When Hollywood came to Stratford: Claire Luce’s Cleopatra

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Angus McBean’s photograph of Claire Luce as Cleopatra

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Lionel Bradley, an ordinary man who lived through the second world war in London, recording his thoughts about not the blitz but the concerts which he and other Londoners attended: a bit of normality during a chaotic time. Just recently I’ve been watching a TV series, Wartime Farm, which has demonstrated how hard and drab life was for ordinary people during the war.

By 1945 people were both exhausted by war and hoping for victory. The Shakespeare Festivals inStratford-upon-Avonhad, remarkably, continued with barely a break,  and audience figures were high, but with production values poor the theatre was taking a critical battering. It was clear to everyone that after the war things would have to change.

The first indication of the sort of change that was to happen came while the war was still on, in 1945. An injection of glamour was required, and the person chosen to signpost the way was American actress and dancer Claire Luce. She had appeared in several high profile movies with actors such as Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy and on stage co-starred with Fred Astaire in The Gay Divorce, missing out on the film version (The Gay Divorcee) only because Ginger Rogers was already under contract. Luce had been in England for most of the war entertaining the troops. It had long been her ambition to work in Stratford-upon-Avon.

In Stratford Luce was given an extraordinary line of parts: Viola in Twelfth Night, Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. She was playing not just the leading female role in each play but in several cases the highest-profile part, male or female. Antony and Cleopatra was chosen as the Birthday Play, and her Cleopatra was the most hotly-anticipated thing in the season.

She acquitted herself well in all the roles. Her Beatrice was described as “glittering”, and she was “superb and enchanting” as Viola. She presented “A Cleopatra whose feminine coils want no subtlety, and whose swift caprices have a natural and serpentine sinuosity”. The reviews agreed she was less effective in the final, tragic scenes of the play, but no matter: the Observer noted “It has been years since Nile has come so near to Avon”.

As well as recruiting a star to play leading roles, 1945 was also the year when the Memorial Theatre began to embrace the concept of image. The official photographs were usually taken by local photographers, but it was decided that they didn’t give a good enough impression of Luce’s performance. The photographer chosen for the reshoot was Angus McBean. McBean was becoming established as not just a major portrait photographer of society ladies but the photographer of choice for major theatrical stars like Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. She was sent to him at his London studio, where he adapted the Cleopatra costume, wrapping her tightly in the glittering fabric in order to make it appear exotic and body-hugging, as well as echoing the figures in Egyptian tomb paintings.

The American journal LIFE published a feature on Claire Luce in Stratford, including a whole range of photos showing her in the olde worlde town. She is shown looking out of the window of the Shrieves’ House (claimed to be where she was staying), enjoying tea in a local teashop with one of her fellow-actors, visiting local landmarks and relaxing after her performance. Most of these photographs are new to me, and indicate just how special it was to have this star in town.

You can see from the photograph of her as Cleopatra, taken by local photographer Tom Holte, why McBean’s portrait made such a difference.

One of the photographs of Antony and Cleopatra taken by Tom Holte

Holte’s is undoubtedly truer to the performance, but McBean’s is a photograph of the  Cleopatra the audience, starved of glamour and luxury, wanted to see. This one photograph marked the beginning of both McBean’s 17-year relationship with the Memorial Theatre and the improvement in the theatre’s national and international reputation.

These photographs were drawn to my attention by The Hamlet Weblog for 11 October 2012 in which Stuart Ian Burns mentioned these and other resources now available at the Google Cultural Institute.

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Shakespeare and our restless world

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

In 2010 the British Museum collaborated with the BBC to create The History of the World in 100 Objects, radio broadcasts linked with a website and book of the same name. It focused on items from the Museum’s collection ranging from stone age tools to a solar powered lamp and its legacy lives on: visitors are still encouraged to find the items on display and read their story. It highlighted the power of objects to make connections between ourselves and people from either the far distant past or the other side of the world.

This year the Museum has had the opportunity, or perhaps the challenge, of repeating this formula. But instead of concentrating on historical events they had the difficult task of finding connections between objects and Shakespeare’s ideas, plays and poetry. The twenty objects they picked, and the stories they told, couldn’t just be about social or political history. Material objects certainly help us understand the world in which people lived, what they believed in, and what entertained them, but this isn’t the whole story when you’re looking at someone whose work has had a profound effect of our culture and thinking.

The objects they chose to include in Shakespeare’s Restless World are different: only 7 of the 20 come from the British Museum’s collections, though all feature in the current Shakespeare exhibition. The others have been sourced from a variety of museums, libraries and private collections. They certainly aren’t the “usual suspects”, many of the items being new (at least to me). Some are predictable: a rapier and dagger is linked with both contemporary fashion and gang culture and the plays  Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, and illustrations of the triumphal arches that welcomed James I to London connect him, the emperors of ancient Rome and Shakespeare’s classical plays.

The eye relic

Others are less obvious: the humble woollen cap worn by all ordinary men, referred to in Coriolanus as “stinking greasy caps”, the eye-relic of the Catholic martyr Edward Oldcorne, testament to the brutality of the times with a direct link to the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear.

The objects are carefully chosen and Neil MacGregor has built up complex and fascinating stories around them. Although they were conceived as radio broadcasts and can now be purchased on CD, it’s much easier to take in the detail of each piece by reading the book, not least because of the many colour photographs. MacGregor has the knack of effortlessly linking the item or items with the Elizabethan/Jacobean period, with Shakespeare’s plays, and with modern life.

But the final chapter is an acknowledgement that no matter how skilfully the argument is phrased, objects from his own period can’t explain why Shakespeare has remained both the soul of his own age and of every age since: why Hamlet and Macbeth still speak to anyone suffering under an oppressive political regime, Romeo and Juliet to teenagers everywhere, why people still feel compelled to stage his plays, and audiences continue to go to them.

The Robben Island Shakespeare

This chapter in the book, as in the exhibition to which it relates, is on the Robben Island Shakespeare. As an object, it’s neither beautiful nor old. But it tells a compelling story about the endurance of the human spirit. Lent by its owner, Sonny Venkatrathnam, this ordinary modern edition of the Complete Works was his only book while he and other members of the African National Congress were incarcerated in the notorious South African jail on Robben Island during the 1970s.  The book was passed between these political prisoners, providing them with both recreation and encouragement in their struggle against apartheid. Before his discharge, Sonny got his fellow-activists to sign the book next to their favourite passages. Nelson Mandela’s highlighted quote is from Julius Caesar:
Cowards die many times before their deaths
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

It reminds me of another book based on a TV series, Melvyn Bragg’s Twelve Books that Changed the World. The idea was that all the books should be factual: Darwin’s The Origin of Species, for instance. But he too couldn’t miss out Shakespeare’s collected works because Shakespeare represents all the authors whose works of fiction have changed human lives. Bragg quoted Harold Bloom’s statement that the First Folio should be called “secular scripture”.

It would be impossible for this book to explain Shakespeare’s creative achievement.  But it does remind us that even in a world superficially so different Shakespeare bridges the divide.  The final words of MacGregor’s book sum it up: “Shakespeare’s words console, inspire, illuminate and question. More simply, they capture for us the essence of what it is to be restlessly human in a constantly restless world.”

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Linking Shakespeare’s Theatre and his Church: Bensonian actor Frank Rodney

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Frank Rodney as Bolingbroke

When I wrote my piece about the Benson memorial windows in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, I received a comment about the memorial to Bensonian actor Frank Rodney that stands in Holy Trinity Church. Stratford’s Church probably contains more memorials to actors than most, but Frank Rodney is not a famous name and his memorial doesn’t even get a mention in Val Horsler’s recent book Shakespeare’s Church.

Rodney had performed in Benson’s Company from 1895, and was one of the most talented of the actors in it. His Oberon was noted for his “cold silver enunciation”. Many years later the great critic James Agate wrote “He was the best Clarence, Buckingham, Bolingbroke, Iago and Mercutio that I have ever seen”.

Ursula Bloom’s book Rosemary for Stratford-on-Avon is an affectionate look back at the town near which she lived as a child, written after she had become a popualr novelist.

Bloom writes about the night on which the great actress Ellen Terry came to the Memorial Theatre to play the Queen in Henry VIII on 23 April 1902. Although Terry’s performance was hotly anticipated, it was in some ways Frank Rodney’s night. He was one of the most popular actors in the regular Benson company, but had been ill, and he had recently been diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. He was to undergo surgery which, at best, would reduce his ability to speak. Everybody in the theatre knew that even if the operation was successful this would be the last time they would hear him, and the place was packed.

In the play Buckingham faces execution, and Ursula Bloom reports that the audience “went deadly silent when Frank Rodney came forward playing the part of a man on the road to death”.
All good people,
You that thus far have come to pity me,
Hear what I say, and then go home and lose me.

His final speech could not have been more appropriate:
You few that lov’d me,
And dare be bold to weep for Buckingham,
His noble friends and fellows, whom to leave
Is only bitter to him, only dying,
Go with me, like good angels, to my end;
And, as the long divorce of steel falls on me,
Make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice,
And lift my soul to heaven. Lead on, o’ God’s name.

The Stratford-on-Avon News, on 8 May, reported “The painful circumstances give a particular pathos to the Duke of Buckingham’s fine speech. Mr Rodney delivered it with much feeling and with more than the usual  emphasis… At the close of the scene he was called before the curtain and met with such a reception as he will probably never forget. The audience loudly cheered him and called him back three or four times.” He was called for again at the end of the play, but the actor was so overcome that he had already left the theatre.

Very sadly the operation did not cure Rodney and he died in Southampton on August 14 1902. He was mourned not only by the Benson Company, but also by Stratfordians. A memorial within Shakespeare’s church was welcomed for this much-loved man.

Paid for by ex-colleagues and family, the beautiful silver processional cross was the result. This is still to be seen in its case near the choir stalls, sometimes in use during services. It is decorated with words from the speech quoted above.

For my connection with the cross let’s go back to Ursula Bloom.

William Tompkins holding the memorial cross

She describes the cross: “it is beautiful but heavy, and most difficult to carry, Tompkins – one of the vergers – being the only man who could really “make a go” of it. The choristers always said that nobody ever carried the cross as Tompkins did.”

William Tompkins was my grandfather, and this photograph shows him holding the cross outside the church. Years later my father showed me the cross and told me the story of Frank Rodney, one of the most notable of the Bensonians, who, had he lived, would have been a famous interpreter of Shakespeare’s characters.

 

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Macbeth from stage to film

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Kate Fleetwood and Patrick Stewart as the Macbeths

Macbeth is one of the most-filmed of Shakespeare’s plays, and no wonder. According to  Daniel Rosenthal in his book Shakespeare on Screen, “From its supernatural opening to its gruesome climax, Macbeth is the Shakespeare play that reads most like a film script”.

So it seems a contradiction that some of the most successful films of Macbeth are actually based on stage productions. I’ve only just caught up with Patrick Stewart’s film, shot in 2010 by the company Illuminations which had already produced the film of Hamlet starring David Tennant. Rupert Goold’s production began life at the Chichester Festival Theatre before a sell-out run in the West End and on Broadway. Goold won Best Director and Patrick Stewart won Best Actor in the Evening Standard Theatre Awards, and both Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood were nominated for Tony Awards for their roles as the Macbeths. The actual filming, following months during which the cast had developed their performances to perfection, took a mere three weeks.

After a couple of TV showings the film has just received what’s thought to be its first cinema screening as part of the first Shakespeare Film Festival co-produced by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Stratford Picturehouse. I took part in a pre-screening discussion with Elizabeth Dollimore, Outreach and Informal Learning Development Manager for the SBT.

One of the subjects we talked about was the setting of the film, Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, a stately home built by a nineteenth-century recluse. The underground network of tunnels, corridors, kitchens and even a ballroom with no windows are perfect for building up the sense of claustrophobia which they had created in the theatre.  This unsettling atmosphere also helped when it came to illustrating the changes in the world of the Macbeths.

Lady Macbeth and the witches turn the idea of the woman as nurturer upside down. As Lady Macbeth Kate Fleetwood chillingly scorns her husband’s reservations:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.

The weird sisters

And the weird sisters extend the idea of women behaving unnaturally. First as nurses, then preparing food in the kitchen, then serving it at the ill-fated banquet, all these normally caring activities become threatening, even deadly. Bringing the witches into the castle, they invade what should be a safe and secure space, and their evil presence makes the film continually unsettling.

Other stage versions that have been made into films include that directed by Trevor Nunn in the 1970s starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench and Greg Doran’s version starring Antony Sher and Harriet Walter,  in which the witches also appeared in the castle, erupting from beneath the table on which the banquet had been set. There, though, they were invaders: in the Goold film they are part of the household: the evil they represent is always there if we decide to invite it in.

The Macbeths are Shakespeare’s closest couple, sharing their thoughts and ambitions. But the evil they invite in drives them apart and sets them on the road to madness and disaster.

Jon Finch and Francesca Annis in Polanski's film

Daniel Rosenthal statement confirms that the play offers a film director many opportunities for action sequences and special effects, whether it’s the appearance and disappearance of the witches, apparitions, battles or murders. The 1971 Roman Polanski film starred Jon Finch and Francesca Annis as a young, beautiful and successful couple. Polanski took advantage of the cinematic possibilities of the play, revelling in location shots of moors, mountains and the castles of Lindisfarne and Bamburgh. Every murder was graphically filmed, including those only described in the text, and the apparition scene turned into a drug-induced orgy. With the emphasis on the visual, inevitably the text was heavily cut.

Goold’s film focuses on the psychological side of the play. The fear of violence is more unsettling than graphic bloodshed: one courtier’s hand trembles, another discovers that a room is bugged, and another character watches a newsreel of a huge, unstoppable military parade. One of the most impressive filmed versions, it’s definitely worth chasing up on DVD.

According to organiser Marion Morgan next year’s Festival is already being finalised, so keep a look out for this next fortnight of Shakespeare on film.

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“Trivial fond records” of wartime performance

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Lionel Bradley

Regular readers will know of my interest in the history of Shakespeare on stage, in particular the ways in which productions have been recorded. Many members of the audience choose to keep autographed programmes, posters or even their tickets, but  the more disciplined among us write down our impressions and keep them. A recent radio programme highlighted how important these personal notes can be.

The programme, One Man’s War, focused on one man who lived through the second world war in London. His name was Lionel Bradley, a Librarian who worked at the London Library in the centre of the capital. Bradley was a passionate concert and ballet-goer who even before the war was sending reports about the performances he attended to friends and family in the north of England. He, or someone close to him, must have been aware they had value as the notebooks found homes at the Royal College of Music and at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Performance Collections, but he might be surprised to find them being quoted as an important record of London’s cultural history.

One of the National Gallery concertsAfter the declaration of war in 1939 concerts were suspended, and valuable artefacts like the paintings in the National Gallery removed to safety, but it was soon realised that culture, and in particular entertainment, helped raise the morale of the nation. Concerts not only survived but flourished due to the large number of foreign musicians taking refuge in England, and audiences were not satisfied with merely patriotic music but flocked to demanding programmes of classical music and dance. The best-known were the lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery where its Director Kenneth Clark,  no doubt thinking of some of the paintings in the collection, commented that the audiences’ rapt expressions were reminiscent of those having a religious experience.

Bradley was almost obsessive. He wrote over half a million words detailing his impressions. He was “better than a critic” because, as Curator of Dance at the V&A, Jane Pritchard explained, he saw ballet productions repeatedly, comparing them over a period and described the colour of costumes when all photographs were in black and white. He went to everything, observed it closely, and as Katie Derham, the presenter of the programme noted, “lovingly wrote it all down”. “If Lionel Bradley were alive today he would have been the most exceptional blogger”.

My interest, of course, is in Shakespeare and Lionel Bradley doesn’t seem to have been keen on drama. But during the war The Shakespeare Festivals continued to be performed in Stratford-upon-Avon in spite of hardships causing cuts in production values and the difficulties of maintaining an acting company as young men were called up. But, again, morale was maintained, Shakespeare representing the sort of Englishness that the war was being fought for.  Just as in London, the repertoire was more challenging than might be expected. As well as comedies like The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing and patriotic histories like Henry V and King John, the tragedies Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth were all performed, as was the troubled comedy Measure for Measure. The one popular play that wasn’t performed was Richard III with its portrait of a psychopathic villain.

At one point it looked as if Stratfordcould have played a major part in the war. As paintings were being removed from London galleries, plans were being laid to relocate the government from the capital in case of severe bombing. Documents now reveal that the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and adjoining Conference Room (now the Swan Theatre) would have been used by Parliament, and it had even been decided which hotels would be requisitioned for use by different grades of staff, MPs and Members of the Lords. In the end, they stayed put, of course: how different would Stratford’s history have been if they had put the plan into action.

The programme confirmed that records and memories of performance are worth keeping. Nowadays you can write your own blog, like Pete Kirwan’s Bardathon, add a post to Facebook, or write a comment to be added to  Year of Shakespeare, but it hasn’t always been so easy. Before you assume nobody would be interested in your “trivial fond records” of Shakespeare productions, remember that they may contain details, and views, that are not recorded elsewhere. The only opinions that exist of some Stratford wartime productions are a couple of brief accounts in local newspapers. If you want to be involved in my Listening to the Audience project, which I’m hoping to begin in the next few weeks, go to the page and send me a comment.

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Shakespeare’s rhyming couplets

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Patrick Spottiswoode

We all know that in order to get to grips with Shakespeare’s writing, you have to understand blank verse, most crucially the unrhymed iambic pentameter. Students often struggle with the theory, though in practice it’s not so tough: one of the reasons why blank verse is so easy to listen to is that it its heartbeat rhythm is also used in everyday speech.

The same can’t be said of the rhyming couplet. Recently Patrick Spottiswoode, Director of Education at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, came to speak to Stratford-upon-Avon’s Shakespeare Club on the subject of rhyme. I have to confess I’ve always thought of rhymed lines as rather inferior, not least because, being used to close scenes, they always seem artificial.

How wrong I was! In order to write this lecture Patrick Spottiswoode has totted up how many rhyming couplets there are in Shakespeare, and while I’m not going to give the number away, suffice it to say there are far more than I had realised, and in his lecture he explained how subtly Shakespeare uses them.

To begin with, he looked at the history of plays before Shakespeare, when at one time all plays were written in rhyme. Reading the plays in chronological order the jangling couplets made difficult reading, and Patrick explained his relief when he got to plays that moved away from them. The first blank verse play was Gorboduc, a tragic drama dating from 1561, and Supposes, a comedy, was written in prose.  By the time Shakespeare came along, writers like Marlowe had made blank verse plays the norm, though rhyme was certainly not dead. Poet Samuel Daniel said rhyme “gives the poet wings”.

Throughout his career Shakespeare experimented with poetic forms, and he does this with rhyme as much as he does with blank verse.

I’d never noticed, for instance, how much the use of rhyme varies according to character. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona the womanising Proteus speaks in rhyme, the virtuous (and rather dull) Valentine in blank verse. In Richard II, Bolingbroke only begins to use rhyme after he’s become king, using it most consistently in his final conciliatory speech. And in Twelfth Night, Olivia speaks in prose until Viola appears on the scene: the rhymes increase as she falls more desperately in love.

Patrick identified leaving and loving as the main situations where Shakespeare uses rhyme.  Leaving rhymes don’t just give an exit to the end of a scene, as in Hamlet’s
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right!

but are used for the death of characters like Brutus in Julius Caesar.

In Othello, Iago’s attempts to influence Othello against Desdemona are in poetry, and rhymed couplets punctuate the progress of the argument. He pretends to be hurt that Othello challenges his motives:
I thank you for this profit, and from hence
I’ll love no friend, since love breeds such offence. 

And as the plot comes to fruition he uses a rhymed aside to the audience to make them complicit.
Will you go on, I pray? This is the night
That either makes me, or fordoes me quite.

Romeo and Juliet

But rhyme is most associated with love. Rhymes, “verses of feigning love” are just one of the “cunning” means which A Midsummer Night’s Dream‘s Lysander has used to “filch” Hermia’s heart from her father. And Shakespeare revels in playing with poetry, Romeo and Juliet probably containing the best examples of using the rhymed couplet differently according to character and situation. Patrick described Lady Capulet’s couplets as “starchy”, and when speaking to Juliet about acceptingParis as a suitor her speech is certainly formal for a mother talking to her daughter:
This precious book of love, this unbound lover,
To beautify him only lacks a cover.

On first seeing Juliet, Romeo starts speaking in much more compelling rhyming couplets:
Did my heart love till now? Foreswear it, sight.
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night. 

When they meet, their first speeches together create a sonnet in which they share the final rhymed couplet before they kiss.
Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayer’s sake.
Romeo: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take. 

The balcony scene, which Patrick  called “a perfect marriage of form and feeling”, is almost 200 lines of mostly blank verse that includes some of Shakespeare’s most memorable rhyming couplets.
Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.

If you get the opportunity to hear Patrick Spottiswoode speaking on this (or any other subject), take it. He’s a hugely entertaining speaker with a wealth of knowledge about Shakespeare and his plays. The Shakespeare Club’s next lecture will be on 13 November when Professor Stuart Hampton-Reeves will be assessing the rebel Jack Cade, alternately viewed as political hero or sadistic monster.

 

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Black History Month: telling the story of Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Adrian Lester as Ira Aldridge

Until only a few years ago the nineteenth-century actor Ira Aldridge was a little-known curiosity in the long history of the theatre. He was the first (probably the only) “gentleman of colour” of any note to appear on the English or European stage until the early twentieth century.

His extraordinary life story has been told in several biographies published in the last 20 years or so, culminating in a two-volume study by Bernth Lindfors.  Now a new play, called Red Velvet, has been written and starring Adrian Lester is currently in preview at the Tricycle Theatre, London.  There’s an interview with Lester here.

During his lifetime Aldridge was a controversial figure. Battling against prejudice, he concealed his real origins from a poor family in the USA, spreading the story that he was originally from an African royal family. His reputation stands on his work with Shakespeare, one of the few playwrights whose roles gave black actors the opportunity to prove themselves. As Othello some praised him for his dignity, acting skill and the quality of his voice. Pictures certainly emphasised his nobility in the role.

Aldridge as Othello

Images of him were popular: I’m indebted to Amelia Mariette, Collections and Exhibitions Curator,  for sending me a photograph of a bust of Aldridge as Othello by Italian sculptor Pietro Calvi which is part of the Torre Abbey collection in Torquay.

But others criticised him for being uncivilised, and he didn’t help his case by failing to deny rumours that he had murdered one of his Desdemonas during a performance of Othello. Although this was a tactic to increase ticket sales there is a report from one Desdemona confirming that he was violent on stage. The contrast of his full-on acting with the formality of W C Macready and Charles Kean must have been significant.

Aldridge couldn’t make his living in Shakespearian roles, and he succumbed to the contemporary typecasting of black characters as low comedians, villains and minstrels.  These roles sustained him in many of his provincial tours.

The mystery painting

A fascinating oil painting has recently come to light, found in a garage in Birmingham, thought to show Aldridge. The focus is on the powerful and confident figure of Aldridge, dressed as a brigand. One man keeps a look out at the door, others hurriedly lower a crate of contraband through a hatch, and the two women in the centre look panic-stricken while a dog cowers under the table. Aldridge, bearing a gun, advances on the door.

Nobody has yet been able to identify the play in which he’s performing: it’s one of the difficulties of tracing nineteenth-century entertainments, especially in the provinces, that many texts have not survived. Some have: his most famous black role was the West Indian slave, Mungo, in The Padlock. This was already a well-known pantomime in which a white actor had played the lazy, drunken and greedy Mungo, beaten by his master and made to sing and dance on command. Aldridge made it a more serious role, showing his versatility by performing Othello and Mungo on the same evening.

Another of his roles was Zanga in The Revenge.  With a Spanish setting it’s a bloodthirsty play in which the wronged Zanga eventually gets his revenge on the man who has turned him into a slave:

Aldridge as Zanga

Look on me. Who am I? I know, thou sayst,
The moor, a slave, an abject, beaten slave:
(Eternal woes to him that made me so!)
But look again. Has six years cruel bondage
Extinguish’d majesty so far, that nought
Shines here to give an awe of one above thee?

Three Fingered Jack was originally a pantomime, rewritten as a melodrama in which Aldridge starred. It was based on the real story of an escaped Jamaican slave who becomes the leader of a rebel group before being captured and killed.

None of these sound quite like the play that’s portrayed in the picture. I’ve found a reference to The Black Brigand of Jamaica  and another play called The Robbers, but haven’t found a text or description of either that might confirm it.

In the mean time, Adrian Lester will portray this complex man on stage. Press night at the Tricycle is on the 16th October: look out for the reviews.

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Fairs, pedlars, and Shakespeare’s Stratford

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

October is fair-time in Stratford-upon-Avon and the surrounding towns as the travelling rides, the prize stalls and the hot dog stands fill the town’s streets. The traditional pig roast is still part of the Mop fair as is the fortune-teller’s tent which stands near the old market cross site.

The itinerant fair with its fortune-telling was a reminder that in Shakespeare’s time people who travelled for a living were suspicious. A surprising number of people in the plays move, from necessity like As You Like It‘s Rosalind and Celia disguising themselves to find a new home after banishment to Edgar’s disguise as a beggar after being accused of plotting to murder his father in King Lear. These people leave their homes because they must, but it’s the pedlar Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale that is Shakespeare’s best example of a person for whom travelling is a job. As a pedlar, a kind of travelling salesman, Autolycus is welcomed because he brings luxury goods and entertainment to a rural community, though the audience knows him to be a thief and a cheat.

Charles Robert Leslie's painting of Autolycus

This is his little jingle that he uses to encourage purchasers:
Will you buy any tape,
Or lace for your cape,
My dainty duck, my dear-a?
Any silk, any thread,
Any toys for your head,
Of the new’st and fin’st , fin’st wear-a?

On stage, Autolycus always arrives with a trunk full of his wares, and much is often made of the examination of the different items. Here’s part of another of his songs which list more up-market wares:
Gloves as sweet as damask roses,
Maskes for faces and for noses:
Bugle-bracelet, necklace amber,
Perfume for a lady’s chamber:
Golden quoifs and stomachers
For my lads to give their dears.

He also carries the latest ballads, and another valuable commodity, news:  “I love a ballad in print… for then we are sure they are true”.

Itinerant people, among them acting companies, were still treated with suspicion. During the 1590s legislation was brought in to control these rogues and vagabonds. Itinerants were not only possibly thieves, or people who might be a drain on the resources of the places to which they travelled, they could be political or religious activists. The British Museum’s current exhibition Shakespeare: staging the world, contains a fascinating and extremely rare object. It’s a trunk which on the outside looks just the sort of thing Autolycus, the pedlar, would have carried, but in this case it contains not ribbons and songs, but Catholic vestments, rosary beads, a chalice, and even an altar stone. A Catholic priest, carrying this trunk, had everything he needed to carry out religious services.

The pedlar's trunk

The trunk had been walled up in a country house in Lancashire, where it was discovered in the mid-nineteenth century after at least two hundred years. Lancashirewas a hotbed for recusancy, and following the banning of Catholic priests in the late 1500s they had to disguise themselves in order to carry on. A travelling pedlar would have been a good disguise, as many of the objects he was carrying could be easily taken for legitimate goods for sale.

Itinerant fairs like Stratford’s Mop can seem an anachronism, taking over town centres and disrupting normal life. But a couple of days when the streets fill with noise, lights and music always seem to me a small price to pay to be reminded that our normal orderly world may be turned upside down. Fairs, and the outdoor streets where they take place, can still be places where the normal rules don’t always apply.

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New online resources for Shakespeare

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The Tempest in Bangla, performed at the Globe

I’ve written before about the many great online resources that exist for those interested in Shakespeare in performance on stage and screen, but just recently several new ones have been launched specially for teachers. One of the best of the existing sites is The Space, launched in May, which provides free access to many staged productions. It’s just been announced that it’s life is being extended for at least six months, but the Globe to Globe films of the 37 plays performed at the Globe theatre, each in a different language, will only be available until the end of October. So if you want to catch these exciting productions you need to devote a few evenings to them soon. They’re not completely lost after that date but you’ll need to visit to the Globe’s archive to see them.

Another reason for visiting The Space is to increase the viewing figures in the hope of persuading those who hold the purse-strings that this site should be encouraged. An article just published points out that The Space hasn’t been well-publicised because is has little money for marketing although the Guardian and the Globe itself have both been promoting it. So do take a look: even without the Globe to Globe videos it’s very much worth keeping. One of the treasures now available is the collection which was issued under the title Silent Shakespeare, including some of the earliest films made of some of the plays.

Meanwhile there are other possible platforms: the British Film Institute has recently set up a YouTube channel which has gained 30 million hits in its first months, way in excess of what The Space has achieved. It covers a much broader range of subject matter: there are no hits for Shakespeare as yet. But the BFI has ambitions for its online presence: it’s going to be launching its own version of IPlayer by the end of 2013 and over the next five years will be making available 10,000 films from its archives.

The British Universities Film and Video Council is also moving forward on several fronts. As well as its outstanding Shakespeare on Film, TV and radio catalogue it’s recently launched The Shakespearience for IPad. This can be seen as an enhanced e-book that uses the IPad’s touchscreen to bring Shakespeare’s plays to life in different ways. Based around text, the program includes some scenes from filmed Shakespeare and commentaries by well-known people including actors and  professional voice coaches. Also included are interviews with directors as well as images of set and costume designs.

The same organisation has launched a database called TRILT, the Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching. Access to the full database, including information about broadcast material from 1995 on 475 channels is only available to the paid-up members of BUFVC (many of which are educational organisations), but some information is available to all users. The database expects to grow by a million records a year.

While we’re on the subject of paid educational resources, take a look at the RSC’s Teaching Shakespeare resource  which offers online professional development for teachers. There’s a video online to view and you can also take a look at some free sample content.

Issue two of the British Shakespeare Association’s education magazine Teaching Shakespeare is also now available.

It’s free to BSA members or can be purchased separately (find out how on the Education Blog front page). It contains lots of information and discussions on the subject of teaching Shakespeare to schools.  Issue 1 is available as a free sample at the BSA’s education blog

And another new digital educational resource is the Routledge Performance Archive, developed in conjunction with Digital Theatre. This includes 40 hours of audiovisual content, as well as critical material from Routledge’s own publications. Organised by subject and practitioner the content can also be uncovered by using the keyword list. It’s for use in libraries and classrooms and available by subscription, though they offer a free trial. New content, covering the entire spectrum of theatre topics, will be added every three months.

I hope you’ll find some of these will feed your enthusiasm for Shakespeare in the coming months.

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Putting a girdle round about the globe: Shakespeare clubs and societies

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The Sevenoaks Shakespeare Society in A Midsummer Night's Dream

What makes a group of like-minded Shakespeare-lovers turn themselves into a formal club or society? According to Nick Walton, it’s when the provision of refreshments, particularly biscuits, becomes an issue. Is the occupation of discussing or reading Shakespeare so exhausting that a guaranteed supply of digestives, custard creams or chocolate hobnobs is essential, or is it pure coincidence?

This discussion of the need for high-calorie snacks was brought up by Nick Walton in his lecture last month to the Shakespeare Club of Stratford-upon-Avon in which he talked about the birth and continued health of Shakespeare clubs and societies worldwide.

Dr Walton knows about Shakespeare societies. He’s the Secretary of the International Shakespeare Association and has helped to organise its last two conferences in Brisbane and Prague.

Shakespeare clubs go back a long way: in the 1730s a group of intellectual women formed the Shakespeare Ladies Club, who influenced Shakespeare performances and contributed towards the Westminster Abbey monument to Shakespeare. The oldest club still in existence is, perhaps not surprisingly, the Stratford Shakespeare Club which meets monthly apart from a summer break.

Santa Fe Shakespeare Society

What was apparent from Dr Walton’s talk, apart from the longevity of Shakespeare societies and clubs, was the variety of reasons why they have been formed. Many began as reading groups, especially in the nineteenth century when cheap copies of the plays became available and more people learned to read. Reading Shakespeare was thought to be both respectable and improving and groups like the Shakespeare Reading Club, which Karl Marx attended, were formed with these idealistic aims. In more recent years many Shakespeare societies have taken this idea further, putting on full productions of the plays. Others like James Frederick Furnivall with his 1874 New Shakespeare Society aimed to professionalise the study of Shakespeare by publishing texts and research. Many groups had a primarily social function, holding luncheons, organising outings, and screening films. The academic Maynard Mack claimed in 1976 that one of the pleasures of coming together was to watch the behaviour of other Shakespeareans.

National Societies often had a political purpose. The British Empire Shakespeare Society aimed to promote familiarity with Shakespeare as a symbol of the Empire. The first national society was the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft, founded in 1864, which stated “we want to Germanize him”. And the Shakespeare Association of Japan also wanted to claim him: “England must share him with the rest of the world”.

Nationalism aside, clubs and societies have been established in order to satisfy members’ personal desire to engage with Shakespeare. If you’re looking for a local group, there doesn’t seem to be a complete list of Shakespeare Clubs, Associations and Societies, but given their number and the frequency with which they are founded, merge, change their names and dissolve this is no surprise. You might try this very selective list of societies, or a web search might lead you to an active website or facebook page. Groups often welcome people who aren’t able to take part in the activities of reading or acting. The Shakespeare Readers Society Facebook group for instance is based around the reading group that meets in a London bookshop, but is allied with other similar groups in the USA. Other groups are based as far apart as Seattle, Dublin and Delhi.

Rehearsing Pericles

The scale of this activity demonstrates that there are hundreds of thousands of people around the world who, independently of school lessons, college courses and professional theatre, choose to spend their leisure time with Shakespeare. This enthusiasm has just been celebrated in Stratford-upon-Avon with four performances of Pericles, in which thirty hand-picked performers have been rehearsed by the RSC and performed on the Courtyard Stage. There’s a long tradition of amateurs sharing the Stratford stages: back in the nineteenth century “supers” or local extras became the crowd in Julius Caesar or the soldiers in Henry V. In 1983 and 1985 a community chorus of 200 locals was used in The Dillen and earlier this year a well-rehearsed crowd played the citizens of Rome in Julius Caesar.  Pericles has been billed as the RSC’s first Amateur Ensemble production. Simply staged, the story of loss, personal tragedy and reconciliation worked its usual magic. Several of the cast were outstanding and using the ensemble to voice Gower’s words was an idea completely in keeping with the aims of the production.

With cast members normally carrying out dayjobs as varied as IT consultant, waitress, binman and solicitor the production was a joy to watch, not least for the exuberance of the audience who celebrated the success of their friends, relatives or colleagues in performing in such a high-profile event.  And a programme note reads: “the RSC have learnt much from the commitment, passion and talent of amateur theatre makers by working with just a handful of the million people in the UK who create theatre purely for the love of it”.

The Shakespeare Club’s website has now been updated to include notes of not just Dr Walton’s lecture but all the talks from the last two years. And on Tuesday 9 October the club will be welcoming Patrick Spottiswoode from Shakespeare’s Globe to give the next lecture to this group of enthusiastic Shakespeare-lovers.

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