This learning, what a thing it is! Education and the written word

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

Tucked away on BBC4 on Thursday evening, under the title A Renaissance Education: the Schooling of Thomas More’s daughter, was what purported to be the story of one of the best-educated women in Tudor England, Margaret More. Even more tucked away within the programme was the story of the success of the Tudor grammar school system and of the importance of printing to promote learning and communication. Thomas Wolsey, who became the second most powerful man in the kingdom under Henry VIII was used as the prime example of a man whose rise can be traced back to his grammar school education. A further glowing example was, naturally, William Shakespeare. Several scenes were shot in Stratford-upon-Avon, including some in the old schoolroom at King Edward’s School, and the programme’s presenter, Helen Castor, interviewed Professor Jonathan Bate. 

The schoolroom in King Edward's School, Stratford-upon-Avon

The programme was originally screened back in August when the radio programme Woman’s Hour ran a feature on it. It looked at the importance of language and reasoning and how the grammar school curriculum trained boys to be able to write persuasively. Margaret More and the neglected subject of women’s education undoubtedly deserved space on a TV programme, but the programme couldn’t conceal the fact that the real success of the Tudor educational system was that many bright young men from ordinary families were able to do well for themselves.

Johannes Gutenberg

 The programme also included a demonstration of the workings of printing using moveable type, one of my favourite subjects. A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to have a go at printing a single page of his bible on a modern copy of Gutenberg’s original 1450 press, now kept at the University of Reading, which had been made for another TV documentary presented by Stephen Fry. Here’s a link to a short clip. Producing 180 copies of the bible in 1455 was Johannes Gutenberg’s major achievement, but although it’s known he spent many years developing his techniques he left no records of how he was eventually successful.

 Last week we were treated to five special radio programmes by Melvyn Bragg entitled The Written World. This has celebrated handwriting from the earliest clay tablets to the Enlightenment. It would be hard to overemphasise the importance of writing since without it science, which relies on the regular documentation of observation and experiments, would be impossible. Although poetry and music don’t rely exclusively on being written down there would have been nothing of the sophistication of a Beethoven symphony or a Shakespeare play without it.

 The invention of printing using moveable type was as important as the internet is now in terms of the spread of ideas and information. One of the most important drivers for printing was the desire to disseminate the Bible, and all the world’s major religions quickly took advantage of the technology of writing and printing. The Written World has interviewed specialists from many universities and libraries, and images of some of the treasures they have examined are pictured on the BBC’s website.

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Exchanging Christmas cards: the actress and Queen Victoria

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

A typical 1870s Christmas card

What do you do with your Christmas cards at the end of the festive season? By tradition cards and decorations should be taken down on 6 January, Epiphany. E-cards and Facebook messages may be convenient, but they don’t have the same appeal as a personal card, and they certainly haven’t reduced the number of cards delivered to my house. I always feel a little sad taking them down, often the only communication I have with old friends and far-flung family, and instead of popping them in the recycling bin, I tend to hold onto them for a while.

 So how must actress Helen Faucit have felt about the Christmas cards she received from Queen Victoria? In the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive is an album containing 23 cards, some of which have the appearance of being handpainted, from the Queen, bearing her Christmas wishes from the 1870s until the 1890s. How did this album come to be where it is now?

 Helen or Helena Faucit, was one of the greatest actresses of her day. Born in 1814 to a family of actors, she made her reputation in around 1836 playing with the great actor Charles Macready, who considered her “beyond all compare the best English actress”.  At her peak in the 1840s she performed most of Shakespeare’s leading ladies, including Rosalind, Lady Macbeth, Imogen, Desdemona, Juliet, Beatrice and Portia. The lawyer and writer Theodore Martin met and fell in love with her, and after an eight year courtship she eventually agreed to marry him. She continued to perform these youthful roles after her marriage and into her fifties. Her final two performances were, notably, the very first performance at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre on April 23 1879 when she played Beatrice and a few months later when she played Rosalind for a fellow-actor’s benefit in Manchester. She was 65, but was still highly regarded in these important Shakespearean roles. She must have remembered the opening of the theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon fondly in later life.

 

Queen Victoria

At a time when the acting profession was still widely regarded as disreputable she brought refinement, and made friends among the aristocracy as well as becoming friendly with the poetry and drama-loving Queen. After Prince Albert’s death, her husband was commissioned to write his official biography and when this was published in 1880 Martin was knighted making her Lady Martin. Such respectability was unheard of for an actress: it would be another fifteen years before an actor, Henry Irving, was knighted for services to the theatre.

 Helen Martin herself wrote “Letters”, actually essays, on some of Shakespeare’s heroines using her insights as an actress who had performed them. The first, on Ophelia, was published in 1880, followed by others on most of the characters listed above, concluding with an essay on Hermione in The Winter’s Tale.

 When young, her acting tended to be over-dramatic, but she learned to keep her power in reserve, and her great talent became the subtlety of her acting, suggesting suppressed emotion and complex unspoken thought. Critic Joseph Knight called her “the greatest interpreter of the poetic drama that living memory can recall”.

 Although people often wrote to each other at Christmas, the idea of having a card to send to all your friends, bearing a seasonal message, was only invented in 1843. The first cards cost a shilling (5p) each, a significant amount, and they were slow to catch on until the introduction of a cheap halfpenny postage rate was introduced. The Queen herself sent thousands of cards, but most of the ones in the album don’t appear to be “official” greeting cards, and the fact that Helen Faucit kept them so carefully indicates that they were personal gifts. Like many Victorian cards they don’t fit in to what we today consider “Christmassy”, the most common subjects being spring flowers, but these little cards were real symbols of the friendship between the two women.

 Helen Faucit died in 1898, and some of her treasured possessions, including the album of personal cards from Queen Victoria, were passed to the Memorial Theatre in which she had performed on its opening night. Her biography was published by her husband, Theodore Martin, in 1901, the year of Victoria’s death.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be writing a series of posts about other distinguished Victorian women with Shakespeare connections.

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Christmas at court: Queen Elizabeth’s wardrobe raided

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

 

James 1

You’re at work again and everything is getting back to normal.  Spare a thought then for those who are busiest at Christmas – those who entertain us. In spite of the more sophisticated offerings available today, people still enjoy pantomimes. These are often the only live theatre people ever attend and a throwback to the old tradition of live performance at Christmas, encouraged by a combination of long dark evenings and the temporary shut-down of most outdoor activities. In summer, Shakespeare suggests, “the human mortals want their winter cheer”.

 For Shakespeare and his company the Christmas season was particularly busy. I’ve just been reading Alvin Kernan’s book Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright, which brings together much of what’s known about these performances. Companies played before Queen Elizabeth on 32 occasions in the last 10 years of her reign, but in the first 10 years of James’ reign there were 138 performances, and rather than ending at Epiphany, 6 January, the period was gradually extended.

 Within only a few weeks of arriving in London King James 1 issued a royal warrant setting up his own official players, The King’s Men, previously The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, “as well for the recreation of our lovinge subjectes, as for our Solace and pleasure when wee shall thingke good to see them, during our pleasure”.

Westminster and Whitehall from Braun and Hogenberg's map of London

 The King’s Men couldn’t satisfy all the needs of the court, but they performed more than any other and as their resident playwright, Shakespeare supplied many of the plays. In any year Shakespeare probably only ever wrote two new plays, so older plays would have been brought back into the repertoire for performing at court. It’s probable that all of Shakespeare’s plays were performed before the King at least once. To celebrate the marriage of James’ daughter Elizabeth’s marriage, 20 plays were performed in the season 1612-13, including Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Othello and Julius Caesar.

 The records don’t often give the details of exactly which plays were performed, but it is known that Measure for Measure was given on St Stephen’s Day (26 December) 1604, and King Lear on the same day in 1606. St Stephen’s Day signalled the start of the playing season, and was a day dedicated to charitable giving to the poor. The revelling came later. Preparations for court performances by professional companies would have taken weeks, and new plays would have had several public performances like modern previews at the Globe before being shown to the king.

 Alvin Kernan explains how this would have affected the author:
Shakespeare may have originally produced his plays on the public stage, but he would have to have been remarkably dull – which he surely was not – not to have remembered after 1603 that his new plays would at Christmastime be acted before the king and his court…Even had he wished to avoid politics, Shakespeare was forced to become a political playwright.

A courtier, Dudley Carleton, wrote to his friend John Chamberlain during January 1604:

A lady masquer designed by Inigo Jones

We have had here a very merry Christmas and nothing to disquiet us save brabbles amongst our ambassadors, and one or two poor companions that died of the plague. The first holy days we had every night a public play in the great hall, at which the king was ever present and liked or disliked as he saw cause, but it seems he takes an extraordinary pleasure in them. The queen and prince were more the players’ friends, for on other nights they had them privately and have since taken them to their protection.
On New Year’s night we had a play of Robin Goodfellow and a mask brought in by a magician of China. There was a heaven built at the lower end of the hall out of which our magician came down…
The Sunday following was the great day of the Queen’s mask. The hall was much lessened by the works that were in it…and …[they] placed…loose mantles and petticoats,…embroidered satins and cloth of gold and silver, for the which they were beholden to Queen Elizabeth’s wardrobe…So ended that night’s sport with the end of our Christmas gambols.

 Shakespeare dramatised performances at court in several of his plays. The raiding of the old queen’s wardrobe for fancy costumes sounds disconcertingly like the ad hoc set-up for the amateurs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the courtiers themselves probably took part in this masque, the finale of the celebrations after which the day came for them, like us, to get back to our usual routine.

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Looking forward to the World Shakespeare Festival #WSF2012

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Sylvia Morris

 2012 has been welcomed in with the biggest celebrations ever, especially the brilliant fireworks in London. The Olympic Games don’t open until July, but the World Shakespeare Festival begins in April and continues until September. The original Greek Olympic Games included culture as well as sport and the Cultural Olympiad for this year revolves around the UK’s greatest cultural export, William Shakespeare.

I wrote about the World Shakespeare Festival when the first details were released back in September. A lot more flesh has been put on the bones now and can be found on the official website for the Festival. Another sign the Festival’s getting on its way is that it now has its own twitter hashtag #WSF2012: let’s hope it gets busy!

The most eye-catching element is the Globe to Globe Festival which over only a few weeks will see 37 international companies each performing a play in a different language. It’s a witty idea to perform Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare’s most linguistically complex play, in British Sign Language. Elsewhere there are going to be top-notch performances: Simon Russell Beale as Timon, Jonathan Pryce as Lear, and Mark Rylance at the Globe repeating his performance in an all-male, original practice Twelfth Night, as well as Richard III.

The Royal Shakespeare Company was invited to organise the festival, and this year Stratford expects to welcome record numbers of tourists to the town. It’s no coincidence that the third new chain hotel is now nearing completion on the edge of the town centre. The RSC will host shows from 50 professional companies from around the world as well as many amateur groups. Some of these will be spectacular, even if they don’t appear to be particularly Shakespearian: as part of their performance the acrobats from the Companhia Bufo Mecanica in Rio de Janeiro will abseil down the RST’s new 36 metre tower.

 In London the British Museum’s exhibition Shakespeare: staging the world will explore the London of 1612 to see the era through the eyes of Shakespeare, his players and audiences. Its sure to be impressive, relating objects from the museum’s collection to Shakespeare’s plays. But I’m still concerned that this festival will bring people in to theatres who already like going to the theatre, and will bring existing museum visitors in to their exhibition. Mark Rylance and 50 other actors promise to ambush passers by with bursts of Shakespeare, but as far as I can tell only in the capital.

Ben Whishaw as Richard II in the BBC's production

The part of the Festival that I’m looking forward to most is the BBC’s cycle of history plays from Richard II to Henry V. Shakespeare on TV has always been influential, bringing the plays right into people’s homes.  Click on the link for a rundown of the stellar cast, including many of our finest actors under Sam Mendes as Executive Producer. These productions will showcase British talent, and will be distributed to audiences around the world. The RSC’s stage production of Julius Caesar will also be filmed and broadcast by the BBC.

 In sport competitors have to match themselves against each other to decide on a winner: in the arts collaboration is more important than competition, and I’d have loved to see a simultaneous broadcast featuring performers from many countries beamed all over the world. Let’s hope the Festival will succeed in taking England’s greatest cultural product out to the world.

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Mourning at the closing of the year

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Richard Day's Book of Christian Prayers, 1581. Death is always at the shoulder of people of all ages

Shakespeare often idealised brotherhood: not just as a literal bond of blood, but also as a relationship of close trust and love.

In his own life Shakespeare was one of eight siblings. Infant mortality took its toll, two sisters dying as babies, and his little sister Anne dying aged only eight, but all three of his younger brothers made it to adulthood, though they died before him. By the time of his own death in 1616 only his sister Joan was still alive. 

It’s likely that Shakespeare was away in London when most of his siblings died in Stratford, but we can be pretty sure that he was present when his brother Edmund was buried at St Mary Overy, in Southwark, near to the Globe Theatre, on 31 December 1607.

Edmund was Shakespeare’s youngest brother, born 16 years his junior in 1580. Without straying too far into the realms of fantasy, during his childhood he must have heard about his brother’s success as a player and writer in London, and it’s no surprise that he found his way to London to become an actor himself. We know nothing about Edmund apart from his baptism in Stratford, his burial, and a reference to the burial of his “base-born” (illegitimate) child at St Giles without Cripplegate only four months before his own death.

Map showing London Bridge and at the southern end, the Church of St Mary Overy

His own burial record reads “Edmond Shakespeare a player”. It was a costly funeral. The service took place in the morning “with a forenoon knell of the great bell” and Edmond was interred within the church itself. The expense, twenty shillings, is assumed to have been paid by Shakespeare himself. There is no proof that this Edmond is the one who was William’s brother, but what facts there are all fit.

 Edmond’s story shows how easy it was for people to disappear from the record. When did he leave Stratford? Where did he live? Which company did he work for? What parts did he play? He was 27 when he died, around the age at which William was just about to make his mark in the theatre.

 Shakespeare’s plays include examples of brotherly and sisterly love, as in Cymbeline and Twelfth Night, but sibling rivalry is more common. Think of the three daughters of Lear and the two sons of Gloucester in King Lear, Katherina and Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew and, most poisonously, in Henry VI Part 3, Richard Duke of Gloucester who sees his elder brothers Clarence and Edward only as obstacles in his way to achieve the crown.
I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word “love”, which graybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me: I am myself alone.

 Brotherhood often has nothing to do with any blood relationship. There was no better image for Henry V to use to rouse the English soldiers before the great battle of Agincourt:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.

Part of the Benson windows, showing Frank Benson on the right

Also on 31 December 1939 died Sir Frank Benson, who led the Shakespeare festivals in Stratford-upon-Avon for thirty years from the mid 1880s up to the First World War. Affectionately known as “Pa” by members of his company, if anybody created the idea of a band of brothers united by the performing of Shakespeare’s plays it was him. For many years afterwards Old Bensonians held parties and performances in memory of the company. The stained glass windows depicting Benson as Richard II surrounded by members of his company can still be seen in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, a fitting memorial to the company ideal which he promoted for so long.

 

 

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Word of mouth: talking about Shakespeare

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

You’ve unwrapped all the presents, eaten and drunk far too much, and you’ve spent all your money in the sales. There are still a few days to go before New Year’s Eve, and if you can’t stand the radio and TV re-running the events of 2011, this may be just the moment for listening to some intelligent conversation.

If so, here’s a link to Shakespeare-related episodes of Melvyn Bragg’s Radio 4 programme In Our Time, each one with a particular theme and a handful of experts to discuss it. Stuart Ian Burns has done a creditable job of gathering these together. I was amazed to see how many there are, and what a range of subjects they cover. The contributors are always good communicators and the programmes make fascinating listening.

If you want something more general, my favourite quick fix is the radio series A Point of View, which broadcasts on Friday evening with a Sunday morning repeat. The programme fills the slot taken for decades by the veteran journalist Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America from which he retired only weeks before his death in 2004. A Point of View has a number of contributors, but for my money is specially good when the speaker is my heroine Lisa Jardine. In a mere ten minutes she moves from history to science, music, art and literature, always relating her subject to something personal or current, with elegance and wit. Inevitably, Shakespeare often gets a passing mention.

 She’s in the middle of a run of programmes just now and I recently discovered that not only can you listen to the programmes again,  but her pieces are transcribed here.

I’m aware that the BBC’s Listen Again is not accessible for people outside the UK so I’m pleased to be able to recommend a source that anyone can access. I recently also discovered that she’s published two books containing a selection of her pieces.

 Her posts are never on a single subject, but here are links to the last two broadcasts, rather loosely about firstly climate change, and Christmas carols.

These are the links to the transcript of the climate change post and the Christmas carols post.

If you’re not a fan already, I hope you enjoy them!

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Shakespeare and the birds at Christmas

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

There’s no doubt that Shakespeare loved the birds he saw and heard around him. He refers time and again to their behaviour, and particularly their song. Romeo and Juliet disagree over whether they hear larks or nightingales, in Macbeth, the crow makes wing to the rooky wood, in Hamlet ravens croak for revenge, and he repeats the legend that at Christmas time the cock, crows all night:
Some say there ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed, and so gracious is that time. 

These are just a few of Shakespeare’s many mentions of birds. At this time of year we celebrate the robin, partly because of its festive red breast, but also because it’s one of the most friendly of birds visiting our gardens all year round. There’s a legend that robins got their red breasts by trying to remove the thorns from Christ’s head during the Crucifixion, drops of blood falling on the bird. They have a reputation for being charitable, and it’s said to be very unlucky to kill a robin.

 In Cymbeline, when Imogen, disguised as the boy Fidele, is thought to be dead, her brother Arviragus says:
                                        The bird is dead
That we have made so much on.

 He goes on to refer to the story that the robin (here called a ruddock) uses its bill to cover bodies with leaves and flowers, as in the story of the Babes in the Woods.
                                       

The Ruddock would
With charitable bill – O bill sore shaming
Those rich-left heirs, that let their fathers lie
Without a monument! – bring thee all this;
Yea, and furr’d moss besides. 

The bird that’s most associated with this time of year is the wren. On St Stephen’s day, the 26th December, the wren was hunted and killed. Although linked with a saint’s day, the tradition probably dates back to pagan times when the killing was seen as a midwinter sacrifice to ensure the return of the sun. Some versions of the story say that the wren was killed by being stoned to death, the same fate that met Saint Stephen. In many languages its name means king, and even though it’s one of our smallest native birds and normally reclusive, they can be belligerent, especially when attacked. Lady Macduff complains that her husband has abandoned his family rather than staying to defend them:
He wants the natural touch; for the poor wren,
The most diminutive of birds, will fight,
Her young ones in her nest, against the owl. 

As so often, Shakespeare shows himself to be an acute observer of nature as well as incorporating stories he would have heard in his youth. He would be saddened by the decline in our native birds over the last few decades, so while you’re enjoying your Christmas feasting, remember to feed the birds.

 

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A view of Christmas

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Christmas Day is always a time for looking back at the year that’s ending and forward with hope.

 I’ve known this picture of Christmas celebrations in an English village all my life as it used to hang in my parents’ dining room. It was created by artist Henry Seabright as part of an advertising campaign for tyre manufacturer Dunlop, for which my father worked. The title  is English Country Customs: the Mumming plays.

 At first sight it seems to be a sentimental image of Merry Old England. It shows a group of mummers performing outside a village pub on Christmas day watched by a crowd, including people in party hats inside the pub.

 But if you look more closely, it’s not just a rural idyll. Among the villagers are uniformed representatives of the three armed forces. It includes people of all classes from the beggar to the lady of the manor in her fur stole. They are of all ages: a toddler runs at the feet of an old lady with her stick. The picture must date to the late 1940s or early 1950s, and shows a country in a state of change. The warmth and plenty of the pub might be a hope of what was to come. The car, a symbol of the future, is parked unglamorously next to a horse and cart. As advertisements go, it’s very subtle: the word Dunlop appears only on the spare tyre on the back of the car.

 Mumming plays are still performed in some parts of England. These folk plays originated in medieval times, but few were written down until the early years of the twentieth century. My father owned a book containing many of these plays. They are very primitive dramas and although every village’s version evolved over the centuries there is a recognisable pattern. After an induction promising a fine performance, two protagonists appear and once they have boasted of their bravery, fight a duel. One of them is wounded or killed, and a doctor is called who revives the fallen man. The performance usually ended with a song during which a collection was held. You can find more information at the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

Shakespeare knew these plays. His only, rather disparaging, reference is in the most unlikely of plays, Coriolanus (set in ancient Rome). The senator Menenius insults the people’s tribunes who “make faces like mummers”.

 In the play from Great Wolford, Warwickshire, Father Christmas sets the scene:

A group of nineteenth-century Oxfordshire mummers

In comes I old Father Christmas
In comes I to make the fun.
My hair is short my beard is long
And me hat’s tied on with a leathern thong.
A room a room brave gallants all
Give us all room to rhyme
And we’ll show you some good activity
This merry Christmas time.
Activity of age activity of youth.

 The book, The Mummers’ Play, was published posthumously by friends and former colleagues of Reginald Tiddy, a lecturer in English and Classical Literature at Oxford University who died on active service in France. In a strange coincidence Tiddy died in 1916, 300 years after Shakespeare, and his book was published in 1923, 300 years after Shakespeare’s Folio had been published, also by his friends and former colleagues.

 The picture’s a reminder of tradition, the present realities of war and the importance of social cohesion, while the Mumming plays are about life, death and renewal. Both celebrate the turning of the year, the remembrance of the past and optimism for the future.

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Celebrating Christmas with the Royal Shakespeare Company

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

At Christmas, the RSC traditionally gets into party mood by putting on a special show. This year the company has two: Matilda in London, after its successful premiere in Stratford last year, and The Heart of Robin Hood, at the newly-transformed Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

 The list of shows put on as Christmas treats, either in London or Stratford, is a long one with some notable successes. The first and most-repeated was Toad of Toad Hall, an adaptation of children’s classic The Wind in the Willows. First performed in theStratford theatre in 1948, it was regularly repeated until the mid 1950s, then revived in 1972 and 1973. It always had the feel of an end-of-term party, featuring actors who had been acting Shakespeare all year. In 1973, for instance, Mole was played by David Suchet.

 In 1976 Wild Oats, though not specifically a Christmas play, was revived in London, giving many of the company’s serious actors the opportunity to show their lighter side.

 It was in January 1981, though, that a completely home-grown, full-blown pantomime was given three performances at the end of the Stratford1980-81 season. It had been a heavy year: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Richard II and Richard III, with only As You Like It to provide light relief. No wonder there was such enthusiasm for the company to collectively let their hair down.

 The Swan Down Gloves was an exuberant Shakespearean pantomime, the story-line loosely revolving around the idea of taking a pair of gloves (Shakespeare’s father being a glover) to London for Queen Elizabeth. Bille Brown, who wrote the play, had been playing a range of small parts: Barnardo in Hamlet, Le Beau in As You Like It, Lovel in Richard III, giving him plenty of time to observe, and to get writing.

 It came complete with principal boy, Dame, Buttons, songs, dancing, and awful jokes. Bille Brown wrote himself a jewel of a part as the evil Griselda Brimstone.  There were in-jokes and misquotations, especially from Hamlet and Richard III.

 From the cast of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet (Judy Buxton) became the principal boy, The Nurse, Lady Capulet and Lady Montague collectively became the Dandini brothers, and Benvolio became Buttons. It must have come as a particular relief for the actors in Richard III to move into comedy, Lady Anne, Queen Margaret, Clarence and the Duke of Buckingham all transformed. Joe Melia, who played one of the murderers in the Shakespeare moved up by donning Richard III’s costume and declaring “a hose, a hose, my kingdom for a hose”.

Julia Tobin and Alan Howard in The Swan Down Gloves

 Actors who’d played small parts were allowed to shine. Terry Wood burst effusively onto the stage as the Pantomime Dame and Julia Tobin was a pocket-sized Earl of Southampton. The biggest joke of the evening was the sad figure of George the Silent Dragon, encased in armour from head to toe, played by the normally anything-but-silent Alan Howard, the Richard II and Richard III that season. At the climax of the play he removed his helmet, regained his voice and dispelled the evil-doers.

 During the 1980s a series of Christmas shows were created for the RSC’s London home and Peter Pan, Poppy and A Christmas Carol were only performed there. Meanwhile the musical Kiss me, Kate, based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew was performed in Stratford and The Wizard of Oz, adapted from the film by John Kane, was performed from 1987-9 in both London andStratford.

 In 1998 Stratford became the focus of Christmas shows again. The first and most successful was The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, performed over five years in Stratford and London. While the cast varied, Patrice Naiambana made the role of Aslan his own. While this was being performed in London in 2000 and 2001 Stratford had its own Christmas shows, The Secret Garden and Alice in Wonderland.

 

Matilda

Under Michael Boyd’s leadership the Christmas tradition continued with Beauty and the Beast and Great Expectations. The Canterbury Tales, in the Swan Theatre, wasn’t really a Christmas show but was high on entertainment. In 2006, as part of the Complete Works Festival, The Merry Wives of Windsor was turned into a musical, with Dame Judi Dench as an apparently somersaulting Mistress Quickly and Simon Callow as Falstaff. While the transformation of the theatres took place Christmas shows continued: Fantastic Mr Fox in the town’s Civic Hall, and the Arabian Nights and Matilda in the temporary Courtyard Theatre.

 I know this list is incomplete, but I hope I might have stirred some memories of Christmas past. You can find details of all the cast lists on the RSC Performance Database.

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Shakespeare’s Christmas through the eyes of the Victorians

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

This year I’ve received a Christmas card featuring an engraving dating back to 1846, originally published to illustrate “A Story about a Christmas in the seventeenth century”*. It’s a charming picture, but one thing is certain: Christmas in the seventeenth century was never like this. The room itself looks quite authentic, and the costumes are at least reminiscent of the period. One of the ladies wears a ruff, for instance. But in the centre of the picture stands a table covered in a white cloth, on top of which stands a magnificent pine tree decorated with candles.

 Prince Albert is widely credited with introducing Christmas trees into England, but some sources suggest that they were already used in some houses, only becoming popular when Victoria and Albert were pictured with their young family around a decorated tree in the Illustrated London News, as below. In 1848 The Times helpfully described the tree for those who wished to create their own:

“The tree employed for this festive purpose is a young fir, about eight feet high, and has six tiers of branches. On each tier or branch are arranged a dozen wax tapers. Pendent from the branches are elegant trays, baskets, bonbonniers, and other receptacles for sweetmeats, of the most varied kind, and of all forms, colours, and degrees of beauty. Fancy cakes, gilt gingerbread, and eggs filled with sweetmeats are also suspended by variously coloured ribands from the branches.”

These two images are so similar it seems possible the earlier one influenced the later.

In Shakespeare’s time, evergreen plants like holly, ivy and mistletoe would have been brought into the house, though “baleful mistletoe” was banned from churches because of its pagan associations. It was thought unlucky to bring green plants into the house at other times.

Amiens’ song in As You Like It contrasts the festivities of the Christmas period with the bleakness of the weather and the coldness of human behaviour.
 Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
They tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude
Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho! Unto the green holly,
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

 The tree that was associated with Christmas was the Yule log. A log large enough to burn throughout the 12 days of Christmas was cut and brought into to house. A piece of the log would be saved to start the fire the following year. The use of evergreen plants, and the burning and keeping of wood is a reminder that Christmas originates as pre-Christian celebration promising the return of the sun to the land at the darkest, deadest time of the year. You’ll find more Christmas traditions here.

Feasting, music and charity to the poor were essential ingredients of the Elizabethan Christmas. The Victorians loved the Elizabethan period, and in this picture from the Illustrated London News of 1875 shows a group of travelling musicians being invited into a grand house.

In 1557 Thomas Tusser summarised the essentials of Christmas:
At Christmas be merry and thankful withal,
And feast thy poor neighbours, the great with the small,
Yea, all the year long, to the poor let us give,
God’s blessing to follow us while we do live. 

Victorians shared this desire to be charitable to the poor at Christmas, and created the idea of Christmas as a family celebration. It’s still seen as the one time of year when families get together, but when Shakespeare was working in London he’s unlikely to have spent Christmas with his family. I’ll be looking at the sort of entertainments professional companies were required to produce for the court in a later post.

 *The illustration mentioned at the beginning is from the University of Birmingham’s Special Collections

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