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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shakespeare, Byron and the rise of the literary superstar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Scottish Play and Scottish independence

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’ve been lied to

I’ve been bullied

I’m tired

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

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

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

Shakespeare and the First World War

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like golden may-flies, dancing in the sun

With glittering wings and shining bodies, they

Have with the dawn their joyous dance begun

Light of heart and true of heart, and gay…

If with the dusk then falls a glittering one,

Beautiful in death as life, no less,

One pair of golden wings forever gone

Another heart in England knows distress.

But other golden wings will carry on

And flit & pass & die as they have done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why didn’t Shakespeare keep his manuscripts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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