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.

Interesting things in Wiltshire pubs (part 1)

Back to Wiltshire, that county in Southern England well-known for its ancient stone circles, Salisbury Cathedral, several Army bases and the fact that the M4 and the A303 go through it. In recent years it has played host to the reintroduction of the Great Bustard, a species of bird which became extinct in Britain in the 1830s (it’s Wiltshire’s county bird; more on that in the unlikely event of my actually seeing one). What is perhaps less well-known is that a couple of pubs in the county have some rather odd things in them…

First up is the Red Lion in Avebury. 

That’s a fairly common pub name, the most common in the country in fact. It’s one of those pub names that has more than one origin. A a red lion was the personal badge of John of Gaunt (the “time-honour’d Lancaster” who does the “this scepter’d isle” speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II, in real life a younger son of Edward III and the father of Henry IV). It was also the Royal arms of Scotland, which were merged with the Royal arms of England when King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England following the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. But then again, the Red Lion in Avebury could derive from the coat-of-arms of an eighteenth-century lord of the manor, Lieutenant-General Williamson, which can be seen on display in the local church.

Anyway – the pub. The Red Lion in Avebury does have something that makes it unique, for it claims to be the only pub in the world that’s located within an ancient stone circle. Since I cannot think of any other ancient stone circle which has part of a village inside it, they’re probably right. So if you want to go for a pint in a pub that is truly unique, this one’s worth a visit.

Inside, there’s more. A mural on the wall shows a map of southern England, with the Line of St Michael marked out. This is probably the most famous ley line in the country, running diagonally from Cornwall to Suffolk, passing through such places as St Michael’s Mount, Glastonbury, Avebury and Bury St Edmunds, among others. Its saintly dedication derives from the fact that there are several churches or places dedicated to said archangel on its length – for example, the hilltop church at Brentor in Devon and the ruined tower atop Glastonbury Tor, as well as the afore-mentioned Cornish island. Some people get very excited by this; occasionally at Avebury, you may even run into someone who’s brought his divining-rods with him. Although I regard the notion of ley lines with a degree of cynicism, a journey along this one would certainly make for an interesting travelogue. Reading up on this, I note that I’m not the only cynic, for Geoffrey Ashe (in Mythology of the British Isles) refers to them as “modern myth” although he does note that “Avebury is at the point where it [the St Michael Line] cuts a parallel of latitude distant from the equator by exactly one-seventh of the earth’s circumference”; make of that what you will, if anything.

Of more tangible interest in the pub, though, is the well. Yes, the village well in Avebury – 86 feet deep, dating back to around 1600 and “believed to be the last resting place of at least one unfortunate villager” – is located inside the pub. How many pubs can claim to have a well inside them? And even if they do, how many of those wells have had a glass top put over them so they can serve as a table?

The presence of the well would seem to indicate that there wasn’t always a pub on this site – and there’s evidence for that, in the form of a map of Avebury drawn up by the antiquarian William Stukeley in 1724. His main purpose was to mark the locations of the stones themselves, and the locations of spots where stones had once stood, but he marked out other key points as well – his map shows a pub (“The Inn”) that is located on the other side of the road to the present-day Red Lion, although crucially (as far as this particular study is concerned) he didn’t mark the location of the village well.

To be continued...

The wonderful story of the Minack Theatre

Down in the far south-west of Cornwall, beyond Penzance which is as far as the Great Western Railway goes, there’s a small coastal village called Porthcurno which can be reached from the A30 via St Buryan (a village named after a sixth-century saint who has a walk-on part in the King Arthur legends). Porthcurno – the name means ‘Port Cornwall’ – is famous for having been the place where underwater telegraph cables used to enter the sea; the first of those was laid in 1870 to provide communication between Britain and India, and Porthcurno’s importance as a major submarine cable station lasted until well into the twentieth century (that, by the way, is just part of a running theme about Cornwall being a centre of global communications, which also takes in the Falmouth Packets of the eighteenth century and the satellite station at Goonhilly).

Today, Porthcurno is a seaside village with a truly stunning beach surrounded by granite cliffs – it’s part of the Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (which itself composes of just over a quarter of the county). That alone would make the place worthy of note, but what concerns me today is what’s on top of the cliffs immediately to the west of the beach.

Accessible from Porthcurno via either the winding coastal footpath or a steep, narrow road stands an open-air theatre that is truly unique – for it has been carved into the clifftop, and the stage has as its backdrop the view out to sea. If you were to peruse a list of the world’s most stunning theatres, you would in all probability encounter this one, the Minack Theatre. And the story of how it came to be is as impressive as the place itself.

That it exists at all is due to the determination and vision of one woman – Rowena Cade, who was originally from Derbyshire but who moved down to Cornwall after the First World War. She bought the Minack headland above Porthcurno and there she built herself a home, Minack House. A Shakespeare enthusiast, she got involved with the local amateur dramatics group, and when in 1929 they were looking for a suitable venue to stage an open-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream she gladly offered them the use of a grassy meadow on her land. This was a great success, and a couple of years later they decided to do The Tempest.

But where could they stage that? Rowena Cade reckoned she had the answer – those cliffs below her house would be ideal, and what better backdrop could there be to a performance of The Tempest than the sea? She needed to make a few changes, though, and over the winter of 1931-32 she and her gardener, Billy Rawlings, worked hard to move granite boulders and carve out a stage and terraces for seating, hauling materials from either the house above or the beach below; that last one was essential as she needed sand to make concrete for the seats (it being more or less impossible to make seats out of the granite that was already there).

The Tempest was duly performed in the summer of 1932. The performers got changed in Miss Cade’s house, while cars parked atop the cliffs provided the lighting. Some of the audience had to take deck-chairs down with them, for there were only a few rows of terracing. It was a resounding success, even getting a positive write-up in the national media (The Times, no less). That spurred Miss Cade on, and over the next few years she and Billy Rawlings worked hard to improve the theatre. More sand was brought up from the beach to provide concrete for the seats, pillars, steps and walkways – which were decorated with Celtic carvings, done by Miss Cade herself with the aid of a broken screwdriver. The stage was gradually built up too – over time there was added a throne for Antony & Cleopatra, and a balcony for Romeo & Juliet.

The Second World War put a stop to theatrical proceedings – Cornwall’s beaches were potential landing-grounds should an invasion have happened, and the telegraph station down at Porthcurno, a major communications centre, was considered to be at risk from attack. Tunnels were dug underneath it, and up at Minack a pill-box was hastily constructed. That, though, did not stop the Minack Theatre from being used as a filming location for the 1944 movie Love Story. The theatre needed a lot of work after the war finished, and it wasn’t until 1951 that it reopened with Tristan of Cornwall (the pill-box had by this point become the box office).

From then, it went from strength to strength. Performances were staged every summer, regardless of the weather, a tradition that continues to this day (weather conditions have to be truly appalling for a show to be cancelled, and anyone planning on taking in a show at Minack should bear in mind that umbrellas are banned, however heavy the rain). Rowena Cade continued to work on the place during the winter, using whatever materials came her way; more seating tiers were added, along with an access road, a car park and some proper steps on the footpath connecting the theatre with the beach. There’s a lovely story about how she even indulged in a spot of wrecking when a Spanish ship carrying timber foundered on the rocks below. She made her way down the cliffs and helped herself, carrying a dozen or so 15-ft beams up to her garden single-handedly, one at a time. When the police came to inspect the wreck, they realised that some of the cargo was missing and started asking around; Miss Cade told them what she’d done, but the cops took one look at this somewhat frail-looking woman and decided that she was obviously having them on. Thus cleared of suspicion, she used the wood to build a dressing-room.

She was still doing heavy lifting and mixing concrete into her eighties – she had the theatre registered as a charitable trust in 1976 and died in 1983, aged 89. Her legacy lives on. Today, plays at the Minack Theatre attract some 80,000 people every year, with a further 150,000 just going to look around the place – which, needless to say, is most definitely worth a visit should you find yourself in the area (and, if you can time it so you can catch a local storyteller retelling the story of how the theatre was built, so much the better). It’s truly unique, and it still very much reflects the vision of its most remarkable founder.

The London Stone

Opposite the entrance to Cannon Street Station in the City – itself built on the site of a medieval church that was destroyed in the Great Fire – there stood until earlier this year one of London’s oldest landmarks, a largely forgotten chunk of masonry (limestone, to be exact) that is said to be of great significance although its surroundings were somewhat modest. Set into the wall behind an iron grille in front of a branch of W.H. Smith’s on busy Cannon Street was the London Stone.

Some say that it is of Roman origin, and that it may have been an object of religious veneration in pre-Christian times. Could it have something to do King Arthur? Or was it a milestone? There’s even a legend in a similar vein to that concerning the ravens at the Tower, although this one ties in with either of the City’s mythical founders (take your pick between Brutus of Troy and King Lud) to the effect that London will fall if it (the stone) is destroyed. The fifteenth-century rebel leader Jack Cade is said to have struck it with his sword, an apparently ancient way of declaring himself to be in charge, although there’s not much evidence for this other than the relevant scene in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2.

All we know for sure is that there are references to the London Stone dating back to the late eleventh century, and it was sufficiently well-known in medieval times for its name to have been given to the surrounding area (the first Lord Mayor was called Henry Fitz-Ailwin de Londonestone). After the Great Fire of 1666, Sir Christopher Wren (who reckoned that it was of Roman origin) built it into the south wall of one of his churches, St Swithin London Stone. This was badly damaged in the Blitz and the remains were demolished in 1962, following which the London Stone was put into its current setting in front of a shop which was built on the site of the church. Occasional development of this site resulted in rumours that the Stone would be removed; perhaps wary of the old legend, the developers left it in its place.

Last year, I went to have a look while going for a stroll in the City, and was assured to note that I wasn’t the only one who was taking a close look as a couple of tourists were interested too; conversely, people from all over the world have come to see it (and have been invariably taken aback by its less-than-auspicious setting), while others just walked past it every day without giving it a glance (for them, it was probably just something on the way to work; historically significant things in London can be like that for Londoners, sometimes). Sadly there was a fair amount of rubbish in the grille but at least the Stone was visible, and the back of it could be seen from the inside of the newsagent’s. A very modest setting for an ancient monument that had survived plagues, rebellions, fires, bombing raids and even the attentions of post-war property developers and (according to a BBC report from 2006) twenty-first century cowboy builders.

That changed earlier this year, when the prospect of  yet further development led to the London Stone's removal from its site. It can now be seen in the Museum of London, presumably getting more attention in a glass case rather than behind a litter-strewn grille, although when the building work is complete on Cannon Street it will return there, to be displayed on a plinth; once again, no doubt, it will attract the attention of some while being ignored by others.

Upstart Crow

I’ve really enjoyed watching the new sitcom Upstart Crow on the BBC iPlayer recently. It’s written by Ben Elton, a man who, although he’s been responsible for some remarkably bad sitcoms (and, let’s be honest, some pretty ropey stand-up as well), has always had one redeeming feature – the fact that, back in the Eighties, he co-wrote Blackadder with Richard Curtis. He’s (finally) returned to Blackadder territory for his new one, which has been done as part of the BBC’s desire to commemorate the quadricentenary (I think that’s the right word) of William Shakespeare’s death. Set in the 1590s, Upstart Crow depicts William Shakespeare as a writer on the cusp of fame – he’s made a bit of a name for himself with some long-winded plays about Henry VI and some poetry – who’s struggling to balance his professional life in London with his home life back in Stratford. He’s played – in a brilliant piece of casting – by David Mitchell. The Bard of Stratford in the style of Mark from Peep Show? Oh yes – and it really works.

Will, as he is called here, is a genius who’s conscious of his humble origins as he tries to break into a profession in which most people went to university. He’s struggling with the first draft of his teenage romance, particularly the meaning of the word ‘wherefore’ when it’s used in the balcony scene, and toys with the idea of killing the main characters off rather than letting them live happily ever after (which is how everyone assumes it’s going to end). This leads into a running gag where his landlady’s daughter keeps badgering him to let her play the female lead, in breach of the laws of the time which only allowed men on the stage (“you know very well that it is illegal for girls to do anything interesting”). It came as no surprise to this Blackadder fan that said landlady’s daughter is called Kate, for this is the name of the young lady who pretends to be a boy in order to get gainful employment under the pseudonym ‘Bob’ in both the Elizabethan and First World War incarnations of that sitcom; brilliantly, Gabrielle Glaister, the actress who played Kate/Bob in Blackadder, makes a brief appearance in Upstart Crow as a judge called ‘Robert Roberts’ who turns out to be a woman.

Like Edmund Blackadder, the Will of Upstart Crow is a man with upward ambition surrounded by fools and enemies. His servant, Bottom, may be a bit smarter than Baldrick but Brian from Spaced goes full panto-villain as the Lord Melchett equivalent Robert Greene – a real person, best known today for his pamphlet in which he complained about an actor from the provinces who thought he could write just as well as the university-educated playwrights (widely perceived as an attack on Shakespeare himself, this is where the phrase ‘upstart crow’ comes from); as with all the best British sitcoms, there’s class conflict and snobbery a-plenty here. Over at the theatre, there’s an actor whose lines all point to a send-up of Ricky Gervais that eventually gets a bit tiresome (how, one wonders, has he offended Mr Elton?). There’s a good turn from Tim Downie as Will’s better-connected and slightly Flashheart-esque friend Kit Marlowe, while Liza Tarbuck and Harry Enfield are on top supporting form as Will’s wife and father back in Stratford (Will’s constantly travelling back and forth between London and his home town; the sixteenth-century spin on commuting jokes does wear a bit thin by the fourth or fifth episode).

There’s so much Shakespeare-related stuff that gets touched on given that this is a six-part series. Did people at the time find those laboured jokes funny? Apparently not (“don’t do comedy, it’s not your strong point”), and they’re not keen on the overly flowery language either. An actor who does the female parts complains about the lack of good lines for men who play women. If you’ve ever wondered, as many an English Lit student probably has, what Shakespeare’s wife thought of all those sonnets which were lovingly dedicated to either another woman or a man, or whether people at the time might have wondered about Shakespeare’s sexual orientation due to the latter (“God’s naughty etchings! Why does everyone presume that just because I wrote 126 love poems to an attractive boy that I must be some kind of bechambered hugger-tugger?”), we have a scenario where this plays out; the same episode has a lovely gag in which it is predicted that, in the future, hardly anyone’s going to bother reading the sonnets in their entirety anyway, although one of them could be popular at weddings.

Cleverly, each episode title is a quote from a Shakespeare play or poem, and each episode ends with Mr and Mrs Shakespeare discussing the events that have just occurred and wondering about whether the sometimes ridiculous scenarios in which Will found himself (writing a play to catch someone’s conscience, getting tricked into wearing silly hose with cross-garters, etc) can be used for future plays. There are Shakespeare-style asides to the audience (although this is only really done to good effect in the later episodes). Elsewhere, the usually ludicrous ‘Shakespeare authorship’ question, always deserving of a good take-down (see Bill Bryson’s book Shakespeare for a good one), gets wonderfully turned on its head – for here, Will is secretly writing his mate Kit’s plays for him on the side as well as his own.

There may be a few bits that need ironing out (a couple of running gags that go on for too long, mainly), but for the most part there is much to like about Upstart Crow. Apparently there’s to be a second series. Hooray!

Macbeth

When Allison and I decided to take in a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theatre earlier this year, the one criterion as to which one was that it had to be one we’d both studied at school. That way we’d both be in a position to figure out what was going on should we get lost amid the Shakespearean dialogue.

Thus did we end up watching Macbeth, or ‘The Scottish Play’ as it is apparently referred to by actors who have a superstition about saying the word ‘Macbeth’ out loud (for a particularly good send-up of this, I refer you to the Blackadder the Third episode ‘Sense & Senility’ – and for a good take on what presumably goes on behind the scenes in theatres with explicit reference to Macbeth, please watch the second series of Slings & Arrows; I still cannot understand why no British TV network ever imported that show; it’s not like we haven’t heard of Paul Gross).

It’s hard to believe that I had never actually seen a Shakespeare play performed live before – I guess I just assumed that actually going to see one in London was something only tourists did. Since this was my (and Allison’s) first live Shakespeare experience, we reckoned that we might as well go all the way and see it at the Globe.

Back in Shakespeare’s time, the Globe was one of several theatres on the South Bank, and they were located there because the City of London authorities had a problem with the staging of plays in the City, as crowd control tended to be an issue. The original was built in 1599, burned down in 1613 (when a cannon was fired on-stage) and rebuilt only to be closed down and demolished by the Puritans in 1644. The modern-day reconstruction was built in the 1990s and was the brainchild of the actor San Wanamaker.

The reconstruction aims to be as authentic as possible, and is constructed of English oak; no structural steel was used and so it is as authentically late-16^th century as you can get; the Globe also has the only thatched roof to have been permitted on a new building in London since the Great Fire of 1666.

As for the play, I rather enjoyed myself. Macbeth seen live at the Globe was much better than Macbeth as studied in GCSE English Lit, and it got a lot more laughs than you might expect from a play about a warrior-turned-bloodstained-psychopath.

We went for the seats as we didn’t fancy standing in the pit for several hours. The seats are hard wooden ones, but at least you can hire cushions.

Another London experience completed…