How to be a Literary Genius - Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to be a Literary Genius - Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shakespeare and Dickens: Soul Brothers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hedging with Hamlet and Horatio

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


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

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

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

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

Inclosure came and trampled on the grave

Of labours rights and left the poor a slave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fairies be gone, and be all ways away.

So doth the woodbine, the sweet honeysuckle

Gently entwist; the female ivy so

Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.

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

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

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

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

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

he was

The ivy which had hid my princely trunk,

And sucked my verdure out on’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Review: David Hockney at the Royal Academy; Hockney, Shakespeare and the English Pastoral tradition

It is only recently that more people in the world came to be living in urban communities than in the countryside. This represents a profound shift in our relationship with the natural world. We are less rooted. The pattern of our daily lives is less marked by the rhythm of night and day and the passing of the seasons. We have lost the slow pace of the countryside, exchanged for the fast life of our cities.

David Hockney’s great exhibition A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy, London, invites us to pause; to view the world in old, slow time; to find beauty in the incidental or nondescript. Born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in 1937 Hockney regularly visited Bridlington on Yorkshire’s east coast as his mother lived there for the last thirty years of her life. He began a series of Yorkshire landscapes at the suggestion of a friend in 1997 and came to live and work in Bridlington some years later.

Since 2004, he has produced a monumental quantity of work in oil, watercolour, charcoal and digital media, often returning to the same locations to document the landscape. One such series, Tunnels, features an unremarkable farm track lined with straggly trees. Painted at different times of the year, working directly from nature on a series of canvases which fit together to create a composite picture, he transforms this seemingly drab scene into a world of startling conjunctions of colour, unexpected pattern and extraordinary beauty. The farm track in each of the paintings is placed at the centre of three canvases, leading on to the middle canvas of the three above where it disappears from view, suggesting new worlds of colour and vibrancy beyond.

By working direct from nature, Hockney’s work has freshness and immediacy. His delight, both in the landscape and the act of painting is everywhere manifest. He obviously works at speed without preliminary drawing and is happy to leave bare patches of canvas, sketchy lines or blobs or splashes of paint that have spilled from his brush. He wants us both to be aware of the physical process of painting as well as to share his delight in a natural world constantly in change from the wild, joyful pulsing of life in spring to the skeletal, leaflessness of winter.   

By placing himself in the landscape, scrutinizing and recording it, charting the progress of the seasons, he is teaching us how to see. As we stand in front of each painting, looking at each canvas in a series, noting changes from one image to the next, we are observing his process of observation. His lesson is simple; beauty is everywhere, even in the apparently banal, but to find it one first has to look. And one has to look not with hurrying, restless, urban eyes, but with the slow, patient gaze of the natural world.

As the work of Hockney’s friend Lucian Freud, also on show in London at the National Portrait Gallery, makes clear, it is the act of looking that is paramount. Freud’s intent, intense, unsettling eye concentrated mostly on the human form. Hockney found his subject almost by accident, his massive series of landscapes placing him firmly in a tradition which links Gainsborough and Stubbs in the 18^th century to Samuel Palmer, Constable and Turner in the 19^th to John and Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious in the last – along with countless others.

It’s clear that Hockney sees himself working in this tradition and one gallery is given over to his re-interpretations of Claude’s Sermon the Mount. It’s not the strongest work in the exhibition, but is a homage to one of the painters who, though not English, helped shape  English landscape painting and who directly influenced one of our greatest landscape painters – JMW Turner.

This tradition of landscape painting is of course echoed in literature in a line which includes modern poets such as Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes back through Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, to Wordsworth, Keats and John Clare back to Andrew Marvell, Shakespeare and beyond. Often (as with the painters), an idyllic, unspoilt rural world is contrasted with the corruption and ugliness of the urban world. In William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c1360-87), the ploughmen are seen to be hard working and honest,

Summe putten hem to the plough, pleiden ful seldene,

In settynge and in sowynge swonken ful harde

while townsfolk are depicted as idle, vain and pampered. This has parallels with Chaucer’s ploughman who in the Canterbury Tales, General Prologue (c1380-1390) is described as,

A trewe swynkere and a good was he,

Lyvynge in pees and parfit charitee.

This opposition between town and country is deeply embedded in our language. Thus the word ‘urbane’ derives from the Latin word ‘urbs’ (meaning ‘city’) from which urban also springs and ‘civilized’ from the Latin ‘civilis’ which in turn is related to ‘civis’ meaning ‘citizen’ and ‘civitas’ meaning ‘city-state.’ ‘Villain’ by contrast, originates from the Latin ‘villanus’ which simply meant ‘farmhand’ while ‘rustic’ meaning ‘uncouth, boorish or rude’ derives from the Latin ‘rus’ meaning ‘country’.  Put simply, our vocabulary associates the town with polish and style and the countryside with all things crude and backward while our poets have typically viewed the town as a place of iniquity and the natural world as a haven of peace and good living.

This polarisation is evident in many of Shakespeare’s plays such as As You Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream where characters leave the complications of life at court or city to find their true selves (and their true loves) in a forest. In the comedies, the natural world is safe and restorative. For the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as for Bottom who might be speaking for them, their night in the forest was ‘a most rare vision… a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was,’ while for Duke Senior and his ‘brothers in exile’ in As You Like It, life in the woods is ‘more free from peril than the envious court.’

For the duke, the ‘churlish chiding of the winter’s wind’ is benign, however chill, and serves to ‘feelingly persuade me what I am.’ Lear finds no such comfort. In his madness in the ‘pelting of this pitiless storm’ on the heath he came to see the injustices of his society with a terrible lucidity and cries,

Take physic pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them.

Despite gaining self-knowledge, Lear’s universe is bleak with the possibility of redemption seemingly denied. By the later plays, nature is once more bountiful and healing, Ceres promising Miranda and Ferdinand, ‘Earth’s increase, foison plenty/Barns and garners never empty.’ In The Tempest the corrupt political world of Milan is contrasted with the simplicity of life on Prospero’s ‘poor’, if magical island. Transformations are hard won, yet absolution ultimately granted - and according to Gonzalo ‘all of us’ found ‘ourselves/Where no man was his own.’ 

Shakespeare’s world was obviously greatly different to our own. In 1600 London was already an enormous city by contemporary standards, yet only numbered about 200,000 people. Even into the 19^th century town dwellers still kept poultry, pigs and occasionally cattle; distinctions between town and country were less defined than they are today.

Growing up in a largely rural England, references to nature are found everywhere in Shakespeare’s work – from the ‘bud of love’ that Juliet hopes will ‘prove a beauteous flower’ to Duncan’s assurance to Macbeth that ‘I have begun to plant thee and will labour/To make thee full growing.’ The late plays are full of pastoral imagery. In the funeral song in Act 4 Scene 2 of Cymbeline, Guiderius laments that,

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Commentators have noted that ‘Golden lads’ was a Warwickshire name for dandelions, the vivid yellow flowers that grow like weeds in fields and hedgerows and that ‘chimney-sweepers’ is an illusion to the same plant when it’s gone to seed, its head a light feathery ball that looks like a chimney-sweep’s brush. I have no idea of the truth of this. Before modern times I thought chimneys were cleaned either by dropping a live chicken down from above or forcing children up from below, but the flowery explication is so poetic and apt that I hope it true.

Implicit in almost all pastoral verse is the notion of change, death and decay. Wilderness and rural idyll carry echoes of the Garden of Eden and our inherently fallen nature. Death intrudes. This links back to the Hockney exhibition, because for all the wild exuberance of his paintings of hawthorn blossom there are reminders of mortality in the piles of stripped timber or the chopped trunk of a dead tree he painted and drew many times and named the ‘Totem’. Yet he doesn’t labour the point. The piles of logs have their own curious life and form part of a landscape rich with colour and movement.

If this is death, it is not chilly and macabre. And the dominant tone of the show is celebratory and affirmative, ending as it does with a huge evocation of spring and several smaller (but still large) paintings on the same theme. It invites us to look, take risks and find the beauty that is all around us whether in town or country.

There is not much of the town in A Bigger Picture, and few enough people apart from those in The Sermon on the Mount series and some dancers in the video installation that drew spontaneous applause from those viewing it. Yet I don’t think he’s making a political point, opposing town and country or advocating green politics or anything else. In part he chose his subject because he has become deaf and finds noisy, crowded places difficult. If the show is about anything, it is about observation – and one can look closely in town or country, whether studying people or trees or any other subject.

Inevitably, not all the work is equally successful. There are some wonderful charcoal studies that show his vast talent as a draughtsman and the incredibly powerful video display produced by nine cameras mounted on the front of a vehicle and shown on a bank of eighteen screens, but I thought many of the studio paintings more contrived and heavy than those painted outside. And although several of his i-pad drawings were very beautiful the majority seemed a little bland, especially the large, later images of Yosemite. I don’t imagine he cares what anyone thinks. Failure is part of the game. And he is constantly experimental, constantly intelligent, constantly at work. He is clearly still fired with energy. Long may it continue.

Review: As You Like It, Clwyd Theatr Cymru. Directed by Terry Hands

After thirty hours without food and two nights without sleep (thanks to a stomach bug), I wasn’t in great shape to see Clwyd Theatr Cymru’s As You Like It. I was rotten. The play was superb.

An immensely strong cast was led by Hedydd Dylan and Alex Felton. He played Orlando with unforced charm and humour while she was captivating as Rosalind. Feisty, playful and vibrant, she is a natural comic actor and was last year a storming Katerina in Theatr Clwyd’s Taming of the Shrew, (also directed by Terry Hands). Dylan and Felton were well supported by a brilliant cast.

Philip Bretherton as Jacques delivered the ‘seven ages’ speech with restrained and angry contempt, physically apart on stage as he was emotionally isolated from the Duke and his companions. Another notable performance was by Christian Patterson as increasingly dishevelled and lecherous Touchstone, while hilarious late cameos were added by Katie Elin-Salt as Phoebe and Elin Phillips as Audrey.

The sets and staging at Theatr Clwyd are invariably impressive. As You Like It was starkly minimalist. Gaunt, black vertical trunks created the Forest of Arden but clever use of lighting conveyed magical effects of moonlight and sunrise – and with only sparse additional scenery and a shower of fluttering golden foil the play ended with a wonderfully evoked pastoral. Clwyd Theatr Cymru is based in Mold, its associate actors almost all Welsh. With only two cast members born outside Wales the production has a rich and pleasing regional flavour, broader accents used to huge comic effect.

When so many Welsh cultural institutions are based in the south, we are privileged to have a gem like Theatr Clwyd in the north. We are also fantastically lucky that for the last fifteen years Terry Hands has been its Director. He brings huge intelligence, insight and flair to his work and almost never fails to deliver top quality productions. I was once slightly underwhelmed by his staging of Under Milk Wood, but that was in 2000, so perhaps he hadn’t yet hit full stride. As You Like It is another amongst his many triumphs.

On leaving the theatre I was told by a friend I looked considerably better at the end of the evening than at its beginning – yet more proof of the regenerative power of art. I went home. As You Like It travels to Swansea and Cardiff in March. South Wales will love it. Good health or bad.