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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Christmas puddings: a taste of tradition

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

A tudor banquet

More than any other holiday time, Christmas has always been about food and drink. Thomas Tusser, an East Anglian farmer, wrote his verse calendar of the year Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, published in 1557 and still full of delight in spite of his quirky and occasionally painful rhyming descriptions of rural life. For Christmas-time Tusser wrote a whole series of poems celebrating the birth of Christ and the importance of charity at this time of year. One ends:
What season then better, of all the whole yeere,
thy needie poore neighbour to comfort and cheere?

Another poem is headed: Christmas husbandlie fare and goes like this:
Good husband and huswife now cheefly be glad,
things handsom to have, as they ought to be had;
They both doo provide against Christmas doo come,
to welcome good neighbour, good cheere to have some.
Good bread and good drinke, a good fier in the hall,
brawne, pudding and souse, and good mustard withall.
Beefe, mutton, and porke, shred pies of the best,
pig, veale, goose and capon, and turkey well drest;
Cheese, apples and nuts, joly Carols to heare,
as then in the countrie is counted good cheare. 

What cost to good husband is any of this?
good houshold provision onely it is.
Of other the like, I doo leave out a menie,
that costeth the husbandman never a penie. 

For Tusser the plenty of the Christmas feast is the result of good husbandry, farmers having put aside enough of their produce to see them and their less fortunate neighbours through the holiday season.

About fifty years later Elinor Fettiplace, wife of Sir Richard Fettiplace from Appleton Manor in Oxfordshire wrote her “Receipt” or recipe book. As befits a higher-status home, her ingredients are more exotic and expensive. Guests are offered going-home presents of sweetmeats and fancy biscuits, and marchpane (marzipan), richly decorated, was the centre piece of the feast.

Even so, Hilary Spurling who edited Fettiplace’s book, commented that in the recipes you can detect “traces of the medieval origins of English cookery – all the standard ingredients (except the roast potato) of a conventional Christmas dinner”.

One item not on the menu for Tusser, but present in Fettiplace, is the plum pudding, rich in imported ingredients. This is Fettiplace’s recipe:
For a Christmas pudding:
Take twelve eggs and break them, then take crumbs of bread, and mace, and currants, and dates cut small, and some ox suet small minced and some saffron, put all these in a sheep’s maw and so boil it.

Spurling suggests it would take up to 6lb of fruit and would make enough pudding for 40 people. Rather than a sauce based on milk or cream which would not have been available at this time of year it would have been served with butter and sugar creamed with sack (sherry). Even without sugar the fruit would have made the pudding very sweet.

 

Middle Temple Hall

Going even further up the social scale, it is said that Queen Elizabeth herself made a Christmas pudding for the lawyers of the Middle Temple. The story goes that she gave them the twenty-nine- foot long Bench Table which still stands in Middle Temple Hall. Middle Temple Hall was renowned for its Christmas-time celebrations, with Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night being performed there in 1602. The table was made from an oak tree from Windsor Great Park whose planks had had been sailed down river especially for them, and the first pudding was mixed on this very table. A small amount of this pudding was saved to be mixed in the following year, and this tradition continued until 1966 when it died out until revived by the Queen Mother in 1971.

This tradition of things being handed on in n unbroken line is very reminiscent of the Yule log (and even the Olympic torch). The Yule log must have been more of a tree, as it burned throughout the twelve days of Christmas. At the end of the holiday period a piece was kept which was used to light the Yule log for the following year. Today the only Yule log most of us will get to see is a chocolate cake decorated with icing and a sprig of artificial holly!

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Michael Attenborough and Shakespeare

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Last week Stratford’s Shakespeare Club was lucky enough to be given a look into internationally-renowned director Michael Attenborough’s views of Shakespeare.

Attenborough is currently Artistic Director of the Almeida Theatre in London, though he is resigning from that post after ten years or so in the spring.

He’s shown himself to be an extremely able administrator during that time, but his reason for leaving is that he wants to concentrate on directing, and one of his opening remarks was that he would be interested in directing for the RSC again. (Yes please!) For ten years he was associated with the RSC, first as Resident Director and Executive Producer, later becoming Principal Associate Director of the Company.

Ray Fearon and Zoe Waites as Romeo and Juliet

He began by talking about this period, and how when he first worked with the RSC he avoided directing Shakespeare until he knew how he wanted to do it. The non-Shakespeare plays he directed included The Changeling at the Swan, and premieres of After Easter and The Herbal Bed at The Other Place. His first Shakespeare with the company was the 1997 production of Romeo and Juliet with Ray Fearon and Zoe Waites in the Swan Theatre which went on international tour and led to the 1999 production of Othello in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre with the same two leads. Later he directed Henry IV parts 1 and 2 in the Swan with Des Barrit playing Falstaff for the first time.

He suggested that even without Shakespeare we would still be fascinated by the writing of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. Shakespeare was one among many outstanding creative writers, and Attenborough suggested that it was the uncertainty of the times which led to this richness. Questions were being asked about the authority of the monarchy, about religion, and with the possibility of people from humble backgrounds changing their lives. The overriding question was “What does it mean to be a man?”, a question Shakespeare explores over and over again, most memorably in Hamlet.

Theatre was a new phenomenon, providing places where these questions could be investigated in public, and drama evolved so that opposing views could be set out and discussed. Blank verse captured the energy of human speech and the writers used it to create easily-remembered speeches in which actors could move from thought to thought. Earlier plays gave people certainty: the plays of Shakespeare’s time dealt in uncertainly. Attenborough’s phrase was “man is the unity of opposites”. He took Falstaff as his example: a man who is full of contradictions and extremes, a real human being.

It was clear his great love is for working with actors in the rehearsal room, and in particular working on Shakespeare’s words. At the start of Henry IV Part 2 the audiences is commanded to “Open your ears”. He suggested we should look for the “opposites”, what John Barton calls the “antithesis” in speeches and situations. When Hamlet asks “To be or not to be, that is the question”, the question is not answered, but the play happens around it.

He described the work of the director as directing the energy of the actors. In Shakespeare when a character speaks he is given the best possible words available to that character to get what they want. Something is always at stake, no matter how trivial the speech seems. The actor’s job is to ask themselves “What do I want and why have I chosen these particular words?”. Ownership of the words is the key, so there is no gap between the character and the words.

Jonathan Pryce as King Lear

He has most recently directed Jonathan Pryce’s King Lear at the Almeida. After speaking for an hour (entirely without notes) he left us with the suggestion that later on we should look at one speech from King Lear that exemplifies the idea of opposites. It’s not a major speech, and can get overlooked among the turbulence of the first major scene of the play. It’s the King of France’s speech towards the end of Act 1 Scene 1 when he accepts Cordelia despite her father’s rejection, and the Duke of Burgundy’s refusal to marry her without a dowry:
Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor;
Most choice, forsaken; and most lov’d, despis’d!
Thee and thy virtues here I seize upon.
Be it lawful I take up what’s cast away.
Gods, gods! ’tis strange that from their cold’st neglect
My love should kindle to inflam’d respect.
Thy dow’rless daughter, King, thrown to my chance,
Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France.
Not all the dukes in wat’rish Burgundy
Can buy this unpriz’d precious maid of me.
Bid them farewell, Cordelia, though unkind.
Thou losest here, a better where to find.

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