Category Archives: London

July 25, 2012 · 3:57 pm

ISRAEL FEARS IRAN ATTACK AT GAMES

The headline was in last Weekend’s Sunday Times, with Israel talking about a possible Iranian attack on its athletes during the London Olympic Games, which start this Friday. The Countdown is now on the nightly news. Let’s pray not, after an attack in Bulgaria and talk of another Munich, although a Mossad team are at work in Europe, talking about a converted white terror cell. A more sombre point though, with British officials saying they are ‘raising the flag’ is about Israel’s attitude to Iran, criticised by one prominent member of IAEA. The question of Iran and a Nuclear weapons capability is said to be the single most important foreign policy issue at the moment, but especially after the WMD fiasco in Iraq, fears and responses need to be very carefully scrutinized.

It is also a major theme of the new thriller The Godhead Game by David Clement-Davies, which employs this year’s supposed End of the World, with talk of the end of the Mayan Calendar, to look at wider issues that threaten us all. The Godhead Game – A Game of Secrets, A Hunt For Skulls, A Battle of Spies.

To buy The Godhead Game Click here

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July 25, 2012 · 3:44 pm

CHARLES DANCE, STEPHEN SPIELBURG AND READING SHAKESPEARE ON SILVER STREET

The Edmund Shakespeare Blog

Just finished Charles Nicholl’s excellent The Lodger, which came into the frame as appropriate scholarship, when trying to get a project on Edmund Shakespeare off the ground. That moved from a novel, to a TV proposal, to months at the Metropolitan Archive, trying to be honourable to the actual evidence, or lack of it. Last weekend I also found a little second-hand yellow bound edition of the 1949 Shakespeare biography, by Ivor Brown, in the wonderful Stoke Abbot book barn in Dorset, at their annual village fair. Brown’s highly articulate and extremely passionate take is dedicated to ‘The Players’, and takes just the route I wanted to, which is straight through a theatre door. It’s approach and language could not be more different to Nicholls’ finely written and very measured story of the Bellot-Mountjoy case, and the evidence of Shakespeare lodging on London’s Silver Street, mixing with the likes of the French immigrant wig making family, and also the tavern-brothel owner George Wilkins, who is the best candidate for the co-authorship of Pericles. Low company indeed.

First though to upbraid a modern ‘player’, Charles Dance, who was extremely nice when I collared him in the Chelsea Arts Club, over a sneaky cigarette in the garden, and asked him to take a look at a two page treatment on Shakespeare’s Brother. Little did he know I had had to suffer repeated nights of watching his striding Coriolanus, when I was working front of House at the RSC, years back. He can have no had idea of my only professional ‘acting’ performace, for one night, as the bear in the Winter’s Tale, at Regents Park Open Air Theatre. I borrowed Joe Regal’s costume. After Anonymous had come out though, he could hardly suspect my already dreaming fantasy, being a fantasy author, of today’s finest players rising up in fiery indignation to defend the ‘cause’ of Elizabethan actors, scumbags to heroes, and tell Edmund Shakespeare’s lost story in Southwark. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers!” Dream on, though my cry these last four years has been about being ‘allowed’ to write, and earn, especially under contract. But, while warning that he would be brutally honest, Charles Dance at least gave his word that he would get back to me, and never did! Words, words, words. Perhaps he loathed it, or it was Molly Parkin, or he was right about my “living in cloud cuckoo land” if I thought the giants of stage, TV and Film had more time than for two pages. At least the folk at Sky Arts thought it not that bad. But since I think a director like Stephen Spielberg has all the storytelling magic, yet necessary respect for historical accuracy too, to tell such a Southwark Tale, perhaps borrowing Roland Emmerich’s set, not to mention the Hollywood clout, he is very welcome to pick up a phone instead and call Phoenix Ark Press. “Mr Davies, I have Mr Spielberg on the phone, we have to have this Edmund Shakespeare story thing, the world is crying out to know!” Both the TV treatment and the nascent novel though, as part of an overall project on Edmund Shakespeare here, with the non-fiction work above too, will be blogged as well.

The Lodger is fascinating, if strangely slight in the end, like so much world building around Shakespeare, although it’s interesting that Nicholl’s creative juices really start to flow when he talks of the steamer side of London, from the fortress brothel, Holland’s Leaguer, in Southwark, to the dirty weekend goings on in Brentford. But then the mystery and drive of sex are always in question in sensing how Shakespeare lived and “conceived it so”, as are all the murderous arguments of the Reformation. That was what my story of lost Edmund was largely about though, living in and surviving often foul London, and the madness, jealousy and misery of art. I still think Stoppard in Shakespeare in Love got some spirit very right, and he should know more than most. Charles Nicholls particularly highlights the period from around 1604 to 1607 as Shakespeare’s time on Silver Street, and Measure for Measure and Pericles as part of a sea change in his work. He also suggests the influence and effect his relationship with the dispossessed daughter Marie Mountjoy may have had on the plays. From Pericles to Lear, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, so many of Shakespeare’s major characters in the later plays are about father-daughter relationships, and London and Southwark was a place where very good advice might be to ‘lock up your daughters.’. But if such biographical links can be made, or are purely suggestive to the creative psyche of such a writer, another fact that must surely have resonated very loudly indeed through William Shakespeare’s life at the time was the death of his youngest, player brother, Edmund, in 1607. Edmund’s own infant son had died, four months earlier, and was marked down as ‘base born’. That means that the unmarried mother, living in the poor environs of Morefields, was about to give birth, at a supposedly very happy time for elder and now succesful William, the marriage of his own daughter Susanna to John Hall, that same year. With the Great Frost that seized up the Thames in December, and saw London watermen cutting channels in the ice, as they do in Coriolanus, with a marriage and a filial death too, 1607/8 was also quite a shattering year then.

Off the top of my head, I think it was the unreliable John Aubrey who first suggested Shakespeare spent something like ten years living in Southwark, after he moved from the Bishop’s Gate. His recorded time on wealthier Silver Street, north and inside London Wall, suggests he was more in transit. It is a pet theory here that his move from Southwark, by current evidence in that monumental year of 1603, that saw a Queen’s death and the return of plague, also had something to do with the political rise of long time resident in Southwark, Philippe Henslowe. I think not enough has been made of the Henslowe rivalry, Will Kempe split, the building of the Globe, the decline of the Rose, two hundred yards away, and the political rivalries at court, with Henslowe as Master of the Game and a Groom of the Chamber, like Shakespeare, the man who would build The Hope, as he northern Fortune declined, but die in the same year as Shakespeare, 1616. These were showmen, in sometimes literally violent competition. Shakespeare in Love gets that rivalry between the Admiral’s and King’s Men, or His Majestie’s Servants.

But there is also Henslowe’s local establishment role, along with Edward Alleyn, as part of The Great Enqueste, under James I. It is recorded in the St Saviour’s Church Token Books too. In Southwark that brought into the frame the fascinating question of the troubled administration of St Saviour’s, now Southwark Cathedral, where Henslowe and then Alleyn became Wardens, and the complaints about the merry behaviour of the 80 stong Vestrymen there. Being a warden meant you oversaw wills, deeds and property transfers in the area though, and we know much of Henslowe’s numerous business interests there from his famous account books. With the death of the Queen and a new royal administration, every office was thrown into question, and in controversial Southwark, the hopeful stomping ground of the expanding City of London too, just around then William Shakespeare, triumphant at the Globe and elsewhere, seems to move out of the area, to Silver Street. In many ways he seems to be a man often trying to get away from it all.

But Henslowe’s fingers in Southwark pies was also dabbling in the administration of poor relief in the area, and the running of local charitable institutions like Cure’s College. It is in an accounts book in the Cure’s College papers, again without the notes and off the top of my head, that I found a note of a payment of 20 Shillings for “Mr Jonson’s Booke”. I do not know if others have found that, and have not jet checked it against Henslowe’s hand writing, but it suggests to me a play by Ben Jonson, and that Church admin, local arms colleges, taverns, brothels and theatres, could be a very off the cuff and interconnected affair.

As for his unknown brother Edmund, completely absent in any playlists, yet marked down as a player too, and dying at only 27 in Southwark in 1607, how can you tell his story? There is a great deal to be said about brothers in Shakespeare’s plays, especially Lear and As You Like It, though nothing that proves anything absolutely. If the controversies rage over the sparse records around William, although far more considerable circumstantial evidence, which The Lodger finely adds to, Edmund’s really would be the ‘Biography of an Unrecorded Life’, as I first tagged Shakespeare’s Brother. As all biography contains ‘fiction’, perhaps putting scholarship right beside creative narrative will be helpful, although it also shows how quickly knowledge of the plays start to change the vision, and get into the work. But there are only six records of Edmund Shakespeare’s existence, one is questionable, and two repeat. We really only know of a birth and a death then, and that he was, although not how successfully, supportively or jealously, a player. So much about him suggests something we are unused to in reading about the mythic William Shakespeare though, a World mythos that he and his work achieved only later, despite any contemporary phenomenon, as Ackroyd claims, and that is a Shakespeare as failure. That is the thrill of the historical detective story too though, which helps recapture the whole extraordinary story of writers and actors in Southwark, indeed ordinary London life, over four hundred years ago.

DCD

Phoenix Ark Press

(Phoenix Ark is a member of the independent Publisher’s Guild.)

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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.

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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 18, 2012 · 8:41 am

EDWARD DEVERE, WILL SHAKESPEARE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF EDMUND SHAKESPEARE

NEW THE EDMUND SHAKESPEARE BLOG

You can read some of the arguments about a Stratford vs supposed Oxford camp, around Shakespeare authorship, mostly in the comments under the post EDMUND SHAKESPEARE, THE EARL OF OXFORD, FALSTAFF AND THE HOLLOW CROWN, in William Ray’s and our notes. First little Phoenix Ark should declare an edge of ‘prejudice’ and that is all instincts here are towards Rowe, Aubrey and the ensuing Shakespeare tradition, of Stratford Will Shakespeare. Not as blind followers of any tradition though, and not without interest in other authorship ‘theories’. Then we would say that there is not a significant Oxford camp, in a theory dreamt up in the troubled 1920s and that any onus towards proving anything lies most assuredly there.

But if anyone starts to trumpet the research they do, Phoenix Ark want to suggest the value, even the singular importance of the Edmund Shakespeare story, in Southwark, to the debate. If a link can be made, and it has not been yet, between a London Hunt family, that owned The Vine in Southwark, where 27 year old Edmund Shakespeare was staying in 1607, (in the tenement rooms of one Edward Woodroofe, and perhaps his wife, probably at least, from the Southwark Cathedral Token Books) and the Stratford Hunts, it is at least suggestive. We tracked The Vine back to The Brotherhood of Our Lady of Assumption, linked to St Margaret’s Church, and founded under Henry VI, in the name of John Le Hunte, Peter Averne and others. But in a highly interconnected world, perhaps Shakespeare’s player brother, young and ultimately tragic Edmund, came to London to stay with people already known in Stratford. That has yet to be proved.

Southwark though, and especially St Olave’s Church, no longer there, but the spire of which is mentioned more than any other in Shakespeare’s plays (Ackroyd), also has strong Wessex ties. But there too, among many players and writers, is another actor in the Shakespeare family. Indeed the tradition of acting families was to emerge out of the Shoreditch, Southwark, and London circles. The significance of brothers in the plays is its own field of study, though echoes in fiction do not absolutely prove historical fact. But beyond any authorship debate, what is wonderful too are the vivid bits of evidence about lives and deaths in Southwark, so evocative of extraordinary times and a world that still raises marvellous passions.

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

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July 12, 2012 · 11:25 am

EDMUND SHAKESPEARE, THE EARL OF OXFORD, FALSTAFF AND THE HOLLOW CROWN

Wonderful to see the BBC series of plays, and actor’s commentaries, in The Hollow Crown. To see Simon Russel Beale talking about that empty word ‘honour’, or Falstaff, though honour was very important to Shakespeare and the time, in a sense beyond the Knighted meaning, that might evoke Calvino’s The Ancestors. To see Jeremy Irons rowing The Thames, recalling those events James Shapiro describes so powerfully in 1599, when the Burbages and Shakespeare, perhaps his youngest brother Edmund, a player too, carried the wood from The Theatre across to river to Southwark, to build The Globe. They took their theatre, their craft and their vision on their backs, and Phoenix believe in very conscious opposition with the likes of impressario and landlord Philip Henslowe, as Will Kemp, an original Globe sharer, split away, although any good story needs its baddy and Henslowe is quite a complex character.

If the experimental blog on Edmund Shakespeare here, Shakespeare’s Brother, is of any value, it has turned up some startling and unknown facts about Southwark and a London district we think completely underestimated in understanding a period and those plays. One of those insights is Jeremy Irons’ reporting that Falstaff was based on the Lollard soldier Sir John Oldcastle. An ancestor of the temporary Master of the Revels, Lord Cobham, whose wife lived on London Bridge and owned Southwark property, Oldcastle may have been an inspiration, though one chorus actually denied it on stage, mentioning Oldcastle, out of the little controversy, and saying ‘this is not the man.’

But another candidate is the real Sir John Fastolf. If you believe in the literal translation of authors, out of people or events, he seems an obvious candidate. Perhaps the point is that the Fastolfs actually owned a Southwark Tavern called The Boar’s Head. The sight was excavated by the Museum of London, though nothing found. Then there is that very famous Boar’s Head of Henry IV and East Cheap. There was a Boar’s Head in the walled City too, and perhaps two in Southwark, with its hundreds of taverns, but again it has been slightly translated. For those who have been following the little spat about the Edward Devere, Earl of Oxford, authorship theory though, it brings up the subject of how writers actually work, moving between facts and fictions, drawing from many ideas and sources, and translating their realities, as Bottom is translated in his fairy dream, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Perhaps then Will was thinking of Oldcastle, but a local tavern owning family too, the Fastolfs, and their cowardly ancestor Sir John Fastolf, soon to be made a False Staff, with a rival tavern in Southwark actually in the frame. Was he taking revenge for some local goings on, as he got caught up in that battle over the Soer house? He might simultaneously have been firing a purposeful shot at the walled City. But perhaps the point, if we are seeking Shakespeare’s ‘identity’, out of the nonsense Devere theory (that’s a friendly shot at William Ray) is the difficulty of biography and the real value being the realised vision on the page.

But what is really thrilling, with unknown Edmund Shakespeare in the frame too in Southwark, now linked to a tavern called the Vine, owned by the Hunt family, probably bought under Henry VI, by a local fraternity called The Brotherhood of Our Lady of Assumption, Edmund being the missing player if you like, is building up the localised picture, however faint, however filled with semi-fictive imaginings, of a real place and very interconnected people. There is a great deal more to come.

Phoenix Ark

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July 5, 2012 · 9:34 pm

THE SHARD AND SOUTHWARK

So Renzo Pianzo’s Shard finally opens officially, if mostly unoccupied! A soaring inspiration, a blinding nonsense or a blot on the landscape? Simon Jenkins calls the building, owned largely by the Quataris, ‘an outrage’ and nothing to do with the landscape and heritage of the area. He is largely right, though it is hard to keep in check the architectural visions and nightmares of London. Then, when the viewing gallery opens in 2013, perhaps it is a chance to look down on the history of little Southwark beneath and perhaps turn any fight towards Thames Water’s plans, or what preserving history in any area, but especially phenomenally important areas like Southwark, means. Perhaps the inspiration on the ground are real people, shops, businesses, Borough Market and the story of the theatres there 400 years ago.

ps Bless Boris johnson for his ‘Shardenfreude‘ joke to the Germans, but we are clearly all overgrown schoolboys and love our tribal quips, as the planet goes to the Isle of Dogs!

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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.

PA PRESS

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