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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Seeing Shakespeare inside-out at the British Shakespeare Association conference

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

At the end of the week I’m going to the British Shakespeare Association’s Conference at Lancaster University.  The three-day conference runs from 24-26 February and is on the theme of Shakespeare Inside-Out: Depth/Surface/Meaning. A host of lectures, seminars and practical sessions will be looking at the ways in which we are drawn into Shakespeare’s plays and poems through external surfaces: books, screens, images and so on, while the texts of the plays turn our deepest human experiences and emotions outwards through speech  and performance. I’m really looking forward to three days of stimulating discussion on this theme, with a healthy dose of entertainment mixed in.

Alan Howard as Henry V, in Henry IV part 2

My own contribution will be a presentation looking at the subject of theatre costume design. I believe that the text of Shakespeare’s plays is fundamental to any engagement with his work, but I’m interested in how costume design can improve the audience’s understanding of the play, and how the designer uses his non-verbal responses to the characters to communicate with those involved in the production, including director and actors.

 I’ve been interested in this since I saw the end of the RSC’s production of Henry IV part 2 in 1975/6. Having spent much time larking around with Falstaff in two plays, Prince Hal, Alan Howard, inherits the throne. This is the moment when he has to signal publicly that he has turned his back on his past life. It’s always a powerful moment in the play, but in this production is was electric. He appears, as Henry V, appeared far upstage, dressed from head to toe in a suit of golden metal. Even his face was covered. Walking slowly and stiffly, like a robot, he moved downstage towards Falstaff who was kneeling.

 Falstaff addressed the King familiarly, as “royal Hal, and “my sweet boy”. When the king arrived downstage, he removed his mask and spoke:
I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester!
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man…
But being awak’d I do despise my dream.

 Even before he had spoken, everyone in the audience understood how completely the new king was separating himself from his past. The suit of armour also sent out signals about the state of monarchy, both repelling outside attack, and imprisoning the occupant. This costume, designed by the great designer Farrah, was a revelation to me. Up to that point, I’d always thought of costumes as complementing  Shakespeare’s words, but this one was far more than mere decoration, adding an extra dimension to this key scene.

The costume design for Peggy Ashcroft as Cleopatra

When I came to work with the RSC’s archives at the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, I continued to be intrigued by the several thousand costume and set designs in the collection. The costume designer is a creative artist who has to take into account and sometimes contribute to the director’s overall concept for the production, also taking into account that the costumes have to be worn onstage by individuals who are themselves artists, and they need to be happy with the result. He has also to think about the practicalities of costume construction, collaborating with the costume department.

 Jessica Risser-Milne, a costume designer, writes a blog in which she explains:
How can we as designers engage actors in an appropriate dialogue about character, when we have already created a design with the director? How do we encourage them to share and collaborate, without overriding the design choices we have already made?  How can we create WITH actors (who don’t fully finalize a character until well into the rehearsal process … and for many, until they put on that costume we’ve designed for them.)?

And Jim Miller, from the University of Missouri, a practicing designer and director, explains the process in this engaging video.

You might also be interested in the RSC’s Spotlight on the Costume Department which explains the practical side of costume production.

Finally, if you’re interested in the design of Shakespeare onstage, you should look at the Designing Shakespeare website created by Christie Carson of Royal Holloway College, University of London. It covers the period 1960-2000. Just click on the Explore Collection button at the top left of the screen.

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Daniel Radcliffe and the story of child actors: Young Roscius comes of age

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Daniel Radcliffe in The Woman in Black

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe is making the transition to adult actor, starring in the newly-released film The Woman in Black. He seems to have survived the experience of spending his teenage years acting in this successful series of films quite happily.

 Exploiting the talents of children in the entertainment business is now done with more sensitivity than in the past. I wrote a few weeks ago about the clown Joseph Grimaldi who was put on the stage by his father from the age of two, and in the early nineteenth century quite a number of children were put on stage by their parents.

The most famous was Master Betty, the Young Roscius, “The Wonder of the Age” who was the toast of London from his first appearance aged 11 in 1804 until 1806. At one point the competition was so great that he appeared at both Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres on succeeding evenings. Master Betty performed in whole plays, the rest of the cast adults, his best Shakespeare roles being Hamlet and Romeo. It’s clear from satirical cartoons such as the 1804 engraving by Rowlands called Theatrical Leap Frog that Master Betty was a serious threat to even the greatest Shakespeare tragedian of the day, John Philip Kemble.

Shakespeare knew all about the threat to adult actors of children. In Hamlet, the “tragedians of the city” are forced to go on tour because of the popularity of children on stage. It’s a reflection of actual events as for a while companies like The Children of Paul’s offered adult companies like Shakespeare’s serious competition. 
There is, sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for’t. These are now the fashion.

 Although also the fashion in the early 1800s, the interest in child performers continued for decades. They included in 1805 “the Infant Billington and Roscius, Miss Lee Sugg, (not seven years of age), who is honoured with the patronage of Her Majesty and their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales. [In] Edinburgh… her infantine efforts were honoured with the most flattering applause for thirty-one nights.” As part of her performance she recited the The Seven Ages of Man speech from As You Like It and “To be or not to be” from Hamlet.

 

Master Grossmith as Richard III

Master W R Grossmith was another Infant Roscius, as he got older becoming the Young Roscius, performing until around 1830, when he was said to be 11 years old. His biography was published in 1825. On his appearance in Stratford in 1830 his “laughable entertainment” included several extracts from Shakespeare such as the dagger scene in Macbeth, Shylock, and several scenes from Richard III. Such was the popularity of young actors that Master B Grossmith, possibly his younger brother, also put on his show in Stratford’s Town Hall in 1835.

 In 1830 Master Henry Herbert, yet another Infant Roscius, was thought to have achieved such distinction, aged only seven and a half, that an eighteen page biographical account of his life was published.

 No wonder Dickens satirised the business of child performers in Nicholas Nickleby. The daughter of Vincent Crummles, known as the Infant Phenomenon, is supposedly ten years old and “the idol of every place we go into”. Dickens comments:
The infant phenomenon, though of short stature, had a comparatively aged countenance, and had moreover been precisely the same age…for five good years. But she had been kept up late every night, and put upon an unlimited allowance of gin-and-water from infancy, to prevent her growing tall.

Writing in the late 1830s when children as young as six were being sent down the mines it’s unlikely Dickens meant readers to see this as cruel.

 As a young adult, Daniel Radcliffe is now looking for new challenges, and he too could do worse than trying his hand at Shakespeare on stage.

PS The boys of King Edward’s School in Stratford are performing Thomas Dekker and John Webster’s play Westward Ho! on 7,8,9,10 March. The play was originally staged by the Children of Paul’s. Edward’s Boys have a great reputation for performing plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and this will be a great opportunity to see what boys can do!

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The Phoenix and Turtle: Shakespeare’s Valentines

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Today we are celebrating St Valentine’s day by giving flowers, chocolates and cards decorated with symbols of hearts and roses to those we love. Traditionally it’s the day when birds pair up for the mating season, and Chaucer, writing in the Parlement of Foules (1382), put it in writing. Shakespeare refers to the story in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Theseus finds the lovers asleep in the woods:
                                 Saint Valentine is past;
Begin these wood-birds but to couple now? 

In mid-February there may be little sign of spring on the ground, but the 14th signals the beginning of the end of winter. Back in January this year there were already indications that birds were getting in the mood with courtship displays, and now the weather is warming up again the birds are resuming their pre-nuptial activities.

I thought I would celebrate St Valentine’s day by looking at one of Shakespeare’s least-known poems that celebrates the true and faithful love of two birds, The Phoenix and Turtle. The birds are the mythical Phoenix, which rises afresh from the ashes of fire, and the turtle dove, a symbol of fidelity. At the end of The Winter’s Tale Paulina, a widow, likens herself to a dove:
                                    I, an old turtle,
Will wing me to some wither’d bough, and there
My mate (that’s never to be found again)
Lament till I am lost.

The title page of Loves Martyr, in which The Phoenix and Turtle was first printed

The Phoenix and Turtle is mysterious work. It is thought to have been written in 1600, and appeared in a collection of poems published in 1601, Loves Martyr or Rosalins Complaint. Its form is unlike other poems by Shakespeare, and though obviously deeply allegorical its actual meaning is far from clear. Some have read it as a political allegory on the love of Queen Elizabeth and Essex. Others have suggested it alludes to the dedicatee of Loves Martyr, Sir John Salisbury. Or it may have a religious interpretation: the relationship between the birds, as lovers, symbolising the holy trinity. The Folger Shakespeare Library contains an essay on the poem.

Only 67 lines long, the poem begins by calling on “the bird of loudest lay” to be a herald to bring other birds, “every fowl of tyrant wing”, to mourn the death of the Phoenix and the turtle, who symbolised the virtues of love:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence. 

It goes on to describe the birds’ mutual love:
So they love’d, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one:
Two distincts, division none;
Number there in love was slain. 

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance and no space was seen
‘Twixt this Turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine
That the Turtle saw his right
Flaming in the Phoenix’ sight;
Either was the other’s mine.

The mythical Phoenix arising from the flames, from an Emblem book

The poem ends with the Threnos, or funeral song:
Beauty, truth and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos’d, in cinders lie.

Death in now the Phoenix’ nest,
And the turtle’s loyal breast
To eternity doth rest. 

Leaving no posterity,
‘Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity. 

Truth may seem, but cannot be;
Beauty brag, but ‘tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be. 

To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair:
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.

Unusually formal in style, the poem relies as much of Shakespeare’s work does on metaphorical allusions to birds. John Masefield said that “This poem gives to a flock of thoughts about the passing of truth and beauty the mystery and vitality of birds, who come from a far country, to fill the mind with their crying”. 

In his edition for the Arden Shakespeare F T Prince suggests that in the poem “Shakespeare has compressed all his feeling for pure passion and loyalty in human love”, a fitting sentiment for St Valentine’s day.

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Taming Petruchio

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Publicity shot for the 2012 RSC Taming of the Shrew

In his latest blog post, Stanley Wells has picked up on Michael Billington’s tweet about The Taming of the Shrew. Was he right, the critic asked, to suggest some thirty years ago that this play should be banned?

How time has moved on. The audience for the current RSC production, which is about to go on tour, express their enjoyment noisily. It’s a confident, brash production that makes the most of the play’s potential for slapstick, and of the attractiveness of Kate and Petruchio. On first seeing Kate, Petruchio turns to the audience and mouths “wow”. He strips to the waist for his wedding. Their onstage wrestling will inevitably lead them under the stage-size duvet, and it’s just a question of how long it takes them to get there. As Professor Wells notes, the production is made more palateable by the relish brought to the extended induction, the play becoming Christopher Sly’s vulgar dream.

 More seriously, the play provides directors of Shakespeare with a tricky challenge. How can it be explained that the man who wrote with such tenderness in Romeo and Juliet could write a scene where a man humiliates his new wife in front of her own family?
She is my goods, my chattels, she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing. 

Latham's Falconry, 1615

Petruchio’s sentiments are appalling, but in the second he explains his plan. He will tame Kate by following the advice of books like Latham’s Falconry, depriving her of sleep and food as he would a bird of prey. This also sounds distasteful, but in the many other versions of this story the husband always resorts to wife-beating. Kate and Petruchio often fight in productions, but Shakespeare doesn’t require Petruchio to strike Kate. He may be violent to his servant, but it’s Kate who ties up her sister, who strikes her tutor, and who hits Petruchio.   

In Shakespeare’s own time there were debates about whether it was lawful for a man to beat his wife, and W Whately, in The Bride Bush, 1617, suggested women should accept that “mine husband is my superior, my better: he hath authority and rule over me; nature hath given it to him… God hath given it to him”.

 In 1978/9 Michael Bogdanov, in a landark RSC production, still saw Petruchio wrestle his Kate to the ground in their first scene together. Perhaps it was this that made Billington label the play “totally offensive” on his first viewing. Another critic, Benedict Nightingale, saw that Bogdanov had uncovered a “secret play” which Shakespeare had hidden “inside the official one”, the production attempting to decode Shakespeare’s subversive message about sexual equality. This may be endowing Shakespeare with too much modern sensitivity, but Bogdanov certainly ensured that Katherina’s final speech was highly charged. 

David Suchet as Grumio, Paola Dionisotti as Kate, Jonathan Pryce as Petruchio admiring the sun (or the moon)

Let’s rewind a bit, to Act 4 Scene 5, the scene where Petruchio insists the sun is the moon, and vice-versa, and their next scene, in which he asks her for a kiss. Kate has learned that life is not just easier, but more fun, if she is in Petruchio’s team. She calls him “love”. Paola Dionisotti, in Carol Rutter’s book Clamorous Voices says “Suddenly, everything was possible. I used to feel, ‘I think I know what game I’m playing. I think it will be all right. I think I can actually enjoy this’. ” But what about Petruchio?  

 When the production got to London, it was reviewed again, and Billington saw it differently. “Before, it looked as if a brutal Petruchio was gratuitously tormenting a high-spirited but not unamiable Kate. I now see that this production is entirely about the taming of Petruchio”.

The master stroke of the final scene was indeed about Petruchio, who had failed to learn when to stop. By making her obedience the subject of a conventional bet with other men, he had gone too far. Paola Dionisotti again: “He makes the mistake of encouraging me to say something. So I say it all”. During her lengthy speech, Jonathan Pryce exhibited more and more discomfort. Billington: “Confronted with the logic of his own actions, he quails: and when she ventures to kiss his shoe, he instantly withdraws his foot”.

Paola Dionisotti describes the same moment:  “My Kate was kneeling and I reached over to kiss his foot and he gasped, recoiled, jumped back, because somehow he’s completely blown it. He’s as trapped now by society as she was in the beginning. Somewhere he’s an okay guy, but it’s too late. “

 Instead of the passionate coupling of the current production, the two protagonists left the stage as lonely individuals. There was little whooping, but it was a production the audience did not forget.

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Performance history and the critic: Michael Billington’s point of view

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

A week or so ago Michael Billington of the Guardian, the UK’s most respected theatre critic, and now on twitter @billicritic, wrote a piece about his job. He talked about the challenges of writing a piece that takes into account the fact that the reader may not have seen any other version while also writing a critical assessment of the production’s success. The critic can be simultaneously valued for the insight gained by years of theatre going and damned for it.

 It must be particularly difficult with Shakespeare. There’s relatively little need to explain what the play’s about as there is with a new play, and most critics will have lost count of the number of Hamlets and Romeo and Juliets they’ve seen. Avoiding comparisons must be almost impossible.

 I’ve certainly read reviews that consist almost entirely of comparisons between the current offering and other productions stretching back decades, usually dull to read and irrelevant for most readers. But there is certainly a place for comparison: a critic’s experience can be invaluable for the student who’s specifically looking at trends in performance.

 Comparing two or more productions is an excellent way of studying the play. I spent many years working with the RSC’s archives which extensively documents Shakespeare in performance, at the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive. Looking at the decisions made by director, designer and actor, examining why they chose as they did, sends students straight back to the play itself: what does Shakespeare actually say?  John Russell Brown, in the introduction to his 2011 book Studying Shakespeare in Performance, writes:
The entire theatrical event should come into the reckoning: the occasion, location and context for performance, the composition and expectation of the audience, the form and equipment of the theatre building, the skill, training and experience of the actors…. A student of the plays must also remember that every reader and critic will bring a unique experience and imagination with them.

In his recent piece, Billington stated how much he was affected by the 1973/4 RSC production of Richard II. Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco alternated the roles of the King and Bolingbroke. In one stroke, the director, John Barton, enforced the point, repeatedly made by Shakespeare, that the role of king dooms the person who takes it. Instead of seeing Richard as a weak king challenged by the stronger, ambitious Bolingbroke, as in most productions, Barton showed them to be mirror images of each other. The mirror in which Richard looks at himself in the deposition scene became the dominant image of the production.

 

Richard Pasco as Richard II, RST 1974

The production certainly gave audiences plenty to think about. Sparely staged in a black box set, Barton’s visual metaphors were used to great effect. For the scene at Flint Castlewhere Richard admits defeat to Bolingbroke he wore a magnificent pleated golden cloak. When he came to the lines:
Down, down I come, like glistering Phaethon,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades…

He held out his arms, and became the setting sun. 

Bolingbroke, once King Henry IV, becomes an uncertain figure. His opening speech in Henry IV part 1 is meant to establish the end of civil unrest, but begins in an unmistakeably minor key “So shaken as we are, so wan with care”, and his insistence that there will be “no more” war is quickly undercut by news of unrest in Wales and the north. In Henry IV part 2, his line “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” could be spoken by any of Shakespeare’s kings. Interestingly Holinshed, Shakespeare’s main source, compares Henry IV’s troubled existence with a classical source, using the same metaphor: “The state of such a king is noted by the poet in Dionysius, as in a mirror”.

 Billington is a perceptive critic who balances his years of experience with the ability to see what the director intends, and the judgement to see if it is achieved. Personally, I’d rather see a well-thought production, taking a few risks, even if I disagree with it, than one that’s just “all right”.  As John Russell Brown concludes, “This study is like a sport, worth watching for spectators, enjoyable and sometimes difficult or surprising for participants.”

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Charles Dickens, Shakespeare and Stratford-upon-Avon

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Dickens in 1842

Celebrations for the 7 February bicentenary of Charles Dickens’ birth are taking place all round the world. His exuberant language, eccentric characters, and gripping, often mysterious story lines, combined with his wacky sense of humour and desire for social justice, have made Dickens and his novels loved all round the world.

Dickens was born in Portsmouth and spent his adult life in the London area, but he had many links with Stratford-upon-Avon and Shakespeare. He visited the Birthplace at least twice, in 1838 and 1840, leaving his signature in the visitors’ book. On the second occasion he was accompanied by his wife and his friend and biographer John Forster. He visited Stratford at least once more, for the 1864 Tercentenary celebrations when he saw Twelfth Night performed.

We don’t know what Dickens himself made of the visits, but in Nicholas Nickleby the joke is meant to be on the vain and silly Mrs Wititterly when she says “I find I take so much more interest in his plays, after having been to that dear little dull house he was born in!…I don’t know how it is, but after you’ve seen the place and written your name in the little book, somehow or other you seem to be inspired; it kindles up quite a fire within one”.

The Birthplace around 1840

At the time of his visits to the house the Birthplace was still in private hands. Dickens took part in the drive to purchase it for the nation in 1847, being involved in the London Committee that worked alongside the Stratford Committee to secure the building. One of the aims of the 1864 celebrations was to raise funds for a new permanent memorial to Shakespeare. A statue was planned, but Dickens’ sentiment that “Shakespeare’s best monument is his works” held sway, eventually leading to the building of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1879.

Little Nell and her grandfather

Dickens’ love of Shakespeare is apparent everywhere, from the dedication of Nicholas Nickleby to the great Shakespeare actor William Macready to the performance of Hamlet in Great Expectations. Some links are more subtle. The horrific murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist is reminiscent of Duncan’s murder in Macbeth, and Little Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop can be likened to Cordelia and King Lear. Dickens quotes and misquotes from Shakespeare hundreds of times.

 As a child Dickens was taken by his father to Gads Hill, the site of Falstaff’s ambush in Henry IV part 1. He fell in love with the place, mostly for its Shakespearean associations, and it was a dream come true when years later he bought the grand house in which he lived for the last ten years of his life.

Following the purchase of the Birthplace in 1847, Dickens continued to be involved with it. He had an impecunious friend, Sheridan Knowles, and came up with the idea of raising money for “the endowment of a perpetual curatorship”, the first incumbent to be Knowles. Dickens decided to raise money with an amateur production of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, performed by himself and friends, and with typical enthusiasm threw himself into organising it.

Playbill for Dickens' production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1848

Forster wrote “He was the life and soul of the whole affair…he took everything on himself, and did the whole of it without an effort. He was stage-director, very often stage carpenter, scene-arranger, property-man, prompter and bandmaster.” Dickens played Justice Shallow, and was joined by George Cruikshank, his illustrator, Mark Lemon, editor of Punch, who played Falstaff, and the compiler of The Shakespeare Concordance, Mary Cowden Clark.

 In the summer of 1848 the production visited several cities, including London, Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh, and was performed before Queen Victoria. At that time Stratford had its own theatre, which from 1827 to 1872 played host to many touring companies. It stood about half way down Chapel Lane, and was demolished in 1872 to make way for the Great Garden of New Place. There is now no sign of it.

The Chapel Lane Theatre

While researching this piece I found evidence that Dickens originally planned to put on one performance in this little theatre. Tucked inside a pamphlet in the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive is a document dating from 1947 mentioning a letter to Dickens, now in the Forster Archive in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which contains “precise details of the auditorium and stage of the old theatre in Chapel Laneas well as plan[s] of both”. The V&A has confirmed the existence of the correspondence. The idea was dropped when it was decided that Stratford’s proximity to Birmingham might make audience numbers suffer.

For anyone wanting to spend some time finding out more about Dickens, I’d heartily recommend the Dickens in Context section of the British Library website, which includes videos of readings from his books by Simon Callow and images of documents from their collections on subjects relevant to his work and life, like Industrialisation, or Poverty and Wealth in early Victorian England.

Dickens was a man of enormous energy, warmth and love of life. If you want to join in with the celebrations for his 200th birthday, everything you need to know is on the Dickens 2012 website.

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Clowning around: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and Shakespeare

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

The Clowns service

At 3pm on Sunday 5 February the greatest clown in the history of England, Joseph Grimaldi will be remembered at the annual Clowns Service which takes place at Holy Trinity Church, Dalston, London. Here’s a link to the Flickr page.

 This celebration comes only two days before the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, one of the greatest novelists who ever lived. It’s rarely remembered that as well as his novels and periodicals, Dickens also put his name to a biography of Joseph Grimaldi. After Grimaldi’s death in 1837 Thomas Egerton Wilks was employed to “re-write, revise and correct” his memoirs, but later in the year the publishers gave the job instead to the up and coming writer of The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens. Dickens was already writing Oliver Twist, and was given only two months to finish the job. Inevitably, Dickens contributed little new work to the resulting book, the least successful work that ever went out under his name.

While this has done little harm to Dickens reputation, it did not allow justice to be done to Grimaldi. He was born in 1778 into a theatrical family, and made his first stage appearance aged only 2. He became a brilliant performer:

Grimaldi as the Watchman

“He was a master of grimace; and whether he was robbing a pieman, opening an oyster, affecting the polite, riding a giant cart-horse, imitating a sweep, grasping a red-hot poker, devouring a pudding, picking a pocket, beating a watchman, …or nursing a child, he was so extravagantly natural, that…neither the wise, the proud, the fair, the young, nor the old, were ashamed to laugh till tears coursed down their cheeks at Joe and his comicalities”.

His personal life, though, read like a script for a melodrama. He was abused by his father, saw his first wife die in childbirth when he was 21, his son from his second marriage drank himself to death, and his own health was ruined by the physical demands of his acrobatic clowning. When he retired in 1827 he was almost destitute, but still loved for his modesty.

 Dickens was only 15 when Grimaldi retired so can hardly be blamed for having little direct knowledge of his work. But I think you can see echoes of the great clown in Dickens’ work. The comic description of Mr Wopsle’s Hamlet in Great Expectations may owe something to the story about a performance of the play recounted by, but not involving, Grimaldi. And in the same book Dickens’ description of Joe Gargery, way out of his comfort zone in Pip’s genteel London rooms, reminds me of the physical mime for which Grimaldi was famous. Grimaldi could be serious, and it has been said that his success as a clown was in part due to him being a good actor. Dickens voiced the popular view, that “the genuine droll, the grimacing, filching, irresistible clown, left the stage with Grimaldi, and though often heard of, has never been seen since”.

What then is the link with Shakespeare? Findlater, in his book on Grimaldi, asks why this superbly talented performer never performed in Shakespeare apart from one performance of the Second Gravedigger in Hamlet. His friend Charles Dibdin wrote a drama featuring a Wild Man, representing the power music had on the savage mind. It was a great success for Grimaldi, and suggests he would have been a great Caliban.

There may also be a clue in the advice Hamlet gives to the players:
Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them that will…set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered”.

Perhaps straight actors like Kemble were not prepared to take the risk of being upstaged by an ad-libbing, grimacing clown.

A more concrete link is to the holdings of the RSC’s Library kept at the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive. Here are two scrapbooks containing images, articles, newspaper reviews and original documents about Joseph Grimaldi, including one letter written by him not long before his death. The books were put together by his family, and presented to the theatre by Alexander B Grimaldi. It seems appropriate that these books, witnessing that Grimaldi, like Shakespeare, was the greatest in his field, should be kept with records relating Shakespeare himself. 

An anonymous writer wrote:
To those who never saw him, description is fruitless; to those who have, no praise comes up to their appreciation of him. We therefore shake our heads with other old boys, and say: “Ah! you should have seen Grimaldi”.

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Coriolanus on the big screen: Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus is an extraordinary achievement. Not only is it Fiennes’ first attempt at directing a film, but he also takes the leading role, in effect directing himself too. He’s breaking new ground: it’s the first feature film version of Coriolanus, which although admired, is rarely studied, and could never be called a crowd-pleaser. But Fiennes has struggled long and hard to get this film made because it’s a play which he believes has much to say to young audiences.

 Fiennes certainly does not aim at conventional Shakespeare-lovers. The time is today, the place somewhere inEastern Europe. There’s no sign of the elegant classical world of ancientRome. Characters find out about news through the TV, removing the need for description, and hand-held cameras dodge around the dangerous city streets.

 I’ve been taking a look at the shooting script for the film, introduced by John Logan, the writer of the screenplay. His motivation is to bring new audiences to Shakespeare. The character of Coriolanus himself shares many features with the heroes of action movies and computer games: he’s violent, arrogant and cold. The screenplay describes him as “a man of steel”. Fiennes inhabits this character magnificently. He isn’t quite the physical powerhouse of most action movies, but it’s mental strength that’s important.

The film doesn’t neglect the emotional heart of the play, a scene where Shakespeare’s writing is simple and intense. Coriolanus’s mother, wife and son come to him to plead with him not to invade and destroyRome. Coriolanus has been impervious to all requests for mercy up to this point. Fiennes has sensitively matched Shakespeare’s spareness by keeping the camera still for this scene and filming it very simply. The film includes all of Shakespeare’s words, and here’s the climax of the scene from the screenplay:

 Volumnia:  This fellow had a Volscian to his mother;
His wife is in Corioles and his child
Like him by chance… Yet give us our dispatch.
I am hushed until our city be afire,
And then I’ll speak a little.
She turns and begins to go.
But…
We finally see Coriolanus crack.
Like a great building crumbling.
Like fissures cutting across marble.
Emotion floods into him.
He lunges forward and grabs her hand. Volumnia stops.
Coriolanus: O, mother, mother!
What have you done?
He falls to his knees, clutching her hand.
Coriolanus: Behold, the heavens do ope,
The gods look down – , and this unnatural scene
They laugh at.
He buries his head in her, like a lost child:
Coriolanus: O my mother, mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But for your son – believe it, O, believe it!
Most dangerously you have with him prevailed…
(he looks up at her deeply)
If not most mortal to him.
She looks down at him. His meaning, his foreshadowing, is clear; she has saved Rome, but he knows he is doomed. Rome will live. He will die. This is the price for her victory today.
She is willing to pay that price. So is he.
A moment between them.
He accepts his destiny.
Coriolanus: But let it come. 

For me, Fiennes didn’t quite manage the emotional breakdown described in the script, but he makes a fine stab at it. It’s interesting that John Logan uses such poetic language to describe the scene and Coriolanus’s feelings.

Much has been written recently about the benefit or harm of modernised versions of Shakespeare. It seems to me this shooting script would make a good basis for the study of the play together with the film itself and Shakespeare’s own text.

 It is a film that’s true to Shakespeare, true to our times and a significant debut for a fledgling director.

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