Shakespeare and the power of music

Posted on November 21, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

22 November is Saint Cecilia’s day, when we should be celebrating music in all its forms, yet on Tuesday morning BBC Radio 4’s Today programme broadcast a piece criticising the fact that only a small minority of people attend ballet, opera and classical music events despite sixty years of Arts Council England funding for the arts. It suggested that ACE has failed to bring “great art to everyone”.

Almost immediately a deluge of tweets was launched, and before the end of the day Guardian online had produced two pieces refuting these claims, here and here. The Today piece went for the easy targets while failing to mention the rest of the work supported by ACE. Theatre companies, galleries, museums and libraries all strive to make the arts in all forms to new audiences. In the past year or so the Arts Council has had to make massive cuts and 200 organisations have completely lost funding, but the BBC’s piece was less about the effect of these cuts than an attack on the support to elitist art without an acknowledgement of the work done to broaden access to the arts in hard times.

Those involved in music and dance already felt themselves under attack, as the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, recently announced that arts subjects will be excluded from the new English baccalaureate. It’s feared these subjects will find themselves excluded from schools when not part of the required curriculum. Unless students are introduced to the arts at school they may never become audiences later in life. The campaign is being led by major figures in the arts, and if you’d like to support it, follow this link.

I don’t wish to enter the ongoing debate about subsidy and the arts, but Shakespeare is supported by Arts Council England, the Royal Shakespeare Company receiving substantial funding from ACE for both the transformation of its theatres and ongoing artistic work. The National Theatre is the regular stager of Shakespeare that is also a major recipient of ACE funding. Shakespeare’s Globe shows what can be done without regular funding since the building was completed in the 1990s. All three organisations have active education departments that aim to connect young people with Shakespeare, theatre or both.

The value of the arts, in particular music, has been championed for centuries. A book entitled The Praise of Musicke, published in 1586, claims that music “encourages chastity, moveth pittie, allayeth anger, restoreth madmen to their wits, cures diseases, and driveth away evil spirits”.

Dowland’s first book of music

Shakespeare’s love of music is obvious from the number of occasions when he uses it to set a mood or to reflect the action of the play. Even when Richard II is in prison, in the scene before his death, he hears music:
            Keep time: how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men’s lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To cheque time broke in a disorder’d string;…
This music mads me; let it sound no more;
For though it have holp madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.
Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!
For ’tis a sign of love; and love to Richard
Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world. 

A couple of projects have recently been announced linking Shakespeare’s work with popular music. In Glasgow Hip-Hop Shakespeare is exploring cultural parallels between Shakespeare and hip-hop artists, using Hamlet, Othello and Romeo and Juliet to look at issues of responsibility and relationships. It’s a good example of how the arts can provide experiences that enrich people’s lives.

And a new musical is in preparation that is based on the story of Romeo and Juliet, using the music of songwriter Jeff Buckley.

Finally, I’ve just spotted this clip on YouTube of Sting performing a song by Dowland to the “lascivious pleasing of a lute”. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I found it  refreshing to hear music of the period sung in a modern style, and shows that music of Shakespeare’s period still has a place.

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So who did invent the Shakespearean Theatre?

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The reconstructed Globe Theatre

Who invented the “Shakespearean theatre”? Burbage and Shakespeare and/or Henslowe and Alleyn?  This is the title of a one-day conference being held at the University of Reading this Saturday coming, 24 November.

Because Shakespeare is now the most famous playwright from the period we tend to think he dominated the theatre world of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But was this true? The conference will discuss the Shakespearean theatres as physical entities as well as the plays and theatre practices which went on in them. Were Burbage and Shakespeare really in competition with Henslowe and Alleyn or was the relationship more complicated?  And what about the other companies about which we know less?

The conference is organised by Professor Grace Ioppolo and brings together some of the most important people in the field, including senior academics Reg Foakes, Andrew Gurr and Stanley Wells, members of the Museum of London Archaeology team who have excavated the remains of many of the theatres, and other leading scholars. It’s aimed not just at academics and students but also at actors, directors and theatre aficionados. Registration is about to close so get your skates on if you want to be there. If you can’t make it, here’s a link to a podcast from the National Archives by Grace Ioppolo on a similar subject.

Sir Ian McKellen unveiling the Rose Theatre plaque

And the Henslowe-Alleyn digitisation project is a great resource for digital information on the subject.

On the subject of Shakespearean theatres, it’s just been announced that Lottery funding has been awarded to a project aiming to draw up plans for further excavations of the Rose Theatre site and to plan the delivery of educational resources and performances.

In an unexpected development, a link has been drawn between Shakespearean theatres like the Rose and another theatre which is currently being restored, the Bristol Old Vic.

Bristol Old Vic

This building dates from the mid-eighteenth century and is the oldest functioning theatre in existence. The exploration has found that originally, like theatres in the Shakespeare period, it had a thrust stage. It has always been thought that once theatres moved inside and adopted the use of lighting and scenery a picture-frame or proscenium arch stage was developed. The thrust stage encourages much more audience participation and it seems that the atmosphere was more like “a speakeasy or nightclub”. It’s known that the audience for Shakespeare’s theatre could be rowdy but it appears that this may have continued much longer than had been thought. This discovery may in itself cause a reassessment of theatres in the eighteenth century.  Technical information is in this article from Lighting and Sound International.

For anyone interested in the history of theatres in the UK, I’d recommend the Theatres Trust website. This organisation aims to protect the UK’s theatres and to champion their future. And they’re also interested in what makes a good theatre. To that end its website includes a database of theatres, an image library, information about the history of theatres and theatre decoration, stages and auditoria. There are also a series of downloadable resource sheets for teachers.

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Shakespeare’s Welsh

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The History of Cambria title page

The Welsh are rightly proud of their national history and heritage, but they haven’t always been represented seriously in literature and the media. Even in Shakespeare’s day efforts were made to set the record straight by drawing attention to the admirable qualities and culture of the inhabitants of Wales.

In 1584 an important book was published entitled The History of Cambria, now called Wales.  The book has a complicated history. Texts detailing the history of the country back to the 7th century were collected by Caradoc, and copies of these documents were kept in a variety of places. Humphrey Lloyd, described as “a painful and a worthy searcher of British antiquities”, translated these documents into English, but on his death they were still only in manuscript. Sir Henry Sidney, father of Philip Sidney, was appointed Lord President of Wales during the 1570s and lived in LudlowCastle.  To his great credit, Sidney was “desirous to have the same set out in print” and approached David Powell, his private chaplain, asking him to “peruse and correct it in such sort as it might be committed to the presse”.  Powell was respected as an antiquarian and Lord Burghley allowed him privileged access to “records in the tower”, providing him with additional resources.

Sir Henry Sidney

In his introduction to the book Powell used the opportunity, in which he must have been encouraged by Sidney, to correct the English prejudice against the Welsh. He wrote: “The inhabitants of England, favouring their countrymen and friends, reported not the best of Welshmen”.

The stereotypical Welshman was described as being proud, rebellious, fickle and unconstant. The rebellion headed by Owen Glendower which forms much of the plot of Henry IV Part 1 caused long-lasting distrust: “This hatred and disliking was so increased by the stir and rebellion of Owen Glendower, that it brought forth such greivous laws, as few Christian kings ever gave”.

At the beginning of Henry IV Part 1 Westmorland announces news from Wales. Lord Mortimer:
Against the irregular and wild Glendower –
Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken,
A thousand of his people butchered,
Upon whose dead corpses there was such misuse,
Such beastly shameless transformation
By those Welshwomen done, as may not be
Without much shame retold or spoken of.

Powell argued though that all the Welsh were doing was defending their own land:  “By what reason was it more lawful for those men to dispossess them of these countries with violence and wrong, than for them to defend and keep their own? Shall a man be charged with disobedience, because he seeketh to keep his purse from him that would rob him?”

Powell ends his introduction with a plea for a translation of “the Bible in their own language according to the godly laws already established”. Shakespeare doesn’t make jokes about the Welsh language, as he does with French in Henry V: in Henry IV Part 1 Lady Mortimer speaks and sings a song in Welsh, but Shakespeare doesn’t write an anglicised version of the language, relying on having a Welsh speaker in the company.

In his book Shakespeare and the Welsh, Frederick Harries suggests that Shakespeare dealt fairly, producing three finished portraits of Welshmen, “the soldier, the divine, and the feudal chieftain”. “In the character of Glendower we are presented with the mystical, idealistic, and the poetical side of the Celtic natures; Sir Hugh Evans is the shrewd, homely, Bible-loving Welshman; while Fluellen displays the war-like, chivalrous, and loyal attributes of the Welsh people.”

 

Roderick Peeples (left) as Fluellen and Will Zahrn as Pistol in the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s 2009 production of Henry V. (Photo by Karl Hugh. Copyright Utah Shakespeare Festival 2009.)

Fluellen in Henry V is my favourite among Shakespeare’s Welshmen. Although he’s sometimes a figure of fun, it’s an affectionate portrait of a man who puts duty, discipline and the rule of law first. He reminds the king of the brave history of his compatriots in the days of the Black Prince:
If your majesty is remembered of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden when leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps, which your majesty know to this hour is an honourable badge of the service…

The Welsh are renowned for their fine singing, and many distinguished actors have come from Wales, the best-known Richard Burton. There are many others, and I’ve recently heard from the Welsh actor Ian Hughes, for years a leading actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose parts included Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, the Fool in King Lear, Prince John in Henry IV and the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Sadly he hasn’t played Fluellen, but as well as acting, Hughes has several other strings to his bow as teacher, lecturer and Business Performance Coach. He is currently developing a lecture “Shakespeare and the Story of Leadership” on the lessons contained in Shakespeare’s works. I’d be surprised if Henry V didn’t feature pretty heavily. I don’t have an online link, but if you’re interested in finding out more, let me know and I’ll forward the summaries and contact details.

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Celebrating the Swan Theatre’s birthday

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Frederick R Koch and Queen Elizabeth II opening the Swan Theatre

On 13 November 1986 The Queen visited Stratford-upon-Avon to open the Swan Theatre. The official opening ceremony was held during the day and in the evening The Fair Maid of the West was staged in front of an invited audience, of which I was lucky enough to be part.

The theatre had been converted from the shell remaining ever since the 1926 fire, when it had been known as the Conference Hall and used mostly for rehearsals. Trevor Nunn had called it “an ugly duckling”. For several years a scale model of the theatre the RSC would like to build in the space had been on display in the RSC Collection Gallery. One day a visitor told the rather surprised curator, Brian Glover, that he wished to fund this new theatre. This benefactor wanted to remain anonymous and it was only on the day of the official opening when he appeared on stage with the Queen that the name and a photograph of Frederick R Koch was released.

In his introduction to the programme for The Two Noble Kinsmen, the first play staged in the Swan, Trevor Nunn explained that “as a Company, we have almost continuously responded to the imperative of presenting examples of the plays which might have influenced Shakespeare, or the plays which he might have influenced, or the plays which give us, both practitioners and audiences, greater insight into sixteenth and seventeenth-century England.” From 1964 the RSC had aimed to put on plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with plays like The Revenger’s Tragedy, but the “comparatively lower box-office response” counted them out for the main theatre. Meanwhile productions at the company’s studio theatre, The Other Place, had proved that “neglected works can still provide tremendous entertainment and theatrical excitement”.

By the time of the official opening, the theatre had been operating for several months with a successful season consisting of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Every Man in his Humour, The Rover and a conflation of the two parts of The Fair Maid of the West. The Swan was cross-cast with the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and The Other Place, and actors who appeared in the Swan in their first year with the RSC included Imogen Stubbs, Simon Russell Beale, Nathaniel Parker, Imelda Staunton and Sean Bean while established RSC actors Pete Postlethwaite, Joe Melia, Hugh Quarshie, Gerard Murphy and Sinead Cusack also made their mark on the new stage.

From its first season the Swan was a massive success with audiences. It wasn’t just the  chance to explore the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and successors from 1570-1750.  The theatre itself was a star: some people would go to any play performed in the Swan. The Observer praised the theatre and its architect: “Michael Reardon’s pale golden galleried playhouse…an exceptionally attractive performance space… first impressions are of precision, harmony, versatility, joy. The acoustic is warm and clear”. Over the years a large number of plays that fit Trevor Nunn’s definition have been staged there as well as premieres of new plays, musicals, Greek tragedies and of course plays by Shakespeare himself. Since 1986 though there has been no full production of Shakespeare’s collaborative The Two Noble Kinsmen, and only one each of  Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus  and Jonson’s  The Alchemist and Volpone. Next summer Middleton’s city comedy A Mad World my Masters will be performed there.

The theatre has proved to be versatile. It became an in-the round experience for the Histories in 2000-2001, and a promenade space for The Winter’s Tale and Pericles in 2006. Entrances have been made from beneath the stage, from the metal walkway high above it, through the audience and even by swinging by rope from the first gallery.

Themed seasons have been a feature of the Swan, beginning with the Restoration season of 1988, then the 2002 Jacobethans, the Spanish Golden Age in 2004 and the Gunpowder season of 2005. As the company’s new Artistic Director, Gregory Doran, directed some of these it’s to be hoped that this exploration will continue. Critic Michael Billington has suggested that seasons focusing on the work of just one playwright (other than Shakespeare) would be enlightening, and the Swan would be a perfect venue for a closer look at the work of one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

Imelda Staunton as Bess and Joe Melia as Mullisheg

I mentioned Joe Melia a while ago: many people will have been saddened to hear of his recent death. Joe played King Mullisheg in The Fair Maid of the West. This joyful production was a delight from beginning to end, not least because of Joe’s comic performance as the lustful king who desires the virtuous maid of the title. Also in the cast that year was another actor who died last year and is sadly missed, Pete Postlethwaite, playing Roughman, a swaggerer who like Mullisheg is won over by the virtuous Bess.

Woolly as the dog Crab and Richard Moore as Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1991

There have also been many successful Shakespeare productions at the Swan. To my mind the best was Titus Andronicus in 1987, but many will also remember the suave version of The Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1991, the action punctuated by songs from the 1930s with the wonderful lurcher Woolly playing Crab. More recently there have been top-notch productions of mainstream plays like Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, and the Henry VI/Richard III cycle in 2000-2001. For more information about plays that have been performed in the Swan Theatre go to the RSC Performance Database and search for the venue “Swan”.

 

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Learning about education in Shakespeare’s town and the universities

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Duncan Salkeld’s new book Shakespeare among the Courtesans is based on close study of documentary evidence, a technique which he notes sometimes takes a battering. Facts, he notes, are “subject to interpretation, and so refracted through a variety of political, semantic, and rhetorical…conditions.” And nowhere are facts more open to a variety of interpretation than in the murky world of prostitution. I’m going to be coming back to this book in a future post, but anyone who’s tried to get a clear view of Shakespeare studies by looking at contemporary documents will agree when Salkeld notes “one of the most rewarding aspects of this kind of research is its unpredictability”.

When I opened the book I was surprised to find an account of a court hearing at London’s Bridewell Hospital in 1598 in which a young woman, Elizabeth Evans, was accused of prostitution. Salkeld highlights it because it was clear that the notorious Evans had evaded arrest for some time. The case was well-documented and called on a number of witnesses to give evidence against her. But it wasn’t the records of the case as such that caught my eye. In her statement to the court she stated that she was fromStratford-upon-Avon. To give herself some social status she had used the aliases Elizabeth Dudley and Elizabeth Carew, names of two noble families from the Stratford area.

Two of the witnesses in the case also named themselves as being fromStratford, Joice Cowden and George Pinder. And Joice Cowden declared that “she was borne on Stratford-uppon-haven and further she saith that she this examinate went to school with the same Elizabeth Evans”. George Pinder confirmed Cowden’s facts, including that he had been asked to call her by the name “Carew”. She clearly wanted to be seen as more than a common prostitute, and perhaps her education, along with the fact that she could sign her name elegantly, helped her to make the point. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what happened to her between her childhood in Stratford and the time of her court case?

Trying to find these people in the Stratford registers is more difficult. George Pinder’s baptism is recorded in 1566, making him just two years younger than Shakespeare, but what of the girls? In 1574 there is Anne, daughter to William Evans,  and in 1572 Elizabeth, daughter to William Cutler. William Evans’ profession was a cutler: might this have been a mistake on the part of the clerk? As for Joice Cowden, there are no Cowdens in the register, though Richard Cowell had two daughters born in the 1570s, Rose and Jone. Just as with Shakespeare’s family, the official records don’t supply all the answers.

The Schoolroom in Stratford-upon-Avon

On this document, found, unpredictably, in the records of a London court, we find the only evidence so far for the existence of a school for girls in Stratford-upon-Avon, in fact I think it may be the only statement by anybody who went to school in Stratford during this period, though the Grammar School definitely existed. Evidence for life in Shakespeare’s Stratfordis found in the most unexpected places. Historian Mairi Macdonald suggests that this Dame school was probably taught by a woman, maybe in the same building as the main Grammar School, but not necessarily. Both girls and boys could attend this kind of school which for boys led on to the Grammar School: girls weren’t so lucky.

On the theme of information about education turning up where you might not expect it, this week’s radio programme The Long View took a look at the problem of graduate unemployment both now and in the sixteenth century. In the student play The Return from Parnassus, staged 1601-2, Cambridge University graduates voiced their disillusion on finding their degree was no guarantee of a job.  The Elizabethan period saw an expansion in education, the Grammar Schools like Stratford’s responding to the increasing numbers of places being made available at university. Thomas Nashe commented in his 1589 book The Anatomie of Absurdity, that men of obscurity from the lower end of the social scale were able to become the equal of princes because of the opportunities given them by education.

The ends of the sixteenth and the twentieth century were both periods of massive social change, when the expansion of education, especially at university level, was government policy. Shakespeare, like many bright young people today, found that the lack of a degree was no barrier to success, while expectations for graduates have been  raised that the job market could not fulfil. If you’d like to listen to The Long View, it’s still available to listen again.

 

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Valuing performance: violins, Vaughan Williams and Henry V

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

This morning violinist Tasmin Little was interviewed on Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today, talking about rare violins and their value. In Vienna the verdict in the trial of Dietmar Machold, accused of fraud and embezzlement in the trade of rare musical instruments, is expected imminently.

In 2008 she performed in a concert in Stratford-upon-Avon celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the death of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Vaughan Williams had Stratford connections going back to 1905 when he and Holst had provided music for a Jonsonian masque, Pan’s Anniversary. This was staged in Stratford with folk dancing arranged by Cecil Sharp. His involvement culminated in 1913 when he was invited to arrange and conduct the music for the Shakespeare Festival. Much of this music is now kept among the theatre’s archives at the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, and among the neatly copied parts are some sections written in Vaughan Williams’ own hand, probably changed during the hurly-burly of rehearsals. Only a few months before the concert some additional fragments of music for Much Ado About Nothing, another play performed in 1913, were identified and these were shown to Tasmin before the concert.

The boys in rehearsal in 1913

Most of the plays in the 1913 season were history plays, including Richard II, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V and Richard III. In addition to the professionally-produced plays, during the spring Henry V was performed by the boys of Shakespeare’s own school in the Memorial Theatre. Music by Vaughan Williams was also used. Although they didn’t know it at the time, it was to be an exceptionally poignant moment.  All the boys who appeared in the production in 1913 fought for real in France during the First World War, seven of them losing their lives.

Tim Pigott-Smith

On 17 March 2013 a centenary performance will take place in the Swan Theatre (built in the shell of the original theatre), in which this music will be reconstructed. The highly-praised amateur troupe of current KES students Edwards’ Boys will take all the roles except the Chorus which will be played by eminent Old Boy Tim Pigott-Smith. Tickets are now on sale, and if you’d like to sponsor the production here’s a link to their Sponsume page

It’s going to be inspirational to see boys from Shakespeare’s own school celebrate Shakespeare’s achievement, and that of their forebears, with a performance in the same space where it took place so long ago.

When Tasmin was asked about the monetary value of the violins, she commented that it’s the music that can be played on them that makes the instruments valuable. It’s easy to put a value on a historic object, to admire it in a museum, more difficult to value the human achievement of the person who created it, and the performer who brings it to life. Fortunately Stradivarius’s violins are far more often seen and heard in the concert hall than in the museum. And quite right too.

Incidentally, Tasmin Little is performing Bach and Vivaldi in a concert in Warwick on Saturday 10 November for anyone who would like to hear her bringing one of these fabulous instruments to life.

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Funeral monuments: remembering Shakespeare’s Henry V and Richard III

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Henry V

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
Comets, importing change of times and states,
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,
And with them scourge the bad revolting stars
That have consented unto Henry’s death!
King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long!
England ne’er lost a king of so much worth.

At the beginning of Henry VI Part 1, the Duke of Bedford, the brother of Henry V, speaks these lines at Henry’s funeral. This service took place in Westminster Abbey 590 years ago today on 7 November 1422. Henry had died in France in August and his body was brought back to England with great ceremony. Four horses drew the chariot bearing his coffin into the Abbey right up to the choir screen and it took nine years for his magnificent tomb with its chantry chapel to be completed.

On the inscription on his tomb Henry was referred to as the “hammer of the Gauls”.  He was a great national hero who would have been remembered even without Shakespeare’s play. Part of his funeral “achievements”, a saddle, helm, sword and shield, were for centuries on display above the chantry and were only removed to the Abbey’s Museum in 1972. It’s tempting to think that Shakespeare must have seen them, with the tomb having been viewed by visitors to the Abbey for over 150 years. The British Museum’s exhibition Shakespeare: staging the world puts them back on display among other items that would have been familiar to Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

The arms on display here may have been purely ceremonial, but they are still powerful objects. Faded and damaged, they are among the most touching in the exhibition. It’s almost impossible to imagine how they appeared at the time of Henry’s burial, and astonishing that such fragile items, kept in such a public place, have survived.

Arms were traditionally displayed after successful battles. The Chorus in Act 5 of Henry V says that the people hoped to see the carrying of “His bruised helmet and his bended sword /Before him through the city” on Henry’s return after his victory at the battle of Agincourt.  In Shakespeare’s play Richard III  Richard Duke of York refers to arms being put on show as symbols of victory.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments.

With hindsight we and Shakespeare see Henry’s death as the beginning of the end. Within only a few lines of Bedford’s speech noting that comets are predictions of doom a messenger arrives with news that many of England’s territories in France have been lost, not because of supernatural intervention or French deceit, but because of a lack of resolve by those in power:
No treachery; but want of men and money.
Amongst the soldiers this is muttered,
That here you maintain several factions,
And whilst a field should be dispatch’d and fought,
You are disputing of your generals.

These disputes provide the basis for the Wars of the Roses which only ended with Richard III’s death.

Portrait of Richard III dating from 1520

The contrast between the grief that met Henry V’s death and his elaborate funeral and what happened to Richard III after his defeat at the Battle of Bosworth could not be more stark. The location of the church in which Richard had been buried, Greyfriars in Leicester, disappeared, but the much-publicised recent excavation of a car park has confirmed where it was and it’s possible that his grave has been found.

DNA tests on the bones will not yield results for another couple of months, but there is already much debate about where they should be re-interred should they prove to be Richard’s. There are calls for a state funeral in Westminster Abbey, for his return to his centre of power in York, while the official line favours a reburial in Leicester. There has even been a jokey suggestion that he should be buried in Worksop because it’s midway between Leicester and York. This excitement is only partly because of the desire to give a resting place to a maligned king. Richard’s grave would also be a tourist attraction and provide a significant boost to the local economy.

It’s ironic that although Shakespeare has been blamed for Richard’s reputation (though he only followed the official version of history), it is Shakespeare’s fictional portrait of a compelling but psychopathic monarch that has created the interest in the real man’s final resting place.

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Images of Shakespeare’s heroines

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Princess Mary around the time of her marriage in 1893

While researching a recent post I spotted a note in the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald saying that in 1945 Queen Mary donated a copy of The Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines to the SMT (now RSC). This might not sound extraordinary, unless you take into account the fact that Queen Mary was so well-known for being a great collector, that when visiting stately homes she expected to be given any objects that she admired. And I was interested in this note because I knew The Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines was published in the late nineteenth century. Why was Queen Mary giving away part of her collection, and why this?

I recently took a look at this magnificent book, published in 1888, which contains 21 studies in Goupilgravure of Shakespeare’s heroines, each one accompanied by a quotation and a couple of pages telling the story of the play. The copy given by Queen Mary is the de luxe edition, one of only 100 copies, each black and white image being signed by the artist. The engravings were made from paintings sold in 1889.

This book contains a note written and signed by Queen Mary, but what interested me was the leather bookplate just inside the front cover. The Latin inscription indicates that the book was given to George and Mary in July 1893, by St Andrew’s College, Bradfield in Berkshire, and it seems this was a wedding gift to the man who was second in line to the throne and his new wife. Nearly fifty years later Queen Mary, now an elderly widow, gave this book to the Theatre for its Library. Mary had an extraordinary life. She was originally to marry Albert Victor, Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson, but weeks after their betrothal he died of influenza. A couple of years later Albert’s younger brother George proposed to Mary. They were married two months later. He became George V, and she outlived both him and their sons Edward VIII and George VI. She died just months before the coronation of her granddaughter, the present Queen Elizabeth.

A strong and determined woman, Queen Mary’s enthusiasm for the arts didn’t only manifest itself in her collecting, regularly taking her granddaughters Elizabeth and Margaret to museums and galleries.

Olivia

The Graphic Gallery was just one of many publications celebrating Shakespeare’s women, including another set of engravings, The Heroines of Shakespeare, and several books such as Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850-52) and Helen Faucit’s On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (1885).

Most of these concentrated on the young, modest heroines: Juliet, Ophelia, Miranda: and  these feature in this collection too. But the Graphic Gallery includes several surprises. Here, representing Twelfth Night we see Olivia confidently lifting her veil, not the more diffident Viola.

Cressida

There is no representative of that most popular of plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but Cressida is here from Troilus and Cressida, looking wary and uncertain as she is taken to the Greek camp. At the time the play was never staged because of its scandalous subject matter. And most notably, we have a sultry femme fatale of a Cleopatra, lounging, uncorseted, with her quotation “My serpent of old Nile, For so he calls me” (see below).

The portraits, then, are character studies rather than illustrations of recognizable actresses.

Ellen Terry, by George Frederic Watts

The exception is the portrait of Imogen in Cymbeline who bears the unmistakeable features (and hair style) of the greatest actress of the time, Ellen Terry. Terry was at the peak of her fame around 1888, but although the artist might have decided she was perfect to represent Imogen she didn’t actually play the part until 1896.

 

Imogen

Terry herself lectured on Shakespeare’s women, the lectures being published after her death. She wrote “Have you ever thought how much we all, and women especially, owe to Shakespeare for his vindication of woman in his fearless, high-spirited, resolute and intelligent heroines?” As it turned out these were appropriate sentiments for Queen Mary, and perhaps the reason why she chose to give this unusual collection to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.

 

Here’s the complete list of subjects and artists.
Portia, Wife of Brutus, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (Julius Caesar)
Juliet, by  P H Calderon (Romeo and Juliet)
Miranda, by  F Goodall (The Tempest)
Imogen, by Herbert Gustave Schmalz  (Cymbeline)
Anne Page, by G D Leslie (The Merry Wives of Windsor)

Cleopatra

Rosalind, by  W Macbeth (As You Like It)
Isabella, by  F M W Topham (Measure for Measure)
Cressida, by  J Poynter  (Troilus and Cressida)
Olivia, by  E Blair Leighton (Twelfth Night)
Audrey, by  P R Morris (As You Like It)
Katharine, by  E Long (The Taming of the Shrew)
Beatrice, by  F Dicksee (Much Ado About Nothing)
Silvia, by  C E Perugini (The Two Gentlemen of Verona)
Mariana, by V C Prinsep (Measure for Measure)
Desdemona, by  Sir F Leighton (Othello)
Portia, by  H Woods (The Merchant of Venice)
Cleopatra, by  J W Waterhouse (Antony and Cleopatra)
Cordelia, by  W F Yeames (King Lear)
Ophelia, by Marcus Stone (Hamlet)
Jessica, by Luke Fildes (The Merchant of Venice)
Katharine of France, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (Henry V)

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Latest news about Shakespeare’s portraits

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The Title page of the First Folio with the Droeshout engraving

Shakespeare’s face is universally recognised, and there must be thousands of different portraits in existence. Yet very few of them could be said to be authentic in any way. For centuries people have wanted to own their own image of Shakespeare and artists have tried to catch the essence of the man in paint, plaster or stone.

There’s no record that a portrait of Shakespeare was created during his lifetime unless you count the reference in the first part of The Return from Parnassus. In this student play dating from 1603 one of the characters, besotted by Shakespeare’s love poetry, exclaims “O sweet Mr Shakespeare! I’le have his Picture in my study at The courte”. Nor is there any reference to a death mask being made when Shakespeare died. The so-called Kesselstadt death mask was found in a shop in Germany in the eighteenth century just at the time when Shakespeare was becoming an international cultural hero.

The Shakespeare monument

The two reliably authentic portraits are the Droeshout engraving, the frontispiece to the 1623 First Folio, and the bust erected in Holy Trinity Church above his grave which is referred to in the Folio. Both must have been accepted as likenesses by his family and friends, but there appears to have been little collaboration between the makers. Neither is a distinguished piece of work and dissatisfaction with these two must be one of the reasons why there have been so many portraits.

The Leicester Square statue surrounded by Olympic “medals”

 

Just recently the subject of Shakespeare portraiture has been in the news again. Leicester Square in central London is being rejuvenated and the statue of Shakespeare at its centre is being restored, with its plinth redesigned to discourage people from climbing on it. It dates from 1874 when the entire square was revamped and opened to the public. It’s said to be an exact replica of the 1740-41 statue in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, designed by William Kent and created by Peter Scheemakers, though the scroll bears a quote from Twelfth Night “There is no darkness but ignorance” rather than the version of lines from The Tempest that are on the original:

The Westminster Abbey statue

The Cloud capt Tow’rs,
The Gorgeous Palaces,
The Solemn Temples,
The Great Globe itself,
Yea all which it Inherit,
Shall Dissolve;
And like the baseless Fabrick of a Vision
Leave not a wreck behind.

Here’s a link to a page about the Westminster Abbey statue.

A few weeks ago a small, delicate portrait of Shakespeare was brought in to the BBC programme Antiques Roadshow.

Antiques Roadshow portrait

The expert judged it to date from around 1730, and suggested it was based on the Chandos portrait. This famous portrait was first mentioned in 1719 by George Vertue and it quickly became the most fashionable representation of Shakespeare. Although it dates from Shakespeare’s lifetime the name of the artist, the date of composition, and even the sitter, can not be identified for sure.

The Antiques Roadshow portrait shows a man wearing a costume similar to the Chandos, though it seems to be facially closer to the Droeshout engraving.

SBT 1978-12

Here’s a similar little portrait from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s Collections, that features on the Windows on Warwickshire website.

The difficulties surrounding the Chandos portrait illustrate the minefield that is Shakespeare portraiture. By the end of the seventeenth century a number of other portraits had appeared which had no claim to be made from life, the Chesterfield and Soest for instance.

The Chandos portrait

There have been many attempts to establish the dates of the different portraits and their relationships to each other. The most recent contender in the authenticity stakes is the Cobbe portrait, first exhibited in 2009, which has been the subject of some heated debates. This portrait isn’t related to the Church Bust, Droeshout engraving or Chandos portrait, but it appears to be the original from which several copies were made, variously identified as being Shakespeare or Sir Thomas Overbury. One problem is that the portrait shows a man younger than the 46 that Shakespeare was when it was painted in 1610. As I said, it’s a minefield.

The Cobbe portrait

The controversy looks ready to continue as an artist based near Stratford-upon-Avon, Garrick Huscared, is in the process of creating a new bronze sculpture based on the Cobbe portrait. More information is being published at the moment and if you’d like to follow developments take a look at the website.

Shakespeare portraiture is a fascinating subject, yet I can’t help agreeing with Ben Jonson who said that to find the man we should “Look not on his picture, but his book”.

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Shakespeare and Hallowe’en: not just Macbeth

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The conjuration scene in Henry VI Part 2 from the Boydell Gallery

The Elizabethan and Jacobeans had superstitions covering almost every area of life. Supernatural explanations for natural phenomena were widely accepted: the appearance of a comet in 1577 caused public alarm, and even historian John Stow believed the story that the striking of a church spire by lightning was the work of the devil. Hallowe’en was the focus of these fears.

We still seem to need witchcraft today, even if for most of us it’s just entertainment. TV and films are full of magic, ghosts, vampires, zombies and extra-terrestrials. That great writer of fantasy, Philip Pullman, has just published his version of fifty of the best of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and these scary folk stories have retained their popularity in spite of their lack of context, character or motivation. One interviewee commented that the stories are “Events, events, events”.

Right from the beginning of his writing career, Shakespeare was intrigued by superstition and magic. When we think of his use of witchcraft, we immediately think of Macbeth and the three weird sisters, but as so often, Shakespeare had tackled the issue before.  The first history play he wrote, Henry VI Part 2, included the germ of the idea.  Here too, a wife, Eleanor Duchess of Gloucester, tries to persuade her husband, the Lord Protector, Duke Humphrey, to “Put forth thy hand, reach at the glorious gold.”

Unlike Macbeth, Humphrey will have none of it, so behind his back Eleanor aims to “remove these tedious stumbling-blocks” by resorting to magic. Another character, Hume, promises to show her “A spirit rais’d from depth of under ground/That shall make answer to such questions”.

John Gilbert’s engraving of the conjuration scene

And so in Act 1 Scene 4 a conjuration is staged. It is
Deep night, dark night, the silent of the night,
The time of night when Troy was set on fire,
The time when screech-owls cry, and ban-dogs howl,
And spirits walk, and ghosts break up their graves.

As in the apparition scene in Macbeth a spirit makes prophecies about the future. It must have been a frightening, but thrilling scene for the suggestible audience.

It’s tempting to see Henry VI Part 2 as “events, events, events,” as there is so much plot. When first published in 1594, its title was The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinal of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Jack Cade: and the Duke of Yorke’s first claim unto the Crowne. But the story of the downfall of Humphrey the Lord Protector shows us Shakespeare’s interest in politics as well as witchcraft. Just after Eleanor has revealed her ambitions to the audience, Hume, the man she has paid to raise the spirits for her, reveals that he is in the pay of two other courtiers, the Duke of Suffolk and the Cardinal of Winchester. She has been set up, and even though her husband has no part in her plot their aim is to precipitate his downfall through the plotting of his wife. At the end of the conjuration scene she is caught red-handed.

In Shakespeare’s main source, Halle’s Chronicles, the story is much simpler. Eleanor attempts to put her husband on the throne and for the purpose she employs witches who “devised an image of wax, representing the king, which by their sorcery, a little and little consumed, intending thereby in conclusion to waste, and destroy the king’s person”.  There’s no mention of anybody being in the pay of nobles, no raising of the devil, no dramatic scene to stage.

Shakespeare’s play shows that right from the beginning of his career he’s aware how politics works, and his play mirrors contemporary events: the Queen had been the subject of several plots during her reign and uncertainties about religious belief and the lack of a clear successor contributed to the sense of unease. In the play the country is full of plots, of jealousy and suspicion. Saunders Simpcox is the original benefits fraudster and the Duke of Suffolk is suspected of fiddling his expenses incurred while on government business.

Finally the Duke of York pays Jack Cade to lead a rebellion which he hopes will lead to himself being crowned:
I will stir up in England some black storm
Shall blow ten thousand souls to heaven, or hell;

In this atmosphere, witchcraft flourishes. Henry VI Part 2 was so successful that he wrote sequels and the prequel Henry VI Part 1. It was this tetralogy, with its supernatural scenes, that firmly established Shakespeare as the leading playwright of the day.

If you’d like to read more, New York’s University Library has a great subject guide on Shakespeare and witchcraft which includes links to several online resources.

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