Category: Shakespeare

Death of Macbeth

15/8/2018

Macbeth or mac Bethad mac Findláich was a Scottish warrior, a clan leader from Moray in the north of Scotland, the son, as his name states, of Findlaech of Moray. It was on this day in 1057 he was killed by the son of Duncan I, the very man he had killed in battle on the 14th August in 1040 - fourteen years and one day later.

There are no images of Macbeth, however, in the Prophecy of Berchan, an ancient Irish poem on the history of early Scotland, Macbeth is called "the red, tall, golden-haired one"

The real Macbeth is overshadowed by the Macbeth of Shakespeare's play which is a tale of ambition, a desire cleverly planted in Macbeth's mind by the 'weird sisters' who we know as the three witches.

As mentioned in a blog on the death of King Duncan of Scotland Shakespeare source is the Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed, to which he is known to have referred for many of his other historical dramas.

meanderingthroughtime.weebly.com/history-blog/king-duncan-i-and-macbeth

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Birth and Death of William Shakespeare

23/4/2018

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On the 23rd April 1616 William Shakespeare died, the 23rd of April (1564) may have even been the day he was born too. His baptism appears in the parish register for the 26th of April. Babies were usually baptised a few days after their birth so it is in the realms of possibility.

I would have liked to write a piece on Shakespeare myself, but his life and his works are much covered and in a way I could never aspire to. However, I found this lovely comic line supposedly said by the man himself and thought, "this is my piece on Shakespeare."

There is no proof that Shakespeare actually had the following conversation but still, it may have come from his lips. We know he wrote comedy using such things as slapstick and practical jokes, and this statement is a fine example of Shakespeare talking in a quick and witty manner.

While visiting Stratford, Shakespeare is said to have gone on an Elizabethan 'pub crawl', setting out with a party of friends with the intent of out drinking a drinking club from the neighbouring village of Bidford on Avon. Drinking all night, in no less than eight alehouses in the same number of villages, including Marston, Exhall and Wixford, Shakespeare finally fell asleep under a tree, where he was woken in the morning by his drinking friends who asked him to join them the following evening, to which Shakespeare is said to have replied.

"No, I have drunk with Piping Pebworth, Dancing Marston, Haunted Hillboro’, Hungry Grafton, Dodging Exhall, Papist Wixford, Beggarly Broom and Drunken Bidford and so, I will drink no more."

What a great pun! Only a man with the talent of William Shakespeare could have said that surely.

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Elizabethan Playwright: Robert Wilson

29/1/2018

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Robert Wilson was an English playwright and actor during the reign of Elizabeth I. He is credited with at least sixteen plays, on most, he collaborated with others, such as Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday and one Richard Hathwaye (not considered to be any relative of Shakespeare's wife Ann.)

A number of these plays were not completed including Henry Richmond (Part 2) and Owen Tudor, what a shame it would have been a wonderful opportunity to read about these two men, who played such an important part in the Wars of the Roses, from the pen of another playwright. However, parts 1 and 2 of Wilson's play The True and Honourable History of Sir John Oldcastle, was completed.

In this play it's protagonist was a soldier who was executed for heresy and treason, being hanged and burnt, in 1417. Oldcastle's character, or part of his character, we have heard of before, Oldcastle was portrayed in Shakespeare's Henry V plays under the guise of Sir John Falstaff.

Interestingly, the play is thought to have been commissioned to counter Oldcastle's/Falstaff's reputation in Shakespeare's play.

Robert Wilson was buried at St. Giles in Cripplegate on November 20th, 1600.

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Death of Sir John Talbot

17/7/2016

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Died at the Battle of Castillon this day in 1453 John Talbot, said to be the best general Henry VI had.

O, no; wherein Lord Talbot was o'erthrown:
The circumstance I'll tell you more at large.
The tenth of August last this dreadful lord,
Retiring from the siege of Orleans,
Having full scarce six thousand in his troop.
By three and twenty thousand of the French
Was round encompassed and set upon….
More than three hours the fight continued;
Where valiant Talbot above human thought
Enacted wonders with his sword and lance:
Hundreds he sent to hell, and none durst stand him;
Here, there, and every where, enraged he flew:
The French exclaim’d, the devil was in arms;
All the whole army stood agazed on him:
His soldiers spying his undaunted spirit
A Talbot! a Talbot! cried out amain
And rush’d into the bowels of the battle.
Henry VI Part One: Act 1, Scene 1

In Shakespeare's play John Talbot is seen as the last of the medieval heroes, a daring soldier loyal to his king while
most of the English nobles are fighting among themselves.

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Laurence Olivier/Richard III

12/5/2016

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Laurence Olivier was born on the 22nd May 1907, for me he is best remembered for his portrayal of King Richard III and the haunted and incredibly handsome Maxim de Winter in Daphne de Maurier's Rebecca.

Olivier was brilliant in the role of Shakespeare's Richard, the "Winter of discontent" scene is a fine example of this man's talents. Olivier doesn't ignore the camera but uses it as a tool to talk to us directly, making us believe that we are actually in the same room as the fifteenth century king.

The close ups are particularly unnerving, resulting in the audiences intimidation being turned to hate.

I have never been able to work out whether Olivier took the film seriously. He is known for his dry humour and his big personality, I cannot make out if he is being funny. The scene at the window for instance he uses his eyebrows to great effect is a prime example or is he just playing Richard as a ludicrous villain as Shakespeare intended?

A review of this film when it was first released stated:

"this is a superb and bold achievement, most honourable to Shakespeare and to the actor-producer-director, something of a cinematographic miracle."

This is true, the only one who loses here is Richard himself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDxnXgYPnKg

Laurence Olivier is one of my favourite actors (Peter O'Toole in the Lion in Winter ranks highly too.) His stage performances are legendary, he was superb as Heathcliffe in Withering Heights and not a little bit naughty in his private life if his letters to Vivian Leigh are anything to go by.

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Rosemary For Remembrance

18/7/2015

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"There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember; and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.There’s fennel for you, and columbines; there’s rue for you, and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets"

Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5

When Ophelia loses her mind, she begins handing out flowers to everyone around her and talks about the symbolic meaning of those particular flowers. Among them there is Rosemary, this herb has been linked to memory for hundreds of years, but its also symbol of love and remembrance, and is frequently used at at both weddings and funerals.

It was customary at one time, for the bride and groom to plant rosemary near the door of their new home on their wedding day.

However, the old saying

"where rosemary flourished, the woman ruled"

may have seen more than a few husbands uprooting the plant, after all, it was he who was wearing the trousers, wasn't it?

Rycharde Banckes, a 16th century herbalist in his book Banckes' Herbal published in 1525, suggested that rosemary
should be

"boyle them in fayre water and drinke that water for it is much worthe against all manner of evils in the body."

Is there something in what Banckes suggests?

Maybe rosemary could be used to help those suffering with Alzheimer's? At long last today's medical practitioners are picking up on the benefits of herbs. Northumbria University is running an experiment to test whether essential oil, extracted from Rosemary, could benefit memory. They recruited sixty older volunteers to test the effects of, not only rosemary oil, but also lavender oil. They placed these volunteers in rooms infused with either rosemary essential oil, lavender essential oil or in one with no aroma.
At the start, objects were hidden around the room in places that had to be remembered at end of the test. The volunteers then were distracted with assorted puzzles and then they were asked what they remembered. The results were astonishing. The scientists running the test said

"volunteers in the room with the rosemary infusion did statistically significantly better than those in the control room but lavender caused a significant decrease in performance."

Sounds promising.

Maybe I will place an extra sprig of Rosemary on the top of my lamb joint in the hope that I won't forget how many people are coming for dinner.

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Coming to Terms with Shakespeare

11/1/2015

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It has taken me a while but I am now able to talk about William Shakespeare without harping on about the fact that he is solely responsible for Richard III's bad press. I can now read and enjoy his plays for what their are, just plays.

Shakespeare in his day was a poet with a living to make he certainly wasn't considered a historian by the people around him he was simply writing what Elizabethan theatre goers wanted to hear and see. The Elizabethans liked their

"villains to be villainous," the audience had a "constant demand for a really bloody gangster play just as today there is a similar demand for a sadistic gangster film. Shakespeare's Richard is nothing but a royal gangster who had been
   presented to him ready made by Tudor chroniclers"

said V E Lamb writing in 1959

Shakespeare wasn't concerned with historical accuracies, he just made the facts fit his plays. In The Betrayal of Richard III it is suggested that it was of no consequence to Shakespeare that he presents Richard as a monster, a grown man who was "reveling in the bloodshed at the Battle of Towton" when in fact he was an eight year old exiled in Utrecht, or that he makes Margaret of Anjou wander around the Palace of Westminster in 1483 foretelling Richards downfall when she actually had been in France since 1475. None of these were actual facts, Shakespeare simply used what he knew to make his plays more exciting. After all we have seen it done today, you have only got to watch any television series or film to see that. Shakespeare portrayed Richard III as the villain his public loved to hate, a murderous, lying, ruthless hunchbacked king.

I read recently that the English take their religion from Milton and their history from Shakespeare how true is that. Not only have I fallen into that trap, but many accredited historians have done the same such as James Gairdner, a British historian who studied the early Tudor period relating to Richard III, Henry VII and Henry VIII. As an introduction to his work entitled Lancaster and York he writes

"For the period of English history treated in this volume we are fortunate in possessing an unrivalled interpreter in our great dramatic poet Shakespeare. A regular sequence of historical plays exhibits to us not only the general character of each successive reign but nearly the whole chain of leading events from the days of Richard II to the death of Richard III at
   Bosworth. Following the guidance of such a master mind we realise for ourselves the men and actions of the period in a
  way we cannot do in any other epoch"

James Gairdner by Frank Baxter. Plaster bust dated 1900

There are many of us who are in someway to blame for Richard III being portrayed for over 500 years as a wife poisoning, niece lusting, nephew murdering tyrant. The Tudor usurpers who needed to blacken his name so that they could hold onto his crown, historians like Gairdner for perpetuating the lie and the likes of me, only a few years ago, for not thinking for myself. I should have read and listened to all points of view before making my mind up, but I see now that we cannot wholly blame William Shakespeare for Richard's undoing.

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‪Richard III‬: Charles Lamb and George Fredrick Cooke.

16/11/2014

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George Fredrick Cooke was a nineteenth century English actor who in 1801 portrayed Richard III in the London theatre.
Of Cooke's performance, theatre goers were said to have come away with the idea that Richard III was

'a very wicked man, and kills little children in their beds, with something like the pleasure which the giants
and ogres in children’s books are represented to have taken in that practice'

Charles Lamb, a noted English essayist and writer thought much on this point, eventually writing in his 1811 essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation" the following.

"Do we feel anything like disgust, as we do at that butcher-like representation of him that passes for him on the stage? A horror at his crimes blends with the effect which we feel, but how is it qualified, how is it carried off, by the rich intellect which he displays, his resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, his vast knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his
part—not an atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.’s way of acting it. Nothing but his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are prominent and staring; the murderer stands out, but where is the lofty genius, the man of vast capacity,
the profound, the witty the accomplished Richard?"

I like to take from Lambs writings some sort of support for the real Richard III, the Richard III I have come to know, but it is more that likely that Lamb writes in defense of Shakespeare's plays themselves for he argues that Shakespeare should be 'read, rather than performed, in order to protect Shakespeare from butchering by mass commercial performances.'

Is he right?

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Death of Macbeth

Birth and Death of William Shakespeare

Elizabethan Playwright: Robert Wilson

Death of Sir John Talbot

Laurence Olivier/Richard III

Rosemary For Remembrance

Coming to Terms with Shakespeare

‪Richard III‬: Charles Lamb and George Fredrick Cooke.

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