Bridge over troubled waters

Humber Bridge (Yorkshire), Forth Bridge (Scotland)

Bridges
Bridges are awe-inspiring objects. I am happily married to someone who, if anything, loves bridges more than I do. One of mine and Sally’s favourite spots in Yorkshire is the elegant (and seemingly impossible) Humber Bridge. A recent trip to Anglesey provided sights of two bridges near each other: the Menai Bridge and the Britannia Bridge. Who isn’t impressed with Tower Bridge in London? (though I have a personal fetish for Blackfriars Bridge.) Even those who haven’t visited know from advertisements, films and TV what the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fancisco looks like. Sally and I hope one day to visit the Øresund Bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen and I have a fantasy that one day we’ll sail under the Sydney Harbour Bridge down under.

Clockwise from top right: Menai Bridge (Anglesey), Moon Gate (Beijing), Golden Gate (San Francisco), Clifton Suspension (Bristol), Allahverdi Khan (Iran), Tower Bridge (London), Millau Viaduct (France)

Bridges in culture
Wordsworth wrote a famous poem Composed Upon Westminster Bridge and Longfellow’s The Bridge was always an accessible and attractive poem to use when teaching younger pupils (both easily found online.) If war films shiver your timbers you will be familiar with The Bridge Over The River Kwai or A Bridge Too Far (bridges at Tha Ma Kham and Arnhem respectively.) A far gentler bridge experience is explored in The Bridges of Madison County but recently the Swedish/Danish TV thriller, The Bridge (Bron/Broen) has been a favourite watch in my house when the main characters are desperate to bridge gaps of understanding in multiple ways as they cross backwards and forwards from Sweden to Denmark and in and out of each other’s lives.

Øresund Bridge between Sweden and Denmark

Westminster Bridge (London), Mackinac Bridge (Michigan)

Bridges as symbols
For our subconsciousness and in our dreams a bridge can mean many things:

• a bridge can represent a journey….
• whether it crosses to the other side or falls short is said to be connected to transitions in our life that are difficult….
• whether it falls down or has gaps in it or is wobbly can indicate great anxiety….
• a bridge can represent a crossing from one state to another, from one phase of life to another, a bridging of a gap….
• in Tarot The Bridge represents stability, progress, directions or connections….
• we talk about “pulling up the drawbridge” to mean hunkering down and hiding away….
• we talk about “crossing over to the other side” meaning to die, to reach heaven….
• we advise against “burning our bridges” for obvious reasons, highlighting the inability to turn back on a decision….
• a bridge can symbolise birth, the penis (in Freudian analysis apparently), the meeting between men and women, young and old, ancient and new….
• in a dream a bridge can represent both safety or danger depending on context, an obstacle that needs to be confronted and crossed….
• a very useful and fruitful symbol, a bridge is….

Zhangjiajie Glass Bridge in Zhangjiajie National Park (China) and Clopton Bridge (Stratford-upon-Avon)

Potentially tragic, potentially hopeful
Crossing a bridge can feel like an act of sadness if you’re leaving somewhere precious; but equally it can be an uplifting and exciting arrival to a new way of life. Bridges are phenomenal feats of engineering, a real tribute to the human capacity for determination and imagination. Bridges can be associated, tragically, with suicide spots; but equally couples regularly propose on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. (Current, only-for-now US President Trump, could do well to pay heed to his fellow American, Joseph Fort Newton, who said People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.)

Raydan at the Watchtower overlooking Grayton Bridge
The main character in my book, Raydan Wakes, starts his story overlooking a bridge. Raydan is on Bridge Duty, keeping an eye on the comings and goings over a particular bridge in a remote spot. His watch partner is throwing up in the bathroom so Raydan is left on his own feeling jittery when a small group arrives unexpectedly in the minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve….

Blue Bridge (Wakefield), Brooklyn Bridge (New York), Clifton Suspension (again, in Bristol), Garabit Viaduct (France), Eshina Ohashi (Japan, nicknamed the rollercoaster bridge)

Would Shakespeare want us to leave Europe?

Great Britons

Shakespeare is one of the greatest Britons ever to have lived. He seems to be in the Top 20 of most lists I can find and in the huge survey conducted by the BBC in 2002 he sat comfortably at Number Five (after Winston Churchill, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Diana Princess of Wales and Charles Darwin.) Other writers who (in my opinion) make the list without question are Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens – I think of Those Three as the writers who forever transformed Poetry (Chaucer), Drama (Shakespeare) and Prose (Dickens.) Nudging them (in alphabetical order) I would include the following writers for a variety of reasons: Jane Austen, William Blake, the Brontës, Agatha Christie, Caryl Churchill, CS Lewis, JK Rowling, GB Shaw, JRR Tolkien, Oscar Wilde and William Wordsworth and there are, of course, many more vying for attention. We have a truly great national tradition of writing that changed the reading and literary habits of the world, as did, I think, the ones I’ve mentioned.

Great Britons

Would Shakespeare, as a Great Briton, vote Remain or Brexit on June 23rd 2016?

I saw Cymbeline at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre recently and (one of) the villain(s) in that strange Romance is the thuggish Cloten who is definitely a Brexiter as he stands up to the Roman Empire by refusing to pay them tribute:

                            Britain is
A world by itself; and we will nothing pay
For wearing our own noses.

So is Cloten speaking for Shakespeare when he wants Britain to stand alone without paying out any money to any foreign power for trade rights and protection?

Current RSC Cloten Marcus Griffiths singing to Bethan Cullinane's Imogen, Anton Yelchin in the 2014 film of Cymbeline and Thomas Gorrebeeck's portrayal as the nationalist Cloten

Confirmation bias

As in the whole of Shakespeare’s work you can usually find a contradictory opinion because Shakespeare seems to see both sides of every human dilemma. The history play King John ends with lines that might well echo Cloten’s sentiments:

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror….
….Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.

The King of France and two King John Philip the Bastards: Pippa Nixon and Rikki Lawton

But these words are spoken by a cynical (though appealing and persuasive) character, Philip the Bastard. Conversely,  in the final scene of the more popular and potentially patriotic history play, Henry V, Shakespeare writes about England and France ceasing their hatred and hopes

                     ....this dear conjunction (will)    
Plant neighbourhood and Christian-like accord
In their sweet bosoms, that never war advance
His bleeding sword 'twixt England and fair France.

So does Shakespeare wants us to stand alone (“England to itself”) or work together in a group (with “neighbourhood and Christian-like accord”)? Perhaps we hear what we want to hear when we listen to Shakespeare, just as we tend to read newspapers or go to websites that already confirm what our opinions are.

Henry V with Donato Giancola's painting of Agincourt, Olivier and Branagh - a Shakespeare king as patriotic hero, senseless warmonger or bringer of peace to Europe - potentially all three

European settings

As well as locations throughout England, Shakespeare presented many European locations on the Jacobethan stage, even if there is no evidence that Shakespeare ever travelled abroad. In the plays we travel to Actium, Agincourt, Alexandria, Antioch, Athens, Bohemia, Cyprus, Elsinore, Ephesus, Florence, Harfleur, Illyria, Inverness, Mantua, Marseilles, Messina, Milan, Mytilene, Navarre, Orleans, Padua, Pentapolis, Philippi, Rome, Roussillon, Sicily, Tharsus, Troy, Tyre, Venice, Verona, Vienna. (Those places cover Europe and north Africa pretty widely: modern-day Austria, Denmark, Egypt, France, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Macedonia, Turkey, Scotland, Spain, Wales, Yugoslavia.) Shakespeare’s imaginative landscape was definitely outward-looking.

from Shakespeare Fangirl's Pinterest page