The tender Spring

Unruly blasts wait on the tender Spring

Unwholesome weeds take root with precious flowers
The adder hisses where the sweet birds sing
What virtue breeds, iniquity devours.

Has Spring finally arrived? In the last week I have felt the sun’s warmth on my face and arms for the first time in 2018. In honour of Shakespeare’s birthday (and death-day) – 23rd April 1564 to 1616 – and St George’s Day, too, that Turkish dragon-slayer…. some Shakespeare words with Spring in the their step. The first quotation above is from The Rape of Lucrece, one of Shakespeare’s less well-known narrative poems and captures the whole ying-yang thing about life – rough with the smooth – good and bad mixed – it’s sometimes wintry just before Spring – “sweet are the uses of adversity” – but you have to hang on to Shelley’s line “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

Roaring Wharfe and calm Wharfe at Bolton Abbey

Song from As You Like It
It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green corn-field did pass
In spring time, in spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding:
Sweet lovers love the spring.

Between the acres of the rye,
These pretty country folks would lie….

This carol they began that hour,
How that a life was but a flower….

And therefore take the present time,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino; 
For love is crowned with the prime
In spring time, in spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding:
Sweet lovers love the spring.

Bolton Abbey: sunshine slanting down the banks

Song of Spring from Love’s Labour’s Lost
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue 
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree, 
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

When shepherds pipe on oaten straws
And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks,
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks
The cuckoo then, on every tree, 
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

Venus and Adonis 1592-3

Photo Credit: RSC (Greg Doran/Little Angel production)

Venus and Adonis
From the summer of 1592 onwards, plague was rife in London so all the theatres were closed to prevent the infection spreading through tightly-packed crowds. A small book was produced in 1593, which turned out to be the most frequently printed work by Shakespeare in his lifetime. Did he write it in 1592-3? Or earlier when he was at school studying Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the origin of the story? Or did he start it earlier and finish it when the theatres were closed? This important volume of poetry, Venus and Adonis, was printed by Richard Field, a neighbour of the Shakespeare family from Bridge Street in Stratford-upon-Avon. Field had set up in London and had a reputation as a scrupulously honest printer with exacting standards. The first edition is printed beautifully.

Images of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, played by Tom Sturridge and Eddie Redmayne in different dramatisations. Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis to this patron.

“The first heir of my invention”
In the dedication to the poem Shakespeare presents Venus and Adonis as “the first heir of my invention” suggesting that either:

• it was the first thing he had ever written
• it was the first thing he had ever printed or
• it was the first thing he wrote that he hoped to make money from

Writing plays was not a lucrative business in Elizabethan and Jacobean England; Shakespeare made his money from being a shareholder of the theatres in which he worked and later from land-owning and property development. Poetry was one of the few ways writers could make money, especially in well-bound short volumes. Venus and Adonis sold like hot cakes. Young people apparently carried the book around with them and no less than 10 editions had been printed by the time of Shakespeare’s death in 1616, a remarkable number considering the level of literacy at that time. Only one original copy of the first print run survives in the Bodleian library at Oxford.

Rubens, Titian and de Ribera paintings

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie
The poem tells of the goddess Venus pursuing the young Adonis who would prefer to go hunting the boar. The language is playful, comic, erotic (see lines in sub-heading above) and ultimately moving. The most frequent motifs in the poem are those of hunting, lips and kissing; the build-up of tension between the pair is a model of the will-they, won’t-they convention in comedy. Unusually for the time, the woman is the main protagonist and Venus is a lusty huntress, reveling in her own sexuality, beginning and ending the poem and driving forward the entire story. One of the key themes of Venus and Adonis is making hay while the sun shines, or, gather ye rosebuds while ye may, or carpe diem or, as the Sonnets express time and again, “love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Make use of time, let not advantage slip;
Beauty within itself should not be wasted:
Fair flowers that are not gather’d in their prime
Rot and consume themselves in little time.

The poem is written in six line stanzas with a controlled rhyme scheme (ababcc) so the poetry bounces along playfully but is crafted to within an inch of its life.

Photo Credit: RSC (Greg Doran/Little Angel production)

"Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies"
Venus uses all her metaphysical wit to try and persuade Adonis to give her a kiss, even fainting at one point. She is assisted by Adonis’s stallion, which gallops off lustily to nuzzle a passing mare, thus giving an illustration to Adonis of how he could behave, almost like the comic sub-plot of a play. In the recent Greg Doran/Little Angel production of the poem at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the horses almost upstaged Venus and Adonis. At the end (spoiler alert) when Adonis dies bleeding from his boar-wounds, Venus’s grief is real and painful and the Venus puppet in the RSC production became expressively heartbroken. The poem was possibly a response to Marlowe’s unbridled and unbuttoned Hero and Leander poem, with Shakespeare’s narrative being more controlled and consciously poetic, but whatever the inspiration (a poetic exercise, a way of making money when the theatres were closed, a poetry-battle with Marlowe, a joyous act of creation) Venus and Adonis cemented Shakespeare’s reputation in his lifetime and contains many elements that define his canon, not least his exploration of love:

Love is a spirit all compact of fire,
Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.

Elements of the poem reappear in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, not to mention the thematic connection with the Sonnet sequence and the other great narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece which can be seen as this poem’s tragic counterpart and which I’ll blog about in the future.

Photo Credit: RSC (Greg Doran/Little Angel production)

Thou met'st with things dying, I with things newborn

Favourite play?

I was often asked by students to name my favourite Shakespeare play or poem or sonnet. I have always found it an impossible task because each work contains moments of sublime stagecraft, astonishing language, profound thematic concepts and fundamental ideas about human existence. And most of the plays contain at least one bit of tatty old rubbish: clumsy characterization, an underwritten scene, some impenetrable phrases, images that no longer make sense and, of course, Shakespeare was writing for a stage with particular constraints (the most glaring being the inability to employ living breathing women as actresses, so female roles are fewer than they should be.) It surprises some people that I am happy to talk about the rubbish bits in Shakespeare, but, for me, it makes his work all the more wonderful for its raggedy unevenness. What I do know is that the best way to experience Shakespeare is to see it or hear it – always my philosophy as a teacher. Simply reading Shakespeare is only a fraction of the experience.

Exit, pursued by a bear - the famous stage direction from The Winter's Tale

Favourites at certain times

A good production can make any play feel like a favourite during its two or three hours length. My first Hamlet and my first Love’s Labour’s Lost were experienced at Bolton Octagon when I was a student in Manchester. I remember the Hamlet starred Douglas Hodge as the Prince and Ophelia’s dead body was brutally zipped up in a body bag on a pile of ruins in a war-torn “Denmark.” Love’s Labour’s Lost was directed by Ian Judge and set in an Oxbridge quadrangle, anticipating the designs for Kenneth Branagh’s film of the play. In both cases the plays were sparklingly clear for me and I became convinced that Shakespeare plays could survive being set anywhere anytime. Whenever I directed students in productions of the plays, each play became a favourite for the time I was working on it. But some plays have always been in the top five and The Winter’s Tale is one of them. Sally and I therefore travelled over to Bolton Octagon to renew my acquaintance with that theatre and had a great evening in Sicilia and Bohemia.

Sicilian scenes in David Thacker's The Winter's Tale at Bolton Octagon. Photographs by Ian Tilton

David Thacker’s production

The cast were uniformly strong:

• Rob Edwards brought Leontes’s morbid jealousy and consequent grief and remorse to blistering life 
• Amy Nuttall was a heartbreaking Hermione, dignified and queenly
• Margot Leicester created a Paulina that was compassionate as well as formidable and determined 
• As Polixenes, Christopher Wright personified humility (and later paternal rage after some comedy capering) 
• Christian Edwards’s Young Shepherd and Eric Potts’s Old Shepherd were delightfully unpretentious and endearing 
• Colin Connor was an engaging and appealing Autolycus 
• The young lovers, Harry Long as Florizel and Leila Mimmack as Perdita, were direct, vivid and vigorous 
• Most touching of all, I found Marc Small to be a compelling Camillo; both on and off text the actor was a brilliant listener and reactor to every nuance of every line spoken by every other character.
  

James Cotterill’s set and costume designs were clear in revealing the play’s moods and David Thacker’s direction was masterful in controlling the pace and the strange changes of tone in this extraordinary play.

Bohemian scenes in David Thacker's The Winter's Tale at Bolton Octagon. Photographs by Ian Tilton

Favourite lines

As well as being one of my favourite plays, The Winter’s Tale contains some of my favourite lines, spoken by Florizel to Perdita at the sheep-shearing festival after she has distributed flowers. The best way to appreciate Florizel’s sentiment is to say the words aloud (gently and calmly) and appreciate how the sound of the words echo the contents of the speech, so that “move still” and “still so” sound (to me anyway) like the “wave o’ the sea” in the previous line….

                        What you do
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet,
I'd have you do it ever: when you sing,
I'd have you buy and sell so, so give alms,
Pray so, and, for the ordering your affairs,
To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that: move still, still so,
And own no other function. Each your doing,
So singular in each particular,
Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds,
That all your acts are queens.

Florizels and Perditas from the net. Main picture = by Ian Tilton of Harry Long, Eric Potts and Leila Mimmack at Bolton Octagon