Our revels now are ended: thoughts on a summer's party

Our revels now are ended. The Bronygarth Summer Party is over for another year, the yurts back in the garage and the lawn at Brookside cleared. There are only 150 people in the whole village, yet almost thirty helped prepare for the party in one way or another. It’s the most important social gathering of the year and an affirmation of our sense of community. It’s also a chance to drink too much, talk nonsense and dance in strange ways. Some of us make fuller use of this opportunity than others.

There are many lines from The Tempest that might seem appropriate to the situation, not least Trinculo’s observation, ‘there’s but five upon this isle; we are three of them; if th’other two be brained like us, the state totters.’

Shakespeare’s drunkards are always great comic value and The Tempest contains some of his funniest comedy. It is arguably his most perfect play and certainly the last he wrote unassisted.  It’s almost impossible not to see it as a valediction. When Prospero abjures his ‘rough magic’, breaks his staff and buries his book fathoms deep, most interpret this as Shakespeare’s renunciation of his art before retiring to Stratford.

It’s equally hard not to see Prospero’s speech after he’s interrupted the masque as expressing the dramatist’s sense of mortality, when ‘every third thought shall be my grave.’ It is imbued with a sense of life’s frailty and transience as well as its magic and beauty,

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Prospero’s words are all encompassing, from our ‘little’ lives to the ‘great globe itself’, his vision cosmic. For while the ‘cloud-capped towers’ and ‘gorgeous palaces’ were the product of his artifice, they equally stand for real buildings that will one day crumble and fall – in the same way that the ‘great globe’ is both his theatre, The Globe, and our planet, which will also pass away. All that is solid will one day cease to be, as unenduring as ‘this insubstantial pageant’.

I think of Prospero’s speech every time the yurts come down. It might seem quite a leap from Shakespeare’s meditation on art and life to the ending of a village summer get together, but every party is kind of performance. For one thing, people dress up. Not flamboyantly, in most cases, but with a modest effort. And there is a willing suspension of disbelief about what bankers, politicians and media tycoons are doing to the world. They are completely forgotten. Instead, food is shared, jokes told and beer and wine consumed while the band plays and children run in the garden or throw themselves about the bouncy castles.

The yurts themselves provide a theatrical space, reminiscent of a circus big top. They were made eight years ago as a community project with brightly coloured covers stitched by a local hot air balloon factory. They are not ‘cloud-capped’, ‘gorgeous’ or ‘solemn’ but they are beautiful spaces that provide dancehall, food-tent and chill-out room, all hung with lights and decorated with flowers.

The yurts are made from steam-bent ash. Circular in shape, the walls are formed by a trellis that supports roof ribs radiating from a central wheel. Evolved by Central Asian nomads, the components are light and compact for the substantial covered area they create. Wishing to thank the nomadic peoples that originated these elegant and economic structures, I invited the Mongolian ambassador to our inaugural party. To everyone’s astonishment, perhaps even his own, he accepted. He arrived in a long black Mercedes accompanied by two minders and seemed reluctant to leave several hours later. When finally he did, everyone at the party lined the drive and applauded as his car scrunched over the gravel and disappeared into the darkness.

That party was deemed to be the best ever, but as we always decide that the latest party is better than any previous, not surprising. This year we were joined by the Bishop of Tanzania, who was staying with friends nearby. He was gracious enough to say a prayer in Swahili and we presented him with £100 as a contribution to the school his church supports in Africa.

We also remembered John Bampfield, first Chairman of the Bronygarth Social Committee, who died last winter. John was formidable. A retired Major who had taught at Sandhurst, he was a member of the MCC and golf-playing Daily Telegraph reader. From the outside he might have seemed a cartoon reactionary, but he had huge personality, enormous energy, multiple enthusiasms and worked tirelessly for the community. He also faced infirmity in his last years with invariable stoicism and good humour.

With his wife, Sheila, it was John who bullied us into having our first ever summer party in 2000, to celebrate the millennium. Wishing to commemorate his incredible contribution to Bronygarth, it was decided to designate the beer yurt as ‘The Bampfield Arms’ so a sign was painted bearing his family coat of arms. This will henceforth stand between two barrels of beer at all our gatherings.

John was a great character. Use of the word suggests the extent to which we are all players. Shakespeare consistently relates our passage of life to parts played by an actor – from Jacque’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech to Macbeth’s ‘walking shadow’ that ‘struts and frets his hour upon the stage’ and Lear’s declamation that ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come/To this great stage of fools.’

The tragedies necessarily portray life as bleak. Prospero’s vision is benign.  ‘We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on’ while ‘our little life/Is rounded with a sleep.’

His words are gentle. Life is ‘little’ suggesting something harmless, almost child-like, while ‘rounded’ implies its ends are smooth and pleasingly shaped - and there is nothing here fearful in sleep (though his Jacobean audience might have been surprised by an absence of Christian afterlife).

The Tempest is ultimately a play about forgiveness and compassion. Despite his brother’s treachery and the drunken stupidity of Trinculo and Stephano, Prospero views humanity as ‘such stuff/As dreams are made on.’ The conjunction of ‘stuff’ and ‘dreams’ is typical of Shakespeare. The former connotes something nondescript, perhaps cheap, while the latter speaks of our capacity for poetry and magic; humans have a simultaneous capacity for ordinariness and transcendence.

Also typical of Shakespeare is the rich ambiguity of Prospero’s lines. It is not made clear whether dreams are the stuff of which we are made or whether the stuff that we are inspires dreams in others. We are both.

If it’s true that the partygoers were like actors, then it has to be admitted that we didn’t melt ‘into air, into thin air’. Instead, we drifted off by twos and threes. When I left with a couple of friends after midnight, the dance floor had been taken over by a group of teenagers, all male. They were mostly arms and legs fuelled by alcohol and testosterone, but keeping the party alive.

Lit from inside, the yurts glow like Chinese lanterns. Looking back, we could see figures flitting about the lawn, then after a bend in the road all was gone and we were walking down a hedged lane with a vast sky above, part clouded and dotted with stars.

The next afternoon we returned. Within two hours all the rubbish had been sorted into bins and bags and the yurts taken down. It’s not quite true that we left ‘not a rack behind’ as there was a battered wheelbarrow on the edge of the lawn filled with the squares of wood on which the drummer had set up his kit. Otherwise, things were concluded, our revels truly over.

Thanks to Jonathan Abbatt for photo

On Living in an Old Country

Britain is an old country. History is everywhere. When I look up from my computer, I see straight across the Ceiriog Valley to a wooded hillside surmounted by Chirk Castle, which dates from 1295. A couple of hundred yards up the road, two stone carved Celtic heads dating back two thousand years were found near an old well. In Oswestry, our nearest town, there is a beautiful Iron Age Hill Fort, a school that dates back to 1407 (the second oldest in the country, after Winchester), and the remains of a Norman Castle built in 1086 and destroyed by Roundheads in 1644.

All countries are old, of course, and most have been peopled for tens of thousands of years – though many native cultures lived lightly on the earth and left few traces. We have lived more heavily and left many marks. We are encumbered with ancient buildings, antique institutions and mouldering traditions, more than a few of which were invented by the Victorians and are deeply bogus.

Shakespeare is now part of the national myth. In a 2002 BBC poll to find our 100 Greatest Britons, he came in fifth (behind Winston Churchill, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Diana Princess of Wales and Charles Darwin), two places ahead of Elizabeth I and three before John Lennon.

Shakespeare is part of our national myth, but he also did much to embed or create it. Henry V, for example, is based on largely accurate historical sources but manages to make fun of the French (always good sport), foster Henry’s reputation as a war hero (when today he might be indicted for war crimes), helped define our national self-image as backs-to-the-wall fighters (it was written only a few years after Drake had defeated the Armada, another great victory against seemingly impossible odds) and offers first hints of Britain as a united kingdom (perhaps anticipating James I’s likely accession - unifying the country was amongst his great ambitions).

The latter aspect is of interest, since in Act 3 Scene 2 Shakespeare introduces Captains Gower (English), Macmorris (Irish – and, incidentally, the only character from Ireland to feature in any of Shakespeare’s plays), Jamy (Scottish) in addition to Fluellen from Wales. Their part is small and only Fluellen features much in the play, but their appearance is significant.  Shakespeare must have wished to suggest a sense of a Britain united against a common enemy – a theme obviously picked up in Lawrence Olivier’s film version of 1944.

There are also echoes of this scene in AG MacDonell’s novel England Their England (1933). Its opening chapter is set in Flanders (not greatly far from Agincourt, itself near the Somme) in 1917. It is a wet October (the same month Agincourt was fought, also wet) and two officers are discussing the English, Cameron from Scotland and Davies from Wales. The tone is light and amusing (echoing the comic elements of Henry V) and though the narrator explicitly states Shakespeare will not be referenced, his presence is evident. He is inescapably tied to our sense of nationhood.

For generations Shakespeare’s History plays helped define our sense of the past – even when they bore little relation to fact. His depiction of Richard III as a hunchback with withered arm and murderer of nephews has become part of the national story – despite the play being a propaganda piece to bolster Tudor claims to the throne (though Richard probably did order the killing of the Princes in the Tower; morally deformed, he was physically well-shaped).

Shakespeare found numerous ways to flatter monarchs. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream he alluded to the famously chaste Elizabeth I as ‘a fair vestal throned by the west’ and as ‘imperial vot’ress’ – thus helping consolidate her reputation as the ‘Virgin Queen’. He was equally skilled when it came to flattering the groundlings, reflecting back to them their image of themselves as drunken, lecherous, witty, prone to violence and contemptuous of all things foreign.

Shakespeare didn’t create these archetypes, but in giving them dramatic life he gave them a certain validation. You will still find Bardolph, Nym and Pistol in almost any pub, in any number of soap operas and on tour in Poland and Ukraine this month, supporting the England football team. Everything changes yet everything stays the same.

This sense of historical continuity was vividly evident with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee at the beginning of June. Remember that? Already it seems distant. The 1,000 boat flotilla that sailed down the Thames on Sunday 3^rd was a conscious echo of Canaletto’s painting of The River Thames with St Paul’s Cathedral on Lord Mayor’s Day, painted in 1746, and other similar galas in the 17^th Century, its symbolism inescapable.

The Thames is the reason London became what it is. In Shakespeare’s day the river was considerably wider than today (the Victorians built its modern embankments) with only one bridge, London Bridge, with its many piers and jumble of shops and houses and the heads of traitors impaled on spikes at its gates. In Tudor times, roads became muddy and impassable in winter, so travel by water was the obvious alternative; when Elizabeth I journeyed from Whitehall to her birthplace at Greenwich Palace, she did so by boat.

Layer is built upon layer, as the Roman quays were replaced by Tudor shipyards. It was from the Elizabethan docks at Rotherhithe that many of the Pilgrim Fathers had embarked in 1620, before sailing on to Southampton and from there to the New World and it was to Rotherhithe that the Trafalgar battleship, Temeraire, was taken to be broken up in 1839. From faraway exotic lands tea, spices, sugar, cloth and porcelain poured into London on the Thames and it was from Mill Bank that convicts were transported to Australia. When Sir Winston  Churchill’s coffin was carried down the river in 1965, the dockyard cranes dipped towards the water in respect, and when the Queen opened the newly finished Globe in 1997, she travelled to the ceremony by boat.

Layer is built upon layer. Organizers of the flotilla must have been aware of historical resonances. The Queen’s barge was named the ‘Spirit of Chartwell’ (Chartwell being Churchill’s country home in Kent) its prow adorned with gilt covered figurehead of Old Father Thames. Havengore, the ship that carried Churchill’s coffin was in the flotilla, along with a maori war canoe, a gondola (a nod to Canaletto), 50 Dunkirk ‘little ships’(Dunkirk high on the sacred war litany) and Belem, a merchant vessel launched in 1896 and used to transport sugar from the West Indies and coffee and cocoa from Brazil.

The only boat purpose built for the occasion was ‘Gloriana’ (remembering Elizabeth I), smothered in £4000 worth of gold leaf. Costing £1m altogether, it was rowed by eighteen royal oarsmen and must in part have been inspired by Cleopatra’s barge,

  The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,

  Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold,

  Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

  The winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver,

  Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

  The water which they beat to follow faster,

  As amorous of their strokes.

Reality is never quite as gorgeous. Although bands played ‘God Save the Queen’ and other loyal tunes from neighbouring boats, there were no flutes to help the rowers keep their stroke and nothing burned on the water – it was a chill and wet day. Tradition must be maintained and almost any outdoor occasion has to be marred by torrents of rain.

Rain affected the Children’s Diamond Jubilee Party in Bronygarth as well. Everything changes and everything remains the same. The local celebrations had echoes of previous centuries.Writing of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, Flora Thompson in Lark Rise to Candleford observed,

The Queen, it appeared, had reigned fifty years. She had been a good queen, a wonderful queen, she was going to celebrate her Jubilee, and, still more exciting, they were going to celebrate it, too, for there was going to be a big ‘do’ in which three villages would join for tea and sports and dancing and fireworks in the park of a local magnate… ‘Fancy her reigning fifty years, the old dear, her!’ they said, and bought paper banners inscribed ‘Fifty Years, Mother, Wife, and Queen’ to put inside their window panes.

Many local houses remain hung with flags and bunting and a few have posted pictures of Elizabeth II in the windows. Rain ruled out the running races and outdoor games that had been organized, but the fancy dress was unaffected and children dressed up as kings and queens, princesses, guardsmen and knights – much as they have before. Remembering back to the Peace Day celebration of his childhood in 1919, Laurie Lee recollected in Cider With Rosie,

Apart from the Squire’s contribution Marjorie had been busy for weeks stitching up glories for ourselves and the neighbours… I was John Bull… I remember the girls stuffing me into my clothes with many odd squeals and giggles… I wore a top-hat and choker, a union-jack waistcoat, a frock-coat and pillow case britches.

Everything changes and everything stays the same. Our neighbourhood squires have long gone, to be replaced by a bouncy castle – but even that had to be abandoned because of the adverse weather. Instead we made do with tea and beer and cake and handed out commemorative mugs to the children and generally made the best of things.

The widespread feeling seems to be the Queen has done a good job. Republican sentiments have been muted, though online a few weeks ago I saw a picture of her opening Parliament in all her regalia with a caption: ‘Old woman in £1m hat delivers speech on austerity’ along with some other amusing if treasonable pictures.

Most republicans seem to be waiting for the Queen to pass away before questioning the monarchy. She is personally popular, but as towards the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, there are questions about the succession. Some people think Elizabeth II will outlive Charles while others insist the crown should pass direct to William. I suspect the Royal Family will survive, if only because no-one could stand the thought of President Tony Blair.

In part it may also survive because the British Establishment is adept at renewing itself. It assimilates and neutralises troublemakers; at the marriage of William and Catherine, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ was sung. The mad old nudist dissenter and visionary would have been aghast at the appropriation of his poem by royalty, the Women’s Institute and English cricket supporters.

Royalty is also good at inventing new traditions; at the Golden Jubilee concert Brian May played the national anthem on the roof of Buckingham Palace. This year Madness performed ‘Our House’. From now to eternity every jubilee will feature an aging pop star on the roof, while the concert ended when the queen lit a six metre high beacon (harking back to the Armada beacons of 1588 and all those since). Everything changes and everything remains the same.

Except of course they don’t. Many millions of years ago Bronygarth was on the equator and thousands of feet underwater. The limestone on which ash trees now flourish was laid down in warm seas. I understand we are still moving in a north-westerly direction and that in several more millions of years we will have reached the Arctic regions. Even then, I suspect there will be a Windsor descendant on the throne, Cliff Richard will still hobble about on stage to celebrate whatever anniversary it happens to be and it will certainly be raining. Hurrah!

How to be a Literary Genius - Part 2

If you wish to be a literary genius, it helps to come of humble parentage. It is also an advantage to be working in a new artistic form in an age of imperial expansion, during the reign of a long-lived female monarch. That, at least, is the pattern set by Shakespeare and Dickens – and their genius is beyond dispute or compare.

So what difference does having a long-reigning monarch make? Well, for one thing an extended reign implies stability. People will make art as long as there are people, but the kind of art they choose to make will depend on the circumstances of their time. Elizabeth I’s reign followed centuries of turbulence and the years after the dissolution of the monasteries had seen terrible religious hostilities.

Her sovereignty must have seemed comparatively tranquil, despite plots, rebellions, foreign wars and threats of invasion. After centuries of warfare against the French, Victoria’s rule also saw a long period of relative peace with only one major conflict (Crimean War, 1853-56) which to everyone’s surprise was not against France but Russia.

The comparative stability of Tudor England allowed theatre to become one of the principal forms of public entertainment, along with sword fights, bear baiting and public executions. Happy days. Relatively full employment, rising wages and freedom from wars, famine and disease all helped Shakespeare develop his art and swell his earnings – though when 30,000 people died of the plague in London in the early 1600s, The Globe was temporarily closed with all other theatres.

Shakespeare was fortunate in the timing of his birth; before the foundation of the first modern playhouse, The Theatre, in 1576, actors had toured the country performing in courtyards. Had he been born earlier, there would have been no theatres in which to enact his plays. Had he been born a few years later, there would have been no theatres at all. When the Puritans seized power only a few years after his death, they were banned - along with Christmas and anything else vaguely enjoyable.

If Shakespeare’s art was favoured by socio-economic conditions, Dickens was equally advantaged. Rising levels of literacy meant greater numbers of people could read novels, growth of the middle class meant more people had leisure to read, while private lending libraries (and from 1850 onwards, the spread of public libraries) reduced the cost of books to the reading public. Even railway travel contributed to the rise of the novel – long journeys required distraction and the first WH Smith stores were sited at stations selling books to passengers. Railways featured frequently in his stories, and while mighty locomotives helped distribute his work round Britain, steamships carried it around the world. Almost all his novels were published in monthly instalments and huge crowds waited on the quay in New York to learn what had happened to Little Nell (she died, as they really should have guessed she would).

The times Shakespeare and Dickens lived helped shape their art; in a largely illiterate society, the theatre was an ideal form of mass entertainment while in a more individualistic age of wide literacy, the novel became pre-eminent. Yet if the worlds the authors shared were characterized by their stability, they were also, paradoxically, periods of intense social upheaval - for although they might have been stable, they were not static. By the time of Shakespeare’s birth, feudal society was well in decline. Early capitalist enterprise had begun and social boundaries were breaking down, precisely giving chances to ambitious men of talent from the provinces like him.

The same was true of Dickens’ era. Huge populations moved from the countryside into constantly growing cities like Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow, all with their terrible poverty, sweated labour and slums. Vast fortunes were made and lost, dynasties created and smashed. Such times can be as full of distress and confusion as they are exhilarating. At times of rapid change we need art more than ever. And Dickens and Shakespeare both made the most of this.

On top of everything else, the reigns of Elizabeth I and Victoria were characterized by imperial expansion. Elizabeth’s rule saw the beginnings of the empire in India with patents granted to the East India Co, the first circumnavigation of the globe by Drake, early colonization of the Americas and, more darkly, the start of the slave trade. Victoria’s reign saw further massive expansion of industry, trade and imperial possessions and by the end of her long life Britain’s empire was the largest the world has seen.

Although the expansion in these periods is touched on by both writers, notably Shakespeare in The Tempest, it is not imperialism as such that seems significant. Rather, it is as if the energy and confidence that drove the exploration and expansion were also driving the huge energies of Shakespeare, Dickens and their fellow writers. And these were numerous. Shakespeare’s contemporaries counted Marlowe, Kyd, Dekker, Middleton, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher while Dickens’ saw Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Wilkie Collins, Trollope and many others. In other words, conditions that allowed Shakespeare and Dickens to thrive supported numerous friends and rivals – competition between them further fuelling their energies.

It could be that some of that energy was also driven by the excitement that always comes when working in a new artistic form (note all the ‘isms’ that sprung up after Picasso kick-started modern art in the early 1900s – cubism, fauvism, futurism, vorticism, expressionism, constructivism…). The Tudors didn’t invent theatre, yet up to the 1570s in England there had been little beyond morality and mystery plays. After the creation of the first purpose built playhouses in London, things began to change and the theatrical explosion that followed Marlowe’s early work was extraordinary. He bashed the door down. Others followed him through it, Shakespeare leading the charge.

The same is true for Dickens and his contemporaries. The English novel dates back to the publication of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719 and later authors such as Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding established a wide readership. Dickens took from them all. Like Defoe, he was a journalist and had an acute eye for detail; with Swift he shared an intense political engagement and like Fielding he delighted in the picaresque and playful. He helped forge the novel in its ‘heroic age’, becoming in the process one of the most celebrated public figures of his day.

We are in times of rapid change now. We also have a long reigning female monarch. So where is our contemporary Shakespeare or Dickens? What seems to be lacking is the confidence of their eras. Elizabeth II’s reign has seen the dismantling of empire and continued erosion of Britain’s role as a world power. As a nation we lack belief in our institutions and are fearful of the future.

Yet during her sovereignty, there was a brief bubbling of optimism. That was in the 1960s, a happy interlude of amazing innovation and creativity which threw up the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Cream, Pink Floyd and many more. We may not have had Shakespeare or Dickens, but at least we had Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards. They fit the template  – children from lower down the social hierarchy but with access to education (three were at grammar school. Richards had to be different and went to a tech, but there became a boy soprano and sang for the queen at Westminster Abbey). They were also working in a new artistic medium, rock and roll.

Their genius was in combination, not individualistic, specialising in the three minute pop song rather than the five Act play or four volume novel. Does their work count as literary genius? Who cares? Let’s just be grateful for Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt Pepper’s and Abbey Road, Let it Bleed, Beggar’s Banquet, Sticky Fingers and the rest. Vivat Regina.

How to be a Literary Genius - Part 1

If you are English you cannot escape class. It has been said that one Englishman only has to speak a word for another to know everything of his background and despise him. This may be less true today, but class instincts and prejudices prevail. And we are marked not just by our accents or vocabulary, but by our dress, the times of day we take our meals, the food we eat, our holiday destinations, the cars we drive and a million other things.

And the class you are born into is likely to determine your access to libraries, theatres, galleries and concert halls and your response to those places when you get there. It is also likely to determine whether or not you grow up to be one of the two greatest geniuses produced by the English speaking world. For of all the symmetries and coincidences to be found in the lives of Shakespeare and Dickens, discussed in a previous blog, the most profound seems the shared class from which they came – and from which almost all our other greatest authors such as Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, William Blake, John Keats and Daniel Defoe emerged. Respectively, their fathers were a shoemaker, bricklayer, hosier, ostler and tallow chandler.

What propelled children from these unliterary backgrounds to take their place amongst our most important writers? Well, firstly education. All these boys had access to schools. Significantly, almost no girls from any class received a meaningful education until late in the nineteenth century while children from a lower class would have been unable to attend school. John Clare is an astonishingly rare example of a self-tutored poet. Briefly fashionable in London as a rustic oddity, he was quickly dropped and the experience helped precipitate his madness.

Clearly, access to education alone is not enough to produce literary genius, or the upper classes would be full of them. Conspicuously, they are not, limited numbers and a restricted gene pool proving insurmountable handicaps; centuries of in-breeding has produced an aristocracy only really good at hunting foxes, ruling empires and oppressing the poor. True, there are exceptions such as Sir Philip Sidney (though I found Arcadia heavy going - and at 795 pages, thought it 794 pages too long).

Where other exceptions occur, as with Lord Byron or John Donne (well-connected if not aristocratic), other factors seem to have been more important than social status; for while both might appear to be social insiders, both were on the outside of polite society. Byron was bi-sexual, club-footed and poor (his father having exhausted two fortunes), while Donne’s family was Catholic at a time when that was illegal. He then maximised his chances of literary glory by spending his considerable inheritance on women before a secret marriage ruined the last of his social standing.

In other words, it helps to be an outsider. If you want to be a literary genius, it helps to have been born to a relatively humble family with access to education. If not, you should claim outsider status by virtue of religion, sexual orientation, physical disability or a combination of these things. If you are an insider, you are likely to be too lazy, pampered and insular to have much hope of writing anything of interest.

Shakespeare and Dickens suffered none of these disadvantages. Coming from a financially modest background means you have to work hard to succeed – and if as in either case your father suffered calamity in your early adolescence that extra kick of insecurity means you never stop working hard. Both authors wrote prodigious, dizzying quantities and Dickens more or less killed himself with his emotionally exhausting one man shows. He needed the acclaim and love as well as the money.

We don’t know if Shakespeare wanted the applause (though most actors do), but he certainly wanted the money. Almost everything we know of him relates to money or status. Amongst many other transactions, for example, we know that in 1597 he bought New Place, Stratford, but the same year was reported for not paying taxes in St Helen’s Parish, Bishopsgate, London. In 1599 he successfully applied for the right to bear a coat of arms, and in that year was found to be hoarding grain, hoping that prices would rise. In 1605 he purchased a substantial portion of tithes in the Stratford area and in 1613 he co-bought a large building in Blackfriars. In 1614 he is back in London on business regarding the collection of tithes while in 1615 he was named in a dispute over land enclosures near Stratford (see earlier blog, Hedging with Hamlet and Horatio).

If lack of private means pushes you upwards and insecurity keeps you hard at work, there are still other advantages to coming from a lower social position. One is obvious: you see more of the underside of life. Which means firstly you have a rich variety of personalities to draw upon – and both Shakespeare and Dickens people their work with wonderful low-life characters with equally wonderful names.

It also means you know your audience. Shakespeare wrote to entertain the groundlings as well as the grandees, while Dickens established an incredibly wide readership – his work fantastically popular with the working classes who were able to buy his novels in monthly serialised form.

Times of rapid change always produce insecurity about status and the blurring of social boundaries. The Victorians were masterly inventors of traditions which both fostered a false sense of historical continuity (hence all the gothic architecture) and confounded the newly rich with their baffling arrays of cutlery, peculiar dress codes, irrational pronunciation and arcane etiquette.

While primarily a form of entertainment, novels were therefore also guide books and self-advancement primers. When Pip is scorned by Estelle for calling ‘Jacks’ ‘Knaves’ thousands of readers must have noted the socially correct terminology and never made the same vulgar mistake again. In some ways Dickens’ most personal book, Great Expectations, expresses the pain and humiliation of social dislocation and questions the value of upward mobility.

Like Shakespeare, Dickens knew all about making his way in the world from lowly beginnings. For them, lack of social status had yet another asset: if you want to get on in life you have to learn how to read people – especially those who might be of use to you. This means you have to be observant, taking note of small detail. Understanding psychology helps anticipate need, mollify, flatter as require; in a word, manipulate. It is also of advantage to have a smooth tongue and quick wit. All these are great assets for anyone wishing to act or write.

It has been said that if Shakespeare and Dickens were alive today, they would be in Hollywood or writing soaps or writing soaps about Hollywood or something equally depressing. I think this probably true. Both wrote to make money and did so by appealing to as wide an audience as possible. They just happen to have been better at doing so than anyone who has written before or since, of whatever social origin.

Shakespeare and Dickens: Soul Brothers

English Literature has two inescapably giant figures: William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. We know much about one and almost nothing of the other. This didn’t bother Dickens who found it a ‘great comfort’ that so little was known of Shakespeare’s life, stating ‘I tremble every day lest something should turn up.’ Given the scandal surrounding his divorce, he may also have wished that more of his own life had been left a ‘fine mystery’.

Although so little is known about Shakespeare, what we do no suggests innumerable similarities and echoes between his life and Dickens’. Of these many are superficial, such as the fact that both had fathers named John; both were born outside London but made their fortunes there, both through writing and acting; both died in their fifties, both returning to die in the places they grew up.

They passed most of their lives in the reigns of long-lived female monarchs – periods which each saw a huge expansion of overseas trade, growth of empire and social change. Much of their work reflected the turbulent and uncertain times in which they lived and both worked in what were then comparatively new art forms which they helped master and define.

Other parallels between the two men are more significant, both coming from similar social backgrounds. Although less is known of Shakespeare’s circumstances, it seems likely that both he and Dickens grew up in comfortable but far from affluent homes. One father was a successful glove maker, the other a clerk in the naval office. Both sons received a grammar school education, but in each case the boys were in early adolescence when their fathers suffered financial and social catastrophe.

It’s not entirely clear what happened to John Shakespeare, but it’s evident that he suffered a business reverse and lost his position as alderman, while John Dickens went bankrupt and was thrown into debtors’ prison. Charles was sent to work in a boot blacking factory, an experience that haunted him for the rest of his life. It’s uncertain what happened to William, but it’s hard to believe the collapse of a secure home and public disgrace for the family didn’t also leave its mark.

Having observed how vulnerable people of slender means might be, it is not perhaps surprising that both men should have had a tough commercial attitude to their work. They wrote to make money and both were prolific, producing a constant supply of high quality writing at incredible speed, both, incidentally, delighting in metaphor.

Both men were also great collaborators. Shakespeare is known to have added lines to the work of other dramatists and collaborated with others on his own (including the unsavoury George Wilkins) while Dickens worked intimately with a succession of illustrators. More than anything, both men were great crowd pleasers and equally brilliant comic authors.

If both created wonderful comic characters, other parallels are harder to sustain. For while Shakespeare wrote consistently strong and significant parts for women, most of Dickens’ female characters are insipid, sentimental creations (unless also partly comic likely the incomparable Betsy Trotwood, or part-grotesque like Miss Haversham or comic-grotesque like Sarah Gamp). And while Shakespeare’s greatest work is arguably found in his tragedies, Dickens tended to deal in melodrama, rarely seeming to hit an authentic tragic note.

There is inevitably another large difference between the two authors; for while Shakespeare could have known nothing of the later writer, Dickens revered the bard. We know he had first wished to become an actor, spent his last years performing rather than writing, loved amateur theatricals, acted in at least one of Shakespeare’s plays (The Merry Wives of Windsor) and referenced him many times in his work. He also helped raise funds to acquire Shakespeare’s birthplace and establish the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust - for which he has been honoured with a place in the Trust’s ‘Shakespeare Hall of Fame’.

Shakespeare and Dickens both married young. Dickens divorced his wife after she had borne him ten children and grown plump and unexciting in the process. We have no idea about the state of Shakespeare’s marriage. The fact that he bequeathed Anne his second best bed has been advanced as evidence that he was emotionally estranged from her and wished her a posthumous humiliation. It has also been suggested that it was the second best bed they shared together (the best being reserved for honoured guests) and that the gesture was tender and romantic.

We have equally little idea about Shakespeare the man. Dickens was known to be hugely convivial, forever raising toasts and slapping backs. I suspect Shakespeare to have been as amiable, if less raucous. He must have been a loyal and sociable man to have spent so many years in a tight-knit company of actors.

He also appears much loved. In a prefatory poem to the First Folio of Shakespeare’s work and dedicated ‘To the Memory of my Beloved Master William Shakespeare’ Ben Jonson wrote of him as, ‘Soul of the Age…the wonder of our stage’ as well as describing him as ‘gentle Shakespeare’, the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’ and ‘Star of Poets’.

This may all sound like conventional eulogizing, but in Timber Jonson also wrote of Shakespeare, ‘He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature.’ If nothing else, the adjectives he uses, ‘beloved’, ‘gentle’, sweet’, ‘honest’, ‘open’ and ‘free’ are at least consistent.

Shakespeare and Jonson would have known one another as Shakespeare’s company produced several of Jonson’s plays and Shakespeare certainly acted in at least one of them (Every Man in his Humour). It’s also said they drank together at the Mermaid Tavern.

Had Dickens been able to join him there in place of Jonson, I have no doubt they would have got on famously; supping ale, swapping jokes, talking books, exchanging plots and drinking more ale – all before linking arms and disappearing drunkenly into the darkness of a muddy London street.

Hedging with Hamlet and Horatio

How much did Shakespeare know about hedge laying? A considerable amount, according to Trevor Nunn who suggests a reference to hedging may be found in Hamlet's speech to Horatio in Act 5. How much does Trevor Nunn know about hedge laying? I'm not sure it's a great deal, judging by that theory. How much do I know about hedge laying? Somewhere between Shakespeare's knowledge and Sir Trevor's (but probably nearer the latter).


In 1945 Britain had 500,000 miles of hedgerow. Following changes in agriculture, this fell to around 250,000 miles in the early 1990s. The word 'hedge' derives from the Old English 'hagga' meaning 'an enclosure' and some of our hedges are very ancient, a few dating back to the Bronze Age. Most were planted in the 18^th and 19^th centuries following a rapid succession of Enclosure Acts.

The enclosure of open land had begun hundreds of years before and was frequently resisted by the peasantry dispossessed in the process. Much early enclosure was to turn arable land into pasture for sheep, the wool trade being highly lucrative. Tending sheep, however, was much less labour intensive than growing crops, forcing many people into vagrancy. In 1607 the Midland Revolt spread into Shakespeare’s home county of Warwickshire when John Reynolds from Northamptonshire led a protest against the enclosure of common land. A tinker, known as ‘Captain Pouch’, he promised his followers the contents of his pouch would protect them from harm – though after he was captured it was found to contain nothing but a piece of green cheese.

Shakespeare himself became caught up in a later dispute regarding enclosures round Stratford in 1615. This was because in 1605 he had bought a half share in 100 acres of arable land for £440, an enormous sum of money (equivalent to what a school teacher might earn in twenty years). A decade later, wealthy landowners wished to enclose the land and were resisted by women and children who marched from the town and attempted to fill in the ditches that were being dug, preparatory to the planting of hedges. We have no idea where Shakespeare’s sympathies lay in the matter, but it is recorded that the landowners assured him he would not suffer financially through their actions and this appears to have bought his acquiescence. 

Enclosures were hated by the peasants because it denied them access to the open land on which they traditionally had the right to graze their sheep and cattle. The old strip field method of farming had given them a degree of independence, despite their feudal obligations. Enclosed land turned them into dependent labourers. John Clare railed against the system and in The Mores wrote,

Inclosure came and trampled on the grave

Of labours rights and left the poor a slave

Enclosures largely produced the pattern of fields we see in today’s countryside. Enclosing was also a key part of the agricultural revolution that saw vastly improved yields that fed Britain’s growing cities following decades of intense industrialisation – the factories of the north, especially, filled by tens of thousands of workers who had been effectively forced from the land. 

The transition from traditional farming patterns to a more scientific form of agriculture was immensely painful, but one beneficial consequence is our extraordinary network of hedges. These are an enormously important wildlife habitat, providing vital resources for mammals, birds and insects as well as acting as ‘wildlife corridors’, allowing creatures to travel significant distances with continuous  protective cover.

Hedges have been in my thoughts of late because apart from spending more than a week hacking at brambles with a sickle, I also spent a few days planting a new hedge. The original plan had been to lay the one that bordered our new field, but it was so full of gaps in places and so overgrown with ivy in others that it was decided to coppice what was there, and re-plant.

Tom Adams (who’s given great advice from the outset and who felled most of the ash trees that had to come down) tackled the long, north facing boundary that runs beside the lane, while Charlotte Price took the shorter eastern stretch that borders a track. I cleared the brash as they worked and planted just over 100m of new hedge when they’d finished. Some of the saplings were beech and hornbeam that I bought from a tree nursery. Hawthorn, hazel, holly and field maple were transplanted from the old orchard, along with some damson saplings growing just beyond it. The job was unfinished; new hedges need to be in by March 31. Running out of time, the rest will be planted next spring.

The hedging work also turned my thoughts to an anecdote related by Trevor Nunn of the RSC in the Guardian, last year. It’s worth quoting the piece in full.

TN: You know when Hamlet says, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will"? An actor friend of mine many years ago was in Warwickshire walking down a country lane and he passed two men working at hedging, one of them 20ft from the other one. And he stopped and said, what are you two doing? And one of them said it's quite simple, I rough-hew them and he shapes the ends. Every page has the country boy's imprimatur.

Hamlet’s lines are taken from his speech to Horatio in Act 5 Scene 2. In them, he seems to accept a providential destiny, in contrast to his uncertainty and prevarication earlier in the play. Like the explication of the ‘golden lads’ and ‘chimney sweepers’ mentioned in the David Hockney blog, the notion that the lines were inspired by countryside craftsmen sounded clever and elegant; but the more I thought about it, the less plausible it seemed.

Although skilled work, hedge-laying is relatively straight forward. First of all the light brushwood (brash) is cut from the hedge, along with dead wood and other debris, leaving relatively straight and evenly spaced stems. These are then ‘pleached’ by cutting almost right through them at an angle, at their base, with a bill hook. The pleachers are then laid diagonally between upright stakes which have been hammered into the hedge at 45cm intervals.

In the account told to Trevor Nunn’s friend, two men were working twenty feet apart on the hedge. There isn’t anything particularly strange about that. Hedgers mostly work alone, but it’s not unknown to work in pairs. What I find perplexing is the ‘rough-hewing’ and ‘shaping’ aspect. The only element in the hedging process that needs shaping is the point at the end of each stake, but this isn’t specialist or time-consuming work. I can’t see that it would take one man to rough-hew the end before another shapes it. Most stakes would be 4-6cm diameter hazel poles, and a couple of swift strokes from an axe or bill-hook would be quite sufficient to produce a sharp point.

I asked both Tom and Charlotte (pictured) about this, and they agreed it wouldn’t require two people. Now both are country born and bred, but neither is old and grizzled, with wind-reddened face, whiskery chops, bent back and hands like leather. I know such people, but decided not to them ask about Hamlet and the rough-hewing and shaping, mostly on the grounds that they would think I was mad. So there might be some ancient lore that I’ve missed.

It’s also true that there are about thirty regional styles of hedge-laying, so there might be a different approach somewhere, but as far as I can gather the principles are much the same. We had our garden hedge laid a couple of years ago by Stewart Whitehead, in what seems is ‘Midland’ style with hazel binders woven between the uprights (see pic). This method is generally used in fields with heavier livestock, such as bullocks, to give the new-laid hedge extra strength. In our case it was because there were a few bare patches (since re-planted) and Stewart thought the binding would make the structure more resilient.

Although it doesn’t seem likely it would take two men to rough-hew and shape hedging stakes, there are crafts where different people perform separate functions. Bodgers, for example, used to work in beech woods turning chair legs, stretchers and spindles on pole lathes. These finished items would then be taken in bundles to other craftsmen who would add the seat (typically of elm) and other elements.

The modern usage of a ‘bodge job’ to mean something unsatisfactory or incompetent is thought to derive from the fact that bodgers never actually finished a whole piece of furniture, their work always being taken on by someone else (although it’s also claimed that ‘bodge’ has become confused with ‘botch’ a word said to be medieval in origin, meaning a ‘bruise’ or ‘carbuncle’).

Whatever the truth of that, I’m not sure the anecdote related by Trevor Nunn bears scrutiny. It sounds to me like a neat, academic theory that doesn’t have much to do with the reality of hedge-laying, or anything else. I would also question it being used as evidence that Shakespeare was a ‘country boy’. If it’s unsafe to claim he was a courtier because he seemed conversant with court life, or had been a soldier because he shows knowledge of soldiering, I’m not sure one could say he was a country boy because of his wide range of reference to the natural world (he could have spent his entire boyhood indoors reading books about courtly life, warfare and nature, for all we know). Actually, I’m inclined to agree with Trevor Nunn on that point. Almost every page does have the ‘imprimatur’ of the country boy – I’m just doubtful about the hedgers and their rough-hewing and shaping of ends. A great couple of lines, though.

Ivy League Shakespeare: thoughts on Shakespeare and Marvell while clearing ivy and hacking at brambles.

Last autumn Sarah and I bought an acre of eccentrically shaped piece of land at the bottom of our garden. It has an orchard at one end and pasture at the other, but had been abandoned for thirty years, the orchard overgrown with ash trees and thick with ivy and the pasture dense with brambles.

Almost ever since, I have been stripping ivy from fruit trees, stacking logs, clearing brash, hacking at brambles and planting a hedge. I wasn’t alone. On Boxing Day we spent nearly five hours as a family clambering in branches to cut them free of ivy (Ellen pictured). The work carried on long after Christmas, with lines from Shakespeare running through my otherwise empty mind - particularly Titania’s words to Bottom from Act 4 Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.

Fairies be gone, and be all ways away.

So doth the woodbine, the sweet honeysuckle

Gently entwist; the female ivy so

Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.

Her speech is wonderfully sinuous and sensual, in part because the sounds ‘ee’ and ‘wh’are repeated throughout, featuring seventeen times in five lines. Both are soft and lingering, their repetition seeming to wrap and wind around the text. A similar repetition of ‘en’ in the last two lines also gives a sense of the words binding themselves round the speech as the ivy does the ‘barky fingers of the elm.’

It’s a great last line; ‘enrings’ is a reminder of the bands exchanged in the marriage service (with all the symbolism of fingers slipping into rings). Shakespeare explicitly identifies the ivy as ‘female’ while the tree is implied as male. Partly this is because of the phallic nature of its fingers, but also implicitly because the flow of polysyllables which slip from one line to the next ends with the monosyllable ‘elm’ – and in the world of Eng. Lit. monosyllables tend to be regarded as hard and masculine while polysyllables are generally seen as soft and feminine.

On the subject of monosyllables, ‘bark’ is a short, rough, punchy word. It begins with a bullish ‘b’, has a harsh sounding ‘ar’ in the middle and ends with an abrupt ‘k’. Yet Shakespeare softens it with the addition of a ‘y’, deftly turning a noun into an excellently expressive adjective and coining a new word along the way. Good old Shakespeare.

Shakespeare needed a tree with a single syllabled name to finish with five iambs to the line (though he wasn’t always fussy; line three isn’t in strict iambic pentameter form, with a dangling half foot) but why choose the elm to be enringed rather than the oak, or ash, or box, or yew or any other tree with a monosyllabic name? Probably because of its immense height and majesty. Elms typically grew to 30m and given this enormous stature, would have been seen as a ‘masculine’ tree. (Oaks tend to be shorter at15-25m, commonly growing wider as they age rather than gaining height. There is one up the valley from us that is said to be over 1200 years old with a circumference of 12.9m).

Sadly, Dutch Elm Disease killed off 20 million elms in the 1960s and 70s and comparatively few mature trees survive. We have one on our new patch of land, but as it grows to maturity it will die. This crueller aspect of the natural world is evident in the other lines I contemplated as I cut away at the ivy. These were Prospero’s words to Miranda, when describing his brother Antonio’s treachery. For while Prospero retired to his library, ‘a dukedom large enough’, his usurper acquired more and more power until, 

he was

The ivy which had hid my princely trunk,

And sucked my verdure out on’t.

The ivy here is seen as parasitic, smothering and deadly. Yet the two passages together suggest the plant’s dual nature. On the one hand its thick foliage offers cover for nesting birds and its berries food for them to eat - and to the Celts its evergreen leaves were a symbol of continuing life in the depth of winter. On the other, its dense canopy starves the host tree of life, often choking it to death, while its heavy weight frequently causes branches to snap off in strong winter winds.

The same duality is true of brambles since its sharp thorns provide excellent shelter from predators for ground nesting birds and other small creatures while its berries are a source of food in late summer and early autumn. It’s also good for protecting princesses who have inadvertently pricked their finger on a spinning wheel and fallen asleep for a hundred years. Apart from that, it’s just a bloody nuisance, especially when tangling over half an acre of ancient pasture.

While slashing away at the brambles, I have been thinking less about Shakespeare and more of Andrew Marvell’s Mower poems. True, his mower uses a scythe rather than a sickle, but I am still wielding a piece of sharpened metal and feel a sort of kinship. As it happens, we found a scythe lodged in one of the ash trees that had been felled. It had presumably been left in the crook of the tree more than seventy years before. Over time, the flesh of the tree had grown around the blade and carried it high above the ground, the tool’s wooden handle long since rotted away.

Marvell’s nature poems seem to lack Shakespeare’s intimate understanding of the natural world, his chronology sometimes dubious. His mower, Damon, finds the ‘dew distils/Before her darling Daffadils’ though why he should be out mowing in the early spring isn’t made clear, since the grass would only have been cut for hay in the summer, in preparation for the winter ahead. If cutting in late June or early July, it’s equally unclear why the daffodils might be in flower so late.  He also finds,

While, going home, the Ev'ning sweet
In cowslip-water bathes my feet.

We have cowslips in the garden, but as yet I haven’t worked out how to wash my feet in their water. Perhaps I’m taking it all too literally.

Andrew Marvell was born in East Yorkshire, where David Hockney now lives and works. He was a parliamentarian during the Civil War and later became MP for Hull. He’s probably best known for the poem To His Coy Mistress, but is also remembered for two haunting lines that close this verse from a longer poem, The Garden,

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, 
Withdraws into its happiness : 
The mind, that ocean where each kind 
Does straight its own resemblance find ; 
Yet it creates, transcending these, 
Far other worlds, and other seas ; 
Annihilating all that's made 
To a green thought in a green shade. 

It’s the final couplet that has remained with me as I hack away at the brambles. For a poet rather too given to nymphs and fauns and bathing feet in cowslips, ‘annihilating’ is an interesting choice of verb. He doesn’t merely retreat from the world or banish it, he obliterates it totally. It is smashed and devastated. At five syllables, ‘annihilating’ has its own rhythmic vitality and is in obvious contrast to the single syllabled words that follow. These are plain and spare, as if stating simple truth. I suspect it is the regular rhythm of the couplet as a whole that partly appeals as I lay waste to the vegetation, the metre in time with the swing of the sickle.

 

After the violence of the penultimate line, the last is quiet and understated. A ‘green thought’ has a wonderfully serene and synaesthesic quality. It’s hard to define quite what Marvell means by a ‘green thought in a green shade’ but it’s mysterious and beautiful and pondering it passes the hours.