Jane Austen and Shakespeare “blotting their papers”

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

The manuscript of The Watsons

It’s been an exciting few days for anyone interested in manuscript versions of literary works. At Sotheby’s on 14 July a large number of magnificent manuscripts written by some of the most famous names of English literature was auctioned. Items by Lord Byron, Andrew Marvell and Charlotte Bronte were outshone by the working draft of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons which sold for slightly under a million pounds.

This manuscript is the only surviving original draft of a novel by Austen, and has been in the care of Queen Mary College, University of London. It’s already been digitised as part of a project entitled Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts which offers both digital images and a transcript of the remaining pages in her own hand, and offers the ability to search for words or phrases contained in them.

By the end of the day it was revealed that the purchaser of the manuscript was the Bodleian Library, Oxford where it will be put on display later this year. The fact that it is already available online won’t diminish enthusiasm to see and study the original, as “The manuscript provides a glimpse into the mind of Austen as every page is littered with crossings out, revisions and additional text”.

The page of Sir Thomas More said to be in Shakespeare's hand

It’s a matter of enormous regret that we have so little in Shakespeare’s hand. Not a single literary manuscript, except for the disputed pages from the play Sir Thomas More owned by the British Library, and only a few signatures on legal documents from which it’s not possible to infer anything about the man himself.

 With none of the magical manuscripts themselves, the comments that people made about Shakespeare’s writing habits take on special interest. They indicate that Shakespeare wrote speedily, pausing to make few revisions. 

 In their essay “To the great variety of readers” in Shakespeare’s First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell wrote “His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers”.

 Ben Jonson, in Timber, or Discoveries was less sure this was a virtue:

I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penn’d) hee never blotted out a line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand….He…had an excellent Phantasie; brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein hee flow’d with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop’d.

 There’s much to be learned about famous writers by the study of their manuscripts, and currently a series of electronic projects are helping this understanding.

St Cuthbert's Gospel in its original binding

On the same day as the Sotheby’s sale the British Library announced its aim to acquire the earliest surviving European book, the St Cuthbert’s Gospel. The British Library’s Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts Blog is a wonderful source of images of ancient manuscripts, which include some secular works such as a fourteenth century manuscript of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and another poem entitled Pearl, from the collection of the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton who died in 1631.

 At the end of July a conference is being held in London to launch the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700, an online record of surviving manuscript sources for over 200 authors of the Early Modern period.

 All these projects aim to celebrate the actual document, such a powerful factor in the purchase of the Austen manuscript. Earlier in 2011 the LitHouses group of museums, libraries and archives representing some of the most important literary figures in the UK held a specialist conference at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, addressing issues regarding the interpretation and display of original literary manuscripts.

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Shakespeare and the French

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Today has been Bastille Day, and a day for thinking about Shakespeare in France. Shakespeare’s Globe has been running a competition on Twitter regarding which of his plays Shakespeare set in France. The question isn’t as simple as it appears. As well as the plays which dramatise historical events that take place there like Henry V and Henry VI Part 1 there’s the question about to what extent other plays are really set there. As You Like It’s probably the best example. Orlando’s described as “the stubbornest young fellow of France”, but the characters are deliberately given names from a variety of sources: Audrey, Corin, Celia, Dennis, Rosalind, Adam, Amiens.  In the forest is a snake and a lioness, palm trees, oaks and brambles.

Francophiles desperate to claim As You Like It remind us that Saint Denis is the patron saint of France, and the Forest of Arden could really the Forest of Ardennes, a region of France. Shakespeare’s as careless with the geography in As You Like It as he is in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, supposedly set in Greece, and with plays set in other countries.

 In 2010 BBC Radio 4 Today’s April Fools Day joke was a piece suggesting that one of the finds in the dig then taking place at Shakespeare’s last home, New Place, indicated that Shakespeare had been French. Nothing, they realised, was more likely to wind up early morning listeners than the idea that their national poet was from across the channel.

 Even back in Shakespeare’s day, perhaps originating in the Norman invasion of 1066 (yes I know the Normans weren’t really French, but let’s not get pedantic), the English and the French didn’t get on. Shakespeare’s French characters are usually pompous and arrogant, certainly touchy. The English don’t speak their language and the French speak English badly. Shakespeare wrote a comic scene about the French princess’s attempts to learn a few words of English in Henry V, balanced at the end of the play with Henry’s own poor attempts to make himself understood in French.

 Shakespeare’s most comic Frenchman is Doctor Caius, the hot-headed physician who lives in Windsor and becomes involved in the complicated farce surrounding Falstaff and those merry wives of Windsor, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. His chief character trait is his anger: anger with his servant John Rugby, with Mistress Quickly his housekeeper, and irritation with everyone and everything. But it’s his misunderstandings of the meanings of words and his way of mispronouncing English words with a French accent so they sound rude that make this part such a gift for an actor. Many leading actors have chosen to play this part rather than the more obvious role of Falstaff.

 No wonder the eighteenth century French writer Voltaire criticised Shakespeare for his lack of sophistication: almost every reference to people from France is either insulting or makes them the butt for jokes about bodily functions or bits of our anatomy that we don’t usually talk about.

Shakespeare may be unkind about the French, but he doesn’t underestimate the value of the country itself.  The Duke of Burgundy, in Henry V, describes the country as “this best garden of the world, our fertile France” and when Princess Katherine and Henry talk, she asks him:

Is it possible dat I sould love de enemy of France?

He replies:

No, it is not possible that you should love the enemy of France, Kate, but in loving me you should love the friend of France; for I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it.

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Shakespeare’s Avon, Act 6: Royal Shakespeare Theatre

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre on the River Avon in Stratford, 2011

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre sits right on the bank of the River Avon in Stratford. When the idea of a permanent memorial to Shakespeare in his town was first suggested in the aftermath of the 1864 Tercentenary Celebrations, it was not obvious that this should be a theatre, or that it should be by the river. But when Charles Edward Flower purchased some land by the river, previously a builders’ yard, the project took off.  Flower was able to see the potential for a memorial that would be within sight of the church in which he was buried.

The successful design took advantage of the fact that the building would be seen from all sides, especially from across the river. A mixture of gothic and Tudor, as Marian Pringle explains in her book on the architecture of the theatres, “the pinnacles and turrets of the main building were to earn comparison with a German fairy-tale castle”. On the inside though, the auditorium drew comparisons with a non-conformist chapel. Perhaps this contrast is appropriate for the theatre as it was:  a place of dream and imagination, based on discipline and principle.

The original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon

The theatre opened in 1879, with a grand opening featuring a specially-written overture and brand new painted sets created by the London scenic artist John O’Conor.  The theatre might not be on the same scale as Henry Irving’s Lyceum in London but within a few years it had established its own character under the idealistic actor-manager Frank Benson and his wife Constance. Benson was a wonderfully eccentric and inspirational character who created a real company for their actors, many of whom went on to lead successful careers. The Old Bensonians (actors who had worked with his company) remained legendary. Benson himself was reputed to go for swims in the river between appearances on stage, sometimes during the performance.

 When the original theatre burned to the ground in March 1926 it was not saved even by the proximity of so much water. George Bernard Shaw, who had hated the building, sent a telegram of congratulation.

 Six years later a new building opened. The shell of the old auditorium lay pretty well abandoned, topped with a simple roof and used only for rehearsals. The new theatre seemed brash by comparison. Modernist in design, the architect was a modern young woman, Elisabeth Scott. The building hardly had a curve about it on the outside and it quickly became known as “the jam factory”. The inside, though, was less harsh. A traditionally painted act drop hung in front of the stage, there were beautifully inlaid wooden doors, and there was an elegant spiral staircase.

 Within a month of the glamorous royal opening by the Prince of Wales, shown in this Pathe News film clip, the river rose and the theatre flooded. Again, the river had proved no friend to the theatre.

 From 1932 until the present day the Memorial Theatre, rechristened the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1961, was an almost continuous home for Shakespeare until the beginning of the redevelopment in 2007. A few years before, in 1998, another flood struck. The Tempest was the play being performed as the rain fell and the water rose by 13 feet. In July 2007 there was another flood and a performance of Macbeth, Shakespeare’s unluckiest play, at the Swan Theatre, had to be cancelled.

The view of the Avon towards Holy Trinity Church from the tower of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre

Now the theatres have been reopened access to the river has been improved so that everyone can enjoy the view across the river and the recreation ground towards Holy Trinity Church and the open countryside beyond. The river makes the Royal Shakespeare Theatre one of the most beautifully-sited of all theatres, and associates it forever with the house dramatist, the Swan of Avon.

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The News of the World and Shakespeare’s Venice #NOTW

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Emily Plumtree as Nerissa and Susannah Fielding as Portia, The Merchant of Venice 1011

On the evening the News of the World’s closure was announced, I went to Rupert Goold’s RSC production of The Merchant of Venice. During the interval a friend and I wondered which of Shakespeare’s plays was most relevant to the situation that had triggered this event. Measure for Measure, we agreed.

 We went on to discuss the production. I wasn’t sure that the concept of “Destiny”, the game show in which Portia is both host and prize, was really working. “Just wait”, my friend advised, “there’s a payoff”.  By the end of the evening I felt I’d found Shakespeare’s angle on the whole News of the World story there in the production.

 I rather like productions with a concept. I’ve seen The Comedy of Errors set on a Greek island, A Midsummer Night’s Dream populated by characters from children’s story books. I’ve seen The Tempest set in the heat of Africa and the cold of the Arctic. This last one was also directed by Rupert Goold, a man who never does a concept by halves.

 In this latest production the concept comes near to overwhelming the play. There will be many people who will take one look at the photos, or read a summary, who’ll decide this production’s as shallow as the Las Vegas world it presents, and one to miss. I can understand people leaving at the interval, but I would say, as my friend did, “Just wait, there’s a payoff”.

 After the interval nothing is quite so big, so garish. There are no more scenes where Portia and Nerissa perform for the cameras, then relax as soon as they are off. After Bassanio has chosen the correct casket and won his prize, it’s a shock to the audience as much as to Bassanio to see Portia revealing her real self by taking off her high heels and blonde wig. His reaction, predictably, is a let-down.

Owen Teale as Bassanio, Penny Downie as Portia, RST 1993

 I expected this production to remind me strongly of that from 1993, where Venice was set in the contemporary world of the City of London, all computers and coffee shops, while Portia seemed to be stuck in a time-warp wearing long ball-gowns in a fairy-tale Belmont. The two worlds didn’t interact at all, and Penny Downie wasted no time in getting into a sharp suit and off to Venice.

 This year the game-show and Venice occupy the same space, but Portia still seems keen to swap her frilly dresses for a suit. The contrast is the courtroom of Antonio’s trial, horrifically resonant of Guantanamo bay, of physical and mental torture, an underworld which most people never see. The trial of Milly Dowler’s murderer with its inhuman cross-examination of the victim’s parents, followed by the revelations of phone hacking by journalists on The News of the World, came strongly to mind.

Unable to unlock the briefcase containing the legal notes intended to save Antonio, Portia is thrown back on her own intelligence, and prowls the stage hoping for the inspiration which comes to her at the very last moment. The ring episode reinforces the feeling that her marriage to Bassanio, the prize for her as well as for him, will not be what she hopes.

The final image of Portia, desperately isolated, hobbling around the stage on one high heeled clear plastic shoe (a reference surely to Cinderella’s glass slipper), clutching her blonde wig, is deeply troubling.

 Antonio is aware from the beginning of the play of the emptiness of his surroundings:

 I hold the world but as the world, …

A stage, where every man must play a part,

And mine a sad one.

Susannah Fielding as Portia. Photograph by Ellie Kurttz

It takes the rest of the play for others to reach the same conclusion. Like contestants in a game show their expectations are thwarted and they are left with nothing but disappointment.

 Goold’s production is a blistering critique of the ghastly, destructive business of celebrity culture promoted by The News of the World which destroys what it seems to celebrate. This production shifts the discussion away from anti-semitism towards the shallowness of the society inhabited by the whole play.

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Blackadder and Shakespeare

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Tony Robinson, Rowan Atkinson and Tim McInnerny from series 2 of Blackadder

My all-time favourite TV comedies are the 1980s Blackadder series, best of all the second in which the unpleasant and incompetent Edmund morphed into the clever but surrounded-by-idiots Edmund, dazzlingly glamorous in ruff and thigh-length boots, set in the Elizabethan golden age. It wasn’t just Rowan Atkinson either. With Miranda Richardson as the dangerously nutty Queenie, Tim McInnerny as hopeless friend Lord Percy, Stephen Fry as slippery Lord Melchett and Tony Robinson really getting into his stride as the unfortunate Baldrick who always has a “cunning plan” to get out of every scrape – or not.

 The comedian Ben Elton was brought in to co-write this series with Richard Curtis, and the scripts are spot on.  According to Tony Robinson in his Desert Island Discs choice the rehearsals were agony, but you would never know. 

From the Shakespeare-lovers point of view the funniest episode is the one called Bells. That’s the one featuring a girl who runs away from home and disguises herself as a boy, gets a job with Blackadder and then falls in love with him. You know the sort of thing. The girl’s called Bob, and the romance, of course, doesn’t go smoothly.  Then there’s the visit to the wise woman who bears a strong resemblance to the witches in Macbeth. The oblique references to Shakespeare’s work litter this episode, but what isn’t in the programme is Shakespeare himself.

Ten years after the end of the fourth series of Blackadder, this was put right by the follow-on, Blackadder: Back and Forth. This involved a modern Blackadder travelling in time to various different eras. In one of them he encounters William Shakespeare in the shape of Colin Firth. Can this get any better? Take a look at the clip.

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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor: Shakespeare’s Lost Years

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

This week’s Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, broadcast on 4 July, asked how much we need to know about writers’ lives in order to fully appreciate their works. Contributors included a specialist on the medieval poet Dante and a poet, as well as the academic Jonathan Bate. Much of the debate was about Shakespeare, about whom Andrew Marr pointed out we know more than we think we do. The many documents relating to his life, sadly don’t take us to what they called his “interior life”, and Jonathan Bate talked about how he has addressed this problem in the writing of the current West End  one-man show for actor Simon Callow, Being Shakespeare.

All agreed with Bate that the “plays are not confessions or diaries or autobiographies, for the ways in which the plays reveal the interior life are indirect”, and are “a witness to the interior life”. The poet used a parallel example of writing poems about mortality while never specifically mentioning her own illness.

In sonnet 48 we get a sense, perhaps, of Shakespeare deliberately not revealing too much of himself:

How careful was I, when I took my way,

Each trifle under truest bars to thrust,

That to my use it might unused stay

From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust.

The discussion led on to scenes where Shakespeare seems to be directly recalling scenes from his own life. The Latin lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor is a throwback, perhaps even a joke, about Shakespeare’s own schooldays, but Bate also considers the scenes of recruitment for the militia in Henry IV Part 2 to indicate that Shakespeare was on the muster roll of men who could be called into military service, and that the many references to the army could imply that he may have been a soldier during the so-called “lost years” where there is no record of where he might have been.

Historian Mairi Macdonald, in a comment, doesn’t agree: “I’m deeply unconvinced by this, given that there were so many soldiers and ex-soldiers around during the late 16th century and, as with so many other aspects of his work, it is clear that Shakespeare loved acquiring and absorbing information”.

I also was surprised by the discussion, as I’ve never heard this idea taken very seriously. In Shakespeare’s younger years he would have heard older men discussing battles. The atmosphere of the scenes in Henry IV Part 2 is overwhelmingly nostalgic, not active. There is a legend that Shakespeare’s own father, or perhaps his father’s father, had done military service.

On my recent visit to the West Country I kept thinking how much the landscape, the sea itself, the waves and the tides would have affected a boy from the gentle landscape of the midlands. Yes he would have heard travellers’ tales, and there were books like The Mariner’s Mirrour from 1588, and Hakluyt’s The Principall Naviagations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, from 1589.  But Shakespeare does write with tremendous intensity about the sea.

Stormy waves crashing on cliffs are described by Horatio to persuade Hamlet that the ghost might draw him to his death:

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,

Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff

That beetles o’er his base into the sea …

The very place puts toys of desperation,

Without more motive, into every brain

That looks so many fathoms to the sea

And hears it roar beneath

On my return I took a look at Alexander Falconer’s book Shakespeare and the Sea. Falconer spent his life at sea, and suggests that Shakespeare “brought with him knowledge of the sea and of the navy [which] can be seen in his earliest plays”, and that Shakespeare spent much of those lost years on board ship.

The manning and running of royal ships;…the duties of officers and seamen;… strategy and the principles of sea warfare, gunnery, grappling and boarding are all known to him; so, too, are the main types of ship, their build, rigging, masts, sails, anchors and cables. The sea itself in its varied working, tides, waves, currents, storms and calms, never goes out of his work.

This may be partly wishful thinking, as like Shakespeare I’m “inland bred” and always feel drawn to the wildness and grandeur of the sea. We’ll probably never know, but I’d far rather hear the sea ebbing and flowing in the rhythm of the verse than the martial pipe and drum.

 

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Shakespeare and honour in All’s Well That Ends Well

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

 

The gulling of Parolles, from the Globe's 2011 production

All’s Well That Ends Well  has recently been described as “one of Shakespeare’s least loved and least performed comedies” (Daily Telegraph) but with current productions at both the Globe Theatre in London and in New York’s Central Park as part of the Shakespeare in the Park season perhaps this complex play is having a bit of a revival. 

Attention inevitably focuses on the romantic story which drives the plot, in which Helena eventually successfully wins Bertram, the man she loves. One of the main themes of the play is honour and its relation to virtue. According to Bertram, his ring is

                   an honour ‘longing to our house,

Bequeathed down from many ancestors

Which were the greatest obloquy I’th’world

In me to lose.

 At the same time, the nobly-born Bertram lacks virtue. Helena has this virtue, but is it enough to make her an equal to Bertram?

 The play is, though, far more than just a romance. The subplot involving Bertram’s friend Parolles is entirely invented by Shakespeare, so we can assume he chose it with some care.  That “most courteous feather”, a braggart  and coward, Parolles can be seen as  either a figure of warm comedy or a disreputable, obnoxious corrupter of youth.

What is Parolles doing in this play? He has some involvement in the romantic plot, but he is there mostly to open up the discussion of military honour. Parolles and Bertram leave France to fight in wars in Italy. The French soldiers lose their drum, and Shakespeare constructs a story by which Parolles lets down not just himself but all his friends.

 In any discussion of the play, including production reviews, this is always passed over almost without comment. Yet it takes up a significant amount of the second half of the play and the exposing of Parolles is essential to the ongoing education of Bertram.

 What does the drum stand for? Drums are the main musical instrument used in modern military display, but historically they would have been a symbol and rallying point as we now rally round a flag and national anthem. When the French drum is taken, it’s far more than a drum.

Drake's Drum

 A drum that exemplifies this symbolic importance is Drake’s Drum. Emblazoned with Sir Francis Drake’s coat of arms, it is supposed to have been on board Drake’s ship when he circumnavigated the globe between 1577 and 1580 (the first Englishman to do so), and to have been with him on the voyage to the Caribbean in 1595-6, during which he died. Following his death the drum was brought back to Drake’s house, Buckland Abbey in Devon, where it is still on display.

 Drake was the ultimate Elizabethan self-made man. Like Shakespeare he came from fairly humble origins, his family being yeoman farmers. His coat of arms bears the motto “Sic parvis magna” or “great achievements from small beginnings”, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s own motto “not without right”.

Sir Francis Drake, aged around 50. This portrait is at Buckland Abbey

Drake became one of the greatest adventurers of his time. The Spanish rated him as a pirate and he certainly didn’t play by any rules. He brought great wealth back to England, in exchange for which he was rewarded with money and a knighthood. A charismatic figure, his exploits made him a figure of myth, and the drum became a powerful symbol. Did Shakespeare know about the story of the drum?

 The first half of the play repeatedly harks back to a past in which honour and virtue went hand in hand. It seems to ask the question of how a younger generation can make their own mark while at the same time retaining what was best about the past. Helena links knowledge of the past, her father’s medical skills, with her own ambition for the future, and Bertram is a young man seduced by the glamour of the new who eventually learns to respect and honour the past.

 It’s a play rich in myth, legend and tradition. Would the mention of the drum raise memories of Drake, the man who proved that achievement and reputation had nothing to do with birth?

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Shakespeare’s Avon, Act 5: was Shakespeare an angler?

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Anglers on the River Avon by the weir near Holy Trinity Church

The River Avon is the centre of attention for visitors to Stratford this weekend, with the Stratford River Festival  entertaining people with lots of  events on and by the water. It probably won’t be the best weekend though for those wanting to pursue that most traditional of river pursuits, fishing.

 The earliest reference to fishing in the town is in the Domesday book of 1085 which found that inhabitants of Stratford-upon-Avon sent 1000 eels annually to the Bishop of Worcester by way of payment for the use of the mill to grind their corn. Jeanne Jones, in her book Family Life in Shakespeare’s England, notes that between 1570 and 1630 there was a fisherman and a fishmonger in Stratford.  

 Angling was also a sport for those with time to spare. Gervase Markham’s book, Country contentments: or, The husbandmans recreations lists “the wholesome experiences in which any many ought to recreate himself, after the toile of more serious business. As namely, hunting, hawking, coursing with grey-hounds…[and] the whole art of angling.  A popular book, it went through many editions in the seventeenth century. The Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive holds a copy of the 5th edition from 1633.

Title page of the poem The Secrets of Angling

John Dennys’s poem The secrets of angling is a much rarer book, published posthumously in 1613, its lovely title page showing that angling was a leisure pursuit.  Among the many books left by the curate of Bishopton when he died in 1607 was a book on angling.

It’s fair to assume that the children of the town fished in the river, the young Shakespeare among them. Shakespeare’s references to fishing are frequent and accurate. Most of them are listed here.  

 In Much Ado About Nothing,  Beatrice and Benedick are both described as fish being baited when their friends deceive them into thinking they are in love with each other:

The pleasant’st angling is to see the fish

Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,

And greedily devour the treacherous bait;

So angle we for Beatrice.

 Cleopatra likens the act of fishing to catching Antony:

 Give me mine angle, we’ll to th’river; there,

My music playing far off, I will betray

Tawny-finn’d fishes; my bended hook shall pierce

Their slimy jaws; and as I draw them up,

I’ll think them every one and Antony,

And say, “Ah, ha! Y’are caught”

 In The Two Noble Kinsmen the Wooer, while fishing, hidden by reeds, overhears a young girl singing.

                         As I late was angling

In the great lake that lies behind the palace,

From the far shore, thick set with reeds and sedges,

As patiently I was attending sport,

I heard a voice…I then left my angle

To his own skill, came near, but yet perceiv’d not

Who made the sound, the rushes and the reeds

Had so encompass’d it. I laid me down

And list’ned to the works she sung, for then

Through a small glade cut by the fishermen,

I saw it was your daughter.

 The authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen was shared between Shakespeare and Fletcher, and there seem to me to be echoes of Gertrude’s speech about the death of Ophelia in these lines. What’s clear from all these quotes is that Shakespeare knew and appreciated the pleasures of fishing, and that he’s likely to have learnt this during his childhood on the River Avon.

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Kevin Spacey as Richard III, the “cunning, conniving, charismatic king”

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Kevin Spacey as Richard III

One of this summer’s hottest theatre tickets will be Kevin Spacey’s performance as Shakespeare’s most famous villain Richard III, currently previewing at the Old Vic in London.

 In a Radio interview with Spacey and his director, Sam Mendes it’s clear that the production will not be ducking the play’s contemporary resonance, especially the parallel with Colonel Gadaffi hanging on to power in Libya by any means. 

It also includes some extremely rare recordings of Henry Irving, Laurence Olivier and Tony Sher, all famous Richard IIIs, performing the opening speech “Now is the winter of our discontent”. It’s going to be fascinating to see what Kevin Spacey makes of what the interviewer describes as this “cunning, conniving, charismatic king”.

 Olivier’s film, and his own delivery of this speech, was so famous that Peter Sellers performed this wicked parody, reciting the words of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night in Olivier’s famous style. Part of a Granada TV special The Music of Lennon and McCartney from December 1965 the show was hosted by the Beatles and featured other pop stars of the day such as Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas and Marianne Faithfull.

Can you imagine any comedian doing something like this today?  It’s a hoot particularly when compared with Olivier’s version of the original which, as well as the Irving version, is on YouTube. (Thanks to Carolyn Porter for reminding me of this great clip!)

I was reminded by one of the comments I received on my post on the new play Dunsinane that Shakespeare showed scant regard for the historical accuracy of his plays. Both Macbeth and Richard III took as their starting point Raphael Holinshed’s great historical survey. It’s quite right that an artist should be allowed to interpret his source material. There’s a place for accuracy and proper documentation, but a play, novel or painting shouldn’t be judged by how closely it has stuck to its source.

Portrait of Richard III

In the case of both these kings it’s Shakespeare’s version that has come to be accepted. It’s been particularly damaging for the reputation of Richard III, Shakespeare’s “bottled spider”, a psychopathic tyrant and child-killer. In order to counter the influence of Shakespeare’s play the Richard III Society was set up, which tries to remind people of the real man.  The society mission is “to promote, in every possible way, research into the life and times of Richard III, and to secure a reassessment of the …role of this monarch in English history”.

The Battle of Bosworth Field is on 22nd August 1485 is the where Richard was finally defeated and killed. It’s one of the most famous of English battlesites, but surprisingly little is known about it. Even the exact location of the battle is still disputed and full information is on the Battlefields Trust website. The Bosworth Heritage Centre has been nominated in the National Lottery Awards for best Lottery-funded heritage project, and is looking for more votes, so do pay them a visit.

It’s a pity that the historic Richard III is remembered for all the wrong reasons, but I can’t be sorry that Shakespeare wrote the play that immortalised him. What do they say about no publicity being bad publicity?

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Unearthing Shakespeare: Good friend for Jesus sake forbear

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Sylvia Morris

Shakespeare's grave decorated with flowers on his birthday

Why is there such fascination with the idea of exhuming Shakespeare? People who want to do so always claim they will find something exciting out by doing so. The current crop of hopefuls, as recorded by the Stratford Herald, BBC America and Fox News expect to find out what he died of, to examine the rumour that he was murdered (I don’t know where this one came from either), or to confirm that he smoked cannabis.

A hundred years or so ago, would-be grave robbers were after manuscripts, and anti-Stratfordians hoped to find evidence that someone else was the author. Some people have also wanted to examine his leg bones in the hope of establishing whether he really had a limp (no I’m not making this up).

 Back in the nineteenth century the interest in phrenology (one of the Victorians’ wackier ideas) led some to hope they would find out about his mind by looking at the shape of his skull, or enable a reconstruction of his face.

 Then there are the rumours that the grave has already been robbed. There were rumours in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the grave had been unintentionally broken into, but since one report says that there was nothing but dust, and another says that a skull and other bones were visible, there’s no way of knowing how true any of these are. In 1879 a story was published seeming to claim that the skull had been stolen in the 1790s.  This created a lot of excitement in spite of the fact that the author is anonymous, reporting the story of another anonymous man (now safely dead), of the escapades of a Frank Chambers whose existence could not be confirmed. Together with the fact that the story was published in The Argosy, a periodical containing charming pictures, poetry and fictional stories, it’s no wonder that the item and its rather limp follow-up published five years later has been categorised in the Shakespeare Centre and Library as “Fiction inspired by Shakespeare”.

The current attempt to open the grave comes from the same scientists who tried to prove in 2000 that Shakespeare smoked drugs by examining some clay pipes in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s collections. In spite of their efforts to convince otherwise, none of them can be linked with Shakespeare and I do have to wonder about the quality of their research when they claim that the phrase “noted weed” which appears in one of the sonnets may be a reference to cannabis. Two minutes searching the Oxford English Dictionary finds that the earliest use of the word “weed” to mean cannabis can be dated to 1929. In Shakespeare’s day, and for centuries afterwards, the word meant either a plant or clothing (as in “widow’s weeds”). This is clearly the meaning in this phrase.

 None of the people who have wanted to dig Shakespeare up seems to me to be really interested in adding to our understanding of the man or his work, but for over two hundred years just suggesting the grave should be opened has been a good way to get a headline.

The grave famously contains a curse against anyone opening it, and for me it says it all.

The curse on Shakespeare's gravestone

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Posted in Legacy, Shakespeare's World, Stratford-upon-Avon | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments