Hope the voyage is a long one

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

John Keats, in his famous Ode to Autumn, outlines, in three stanzas the abundant harvest of Autumn, then its hard-working processes and finally its descent into the potential of Winter…. whatever Winter means. Old age? Death? And Spring will surely come again….

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run….

I’ve just about emerged from the shadow of Covid and have my booster booked (go, me!) So, I find myself once again striding out to enjoy the burnished colours and low-lying sunlight of Autumn.

Hope the voyage is a long one

As well as Keats, I’ve recently reached for the words of a Greek poet I admire, Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, better known in English as CP Cavafy. I’ve pasted below one of his poems that reminds me to “not hurry the journey.” To savour the here and now. The poem’s title, Ithaka, refers to the island home of Odysseus, the hero/antihero who took ten years to reach Ithaka (and his wife) after leaving the Trojan War. Ithaka captures the idea that life is so fleeting (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter….) that it is important to savour the journey, not to only focus on the destination. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors has themes of loss, travel, searching, finding your identity and reunion and a joyous production I saw in an outdoor theatre in summer in Stratford-upon-Avon made its way on tour to the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford. Welcome to the north, Royal Shakespeare Company! It was an uplifting return to live theatre:

“after so long grief, such nativity.”

Moving, frantic, hilarious, inspiring. Like Keats, like Cavafy. May all your voyages be long.

Ithaka

by CP Cavafy

translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

As you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.

May there be many a summer morning when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbours seen for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you have gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.

Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Talking Shakespeare Neljä (Four)

Dense, Juicy, Layered

David Oyelowo, speaking from Los Angeles, remembered a dusty (and intimidating) copy of Shakespeare’s plays in his family’s Islington council flat. He was later surprised to discover Kenneth Branagh’s film of Henry V was also written by Shakespeare, having watched it as a movie, not caring about the language. The real breakthrough for David, though, was seeing a live production at the National Theatre – the visceral production of Robert Lapage’s mudbath Midsummer Night’s Dream with Timothy Spall as Bottom. David started acting accidentally when he tried to impress a girl by joining a youth theatre and then standing in when another young actor couldn’t attend because of a tube strike. His Theatre Studies teacher, Jill Foster, encouraged him to consider acting as a profession and helped David audition (successfully) for LAMDA. His father fully expected him to “get it out of his system” when he was given small roles (seven lines in Antony and Cleopatra) at the Royal Shakespeare Company. But the bug had bitten and seeing someone like Mark Rylance in his fourth incarnation of Hamlet at The Globe deliver the language with “dexterity, musculariy and elasticity” further reinforced David’s conviction that Shakespeare is the “Everest of Acting… so dense, so juicy, so layered.” 

Greg Doran of the Royal Shakespeare Talking Shakespeare with David Oyelowo, Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen

Vulnerability and Frailty

He gave a very funny account of getting the role of Henry VI and loved “the journey” of his time on Michael Boyd’s production but became weary of the “pioneer” emphasis placed on him by the media wanting to interview him about being the first black actor at the RSC to play an English king. He detected a similarity between Dr Martin Luther King in the movie Selma and Henry VI where the abiding motivation for both characters, as he played them, was religious faith, leading to vulnerability and frailty. David felt that both MLK and Henry VI fully expected everyone around them to be imbued with the same values and were both destabilised when the. His other major Shakespeare role was playing Othello with Daniel Craig and Rachel Brosnahan (as Iago and Desdemona) in an intimate production in New York in 2015. Like Greg Doran, I hope he can be tempted away from Hollywood for more UK stage work in the future.

Selection of David Oyelowo roles: as Henry VI, Othello, Orlando in As You Like It and the movie Selma

Queen Helen

Helen Mirren is a multiple award winner: she has carried home an Oscar, a Tony and an Emmy and has famously played a line of queens: Queen Margaret in the Henry VI trilogy; and on TV and film: Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II. She also has the distinction of playing Cleopatra three times, first at the National Youth Theatre in 1963 and then later playing opposite Michael Gambon (1982) and Alan Rickman (1998) as her Antonys. I was lucky to see the 1982 Adrian Noble production (in The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon) and for me it became a benchmark production of how epic plays can be staged in small spaces. Helen’s early memories of working at the RSC include watching the generous Ian Richardson from the wings in Coriolanus.  She reminisced about working (warily) with the mercurial Nicol Williamson (on both stage and in the film Excalibur) and played Lady Anne, Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Ophelia to Alan Howard’s Hamlet. She also vividly recounted the touring production of Troilus and Cressida which many argued brought the play back into favour in modern times and she described working with Peter Brook in the legendary project Conference of the Birds which toured the Saharan regions of Africa in 1979.

Helen Mirren as Cleopatra (three times), Cressida, Prospera in The Tempest and Rosalind in As You Like It

Sir Ian ("You shall not pass....")

Ian McKellen has had recent experience of remembering his distinguished acting career as part of his touring one-man show which raised considerable funds for small venues throughout the UK. (Tolkien, Shakespeare, Others and You.) With Greg Doran he shared early memories of seeing and loving theatre and getting involved in amateur and school productions. He always thought Shakespeare seemed fun and enjoyed travelling down from Bolton for school Shakespeare camps in Stratford-upon-Avon. He saw Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft and Charles Laughton in their prime (but also confessed to sleeping through Olivier’s Corialanus – it was a school trip, after all.) At Cambridge he joined the Marlowe Society and came under the influence of George Rylands who has mentored many of today’s great theatre directors as well as John Barton who persuaded young McKellen he could play the ancient Justice Shallow in Henry IV Part Two. He gave a moving account of working at Nottingham Playhouse with Tyrone Guthrie who gave McKellen confidence about becoming an actor and credits Maggie Smith with recommending him to Olivier to join the Old Vic. He was waspish about Franco Zefirelli and had insights into the impact of Olivier and of touring Shakespeare in the provinces and abroad with Prospect Theatre. I’ve seen many of his stage performances and been lucky to meet him both backstage after Waiting for Godot and at a UK showing of the film Gods and Monsters at Bradford’s Pictureville Cinema. Always gracious and always energetic, with a significant place in popular film history with his portrayals of Magneto and Gandalf, Sir Ian continues to be an astonishing creative force for good in the UK.

Ian McKellen as Romeo, Macbeth, Toby Belch in Twelfth Night (which I saw in Doncaster!), Coriolanus, Richard III, King Lear (twice) and Prospero in The Tempest at Leeds Playhouse

"Truly Heart-stirring Relic"

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, begun in 1847, looks after key properties and materials today

September 1847
September always feels like a time of renewal – throughout my school years and my career as a teacher it always signalled the start of the new term, new books, new pens, turning over a new leaf. It signals the month when Autumn begins and the Summer fades fast. April, wrote T S Eliot in The Wasteland, “is the cruellest month” but for me April means my Mum’s and Sister’s birthdays and (not-so-secretly for those who know me) Shakespeare’s birthday on the 23rd April (which was also his death day and has been designated the feast of St George…) We often make unremarkable dates significant by remembering personal events – the first time or the last time we did something…. September also contains a historical twanging thrill for me, a secret celebration, I know, for many Shakespeare fanatics…. In 1847 an auction took place in London advertising the sale of “The Truly Heart-stirring Relic of a Most Glorious Period, and of England’s Immortal Bard.” What we now know as Shakespeare’s Birthplace was up for public sale and celebrities as grand as Prince Albert and Charles Dickens were promoters of “saving the house for the nation.” Stratford-upon-Avon has never looked back, though it was an uphill struggle to keep the project on track and every year sees challenges to the promotion of Shakespeare’s genius. One of my favourite blogs (The Shakespeare Blog by Sylvia Morris) details the struggle and the commemoration of the auction in 2017.

Shakespeare flirting with both Comedy and Tragedy in a Richard Westall painting at the Birthplace Trust and London scenes from recent visits to The Globe on the South Bank in London.

Inveruel, Colintraive

Harriet, Chris, Emily, Sally and me in September, north of Hadrian's Wall....

Home from home
Regular readers will know there are (currently) three other spots in the UK where I feel “at home” other than Yorkshire:

• Badby/Stratford-upon-Avon/the Cotswolds
• Northumberland (especially the coast)
• and Scotland.

So, in September, it was a deep pleasure to visit another Scottish spot we’ve never been to – Colintraive, near Dunoon on the Cowal Peninsula – miles from the nearest shop and hunkered down in a house called Inveruel overlooking Loch Riddon.

Inveruel, Colintraive, lovely house with views and visiting sheep....

Test of a holiday
In our retired state (mindful of budgets) the test of any holiday is that the place we stay has to be as nice or nicer than our own home. Inveruel exceeded expectations: well-designed, with oak floors, plenty of space for spreading out to relax, read, do jigsaws, eat, drink, sleep and strip off muddy boots and coats from hearty walks.

Rooms with a View or two
It also had lovely views. And it was easy to feel Gatsby-like and imagine the lights over the loch belonged to mysterious celebrities. The nights were dark, the stars were out, the moon was bright and the next few blogs will have pictures of what we did during the week….

Plenty of atmosphere and chances to star-gaze as the sun went down....

Exciting times

July memories with Harriet, Chris, Emily, Alex from Badby, Sally and random daleks

That was July and this is August
Yes, another brief blog, but, then again, loved ones tell me some people only look at the pictures anyway…. which is fine. So, yes, the 2018 summer heatwave continues (gorgeous weather or the beginning of our planet’s final descent into a cosmic inferno of global warming? Who knows? Time will tell.) My eldest daughter celebrated her July birthday in fine style in beautiful places and doing cool things and is plotting the next stage of her life (what will happen? Who knows? Time will tell.) I’ve been revisiting my past notes on Merry Wives of Windsor and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays in anticipation of this year’s Royal Shakespeare Company Summer School (my manly vice.) And I’ve been receiving feedback from my beta readers (thank you, all) on the (6th ? draft) of Raydan Wakes, the first book in the trilogy Rhenium Tales on which I’m doing my final feedback-fuelled revisions. Plots for all three books are sewn up, the website is almost ready to be released to the world, so that’s one item on the bucket list that can be ticked off. (Will an agent champion it? Who knows? Time will tell.) Exciting times.

top page of the soon-to-be-released website about my trilogy....

When old people plant trees

En route South, "is Shakespeare coming out to play?"

Ripley Castle, near Harrogate
May and June are great months to wander round gardens with Spring definitely springing and Summer peeping out every now and again. A recent re-visit to Ripley Castle (home of the Inglebys, Trooper Jane and Civil War shenanigans) featured a lovely walk around the walled areas, lakes and weirs in the deer park and grounds. Blooms, bushes, trees and views across the lake – great soup for the soul.

Ripley Castle

New Place
The picture at the top of this post is of one of my favourite spots in the world, New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s family house, which I’ve blogged about before. It was a stop-off on a recent venture South – yes, the South, the land below the North. My next blog will show where we went. In the meantime New Place was as tranquil as ever; great to visit early in the morning on a working day and happily just before any school parties or tourist buses arrived. And did those feet in ancient time (Shakespeare’s, that is) tread the ground of New Place and did those hands write some his works there? I have no doubt.

The centre of Shakesperare's world for the final stretch of his life

Greek Proverb
A society grows great when old people plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. As I hit the home stretch of my first novel, Sally is spending as much time as the weather allows in the garden, tending, feeding, pruning, designing. Waiting for things to grow is a wonderful pass-time for humanity, seeing the incremental budding and bursting. If we all spent more time gardening, the world would doubtless blossom.

Kenilworth Castle

Robert Laneham
An eyewitness account by Robert Laneham has allowed English Heritage to recreate an Elizabethan privy garden at Kenilworth Castle. The whole site is well-managed with excellent audio-guides (in my opinion) and it was easy to picture Elizabeth I stopping there with Robert Dudley on her tour and lingering longer than planned. Robert Laneham writes that he sneaked into the garden one day when the queen was “out hunting” and noted the fountain could “at the twist of a stopcock” shoot spouts of water over anyone in the grounds who was “found hot in desire.” (Having been in the Civil War at Ripley, Jacobean times at New Place and Elizabethan times at Kenilworth, we then went further back in time for our next stop….)

Kenilworth Castle

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)

Fish Finger Butties

Back in Yorkshire
After a week on Anglesey it was good to touch down in time to catch the final afternoon of the Saltaire Festival. The beaches, castles, walks and bridges of north Wales will appear in a future blog but, for now, I’m commemorating the joys of tucking in to a Fish Finger Butty (with a glass of prosecco!), listening to the music and soaking up the atmosphere of my adopted “village”, Saltaire. (I noticed I was not alone in gravitating towards the Fish Finger Heaven stand….)

A sense of place; images of Saltaire including the day of the Tour de Yorkshire

Sense of place
I’ve written elsewhere about the concept of “home” (having felt roots in Wakefield, Manchester, Stratford-upon-Avon, Helsinki, Sheffield, Leek, Bingley, Badby, Dorking and even in Sorrento, Italy and Wengen, Switzerland….) One good thing about Saltaire, though, is that it has risen to a sense of itself through a series of cultural and entrepreneurial decisions. When Jonathan Silver invested in the purchasing of Salt’s Mill in 1987 he boosted the local economy, leisure and work opportunities and promoted David Hockney’s work through gallery space in the converted mill. Regular events like the Advent Windows or the Open Gardens ensure there are often reasons to walk around the World Heritage site. So it’s always good to come “home.”

2017 Saltaire Festival - band at top = the excellent Backyard Burners

The School's The Thing

A leaf on The Greenwood Tree, Michael Thompson and Robert Lister

Back to the street across the ford at the River Avon
And so back to Stratford-upon-Avon, this time for a retirement present for my Shakespeare buddy, Michael. We’re enthusiasts for productions of Shakespeare and, in particular since the mid-1970s, the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company. And so I planned a geek day of exhibitions, walks and tourist attractions; things that you can fit in when the demands of paid work are in the past. Luckily for me, I also had a secret weapon for two bits of the day: actor Robert Lister, the partner of Pat, one of my long-standing friends from the world of drama teaching.

The Play's The Thing exhibition at the RSC and the view across the Great Garden at New Place to the theatres

A leaf for his pages
I included a picture of The Greenwood Tree in my blog about New Place, but I didn’t know that Rob and Pat already had an engraved leaf there so it was a thrill to find it on the wall when Rob helped us envision the outline of the roofspace and floor plan of New Place.

Busts in the Schoolroom decorated by pupils at the current school on site

Ripe voice of Raconteur
Rob is a journeyman actor, known for work with the RSC, National, English Touring Theatre, one-man site-specific shows and as Lewis Carmichael in The Archers. On this occasion he was a vivid storyteller bringing to life not only New Place but also the extraordinary Schoolroom and Guildhall, renovated in recent years and opened to the public.

The cradle of the bard's imagination and a very very early Tudor rose (the first ever depicted?)

The child is father of the man
It is inconceivable that Shakespeare didn’t attend the Schoolroom above the Guildhall in Stratford, given the status of his father, John Shakespeare, as alderman, chief magistrate and bailiff at various times. One of the more romantic concepts illustrated in the displays at the Schoolroom and Guildhall was how likely it was that the child Shakespeare would have observed petty trials and travelling actors as his father presided over the Court of Record and granted licenses to the touring companies. The trial scenes in plays like The Merchant of Venice and The Winter’s Tale surely had their seeds sown here. And did the young Shakespeare leave with one of the companies when he was in his early 20s, father of three young children but, critically, son of a man who was facing financial ruin by then? Shakespeare travelled and then started to commute between Warwickshire and the capital, desperate to find a level of success – as he eventually did as actor, writer and, most significantly for his family’s economics, as theatre shareholder and landowner in both London and Stratford.

The Guild of the Holy Cross, next door to the Guildhall with a stained glass window depicting Edward VI and John Shakespeare and extraordinary wall paintings

Raydan Wakes

No blog
On Thursday 31st July 2014 no blog written by me existed out there in cyberspace. Today (Saturday 26th August 2017) there are 172 posts and, although the original intention of always connecting everything to Shakespeare hasn't been fulfilled, the regularity has settled into a 5 a month pattern and I've got better at incorporating pretty pictures which some readers tell me are (quite truthfully) the best bits. I can live with that. I've learned to keep to my own deadlines. The dream of course was to write a novel....

No words
On Friday 1st April 2016 there were no words for a novel but that's the date I started dedicating three days a week to writing. There was the play set in a doctors' surgery. There was the screenplay set on the banks of a river. There were the poems about birth and childhood. There was the book about growing up Roman Catholic.... and there was the story of a red-haired teenager who suddenly realised his parents and the world around him were not what he thought....

Rhenium
On Monday 1st August 2016 it dawned on me that all the other writing projects had fallen away and Raydan, the red-haired teenager on the planet Rhenium, had become real to me and scenes I had written were having consequences in my imagination. And I had to write more. So The Akolyte Wars were born. The story became The Rhenium Wars. The over-arching story is currently Rhenium Tales and the first book is Raydan Wakes.

Tippy-tapping
On Sunday 7th August 2016 I finally started committing to the laptop and at 10:30am on Friday 25th August 2017 (yesterday) I finally printed the final chapter of my first draft for my first reader, Emily. It took me a couple of years of churning out blogs, 4 months of experimenting, a week of fear deciding whether or not Rhenium was The One, and then One Year And Eighteen Days to produce Draft One of 118,285 words divided into 15 chapters, each chapter having 3 distinct sections. (And bits that have been edited out are already waiting to be pasted into Book Two....) I have no doubt that the final word count will come down. The first version of Chapter 15 was 12,000 words, at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon it became just over 8,000 words. Today it's 6,521 words. Editing's the way to go. But I'm feeling weird at the moment - half Superman and half petrified/embarrassed/confused. What next? Keep editing. Keep writing. Just keep going.

Superman picture credit: Sacha Goldberg

There is a world elsewhere

Productions during the 2017 summer school

70th anniversary of the summer school
I’ve just finished attending the 70th anniversary of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Summer School. There are some attendees who remember seeing Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh perform in Stratford in Titus Andronicus in 1955. Four years later delegates saw a season including Paul Robeson in Othello, Charles Laughton in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Dame Edith Evans in both All’s Well That Ends Well and Coriolanus (the latter also with Olivier.) Imagine.

Faces of the RSC summer school 2017: Janet Suzman, Katy Stephens, Ray Fearon, Tony Byrne, Nia Gwynne, David Troughton, Erica Whyman, Chuk Iwuji, Dr Elizabeth Sandis, Miles Tandy, Penny Downie, Suzanne Burden, Michael Billington, Jacqui O'Hanlon, Dr Maria Evans, Matthew Tennyson, Prof Michael Dobson, Prof Russell Jackson, Gavin Fowler

31st anniversary for me….
My first summer school was in 1986, the year I married Sally, and the year The Swan theatre opened in Stratford-upon-Avon. I haven’t been every single year since then, but more years than not and, like with Shakespeare himself, there are surprises every year.

Roman season
This year it’s all about Ancient Rome. So all four of Shakespeare’s Roman plays are being staged: Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus at the moment and  Coriolanus later in the year. There is a spoof new play based on Plautus by Phil Porter, charmingly titled Vice Versa (or the Decline and Fall of General Braggadocio at the hands of his canny servant Dexter and Terence the Monkey) which can only be described as the love child of Carry On – Up Pompeii – Panto On Weed. Sitting between these offerings was a gay-focused version of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé with a male actor in the role of the dancing princess.

Decapitations, songs, stabbings, dances, neck-breakings, love scenes….
They say variety is the spice of life and the theatrical sights veered between grisly shocks and tender vignettes. All of the productions offered a new angle or fresh perspective on the characters or themes. Over it all soared the language of Shakespeare and Wilde (and the thumping doggerel of Phil Porter, acting like a satyr dance or bergomask to the season.) During the day lectures by people like the rigorous Dame Janet Suzman and the visionary Erica Whyman commented on the season, the plays, the RSC and the state of theatre and the world in 2017. As Coriolanus himself says, “There is a world elsewhere….” There were no overt attempts to make the plays relevant to today’s political upheavals but it was impossible to ignore the parallels and hear echoes of our current world. As Ben Jonson wrote in the First Folio,

“Soul of the Age!....
He was not of an age, but for all time!”

Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Exhibition

All time and all places
As if to underline the Shakespeare Everywhere theme, a new exhibition at The Birthplace explores active involvement in Shakespeare in a group of Asian countries. To some Shakespeare is all about the overthrow of tyrants; to some he is the epitome of justice and mercy; to others he is the key to unlocking the freedom of the imagination and creativity. He is, to me, all these things and many more – a body of work, a fascinating point in history, an explosion of language and dramatic situations.

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

Shakespeare Imagery: to Bard or not to Bard....

The Great Garden at New Place

A place in inspiration, a place of rest
New Place (previous blog) is, for me, an emotional place to be. On the whole I think the development there has been an imaginative success. To me is seems to be a place of inspiration with its quirky nooks and the roofline of the Guild Chapel, with its ancient wall paintings, looming over it. It is also a place of rest, somewhere I imagine Shakespeare would have appreciated given the death of his only son, Hamnet, one year before Shakespeare bought New Place. The house would’ve, I imagine, signalled a new beginning, a new leaf, a new page, a new act.

William, Fulke and Hercules
The family who sold New Place to Shakespeare have a shady history. William Underhill who did the original sale to Shakespeare in 1597 died two months after the sale. History tells us Underhill Senior was poisoned by his son and heir, Fulke (why does no-one name their son Fulke any more?) History is less sure whether Fulke died of natural causes or was hanged for the murder, but it was Fulke’s younger brother, the flamboyantly named Hercules who confirmed all the paperwork to Shakespeare including the orchards behind the property which became known as The Great Garden.

The Great Garden at New Place
In my own “olden days” (1980s and 1990s) The Great Garden was my favourite place to sit in Stratford-upon-Avon. It used to have open access to the public and was a green oasis in the midst of the tourist bustle. Now you enter the garden as part of your (paid) entry to New Place but, in my opinion, it remains a lush and evocative oasis. It is still populated with the offspring of a mulberry tree from Shakespeare’s day and with the ashes of Peggy Ashcroft and with benches to sit and dream. But it now also has a marvellous tactile bronze sculpture trail by American Gregg Wyatt.

Family weddings
Both Shakespeare’s daughters lived with Anne and William in New Place until they were married:

• Susanna, aged 24, to Dr John Hall on June 5th 1607
• Judith, aged 31, to (“bad boy”) Thomas Quiney on February 10th 1616

And one man in his time plays many parts
Shakespeare is known in 2017 primarily as

a PLAYWRIGHT and ACTOR

In his own time he gained most cultural prestige as a writer of narrative poems and sonnets

a POET

But he had the most influence on his immediate contemporary world as

a SHAREHOLDER and THEATRE OWNER
a LANDLORD and LANDOWNER
a BUSINESSMAN and GENTLEMAN

(having bought a family coat of arms in 1596)
But visiting Stratford-upon-Avon as I do a few times each year and delving into the depths of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust properties, the Shakespeare Institute and the work of the Royal Shakespeare Company, I never cease to learn something new about Shakespeare as

a SON and GRANDSON
a BROTHER
a SCHOOLBOY and TEENAGER
a LOVER and HUSBAND
a FATHER and GRANDFATHER
a RETIRED GENT

living and loving (and dreaming and writing) in New Place and its Great Garden until the day he died.