Recording Shakespeare’s town: documents of the Stratford-upon-Avon Corporation

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

After experiencing Hollywood’s wildly inaccurate version of history in the film Anonymous I’ve returned with relief to a book which looks at the reality. Dr Robert Bearman has continued the task, begun in the 1920s, of transcribing and editing the main documents detailing the history of Stratford-upon-Avon in Shakespeare’s lifetime. His book Minutes and Accounts of the Stratford-upon-Avon Corporation Volume VI: 1599-1609 has just been published by the Dugdale Society.

Records of the activities of the Corporation  were kept from its foundation in 1553. These are still in existence at the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive and continue to demonstrate what life was like in the town in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Shakespeare’s father John was an active Member of the Corporation in earlier years, and during the period covered by the book Members included people who knew Shakespeare, like Francis Collins the lawyer and Hamnet Sadler, both witnesses to Shakespeare’s will, and there are many mentions of families like the Quineys.

The detail is fascinating. Petty and not so petty crime, including murder, building improvements, the state of the roads, rubbish disposal, are all subjects that still preoccupy us in our towns and cities. Other records remind us how much the world has changed. Dr Bearman tells us:

“We read of complaints that the high bailiff, no less, had his head ‘grievously broken’ whilst trying to put a stop to a brawl in a local tavern…. of the arrest for trespass of the bailiff, chief alderman and four other aldermen after they had symbolically broken into the Bancroft, illegally enclosed by the lord of the manor, [doing damage] to the value of forty shillings; and of the excommunication and expulsion of the of the vicar, Richard Byfield for being too much of a Puritan for his own good”

Christopher Benjamin as Dogberry for the RSC, 2002

Neither Shakespeare, then at the height of his success in London, nor his immediate family, feature very much in these records, but that’s only to be expected as  affluent landowners rarely get into trouble with the law. There are, though, echoes. As Bearman notes, the behaviour of the officers of the Stratford watch, the equivalent of local policemen, reminds us of the self-important Dogberry and his men in Much Ado About Nothing. In 1608 it’s reported that ‘the constables are very negligent in their return and charging of sufficient watchmen and that those watchmen which are ordinarily charged neither begin the watch at a lawful hour, and always for the most part break off and depart before the lawful hour’. In Shakespeare’s play the watch, supposedly “good men and true” discuss their evening duties to apprehend vagrants, drunkards and thieves. “You are to call at all the ale-houses, and bid those that are drunk get them to bed”, while making it clear that they will not intervene should they encounter trouble. The watchmen themselves expect a quiet night:“Let us go sit here upon the church-bench till two, and then all to bed”.  Another Shakespeare play, Measure for Measure, also features a constable, Elbow, who makes a joke of his name: “I do lean upon justice, sir”.

The Guild Chapel

I particularly like the section in the book dealing with the 1606 casting of a new bell for the Guild Chapel. The accounts list what had to be purchased: the metal for the bell, stone for the furnace, bags of coals to dry the moulds, nails, timber for the bell frame. Then there are the payments to people: Richard Dawkes who cast the bell, Spenser and others “for helpinge us out of the pit with the bell and for gettinge her into the chapel in money and drinke”, and to “Richard Greene and Harrington for watchinge the night after the bell was caste”. The bell cost in total £28 7s 1d, a significant proportion of the Corporation’s expenses. Although it’s unlikely that Shakespeare was in Stratford when it was being made, he would have heard the bell striking from, New Place, just across the road.

We shouldn’t forget Mairi Macdonald who has made access to the documents immeasurably easier by creating the name index to all six volumes in the series, and including it in this one.

During this period Stratford found itself at the heart of events of national importance. Clopton House, just outside Stratford, was occupied by one of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot. I’ll be writing a blog about what the book shows to have happened around the anniversary of the plot, 5th November.

If you’re interested in acquiring a copy of this excellent book, please contact the secretary, 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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Why Shakespeare was Shakespeare, Mr Emmerich

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Roland Emmerich, aiming to promote his film Anonymous, has now come up with a video giving 10 reasons why he believes that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare. I’ve been trying to ignore the hype over this film, but I couldn’t resist answering these. If however you’re bored by the whole thing, look away now.

1. Not a single manuscript in Shakespeare’s hand has ever been found. Why are none of his letters home still around?

You might just as well ask why there are no manuscripts of Marlowe’s plays, or why so few personal letters from 400 years ago have survived. The actor Edward Alleyn went on tour and wrote a lovely letter to his young wife that still exists, but any survival is a rarity.

 2. Shakespeare’s parents were illiterate, and his daughters couldn’t read or write.

Unfortunately the ability to read doesn’t leave any mark on the historical record, so we don’t know if any of Shakespeare’s family could read. As for writing, John Shakespeare used a mark rather than a signature on documents, but there are records of people who could write putting the sign of the cross on documents. So we just don’t know, but for the record Emmerich is wrong about Susanna as one of her signatures has survived. What does this argument have to do with Shakespeare’s ability to write the plays?

 3. Shakespeare writes obsessively about the aristocracy. Ben Jonson’s plays reflect the social class he came from, whereas Shakespeare mocks the lower classes by giving them names like Dull and Mistress Overdone. Would he be a traitor to his class?

Shakespeare wrote plays to be popular. Has Mr Emmerich never noticed the media’s interest in the current Royal Family?  This only exists because the public are interested in those who rule them. For the class argument to work Jonson shouldn’t give any of his lower class characters funny names, yes? Pity then about Ferret, Nick Stuff, Trundle and Staggers in The New Inn for one. And Shakespeare often gives humble characters like the soldiers in Henry V’s army dignfied names, like Michael Williams, John Bates and Alexander Court. The names are for comic effect, Mr Emmerich. Marlowe, the son of a cobbler, wrote a play about the monarchy called Edward II, and there were several plays on the subject of Richard III, not just Shakespeare’s.

 4. Only a few, poorly-executed signatures by Shakespeare exist.

The few authenticated signatures are all on legal documents. Three on the will written a month before he died, the others on legal documents where space was cramped. Part of the manuscript of the play Sir Thomas More (see left) may well be in Shakespeare’s handwriting, but its authenticity is still in doubt: academics don’t agree. Incidentally Marlowe’s only signature is the sole surviving example of his handwriting, and it’s spelt Marley. So Marlowe couldn’t spell his name either!

 5. Shakespeare’s plays and poems don’t reflect his own life, unlike Ben Jonson who wrote a poem on the death of his son and John Lennon who wrote a song about his mother.

This is the “writers write about their own lives” argument. Has Mr Emmerich never heard of imagination? Where does he think Mary Shelley got Frankenstein from, let alone the screenwriters for Godzilla and Independence Day, both films he directed.

 6. There’s no record of Shakespeare going to school, but the writer knew subjects like medicine, law, astrology, and he had a huge vocabulary.

There’s no record of any boy attending the Grammar School in Stratford until 1740, although the names of the schoolmasters and their rate of pay are known. Several Stratford boys of Shakespeare’s age acquired a good education: Richard Field became a printer in London, and William Smith, the son of a mercer, went to Oxford. As for all that knowledge, why shouldn’t a young man with an enquiring mind learn an awful lot about these subjects between the ages of 18 and 25? On vocabulary, the English language was expanding all the time, and Shakespeare himself coined several thousand new words.

 7. Shakespeare retired in his 40s and never wrote again.

It’s now thought that Shakespeare collaborated on his last play in 1613-14, only 2-3 years before he died. Emmerich says that he can’t compare himself with Shakespeare then cheerfully goes on to do so, saying he couldn’t imagine himself giving up film-making, so how could Shakespeare give up writing? What sort of evidence is this? Perhaps he should revisit this question in twenty years time.

 8, Shakespeare set a third of his plays in Italy and refers to Italian cities in great detail.

I wondered when this would come up, and it’s just not true. That third has to include Cymbeline, where the only Italian thing in the two scenes set in Rome are some personal names, several plays set in Ancient Rome based heavily on historical resources, and Two Gentlemen of Verona in which Valentine travels from Verona to Milan by sea (both are inland). English servants seem to abound in these Italian cities and there’s even a horse called Dobbin in Venice. Italy was a fashionable location for plays, not just Shakespeare’s: Women beware Women, The Revenger’s Tragedy and Volpone were all set there, and John Florio could have supplied Shakespeare with details of Venice just as he did for Ben Jonson.

 

Shakespeare’s monument

9. Shakespeare’s monument shows a grain dealer.

Another old chestnut. Emmerich shows the illustration of the bust in Holy Trinity Church from Dugdale’s  1656 Antiquities of Warwickshire, in which Shakespeare’s hands are on the cushion before him, and neither paper nor quill are present. It’s been pointed out many times that Dugdale’s engraving is inaccurate, and there’s another early illustration to prove it. Mr Emmerich, why didn’t you show us the rest of the entry in Dugdale? Then we would have seen the English and Latin inscriptions on the monument which refer to Shakespeare as a writer, celebrating “all that he has writ” and calling him “A Virgil in art”. Not how you would describe a tradesman.

 10. The will doesn’t mention books or manuscripts, so he didn’t own any.

Shakespeare didn’t necessarily own his own manuscripts, as they would have been the property of the theatre for which they were written. But any books and papers which he did own would probably have been mentioned in the inventory taken to London by Shakespeare’s executor, John Hall, now lost. Historians who have studied wills of the period haven’t found anything suspicious in it, though the mention of the second best bed is eccentric  – but presumably even Mr Emmerich wouldn’t try to suggest this had anything to do with the authorship.

 I’d be prepared to accept Anonymous as “just a film” if it wasn’t for the fact that Education packs have been prepared to send out to schools, and if videos like the one I’ve linked to weren’t so snide and sneering. Everybody who worked with Shakespeare or knew him, and all their descendants, knew that Shakespeare was genuine. Nobody has ever uncovered any evidence at all that anyone else wrote the plays. Shakespeare’s friends and colleagues wrote that they put the First Folio together to honour him, and his family erected the church bust for him. There’s no reason to doubt the integrity of either. If you want to find out more, the SBT’s Sixty Minutes with Shakespeare is a good place to start,  and the Shakespeare Authorship Page is full of tremendously detailed information.

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Stephen Fry and the English language

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Stephen Fry has just reached the end of his five-part series Fry’s Planet Word, in praise of the English language. Saving the best until last Fry looked at English story-telling through poetry, drama, fiction and even songwriting. It’s available now on I-Player

 Fry brought in well-known practitioners from a variety of backgrounds such as screenwriters, film-makers and publishers, to talk about the writing of Tolkien, George Orwell, James Joyce and Bob Dylan.

 

Inevitably Shakespeare took a leading part in this programme, and Fry talked about the blossoming of the English language that took place during Shakespeare’s lifetime before interviewing a number of actors who’ve performed his work, including the irrepressible Brian Blessed and several who have played the part of Hamlet with distinction: David Tennant, Simon Russell Beale and Mark Rylance. 

He also included the wonderful spoof, where Hugh Laurie as Shakespeare, has his “To be or not to be” speech rewritten for him by Rowan Atkinson, who’s in full Blackadder mode, as the theatre manager or editor trying to make the play commercial. I’d been saving this clip up to share with you, so I was delighted to see it in the programme. Here’s the whole thing.

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What next for the Royal Shakespeare Company?

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

A few days away from mobile phones, TV and radio combined with the aftermath of a cold have played havoc with posts to my blog. Now back on track, I find that not only has Michael Boyd announced that he will be leaving the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012 but speculation about his successor is in full swing. Lists of potential candidates, even shortlists and ballots, for the most important job in the Shakespeare world have already started to appear.

 So who should be the next Artistic Director of the RSC?  I thought it might be worth looking back to see how the leadership of the Company has developed.

 In the 50 years since the Company was renamed in 1961 it has had only five Artistic Directors, all theatre directors: Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn, Terry Hands, Adrian Noble, Michael Boyd. At the time of their appointment all were already working for the organisation. Two of them had directed cycles of Shakespeare history plays just before being appointed, as if this was a kind of audition for running the Company.

 Before the foundation of the RSC many of the people who ran the Theatre were actors, the most distinguished being Anthony Quayle who during the 1950s raised the profile and reputation of the theatre by bringing in virtually all the greatest Shakespeare actors in the country as well as foreign stars like Charles Laughton and Paul Robeson.

 Further back, before there was an Artistic Director, Stratford was the highlight of Frank Benson’s tours around the country for over 30 years. He became synonymous with the town’s Shakespeare festival, undertaking several foreign tours in its name.

 Quite a range of possibles have been suggested as successor to Michael Boyd, just as there were back in 2002: then, as well as Boyd himself, two director/actor duos put themselves forward: Gregory Doran and Antony Sher, and John Caird and Simon Russell Beale. John Caird, less high profile than the others, had directed a number of successful RSC productions as well as partnering Trevor Nunn on two of the company’s biggest successes, Nicholas Nickleby and Les Miserables.

 

Vikki Heywood

Talking about partnerships is crucial: it isn’t just Boyd who’s leaving the Company, but his Executive Director, Vikki Heywood is departing at the same time. The interview in the Stratford Observer for 21 October has described Vikki as “Bonnie to Mr Boyd’s Clyde”, and any new Artistic Director will need to establish a similarly strong relationship with their Executive Director.

 So who, so far, is being suggested? The most obvious candidates are the three RSC Associate Directors, Gregory Doran, the most senior, Rupert Goold and David Farr.  Michael Billington included in his list Dominic Cooke (currently at theRoyal Court), Marianne Elliot (at the National), and Michael Grandage (now at the Donmar).

Billington’s list didn’t include any actors, but both Kenneth Branagh and Sam West have experience of directing and of management. Both, incidentally, have been notable Hamlets for the RSC. Only a couple of weeks ago Kenneth Branagh, with immaculate timing, mentioned that it was his ambition to be Artistic Director of a theatre company. Branagh’s got the huge advantage of being a globally-known Shakespeare actor, though his appointment would probably not please those wanting the RSC to pursue an edgy agenda.

 

The interior of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre

The Boyd/Heywood collaboration has achieved what seemed impossible less than ten years ago: the successful transformation of the RST, the Complete Works Festival, the building of the temporary Courtyard Theatre, the reintroduction of what seemed to have become a dirty word, the ensemble. Partnerships with theatre companies worldwide have been encouraged and major foreign visits have been carried out. The plans for the 2012 Shakespeare Festival are in place. The way seems clear for the Company to exploit the potential of having two fully-functioning theatre spaces in which to focus on Shakespeare’s plays.

 Peter Hall’s appointment, back in 1960, set the tone for a completely different style of theatre: moving away from the glamour of established actors like the Oliviers, Hall proclaimed that the company would create its own stars, and so it did, and continued to do. The theatre’s now at another crossroads and the new Artistic Director will almost certainly put the Company on another new path, perhaps for years to come. It’s going to be a fascinating few months until March when the announcement is made. “The readiness is all”.

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Stratford-upon-Avon in autumn

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Autumn is really on its way now, and although it’s a beautiful time of year there’s always a feeling of sadness because summer’s past and the cold harsh days of winter are on the way.

 Shakespeare’s most often-quoted passage about late autumn comes in sonnet 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

 Elsewhere autumn’s characterised less by melancholy than by storms. In The Taming of the Shrew Petruchio says he won’t be put off by Katherina’s arguments

For I will board her, though she chide as loud
As thunder when the clouds in autumn crack.

 Titania too characterises autumn as “chiding” in her often-quoted speech about the alteration of the seasons. October certainly can be a stormy month.

 I’ve put together a few photographs of Stratford-upon-Avon and the wooded Welcombe Hills where Shakespeare owned land, celebrating this magical season.

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Very like a whale: Adventures in the far North, Part 2

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Seal-die of the Muscovy company

In Part 1 I looked at some of Shakespeare’s references to whales, and the history of whaling in Spitsbergen. This time I’m looking at the stories of adventurers who headed north.

 The very first English trading company was established by Act of Parliament in 1556,  “The Fellowship of English Merchants for the Discovery of New Trades” commonly known as the Muscovy Company. The main commodities traded with Russia were listed as “Tallow, wax, flax, … cow-hides, cordage and hemp”. Other companies followed: the Barbary Company was formed in the 1570s, and the East India Company in 1600. Russians would have been seen in London: the four young men in Love’s Labour’s Lost disguise themselves, for comic effect, as “Muscovites or Russians” and are asked:
                        Why look you pale?
Seasick, I think, coming from Muscovy.

 Shakespeare knew about the weeks of continuous darkness experienced north of the Arctic Circle. In Measure for Measure Angelo tires of listening to a long story: “this will last out a night in Russia when nights are longest there”.

 The potential for whaling was recognised in 1576 when a monopoly to hunt was granted to the Company, but it wasn’t until 1594-5 that English ships went to procure whale products, though not to hunt. At around the same time Dutch adventurers were searching for the North-East passage to the orient and the great Dutch explorer William Barents discovered Spitsbergen. In 1596 encroaching ice forced his crew to build a hut on the bleak uninhabited island of Novaya Zemlja north of Russia. In an account it was stated that they “Lived in the house from the 12 October anno 1596 all the whole winter through till 13 June of the following year 97 in great cold” The fifteen men who survived to set sail in two open boats were so weakened that three of them, including Barents himself, died before being picked up 1600 miles from Novaya Zemlja.

 In 1871, nearly three hundred years after it had been abandoned, their hut was found, buried in snow but still containing many objects including the account quoted above.

Walruses on an island in Spitsbergen

The first English expedition was in 1603, to Bear Island, south of the main archipelago. There they found large numbers of walruses, killing a reported 600. Although large animals with dangerous tusks, they pull out onto land in groups making capture relatively easy. In 1610 a ship was sent to the main part of Spitsbergen and reported “great store of whales”. The first expedition specifically sent to hunt whales was the English one of 1611. Several ships carried one hundred and seven men including six Basque harpooners from Northern Spain(the only Europeans experienced in killing whales). The instructions issued to Thomas Edge, the Muscovy Company agent, include a note to treat the Basques “very kindely and friendly” and to learn from them “that businesse of striking the whale as well as they”. Whales were caught but the ships were lost, then in a return voyage in 1612 seventeen whales were taken yielding 180 tons of oil. Dutch whalers sent similar expeditions, and after some pointless skirmishes the two groups agreed a compromise by which they shared the coast.

 A wonderful account of the 1613 expedition includes a full description of the hunt. Several small rowing boats called shallops set off together, each one containing a harpooner. Once hit with a single harpoon the whale would drop to the bottom of the sea, and the sailors might have to let out 60 fathoms of rope. After a few minutes the whale would come back up, and would fight for its life: “he comes not directly up above the water, but swims away with an uncontrolled force and swiftness; hurrying the shallop after him…When he hath thus drawn her perhaps a mile or more, – which is done in a very short time, considering her swiftness, – then will he come spouting above the water; and the men row up to him, and strike him with long launces …But when he is wounded, he is like to wrest the launce out of the striker’s hand …and now will he frisk and strike with his tail very forceably; sometimes hitting the shallop, and slitting her asunder; sometimes also maiming or killing some of the men. And for that cause, there is always either two or three shallops about the killing of one whale…He will sometimes draw the shallops 3 or 4 miles from the place where he was first stricken with the harping-iron.”

 In Troilus and Cressida, Troilus suggests that Hector has the same effect on the Greek soldiers as a whale had on sailors in rowing boats:
There is a thousand Hectors in the field;
                       ….. anon he’s there afoot,
And there they fly or die, like scaling sculls
Before the belching whale.

 The illustration shows much of the process, including the coppers in which the whale’s blubber, chopped into tiny pieces, was heated to release its oil. A Greenland right whale could produce 100 tonnes of oil which could be used to produce soap, lamp-oil, or to waterproof clothes. In The Merry Wives of Windsor Falstaff is likened to a whale:

 What tempest, I trow, threw this whale (with so many tuns of oil in his belly) ashore at Windsor? How shall I be reveng’d on him? I think the best way is to entertain him with hope, till the wicked fire of his lust have melted him in his own grease.

 English whaling declined after other nations became better organised, and English adventurers continued to develop trading links in other parts of the world. We’re used to hearing how much Shakespeare owed to the culture of the Mediterranean, but stories of the almost-unbelievable landscapes and hardships of the arctic north may also have formed part of his imaginary landscape.

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Stratford-upon-Avon’s Mop Fair

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

For a few days every October the residents of Stratford-upon-Avon have the history of the town brought home to them. The centre of the town literally comes to a standstill, all the cars, buses and lorries that pound the streets banished. First thing in the morning the roads are still, and pedestrians claim the centre of the roads without having to dodge traffic.  

 Of course the annual Mop Fair isn’t in any real sense a medieval fair. Walking through the streets you have to be careful to avoid the electrical cables that power the rides. And it doesn’t stay quiet for long. The sounds are the noisy music of the rides and the shrieks of the riders, the smells of frying onions and candy floss, the brash lights in all colours of the rainbow. What makes the Mop Fair different from most fairgrounds is that it takes place in the medieval streets of Stratford, just as it has for hundreds of years.

 This great photograph posted on Flickr by Mr Stezz shows the fair among the buildings of Rother Street and Greenhill Street.

Stratford’s position on a strategic route at the crossing on the river Avon amidst productive agricultural areas was responsible for its success as a market town. As well as the weekly markets at least four fairs were held in the town during the middle ages. When the town received its Charter of Incorporation in 1553 the weekly market was confirmed along with two fairs, to which were added another three in 1610.

Men hoping for employment, around 1900

There were several different types of fair. A town guide dated around 1800 listed some of the commodities traded: cattle, cheese, hops, horses, sheep, and “A Statute or mop, for the hiring of servants, is also held on the morrow after old Michaelmas-day”. This early version of the job centre fitted those who needed workers with people hoping to find employment. In Shakespeare’s day they would probably have been mostly agricultural workers, but the heyday of the hiring fair was the nineteenth century when as well as farming, many people went into service. The photograph shows three men looking for work, each one bearing a sign of his craft in his lapel.

 Inevitably there were many other activities at the fair. There were ox and pig roasts, perhaps again because of the traditional importance of livestock farming, in which Shakespeare’s father was indirectly involved as a glover dealing in animal skins. Each of the public houses (and Stratford had many public houses) had its own animal roast, and even today there is a pig roast, the only traditional element of the fair that still remains.

 The fairs would have been pretty lively occasions, with various goods and services on offer. Shakespeare was obviously familiar with them. In The Winter’s Tale the rogue Autolycus “haunts wakes, fairs, and bear-baitings”, selling trinkets including “ribbon, glass, pomander, brooch, table-book, ballad, knife, tape, glove, shoe-tie, bracelet, horn-ring” as well as picking pockets “so that in this time of lethargy I picked and cut most of their festival purses”.

 The Mop goes on until midnight on 12 October. But by the following morning, all sign of the fair has gone. The rides themselves, the sideshows, the stalls, even the rubbish. Ten days later the traditional runaway mop, the little brother of the main fair which gave people a second chance to find work, appears. Coming in October the Mop now is a sign that winter’s on the way: it signals the beginning of the build-up to Christmas, with the Christmas lights starting to go up soon after.  

 A few years ago there was a suggestion that the Mop Fair should move out of the town centre to somewhere where the disruption to the town could be avoided. A local referendum was taken which showed that local people valued this link to the past and wished it to continue. For me it’s a valuable reminder of the history and origins of Stratford-upon-Avon.

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Very like a whale: Adventures in the far North, Part 1

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

A sea monster from the1621 Novi Orbis Indiae Occidentalis, representing the legend of St Brendan

Most people are familiar with the phrase “very like a whale”, used nowadays to indicate a mocking disbelief. It is, of course, Shakespeare, from the scene in which Hamlet, in his antic disposition, taunts the “tedious old fool” Polonius by comparing the shape of a cloud first to a camel, then to a weasel, then to a whale. Polonius has to politely agree with the mad prince.

 In the camel and the whale, Shakespeare picked two exotic animals which his audience would have known from the bible readings they heard read in church each week. The story of Jonah being swallowed by the whale then belched up onto land creates a vivid image. Shakespeare refers to it indirectly in Pericles where Thaisa’s coffin is cast up on the shore. The men who find it think it holds treasure:

 If the sea’s stomach be o’ercharg’d with gold,
‘Tis a good constraint of fortune it belches upon us.

 “Did the sea cast it up?” Asks the Doctor, Cerimon. “I never saw so huge a billow…as tossed it upon shore” his servant replies.

 Also in Pericles, fishermen moralise about how for men on land, like the fish in the sea “the great ones eat up the little ones”:

 I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale: ‘a plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devour them all at a mouthful. Such whales have I heard on a’ the land, who never leave gaping till they swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.

 Whales are seen off the shores of the UK and even, on occasion, lose their way and get stranded in the Thames estuary where, sadly, they usually die. Once beached on land, struggling rarely frees them. Shakespeare refers to this:

 Till that his passions, like a whale on ground,
Confound themselves with working.

 Until recently it had never occurred to me that there had ever been an English whaling industry, or that the English had explored to the archipelago of Spitsbergen, far north of Norway. But they did both, and during Shakespeare’s lifetime.

 

A modern sailing boat in Spitsbergen

In June of 2010 I was lucky enough to visit Spitsbergen, and each day we left our comfortable ship to explore the land in small inflatable boats.  One day we visited a colony of walrus, another we hiked across the snowy landscape on the lookout for polar bears and other mammals, and on another we landed on an isolated stretch of icy land where it was still possible to see the remains of huts and the tanks where whale blubber was boiled up to release oil. We heard stories of people forced by the closing in of sea ice to spend the whole winter in the darkness of Spitsbergen until spring brought a chance of escape or rescue. At one point we passed what appeared from our ship to be a tiny sailing boat, which reminded me how small the whaling ships were, and the boats used for hunting holding only a handful of men. In the museum in Longyearbyen, the only settlement of any size, items of clothing dating back to Shakespeare’s period, found preserved by the cold, are displayed.

 I’d never given much thought to those references in Shakespeare to whales. But after my visit to Spitsbergen I realised that Shakespeare probably heard stories about this wild and forbidding area and the creatures which his compatriots were hunting. How did people from England, where there was no tradition of whaling, get involved in this terrifying business, in this desolate place?

 The explanation goes back to the search for better trading routes to Asia: an ice-free north-east or north-west passage would have saved a huge amount of time and money by removing the need to go all the way round Africa in the one direction or South America in the other direction. During early expeditions looking for these routes sailors reported seeing whales, but to begin with there was no thought of catching them. Next week I’ll be writing a post exploring the history of trade with northern countries and the development of whaling in Spitsbergen.

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Paul Robeson, Othello and Mixed Britannia

Posted on October 8, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona, Paul Robeson as Othello

The BBC has just begun a mixed race season, examining how over the past 100 years Britain has come to be a country in which inter-racial partnerships are commonplace. The first documentary in the series Mixed Britannia looked at the period 1910 to 1939, before the well-documented postwar wave of immigration.

During this period a white girl could be ostracised for dancing with a black man, and those who forged relationships with them could be branded little better than prostitutes. Some of the details were shocking: the children of mixed race couples were treated as mentally and physically inferior and the British Eugenics Society theorised that interbreeding would result in a weakening of the population. The programme was a tribute to the open-minded women who put up with this intolerance, sometimes giving up their own nationality while striving to bring up their children as the product of two sometimes conflicting cultures.

The programme included the example of Paul Robeson’s 1930 London performance as Othello. The amount of public interest in watching a black man embracing a white woman, even if just on stage, made Robson nervous: “That girl couldn’t get near to me,” he said later. “I was backin’ away from her all the time. I was like a plantation hand in the parlour, that clumsy.” The problem wasn’t Peggy Ashcroft: what the press and the audiences didn’t know until many years later was that their offstage relationship also blossomed. Although both were already married, Peggy Ashcroft delicately explained “what happened between Paul and myself” was “possibly inevitable”.

Shakespeare wrote the part of Othello for the star actor of the King’s Men, Richard Burbage. It would never have occurred to anyone at the time that a Moor should play the role. All the women’s parts, after all, were also taken by men and continued to be so for several decades.

Ira Aldridge as Othello

The earliest black man to play Othello in England was another American, Ira Aldridge, who being unable to pursue an acting career at home came to London to make his name. He first appeared as Othello in 1825, adopting the title “The African Roscius”. Convention prevented him from performing in the top London theatres but he was not seen as a threat to white men as Robeson was a century later. He played on his race’s reputation for violence, encouraging the rumour that he had actually killed some of his Desdemonas. Madge Robertson in her memoirs described how he used to drag her round the stage by her hair before smothering her. Aldridge was not just a novelty act, but an actor of quality. One reviewer wrote:

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

His greatest success was Othello but in his long European career he also performed the conventionally white roles of Macbeth and King Lear, for which he rather bizarrely had to “white up”.

Paul Robeson also continued to be associated with Othello for most of his life. Embracing Socialism during the years of the Depression he worked in Russia, visited fighters in the Spanish Civil War and made British films. The 1939 film The Proud Valley questioned prejudice in a Welsh mining valley: “Aren’t we all black down the pit?”  In 1939 he returned to the USA and a few years later played Othello again. He committed himself to the war effort and Civil Rights but in 1945 was ordered to be kept under surveillance, and after a tour of Britain in 1949 his passport was revoked. His right to travel outside the USA was only reinstated in 1958. By the time he appeared as the first black Othello to perform in Stratford in 1959 he was a figure of enormous political significance. The son of a slave, a fighter for human rights, he, like Othello, was a powerful outsider in a white-dominated world.

The story of mixed race Britannia is, like the play itself, as much about love as hate and jealousy. Othello was after all “One that loved not wisely, but too well”. After Robeson, it was said that no white man would ever be able to play the part again. This wasn’t quite the case but it’s now possible for black actors in the UK to play Shakespeare’s English kings and Hamlet as well as the Moor of Venice.

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Shakespeare and National Poetry Day

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Thursday 6 October is National Poetry Day in the UK. With so much economic gloom in the news, and to mark the day, here are a couple of pieces of Shakespeare’s most beautiful poetry.

 The first one comes from near the end of The Merchant of Venice and conjures a peaceful, harmonious scene where Lorenzo and Jessica sit outside at night listening to music playing. Looking up at the sky, Lorenzo describes the music of the spheres, by which the planets were thought to sing as they move through the heavens. 

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

 And in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon describes the power of the imagination to drive the lunatic and the lover to madness, while it inspires the creativity of the poet:

 The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
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 airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

 Enjoy the day!

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