Phoenix Ark's Blog

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