Fools and Mortals: on and off the stage with Shakespeare's brother

Bernard Cornwell’s got a new book out, and I’m not taking about the latest instalment in the Saxon saga (or, as it’s now being billed thanks to the TV series, the Last Kingdom saga). It’s a stand-alone adventure set in Elizabethan England, and the protagonist is a brother of one William Shakespeare.

He’s not a soldier or a government agent or anything like that. The world of historical fiction does have a Shakespeare brother who’s a government agent, though – John Shakespeare, an entirely fictional older brother of the Bard who’s working for Sir Francis Walsingham to make sure that Elizabeth I is safe from assorted Catholic plotters who’d rather have her Scottish cousin on the throne. He is the creation of Rory Clements, who has set out to do for Elizabeth I’s reign what C.J. Sansom’s excellent Shardlake novels have done for that of Henry VIII – provide a series of thrillers (Revenger, The Queen’s Man, etc) that explore the more dangerous side of Tudor England. They’re not bad but there are a lot of Tudor-era thrillers around these days, and if you try to compare any of them with the Shardlake books then there’s only going to be one winner.

Bernard Cornwell’s latest is not about threats against the crown. It’s set on the stage, or rather in and around the world of the theatre, and the Shakespeare brother who leads the action does at least have the merit of being a real person. Well, based on a real person at least. Richard Shakespeare is the narrator of Fools and Mortals which is set in London in 1595. Little is known of the real-life Richard Shakespeare, a younger brother of the Bard who is thought to have spent most of his life in Stratford-upon-Avon and who predeceased his famous brother by three years. This, in a way, makes him an ideal candidate for being a character in a Bernard Cornwell novel as the author has a more or less blank canvas to play with. At Cornwell’s hands, he’s a bit of a tearaway who, rather than be apprenticed to a brutal Stratford merchant, ran away to London to become a ‘player’ like his brother, who was less than pleased to see him show up in the big city. He’s shown some talent for acting but he is in a bit of a rut; although a boy no longer, he’s only considered for the female roles in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. What with having to resort to the occasional act of petty theft to supplement his meagre pay, he is growing ever more resentful of his big brother (who, as is the case of William Shakespeare as depicted in Upstart Crow, is on the cusp of fame here).

Despite being disapproved of by Puritans, going to the theatre is very popular in Elizabethan London (theatre-goers come from all walks of life and seem surprisingly willing to suspend their disbelief for the duration of a play, which can last for several hours although Cornwell reckons that they would have been edited for performances in order to get them down to the two-hour mark). As audiences get bored with repeat performances of plays they’ve seen before, the playing companies are always in need of new material. Play manuscripts are therefore jealously guarded by the company (not the playwright) that owns them; other than getting closed down by the Pursuivants (quasi-official ruffians on the look-out for the merest hint of sedition against the Queen, this being less than a decade after the defeat of the Spanish Armada), the worst thing that can happen to a theatre company is a manuscript going missing.

One such company is the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – named for their patron, Lord Hunsdon (who, being a son of Mary Boleyn, is a cousin of Elizabeth I as well as being the Lord Chamberlain). Will Shakespeare originally joined them as an actor but has since become a partner of the company; he may not be the most handsome chap (as his better-looking brother often tells the reader), but he’s definitely the brains of the operation. He’s recently written a new comedy which will be performed indoors at his lordship’s grand-daughter’s wedding which, it is thought, will be attended by none other than Good Queen Bess herself. Funnily, he uses this play – A Midsummer Night’s Dream – to mock his fellow-actors, having written parts for them that allude to some of their foibles; brother Richard finally gets a male part, but it’s that of Francis Flute – the ‘mechanical’ who is disappointed to learn that he’s been given a female part in the play-within-a-play.

His resentment towards his brother is therefore higher than ever when the manuscript of Will’s recently-completed tragedy about two star-crossed lovers in Italy gets stolen, thus driving the plot of Fools and Mortals. This happens at around the half-way point, the first half having set the scene with plenty of detail about Elizabethan society and the politics of the time, with emphasis on theatres (which have to be outside the City of London; as the Globe won’t be built until 1599, the theatre where the on-stage action takes place is the, ah, Theatre, located off Bishopsgate) as well as sufficient background concerning how Richard ended up in London and why he resents his brother. He’s even been tapped up by a rival acting company, offering him male roles provided he steals his brother’s manuscripts, but has turned them down. But the very fact that he was approached means that the finger of suspicion points towards Richard, who must prove his innocence by figuring out who’s actually nicked it and then getting it back. The former is fairly straightforward, the latter considerably less so.

This is a pretty interesting departure for Cornwell, probably the best living historical novelist at the moment but one more associated with military adventures (in various historical periods). Fools and Mortals is more of a slow-burner than your usual Bernard Cornwell novel, and when the action does come there’s not actually a lot of it; those expecting a Tudor-era version of Sharpe or Uhtred will be disappointed. I liked it, though. There was plenty of historical detail (Cornwell, as ever, is second to none in this regard) and Richard Shakespeare made for an interesting and multi-layered character. William Shakespeare himself remains somewhat elusive, even a bit dislikeable – there’s little on why he has acted the way he has done to cause his brother’s resentment, and his domestic life is merely hinted at (he seems to have a mistress or two in London, while Anne Hathaway is back in Warwickshire with the kids). Perhaps it’s better that way. At least Cornwell is depicting William Shakespeare as the writer of Shakespeare’s plays; on top of having produced an engaging historical novel, he is fully deserving of top marks for refusing to buy into that ‘Shakespeare was written by someone else’ conspiracy nonsense.

The Last Kingdom (the second series, three episodes in)

“I am Uhtred, son of Uthred…”

So begins each episode of The Last Kingdom, the BBC’s adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s ‘Saxon’ novels which has deservedly returned for a second series. In this, the real-life struggle of Alfred the Great’s Wessex (the kingdom of the title, it being the only one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that hasn’t fallen to the marauding invaders from Scandinavia) is intertwined with the adventures of the fictional Uhtred, a warrior whose life’s ambition – to retake the northern coastal stronghold of Bebbanburg which is his by right but his villainous uncle’s by possession – is frequently put on hold so that he can either fight for Alfred or chase after women. He’s the one saying that he’s Uhtred, son of Uhtred, of course – although I cannot for the life of me figure out what accent he’s saying it in (the actor who plays him, Alexander Dreymon, was born in Germany and has appeared on stage in Paris and London but knowing that doesn’t leave me any the wiser; but hey, at least he’s well-spoken).

In a world of sharply-defined loyalties – for late ninth-century Britain, it’s generally Christian Anglo-Saxons versus pagan Vikings – Uhtred is a curious mixture of the lot; a Saxon raised by Vikings and a pagan who, as he reminds us at some point, has been baptised not once but twice. His enemies fear him, while his allies are somewhat wary of him as they can never be entirely sure of his loyalty. His weakness (or, if we’re using a fictional warrior analogy, his Achilles heel) is women; were he to put them from his mind, or at least stop trying to sleep with every other one that he encounters, he would probably be warming himself in front of the fire with a flagon of ale in his hand following a slap-up feast for himself and his motley band of followers in Bebbanburg’s great hall by now.

At the end of the first series, having helped Alfred secure his great victory at Ethandun, Uhtred rode north to retake Bebbanburg. However, we weren’t that long into the first episode of the new series when he’d been easily distracted from this ambition that he keeps going on about, not even making it half-way through Mercia before a woman with whom he had shared a one-night stand tried to make off with his money and his sword, only to be thwarted by Hild, the nun-who-wants-to-be-a-warrior (her reward was to have Uhtred try to look at her while she was washing herself in a river). As Father Beocca wisely noted, Uhtred would probably fancy a goat if someone put it in a skirt.

Back down south, Alfred was busy thinking of the future – for it is he who is laying the foundations of what will become England. His latest plan is for an alliance with Mercia (the kingdom to the north of Wessex) by way of marrying off his daughter, Aethelflaed, to a Mercian noblemen. Watch out for her; the Lady of the Mercians, as she is known to history (although she has tended to get airbrushed out of some accounts of the creation of England), is going to matter a big deal as this series progresses.

Next up for Uhtred, however, was a madcap scheme to turn Guthred the slave into a king, which was actually going rather well until Uhtred slept with Guthred’s sister Gisela; for this, he was sold into slavery and ended up on the rowing-deck of a galley bound for Iceland. He was released thanks to his foster-brother Ragnar (son of Ragnar) and Hild, the latter of whom had to remind him that he was indeed Uhtred, son of Uhtred (since some people had started referring to him as Osbert, which was his original name, perhaps he needed reassuring). Our hero then managed to make a rod for his own back by killing the evil Abbot Eadred – over Gisela, of course – which ultimately gave him no option but to swear an oath to fight for Alfred once again in order to avoid facing trial for killing a priest in a church. Bebbanburg, it seems, can wait (and it’ll have to, for the TV series is only on the third novel of Cornwell’s series; there are now ten, with the latest – published late last year – focussing on, you’ve guessed it, a much older Uhtred’s continuing ambition to capture the place).

It’s been noted by various critics that this show – what with the muddy fight scenes, men with beards claiming to be kings, regular killings-off of characters and all that – is very much a British version of Game of Thrones; the same idea but done on a smaller scale, with less overtly naughty stuff (swearing, nudity, etc). That’s as maybe, but what that somewhat easy analysis overlooks is that The Last Kingdom is no fantasy epic – this is historical drama, based on a series of novels which are themselves about stuff that (mostly) really happened. It’s very well acted, with – get this – Scandinavian actors having been cast in the Viking roles, and I’m prepared to forgive the whole thing about what accent Uhtred’s speaking with as there have been far worse accent-related transgressions on the box; at least the viewer can clearly understand Mr Dreymon even in the fight scenes!

Waterloo

When I was given a copy of Waterloo by Bernard Cornwell, I was surprised to learn that this book, written to coincide with the bicentenary of said battle, is his first work of non-fiction.

Bernard Cornwell has been one of my favourite authors for many years; I started reading the Sharpe series as a teenager (around the same time as the TV series) and I went on to enjoy his novels set in the American Civil War, post-Roman Britain (this, the Warlord trilogy, is in my opinion his best work), the Hundred Years War and the struggle between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings (soon to be a TV series), among others.

He has, to date, written over 40 novels - a prodigious output by any standard (apparently he started writing when he moved to the United States and couldn't get a green card; his big idea was a series about the Peninsular War which he hoped would become a land war equivalent to C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels, of which he was a fan).

He's even done Waterloo before - Richard Sharpe, his most famous creation (forever associated with Sean Bean, who played him in the TV series) was inserted into various parts of the battle for the 1990 novel Sharpe's Waterloo which, like most of his books, had a highly informative 'historical notes' section at the back in which he outlined the true story behind his fiction. He wasn't the first historical novelist to do that (George MacDonald Fraser was already doing it with the Flashman novels), but a lot more novelists do it nowadays than they used to.

So what was Cornwell's first non-fictional work like? Well, my expectations were high as Cornwell is known (partly due to those historical notes) as a writer who strives for accuracy, he's always been at his best when describing battles and, as has been previously noted, he's covered this particular battle before. I knew before I started that we'd get plenty by way of eye-witness accounts, and that his emphasis would be on how the Anglo-Dutch and Prussian armies were working together; one thing I remembered from the novel was the point, constantly hammered home, that Wellington wouldn't have stood and fought on the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean if he hadn't known that Blucher would march to his aid, and that Blucher wouldn't have marched unless he'd known that Wellington was going to stand and fight.

Waterloo was one of those era-defining battles; it brought to an end over two decades of war and ushered in an age of (relative) peace. 1815 is a cut-off date for period histories as a result. It was the only time that the two most famous generals of the age, the Emperor Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington, faced each other in battle. Yet for much of that long June day two centuries ago, the result hung in the balance until the bitter end. It was also one of the bloodiest of pre-twentieth century battles; between them, the three armies that converged in that valley lost over 60,000 men, and it was in that almost-inconceivable aftermath that Wellington made his remark about the one thing being worse than a battle lost was a battle won. 

Alongside the nigh-on unbelievable acts of heroism (Lieutenant-Colonel Macdonell's defence of Hougoument, Sergeant Ewart's capture of a French Eagle), occasional tales of military stupidity (Jerome Bonaparte, Prince William of Orange) and desperate hand-to-hand fighting while an outwardly unflappable Duke of Wellington cast furtive glances at his pocket-watch, there also lurks a major difficulty in writing about Waterloo: something that military historians call the fog of war.

Battles can be confusing; even the best-laid plans rarely survive the first contact with the enemy, and once the dust has settled accounts of those who survive tend to differ, often on minor details but sometimes on big things too. Wellington himself famously pointed out that it was impossible to tell the story of a battle because there were too many (differing) stories woven together, while Cornwell notes that "for some men it was a blur, a day of terror in which they saw little but smoke". For a long period of time on 18th June 1815, the British infantry endured a series of charges by French cavalry interspersed with artillery attacks which required a change of formation; afterwards, none of the survivors on either side could agree on just how many times the French cavalry had charged. At the battle's climax, the 1st Foot Guards believed they had fought off the Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard and so were later renamed the Grenadier Guards; in fact, they'd beaten back the Chasseurs of the Guard.

What Cornwell has done is to unpick the various and varying strands of the campaign (Waterloo was preceded by other battles, at Ligny and Quatre-Bras, both of which took place on the same day and which are often overlooked because of what happened next - the book's full title is Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles) and use his expert knowledge to deliver a highly readable and detailed account that makes good use of eyewitness accounts by those who took part to give a sense of both pathos and authenticity. Cornwell, a master storyteller, really has delivered the goods in his first foray into telling a true story. The divergent accounts of this most decisive of battles are brought together to form a coherent and well-told narrative.

It so happened that I was working my way through this book when the actual anniversary of the battle came up. This just happened to be when Allison and I went to Paris - yes, I really did take a book called Waterloo with me to France. And it was worth it.

Bernard Cornwell and Simon Scarrow

For around twenty years, I have listed Bernard Cornwell as one of my favourite authors. The other month I finished reading Death of Kings, the latest instalment in his ‘Saxon’ series which is worth a read if you like novels that you can come away from with the feeling that you’ve actually learned something interesting as a result of having read them.

Bernard Cornwell’s novels usually centre around an honest man of action who has little time for political scheming, and in this series the hero/narrator is Uhtred, a Saxon who was brought up as a Viking but who fights (somewhat reluctantly) for Alfred the Great, King of Wessex and the one man standing between the Vikings and their goal of dominating all of Britain. This has formed the basis of the series so far, but in this sixth novel the focus changes as Alfred is dying, various would-be successors are getting ready to make their bids for power and the fragile truce between Wessex and the Vikings is about to fall apart.

Alfred the Great has somewhat fallen out of favour with whoever decides what should be part of the history curriculum in schools (in which there’s a big gap between the Romans and 1066), even though his story is integral to the formation of what would come to be England. But Cornwell’s Alfred is no warrior king. His take on Alfred as a sickly scholar who is very much the ‘brains behind the operation’ is an good one, and having the narrator as a pagan – in contrast to the pious Alfred – allows the author to explore more fully the struggle between Christianity and paganism that he started on in the Warlord trilogy – a reinterpretation of the Arthurian legends which I still think is Cornwell’s best work. I think there’s a touch of the pagan in Cornwell, as the Christians of his stories are portrayed in a rather negative light. Although it clearly inspires some of the characters to do great things, organised religion is portrayed here as a force for intolerance, pomposity and repression (over the course of Death of Kings, Uhtred manages to infuriate and poke fun at several clergymen to good comic effect). In a sense, therefore, there’s something very modern about these books even though they’re set in the Dark Ages.

One of Cornwell’s more shorter works is the blurb that features on the cover of every edition of every Simon Scarrow novel, in which he is quoted as saying ‘I really don’t need this kind of competition’. Simon Scarrow has been around for over a decade now, during the course of which he has produced the ‘Eagle’ series of novels about Macro and Cato, a pair of Roman soldiers who, although initially mismatched (bluff veteran and younger, more thoughtful man who is mentored in the ways of soldiering by said veteran) become firm and trusted friends. Their adventures have taken them to various parts of the Roman Empire of the mid-first century AD and supporting characters have included Vespasian, Boadicea, St Peter (I kid you not) and Narcissus, the imperial secretary to the Emperor Claudius who serves as a scheming proto-spymaster who gets our heroes to do his dirty work despite the fact that they’d much rather be doing some good, honest soldiering (shades of Bernard Cornwell here).

No novel set in the past can truly escape the time at which it is written, and this applies to novels about the Romans as much as it does to those about the Saxons. In the former, an all-conquering empire has invaded places like Britannia and Judea but is struggling to govern these unruly provinces, with the locals engaging in guerrilla-type resistance that the highly-disciplined Roman army is unable to deal with as effectively as it can deal with its enemies in a proper battle. As such, some people are coming to the conclusion that it would be better to withdraw from such places. The plot of one of the earlier books, When the Eagle Hunts, centres around the kidnapping of a general’s family by a group of religious fanatics (Druids in this case, but the modern parallel is obvious).

The eleventh and latest in this series, Praetorian, takes us to the heart of Rome itself as our heroes go undercover as ordinary soldiers to join the Praetorian Guard in order to root out a conspiracy against the Emperor. As a result, this is a little different from the other books as Macro and Cato become immersed in espionage and politics. There’s less fighting than usual and more sneaking around and talking in whispers, and when there is fighting it’s in the form of street brawls rather than pitched battles. There are a few points where one gets the impression of this being a thriller that just happens to be set in Ancient Rome – the novel begins with a well-planned heist, and at one stage a couple of characters need to be taken out of the city quickly and someone says he’s got a horse-and-cart in a lock-up down the road that can be used. There are also a few light-hearted moments, such as when Narcissus wonders why there isn’t a (Latin) word for that feeling of superiority you get when you hear of someone else’s misfortune.

The Emperor at the heart of the action is Claudius. Rather like Alfred the Great, we have become accustomed to a certain idea of what he was like as a person. Thanks largely to Robert Graves (author of I Claudius) and Derek Jacobi (who played Claudius in the TV adaptation of Graves’s novel), we think of him as a man who, thanks to a stutter and a pronounced limp, is written off by everyone as a fool, but beneath the bumbling exterior he is in fact very intelligent and he eventually becomes a surprisingly effective emperor. There’s some of that in Scarrow’s interpretation, although his Claudius is more reflective of the Claudius of Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars – over-reliant on advisers, manipulated by those around him and something of a dirty old man. Waiting to take over is his adopted son, Nero, shown here as a thoughtful youngster rather than the murderous tyrant he would become.

Macro and Cato will return, we are assured, and when they do they’ll be back with the legions in Britannia so it looks as though Scarrow wants to return to the successful formula of his earlier books. In the meantime, his latest novel, due out in paperback later this year, is about an English knight at the siege of Malta. I can’t wait.