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!

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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.

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Exit, pursued by a bear? Bear-baiting in Shakespeare’s London

Posted on January 13, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

Outdoor bear-baiting

On Sunday 13 January 1583 one of the bear-baiting arenas that had stood on the Thames’s south bank collapsed. Bear-baiting was a popular spectacle for all kinds of people: both Henry VIII and Elizabeth 1 enjoyed the “sport” in which the bear was chained to a post to defend itself against the attack of mastiff dogs. Since around 1540 purpose-built arenas were put up on the south bank of London where locals and visitors could enjoy this recreation. In 1587 playhouses began to be built in the same area instead of to the north of the city.

Uproar in a bear-baiting arena

The Reverend John Field’s account of the collapse is quoted in Julian Bowsher’s book Shakespeare’s London Theatreland. Here’s an extract:
“the yeard, standings and galleries being ful fraught, being now amidest their joilty, when the dogs and Bear were in the chiefest Batel, Lo the mighty hand of God uppon them. This gallery that was double, and compassed the yeard round about was so shaken at the foundation, that it fell (as it were in a moment) flat to the ground, without post of peere, that was left standing, so high as the stake whereunto the Beare was tied”.

Seven people were killed and many injured: Field reckons that over a thousand people were in the Bear Garden sat the time. He makes the connection with the early playhouses: “For surely it is to be feared, beesides the distruction bothe of bodye and soule, that many are brought unto, by frequenting the Theater, the Curtin and such like”. It’s ironic that the reports of the destruction of the building, as with the burning of the Globe Theatre in 1613, give us so much information about the building and what went on in it.

Although not identical, the early playhouses obviously shared similar floor plans and construction methods: perhaps when they came to build playhouses south of the river they took note and made them more robust.

Not everyone approved of animal-bating, as both Field and Phillip Stubbes thought the destruction of the arena was a punishment from God, “to show how grievously he is offended with those that spend the sabbath in such wicked exercises”.

Dave Saxby of Museum of London Archaeology has made a special study of the animal-baiting arenas, and back in November gave a presentation on the subject to the University of Reading conference on Shakespearean theatres. These arenas feature on the early maps of the city, so detailed that they even show the kennels with tied up dogs as well as the ponds where the animals were washed after their bloody battles.

Shakespeare was fully aware of these shows. In The Merry Wives of Windsor there are a number of references, the fullest being Shallow’s attempt to chat up Anne Page by bragging: “I have seen Sackerson loose twenty times, and have taken him by the chain”. It was common for bears to be given names and they could live for many years: one list from 1638 mentions two white bears which it’s thought could be the two bear cubs from Greenland given to James 1 in 1609.

Another possible connection between Shakespeare and the animal-baiting arenas is that most famous of stage directions: “Exit, pursued by a bear”, in The Winter’s Tale. Did they bring in a real bear from the Bear Garden nearby? The audience would have been used to seeing real bears and wouldn’t have been impressed by a man in a bear skin.

There were other entertainments too: a jackanapes can be an impudent or mischievous person, especially a child, and Doctor Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor uses the word in this sense. But the jackanapes was also a monkey on horseback chased around the arena by dogs. It was said to be “very laughable” to witness ” the screaming of the ape, beholding the curs hanging from the ears and neck of the pony”. Shakespeare knew this too: when Henry V uncomfortably tries to woo the French princess he compares himself with a jack-an-apes monkey, bound to his horse.

Like the Globe, the bear-baiting arena was quickly rebuilt after its collapse. It’s an uncomfortable thought that these brutal entertainments were competing with the performance of Shakespeare’s plays taking place close by. At the end of Macbeth, the king compares himself with a bear:
They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly,
But bear-like I must fight the course.

Bear-baiting was finally banned in England in 1835, but exploiting animals for entertainment still continues. The photograph shows a dancing bear which my father photographed in Athens in 1936.

 

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Was 2012 Shakespeare’s year?

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

2012 was the  year of the World Shakespeare Festival, the biggest celebration of Shakespeare ever, when this early-modern writer was to be proclaimed a global superstar, as if he wasn’t already one of the most-recognised faces, and the most-performed playwright, in the world.

Looking back, for me the most impressive tributes to Shakespeare were the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympics and Paralympics. Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, entitled Isles of Wonder, had Shakespeare’s words and ideas at its heart, even if the most directly-related bit was the somewhat bizarre vision of Kenneth Branagh dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel reciting a speech by the “salvage and deformed slave” Caliban from The Tempest. In one of the other ceremonies paper printed with lines of poetry from Shakespeare and others formed part of the set, and the opening of the Paralympics featured Ian McKellen as Prospero with Ariel delivering more lines inspired by The Tempest.

Ben Whishaw as Richard II

Elsewhere, what were the highlights of my Shakespearean year? While I didn’t manage to get to any of the Globe to Globe performances, this extraordinary season in which each of Shakespeare’s plays was performed in a different language got the party going and generated a huge amount of positive publicity early in the year. It also provided a way in which the rest of the world could share these productions through the website the Space. The BBC did Shakespeare proud with new documentaries by James Shapiro and Simon Schama, and programmes presented by actors and theatre professionals on their view of Shakespeare. Most spectacular were the new productions of the Richard II -Henry V tetralogy and the screening of the African Julius Caesar. The British Museum staged a fabulous exhibition Shakespeare: staging the World.

Much of the focus remained in London: Timon of Athens at the National Theatre, the African Julius Caesar, the Indian Much Ado About Nothing, the Almeida’s King Lear and the pairing of Richard III and Twelfth Night by the Globe, though both the RSC versions started in Stratford and Julius Caesar has been on tour.

Most of my Shakespeare theatregoing has been in Stratford, but I’ve really enjoyed those productions I’ve seen elsewhere: The Tempest in Bath, the National’s Timon of Athens and the Donmar’s all-female Julius Caesar.

Sport is nothing without energy, but for a few weeks in the summer it became cool for us all to be enthusiastic: cheering on the athletes in the stadium, sharing experiences with fellow-travellers on the train, and enjoying the collective experience of being a member of a theatre audience for Shakespeare. When Michael Attenborough recently addressed the Stratford Shakespeare Club he commented that actors have to approach Shakespeare very differently from how they might work on a modern play: he demands energy, not relaxation.

Ray Fearon

My favourite productions of the year have both been high-energy, and have required commitment from the actors and other participants. They’ve both been of Julius Caesar. In Gregory Doran’s African production the temperature was raised even before the play began by the extras who performed a series of meticulously choreographed mini-scenes, and Ray Fearon’s Mark Antony delivered his Forum speech with spine-tingling emotion. The Donmar’s all-female Julius Caesar was completely different, breaking down the barriers between audience and actors, continually asking questions about who were the actors, who the guards, what was our function, and what was it that we were watching?

Harriet Walter as Brutus

It was an uncomfortable experience, the final moments showing how much had been at stake for the “prisoners” whose performance we had witnessed.

The production I’ve least enjoyed? Easy: the RSC/Wooster group’s collaboration Troilus and Cressida, which sucked the life out of the play for me. Enthusiasm and energy alone can lead to the strutting and bellowing that Hamlet criticises, but encouraging the actors to speak in expressionless monotones and deliver their lines not to the audience but to onstage TV monitors seems to me to be going down a blind alley, no matter how interesting it might be as an intellectual concept.

My hope for 2013? That we’ll see acting that lives up to Hamlet’s instructions:
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with
this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of
nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing,
whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as
’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show Virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his
form and pressure.

 

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Comic artists with a sense of Shakespeare’s poetry: Des Barrit and George R Weir

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

The RSC’s current production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, featuring Des Barrit as Falstaff

This week I finally caught up with the RSC’s joyful production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. It was the company’s grown-up Christmas extravaganza and if you have the chance, there are still a couple of performances which are guaranteed to bring cheer in the January gloom.

It’s a play which allows women a prominence they can lack elsewhere and here both wives and Mistress Quickly are allowed to let their hair down as they develop the comic potential of their roles.  The RSC has also cast the most skilful of Shakespearean comics, Des Barrit, as Falstaff. His Shakespeare roles have included a wonderfully fruity Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both Antipholuses in The Comedy of Errors, and Falstaff in Henry IV parts 1 and 2, a very different version of the role from that in The Merry Wives of Windsor. It’s over a decade since he performed for the RSC, though he would have performed in the 2006 musical version of Merry Wives had he not had to withdraw through injury.

I first saw Des in the one-off panto The Earth Awakes, put on as a fundraiser for the Friends of the Earth Trust in November 1987, which was performed on two occasions, at the Palace Theatre in London and at the RST in Stratford. Although it had an impressive cast and was devised by the extremely talented comedy writer and performer Graeme Garden, the best moment of the evening for me was when Des burst onto the stage as the pantomime dame wheeling a shopping trolley. I don’t remember much about the panto itself, but Des’s was a superbly assured comedy performance that instantly connected with the audience.

Following this appearance he became a member of the RSC for its 1988 season and several times afterwards. He’s one of those actors that can made an audience laugh just by standing still as he did when playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night and, memorably, Trinculo in The Tempest.

His ability to play serious, even threatening roles, including the Porter in Macbeth and the Duke of Gloucester in King Lear demonstrated he was more than a clown and more than capable of handling the complexity of Shakespeare’s language. His path into the profession was unusual: he didn’t go into acting until he was 35 and a professional accountant.

The Benson window: George R Weir as Bottom

Watching Des in action reminded me of some correspondence I’ve just had with a reader of my blog about the Bensonian window in the RST, one pane of which features Frank Benson’s most successful comic actor George R Weir. The two men worked together for a quarter of a century from the 1880s until Weir’s death in 1909. Described by J C Trewin as a genius, this “plump, unctuous-voiced, merry-eyed man” played not just the great clowning roles like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, but also roles demanding more depth such as the First Gravedigger in Hamlet, one of the Murderers in Richard III and, like Barrit, the Porter in Macbeth.

Weir was the most-loved of the Bensonians, and J C Trewin in his book Benson and the Bensonians recounts how “at Stratford it was a custom to call for Weir on the last Festival night, though everyone knew he would have to be coaxed into uttering a few shy, not very coherent words in the hubble-bubble voice that, when needed, he could discipline.”  Weir died at the early age of 56, and The Manchester Guardian in its obituary said of him: “He had just that patient intimacy with the unchanging movement of nature which is the spirit behind all the Shakespearean rustics. This helped to make him the very rare artist that he was: a comic artist with a sense of poetry”.

It’s been said that the most difficult parts to play in Shakespeare are the so-called clowns. George Weir and Des Barrit are two actors who have managed to perfect the art of finding both the comedy and the poetry within Shakespeare’s plays.

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Brian Cox’s Titus Andronicus: “the greatest stage performance I’ve ever given”

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

Brian Cox in Titus Andronicus

Earlier in the week  an interview with Brian Cox (the actor not the scientist) was published in which he commented that the production of Titus Andronicus in the Swan Theatre in 1987 was “the most interesting thing I’ve ever done in the theatre”. The theatre itself had opened only the year before and this would be the first accepted Shakespeare play performed there.

Titus Andronicus was a novelty: it was the last of Shakespeare’s plays to be performed in Stratford, its first performance coming in 1955 during Laurence Olivier’s first season at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre  when he played Macbeth, Titus, and Malvolio in Twelfth Night. It was a demanding season for Olivier’s wife Vivien Leigh too, as Lady Macbeth, Lavinia and Viola. Titus Andronicus was directed by rising star of the theatre, Peter Brook.

Later productions of Titus Andronicus in Stratford tended to be an add-on to related plays: it formed part of The Romans season directed by Trevor Nunn in 1972, and was half of the unlikely-sounding double-bill with The Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1981, both plays being cut by director John Barton. Titus, it seemed, couldn’t stand on its own, needing the help of the company’s most experienced directors.

1987 was different. Brian Cox, cast as Titus, was an accomplished actor though he’d never performed in Stratford before. As he mentions in his interview, he wanted to be directed by someone unusual. Deborah Warner was certainly that. For one thing she was a woman, and the RSC had a poor record in employing women directors. She was very much not from the Cambridge University background of each of the three previous Titus directors, having trained in stage management. She had founded the alternative Kick Theatre, bringing a collaborative approach to her directing. And she refused to cut the text (Peter Brook removed around 500 lines).

Few who experienced the production will have forgotten it. The first entry of the conquered Goths, chains clanging on the aluminium ladder that bound them, told you it was going to be inventive, perhaps a bit of a rough ride. The brutal setting of Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Julius Caesar currently at the Donmar reminded me of the spareness of Warner’s Titus Andronicus.

Vivien Leigh as Lavinia

The issue in staging Titus has always been the horrific violence of the play. Peter Brook ritualised it, Lavinia draping red ribbons from her arms and mouth after she had been mutilated (an idea re-used by the Japanese Titus in 2006). In the photos Vivien Leigh looks sorrowful but still composed and beautiful.

In 1987 Deborah Warner wanted to make the audience feel uncomfortable. Lavinia, played by Sonia Ritter, was released by her abusers who laughed mockingly as they copied her crawling around the stage like a wounded animal. Later she struggled agonisingly to communicate the details of her attack. The Swan Theatre audience was almost on top of the action. It was said that the stage managers kept a tally of the number of people who fainted at each performance, and a St John’s Ambulance was always present.

Sonia Ritter as Lavinia, Donald Sumpter as Marcus

Yet the many murders and mutilations were achieved without shedding gallons of stage blood, but suggested the horror using Shakespeare’s language and bold staging. Titus’s cutting off of his own hand was carried out, not in some dark corner of the stage but right at its edge (I won’t go into the details but on one occasion I was sitting in the front row as he did this, and somehow I couldn’t look).

The production centred on Cox’s full-on performance, gradually losing his grip as his family was cut down by Estelle Kohler’s revengeful, ferocious Tamora. As well as showing himself to be a master of Shakespeare’s language and a powerful tragic actor he demonstrated a flair for black comedy, bringing in the pie in the final scene with a mad gleam in his eye. When Saturninus called for Tamora’s sons Chiron and Demetrius he always got a laugh on the line:
Why, there they are both, baked in that pie;

As the climax of the play where three people are killed in quick succession it’s a dangerous place to make the audience laugh. But Cox’s performance was well-judged: he calls it “the greatest stage performance I’ve ever given”.

The play deserves to be staged: in his review of the Globe’s 2006 production Michael Billington wrote “one of the pleasures of my theatre-going life has been to watch [Titus’s] restoration to public favour. Instead of a primitive, Marlovian gore fest, it is now seen as a study in monumental suffering”. This production is certainly one of the highlights of my Shakespeare-watching career and I’d say the finest production staged in the Swan Theatre. In 2013 another production of Titus Andronicus will make its way to the Swan stage – it’s going to be a difficult one to follow. You can find details, including photographs of RSC productions of the play here.  There’s also a full performance history of the play here.

And to show the other side of Cox’s character, do watch this YouTube video in which he undertakes a Hamlet masterclass with 2-year old Theo.

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Shakespeare’s blasts of January

Posted on January 3, 2013 by Sylvia Morris

When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl . Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw
And birds sit brooding in the snow
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl . Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

The image is another from the British Library: Calendar page for January, from the Golf Book (Book of Hours, Use of Rome), workshop of Simon Bening, Netherlands(Bruges), c. 1540, Additional MS 24098, f. 18v.  A blog post discussing it is here.

The song of Winter from Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of those places where you feel Shakespeare must be writing about his own experience of life in the country. It’s a bleak picture, but a reassuringly predictable one. We’re now in the last few of the twelve days of Christmas, after which normal working life resumed. Many writers and artists have vividly described activities appropriate to the season: here are a couple of contrasting examples.

In Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry Thomas Tusser lists jobs on the farm at all times of the year, and although January might seem like a quiet month he has plenty to say about work to be done. “When Christmas is ended, bid feasting adue, goe play the good husband, thy stock to renue” he suggests. Cleaning out the farmyard, taking cuttings of roses and willow, felling and pruning trees, hedging, cleaning out the dovehouse, and keeping an eye on your cattle and sheep, all needed to be done. Preparing the soil for planting crops later in the year was a hard job:
Go breake up land,
get mattock in hand,
Stub roote so tough,
for breaking of plough. 

Nicholas Breton’s charming description of January is quoted by Gregory Doran in his Shakespeare Almanac. This is a shortened extract:

Brueghel’s painting Winter landscape with skaters and birdtrap

It is now January, and Time begins to turn the wheel of his Revolution, the woods begin to lose the beauty of their spreading boughs, and the proud oak must stoop to the axe: the squirrel now surveyeth the nut and the maple, and the hedgehog rolls himself up like a football: an apple and a nutmeg make a gossips cup: and the ale and the faggot are the victuallers merchandise…. Down beds and quilted caps are now in the pride of their service, and the cook and the pantler are men of no mean office….Fishermen now have a cold trade, and travellers a foul journey: the Cook room now is not the worst place in the ship, and the shepherd hath a bleak seat on the mountain: the blackbird leaveth not a berry on the thorn, and the garden earth is turned up for her roots: the water floods run over the proud banks….To conclude, I hold it a time of little comfort, the rich man’s charge, and the poor man’s misery.

I know there’s still plenty of time for a change, but so far the weather in January 2013 has been kind.

 

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Celebrating Shakespeare at the turn of the year

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

As it’s the end of the year I want to thank readers of The Shakespeare blog for making it such a success. During 2012 the blog has had over 67,000 visits and over 100,000 page views. 239 of you have signed up to receive every post by email and another 200 receive each link on twitter. I’ve been delighted to find that readers come from all over the world.

Over the year I’ve written 157 posts, and received 400 or so comments. I love getting your comments especially when they add some information (or correct something I’ve got wrong!).

My Listening to the audience project has been slow getting started but this is my number one New Year resolution and all of you who sent messages about this project will be hearing from me.

Over the Christmas period I’ve taken a bit of a rest from the blog but in the next couple of days I’ll be writing about some of my highlights from 2012, the year of the World Shakespeare Festival in which Shakespeare was given a leading role in the celebrations for the London Olympics.

Just in case you haven’t had enough of the festive season (which lasts until 6 January) I’ve spotted a couple of items about music, particularly important at this time of year. I’ve written before about the effects music and poetry have on the brain. The British Library hosts a wonderful music blog which has recently included two posts on the history of the Christmas carol. This first one covers their early history, including an image of a manuscript of a carol written by King Henry VIII.

And this article looks at a study of the link between music and emotion.

I hope 2013 will be a wonderful year for all of you, and that Shakespeare’s plays and poems continue to enrich your lives!

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“New-fangled shows”: Christmas and the Rose Theatre

Posted on December 27, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

An Elizabethan rehearsal

Christmas must have been anything but relaxing for Shakespeare when he was at the height of his career. Instead of putting his feet up in front of a roaring fire with a warming drink in his hand, he was hard at work. During the Christmas period theatre audiences wanted  their fill of seasonal entertainment.

Last Christmas I wrote about the goings-on at court, particularly during the reign of King James.

In his book 1599 James Shapiro gives an account of the Christmas season at the end of that year. The court was at Richmond, where a series of plays were to be performed by Shakespeare’s Company (the Chamberlain’s Men) and the Admiral’s Men. The plays included two by Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Old Fortunatus,  and Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour. All were new, and all were comedies.

Dekker wrote a special prologue for Old Fortunatus to flatter the Queen:
Our eyes are dazzled by Eliza’s beams,
See (if at least thou dare see) where she sits:
This is the great pantheon of our goddess,
And all those faces which thine eyes thought stars,
Are nymphs attending on her deity.

It seems that none of Shakespeare’s plays were performed but he might not have had an appropriate new play. In Love’s Labour’s Lost he refers to “Christmas comedy” and in The Taming of the Shrew to “a Christmas gambold”. Shapiro suggests he had spent much of 1599 writing Hamlet, and his new play Julius Caesar would not have fitted the bill, the murder of the ruler being at the centre of the plot. It was a politically difficult time: the Earl of Essex was said to be ill, but was in fact under house arrest. The poet John Donne was at court and wrote “The court is not great but full of jollity and revels and plays and as merry as if it were not sick”. It sounds as if  courtiers were unable to acknowledge the uncertainties relating to Elizabeth’s old age and the lack of a clear royal successor. 

Henslowe’s diary

Back in the public playhouses performances continued. A few years earlier, in 1594, Philip Henslowe recorded what was on offer at his Rose Theatre during the Christmas period. Three plays by Marlowe were revived: Dr Faustus, and both parts of Tamburlaine (Marlowe had died over a year before), and many other plays were on offer, most of which are unknown except for their titles. On Christmas Day itself The Grecian Comedy was performed, followed the next day by The Siege of London. The Christmas play in 1595 was The Wonder of a Woman, and in 1596 their hit play was Nabucadonizer, presumably, as Gregory Doran speculates in his Shakespeare Yearbook, a play about the great king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar.

The 1989 excavation of the Rose

Henslowe’s Rose was the first theatre to be built south of the river, and in 1989 it was also the first early modern playhouse whose archaeological remains were found on the site where an office block was about to be built. The “Save the Rose” campaign arose spontaneously and was extremely successful. The site was designated a Scheduled Ancient Monument, and the remains were preserved in the basement of the new office block. It also drew attention to the fact that these famous theatres still existed and encouraged the search for them. The Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) has now excavated so many of these sites that they are experts on the subject. It’s by no means easy though, as archaeologists are only able to excavate sites that are about to be redeveloped.

Plans for the current project

The Rose has always received generous support from important members of the theatrical profession such as Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, and during November it was announced that the Heritage Lottery Fund had awarded a development grant to enable the Rose Trust to work up plans for further archaeological exploration as well as the building of a visitor and performance centre. For now, the site is open every Saturday to visitors from 10-5 , and performances are being put on.

Full details are on the website, but events for 2013 include a Q&A session with actor Liam Brennan (currently appearing in the production of Twelfth Night at the Apollo Theatre), and productions of Hamlet, Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, Jonson’s The Alchemist, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth.

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Medieval images of Christmas-time

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

As it’s Christmas, the darkest time of the year I’m putting on the Shakespeare blog a few images drawn from the British Library’s Illuminated Manuscripts stunningly beautiful collection. Thousands of images are now online: the connections to Shakespeare are a bit loose in this post, but at this time of year who cares? This link leads to some images of winter from some of these amazing medieval manuscripts.

Click on the links to be taken to the British Library’s site where you’ll find full details of the images, and the ability to look in more detail at these jewel-like pages.

A nativity scene

The annunciation to the shepherds

The Castle of Love, including images of the white rose and the red, symbolising the union of the houses of York and Lancaster

A view of London

And this beautiful image illustrates the month of December from a book of hours. Imagine how much the person who owned this book must have cherished this glowing golden image of summer flowers, fruit and birds when days were short and the landscape bare.

Happy Christmas!

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