Shakespeare and the First World War

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like golden may-flies, dancing in the sun

With glittering wings and shining bodies, they

Have with the dawn their joyous dance begun

Light of heart and true of heart, and gay…

If with the dusk then falls a glittering one,

Beautiful in death as life, no less,

One pair of golden wings forever gone

Another heart in England knows distress.

But other golden wings will carry on

And flit & pass & die as they have done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why didn’t Shakespeare keep his manuscripts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unkindest cuts: on editing Shakespeare

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

‘thou’ldst have, great Glamis,

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

And that which rather thou dost fear to do

Than wishest should be undone.’

 

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

 

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

 

Shakespeare's Big Birthday

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

Donmar Coriolanus in review

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

Lear, Pickwick and Dr Charity

There are few plausible connections between King Lear and The Pickwick Papers. Only one man seems to have found a bridge between the two. He was Dr Alan Charity, late of York University.  Alan Charity was a brilliant academic. It was said his doctoral thesis was so recondite that no-one else could understand it, not even him some years after it was written.

Dr Charity was aptly named. For apart from being a deeply erudite scholar who could quote enormous passages from The Prelude (which he frequently did), he was a lovely man. To me he seemed benevolent, witty and perpetually amused. Perhaps he was inwardly laughing at my habitual incompetence. He was also of a charitable disposition, for it was he that gave me access to York University.

On arrival for interview, I found myself outside a door which had FR Leavis on its nameplate. I waited, expecting some fierce interrogation from the angry patriarch of Eng. Lit. and was relieved instead to find a somewhat tired and dishevelled man waiting to interview me. He explained that FR Leavis was a visiting professor and spent most of his time in Cambridge. I subsequently attended a talk given by the great man shortly before his death. It was in a small room accompanied by two other people. We listened as he ranted for what seemed like several hours against the failings and impertinencies of other academics and critics, before he slumped back into his chair. But that is another story.

I doubt FR Leavis would have been kindly disposed to me. Dr Charity was in more amiable mode. I think he probably wanted to get home. We chatted in a general way about books for twenty minutes or so, and then he offered me a place. Not having anything else to do, I accepted.

Some months later I found myself outside Dr Charity’s office, waiting for an early morning tutorial. It was 10.00am. This was a problem. I have never been an early morning person and my first term at university was not a moment to begin. I was not profoundly ready for discussion of King Lear.

If Dr Charity’s first big mistake had been to offer me a place at York, his second obvious error was to offer me a glass of sherry. I was anyway barely sentient. The sherry rendered me catatonic. As it happens, Shakespeare was the reason I wished to study literature. Even before university I had read more or less the complete works, pretty much only The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry VIII having eluded me. Perhaps for understandable reasons, they still have. I was well acquainted with King Lear. I had much to say about the play. It was just unfortunate I was incapable of coherent speech or thought. 

It didn’t take Alan long to assess the situation. ‘Let us see what light The Pickwick Papers can throw on King Lear,’ he announced. Sipping his sherry, he then read to me for the remaining hour of tutorial. I was entranced. Staggering from his office, I went straight to the university bookshop and bought a copy of Pickwick which I then read and later re-read many times.

Much has changed since then. I suspect that interview procedures are no longer so informal. I’m pretty sure tutors would be forbidden to drink sherry at 10.00am and I’m almost certain that Alan’s successors would have to write schemes of work and produce tutorial plans and tick a million bureaucratic boxes, before each encounter with a student. I doubt there is scope for an impromptu reading from The Pickwick Papers while notionally discussing King Lear. And with students paying thousands of pounds a year in tuition fees, they may rightly feel entitled to more rigour. 

All of which is a shame, since that tutorial transformed my appreciation of Dickens. Having read Pickwick, over the next few years I went on to read all of his novels, re-reading favourites several times, as well the short stories and other works. Alan wouldn’t have been happy writing schemes of work or ticking boxes (or not drinking sherry, frankly), but what he communicated was a passion for literature, sharing his love for Wordsworth and Shakespeare and Dickens and a multitude of other writers. He was a lovely man and a great teacher. I owe him much and honour his memory.

PS. I emailed the alumni association to see if a photo of Alan could be found, but didn’t hear back. Instead, I’ve used a picture of me in student days. Sorry about that. If anyone has a picture of him, I’ll post it up.

 

 

Shakespeare, Dylan and self-creation myths

 

‘No artist can accept reality,’ Nietzsche observed. This is not surprising since artists live in fictional worlds. They make things up for a living, so it’s also not surprising they should make things up about themselves. Everybody does it in minor ways, but the scale of deception deployed by Bob Dylan when he first emerged on the New York music scene was heroic. For one thing, he wasn’t Bob Dylan at all, but Robert Zimmerman, though that seems of minor importance compared to the elaborate tales he told of a wild boyhood spent roaming the US.

 

Interviewed in 1962 he claimed, ‘I was with the carnival off and on for six years… I skipped a lot of things and I didn’t go to school for a bunch of years.’ Two years later he was explaining to Nat Hentoff of the New Yorker, ‘I started running when I was ten. But always I’d get picked up and sent home. When I was thirteen, I was travelling with a carnival through upper Minnesota and North and South Dakota, and I got picked up again. I tried again and again, and when I was eighteen, I cut out for good.’
 

It now seems astonishing that the scale of his self-invention wsn’t challenged. Didn’t anybody think to check with his high school, or maybe ask his parents? That he was able to spin the same stories for over two years suggests nobody bothered to question them. In part, this must have been because his extraordinary talent was unquestionable so an extraordinary genesis was to be expected. He was also a young man at a point where youth was taking over the world. His was the voice of the future and no-one wanted to examine his past.
 

Had they done so, they would have found he’d been born in a decaying mining town on the edge of a lake in the far north, in 1941. Two years later the Zimmermans moved from Duluth to nearby Hibbing where he was brought up by a loving family in which he was indulged by aunts and uncles. He joined the boy scouts, wrote affectionate poems to his mother and father and didn’t run away to join the carnival even once.
 

There are many explanations why Dylan might have wished to create an exotic backstory. He may have thought it would help sell records. Perhaps telling lies to journalists was a form of self-protection. Or perhaps the stories helped bridge the gap between where he’d started and what he’d become. It was easier to invent a pack of lies than try to explain how it was that the child he later described in Chronicles as a ‘skinny, asthmatic introvert’ had so quickly become the man who would change popular music for ever.
 

He wasn’t alone in self-mythologizing. John Lennon posed as a working class hero when really he’d been brought up by nice Aunt Mimi in Menlove Avenue, David Bowie created a whole new persona in Ziggy Stardust while at least in song, Hendrix proclaimed that the ‘night I was born, I swear the moon turned a fire red’ and Jagger claimed to have been ‘raised by a toothless bearded hag’. Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t. It could just be that if you’re a rock superstar and international sex god, but until a few months ago you were a pimply, reserved student at the LSE and your dad is a PE teacher in Dartford, then the distance between where you’ve arrived and where you started from is too great to comprehend. Even with the help of mind-bending drugs. In which case a self-creation myth answers all needs.
 

And what has any of this got to do with Shakespeare? It’s my belief he suffered a similar dislocation of reality, which he helped adjust by inventing a new family history for himself. For while he had abundant talent he lacked pedigree, and though by the mid-1590s he was becoming seriously rich he was without social position. Unlike Christopher Marlowe, from a similar background, he didn’t even have a Cambridge degree. This situation had to be addressed. Instead of claiming he’d run away to the carnival (though ironically it's likely he did go off with a band of travelling players after he'd married Anne Hathaway), he made the equally preposterous claim that he came of gentlemanly stock.
 

So to prove this, in 1596 he set about acquiring a coat of arms - though not for himself, but his father. This may have been an act of filial thoughtfulness towards an ailing old man, since John Shakespeare had applied for a coat of arms himself in 1576, before financial ruin. It’s more likely though, that his son was attempting to legitimate his right to armigerous status – an inherited coat of arms, after all, has slightly more lustre than one bought off the shelf.
 

And buying a coat of arms is what Shakespeare did. The cost of a ‘patent of gentility’ was considerable, ranging from £10-£30, depending how monstrous the claim. Even at the lower end, it was more than most people earned in a year. But that was only the start of the expenses, since there was no point having a coat of arms unless you blazoned it above the entrance to your house, had it carved into furniture and embroidered onto hangings and canopies. And since gentlemen were entitled to wear silk, you probably had to buy new suits of clothes to display your gentle condition.
 

When it came to the coat of arms itself, Shakespeare went for a visual pun, something typical of the nouveau riche in Tudor England. It was relatively simple in design – a shield displaying a gold spear on diagonal black band with a gold background. The tip of the spear was silver, the use of silver and gold connoting wealth, while the spear itself was the kind used in jousting tournaments, suggestive of chivalric deeds.
 

The shield was surmounted by a silver falcon, its wings part outstretched. In falconry this is termed ‘shaking’, the movement just before the bird takes flight. Since it also holds a spear in its right claw, the visual pun is complete.  But according to Katherine Duncan Jones in ‘Ungentle Shakespeare’, this use of a falcon might have occasioned the rift between Shakespeare and his early patron, the Earl of Southampton. His coat showed four silver falcons in profile and he may well have thought that in choosing to adopt the courtly creature, his upstart protégé had gone too far.
 

In his choice of gold and silver, depiction of a jousting spear and aristocratic bird, Shakespeare was certainly making a bold claim to gentle birth. This was further emphasized by his choice of motto in medieval French, NON SANZ DROICT. This translates as ‘not without right’, though his right to gentlemanly status was dubious at best.
 

It was claimed that John Shakespeare’s great-grandfather had given ‘faithful and approved service to the late most prudent prince King Henry VII of famous memory.’ This was spurious - again according to Katherine Duncan Jones – since Richmond’s army at Bosworth mostly comprised Bretons, not Midland yeoman. And if the alleged great-grandfather’s service wasn’t at Bosworth, it’s hard to see where it could have been.
 

Although by 1597 Shakespeare had bought his father the coat of arms and himself a swanky house, New Place, in Stratford, his assertion of gentility was shaky. Two years later in 1599, perhaps to substantiate his claim, he appears to have unsuccessfully applied to have his arms quartered with those of the Arden family. This attempt to incorporate the arms of a well-born family into his own was another piece of social bluster since although an Arden, his mother was the youngest daughter of a junior branch of the family, yeoman not gentle. And even if she had been, the fact that she was female meant she couldn’t confer gentle status on her husband since things didn’t work that way.

 

 

 Genius though he was, Shakespeare couldn’t get around the fact that he came from humble stock. And his attempts to prove otherwise rendered him ridiculous. In 1599, Ben Jonson wrote ‘Every Man Out of His Humour’, performed by Shakespeare’s company The Chamberlain’s Men. In it, the uneducated Sogliardo arrives from the country in London to make himself a gentleman, having sold a few fields for the purpose.  Discussing a coat of arms, Puntarvolo tells him the motto should be ‘Not without mustard’ – a direct allusion to ‘Non Sanz Droict’.
 

It’s possible that Shakespeare had come to recognize the absurdity of his situation for in ‘Twelfth Night’ we see Malvolio punished for his social ambitions. Deceived by a letter he thinks from Olivia, he reads that ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em …cast thy humble slough, and appear fresh.’ As importantly, he is tricked into wearing cross garters with yellow stockings – a colour Olivia ‘abhors’ yet one often used to represent gold in heraldry. The dress also created a mocking visual pun, the black diagonals of the garters against the yellow stockings a reminder of black band on a gold background of Shakespeare’s arms. Later, when pleading with Sir Topas to be released from his cell, Malvolio cries out for ‘a candle, and pen, ink, and paper’ – emblems of the writer’s craft – and adds, ‘as I am a gentleman, I will live to be thankful to thee for’t.’
 

If by 1600 when he was writing ‘Twelfth Night’ Shakespeare still had any pretensions to gentility, his tenuous claim was finally undermined when Sir William Dethick, the herald that had granted him the patent, was suspended from the College of Arms in 1604. Argumentative, bullying and corrupt, Sir William was finally sacked for bringing the college into disrepute in 1606. Perhaps significantly, that was the year Shakespeare wrote ‘King Lear’ in which the Fool asserts ‘he’s a mad yeoman that sees his son a gentleman before him.’ The game was up.
 

I first became aware of both Shakespeare and Dylan in the 1960s and one way or another they have been in my head ever since. In the early 1970s I was on the top deck of a bus in London when my girlfriend began reciting The times they are a changin’, particularly emphasizing the verse, ‘Come mothers and fathers/Throughout the land/And don’t criticize/What you can’t understand/Your sons and your daughters/Are beyond your command/Your old road is rapidly agin’./Please get out of the new one/If you can’t lend your hand/for the times they are a-changin.’
 

What strikes me now is how naïve we were. Not just us, but pretty much a whole generation. Quite what we believed and how we thought things might change is obscure, but it seemed to involve Love (which we’d been assured was all we that we’d need), flared trousers, a few beads and lentils. In retrospect, not a very rigorous manifesto.
 

On the other hand, America now has a black president, Maine and Maryland voted to introduce same sex marriage, Colorado and Washington legalised smoking cannabis for recreational use and Wisconsin elected the first openly gay senator. Perhaps the times really were changing after all. And maybe on some level Dylan really had run away with the carnival. And Shakespeare was a gent all along.