Nelson Mandela, Shakespeare and The Robben Island Bible

The world is full of extraordinary people. Mostly they are unknown outside their immediate community. Occasionally they enjoy a brief renown. More rarely, their lives will be remembered for centuries to come. Nelson Mandela is one such person. Along with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he is one of the truly great leaders of the last century. Without him, South Africa might have faced decades of bloodshed. Its future is still uncertain, but he gave his country freedom and continues to give it hope.

Mandela’s recent health scare was in part due to the fact that he is now an extremely old man. It was also due to a lung condition related to the tuberculosis he suffered whilst in prison on Robben Island. His twenty seven year incarceration is now part of the Mandela legend. Less familiar is the important role Shakespeare played in his captivity, as well as the lives of fellow inmates.

What was to become known as the Robben Island Bible belonged to prisoner 183/72, Sonny Venkatrathnam. Imprisoned during the 1970s, he disguised his copy of Shakespeare’s complete works by pasting Deepavali greetings cards onto its covers using porridge for glue. He then told the Afrikaner warders it was his bible, knowing that ‘There are two things he’s scared of: his God and his Bible… They did not touch it.’

Conditions on the island were always tough, but harshest between 1962 and 1966. A hunger strike brought some improvement, as did an International Red Cross inspection of the island and testimony given to the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid by former inmate Dennis Brutus. Further hunger strikes finally gained prisoners the right to study.

Such rights might be arbitrarily withdrawn. Warders could be obstructive.  And even once right to study had been granted, there were other obstacles to learning such as an absence of chairs in the prison cells. This at least had the advantage that students were less likely to fall asleep whilst reading.

Education was taken just as seriously by inmates who had had little or no formal education. Books were secretly made out of cement bags. Teachers or those with specialist knowledge used to hold lessons whilst working in the limestone quarry while prisoners organized groupings in the communal cells into those who wished to learn and those who did not. C1, a cell housing up to fifty men, thus became the study area. According to Sedick Isaacs,

‘Somebody clapped his hands and quiet descended over the cell. It was study period… An hour later the same person clapped his hands to signify the study period was over and conversation started again… At eight o’clock the bell rang to tell prisoners that they must now sleep. Only those with study privileges were allowed to stay awake till ten o’clock when a warder would come and flick the lights to indicate it was time to sleep.’

It was into this world that Sonny Venkatrathnam arrived with his ‘bible’. As he approached his release date, Venkatrathnam passed the book around some of the senior prisoners, asking them to mark the passage they felt had most resonance. Nelson Mandela chose lines from Julius Caesar. This was not a surprising choice, since the play had profound significance for black African Nationalists. The first president of Tanzania, Julius Nyere, translated it into Swahili and in 1944 the Youth League of the African National Congress ended its first manifesto with the lines,

‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

But in ourselves that we are underlings.’

A young Nelson Mandela was one of its signatories. The lines he was to mark in the Robben Island Bible three decades later were these,

Cowards die many times before their deaths:

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come, when it will come.

The passages marked by Mandela’s comrades in the Robben Island Bible were varied. Walter Sisulu chose from The Merchant of Venice,

‘For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe;

You call me mis-believer, cut-throat dog,

And spit upon my Jewish gabardine.’

Born of a Xhosa woman and white father, Sisulu clearly knew what it was to be despised. Billy Nair, who spent twenty years on the island, marked off a passage from The Tempest. Again, the implications are immediate,

‘This island’s mine…

… and here you sty me

In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me

The rest o’ the island.’

For a person dispossessed of his land by whites, imprisoned on a barren island, kept in a bare cell and forced to work the hard rock of a quarry the passage is staggeringly apt.

Andrew Masondo also chose from Julius Caesar,

‘Oh, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,

That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!

Thou art the ruins of the noblest man

That ever lived in the tide of times.

Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!

The words are powerful, but become multiply more so once placed in context of the treatment Masondo received. It is described by Dennis Brutus,

‘He had been tied to a stake in the centre of his working group…and he had been left there for some time, in the sun… the guards were armed with batons, or leather straps…they waded into the prisoners with batons and straps and sticks and then grabbed wooden pick handles and staves from a nearby storing shed… It was an indescribable fury unleashed.’

After such an experience, Masondo’s take on bleeding pieces of earth and costly blood, is likely to be notably different to that of the average academic.

Most of the information in this piece has been taken from Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island, by Ashwin Desai. It’s a fascinating and at times very moving book, placing Mandela amongst others with whom he shared both the struggle against apartheid and prison. After the years of his presidency and retirement, it has almost come to seem as if he was the only important activist or the ANC the only protest movement.

Reading Revolution reminds us otherwise. Prisoners on the island belonged to the Black Consciousness Movement, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Pan African Congress, Azanian People’s Liberation Army and many others.

The portrait that emerges of Mandela is of a man of huge intelligence, thoughtfulness and strength of character though not an easy person to know. Richard Stengel, who ghosted Mandela’s autobiography, said of him, ‘The man and the mask are one.’ Ahmed Kathrada, who spent twenty five years in prison with Mandela put it more simply, ‘He’s impenetrable.’

Ashwin’s view of post-apartheid South Africa is also questioning; only too aware of the corruption, violence and persistent inequality marring his country. Sonny Venkatrathnam is even more critical,

‘I am bitter. I don’t deny that. I think I’m bitter that so many years of struggle seem to have gone down the drain… we’ve got the right to vote, we’ve got the right to free speech… but we don’t have the right to free education; no free medicine; no free housing or anything like that; which is the crux of democracy. If you don’t have that, to have the right to vote is meaningless.’

Sonny Venkatrathnam’s Robben Island Bible was one of the concluding exhibits at last year’s Shakespeare: Staging the World exhibition at the British Museum. Having to hurry through the final sections, I missed seeing it. It was a shame, but not a great one. It was after all, just another Complete Works, though one with Deepavali greetings cards pasted to its covers with porridge, admittedly.

The value of any book isn’t in its materiality, but in its content. Forced into exile on a ‘rotten carcass of a butt’, Prospero took with him the most precious volumes from his library, prized ‘above my dukedom.’ They lined his bare cell and Caliban knew them as a source of power, urging Stephano and Trinculo, ‘First to possess his books; for without them/He’s but a sot, as I am.’

The warders on Robben Island were also aware that knowledge is power, one of them telling Alcott Dumelelo Blow, ‘If we give you education, we are sharpening the spear against us.’ Having won the right to study, prisoners took degrees in law, accountancy and computing - even though they had no computers.

Yet books have power beyond equipping us for law or accountancy, however important these are. They also feed the soul; fire the imagination. They set us free, even from the worst of prisons. As Mandela’s colleague Eddie Daniels put it,

‘Shakespeare was a voyage of discovery. I never knew about Shakespeare, never heard of Shakespeare at primary school, but when I discovered Shakespeare it was beautiful, it was beautiful you know. It was a voyage of discovery for me… to read books which I never ever dreamt of reading was beautiful.’

Henry V, Churchill, and the rhetoric of war

For much of his presidency, a bust of Sir Winston Churchill was placed in George W Bush’s Oval Office. On coming to power in 2008, Barrack Obama had it removed. While Bush may have seen Churchill as a heroic defender of democracy, Obama regarded him as an imperialist oppressor, his father’s family having suffered during the Mau Mau rebellion. One man’s celebrated war hero was another’s colonial tyrant.

He was both. A complex and troubled man, Churchill’s career was marked by a series of mistakes, controversies, disasters and tragedies. Yet in 1940 he was the single man able to lead Britain’s fight against Nazism. At times it seemed his only weapon was the power of his rhetoric. Speaking in April 1963, President John F Kennedy said of Churchill’s oratory, ‘In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone… he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.’

Churchill’s gift for speech making was not innate. As a child he spoke with a lisp, was considered a dunce at school and twice failed exams to get into Sandhurst.  Hope for us all. It was whilst with the army in India that he began a serious study of rhetoric, working his way through the speeches of Gladstone, Disraeli and other notable speakers, analysing their construction.

He learnt well; his great wartime speeches deploy every rhetorical device. They featured repetition (We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender), lists (I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat…), inversion (This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning), colloquialisms (Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job), metaphor (Now the old lion… stands alone against hunters), quotation (‘Every morn brought forth a noble chance/And every chance brought forth a noble knight’ Tennyson), contrast (Broad, sunlit uplands… the abyss of a new Dark Age), his lines of rolling grandiloquence (Wickedness, enormous, panoplied, embattled, seemingly triumphant, casts its shadow over Europe and Asia) generally offset by sentences of short monosyllables (These are not dark days; these are great days).

Like almost anyone from his background, Churchill would have grown up familiar with both the bible and Shakespeare. In one of his earliest wartime speeches he referred to freedom as ‘a house of many mansions’ and there are frequent echoes of Shakespeare in his phraseology.

He consistently referred to Britain as ‘our Island’ – the noun always capitalised in his typescripts. This helped emphasize both Britain’s isolation in its opposition to Nazism, but also its special destiny. It was not part of the continental landmass dominated by the ‘barbarisms of Nazidom and Bolshevism’.

This constant reference to our island evokes John of Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’ and, less flatteringly, Britaine’s disparagement of that ‘nook-shotten isle of Albion’ in Henry V. We have always defined ourselves against the French, even when not at war with them. Even when they were on the same side.

The sense of Britain as a beleaguered nation battling against superior forces was conjured by Churchill in his ‘House of many mansions’ broadcast when he said, ‘Certainly it is true that we are facing numerical odds; but that is nothing new in our history. Very few wars have been won by mere numbers alone… Numbers do not daunt us.’ In the minds of many of his listeners would have been Henry’s speech before Agincourt when his bedraggled army faced the flower and might of French chivalry. In Act 4 Scene 3 he tells his followers,

From this day to the ending of the world

But we in it shall be remembered –

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
 For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition.

Consciously or not, Churchill was to echo Henry’s words in two of his most celebrated speeches. Speaking in the House of Commons following Dunkirk and the fall of France, he said,

‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’

Henry’s timespan ‘from this day to the ending of the world’ may be a little more expansive than Churchill’s ‘thousand years’ but both suggest an enduring moment of glory. Only a few weeks later, at the height of the Battle of Britain in August 1940, Churchill was to reference the Agincourt speech again when he told the Commons,

‘The gratitude of every home in our Island… goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

Churchill’s ‘few’ – ‘undaunted by odds’ - is a clear restatement of Henry’s ‘happy few’. It is a tellingly simple word on which to end a speech packed with alliteration, assonance, repetition and grand phrasing.

In many ways Henry V is a patriotic hymn, showing us at our heroic best. It is therefore not surprising that Churchill’s government wished to enlist it as part of the war effort - and in 1943, Jack Beddington, a civil servant in the Ministry of Information invited Laurence Olivier to produce a film version of the play. A sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve, Olivier had yet been regularly touring the country with a medley of rousing speeches, always ending with ‘Once more unto the breach dear friends…’

He both starred and directed, cutting Shakespeare’s text from 3,000 to 1500 words, in the process shaving anything that would detract from Henry’s stature as war leader. His threat to the governor of Harfleur to have ‘your naked infants spitted upon spikes’ is omitted. So too is his order that ‘every soldier kill his prisoners’ after the French have attacked the baggage boys, while Bardolph’s execution also goes unmentioned. This is Shakespeare as propaganda.

When released in 1944 the film was dedicated ‘To the commando and airborne troops of Great Britain’ and its first audience would have been conscious of the parallels between Henry’s battle and their own. By trivial coincidence, the early theatres shared use with cockfights, dog fights and bear baiting shows which is why in the Prologue Shakespeare referred to the ‘cockpit’ that now holds ‘the vasty fields of France’. By 1944, the words ‘cockpit’ and ‘dogfight’ had taken on a very new and different meaning, both intimately familiar to the ‘few’ of Churchill’s speech.

Although the play is stirringly patriotic, it isn’t merely a celebration of war. In one of its key scenes, a disguised Henry moves amongst his troops on the eve of battle. In conversation with ordinary soldiers, one of them tells him, 

‘If the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, ‘We died at such a place,’ some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey, were against all proportion of subjection.’

Strikingly, Shakespeare gives the speech to a character called Michael Williams. Unlike Bardolph, Pistol and Nym whose names reflect their comic oddity, Michael’s is the name of Everyman. There must be hundreds of Michael Williams in any large town. By choosing the name for him he did, Shakespeare is giving him respect. Its ordinariness deflects ridicule.

He speaks for the common man and tells of ‘wives left poor’ and ‘children rawly left’. Death in battle is not glorious. It is bloody and brutal, with ‘all those legs and arms and heads chopped off’.

In his speech before Agincourt, Henry said that those who fought with him would ‘gentle their condition. At Harfleur he appealed to the ‘good yeomen’. In other words, making it clear he was leading a whole nation, not a narrow military caste of noblemen.

The Second World War has been described as ‘the People’s War’, though the patrician Churchill did not refer to it as such. At its end he was voted out of office, Labour winning the election by a landslide. Churchill had been an indispensable war leader, but the people chose Clement Attlee to lead them into peace.

Roads to War: Henry V and Iraq

Another tenth anniversary approaches. In March 2003 the US led coalition invaded Iraq. It was a disaster on almost every level. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and many continue to die every year in continuing instability; opinion in the Arab world hardened against the west, pushing countless young men towards militancy and Al-Qaida; in Iran the liberal, western leaning opposition was hugely damaged and its theocracy strengthened; crucial resources were diverted from Afghanistan at a time when that country was beginning a fragile recovery after years of Taliban rule; thousands of Coalition service personnel were killed or damaged by the conflict; at home disillusion with politicians and our political processes intensified.

Defending his decision to invade, Blair now cites the removal of Saddam Hussein as an unquestionable good. Few would argue otherwise, but Parliament didn’t vote for regime change as a stated war aim. Ironically, had Bush and Blair waited a few more years, he would probably have been deposed in the Arab Spring anyway, along with Ben Ali of Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt, Gadaffi in Libya and Saleh in Yemen.

As we built towards what seemed an unstoppable invasion in February 2003, I was beginning work on a comic book version of Henry V. Parallels were intense. For one thing, the play opens with Henry questioning two Archbishops on the legality of his claim to the French throne, and hence of his planned incursion into France.

This claim was tenuous, based on the fact that his great-great-grandmother Isabella was daughter of Philippe IV. The case was weak in law, partly because Isabella’s son, Edward III had renounced his right to the throne in return for substantial territories, but more importantly because French law denied inheritance through the female line. Henry asserted it did, ignoring the fact that should inheritance descend through the female line, his cousin Philippa had a better claim to the English throne than he did.

The intricacies of Salic Law are bewildering, but slightly more understandable than whether or not we had the right to invade Iraq under United Nations Resolution 1441. In a memo of 30 January 2003, Blair’s Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, had declared the war wouldn’t be legal without a further UN Resolution. Blair knew this would not be forthcoming. We shall probably never know whether political pressure was placed on Goldsmith, but in final advice written on 17 March he deemed the war to be lawful.

This was not a view shared by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who in September 2004 said it was ‘not in conformity with the UN Charter… from the charter point of view, it was illegal.’ Henry’s claim was supported by his Archbishops. Blair’s invasion of Iraq was condemned by another, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who in 2003 described the decision to support Bush as ‘mind boggling’ and in 2012 called the invasion of Iraq ‘morally indefensible.’

The case for war was made on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, which according to Blair could be used against the United Kingdom within 45 minutes of a decision to deploy them.

In the months leading up to the war, Dr Hans Blix had led a UN team searching for WMD. No evidence of their existence was found. Blix had pleaded for more time to continue his investigation in an attempt to avert the conflict, but this was disregarded.

There was clear pressure of time. The US had tens of thousands of troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and the Pentagon knew they had to go into action before the onset of summer when desert conditions would have become impossibly hot. Any delay meant either holding them in base or returning them home.

Henry V faced similar campaigning constraints. Arriving in France in August 1415 he immediately began a siege of Harfleur, but this took longer than anticipated and the town didn’t fall until September 22. Although this was late in the season and his army strength had been diminished by dysentery, Henry was reluctant to return home without further reward. He therefore headed north, for Calais. As the French army moved to block this advance, the two met at Agincourt on October 25 1415.

Here, the lateness of the campaign was to Henry’s advantage as the field of battle had been recently ploughed and days of heavy rain turned it to mud. As the leading French knights were felled by English and Welsh archers, the weight of numbers following behind meant the second wave stumbled into the fallen and tumbled into the mud. Many drowned in it or were crushed by those pushing on them behind.

The slaughter of French knights was immense, but even at the time Henry’s victory was tainted by his decision to have massed prisoners put to death. On balance, it was felt to be a legitimate decision, given his fear that the prisoners might re-arm and attack again. Less easy to justify was Henry’s conduct at the siege of Rouen in the winter of 1418-19 in which twelve thousand starving women and children left the city in the hope of safe passage. Henry refused this, leaving them to die of cold and hunger in the perimeter ditch.

In modern terms, this would certainly have been considered a war crime or crime against humanity. There is still faint hope that Blair will be dragged before the International Court in The Hague on similar charges. The concept of a ‘just war’ was much discussed in 2003. It is also a key aspect of Act 4 Scene 1 when the disguised King Henry talks with ordinary soldiers on the eve of Agincourt. One of them tells him,

If the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, ‘We died in such a place,’… I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle… Now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it.

The soldier’s words are impressive and moving. It is indeed a ‘black matter’ for any ruler to lead his country to war without good cause. In Blair’s case, everything turns on the weapons of mass destruction and the extent to which evidence of their existence was inflated.

In February 2004, Dr Blix accused the British and US governments of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq’s WMD to justify invasion. He was not alone in this view. Dr David Kelly, a member of the weapons inspectorate clearly felt the case had been ‘sexed up’ – to use Andrew Gilligan’s infelicitous phrase.  Less sensationally stated, Major General Michael Laurie told the Chilcot Inquiry in 2011 that the purpose of the intelligence dossier ‘was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.’ Since Major General Laurie helped compile the dossier, I guess he should know. His deposition echoed an earlier finding by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2008 when it stated the Bush administration had ‘misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq’.

It is possible that the Chilcot Inquiry into the war will give us a clearer understanding of what happened in the days preceding the invasion. This is uncertain, since in July 2012 the government vetoed release of Cabinet documents to the Inquiry, at the same time that the Foreign Office successfully appealed against disclosure of phone calls made between Bush and Blair.

On February 15 millions of people around the world marched to protest against the impending war. In London, there were perhaps as many as two million marchers, myself amongst them. It was an extraordinary and inspiring occasion. We failed.

It is hard to know why a politician as astute and sensitive to popular opinion should have committed himself so completely to the disastrous American led invasion of Iraq. There are various theories. One argues that by allying himself to the US, he believed he could exert a moderating influence on policy (if true, a humiliating delusion); another suggests that a successful and applauded intervention in Sierra Leone had given him a taste for military solutions. It is possible that after two election victories, a huge majority in parliament and seven years in power he had simply gone mad; a messianic sense of purpose intensified by a growing Catholic adherence and belief in his own infallibility, whatever the evidence or opposition.

On March 17 Lord Goldsmith gave his opinion that the war was legal. Two days later the bombing of Iraq began. Overnight Tony Blair became what he has remained, a figure of hatred and ridicule.

Ten Years of Shakespeare Comic Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art theft: Shakespeare, Picasso and grand larceny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rain stops play: Wet summers in Elizabethan England

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

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

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

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

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

Contagious fogs; which falling in the land

Have every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents:

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

The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;

The fold stands empty in the drowned field,

And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;

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

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green

For lack of tread are undistinguishable:

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

Pale in her anger, washes all the air,

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

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts

Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,

And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown

An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds

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

The childing autumn, angry winter, change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,

By their increase, now knows not which is which:

And this same progeny of evils comes

From our debate, from our dissension;

We are their parents and original.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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