Much Ado about David Tennant

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actor having more fun onstage than I did on Monday night when I went to Much Ado About Nothing at Wyndham’s Theatre London. From his first entrance in a ridiculous golf buggy right through to the curtain call where he bounds across the stage you know David Tennant is just loving it.

The part of Benedick is a gift to any comic actor, but that isn’t to say it’s all comedy. Tennant clearly loves all the dressing up (his costume for the ball scene is outrageous), the physical comedy of the gulling scene and those speeches directed straight at the audience, but there are serious moments too, and he and Catherine Tate manage to control that chilling moment when Beatrice demands Benedick should “Kill Claudio” without a titter from the audience.

 Tennant’s theatre credentials are impressive.  In his first season for the RSC, 1996, he combined one of Shakespeare’s challenging fools, Touchstone in As You Like It, with slimy Jack Lane in The Herbal Bed and a straight down the line Colonel Hamilton in The General From America. On his next visit, in 2000, he played Jack Absolute in The Rivals, Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, and Antipholus of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors. In 2008, though, his ability to communicate with a live theatre audience was developed to the full with his Hamlet and Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, which even then felt like a warm-up for Benedick. He’s performed important roles with many other theatre companies too.

 In between and since, he’s managed to balance his stage career with serious dramatic roles on TV and film and the sci-fi fantasy of Dr Who. In a recent interview with Simon Hattenstone he made it clear how much he enjoys this blend of live theatre and studio work. 

When Josie Rourke began directing the production she couldn’t have known how timely this exuberant production would turn out to be. In her programme essay, Emma Smith writes about the period when the play was first performed:

 “For London audiences in 1598-99, conscious of ongoing conflicts in Ireland and in the Low Countries, beleaguered by high food prices, suppressing political uncertainties about the end of the ageing Elizabeth’s reign, the play must have seemed an escapist fantasy”

 With 2011’s ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Libya, high food prices and riots in the streets of our cities, we’re all again in need of the feel-good factor.

George Bernard Shaw described Much Ado About Nothing as “romantic nonsense”, and you could certainly drive a bus through the holes in the plot of the play. It’s as if Shakespeare was so enjoying writing the scenes that sparkle with wit and repartee he couldn’t quite be bothered with the tedious business of tidying it all up. Rourke manages to give the Claudius and Hero story some weight by adding a nightmare sequence where Claudio threatens suicide in remorse for Hero’s death until prevented by a vision of Hero. Is this letting Claudio out of jail free or just filling in one of those gaps?

Beatrice can be seen as a woman whose prickliness covers her vulnerability, her gulling leaving her painfully exposed. But Catherine Tate grasps the opportunity for physical comedy with a hilarious aerial turn. Rather than worry about any dark psychological examination, the audience can just surrender to the production’s good nature. As Tom Stoppard writes in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, “I mean, people want to be entertained “.

The evening, though, belongs to Tennant, energy and enthusiasm bursting from every pore.  And if this play, above all others, didn’t delight, it’s would be an opportunity missed. As it is, the audience is allowed to leave having experienced what Emma Smith calls “the fleeting, soap-bubble evanescence of the theatrical moment”.

 Catch it if you can before September 3.

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Shakespeare and the Jacobethans at the Swan

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

This year the Royal Shakespeare Company is celebrating 50 years of existence by staging a series of events marking some of its key moments of theatremaking.

 Exactly half way through this half-century, in 1986, the RSC opened the Swan theatre in the shell of the 1879 building which burned down in 1926. For many years used only for rehearsals and occasional events, it was transformed following a generous donation from Frederick R Koch into a performing space which immediately stole the hearts of theatregoers.

 On 21 August RSC Chief Associate Director Gregory Doran staged a Sunday talk with the title The Swan and the lost Library of Jacobethan plays, a handy term combining Elizabethan and Jacobean. The Swan was originally intended to stage “the once hugely popular but now rarely-seen plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries” , plays to which the RSC had already shown their commitment in successful productions of The Changeling, The Maid’s Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy among many others. The Swan’s success has owed not a little to the brilliance of  the architecture: “Michael Reardon’s pale golden galleried playhouse…an exceptionally attractive performance space…first impressions are of precision, harmony, versatility, joy.”.

 Beginning the session with a brisk run-through of some of the highlights of these twenty-five years, Doran reminded the audience how many great plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and collaborators have been staged in this auditorium.

 

Thomas Middleton

To celebrate these playwrights he invited onto the stage five actors from the current company, each to perform a key speech by one of Shakespeare’s worthy contemporaries: Alex Hassell as Christopher Marlowe, Felix Hayes as Ben Jonson, Simeon Moore as John Fletcher, Oliver Rix as Thomas Middleton and Michael Grady-Hall as John Webster.

 It’s easy to be confused by the number of playwrights working so successfully in the theatre in Shakespeare’s period. It was a chaotic period when there was big money to be made but trying to piece together what happened, and even who wrote what, has been difficult. The Revenger’s Tragedy is a case in point: when it was performed in 1987 at the Swan it was attributed to Cyril Tourner, but since then has been reassigned to Thomas Middleton. Dates of performance and casting for all the plays performed at the Swan can be found at the RSC Performance Database .

 Doran filled in some details of the lives and works of the five playwrights he’d chosen. What emerged was an impression of what unstable and risky lives most of them led. Marlowe, the first playwright to attain celebrity status, was involved in the murky world of espionage and stabbed to death. Jonson killed a man but escaped hanging because of his education, and some of Middleton’s plays were burned as blasphemous. 

 At the end of the session Doran invited Antony Sher to discuss his experiences acting in the Swan Theatre in Jacobethan plays. Sher’s had more experience of working in the Swan Theatre than almost anyone, performing in modern plays and Shakespeare as well as plays written by his contemporaries, including Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, Massinger’s The Roman Actor and Marston’s The Malcontent. He chose to speak about how each of the dramatists of the period write with their own individual voices.

 Language was the tool of communication in the theatre of the time (you went to hear a play, rather than see it). A huge number of new words entered the language and the playwrights, not just Shakespeare, were responsible for many of these inventions.

  Doran quoted from Ben Jonson’s Timber or Discoveries: “Language most shows a man: Speak that I may see thee.” Jonson continues:  “It springs out of the most retired and inmost part of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man’s form or likeness so true as his speech”.

Christopher Marlowe

 Sher compared Marlowe’s verse with Shakespeare’s, Marlowe’s “underdone steak” versus Shakespeare’s “greatest Dover sole”, While Marlowe’s “mighty line”was written using the strict confines of the iambic pentameter, “the hearbeat”, Middleton’s plays are more difficult to speak, being written in longer sentences. Perhaps this is because he, unlike Shakespeare and Jonson, was never an actor.

 They speculated about why these four hundred year old plays are still so appealing. The period was one of instability and change, even reflected in the despairing quality of much of the comedy. It’s easy for us to identify with this.

 Here’s a few lines from the great final speech of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, which continues to speak to us today.

 Ah, Faustus –
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually.
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come.
Fair nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but a year,
A month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul.

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Seeking out Shakespeare’s villains

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Ian McKellen as Richard III

The series of blogs about Shakespeare’s villains posted by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust at Blogging Shakespeare and Finding Shakespeare, has raised interesting questions about what that word “villain”means. The dictionary definition is a “person guilty or capable of great wickedness, scoundrel”, and this definition of Shakespearean villains is on Yahoo answers:

 I don’t believe Shakespeare has any villains per say [sic] but more like misguided characters  …the “bad guys” … are not really bad deep down but broken out by the cruel hand of fate. The villains in Shakespeare’s plays are not horrible people with no sense of humanity…but complex characters, usually more complex and deeper than his protagonists.

 Most of this could be summarized by the saying “to understand all is to forgive all”, but the last sentence makes an interesting point. Does Shakespeare find his own villains attractive, and is that why we find ourselves liking them? Would Shakespeare have agreed that nobody is completely bad, but the victim of upbringing or circumstance?

 In any list of Shakespeare villains, Iago and Richard III always come at the top. Coleridge coined the phrase “motiveless malignity” for Iago, and Shakespeare obviously enjoyed writing their scenes, giving them the best and most persuasive speeches. Conflict’s an essential part of the entertainments Shakespeare wrote, and his arguments between characters are rarely so neatly divided into good and evil.

 Macbeth embodies both sides of the argument within himself. He’s tempted by the ultimate reward, power, egged on by the person who has most influence on him, his wife. Watching this fundamentally good man waver before succumbing to temptation Shakespeare reminds us that we’re all “capable of great wickedness”, and potential villains.

 Internal conflicts can be used to comic effect. In The Merchant of Venice, Lancelot Gobbo carries on a debate to decide whether to leave his master, making himself a battleground between conscience and the devil.

 “Budge” says the fiend. “Budge not, says my conscience…To be ruled by my conscience, I should stay with the Jew my master…and to run away from the Jew, I should be ruled by the fiend…The fiend gives the more friendly counsel.

 

Roger Allam as Falstaff, Globe Theatre, London, 2010

Shakespeare’s villains have usually already decided against “the steep and thorny way to heaven” and have succumbed to the easier path offered by the devil.  But what about those characters, “more complex and deeper”, who aren’t normally thought of as villains? He doesn’t feature on any of the lists of Shakespeare’s villains, but should Falstaff be among them?

 Falstaff is a major character in the two parts of Henry IV. In terms of plot, he brings to life the story that the heir to the throne, Prince Henry, got into bad company in his youth. Falstaff is the bad company he got into. Enormously popular, Queen Elizabeth was said to be such a fan that she asked Shakespeare to write a new play as a vehicle for him, and Leonard Digges wrote:

               let but Falstaff come,
Hall, Poines, the rest you scarce shall have a roome
All is so pester’d

 Can a character so popular also be a villain? Other people call him a villain, and when he promises to reform he says “[if] I do not, I am a villain” (he doesn’t, of course). He’s wonderfully witty, but he’s also a coward, a liar and a thief. Although spoken partly in jest, the prince is Falstaff’s main accuser describing him as “That villainous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan”. The early commentator Maurice Morgann, writing in 1777, excused him by suggesting that he should be judged by the impression he left on the audience rather than his actions. Nowadays it’s more difficult for audiences to forgive Falstaff’s taking of bribes when recruiting soldiers, callously describing them as “food for powder” who will “fill a pit as well as better”.

 It’s a difficult job for an actor to encompass all the aspects of the part successfully but Roger Allam made the part his own at the Globe in 2010, combining Falstaff’s zest for life, wit and attractiveness with more than a little sophisticated wily cruelty. In doing so he related the character more closely than you would expect to that undisputed Shakespearean villain, Richard III.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream on stage

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Pippa Nixon as Titania and Marc Wootton as Bottom in the RSC's 2011 production.

When diarist Samuel Pepys went to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1662 he was not impressed. “I had never seen before nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life”. It’s possibly the worst review that the play has ever had as it’s been a perennial favourite through the centuries and remains a real crowd-pleaser.

 The story of Bottom, his fellow-workmen and their play of Pyramus and Thisbe has also had a separate existence, being lifted and performed on its own from as early as 1661 as The Merry Conceited Humours of Bottom the Weaver. In the eighteenth century several operatic versions of the play appeared and it wasn’t until well into the nineteenth century that it was performed as written by Shakespeare.

 One of the reasons for its enduring popularity is the scope it offers for elaborate scenery, magical effects, music and dance. It’s also a beautifully constructed play containing some of Shakespeare’s most memorable poetry. There’s no direct source for the play but Shakespeare drew heavily on the stories and legends which he would have heard as a child and which many country people still believed in. He also created compelling characters and a story in which two young men are in love with the same girl, a recipe for confusion and slapstick humour. Nowadays the play can be set in virtually any time or place, and productions are always interesting because of the artistic freedom this allows.

 I’ve been lucky enough to see many productions of this great play, mostly in Stratford by the RSC.  The latest production has been praised for its inventiveness, its physicality and its humour. Casting a comic rather than a straight actor ensures that Bottom’s scenes are hilarious, and the slapstick is beautifully choreographed. It seems to me this element may owe something to the Indian production which had its first performances outside India in 2006 as part of the Complete Works Festival.

Directed by Englishman Tim Supple the production, firmly based in the Indian sub-continent, was universally admired. Michael Billington described it as “the most life-enhancing production of Shakespeare’s play since Peter Brook’s”, and the experience “an act of ritual communion”. It was performed in seven languages, so nobody was able to understand more than part of the heavily-cut text. Professor Christopher Conway suggested that “Freed from English, we discover a new Shakespeare, one that is constructed out of visual metaphor and action. And surprise, it is wonderful and hypnotic, it is entertaining and moving.” There’s a fantastic trailer which catches the spirit of the production here.

 

My favourite production of the play, though, was the 1989 John Caird production. Quirkily English through and through, it featured grumpy teenage fairies in tutus and Doc

Richard McCabe as Puck and John Carlisle as Oberon, RST 1989

Martens and a stiff upper-lipped Demetrius wearing smart pyjamas done up to the neck. Puck and Oberon were gloriously eccentric in both dress and behaviour, the forest was a rubbish dump containing iron bedsteads and old pianos. Beautifully acted, it was also hilariously funny and Ilona Sekacz’s jazzed up version of Mendelssohn’s music hit exactly the right tone.

 The most influential production of any Shakespeare play in the second half of the twentieth century was Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970. It was seen around the world, including the USA and Japan. Brook uncovered the psychological aspects of the play, the sexuality and darkness which conventional productions did not explore. Set in a white box – a gymnasium? –a circus? with costumes that some thought were Chinese, and actors doubling the roles of Theseus/Oberon, Hippolyta/Titania and Philostrate/Puck, it looked and sounded like no other production. This Bardfilm blog includes the few clips that exist of the production, and there’s an online exhibition focusing on the production as part of the Touchstone cooperative Shakespeare project hosted by the University of Birmingham.

 

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Disorder, riot, and unweeded gardens

Posted on August 14, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

 Bill Bratton, the supercop who’s credited with successfully cutting gang crime in New York and Los Angeles, is going to be consulted by the UK prime minister about how to solve the issue of the recent riots in English cities.

 Probably without realising it, he made a very Shakespearian statement in an interview reported by the Daily Mail:

 In a country that loves gardening, you fully appreciate the idea if you don’t weed a garden, that garden is going to be destroyed – the weeds are going to overrun it.

Similarly for social disorder: if you don’t deal with those minor crimes, they’re going to grow. What also grows is fear, the most destructive element in any civilised society.

Shakespeare often used the metaphor of the garden when talking about disorder and unrest. In despair at the beginning of the play, Hamlet can’t see any good in the world:

                       ‘Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. 

 In Richard II it’s no surprise that it’s the gardeners, who come to keep the King’s garden orderly, who make the most direct link between their world and what happens in the country as a whole.

      Why should we …
Keep law and form and due proportion,
Showing as in a model our firm estate,
When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,
Her fruit trees all unpruned, her hedges, ruined,
Her knots disordered, and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars.

 

The recently restored Elizabethan knot gardens at Kenilworth Castle

The ideal garden in Shakespeare’s time was a model of order, the knot garden, a formal geometrical construction. The whole point of this style of garden is that it is under control. Vigilant gardeners had to clip the box hedges regularly, scrupulously remove weeds and rake the gravel, or the garden ceased to be a garden at all, and they required so much maintenance that they can only ever have been popular with the wealthy. There are several modern examples of modern knot gardens, including the one at Nash’s House and New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon and the recently restored and controversial gardens at Kenilworth Castle. If you’d like to read more click here for an excellent description of Elizabethan gardening.

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After the riots: Shakespeare’s tragic fathers and sons

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Tariq Jahan

Over the past few days we’ve witnessed the inspirational dignity and grace of Tariq Jahan, the father of one of the young men killed during the riots in Winson Green, Birmingham.  For any of you who haven’t seen it, you’ll find one of Mr Jahan’s statements in which he spoke about losing his son here.   

This week has also been the anniversary of the burial of Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, who died aged 11 in 1596. Shakespeare didn’t write directly about his loss, but Ben Jonson, whose son died aged only seven, did. Jonson usually gives the impression of being a tough character, but in this tender poem he shows his human side.

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy;
Seven yeeres tho’ wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day……
Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lye
Ben. Johnson his best piece of poetrie.
For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.

Discussion about the riots that have shaken our cities over the last week has now shifted from simply blaming the mindless rioters to considering the responsibilities of society as a whole, particularly the behaviour of those in authority.

Josiah Boydell's engraving of the battle of Towton showing the King watching the fathers and sons, 1794

In Henry VI Part 3 Shakespeare dramatises the battle of Towton, the bloodiest battle of the civil wars, writing simultaneously of national events in which leaders provoke violence and of the effects on ordinary people. There is a scene during the battle in which a son who has killed his father and a father who has killed his son appear.  The personal tragedies are connected with the larger issue of the ruling of the whole country. The father exclaims:

O, pity, God, this miserable age!
What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly,
Erroneous, mutinous, and unnatural,
This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!

The scene is being watched by the King who has just spoken of his desire for the simple life of a shepherd. He sympathises with the ordinary men:

Whilst lions war and battle for their dens,
Poor harmless lambs abide their enmity.
Weep, wretched man; I’ll aid thee tear for tear;
And let our hearts and eyes, like civil war,
Be blind with tears, and break o’ercharg’d with grief.

But the audience knows that it’s his weakness and lack of leadership that has led to the bloody battle.

 This scene was particularly effective in Michael Boyd’s production for the RSC of the Henry VI trilogy which were first performed at the Swan Theatre in 2000-2001. By clever doubling both fathers and both sons were played by Keith Bartlett and Sam Troughton. They had already been seen as Lord Talbot and his son John in Henry VI Part 1, where John is killed and lamented by his father, and the pair represented all the fathers and sons caught up in the conflicts of civil war.

The father in Shakespeare’s play speaks for any parent in the awful position of having to grieve over a dead child.

These arms of mine shall be thy winding sheet;
My heart, sweet boy, shall be thy sepulchre,
For from my heart thine image ne’er shall go.

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Asian Shakespeare brought “to the far West” in Edinburgh

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

It’s Festival time again in Edinburgh. The Fringe Festival is already in full swing and on 12 August the official International Festival will begin. The scale is vast: at the Fringe alone 41,689 acts are being performed. This year the Festival focuses on cultural connections

Wu Hsing-kuo as Lear

between Asia and Europe under the theme “To the far West”. Productions from China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and India will show how the relationship between the vibrant storytelling and performance traditions of Asia and the West is developing.

One of the strongest points of connection between East and West is in the works of Shakespeare. The Herald Scotland and Prospect Magazine have published articles describing the Shakespeare productions which are on offer during the Festivals.  

Interest in Shakespeare in Asia has been growing, and in 2010 two academic collections of essays were published. These were Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan’s Shakespeare in Asia; contemporary performance, published by Cambridge University Press and Poonam Trivedi and Minami Ryuta’s Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia, published by Routledge.

The history of Shakespeare in Asia varies greatly from country to country. His work was hardly known in China before the twentieth century, but Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare were translated in 1904 making his stories popular decades before any texts were available to read. The first play to be translated was Hamlet, in 1922, and it was 1967 before the first Complete Works was published in Chinese.

For a variety of political reasons Shakespeare and other western authors were ignored until after the end of the Cultural Revolution, but then the country began to open up to European culture. The first Shakespeare Festival in China took place in Beijing and Shanghai in 1986, featuring both productions in traditional English Elizabethan costumes and versions of plays reinterpreted using traditional theatrical forms. Since then Chinese Shakespeare has come of age. The spectacular Chinese production of Romeo and Juliet for this year’s Fringe used the full range of modern performance methods including 3D animations, martial arts, animated scenery and original music. Other productions coming up include a version of King Lear adapted and performed in Mandarin by the Peking Opera actor Wu Hsing-kuo, and a spectacular Shanghai Peking Opera version of Hamlet.

Koreans first encountered Shakespeare as a result of being under Japanese rule. A production of Hamlet was put on by a Japanese company for Japanese colonisers of the country in 1909.  At Edinburgh there will be a version of The Tempest which transports the play to 5th century Korea. Korean theatre is full of magic, music and spectacle, and the production pays respect to these traditions. It’ll also have a political dimension: the director, Tae-Suk Oh, expects the story of warring brothers to be seen as a metaphor for the current division of Korea, holding out the hope for future reconciliation.

Desdemona in an Asian production of Othello featured on the MIT Asian Shakespeare site

Why are we so interested in Asian Shakespeare performances? Kennedy and Lan suggest they “are collectively distinguished … by the force of their visual, aural, and corporeal strategies…and can be enjoyed, irrespective of how well one understands them”. Even native English speakers can have difficulties with Shakespeare’s language so Asian performers may have much to show us.

 Economic forces are at work too. Poonam Trivedi says that “The growth and development of major Asian economies will lead…to a transformation of their geopolitical roles and an assertion of dominance in the cultural arenas too”.

 If you’d like to follow up Asian Shakespeare, take a look at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Shakespeare Performance in Asia site. It’s a fantastic collection of film clips, photos, interviews and essays. Even if, like me, you can’t view the video clips, it’s still a great resource.

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Riots and Shakespeare’s ragged multitude

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

The riots that are currently spreading through UK cities are unprecedented. Mike Butcher, interviewed this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme spoke of how mobile phones have become “weaponised”, and in an interesting turn of phrase he stated “thugs have found their Gutenberg press”. A Blackberry phone can send a message simultaneously to hundreds of other phones without leaving any trace.

The mobile phone, central to the News International hacking scandal a few weeks ago, is now being held responsible for the violence of the current riots. The technology has developed so fast, and become so universal, that it’s taken the police and politicians unawares.  It seems likely to be as impossible to control as the internet itself.

The parallel between the mobile phone and the Gutenberg press is not an obvious one.

Elizabethan printers

Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press with moveable type was operating in Germany by around 1450 and his Bible was printed in 1455. It’s hard for us now to imagine how revolutionary the press was, but as with the mobile phone it made it possible to send identical messages to hundreds of people, and for it to be difficult to trace back to its source. So printing could be, and was, seen as subversive when it was first invented.

By Shakespeare’s time printing and publication in England had become regularised, with printers being controlled by the Stationers Company from 1557, and books having to be licensed before publication by 1586. In the theatre, plays had to be licensed before they could be performed, and some potentially inflammatory scenes which had been performed on stage were omitted from printed versions. Printing had become a tool of government propaganda.

You can see something of this attitude in Shakespeare’s scenes of rioting. The Jack Cade rebellion took place in 1450, and takes up much of Shakespeare’s infrequently-performed play Henry VI Part 2. The Duke of York, who plans to take the throne, incites Cade to lead a rebellion so he can “reap the harvest which that rascal sow’d”. Initially Cade can appear to be a likeable rogue, but the execution of the inoffensive Clerk of Chartham whose only crime is being able to read and write, marks him down as dangerous. The ignorant, uneducated mob are described by Cade as “honest plain-dealing” men whereas those who are literate represent the power of the state, education itself being an instrument of oppression. Before executing Lord Say, Cade lists his crimes:

Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou has caused printing to be us’d.

This is incidentally an anachronism, as Cade’s rebellion took place before printing was established. In Julius Caesar, written around ten years later, Shakespeare uses the same idea. Cinna the Poet is guilty of nothing but sharing the name of one of the conspirators who killed Caesar, but is torn apart onstage by a mob who “tear him for his bad verses”.

In Coriolanus the mob riots because they are starving, but Shakesepeare’s never on the side of any crowd when they turn into a violent mob. As in London now, it doesn’t take long for Cade’s followers in Henry VI Part 2 to turn to destroying buildings and looting. A messenger brings news to the king:
Jack Cade hath almost gotten London Bridge;
The citizens fly and forsake their houses;
The rascal people, thirsting after prey,
Join with the traitor; and they jointly swear
To spoil the city and your royal court

It’ll be interesting to see whether those trying to re-establish control and prevent violence are able to use new technology to restore order.

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Ben Jonson and Anne Hathaways’s shared anniversaries

Posted on August 6, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

I couldn’t let the 6 August go by without mentioning that it’s the anniversary of the death of two of the people most important to Shakespeare.

 

Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson’s relationship with Shakespeare spanned almost twenty years, beginning, according to Rowe’s account in 1709, when Shakespeare, already an established dramatist, “luckily cast his eye” upon one of Jonson’s first plays and gave him his first break in the theatre. Once Jonson became established, the two had a competitive professional relationship. There’s a wonderful description in Fuller’s Worthies of England, dating from 1662:

Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Johnson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Johnson (like the former) was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow, in his performances. Shake-spear, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention.

 In private, though, Jonson wrote that he “lov’d the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry), as much as any”.

 According to a story told to John Ward, vicar of Stratford during the 1660s,  Jonson may have been partly responsible for Shakespeare’s death. “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted”

 Jonson wrote two poems dedicated to Shakespeare in the collected edition of the plays known as the First Folio, published in 1623. In the years following Shakespeare’s death Jonson became a favourite at court, and was effectively the first Poet Laureate. He died in 1637 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

 

Engraving imagining Shakespeare reading to his family including Anne

The other anniversary is that of Anne Shakespeare, his wife, who died on 6 August 1623, the same year that Shakespeare’s monument was placed in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon and the First Folio was published. Anne is buried near her husband, and there is a Latin inscription on her grave. The lines were probably written by John Hall, her son in law, but the sentiments are those of her two daughters. This translation of part of the inscription is in the book Shakespeare’s Church:

 Mother, you gave me the breast, you gave me milk and life;
Woe is me, that for so great a gift my return will be but a tomb.
                                          … come quickly, Christ!
That my mother, though shut in the tomb, may rise again and seek the stars

 It’s a surprisingly personal epitaph for so public a spot.

 The sonnet Anne Hathaway written by Carol Ann Duffy refers to Shakespeare’s bequest to his wife. Unusually it describes Anne and William’s relationship as a loving one and imagines the intimacy and closeness that they shared in that second best bed.

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love-
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

History has not been kind to the memory of Anne Hathaway, so these poem may help to redress the balance, particularly today.

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I’ll write it straight: The Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

This is the second post looking at the subjects raised by the 29 July conference launching the new online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700.  

The first paper was contributed by the prolific writer and academic Germaine Greer. Ever since the publication of her famous book, The Female Eunuch, sexuality has been the focus of Greer’s work. Her current research is on the poet Ann Finch (1661-1720). Ann’s poems were published during her lifetime and Greer wondered why it was that on her death her husband Heneage, who had encouraged and supported her writing, ordered that all her manuscripts should be destroyed. The fact that only a few  survived brought home how important the author’s manuscripts are to anyone wanting to connect with the author’s thoughts, and set the tone for the rest of the day.

 In his opening statement Peter Beal had commented on the increased interest in women’s writing since the original Index was published forty years ago. Over 60 women are represented in the new Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts as opposed to just one, Aphra Behn, and there is growing interest in women’s education and literacy in the early modern period.

 One of the papers was on the letters written in Italian by Queen Elizabeth, and as commented by Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo in their book Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing, “Elizabeth I …lived immersed in a culture of writing, one in which she herself participated and which to some degree she helped to create”. Fluent in several languages she encouraged writers, and the spread of education.

 A few years ago Greer published another book heavily based on manuscripts, a study of Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s Wife. Greer argued that Anne, far from being the neglected and despised wife, left only the infamous “second best bed” in her husband’s will, was a resourceful woman who during her husband’s long absences managed the household in Stratford and may have made substantial financial contributions to the family.

 There is no evidence of Anne’s ability to read or write, but it’s always taken for granted that she was illiterate. It’s also frequently said that in spite of evidence to the contrary, Shakespeare did not care about his daughters’ education. But as Greer points out “Anne’s staunchly protestant family would have had her taught to read if only so that she could read her Bible every day” and up to the age of seven both boys and girls would have attended dame schools which taught reading.

 Queen Elizabeth was a clear example of women’s capability of learning to the highest standards.  Mulcaster’s influential 1581 book Positions concerning the training up of Children was dedicated to her. He suggests there are “many and great contentments …which those women that have skill and time to read, without hindering their housewifery, do continually receive by reading of some comfortable and wise discourses”.

 

Charles Leslie's painting of Autolycus selling ballads to Mopsa and Dorcas

What do we find if we look at the women in Shakespeare’s plays? Many of them can read from the country girls Mopsa and Dorcas in The Winter’s Tale who “love a ballad in print …for then we are sure they are true” to Alice Shortcake who is lent a book of riddles, and the merry wives who receive Falstaff’s letters. The more advanced skill of writing is known by some of Shakespeare’s girls. Phebe, a shepherdess inArden, writes a “very taunting letter”, and Maria in Twelfth Night forges a letter to Malvolio in her mistress’s hand.

 None of these women read religious or instructive works, and Nicholas Bownde’s 1595 words might have been written for them:

“in the shops of artificers, and cottages of poor husbandmen … you shall sooner see one of these new ballads, which are made only to keep them occupied… than any of the psalms….   So that in every fair and market almost you shall have one or two singing and selling of ballads”

 Poor Ophelia is given a devotional book to read by her father when meeting Hamlet:

                             Read on this book,
That show of such an exercise may colour
Your loneliness…. With devotion’s visage
And pious action we do sugar o’er
The devil himself.

 Hamlet immediately sees through the pretence. Apart from the conventional Ophelia, Shakespeare’s spirited women use their reading and writing skills to outwit the men in their lives.

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