Harley Granville Barker and Shakespeare

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

A new play about the great man of the theatre Harley Granville Barker is now playing at the Hampstead Theatre, London. As explained on the Radio 4 Today programme on 29 February Granville Barker virtually invented the idea of the director, and is one of the most influential people in theatre from the last 150 years. He campaigned for the National Theatre, decades before it became a reality, hoping it would raise standards within the profession.

As well as being a famous director he was also an actor, author, playwright and activist. He produced three groundbreaking seasons of plays at the Royal Court from 1904-1907 and his most famous work, productions of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream were put on at the Savoy Theatre in London from 1912-1914. These productions caused a sensation. Instead of complicated realistic sets which slowed the action of the play down every time a change was required he used simple sets, unfussy costumes, brightly-painted curtains and an apron stage. He restored fuller texts and insisted on a speedy, natural delivery of lines. Today this may not sound revolutionary, but he was reacting against the traditions of spectacular productions with an over-dependence on elaborate sets.

Oberon and Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream

His production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was perhaps the most influential, with a small cast, spare staging and golden, slightly sinister fairies based on Asian idols. Here we see George Burrows as Oberon and Donald Calthrop as Puck.

The current play, Farewell to the Theatre, is written by Richard Nelson, and focuses on the period after this major theatre work. He took some of the plays to the USA and there fell in love with an American authoress. He divorced his first wife, the famous actress Lillah MacCarthy, and during the 1920s he moved to Paris. For the rest of his life he turned his back on the theatre, which he had done so much to shape, and concentrated on writing.

His influence is still felt today through his series of Prefaces to Shakespeare, which examine the plays in minute detail. He wrote in the introduction “The text of a play is a score waiting performance, and the performance and its preparation are… a work of collaboration…. A producer might talk to his company…on such such lines as these Prefaces pursue, giving a considered opinion of the play, drawing a picture of it in action, providing, in fact, a hypothesis”. The plays discussed include Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Love’s Labour’s Lost among others.

Actor and writer Simon Callow comments: ‘Barker offers a learned yet deeply intuitive approach to Shakespeare as a man-of-the-theatre, an act of empathy so complete as to give the illusion that Shakespeare himself has been given the opportunity to say what he was aiming for’.

To find out more about this complex and enigmatic man, see the play which is on at the Hampstead Theatre until 7 April.

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Shakespeare’s minds diseased: mental illness and its treatment

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

A doctor bleeding a patient

Shakespeare was clearly fascinated by mental illness, many characters displaying a variety of symptoms from Lear’s madness, Jaques’ melancholy, Timon’s bitter cursing, Macbeth’s visions and Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, to the obsessiveness of Leontes.

 It’s usually accepted that Shakespeare was influenced in medical matters by his son in law, the renowned doctor John Hall. Some of his patients suffer from a kind of mental illness which he calls “hypochondriac melancholy”, combined with physical symptoms such as fever. According to his Casebook, patients were offered his usual combinations of bloodletting and purgatives, as if curing the physical symptoms would also cure the mental ones.

Captain Bassett, for instance, was “afflicted with Hypochondriac Melancholy, with trembling and pricking of the Heart, as also with Pain in the head”. The cure consisted of a concoction made up of leaves, roots and seeds from plants, mixed with oil of almonds, infused, boiled and reduced, then strained, spices finally being added together with syrup of roses.

There seems to be nothing, though, in Hall’s Casebook specifically for the mentally ill. Macbeth’s question to the doctor, “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d?”, might have provoked the same response from John Hall; “Therein the patient must minister to himself”.

King Lear's recovery from madness

Shakespeare mentions another form of mental illness, which is explained at some length in Sujata Iyengar’s recent book Shakespeare’s Medical Language. This is hysterica passio, also known as “the mother” a uterine disorder thought to be restricted to women, but which Lear claims to suffer from. It manifested itself as a choking or smothering sensation, sometimes resembling apoplexy, which could be mistaken for possession, and was thought to be triggered by melancholy. The illness was recorded by Hippocrates, and Iyengar quotes a 1603 book by Edward Jorden suggesting that a sense of powerlessness could be a contributory cause:
For seeing we are not maisters of our own affections, wee are like battered Citties without walles, or shippes tossed in the Sea, exposed to all maner of assaults and daungers, even to the over-throw of our owne bodies.

Hamlet contains Shakespeare’s most fully-developed study of mental illness, and has always intrigued commentators on the play. I’m indebted to local historian Mairi Macdonald for information about another Stratford doctor who 200 years later had rather more to say about the treatment of the mentally ill, particularly in this play.

John Conolly's house is the house with the columns, now demolished

In 1823 the young doctor John Conolly came to live in Stratford, in a house next door to Shakespeare’s Birthplace. In the next six years he became the town’s mayor and opened a dispensary to treat those who could not afford to pay medical fees. He was also involved in the town’s Shakespeare Club, and even after he left the town was involved in the campaign to restore Shakespeare’s monument.

 As a student he had written on insanity and melancholia, and after leaving Stratford he published An Inquiry into the Indications of Insanity. At the time it was normal to restrain the insane using manacles or straitjackets, but he argued in favour of humane treatment including the removal of physical restraints. Eventually he took charge of the Hanwell Asylum in Middlesex where he put his enlightened ideas into practice.

Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet, 1992, wearing a strait-jacket. David Bradley plays Polonius

In his sixties he was able to combine his love of Shakespeare and knowledge of the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, in 1863 publishing his Study of Hamlet. He tries to establish “whether…Shakespeare intended simply to portray the feigning of madness, or designedly drew a representation …of a mind really disordered”.

 Conolly’s diagnosis is that Hamlet is indeed in the grip of mental disorder. On his first appearance “his mind is a very whirlpool of violent and miserable thoughts”. After he has encountered the ghost “the balance of his mind is lost, the sovereignty of his reason is really gone….His thoughts are disordered; his very frame is nearly paralysed, and his rapid meditations are not to be marshalled and controlled”.

 According to Polonius, after being rejected by Ophelia, Hamlet:
Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,
Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,
Thence to a lightness, and, by this declension,
Into the madness wherein now he raves
And all we mourn for.

Conolly comments these “might have been copied from the clinical notes of a student of mental disorders. We recognise all the phenomena of an attack of mental disorder consequent on a sudden and sorrowful shock; first the loss of all habitual interest in surrounding things; then, indifference to food, incapacity for customary and natural sleep”.

 In spite of Conolly’s diagnosis of Hamlet as a text-book case, there’s still no agreement over whether his madness is genuine or just an act. It’s a question that will continue to be argued over as long as the play is performed or read.

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International Women’s day: remembering Mary Cowden Clarke

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Every year on 8 March International Women’s Day celebrates the achievements of women. All round the world women still suffer serious inequality, and education is one area to which even in the Western world women were denied equal access until relatively recently.

 This post is about a woman who, in the mid nineteenth century, entered the almost-exclusively masculine world of Shakespeare study. And who attempted, by her writings, to guide young women towards an appreciation of Shakespeare and other literary works.

 This woman was Mary Cowden Clarke, rarely remembered now but according to Gail Marshall in her book Shakespeare and Victorian Women “the pre-eminent female scholar of the century”. Her life was enormously productive, and centred around the work of Shakespeare.

 She was born into the Novello family of music publishers, and through her father made the acquaintance of many distinguished people of arts and letters, including Leigh Hunt, Keats and Charles and Mary Lamb, the adapters of Shakespeare’s stories.  Charles Cowden Clarke was a business partner of Novello and although he was 22 years older than her it’s clear that theirs was a love match. She was 17 when they became engaged and married eighteen months later.

 The year after their marriage, Mary set about the task of creating a Concordance to Shakespeare’s works, a Verbal Index to all the Passages in the Dramatic Works of the Poet. This massive task took twelve years, and was eventually published in eighteen monthly parts, being completed in 1845. It was far superior to the existing version, and was not superseded for another 50 years.

Her next Shakespearean project was to write a series of fifteen essays which were published under the title The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s heroines. With titles including Juliet: the white dove of Verona and Ophelia: the rose of Elsinore it’s easy to see why Cowden Clarke’s work is now unrecognised, but these prequels, written in the style of much of the fiction of their time, were aimed at helping young women in particular to find a way into Shakespeare’s plays and other more worthwhile literature.

 Mary then moved on: she was the first woman to edit all of Shakespeare’s plays (Henrietta Bowdler, using her husband’s name, had censored 20 of them of scurrilous material in The Family Shakespeare). In 1860 Mary’s edition appeared “with a scrupulous revision of the text”. She and her husband then worked jointly on an annotated edition which was issued in weekly parts from 1863-68.

 They continued to collaborate on The Shakespeare Key, unlocking the Treasures of his Style, elucidating the Peculiarities of his Construction, and displaying the Beauties of his Expression; forming a Companion to The Complete  Concordance to Shakespeare, a project which took them up to 1872, though only published seven years later after the death of her husband.

By 1879, when Mary was 70 years old, she had completed a concordance, two editions, a series of essays, and a major reference work on Shakespeare. This extraordinary body of work does not include the many stories and articles which she had written and published on other subjects during her career.

 In case you’re thinking that she must have been an over-serious, dull Victorian, her autobiography, published in 1896 when she was 87, is written with delightful joie de vivre and good humour. She was happy to be one of Charles Dickens band of amateur actors who in 1848 took The Merry Wives of Windsor and other plays on tour, playing the comic role of the servant, Mistress Quickly. Apparently her performance was one of the highlights of the evening.

 As a final note, I discovered while researching in the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive a book which had once belonged to Mary Cowden Clarke. It’s a copy of Edward P Vining’s book The mystery of Hamlet: an attempt to solve an old problem, 1881. Vining was a well-known actor who had played Mercutio in the 1864 Tercentenary celebrations in Stratford-upon-Avon. His book suggests that Hamlet is not only a womanish man, but, “in very deed a woman, desperately striving to fill a place she was by nature unfitted”. The flyleaf of the SCLA copy contains Mary’s decisive handwritten comment that the premise of the book was “preposterous”.

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Sorrow, pitiful sorrow; the burning of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The theatre burning, showing the wind blowing away from the Library wing on the left

In the early afternoon of Saturday 6 March 1926 a man was cycling down Chapel Lane in Stratford when he spotted smoke coming from the roof of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in front of him.

He immediately took action to raise the alarm, but found the fire had already taken hold. The building was full of smoke and timber could be heard cracking. People rushed to help, but there was little they could do even with a river so close. Horse-drawn fire engines had to come from surrounding towns, and I was once told by a person who was there that the horses were near exhaustion when they arrived, so hard they had been driven.

 It was all in vain, and I’ll let Ivor Brown and George Fearon, authors of the 1939 book Amazing Monument, tell the story.
Soon hoses innumerable were being played on the flames which threatened, at any minute, to bring the hideous baronial towner crashing on to the roof of the Library and Museum, where were kept so many treasures of Shakespeare and his day. These had to be saved. Volunteers were called for and quickly responded. A human chain was made across the road from the interior of the Museum to the Memorial Lecture Room. Books, pictures, and relics were transferred from hand to hand and finally deposited in safety well away from the flames. So great was the enthusiasm that two men were able to carry out, with the greatest of ease, an enormous marble bust which required seven men to put it back. It speaks well for the honesty of Stratfordians that not one single relic was lost during this excitement. There were no snappers-up of unconsidered treasures.

The things which were removed to safety, whilst the flames were roaring round about them, included the first four Folios, the Droeshout portrait, numerous large oil paintings, hundreds of valuable books, relics of famous Shakespearean actors, a piece of the inevitable mulberry tree, and a hundred and one other exhibits. Whilst all this was going on the fire was spreading. It looked as though the tower would crash at any minute.

The ruins of the theatre before rebuilding began in 1929. The Library and Art Gallery wing is on the right

By a lucky chance the wind direction changed so that the fire was blown towards the river, and away from the Library and Art Gallery wing. It took three hours to move all the treasures, and the fire still raged in the rest of the building. Eventually the tower collapsed, as did the roof of the auditorium. By the next morning, only the walls of the main building were still standing. But the Library and Art Gallery wing was untouched, and is the only part of the original 1879 building that still contains original architectural features, including, incredibly, its stained glass windows.

The contents of the Library and Art Gallery returned to their places, and became part of the new building when it reopened in 1932. In 1964 the Theatre’s Library and Archive collections were transferred to the newly-built Shakespeare Centre in Henley Street where purpose-built fireproof strong rooms had been created for both the theatre’s and the Birthplace Trust’s paper collections. The RSC’s paintings, costumes and memorabilia are also now located in secure storage well away from the theatre itself.

Theatres have a terrible record for burning down. Shakespeare’s own Globe burned in 1613, the fire starting in the theatre’s thatch. Who knows what treasures might have been lost in that fire?

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Farewell to the majestic cedar

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The Cedar of Lebanon in the garden to Shakespeare's Birthplace on a misty morning

It’s sad to report that the Cedar of Lebanon tree which stands in the garden of Shakespeare’s Birthplace has to be taken down later this week. It’s a real focal point of the garden, forming the backdrop for countless photographs, and  must have been seen and admired by millions of visitors over the years.

Several attempts have been made to date the tree, unsuccessfully, as in spite of the many images in the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, none of them show it as a young tree, and there is no record of its planting. These trees were first brought into the UK in the mid-seventeenth century, but the height of their popularity was in the eighteenth century when every country house planted at least one in their gardens, many still to be seen today. Now standing at 15.5 metres tall, it’s estimated that the tree is probably around 200 years old, but ironically it will only be possible to date the tree accurately after it has been felled.

The cedar tree appears in classical and biblical texts as a symbol of power and majesty, and Shakespeare refers to it several times. In Cymbeline, a written tablet left with Posthumus is interpreted, prophesying good fortune:
The lofty cedar, royal Cymbeline,
Personates thee: and thy lopp’d branches point
Thy two sons forth; who by Belarius stolen,
For many years thought dead, are now reviv’d
To the majestic cedar joined; whose issue
Promises Britain peace and plenty. 

And in Henry VI Part 2, the mighty Earl of Warwick suggests his family, represented by its crest, has the endurance and strength of a cedar tree:
Now by my father’s badge, old Nevil’s crest,
The rampant bear chain’d to the ragged staff,
This day I’ll wear aloft my burgonet,
(As on a mountain top the cedar shows,
That keeps his leaves in spite of any storm.) 

It really is that close to the main road

Unfortunately the tree in the Birthplace Garden has been in decline for some years. It first shed branches in 1949, and just in 2007 a major branch fell off the tree, miraculously happening early in the morning before anyone was in the garden. This would probably not be the case if any of the remaining branches were to fall as they have grown out over Guild Street, the extremely busy A3400, which carries much of the through traffic in the town. It will be a sad day for everyone when this once-beautiful historic tree is cut down, and it will be greatly missed.

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Marie Corelli and Shakespeare on World Book Day

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Today is World Book Day, so it’s a good opportunity to look at an author, almost forgotten now, but who 100 years ago outsold just about everybody.

Stratford-upon-Avon 100 years ago attracted literary tourists who were interested, not in Shakespeare, but in a living novelist. Marie Corelli was a prolific writer who made a fortune from the 20-or-so novels that she wrote in a style that has been described as “over-written exotic romantic fantasy”. She came to live in Stratford at the height of her fame in 1899, seeking a soothing place to live and work. From Hall’s Croft, she later moved to Mason Croft where she lived until her death in 1924.

 Marie was a larger than life character who sometimes seemed to confuse fact and fiction. She certainly invented herself. The truth of her birth and early years are still not known, but it appears she was born Minnie Mackay, in 1855, the illegitimate daughter of the minor but respected author Charles Mackay. Although a bright and charming child she had a lonely childhood with no friends of her own age who might have brought her down to earth.

 At some point she began calling herself Marie Corelli, claiming Italian descent, and had a short career as a pianist before deciding to pursue writing. Her love of all things Italian led her, while living in Stratford, to buy a gondola from Venice, complete with Italian gondolier who took her up and down the Avon.

 It’s easy now to mock her way of life and aspirations. She longed to be respected as a professional author, but her books, although wildly popular, were never taken seriously. Lacking a sense of humour, she was both aggressively insensitive to others’ feelings and oversensitive herself when she met opposition.

 In Stratford, locals were initially flattered by the famous author taking up residence in the town, but the honeymoon was short-lived. Marie took on all comers when it came to preserving any part of the town which dated back to Shakespeare’s day, and had public rows with people through the pages of the local newspaper. Mr T Edgar Pemberton wrote “This curiously angry lady would have us believe that until she chose to reside at Stratford, no one did anything for the township, and the memory of Shakespeare”, before listing some of the buildings which had been successfully restored without her assistance.

The Shakespeare Gold Medal

 She attempted to encourage local appreciation of Shakespeare in 1919 by sponsoring an annual Shakespeare essay competition at his old school, the winners to be awarded medals. The winner of the final gold medal was my father, Eric Tompkins. He found the experience of collecting his medal from Mason Croft intimidating to say the least.

 A few years ago, tucked into his copy of a biography of Marie Corelli, I found the original exam paper, five pages long. It’s full of leading questions from which it’s easy to see her opinions: “Has the deer-stealing episode any foundation in fact? Considering the manner in which Sir T Lucy was employed at this time, are there not other reasons for Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford than the legendary deer-stealing?”

 And on the authorship question, “Did Ignatius Donelly visit Stratford before or after his book entitled “The Great Cryptogram?” Was he not under the impression that the Grammar School was a Dame’s School kept by a couple of illiterate old ladies? When the true position of the Grammar School was pointed out to him, is it not a fact that he left Stratford and England at once – never to return?” 

Mason Croft as it was when lived in by Marie Corelli

 Marie Corelli wanted Mason Croft to be preserved as a shrine, the house to provide lodgings for distinguished persons in literature or science visiting Stratford. After the death of her devoted companion, Bertha Vyver, in 1942, Marie’s will was declared void, and the house’s contents were sold. By a stroke of good fortune the building now houses the Shakespeare Institute, part of the University of Birmingham, devoted to the study of Shakespeare, and where her music room is still used for recitals, lectures and performances.

And perhaps Marie Corelli’s hopes for her competition did bear fruit. My father became a scientist, working in industry, but all his life he read, listened to and attended performances of the plays, gave lectures on Shakespeare’s life, and of course instilled in me a love of Shakespeare too.

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Picturing Shakespeare: Alan O’Cain’s The Tempest

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

 

Full Fathom Five, by Alan O'Cain

Responses to Shakespeare’s plays come in many forms, and his influence on other art forms such as music, painting and design was explored as part of the British Shakespeare Association’s Lancaster University conference last weekend.

 Picturing Shakespeare was one of these sessions, chaired by Stuart Sillars who has himself written several authoritative books on Shakespeare in art and delivered one of the plenary lectures.  Alan O’Cain is a practicing artist and designer who officially observed, both in the rehearsal room and onstage,  the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest in 2006-7 which starred Patrick Stewart. In his engaging talk he spoke about this work, posing the question “What insights can a visual artist bring to interpretations of a play?”

Alan explained how his own idea of the island, gained from readings, was of a deserted and exotic place fringed with golden sands. On arriving at rehearsals, he found that the director was intent on creating something very different. In Dominic Cavendish’s words, Rupert Goold’s directorial vision…conceives Prospero’s island not as some tropical paradise but an inhospitable stretch of freezing Arctic tundra, across which snow is constantly drifting. This world was complete with Inuit costumes and rituals.   Transcribed interviews with the costume and set designers and other information, are on the RSC’s website.  

There is some justification for Goold’s choice: Shakespeare doesn’t describe the island in any detail, and teasingly allows characters to contradict each other. Gonzalo finds that “here is everything advantageous to life”, Antonio retorting in an aside “True; save means to live”. I’ve written before about how English seafarers were exploring the Arctic region during Shakespeare’s lifetime, even undertaking whaling on the Svalbard archipelago at 80 degrees north. It’s perfectly possible that Shakespeare knew of this inhospitable but magical landscape, where gathering firewood is indeed an essential part of life.

Shakespeare deliberately encourages actors and audience to imagine their own island. While the literal choices are either the West Indies or the Mediterranean, stage productions and films have found much more inventive solutions such as Janice Honeyman’s 2009 spectacular post-colonial production for the Baxter Theatre Company in Cape Town, located in South Africa.

The figure of Ariel in Alan O'Cain's painting My Liberty

Alan found Goold’s view of the island required a dramatic readjustment of his ideas about the play. He also had to find a way of representing the energy of the actors in rehearsal, and explained how difficult it was to sketch the constantly-moving actors, producing notebooks to catch significant moments, and how he eventually produced the fourteen artworks that were his response.

The figure of Ariel was key. Again, Dominic Cavendish describes how Julian Bleach, in a “chilling and wonderfully restrained performance”, is

Ariel and Prospero, photographed by Tristram Kenton

A figure of Beckettian austerity – white-faced, black-garmented, unsmiling – Bleach creeps around the stage clutching an hour-glass, his handheld countdown to personal liberty. How greatly he craves that freedom is communicated by nothing more extravagant than his haunted eyes.

Alan O'Cain's portrait of Miranda: Do you love me?

And Kate Bassett wrote about Mariah Gale’s interpretation of Miranda, “sweetly gawky…, stiff with isolation”.  As Alan put it, “If the artist is an expressionist he will aim to capture the direct personal emotional impact of what he sees before him”. 

Alan O’Cain offered a compelling insight into the challenges of being an artist in interpreting not only Shakespeare’s play, but a production of it. Do take a look at the evocative Images of all the paintings he created, and listen to his talk on the subject given to the Shakespeare Institute in October 2011, recorded by Backdoor Broadcasting.

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Ira Aldridge, Shakespearean actor and gentleman of colour

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Ira Aldridge as Othello

The black actor Ira Aldridge is now recognised as one of the most remarkable interpreters of Shakespeare’s leading roles. He first appeared on the London stage as Othello in 1825, and remained associated with the role for the rest of his life.  The critics’ reviews were patronising and racist, but Aldridge took advantage of even the negative comments, taking The African Roscius as the title by which he became universally known.

 He was always popular with audiences who found his physical acting style exciting, and his appearance powerful and exotic. He encouraged the legend that he had been born in Senegal, descended from an African prince whose family was forced to escape to America to save their lives, while the mundane truth was that he was born in New York in 1807 of poor parents. Finding it was impossible to pursue an acting career in America he came to England at the age of 17 determined to make his name.

Ira Aldridge as Mungo in Padlock

Following poor notices in London, but taking advantage of the interest in himself, he toured relentlessly, including a visit to Stratford in 1851. He performed at the Royal Shakespearian Theatre in Chapel Lane for a week at the end of April and early May, with one performance of Othello followed by farces and melodramas including Slave, or the revolt of Surinam, Padlock, and Revenge, or the Captive Moor.  While in Stratford he visited Shakespeare’s Birthplace, signing the Visitors’ Book on 2nd May “Ira Aldridge: the African Tragedian, Senegal, Africa.” He included a quote by the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice:  “Mislike me not for my complexion, the shadowed livery of the burnished sun”. Both his wife and son also signed the book.

 Elsewhere he extended his range, performing Shylock, Macbeth and King Lear, and rather bizarrely had to “white up” for these roles. Titus Andronicus was largely rewritten so that Aaron the Moor, the villain of Shakespeare’s play, could be played by Aldridge as its hero.

 For the last 15 years of his life he toured the Continent with great success, spending much time in Russia. This review appeared in a newspaper in St Petersburg, where he performed 31 times in a month.

 No sooner did the Moor make his appearance, than I felt myself, I confess it, instantly subjugated, not by the terrible and menacing look of the hero, but by the  naturalness, calm dignity, and by the stamp of power and force that he manifested.

Engravings of Aldridge usually highlit the noble, dignified side of Othello. However he did little to dispel the rumour that he had actually killed some of the actresses playing Desdemona. In one of his last UK performances Madge Robertson (later Mrs Kendal) played the role at the Haymarket in London, and in her memoirs she described how he would take her out of the bed and drag her around the stage by her hair before smothering her.

 Aldridge’s foreign tours encouraged translations of Shakespeare into some European languages for the first time. He was showered with honours by many European heads of state, and was entitled to the title Chevalier Ira Aldridge, Knight of Saxony.

 He died in the Polish town of Lodz in 1867.  Memorials in this country are few, but in Stratford, a plaque for him is on the back of one of the seats in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

 Aldridge was a true ambassador for Shakespeare, bringing his work to audiences who had never encountered him before. Shakespeare too enabled Aldridge’s career to progress beyond the conventional fare of Victorian theatre to major roles which allowed audiences to see that “a gentleman of colour” could also be a great actor.

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Teaching Shakespeare: the British Shakespeare Association conference

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

At the end of Friday afternoon, a new publication, Teaching Shakespeare, is to be launched at the British Shakespeare Association’s conference at Lancaster University. This pilot issue is being published both on paper and online, and after the conference will be available on the BSA’s website. It’s designed to help all those involved in teaching Shakespeare, especially at school level. In order to provide a forum for discussion and a place for announcements and questions a new blog Shakespeare in Education: the BSA Education Network is also being announced which will become active shortly. I’ve been setting up this new blog and am delighted to be involved with this strand of BSA activity.

The new publication and the blog will, it’s hoped, see some lively sharing of ideas on the subject of making Shakespeare come alive for students of all ages.

This conference includes a particularly strong schools strand. On Friday the programme features a local schools’ open rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet before the launch of the new publication and all weekend there will be a whole series of workshops and panels focussed on teaching and on childrens’ engagement with Shakespeare.

An Elizabethan school room

On Friday afternoon the panel on Shakespeare and Children includes consideration of the role of the child actor, on the way in which children speak in early modern plays, and on the boys’ company Edward’s Boys. On Saturday the stress on education will continue with a panel on Teaching Shakespeare inside out which will include papers on the use of contemporary works of art to assist the teaching of Shakespeare, blogs and wikis as learning tools, and the use of television adaptations in education.

The paper on Edwards’ Boys will be given by Perry Mills, from Shakespeare’s own school, King Edward VI in Stratford-upon-Avon. He will be sharing some of his experiences staging a selection of the repertoire of Early Modern childrens’ companies using only boy actors. He began this project in 2003, exploring how boys play female roles in a series of extracts from Shakespeare and Jonson. Then he and the new company began to focus on plays written explicitly for boys’ companies by dramatists including Lyly, Marston, Middleton, Dekker and Webster. These productions bring to life rarely-staged plays, and have offered valuable glimpses into the dynamics of an all-boy company. According to Professor John Jowett of  the Shakespeare Institute “the company is… the only stable group of players in the world consisting entirely of boy actors”.

Here’s an extract from RSC Chief Associate Director Greg Doran’s blog post on Edwards’ Boys performance of Antonio’s Revenge at Middle Temple Hall in London in 2011:

Edwards' Boys at Middle Temple Hall, London

The KES boys do a great job, with lashings of relish (and admirable diction) they throw themselves into the action, having a particularly good time ripping out the evil Duke Piero’s tongue. In the lofty hall of Middle Temple under its magnificent double hammer beam roof, Marston’s anarchic gore-fest seems to suit the crepuscular gloom.

It’s not hard to see how the novelty of these boy companies found huge popularity in the early 1600’s. Rosencrantz tells Hamlet of ‘an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapp’d for’t’. This ‘late innovation’ caused some concern among the profession, ‘berattled’ the common stages, and caused much ‘throwing about of brains’. Ben Jonson is said to have liked writing for them because he knew they would not argue back and change his script, or improvise around it.

It’s sure to be an interesting paper on a subject that is often discussed, but rarely explored.

 

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Players in Stratford-upon-Avon: Robert Bearman’s latest discoveries

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Elizabethan travelling players

A few weeks ago Dr Robert Bearman wrote a piece for this blog explaining that he had rediscovered some evidence about touring companies visiting Stratford-upon-Avon in Shakespeare’s lifetime. He’s now found some more intriguing evidence relating to Stratford Corporation’s attitude to playing companies which he’s sharing with readers of this blog.

 Growing hostility on the part of the Stratford-upon-Avon authorities towards travelling troupes of players is apparently already well documented. Until 1598, the annual accounts of the borough chamberlains are peppered with fairly regular payments to visiting companies. But then, in 1602, we have a Corporation order forbidding further performances on Corporation property on pain of a fine of 10 shillings, raised to a massive £10 by a further order in February 1612. As if in confirmation of this growing hostility, the King’s Men, were paid six shillings in 1622 for not performing in the Gild Hall.

            However, as is often the case, things may not have been quite as simple. In getting together material for the next volume of Minutes and Accounts of the Stratford Corporation, several pieces of evidence, hitherto overlooked, suggest a more complex picture. For instance, no-one seems to have noticed that in the Corporation’s elaborate book of orders, issued in July 1612, the fine of £10, so recently announced, for allowing a performance on Corporation property, was within months reduced to 40 shillings. This was still four times higher than that imposed by the original order of 1602, but on reflection had perhaps been deemed a more appropriate penalty. The inference here is of an initial knee-jerk reaction following a disorderly, albeit unrecorded, public entertainment in February, followed by a more sober assessment of the situation.

William Kemp

But forbidding performances on Corporation property was not the same as keeping players out of the town. In confirmation of this, we find that, in 1618, the Corporation, on the bailiff’s appointment, paid one company of players 5 shillings and another 3s 4d. Even more surprising was to find, in a set of accounts which we have now been able to date to 1620, a payment of 6 shillings, again by the bailiff’s appointment, to another troupe. Given that the well-publicised payment in 1622 to the King’s Men was for not playing in the Gild Hall, it may well be that these payments of 1618 and 1620 were made in the same spirit: namely, that, although the Corporation could prevent performances on its property, it was still thought advisable to keep the players on-side through a continuing, if tempered, display of patronage. This is of particular interest as it was in May 1619 that the Corporation’s Puritan majority managed to displace the easy-going minister, John Rogers, with the more radical Thomas Wilson, leading to civil disturbance and the publication of libellous pamphlets attacking the Puritan tendencies of several Corporation stalwarts; on the face of it, an unlikely time for a compromise on the issue of travelling players.

It just goes to show how misleading even official documentation can be unless put in its context by an expert. With so many documents having been lost caution is always advisable.

  If you’re interested in acquiring a copy of Dr Bearman’s excellent book Minutes and Accounts of the Stratford Corporation 1599-1609, please contact Cathy Millwood, at dugdale-society@hotmail.co.uk . Readers of this blog will be able to acquire it at the bargain rate of £30, a discount of £5 off the normal price.

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