Simon Schama and The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare and history

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Simon Schama

Among the must-see television shows for Shakespeare fans this summer has been Simon Schama’s Shakespeare. Love him or hate him, he’s the UK’s highest-profile historian. His style is individual, even eccentric, one minute generalising about the broad sweep of history, the next focusing in on some carefully-chosen detail. His two part series on Shakespeare has inevitably concentrated on Shakespeare’s view of history, and on how important it is to understand Shakespeare’s place in it for an understanding of his plays. The first one concentrated on the history plays themselves, the second, which I thought the better of the two, looked at the great tragedies, especially King Lear where the role of the monarch is most shatteringly explored.

The second documentary is on IPlayer only until early evening on 6 July, but with any luck they will be repeated.

Schama hasn’t tangled much with Shakespeare’s comedy, confining himself to profiling that great character, Falstaff. On Saturday the BBC also began The Hollow Crown cycle of Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V, so we’re about to meet Simon Russell Beale’s Falstaff this weekend. Later this summer Beale is performing that rarity, Timon of Athens, at the National Theatre.  In the first of Schama’s programmes we saw and heard Roger Allam, a great Falstaff at the Globe a couple of years ago, memorably delivering Falstaff’s debate with himself about Honour while walking around a graveyard. “What is Honour? A word…What is that honour? Air…Who hath it? He that died a’ Wednesday”. For anyone who finds Shakespeare’s verbal flourishes a bit much, this spare speech shows that Shakespeare can say it all in just a few syllables when he wants to.

I was less sure about Schama sitting at a table with Harriet Walter reading a scene including Doll Tearsheet, but I can’t blame him for wanting to have a go. He used some of the greatest interpreters of Shakespeare on stage, and The Hollow Crown  brings together more of them. In Richard II we had Patrick Stewart as John of Gaunt, and David Suchet as the Duke of York, two distinguished Shakespeare veterans. If you’ve only ever seen David Suchet as Poirot, you don’t know what you’ve missed. I still remember him in the RSC’s 1980 Richard II, playing Bolingbroke. I’ve never heard anyone deliver his lines about absence and loss better:
O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?

The kings in The Hollow Crown

In Richard II you could almost have missed another accomplished performer of Shakespeare in the tiny role of the Gardener. David Bradley’s better known these days as the caretaker, Filch, in the Harry Potter films, but he too has great Shakespeare credentials, mostly playing character roles. He was the funniest Andrew Aguecheek I’ve ever seen in the RSC’s 1987 production of Twelfth Night in which, as it happens, Roger Allam played  that great warm-up for Falstaff, Sir Toby Belch and Harriet Walter played Viola. The comic partnership of Allam and Bradley almost overshadowed the real comic heart of the play, Malvolio, played by Tony Sher. Quite a cast.

David Bradley as the Fool, Brian Cox as King Lear

But the most extraordinary role I’ve seen him play was in 1990 when he was the Fool in the National Theatre’s touring production of King Lear with Brian Cox as the king (the picture does not do these performances justice). As Schama pointed out, James I had a fool at court allowed to say what others were not, but the Fool in King Lear criticises the King very sharply. In inexperienced hands Shakespeare’s fool can seem incomprehensible, but Bradley knew exactly what he was saying. We first see the Fool when Lear’s already suffering the consequences of his actions, and calls for his “pretty knave”, hoping for some comfort. Instead, Bradley’s Fool reminded him, over and over again, of his stupidity.

“Dost thou call me fool, boy?”, Lear asks. The fool replies “All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with”.  A few lines later “Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gav’st thy golden one away” and later again “I had rather be any kind o’ thing but a fool, and yet I would not be thee, nuncle”. It’s a bitter and devastating exchange from someone who has no power except the power to entertain with words.

Schama drew the parallel between the role of the licensed fool and the role of the King’s Men and its resident playwright. With no power, but relative freedom to speak, they were given the chance to indirectly point out the folly of the king’s actions. In King Lear the fool is threatened with the whip, and certainly playing companies could go too far. But Shakespeare seems to have managed to stay on the right side, perhaps because Lear is redeemed by the end of the play.

The current BBC season stresses Shakespeare’s ability to comment on current events  and shows that he wasn’t then, and isn’t now, just an entertainer.

If you want to catch it again, Richard II is available until 28 July here on IPlayer.

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Writing Britain at the British Library

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

When visiting other people’s houses, I always enjoy looking at their bookshelves to see what they like to read, and to keep. All my Shakespeare books are in the room where I work, while books on other favourite subjects are elsewhere in the house. Here are shelves of novels, mostly Victorian, books on gardening, art, walking guides, photography, history and the natural world. And there are two shelves of maps, mostly covering scenic areas of the UK. So it’s not surprising that I loved the British Library’s current exhibition Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands.

The exhibition’s divided into six sections: Rural Dreams, Dark Satanic Mills, Wild Places, Beyond the City, Cockney Visions and Waterlands. Within each section is a fantastic range of items from author’s first drafts, fair copies, printed books, dustjackets, and illustrated editions. Apart from giving a sense of the importance of Britainas a concept, it showcases the sheer range of the Library’s holdings combined with glorious items loaned from other collections and from living authors. It’s a tribute to the work of those organisations that collect and preserve these items. For a full review of the exhibition click here, and for a podcast, click here.

Books and manuscripts may not appear to be exciting exhibition objects, but here we have a celebration of the power of the imagination and of words, that conjure up a time, a place, or an emotion, or sometimes as with Matthew Arnold’s poem On Dover Beach, all three. Here, in pencil, biro, or the felt-tipped pen that John Lennon used for the draft of In My Life, are magical words written in notebooks or on sheets of bog-standard A4 notepaper. If only someone had collected up the contents of Shakespeare’s litter bin.

William Blake's notebook

The ancient illuminated manuscripts would always have been of value. The glorious version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has been treasured since the day it was created.  But what about one of my favourite objects in the exhibition, the little notebook that originally belonged to William Blake’s brother? After his brother’s death, Blake kept the book and wrote in it for two decades, including the text of his poem The Tyger.

Lewis Carroll's manuscript of Alice's Adventures Underground

I was excited to see pages of manuscripts from some of my favourite novelists: Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, and of children’s books like The Wind in the Willows and Alice’s Adventures Underground. The most extraordinary ones are the first drafts of poems and novels where you see the author’s mind in action, like Stella Gibbons’ book Cold Comfort Farm, written in an unsophisticated hand, and the manuscript of Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop, voted the nation’s favourite poem. But there are surprises too: who has ever heard of Mary Collier, the eighteenth-century “washerwoman poetess”, and who would have guessed that Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, himself lived in the suburbs?

Shakespeare takes a bit of a back seat in the exhibition, though several contemporaries (Michael Drayton, Edmund Spenser, John Taylor) are represented. Although some of Shakespeare’s most memorable lines conjure up feelings of nostalgia for the loss of a rural past he rarely describes actual places. The film of Richard II screened only on Sunday treated us to sumptuous locations including St David’s Cathedral, a beach in Pembrokeshire, the garden of Packwood House in Warwickshire and several castles. Standing in for Coventry (which has changed rather a lot) was a lush green field backed by a richly wooded hillside.

The Rural Dreams section covers the rustic vision of England, already mythologised by the legends of King Arthur and represented by a manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, right up to a twentieth-century recruitment poster reminding men what they were fighting for: a landscape of green valleys and thatched cottages.  Shakespeare’s Arden is represented by a single volume of the 1709 edition of his plays showing the illustration for As You Like It.

He’s there too in the Wild Places section along with those depicters of wild scenes, Thomas Hardy and the Brontes, a modern edition of King Lear illustrating the storm-beaten heath, where the savagery of the landscape mirrors the King’s mental torment.

More surprising are early reminders that industrialisation was not always seen as an evil. The mock-heroic poem The Fleece was published in 1757 by John Dyer. It celebrates the early mechanisation of rural industry, tracking the progress of wool from the farming of sheep to exporting of the cloth. Within a few decades industry had turned Britain’s landscapes into the nightmare world made notorious by writers like Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, though George Eliot in Middlemarch optimistically welcomed the coming of the railways to rural areas.

I was fortunate to be part of a curator’s tour led by Jamie Andrews. A podcast is available from his appearance on Radio 4’s Open Book on 24 June, just follow this link.

As well as pointing out some of the gems of the exhibition he mentioned that changes in working methods means that materials like those on display are now rarely created. Instead of scratching with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper, or correct typescripts by hand, most do all the work on computers. So the exhibition also commemorates a way of working that is in decline.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the wonderful exhibits, but I should mention the exhibition is a multi-media display containing film clips and sound recordings of readings of some items.

Entry to the exhibition  is normally £9, and runs to 25 September. The British Library have offered a reader of this blog the chance to win a pair of free tickets. All you have to do is write a comment at the end of this post (subscribers should follow the link at the end of the email to The Shakespeare blog itself), about a place which you associate with a scene from one of Shakespeare’s plays. It could be a place Shakespeare mentions, or somewhere that makes you think of one of his speeches. You’ve got until Sunday 15 July, and I’m really looking forward to hearing from you!

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The first English Olympic games

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The Olympic flame being carried past the Gower Memorial in Stratford-upon-Avon

On 1 July the Olympic flame came through Stratford, passing over the ancient Clopton Bridge and past Shakespeare’s Birthplace on Henley Street before heading north. Earlier in the day it had passed though the beautiful Cotswold town of Chipping Campden. It was here that the first English Olympic games were held, and during Shakespeare’s lifetime.

A couple of months ago the four hundredth anniversary of the English Olimpick Games was celebrated. In 1612 Robert Dover, a lawyer, founded these games which took place on the hill which now bears his name.  Dover had the approval of King James 1. Sports that prepared and trained young men for battle were always encouraged, but the Chipping Campden games were always also about enjoyment and social cohesion.

Title page for Annalia Dubrensia

One poem about the games suggested that:
Thy sports are merely harmless, such they be,
Augment the bond of love and unity.

The association with the ancient Greek Olympics may have been an attempt to gentrify what could otherwise have been seen as just another English country festival. Dover patrolled the games himself on horseback, as you can see in the illustration.

Shakespeare portrayed the kind of festival which Dover was trying to rise above in the sheep-shearing festival in The Winter’s Tale. Even here there are classical references: Perdita has been decorated with flowers, “most goddess-like prank’d up” and she compares humble country flowers with the most important of goddesses:
violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath.

There is dancing, singing, eating and drinking, but the rascal Autolycus is bent on picking pockets under the cover of selling trinkets and ballads. Although Shakespeare doesn’t mention the Chipping Campden games himself, they created quite a stir, and it would be surprising if he hadn’t heard of them from just a few miles away in Stratford.

Greek Olympic athletes

In the Ancient Greek Olympics poets, musicians and artists competed as well as athletes. Poems called Epinicians were written in honour of the victorious athletes by the most famous poets, and it may have been this link that sparked the idea for the book Annalia Dubrensia, published in 1636. This was a collection of poems praising Dover and his games written by some of the leading poets of the day, including Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. A Stratford tradition held that it was a “merry meeting” with these two men that caused Shakespeare’s final illness.

Here is Michael Drayton’s poem, “To my noble friend Mr Robert Dover, on his brave annual assemblies upon Cotswold”:
As those brave Grecians in their happy days,
On Mount Olympus to their Hercules
Ordained their games Olympic, and so named
Of that great mountain; for those pastimes famed;
When then their able youth leapt, wrestled, ran,
Threw the armed dart; and honoured was the man
That was the victor; in the circuit there
The nimble rider, and skilled charioteer
Strove for the garland; in those noble times
There to their harps the poets sang their rhymes;…
So Dover, from these games, by thee begun,
We’ll reckon ours, as time away doth run.
We’ll have thy statue in some rock cut out,
With brave inscriptions garnished about,
And under written: Lo, this was the man,
Dover, that first these noble sports began.

Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, insisted on the link between sport, culture and education. From the first games in 1896 until 1948 medals were awarded for painting, sculpture and music as well as sport, and it’s only in the last 60 years that the Games have been completely taken over by the sporting competition. In 2012 the Cultural Olympics have been given considerable prominence as befits their location in one of the cultural capitals of the world.

The Olimpick Games today

The Cotswold games then and now take place each year over the Whitsun holidays, in a natural amphitheatre on Dover’s Hill. Sports originally included wrestling, swordfighting, throwing the sledge-hammer, running, jumping and horse-racing. Echoes of many of these can be seen in today’s international Olympics.

The Dover’s Hill games stopped for a few years during the English Civil War and Commonwealth, and by the time they could be restarted Robert Dover was dead. They continued, degenerating into a standard country festival, until they were abandoned in the 1850s. In 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain, the games started again, but it wasn’t until 1964 that they became a regular, organised event and it’s now well-established. It remains a blend of cultural and sporting events, with a folk concert and this year, in honour of the London Olympics, some newly-composed Welcome songs. Traditional events like shin-kicking, a tug of war, and a five-mile race were held.  The climax of the festival is a bonfire, from which people light torches and walk down to Chipping Campden. Following the torchlit procession there is more music in the town square.

It’s a pity that the Olympic flame didn’t make it to Dover’s Hill but in being carried through the historic market-place it will have been a reminder of those first English Olimpick Games.

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Oh sorrow, pitiful sorrow: the burning of Shakespeare’s Globe

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

 

The Globe in flames. By C Walter Hodges

The Globe Theatre, that most famous building, burned to the ground on 29 June 1613. It had stood for only 14 years.

It would have been front page news, if newspapers had existed then: at least five separate accounts of the event have survived. The fullest was written in a letter by Sir Henry Wotton to Sir Edmund Bacon a few days later on 2 July. A performance of Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII was taking place, perhaps the first performance. This, ironically, is one of the few performances of a Shakespeare play during his lifetime that we can be absolutely sure of.  The play “was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting on the stage: the knights of the order with their Georges and garters, the guards with their embroidered coats and the like…” In the scene in which King Henry came in disguise to Cardinal Wolsey’s house, when “certain chambers [were] shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive on the show, it kindled inwardly and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw and a few forsaken cloaks. Only one man had his breeches set on fire that would perhaps have broiled him if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale”.

The remains must still have been smoking when the amusing ballad A Sonnett upon the pittiful burneinge of the Globe Playhouse in London was printed the next day. It consists of eight verses, each one ending with the refrain punning on the alternative title for Henry VIII, “All is true”.  “Oh sorrow, pittifull sorrow, and yett all this is true”. Here are two verses:
No shower his raine did there downe force
In all that Sunn-shine weather,
To save that great renowned howse;
Nor thou, O ale-house, neither.
Had itt begunne belowe, sans doubte,
Their wives for feare had pissed itt out.
Oh sorrow, pittifull sorrow, and yet all this is true.

 Bee warned, yow stage-strutters all,
Least yow again be catched,
And such a burneing doe befall,
As to them whose howse was thatched;
Forbeare your whoreing, breeding biles,
And laye up that expence for tiles.
Oh sorrow, pittifull sorrow, and yet all this is true.

While no lives were lost it’s tantalising to think how many playscripts and other documents might have been lost when the theatre burned down. In 1621 when the same thing happened to the Fortune Theatre, John Chamberlain reported in a letter that the players’s costumes and prompt books were lost in the fire. Several other theatres had been used by Shakespeare’s company: they played at the Curtain and The Theatre north of the river, and they also had an indoor theatre, The Blackfriars. But the Globe was their own, a hugely successful theatre where the public saw and heard Shakespeare’s plays performed, and where Shakespeare’s reputation as a popular writer was cemented. When rebuilt, reopening on the same site almost exactly a year later the company had taken the advice of the ballad-maker and paid for a tiled roof.

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Julius Caesar on stage and screen

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The murder of Caesar, "Et tu, Brute"

Greg Doran’s production of Julius Caesar breaks new ground. With an all-black cast, set in an unnamed modern African city rather than imperial Rome, the film version has been shown on TV while still being performed onstage at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. I watched it on TV on Sunday, and have seen it onstage twice, once at one of the performances which was being filmed. After the other performance, the actors came back on stage to answer questions in a post-show talkback.

As far as I know, it’s the first time that a TV version of a stage production has been filmed while the play was still in rehearsal. Doran has directed stage productions for TV before, including the David Tennant Hamlet,  and he knows the pitfalls of transferring from one medium to another. One of the issues is that of scale: after a long stage run actors usually have to tone down their theatre performance to address viewers in their living rooms. At the talkback session actors commented that it had been a positive experience to film intimate scenes such as that between Brutus and Portia, as they were then able to include details in their stage performances.

The community chorus

Another interesting innovation is that some scenes were filmed in the theatre in front of a full audience, while most of the play was shot on location in an abandoned warehouse and shopping mall in Colindale. The sections shot onstage are the beginning and the very end of the play, and the Forum scene, Act 3 Scene 2. In most of these scenes the filming uses the on-stage chorus of well-choreographed “Roman citizens” who tie the action together by singing, chanting and dancing before and during the play, and react to the speeches in the Forum. In the sections filmed on location it felt very obvious that this chorus weren’t available. Click here to go to links relating to the filming.

The model for the stage set

The disconnection between the stage set and the location makes for intriguing viewing. The stage set shows us a Rome that is run down, but that still has some warmth and grandeur. Some of the scenes filmed on location gave a strong sense of a dangerous modern city, familiar to us in news reports, but the dirty rooms, claustrophobic corridors and dingy open spaces give an impression of an empty, abandoned Rome rather than the vibrant scenes of revolt which we saw during the Arab spring.

But the location does provide some effective moments. Onstage, Caesar’s assassination is staged very much as Shakespeare wrote it. He dies centre stage, conspirators rushing in to knife him. It’s a shockingly public scene, as it would be if the Prime Minister were attacked in parliament. But Doran takes advantage of the abandoned location to make a different point about political assassinations, and perhaps about death itself. With nobody to see, nobody to react, Caesar dies, crumpled up near the bottom of a disused escalator. For a TV audience the death of the mighty Caesar is reminiscent of the ignominious death of tyrants like Colonel Gadaffi. So much for Brutus’s naive suggestion:
Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcase fit  for hounds.

During the talkback, several questions were asked about the accent adopted for the production. The idea of using an African accent was first raised during a symposium that took place over a year ago, and eventually led to the use of a Kenyan accent, though it was pointed out that there are as many Kenyan accents as there are English. The actors in the production originate from several different parts of Africa and from the West Indies.

The accent has a deliberate, extravagant quality, and one of the great pleasures of the production, both on stage and film, is hearing Shakespeare’s words spoken with distinction and precision. CisBerry, (the RSC’s veteran voice coach) says that intentions are carried through consonants, and emotions are carried through vowels. In this accent the vowels are lengthened so that “will” becomes “weel” and “blood”, “blahd”, and “r”s are rolled.

In my recent post about rhetoric, I looked at how rhetoric can provide a framework on which to build an argument, but didn’t go into another requirement, that an orator has also to delight his listeners. In The Art of Rhetorique, Thomas Wilson explains: “every orator should earnestly labour to file his tongue that his words may slide with ease, and that in his deliberance he may have such grace as the sound of a lute”.  We don’t very often take into account the sensuousness of the sound of Shakespeare’s words, but the use of the Kenyan accent gives a richness to the sound which we who are used to Received Pronunciation rarely hear.

If you’re interested in the use of varied accents and their effect on Shakespeare’s plays, take a look at what Northern Broadsides has been doing over the last twenty years to promote the use of northern accents onstage. And although we don’t know precisely how Shakespeare’s plays sounded, David Crystal has done some extraordinary work on OP or Original Pronunciation.

If you’ve had your curiosity aroused by the film, come to see the live production on its tour. If you haven’t caught it yet, the film will be on BBC IPlayer until 1 July, and if you’re not able to get it there, at least listen to the trailer.

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Tennis and football: ball games in Shakespeare’s England

Posted on June 25, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The Olympics are still weeks away but we’re already awash with sporting events. Football’s Euro2012 is still in full swing, and today the nation’s annual two-week love affair with tennis, strawberries and cream begins at Wimbledon.

Tennis and football are both ball games that have been played for centuries, but they’ve always attracted very different players.  John Stow’s Survey of London dates back to Shakespeare’s time, and among popular games in the city: “the ball is used by noblemen and gentlemen in tennis courts, and by people of meaner sort in the open fields and streets”.

The real tennis court at Hampton Court

Henry VIII played what is now called “real” tennis on an indoor court at his palace at Hampton Court. The court was remodelled by Charles II in the late 1600s, and still exists. Lawn Tennis didn’t get going until the end of the eighteenth century and the game as we now play it became popular in the Victorian period.

In Shakespeare, tennis players are usually courtiers like Laertes, at the French court in Paris, or the French Dauphin who insultingly sends tennis balls to Henry V (the game originated in France). Henry’s reply shows Shakespeare’s familiarity with the game’s terminology:
When we have matched our rackets to these balls
We will in France by God’s grace play a set
Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.

Courtly seventeenth-century French players of real tennis

In his 1570 book The Scholemaster Roger Ascham suggests that tennis, like running, dancing and swimming, is “not only comely and decent, but also very necessary, for a courtly gentleman to use”.  Another educator, Richard Mulcaster, wrote a book on education in which he asserts the health benefits of exercise. “The racketers in tennis play… must show themselves nimble without straining”. Tennis “is very good for the arms…is a great furtherer to strength; it quickeneth the eyes… it helpeth the ridgebone [spine] by stooping, bending and coursing about”.

Football, however, has always been different, and kicking a ball around, particularly before there were fixed rules for the game, was rough and ready. In The Comedy of Errors the servant Dromio complains of his treatment by his masters:
Am I so round with you as you with me,
That like a football you do spurn me thus?
You spurn me hence, and he spurns me hither:
If I last in this service, you must case me in leather.

Philip Stubbes was a Puritan who wrote The Anatomie of Abuses. In his opinion, “As concerning football playing, I protest unto you it may rather be called a friendly kind of fight, than a play or recreation; a bloody and murdering practice, than a fellowly sport or pastime.” He suggests that few players escape without serious injury: “sometimes their necks are broken, sometimes their backs, sometimes their legs, sometimes their arms, sometime one part thrust out of joint, sometime another, sometime their noses gush out with blood, sometime their eyes start out”.

Richard Mulcaster was the headmaster of two major London schools, and his 1581 book Positions… for the Training up of children, which has already been quoted, contains his thoughts about the importance of exercise for his pupils: the humanist ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body. He acknowledges the popularity of football and defends it, particularly when played under the control of a referee, and with a small number of players, when “the football strengtheneth and brawneth the whole body”. But he agrees with Stubbes that it’s necessary to guard against the game becoming rowdy. “It is now commonly used, with the thronging of a rude multitude, with bursting of shins and breaking of legs”.

Overstating his case just a tad, Stubbes blames football for every evil you can think of: “envy, malice, rancour, choler, hatred, displeasure, enmity and what not else: and sometimes fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of blood, as experience daily teacheth.”

Now just bear that in mind next time you watch or take part in a football match.

With England having been put out of Euro2012 yesterday and little hope of much success in Wimbledon, if you want to see Brits doing well before the Olympics you might be better advised to watch the cycling Tour de France. Now there’s a sport which Shakespeare really wouldn’t have recognised!

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Revealing Shakespeare’s hidden history

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

In the year of the World Shakespeare Festival a new biography of Shakespeare has hit the bookstands. It’s done so with little fanfare, perhaps appropriately since it has the title Hidden Shakespeare.

It sometimes seems that every author feels obliged to write a biography of Shakespeare, so important is it to link their name with the great man. This book is different. Nicholas Fogg is, as far as I know, the first person born and brought up in Stratford to publish a biography of Shakespeare. This wouldn’t in itself give him an advantage, but he has for decades been obsessed with the man and his works, which he’s observed from his home in another English country town. Back in 1986 he published Stratford-upon-Avon: Portrait of a Town, a detailed history which inevitably included information about the town’s most famous son, and which has provided some of the background for this latest book.

Hidden Shakespeare brings to the fore the minutiae of town life, based on the author’s detailed study of the records of the borough. The Elizabethan and Jacobean period is often painted as “Merrie England”, but here he gets below the skin of the town to reveal that in Shakespeare’s lifetime Stratford was not a sleepy backwater. He documents several murders and other crimes, petty misdemeanours, and major fires and outbreaks of plague. Enclosing common land and bad harvests caused hardship, even starvation in the town as well at the surrounding countryside, and national events like the Gunpowder Plot had repercussions far from London.

The book never turns into a catalogue of the town’s history because, with a light touch, the author links these events with parallels from Shakespeare’s works. When talking about disorder, he reminds us of Dogberry and the watch in Much Ado About Nothing. Looking at the haste of Shakespeare’s marriage he compares it with others in the town, and quotes Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest. And he spots some lovely details: I’ve never before read that John Hall’s father William, an astrologer and alchemist, had a servant called Matthew Morris who settled in Stratford, naming his children Susanna and John after Shakespeare’s daughter and son-in-law.

Shakespeare spent most of his creative life in London, and the story maintains its pace because the author has also closely examined events in the capital. He suggests for instance that the Thomas Lucy who is mocked in The Merry Wives of Windsor is likely to be the son of the Thomas Lucy of Charlecote who Shakespeare is thought to have fled from as a young man. The younger Thomas Lucy was a well-known figure in the London of the 1590s and the subject of a long-running court case, making Shakespeare’s reference topical rather than obscure. And he shows how fears about the succession to the throne, which became almost a national obsession, crop up not just in Richard II, but also in Hamlet, King John and even The Rape of Lucrece.

Watching the author make connections between many seemingly disconnected plays is one of the great pleasures of reading the book. In the space of one page about the gravedigger’s scene in Hamlet, he moves from that play to Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Richard III. Indeed if I have a criticism it’s that some readers who aren’t well-versed in the plays and the history of the time might not always get all the references.

He also makes comparisons between Shakespeare and the lives of his contemporaries: other Stratford boys like Roger Lock, Richard Field and John Sadler who went to London to work, and with other writers and actors like Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Edward Alleyn, many of whom like him were from the rising middle classes.

Nicholas Fogg at the launch of his book Hidden Shakespeare

All biographers still have to counter the notion that Shakespeare was an ideal national hero who existed almost in a vacuum, and Fogg is relaxed enough to allow Shakespeare his imperfections, his dark ladies and fair young men. A hundred years or so years ago a biographer would have been unlikely to mention with approval that part of the house we now know as his Birthplace was let out as a public house. Fogg rather likes he idea: his Shakespeare is human.

Fogg’s book is also a pleasure to read because of his enjoyment of the English language, from the handing down of traditional words and sayings to his own nice turn of phrase. Talking of Hamlet, “Death is an unseen character in the play. He stalks the halls of Elsinore like his counterpart in the morality plays”.

In his foreword, he imagines how it would feel to be the gods setting out to create the greatest writer who ever lived. As well as endowing the child with genius, “the time, culture and place that we select are essential to the project”. This book acknowledges that all people are the product of their family background and environment, and that Shakespeare became Shakespeare because of the coincidences of his birth.

Hidden Shakespeare is published by Amberley Publishing, and an article about it can be found here. You can get a very different, but compelling and watchable view of Shakespeare’s life by watching the two-part series Simon Schama’s Shakespeare beginning on 22 June on BBC2 at 9pm.

 

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Julius Caesar and Shakespeare’s power to persuade

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Ray Fearon as Mark Antony for the RSC, in the Forum scene

I’ve always thought of rhetoric as a rather dry subject, but in a recent lecture barrister Benet Brandreth, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Rhetoric Coach, zipped entertaingly through some of the principles in an hour. He succeeded in demonstrating how powerfully rhetoric, and in particular, one book, influenced the writing of  Julius Caesar.

Elizabethan schoolboys would have learned Latin from books by authors like Lyly, and translated Latin texts like Ovid’s, but they would also have learned rhetoric, or the art of persuasion. Thomas Wilson’s book The Art of Rhetorique was first published, in English, in 1553, and went through eight editions by 1585. I went to the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive afterwards to read their original copy. It dates back to 1567 and is a well-thumbed pocket-sized book, made for use rather than for show. Reading it must always have been difficult: each page is densely covered in black letter print, little space wasted on paragraphs and headings, and without decoration.

Wilson’s book was probably used in schools: the book’s ideas come from classical authors such as Aristotle and Cicero, but he gives many examples of how to put arguments into practice which Shakespeare expects his audiences to be familiar with too.

Brandreth’s talk covered much more than just Wilson’s book. In classical theory a person’s character is revealed by their speech. Shakespeare differentiates between  characters, Cassius for instance using modern words, whereas Brutus favours old-fashioned language, a distinction today’s audiences are unlikely to pick up. Cassius uses a whole range of arguments to persuade Brutus to murder Caesar, but his words are carefully chosen: “honour”, “free”, “Rome”, and he reminds Brutus of his ancestry by using an example, a rhetorical device, that looks back to the founding of Rome:
I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor,
Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder
The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber
Did I the tired Caesar.

It’s with the speeches in the Forum, after Caesar’s murder, that Brandreth’s analysis became really interesting. We’re all used to hearing Brutus’s speech to the Roman crowd, which is then followed by Antony’s. What is it that makes Antony’s so much more persuasive? Brutus assumes the Romans are already on his side, addressing the Romans as “lovers”. He talks about Caesar’s ambition without giving an answer to the unspoken question of what offences Caesar had committed to justify his murder. He has what sound like logical arguments, but doesn’t back them up with facts, nor does he appeal to their emotions.

Antony’s speech, by contrast, is textbook. There are three elements in classical rhetoric that were essential for a persuasive speech: Ethos: authority and expertise (making them listen), Logos: reason (arguing the case), and Pathos: Emotional connection (making them care), in that order. And the speaker needs to tailor what they say to their audience.

Even a quick look at Antony’s speech shows how brilliantly Shakespeare does this, using examples, emotion, and appealing to the interests of the Roman crowd.

Wislon's Arte of Rhetorique, 1567

Brandreth also made a direct comparison with The Arte of Rhetorique. As well as explaining the theory, the book includes examples of how to fit an argument to different circumstances. One example is for when your listeners (the Judge) are not on your side, as in Antony’s case. Wilson describes how to start: “A privie beginning, or creeping in, otherwise called insinuation, must then …be used when…our cause [is] hated of the hearers”. “Nothing should be spoken at the first, but that which might please the Judge”:
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

Wilson: “When the hearers are somewhat calmed, we may …say that those things, which our adversary doth mislike in the person accused, we also do mislike the same”.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.

Wilson: “And when the hearers are won, we may say that …we …speak nothing at all against our adversaries… Neither were it wisdom openly to speak against them, which are generally well esteemed and taken for honest men.”
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honourable man,
So are they all, all honourable men).

Where Brutus omitted to use examples to support his case, Antony uses them to refute Brutus’s claim that Caesar was ambitious:
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?

After he’s presented the logic of his argument he gets to the pathos.  “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now”, he says, showing them Caesar’s gashed and bloody cloak.

Wilson: “In moving affections…the weight of the matter must be so set forth as if they saw it plain before their eyes”.
Then he shows them Caesar’s body itself, to
Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me.

Finally he appeals to the self-interest of the crowd, telling them that by Caesar’s will they inherit money and the enjoyment of Caesar’s private gardens. In the palm of his hand after this performance, they take up his hint to “rise and mutiny”, against Brutus and the conspirators.

It’s a masterclass in the use of rhetoric, and one which Shakespeare may have taken almost point by point from Wilson’s little book.

The filmed version of the RSC’s current production is to be screened on Sunday 24 June at 8pm on BBC4. And here is the trailer to the stage version, which includes Ray Fearon performing part of his great speech.

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Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

This year The Queen’s Birthday Honours list has recognised a bumper crop of people in the arts. For me the most pleasing was the knighthood which has been awarded to Kenneth Branagh. His association with Shakespeare goes back to his teenage years, and he’s promoted Shakespeare’s works to young audiences through his many films.

I first saw him playing Henry V in 1984 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, on the second preview, standing at the back of the stalls. As the youngest-ever Henry V on that stage,  only 23, his performance could have been a bit rough around the edges. But not a bit of it.

Programme for the 1984 Henry V

Branagh’s precocious confidence and his energy in mastering that difficult stage and auditorium was extraordinary. I saw the production repeatedly that year, as well as Love’s Labour’s Lost (King of France), Hamlet  (Laertes) and, at the RSC’s studio theatre The Other Place, a new play called Golden Girls about a team of women athletes. His sprinter, was, I thought, the only unconvincing role he played. Although he had already been awarded Most Promising Newcomer, it was this season with the RSC that made him a star. He writes disparagingly of his performance in the other plays that season, but I remember them with great enjoyment. Was there anything he couldn’t do?

After his two-year stint Branagh went independent again. In 1986 he decided to put on and star in Romeo and Juliet. In order to work out what really worked onstage he came to the Shakespeare Centre Library in Stratford-upon-Avon where I worked and asked to see the prompt books for the last 40-years worth of RSC productions. I asked him why he was working on the play and he told me he was planning a production. After it, he capitalised on its success by creating the Renaissance Theatre Company and staging a trilogy of Shakespeares at Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s Studio: Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, to be directed by three distinguished actors: Derek Jacobi, Judi Dench and Geraldine McEwan.

Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet, RSC 1992-3

He directed a production of Twelfth Night casting Richard Briers as Malvolio, so successful that it was filmed for TV. He played Richard III. And he began his series of Shakespeare films: Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It. He sent himself up in one of the Harry Potter films and wrote and directed a film which is a tribute to Hamlet, In the Bleak Midwinter. Here’s a link to a post about this film by Stuart Ian Burns.

In 1992-3 Branagh made a return to the RSC to perform as Hamlet, directed again by Adrian Noble, in a full-text version. By this time he was closely associated with the play, and had played the title role several times. A sellout on its London and Stratford showings, Branagh later filmed the play for the big screen.

When a very young man he was hailed as the new Olivier, which must have been an unhelpful comparison. Olivier’s best-known work was his film of Henry V, created as a piece of wartime propaganda, while the 1984 production, directed by Adrian Noble, was widely referred to as the first “post-Falklands” production. The play and subsequent film wanted to avoid the jingoism of the earlier version in favour of portraying the realities of war and kingship. Many people will remember the starkness of the execution of Henry’s one-time friend Bardolph, garotted onstage, his body left kneeling in front of the audience. As Henry watched, it felt as if he was saying a final goodbye to his youth as he accepted the necessities of being a king. And in the film of Henry V the long tracking shot through the battlefield after the end of the Battle of Agincourt testified to the inhumanity of war.  Here’s a link to a more rousing moment, the St Crispin’s Day speech. The association with Olivier lives on: in the recent film My Week With Marilyn Branagh plays Laurence Olivier.

In recent years he’s become much better known for other TV and film roles and for directing, but it’s his Shakespeare work which has had the most impact. In his autobiography Beginning, written before he was 30, he described how he felt about Henry V.
I have been able to produce exactly the film I wanted. It will not be to everyone’s taste, but for me it succeeds in realising what we set out to do… an indefinable element of commitment and heart shines through the picture. It is a popular, accessible and yet serious view of an underrated play.

There must be millions of people for whom watching this or one of his other films has been the spark for understanding and enjoying Shakespeare, and here’s hoping we’ll see more of this popularising agenda in years to come.

PS  have just received a Michael Coveney piece about Alan Howard and others, reminding me of Alan Howard’s brilliant Henry V 1975-7. Read his piece here.

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The case for Anne Hathaway

Posted on June 15, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

An image, said to be Anne Hathaway

Last week I attended a lecture in which the speaker said, with a laugh, that according to Stephen Greenblatt and others Shakespeare left Stratford in order to get away from his wife. I bristled. Why, when it wasn’t relevant to the subject of the lecture, did he make a joke at Anne Hathaway’s expense?

 As it happens, I’m currently reading Germaine Greer’s book Shakespeare’s Wife, and while she probably overstates her case, given the awful press that Anne has had over many years I agree it’s about time someone stood up for her. Most biographies of Shakespeare have lazily accepted the received prejudice against her without bothering to look deeper. 

Greer has uncovered much material suggesting that married women were more than capable of running homes and businesses on their own, and towards the end of her  book, “the intrepid author makes the absurd suggestion that Anne Shakespeare might have been involved in the First Folio project”, and she goes on to state “The idea that she might be entitled to some of the credit for the preservation of her husband’s work is apparently too ridiculous to contemplate, which is why we shall now contemplate it”. 

So how did this prejudice start? Early accounts of Shakespeare’s life didn’t mention any disharmony, or suggest there was anything unusual in a husband working away from home. But the discovery of the will and its infamous legacy of the “second best bed” didn’t help, and neither did the marriage bond and baptism record which indicated that the wedding might have been rushed because Anne was pregnant. The already-known facts that Anne was several years older than William, and that the couple had only three children, only blackened her image even more.  

 Commentators are always happy to suggest that in Twelfth Night Orsino’s suggestion that a woman should marry a man older than herself is a swipe at Anne, without also noting that several of Shakespeare’s young heroines, Rosalind, Imogen and Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well are considerably more emotionally and possibly physically mature than their chosen partners.

The 1609 Sonnets

Then, of course, there’s the “evidence” in the Sonnets.  No area of Shakespeare’s work has generated the speculation surrounding these 154 poems. Most serious editions, like Kathryn Duncan-Jones’s Arden, don’t countenance any personal interpretations, but questions still have to be asked about when and why they were written. Even such sensible commentators as Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells have to admit that the “story” if there is one, is very complicated. Contemporary references that help to date the poems are sought because the story seems, in some sense, to have to be true.

The story that’s usually uncovered is of Shakespeare’s love for a young man, an affair with a dark lady, and sometimes a rival poet. But some sonnets don’t fit. Sonnet 145 is usually dismissed as an immature poem, and in the past some have even suggested that Shakespeare didn’t write it. It’s the one which puns on Anne’s maiden name, and is one of the tenderest of the poems. It ends:
“I hate” from hate away she threw
And saved my life, saying –“Not you”.

Another sonnet which is mentioned grudgingly if at all in biographical terms is Sonnet 33, where Shakespeare puns on the words sun/son.  “My sun one early morn did shine”. Read in the light of other uses of the word “sun”, for example where Hamlet is “too much in the sun”, and in Henry VI part 3 where the sons of York see “three glorious suns” which prophesy the unity of their family, this poem makes sense if it’s seen to be about the death of Shakespeare’s own son.

Sonnet 135 and Sonnet 136 both pun on Shakespeare’s name: “My name is Will”. These personal poems are scattered throughout the sonnets. In trying to make sense of the sequence in which love is directed towards the boy or the dark lady, have interpreters ignored the fact that some of them could have been written to Anne? Reading them on their own, there’s no reason that Sonnet 57 couldn’t be addressed to her, and Sonnet 117, below, reads like an apology to a wife:
Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all
Wherein I should your great deserts repay;
Forgot upon your dearest love to call,
Whereto all bonds do tie me day by day;
That I have frequent been with unknown minds,
And given to time your own dear-purchased right;
That I have hoisted sail to all the winds
Which should transport me farthest from your sight.
Book both my wilfulness and errors down,
And on just proof surmise accumulate;
Bring me within the level of your frown,
But shoot not at me in your waken’d hate;
Since my appeal says I did strive to prove
The constancy and virtue of your love. 

For all we know, one of the stories told by the sonnets is of Shakespeare’s love for his wife. It’s at least as good a story as the one which biographers have written over the past hundred and fifty years, and may be closer to the truth.

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