The legend of Herne’s Oak

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Robert Smirke’s painting of Falstaff and the Wives at Herne’s Oak

The Merry Wives of Windsor is set in the depth of winter, the season Shakespeare associates with eating, drinking, telling stories, singing, and practical jokes. It’s also  one of the few plays for which Shakespeare invented the plot, and he drew on popular myth for the climax of the play. Mistress Page explains:
There is an old tale goes that Herne the hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor forest,
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns;
And there he blasts the tree and takes the cattle
And makes milch-kine yield blood and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner:
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Received and did deliver to our age
This tale of Herne the hunter for a truth.

Herne was thought to have lived in the time of Richard II, and the ancient tree became known as Herne’s Oak, a place where “many …do fear /In deep of night to walk”. Playing a trick on Falstaff, the wives suggest that he disguise himself by wearing a stag’s horns strapped to his head and meet there at dead of night for their long-delayed assignation. For more on the Smirke painting, follow this link.

In the final scene of the play the residents of Windsor arrange for Falstaff’s humiliation to be complete: local children dress up as fairies and dance around the oak pinching Falstaff as they go. Mistress Page:
Let them from forth a sawpit rush at once
With some diffused song; upon their sight
We two in great amazedness will fly:
Then let them all encircle him about
And, fairy-like, to-pinch the unclean knight,
And ask him why, that hour of fairy revel,
In their so sacred paths he dares to tread
In shape profane.

Mistress Ford continues:
And till he tell the truth,
Let the supposed fairies pinch him sound
And burn him with their tapers.

The locals don’t get it all their own way, as Anne Page uses the opportunity to elope with the man of her choice instead of either of the suitors chosen by her parents, but the play ends with the victory of the Wives and their husbands over Falstaff, the interloper.

Benjamin West’s painting of woodcutters in Windsor Park

Not least because of the popularity of Shakespeare’s play, Herne’s Oak, in Fairies’ Dell, Windsor, attracted visitors in the eighteenth century. There must have been some confusion about the identity of this tree, because when gales blew it down in 1863 it was claimed by some that this was in fact a tree planted later to replace the original tree which had been felled in the 1790s.

William Perry, Wood Carver to the Queen, investigated and in 1867 published a book,  titled A Treatise on the Identity of Herne’s Oak Inferring the Maiden Tree to Have Been the Real One. He had compared the account appearing in Samuel Ireland’s 1791 Picturesque Views of the Thames, and documents on the Park, as well as making site visits before concluding that the blown-down tree was the original one. Perry wasn’t unbiased though. He had been given pieces of the tree from which to make souvenirs, so its authenticity was important, and the argument is reminiscent of the discussion about objects made from Shakespeare’s Mulberry Tree in New Place Gardens, Stratford, which had been cut down about a century before.

It’s now popularly thought that the original tree was felled as a result of George III wanting to replace some of the old, unsightly trees with young ones. The trees seem to be fated, because following the 1863 storm another was planted which in its own turn blew down in 1906.  Like most legends, it’s hard to know how much of it is true: the Falstaff story though comes straight from Shakespeare’s imagination.

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E-Learning and the use of digital resources

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Enabling the study of  Shakespeare, especially by making available resources to students of all kinds was the focus of my professional life as a librarian working at The Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive. But over the past year I’ve become increasingly aware of the efforts being made by organisations and institutions around the world to make their holdings accessible to the public. This post isn’t going to be directly about Shakespeare, but I hope you’ll find the links to some amazing resources interesting.

I’ve just posted a blog in the BSA’s Shakespeare in Education site on the subject of how teaching is changing given the major changes taking place in technology, and just yesterday there was an announcement about how British universities are to provide MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).

Last month JISC (the UK’s expert on digital technology for education and research) hosted an online conference Innovating e-Learning 2012: Shaping the future. This brought together (virtually) delegates from further and higher education to look at the changing educational environment from the point of view of learners, practitioners and institutions. One session was entitled Lifelong learning in a digital age, and the final keynote address asked the question “Why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google?”

Students still need teachers, but that isn’t to say that they shouldn’t explore the amazing resources now coming on line. The links I’m including are to some terrific online image libraries which are the result of digitisation programmes in libraries, archives, museums and galleries. 

There are many difficulties for organisations in opening up their holdings including copyright, variable metadata standards, pressure to protect valuable images rather than share them, and the difficulty of finding scattered resources, but there now seems to be a real willingness to open up access to printed articles, digitised images, sound recordings of lectures or films for the benefit of all.  This link leads to a recent post explaining how restrictive policies can undermine education.

Most collection-holding organisations find it hard to justify an expensive digitisation programme without the promise of an income stream from the sale of images, but Nick Poole of the Collections Trust, explains the need for opening collections up in this post. It’s not a simple choice, and this link explains the complex issues involved in using films.

The following resources demonstrate how active this area is: some of them are still under development, and some are very new. Most have some Shakespeare resources, some very surprising!

An image from one of the British Library’s manuscripts

Europeana:  The Europeana project was founded with the aim of making 5 million digital objects available. There’s a full explanation here.

British Library Illuminated manuscripts  This post explains about the British Library’s illuminated manuscripts

Folger Shakespeare Library has digitised thousands of its Shakespeare-related images

German Digital Library. The beta version of this project linking 1800 collecting institutions has just been released

The National Gallery of France has launched an app to make millions of its holdings available

National Gallery of Denmark  online resources 

Trinity College Dublin’s digital collections

Cambridge Digital Library   Link to an article about the university’s release of material from its library

Wellcome Images  This article explains more about viewing their digital collections

Last but by no means least:

Your paintings by the Public Catalogue Foundation. This online image bank has catalogued over 200,000 oil paintings in the UK’s public collections. Put in a search for Shakespeare and see what you find! Here’s an article about the whole project.

 

 

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Women in the theatre: what next after Julius Caesar?

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Harriet Walter as Brutus

Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female production of Julius Caesar has now opened to great reviews: here are two from the Guardian and the Observer. More information, including an image gallery, is available on the Donmar Warehouse’s website.

The production has created quite a stir, with Phyllida Lloyd taking the opportunity to state that major companies like the Royal Shakespeare Company should employ equal numbers of men and women in all areas, especially directors and actors, and bring in gender-blind casting. In view of this stance I’m rather surprised that Lloyd has felt the need to give her production a “frame”, setting the play in a women’s prison, the production being put on by the inmates. There’s a strong tradition of plays working like this: the Marat-Sade is set in a lunatic asylum, and The Churchill Play in an internment camp, but the best-known is Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew where the “play” is performed by a group of touring actors before a lord and his guests. Certainly with Shakespeare’s play the effect is to distance the main action from the audience: it feels like a harder play when the frame is left out. I haven’t seen the Julius Caesar yet so can’t comment but I hope the frame is justified because as a technique it can be overused.

Jenny Jules as Cassius

Lloyd’s comments about the RSC’s employment policy has been much discussed: Michael Dobson speaks for many when he suggests that casting should be an artistic decision, not forced on companies, and Mark Lawson makes the same point. Greg Doran has reminded us that six of the plays in the RSC’s current and forthcoming season are to be directed by women, and that the RSC has often cast women in men’s roles: the Bastard and the Cardinal in King John were both played by women earlier in 2012. Doran’s first two major appointments were both women: Executive Director Catherine Mallyon and Deputy Artistic Director Erica Whyman. And he’s also stated “We have future plans to further explore the issues surrounding women in theatre, and a company with a 50:50 split of male and female actors is one that I’ve already challenged Phyllida to come and run in Stratford-upon-Avon”.  So perhaps Phyllida Lloyd will be putting her money where her mouth is quite soon, and it will be interesting to see where the all-female Julius Caesar leads her next.

The all-female company

Just in the last few days there’s been a further development, with the Guardian raising the issue of why women are under-represented in the theatre in general, especially since drama schools have a larger intake of girls than boys and the majority of the audience for live theatre is also female. Yet the ratio of plays written by women is poor compared with those by men, and there are fewer female directors, designers, composers and actors. I’m putting in links to several posts including some statistics that make the point.

You can understand the frustration of women in the theatre because it seems that little has really changed, particularly among the publicly-funded national companies. Apart from actresses the best-known women in theatre within the last century have been Lilian Baylis, the manager of the London Old Vic from 1912 to her death in 1937, particularly famous for her work producing Shakespeare’s plays, and Joan Littlewood, who gained an international reputation for her left-wing Theatre Workshop, mostly at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, East London, between 1945 and 1975. Neither particularly favoured women in the theatre, and neither left a lasting legacy for women. There are now a number of women theatre directors and women in control of theatres but none with the influence of either of these two. Phyllida Lloyd’s suggestion is to create a level playing field by force: Let’s hope the RSC challenge becomes a reality: a 50:50 company is a fascinating prospect.

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Measure for Measure, Pericles and Leveson

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

David Troughton as the Duke in Measure for Measure, 2004, a collaboration between the National Theatre and Complicite

O place and greatness … millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee: volumes of report
Run with these false and most contrarious quests
Upon thy doings: thousand escapes of wit
Make thee the father of their idle dream,
And rack thee in their fancies.

This speech, spoken by the Duke in Measure for Measure, fills a kind of onstage gap, covering the moments when Isabella persuades Mariana to substitute herself for a liaison with Angelo. He could have chosen to have Mariana agree to the suggestion immediately, but Shakespeare deliberately creates this moment for the Duke to remind the audience of how rumour affects those in the public eye.

The Leveson inquiry, which has just published its report, has looked at the freedom of our own press when considering the lives of celebrities, of ordinary people who become victims, and at those who are suspected of criminal activity. All can be damaged by the press’s attention.

This moment in Measure for Measure is a dodgy and questionable one. Those who are spreading the rumours may be acting wrongly, but what about those who pretend to be what they are not, even for the best of motives? The Duke has left his post, returning disguised as a friar in order to spy on the man he has left in charge. Isabella helps to set up the bed-trick even though by doing so she condones behaviour of which she previously disapproved. Does the end justify the means? Measure for Measure questions the morality and motives of everyone in the play, and nobody is without guilt.

The Provost (Angus Wright), Isabella (Naomi Frederick) and Angelo (Paul Rhys) in the 2004 collaboration between the National Theatre and Complicite

The Leveson inquiry is just one of a series of disturbing stories coming to light on the subjects of sexual exploitation, privacy, and the potential for corruption between the press, police and politicians. Measure for Measure is concerned with many of the same issues, where the rumour-monger Lucio performs the role of the press and the gaol authorities represent the police.

Angelo highlights the moral dilemma, desiring Isabella while also condemning her brother to death:
O, let her brother live:
Thieves for their robbery have authority,
When judges steal themselves. 

One of the most unsettling aspects of the Jimmy Savile abuse cases is that he deliberately exploited young, vulnerable girls who he knew would either not dare to speak up, or who would not be believed if they did. When propositioned by Angelo, Isabella threatens to expose him.
I will proclaim thee, Angelo – look for’t!
Sign me a present pardon for my brother,
Or with an outstretched throat I’ll tell the world aloud
What man thou art.

In the most chilling moment of the play Angelo turns on her:
Who will believe thee, Isabel?
My unsoiled name, th’austereness of my life,
My vouch against you, and my place i’th’state,
Will so your accusation overweigh,
That you shall stifle in your own report.

There’s a section on child prostitution in Duncan Salkeld’s recent book Shakespeare Among the Courtesans. The author could hardly have guessed how relevant it would be. I was reading it when a news item came on the radio about the activities of gangs in the north of England which have been grooming young girls. They too were let down by police and social services, allowing the abuse to go on for years. And in recent days and weeks a whole series of public figures have been questioned about possible child abuse which has been uninvestigated until now.

Mariko Nakasone as Marina in Pericles at Utah Shakespeare Festival 2010. Photo by Karl Hugh

Paedophilia was certainly not unknown to Shakespeare. In Pericles Marina is asked “Were you a gamester at five, or at seven?” Salkeld comments that in this play Shakespeare “uniquely acknowledges the emerging sexual value of children in a world of commodity and capital”. Her virginity, her beauty, even her innocence, make Marina more valuable. That Shakespeare meant the world of Mytilene, like that of Vienna, to be recognisable to the citizens of London, is not in doubt in the face of the evidence in the form of court records examined in Salkeld’s book. Marina’s escape from the brothel leaves many other young girls still within, and the governor of the city is a regular client of that same brothel until converted by her.

Salkeld concludes that “the play may hold her up as a beacon of chastity but she is in fact a far more disturbing symbol in the history of desire’s demand and supply”. Similarly Isabella may not be the “thing enskied and sainted” that she at first appears, her moral certainties vanishing as the story unfolds and the need for deception increases.

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Adapting Shakespeare’s Henry VI: The Wars of the Roses

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Until a few years ago the Henry VI plays were rarely performed, especially outside Stratford-upon-Avon, so the news that next year Shakespeare’s Globe is going to be touring the plays to venues in the UK is to be welcomed.

I’ve featured the plays on this blog many times because their themes are still so current. After years of neglect they began to be recognised in the 1960s, when the newly-founded RSC took the daring step of performing Henry VI and Richard III, conflating four plays into three under the joint title The Wars of the Roses. Reshaping was unusual, but the plays as written were thought to be virtually unplayable. Peter Hall and John Barton (who did the rewriting, as well as sharing the direction) were earnest advocates for these plays: Hall wrote “We are forced to experience the passionate responsibility of mother to son, of king to country, of people to king, of blood to blood.” Their faith was justified as the relevance of the plays in the second half of the twentieth century was quickly appreciated. Hall explained why they were unpopular during the nineteenth century: “it was hoped then that such horrors were past. We know now that this optimism was premature”.

The Wars of the Roses became the defining production of the fledgling RSC, struggling to create its own identity. It opened in 1963, transferring to the company’s London home the Aldwych Theatre before returning to Stratford for the quatercentenary year of 1964 when they were joined by Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V to form a history cycle.  The company was led by Peggy Ashcroft as Queen Margaret, one of the country’s leading actresses already well known in Stratford for her performances as Rosalind, Portia and Cleopatra, and Donald Sinden who played York. She was joined by promising but little-known actors who were to become household names such as David Warner playing Henry VI, Janet Suzman as Joan of Arc and  Ian Holm as Richard III.

 

David Warner as Henry VI

According to Richard Pearson, who has documented the productions in his book A Band of Arrogant and United Heroes, the RSC had already made a “happy and friendly deal with the BBC to televise a certain amount of productions”, so the decision to televise The Wars of the Roses was not difficult. The plays were filmed between 20 November and 18 December at the end of the 1964 season. The RSC’s Annual Reports state “it was the biggest and most ambitious outside drama recording BBC TV has done”. For contractual reasons it was filmed out of order, Richard III first, followed by Henry VI and Edward IV. The films were shown in the UK on successive Thursday evenings between 8 and 22 April 1965, repeated between January and March 1966, and also televised in the USA.

Recently the Screen Plays blog has featured a terrific post about the published text of the adaptation which also explains how the filming was carried out using the stage rather than trying to transfer the production onto a set.  It was a complicated business. The issue of how to film live theatre performances has been discussed over and over again in the past twenty-five years, but right back in 1964 Michael Bakewell was already “intent on finding a new way of presenting Shakespeare on television… not merely to observe it but to get to the heart of it”. A structure was built above and behind the stage, and a pit at the front of the stage. “Eight cameras were used, including a special Japanese hand-held camera which could penetrate into the battle scenes”. And a platform was built right across the auditorium on which to stand these cameras. Many scenes had to be re-staged, but this didn’t create problems for the actors because they had been in performance for eighteen months already.

Both Hall and Barton found filming stimulating. Barton commented on how well the soliloquies, of which there are many, worked on TV, and Hall found “The closer you shoot, the more the words mean”.

The RSC’s Annual Report, again: “The series was acclaimed by the television critics and seen by about eight per cent of the population of the United  Kingdom”. which must have been one of the largest TV audiences for any Shakespeare, let alone such obscure plays. It remains an outstanding achievement. Incidentally the Screen Plays blog includes a link to part of the film, all of which is currently available on YouTube.

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Discussing the evidence for Shakespeare’s Theatre: Andrew Gurr, Stanley Wells and Reg Foakes

Posted on December 5, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Archaeologists digging at The Theatre

The Who Invented the “Shakespearean Theatre”? conference held recently at the University of Reading ended with a round table discussion between senior academics Andrew Gurr, Stanley Wells and Reg Foakes. Over the past fifty years these three have probably written more about Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and the theatres of the time than any other trio.

The session gave them the opportunity to reflect on the issues that had been raised during the day and to talk about how the developments of the past 25 years have affected thinking about Shakespearean theatres.  All began their careers before the key events of the founding of the Globe Trust and the archaeological excavations of the theatres by Museum of London Archaeology.

The type of evidence now available to theatre historians has undergone huge changes. Instead of searching for clues in the plays and sources like Henslowe’s diary at least some of their questions such as how large were the theatres and their stages, seem to have been answered by the MOLA archaeologists.

Andrew Gurr commented on the fact that the early theatres have been found to be fourteen-sided, not sixteen-sided as predicted. A fourteen-sided structure has been shown to be easy to construct using the traditional method of pole and rope.

Reg Foakes, whose work on the Elizabethan theatre goes back to the 1961 publication of Henslowe’s Diary, also talked about the size of the theatres, several of which are now known to have had a diameter of 72 feet. The Globe was built larger than the Rose, but it’s still difficult to be precise as so little of the Globe has been excavated: 85 feet is the current estimate, while the reconstructed Globe has a diameter of 102 feet. It’s now thought that the Globe was sixteen-sided, whereas it was previously thought to have eighteen sides.

The De Witt drawing of the Swan Theatre

The digs have also forced a rethink about the internal arrangements of the theatres. The only evidence for this in Shakespeare’s period was the so-called “De Witt” drawing of the Swan Theatre, actually a copy made by Buchel, who did not visit it. For years this was a key piece of evidence, showing the galleried seating, the entrances, and, crucially, the shape of the stage. Reg Foakes commented that Buchel may have interpreted the drawing wrongly, and drew a theatre that was aligned more closely with what he expected to see. He commented that in the same period the gothic arches of Notre Dame in Paris were drawn as rounded Roman arches because of the fashion for Vitruvius’s book on classical architecture.

The De Witt drawing shows a rectangular thrust stage, but the archaeologists have uncovered evidence that the early stages were tapered, wider at the back than the front, and relatively shallow. The Rose stage was tapered, 30′ wide at the back, 20′ wide at the front, and 15′ deep. How, Andrew Gurr wondered, did they stage Henry VI or Tamburlaine in such a small area? Perhaps we have trouble with this because we’re used to seeing theatres built to give enough room for up to 200 extras, or we’ve grown used to seeing films using computer-generated armies going into battle, while people in Shakespeare’s time had only experienced stages erected in inn-yards or chambers, when a 30-foot wide stage might have seemed spacious.

I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the Chorus’s first speech in Henry V when he invites us to:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.
Into a thousand parts divide one man
And make imaginary puissance.

Shakespeare’s Globe

In response to a question about the investigative use of the reconstructed Globe, it was agreed that although there had been a number of experiments using original practices  there was much still to be done to satisfy academics in working out exactly how theatres were used in Shakespeare’s day. There had for instance not yet been an all-male production in which the female roles were taken by boys. And although the Globe stage had been adjusted by the building of catwalks, they had not experimented with altering the shape or size of the stage itself.

Stanley Wells concluded by reminding us that no matter how closely we try to revive plays as staged by Shakespeare’s company, we ourselves are not Elizabethans. Exciting as it is to see walls, pavements and finds appearing during archaeological explorations, the digs can answer only some of the questions about the players, audience and the playhouses. Finding out how the acting companies evolved, what the relationships were between Alleyn and Henslowe, and Burbage and Shakespeare, is beyond archaeology and it’s to be hoped further information will come to light. The work done on documents like the Bridewell court records analysed by Duncan Salkeld has added much to what we know about life in London during this period when the theatres were surrounded by brothels, inns and bear-baiting rings.

Archaeology is providing the key to unlocking many mysteries of the Shakespearean playhouses, but the answers to many questions are still tantalisingly undiscovered.

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Shakespeare among the Courtesans

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Since Eric Partridge’s 1968 book Shakespeare’s Bawdy the subject of sex in Shakespeare has been commonplace. With titles including words like “desire”, “eroticism”, and “sexuality” the reader knows what to expect, but both the jacket image and the title of Duncan Salkeld’s new book Shakespeare among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature, and Drama, 1500-1650 indicate that this might be a rather demure look at the issue. But Salkeld’s book describes the realities of the early modern sex trade which was known to Shakespeare. It also raises uncomfortable questions about the extent to which this shady world still exists.

This book is one of Ashgate’s series Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies, and Salkeld makes much use of contemporary Italian literature as well as accounts written by English visitors to Italy and of foreign tourists to London.

The powerful, glamorous courtesan makes few appearances on the English stage, Bel-Imperia, the tragic heroine of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy being one of the exceptions. Among Shakespeare’s characters the Courtesan in The Comedy of Errors and Bianca in Othello are both subject to the whims of the men in the plays and it’s actually Cleopatra who displays most of the characteristics of the courtesan.

Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2011

Shakespeare’s whores are low-status, powerless, and can be humorous in a Chaucerian, Wife of Bath, sort of way. But the brothel scenes often provoke uneasy laughter, as with Doll Tearsheet in Henry IV part 2, Mistress Overdone in Measure for Measure and the brothel-keeper in Pericles where it’s obvious that the prostitutes are not there from choice. In Measure for Measure both the Duke and Angelo are simultaneously disgusted and fascinated by prostitution and Shakespeare recognises the ambiguity of their, his, and our responses.

To me the eye-opening strength of Salkeld’s book is the analysis and quotations from the Bridewell Court Records. Here sexual misdemeanours are reported in frank and graphic detail. Prostitutes must have expected to be caught and punished as people were willing to testify against them, but what’s more surprising are the testimonies against neighbours caught in relatively harmless extra-marital romps.

Just occasionally the voices of defendants come across, the best example being the examination of Margaret Aprice in March 1575. Margaret seems to have been a servant  made pregnant by Thomas Medcalf, who the previous summer had enticed her “once when she carried clothes in a morning And another tyme when he went to seke eggs for his Aunte”. It turns out that he had promised to marry her: “Thomas Medcalf required good will of her & that she wolde consent to him & he wolde marrie her she saide howe maie wee live for I am a poore mayde & have nothinge”.

We hear echoes of the complaint against Lucio in Measure for Measure where
If any woman’s wronged by this lewd fellow –
As I have heard him swear there’s one
Whome he begot with child  – let her appear,
And he shall marry her.

and of Ophelia’s song in Hamlet, “Quoth she, ‘Before you tumbled me,/You promised me to wed'”.

In Margaret Aprice’s comment about her poverty and her lack of prospects “I am a poore mayde & have nothinge” the real sadness of ordinary people’s lives comes through. It reminds me of a moment in Henry VI Part 2, when Saunders Simpcox tries to convince the king and nobles that he has miraculously been cured of blindness. The lie is quickly uncovered by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and in their defence Simpcox’s wife says “Alas! Sir, we did it for pure need”. The plea is ignored and both Simpcox and his wife are ordered to be whipped unmercifully, to the amusement of most of the watching nobles.

In productions this moment can go for nothing, quickly followed by the news of the arrest of the Duke of Gloucester’s wife. When I was researching the Jack Cade story a few weeks ago I looked at the photographs of the 1977 RSC production. There, among the onlookers in this scene was Jack Cade, a couple of acts before he appeared as a rebel. Why had the director, Terry Hands, put him there? I assume his appearance in this scene where ordinary people were punished for trying to find a way out of their poverty provided him with motivation for his later rebellion of commoners against the government.

I’ll be writing more about this book in a future blog: in the mean time I recommend it for its insights into this largely hidden area of life in Shakespeare’s England.

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The Sam Wanamaker Theatre

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The Sam Wanamaker Theatre, CGI

Major congratulations are due to Shakespeare’s Globe, where the building of their new indoor theatre has just begun. It has just been announced, here and here, that the theatre will be named after the man who devoted himself to the creation of a reconstruction of Shakespeare’s theatre, Sam Wanamaker.

Sam Wanamaker

Wanamaker first came to the UK in 1949 as a young actor and was disappointed to find no reconstruction of the most famous theatre in the world. From 1970 until his death in 1993 he worked tirelessly to make the Globe a reality and it’s entirely appropriate that his name should be so permanently associated with the building.

The new theatre will be based on Shakespeare’s indoor theatre, the Blackfriars. Plans were discovered by chance in the 1960s, and the intention is to light it as the original would have been, using candles. This new theatre will allow playing to go on during the winter, and in all weathers. It will also have the great advantage of not being disturbed by the sound of aircraft flying above.

The theatre is scheduled to open in early 2014 with a repertoire of appropriate plays. It’s rumoured that one of the first performances will be by Edward’s Boys, a group of boy-players, pupils from Shakespeare’s own school in Stratford-upon-Avon, another unmissable event for the Shakespeare-lover.

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C Walter Hodges and Shakespeare’s Theatre

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

A youthful C Walter Hodges

I spent Saturday at the conference Who invented the “Shakespearean theatre”?, held at the University of Reading. I wrote about the conference in advance,  and I’ll be writing more about the conference in a later blog (or two), but just now I want to focus on the artist C Walter Hodges, one of whose images was used to illustrate a point during the day. When I got home I went to my copies of two of his books to remind myself of them and found that by coincidence today, 26 November, is the eighth anniversary of Hodges’ death at the age of 95.

I now have my father’s copies of Shakespeare and the Players and Shakespeare’s Theatre, two of the many he wrote and illustrated. It was the second of these, full of Hodges’ beautiful colour images, that my father showed me on its publication in 1964 and which sparked my own lifelong interest in Shakespeare in the theatre. Hodges was awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal for childrens’ book illustration for this book.  

Hodges continued to promote the idea of building a reconstruction of the Globe. In an article that appeared in the Birmingham Post in 1968, it was stated “Mr Hodges believes that a modern reconstruction of the Globe as working theatre …would teach us much not only about Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, but also about a tradition of presenting plays that is slowly reviving now that the picture-frame stage and its elaborate scenery have reached their limits”. He became an authority on the design and structure of the Elizabethan theatre, in 1970 being appointed technical adviser to the Globe Playhouse Trust. During 1971 the first World Shakespeare Congress passed a resolution expressing the hope “that a studied effort will soon be made to build a full scale reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre”. He lived long enough (until 2004) to see the reconstructed London Globe turn from dream to reality.

Conjectural reconstruction of the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice

In the 1980s he was commissioned to provide conjectural illustrations of how scenes from the plays might have been staged, to be published in the New Cambridge Shakespeare editions of the plays. And he designed a series of stamps illustrating the Globe and other theatres of the period in 1995. If you’d like to see more of his work many examples are featured in the Gallery of the Shakespeare Out Loud website.

Tucked inside the back of Shakespeare’s Theatre I found two pieces of paper I hadn’t noticed before. One is the front cover of the Radio Times for Christmas week 1950, decorated with a black and white image by C Walter Hodges of a modern nativity play being performed in a church, complete with Christmas trees and an audience of children. Looking at the illustrations in the book, he includes a similar scene, an imagined version of a nativity play in a church during Shakespeare’s childhood.

Hodges designed many covers for the Radio Times. With the cover is a letter from Hodges, dated 31 December 1950, responding to a letter my father had written in appreciation. In the letter he comments “It is very nice to know that one’s work gets noticed by people – for, with all the perplexities and difficulties of actually doing it, one sometimes forgets the “public”.

Hodges was a great believer in the importance of theatre: “the theatre as an institution is the pre-eminent arrangement whereby human beings work out the models of their own conduct, their morality and aspiration, their ideas of good and evil… If this is so, and it would be hard to deny, then the theatre must be seen as a most powerful instrument in the social history of mankind, and its own history must therefore be allowed a corresponding importance.”

In his foreword to the second edition of Shakespeare and the Players Hodges explains why he felt so drawn to these particular theatres: “for the first time, an important part of a nation’s cultural life was entirely created …by common citizens, of the sons of tradesmen from side streets and country towns, working together on their own”.

He went on: “there is still no certain knowledge about what Shakespeare’s theatre looked like in all its corners,…perhaps these may help to explain or justify, or even pass on to others, the infection I have so much enjoyed”.  It is certainly a subject that continues to fascinate many.

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Chaos, Jack Cade and the men of Kent

Posted on November 23, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

But then are we in order when we are most out of order.

Sir John Gilbert’s engraving of Jack Cade

This contradictory line is spoken by the rebel Jack Cade in Shakespeare’s play Henry VI part 2. In his very first history play Shakespeare chose to explore issues of rebellion, authority, and the importance of maintaining order, which would be central to all the later history plays and others.

Last week’s meeting of the Stratford Shakespeare Club was a lecture on Jack Cade by Professor Stuart Hampton-Reeves. His aim was to re-evaluate Cade, who he feels has recently been unfairly demonised. During the nineteenth century, when Shakespeare’s play was rarely staged, Cade was thought of as a political hero, particularly in the US where his revolutionary fervour was admired, and a play as written and staged about him. In the UK one of the foremost artists of the day, John Gilbert, created images of Cade for Howard Staunton’s 1858 edition of Shakespeare. Here is Cade, sword in hand, when he and his mob have arrived victorious in the centre of the City at London Stone. Cade is unkempt, but not barbarous, with more than a hint of Robin Hood about him.

James Laurenson as Jack Cade

In the past 60 years there have been many productions of the Henry VI plays on stage and television. The three parts of Henry VI have often been conflated into two, resulting in the foregrounding of the violence of the Cade scenes rather than giving him and the scenes of rebellion space to develop. Apart from James Laurenson’s charismatic Cade at the RSC in 1977-8 (a full text version), he has tended to be either apolitically anarchic or a representative of the right wing National Front, as with Michael Pennington’s English Shakespeare Company performance in the 1980s. As indicated by that quote at the start of the post, Cade’s political views are a confused blend of wanting to hold proptery in common, to destroy learning, to abolish the aristocracy and, eventually, to be an autocratic dictator. To Lord Say, who Cade orders to be executed, he declares “I am the besom that must sweep the court clean of such filth as thou art”. But Cade makes his worst threats only after Stafford has proclaimed that his followers will be hanged in their children’s sight. Then

Michael Pennington as Jack Cade

We will not leave one lord, one gentleman;
Spare none but such as go in clouted shoon,
For they are thrifty honest men, and such
As would, but that they dare not, take our parts.

Towards the end of the lecture Stuart Hampton-Reeves talked about Cade’s association with Kent. Shakespeare describes him as “a headstrong Kentishman, John Cade of Ashford”, yet in Halle’s Chronicles which Shakespeare used as his main source, he is described as an Irishman. Why this change, and why was Kent such an important county to Shakespeare?

I took a look at an important book, William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent. This book was written in 1570, published in 1576, and was the first county history published. William Dugdale’s History of Warwickshire did not appear until 1656. Lambarde’s book is modest in size and lacks illustrations apart from a fold-out map. He describes the abundance of Kent, rich in pasture, woodlands, fruits, cattle, deer and rabbits, and inhabited by many members of the gentry. It’s also near to the capital ” from which city (as it were from a certaine rich and wealthy seed plot) courtiers, lawyers, and merchants be continually translated, and do become plants among them”.

In Henry VI part 2, Lord Say describes Kent as
the civil’st place of all this isle:
Sweet in the country, because full of riches;
The people liberal, valiant, active, wealthy.

Title page of The Perambulation of Kent

Lambarde suggested that because of this prosperity, “nowhere else in this realme, is the common people more willingly governed”. As a Kentishman himself, he found it difficult to write about the three rebellions that broke out in the county: the 1380 Peasants Revolt, 1450 Cade rebellion, and a rebellion during the reign of Henry VII. “I cannot (without paine and pitie) enter into the consideration of these times and matters”, he writes.

Kent also had its own laws,  which gave inhabitants extra freedoms. The custom of “Gavelkind” prevailed in which men were freeholders rather than tenants, and every man “hath some part of his own to live upon”. Instead of primogeniture, which disinherits all but the eldest son, all the children shared the inheritance of their parents. Stuart Hampton-Reeves pointed out that Kent is also the setting for part of King Lear. Here we see both kinds of inheritance: in the Gloucester family the oldest son is expected to inherit, whereas the King splits his country equally between his three children. As well as being set partly in the county, the main voice of reason, exiled for his plain speaking, is the Duke of Kent. As with Henry VI, the disorder that follows is the responsibility, not of the system, but of the flaws of the monarch.

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