Shakespeare – then and now?

An historian, working with a team of digital artists, has spent three months updating a series of classic portraits to reflect how historical figures might look today.  A fourteen part television series is underway on the UK television channel, Yesterday.

Shakespeare is one of the subjects. They’ve used the Cobbe portrait of 1610,  in which Shakespeare, is splendidly dressed in aristocratic clothes, like the wealthy man he was by 1610. They have left him pretty much as he is in the portrait, but changed his hairstyle and dressed him in a striped tee-shirt and a casual but traditional style of jacket. In that portrait he comes across as lean and hungry, although other portraits of Shakespeare show him to be more full-faced.

It’s an interesting idea and it’s set me on my own course, thinking about what Shakespeare might have looked like today. I like the Chandos portrait, in which Shakespeare has quite wild hair and facial growth. He’s wearing an earring, too,  a feature of the portrait that I’ve always liked. I prefer the earring to the crucifix that the digital artists have hung around his neck.  In the Chandos portrait  he’s wearing very plain clothes – a black suit and a white collar, like a Puritan.

We have to consider what he might have been like if he were living today. We must also assume that he would be a great writer whose work will be read and studied for the next half millennia. Much has changed in the last half millennia and the only thing that hasn’t is human nature. Shakespeare lived before the Industrial Revolution, so even the most primitive of steam driven machines couldn’t have been imagined by him, not to mention the wonders of the digital age.

Given all that, though, what would he be like today? Alright then, he’s a writer – a successful one, making a lot of money. He was also a theatre director so let’s transpose him to a man who makes a lot of money writing and directing scripts. That would make him a Hollywood film man. Given his talent he would also be going round the circuit picking up awards for his films. I place him as a cross between Stephen Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino.

Both those movie men are more hard working film makers than celebrities. Whenever we see them they appear as men who aren’t very concerned about their appearance and the image they create. They’re fanatical about film making. That’s Shakespeare, too – a very hard working play maker. Spielberg and Tarantino are both rich men, but like Shakespeare, they don’t take the money and run, they keep on working. As Shakespeare did, even after his retirement from the theatre.

I think the Chandos portrait shows Shakespeare more or less as he would be today. The unruly hair and beard indicate a man more interested in working than in creating an image. The simple clothes show a lack of interest in social graces. I’m going to keep the earring, which is every bit as modern today as it was in his time. It suggests a man who rejects conformity.

This is a spurious exercise, however, because Shakespeare was a product of the Elizabethan age, a very different age from ours and there’s no way one can  make comparisons between people living in such different cultural contexts. To drape him in modern clothes and give him a contemporary hairstyle the digital team has done is the best anyone could do.

If you have any ideas about what Shakespeare might have been like if he’d been born in our time let us know.

Strange to think of the big birthday celebrations that we honour Shakespeare with, considering that birthdays weren’t celebrated during his time. In the Elizabethan era many people didn’t even know the date of their birth and, indeed, we don’t actually know Shakespeare’s birth date. We make an inference from the date of his baptism, which was recorded in the parish register. There is no record of the date on which he was born.

Perhaps the aristocracy marked their birthdays back then, but there is very little of that recorded. I have unearthed one mention of an Elizabethan birthday party, however – that of thirteen year old Mall Sidney.

Mall grew up to become the famous writer, Lady Mary Wroth, Countess of Pembroke. She was the daughter of Robert Sidney, the brother of the illustrious poet and soldier, Sir Phillip Sidney. They were a very high ranking family. Lady Mary was the first English woman author to write a sustained work of prose fiction. Like Shakespeare she also wrote a sonnet cycle. The American biographer, Margaret Hannay, produced a biography of Mall in 2010: Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth. She reports: ‘On 18 October 1600 Whyte came to Penshurst, no doubt along with other guests, to celebrate Mall’s thirteenth birthday.’ (p. 77) Unfortunately, Margaret Hannay doesn’t describe the party so we still don’t know how even those who did mark birthdays celebrated them.

There is no indication that even monarchs celebrated their birthdays. Everyone had a saint associated with their birth dates, though, and sometimes they would pay their respects to their saints on their birthday.

Perhaps the best confirmation of the lack of birthday celebrations is the fact that we don’t find much mention of them in Shakespeare’s works. There are references to a birthday only twice in his plays, although not in any way that indicates the kind of attitude that we have to birthdays today. For example, in Julius Caesar, a few moments before Cassius and Brutus engage in battle with Antony and Octavius Caesar, Cassius, feeling his imminent death upon him, says, ‘this is my birthday; as this very day was Cassius born.’ There is no more about it, just that wistful statement, that comes out of the blue.

In Antony and Cleopatra, though, we see Cleopatra grasping the opportunity for an unexpected celebration on her birthday. Antony has just had Caesar’s messenger whipped. He’s in a foul mood but somehow gets a new wind and calls for the servants to fill the bowls for some late night drinking. Cleopatra who has been feeling lonely and rejected is delighted with this change in mood. She says: ‘It is my birthday. I had thought to have held it poor,’ meaning that she had not expected anything for her birthday. But now she has something – not her birthday, though – to celebrate: Antony’s change of mood.  ‘Since my lord is Antony again,’ she says, I will be Cleopatra.’

It’s doubtful whether Shakespeare gave a second thought to his own birthday, even if he knew what date it was. But we can imagine, on that day, John and Mary Shakespeare gazing down on the new member of their family, eyes tight shut, sleeping peacefully in the cradle at the foot of their bed. How could they know that the tiny creature they had just produced was going to be one of the greatest writers who had ever lived and was not to be outdone for at least four hundred and fifty years? It’s a sublime thought, isn’t it?

Portrait of Robert Johnson

I’m grateful to Ed Kliman, one of our readers, for drawing my attention to the composer, Robert Johnson, the son of John Johnson, lutenist to Elizabeth I , who had a long working relationship with Shakespeare. The two men worked together on several of the plays, like a Renaissance Rogers and Hammerstein.

We tend to concentrate on the drama, characters and language in Shakespeare’s work and lose sight of something as fundamental to Renaissance entertainment as music, which features strongly in his plays. For all Shakespeare’s genius in drama, poetry and business, he was probably not as skilled as many others in acting, although we do know that he was, in fact, an actor. There is no indication whatsoever, though, that he had any skill in music. But he wrote parts for great actors, both tragic and comic, and he used music as an expression of his themes and the action of his plays. It was for others to write the music.

When we think of the great roles like Hamlet, Lear, Othello, we know that Shakespeare was taking advantage of the presence in his company of some particularly skilled actors whom he knew could handle such roles. In the same way he had at his disposal a very interesting, prolific and talented composer for much of his writing career, with whom he became close friends, increasingly so towards the end of his career. And so we have the constant use of the musician, Robert Johnson, who supplied incidental music and settings of the songs for his plays, until the climax of Shakespeare’s career arrived with The Tempest, a masque play, which in modern terms would be regarded as a musical drama, or what we simply call a musical.

The Tempest is a huge and major drama that draws the threads of Shakespeare’s ideas and preoccupations together in a beautiful resolution. It’s a delightful play in which action and ideas are expressed in a balance of poetry and music. At the time he was writing the play his composer friend and collaborator was deeply interested and active in the new, fashionable form – the masque. The friendship was clearly very influential in the creation of The Tempest which is the most famous of all the masques produced in that era.

There have been so many English composers who have disappeared into obscurity. That would have happened to Robert Johnson, in spite of his having been employed by James I’s son, Prince Henry, and later by Charles I, as a lutenist, and having composed a great deal of music, most of which is lost. He has been immortalized  though, by the happy accident of his having met Shakespeare and having composed the original settings of several of the songs in Shakespeare’s plays. Other composers of the time – such as Thomas Morley – set Shakespearean lyrics to music, but Johnson is the only one who has been proved to have been connected to the original performances of the plays. And here’s Robert Johnson’s setting of Shakespeare’s song ‘Where the bee sucks there suck I’ from The Tempest.

>> Listen to MP3 of Robert Johnson’s “Where the bee sucks there suck I” <<

So many books and papers about Shakespeare begin with the declaration that we don’t know much about the dramatist, but information like the association of these two artists crops up from time to time and is explored by scholars and historians. Then we find that we actually do know quite a lot about him, although it’s oblique rather than direct knowledge.

“It’s Spring!” My English teacher used to yell, usually at the boys. “The sap is rising!” She would look at us meaningfully, then repeat, “RISING” in a tone of great meaning and portent. Not that we got what she was saying, the boys far too distracted with the sight of the girls in warm weather skirts and low-necked shirts, the girls either savoring or suffering the boys’ attention.

In that same time of year, the time of the rising sap, we would read Shakespeare—most notably Romeo & Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was fairly fun—we got to talk about suicide and swordfights and somebody got to say, “This is to make an ass of me!” when we read the plays out loud in class—but my school being a Catholic school, the teacher could only discuss the bawdy elements of the Bard about as obliquely as she could discuss our raging hormones. It wasn’t until college that I learned what biting your thumb at someone really meant, let alone what Mercutio meant by “the prick of noon.”

And it’s a shame, really. Because like with so many other things, Shakespeare manages to capture all of the awkward longings of adolescence, whether it’s the problems of disapproving parents, the drama of love triangles and unrequited desire, or the fascination and fear all teenagers have of the great forbidden act that is sex. And by addressing these things, by frankly discussing them through the safe medium of a play, there’s so much that can be discussed to help teens make sense of their new world:

· Why do so many stories cast love and desire in such a negative light? Why is it that we equate sexuality with destruction, so much so that Shakespeare and his cronies endlessly used “death” as a slang term for orgasm?

· Is a healthy relationship one that works like that of, say Romeo & Juliet or Helena & Demetrius? (assuming that one is not actually into the 50 Shades of Grey-level of slavishness that Helena embodies when she humiliates herself for her boyfriend’s attention)

· And, of course, that old chestnut: is there really such a thing as love at first sight? And how fast is too fast? And how do you really know when you’re in love, or why you’re in love, or who’s the right person to love?

And while I’ll let them wait until their college classes to really delve into the dirtiest plot points of Shakespeare, we can analyze a lot…and they, in turn, can better analyze and understand themselves, sap and all.

Guest blogger Robert Dale is an English Teacher at Atlanta International School. His first book, a retelling of Midsummer Night’s Dream called A Most Rare Vision is available on Amazon.

Like the above? Check out more fun Shakespeare infographics in Pintrest

Sketch of Shakespeare’s home New Place done by George Vertue in 1737 from contemporary descriptions when he visited Stratford-on-Avon

England is one of the world’s top tourist destinations, where visits to the homes of English poets, dramatists, novelists, artists, composers and scientists are firmly on the itinerary. To name just a few, around London one can see the homes of Milton, Darwin, Keats, Coleridge, Dickens, Dr Johnson and many others. A few day trips from there will take visitors to the worlds of such famous figures as Jane Austen, John Constable, William Turner,  Benjamin Britten and too many more to name.

Of course, many tourists coming to England have a visit to historic Stratford-upon-Avon on their itenrary, which is rich in things Shakespearean. You can see his birthplace, his school, the cottage where his wife grew up, and many other places associated with him. The one place you cannot see, though, the possession he was probably most proud of, is New House, the house he bought in 1597.  By that time he had become very successful as a writer and theatre proprietor, and the house is always described as the second best house in Stratford. It became the main residence of his wife, Anne Hathaway, and the Shakespeare daughters.

When Shakespeare retired in 1610 he moved into New House permanently and died there in 1616. Anne lived there until her death in 1623. If the house had survived it would have been one of the most important items of English cultural and historical heritage. It is thought to be the place where Shakespeare wrote his last plays, including The Tempest, and where younger writers came to seek his assistance with their plays.

You will be able to visit the site, but all you will see are signs of New House’s foundations: the house was demolished in 1759.

How did such a tragedy occur?

It’s an interesting story of spite and a tragedy of cultural attitudes towards property. This year, 2013, marks a hundred years since the first legislation was passed giving the British government power to act directly when an historic site is under threat. That Britain has very strict and powerful conservation laws will prevent such further tragedies but they came far too late to save New Place. We can only be grateful that the Birthplace is still there, and that so many such buildings survived: up until the time the new law was introduced property owners had the right to do what they liked with the buildings, gardens, fields and so on, that they owned. They could alter them or completely demolish them.

The Reverend Francis Gastrell bought the house in 1753. He soon made himself unpopular by chopping down a mulberry tree that the Shakespeare family had planted. So he wasn’t very happy, and he became increasingly unhappier as people were always leaning over his garden fence, staring, and knocking on his door, wanting to see inside the house. At this time, too, he was in a prolonged dispute with local officials concerning his taxes. In a fit of rage and incredible spite he had the house demolished in 1759. He never rebuilt anything on the site and it remains vacant to this day, with only traces of the foundations for tourists to view.

The residents of Stratford were horrified but there was nothing they could do about it. Gastrell became impossibly unpopular and eventually moved away from Stratford.

Those people who own listed buildings in Britain and complain about not being able to change as much as a doorknob should think about this little horror story and be grateful that for a hundred years no-one has been able to do anything as monstrous as the Reverend Francis Gastrell was allowed to do.

Shakespeare grew up in a village in the middle of England, surrounded by mud and snow and ice, subject to months on end of icy blasts and freezing temperatures. He used the seasons and the weather in his poetry, just as he used everything else in nature. His plays and sonnets are crammed with imagery of the seasons, not least of all winter. His poetry of spring, and, particularly summer, generally has the effect of being uplifting but it is impossible to find an image of winter that is anything but negative.

Shakespeare is never purely descriptive – his nature imagery is always metaphorical, presenting an emotion, a feeling, an idea or a situation. One of his most famous lines is a political statement using the seasons in the opening of Richard III: Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York.

Winter is associated with something negative, such as discontent, and as usual with Shakespeare’s winter images there is a contrast with the summer and an anticipation of the glorious summer that will come when this awful winter has passed.

Winter and the coldness of it are always negative in Shakespeare. His summers and springs are joyous and life affirming. Autumn, for him, is a mixture of sadness and beauty. If we were to make a montage of winter images from Shakespeare we would probably get a strong impression of this negativity. So let’s try it:

Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold;  … the icy fang and churlish chiding of the winter’s wind…bites and blows upon my body; I shrink with cold; what freezings I have felt, what dark days seen, what old December’s bareness everywhere! I, that did never weep, now melt with woe that winter should cut off our spring-time so;  hideous winter …sap cheque’d with frost,  and lusty leaves quite gone, beauty o’ersnow’d and bareness every where;boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang; freeze, freeze, though bitter sky.

It goes on, throughout his work – an ever-present awareness of winter, with nothing positive to say about it.

And here’s one of my favourite poems, a song from Love’s Labours Lost. It’s a picture of a poor, rural family, and I suspect that if we really want to know what winter was like for the rural folk of Warwickshire in Shakespeare’s time, this is it. People sniff and cough and the whole world is closed in. Even the birds are depressed. It’s a wonderful picture and we can be grateful that we don’t have to live like this.

When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
To-whit! To-who!—a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doe blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
To-whit! To-who!—a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

We often think about Shakespeare at this time, because he’s a kind of spokesman for our culture on the subject of romantic love. If you look at some of Shakespeare’s most famous love quotes you’ll get an idea of how central he is to our cultural thinking about romantic love. Shakespeare is a spokesman for so many things – defining the character of such areas as war, death, politics and much more – always finding the right words and going to the heart of those aspects of life, and Shakespeare’s take on love is no different in it’s influence.

His sonnet 116, Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments, is about far deeper love than romantic love. It’s a philosophical dissertation on the substance of love and its eternal quality. Sonnet 18, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? comes closer to romantic love – a man addressing a particular woman, although here, too, he projects the beautiful young woman into the future and imagines her old and wrinkled, but sees beyond that: the young man’s love is not dependent on her youthful beauty.

Apart from the innumerable beautiful expressions of romantic love we find in Shakespeare’s plays, which are crammed with lovers, there are some feet-on-the ground reality checks such as ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But my favorite, almost tear invoking , image of romantic love, is the young Romeo’s overwhelmed emotions as he gazes with awe at Juliet when he first lays eyes on her:

Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear.

Juliet lights the world up for him as she comes into his consciousness like a bright light.

But more in line with the Valentine’s Day idea of two lovers immersed in each other we have the middle-aged Antony and Cleopatra who wallow in the wonder of sexual attraction. In their first scene they ignore everyone around them, even though they’re surrounded by courtiers and ambassadorial visitors from Rome: their eyes are only on each other. If this is really love, she says, tell me how much. He replies that love that can be measured is worthless. She tells him that she’ll set a boundary on how far he can love her. His response is that in that case she will have to go beyond the boundaries of the known world and seek out unexplored regions of the Earth and also the unknown heavens.

To me that’s wonderful. There’s flirtation, excessive expression, real attraction and the suggestion of something eternal, divine, and all the things that Shakespeare can get into a few words. But here we have two people in love, the mutual emotion sketched by Shakespeare in this short exchange, expressed in a way that no other poet has ever been able to surpass.

In recent times we have made a big thing of St Valentine’s Day, and it has become an opportunity for commercial enterprises to sell cards and gifts. Restaurants are booked up on St Valentine’s evenings and it’s a way for young men and women in love and newly-weds to mark their sentiments. But Shakespeare could not have had anything special going on his mind when it came to 14^th February. Indeed, Valentine’s Day is mentioned only once in his plays. It’s part of the ravings of the mad Ophelia in Hamlet once she’s lost the ability to communicate and shortly before her suicide. She’s complaining about having given herself to Hamlet only to be discarded by him. It’s impossible from that reference to see how St Valentine’s Day impinged on Shakespeare’s general outlook. It’s a dark moment in Shakespeare.

But where does this concept of St Valentine’s Day come from? The answer is that no-one knows: it’s like so many things that have survived to modern times but whose origins are shrouded in obscurity. At least three St Valentines have been dug up by scholars looking for him – all martyrs. It seems that one of them wrote a letter to his beloved from prison and that’s perhaps the origin of St Valentine’s Day as we know it. But we will never know. Let us just enjoy it and keep looking to Shakespeare to supply its language.

Richard III’s remains uncovered in Leicester carpark

We are all familiar with a range of Medieval English kings. We know about the fiery, charismatic Bolingbroke who deposed his weak cousin, Richard II, who was  indecisive and cowardly. It’s an historical fact that Bolingbroke became Henry IV and we also know that he was an unsuccessful, unfulfilled monarch who spent the last part of his life wallowing in a kind of depression.

We know that Henry’s son, Hal, was a tearaway prince, prodigal, irresponsible, the companion of London lowlife. We know that he eventually became England’s greatest king, Henry V, with considerable leadership qualities, who led his troops into battle against the French and won the Battle of Agincourt. We know the very words he spoke in inspiring speeches to his troops – words that will be with us as long as the English language lives. We know that his son, Henry VI was a spiritual, scholarly young man, easily swept away by the political tides of his time.

We think we know all that but if it hadn’t been that Shakespeare’s interest in these historical figures actually created them as human beings for us we would probably never have heard of them. After all, apart from the kings in Shakespeare’s plays, which other historical kings do we know anything about? And how many have we even heard of?

When we think of Richard III we have the image of a villainous, murderous, psychopath – crippled and hunchbacked. Any attempts to question that image can’t get past the picture that’s so deeply imbedded in the consciousness of our culture. But now that the historical Richard’s remains have been discovered under a carpark in Leicester scholarly attention is going to be focused on him. Not only will he be buried in the cathedral, there will be countless things written about him – things that will contradict the account of Shakespeare’s Richard III. For a start, although Richard had a curved spine, it did not amount to a hunched back. The scholars who have maintained that he was no more villainous than most kings will now have a hearing.

But most interesting for us here at No Sweat Shakespeare, is the problem it may cause to actors playing the role created by Shakespeare.

Jonathan Slinger, who played Richard for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 2006-08, argues in a Guardian interview this week that the discovery doesn’t change anything. He sees the remains as evidence that Shakespeare was just about right. Moreover, in his opinion, the curved spine authorizes the traditional presentation of the character as a physically contorted figure.

Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe Theatre, in the same interview series, shrugs, admitting that he has no idea of how the discovery of the remains will play out in future productions of the play. Simon Russell Beale who played Richard for the RSC in 1992 says that Shakespeare created a lot of monsters and that Richard was nothing more than a monster in an age of monsters. Beal is glad that he doesn’t have to change his physical view of Richard, even though he played him as a large figure and the remains show Richard to have been a very small man.

It’s doubtful that actors are going to rethink the role. Each one is going to interpret it in his own way, as actors have always done. In any case, as Shakespeare has written him as a hunchbacked monster that’s how he will be played. We mustn’t forget that Shakespeare’s play is a stage drama, not an historical biography. I suspect that the play will be performed for hundreds of years to come, whereas the discovery of the remains will be a temporary bubble and scholarship will not in any way dent the general perception of Richard 111.

English teachers have always taught the great writers, who continue to appear on English curriculum reading lists for all age levels, and it’s generally taken for granted that reading the works of the likes of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Chaucer, Dickens, Whitman, Jane Austen is good for you. But how many of them have been clear in their own minds about why that is? And, indeed, there has been a debate about the accessibility of the great writers. And there has been a shift in many school systems to more accessible modern and contemporary teenage fiction. Fortunately, even those systems retain Shakespeare on their syllabi because he is regarded as the Man – the essential core of literature – even in non-English speaking cultures. Here again, those who dictate the syllabus aren’t very clear in their own minds as to why Shakespeare is the ever present compulsory element.

The researchers conducted a series of very simple experiments. They gave the subjects passages of writing from the ‘great’ writers to read, followed by simplified versions of the passages in which the more challenging words and phrases had been substituted for something more simple. They monitored the electrical activity in the subjects’ brains, and found that the more challenging versions set off far more electrical activity than the more simple versions.

The researchers were able to study the brain’s response to individual words. They noticed that it lit up as it encountered unusual words, surprising phrases and difficult sentence structures. It was not just a momentary lighting up of the brain cells but the effect lasted for some time, indicating a brain shift to a higher gear – something more lasting than a quick impression, something creating a permanent effect, which the simplified versions did not. Philip Davis, an English professor who worked on the study, said: ‘Serious literature acts like a rocket-booster to the brain. ‘The research shows the power of literature to shift mental pathways, to create new thoughts, shapes and connections in the young and the staid alike.’

Most interesting is that the ‘great’ writers’ careful crafting of language in order to connect with readers’ own experience has a profound effect on a reader’s brain. The brain’s encounter with their poetic language lights up, not only the left part of the brain concerned with language but also the right hemisphere that relates to autobiographical memory and emotion.

The academics concluded that the enduring language of Shakespeare and company triggers reappraisal mechanisms that cause the reader to reflect on and rethink their own experiences.  In that way, particularly, they conclude that reading the classic writers is more valuable than reading self help books as by reading them you not only get what the self help books offer but also the brain development that the writers’ language provides.

Once again, in this, as in other things, our William Shakespeare heads the pack and leads the way!