Category Archives: Education

August 5, 2012 · 8:43 am

SHAKESPEARE’S BROTHER – FINDING EDMUND SHAKESPEARE?

THE EDMUND SHAKESPEARE BLOG

An editor at the FT suggested the story of Shakespeare’s youngest brother Edmund might be ‘flogging a dead horse’. With only six records of his life, over four hundred years ago, who exactly are you searching for anyway, and does it matter? It perhaps matters most in building up a record and portrait of Southwark and London at the time, especially with many players living in the area. But apart from a birth record, and the assumption that Edmund would have shared many of the peripheral experiences William did, back in Stratford, then a death at only 27, with an infant son dying 4 months earlier, as Susanna was being married in Stratford, there is nothing else. A potential biography of ‘an unrecorded life’ indeed! There is a rather weak and unconvincing portrait that is supposed to be Edmund Shakespeare, but how else might you look for Shakespeare’s Brother?

One answer might be the plays, and two images that conjure how brothers and especially youngest brother’s were moving inside the poet and playwright’s psyche. There is that Edmund of King Lear, who rails against the ‘monster custom’, scorns astrology, and branded a bastard, like real Edmund’s ‘base born’ son, engages in the ambitions and cruelties of Lear’s eldest daughters. Edmund of Lear is much the ‘new man’ of an increasingly competitive London world and the striving ambitions of the City of London. But there is almost the diametrical opposite to that character, a youngest son, and that is Orlando, of As You Like It. Although ostensibly set in France, there is so much in the play that speaks of Shakespeare’s attitude to nature, and, of course, with those forests of Arden echoing a Shakespeare family name, of Shakespeare’s movement between country and city, court and commoner.

It is very interesting how Orlando is the hero, in relation to his disposessing elder brothers, and maintains some intrinsic spirit as ‘old Sir Roland’s son’, which is almost about a vision the poet has of full manhood. Well built, muscular, brave, he also has the poet’s heart, and gets perhaps the finest girl in all of Shakespeare, Rosalind. Sensing something about the real Edmund Shakespeare then, and his eldest’s brother’s journey too, perhaps it speaks very loudly of the playwright’s own guilt, and responsive idealization of his youngest brother, whose journey in dangerous London was one that seems to have ended in a kind of tragedy. Although tragedy, like comedy, is the stuff of theatre and drama and maybe Edmund’s life was not so bound up with his brother’s. Yet it is very likely that the by then 40-year-old playwright paid that ’20 shillings’, to bury his brother Edmund in St Saviour’s Church, with an honouring ‘forenoon toll of the great bell.” But what is so fascinating about the research is that it begins to build up a gritty portrait of many London lives, and beyond that, in his mirrors up to nature, it is Shakespeare above all who provides ways of evoking what potentially moves inside us all.

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July 31, 2012 · 12:33 pm

SHAKESPEARE’S BOOKES AND THE TEMPEST

The Edmund Shakespeare Blog

The end of Charles’s Nicholls’ The Lodger is very good on Shakespeare’s supposed swan song, The Tempest, when Prospero drowns his ‘bookes’ and breaks his staff. As both he and Peter Ackroyd point out, it was not his actual writing end, before his death in 1616, (the Earl of Oxford had died in 1604) and so instead Nicholls quotes Theseus’s lines from another little-read collaboration – The Two Noble Kinsmen

“O you heavenly charmers
What things you make of us! For what we lack
We laugh; for what we have are sorry; still
Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
That are above our question. Let’s go off
And bear us like the time.”

Appropriate words for Phoenix Ark Press, perhaps! As Nicholls says, that does not mean that The Tempest was not his greatest swan song, but then, as so much in Shakespeare is about the art and artifice of theatre itself, and generative language too, Prospero is much about the magical engagement of the poet magician’s own psyche, meeting the intractable threat of real life and politics. The appeal beyond fragile art too, not half so real or true as when fact and fiction meet.

There were about 15 permanent theatres in London at the time, and the remains of The Curtain were uncovered in work on the London Olympics. But in the story of William and many other players, like his youngest and virtually unknown brother Edmund Shakespeare, that astonishing flowering of poetry and theatre in London and Southwark was soon to be swept away by the Puritans, and Civil War, or find its channels in other more aristocratic rivers. Closed winter theatres, like the one Shakespeare and The Globe sharers were developing in Blackfriars, brought more expensive seats, the introduction of candlelight, one day to become ‘the limelight’, and so changed the shape of playwriting too, into formal acts. Theatre also moved towards London’s ‘West End’ – the City was pushing that way – with theatre’s like Beeston’s Cockpit, and developing Drury Lane.

But by the 1640’s The Swan theatre in Paris Gardens in Southwark, built by Francis Langley, was described as hanging down its head “like a dying Swan.” The Globe, that had burnt down in 1613 and was rebuilt, had gone by 1642. Later reformers would associate the site with a Baptist meeting-house, but if, for the morally minded, the ‘sinful miasmas’ of the theatres had been happily expelled, what really drove the development of the area now was the hugely lucrative brewing business, as individual ‘taps’ were driven out, and everything went through the guts of kings, beggars and London Citizens alike. So those ‘player’s fictive worlds were vanishing under their entertaining feet!

If Shakespeare, during the Reformation, did turn away from Marlowe’s darker revolts and investigations, that fiery playwright spy, to the purposeful prosperity of secular theatre and sought futures, perhaps he also echoed Dr John Dee’s turning from alchemy and the occult too. It seems that in writing about London, a skillful fiction writer like Peter Ackroyd, who wrote a novel about John Dee, has himself touched the potential darkness of that imagining. Shakepseare’s astonishing alchemies are of the heart, most interested in working effects on an audience, so he is always concerned with real love, and the effect of the play in engaging with life. Summoning too though those mythic ‘Gods’ of a classical imagination and belief, powerfully real forces inside such a psyche, before any pseudo ‘science’ of psychology had been invented, but knowing in The Tempest, and the flow and tide of time, that everything dissolves in the end, except the play itself:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

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July 27, 2012 · 1:05 pm

SERGIE LOBANOV-ROSTOVSKY, THE NEW YORK TIMES, MITT ROMNEY, SHAKESPEARE AND THE OLYMPICS

So, the game’s afoot today (quote – Will Shakespeare not Sherlock Holmes), The London Olympics, and not remotely a chance to plug the sporting thriller The Godhead Game, with its kidnapped athletes,Click here. But, as the Torch was held high at the modern Globe in Southwark, a wonderful little article about politics, history and the show of it all, London Struts on The World Stage, appeared in the New York Times by Sergie Lobanov-Rostovsky, Click here, which proves America (not Abrams) has some culture and sense of it all.

This blog has been much caught between London and New York, ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds, but we make the point in Shakespeare’s Brother, as American academics like James Shapiro, Bloom and Greenblat hold the field and rekindle that interest in Southwark and the time, that perhaps they only need Shakespeare to really interpret it all, especially out of nasty Reformation struggles. Though, if ‘The American Dream’ was, in the founding of the Virginia Lottery, (taken up by all thirteen colonies), after 1612, dreamt up by tempestuous Elizabthans not Arthur Miller, perhaps America, bankers, politicians, the City of London and the entire world are really stuck in the past, 400 hundred years ago. John Harvard came from Southwark too, though we don’t think much of the signature in the Christening record. But Good God, did Mitt Romney really say he could understand the spirit of the Olympics better than Obama because he’s an Anglo-Saxon?! Set Othello’s wrath on him, or, Doh, invite him to the Olympian, Greek foundations of the Games. “Oh brave New World, that hath such people in it!”

But guff to that, for now, and good luck to all those Olympian players and team GB.

PA PRESS

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July 27, 2012 · 9:40 am

SHAKESPEARE, OXFORD, CATHOLICS, MIDDENS AND SCHOOLING WITH IVOR BROWN

The Edmund Shakespeare Blog

That little 1949 edition on Shakespeare by Ivor Brown certainly underlines gaps in my knowledge, which are probably wide as a church door, but it’s very clear the Stradfordian-Oxfordian clash is in full swing by the time it came out, five years after the war. Indeed the book seems written to defend against it, though, with apologies to passionate William Ray, Brown reminds how it was all good-natured stuff, with a shared love of the times. So, if genius cannot perhaps come from quite ‘anywhere’, but needs the soil of some culture, certainly reading and writing, Ivor Brown underlines the grandeur of the Arden line, if Shakespeare’s family were a dispossessed branch, financial crises, but the town prominence of John Shakespeare and that fight for a Coat of Arms, even if Shakespeare winked at it. He also pours a dung heap of scorn on the contempt the Oxfordians then hurled at a supposedly illiterate household, because it had a midden outside. The communal dung heap was a feature of country towns, and he also points out that the demonstrably literate Adrian Quiney also signed his name with a cross, as did John Shakespeare, on the same document. That x marking a spot was a common Elizabethan practice, particularly perhaps among people who did not especially like signing documents, or trust the law.

He’s very interesting on the lack of information about any schooling, and again, having spent my own little time going blind trying to read Elizabethan records, while evoking the Stratford Shakespeare you must underline the sparsity and sometimes difficulty of evidence too. No record of Shakespeare exists between a baptism and a wedding, but then why would there need to be any? If there is not a ‘mountain of evidence’ though, there is a comparative mountain, compared to Bacons and Oxfords, though I owe time to a Cardan grille! But one name comes up again in the book, Simon Hunt, a teacher at the Stratford Grammar School, who ended his days a Jesuit in Rome. I have made no connection yet between the London Hunts, owners of The Vine where Edmund Shakespeare was staying when he died, a Phoenix discovery linked to the reign of Henry VI, thank ye very much, and any Stratford Hunts, whether Simon, or Richard Hunt, the Vicar and Oxford man who owned the book with the latin inscription talking of Shakespeare as a ‘Roscius’. I think it’s a valuable area of enquiry though, in that intensely interconnected Elizabethan world, so do join the blog, if you can add to the scholarship. (Then I’ll write a book and make some money out of it, buy a fine house and live like the earl of Oxford!)

As for a Catholic trail that might echo out of a Catholic school master, as one Catholic friend said hopefully at Stoke Abbot last weekend, “then everyone was a Catholic”. Well, yes, perhaps, because ‘is the pope a Catholic’? You might ask it of the Barberinnis, those hungry Princes of the Church, or indeed Pope Leo X, who said ‘it has served us well, this myth of Christ’. As for any myth of Shakespeare, I have my own notions about his beliefs, out of highly secular though also magical plays, but also his affections for prominent Catholics, and connections with them too. There is that Blackfriars Gatehouse, and if there was any intimacy with the London Hunts, pure surmise, there is now that Brotherhood of Our Lady of Assumption, somewhere in the background, founded at St Margaret’s Church in Southwark. But above all there is Southwark as a place of independence and free thought, on both sides, but a vivid London Reformation fault line.

St Margaret’s had been thrown down, though who knows what became of the Brotherhood. But anyway, the Fraternity, like the Bishops of Winchester, seems much involved in local property ownership, of taverns and perhaps brothels, since Alan Nelson said in his lecture that local lore suggested The Vine was a tavern-brothel. Alan Nelson is right in saying there is no evidence, but you just have to look at Cowcross Street, Clerkenwell,Shoreditch, described in The Lodger, something of Soho today, but especially Southwark then, to understand what taverns often were, or how close it all was. “It all happened here,” said one lady, talking of Bankside and beaming at me from the Globe reception, while the theatre too is that place of putting on and taking off clothes. Ooh la la.

DCD

PA PRESS

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July 23, 2012 · 11:31 am

HENRY V, THE HOLLOW CROWN, HENRY VI AND EDMUND SHAKESPEARE

Perhaps it’s that Henry V is such a triumphant example of the language of transforming imagination, soaring poetry transporting us all beyond the physical confines of the ‘Wooden O’, that the BBC’s next contribution to The Hollow Crown did not quite soar, despite John Hurt voicing the chorus. It’s why the play, probably first performed in 1599, has become almost a metaphor for British martial rhetoric, intentionally undercut here, and out of Henry’s mis-spent youth at the Boar’s Head, for the making of man and hero. Perhaps it needed Oliver’s theatrical references in the World War II film, or the Te Deum splendour and horror of Kenneth Brannagh’s version, but the moment Henry delivered his warning to the Burghers of Harfleur, with the gates already open, was almost comic. Perhaps that was the director’s intention, to deflate Hal’s semi psychotic but truthful vision of war, but, just as the poetic language speaks to an audience in a theatre, both that and the Crispin’s day speech need a bigger present audience. It is about the making of political and royal rhetoric, despite the ironies of life and horror of war, though with the vision of the truly good King in the frame.

What was so winning though was Tom Hiddleston’s human, sensitive and pasionate Harry, reminding us that love and brothership is behind his journey, at least he hopes, high to low. The strange wooing of Katherine was lovely, with the ravashing Melanie Thierry playing the forced French consort, and reminds that the drive of the play is towards union, from Germaine Greer’s ‘poet of marriage’, as she described Shakespeare. It also places, as ever, the play of language and metaphor at the very centre of everything, as does the famous English-French translation scene, with its sexual punning, getting to the heart of the matter. So of course brave King Harry dies, in fact of dissentry on the way back from France, but Henry VI is sired, truly ushering in those Wars of the Roses, and the perpetual fear of weak Kingship “Whose state so many had the managing, That they lost France and made his England bleed.”

Henry VI was related to Charles I of France, who thought he was made of glass, and a devote King who reportedly wandered the Court, in days where one fashion was for Court ladies to wear dresses with their breasts exposed, with his head in his hands. He is also supposed to have spent the battle of Tewksbery talking to a tree! A clear warning about the danger of heriditary monarchy. But it is work here on Southwark and Edmund Shakespeare, William’s unkown youngest brother, with the real founding under Henry VI of The Brotherhood of Our Lady of Assumpiton in Southwark, that originally owned The Vine where Edmund Shakespeare was staying when he died, that might open a valuable doorway on the very neglected Henry VI play cycle too. Just as it should open a door to Southwark itself and how that place of theatres also echoes back into the plays. Henry VI features a very dishonourable Bishop of Winchester, the power there, a false miracle, at the cusp of a Reformation, and all the themes that of course haunted power and Kingship during the Reformation. Yet perhaps there is another brotherhood at play when Shakespeare speaks of we “few, we happy few, we band of brothers” in Henry V, the brotherhood of the players themselves, excempt from military service, inside the arena of a theatre.

Phoenix Ark Press

For Shakespeare’s Brother Click here

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July 20, 2012 · 9:18 am

OLYMPICS, EDMUND SHAKESPEARE AND PLACING A STORY IN CONTEXT

THE EDMUND SHAKESPEARE BLOG

London is about to host an Olympics, but there is also a Cultural Olympics going on and a Shakespeare fest too. There is useful work being done at the moment mapping Elizabethan London, and Southwark. It is work that a lay student can join in with too and an example is the use of the so-called ‘Agas Map’ Click here. A little doubtful here of ‘Virtual Reality’ or ‘interactive history’, often supposed facts and dates too, it still helps readers imagine the ground, four hundred years ago.

To start imagining Bankside though, go there today, and visit Sam Wanamaker’s Globe Project, which stands near the area of old ‘Paris Gardens‘, a Liberty, where Francis Langley’s Swan Theatre once stood, a Bull and Bear baiting arena, and the Royal Barge house on the Thames, that the landlord and impresario Philip Henslowe franchised and re-equipped. Just South East of the modern Globe, parallel with the Thames, runs dreary modern Park Street, which more or less follows the line of old Maid Lane, which for a time became the Broadway or Shaftesbury Avenue of its day. It was on Maid Lane that Henslowe put up his Rose Theatre, and in 1599, the Burbages, with Will Shakespeare a sharer, The Globe. It is possible that another figure involved in the theatres, Jacob Meade or Maide, a prominent waterman, like so many in the district, took his name for Maide Lane.

The Elephant Tavern, perhaps referenced in Twelfth Night, stood on one Maid Lane corner, as did The Vine, in a group of properties called Hunt’s Rents. The Vine included, as did many monastic and also tavern properties, a brewhouse, in a celebrated brewing area by the river, and a ‘messuage’ of land, tenements, stables and gardens. So it was like hundreds of taverns located in Southwark. It was bequeathed in the Online will of Edwarde Hunt, to his ‘beloved wife Mary’, who was pregnant, in 1588. It is uncertain when it went up, but a Vyne is mentioned in the 1530’s, and it belonged to a John Le Hunte, under Henry VI. Or rather to that Brotherhood of Our Lady of Assumption, connected to St Margaret’s Church, granted rights to buy Land and properties by the King of up to Twenty Marks. In the Token Books of Southwark Cathedral, registers of locals buying church tokens handed in to prove communion attendance, Edmund Shakespeare’s name appears at the Vine in 1607. He died that freezing December and was buried on the 31st, though the furiously chill weather extends the possible time of fairly rapid burials. Alan Nelson and his colleague Professor Ingram have been listing all the names in the Token Books to put up on line.

They include the likes of Edmund Shakespeare, Phillip Henslowe, and Edward Alleyn, several actors and some characters who appear in other references to Shakespeare. Keep walking East passed the modern sites of The Rose and Globe excavations, and you get to the point Park Street turns right and South. It was once called Deadman’s Place. If you had gone South West four hundred years ago you would have got to St Margaret’s Cross, where St Margaret’s Church once stood, dissolved during the Reformation, to become a local prison. We think Deadman’s Place is linked to land called, in one document, Lord Farrar’s Place, that St Margaret’s Church bought up for a new burial ground and sepulchre.

Above the Park Street bend, at the modern wine mecca Vineopolis, begins what was once the Liberty of The Clink, running along Clink Street, where London’s oldest prison stood, passed the remains of Winchester House, the London palace of the Bishop of Winchester, and you get to St Saviour’s Dock, where the Golden Hinde replica is, Winchester Street and then Southwark Cathedral. We can now prove that Phillipe Henslove lived in a house that was effectly No 5 Bell Alley, just before Clink Street, on the edge of the Church Square, probably part of another tavern and tenement complex, like The Vine, or the nearby Green Dragon Inn.

Henslowe lived in Southwark for over 20 years, but for several years his Son-in-law the famous actor Edward Alleyn moved in with him. Both were to become Wardens of St Saviour’s Church, for a time. Both were also involved in something called The Great Enqueste. It began with the Coronation of James I, into many affairs, but in Southwark coalescing about complaints against the Church Vestrymen and local administration, that is its own important and fascinating story. Here we think, because the Wardens oversaw legal agreements and purchases, it was very important in the Shakespeare story, and may have been one of the reasons William Shakespeare moved out of the area again. If Charles Nicholls is right about the dates surrounding Shakespeare’s sojourn on Silver Street, around Elizabeth’s death, then it makes sense, if a rival like Henslowe came more to the fore as a Southwark Man, with the Queen’s death.

The topography of the area has of course changed enormously, with the rise in height, the crowding of concrete buildings, and above all the movement of London Bridge, west by over fifty yards. But what remains is the dominating space of St Saviours Church, Southwark Cathedral, and the fact that Bankside, once Stewside, has not moved at all, unlike the North Shore. Olympic visitors disgorging next week at London Bridge Tube Station, or people trying to get away from it all, and rediscover an extraordinarily interesting and important area, threatened by buildings like the Shard and the activities of Thames Water, may find it difficult to imagine. But perhaps the coming blogs and precise details will help. In the meantime, here is a picture of JJ Visscher’s famous engraving of 1616, the year both Shakespeare and Henslowe died.

Let the eye dwell on the bottom shore, across the river from the old wooden, walled City of London. To the right is the small church of no longer standing St Olaves, the spire of which Peter Ackroyd says is mentioned more than any other in Shakespeare’s Plays, although London then had five St Olaves. Go West to the old covered London Bridge, famous throughout Europe, then to the large church of St Saviours, originally St Mary’s Overies, now Southwark Cathedral. Keep going left and you get to Winchester House or Palace, in the Clink Liberty, and then you get to Maid Lane, where the round bear gardens and theatres stood. In time we will pinpoint where Edmund Shakespeare was staying in 1607. (The panorama is taken from Wikepedia. If there are any copyright issues please contact the blog.)

FOR FURTHER EVIDENCE AND WORK SEE SHAKESPEARE’S BROTHER IN THE PUBLISHER’S PAGES, ABOVE


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July 18, 2012 · 5:50 pm

DISCOVERING SOUTHWARK

Well, John Constable is another one who is quite guarded about his ‘Shakespeare’, but does interesting stuff, so for anyone wanting to explore Southwark, grimace at the Shard, or listen to stories…

SOUTHWARK MYSTERIES GUIDED WALKS
Discover the most historic part of London with writer and performer John Constable, author of The Southwark Mysteries and Secret Bankside – Walks In The Outlaw Borough. Meet: Tabard Street Piazza, SE1 1JA. Between St George the Martyr Church and John Harvard Library. Nearest tube: Borough. Please arrive 15 minutes before departure time. Tickets: £10 / £7 concessions including booking fee. Pre-booking advised.
More info and online booking: http://www.southwarkmysteries.co.uk/guided-walks

SHAKESPEARE’S BANKSIDE – Sun 29 July: 11am. Mon 6 August: 11am and 6.30pm
London’s oldest pleasure-quarter and the birth of English theatre. Taverns, bear-pits, theatres and stews – licensed by the Bishop of Winchester. This walk conjures up an unforgettable gallery of Elizabethan characters!

DICKENS WALK – Wed 1 August: 6.30pm. Tue 7 August: 11am and 6.30pm. Wed 8 August: 6.30pm
Celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, this walk explores his childhood encounter with the Victorian underworld, visiting places which cast a shadow over his entire life and inspired scenes in his novels from ‘Little Dorrit’ to ‘Oliver Twist’.

ROMAN LONDON REVISITED – Thu 2 August: 6.30pm. Wed 8 August: 11am
Recent excavations near London Bridge have uncovered the sites of Roman baths, a market-arcade, temples and a cemetery with the bones of a female gladiator. This walk uncovers 2,000 years of settlement around Borough and Bankside.

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July 18, 2012 · 11:01 am

EDMUND SHAKESPEARE AND ALAN NELSON

The Edmund Shakespeare Blog

William Ray described Alan Nelson as a somewhat rude Shakespeare critic, or words to that effect. That impression also emerged in a spat that took place between him and Katherine Duncan Jones on the Net, or his Socrates site. I first contacted the Berkeley University theatre historian about a novel I had started on Edmund Shakespeare, when a teacher in a Clapham pub told me about the tomb stone in the centre of Southwark Cathedral. It must be said, a late eighteenth or early nineteenth century addition to the sculptured dead there. Professor Nelson was working on listing the names in the Southwark Cathedral Token Books with a colleague, Professor Ingram, and certainly deserves the credit for naming the place Edmund Shakespeare turns up in Southwark, The Vine, at a little lecture to his students at The Globe Theatre. I hope I would have eventually uncovered it alone, but along with the difficulty of deciphering names and Elizabethan writing, you have to let a period into your blood, before you wake up to who and what, and interesting connections, that can suddenly vanish again, like wood smoke.

I was rather less impressed with a desire to ‘protect moral copyright’ in that work, since Edmund’s presence in the Token Books was already up on the net, and there is no copyright, moral or otherwise, in fact. To be fair, Alan Nelson quickly announced that at a first talk to the friends of Southwark Cathedral and how the name just might have been a forgery of John Payne Collier’s. He does not think so, though I am less certain about the name attached to The Vine, than Edmund’s certain burial record in Southwark Cathedral in 1607. I was also less impressed when I invited him to lunch in London, to discuss the whole subject, even perhaps seeking support from Berkley University, but never even got an answer.

As James Shapiro, doing 1608 for Faber and Faber, was not exactly hugely supportive of an Edmund Shakespeare project, although he said it was important. Well, our American cousins are as capable of being as protective of ‘new’ information about Shakespeare as anyone, not least because of waspish voices everywhere, in an increasingly competitive publishing world, and that there is gold in them there Shakespeare hills, or academic kudos. Except here, because frustration means we are giving work done for free! I hope it is of interest and value.

I also hope the scholars can be a little more open to work from those who are not the supposed ‘authorities’. I think writers’ and players’ instincts are very real authorities, but you must also have respect for what is actually said in the records. Alan Nelson made that point about the record of Will Kemp’s death, and the relaying of mistakes into the ‘mainstream’, picked up as ‘truth’. Go back to the source then, but do not get too fustion either about the nature of historical imagination and insight needed, nor the certain reliability of records or indeed scholarship. Much American interest in Southwark now, with Sam Wanamaker’s Globe, does seem to come straight out of the American search for its own roots, from an age of New World Discoveries, but I for one am rather dubious about the supposed name of John Harvard highlighted by an arrow in the Southwark burial records. Perhaps I am going blind!

As I have said though, I think the direct link of The Vine, in a group of Southwark buildings in the Token Books called Hunt’s Rents, to John Le Hunte, and The Brotherhood of Our Lady of Assumption, is a new and extremely important window into the vitally under studied area. As far as I know, no one else has revealed that but a scholar will have to tell me if I am wrong. Following the records of St Margaret’s Church there, which became one of the Compter Prisons, it is wonderful to find records of ‘pleyers‘ in the church, a hundred and fifty years before the new permanent Theatres. It ties that playing tradition to everyday and church life, to the great festivals and to the mystery plays, that were effectively banned under the Reformation. So theatre became essentially secular and political, in an intense and dangerous London environment. But as Ackroyd says, a Roman gladiator’s trident has been found in Southwark, and there was a very long tradition of ‘entertainments’ there.

So the dirge being sung for Henry VIII, at his death, by priests in St Saviours, now the Cathedral, was interrupted by the rowdy sound of players in the Southwark streets. Ah, time and history stop for no man, as was written over London Bridge. That band of ‘low life’ scum that William Ray tries to refer to then, or a great tradition of player troupes in England, that Shakespeare joined and fed from, however much he and Hamlet may have redirected the vision of theatre, or not, as the case may be. But it is of course Hamlet, and Hamlet’s reaction to the players’, with their vital reports, their window into truth, the play being the thing to catch the conscience of the king, and everyone else, that is one of the most obvious signs of Will Shakespeare’s living engagement with the playhouses. As that ‘magestical roof, fretted with golden fire’, gives a new resonance to an actor’s consciousness, standing physically on stage, referring to the props and artifice of the wooden O. The echo chambers to his art and his metaphysics. But it works throughout the plays, as Shakespeare engages in a dialogue about his own art, and what is truth and what show. What ‘History’ is too.

If you try and read my handwriting, in my large notebook, out of six months work at the London Metropolitan Archive, you might think mine an example of sloppy, mispelt Elizabethan writing, before spelling codified, like so much else! I have not got that with me, but it will come out in time. The picture you can begin to build up of Southwark, what was there, who living there, and how that assists Shakespeare scholarship, is one that should be shared, and shared by people on each other’s ‘side’, not trying to be the harbingers of the only truth around. Shakespeare scholarship does stand on the cusp of recorded ‘history’, perhaps a new consciousness of English or British history, suddenly being dramatised so powerfully by Shakespeare, not least because it was the beginning of parish records themselves.

DCD

Phoenix Ark Press

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July 17, 2012 · 1:51 pm

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, PRINCE CHARLES AND EDWARD DEVERE

There is one small element of the William Ray’s trumpeting of the theory about Edward Devere that Phoenix Ark will support, and that is you must not make too many ‘establishment’ assumptions about Shakespeare for granted. It is why we found something of the ‘Shakespeare Land’ RSC tradition, at times, or the entire industry that has built up, something of a block to rediscovering the playwright and the plays. Not to mention why the Barbican Centre, one former RSC home, may have great concert halls but is the ugliest building in Europe. As, in contrast, the BBC and The Hollow Crown are so superbly recapturing Will and the plays. It is why too much worthiness towards the ‘bard’, in school, or anywhere else, can vitally separate students from the living word, which you must inhabit, perhaps like a player, to get to the wonder and genius of.

In fact, even the ‘establishment’ theory, with so much more evidence than others, often has thin links and tiny facts too, built into entire worlds. That is certainly not to go against the William of Stratford ‘theory’, but it is to leave imaginative space to understand the real man and the time again. Someone we believe even more astonishing, if you really put it all in context. But if there is the world of airy fancy, or the new American approach of near virtual ‘recreation’, there is that third place, part fact, part fiction. It is perhaps expressed in Peter Ackroyd’s instinctive understanding of writers and the mystery of identity, and above all about the metaphorical nature of an explosive language, and a vital, organic historical moment. Shakespeare reforges the language, as if it was his non-royal but divine right. But of course Shakespeare was not THE Shakespeare he has become, however lauded in his time. He was rediscovered, even ‘reinvented’, mythologized and institutionalised too, with almost every private or public political agenda attached to his name and works, over the years. But then his work encompasses so much. His greatest rediscovery was under the early Victorians, even if they ‘Bawdlerised’ the agonies of King Lear.

One notable critic of course was Dr Johnson though, who has very interesting links, talked about in Shakespeare’s Brother (if it ever gets published) to the Thrale family. Ralph Thrale, direct from the Bishops of Winchester, bought up the land on which those theatres stood, and where Edmund Shakespeare lived for a time, turning it into the largest brewery in Europe, the Anchor Brewery. So while the players and playwrights, and their and Will’s words, were going through the guts or ears of Londoners, the future in Southwark was headed towards that all driving force, money, thanks to Londoner’s drinking guts, and the land ownership of taverns by the City, especially with the entry of the Barclay’s and Courage families. Hey ho.

It was very interesting when Anonymous came out though that Prince Charles put his name to the Stratford Camp, with his face on the website. Then he is a patron of the Birthplace Trust. We have often been admirers here, to adopt just a token of Royal crawling, or graceful respect, especially for work such as the Princes’ Trust, and even thought of sending him the ‘royal’ spirited Fire Bringer, when it first came out. It is about Scottish deer, after all. We have no idea if he’s any kind of scholar or not on the subject of Shakespeare, but it is also interesting that The Prince of Wales, divinely righted or not, does not support the Edward Devere theory either. Incidentally, along with Dr Johnson, one of the many visitors to the Anchor Brewery where The Globe and The Vine had stood, was another Prince of Wales.

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July 5, 2012 · 6:59 pm

SHAKESPEARE, SCHOLARSHIP, SOUTHWARK AND THE OXFORD SIDESHOW

“All cough in ink, all think what other people think,” Yeats

It is not the acceptance of the absolutes of ‘worthy’ scholarship or ‘establishment’ theory, even if Prince Charles did put his face on the Shakespeare Birthplace website in reply to Anonymous, upholding the very merry Shakespeare industry and RSC land, that makes an ‘attack’ on the Oxford authorship theory for Will Shakespeare important, but because it is an irritating sideshow. In fact, the supposed authority of the scholars on a Stratford Shakespeare can be just as irritating, since documentary evidence is so thin, and truths lost to the veils of time. Half of the reason for scholarly tentativeness seems to be you might get your head bitten off, but in terms of the supposed authority of established truth, of course Shakespeare has been reinvented and rediscovered for four hundred years. As history is a dialogue between past and present. So he has been co-opted as protestant path finder, a staunch monarchist, pure revolutionary, the voice of Brit propaganda, or simply the God of the word.

Perhaps that’s why it is important to resist received authority too, especially when setting out to make discoveries. When trying to present ideas on Edmund Shakespeare to one major publisher, and also bringing up the three signatures in the Catholic English college in Rome, the only comment was ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’ Because the Reformation itself still carries such deep echoes. But if a person’s ‘faith’ or lack of it can be a private and intimate thing, or should be, there is much evidence for Shakespeare’s involvement with prominent Catholics, as a society mutated from ‘Catholic’ to ‘Protestant’. So the ‘truth’ carries deep felt echoes and controversies, but is also defended so hotly because there is gold in them there hills. Though it is circumstantial, the residence in his last days of Edmund Shakespeare, Will’s youngest brother, living at The Vine in Southwark, ties into the London Hunt family’s involvement, under Henry VI, and the likes of Peter Averne, with the very Catholic Brotherhood of Our Lady of Assumption in Southwark. Perhaps the overriding point though is that Southwark itself is such a fascinating area and an absolute fault line for London politics and the Reformation too. It does irritate too, much as facts are a guide, when the new voice of American literalism swings onto the scene, if it loses Peter Ackroyd’s sense of the intrinsic mysteries of identity, creativity but above all a shifting English language.

St Margeret’s Church, where the Brotherhood began, was thrown down by Henry VIII and turned into a prison, and its parishoner’s transferred to the large St Saviours, previously St Mary’s Ovaries, now Southwark Cathedral. But at that Cathedral, five minutes walk away, there Becket had preached, there too Bloody Mary staged heresy trials against Protestants, and nearby at St Thomas’ ‘hospital’ they produced the first English language bible, in the form of the Vulgate. It lay on the Canterbury Road, real and metaphorical, running down towards the continent. It was filled with Protestant Dutch, many involved in the tavern-brewing business that swallowed up the district, but also notable for many years for Catholic dissenters, especially under the Jacobites. The Bishops of Winchester there were at the heart of Henry’s divorce and ensuing Reformation battles, but also excerised their power and protection in the liberties, until the Puritans and the Civil War closed them down in London, and the theatres too. So exactly the place, with it taverns, brothels and theatres, used but complained about by the City of London across the water, or local ‘respectable’ folk, to encourage the stews of free thought and creativity. A place to be wary of too. Evidence suggests Will did not live there all the time, in that ‘Domus et Aliorum’, also living in St Helen’s, at the Bishop’s Gate, Silver Street or Stratford, but he may have lived and worked there for ten years and more, and the place has been underestimated in its significance. Go back to the source, though the ‘source’ of Shakespeare’s mind and art is another thing, the different ‘countries’ he journeyed to, as is what we are really talking about when we talk of his ‘identity’. It was Bulgakov who wrote the life of Mr Moliere, Shakespeare’s only comparative rival in Paris, but doubting the easy validity of documentary biography, believed an artist had to inhabit an artist to get close. To do that with a mind like Shakespeare’s, through the currents of his time, can be a slightly dangerous exercise and you might do better just to enjoy the work!

Arguments can be followed in Shakespeare’s Brother, posted experimentally above.

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