius through the forest, and refers to Apollo’s chasing of the nymph Daphne.
Run when you will, the story shall be changed:
Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase;

Shakespeare expected many of his audience to understand the reference, in which Daphne appeals to the gods to preserve her virtue, resulting in her being turned into a tree. This unstageable moment has been brilliantly sculpted by Bernini, showing the moment when her skin becomes bark, her hair leaves, and her arms branches.

There are many other examples of Shakespeare’s use of Ovid, but in The Winter’s Tale, written towards the end of his career, Shakespeare combined different stories. to move towards the conclusion of the play. “A sad tale’s best for winter” they say, and Leontes’ jealousy is no more explained than the idea in Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Snow Queen where a splinter of glass enters and settles on the boy’s heart, only to be melted by the love of his friend. Winter comes to stay in Leontes’ court, as the Oracle predicts, until his lost daughter is found.

In Bohemia, sixteen years later, Perdita appears at the summer sheep-shearing festival, bedecked in flowers as the goddess Prosperpina is, her basket containing  purple violets. She is above all the goddess of the springtime, of flowers and fertility. Perdita herself appeals to the goddess:
O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that frighted thou let’st fall
From Dis’s waggon!

At the climax of the play Shakespeare does what seems impossible: he stages one of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Though it’s never named,the story is that of Pygmalion, known much better to us through the musical My Fair Lady. Pygmalion, a sculptor, creates his perfect woman out of marble, and falls in love with her. Pygmalion wants her to be real so desperately that the gods grant him his wish, and she is brought to life.

Kelly Hunter as Hermione in the RSC production of The Winter’s Tale

The apparent coming to life of the statue of Hermione is the most miraculous moment in all of Shakespeare’s plays. The finding of Perdita, “that which is lost”, brings life to both her parents, as spring follows winter. It’s a reversal of Ovid’s usual turning of an animate into an inanimate object, and Ovid’s story is more about art outdoing nature than reincarnation but Paulina reminds us “It is required you do awake your faith”. Jonathan Bate, in his book Shakespeare and Ovid, suggests that both men knew that ” representations of myth, metamorphosis, and sexuality can still work the traditional magic of poetry by moving us – to tears, to laughter, and to thought – and by awakening our wonder”.

Share
Posted in Shakespeare's World, Sources | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Touring performances in Shakespeare’s town

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

Stratford’s Guild Hall, 1830

It’s refreshing to be made to rethink something you have always accepted as fact, and J R Mulryne’s The Guild and Guild Buildings of Shakespeare’s Stratford challenges some of the received wisdom about these ancient buildings.

This is true throughout the book, but never more so in the chapters which talk about the functions of the Guild Hall and the School Room which was built above in the 1560s. Guide books all tell us that the upper room was used for the school, whereas the lower Guild hall was used for meetings of Stratford’s town council, and for the performances of visiting professional acting companies which played in the town from 1568 onwards. The vision of John Shakespeare in his robes of office, sitting in pride of place with his little son William seeing his very first play, is irresistible.

And it may well be true, but several chapters in this book raise questions about the functions and layout of these rooms which may surprise those who like me thought it was straightforward. To begin with, the chapters about civil governance in the Guild Hall suggest a complicated picture. The Guild Hall was used not just for council meetings, local feasts, plays and hearings relating to local breaches of the peace, but for a whole range of other events. The list includes full trials for serious offences requiring a jury of twelve men, trials overseen by visiting justices of the peace, and the entertainment of  important visitors such as the Earl of Worcester.

All these are the sort of events that Shakespeare often incorporated into his plays. Think of the council meetings in the history plays, court hearings in Measure for Measure, the preparations needed for the theatricals in Hamlet or a banquet like Capulet’s in Romeo and Juliet where the servants are encouraged to make room: “turn the tables up”, and “Away with the joint-stools, remove the court-cupboard, look to the plate”. This was a multi-purpose building that Shakespeare knew well.

I found the three chapters which focus on the visits of professional troupes of players particularly interesting. J R Mulryne, in collaboration with a number of historians, has examined the records of these performances and suggests there is much still to find out. Travelling players were required to perform in front of the civic authorities before being licensed to play elsewhere in the town, and it is thought that this performance would have taken place at the Guild Hall, the players then being able to perform elsewhere, probably one of the town’s large inns.

The School Room

It’s always assumed this was in the lower Hall, but Mulryne makes the sensible suggestion that it may have been the upper or school room that was used for performances rather than the ground floor Hall. This room has a rather low ceiling and the upper room would allow more freedom to the actors as well as better visibility for the audience. He also suggests that some performances might have taken place out of doors in the courtyard behind the Guild Hall.

Mulryne also finds a link between the status of the patron of the company of actors and the amount which they were paid: the three main companies playing in Stratford were the Earl of Worcester’s Players, The Earl of Leicester’s Players and the Queen’s Men. All the recorded visits are listed in the book, and although we know the approximate dates of these visits neither the names of individual members of the companies nor the plays which were performed were listed. But here is where other records fill in the picture, giving us details of the size of the companies and what plays were in their repertoire. Margaret Shewring in her chapter explores much of the evidence while Oliver Jones explores one play in particular, The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England (the relationship to Shakespeare’s play on the same subject is much argued over) discussing how it might have been staged within Stratford’s Guild Hall, and by whom.

The Guild Hall in Coventry, another touring venue

Records of Early English Drama, or REED, is a Canadian project that over the past thirty-five years has undertaken a county-by-county survey of performances up to 1642. Many volumes are now complete, and are gradually being made available online, making it possible to build up a picture of how touring companies moved around the country between towns and the houses of the nobility. It’s also allowed researchers to find, for instance, that although Stratford is an average-size town it had for many years a larger than average number of visits from acting companies.

After 1600 there were increasing restrictions on the visits of acting companies: the 10 shilling fine if players performed in 1602, became in 1612 the eye-watering amount of £10, a twenty-fold rise. But it has recently been noticed that only six months after this increase there was a reduction to the more sensible level of £2. I like the thought that Shakespeare had bought the large house just across the road from the Guild Hall and by 1612 was, it is thought, semi-retired. I wonder if he was amused or irritated by this ban on the performance of the plays which he had spent his life writing, and which had made him a wealthy member of Stratford society.

Share
Posted in Legacy, Shakespeare on Stage, Stratford-upon-Avon | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Touring performances in Shakespeare’s town

Getting inventive in Shakespeare’s England

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

Plate from Mathew Baker’s book

BBC 2 is currently screening a season, Genius of Invention, accompanied by a listing of 50 Great British Inventions. But although these include the obvious (steam and jet engine) and the quirky (soda water, baby buggy), not one of these was invented before Jethro Tull’s 1701 seed drill. It was a landmark in the modernisation of agriculture: by dropping seeds at regular intervals at the right depth for optimum germination it increased crop yields eightfold, helping to increase the population and their life expectancy. And the freeing up of the agricultural population helped to set the scene for the industrial revolution.

But did British inventiveness really only start in 1701? Advances in scientific thinking are often dated back to the foundation of the Royal Society in 1660, when it became fashionable to devote one’s thinking to science. But surely, necessity had been the mother of invention, and Britons had found solutions to practical problems, before this date?

In his introduction to the magazine, Michael Mosley quotes James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner man, who believes that our inventiveness owes much to being an island race. Perhaps Jethro Tull, based in landlocked Oxfordshire, was just an exception because in the century before the foundation of the Royal Society many inventors were obsessed with all aspects of seagoing enterprise. Stephen Johnson, in his thesis, Making mathematical practice: gentlemen, practitioners and artisans in Elizabethan England (Ph.D. Cambridge, 1994), explains the pressures and opportunities: “All aspects of the industry were undergoing rapid development throughout Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Commercially, there were the early voyages of discovery and the subsequent development of long-distance trade. Organisationally, there was the establishment of the first permanent, ocean-going navies. Technically, there were challenges such as the adoption of Mediterranean carvel construction techniques in Northern Europe and the development of 3- and 4-masted full-rigged ships. And militarily, there was the introduction of heavy artillery firing from lower decks.”

An English warship

English inventors were among the best: Mathew Baker was a royal master shipwright responsible for the construction or rebuilding of many of the ships used to repel the Spanish Armada in 1588. His manuscript, known as Fragments of Ancient English Shipwrightry, explains the developments he made in the design of warships to made them less clumsy and more maneoeuverable than earlier ships.

His success is confirmed by Thomas Fuller’s comparison of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare in his Worthies of Warwickshire, “which two I beheld like a great Spanish galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances; Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention.”

On related subjects, William Bourne of Gravesend published a 1574 manual on navigation including tables to aid the calculation of latitude, and Christopher Saxton’s 1579 atlas covering all of England was the first national atlas to be published anywhere.

John Dee

The science of astronomy suffered from often being confused with astrology. The Puritan writer Philip Stubbes condemned “astrologers, astronomers and prognosticators” who relied on “mere conjectures, supposals, likelihoods, guesses… conjunctions of signs, stars and planets, with their aspects and occurrents, and the like, and not upon any certain ground, knowledge or truth, either of God or of natural reason”.  John Dee was a man of enormous learning and a brilliant mathematician, but his obsession with astrology and the search for the philosopher’s stone that would turn base metal into gold seriously damaged his reputation as a scientist.

The man who was the greatest influence on scientific thought and method was Francis Bacon, who encouraged practical applications of science, which should be “operative to the endowment and benefit of man’s life”.  He called for a “spring of a progeny of inventions, which shall overcome, to some extent, and subdue our needs and miseries”.

Frontispiece to The History of the Royal Society of London

Bacon was so highly thought of that in the frontispiece to the History of the Royal Society he is pictured as one of its founding influences. His great interest in the theory and application of heat and cold was his undoing. In spring 1626 he was out driving through snow when he decided to conduct an impromptu experiment, buying and then stuffing a dead chicken with snow to find out more about the effect of cold on putrefaction. Sadly he caught a chill from which he died.

But if you’re looking for inventiveness in Shakespeare’s time you need look no further than the theatre itself.  Julian Bowsher comments in his book Shakespeare’s London Theatreland “the iconic polygonal playhouses that sprang up …were unique buildings”. Roughly circular with three tiers of galleries, they were so unusual that they were commented on by many visiting foreigners. The Chorus in Henry V comments on their inadequacy, but these permanent buildings encouraged experimentation not possible when plays had to be adapted to inn yards or indoor halls. The inventiveness of the builders of the theatres literally set the scene for some of our greatest cultural achievements.
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Share
Posted in Shakespeare's World | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Shakespeare’s school: new discoveries

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

The schoolroom

This is the second post I’m writing about the new book, J R Mulryne’s The Guild and Guild Buildings of Shakespeare’s Stratford: Society, Religion, School and Stage, published by Ashgate. The first can be found here.

The fame of this cluster of buildings rests on the fact that from the late 1500s the floor above the Guild Hall housed the town’s school, attended by the sons of local townsmen including William Shakespeare. It’s a sad fact that although many of the business records of the town have survived the names of the pupils have not, but then why would they? The earliest record of the names of the scholars is a list written in 1740 on the back of another piece of paper by the then schoolmaster Joseph Greene, and the official list of enrolled boys dates only from 1810. A full history of the school, Richard Pearson’s King Edward VI School, Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare’s School, was written as recently as 2008.

Two chapters in the book deal specifically with the school. Sylvia Gill writes about the period from 1420 to 1558, looking in detail at William Dalam,the last teacher before the school was refounded under its new Protestant charter in 1553. We are fortunate that a number of agreements were drawn up clarifying the arrangements for the handover to Dalam’s successor William Smart including the terms of Dalam’s retirement at the age of 65. Ian Green by contrast broadens the view in his chapter, discussing the developments in education during the period more generally. He looks at the developments in the grammar school curriculum, the work of the teachers, and the standing of Stratford’s school during the sixteenth century. He concludes that the life of a schoolmaster may not have been a happy one, with up to sixty not very interested boys pupils learning the rudiments of Latin in one classroom.

The image, which featured in the British Museum’s Shakespeare exhibition in 2012, is a caricature of a schoolmaster drawn by a seventeenth-century scholar in a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from Eton College Library. We still recognise the portrait of the second of Jaques’ seven ages of man,
             the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

Though the curriculum focused on learning Latin, the boys read a wide range of material, including rote learning of William Lilly’s official Grammar, set pieces from other books and, for the older students, the humanist literature of Cicero, Terence, Virgil, Horace and Ovid. The Latin lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor is clearly taken from Lilly’s Grammar, and Shakespeare includes quotations from the book in both Love’s Labour’s Lost and Twelfth Night.

Mulryne describes as “a main impetus towards writing this book” the recent archaeological and documentary research on the Guild buildings, summarised in the chapter by Kate Giles and Jonathan Clark. This has provided some new interpretations of the lower Guild Hall’s wall paintings and on the chapel, but tree-ring analysis has also led to a reassessment of the building traditionally known as the Pedagogues House tucked away from public view in the courtyard behind the Guild Hall. This building has always been assumed to be that which documentary sources from 1427 described as the “Scolehowus”. The results of the dendrochronological survey  suggest, though, that the trees used to build the Pedagogue’s house were felled in 1502. This raises two questions: where was the 1427 Schoolhouse, and what was the Pedagogue’s House’s original function? The answer to the second question will only be confirmed by further research, but it seems possible that it was intended as a hall and parlour for the almshouses.

The Guild buildings, the Chapel on the left, then the Guild Hall and on the right the “infill house”

For the first question, about the early Schoolhouse, a “tentative proposal” has been made that this could in fact be the irregular-sized almshouse that stands adjacent to the Guild Hall, known as the “infill house”, and the suggestion seems to be supported by tree-ring analysis of its timbers. If this is true, the schoolroom would have been on the ground floor off Church Street with the master’s chamber above, and this information will add considerably to the interest of the buildings for those looking at them from the street. In the 1560s only a few years before Shakespeare became a pupil the school would have moved from this small space into the much larger room over the Guild Hall.

Share
Posted in Shakespeare's World, Stratford-upon-Avon | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Announcing the future of the RSC: David Tennant, Hilary Mantel and costume

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

Wednesday morning was an important one for Shakespeare-lovers, with the new team at the RSC, Artistic Director Gregory Doran, Deputy Artistic Director Erica Whyman and Executive Director Catherine Mallyon setting out their plans. There’s a link to the main announcement here and another to the press release, which contains more information, here. And there’s more in the BBC’s report here.

Doran explains the overall strategy in this video clip, here: This winter season acts as a prologue to a wider plan, stretching forward over the next five years. I hope we will work through the entire canon, producing all his plays in our new Royal Shakespeare Theatre, but without repeating the titles in that time. The Swan will be dedicated largely to looking at the stable of writers who worked alongside Shakespeare; to the plays which inspired him and which he inspired; and to writing which matches his scale and ambition, providing a deeper context to the genius of our house playwright.

The biggest announcement was that David Tennant will be playing Richard II, directed by Gregory Doran himself. This was widely rumoured, but I was pleased to hear that casting includes Oliver Ford Davies, the Polonius in Hamlet as, presumably, John of Gaunt who delivers the famous “This England” speech.

Gregory Doran

Doran expects this to be the first in a history cycle which he’s planning to direct over the next few years. Although he’s directed over half of Shakespeare’s plays for the RSC the only history he’s directed is Henry VIII, right back in 1996. I’m delighted to hear the news about David Tennant, who I first saw playing a terrific trio of parts also in 1996: a genuinely funny Touchstone in As You Like It in the RST, the slimily unpleasant Jack Lane in the premiere of The Herbal Bed at The Other Place, and the upright Colonel Hamilton in The General from America in the Swan. Tennant’s an actor who revels in being liked on stage, and Richard II will be a challenge for him. It doesn’t seem likely that this will ever happen, but I think he could be a really interesting Iago in Othello. There’s a video interview with Tennant here.

Other productions announced include a new version of Peter Pan, entitled Wendy and Peter Pan, which will be the latest in the tradition of RSC Christmas shows. Over in the Swan there will be adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s award-winning books Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies on the rise to power of the Tudor politician Thomas Cromwell. Speculation about who might play the role of Thomas Cromwell began immediately on Twitter. Any suggestions?

Erica Whyman has been put in charge of planning the re-opening of The Other Place as a studio space and promises to bring a spirit of “radical mischief and festivity” from 2014, which should be fun.

I was particularly pleased to see that the company’s rich history is to be celebrated through In Stitches – A Celebration of RSC Costume, which will feature some of the RSC’s iconic collection of historic costumes.In the Ferguson Room (previously the RSC Collection) will be Costume Craft, an interactive display that will show how a theatre costume is made and maintained by the RSC’s Costume Department from the first fitting to the final performance. In the PACCAR Room there will be Into the Wild, an RSC Costume Collection exhibition which will explore how costume designers have interpreted themes of nature in Shakespeare’s work.

With my background working in the RSC’s archives I’m delighted that exhibitions are being planned that will simultanously show off the talents of current costume department, display the contents of the historic costume stores, and exploit the phenomenal riches of the RSC’s archives which, for costumes, include huge numbers of photographs, costume designs and working costume bibles, making it one of the best-documented theatre companies in the world. And although the RSC’s productions are rarely strictly in period this is perfectly timed to coincide with the Royal Collection’s exhibition In Fine Style: the art of Tudor and Stuart Costume.

 

Share
Posted in Legacy, Shakespeare on Stage, Stratford-upon-Avon | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Stratford’s Guild: the background to Shakespeare’s town

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

Any guide to the town of Stratford-upon-Avon will mention the buildings of the Guild of the Holy Cross and their association with William Shakespeare and his family. For it was here Shakespeare almost certainly received his education and here he probably saw his first plays. The importance of the buildings in the history of the town is less frequently considered.

The well preserved-buildings are some of the most striking in the town, and, remarkably, are still used for the purposes for which they were constructed over five hundred years ago. The complex is made up of the Guild Chapel, the Guild Hall with the schoolroom above, the alms houses and additional buildings tucked away behind. A new book, The Guild and Guild Buildings of Shakespeare’s Stratford: Society, Religion, School and Stage, edited by J R Mulryne and published by Ashgate, seeks to put these buildings and the Guild for which they were erected in the spotlight. This collection of essays is written by ten scholars with a variety of expertise from archaeology to historic archives and theatre history. Several of these contributors have been associated with the town for more than thirty years and bring a wealth of knowledge to the subject.

I’ll be writing further blog posts looking at two particular aspects of this book, the school and the performances which took place in these buildings.

The Guild itself dates back to the thirteenth century, a religious foundation which over the years became more and more secular and provided much of the government of the town. Mairi Macdonald has already published a transcript of the Guild’s membership register dating from 1406 to the dissolution in the 1540s, and her chapter in the book is based on her findings. Both the clergy and laity were involved with the Guild, and members were drawn not just from the local area but also from Coventry, London, Bristol and even Cumbria. Local members stated their occupations which illustrated “an economy focused on the food, clothing and building trades: bakers, butchers, millers, weavers, tailors, walkers (fullers of cloth), shoemakers, drapers, hosiers, glovers, carpenters, smiths and slaters”. The surviving accounts also demonstrate how much building and rebuilding took place, and the part played by a few wealthy benefactors in this process.

The Guild Chapel, and the Guild Hall to the right

Sylvia Gill’s chapter on the Reformation looks at the effect of the sixteenth-century’s religious upheavals on the Guild. Both the town’s religious institutions, the Guild and the College, were dissolved, with the thirteen priests in the town being reduced to one, the others offered pensions. Surviving documentation, amazingly, allows us to know the names of some of these priests and even what happened to them, most of the younger men eventually finding positions elsewhere. Personalising these stories emphasises the difficulties experienced by those who lived through the religious upheavals of the decades before Shakespeare was born.

Robert Bearman’s chapter and its companion by M A Webster focus on the process by which the town moved towards independent governance after the Reformation and how this change affected the Guild buildings. Several of the people most dominant in the affairs of the Guild also became burgesses in the newly-formed Corporation, and the Guild Hall carried on being the focal point of civic life, holding the hearings of the court of record which handled relatively small financial claims, important in a community so dependant on commerce.

It’s rare to find buildings like this still standing, rarer still that they still carry out many of the functions for which they were intended. The book also includes the results of archaeological surveys that have provided much new information about the development of these buildings. But it’s the existence of the documentary sources that complete the picture, allowing the authors to put flesh on the bones by personalising these buildings and providing additional evidence.

Just as the study of Shakespeare’s plays has tended to encourage a view of him as a solitary genius rather than a writer among writers, a Shakespeare-centric view has prevented us from seeing that Stratford was a town governed in an orderly fashion by an organisation that had been taking care of the spiritual, educational and social needs of its residents for centuries before his birth. This timely collection brings a new depth to the history of Stratford and to the background of its most famous son.

Share
Posted in Shakespeare's World, Stratford-upon-Avon | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Speaking of comfort: theatre, Shakespeare and the audience experience

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

Audience at Shakespeare’s Globe

When you go to the theatre, do you have your favourite seat? Many of us have a preference, to sit upstairs, or to be down near the stage, at any rate. Back in Shakespeare’s theatres you would have been able to decide where you wanted to sit or stand, paying according to how comfortable your place was.

A few weeks ago I found myself sitting in a seat in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre dedicated to the actor Patrick Stewart. The naming of theatre seats, either in memory of someone else, or in your own name, was encouraged as part of the “Take your seat appeal”, by which it was possible to name a seat in the transformed theatre in exchange for a donation of between £1200 and £5000. Over 600 such names are listed in the 2010 Welcome booklet.

Raising funds by naming a seat in the theatre has quite a long history in Stratford. Back in 1932 those who had subscribed the substantial sum of £1000 towards the building of the theatre were invited to choose the name of a famous actor or theatrical personality whose name would be inscribed on a plate attached to a seat. Names chosen included Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, the American actress Ada Rehan, David Garrick, the African Roscius Ira Aldridge, Richard Burbage and even Katherine Hepburn.

This idea was revived in 1975 as part of the Centenary appeal in order to help raise funds for the theatre’s air conditioning plant. Donors were asked to pay a minimum of £500, and the practice of sponsoring plaques continued into the 1990s. Some of the people remembered in this way include Vivien Leigh, Alec Guinness, Dorothy Tutin, Director Michel St Denis, Judi Dench and the theatre’s manager for over 30 years, David Brierley.

Audience at the Courtyard Theatre

When the theatre closed in 2007 for redevelopment the plaques were saved and re-attached to seats in the new theatre. The new list includes a more international group, people from Australia and Japan, ordinary theatregoers wanting to celebrate their enjoyment like John and Judith Theakston “The play’s the thing”, one couple wanting to commemorate favourite actors of their youth Alan Badel and Fabia Drake, and many in memory of people who loved Shakespeare in the theatre.

Sponsoring a seat sadly doesn’t give you the right to sit in it, but at least when you go to the theatre these days you can usually expect an upholstered seat (unless you go to the Donmar’s current Julius Caesar where sitting on a grey moulded plastic chair is part of the immersive experience, and actually not uncomfortable). Online booking has meant we can often choose our own seats, but apart from sites like the National Theatre’s where you can see photographs taken from different seats, you don’t really know what to expect. When writing the history of the theatre, the audience’s experience doesn’t usually feature very heavily, and this piece from the V&A explains how audience expectations have changed over the centuries.

Of course the play is the thing, but we all know how different it can seem when seen from a really good seat as opposed to from behind a pillar, right at the back, with no leg-room or facing a vertigo-inducing drop. Reviewers, and the creative team, tend to see the play from some of the best seats.

Last year Lyn Gardner wrote a piece  complaining about ticket prices: the average West End theatre ticket in 2011 cost £46.40 and top price tickets in 2012 often reached £70. Now Tim Sullivan has decided it’s about time audiences had the opportunity to check out individual seats in theatres, and to write their own review of them. His new website, http://www.seatplan.com is asking people to leave their own reviews on the site, rating how comfortable a seat was, whether there was enough leg room, and what the view of the stage was like. He’s aiming to map and rate every one of the 50,000 seats in West End Theatres. In order to encourage use of the site if you add your review to the site before the end of January your name will go into a draw for a pair of tickets to the final performance of Twelfth Night (starring Stephen Fry and Mark Rylance) at The Apollo Theatre on 9 February. The production has received rave reviews and the tickets are a great prize.

And as Tim says: with the launch of Seatplan you need never get a bum seat again!

Share
Posted in Shakespeare on Stage, Stratford-upon-Avon | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Hilary Mantel and Shakespeare: two tales of Henry VIII

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

I’ve only just got round to reading Hilary Mantel’s 2009 novel Wolf Hall, the first of a trilogy (the third part still being written) about the life of Thomas Cromwell. Both Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies have won the Man Booker Prize, and you can hear Hilary Mantel talking about Wolf Hall in this podcast. Thomas Cromwell became a great influence on the reign of Henry VIII, his marriages and the religious upheavals of the time, but he’s not one of the colourful figures who are usually the subject of books on the period.

The book of course reminded me of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play Henry VIII, covering much the same period. It’s meticulously researched: Mantel took 5 years to write the 600-page book, and made sure as she did so that she stuck as closely to the facts as she could. Shakespeare did do research: he took his history from his usual source Holinshed’s Chronicles, as well as other minor sources, but nobody could call him meticulous and it’s a good example of how he ignored the actual sequence of events in order to tighten the structure of his play. In his version things move swiftly up to the marriage with Anne Boleyn, whereas Mantel documents the gradual inching forward that in reality took years. And Shakespeare re-orders historical events: reading the book I found myself anticipating Katherine’s death, one of the most notable scenes in Shakespeare’s play, having forgotten that in fact she died several years after Elizabeth’s birth and the execution of Thomas More, both of which occur in the book.

Both Mantel and Shakespeare stress Cromwell’s faithful service to his master Wolsey, even though he gained by his downfall. In this passage, thought to be written by Fletcher, Wolsey advises Cromwell to be an honest servant, rather than a scheming politician:

Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Wolsey in 1910. From the V&A: http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/8599

Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition,
By that sin fell the angels; how can man then,
The image of his maker, hope to win by it?
Love thyself last, cherish those hearts that hate thee;
Corruption wins not more than honesty.
Still in they right hand carry gentle peace
To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not;
Let all the ends thou aim’st at be thy country’s,
They god and truth’s: then if thou fall’st, O Cromwell,
Thou fall’st a blessed martyr.

From Shakespeare’s day to today, we have been obsessed with the Tudor period: the colourful lives of the monarchs, the complex rises and falls of both the servants of the crown and the nobility, the fact that ordinary people could make their way into the highest offices of the kingdom. Shakespeare and Fletcher weren’t the first to write a play about about this period of history: Sir Thomas More  and Thomas, Lord Cromwell are both earlier.

Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell

Mantel’s writing successfully conjures a constant sense of threat and unease, the damp darkness of houses, the appearance and feel of clothes. And like Shakespeare, Mantel is fascinated by how politics works, how power transfers from one person to another and how events come to be shaped. Her Cromwell is a master of persuasion, and it’s no surprise to find in an interview that she has long admired Shakespeare’s work:
“I came to Shakespeare very early,” said Mantel. “When I was about eight I found somewhere a black, grimy, ancient-looking book called Steps To Literature: Book Five. And in it there was a piece of Shakespeare, an extract from Julius Caesar … The crowd has been on the side of the conspirators and Brutus, but Antony, by a feat of rhetoric, turns them around so that they become not a crowd but a mob and they are hunting for the conspirators through Rome….Everything I have done is somehow wrapped into that scene. I have been concerned with revolution, with persuasion, with rhetoric, with the point where a crowd turns into a mob; in a larger sense, with the moment when one thing turns into another, whether a ghost into a solid person or a riot into a revolution. Everything, it seems to me, is in this scene.”

Both writers knew how Cromwell’s story would end, with his eventual execution by the King who he served as faithfully as Wolsey had advised. Mantel’s ability to depict the foibles of the monarch and the Machiavellian scheming of the nobility highlights the constraints under which Shakespeare was forced to write, diplomatically ending his play with the triumphant christening of the Princess Elizabeth. Definitely a good read, a TV mini-series of the first two books is currently being planned, which is expected to be screened towards the end of 2013.

Share
Posted in Legacy, Plays and Poems, Shakespeare's World, Sources | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments