Shakespeare and The Space

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Coriolan/Us

The Globe to Globe’s seven week Shakespeare festival has just come to an end, and for anyone who hasn’t been able to keep up with it (which must include most of us), but would like a way of catching up, a new website The Space is capturing recordings on many of the events so far. It’s free, and to quote their publicity,
Available on computer, tablet, smartphone and connected TV, The Space invites you to take part in the biggest summer of arts the UK has ever seen, whenever you want it and wherever you happen to be.

From the front page you can find all the Shakespeare items by doing a search on his name, but you’ll also find lots of other material too. It’s an evolving site and one which should build into being a wonderfully valuable resource for both students and those interested in the arts.

If you want to read how they’ve put this site together, here’s an explanation.

But there’s still much to enjoy in the World Shakespeare Festival. The series of four history plays, The Hollow Crown, is now scheduled to be transmitted on BBC 2 from the end of June, and the filmed version of the RSC’s African Julius Caesar will hit BBC4 also at the end of June. Video clips relating to both these are available to whet your appetite: just follow the links.

Timon of Athens

In the theatre we can look forward to the National Theatre’s production of that rarity, Timon of Athens, with one of our greatest Shakespearean actors, Simon Russell Beale.

There’s a production of that great musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story at the Sage in Gateshead, a reimagination by the National Theatre Wales of Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus, Coriolan/Us, drawing on a world of celebrity culture and 24 hour news, Verdi’s wonderful operas Otello and Falstaff at the Royal Opera House, and in Stratford, an Indian Much Ado About Nothing and a Russian version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The British Museum’s exhibition Shakespeare: staging the world, begins in July. This is by no means all, and information about all these and more is at the official World Shakespeare Festival site.

Many of these performances and events will, hopefully, make their way onto The Space. It has the potential to become an indispensable part of the way culture is delivered, so do try it out.

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Shakespeare’s infinite variety

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The Tempest

I’m always impressed by the number of ways in which people adapt Shakespeare. He and his works seem to have something to say to everyone. Since I began writing this blog I’ve been contacted by many people telling me what they’ve been doing with Shakespeare, and I thought I’d share some of them: just follow the links to websites, books, videos and blogs. A few are commercial sites: I’m not endorsing any of the products, but hope you will enjoy taking a look at them.

First of all, here’s news of a film, a fresh and contemporary version of The Tempest. Made over five years by the company Fifth Column, it’s a reimagining of the play in which 17 young actors from South London attempt a production. The resulting film reflects the 2011 riots, urban youth culture, the lead-up to the Olympic Games and questions about English identity. It will premiere on 6th July at the East End Film Festival and will feature in the Shakespeare Film Festival to be held in Stratford-upon-Avon in the autumn.

Now a couple of educational sites: Early Shakespeare is a fun, nicely-designed site where you can find software designed to help introduce children to Shakespeare. There’s a free sample of a section of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the site for you to try.

Minor Critics is a very personal account of a New York resident who is introducing her children to Shakespeare and other drama via the New York Classical Theater Company, Theatre For a New Audience and other acting companies. Not many people have access to as many live performances as Mila, but her blog is full of ideas about how to encourage children to learn.

If unusual Shakespeare-related fiction is your thing, take a look at D R O’Brien’s novella. It’s certainly different: based very loosely on the story of The Tempest,  it “slithers hideously onto the literary mash-up scene, whispering of cosmic horrors and eldritch tales whilst espousing sweet soliloquies and profoundly contemplating mankind’s place in the universe.” Follow this link if you like the sound of it.

Shakespearesworld is a YouTube channel containing videos by Tony Butler, the Director of the Shakespeare Workshop in London. It contains several short videos on subjects from individual speeches to Shakespeare and the Audience’s Imagination.

Here’s a light-hearted blog written by an Irishman in London, Tales of an Irish Exile that contains a link to an episode in the BBC’s Shakespeare’s Restless World.

And Sarah Beckwith from Duke’s University votes for her favourite five Shakespeare plays. Why don’t you take a look and see if you agree with Sarah’s choice?

Finally a couple of sonnet-related items:  Alan Tarica has created an adaptation of the sonnets in which he reverses the order of the poems, so the poems that try to persuade the young man to marry come at the end rather than at the beginning. He aims to provoke discussion about the accepted meaning of the poems. His commentary is based on the idea that “a young (initially) man who after a brief seduction…by his older and much more powerful lover and muse, appeals to her to recognize and live on through their son”.

Last but by no means least is Pentameter Productions’  sonnet show Love’s Eternal Summer. It’s performed by Richard Moore, an actor who has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company, accompanied by Carole Bannister playing Elizabethan music on the dulcimer. This is a quote from a review from their show in Truro.
Richard Moore held the audience spellbound with his powerful and moving interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, linking them by narrative with their historical background and giving them an extra dimension. Carole Bannister’s precise and gentle dulcimer playing was a perfect counterpoint to the sonnets. It is an evening of elegance and style, a touch of Elizabethan magic.
The facebook page is entertaining, and Richard and Carole are looking for venues so if you’d like to book them, get in touch.

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Digging for The Curtain Theatre: archaeological discoveries

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The Globe plaque

On Wednesday morning the news broke that archaeologists have found the remains of the Curtain Theatre in the Shoreditch area of north London, where it’s thought Shakespeare’s  plays Henry V and Romeo and Juliet were performed, perhaps for the first time. We all associate Shakespeare with the Globe Theatre on the South Bank of the Thames, but this opened only in the middle of 1599 by which time he’d written many of his finest plays. In his 1598 book Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury, Francis Meres lists over a dozen plays which had already made Shakespeare’s name.

Considering how heavily London has been built on since Shakespeare’s day, it’s amazing that remains of so many of these buildings still exist under the ground. Back in 1909 a plaque was put up to commemorate the Globe Theatre itself, the first such monument. In 1989 some remains of this theatre were found, but a more complete excavation has never been possible because of the presence of other buildings.

Excavating the Rose, 1989

In the same year, 1989, remains were found of the Rose Theatre, close to the Globe site, during routine excavations before a new office block was built. After a high-profile campaign to save the site, the building was adapted to allow the remains to be preserved and the Rose Theatre Trust still exists to realise the site’s potential for interpretation and display to the public. When it was built in 1587 it was the first theatre on the South side of the river. In this building Marlowe’s great plays Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Henry VI Part 1 were performed. The success of the Rose encouraged other theatres: the Swan in 1595, the Globe in 1599 (rebuilt 1613) and the Hope in 1614. Some remains of the Hope were also uncovered in 1999.

The fork found at the Rose

The Rose Theatre excavations also uncovered some important artefacts: the hazelnut shells that covered the surface of the pit, and a delicate fork which an affluent theatregoer might have dropped in 1592. This item was described in Snacking Through Shakespeare, an episode of Shakespeare’s Restless World, transcribed here.

The first purpose-built theatres in London, though, were north of the river, and well outside the jurisdiction of the City of London so that performances of all kinds could take place. In his 2003 TV series In Search of Shakespeare historian Michael Wood visited  some premises in Shoreditch which incorporated parts of the site of The Theatre, but it was only in 2008 that actual remains were found and a report was written on the complicated history of the site. Hackney Museum is holding an exhibition of some of the finds until September 2012.

Until 1596 James Burbage leased the land on which The Theatre stood, but in that year he lost the lease, so for a couple of years The Lord Chamberlain’s Men used other venues including the nearby Curtain. Eventually in 1599 The Theatre was famously dismantled, the timbers being taken from Shoreditch south of the river where they were used to build the Globe Theatre, finally giving the company a permanent home which they could control.

Excavations at the Curtain Theatre, 2012

This week has come the news about The Curtain, built just a year after The Theatre, in 1577, and the remains they have excavated look impressive. Museum of London Archaeology has been responsible for these excavations, which show us something of the reality of Shakespeare’s London and the vitality of its theatres, all built within a few decades of each other. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this excavation progresses and what more will be found out.  Although it’s the reconstructed Globe, sited down on the south bank of the river, that now draws the crowds, the re-creation would not be anything like so accurate without the information which the digs provided.

Shakespeare’s Globe was only built because Sam Wanamaker, an American actor, was so disappointed to find only the plaque when he went in search of Shakespeare’s theatre that he devoted much of the rest of his life to creating a replica. He died in 1993 and, after his death a grant enabled the theatre building to go ahead. It was officially opened in June 1997, since when it has gone from strength to strength, this year hosting the Globe to Globe Festival which in 7 weeks has staged 38 plays, each in a different language. Here’s an assessment of this extraordinary project.

Shakespeare's Globe, 2012

 

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The Queen ‘s Diamond Jubilee and the elements

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

I know I’m a bit obsessed with things of Shakespeare’s period, but has it occurred to anybody else that each of the four days of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations has represented a different one of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water?

During Shakespeare’s time most people believed that everything was made up of these elements. Each element had two qualities: Earth, dry and cold, Air, moist and hot, Fire, dry and hot, Water, cold and moist.

It started on Saturday with the horse-racing at Epsom, horses always being associated with the famous lines from Henry V: “think, when we talk of horses, that you see them, printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth”.

Sunday’s Thames pageant represented water, both below and from above. Monday was dominated by the excitement of the concert after which beacons and spectacular fireworks were lit around the country.

Finally on Tuesday, the spirituality of the glorious service at St Paul’s Cathedral was rounded off by the flypast of planes over Buckingham Palace, representing air.

The four elements needed to be balanced in order for a person to be healthy, an imbalance causing a person to

The Red Arrows’ flypast

be humorous, or dominated by one of the humours, either choleric, melancholic, sanguine or phlegmatic. Each element was also associated with a particular season, a planet, parts of the body and even skin-colours. The words element, complexion, temperament and humour all had very different meanings in Shakespeare’s time.

This is an extremely simplified summary of a complicated subject, and I’m indebted once again to Sujata Iyengar’s book, Shakespeare’s Medical Language which explains the various theories in great detail.

Understanding some of these references helps to make sense of some of the otherwise difficult passages in Shakespeare. In Twelfth Night Sir Andrew asks “Does not our lives consist of the four elements?”, and  the Dauphin in Henry V describes his horse: “he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him”.

In Love’s Labour’s Lost Armado asks Moth what complexion a woman was of : “Of all the four, or the three or the two, or one of the four”, Moth replies. Armado goes on to say “My love is most immaculate white and red”, colours associated with the sanguine or cheerful temperament.

In The Taming of the Shrew Petruchio tells Kate why he and she, both argumentative and thus tending to the choleric humour, should not eat overdone meat:
I tell thee, Kate, ’twas burnt and dried away,
And I expressly am forbid to touch it,
For it engenders choler, planteth anger,
And better ’twere that both of us did fast,
Since, of ourselves, ourselves are choleric.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 45 is created around the concept of the elements and the humours, the author assuming his readers understand it. The quicker elements of air and fire belong to the person who is addressed, while the author, lacking his lover, is reduced to melancholy, the humour governed by earth and water.
The other two, slight air and purging fire,
Are both with thee, wherever I abide;
The first my thought, the second my desire,
These present-absent with swift motion slide.
For when these quicker elements are gone
In tender embassy of love to thee,
My life, being made of four, with two alone
Sinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy;
Until life’s composition be recured
By those swift messengers returned from thee,
Who even but now come back again, assured
Of thy fair health, recounting it to me.
This told, I joy, but then no longer glad,
I send them back again, and straight grow sad. 

Whether intentionally or not, the four days of the Diamond Jubilee have been a complete and balanced celebration, a fitting tribute to sixty years of service by a woman in whom, like Brutus in Julius Caesar, the elements are perfectly mixed.

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The Thames Jubilee Pageant: the royal throne of kings

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The Thames pageant

The Jubilee weekend’s most spectacular event, the Thames pageant, was a bit of a victim of the English weather. The brand new Shard, the tallest building in Europe, disappeared into the mist as the weather worsened.

Apparently nowhere in the UK is further than 70 miles from the sea, and the pageant was a reminder of how important our waterways and coast are for both  leisure and to move goods from place to place. Over a thousand boats of all shapes and sizes made their way down from Battersea Bridge to Tower Bridge. They’d come from all round the UK, including a Cornish gig, the last ocean-going paddle steamer and a fishing boat from Shetland. There’s a long tradition of holding river pageants, which is told in this video. When it comes to the Olympics two sports that the UK always excels in are rowing and sailing. We do love our boats.

There were even a few of the little boats that had helped to evacuate British troops from Dunkirk during the second world war. Shakespeare was very much aware of the isolation of Britain from the rest of Europe. It was during his lifetime, and the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, that England really began to be a force to be reckoned with. With the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 the country was confirmed as a maritime power, even if the Spanish fleet was really defeated more by the weather than by English ships.

Patrick Stewart as John of Gaunt in the BBC's forthcoming production

Shakespeare’s history plays, the two great tetralogies, concentrate mostly on civil war and its consequences.  The earliest in setting, if not in composition, is Richard II. John of Gaunt, a representative of old England, sets the tone for the other plays which lead through the Wars of the Roses. In his famous speech he describes Britain as “this sceptr’d isle”,  but his point is that the country is eroding itself from within.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame…
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. 

At the same time John of Gaunt sees Britain as an island cut off from other countries and the threat of invasion which they represent.
This little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands.

The idea of the country, separate from the rest of Europe, is one which comes up over and over again. In King Lear,  the King brings a map of his kingdom onstage and proceeds to divide both map and kingdom between his daughters. It would be interesting to know if in Shakespeare’s original production, performed before King James, it was a map of James’s Britain or, more historically, just England and Wales. Either way, the coast marks the boundary of the map, and his banished daughter Cordelia is forced to make her home overseas.

Alex Waldmann as King John in the 2012 RSC production. Photograph by Keith Pattison

Shakespeare chooses to open King John with the King of France’s demand that John gives up the crown of England to avoid “fierce and bloody war”. Although set centuries before England’s split from the Roman Catholic church, the dispute is between England and a European Catholic alliance aiming to put a puppet monarch on its throne. At the very end, once the conflict is resolved, some of Shakespeare’s most patriotic lines proclaim the independence of England against invasion, and the importance of remaining united:
This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror
But when it first did help to wound itself.

Cymbeline was written only a little after King Lear and in it Britain is threatened by demands from Rome for unpaid tribute.  Roman troops invade and are defeated, but in an ending that’s almost the opposite of King Lear the family of three siblings is reunited, the King comes to his senses, and the heroine Imogen is reunited with her husband. “Pardon’s the word to all”. Finally, in an extraordinarily mature decision, the king pays the tribute owed to Rome: peace and reconciliation over war.
Publish we this peace
To all our subjects….Let
A Roman, and a British ensign wave
Friendly together… Never was a war did cease
(Ere bloody hands were wash’d) with such a peace. 

The Queen promoted the formation of the Commonwealth to encourage countries to be “friendly together”, so it’s appropriate that boats representing all the Commonwealth nations were there, waving their flags.

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Jubilee Queens

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

This weekend we celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of our Queen, and the media have made many references to the other massively influential English monarch who ruled for sixty years, Queen Victoria. Queen Elizabeth II doesn’t pretend to take a great interest in the theatre, though her eldest son makes up for her by being a real enthusiast for Shakespeare and the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company.  He gave the Annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1991, later that year became the Company’s President, and regularly attends performances of the plays.

Queen Victoria with Albert and her family, 1846

Queen Victoria though was enthusiastic about the theatre and other entertainments. Farces, circus acts and melodramas were her favourites when young, but Prince Albert was a knowledgeable enthusiast for Shakespeare’s works and his taste rubbed off on her. She was impressed by King John, a play full of patriotic sentiment, and she judged Richard III “a fine heart-stirring play”. In the early years of her reign W C Macready was the most important actor in the country, a fine tragedian who undertook the restoration of Shakespeare’s texts as written after a century and a half when theatre audiences had seen mangled versions of them. One play which Macready was commanded to perform before the Queen was As You Like It in which he took the part of the melancholy Jaques. She sometimes attended the public theatres, attracting bumper audiences and creating something of a security risk, but otherwise plays were performed at Windsor Castle.

W C Macready as Brutus in Julius Caesar

In 1850 a series of plays were performed under the direction of Charles Kean, the son of Edmund Kean and an established actor in his own right. On this occasion Macready performed Brutus in Julius Caesar. Charles Kean received royal favour, and the Queen visited his theatre on a number of occasions. When Macready retired from the stage in 1853 Samuel Phelps seemed to inherit Macready’s status, but never the same level of royal patronage.

Other performances are recorded: Charles Dickens, with his company of amateur friends performed Ben Jonson’s farce Every Man in His Humour twice, and during the 1850s Dickens appeared in Wilkie Collins’ play The Frozen Deep before Victoria and Albert, a performance which she was to remember for many years.

Then in 1861 Albert died, and there was no more frivolity. Her mourning lasted decades, but in the last twenty years of her long reign her interest in the theatre revived. From 1881 command performances at Windsor and Sandringham resumed, and it’s recorded that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry performed in front of her at her Isle of Wight home, Osborne House. I’ve written before about the Queen’s longstanding friendship with the actress Helena Faucit, and we shouldn’t forget that it was during her reign that the acting profession finally achieved respectability when in 1895 she knighted Henry Irving.

Queen Victoria’s reputation is of a prudish and disapproving woman: you can see this from the items reproduced on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s pages on Queen Victoria, Shakespeare and the Ideal Woman.

But in recent years her diaries and correspondence have revealed a different side to Victoria, just as recently-released home movies have shown us a softer side to our present Queen.

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Playing the Macbeths

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth from a nineteenth century edition of the play

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are two of Shakespeare’s most intriguing inventions. No matter how many times you see the play or read it, you are always left with questions. Which of them is more to blame for Duncan’s murder? Are the weird sisters in some way conjured up by one of them? In some productions the actor playing Lady Macbeth actually also plays one of the sisters, or they dress like her.

It can be illuminating to look at the sources which Shakespeare used for his plays, to see which elements he retained and enlarged, and which he omitted. Liz Dollimore of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has written a whole series of blog posts about the sources, including this one on Macbeth. Shakespeare took the main story from Holinshed’s Chronicles, including the detail that Macbeth was goaded on not only by the weird sisters “but speciallie his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was verie ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire to beare the name of a queene”. He took some of the details, though, from another part of the same book where the story of Donwald appears. He had a similarly ambitious wife “who had prepared diverse delicate dishes, and sundrie sorts of drinks” for the men who guarded the king’s chamber so that they slept while the murder took place. After the murder Donwald killed the guards and blamed them for the murder, just as Macbeth does.

In Shakespeare’s play, Lady Macbeth doesn’t seem to be particularly ambitious for herself. The famous picture by John Singer Sargent of Ellen Terry playing the role in 1889 shows a moment that was not in the production, Lady Macbeth appearing to crown herself. In the text, on her first appearance, where she reads Macbeth’s letter, she speaks only about him:
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promis’d. – Yet do I fear thy nature:
It is too full o’th’milk of human kindness,
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it.

Yet the audience has already heard that murder is in Macbeth’s mind. Lady Macbeth, though, gets more blame than he does for Duncan’s death, and she certainly holds him to his oath to do the killing. But does Lady Macbeth really deserve the title “fiend-like queen”?

Images like the one at the top of the post certainly paint an evil picture of her. But actors who have to perform the whole part including the most disturbing scene in the play, the sleepwalking scene, often find more humanity in her.

After reading the letter, Lady Macbeth conjures up spirits to make herself unnatural, pitiless and fearless, to “fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full of direst cruelty”. Judi Dench played this part onstage in 1976, and the acclaimed production was filmed. Always an actor who performs with humanity, she broke off at this point with a cry, as if too frightened to continue, before carrying on to complete the spell, as this clip shows.

Her Macbeth, Ian McKellen, interviewed by Julian Curry for his book Shakespeare on Stage, said  that before the murder, “she’s caught up with the thought that ‘All we’ve got to do is kill him!’ … She’s got no imagination”. Judi Dench played her, with textual justification, as a woman with imagination but who buries it in order to goad on her wavering husband.

Macbeth is a professional soldier who finds that murdering a sleeping old man who is also his king is a very different matter from killing his enemies. But once he has started he realises he has no choice but to keep on, eventually ordering the cold-blooded killing of an innocent woman and her children. His conscience troubles him less, while for Lady Macbeth it becomes unbearable. Ian McKellen again:
When later on she does have imagination, when she realises what’s gone on, she goes mad. She’s much more frail than Macbeth. Lady Macbeth as the strong woman is not what you think once you’ve seen the play all the way through.

Sinead Cusack as Lady Macbeth

Another Lady Macbeth, Sinead Cusack in 1986, seen on the left early on as the “golden girl”, played on her beauty, showing the character deteriorating both physically and psychologically. In Carol Rutter’s book Clamorous Voices, she interviewed Cusack who had played the sleepwalking scene wearing a soiled nightshirt and scruffy jumper. At the end of the scene “It’s an absolute panic attack. She’s shaking. ‘Don’t say he’s come out of his grave, because if we admit to that one, we’re lost'”. Carol Rutter comments:
The ravaged sleepwalker, showing only the vestiges of the golden girl she had been, recalled the witches’ paradox, ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’, for the beauty is defaced, and, in winning, Lady Macbeth loses everything… For Sinead Cusack, the end of Lady Macbeth’s play was ‘Lonely. So lonely. Utter desolation’.

We often see news reports of murders that remind us of those in the play, and it’s easy to brand those committing them “fiend-like”, and “butchers”, as the Macbeths are branded. Shakespeare though reminds us of the human price of murder, for the perpetrators as well as the victims.

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Telling a book by its cover

Posted on May 28, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

A coloured illustration of Lady Macbeth, 1850

If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll have noticed that among my interests are early books and internet resources as well as Shakespeare.

I’ve just become aware  of a group of linked resources which bring together people who spend their lives in the world of early printed books and special collections. They’re mostly librarians, but also include bookdealers who create extremely full descriptions of the items they have for sale.

Echoes from the Vault is owned by the University of St Andrews, but it’s the specialism that is important, not the organisation, the collection, or the profession of the contributor. Members of the group keep in touch and help each other out. In the post Bloggers of the World Unite, the authors Brooke Palmieri and Daryl Green (a bookseller and a librarian, writing jointly) state the aim of the group: “It is our hope that we can reawaken the potential of these books, manuscripts and photographs as research and educational resources by getting them in the hands of students, staff and researchers”.

The group includes several Shakespeare specialists, such as the Folger Shakespeare Library’s blog called The Collation. I particularly liked their recent post on the history of cataloguing early printed books and the signficance of the mysterious abbreviation “col”. And I’ve mentioned before the Remembering Shakespeare blog from Yale University.

It’s a very specialised subject area, but like most things, the closer you look the more interesting the books get, and all the blogs tell fascinating stories about discoveries which have been made about the books. Many early printed books have complex and intriguing histories. Owners may have written inside the book, anything from a signature of ownership to lines of comment in the margins. In their long history they may have been rebound several times or bound in combination with other titles.

The St Andrews blog has posted a whole series about book bindings. Not just there to protect the book, bindings can be beautifully decorated by being gilded, embroidered, or set with stones. When Juliet is told that Romeo has killed her cousin Tybalt, she compares Romeo with a beautiful book:
Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell
In such a gorgeous palace!

 

The illustration is of a coloured print from the Folger Shakespeare Library, “Lady Macbeth” in Characteristics of women, moral, poetical, and historical / by Mrs. Jameson. New York: John Wiley, 1850.

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Shakespeare’s daughter

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Sylvia Morris
David Tennant as Jack Lane, Teresa Banham as Susanna, in The Herbal Bed, RSC 1996

May 26 is the anniversary of the baptism of Shakespeare’s first daughter, Susanna. The only fact that most people know about her is that she was conceived before her parents were married. From this slender fact has led much speculation about the marriage of the 18-year old William to the older Anne Hathaway. Was it a “shotgun” wedding in which the unwilling groom was forced to marry a woman he didn’t really love, and was this the reason why he left Stratford?

Whatever the background, it’s impossible to feel that Shakespeare didn’t love his daughter. Fathers and daughters feature over and over again in loving relationships though they always have their ups and downs: Prospero and Miranda, Lear and Cordelia, for instance. When Prospero and Miranda were banished, the little girl was her father’s comfort:
A cherubin
Thou wast that did preserve me. Thou didst smile,
Infused with a fortitude from heaven.

And he’s overwhelmingly protective of her. “I have done nothing but in care of thee, of thee my dear one, thee my daughter”.

Susanna married a man Shakespeare must have approved of, a well-known physician John Hall, respectable and several years older than her. She gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. Little else is known of her life. She appears in a 1606 list of recusants for failing to receive Communion of Easter Sunday and in 1613 brought a suit for defamation against John Lane, a local man, who had slandered her by claiming she “had been naught with Rafe Smith”, that is she had committed adultery with him. The court took Susanna’s side.

This episode was turned into a compelling play by Peter Whelan as The Herbal Bed, written for the RSC and performed by them between 1996 and 1998 in Stratford, London and on tour. The original production featured the then little-known David Tennant as Susanna’s accuser Jack Lane (ie John) and Joseph Fiennes as her would-be lover Rafe Smith, alongside Teresa Banham as Susanna. It has since frequently restaged by many other companies.

Susanna and John Hall were executors of Shakespeare’s will, and she inherited most of his property. Like her father, Susanna was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, in 1649. Her gravestone contains the following epitaph, which says something about her character and her closeness to her father.
Witty above her sexe, but that’s not all
Wise to salvation was good Mistris Hall,
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this
Wholy of him with whom she’s now in blisse.
Then, Passenger, hast nere a teare,
To weepe with her that wept with all,
That wept, yet set her self to chere
Them up with comforts cordiall.
Her love shall live, her mercy spread,
When thou has’t ner’e a tear to shed.

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Flowers and history in Stratford’s Guild Chapel

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Chelsea’s not the only festival of flowers that’s going on this week. Over the weekend Stratford-upon-Avon has its own flower festival. Every year the little jewel of a building, the Guild Chapel, is decorated by the Avon Evening Flower Club. The Chapel is always beautiful, but can sometimes feel a little bare, so walking inside to find the air full of the scent of fresh flowers and its features decorated with fresh blooms, artistically arranged, is quite an experience, and this year it looks as if it will also offer a welcome retreat from the heat outside.

One of the exhibits from the 2010 Festival

The theme of the display this year is, predictably for 2012, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games.

The Guild Chapel is one of Stratford’s most historic buildings, founded as the chapel of the Guild of the Holy Cross around 1269. Elements of that original building are still in existence, but the nave and tower were added in the 1400s. Information about the chapel can be found on the website of the Friends of The Guild Chapel. The Chapel stands on an important junction across the road from the site of New Place, the house which Shakespeare bought when he became prosperous, and where he died in 1616. He would have known the Chapel from his earliest days: the school stands next door and has always been closely associated with it.

Even without the link with Shakespeare the Guild Chapel would be a notable building. Still to be seen above the chancel arch is most of the most remarkable medieval wall paintings still in existence.

The 2010 Flower Festival including some of the Chapel's wall paintings

The main painting is what’s known as a Doom, depicting the scene of Christ at the Last Judgement surrounded by the dead rising from the graves to be either welcomed into heaven or cast into hell. This wasn’t the only painting though: others, still to be seen, though much faded, are of subjects like George and the Dragon and the murder of Thomas a Becket.

The paintings were whitewashed over just months before Shakespeare’s birth during the winter of 1563 and it was John Shakespeare, his father, who as Chamberlain or Treasurer of the Corporation, was responsible for obliterating them. So significant was this event in the history of the world Shakespeare was to inhabit that Michael Wood began his book In Search of Shakespeare with an account of what happened. This is his description.

Reconstruction of the medieval Doom wall painting

At the start of Elizabeth’s reign a royal injunction had instructed town councils to enforce “The removal of all signs of idolatry and superstition, from places of worship, so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glasses, windows, or elsewhere within their churches and houses”….Whatever his private feelings, it was John’s duty to vandalize images that represented a world of encoded memories built up over the centuries.  

The story had started with Henry VIII’s break from Rome and the reformation of the English Church which began in 1533. It’s strange to think that Shakespeare’s father was one of the last people to see these magnificent murals intact. The Heritage Technology website contains some fascinating 3D digital reconstructions of the interior and exterior of the buildings showing what the wall paintings are thought to have looked like.

If you’re going to be in the area, come and enjoy the Festival. The Chapel is open all day on Saturday, Sunday and Monday and it’ll definitely be worth the modest entrance fee.

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