Rain stops play: Wet summers in Elizabethan England

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

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

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

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

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

Contagious fogs; which falling in the land

Have every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents:

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

The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;

The fold stands empty in the drowned field,

And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;

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

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green

For lack of tread are undistinguishable:

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

Pale in her anger, washes all the air,

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

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts

Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,

And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown

An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds

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

The childing autumn, angry winter, change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,

By their increase, now knows not which is which:

And this same progeny of evils comes

From our debate, from our dissension;

We are their parents and original.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six Tempests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shakespeare, Staging the World @ the British Museum: Reivew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The isle is full of noises: Caliban at the Olympics

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

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

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

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

Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises,

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

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,

That if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open, and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,

I cried to dream again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Jonathan Abbatt for photo

On Living in an Old Country

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,

  Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold,

  Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

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

  Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

  The water which they beat to follow faster,

  As amorous of their strokes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to be a Literary Genius - Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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