Shakespeare and the first actresses

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

George Henry Harlow's portrait of Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth

The National Portrait Gallery in London’s new exhibition celebrates the careers of the earliest English professional actresses. Entitled The First Actresses: Nell Gwynn to Sarah Siddons it neatly documents womens’ increasing respectability in the world of the theatre.

In Shakespeare’s day women could not appear on stage publicly, and it was only with the accession of Charles II in 1660 that the position changed. Private theatricals were a different matter however, aristocratic ladies appearing in court masques from the early seventeenth century, and one of the paintings in the exhibition, dating from 1775, shows three such ladies in the roles of the three witches in Macbeth, though it doesn’t record an actual performance. There’s a full description of the painting on the website.

 Sometimes Shakespeare deliberately seems to make his women masculine, as with Queen Margaret in the Henry VI plays, described as “she-wolf of France”, Tamora in Titus Andronicus who’s completely ruthless and Lady Macbeth who asks “unsex me here”. All three daughters in King Lear show their masculine side at different points in the play.

 Of course there’s that plot device that’s almost a Shakespeare comedy trademark, a young girl disguising herself as a boy.  This one occurs in Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Cymbeline and As You Like It, and there are also plenty of straight-talking women like Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew. Often the dominant woman is balanced by the foil of a younger and more passive girl.

Touchstone, Celia and Rosalind, by Walter Paget

 Shakespeare wrote for a known group of actors, and it’s noticeable in both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It that he writes parts for two boys, one tall and fair, the other shorter and dark, both good comic actors. He’s able to use these differences to great effect in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where much of the comedy revolves around the statures of Helena, the “painted maypole” and Hermia “low and little”. There’s a minor textual problem with this in As You Like It. When Rosalind and Celia talk about running away Rosalind describes herself as “more than common tall”, yet Orlando has already been told that “the taller is his daughter [Celia]”. Some editors have assumed that this is an error, but Shakespeare could be building in a visual joke. Rosalind’s imagination begins to run away with her the moment the idea of escaping is suggested:

                                    Were it not better,
Because that I am more than common tall,
That I did suit me all points like a man?
A gallant curtle-axe upon my thigh,
A boar-spear in my hand; and in my heart
Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will,
We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside.

The actor playing Celia needs only to cast a meaningful look at the audience to make a joke of this lovely moment.

And then there are Juliet and Cleopatra, two heroines who really carry the play they appear in. Shakespeare must have known that he had talented boys who could be convincing in these roles. In both plays, the female lead is a much better role than the male. Reputations are rarely made by an actor playing Romeo orAntony, whereas Juliet and Cleopatra can be high points in an actress’s career, though admittedly this is partly because of the scarcity of strong roles for women.

Frances Barber as Cleopatra at Shakespeare's Globe, 2006

It’s difficult for anyone, man or woman, to live up to Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra:

                        For her own person,
It beggar’d all description: she did lie
In her pavilion – cloth of gold, of tissue-
O’er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature.
And:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.
Shakespeare wrote some of the greatest theatrical roles for women ever created. The benefit of writing for boys may be that his heroines seem more modern than the heroines of some of the writers who came after him. This exhibition illustrates how Shakespeare helped them to reach the highest status among actors and artists.

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Facts, fiction and Shakespeare’s view of history

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

One of many books written about Shakespeare's history plays

It’s always claimed that Shakespeare must have been fascinated by British history because he wrote so many plays about it. I make the play count thirteen. But was this fascination with the history itself, or did he see it as a source for stories which he went on to turn into plays?

In Andrew Marr’s Start the Week this week on Radio 4, he took the subject of the representation of history in books, in particular its relationship with fiction. His guests included Boris Johnson, who has just published a book on the history of London, and Alison Weir. It was fascinating to hear how these authors approach the writing of fiction as opposed to fact, though I couldn’t help thinking that Alison Weir protested too much about how readers confuse the two. She’s written factual biographies and novels about the same person, as in her biography of Eleanor of Acquitaine and a novel based on her life called The Captive Queen, so it’s hardly surprising that readers get them mixed up.

 Shakespeare was limited in the resources he could use, and often relied on one or two source books. Liz Dollimore is currently writing a series of blogs about the sources for Shakespeare’s plays and has just posted one about King John, in which Holinshed’s Chronicles are used as the unmistakeable source for part of the plot.  

The title page to the 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles

The boundaries between fact and fiction are always fuzzy to say the least, and if Holinshed gets the facts wrong, then Shakespeare will repeat the error. The murderous figure of Richard III with his hunch back was not invented by Shakespeare. He was merely repeating the Tudor myth that the last of the Plantagenet kings was evil through and through, and the Richard III Society and other advocates of the real Richard know they are fighting a losing battle against one of Shakespeare’s most compelling villains and best stories.

 In his introduction to the now rather elderly Penguin edition of Henry IV Part 1, P H Davison comments on “the difference between Elizabethan and modern conceptions of the use of history”. History was thought to be educational, but not by teaching lists of dates: “By holding up a mirror to the past it was thought possible to learn how to amend one’s own life and how to anticipate events”. He goes on to explain how Shakespeare’s perceived political conservatism can be seen as a result of his, and of his countrymen’s fear of the consequences of rebellion and disorder, though we’re now much more aware of the subversive elements in Shakespeare’s writing.

 In the two parts of Henry IV, Shakespeare juggles material from a large number of sources, giving any modern editor the difficult job of disentangling them. Some elements of the plays are straightforwardly from source books like Holinshed, some are from earlier plays. The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth covers Prince Hal’s “pranks” as well as his conversion on the death of his father, and it’s thought that there may have been an earlier play on the same subject. Then some of the evidence for Hal’s wildness comes from accounts that were circulating during his lifetime, so it’s likely there is some truth in them. The story that Prince Hal boxed the Lord Chief Justice on the ears appears in one of the early plays written before Shakespeare’s, but Shakespeare tones it down by having Falstaff merely refer to it in passing.

Falstaff himself is one of Shakespeare’s great inventions, as are the scenes in Gloucestershire. These scenes have a purpose in the structure of the play, comic relief between the serious political scenes, but also serve to remind the audience of the truly national significance of the accession of the new king, with repercussions felt as far away as Justice Shallow’s peaceful orchard in Gloucestershire.

 In Henry IV Part 2 Shakespeare was also setting the scene for what he knew would be his great story of national celebration in Henry V. The awareness of history is everywhere in the play, but especially in Henry’s speech before Agincourt.

                                    Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.
This story shall the good man teach his son,
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by
From this day to the ending of the world
But we in it shall be remembered. 

Holinshed’s Chronicles report what King Henry really said to his troops before this battle, and Shakespeare pretty much ignored it to write his own incomparable speech. Samuel Johnson wrote “no good story is ever wholly true”, and thankfully Shakespeare always went for the story.

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A Monty Python view of the authorship question, by Eric Idle

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Over the past months I’ve read dozens of pieces about the authorship question and although many of them have been very much worth reading, this article from the New Yorker is the only one that has made me laugh. The wonderful Eric Idle knows a thing or two about creativity and imagination and has turned his attention to the issue in his own inimitable fashion. I’d love to know what the whole Monty Python team would have made of it all.

 

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Robin Hood and Shakespeare

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

The Robin Hood statue in Nottingham

A new play by David Farr, called The Heart of Robin Hood, is just about to open at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

The legend of Robin Hood is a great subject for the RSC as it was obviously a story Shakespeare knew well. It comes to his mind when he’s looking back to a more comforting past. The scene in Justice Shallow’s orchard, in Henry IV part 2, is one of those. A group of old men sit around reminiscing about the good old days. All through the scene, one of them, Silence, sings snatches from old songs, one of which is “of Robin Hood, Scarlet and John”. That’s his last line before the news arrives that the old King is dead and young Prince Hal is now to be crowned. While plans are made celebrating the dawn of a new era, Silence is carried offstage to his bed.

 At other times Shakespeare introduces the world of Robin Hood to the stage. No sooner do they meet him than the outlaws in The Two Gentlemen of Verona adopt Valentine as their leader:
By the bare scalp of Robin Hood’s fat friar,
This fellow were a king for our wild faction!

 And in As You Like It two worlds collide. The old Duke has been banished by his usurping brother, and has fled:
They say he is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.

 Pretty shepherds and shepherdesses, straight from the fashionable world of pastoral romance, fall in love and share the space with the outcasts, but the forest isn’t as idyllic as the pastoral poets suggested: there’s cold weather, fierce animals, and the threat of interference from the outside world.

 By Shakespeare’s time the legend was already old. Nobody is clear when or where it first appeared. Although Robin is now firmly associated with Sherwood Forest and the Nottingham area, he’s also been linked with other places, even the village of Loxley, near Stratford-upon-Avon where in 1193 the Lord of Loxley Manor was Robert Fitz-Odo, a noblemen of Norman descent who mysteriously lost his land.

The story even finds its way into Shakespeare’s life: one of the most persistent myths is that he poached deer from Sir Thomas Lucy, whose threat of prosecution forced him to flee, not into the forest, but to London. This story was adopted by the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In every performance of As You Like It (and there were many) a stuffed stag from Charlecote Park was brought on stage. In between performances the animal was hung high up in the theatre’s Picture Gallery for visitors to admire.

 

Basil Rathbone as the Sheriff of Nottingham and Errol Flynn as Robin

There have been too many versions of this legend to mention, but there are lots of sites to check out if you’re interested. Allen W Wright’s website is full of illustrations and links,  and this site is full of information about the Robin Hood legend. The article on Wikipedia is also extremely full. 

 The “Robbed from the rich, gave to the poor” line which makes him everybody’s favourite outlaw is a fairly recent addition,  though the story always shows him standing up to authority. Russell Crowe’s 2010 film seems to have taken itself very seriously: “Robin and his band of marauders confront corruption in a local village and lead an uprising against the crown that will forever alter the balance of world power”.

 And the RSC’s production promises to be “darker than you’re used to”.
The notorious Robin Hood and his band of outlaws steal from the rich, creating a fearsome reputation amongst those who dare to travel through the mighty forest of sherwood. But they do not share their spoils with the poor and are unloved by the people, who must also pay unfair taxes to the evil Prince John as he plots to steal his brother’s crown. In this time of chaos and fear, it is down to Marion to boldly protect the poor and convince Robin that he must listen to his heart if they are to save the country.

This certainly sounds like a fable for our times. The production begins previewing on 18 November and promises to be spectacular. I can’t wait!

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The Shakespeare blog hits 100!

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Yes this is my 100th post since I started The Shakespeare Blog just over six months ago. It’s a good time to reassess the site, and over the past week I’ve been planning a few changes which will go live in the next few days. I hope you’ll enjoy them: as well as the blog there will a new front page where you’ll find links to new pages and easier ways of locating past blogs.

 If you’re already a regular visitor I’d like to thank you for your loyalty and I hope you’ll continue to find the posts interesting. The latest one will still pop into your inbox if you’re a subscriber, and don’t forget that if you click through to the actual site you can comment on the posts:  I always enjoy hearing what people think. If you’re a first-time reader, it’s really easy to subscribe, so please join in and mention the blog to your friends .

 I can’t write a post without including a bit of Shakespeare, and because it’s Remembrance Weekend, this is Talbot’s dying speech, from one of his early plays, Henry VI Part 1. Talbot is a great military hero who goes into battle alongside his young son John against the French. John is killed and his father mortally wounded. Much later in his career Shakespeare wrote another scene in which a father dies grieving over the body of his dead child. I’m referring of course to the final scene of King Lear. The scene in Lear is a far more accomplished piece of writing, but this speech, especially the last four lines, is moving too.

 

The death of Talbot from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's production of Henry VI Part 1

Thou antic Death, which laugh’st us here to scorn,
Anon, from thy insulting tyranny,
Coupled in bonds of perpetuity,
Two Talbots winged through the lither sky,
In thy despite shall scape mortality….
Poor boy! He smiles, methinks, as who should say,
Had Death been French, then Death had died to-day.
Come, come, and lay him in his father’s arms:
My spirit can no longer bear these harms.
Soldiers, adieu! I have what I would have,
Now my old arms are young John Talbot’s grave.

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Shakespeare’s King Lear and possession

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Gwilym Lee as Edgar in the Donmar Warehouse's 2010 production of King Lear

A few weeks ago I attended one of the Shakespeare Club in Stratford-upon-Avon’s lectures given by Professor Ewan Fernie, on King Lear. It was a thought-provoking look at some of the darkest scenes in this already dark and gruelling play. King Lear has often been called Shakespeare’s greatest play, but it’s also one of the most difficult to sit through. Violence, mutilation, betrayal, murder and madness all feature and in the closing lines of the play the audience is likely to feel just like Edgar who delivers them:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long

 In the 1608 Quarto these lines are assigned to Albany, but it’s accepted practice to follow the Folio, which gives them to Edgar. These lines are most appropriately delivered by the character whose extreme suffering has been shared by the audience.

 It was Edgar, or Poor Tom, that Professor Fernie concentrated on in his lecture. He commented that before adopting the identity of Poor Tom, a mad beggar, Edgar is a conventional and rather dull figure, overshadowed by his much more interesting half-brother Edmund. When becoming Tom, Edgar talks and behaves like a madman. Is he feigning, or is he genuinely a man possessed by the devil?

Here’s an example:

This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbbet: he begins at curfew and walks till the first cock; he gives the web and the pin, squinies the eye and makes the harelip; mildews the white wheat and hurts the poor creature of the earth.

Swithold footed thrice the wold;
He met the nightmare and her nine foal,
Bid her alight and her troth plight,
And aroint thee, witch, aroint thee.

 Passages like this are quite a challenge for the editor as these lines are easy to dismiss as gibberish. Academics approaching the play have identified the source for some of Edgar’s speeches, and the character of Poor Tom, as Samuel Harsnett’s wonderfully-titled book A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, published in 1603. Professor R. A Foakes, in the introduction to his Arden edition of King Lear, describes this book as a “polemical attack on a group of Catholic priests who conducted exorcism in private houses” and was “part of an official campaign against exorcism as practised both by some Protestants and by Catholics”. Foakes also notes that “Harsnett often writes with great verve, and his quirky vocabulary and lively imagery were raided by Shakespeare for his characterisation of Edgar as Poor Tom in Act 3, as well as occasionally for words or phrases elsewhere in the play”. The name of the devil in the passage quoted above, for instance, comes from Harsnett.

As well as discussing Harsnett, Fernie also mentioned a line from A C Bradley, the author of the 1904 book Shakespearean Tragedies. I was delighted to hear him mention Bradley as I discovered his book in my school library and remember reading it avidly. Bradley’s method involved writing about the characters in the plays as if they were real, and it’s a credit to Shakespeare’s writing that readers and playgoers feel they know his characters as if they were living people. In the nineteenth century this led to attempts to construct the lives of characters outside the play, for example Mary Cowden Clarke’s 1851-2 The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, and led on to Bradley who asked questions like “Where was Hamlet before his father’s death?” and “When was the murder ofDuncan first plotted?”

 Even at sixteen I could see that asking these sort of questions about characters in a play was misleading, but I found Bradley’s method a compelling way of approaching the difficulties of the play on the page. Modern critical methods caused Bradley to fall completely out of fashion for the second half of the twentieth century, but it’s noticeable that in the last few years character has begun to be discussed in academic circles. A few years ago John Russell Brown published a reassessment of Bradley’s famous book. And  Ewan Fernie concluded that Bradley had been right to suggest that Edgar when Poor Tom, rather than Cordelia, is the most religious person in the play. If you’d like to take a look at it, the full text of the 1905 edition is available here.

Stratford’s Shakespeare Club meets monthly and welcomes visitors.

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Gunpowder, treason and plot: Guy Fawkes and the Shakespeare connection

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

As I write this Guy Fawkes is trending on Twitter and “Occupy Wall Street” protestors are wearing Guy Fawkes masks inspired by the film Vendetta. Perhaps Guy Fawkes Day is set to become a politically meaningful date in the calendar instead of just an excuse to let off some fireworks around a bonfire.

 The Gunpowder Plot was an attempt to kill the king and members of his government and to destroy the Parliament building itself. Following James I’s accession in 1603 it had been hoped that he would adopt a more tolerant approach to Catholics, but this hope was quickly disappointed and powerful Catholics tried to find a way to return the country to Catholicism. Explosives expert Guy Fawkes was caught red-handed in a cellar beneath the Palace of Westminster with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, just hours before the ceremonial opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. It was later revealed that a tip-off had actually given the plot away days before. 

Some of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators

Many of the conspirators had strong connections with the Warwickshire area and the effects of the unsuccessful plot were felt in Stratford-upon-Avon. Dr Robert Bearman’s new book Minutes and Accounts of the Stratford-upon-Avon Corporation 1599-1609 details the events that followed the plot.

 In 1605 one of the less well-known conspirators, Ambrose Rookwood, leased Clopton House just outside Stratford to be nearer to the other plotters. Robert Catesby’s home was only 12 miles away and other key locations were nearby. Coughton Court, near Alcester, was a stronghold of the Catholic Throckmortons where the families of some of the plotters waited for news of its success or failure.

 On the 6thNovember, just the day after Fawkes was arrested, news reached the area. Messengers must have ridden like the wind to travel the hundred or so miles from London so quickly.  The town sheriff acted swiftly, searching Clopton House for evidence to link its

Clopton House

resident with the Catholic plot. The examination and valuation of the goods seized was carried out on 20 February the following year. The goods seized consisted of crucifixes, chalices, surplices and other evidence of Catholic worship. Most of the description is in Latin, with occasional phrases in English: “a Crosse of Copper with the picture of Christe uppon yt, and an Altar stone”, “a Little Silver Bell”, “a Vestemente of Crimson Satten with a pall and Armelettes belonging to the same”, “Five Latine Bookes”.

The accounts for 1605 include a number of payments indicating that the town swiftly moved to improve its defences.  The payments in early November are for routine building maintenance, then: “Paid the vith of November to Richard Dewes for two pounds of gunpowder”. “Paid the same day for scouring of one musket, … four flaskes and one bandelyre to Henry Broome”, and “Paid the viith of November to Mrs Queeny for wyne that was brued for Mr Hailes when he came to survey the armour”. Later purchases included more gunpowder, bullets, swords and daggers .

 At the Borough Sessions in January 1606 Catholic recusants “and suche as wee find that doe not come to Churche” were listed. Fourteen people are on the list, and Bearman notes that these investigations followed the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot a few months earlier, when all Catholics were seen as potentially suspicious.

 These records show that the ripples of the Gunpowder Plot spread far and wide. In the Stratford area there was much jitteriness: It was rumoured that Fulke Greville’s house near Alcester had also been besieged. No wonder: the plotters fled through this area before the stand-off on the 8th November at Holbeache House in Staffordshire, where Robert Catesby was killed. Those who survived were executed in January 1606. Ambrose Rookwood was executed on the same day as conspirators Thomas Wintour and Guy Fawkes.

 Interest in every aspect of the plot would have been intense and must have had an effect on Shakespeare. Although there’s no record of its first performance, Macbeth was almost certainly written and performed in 1606.

 Shakespeare was too subtle and careful a man to write directly about contemporary events, but he took the basic story from his main sourcebook, Holinshed’s Chronicles and incorporated elements that would remind audiences of the Plot. The assassination of a reigning Scottish monarch, the flight of the suspected murderers, the Porter’s remarks about equivocation relating to the trial and execution of the Jesuit Father Garnet, the opening with its thunder and lightning, and the poetic consideration of regicide, evil and conscience made this a play much more than just a piece to flatter the new King.

 Until earlier this week (thank you, Globe Theatre) I’d never seen this jeton, or medal, which was struck after the event to commemorate the Plot. The image shows a snake surrounded by lilies and roses. Is it just a coincidence that Lady Macbeth tells her husband to “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it” or was this a direct reference to this medal? She continues:

                            “You shall put
This night’s great business into my dispatch,
Which shall to all our nights and days to come
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom”

The Gunpowder Plot was indeed a great business which had lasting repercussions, not least ensuring the centuries-long persecution and suspicion of Catholics throughout the country.

 If you’re interested in acquiring a copy of Dr Bearman’s excellent book, 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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The mysteries of emblems, mottoes, and Shakespeare’s own chair

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

In my last post I looked at how Shakespeare acquired his family’s coat of arms. It is set down in two drafts made on 20 October 1596, described as follows:  

The arms are blazoned. “Gold, on a bend sable, a spear of the first, steeled argent [a gold spear tipped with silver on a black diagonal bar]; and for his crest, or cognizaunce a falcon his wings displayed argent, standing on a wreath of his colours, and supporting a spear gold steeled as aforesaid, set upon a helmet with mantles and tassels as hath been accustomed”

Heraldry has its own language: Silver is argent, sable is black, and so on. Coats of arms often included witty visual references to people’s names, as in Shakespeare’s case where the spear is an obvious reference to the family name.

 The College of Arms also had its own rules about who was and was not fit to be granted arms, hence the 1602 disagreement about Shakespeare’s arms. When two of the Heralds replied to the complaint, they stated that the spear was a “patible difference”, making the coat of arms unique. To the suggestion that the family was unworthy, they wrote that John Shakespeare had “borne magistracy and was Justice of the Peace at Stratford-upon-Avon,”, had married “the daughter and heir of Arden” and “was able to maintain that estate”.

 I confess to knowing little about the subject and am grateful to heraldry expert William Collins for these details. He also comments that “In a period when many grants were of complicated coats of arms, the Shakespeare arms were simple, beautiful, and a good example of canting arms”. His work detailing all the heraldry to be found in Holy Trinity Church can be found in the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive in Stratford-upon-Avon.

 

The Shakespeare monument

Once granted, how was the coat of arms used? The most prominent use is on the monument to Shakespeare above his grave in Holy Trinity Church. It’s worth noticing that while William Dugdale, in his 1656 History of Warwickshire, gets some of the details of the figure of Shakespeare wrong, the coat of arms is accurate. It also appears, quartered with other arms, on some of the family gravestones: John and Susanna Hall, and their son-in-law Thomas Nash. None of these show the quartering with the arms of the Arden family.

 Shakespeare’s coat of arms is also carved on a chair which has a fascinating history.  Traditionally known as Shakespeare’s Courting Chair it was in Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in 1792 when it was purchased by Samuel Ireland from descendants of the original Hathaway family. He was told that the chair had been passed down to Shakespeare’s grand-daughter who passed it to them. Ireland published an illustration of the chair showing the coat of arms but not the carved initials WAS (William and Anne Shakespeare). After its purchase the chair disappeared for over 200 years, unexpectedly turning up in an auction in 2002 when it was returned to Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, where it can still be seen. I’m indebted to Ann Donnelly, former Museum Curator for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, for the following:  “we had the layers of patina,  taken from strategic points on the chair and carvings, analysed microscopically.  It wasn’t conclusive, but it was suggestive that  the two elements of the arms, the shield and falcon, were roughly contemporaneous with the making of the chair itself.  They are cruder  than the cresting and carving on the stiles of the back of the chair, and were maybe added slightly later”.

 Furniture expert Victor Chinnery suggested the style of the chair was appropriate for a date in the early to mid 1600s.  We can’t know if it was Shakespeare’s chair but it certainly dates from his own lifetime or soon afterwards.

  Ben Jonson was obviously amused by Shakespeare’s enthusiasm to join the gentry. A motto accompanied the coat of arms, “Non sanz droict” or “Not without Right” and in  Jonson’s 1599 play Every Man Out of his Humour, the character Sogliardo’s motto is  “Not without Mustard”. I wonder if Shakespeare saw the joke. He doesn’t ever seem to have used the motto.

Pericles presenting his arms to Thaisa in the Shakespeare Theatre Company's 2007 production of Pericles

 It seems though that he wrote other mottos. It’s recorded that in 1613 Francis Manners, 6th Earl of Rutland, ordered an “impresa”, an allegorical device, with a motto, from Shakespeare, which the actor Richard Burbage painted onto a paper shield.  The record of the payment, 44 shillings, still exists, but rather typically the design itself is lost. The Earl then carried the shield at a tournament to celebrate the anniversary of the King’s Accession on 24 March. This sort of occasion is described in Pericles, where several knights appear bearing heraldic emblems and devices, including:

 A burning torch that’s turned upside down:
The word: “Qui me alit me entinguit”.
Which shows that Beauty hath his power and will,
Which can as well enflame as it can kill.
 The scene was probably written by George Wilkins, the play’s co-author, but Shakespeare would have known it.

One of Wither's Emblemes

 The devices are reminiscent of the puzzling images that accompany verses in emblems books like Wither’s Emblemes, published in 1635 but using illustrations from 1610-1613. Like the art of heraldry itself these mysterious but beautiful images demand special knowledge in order to unlock their meaning.

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The facts about Shakespeare’s coat of arms

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

The Shakespeare Coat of Arms in glass, in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre

At some time in the late 1560s or early 1570s William’s father John Shakespeare enquired about acquiring a coat of arms for his family. John had ambition: as a young man he left the little village of Snitterfield for the nearby town of Stratford-upon-Avon, setting up in business and taking part in local government. He married the heiress-daughter of landowner Robert Arden, from a well-known family of minor gentry. That coat of arms would have given his family added respectability and status.  Just as we don’t know exactly when he made the enquiry, we don’t know why John didn’t pursue this claim: perhaps it was the expense, at a time when his previously successful business was beginning to falter.

 In order to get a coat of arms, an application had to be made to the wonderfully medieval-sounding College of Arms, grants being made by several men known as Heralds. Coats of arms were ceremonial rather than practical, though they took the form of a shield and the grant conveyed the right to bear a sword. The College of Arms still exists and continues to approve coats of arms to this day.

The title page of Richard Brathwait's 1630 book The English Gentleman, features an idealised portrait of a gentleman

In Elizabethan England more and more people were becoming wealthy through trade and commerce, and hankered after the respectability which a coat of arms could give.

Coats of arms were expensive, costing between £10 and £30. As a comparison the schoolmaster in Stratford-upon-Avon was paid a salary of £20 a year.  Money alone didn’t guarantee success though; you had to prove that you or one of your ancestors deserved the honour.

 In October 1596, the Shakespeare claim was renewed. John, the head of the family, was elderly by this time but his eldest son was a successful actor, poet and playwright in London and it’s thought that he revived the claim on behalf of his father. He was successful and three years later another claim was made, to quarter the Shakespeare arms with those of Arden (this involves dividing the shield in two so that it contains both coats of arms) linking the Shakespeares with the older family.

 The story takes another twist when in 1602, after John Shakespeare had died and William was the head of the family, one of the Heralds checked the grants of arms that had been made in the previous few years and claimed that twenty-three had been made to “base persons”, accusing his fellow Herald of corruption. Shakespeare was one of these singled out, as “Shakespeare ye player”. Acting was not a suitable occupation for a gentleman.

 The Herald who had made the original grant, backed up by William Camden, the most senior of the Heralds, upheld the Shakespeare claim citing John Shakespeare’s experience as Bailiff of Stratford-upon-Avon and the military service said to have been done by Shakespeare’s great-grandfather in the days of Henry VII.

 So how do we know these details are true?

There are five documents that confirm this story: two drafts dated 20 October 1595, the document outlining the suggested quartering of the arms, the complaint made in 1602, and the refutal of it. Several bits of evidence are missing: the original document in which John Shakespeare set out his claim, the fair copy of the coat of arms, and the grant of arms isn’t set out in the register. In fact you might say we don’t know the grant was actually made because we don’t have the document that says so, but none of the later documents would exist if it hadn’t.

Shakespeare used the grant made to his family. Shakespeare is called “Gent”, or “Gentleman” in several legal documents, he left his ceremonial sword to young Thomas Combe in his will, and the coat of arms is displayed on the Shakespeare monument in Holy Trinity Church. In the poems dedicated to Shakespeare in the First Folio he is several times referred to as “gentle”, though the word could refer to behaviour as well as status.

 In one of the greatest speeches ever written, Henry V rouses his soldiers with the thought that fighting with him will make them all gentlemen:

 We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon St Crispin’s day. 

In my next post I’ll look in more detail at the Shakespeare coat of arms and its uses.

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Walking for Shakespeare: Nine Day’s Wonder

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Walking for fun’s not a concept that would have been understood in Shakespeare’s day, and the sponsored walk would have been an even more alien idea. Walking was a necessity, and when Shakespeare left Stratford for London as a young man, he would almost certainly have walked because he had to. The alternative, riding, wasn’t cheap: according to the Stratford Corporation Minutes and Accounts, in the early 1600s hiring a horse to Worcester, only about 30 miles, cost 2 shillings, twenty-four times as much as entry to the Globe Theatre.

 In Shakespeare’s plays, walking is less for pleasure than for contemplation: Alexander Iden in Henry VI Part 2, loves his “quiet walks” in his garden, and Hamlet walks for hours in the lobby of the palace at Elsinore. It wasn’t until the Romantic period when Wordsworth wrote his Guide to the Lake District that walking as an outdoor recreation really took off.

 In 2006 Shakespeare’s Way, subtitled “A Journey of Imagination”, was launched. This 146-mile walk covers much of the same ground as Shakespeare did walking from Stratford to London. 

The walkers from the Shakespeare Institute set off from Shakespeare's Birthplace

On Friday a group of walkers set off on their Nine Days Wonder, following this route in order to raise money for the newly set-up charity The Lizz Ketterer Trust. I didn’t know Lizz personally, though during her years at the Shakespeare Institute where she completed her PhD in 2009, she touched many lives. She died earlier this year at the tragically young age of 31, having only just taken up a teaching post at the University of New Mexico. Her friends at the Institute have set up the trust to fund an annual award that will allow a student from Lizz’s home in Winedale Texas to visit Stratford-upon-Avon to immerse themselves in Shakespeare as she did.

 The walk is the second fundraising event: a successful performance of Hamlet has already been put on by the newly set up theatre ensemble Ketterer’s Men. The walkers expect to arrive at the Rose Theatre on Saturday 5 November. If you want to find out more, sponsor the walkers, or make a contribution, the information is on the website.

 Here’s Shakespeare’s Sonnet 36 which describes the beauty of nature, overshadowed by personal loss:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendour on my brow;
But, out, alack! He was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath maskt him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

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