Shakespeare and suicide: George Chakravarthi’s Thirteen

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Othello

An exhibition on the subject of suicide doesn’t sound very suitable for the festive season, but George Chakravarthi’s Thirteen, currently at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, is no ordinary exhibition.

The artist became interested in how the perception of suicide has changed in our post-9/11 world, and can be motivated by a moral or ideological cause. The exhibition features photographs of Chakravarthi himself assuming the role of thirteen of Shakespeare’s most doomed characters. He often uses himself as a model for his work to explore ideas of identity, race and sexuality.

The images are strongly dramatic: he dressed himself in costumes from the RSC then added layers of detail: “I tried to avoid being too theatrical because the theatre is in the costume, the visual texture and the colour”. The photographs were printed onto a transparent material, mounted on Perspex and placed on a sheet of LED lighting. The end results are complex pictures, rich in symbolism, that seem to glow. In the old Picture Gallery, the architecture reminiscent of a church, the connection with religious imagery on stained glass is unmistakeable.

Cleopatra

Rather than focusing on death, Chakravarthi has said that he’s interested in the immortality of Shakespeare’s characters, which is why Cleopatra, one of the most iconic of them, is the most striking and complex of the images. The booklet accompanying the exhibition states “It is the glamour attendant on these deaths, however dreadful, which transforms them into icons of beauty, terror, nobility and tragedy”.

 Some of the images are disturbing, especially the androgynous Lady Macbeth and Timon, portrayed upside down, seeming to turn back into dark earth. In the plays the suicides are motivated by honour, guilt, grief, hopelessness or loss.

Juliet

Romeo and Juliet face each other across the gallery, matching each other in colour and style. They’re the ones among the thirteen whose death seems most pointless, but who positively embrace death rather than live a life without love. This quotation from Romeo and Juliet is reproduced in the booklet that goes with the exhibition:

Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!

These beautiful, exotic and strange images are on display until April, and if you’re in Stratford-upon-Avon do go and visit them. Before you do, or if you’re not able to see them in person, take a look at the RSC’s website for  an interview with George Chakravarthi and a guided tour by him which gives lots of detail about the portraits. They are a bewitching response, in his words “a memorial…a temple” to some of Shakespeare’s most compelling characters.

 I must point out that the images on this page were taken by myself solely for this post and do not fully represent the exhibits. To see them properly illustrated use the link above to the RSC’s website – or go and see them yourself.

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The RSC’s golden years: Terry Hands and Alan Howard

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Terry Hands

What better way to end the RSC’s season of events celebrating the Company’s 50th anniversary than with a discussion between two people who for many epitomised the RSC during the 1970s and early 1980s? On Saturday morning Greg Doran hosted just such a discussion.

 The partnership between director Terry Hands and actor Alan Howard was so successful that this period is remembered by many as a golden age in the history of the RSC. Their productions were exciting both visually and vocally, while keeping the focus firmly on Shakespeare’s text.   

The two men began working together in major productions in 1969 with Bartholomew Fair. Howard’s powerful stage presence and vocal strength had already made him one to watch in Trevor Nunn’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. In 1970 Alan Howard played Oberon/Theseus in  Peter Brook’s landmark production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Performed in England and around the world over three years, Howard was the only member of the original cast who remained with it to the end.

Hands had been recruited from the Liverpool Everyman in 1966 by Peter Hall to run the Company’s new outreach programme, Theatregoround. Howard took part in readings like Hands’ own compilation, Pleasure and Repentance in small venues up and down the country. The success of Theatregoround was one of the factors that led to the formation of a studio theatre, The Other Place in the mid-seventies.  

 But it was when the two men came together in 1975, with a season of history plays to mark the centenary of the Shakespeare Memorial Association that they began their great partnership. The very first Shakespeare play they worked on together was Henry V, with Howard playing the king, to be followed by the two parts of Henry IV, Howard playing the same character as young Prince Hal. So successful was this cycle that in 1977 Henry V was revived, followed by all three parts of Henry VI, Howard playing both kings. This was my first introduction to the partnership, and seeing the man who one night roused his troops before Agincourt, swinging down ropes,  wearing black leather one night, transformed into the young Henry VI, seated meekly on his throne while nobles argued around him the next, gave me a real insight into  great acting.

 Before the Henry VI trilogy was put on, the plays were seen as virtually unperformable. Hands and Howard proved them wrong, and during the discussion Hands defended these plays, still too rarely staged. The next time the RSC performed them in full was Michael Boyd’s production in 2000.

Alan Howard as Coriolanus

 In 1978 Howard played Coriolanus, again directed by Terry Hands, a part that seemed made for him. Howard seemed physically fearless, using his ringing voice to convey the confidence, even arrogance, of the man. The production was so successful it was taken on a major European tour, and he repeated the role, rather watered down, for the BBC TV’s Shakespeare series, sadly the only filmed version of any of the roles he played for the RSC.

 In 1980 the pair added two more English kings, Richard II and Richard III to their tally.  Both were strikingly designed, Richard II in gold, Richard III in black, by Abd’Elkader Farrah, usually known as Farrah, who had also designed all the Shakespeare plays the two had worked on. Farrah’s designs carried an unmistakeable visual signature, perfectly matching Hands’ rigorous direction and Howard’s muscular acting. Costumes were either hard and metallic, or sensuous, using fabrics like velvet, suede and leather, in a few bold colours.

 

Alan Howard as Richard II

Hands spoke about theatre politics: the RSC was perpetually short of money. He became joint Artistic Director with Trevor Nunn, and in 1978 Deputy Chief Executive, then in 1986 took over the sole running of the Company, leaving it after 25 years in 1991.  One of his regrets in the current RSC is the lack of a permanent London home for the Company, one of Peter Hall’s founding principles for it back in 1961.

In the discussion, Hands spoke about theatre as a collaborative art form, perhaps the most collaborative art form there is. As he put it, in the theatre “There’s no room for I”. I couldn’t help thinking that nevertheless Hands must also have become skilled at dealing with creative people with large egos. Both men spoke generously and warmly of their debt to each other and to others, in particular actors Emrys James and Brewster Mason.

 At the end of the session Terry Hands asked Alan Howard to perform a speech from Shakespeare, to hear his voice within the new RST space. He chose the great speech about creativity and imagination from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which Howard delivered hundreds of times in that Peter Brook production. It was a fitting end to a very special event.

Alan Howard as Theseus

 The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

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More about Shakespeare and the King James bible

Posted on December 10, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Title page of the 1611 bible

You can’t have missed the fact that 2011 marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. Many of the events and articles celebrating this milestone have made the connection with Shakespeare as the KJ Bible was published only 12 years before the posthumous collection of Shakespeare’s plays in the First Folio. These two great books have influenced the English language, contributing words, phrases and ideas from that day to this more than any others.

 The King James Bible was published too late in his life to have any real influence on Shakespeare’s writing. It was by no means the first bible available in the vernacular, there being eleven translations before the King James version, beginning with Tyndale’s unofficial version in 1526, the one which Shakespeare knew best being the so-called Geneva Bible.

The New Testament in the 1581 edition of the Geneva Bible

The King James Bible, too, was not a completely new translation, but drew heavily on earlier versions. The importance of having a bible which could be understood by the people is explained in the book’s Note to the Reader:

 But how shall men meditate in that, which they cannot understand? How shall they understand that which is kept close in an unknowen tongue? …. Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtaine, that we may looke into the most Holy place; that remooveth the cover of the well, that wee may come by the water, even as Jacob rolled away the stone from the mouth of the well, by which meanes the flockes of Laban were watered. Indeede without translation into the vulgar tongue, the unlearned are but like children at Jacobs well (which was deepe) without a bucket or some thing to draw with.

You might be interested to dip into the text of the 1611 Bible – it’s available to read online.  

Stephen Boxer as Tyndale and Oliver Ford Davies as Lancelot Andrewes, the convenor of the translation committee, in the RSC's production of Written on the Heart

The Royal Shakespeare Company is currently performing David Edgar’s new play on the creation of the book, Written on the Heart, which includes humourous debates about the selection of words to appear in the new version. David Edgar has been interviewed by the Birmingham Post on the subject.

Shakespeare’s debt to the bible is apparent in plays like Portia’s speech on mercy in The Merchant of Venice, King Lear’s suffering which is paralleled in the story of Job, and Measure for Measure, where the title itself is a biblical quotation. Echoes are to be found scattered throughout his plays and several books have been published documenting these references. There’s a small exhibition on Shakespeare’s use of the bible, including an original first edition of the KJ Bible, at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, and The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC has created a fascinating website to explore to coincide with its own exhibition Manifold Greatness.

For anyone interested in the subject of Shakespeare and religion, a podcast is now available on the subject of Shakespeare and Theology, a recording of a recent seminar at Stratford’s Shakespeare Institute by Paul Fiddes and Paul Edmondson.

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Michael Sheen’s Hamlet and the vision of Philip K Dick

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Michael Sheen as Hamlet. Photograph by Simon Annand

In my last post I mentioned that Michael Sheen was talking on the radio about the life of the science fiction writer Philip K Dick who inspired his Hamlet. The broadcast will be repeated on Friday 9 December at 11pm, and then to listen again, but this may not be possible outside the UK.  

 Before this programme I’d never heard of Philip K Dick, but Michael Sheen, always a fan of science fiction, became hooked on Dick’s work early, finding his stories to be much more than just tales of space ships and alien invasion. He was joined for this radio programme by science fiction specialist Roger Luckhurst.

 They talked about what sets Dick apart from other science fiction writers, his interest in the human psyche and the real versus the imaginary. In the 1970s Dick absorbed the paranoia of current politics and world events, with the Watergate scandal, the fall of Nixon, the Manson murders and the increasing use of surveillance. He asked questions about what counts as an authentic experience in a consumerist world that offers only a filtered view of reality.

 Having recovered from being addicted to hallucinogenic drugs he suffered a nervous breakdown, and struggled with mental illness all his life at a time when it carried a much greater stigma than it does now. He became agoraphobic and, hooked on painkillers, lived in chaos.  In spite of all this his books are often humorous, absurd and self-aware. Towards the end of his life he had a religious vision which greatly affected him.

The cover of Michael Sheen’s favourite novel by Philip K Dick

Many of the details of his life suggest parallels with Shakespeare, and it’s possible to see how Michael Sheen may have found inspiration for his Hamlet in his story. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 as one of twins, but his sister died aged only six weeks, and the guilt of being the survivor haunted him throughout his life. From this may have come the recurring idea that we may be two people, related but separate. He had a troubled relationship with his mother, who married his uncle. He married five times, and had obsessive relationships with women. He died in California, where he had lived for many years, in 1982 at much the same age as Shakespeare.

 The cover blurb of one of Dick’s early books, The World Jones Made reads “Floyd Jones is a sullen malcontent, ungainly and quite possibly mad. But he can see exactly one year into the future…His limited precognition ultimately renders him helpless to fight against what he knows will happen”.

 Michael Sheen quoted a key passage from Hamlet which he finds particularly relevant to Dick’s life:
So oft, it chances in particular men,
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty…
Or by some habit… – that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,…
His virtues else, be they as pure as grace,…
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.

 I’d love to have heard this discussion before seeing Michael Sheen’s Hamlet, as it’s clear how much his performance owes to the vision of Philip K Dick. But does it help or hinder the understanding of Shakespeare’s play?

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Is Hamlet a callous, egocentric villain?

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Michael Sheen as Hamlet

According to author John Updike, “Hamlet is in fact the callous, egocentric villain of Hamlet”. This view was recently quoted in a posting on the Shakespeare Bulletin board SHAKSPER.

 That’s quite a condemnation of probably the most famous of all fictional characters, and certainly Shakespeare’s best-loved hero.

He’s what makes the play so endlessly fascinating for both actors and audiences. We can all identify with elements of the complex and contradictory character Shakespeare created. Hamlet may be callous and egocentric, but aren’t we all, sometimes? 

Portrait of a young man with a skull, by Bernardino Licinio

This painting, from around 1515, shows a beautiful and soulful young man contemplating a skull, signifying death. It was painted by a Venetian painter, and now hangs in the Ashmolean Museum,Oxford. We’d all, probably including John Updike, prefer this renaissance image of poetic melancholy. The Hamlet Shakespeare gives us, though, is full of contradictions. To him, man is both “the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals” and the “quintessence of dust”.

 Although there are Italianate elements in the play, not least the reference to The Murder of Gonzago: “the story is extant, and written in very choice Italian”, the story of Hamlet comes from northern Europe. The Danish author Saxo Grammaticus gathered together many Icelandic and Norse sagas to create his history of Denmark, Historiae Danicae, in around 1200.  One of these contains the story of Hamlet. Almost all the elements of Shakespeare’s play exist in this tale, but the Hamlet figure, Amleth, is more violent and bloodthirsty. The story is less subtle than Shakespeare’s: the murder of Hamlet’s father is not a secret needing a ghost to reveal it, Polonius’s murder is horribly grisly, and the story ends with Amleth setting fire to the palace, burning everyone inside to death.

 Other plays on the subject were written and performed before Shakespeare’s, and though none have survived it seems likely that they introduced at least some of the changes from Saxo that Shakespeare went on to include. The resulting plot is then a blend of elements from this rough and brutal story with subtler details from earlier plays and Shakespeare’s own additions.

Actors playing this role always have to perform a delicate balancing act between these extremes. In the current production at the Young Vic the audience is prepared for the play to be set in a psychiatric hospital. From the first moment Michael Sheen’s wild-eyed Hamlet appears, taking his father’s greatcoat from his coffin and clutching it to his chest, they know not to expect him to be “The glass of fashion and the mould of form” that Ophelia later speaks about.

Hamlet and the Ghost of his dead father

One of the most exciting scenes in the production is that in which Hamlet becomes the ghost of his dead father, his voice becoming deep and resonant, wearing his military greatcoat. Jonathan Pryce famously also spoke the ghost’s words when he played the prince, but he was possessed by the spirit of his father, Exorcist-style, whereas Sheen seems to adopt his father’s physical being.

 It’s possible for the Ghost to almost take over the early part of the play, so powerful are his appearances. There is an old story that Shakespeare performed the part of the Ghost for himself, and many actors would relish speaking these terrific lines:

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

This serious production has an outstanding central performance from Sheen, and some other great moments, but I wondered if the audience might be preoccupied by trying to make sense of the setting.  The focus, as ever, is Hamlet himself, and I doubt if many people in the audience would agree that he’s the villain of the piece.

I’ve found a couple of interesting views by actors who have played the role with distinction. Here Simon Russell Beale talks about playing the part, and here Sam West demonstrates different ways of performing “To be or not to be”.

While writing this post, I heard that on Tuesday 6 December at 4.30 on Radio 4, Michael Sheen will be celebrating the Great Life of science fiction author Philip K Dick whose writings inspired his Hamlet. With a repeat on Friday 11pm, don’t miss it!

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Michael Sheen’s Hamlet: driving out the feminine side

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

For centuries, critics have noted  Hamlet’s effeminacy: his inability to act decisively, that description as a “delicate and tender prince”. In the eighteenth century the great actor David Garrick was criticised for “giving a kind of feminine sorrow” to his performance, and Tony Howard in his book Women as Hamlet has found that at least 200 professional actresses have performed the role of the Danish prince. In 1881 Edward P Vining suggested that not only are “the charms of Hamlet … essentially feminine in their natures” but came up with the extreme theory, stated in his little book The Mystery of Hamlet, that the Prince is actually a woman in disguise, thus explaining his affectionate relationship with Horatio,“a perfect man”.

 In the current Young Vic production, directed by Ian Rickson, there’s no doubting Michael Sheen’s masculinity. But in the world of this production nothing is certain. The pre-show is deliberately disorientating, the audience being taken on a route that circles the auditorium, past treatment rooms and a gymnasium, while being observed by clipboard-carrying staff, finally entering through a glass-sided office which then becomes part of the set.

Hamlet and Ophelia

In this secure psychiatric hospital, Hamlet is the most obvious patient, but he’s not the only one. When the main characters sit on chairs arranged in a circle for what is usually the first court scene, who are the doctors, who the patients?  I’ve never been so conscious, in a production of Hamlet, of the vulnerability of the human mind, the destructive power of grief, and of many lives shattered by a single event. A pair of huge metal doors clang shut, trapping the audience as well as the actors in the same room. We’re all in this together. Many of the play’s references to the outside world are omitted and we’re left with the enclosed, claustrophobic world of Elsinore, where nearly everyone seems paralysed.

 The physical effects of psychological stress are seen most clearly in the women. In most productions Gertrude begins confidently, her world only gradually beginning to crumble as her son’s actions become more extreme. Here, played by Sally Dexter, she is in trouble almost from the beginning, stumbling around the stage, grinning and giggling, drugged or drunk? Ophelia ((Vinette Robinson) is both physically and mentally wrecked by her father’s death, singing her mad songs while confined to a wheelchair.

 

Eileen Walsh as Rosencrantz and Adeel Akhtar as Guildenstern

Two male characters are also played by women. Rosencrantz is strikingly played by Eileen Walsh, severe in costume and demeanour, but genuinely hurt by Hamlet’s question after the play scene: “Have you any further trade with us?”. Her femininity is used to make her response “My lord, you once did love me” come from the heart.

 Horatio can seem uncritical of Hamlet, but the diminutive Hayley Carmichael plays the part as a sad and sensitive observer. Hamlet describes him:
A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks; and blest are those
Whose blood and judgement are so well co-meddled,
That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay in my heart of hearts,
As I do thee.

 

Hayley Carmichael as Horatio and Michael Sheen as Hamlet

It’s to Horatio’s credit, then, that in this production his “blood and judgement” leads him to visibly recoil from Hamlet when told that he has condemned his two friends to death, a step too far. I don’t remember seeing it played like this before, but I’m sure that having the part played by a woman encourages this interpretation.

 Tony Howard quotes Richard Eyre’s 1989 view, very relevant to Ian Rickson’s “difficult and jagged” production.

I’ve come more and more to see the play as a war between the female, the feminine, within a man and the masculine within a man, and the story is effectively how you drive out the woman from a man. And in order to deal with the world which he occupies, the world of the Court, the exclusively male-dominated world where military values and the values of realpolitik are held as absolute, he has to drive out the woman in him… And I think that’s the tragedy.

 I’ll be coming back to look at Michael Sheen’s performance, and other Hamlets, in my next post.

 

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Still harping on First Folios with Eric Rasmussen

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Not many books in themselves become the focus of other people’s work, but the 1623 edition of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, commonly known as the  First Folio, is no ordinary book. Professor Eric Rasmussen has just paid a flying visit to the UK where he’s been talking about the two, yes two books he has just published on the subject of this book.

 On Friday evening he simultaneously lectured at the Shakespeare Centre and was heard in a pre-recorded interview on Radio 4’s Front Row.

Why two books? He and a team of researchers have been working for years on a massive undertaking, to document every existing copy of the First Folio, resulting in The Shakespeare First Folios: a descriptive catalogue. There have already been two previous censuses, one dating from 1902 by scholar Sidney Lee, the second, published only about ten years ago by Anthony James West in which 232 copies were identified as opposed to only 160 in Lee’s book. West also co-edits the new volume.

 This serious academic book, described by Rasmussen as “geeky”, contains descriptions of every existing copy including all the variants, manuscript notes and omissions. Being a bit of a geek myself I was fascinated to see how much detail is given for each copy of this most valuable of books.  

 His second book, The Shakespeare Thefts: in search of the First Folios, is anecdotal and entertaining. In his lecture Rasmussen took a few examples of the strange but true stories that surrounds this book, and I was delighted that he chose to talk about the wonderful story about the Royal Shakespeare Company’s copy. I first heard RSC veteran actor Tony Church tell it in a lecture given in around 1980.

 He was one of a trio of actors, with Dorothy Tutin and Derek Godfrey, representing the RSC at a performance in the Vatican of Shakespeare extracts designed to celebrate the 1964 Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. After the performance (the first theatrical performance that had taken place in theVatican), Dorothy Tutin came forward to the Pope, holding the RSC’s copy of the folio, with the intention that he should bless the book. Clearly misunderstanding the gesture, the Pope walked off with it in his arms. Somehow he had thought the book was a gift for the Vatican Library, and it was several embarrassing minutes before the book was returned.

The story was widely reported in the press, and still stuck into the book is a small typed note, explaining that the book had been taken to Rome and blessed by the Pope. The last sentence has been crossed out, presumably because it isn’t known if it was ever blessed.

 After this escapade, the book was returned to the vaults of the Shakespeare Centre. When Tony Church used the Library several years later, I asked him to repeat his story, which until then I had never heard anyone else recount.

First Folio title page 1623

 This is one of three copies of the book kept at the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive. One, the most incomplete of the three, is on permanent display for all visitors to the Birthplace to see. The other, the Ashburnham copy, owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, is also cared for at the SCLA.

 More recently the SCLA has played a part in another story about a copy of the First Folio, the high profile case surrounding the theft of the Durham copy. This copy was brought to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC by the flamboyant Raymond Scott, who claimed to have found it in Cuba. The librarians at the Folger were immediately suspicious. The SCLA was contacted as it contained Sidney Lee’s archives, including the original returns for his census of Folios. These returns included far more details about markings and variants than were included in the printed version, and enabled the copy to be positively identified even though all the obvious signs of its ownership such as stamps, notes and even the book’s binding had been removed. Scott was eventually found guilty of handling stolen goods though the theft itself could not be proved.

 The new census makes each copy as individual as a fingerprint. If you’d like to find out more about these new books, Open Shakespeare includes a review of both, as does Pete Kirwan’s blog. You might also like to look at one of my previous blogs about the Folio

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What can doctors learn from Shakespeare?

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Patrick Stewart as Macbeth

It’s long been acknowledged that Shakespeare took a great interest in medicine and psychology, and this week the BBC picked up a new article written by Dr Kenneth Heaton indicating that doctors might do well to study Shakespeare to improve their understanding of the link between emotion and illness.

 An abstract of the paper is to be found here. Dr Heaton uses examples from several of Shakespeare’s plays which feature symptoms like fatigue and dizziness, and concludes that “Shakespeare was exceptional in his use of sensory disturbances to express emotional upset”.

One symptom that Shakespeare mentions many times is sleeplessness, or sleep disturbance. In sonnet 27 he describes the experience most of us will recognise when our minds continue to race even when we’re tired:

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired:
For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see.

 Here the experience is pleasant, but in sonnet 28 he writes about being tortured and oppressed by being “debarr’d the benefit of rest”:
But day doth daily draw my sorrows longer,
And night doth nightly make grief’s strength seem stronger. 

Sarah Siddons playing Lady Macbeth sleepwalking

Shakespeare’s use of sleep disturbance to signal emotional trauma reaches its highest point in Macbeth, where Macbeth and his wife are both guilty of the crime of murder. Their symptoms range from “terrible dreams, that shake us nightly”, to sleeplessness: “you lack the season of all natures, sleep”, and Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, “a great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching”. She is also described as “not so sick…as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies, that keep her from her rest”.

As well as seeing apparitions, Macbeth hears warnings:
Methought, I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murther Sleep,”-the innocent Sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life”…
Still it cried, “Sleep no more!” to all the house:
“Glamis hath murther’d Sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!” 

Macbeth isn’t one of the plays that Dr Heaton focuses on, perhaps because it’s so obvious, but an older article published by the same journal looks at the way that in this play Shakespeare uses the metaphor of Scotland as a sick body needing purging or surgery to cure it.

These articles come from Medical Humanities, a journal on the subject of medical ethics and the exploration of the relationship between medicine and the arts. Issues regularly contain poems, acknowledging, as Shakespeare so often does, the links between illness and emotion, and that health isn’t just the absence of disease.

Another article in the most recent issue, Plagued by kindness: contagious sympathy in Shakespearean drama, looks at the metaphor of infection in Shakespeare’s plays, comparing his treatment of the subject with contemporary plague pamphlets and medical tracts.   

Shakespeare’s interest in illness, and the number of doctors who appear in the plays, is sometimes attributed to the fact that his son-in-law, John Hall, was a well-known doctor himself. Plague occurred everywhere, including Stratford-upon-Avon, and, in London Shakespeare could have encountered much mental illness, Bedlam already being a hospital for the insane.

 It’s interesting that Shakespeare is thought able to teach medical students a thing or two about human psychology and the effects of emotions on our bodies. It’s an unusual reason for studying Shakespeare, but sounds as if it could be worth a try.

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Celebrating Shakespeare as a symbol of Britishness

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Shakespeare's grave and monument decorated with flowers

In a recent survey, William Shakespeare came out top when people were asked to choose which symbol of Britishness they were most proud of. The Demos thinktank’s report A Place for Pride found that 75% of people agreed that “I am proud of William Shakespeare as a symbol of Britain”, compared with other symbols such as the Union Jack, the royal family, the pound and the National Health Service.

These results are probably no surprise, but I do think it’s odd that, given how popular Shakespeare is both in this country and across the world, that there is no national Shakespeare day. Is he so omnipresent that we don’t need one?

Ironically the local newspapers in Stratford have been able to report the findings from Demos cheek by jowl with another report documenting disagreements between local organisations about how Shakespeare’s Birthday should be celebrated in the town. For many years, in fact for almost two centuries, Shakespeare’s Birthday has been celebrated by local people. The origins seem to be lost in time, but the story goes that the tradition was started by the boys of Shakespeare’s school who, on April 23rd, walked down to Holy Trinity Church where Shakespeare is buried, carrying flowers to leave on his grave. This charming tradition began somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century, around the same time as the 1824 foundation of the Stratford Shakespeare Club which commemorated the day with a celebration dinner or performance. This was before the founding of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust or the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, both of which took on roles in the celebrations, the theatre putting on a Birthday Play right from its opening in 1879.

As time went by the celebrations became more elaborate: from 1896 the American Ambassador was invited to take part, gradually leading to the flags of all the nations being unfurled by representatives of their countries. A lunch, with speeches, is a tradition that dates right back, including since 1990 the award of a silver bowl for outstanding services to Shakespeare, funded by local jewellers’ Pragnells. This award has been given to actors, directors and academics including Dame Judi Dench, Sir Peter Hall and Professor Stanley Wells, CBE. For many years the main celebrations have taken place on the nearest Saturday to the 23rd April, a special Shakespeare service being given at Holy Trinity Church on the following morning.

Over the years many peripheral events have been added: local children performed folk dances, and local acting companies have performed extracts from Shakespeare’s plays around the town. In recent years there have been even more attempts to make the day inclusive, and perhaps the current problems are caused by the celebrations trying to do too much.

The birthday parade

According to reports, the part of the celebrations that seemed most at risk was the parade itself, which it was suggested would be downgraded to the Sunday, while the lunch and the family events would continue to take place on the Saturday. For me the parade is the heart and soul of the Birthday celebrations. Not only does it predate the other activities, it’s the part which has most to do with Shakespeare and his relationship with the town, mapping his journey from cradle to grave via the site of the house where he died, and the school where he received his education, where the schoolboys, referencing the fact that they started the idea, join the procession, leading it down to the church.

Earlier this year the Daily Telegraph called it the “people’s parade” because of its inclusiveness, and suggested it was a great British ritual which everyone should experience at least once. Fortunately the issues seem now to have been resolved by a reorganisation of responsibilities. 2012 should be extra special, with a Shakespeare festival planned for much of the year both in Stratford and around the country.

The traditional parade will take place as normal on Saturday 21 April 2012. If you’ve never been before, put the date in your diary, and on the day bring a modest bunch of flowers, and come along to enjoy the day. A sprig of rosemary in the lapel completes the picture and is a reminder of what the day’s about:

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember.

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The mysterious Passionate Pilgrim and Shakespeare

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

I’ve been spending some time just recently re-reading James Shapiro’s great book 1599, which I strongly recommend if you haven’t already read it. It focuses on a single year, decisive in Shakespeare’s creative life as well being as the year when the Globe Theatre was built and opened.

Shapiro admits that until he came to write the book he had little knowledge of one of the most successful, yet now most forgotten publications of 1599, The Passionate Pilgrim, and he’s not the only person recently to comment on this interesting little book. It gives an insight into how publication worked, and into Shakespeare’s growing standing as an author.

 The title page of the book promises that it’s going to be a wonderful collection of poetry by that master of amorous verse, William Shakespeare. The title itself relates to those love poems for which Shakespeare was already well known, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and to the play Romeo and Juliet. Remember Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting? Their first speeches make up a fourteen-line sonnet, in which Romeo characterises himself as a pilgrim, and Juliet joins in the game, becoming the saint to whom Romeo prays. Here are the first eight lines:

 Romeo         If I profane with my unworthiest hand
                        This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
                        My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
                       To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet           Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
                        Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
                        For saints have hands which pilgrims’ hands do touch
                        And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

Romeo and Juliet meet in the film Romeo+Juliet

The title page suggests that all the poems Shakespeare’s, but in fact only five of the twenty are by him. Two previously unpublished sonnets come first, doubtless to persuade would-be buyers to part with their cash, and the other three Shakespeare poems are those written by the lovers in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The quarto of this play had been published only the year before with Shakespeare’s name on the title page.

Even so in 1599 Shakespeare was better known as a love poet than as a writer of plays for the public playhouses. Authors had little power when it came to publication, especially with plays.  He had seen the two long poems safely through the presses but this wouldn’t have been the case with the plays. Books were sold on the bookstalls in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral, and The Passionate Pilgrim was sold at the sign of the Greyhound by W Leake.  It must have annoyed Shakespeare. Not only was this unauthorised publication reproducing some of “his sugared sonnets among his private friends”, but his three others were intended to be laughed at as poorly-written love poems. The authors of some of the fifteen other poems have never been identified.

I recently stumbled on this fascinating blog from Adam G Hooks at the University of Iowa who examines the history of The Passionate Pilgrim and a mysterious copy that’s in their Special Collections. Do take a look.  

The Passionate Pilgrim also gives us some clues about how Shakespeare wrote. The version of Sonnet 138 appears like this: 

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her (though I know she lies),
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unskilful in the world’s false forgeries.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although I know my days are past the best,
I, smiling, credit her false-speaking tongue,
Outfacing faults in love with love’s ill rest.
But wherefore says my love that she is young?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is a soothing tongue,
And age (in love) loves not to have years told.
Therefore I’ll lie with love and love with me,
Since that our faults in love thus smothered be. 

Shapiro points out that this is subtly, but effectively, different from how the same sonnet appeared when it was published in 1609 in another unauthorised publication.

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore say she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be. 

It looks as if Shakespeare revised this poem between 1599 and 1609, and perhaps kept on reworking the other sonnets too over many years.

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