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

Death in a field of peas: Shakespeare and the Battle of Shrewsbury

Not far from Shrewsbury is its Battlefield Enterprise Park, where Shakespeare Comic Books are warehoused and distributed. And not far from Battlefield Enterprise Park are a few pleasantly undulating but nondescript fields dotted with woodland. Six hundred years ago this was the site of one of the bloodiest battles fought on English soil.

The Battle of Shrewsbury took place in a field of peas on July 21, 1403. It saw Henry IV defeat a rebel army led by Harry Hotspur and thus helped secure his monarchy - viewed by many as a usurpation following Richard II’s overthrow and possible murder. It also closes Henry IV Part 1, having shown Hal move from dissipated companion of whores and drunks to heroic prince.

The play depicts a kingdom in turmoil in which the disorderliness represented by Hal’s fat friend, Falstaff, reflects a more dangerous political instability. For while Henry IV is threatened by numerous insurrections, Falstaff is in rebellion against any kind of order. He is supreme Lord of Misrule; drunken, lecherous, false, cowardly and greedy, yet full of wit, charm and gusto. As such he is the counterpart to Henry’s constrained and inflexible character.

Henry probably wasn’t the man you needed if you were after a roistering night out, but in fairness he had other things on his mind. Having previously fought against both the Welsh and Scots on his king’s behalf, Hotspur had turned against Henry and allied himself with both Owen Glendower and Archibald Douglas. These plots and manoeuvrings are in part mirrored by Hal’s scheme to expose Falstaff’s blustering falsehoods with the attack at Gadshill. The play is thus both history and comedy, culminating with the Battle of Shrewsbury, but the depiction of it is sketchy and disposed of in only a few hundred lines.

This isn’t too surprising. Even a stage crowded with extras could never replicate full scale conflict. Instead it is represented by a series of combat encounters between Blunt and Douglas, Douglas and the King, Prince Hal and Hotspur and flurries of conversation between Douglas and Hotspur, the King and Hal amongst others, all building a sense of the speed and movement of battle – though any sense of chivalrous enterprise undercut by Falstaff’s cowardice and comic subterfuge.

As in the play, the actual battle was preceded by a parley between the two camps and fighting didn’t begin until around 4pm. When it finally commenced, it did so with volleys of arrows fired from either side – the Battle of Shrewsbury the first in which both armies were equipped with English longbow men. Tens of thousands of arrows would have twanged into the air within minutes and huge numbers of men killed even before they had entered the fray.

Medieval clashes tended to be intensely brutal but short in duration since fighting in full armour on a hot day was simply too exhausting. Four hours after it had begun, the battle was over. It was decided by the death of Hotspur, shot in the head by an arrow. For while Shakespeare was following historical sources in portraying the fight between Scottish rebel Douglas and Sir Walter Blount, who was carrying the royal standard, there was no recorded duel between the two Harrys.

It’s easy to see why Shakespeare should have paired them together, since just as Henry IV and Falstaff represent Hal’s opposing father figures, the two Harrys stand as opposites throughout the play – not least in Henry’s estimation. While he sees Hotspur as the ‘very straightest plant’ and ‘Fortune’s minion and her pride’ he considers his son stained with ‘riot and dishonour’ and hopes it could be proved ‘That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged/In cradle-clothes our children where they lay.’

In the play the Good Harry becomes Bad Harry while the old Bad Harry kills the new Bad Harry, so becoming the new Good Harry. Literature can do this sort of thing. In real life there was more than a twenty year age gap between them, Hal only sixteen in 1403 while Hotspur was a veteran of wars against the French, Scots, Irish and Welsh.

There was, though, a grimmer symmetry since both Harrys were struck down by arrows at Shrewsbury. In Hal’s case, the teenager was hit in the cheek and since the barbed tip meant it could not be simply withdrawn, desperate measures were needed. This involved a metal tube being inserted six inches into the wound around the arrow head, which could then be pulled out without tearing the flesh. The injured area was afterwards bathed with white wine and dressed by the Physician General with a mixture of honey, barley, flour and flax fibres. Harry survived, though horribly scarred.

It is not entirely co-incidence that both Harry’s were shot in the head, as knights were occasionally obliged to lift their visors to refresh themselves. Encased in full armour weighing up to sixty pounds after several hours of fighting on a hot day, the occupant must have been sweltering. Yet removing the helmet or lifting its visor would have exposed them to extreme danger and it is said archers positioned in trees were trained to take advantage of such vulnerability – though even randomly fired arrows would have been a threat.

The problems of armour on a hot day were alluded to by Prince Harry in Henry IV Part II when he is at his dying father’s bedside. Contemplating the two-sided nature of kingship, he says that majesty is like ‘a rich armour worn in heat of day/That scalds with safety’. The image is typical Shakespeare – brilliantly observed, concise, vivid and yet almost casual -‘Scalds with safety’ an extraordinary reminder that wearing a suit of metal in the height of summer may have been a form of torture, however also protecting.

Although at about 12,000 men, Hotspur’s army was slightly smaller than Henry’s of 14,000 it appeared to be winning at the time of his death. Once it became known that the rebel leader had been killed, however, the battle rapidly came to end. Six thousand men had lost their lives, almost a quarter of all those who had taken to the field. The bodies of knights would have been retrieved and returned to their families for burial. Those of the commoner sort were thrown into hastily dug pits, the ground consecrated and they left to rot.

Hotspur’s corpse was buried by his nephew, Thomas Nevill, in nearby Whitchurch – but once rumours began to circulate he was still alive, Henry ordered it to be exhumed and moved to Shrewsbury. It was then displayed in the market place at the top of Pride Hill and later dismembered.

At the same time, the Earl of Worcester, Sir Richard Venables, Sir Richard Vernon and Sir Henry Boynton, all captured rebels, were hanged, drawn and quartered. This means that while hanging, they were emasculated and their stomachs were ripped open, their entrails thrust into their faces. They were then taken from the gallows, beheaded, their limbs hacked off and their heads placed on public view – the earl’s on London Bridge.

The object was clearly terror. Henry wished all who plotted against him to know what fate would befall them. Had he had access to social media, he doubtless would have posted footage on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Lacking the technology, he instead had Hotspur’s body parts sent to Chester, Bristol, London and Newcastle and his head placed on a spike on the North Gate in York.

Today, Pride Hill is a busy pedestrianized shopping area with arcades, fast food outlets, Big Issue sellers and the occasional busker. It’s hard to imagine that only six long lifetimes separate us from the gruesome scenes of July 23 1403, or that rebels fleeing the battle were hunted down in the surrounding villages and slaughtered.

The events are commemorated by a plaque on a cross at the top of Pride Hill and Harry Hotspur’s name has been given to a pub which specialises in Chinese cuisine in Harlescott Lane. The Battlefield Enterprise Park where Shakespeare Comic Books are warehoused by NRG Direct Mail Ltd is a large place with buildings occupied by upholsterers, accountants, garages, beauticians and surveyors amongst others. It is to be found at 7 Knight’s Park, Hussey Road – the latter named after Richard Hussey, owner of Harlescott Manor on whose land the battle was fought.

Should the Shakespeare Comic Book Company thrive, I hope one day to add Henry IV Part I to its list of titles, that it might be despatched from near the field its final action portrays. If so, the book would be dedicated to my old tutor, Dr Alan Charity. Having read the passage in which the Boar’s Head is raided by the Sheriff and his ‘monstrous watch’ he paused in our tutorial to draw from this scene the moral ‘that one should always be polite to policeman’. Doubtless he felt I needed the advice. Clearly there is much to be learned from the study of Eng. Lit.

PS. Photo taken in 2003 at six hundredth anniversary re-enactment of battle.

The Scottish Play and Scottish independence

  

Scotland didn’t snap off at Hadrian’s Wall and float away to the sound of bagpipes on 19 September, but in the days before the referendum it looked as though it might. As it happens, we were in Edinburgh at the time for Sarah to attend the British Orthodontic Conference. So while she went off to hear about such things as the effect of enamel pre-treatment on the bonding of orthodontic attachments to hypomineralised enamel or the relationship between maxiliary central incisor proportions and facial proportions, I explored the city and tried to get a sense of its electoral mood. Not for the first time, one of us had the easier ride.

What was immediately evident was that all the energy seemed to be with the ‘Yes’ campaign. This is not surprising, since ‘Yes. Yes. Yes’ sounds like an orgasm and ‘No. No. No’ a miserable Saturday night. Had I been Scottish, I suspect I would have voted for the orgasm, but as an English person I was quietly relieved they went for the miserable Saturday night. Had they chosen otherwise, England might have been left with endless Conservative dominion - though we might be stuck with that anyway.

One of the decisive factors which helped swing voters towards ‘No’ was the late intervention of Gordon Brown. Having grown used to him as an irascible and incompetent figure of derision, he suddenly emerged as passionate, coherent and credible. Bullying the Westminster establishment into granting Scotland all kinds of devolved power, he gave a great barnstorming speech in which, amongst other things, he paraphrased Macbeth arguing that ‘Once it’s done, it’s done’ and concluding that ‘If you have any doubts, and if you don’t know, the answer has to be ‘No!’

Perhaps not surprisingly, Macbeth popped up more than once, not least when a UKip MEP likened Nicola Sturgeon to ‘Lady Macbeth’. Comments such as that make it easy to see why some Scots want nothing to do with the rest of us - and why after centuries of condescension and exploitation a minority simply loathe the English. As an English person in Scotland at the time of the vote for independence, I found myself thinking about Macbeth and felt obliged to view it in new light.

What would someone make of the play if brought up on the bad end of Edward I’s hammering of the Scots and appropriation of the Stone of Destiny, Cromwell, Culloden, the Highland Clearances and imposition of the Poll Tax? How would I feel if it were my country portrayed as a place of blasted heaths, murdering psychopaths, ghosts and weird hags? In brief, what would anyone Scottish make of the ‘The Scottish Play’? I put this question to a friend who has lived in Scotland for more than twenty years, but although of Scottish descent, he was born and educated in Essex, so shared my southern assumptions.

As ever, things are far from straightforward. For one thing, the play was written to flatter a Scot who just happened to have become King of England. And the weird sisters were added in recognition of his interest in witches, James I having written a book, Daemonologie in 1597, while James VI of Scotland. That they inhabited a stormy wilderness is only to be expected, since to someone living in London in 1600, anywhere in the north must have seemed a place of darkness, immorality and wild spaces. I doubt knowing this will prove much consolation to anyone viewing the play as an instrument of cultural imperialism.

If the witches were added to please James, the history in Macbeth was real enough - if heavily distorted to satisfy the king, who believed himself descended from Banquo and Fleance. In Shakespeare’s source material, Holinshed’s Chronicles, Banquo is complicit in Duncan’s murder though this was written out. In reality, Duncan was defeated in battle near Elgin in 1040. In reality, there was probably no such person as Banquo at all.

Mac Bethad or mac Findlaich, otherwise known as Macbeth, actually ruled for seventeen years rather than the short brutish period depicted in the play. And far from being a bloodthirsty tyrant, it seems he encouraged the spread of Christianity and travelled to meet the pope in Rome in 1050 – something he could not have done had the country been other than well-governed and secure. He was eventually defeated by Duncan’s son Malcolm Canmore (‘Bighead’) at the Battle of Lumphanan in 1057 – Malcolm assisted by his uncle, Siward of Northumbria. The latter’s motives were likely to have been mixed, since given the long tradition of cross-border warfare, he was almost certainly looking to strengthen his hold in the region. Malcolm may not have been overly grateful for the help, spending a large part of his thirty five year reign trying to gain possession of Northumbria, though without great success.

Malcolm did not, though, immediately become king after victory at Lumphanan. Instead the monarchy passed to Lulach, Macbeth’s stepson, by his wife Gruoch’s first marriage to Gille Coemgain, Mormaer of Moray. Lulach, however, seems to have been weak and ineffectual and ruled only for a few months before being murdered by Malcolm who then assumed the kingship, slaughtering the rest of Macbeth’s family to make assurance double sure. Such violence wasn’t particularly uncommon. Of the fourteen kings who ruled Scotland between 943 and 1097, ten met bloody ends.

The bloodthirsty madness of Scotland is contrasted in Macbeth with the peace and orderliness of the English court, where Edward the Confessor is described in saintly terms, manifest in his ability to heal scrofula by touch. Even this, however, was a nod to James who believed he had inherited divine healing powers – a delusion that afflicted monarchs until the late eighteenth century.

In some sense Edward is seen to cure Scottish ills through the help given to Malcolm by Siward and the English. Even if I’d got over the blasted heaths, weird sisters and psychopathy, were I a Scot, I think I’d be pretty fed up by the implication that troubles north of the border could only be sorted out by intervention from the south – especially as the English throne wasn’t particularly characterised by the orderliness of its succession.

James might, perhaps, have felt Shakespeare had a point. His family was not conspicuously happy since his father, Lord Darnley, had been blown up in 1566 – many people believing the murder instigated by James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots. She was later beheaded on her cousin Queen Elizabeth’s orders in 1587, while James’ uncle, Lord Moray, had been murdered in 1570 when acting as regent for the young king. And to make matters worse, in 1628 James’s lover, the Duke of Buckingham, was stabbed to death while his son Charles was beheaded in 1649 – though as James died in 1625 he missed out on those. 

There were at least two attempts on James’ own life. In 1600, the Earl of Gowrie had tried to kill him with a knife, after which the king understandably took to wearing heavily padded vests. More famously, the Gunpowder plotters tried to blow him up along with the rest of the nobility in 1605. And since many involved in the conspiracy came from Warwickshire and some were acquainted with Shakespeare, the playwright had good reason to ingratiate himself with James, Macbeth’s main theme being that killing a king is never a good idea, especially if prompted by witchcraft.

The Gunpowder Plot itself is referred to in the play in Act 2 Scene 3 in which the Porter jokes that ‘here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.’ This may not sound as funny as it once did, but his audience would certainly have understood the allusion to Henry Garnet, a Catholic priest implicated in the conspiracy, who committed perjury when on trial but used his right to equivocate in self-defence.

It could be argued that the Porter scene reflects how little Macbeth is really about Scotland at all. For while the porter is a drunk, he isn’t particularly a Scottish drunk. Shakespeare makes no effort to give him a Scots accent or tropes of speech – he’d probably worked out that ridiculing the Scots wasn’t going to endear him to a Scot - so the Porter isn’t a comic Scotsman the way Fluellen in Henry V is comically Welsh. And if one were to remove the Scottish names, there is nothing intrinsic to Scotland in the play – which is why it works as well in Japan or South Africa or anywhere else. The insanity into which Macbeth and his wife plunge is not a Scottish madness. It is the psychic torment of anyone driven to extremes by ambition and broken by fear and remorse.

Although a formal Act of Union between England and Scotland did not occur until 1707, on October 20 1604, King James announced he was taking the ‘Name and Stile of King of Great Brittaine, France and Ireland’ though I guess without asking anyone in France or Ireland what they thought of the plan. Those in Scotland and England were not keen. The former worried they would be subsumed by the larger entity. The latter fretted that all sorts of laws and treaties would have to be re-negotiated. Ironically, one of the ‘No’ campaigns major arguments was that in the event of Scottish independence, all sorts of laws and treaties would have to be re-negotiated. At least we were spared that.

On polling day I had visited the Scottish National Gallery. On the square outside a fence had been erected on which people had pinned their hopes for a brave future. One person had written,

‘I’ve been lied to

I’ve been bullied

I’m tired

But I won’t lie down my head to sleep until in an independent Scotland’

The following day was grey and rain had soaked the scraps of paper. Many had blown away or been removed. On my last day the sun was shining and the plaza at lunchtime was full of couples dancing to swing time jazz. Independence was on hold for another few years.

Digitally coloured image of weird sisters by Phill Evans (www.endsofinvention.biz), taken from forthcoming full colour comic book edition of Macbeth.

Shakespeare and the First World War

Shakespeare took a sabbatical last year. More precisely, I took time away from Shakespeare Comic books to write a book about National Trust properties and the First World War. Having sent a proposal to the publisher in December 2012, I met with a commissioning editor in January, had a follow-up meeting with the National Trust in February and began preliminary work straight afterwards. For the first few months of 2013 I continued to spend time on a new colour edition of Macbeth, but from May I was lost in warfare, visiting more than forty NT properties and making contact with many others.

During my researches, I had expected to come across men like Virginia Woolf’s Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs Dalloway who ‘went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole walking in a green dress in a London square.’ Yet if any carried pocket editions of Shakespeare or consoled themselves under fire by reciting Sonnet XV they didn’t mention it in letters. Instead, the correspondence I came across was mostly characterized by observations on the weather and thanks for parcels of cake and cigarettes.

Shakespeare was elusive. He made a fleeting appearance in my visit to Rufford Old Hall, but other than that the only connection I unearthed was tangential, in the death of Arthur Greg on April 23, 1917. The son of a wealthy textile manufacturer at Quarry Bank Mill, Cheshire, Arthur had enlisted while at Oxford in 1914 and wrote to his parents from France the following year, ‘This is a dirty and barbarous life. The sight of the first charge on Hill 60 was terrible. Hardly a man survived the storm of the shell and machine gun fire… The constant close contact with death makes me think deeply. I long to be home away from these sights and sounds.’

Later, in May 1915, he was severely injured in the jaw. Of his injury he wrote, ‘I went down like a log and was next aware of a loose, horrid and disconnected feeling about the lower part of my face... At one time I thought I should not live as I was bleeding so furiously. I thought it a pity that one more so young should have to go.’

Having recovered from his wound, Arthur transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in September 1916 and after elementary training found himself posted back to France in early 1917. By then, the RFC was losing twenty air crew every day and the average life expectancy of a newly arrived pilot was under a fortnight. Arthur was to exceed this by just eight days. He was posted to 55 Squadron on April 4 and on St George’s Day took part in a bombing raid which left at 3.50pm.

The raiders were attacked by a formation of German fighter planes, one of which was believed to have been piloted by Herman Goering.  Arthur was shot down and killed. His younger brother, Robert was killed in France the following year, having been at the front for barely a few days. Arthur was twenty-two when he died, Robert was nineteen. Three days after his death, Arthur’s fiancée, Marian Allen, wrote one of several sonnets to him. Part of it reads,

Like golden may-flies, dancing in the sun

With glittering wings and shining bodies, they

Have with the dawn their joyous dance begun

Light of heart and true of heart, and gay…

If with the dusk then falls a glittering one,

Beautiful in death as life, no less,

One pair of golden wings forever gone

Another heart in England knows distress.

But other golden wings will carry on

And flit & pass & die as they have done.

That Arthur was killed on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and death provided a tenuous link with the bard. Slightly more substantial ties were to be found at Rufford Old Hall, in Lancashire. The hall was built in about 1530 by Robert Hesketh and apart from the occasional spendthrift his descendants seem to have lived quietly and married well for generations. Few family members appear to have come to public attention apart from the third Lord Hesketh who in 1972 started a motor racing team with his friend Anthony ‘Bubbles’ Horsley and with driver James Hunt managed to win the Dutch Grand Prix in 1975 before settling back into the Hesketh tradition of comfortable obscurity.

The hall is a beautiful half-timbered building with later wings added in 1661 and the 1820s. It is particularly noted for a huge, free-standing screen of bog oak, carved with finials, coats of arms, traceried panels and an angel with six fingers. Described by architectural historian Nickolaus Pevsner as being of ‘an exuberance of decoration matched nowhere else in England’ and the only known example from the first half of the 16^th century, it would have screened the hall from its kitchens beyond.

It creates a natural theatrical space, with the coal black bog oak as a crazy backdrop and space for performers to enter and exit either side. And there is a belief that Shakespeare performed here as a young man. Evidence for this derives from the fact that his last teacher at Stratford Grammar School, John Cottam, came from Hoghton in Lancashire. This establishes a link with the county, reinforced by the finding that in 1581, Alexander Hoghton of Lea Hall, near Preston, referred in his will to one ‘wilim Shakeshaft nowe dwellynge with me’. This was made in reference to a bequest of musical instruments and ‘playe clothes’ to Sir Thomas Hesketh.

The theory that ‘wilim Shakeshaft’ was a seventeen year old Shakespeare is based on a series of conjectures – that James Cottam recommended the boy as tutor to Alexander Hoghton, propped up by the knowledge that Lancashire was a Catholic stronghold (Thomas Hesketh was made a knight at the coronation of Queen Mary in 1553) and the supposition that Shakespeare’s family had Catholic sympathies. It is further bolstered by the coincidence that one of the Globe’s trustees and backers, Thomas Savage, was from Lancashire and married to one of the Heskeths. There is also the likelihood that Shakespeare spent part of his early manhood as a jobbing actor and thus might have been amongst the ‘Hesketh Company of Players’.

By 1585 it is thought probable that he had joined Lord Strange’s company of actors which is said to have included Will Kempe and Richard Burbage. When Strange inherited the Earldom of Derby in 1593, the troupe became known as Derby’s Men, performing Titus Andronicus and the Henry VI trilogy. As it happens, Fernando Strange had been Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire and Cheshire and was thought to have Catholic tendencies. In 1594 he was approached by Richard Hesketh on behalf of Catholic exiles who wished him to claim the throne, based on descent from Henry VII’s younger daughter. Strange declined and handed Hesketh to the authorities who was then tortured and executed, perhaps persuading the family to keep out of public affairs for another few hundred years. Strange himself died shortly afterwards, thought to have been poisoned.

Whether Shakespeare was mixed up in any of this is unproven. There are several tantalising leads, but it all turns on the identity of ‘wilim Shakeshaft’ and Shakeshaft was a common Lancastrian name – the Preston guild records of 1581 even mentioning one John Shakeshaft, a glover. All we can be certain of is that he must have been doing something between leaving school (though we don’t even know for sure he attended school) and his arrival on the London stage. The only definite records we have relating to him at this time are of his marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582 and the birth of Susanna in 1583 and Judith and Hamnet in 1585. Everything else is speculation, which of course merely encourages people to speculate.

What took me to Rufford Old Hall wasn’t Shakespeare, but a doll. Not on public display, I was aware of it through an inventory sent me by the National Trust. It is part of the Trust’s vast, unseen collection, much of it not even catalogued. Retrieved from an attic and presented in a cardboard box, wrapped in tissue paper, the doll was dressed in the uniform of a First World War army officer.

It was an intriguing object, and clearly not a factory made product. For one thing, the body had once belonged to a child’s doll, the lips being cherubic and unsoldierly and the blonde locks roughly cropped short, but still of unmilitary length. The uniform, though, had been made of beautifully stitched felt. There was also considerable attention to detail with regimental badges on the lapels, braided cuffs, Sam Browne belt, puttees and peaked cap.

Yet who made it and why? It could not have been played with by a child, since the doll’s condition was immaculate, the colour pristine. Above all, the monocle had been delicately sewn into place and would not have survived a moment’s rough handling.

Might it have been made to raise funds for the war effort? Perhaps. A more romantic explanation suggests it could have been made as a lover’s talisman. The monocle may provide a clue, since these were not regulation issue – the doll representing a specific individual rather than a generic soldier. If so, then making it would have filled lonely hours and focused thoughts on the young officer it embodied. What then became of him, or the person that converted the plaything from peace to war?

Nothing is known. The staff at Rufford Old Hall were unaware who made it or why or when it had entered the collection. Without information and with no usable photograph, the doll was left out of the book. Instead, it was wrapped again in tissue paper, placed back in its box and returned to the attic. It may well rest there for another hundred years.

The Country House at War is published by National Trust Publications and is available through NT shops, booksellers and online (£15).

Why didn’t Shakespeare keep his manuscripts?

Writers are mostly vain creatures. For one thing, writing anything longer than a shopping list and expecting that anyone else could be bothered to read it, is a kind of egotism. This is inevitable. Composing even a bad novel of average length would take at least several weeks, almost certainly months and possibly years – and unless you were sustained by the belief that what you were working on would redefine the genre, top the best seller list and guarantee you the Nobel Prize for Literature you would probably give up after a few pages and go and watch TV.

However worthless it might prove to be, at the time of writing, you have to be convinced of its value. Which is a paradox because the part of our brains that isn’t in a state of permanent fantasy (admittedly quite a small part), is perfectly aware that almost no art has any value whatsoever – beyond paying a few bills and incurring brief minor celebrity if you’re incredibly lucky.

Books that are all the rage today will be largely unread in fifty years and totally forgotten in one hundred. Comparatively few writers endure for long, but way ahead of the field is William Shakespeare. Which is all the more extraordinary because he seems to have made no effort to preserve his work for posterity, seemingly indifferent to its survival. All that’s left to us definitely from his hand are six signatures attached to four legal documents - each with variant spellings with none as we spell his surname; Willm Shakp, William Shaksper, Wm Shakspe, William Shakspere, Willm Shakspere and William Shakspeare.

There is also the possibility that three pages of Sir Thomas More, a play by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle were written by Shakespeare, one of several other contributing authors. Probably written between 1591-93, the manuscript’s survival is astonishing – none exist of any successful play produced on stage before the English Civil War (with the questionable exception of a few lines from The Massacre at Paris by Kit Marlowe). There are reasons for this, not least the fact that once a play was available in printed form, the handwritten scripts were not considered worth keeping.

There are reasons for this, too, since plays were written to be performed rather than read. Their commercial value was in the theatre and there wasn’t much money to be made by their sale in book form. Even so, it seems mind boggling that someone coming across a manuscript copy of Hamlet or Othello shouldn’t have thought it worth tucking away in a drawer. And one reason for this is that Shakespeare wasn’t especially esteemed by his contemporaries; his plays were popular but he wasn’t regarded more highly than Marlowe, Kyd, Jonson, Dekker and the rest. Pirated editions of his work began to appear in Quarto or Octavo format from 1594 onwards, selling for sixpence each, but it was not until 1597 his name appears on the title page. This would suggest that in the early part of his career at least, printers didn’t think it worth adding to the work as it wasn’t going to boost sales.

Had two of Shakespeare’s fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, not decided to produce the First Folio of his work in 1623, the Quartos or Octavos might have been our only record of such plays as Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V and Julius Caesar. And as with everything else to do with Shakespeare, their origin is something of a mystery.

Some scholars argue they were compiled by people who’d attended performances and memorised chunks of text; that they derived from stolen prompt books or copies of the actors’ scripts; that the actors themselves sold their parts in return for a few shillings; or that they were in fact copies of other plays which themselves plagiarized Shakespeare’s material. However they came about, they are often incomplete and with notable divergences from the First Folio, that described them as ‘stol’n and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by frauds and stealths of injurious impostors.’

It was naturally in their interest to rubbish the competition, but comparing versions of the most famous soliloquy in world history, Heminge and Condell seem to have a point. While they go with, ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question’, the 1603 Quarto opts for ‘To be or not to be. Aye, there’s the point/To die to sleep, is that all? Aye all.’ Some academics have suggested these discrepancies suggest the extent to which Shakespeare was a constant reviser; that they represent an earlier form of a work in progress. I would suggest this theory indicates how far from reality some academics have floated.

Yet if there was any money to be made from publishing the works, why didn’t Shakespeare publish them himself? Why leave it to pirates? One reason is perhaps that he didn’t own the work, that they were the property of the company for whom he was writing. A likelier explanation is that the big money was to be made from the works on stage and that an accurate published edition would mean gifting valuable intellectual property to other companies which could then perform it themselves.

Even so, it’s hard to believe that having written Hamlet, Lear, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet and more, Shakespeare had no interest in ensuring accurate copies were retained. At least two works, Love’s Labour’s Won and Cardenio have been lost, possibly with several others. He wasn’t alone. Hundreds of plays written in the period have vanished. Only Shakespeare’s friend and rival, Ben Jonson, troubled to supervise the printing of his own collected work, in 1616.

By contrast, Shakespeare’s rare authorised publications began in 1593 with Venus and Adonis, written to earn a bit of cash when plague closed the theatres, as well as seek an aristocratic patron in the Earl of Southampton. This was followed in 1594 by The Rape of Lucrece and Phoenix and The Turtle in 1601. Otherwise, that’s it. Even the Sonnets, published in 1609, appeared in an illegitimate edition by Thomas Thorpe and contain so many inaccuracies and inconsistencies that Professors of Eng. Lit have been busy ever since.

Shakespeare’s colossal unconcern about posterity seems all the greater when modern writers hoard every jotting. It is not surprising that they should, given the huge sums universities pay for literary archives. Last month the Harry Ransom Center, Texas, paid two million dollars (£1.2m) for a collection of Ian McEwan’s early drafts, abandoned novels, seventeen years’ worth of emails and letters from other authors.

Whether anyone will have the slightest interest in any of that, let alone his fiction, in two hundred years’ time is conjectural. The Harry Ransom Center has also acquired the archives of, amongst others, Julian Barnes, JM Coetzee, Doris Lessing and Tom Stoppard. Good luck to them and all writers everywhere. Stocks in some may rise, most will fall. I guess institutions gamble that kind of money in the hope that at least a small percent of the material they buy will have permanent value.

By coincidence, a draft of Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan was sold at auction to an anonymous bidder last week, also for two million dollars. The manuscript comprises four pages of hotel stationery on which the song had been hand-written in pencil, accompanied by notes, doodles and drawings.

Such a dizzying price for four scraps of paper asks all kinds of questions. What can owning them confer? Will possession enhance the buyer’s song writing capabilities, deepen an understanding of the song or make Bob Dylan his or her friend? Can it mean anything other than that he or she (but almost certainly a bloke) made a fortune inventing the last but one big thing on the internet and can’t think how to spend even a fraction of that wealth?

More generally, does it help to know that Dylan contemplated rhyming ‘truth’ with ‘Vermouth’ before deciding against? Would the world be a worse place if the manuscript had been thrown in the bin or even if the song itself had never been recorded?

I seem to have managed quite well without knowledge of the abandoned rhyme, but my experience of life would have been poorer without the song. I’ve listened to Like A Rolling Stone perhaps more than any other, in multiple versions by Dylan and various artists, particularly his own incensed interpretation at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966 and Hendrix’s incendiary performance of it at Monterey Pop in 1967 (the guitar he played that day, before setting fire to a cheaper model, incidentally selling for £250,000 at auction in 2012).

If the lyrics of a pop song are now deemed worth $2m, it’s hard to imagine how much might be paid for even a dodgy sonnet in Shakespeare’s hand. Rather quaintly, another reason manuscripts were not preserved in his day is that paper was expensive, mostly imported from France. Once used, it was recycled for other purposes, often stiffening the spines of books. It is therefore possible that fragments of his foul papers, the term used to describe an early draft, could have survived hidden in ancient tomes in forgotten corners of little visited libraries.

Would the discovery that he really did write, ‘To be or not to be. Aye, there’s the point’ alter our perception of Hamlet? Impossible to say, but it would be fun to find out. In the meantime, if you’ve read all the way through to the end, thank you for your commitment. And if you’re from the Harry Ransom Center and would like to buy any of my old emails, unpublished novels, juvenilia or letters from my bank manager, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Unkindest cuts: on editing Shakespeare

Some while ago I heard Sir Peter Hall opine on the radio that Shakespeare should never be cut. Henceforth, he would only direct productions with full original text. This seems such an extreme and peculiar position that I have since wondered if I misheard the interview, or was listening to another Sir Peter Hall or have simply misremembered and he was in fact saying the opposite. As I recall, his view was that the texts were written as Shakespeare wished them to be and that any meddling was presumptuous - simultaneously misshaping the work and denying the public opportunity to see the work as viewed by Tudor or Jacobean audiences.

 

Whether the plays as we know them are in any sense definitive is of course questionable, as most  were compiled by actors working from memory after Shakespeare’s death. Which text to follow when, as with Richard III, the first Quarto version is significantly divergent from the first Folio is another problem I’m not sure Sir Peter addressed. But he is one of the great men of British theatre and I apologize if I’ve misconstrued his words or if it were another Sir Peter voicing those opinions. It’s certainly true that the moment you begin to edit a text you are imposing your own interpretation. By cutting a speech or dropping a scene you are in some sense deceiving the audience; the play is no longer Shakespeare but a modified version.

 

Such intervention is fine if everyone watching the piece is familiar with the original, but misleading for anyone for whom it is a new and perhaps only experience of the drama. When Baz Luhrmann cut Romeo’s line ‘Thy drugs are quick’ and gave it to Mercutio before the Capulet’s ball it was impressive cinema, the words followed by an explosion of fireworks suggesting hallucinogenic rush, adolescent excitement and party fever all at once. It also created a problem for English teachers everywhere whose students were no longer studying Romeo and Juliet but Romeo + Juliet.

 

I don’t have difficulties with that. Luhrmann’s film was fresh and vibrant. It played games with the text but was true to its essence.  His job wasn’t to shore up the canon but entertain and make money. He did both, kicking new life into the play at the same time. Good for him.

 

My task at Shakespeare Comic Books is slightly different; for while the intention is also to entertain and make money, the series was expressly designed for use in schools. To that extent, it has to remain orthodox; re-arranging the text to make something punchier isn’t an option, however tempting.

 

A few rival comic book companies have decided to present complete Shakespeare scripts, I suspect for the simple reason that it avoids having to employ an editor to trim them down. It also means presenting a lot of material that in some cases may not have been written by Shakespeare at all (it’s thought the Hecate scene in Act 3 Scene 5 was added later to beef up Macbeth’s weird sister quotient, appealing to the Jacobean taste for all things witchy), some parts which are dull and others plain daft.

 

Amongst the dullest passages I’ve cut was Macbeth’s Act IV Scene 3, in which Macduff confronts Malcolm at the English court. At 240 lines it is ninety-nine longer than the next longest scene, Act III Scene 4 – and in that you get a ruined banquet, Banquo’s ghost, Macbeth’s near madness and ends with his chilling pronouncement ‘blood will have blood… We are yet but young in deed.’ The later scene, by contrast, doesn’t much advance the plot or capture attention.

 

It was put there for a reason, of course, but since its principal purpose was to flatter James I’s notion of a sovereign’s divine healing powers while exploring the attributes of kingship, it isn’t packed with action. We already know that Macbeth has plunged Scotland into chaos, Lady Macduff and her children murdered and Malcolm in exile. It has some good lines, but since I had to compress the whole play into sixty pages, it seemed sense to cut along that dotted line rather than another.

 

Macbeth, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are all relatively short plays. That made it possible to retain more of the original text - almost sixty per cent in most instances. Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and Henry V, by contrast, are significantly longer works; tougher decisions had to be made.

 

Amongst the cuts from Henry V was most of Act 2 Scene 2 in which Henry toys with Grey, Cambridge and Scroop, knowing they have plotted against him before unmasking their treachery and sentencing them to death. The scene is not without value, for one thing revealing Henry’s loneliness as king. He has had to renounce Falstaff, now he finds that one of his closest friends, Scroop, has betrayed him to the French. It also shows his decisiveness; just as he had cast off the fat knight, he condemns the traitors to death. He then sets sail for France. Yet at 185 lines, it was too long and digressive – the plotters do not appear before this scene and are not mentioned afterwards – and their action has no impact on events. So mention of the plot was reduced to a note in the continuity box, leaving only Henry’s rousing words as he embarks at Southampton.

 

Some decisions to cut were slightly easier than others. Since the Shakespeare Comic Books are used in schools a certain level of propriety is essential. Thus a large portion of speeches by Mercutio and the Nurse went into the bin. Famously, in Act 2 Scene 1, he makes reference to the medlar, a small brown fruit with a cleft that’s not possible to eat until rotten, when it splits, spilling juice. It was known as ‘open arse’ and if all this wasn’t enough, Mercutio jokes that Romeo wishes he were a ‘poperin’ pear, a phallic shaped fruit from Poperinge in Belgium. Happily for his purposes, its name also puns on ‘pop her in’.

 

Some have argued Mercutio’s words imply Romeo is hoping for anal intercourse with Rosaline. Others contend that the ripe medlar fruit was thought to look like female genitalia and thus Romeo’s sexual desire more conventionally directed. Either way, pretty strong stuff for primary school pupils. As is Mercutio’s assertion that ‘the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.’ Children these days are less sheltered than they used to be. Even so, I thought it prudent to shed the lines.

 

Equally easy to cut was the brief scene at the end of Act 4 Scene 5 in which Peter bandies words with a group of musicians after Juliet’s supposed death. It’s a curious scene, following Capulet’s heartfelt distress on the loss of his daughter, though the mixing of comedy with tragedy was commonplace. Some have suggested it was an opportunity for the celebrated Will Kempe to come on and do a comic turn and might also have provided an interlude during which Juliet’s bed could be withdrawn and the stage re-arranged.

 

This may be true, but the fact is it lacks hilarity. For while much of Shakespeare’s low comedy remains wonderfully funny, the greater part of his humorous word-play falls flat. So out went Peter and the musicians, and out too went the repartee between Antonio and Sebastian in Act 2 Scene 1 of The Tempest and out also went almost all of the drunken Porter from Macbeth’s Act 2 Scene 3. Jokes that require ten footnotes to explain them have lost their zing, however side-splitting they were four hundred years ago.

 

Which is not to say that the porter, at least, wouldn’t be hugely entertaining on stage, but actors have the chance to bring words to life through gesture and physical comedy. It’s true I have pictures, but not much space and providing a modern English translation compounds the problem. For while Shakespeare’s audience would have understood the reference to an ‘equivocator’ as being to Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest known as the ‘Great Equivocator’ who was executed for his part in the Gunpowder Plot, any normal child would be unaware of this. But explaining it crisply would have been difficult and making it amusing virtually impossible. So out it went.

 

I was reluctant to cut the Porter’s opening speech because it’s so celebrated, but I’ve agonised more about cutting other lines simply because of their power and beauty. It feels like sacrilege or vandalism and I’ve struggled to install as much original text as possible. The American writer and Shakespeare scholar, Michael P Jensen, once commented that the comic books were a crime against the art form – his argument being that the genre inherently favours pictures over words, however expressive the latter, while the Shakespeare comic books are text heavy. Some of the pages are weighted down with them.

 

I plead guilty as charged, but with mitigating circumstances.  For though a vast amount of space could be freed without the modern English translation, it seems essential to offer some clue to Shakespeare’s original meaning - when highly qualified academics can’t always agree quite what Shakespeare’s saying, it seems tough to let thirteen year old students work it out for themselves.

 

For example, I read at least three separate interpretations of Lady Macbeth’s lines,

 

‘thou’ldst have, great Glamis,

That which cries ‘Thus thou must do’, if thou have it,

And that which rather thou dost fear to do

Than wishest should be undone.’

 

I came up with fourth variant of my own, though off-hand I can’t remember what it was. In that instance, it seemed simplest to snip the lines.

 

I don’t think Sir Peter likely to approve. I’m not sure Secretary of State of Education, Michael Gove, would either. At the moment he is insisting students read only complete texts by British authors. Beyond returning to a 1950s style curriculum, it’s not certain what he hopes to achieve by this. If he wants to induce intellectual coma, he should push on with his plan. If he wishes to inspire the next generation with a love of Eng Lit, he might do better letting teachers decide what’s best for their students. Hopefully at least a few will continue to opt for the Shakespeare Comic Books.

 

Shakespeare's Big Birthday

If Shakespeare were alive today, he would be celebrating his 450^th birthday. This would make him simultaneously the world’s greatest living playwright and its oldest inhabitant. Since he’s not, he will have to be content with recognition as the greatest writer in history. I doubt he would be much bothered about that acclaim, though greatly interested in box office receipts and royalties.

 

My first memory of the bard dates to celebrations of his 400^th anniversary, when I was eight. There must have been all kinds of programmes about him on the radio and television and lessons on the subject at school, but what I remember especially is a set of commemorative stamps. This might seem an odd beginning to a relationship, but I loved pictures as a child, spent hours drawing and painting and had a sense of history, if ignorant of almost everything else.

 

And these were no ordinary stamps. For one thing, they were larger than usual and for the first time ever, they honoured a commoner. There was controversy about this, since the Post Office had a policy of not depicting famous people other than royalty and the ostensible reason for their issue was to mark the annual Shakespeare Festival at Stratford rather than William’s birthday.

 

They were also different in style. For while the 2s 6d stamp was a line engraved depiction of Hamlet contemplating Yorick’s skull, the other four were minimalist in tone using a reversed image of the Droeshout portrait on the left to complement a picture of the Queen on the right, with stylised scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet and Henry V in between.

 

It was the Dream stamp that struck me. It might be because at 3d it was the lowest denomination and thus the one most frequently used on letters. Henry V at 1s 6d would have been a comparative rarity. There is, though, probably another more resonant reason, since while Henry was shown at prayer before Agincourt and Romeo and Juliet in balcony mode, the Dream featured Puck doing some sort of outlandish dance and Bottom with an ass’s head. There can be few children not amused by the idea of a character called Bottom, especially one with a donkey’s head on his shoulders. I have always loved the imaginary and when a child, this fantastical creature along with Puck dancing a crazy jig would have exerted enormous appeal. They told me that here was a man who, if nothing else, was not Enid Blyton.

 

 

Today the designs perhaps look a little staid, but in 1964 they would have been revolutionary. Not only was Shakespeare the first non-royal to appear on a stamp, but his portrait was the same size as that of the Queen, giving him a kind of equality with her. It seems there were also jokes in Parliament about the proximity of Her Majesty to Shakespeare’s Bottom, confirming once again that the Palace of Westminster has never been noted for the hilarity of its humour.

 

The set was designed by David Gentleman, who later in the same year persuaded the incoming Postmaster General, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, to remove images of the queen from stamps altogether. Tony Benn, as he later became, enthusiastically took up this suggestion. It seems Elizabeth II was less keen on the idea and the plan was quietly shelved.

 

You may not be familiar with David Gentleman’s name, but you will almost certainly know his work. Apart from many sets of stamps, he designed the ceramic tiled murals of medieval workers at Charing Cross tube station and refreshed the iconic oak leaf emblem for the National Trust. If you attended the anti-Iraq war rally in February 2003, you would have seen the blood spattered ‘No’ posters he created for the Stop the War Coalition and it was Gentleman who flipped the vowels in Blair’s name to BLIAR, another ubiquitous placard on the march.

 

More recently he illustrated Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay a pioneering work of oral history, written by his father-in-law, George Ewart Evans, first published in 1956. The main illustrations are pen and ink with watercolour and are detailed and precise yet fluid and unfussy; a wonderful evocation of contemporary rural existence.

 

The book itself presents a picture of agricultural life in Suffolk in the final days before mechanized farming, when gathering the harvest was the work of a whole community and even neighbouring villages were remote and strange places.

 

After my family moved from Kent to Essex in 1963, I was brought up on the edge of East Anglia and had glimpses of that old world. From the school bus I would see a smallholder at work with horse and plough and would find stone beer bottles in hedgerows or long discarded tools slowly decaying amid clumps of weed. Once I found a rusting sickle and wondered whether it had been lost, or thrown away by its last owner as mechanical reapers made centuries of hand work redundant.

 

It was the kind of childhood that was common then but rare today. I spent hours outside making dens, following meandering streams or exploring a disused railway line. Mostly I walked in the woods and fields, sometimes with a brother or friend, but often alone. I don’t recall any purpose to these ramblings and suppose they weren’t accompanied by Wordsworthian nature raptures; it was simply the world into which I had been dropped and I was delighting in its freedom.

 

Like Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, a book it inspired, Ask The Fellows is not sentimental about the past. That was a brutal world. In my teens I sketched a dilapidated building near home attracted by its romantic dereliction. Some years later, I met the farm worker who had formerly lived there. He told me the place was cold, damp and had only an outside toilet. He was much happier on the modern council estate. It wasn’t picturesque, but it had every convenience and wasn’t a tied cottage. In the 1970s the hovel was renovated and is probably now worth close to a million pounds.

 

Fifty years isn’t a long time, though long enough for Shakespeare to have written at least thirty nine plays, three long poems and 154 sonnets. Aged fifty, he only had two more to live. So assuming he really was born on April 23, today is not only his 450^th birthday, but also the 398^th anniversary of his death.

 

Britain hasn’t changed beyond recognition since 1964, but much has altered. Back then, homosexuality was still a criminal offence, landlords placed notices in windows saying, ‘No blacks. No Irish. No dogs’ and it was only in that year that The Married Women’s Property Act entitled a woman to keep half of any savings she made from the allowance given by her husband (although the Act didn’t apply in Northern Ireland). It could be a pretty horrible place. Yet while it’s easy to deride the controversy surrounding the depiction of a commoner on a postage stamp fifty years ago, at least Shakespeare’s 400^th birthday was celebrated.

 

There is no such special issue this time round. The current set is of Buckingham Palace (complete with monarch’s head) and will be followed by ‘Remarkable Lives’ featuring among others, broadcaster Roy Plomley and football manager Joe Mercer. Shakespeare is not among them. Yet if his big birthday is not worth a commemorative stamp, I don’t know what is. Happy Birthday, William!

 

PS. Our cat has a big birthday next month when she will be 22. In terms of human life expectancy, this makes her about 450 years old. So far she hasn’t written any plays, long poems, or even a sonnet.

 

 

 

Donmar Coriolanus in review

The National Theatre production of Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse sold out the day tickets were released. This was not a surprise, partly because it’s a small theatre with a relatively short run, partly because of its casting and also because it’s Shakespeare and he’s bigger box office now than ever. It’s actually quite remarkable that a less well known play in the canon about a man who is hard to like should be such a hit and says much about our appetite for Shakespeare as well as the high quality of contemporary interpretations of his work.

 

I had hoped it possible to see Coriolanus live at the NT, but with people queuing all day for the chance of released tickets and black market tickets reportedly changing hands for £2,000, there was never any chance of that. So instead I went to the live-streamed performance in the Attfield Theatre, Oswestry.

 

The Attfield is in the nineteenth century Guildhall. I’ve no idea if the theatre was part of the original fittings, but it feels as if it could have been with its seats upholstered in fading velvet, restricted leg room and a general sense that things weren’t quite what they had been. It has charm and character and over the years I’ve seen a few amateur stagings there, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which two of the mechanicals were played by our village postman and an English teacher from a nearby school. They were great, with Bill the postman as Lion a triumph.

 

I was apprehensive about the live-streaming, having always been slightly sceptical about filmed stage productions – probably scarred in childhood by Olivier types declaiming to the camera, unaware there was no need to shout. Concern was groundless. For one thing, the Donmar is an intimate space; there was no strain to be heard at the back of auditorium. For another, the lead actors were almost all familiar faces from film and TV; they know that on screen less is more.

 

Which is not to say there weren’t some high theatrical moments - such as when Tom Hiddleston as Caius Martius showered after battle, the bloodied drops of water flashing jewel-like as they splashed from his wounded body. Or when he had earlier attacked the Volscian capital of Corioli alone, but accompanied by much clattering and banging and flying of sparks. These moments were much in contrast with some of the scenes between Martius and his wife, Virgilia, played by Birgitte Hjort Sorensen, where close ups allowed her to do much with very little.

 

I didn’t find it possible to forget this was a screened production, although its live-streamed nature did give it an edge. It was also very much a piece of theatre. The staging was minimalist, dominated by a brick back wall onto which slogans were at times graffitied, reminders of all those other walls from Ancient Rome to Berlin and the West Bank Barrier on which the powerless have expressed their discontents.

 

And for much of the time the actors, when not performing, sat on chairs set against the wall. In part, this gave the sense of a rehearsal, but more powerfully seemed a link to the origins of theatre. They were like a mute chorus, silently commenting on Martius’s classic tragic arc from war hero to double traitor and corpse.

 

The critics generally agreed that Tom Hiddleston’s performance was outstanding. I didn’t entirely share that view. I couldn’t escape the feeling that Martius was basically an idiot and that with a little more tact the whole mess could have been avoided. I know that’s like saying that if only Macbeth had been a little less ambitious or Othello slightly more trusting of Desdemona they wouldn’t all have ended up untimely dead, but I couldn’t quite believe in or care enough about the character Hiddleston portrayed. Why couldn’t he just have been a little nicer to the plebs? How come he thought it such a great idea to take up sides with his fiercest enemy?

 

There was though, real pathos in the scene with his mother, Volumnia, played by Deborah Findlay, as she, Virgilia, and his son plead with Martius to spare Rome – knowing that were he to do so he would condemn himself to death. When it came, it too had an emotional charge. Hiddleston was hung centre stage by his ankles, like a carcass in an abattoir - a cross between routine butchery and animal sacrifice.

 

Whether I would have been more willing to suspend disbelief had I seen the performance live is imponderable. The friends I went with were gripped by the drama, so I guess the failing was probably mine, not Tom’s. But there was much that I enjoyed along the way, not least a gifted portrayal of Mennenius by Mark Gatiss which added much deft humour.

 

It was notable that the Donmar audience found more to be amused by than we in the Attfield. They might have been responding to things out of camera shot, or perhaps picked up on nuances lost on screen. At the close, when the London audience applauded there was uncertainty with us – was it appropriate to clap or not? A few tried, but most simply picked up coats and headed for the exit.

 

It’s been said the play is more relevant now than ever, with a greater disparity of wealth in the UK even than in Victorian times. While Pay-Day loan firms multiply, the government that cuts housing benefits for the disabled is stuffed with millionaires and led by an ex-Etonian. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, really, that the cast of a play that turns on patrician contempt for the poor should be led by another old Etonian, Tom Hiddleston.

 

But it would be unfair to hold his schooling against him. He put in a strong performance and for those of us who can’t afford £2000 for a black market ticket, the live-streamed production was a great way to share the drama. Next up, King Lear on May 1. I have booked my place already. It cost £12. A snip.