Ten Years of Shakespeare Comic Books

Happy birthday! Shakespeare Comic Books are ten years old. The series was created out of a love of Shakespeare and a desire to make money. He would have approved, since he wrote to get rich and almost every record we have of him concerns money or business transactions of one kind or another. He died an immensely wealthy man - something rare for genius. Both Rembrandt and Mozart ended in poverty, which just goes to show that being dazzlingly brilliant isn't sufficient. You also need a good business brain.

When I started Shakespeare comic books, I lacked both dazzling brilliance and a good business brain. The former can be excused. Rembrandt, Mozart and Shakespeare are treasured rarities. The latter I have attempted to acquire. Over time, these are some of the things I have learnt about business:

Competition is healthy Capitalism thrives on competition, which speeds innovation. When I first produced the Shakespeare comic books, they were almost the only books in the UK offering Shakespeare in cartoon format. Needing to restrict production costs and produce titles at high speed, the illustrations were sometimes a little rushed and lacking polish.

  This didn’t matter initially, but over time, more and more competing books arrived on the market. Almost all were highly illustrated and full colour. Most were rubbish, but attractively packaged. Producing full colour versions of the plays became imperative. Two have been published so far, both in collaboration with digital colourist Phill Evans. His gifts are immense. Colour has transformed the comic books. Our next work together, Macbeth, will hit new heights. Thanks, capitalism.

Marketing is guesswork Over the decade I have wasted an enormous amount of money on marketing and publicity. I am not alone. Mega corporations spend billions on advertising campaigns through which people fast forward, screen out or otherwise ignore. What advertising agencies sell best is the notion that advertising works. Clearly some campaigns succeed fabulously, but many fail - when was the last time you bought a Rolex, changed your shampoo or tried a different beer based on an advert? Marketing is essential, but it’s mostly trial and error. Over the years I’ve learnt to be better targeted, but it’s not an exact science - and I still haven’t bought a Rolex.

Diversify markets and products The Shakespeare Comic Books were originally created for students sitting Key Stage 3 SATs exams in Year 9. When these were abolished without warning in 2008, sales collapsed.

  Timing is always everything. Pulled by competition and pushed by a need to diversify and find new markets I had already decided to produce the books in full colour, in order to reach a wider audience. Another few years of sales growth would have made the necessary investment in colour possible.

  Yet with our key market lost and income slashed, production has been slow. The business is being re-built, new markets established. In the meantime, I have diversified into work on a range of non-Shakespeare projects. The Bard hasn’t been abandoned, however, and the next few years will see a new selection of titles that should include King Lear, Hamlet, As You Like It and Julius Caesar – all in full colour.

Appearance matters Steve Jobs liked to present himself as an LSD inspired ex-hippie who just happened to head up the most powerful corporation in the world. When unveiling his latest product, he would do so in jeans and T shirt. His gift was for marketing. He knew the importance of presentation and that everything from your logo and website to your stationery or choice of footwear says something about your company. You can bet that before making a presentation he didn’t just get up and throw on the clothes he had lying in the corner. His style may have looked casual, but it’s message was calculated.

  I work on the assumption that when your company is globally dominant with an income greater than that of many moderately sized nations, you can wear what you like. Until then, I think it probably best to smarten up.

Watch the bottom line When The Tempest was printed in 2007 before the crash, I ordered a print run of 10,000 copies at 50p per unit. When Romeo and Juliet was published in 2010, it had a print run of 1,000 at £1.50 per unit. The margin per book was thus dramatically cut. Borrowing to pay for a larger print run was an option, but I prefer not to incur debt. This might seem unadventurous, but I don’t really care. 

  Right now, almost all developed nations are busy cutting vital public services in order to pay off debts acquired in fat years, when credit was cheap and bankers considered themselves masters of the universe. Canada is a rare exception. Canada is also ridiculed as dull. When it comes to finance, I would rather be dull and solvent than exciting and bankrupt.

Always read the small print and beware sharks The commercial world isn’t greatly different to the world outside work. Most people are decent and trustworthy and just want to go about their business without fuss. Occasionally you meet someone with whom you get on particularly well. If you’re unlucky you may also meet somebody who would strip you of your wife, children, house, soft furnishings and cat if it enabled them to make money. These people are to be avoided. Unfortunately, they often appear as if they are decent and trustworthy and just want to go about their business without fuss. If you’re very unlucky, they may also appear to be somebody with whom you get on particularly well. Good luck if you meet one. And always read the small print. 

Keep up with technology When I went to work for book designers DP Press in 1981, manuscripts were generally presented in illegible longhand and were typeset on IBMs and ACMs before going to a drunken proof reader to be checked for grammar, punctuation and spelling. Proofs were returned to the typesetters for corrections to be reset, and finished galleys then printed and sent to the studio where they were pasted into page by designers using scalpel and light box.

  When I began publishing the comic books in 2003, I had a website and email, but most marketing was done through direct mail shots, advertising in journals and at education shows. Much of it is now social media. I make efforts to keep up, aware that tomorrow texts, tweets and blogs will be obsolete, superseded by a brief new technology. Change is here to stay. I’d just be grateful if it could slow down a bit so I could catch up.

Teamwork is everything Like most artists and writers, I spend almost every day alone in my studio. But although I edit the Shakespeare, write the modern English translation and produce illustrations in isolation, the comic books are far from a solitary work. Hundreds of people are involved one way or another, but there is a core on whom I depend.

  These include Jane Hadlow who puts the comic books together on her Mac, manages the accounts, designs whatever needs designing along with her husband Ray and offers advice and guidance. Phill Evans provides the brilliant digital colouring. My brother, Andrew Greaves, has offered constant support and encouragement from the outset and has spent hours helping with the modern English translations, as have Victoria Gemmell, Ian Evans and Mo Olivero. Kathy Benzinski proof read several of the books, so thanks to her.

  The books are warehoused and distributed by NRG Direct Mail in Shrewsbury. NRG is led by Nick Chavasse who seems to have unlimited energy and a great team. Claire Lawrence is currently responsible for the comic book side of his operation, but before her were Debbie Taylor-Williams and Carol Shuker and all have been equally wonderful.

  Business adviser Tony Barrow gave invaluable help when I was starting the company and still phones to check how things are going. Esther Heasman is doing much to establish overseas markets for the books, hampered by a lack of colour titles, but Macbeth is on the way.

  Steve Anderson has given significant help with IT and Rick and Julia Burne helped out with a succession of education shows in London. There are numerous other suppliers, printers, proof-readers, accountants, website builders and software engineers who have been part of the story, but particular thanks should go to Stella Robinson, late of DP Press who did so much to help when the company was founded, Sim Hadlow who was principal designer at the outset and of course to Sarah, Ellen, Harry, Rob and Jude who have been patient long enough.

  Thanks too, to Mike Jensen. Mike is an American academic who writes on Shakespeare and popular media. We’ve never met, but he took an early interest in the comic books and has provided his own insight and encouragement over the years. He has capacious knowledge of Shakespeare and a network of friends in the US whose understanding of the Bard makes ours in the UK look amateurish.

  Finally, massive thanks to William Shakespeare, without whom none of this would have been possible. Where there’s a Will, there’s a way…

Art theft: Shakespeare, Picasso and grand larceny

Originality is an illusion. Or at least, it is so rare as to be almost non-existent. It is hard to think of any artwork that doesn’t in some way derive from or relate to other works that preceded it. Despite this, we prize originality almost beyond anything else. An original Rembrandt is worth infinitely more than a copy, reflecting the fact that whatever else it is, art is just another commodity. Scarcity adds value.

Painters weren’t always much valued. In early medieval Europe they were seen merely as skilled craftsmen. It took centuries for artists to establish themselves as semi-divine creative forces, the centre of their own celebrity cult. Few enjoyed the role more than Picasso. The son of a professor of art, he had precocious gift and was brought up steeped in European painting. Throughout his life he returned to and constantly re-interpreted the works of the masters, especially Velasquez. Ferociously modern, he was rooted in tradition.

In a Parisian review of 1901, the critic Felicien Fagus described him as a ‘brilliant newcomer’ but wrote of his work, ‘Many likely influences can be distinguished – Delacroix, Manet…Monet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas... Each one a passing phase, taking flight as soon as caught…Picasso’s passionate surge forwards has not yet left him the leisure to forge a personal style.’

The critique was perceptive. It notes his dynamism, versatility and technical accomplishment but makes clear the young artist had yet to establish his own identity. Egotistical, ambitious and deeply impoverished, Picasso must have seen this and similar comments as a challenge. His response came in 1907 with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon a painting that biographer John Richardson called ‘the first unequivocally twentieth century masterpiece.’ It is therefore ironic that this defiantly modern work should have owed its subject, palette and proto-cubism to Cezanne, as well as his study of African art. Nothing comes from nothing. Or to put it another way, everything has to come from somewhere.

Picasso was an unashamed borrower. It is said that other artists feared his visits to their studios because he would seize their ideas, then adapt, expand and make them his own. His remark that ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal’ has been much discussed. I saw the truth of it when I first visited the Pompidou Centre in the early 1980s and found gallery after gallery stuffed with amazingly dull Cubist paintings by artists of whom I had never heard.

What was obvious was that while the works of Picasso and Braque shone out, those by their followers were mediocre at best and ghastly at worst. What was harder to define was what exactly distinguished the masters from the rest, for although the subject matter, technique, use of colour and collage etc. were similar, the results were pastiche. They were simple copies. Whatever it takes to make great art, they didn’t have it.

Picasso’s genius was early recognized by Felicien Fagus. Interestingly, Shakespeare’s arrival in London had provoked similar, if more contemptuous, comment. In his Groatsworth of Wit, Robert Greene had written, ‘There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes factotum is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.’

Greene’s hostility is palpable, but the outline of his case is strikingly similar to Fagus’ critique of Picasso. 

Like Picasso, Shakespeare is described as versatile (‘Iohannes factotum’ means ‘Jack of all trades’), full of self-belief (‘in his owne conceit the onely Shakes-scene in a countrey’) and by co-incidence each passage makes reference to birds. Fagus says of the painter’s restless talent that it takes ‘flight as soon as caught’ while Shakespeare is an ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers.’ And while the artist is said to be dabbling in the styles of other painters, Shakespeare is accused of outright plagiarism.

In a borrowing of his own, Greene’s crow refers to Horace’s Epistles in which a plagiarizing poet is depicted as a ‘little crow’ decked with ‘stolen colours’ (for which information I am indebted to Charles Nicholl). Nicholl points out that Greene’s editor, Henry Chettle, later apologized in print for impugning Shakespeare’s ‘honesty’, but the fact is that the playwright was an omnivorous borrower.

The ‘blanke verse’ style he was said to ‘bombast out’ had been developed by Kit Marlowe and Shakespeare’s early plays contain many resonances of his contemporary’s work. In Henry VI Part 1, for example, the line ‘these arms of mine shall be thy sepulchre’ is a near echo of Marlowe’s ‘my heart shall be thy sepulchre’ and ‘made our footstool of security’ from Henry VI part 3 is distinctly similar to ‘makes his footstool on security.’ Thanks again to Mr Nicholl (this isn’t all original scholarship).

Shakespeare didn’t just borrow lines, of course. He plundered entire libraries. Of all his plays, only three appear to have no obvious source. They mostly derive from Plutarch and Ovid among classical authors, Holinshed and numerous others. Some of his sources themselves have a long lineage of borrowings. Romeo and Juliet, for example, is based on The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet published in 1562 by Arthur Brooke which had been translated from a French version by Pierre Boaistuau of 1559, which in turn was derived from a 1554 story by Italian, Mateo Bandello, which itself was developed from Luigi da Porto’s version of 1530, which was based on a story by Masuccio Salernitano written in 1476 - and he was probably working from a tale with a long oral tradition.

What is important is not where Shakespeare found his plots; it’s what he did with them. Amongst other things, he reduced Juliet’s age from sixteen to thirteen, contracted the timespan from nine months to five days, expanded the minor character of Marcuccio in da Porto’s version into Mercutio’s key role and stripped the play of its moralising, since Brooke felt the lovers had to be punished for leading an ‘unhonest lyfe’.

One of the plays for which Shakespeare had no definite source was The Tempest, though it’s thought to have been inspired in part by William Strachey’s account of the Sea Venture’s wreckage off Bermuda on its passage to Virginia in 1609. Although A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas, Gates, Knight was not published until 1625, it was written in July 1610 and many academics believe Shakespeare must have seen it in manuscript form. Almost certainly, he would have heard tales of the shipwreck.  

Even more certainly, he directly took what he chose from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, probably from a translation by Arthur Golding published in 1567. Prospero’s great speech in which he abjures his ‘rough magic’ is hugely indebted to Golding. There are evident borrowings throughout, its opening line, ‘Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves’ clearly an echo of ‘Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hilles, of Brookes, of Woods alone’.

In general, as above, Shakespeare compresses the original. Thus the words ‘Our Sorcerie dimmes the Morning faire, and darkes the Sun at Noone’ is cut from twelve to six, ‘I have bedimmed/The noontide sun.’ Golding’s version has its own charm and power, but Shakespeare’s carries more punch. In places, though, he expands on his source, to equally potent effect – Golding’s somewhat prosaic rendition, ‘I call up dead men from their graves’ becoming, ‘graves at my command/Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth’ command especially having much greater strength and impact than call.

It is appropriate that Shakespeare’s last great theft should have been from Metamorphosis since all art is transformational. If Picasso was right that ‘great artist’s steal’ then Shakespeare was unquestionably a grand-scale larcenist. But in stealing from Ovid, Shakespeare had made the lines his own and turned Golding’s silver into true gold.

Stealers are stolen from. TS Eliot dripped references from The Tempest into The Wasteland, Aldous Huxley lifted Miranda’s line as a title for ‘Brave New World’, while John Fowles filched the plot for his novel ‘The Magus.’

In 1940, Picasso visited the newly discovered Lascaux cave. It seems the Stone Age paintings left him somewhat depressed and he remarked, ‘We have invented nothing.’ They were as good as he was and 17,000 years before him. His immense ego was bruised.

Nothing is new. Yet art is like love; however many times you fall in love, it is always for the first time and no-one else has ever been in love before. The world is always brave and new.

Survival of the fittest: Shakespeare and the fall of the Victorian novel

Penguin Books is to merge with Random House. To widespread dismay, this will not result in a new entity called Random Penguin, or even Penguin House, but the more prosaic Penguin Random House. It is a significant moment for anyone who loves books; it is the old guard consolidating forces to oppose new commercial pressures represented by Amazon.

The way we read is changing fast. Sales of e-books rose by 89% last year, to a value of £145m in the UK. I suspect that what we read will also change significantly and it’s hard to imagine many classic Victorian authors having much appeal in only a few generations time. Equally, it’s easy to suppose that Shakespeare’s audience will continue to flourish.

There are reasons for this. For while the Victorian novel tended to reflect the nineteenth century back to its readers, Shakespeare is attached to no time. He set his plays in Illyria, Bohemia, Athens and Verona at various periods from the ancient world to contemporary Tudor and Jacobean, but really they exist anywhere and at any time – and in recent productions I have seen Measure for Measure set in Freud’s Hapsburg Vienna, As You Like It in eighteenth century pastoral, Troilus in a non-specific classical past and Othello in Edwardian dress.

Shakespeare is for all time, but Victorian novelists seem trapped in their shadowy house of poverty, gas lamps, polite repression and madness in the attic. Their literature is slipping from us as their era passes from view. I was born in 1955, so am not yet incredibly old, but all my grandparents were Victorians and the world in which I grew up was still tangibly nineteenth century. Plumbing was poor and houses were freezing cold in winter. Steam trains still ran on pre-Beeching-cut railways. Public buildings in every major city were blackened by soot, and cars were still a relative rarity. I remember rag and bone men collecting with horse drawn carts and knife grinders sharpening knives in the street, sparks flying. In school I was taught to form my first letters in chalk on slates with wood framed borders.

In other words, the outlines of life were still significantly Victorian. As it happens, I spent the first seven years of life on an island in the Thames Estuary only a few miles from Chatham, where Dickens grew up, and remember the shock of recognition on first reading Great Expectations. The flat, misty Kent marshes were instantly familiar. The marshes may still be there, but we are moving at speed from the world that Dickens and his contemporaries inhabited.

We are also moving away from a world in which reading is a mass leisure activity.   Although my 1950s childhood was not quite pre-television, it was long before 24 hour, multi-channel TV. It was a world in which people read vast broadsheet newspapers, in which pupils were expected to recite poetry from memory, the Bible was still a part of everyday life and in which books were revered.

This is changing. Newspaper sales are falling steeply everywhere. Millions of books are still published annually and e-books are establishing new markets, but in an age of twitter, texting and shortened attention span I doubt a continued appetite for the heavyweight three volume novel. Pre-Victorian, Jane Austen may continue to find a readership, partly because her novels are crisper and in part because her main themes are timeless.

She deals in relationships and as long as people fall in love, a few of them are going to fall in love with her work. There is also an element of escapism, for although the Napoleonic wars were being fought for almost all her writing life, they are never referred to. It intrudes even less than the poor, who only appear as servants, and even then not very often.

Her society is engaging – and while few would choose to return to Victorian cities with their fogs, slums and cholera many literary types still aspire to a Jane Austen style world of Georgian architecture, rolling parkland and acres of bosom in neo-classic dress. On top of all this, she created some wonderful female characters – notably Elizabeth Bennet who is intelligent, sparky and bold.

Elizabeth is in great contrast to those that followed her. Becky Sharp is an interestingly amoral creation, and there are other strong and passionate women in nineteenth century literature, but of these Catherine Earnshaw opts for Linton rather than Heathcliff and dies in childbirth, Dorothea Casaubon endures years of patient suffering before finding happiness with Ladislaw and though Jane Eyre eventually marries Rochester, it is only after he has been maimed.  They are exceptions. The typical Victorian heroine is loyal, passive, mute and dependent. She is rarely centre stage.  She is not, in short, a woman of the 21^st century.

That is not the case with Shakespeare, who consistently wrote interesting female roles – who created full-blooded women able to argue, outwit suitors, defy their fathers, cross-dress, follow their sexual nature or even urge their husbands to murder. They are funny, resilient, daring and fully alive.

They are also on stage. This is a huge advantage for Shakespeare. For if reading a novel requires active will, watching a play is in some ways a passive experience. It unfolds itself before us, even if we’re half asleep. And in the best theatre we are gripped by the performance, transported by a magic suspension of disbelief into other worlds that are simultaneously our own.

This happens too, with the novel, of course. The opening paragraph of Bleak House throws out a wonderful image of London, dank and muddy in which it would not be strange ‘to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’ Dickens deals in such imagery, but the ability to read is not innate and the imaginative muscle required to vivify his megalosaur might slacken and be lost.  

Humans are instinctively creative. We are natural makers of art, but our ability to read came to us late and might be the first skill to depart. We were scratching petroglyphs on rocks in Kimberly, Australia, perhaps as long ago as 50,000 years. By 17,300 years ago we were creating spectacular cave art in Lascaux. Yet the earliest fragments from the Epic of Gilgamesh, generally considered the first work of literature, date only from about 1800 BC. We were painters and sculptures thousands of years before we were readers and writers and it’s reasonable to suppose we were storytellers and actors, dancers and musicians long before we were painters and sculptors.

Written language was invented by accountants. It began as a purely functional activity, to record stores of grain and inventories of things. It is useful and it allowed knowledge to flourish and spread. We are unlikely ever to cease to be readers, but it is possible that our reading will revert to its perfunctory role, as a means to catalogue possessions or arrange assignations.

Since Shakespeare wrote to be performed, he will be proofed against this trend. His work seems in better hands now, than it has ever been. We have a fantastic collection of actors and directors able to bring the plays to life in consistently fresh and exciting ways. And if we are becoming a less literate culture, we are becoming an intensely visual one. We are constantly looking at screens and monitors – and Shakespeare is as constantly being re-interpreted on film; Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet remains the best of recent adaptations, with Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus not long released, new versions of Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing in production and Al Pacino rumoured to be starring as King Lear.

Shakespeare lends himself fluidly to film. A play adapted for the screen retains its essence while the adaptation of a novel transmutes it into something else. It may make for good cinema or TV but it won’t be the novel written by Dickens or Thackeray, Bronte or Eliot.

I regret this, but things change. One hundred years ago an educated person would have been expected to speak Latin and Greek. Today, few people are familiar with either. Today, English is the most widely spoken language in the world, the second choice for most non-native speakers. This too is likely to change. In one hundred years’ time the dominant language is likely to be Chinese. In the US it may be Spanish. Yet you can be pretty sure that as long as there are poor players strutting and fretting upon a stage, they will be strutting and fretting Shakespeare’s stuff, however much or little it signifies. Being Shakespeare, it will naturally signify much.

Rain stops play: Wet summers in Elizabethan England

The world is largely covered by water and most of it seems to have fallen on Britain in the last few months. It is not surprising that Brits are ridiculed for talking so much about the weather, since we do. It is also not surprising we should talk about the weather when it is so changeable and hard to predict.

Last winter was unusually mild and dry leading to hosepipe bans in many parts of the country. Then it started to rain, and April proved to be the wettest April since records began. Things cheered up a little in May, but it started to rain at the beginning of June (just in time for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee) and didn’t really stop until the Olympics had concluded at the end of August. It proved to be the wettest summer since 1912, though as it turns out records only go back to 1910 it’s hard to say where it stands in a league table of wretched summers.

An all-time list would probably have to include the first Elizabethan era when it seems there were heavy rains in May, June and July of 1594 and a further bad summer in 1596. These appear to have inspired Shakespeare’s description of a soggy, miserable world which he gave to Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (apaprently written between those years). In argument with Oberon, she declares,

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea

Contagious fogs; which falling in the land

Have every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents:

The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,

The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;

The fold stands empty in the drowned field,

And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;

The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud,

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green

For lack of tread are undistinguishable:

The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest:
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,

Pale in her anger, washes all the air,

That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts

Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,

And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown

An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds

Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,

The childing autumn, angry winter, change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,

By their increase, now knows not which is which:

And this same progeny of evils comes

From our debate, from our dissension;

We are their parents and original.

One immediately striking fact about the passage is its length and detail, while adding almost no development to the drama. The second obvious thing is that it doesn’t sound very much like the Mediterranean. When we think of Greece, we think of financial crisis. We don’t tend to think of ghastly summer weather (or Morris dancing, come to that).

This clearly didn’t bother Shakespeare. Whether he was writing about Ancient Greece, or Rome or Illyria or Bohemia, he was really writing about our damp, green island – and his audience would have appreciated an extended grumble about the weather. The speech begins with a tenuous link to the plot when Titania asserts that the cause of all the flooding is her dispute with Oberon. Their quarrel having upset the natural order, this resulted in ‘contagious fogs’ being sucked from the sea and dumped on land, causing the ‘pelting’ rivers ‘made so proud’ to overflow their ‘continents.’

She then moves on to describe the ruined harvest, the ox and ploughman who have worked in vain and the green corn that ‘hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard’. Despite the gloominess of scene, Shakespeare couldn’t here resist a metaphorical flourish, though likening the wispy growth on the ears of wheat to a young man’s downy beard is a deft touch. The crop is lost and livestock equally affected. The sheepfold stands empty in a drowned field and crows fatten themselves on the corpses of diseased animals.

It all sounds grim. For us, a spoilt harvest means little more than a few pence more for a loaf of bread, not the absence of bread. We can buy grain on the world markets. Prices will be high because whilst we have had months of rain, wheat producing areas of the US and Russia suffered drought. Global supplies are short, but we won’t starve, though people in the poorest countries will. Unrest there may follow; ‘A hungry man is an angry man,’ to quote Bob Marley. In the 1590s scarcity of food led to riots in London and in the 1780s a series of calamitous harvests was a contributory cause of the French Revolution.

Shakespeare explored the link between grain shortage and rebellion in Coriolanus (c1607-09) in which plebeians attack the nobility for allegedly hoarding grain at a time of widespread starvation. This might make Shakespeare seem like the people’s friend, though in 1599 he had been accused of holding ten quarters of corn and malt at a time of grain shortage in Stratford.

We’re unlikely to starve and most won’t face other privations. As it rained outside over the summer, the majority of us were indoors watching the Olympics. Shakespeare’s contemporaries lacked sporting distraction, their nine men’s morris ‘fill’d up with mud’ and ‘quaint mazes’ abandoned on the green. Such pastimes were obviously important in rural areas, without even theatre for solace and it’s interesting that he lists lack of entertainment above another consequence of the rotten season, ‘rheumatic diseases’ that ‘abound’.

It all sounds miserable. Most of us have warm, centrally heated houses. Most of us also have the option of escaping to hot and sunny places like, well, Greece. A Tudor peasant would have just had to sit it out on rat infested straw in a cheerless hovel that was damp, cold and draughty. It was all too much like winter, but without even the compensation of nights with ‘hymn or carol blest’.

The sense that the seasons are deranged is familiar. This year saw the second hottest March day recorded in England (only one in 1938 was hotter), later followed by the coldest night in August on record. Things aren’t as they should be, ‘the seasons alter’. The world is ‘upset’ with ‘seasons out of joint’ and changing ‘their wonted liveries.’

At the end of Titania’s long speech, Shakespeare steers us back to the plot by a reminder that the cause of all this ‘progeny of evils’ comes from her ‘dissension’ with Oberon. The two of them are its ‘parents and original’.

We are more scientific and prefer global warming rather than the spat between a fairy king and queen as a likelier explanation of bad weather. It might be that in a few centuries time our concerns about climate change seem fanciful and superstitious. That might prove to be the case, but the fact is that while we were watching the Olympics, the Arctic sea ice was melting at a faster rate than ever before. A satellite image taken on August 27 showed the ice cap covering 4.11 million sq. km, 50% less than forty years ago. This year, 11.7m sq. km of ice had melted, 22% more than the long term average of 9.18m sq. km.

We should be alarmed. It is believed that melting ice and warming seas will lead to severe disruption of global weather systems. We may well come to look back on a wet summer as the least of our problems.

Six Tempests

Prospero failed to show up at the Paralympic Closing Ceremony. It has to be said that went off very well without him, though his absence was a surprise – particularly as he and Miranda had featured so centrally at the Opening. On that occasion their parts were taken by Sir Ian McKellen and Nicola Miles-Wildin, though with few direct lines from The Tempest. Even so, the fact they were there along with the Big Bang, Sir Stephen Hawking, Sir Isaac Newton, a flock of flying books, giant umbrellas and massive pyrotechnics all indicate how important Shakespeare remains to our culture and sense of self as a nation.

It also suggests how much loved is The Tempest, in some ways his most perfect play. It is amongst my favourites, and in each of the last five decades I have watched at least one production.  The first was by an amateur company in London in the late 1970s. It was a disaster tinged with tragedy and farce and huge amounts of unintended comedy. It is probable the cast was very drunk. At times it was unclear what play was being performed, or why. All that can be said for certain is that at some point the performance came to an end. Whether this was after Prospero’s epilogue or at an arbitrary point anywhere from Act III onwards is open to debate. If there was applause, it can only have been because those left in the audience could then go to the pub.

Not deterred, the next was a student production in Durham in the early 1980s. It was magical; the play performed on a balmy summer’s evening on a wooded hillside beneath the magnificent Norman cathedral with the Wear flowing quiet below us. Outdoor performances are a risk, but the setting was perfect. As darkness fell and shadows deepened, lights picked out Ariel as he appeared first from behind one tree, then another and a third, to delight the audience and confound the play’s plotters and miscreants. At its conclusion, night had fallen and seemed all enveloping. The cathedral, river and city had ceased to exist - wonderfully appropriate for a play that speaks as much about the evanescence of all things as the power of love and the magic of art.

I next saw a performance in the mid-1990s, having now moved to Shropshire. It was an RSC touring production but was disappointing. I chiefly remember the effective use of back projection during the storm scene and some very splendid raiments purloined by Stephano and Trinculo. But if all that sticks in the mind is a clever piece of staging and some showy luggage, it’s probably fair to say it wasn’t a great evening out.

Not a great deal remains either of the next performance I saw, in Chester, in the early 2000s. This was a Girls’ School production for which my niece had designed Caliban’s costume. It was made of old ropes that gave its actor a bulky yet shapeless presence that seemed partly reminiscent of an orangutan’s tangled hair and part the sort of thing you might find washed ashore after a storm at sea. Great work, Lucy.

This was followed a few years later in 2005, when I took my teenaged son to a remarkable production at The Globe. It was the last work produced there under the artistic directorship of Mark Rylance in which he played Prospero and Stephano along with a bewildering number of minor characters. He was supported by Edward Hogg who played Miranda and Ariel and Alex Hassell who took the role of Caliban and just about any character not being played by the other two.

I could see the point of having only three actors play all parts since the drama is built on a constantly changing sequence of triangular relationships – Prospero, Miranda and Ariel/ Prospero, Miranda and Caliban/ Prospero, Ferdinand and Miranda/Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo etc. Despite this intellectual underpinning, the concept didn’t work entirely well on stage. I know the play in depth, but there were moments when I was uncertain who was playing whom and quite when Prospero had turned into Stephano or whether in fact he might be Alonso or Gonzalo. My son was even more confused, and I suspect remains so to this day.

Bewilderment aside, it was a compelling accomplishment and one that was brilliantly funny. I struggle with much of Shakespeare’s more sophisticated comic repartee which doubtless delighted the Jacobean intelligentsia but now requires pages of exegesis. Jokes that have to be explained, don’t generally raise many laughs while a line such as ‘Monster, I do smell all horse-piss’ can bring the house down.

Shakespeare’s low-life characters remain a delight and their uncomplicated humour remains rude and fresh. As long as we are human we will probably find farts and bums hilarious, along with any infantile reference to genitalia or copulation. Shakespeare knew this and was at first more than happy to provide what his audience wanted.

Shakespeare’s dramatic company included at least two notable clowns, Will Kempe and Robert Armin. The former is said to have played the roles of Dogberry and Falstaff amongst others, but left around 1600. The reason for his departure isn’t certain, though it’s possible Shakespeare wished to refine his comedy. For his successor, Armin, he created the roles of Feste and Touchstone as well as the Fool in King Lear – parts that rely more on wordplay and causticity of wit than slapstick.

That may be true, but in Stephano and Trinculo he reverted to more traditional knockabout clowning. What the Rylance production made clear was how much scope Shakespeare left for unscripted, purely physical comedy. In the scene in which Trinculo hides under Caliban’s gabardine, the comic homoerotic potential of two men writhing around under a coat was fully explored – in a way that the girl’s school version unaccountably failed to exploit.

There was a similar a restraint in the most recent production I saw, in mid-July. Produced by The Oswestry Drama Project as part of the Cultural Olympiad and supported by the RSC’s Open Stages project, it had a cast of more than thirty, the actors ranging in age from 7 to 83. Emphasis was evidently on inclusivity and contributions were variable in quality. Huw Sayer was notably good as Prospero. He has a fine, sonorous voice and a commanding stage presence and was well supported by Andrew Humphreys as Caliban and Michael Jenkins as Stephano. There were also some charming dance sequences, an enjoyable enchanted feast and some excellent percussion – especially strong in the opening storm scene.

It’s perhaps not surprising that amateur companies prefer to take on Shakespeare’s comedies rather than the tragedies. I’ve seen at least three wonderfully good productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and not even bad attempts at Lear, Othello or Hamlet. There will be many reasons for this. One perhaps, is that in our errors and fallibilities we are nearer to Quince, Snout, Flute, Bottom, Stephano and Trinculo than we are to the tragic heroes. It takes great actors to play the parts of great men and women. Most of us take the less demanding roles – and probably have far more fun in the process.

This has been a special summer in the UK, with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, Olympics, Paralympics and Cultural Olympiad. All events seem to have merged into a vast and very expensive party. One morning we might wake up, look at the balance sheet and declare it was madness. One morning we might wake up and wonder why we’d all become so excited about people running and biking and riding horses and the rest. We might, but not just yet.

Shakespeare, Staging the World @ the British Museum: Reivew

The Games have gone. They departed in a flurry of golds and closed with a ceremony that featured what looked like old newspapers but turned out to be Eng. Lit, more Beatles and more fireworks. Caliban’s speech popped up again, this time voiced by Timothy Spall as our Great War Leader (Churchill, not Tony Blair) - and from the top of a Big Ben which had burst open like an over-ripe banana. I did not attempt comprehension.

The closing ceremony may have underwhelmed, but the Olympics seem to have been a triumph. To everyone’s intense relief, there were no disasters. Things were well organized. Brits won lots of medals. Even the sun shined, occasionally. We found we were good at something after all. Hurrah.

It’s a long time since it were possible to win an Olympic gold medal for architecture or flower arranging, but the Cultural Olympiad that complemented the Games has been an equal, if less celebrated success. It has involved musicians, dancers, visual artists, film makers, writers and actors. It also centred on William Shakespeare.

His plays have been produced by amateur companies all around the country, broadcast on the BBC and explored in a mighty succession of talks and documentaries. It has been heady stuff. Highlights of The Shakespeare Unlocked series included James Shapiro discussing Shakespeare’s Jacobean dramas, Joely Richardson on Shakespeare’s heroines and The Hollow Crown which presented Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. Stunning.

There was also a sequence of late night talks by Margaret Drabble about Shakespeare and Love on Radio 3, but I’m vague about these as I generally fell asleep after her first sentence and somehow failed to return to them on i-player. Better scheduled was Neil MacGregor’s Shakespeare’s Restless World on Radio 4.

These programmes viewed Shakespeare’s world through a variety of objects, revealing what each told us about his life and times. Almost all were fascinating. Some reminded me of things I must once have known but forgotten and some about which I was forgivably ignorant (or about ignorance of which I kindly forgave myself). Some facts it was a delight to discover; others I was stunned not to have heard about before.

In no particular order, it was of interest to learn that theatres were also used to present sword fight shows; that in 1564 (the year of Shakespeare’s birth) a quarter of Stratford’s population died of the plague; that the earliest mechanical clocks only had an hour hand, leaving people to guess what the minutes were doing and that most plays (even tragedies) were followed by music and dancing on stage.

We were also informed us that the embalmed corpse of Henry V’s widow, Catherine de Valois, was displayed in Westminster Abbey – where diarist Samuel Pepys later kissed her dead lips. This sounds gruesome. Did Pepys make the story up? If so, why write about it in a cipher diary he thought no one would ever read? If not, what prompted him to kiss the lips of a woman who’d been dead for more than two hundred years? Either way, psychotherapy might have helped.

The single fact that Shakespeare’s Restless World most stunned me with is that in 1596 Shakespeare was one of four men to attack William Wayte outside The Swan theatre. Wayte later swore before the Court of Queen’s Bench that he was in danger of death or serious injury. Brought before a judge, Shakespeare and his co-assailants had to post bail and promise to keep the peace. The matter was eventually settled out of court.

What staggers me is that we are constantly told how little we know of Shakespeare’s life, yet this extraordinary incident appears undiscussed. How long has it been known? Did academics suppress the story because it conflicts with a notion of him either as ‘gentle Shakespeare’, or the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’?  Like many of the few facts we do have, the information is tantalising. Was it a serious assault or a scuffle? Did Shakespeare instigate the attack or was he by-standing? Did William Wayte simply deserve a good kicking? Were all playwrights inclined to violence? Ben Jonson, after all, was sent to prison for murder and Kit Marlowe stabbed to death in a pub fight.

Mention of the incident occurred in Swordplay and Swagger, in which Neil MacGregor discussed a rapier and dagger, found separately on the Thames foreshore near The Globe. In his day job, MacGregor is director of the British Museum and the weapons are on show in the BM’s exhibition, Shakespeare, staging the world.

They are objects of great beauty. And there is an incredible amount of other fascinating material to view. Some of this, such as the portraits of Richard II or John Donne or Henry V’s battle helm is normally on view elsewhere in London. Some of the items, such as Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraving of London (‘The Long View’) were familiar only through reproductions, but much was new to me. One such was the painting (c. 1600) of a Moroccan dignitary with the splendid title, ‘Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, ambassador to England from the King of Barbary’.

His features are proud, sharp and intelligent – and astonishingly contemporary. For while the likenesses of Henry Wriothesley, 3^rd Earl of Southampton (a ridiculous, if pretty young man) or the adventurer Captain Thomas Lee (somewhat absurdly bare legged) are trapped in time by their raiments and accessories, the ambassador might still be seen striding to the Court of St James (though he would have difficulty getting his sword through security).

Many of the objects exhibited are sumptuous, such as the wonderful Sheldon Tapestry depicting Shakespeare’s home county of Warwickshire. These were clearly designed to display their owner’s wealth and taste, yet some of the most affecting items are altogether humbler. There was a delightful, loose-fitting women’s jacket (c. 1600-1625) made of linen, with strawberries, peapods, acorns and honeysuckle embroidered in silk.

Humbler still were a child’s hornbook (which comprised a small wooden tablet with alphabet and The Lord’s Prayer printed on a sheet of paper, protected by a film of transparent horn) and a wooden drainage spade dating from the 1700s. By this we are told that Shakespeare became a keen gardener on his retirement to Stratford. How is this known? First we learn he tried to kill a man outside his theatre, then that he took up gardening in old age. For someone of whom we know almost nothing, this seems quite full detail.

Horticultural pursuits aside, I wasn’t sure how much revelation there was in the show. Instead, what it provided was context. It opened doors into his world. Here was John Dee’s obsidian divination mirror, there a Venetian courtesan, pictured with liftable flap in her skirt to reveal breeches and salacious slippers. In another chamber was a hand written poster (c. 1603-25) that advised of a bear-baiting contest at the Bear Garden, Southwark. Nearby was a bear skull, excavated during reconstruction of the Globe. Its teeth had been filed smooth to prevent it biting the dogs to death in the bear-pit.

All these objects asked as many questions. From what attics and mouldering cupboards had they been retrieved? Who recognized the cow-pat coloured tamoshanter as a ‘statute cap’ dating from the 1570s? How did the playing cards (c. 1590) depicting English and Welsh counties survive? Which men lost their sword and dagger in the Thames and why – and who found them in the mud several centuries later? Most importantly, whose job was it to grind the bear’s teeth and what sort of sedative was the animal given? If it wasn’t sedated, what sort of burial did the tooth grinder get?

I took in the exhibition on my way through London to Wembley to see the Women’s Football Final. Like the football, I was advised to allow 90 minutes for the show. This was insufficient. Hurrying to rendezvous with Ellen and Stuart for the match, I had to rush through several of the latter galleries. Showcases on Cleopatra and Macbeth were almost unviewed and I entirely missed Sonny Venkatrathnam’s ‘Robben Island Bible’. A big regret.

I needed extra time. The final almost went to extra time as well, though in the event the USA beat Japan by a late goal.

It is impossible to know what remnants of our time will survive the next four hundred years. Or to know what sort of people might excavate them. Some of what we leave may seem as mysterious to those in the future as Dr Dee’s obsidian mirror to us. Some things may seem as familiar as the spade, with one similar to which Shakespeare supposedly dug his retirement garden. Yet if whatever is left ends up in an exhibition half as good as Shakespeare, Staging the world it will be a jolly good show indeed. Well done, Games. Well done, Cultural Olympiad. Gold medals all round.

The isle is full of noises: Caliban at the Olympics

The Games are upon us. After years of waiting, billions of pounds, massive hype, major security embarrassments and mounting public frenzy, the Olympics are underway and a huge success. And they began in fine style with a splendid opening ceremony that flattered Britain with a fantasy portrait of itself while managing to confuse everyone else.

Danny Boyle’s show was spectacular and played many familiar cards with a mostly original twist. The ceremony expectedly featured Blake’s Jerusalem, bucolic idylls, Elgar and Churchill and, more surprisingly, the Queen parachuting out of a helicopter. It also included some visually stunning effects and moments of pathos and beauty, notably Akram Khan’s tribute to the victims of the 7/7 bombings.

In many ways the Opening Ceremony was a four hour promotional video for UK PLC, with creativity our Unique Selling Point. To this end it displayed many of the things we invented such as a multitude of sports (at quite a few of which we are doing exceptionally well), the industrial revolution (though I think we should keep quiet about this), the NHS (Mitt Romney must have loved that sequence) and the World Wide Web (well done, Sir Tim). It also celebrated our creative genius when it comes to children’s literature (hello JK Rowling), pop music (doesn’t Sir Paul ever get tired of doing this kind of thing?) and of course, William Shakespeare. He glorified the English language and his great works helped carry it to every part of the globe, our greatest gift to world culture.

Having heard the Opening Ceremony was titled The Isles of Wonder it was to be assumed there would be reference either to John of Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’ speech or Caliban’s ‘this isle is full of noises.’ Boyle made the right call. Caliban is one of Shakespeare’s most interesting and complex creations and this speech particularly moving and beautiful,

Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises,

Sound and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,

That if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open, and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,

I cried to dream again.

Caliban is many things and is called many names including ‘thing of darkness’, ‘deboshed fish’, ‘hagseed’ and ‘monster’. He regrets not having raped Miranda and incites Stephano to murder Prospero, yet the speech Branagh quoted shows Caliban to have been fully alive to the beauty of the island, especially its music – the ‘sound and sweet airs’ and ‘thousand twangling instruments’. In none of Shakespeare’s plays is music more integral or important. It is part of its magic. It leads Ferdinand to Miranda, charms Alonso and Gonzalo asleep and leads the drunks astray. That Caliban is more sensitive to it than Antonio and Sebastian suggests he is less bestial than they.

If Caliban is most responsive to music, he is also the character that most loves and understands the island. While Prospero refers to it as ‘bare’, Caliban offers to find Stephano and Trinculo berries and fish, crabs, pig nuts, marmosets, filberts and scammels. He also promises to show them where to find water, as he had once shown Prospero the ‘fresh springs’.

The question of who ‘owns’ the island is contentious. Prospero refers to himself as its ‘lord’ while Caliban is insistent that ‘by sorcery he got this isle/From me he got it.’ It is a troubling aspect of the play. For some Prospero is a colonizer who seizes the island from its sole inhabitant, forcing him into servitude, calling him ‘earth’, ‘filth’, ‘devil’ and ‘slave’. He subdues Caliban with violence, racking his body with ‘cramps’ and ‘aches’ and winding him around with adders who with ‘cloven tongues’ hiss him ‘into madness’. It is significant that when describing the music of the isle, Caliban says ‘it give delight and hurt not’ – pain having become inseparable from existence.

Others point out that the island was empty of people before Caliban’s mother Sycorax arrived. It’s also argued that the island is located somewhere between Italy and Tunisia – far from nascent colonies in India, America and the West Indies. This argument is paltry, particularly as it’s likely that Shakespeare’s main source for the play was an account of the wreck of the Sea Venture off Bermuda where its crew were stranded for ten months before building two small boats and continuing on their way to Virginia. The pamphlet, A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Isle of Divels was written by one of the survivors and published in 1610 – the likely year Shakespeare wrote The Tempest.

The whole troubled question of Britain’s colonial past was not directly addressed in Danny Boyle’s opening extravaganza, but it was touched upon by reference to the Empire Windrush – the ship which carried 493 West Indian immigrants to Britain in 1948. And while it’s understandable that our imperial role did not feature in the Opening Ceremony, almost everything else did.

Shakespeare would have approved its showmanship and theatricality. For while it’s true that Tudor theatre was relatively spare in its presentation without scenery or elaborate stage effects, by the Jacobean period staging was far more concerned with artifice and visual display. It’s believed The Tempest was first performed indoors at the Blackfriar’s Theatre rather than outdoors at The Globe – the darkened theatre lit by candles giving greater scope for illusion and magical trickery. The play is full of both, from the storm which Prospero conjures in the opening scene to the banquet produced by fantastical creatures, which as magically vanishes. It is likely Ariel would have appeared on a trapeze, though this might have seemed rather pedestrian when compared to the entrance of Jupiter in another late play, Cymbeline. The stage note for this reads, ‘Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle. He throws a thunderbolt. The Ghosts fall on their knees.’ Nothing understated about that.

Shakespeare obviously enjoyed the theatricality of theatre and had the fireworks deployed by Boyle been readily available, no doubt he would have used them. It was, after all, the firing of a cannon ball into the thatched roof of the Globe during a performance of Henry VIII that caused it to burn down in 1613.

Shakespeare would have delighted in the Opening Ceremony’s flamboyant staginess. And along with everyone else, he would have been confused as to why Caliban’s speech should have been declaimed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Perhaps the choice was inspired by no more than its reference to an island full of ‘noises’. As one of our greatest engineers, Brunel would have spent his life surrounded by the clanking of iron and hammering of steel.   

Perhaps it was in other ways appropriate. Like those on Prospero’s barren island, everyone here has arrived from somewhere else. Brunel’s father was a refugee from the French revolution who had first settled in America where he took citizenship, only later arriving in London. So the man voted number two in the BBC’s Greatest Britons poll was part French. Churchill (at number one), had an American mother, while the Queen is of German descent.

Of those others involved in the Opening Ceremony, Akram Khan’s parents moved to Britain from Bengal, JK Rowling’s forebears came from Alsace-Lorraine while Danny Boyle, Kenneth Branagh and Sir Paul all have origins in Ireland. Many of the athletes representing Britain will come from families who travelled from more distant parts of the world.

Of those who won medals on an extraordinary middle weekend of competition in the Olympic Stadium, Jessica Ennis has a Jamaican father, Mo Farah came here as a refugee from Somalia, aged 8 and Christine Ohuruogu’s parents are Nigerian. Greg Rutherford is English but his surname is Scottish and it’s a fair bet a few of his ancestors were Vikings who sailed here from Scandinavia many centuries ago.

This crowded isle is full of noises. It is also full of many languages. More than 290 are spoken in London alone. We are a mixed up and multifarious nation. This is not without problems, but we are all the better for it. I was lucky enough to be in the Stadium on Saturday night to see Britain win three gold medals in under sixty minutes. It was amazing theatre. I went with family, but by the end of the evening, the whole crowd felt like family. An unrepeatable experience. Great Opening Ceremony, Danny. Go Team GB!