Food for thought: Shakespeare on eating and agriculture

For somebody we don’t know very much about, we know an awful lot about Shakespeare. Unfortunately, much of what we don’t know is the big stuff such as what year he became an actor, when he evolved into a writer and how he engaged in the writing process.

What we do know is mostly incidental; details that hint at personality or provide a social context. That’s pretty much the case with recent archaeological research at New Place, in Stratford. Bought by Shakespeare in 1597, New Place had over twenty rooms and ten fireplaces, an impressive frontage, Great Chamber and Gallery. Sadly it was demolished in 1759 when its owner, the Rev Francis Gastrell became irritated by tourists. He also destroyed a mulberry tree supposedly planted by Shakespeare. Both of which actions caused him to be chased out of town, and quite right too.   

Excavations have revealed that its kitchen was built on generous scale and along with fragments of plates, cups and other utensils, evidence was found of an oven, cold store and brew house. Since water was unsafe to drink, the brewery was where small beer was made – people drinking up to a gallon a day, topped off with wine. Less spectacularly, the kitchen was also where foodstuffs were pickled or salted.

The latter hardly sounds like the stuff of drama - and food, its preparation, consumption and social signification, doesn’t feature much in Shakespeare’s work. The banquet scene in Macbeth is famous because of Banquo’s ghost and other matters; what was on the menu is never mentioned. Similarly the fantasy feast that Prospero conjures in The Tempest is less about food and more important as proof of his powers to inflict ever stranger torments.

It might be that Shakespeare couldn’t be bothered to describe what was anyway visible to the audience on stage. Or it might be that he simply wasn’t bothered about food. Given how sharply he observed almost every aspect of life, it’s curious that an area so vital to existence should have been ignored. Most of the references to food are slight, such as when Bottom admonishes his fellow actors to ‘eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath.’ Similarly allusive is Cleopatra’s remark to Charmian that her former opinions belong to ‘salad days/When I was green in judgment.’

For Shakespeare, ‘salad days’ would have been synonymous with spring and early summer when vegetables were first becoming available – that phase of the year when cold is dispelled, sap rises, vigour returns, animals are turned out into lush pastures and the world falls in love for the first time all over again.

Cleopatra’s ‘green’ judgment may have smacked of immaturity, but the colour also symbolizes fertility. And after the long days of winter, drab and barren, spring fever could be forgiven.  In medieval times, few fresh things would have been available to eat during the harsh months except leek, brassicas and one or two root crops. This is about as exciting as it sounds, with the diet of ordinary people supplemented by grains such as wheat, oat, rye and barley and occasional fish or meat.

It may have been healthier than the modern Western diet, but it must have been dull, so the arrival of salad days would have had an appeal unimaginable today when the concept of seasonality is a little hard to grasp with everything being in season somewhere and our shops full of foodstuffs from the other side of the globe.

As it happens, globalization was in part driven by European demand for exotic condiments to flavour plain fare. And although expensive and generally only affordable by the rich, when robbed by Autolycus, the Clown in The Winter’s Tale was on his way to buy rice, mace, nutmeg and ginger, along with saffron, prunes and raisins for a sheep shearing feast.

The spices he hoped to buy, would have originally reached Europe along the Silk Road, but by Shakespeare’s day were mostly brought by sea, trade initially dominated by the Dutch East India Company founded in 1602. The Levant Company had been formed in 1581, helping import almost 250 tons of sugar annually, mostly from Morocco. The majority of this seems to have been consumed by Queen Elizabeth, whose teeth turned black as a consequence.

Speaking of the perils of sea voyages in The Merchant of Venice, Salarino describes his anxiety about ships foundering on rocks, with spices scattered ‘on the stream’ and silks enrobing roaring water. We’re not told what cargos Antonio’s ships were carrying, but Shylock reports they were in Tripoli, Mexico, the Indies and England. That one of his ships was in South America shouldn’t come as a surprise; Columbus was after all searching for a westward route to India when he chanced upon the Americas and subsequent travellers brought back coffee, potatoes and tobacco, all of which have remained more or less harmful addictions ever since.

It was on a voyage to the Virginia colonies that the Sea Venture was wrecked off Bermuda and accounts of the ten months passengers and crew spent on the island is thought to have inspired The Tempest. In that play, Shakespeare explores, amongst other things, the power relationship between those that produce food (in medieval times the peasantry) and those by whom it is consumed (landowners and a rising urban population)  – for it is abused Caliban, whose land has been stolen from him that knows the ‘fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.’ Bookish, unworldly, Prospero wouldn’t have survived without Caliban’s intimate understanding of the island. Nor would the drunks, for whom Caliban promises to dig pignuts with his long nails and to show where crabs grow, as well as clustering filberts and how to snare the nimble marmoset and where to catch young scamels from the rock – without ever explaining what a scamel is or was.

Caliban was more hunter-gatherer than farmer, but he is one of the few characters in all Shakespeare’s plays defined by their association with food or its production. The countryside in his work is almost always a place of refuge or regeneration; it’s not generally a place where we see serious work. The sheep shearing feast for which the Clown is off to buy food is more an excuse for song and dance, including one danced by twelve satyrs, with no real sense of the shepherd’s life.

The Clown’s father had found abandoned Perdita while out looking for his two best sheep, scared from the flock by ‘boiled brain’ adolescents. Grown into young womanhood, her language is suffused with images drawn from the natural world and she is the play’s healing presence, but when declaring she will ‘milk my ewes and weep’ she has more in common with Marie-Antoinette’s pastoral fantasies at Versailles than real shepherding.

Like rural Bohemia with its improbable sea coast, the Forest of Arden in As You Like It is also a place of refuge and regeneration. It’s also peopled with shepherds, but in contrast, Corin talks vividly of fells (fleece) that are greasy and says his hands are often ‘tarred over with surgery of our sheep’ - words rooted in reality. And when he states he’s a ‘true labourer’ who earns ‘that I eat and get that I wear’ and that his greatest pride ‘is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck’, he seems to be speaking with an authentic voice.

In the same play, Silvius explains that in his desperate love for Phoebe he would be satisfied to ‘glean the broken ears after the man/That the main harvest reaps’. It’s a deeply touching expression and a rare allusion to life in the fields - but for every figment of speech in Shakespeare drawn from agriculture, there are infinitely more relating to finance and law – or the natural world away from farming, for that matter.

This is curious, since both Shakespeare’s grandfathers were farmers and his mother inherited a farm at Wilmcote, a few miles from Stratford. The town itself would have been surrounded by farmland and even London little more than a collection of villages. He must have been familiar with the routines of farming life, but perhaps the absence of agricultural characters suggests an increasing disconnectedness from his roots – that he was a creature of the town not working countryside. Grain shortages in Coriolanus cause the plebeians to riot, but his focus is on the masses, not the growers of corn beyond the city wall. In this regard, Shakespeare and his urbanite audience were already becoming modern; these days food is a commodity provided from elsewhere and produced by means unknown.  

Perhaps Shakespeare was merely reflecting his audience back to itself, with few ploughboys, milk maids or swineherds amongst the groundlings. Perhaps, but with a few notable exceptions, dramatists and novelists tend not to feature the wearying routines of agriculture. Poets are different, but then they would be.

Back in my own small piece of countryside where pigs helped clear our field of brambles, we have created a kitchen garden. This is shared with five other families. Digging over the ground, we also turned archaeologists finding Victorian bottles, tons of broken crockery, hundreds of clay pipe stems and a mass of rusted metal.

A mid-nineteenth century tithe map shows our field was in those days divided into allotments. Not surprisingly, the greatest number of clay pipe stems have been found where we have our vegetable plots – the soil being light and well-drained and of sunny aspect. Lower down it becomes heavier with clay; higher up was the site of the old lane. Where we dig, unknown people once dug – and smoked as they worked, discarding bits of their pipes as the fragile stems snapped.

Winter is on its way out. A farmer kindly dumped a load of cow muck over the hedge which has been spread on the beds. A few crops have already been planted. More planting will follow. Then we await our salad days.

Photo: allotment in July 2015

Educating Shakespeare: schools, creativity and genius

We know almost nothing about Shakespeare’s life. At least, considering he is the greatest writer that ever lived, we know frustratingly little about most of it. And in the absence of concrete information an entire academic industry has been built on where he might have been and what doing when. Some of it verges on madness. 

What seems almost certain, though, is that Shakespeare went to school. And as educationalist and stand-up comedian Sir Ken Robinson observed in a TED lecture, ‘Shakespeare was in somebody’s English class. How annoying would that be?’ Apart from cracking a joke, Robinson was also reminding his audience that Shakespeare wasn’t always the middle aged bloke with a bald head, large cranium and pointy beard that is the familiar image. Once upon a time he was a child who went to school.

Quite what Shakespeare made of the experience is of course further conjecture, but in As You Like It Jacques talks of the ‘whining school-boy, with his satchel/And shining morning face, creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school.’ Romeo makes a similar observation when he tells Juliet, ‘Love toward love, as schoolboys from their books/But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.’

In other words, he wasn’t a big fan. This isn’t a surprise. Schooling began at six o’clock in the morning in summer time (seven in winter), boys were frequently beaten (there was no grammar school education for girls) and learning was by rote. All of which prompts questions about the nature of schooling and creativity. If we wish to produce another Shakespeare, should we send our children to school earlier in the day, force them to memorize large chunks of Latin and Greek and beat them when they don’t?

Creativity is Sir Ken’s big theme and he contends our schools are designed to suppress it. One of his more engaging theories is that dance should be put at the heart of the curriculum, contending that we all have bodies and these should be more than just vehicles to move our brains from one place to another. Dance would set us free.

It’s hard to imagine what a world would be like in which dancing was the main focus of education. It’s also difficult to know what conditions would best foster creativity. As Sir Ken pointed out in another of his talks, the same music teacher at Liverpool Institute High School taught both Paul MaCartney and George Harrison and failed to discern any ability in either of them, yet along with John and Ringo they went on to form the biggest band in pop history.

Would they have succeeded in the same way if their talents had been spotted and nurtured? Would they have been even better if they’d spent more of the school day dancing? Are there certain types of creativity that require alienation and rejection to flourish? Were they just lucky?

Humans are naturally creative. We’re innate problem solvers and improvisers. But not much seems to be known about the creative process. Where do ideas come from? Why are most of them rubbish? Can creativity be taught in schools? Do Schools make any real difference? Would most children be better off without them? Would Shakespeare have been Shakespeare without the early morning beatings and the absence of dancing lessons?

Although it’s not certain he attended the King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford, it’s likely he did since his father was a member of the corporation that provided its finance. It dated back to the 15^th century and by the 1570s probably had about forty pupils. These were taught by a single master, assisted by an usher. Parents were expected to equip their sons with ink, paper, quill pens and candles.

Formal schooling for boys began at the age of seven, but pupils were expected to be literate and numerate on entry, so young William must have had some previous education. Since both his parents signed their names with a mark, it’s unlikely either could write, but it’s equally probable both could read since his father was a successful businessman and his mother executrix of his grandfather’s will. Typically, a child of his background would have attended petty school between the ages of five and seven where he would have been taught simple arithmetic as well as to read and write.

Teachers at petty school were commonly women and often untrained. Those at grammar school would have been graduates and the curriculum far tougher. Shakespeare would have begun with Latin primers, having to memorize passages and study their grammatical construction, translate extracts and imitate classical authors. By the age of eight or nine he would have moved on to full texts by writers such as Ovid and might have acted in plays by Terence and Plautus (both of whom are cited as sources for The Comedy of Errors).

Famously, Ben Jonson asserted that Shakespeare had ‘little Latin and less Greek’, but it’s reckoned he had at least as good an understanding of Latin as a modern Classics graduate such as Boris Johnson, no relation. This is hardly surprising since rhetoric was another key part of grammar school education, taking in authors such as Cicero and Quintilian. Boys as young as nine would also have had to engage in debate, speakers having to attack or defend a proposition such as whether Brutus was right to assassinate Caesar, in Latin.

In the upper forms pupils would have been required to speak in Latin at all times and would have studied Virgil, Caesar and Horace amongst other major authors. Shakespeare, however, probably left school before those excitements. Up to the 1570s his father was a man on the rise. Then in 1576 his business collapsed and he was forced to sell his assets.

According to an early eighteenth century source, the family’s circumstances obliged William to leave school at fourteen in 1578 as, ‘the want of his assistance at Home, forc’d his Father to with draw him from thence.’ There is no more proof of when he left than that he ever went at all, but this account seems plausible. With John’s business in crisis and five siblings under the age of twelve, it’s highly likely that Shakespeare would have had to find work to help support them all.

If there is no firm evidence of Shakespeare’s schooling, there is circumstantially much in his plays to suggest he’d had a formal education, not least a scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor in which a boy is quizzed in the street by his school master. It is irrelevant to the plot and inserted for its supposed comic value. Suggestively though, the child’s name is ‘William’ and the humour is at the expense of both his Welsh schoolmaster and the type of Latin exercises found in the standard Tudor textbook, Lily’s Grammar. This is about as hilarious as it sounds.

Ironically, children today must find studying Shakespeare at least as dull as he found Lily, Cicero, Quintilian and the rest, despite heroic efforts by the Shakespeare Comic Book Company. Quite what’s the point of it all is open to question. After universal state education was introduced by the Education Act of 1870, the aim was to provide working class children with basic literacy and arithmetical skills before a life of drudgery in factories or domestic service.

It’s obvious that one key aspect of modern education is to keep children off the street and reasonably occupied while their parents are at work. And for all their logos, mottoes and inspiring mission statements in glossy brochures, it’s doubtful how much real learning takes place in schools. Pupils today are relentlessly tested, their teachers’ role so prescribed that there is little room for flexibility, innovation or fun.

Should schools be about fun? Mine wasn't. Sent to a boarding school at the age of eleven I found it the usual combination of freezing dormitories, ghastly food and routine bullying. Discovering AS Neill and Summerhill, I decided I should have been sent there instead, but somehow this never happened.

Summerhill was the experimental school set up by Neill in the 1920s in which the child was autonomous, even the youngest having an equal vote in the school council which determined basic policy. Lessons were optional and children were left to occupy their days as they chose. In his late book, Summerhill, he argued that ‘a child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing.’

He also took the view conventional schools with their insistence on uniforms and regimentation with all their ‘interference and guidance on the part of adults’ could ‘only produce a generation of robots.’ His ambition was to produce happy children and Neill said he would rather a child grew up to become a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar. He also said he would consider himself a failure if any of his pupils went on to become prime minister. So far this has yet to occur.

Much of his philosophy now seems slightly bonkers, but Neill’s aim to produce happy children begins to seem more reasonable when contrasted with the experience of modern school students – growing numbers of whom are reported to become depressed, self-harm, develop eating disorders or even attempt suicide, in part due to the pressures of continual testing.

Sir Ken has likened the system to a protracted process of university entrance exam. Which is fine for academic children destined for university, but inappropriate for those who would rather work with their hands, play football or sweep roads.

Would society be better off if schools merely produced happy adults rather than tormented individuals who hated themselves but produced great art or a cure for AIDS? Under the present regime we might end up with a generation of creative people who are balanced, happy souls. But what if all we get is miserable men and women who hate the thought of art and never want to look at a test tube?

Perhaps Sir Ken is right and schools should turn into dance studios. On the other hand, anyone who has ever seen me dance might favour a return to early starts, daily beatings and Quintilian.

Is ripeness all? Lear, Dementia and Zipper the Cat

Zipper the cat is twenty three years old. In human terms, she’s over 110 and like all elderly creatures spends most of her time dozing – though unlike her human equivalents she’s occasionally to be found at the edge of the lawn, hoping to catch mice. Why she does this is a little unclear as she hasn’t caught anything for over eighteen months.

For a long time we thought she might be immortal, but it’s now apparent Zipper can’t have very much longer to go. We’ve been told that once she ceases to use the litter trays, it will be a sign her mental faculties have degraded – and even though there seem to be trays everywhere she has begun to poo on the floor or door mat or any place else she happens to be. In addition to which she’s arthritic and deaf and unable to groom herself.

Even so, it’s not been easy deciding when she should be put down, assuming that she doesn’t simply wander into the garden and die under a bush.  And if it’s tough making such a decision about a cat, how much more complicated and painful it is to consider when a human life might reasonably be ended. As we live longer, so we are having to face the problems of extreme age on a scale unimagined even a generation ago. Once upon a time we mostly would have died of pneumonia or septicaemia or some other cheery condition long before we had chance to develop Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or something equally horrible.

So the question whether we continue to preserve life, irrespective of its quality, perhaps for years on end has become urgent. Many of us may have the care of an elderly parent or other loved one whose mind may have died but whose body continues to live. It was possibly this that prompted a new interpretation of King Lear in the current National Theatre production in which Simon Russell Beale portrays Lear in the grip of Dementia with Lewy bodies – symptoms of which include hallucinations, delusional behaviour, disordered sleep, agitation and aggression along with physical problems such as stooping, shuffling and trembling of limb.

Russell Beale’s performance is compelling and colossal. He plays the king as an old man whose mind and body are equally eroding, at times lucid and strong, at others broken and mad. I saw the live-streamed production and during the interval the actor explained in a recorded interview how an understanding of DLB had informed his characterisation. He said that while the illness did not provide a blueprint, it had helped shape his understanding of the part and that its typical ‘sudden outbursts of rage’ had ‘seemed to tie to Lear very well.’

This reading sees the madness on the heath not as a consequence of mistreatment by his daughters following an unwise decision to divide his kingdom, but the intensifying of a mental frailty that led him to abdicate in the first place. In the earlier scenes, it also allowed Regan and Goneril to counterfeit the role of carers of a father that they love but by whose lack of reason they are exhausted and driven beyond patience.

Russell Beale’s portrayal of Lear as a dementia sufferer equally adds insight to the lines, ‘I fear I am not in my perfect mind/Methinks I should know you.’ The lines have always been heavily poignant, but now seem related to the experience of all those caring for people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia who fail to recognize their children or life-time partners and are ‘mainly ignorant/What place this is’ and ‘know not/Where I did lodge last night.’

Lear’s speech continues,

Do not laugh at me;

For as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child Cordelia.

While Lear is briefly reunited with his daughter, the blind Gloucester has unknowingly been accompanied by his son Edgar. It is he that persuades the despairing old man that a fall from the cliff at Dover has been miraculously survived and urges him to continue. Gloucester promises that henceforth he’ll bear ‘Affliction till it do cry out itself/”Enough, enough,” and die.’

Later though, he relapses and Edgar has to remind him,

What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure

Their going hence, even as their coming hither;

Ripeness is all.

His words are sometimes taken to show that redemption is possible, even in Lear’s cruel world. It’s true that when Edgar finally reveals himself, Gloucester’s ‘flaw’d heart’ is torn between ‘extremes of passion, joy and grief’ and ‘bursts smilingly’, but context is everything and throughout the play one event is contradicted by another. Edgar had declared to Edmund that the ‘gods are just’, but there is no justice for Lear. Cordelia is murdered. The Fool is dead.

Gloucester’s long journey may have ended with a kind of peace, but Lear is left in torment. What would he have lost had he died in madness on the heath? True, he would have missed the tender reconciliation with his daughter, but he would have been spared the agony of her death. So much for ripeness being all. And when Edgar later attempts to salve the dying king, Kent rebukes him saying,

Let him pass! He hates him much

That would upon the rack of this tough world

Stretch him out longer.

It’s hard to find much comfort in Lear. By the end, nearly all its principal characters are dead. Even Kent, one of the few left alive, announces he’s off to follow his late master, his ripeness for death unchallenged. Yet why should Edgar frustrate Gloucester's attempted suicide and not Kent's? The answer presumably lies in the fact that he was emotionally unprepared to lose his father, so in preventing Gloucester’s death he is allowing his own needs to prevail over those of his parent. This contrasts with Kent whose love for the king favoured Lear’s wish for death over personal desire to sustain him.

Which is a curious route back to the cat, sleeping on the sofa. At some point we shall have to decide when it’s time for her to go, trying to consult her needs, not ours. Our children were at primary school when she came to us as a kitten. In the subsequent twenty three years, they have left secondary school, travelled the world, graduated and in my daughter’s case, married and become a mother. 

And all that while, Zipper remained with us, allowing us to feed her but indifferent to our attention. When she produced young of her own, she proved an excellent mother. Her kittens were born under the kitchen table, but one by one she carried them to the top of the house where she had prepared a nest for them. She would bring them dead mice, and was always an expert hunter. Even until two or three years ago she was still catching up to thirty rabbits a year, as well as innumerable smaller rodents.

Sometimes she would return with soil on the back of her neck where she had followed prey into its burrow. Often the creatures she brought home were dazed or half-conscious and she would fling them around the lawn or let them stagger away from her before pouncing again. Occasionally we would find dead things behind a cupboard where they had hidden from her before expiring.  

When not hunting, she would find a sunny place to lie and take in warmth, or somewhere dry to shelter from rain. She was always utterly herself; sleek, elegant, aloof – though in her declining years becoming more affectionate and seeming to need our company.  

In the natural state, she would have died years ago, either of cold or starvation, or been killed and eaten. In our insulated houses, it’s easy to forget the savagery of life in the fields and hedgerows. Foxes will break into hen coops or pheasant pens and kill all the birds in a frenzy. Crows are said to peck the eyes from new born lambs and though I've never seen evidence of that, creatures killed on the road will first have their soft and protein full eyes removed before the corpses are scavenged by other birds and rats.

It all seems cruel, but it’s just nature going about its business. The bird that pulls a worm from the ground may feed it to its chicks and in turn be taken by a hawk, which might once have been shot or poisoned by a gamekeeper. This is the world Lear inhabits, where humanity preys on itself ‘like monsters of the deep’ and it’s not surprising the play should contain so many references to wild creatures. Humans are exposed as simply poor bare, forked animals and when Lear laments his daughter’s death he cries ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life/And thou no breath at all?’ There is no explanation. In Lear’s world you are born, suffer and die and there is no promise of anything beyond. 

The father of Zipper’s kittens was a monstrous brute of a tom. We didn’t know where he came from, but one day found him dead in the lane, hit by a car. He was buried in the flower bed. One day Zipper will join him there. She is unaware of this. Being a cat, she is also unlikely to be acquainted with King Lear. For now she is sleeping on the sofa, probably dreaming of mice.

Disordered states: Hamlet, Durkheim and Don Quixote

I attended only one lecture while at university. This was in my first week at York and given by Professor Philip Brockbank, founder of the English faculty. Its subject was The Lunatic, The Lover and the Poet. I can’t remember much of what he had to say about the lover and the poet, perhaps these were discussed in subsequent lectures that I missed, but I was interested in what he had to say about the lunatic, who turned out to be Hamlet.

As far as I can recall, his contention was that the doomed prince was the first expression of a modern, Western sensibility. In his solitariness, self-preoccupation and internal anguish, he represented a new model of humanity; an individual whose consciousness is private and inward rather than merged with those around him.

In today’s highly individualized society in which one’s own preferences are frequently the primary consideration before any course of action, this might seem a perfectly natural state of affairs. Yet in many traditional cultures there are so many constraints imposed by age, gender and layers of family obligation and custom that the idea of doing anything simply for oneself would be, almost literally, unthinkable. In such communities, the mere desire for solitude or personal space would be thought, at the very least, peculiar. How could a person exist separate from those others that define who he or she is?

Hard evidence of how social organizations evolved is scarce, but it is reasonable to suppose that in our far off days the hunting of mammoths or other large animals would have been safer and more successful when undertaken by a group rather than singly. Similarly trekking across unknown or hostile environments would have been much less dangerous in the company of others. Survival depended on safety in numbers and this must have determined the sublimation of self to the group.

Things change. The mammoths became extinct and by the beginning of the seventeenth century, thousands of years of evolution had delivered homo sapiens to the point where it was possible to sit down and ponder if it was all worth it.  At some stage a few people at least decided that perhaps it wasn’t.

Having been a morbid adolescent, I’d read Emile Durkheim’s classic study of Suicide. Much of what Professor Brockbank argued seemed to fit Durkheim’s theory which contended that the more socially integrated a person, the less the chance they would kill themselves. He found suicide rates are higher for men than women; those that are single rather than married; those without children and those that are highly educated. He also found Protestants more likely to take their own lives than Catholics and Scandinavians particularly prone to kill themselves. As a single, highly educated Protestant male Scandinavian, Hamlet was already in big trouble.

According to Durkheim, this higher propensity in Protestants was to do with the contrasting nature of the two faith traditions since he argued that in Catholicism the priest as intercessor between the communicant and God, and with the power to give absolution, was able to give spiritual comfort in a way that Protestantism did not. Typically more austere, Protestantism places greater emphasis on the word rather than display and conduces to a higher degree of individualism.

Given that Hamlet is thought to have been first performed in 1601 only a couple of generations after the Reformation and dissolution of the monasteries, it seemed to me that Professor Brockbank’s assertion that Hamlet was the first expression of a modern sensibility in literature could be linked to Durkheim’s notion that Protestantism in some way fostered both an increased sense of isolation and individualism and a greater tendency to suicide.

Durkheim also classified different types of suicide into four main categories; egoistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic. These too seemed to offer a fruitful way to explore the play since although Hamlet doesn’t kill himself, his most celebrated speech ponders its implications and the two women he loves, Ophelia and Gertrude take their own lives (if, as in some productions, she is shown to be aware the wine she drinks is poisoned).

Durkheim defined egoistic suicide as one in which the individual has become excessively detached from his or her community, this lack of social integration leading to depression, apathy and a sense of meaninglessness. He contrasts this with altruistic suicide in which a person is so completely integrated into his or her society that a person will willingly sacrifice themselves for what they believe the greater good; of which suicide bombers are the latest chilling manifestation.

According to Durkheim, anomic suicides occur at times of breakdown in social cohesion when individuals feel insecure and lacking the bonds which normally hold communities together. Typically, this form of suicide is associated with rapid and disruptive social change, especially periods of economic volatility. The fourth type of suicide, fatalistic, may be found in situations where the individual is so oppressed by circumstances, they prefer death to life. Thus prisoners in abusive confinement may well opt to escape in the only way they can, rather than face continued degradation.

Hamlet offers examples of three of these states, since the gloomy young prince is the archetype of egoistic suicide – melancholic, withdrawn and brooding. Yet in many ways his situation is brought about by anomic disregulation, his time is ‘out of joint’, its disordering caused by his uncle’s murder of his father and marriage to his mother. All of the structures that should have been in place to keep him secure had been kicked away, leaving him adrift and vulnerable.

This is even more true of Ophelia. We don’t learn much of her relationship with Hamlet prior to events in the play, though as it begins both Laertes and Polonius warn her his love may not be sincere. Given that her father is a member of the royal household for whom an alliance with the prince could be advantageous, this might indicate an honest concern about Hamlet’s intentions. Equally, it could be evidence of the way she is constrained, her affections trammelled by father and brother.

Whatever Hamlet’s original feelings for her, in Act 2 she reports that he’d visited her chamber, his appearance dishevelled and his manner strange. Later his treatment of her is harsh and taunting and she is confusedly torn between his professions of love and rejection of her. Later still, his unintended murder of her father tips her into suicide.

Destabilized by Hamlet’s cruelty and the killing of Polonius, Ophelia’s death has anomic aspects. Yet there are also fatalistic traits. For while in the course of the play Laertes leaves for Paris, Hamlet sets out for England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Fortinbras arrives from Norway, she is trapped in Elsinore. Bullied by the three males closest to her and deprived of independence, it is a kind of psychic prison. Apparently lacking other options, death came to seem preferable to living in hell.

It was only much later I discovered that Durkheim’s elaborate theory was built on statistics that were almost certainly flawed, since the recording of death by suicide is itself subjective; wherever self-slaughter was disapproved or illegal, many apparent suicides may have been described as an accidental death or due to natural causes in deference to the bereaved family. What Professor Brockbank made of the thesis, I never troubled to ask.

I didn’t attend another lecture, not even one of his, largely because too lazy to get out of bed and too arrogant to suppose them of use. Life after university might have been somewhat easier had I taken a more rigorous approach. Instead I took a series of casual jobs, including three months on a farm, before heading to London and temporary work for the British Council.

After six months in the city with excess alcohol, insufficient sleep and a series of disastrous relationships I thought I was going crazy and decided the best thing would be to live alone in the country. Finding a cottage on the Cumbrian border, I headed north but couldn’t get work. Signing on the dole, I spent my time reading, walking the fells and illustrating Don Quixote.

In retrospect the choice of subject to illustrate seems itself quixotic, though a wonderful book. Don Quixote is in some ways Hamlet’s second cousin - both eponymous heroes, both of questionable sanity, both attempting to right wrongs in their world, both created in the early years of the seventeenth century and, by coincidence, their authors dying a day apart in April 1616.

In Hamlet the question regarding the protagonist’s sanity is open. Is the prince mad or merely feigning madness? If the latter, was he already mad or driven so by circumstance? Alternatively, is he sane and the world around him mad? Few doubts exist about Don Quixote, driven insane by hours alone in his library, studying works of chivalry. 

Don Quixote is an innocent, yet his actions are not harmless. He kills sheep thinking them part of an army, destroys puppets believing them to be real life miscreants and sets free thieves and pimps who rob him and run away. He rarely wins, yet is indomitable. He is the mistaken idealist and bungling dreamer in all of us.

At first, the solitude in Cumbria was healing, but after several months I also began to go a little mad. Once I was shouted at by a farmer and told to get out of his field. As the first human contact in many days I found the experience unsettling. Towards the end I became unbalanced and paranoid. Offered a job doing up a basement flat in Durham, I boarded a coach and crossed the Pennines. The vehicle was full of Geordies on their way home from a holiday in Blackpool and full of warmth and raucous humour. It felt like coming back to life.

Shakespeareworms - or the bits of the bard that stick in the brain

Fragments of Shakespeare are to be found in forgotten corners of almost everybody’s brains. Even people who don’t like Shakespeare or think they couldn’t quote any of his lines probably have ‘Wherefore art thou Romeo?’ or ‘To be or not to be?’ hidden away behind dust covered memories of school day romances or cobwebbed adolescent existential crises (the latter possibly precipitated by the former).

Apart from the fact they’re both interrogatives, the two quotes share several things in common. For one thing, the language of each is relatively simple, both express profound thoughts condensed into a few words and both deal with essential elements of the human condition: love and death. Hamlet’s phrase is so compacted it could be reduced to text speak as ‘2B or not 2B’ and sounds like a metaphysical equation. Yet while most would struggle to understand ‘E=MC2’ almost anyone might grasp what the prince was on about. Relatively few people can have gone through life without having wondered at least once; a. what is the point of being alive? b. what happens when you’re dead?  and c. what the bloody hell is going on?

Of the quotations, it’s more surprising that Juliet’s should be so widely remembered since two of the four words are archaic and ‘Wherefore’ is frequently understood as meaning ‘Where are you?’ rather than ‘Why are you called by the name you are?’ In brief, her words are generally understood to mean ‘Where are you Romeo?’ but this doesn’t matter. What people respond to is the anguish behind what she says. If the majority of us have occasionally wondered if being alive is such a great deal, most will also have been infatuated at one time or another and found the experience as much full of despair as exhilaration. Love is a bumpy ride.

That the words are phrased as questions is perhaps key to their punch. Had Hamlet and Juliet simply stated how they were feeling, along the lines of ‘I don’t know whether to kill myself or not’ or ‘I’m so upset Romeo is a Montague’ they might have elicited sympathy, but not drawn us into their psychic drama. For while statements close the issue (‘This is how I’m feeling at the moment’) posing the thoughts as questions universalize them. ‘Should I kill myself?’ or ‘Why is he a Montague?’ invite a response.  As members of the audience, we are asked to consider the problems and in contemplating them we automatically draw on our own lives. We too have known the tough moments.

Not all the bits of Shakespeare that stick are especially profound or even beautiful. One line that rattles round my head is Titania’s exclamation when she discovers she has spent the night with Bottom, ‘O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!’ It is the aghast tone of anyone who ever got drunk at the office party and woken up next morning with the odd looking one from Accounts.

Titania’s clipped expression of horror is in wonderful contrast to Bottom’s idiotic remembrance, ‘I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was… The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was…’ He is the frog who marries the princess, the loser who wins the lottery. He is all of us who ever got lucky, if only for a midsummer’s night.

Since almost everything has been given a name by somebody who probably didn’t have enough to do, ‘earworms’ is the term denominating the snatches of music that get stuck in one’s brain and won’t dislodge for days on end. They irritate with repetition but typically were irritating to begin with; for some reason one tends not to download anything actually enjoyable. And earworms tend to be short, one or two bars of chorus rather than a whole song.

Shakespeareworms (apologies, I’ve just discovered I don’t have enough to do) are different in that the pieces seem not to be tiresome, but similar in their brevity. They are more likely to be Titania’s exclamation than Bottom’s rapture.

Working on Macbeth, I find the line that insinuates itself is not a part of his troubled soliloquizings but Lady Macbeth’s ‘When all’s done/You look but on a stool.’ Unremarkable in its way, it yet shows Shakespeare’s seemingly effortless ability to nail personality. Hers is the exasperated voice of all strong women married to feckless men who have just lost the week’s rent on a horse that came in last at Kempton Park or who slept with the odd looking one from Accounts at the office party or who failed in any one of a million other ways.

Why that line chose to stick will remain confidential between me and my psychotherapist. But it’s not the one that is most insistent. That is Lear’s cry on the heath, ‘O, I have ta’en/Too little care of this.’ It is his appalled realisation that throughout his long reign he had neglected the ‘poor naked wretches’ with ‘houseless heads and unfed sides.’

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the utterance is his use of the first person pronoun. For while in Act 1 Lear employs the royal ‘we’, by the time he finds himself in the storm with Kent and the Fool he has been stripped of the comfortingly impersonal plural form along with all his other kingly appurtenances. He knows that it is not ‘we’ as an expression of monarchical office or the embodiment of a social order that is responsible for the injustice, but ‘I’. He has failed the neediest of his subjects. The blame cannot be shuffled off.

Had Lear retained ‘we’ it might in some senses have implicated everyone in the play as well as those watching it. We as an audience would have been complicit in his guilt; but by definition that guiltiness would have been diffused, shared with everyone else. ‘I’ challenges us to examine our personal responsibility for the injustices around us. And every one of us is at fault.

Oxfam recently announced statistics to show that the share of the world’s wealth owned by the richest 1% has increased from 44% in 2009 to 48% in 2014, while the poorest 80% own just 5.5%. On current trends it is claimed that the richest 1% will own more than 50% of the planet’s wealth by 2016.

I have no idea how these figures are calculated, but it is obvious there are huge structural imbalances. And it is equally obvious that we can’t take refuge in the fact that we are not part of the super-rich club.  Even if we don’t own yachts or private jets, pretty much everyone in the West is a pampered aristocrat compared to those in most of Africa or Asia. Our privilege is at their cost.

We are aware that our cheap clothes were produced by sweated labour in Bangladesh, that our smart new trainers were made by children in the Philippines and that our demand for oil has led to the devastation of the Ogoniland coast. If we watch the News at all, we must also be aware that millions of refugees are streaming from Syria into Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon; that around the world tens of millions of slum dwellers live in unimaginable squalor near to gated communities of the elite and that homeless people sleep rough in all our major cities. Yet what do we do about it?

More to the point, what do I do about it? How much care have I taken? The answer is not much.  With my wife I have a monthly standing order payment to Oxfam, contribute to the Disasters Emergency Committee more often than not, sometimes buy The Big Issue and occasionally give money to down and outs. I once also protested outside a Shell filling station after the hanging of Ogoni environmental activist Ken Saro Wiwa in 1995. In other words, very little. Enough to make me feel I’ve helped out, but not sufficient to cause inconvenience. Along with almost everybody else, I have taken too little care.

Yet what’s to be done? Mounting the barricades and throwing cobble stones at policemen has been tried and appears not to work. Voting at elections seems almost as pointless as joining a political party. And Shakespeare doesn’t offer any clues. Being a genius didn’t give him all the answers and in everyday life he was almost certainly the sort of man to hide his silver spoons in the thatch and agree with whoever knocked on his door in turbulent times.

In that respect he was like pretty much all the rest of us. If it’s possible to draw conclusions about him from his work, then it would seem he favoured love over hate and order over anarchy. Again, pretty much like most of us.

He doesn’t preach, but shows us ourselves through Hamlet’s doubt, Juliet’s love, Bottom’s rapture, Lear’s madness and more. His plays present a series of problems to which he provides solutions, some tragic, others comic. What we should do, he leaves up to us.

Shakespeare, Byron and the rise of the literary superstar

If people know anything about George Gordon, Lord Byron, it is likely to be that he had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, had sex with the majority of women and most of the men of his acquaintance, drank wine from a cup made from a skull, kept a tame bear while at university, suffered a club foot, sired a daughter, Ada Lovelace, who became the world’s first computer programmer, swam the Hellespont, was a friend of Shelley and died of fever whilst fighting for Greek independence from the Turks. After which John Murray destroyed his memoirs as too scandalous for publication, thus ensuring his reputation for degeneracy. They may also know he wrote a few poems and a pile of letters, though I doubt many these days would have read all, or even extensive parts, of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage or Don Juan.

In other words, much is known about Byron, if his work is unfamiliar. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since he was, in effect, one of the first modern celebrities. Famously, he awoke and found himself famous after publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold and he has remained famous ever since, though mostly for his sexual adventuring, political radicalism and mountainous debts.

Byron wasn’t the first aristocratic poet to live fast and die young. In the 1670s John Wilmot, 2^nd Earl of Rochester, had fornicated himself through Restoration London in a drunken haze, one contemporary writing of him that ‘for five years together he was continually Drunk… [and] not… perfectly Master of himself… [which] led to him to… do many wild and unaccountable things.’

Wilmot died of venereal disease aged thirty three, having had a multitude of affairs, including one with actress Nell Gwyn, later mistress to Charles II. He also found time to pen some of the rudest poems in the English canon as well as a play, Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery, though its authorship is uncertain. On top of everything else, he was also a war hero, having shown conspicuous bravery in two sea battles.

So why didn’t John Wilmot become the first literary superstar, rather than Byron? More importantly, what about Shakespeare? As far as Rochester is concerned, a big problem was simply his work was so bawdy it was never going to find its way into polite society; after his death, Sodom was prosecuted for obscenity and almost all copies destroyed.

Another crucial factor was timing. Rochester’s world was still semi-feudal with a restricted press and widespread illiteracy. By the early nineteenth century, the industrial revolution was well underway. Rising prosperity had created a leisured class with time to read, increased literacy meant an appetite for literature of all kinds while mechanization provided the means to produce and distribute vast numbers of books, papers and journals.

All that was needed was a superstar. Enter George Gordon, Lord Byron, Stage Right. In the same way that post-war affluence and technological innovation created conditions first for Elvis and then the Beatles and Rolling Stones, Byron was ideally placed to exploit a vast new market.  Notoriety fed sales and booming sales increased scope for extreme behaviour which in turn stoked his notoriety. The pattern has become familiar, including, often, exile, early death and enduring fame.

In his way, Shakespeare as much became a beneficiary of the same commercial and social forces that helped propel Byron. For he hadn’t always enjoyed superstar status; in his lifetime he had been relatively uncelebrated. And within thirty years of his death, the Puritans had closed the theatres as ungodly.

By the 1650s the prohibition was slightly relaxed and William Davenant, thought by some to be the playwright’s illegitimate child, was licenced to produce adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in musical adaptation. It was after the monarchy’s Restoration in 1660 and Charles II’s passion for theatre as well as actresses, that plays were once again produced, with Hamlet performed in 1661. Productions became lavish, but often bore little relation to Shakespeare’s original stagings.

Outside London, relatively few people other than the wealthy would have been familiar with his work since books were expensive commodities. This began to change in the 1730s when single editions of his plays became available and thus more affordable. Around the same time, the Licencing Act of 1737 indirectly created a larger audience for Shakespeare’s work.

The Act was effectively a form of government censorship and required all new plays to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain and remained in force until the 1960s. It was introduced because playwrights such as John Gay and Henry Carey (who wrote Chronohotonthologos in 1734) used their productions to attack Robert Walpole’s administration.

It closed some theatres altogether and made many companies wary of producing new work, inclining them instead to stage approved or non-controversial pieces  – by the 1740s Shakespeare’s plays represented a quarter of all performed in the decade. Perhaps coincidentally, it was in 1740 that he was finally accorded a statue in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Although Shakespeare’s popularity grew throughout the eighteenth century, neither he nor modern audiences would have recognized much about the productions. They were loose interpretations at best as theatre companies weren’t too bothered about the text. Amongst other things, the plays were re-shaped so they conformed to Aristotle’s classical precepts, vulgarities were excluded, the puns were dropped (they got something right, at least) and were made more didactic and morally improving – while at the same time extra parts were added for women. This wasn’t an attempt to enhance female equality but an opportunity for them to appear on stage in breeches and show off their legs.

Bizarrely, a production of Macbeth in 1726 included interludes after each act, and featured a wooden shoe dance after the third, a ‘Dutch Skipper’ after the fourth and Pierrot dance after the fifth. Similarly in 1774, King Lear was livened up by fireworks during the storm scene.

The actor David Garrick did much to promote Shakespeare and he instituted the first Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford in 1769. Designed to celebrate the bi-centenary of the playwright’s birth, if five years’ late, it opened with the firing of thirty cannons and ringing of church bells. Curiously, the Jubilee didn’t offer a production of any of the plays, but this didn’t matter very much as most of it was washed out after heavy rain caused the Avon to burst its banks. Even so, bardolatry was now well under way.

In 1755 Samuel Johnson had done as much to promote the bard in the national consciousness, since his use of quotations from the plays and poems in his Dictionary referenced Shakespeare 17,500 times. Perhaps as influentially, Johnson later published Prefaces to Shakespeare. He was intimately acquainted with the works, and though he deplored the propensity to wordplay and lack of moral justice, valued them for their understanding of character and insight into human nature. Johnson’s approach to Shakespeare was developed further by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, famed for his opium use, Ancient Mariner and the Man from Porlock.

A contemporary of Byron’s, with whom he is generally lumped as a Romantic, Coleridge’s criticism of Shakespeare was defined by close analysis of the text, study of its imagery and interest in psychology. His perceptions helped mature our understanding of Shakespeare and defined study of his work for more than a century, even if it didn’t stop the Victorians putting on garishly spectacular and extravagant productions and changing the endings when it suited them.

By the nineteenth century, Shakespeare had become an unchallengeable part of our culture, part of our national myth, an expression of our collective Genius, and a self-sustaining industry. The same engines of literacy, prosperity and technical innovation that helped Byron become a superstar pushed Shakespeare even higher while the Empire carried him around the world.

Now a global brand, it’s hard to imagine his work was almost lost to us.  Had Condell and Hemminge not bothered to compile the First Folio, The Licensing Act of 1737 not favoured production of his work or Garrick produced the Shakespeare Jubilee a few years later he might have remained in the shadows.

He might, but then he is Shakespeare. If he overtops even his great contemporaries such as Marlowe or Jonson, it’s because his greatness trumps theirs. Such dominance inevitably has a downside, since while provincial theatres may offer the occasional Shakespeare, few would risk staging The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Changeling - or Chronohotonthologos for that matter. Cash flow wins. Diversity is lost.

On the other hand, faced with the choice between a rare revival of Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess or a new production of The Winter’s Tale, I guess I’d go Shakespeare almost every time.

Glendower or Glyndwr? Shakespeare and the last Welsh Prince of Wales

Borders separate them from us. They are frequently places of blood.  Ancient animosities linger. Offa’s Dyke runs through Bronygarth, dividing England from Wales and Edward I’s Marcher fortress at Chirk dominates our part of the valley, symbol of English overlordship. In a field below our house, Henry II’s army was defeated by a small Welsh force that appeared out of the mist, fought with frenzy and then disappeared into the hills. A dip in the road up to where the castle now stands was piled with corpses and a nearby tree is still known as the Oak at the Gates of the Dead.

When a plaque commemorating the encounter was unveiled a few years ago, civic dignitaries, flag wavers, a band, people dressed in period costume and a crowd of others turned up to celebrate victory over the English - even though Henry was French and his army composed of mercenaries from all over Europe. The Battle of Crogen was fought in 1165, Roger Mortimer began building the castle in 1295 while the Welsh were still resisting the English one hundred years later, this time led by Owain Glyndwr – his stronghold at  Sycharth Castle about ten miles away.

Glyndwr was one of the principal rebel leaders opposing Henry IV and it was partly his failure to appear at the Battle of Shrewsbury that led to Hotspur’s defeat. He features briefly in Henry IV Part 1, though with his name anglicized to Owen Glendower, the way Llywellyn’s is to Fluellen in Henry V.

As the last native born Welshman to assume the title Prince of Wales, it is also questionable whether he would have seen himself as a rebel. A descendant of the Princes of Powys, it is more likely he would have considered himself, in modern terms at least, a freedom fighter or liberator. Yet his depiction in 1. Henry IV itself reflects an English stereotype of the Welsh and in the opening scene he’s described by Westmoreland as ‘irregular and wild Glendower’. He goes on to say that after Sir Edmund Mortimer’s capture at the Battle of Bryn Glas by Glyndwr’s ‘rude hands’, the dead were subject to ‘beastly shameless transformation’ by ‘those Welshwomen… as may not be/Without much shame retold or spoken of.’

To be Welsh, in other words, was to be uncivilized – ‘irregular’, ‘wild’, ‘rude’, ‘beastly’ and ‘shameless’. Colonizers necessarily disparage the peoples they colonize. It is, after all, easier to justify butchering someone you consider savage, having stolen their land, than to recognize they were doing perfectly well without your interference.

Glyndwr himself was part of the Anglo-Welsh Marcher establishment, his family seat at Sycharth a motte and bailey castle built by the Normans. Born around 1350, it is likely that he studied law for several years in London before entering military service under Richard II in 1384. During this period he fought with John of Gaunt in Scotland in 1386 and was present at the destruction of the Franco-Spanish-Flemish fleet in 1387.

Although not named as such, it’s likely he appears as the ‘Welsh captain’ in Richard II. In a short speech he explains the withdrawal of Welsh forces saying,

‘Meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look'd prophets whisper fearful change…
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.’

This association of the Welsh with mystical prognostications is equally characteristic of Glendower’s portrayal in 1.Henry IV- described by Henry as that ‘great magician’ and as a man who claims that at his birth, ‘the front of heaven was full of fiery shapes/Of burning cressets’ and that ‘the frame and huge foundation of the earth/Shaked like a coward.’

Hotspur is unimpressed by this information, arguing the tremor had nothing to do with him having been born and would have shaken had ‘your mother’s cat but kittened’. And to Glendower’s assertion that ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep’ he responds, ‘So can any man/But will they come when you do call for them?’

Although in alliance against Henry, Hotspur is the voice of England disdaining Wales. When Glendower says he was ‘trained up in the English court’ and ‘framed to the harp/Many an English ditty lovely well’ Hotspur responds that nothing sets his teeth on edge so much as ‘mincing poetry’.

Having dismissed Glendower’s musical and literary accomplishments as well as his Celtic mysticism and earth magic, he later attacks him as a windbag, complaining to Mortimer that he can’t stand being told ‘of the mouldwarp and the ant/Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies… And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff/As puts me from my faith.’

Getting worked up, he complains he had to listen for ‘at least nine hours’ to Glendower’s nonsense and continues,

  

‘He is as tedious
As a tired horse, a railing wife… I had rather live
With cheese and garlic in a windmill, far,
Than feed on cates and have him talk to me
In any summer-house in Christendom.’

He’s equally harsh when Glendower’s daughter sings in Welsh, saying he would prefer to listen to his ‘brach (dog) howl in Irish’ – thus managing to insult two Celtic minorities for the price of one.

Glendower is defended by his son-in-law, Sir Edmund Mortimer, who protests that he is a ‘worthy gentleman’, ‘exceedingly well read’, ‘valiant as a lion’, ‘wondrous affable’ and ‘bountiful.’ Having been taken prisoner by Glyndwr at Bryn Glas, Sir Edmund switched sides as Henry had refused to pay his ransom on the understandable grounds that Sir E’s nephew, also Edmund Mortimer, had a better claim to the English throne than he did and wanted the Mortimers out of the way. A relation of Roger Mortimer who built Chirk Castle, the younger Edmund’s title to kingship was through his grandfather Edward III and his father, another Roger Mortimer, had been Richard II’s heir. On Roger’s death in Ireland, that title fell to Edmund and after his capture the older Edmund declared his young kinsman the rightful king. All clear?

Having formed an alliance with Glyndwr, Edmund married his daughter, Catrin (she of the singing voice) so it’s not surprising he should have a defended his father-in-law. He was justified, for Owain Glyndwr was a far more impressive character than the buffoonish Owen Glendower.

After a series of provocations, Owain had led a small band against Henry IV’s authority in 1400. The king sent Hotspur to suppress the uprising, but support for Glyndwr grew, especially after 1402 when the English Parliament passed penal laws against Wales designed to enforce English power. 

By 1403 men had joined him from all over Wales and with this strength he joined with Edmund Mortimer and Hotspur, now also in rebellion against Henry. Together they agreed a tripartite division of England and Wales and arranged to gather their forces at Shrewsbury - as depicted in Act 3 Scene 1. As events transpired, however, Glyndwr was on campaign in West Wales when Hotspur fought Henry in July and his absence may well have ensured the king’s victory.

Despite that defeat, he remained strong and in 1404 Glyndwr established a Welsh parliament in Machynlleth where he was crowned Prince of Wales and proclaimed Wales an independent state with a separate church and two national universities – one each in the north and south. He also signed a treaty with France and an informal alliance with Scotland -  and French and Scottish shipping proved a key part of his continuing resistance. English presence in Wales was reduced to a few castles only.

Things began to change in 1406 when France withdrew its fleet. Prince Hal was then able to begin a new strategy of economic blockade and slowly cut Welsh trade and supplies of arms. Even though Owain’s forces pushed as far into England as Birmingham in 1407, he increasingly had to withdraw. Aberystwyth Castle was lost that year and Harlech two years later.  1409 saw the death in battle of Edmund Mortimer and the capture of Owain’s wife, two of his daughters and three grandchildren, all of whom were to die in the Tower of London.

Glyndwr himself was never taken prisoner. He fought a last successful battle against the English at Brecon in 1412, but after that wasn’t again seen alive by his enemies. He was never betrayed by his countrymen, despite rewards offered for his head and he ignored all offers of pardon. It seems likeliest that he retired to live with one of his daughters in Herefordshire but the precise date of his death, believed to be in 1414, is unknown.

All that remains of Sycharth Castle is a grassy mound. The place had been destroyed by the English Prince of Wales in May 1403. Writing to his father about the event, Hal informed the king, ‘we took our people and went to a place of the said Oweyn, well built, which was his principal mansion called Saghern, where we supposed that we should have found him… but upon our arrival we found no one; hence we caused the whole place and many of his other houses of his tenants in the neighbourhood to be burnt.’

In 2012, the Bronygarth Social Committee organized an oral history project, After Offa, which created a picture of life along Offa’s Dyke between Chirk and Scycharth castles. One man, born in 1932, told how at his father’s school any child speaking Welsh was forced to where a board tied round his neck. If a second child was heard using the language the board was passed to him and so on - and at the end of the day whoever was wearing it was caned.

Another person, born in 1928, told of her sadness that pupils hadn’t been taught any Welsh history, even though Sycharth was less than a mile from her school. She supposed it was because the teachers were English. Given everything that has occurred, it is perhaps not surprising that resentments persist. Perhaps we should be grateful so much has been forgiven.

Many thanks to Bob Guy for permission to use his engraving of Sycharth as an illustration. To see more of Bob’s work, visit: www.bobguy-printmaker.co.uk