It is not surprising that this rarely performed 19th-century Russian classic is better known from Mussorgsky’s opera than from Pushkin’s original play.
The force of its reputedly magnificent poetry is necessarily lost while, for all its conscious echoes of Shakespeare’s histories, this epic tale of power politics in 17th-century Russia has a grand, static quality short on the shades of light and dark characteristic of its model.
Not that Michael Boyd’s direction of Adrian Mitchell‘s adaptation lacks energy and even an element of slapstick comedy. The two-hour, straight-through production never flags and, despite its dependence on declamatory rhetoric rather than theatrical action, holds the audience’s attention throughout.
Two-thirds of the way through Tom Piper’s designs change from traditional to modern costume, although we need no reminder of Putin to recognise the play’s modern affinities with Boris Godunov’s calculated and ruthless rise to the tsardom. In the process, Richard III-like, he has the legitimate young heir murdered. Depending on Machiavellian courtiers and a servile and fickle serfdom, he is never free from the insecurities founded on guilt.
After a deathbed lesson to his young son on how to hold and handle power, closely modelled on that of Henry IV to Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s play, he dies leaving an open field for the new pretender who, of course, has the young tsar murdered.
Oddly Lloyd Hutchinson’s Godunov has little to do but reveal his inner angst. Gethin Anthony’s lightweight pretender is far more interesting, especially in a comically shaped key scene when, stricken with idealistic romantic fervour, he reveals his humble origins to Lucy Briggs-Owen’s Polish princess. She is horrified, having opportunistically seen herself as a a potential tsarina.
A fitting final production for Michael Boyd as artistic director of the RSC.
Fear because of the power his dead hand seemed to wield over otherwise unimpressable teachers and loathing because of the apparently insurmountable gulf between his Early Modern English and my unwillingness to even try and decipher it.
For most 12-year-olds it was probably not a major issue, but I had just moved with my family from the south Wales valleys to Stratford upon Avon.
Worse, I was a pupil in the very school Shakespeare was said to have once attended, so naturally he was a permanent and frequent fixture on the curriculum.
To read his words, sterile and flat on the printed page was an onerous task, ploughing through line after meaningless line and very soon giving up the struggle to make any sense of it.
To read them out loud helped a bit, it was at least now possible to determine the moods of the protagonists and there was an occasional bit of swordplay, but it still wasn’t a patch on James Bond or John Wayne.
Later in life I would occasionally overhear a snippet of conversation in which someone would accuse someone else of “living in a fool’s paradise” or a character on TV would say: “He’s sent us on a wild goose chase, Sarge!” and somewhere deep in the cold hearth of memory the ember of a long-gone lesson would briefly flicker.
And that’s where my attitude stayed until I was working on an assignment involving some research into the history of Elizabethan working people, which caused me to bury my nose in a book about 16th century London. And it was like turning a key in a lock.
A chapter was dedicated to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Ben Johnson, Richard Burbank et al, and I found that everything I thought I knew about him was wrong.
I borrowed a book specifically about Shakespeare’s life and quickly realised I had known next to nothing about the man at all.
School had taught us dates and deeds but little about the human beings behind them.
I discovered that Shakespeare, feted by kings, queens and earls, idol of the literati, was a working bloke who drank wine and ale, who almost certainly smoked, played music, wrote songs and probably sounded not unlike Ozzy Osbourne.
He never attended university nor enjoyed a childhood hunting on the great estates – at least not legally – and during his adult life he worked very hard, so hard in fact that by his 50th birthday he was quite possibly all but burnt out.
He wrote prolifically, performed perpetually and toured the country throughout his career.
And he hadn’t made it to the top via nepotism or luck. He was world famous 400 years after his lifetime because he was brilliant at what he did.
If only they’d told us this at school instead of burying the flower of genius under an avalanche of analysis.
Shakespeare’s plays are written to be seen. They are first and foremost a spectacle and, like any good drama today, they are life distilled and condensed and full of rogues, clowns, scarlet women and livid men.
It’s not the plots that make the plays so good, most of them he adapted from earlier works anyway – the tale of Hamlet was knocking around for hundreds of years before Will was born – it’s the sheer brilliance with which he uses words to invoke emotion.
So great was his skill with words that he had to stretch and expand the English language to accommodate his imagination.
And so great his influence that, had he not lived, we would speak English quite differently today.
Phrases that have lived on for centuries flavour our everyday speech turning the functional into the beautiful.
Millions quote him quite unknowingly, many of who would confess to not knowing a thing about the man.
And that’s in keeping with his stated philosophy of the play being the thing. Not that he went to any great pains to preserve his work – it was his former colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell, who, in 1623, published what has become known as the First Folio thus preserving for all time 36 of the Bard’s known plays.
We know for certain some plays, including Love’s Labour’s Won died with him. We may never know how many others did too.
His literary success measured in figures dwarfs everyone else, anywhere, ever. He is the bestselling author of all time, the most successful poet and playwright. He is also the most prolific “screenwriter” in history with, to date, 113 films to his credit.
Were he alive today his annual royalties would make him, by a country mile, the richest person on the planet.
In his plays we can see the common ancestors of every whodunnit, romantic comedy, “slasher” movie and Carry On film brought to life once again – a timeless link to centuries past and one of the few things we can be sure will enrapture audiences of the far future.
Objects that bear witness to Shakespeare’s restless times
The last thing the eyeball of Edward Oldcorne would have seen was the executioner walking to disembowel him.
That eyeball became a relic. And the crowds who watched his execution in the morning could then go to a Shakespeare play in the afternoon.
Neil MacGregor points out in his new book on William Shakespeare, “A stage is actually called a scaffold, and in Henry V the Chorus uses the word.
“So when Shakespeare stages the gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear, it is for an audience who would have seen people being disembowelled and the severed heads on London Bridge.”
There is probably more mysticism about Shakespeare than any other writer. MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, cuts through this. He uses the method adopted in his A History Of The World In 100 Objects—looking at 20 things that give a glimpse into Shakespeare’s world.
They include an iron fork, a wooden model ship, designs for the Union flag, a clock, a pedlar’s trunk and Oldcorne’s preserved eyeball. They reveal much about the audience that watched Shakespeare’s plays, as well as about the works themselves.
Revolution
MacGregor reminds us of the grim economic and social realities of a society racked by wars and the threat of civil war and revolution. It is a society wrestling with new ideas about people’s position in the world.
Shakespeare reflected every aspect of these unsettled times. The model wooden boat is not a toy, but a religious offering—giving thanks for the safe return of James VI from his storm-hampered trip to meet his betrothed, Anne of Denmark.
The book links this to Macbeth’s witches and their power over tempests and sailing ships. Several women from North Berwick were accused of witchcraft, threatening the king’s boat. The wedding party had travelled to the castle at Elsinore—later to be the setting for Hamlet.
The book started as a BBC Radio 4 series, and occasionally it seems as if the transfer to print was a bit rushed. But it brings Shakespeare and his world to life, placing it in its historical context in a fascinating way.
MacGregor explains, “I feel I understand now why whenever there are revolutions Shakespeare is what people turn to. Because whenever a society is on the cusp, about to become something else, they find themselves in Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare’s Restless World by Neil MacGregor (Allen Lane, £25)
As Eagleton almost suggests, if Ireland can do it, why can’t we?
The obvious choice would be Sir John Falstaff, who appears in a number of Shakespeare‘s plays. Falstaff was so popular with Elisabethan audiences that Shakespeare even rewrote the comedy The Merry Wives Of Windsor to include him.
This is despite the fact that he is a thief, a braggart and quite possibly a murderer who is described in Henry IV, part 1 as “that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with pudding in his belly.”
His character seemed to appeal to the people of 16th and early 17th-century London in much the same way as it appeals to us, putting us in touch with their lives and feelings in a way which is both powerful and moving.
Knowing what Sir John got fat on has a similar effect. Though it was hardly the fat knight’s kind of fare, I get a strange thrill from reading that back then people liked to breakfast on eggs, bread and butter – exactly what I tuck into almost every morning myself, more than 400 years on.
This is not the only reason to get your own copy of The Shakespeare Cookbook by Andrew Dalby and Maureen Dalby.
Though it is probably one of those volumes destined to be bought as a gift more than for personal use, it will definitely – unlike many such books – be read and read again and its recipes used.
As well as being simply an enjoyable read, it works both as a source of some very palatable historical information and a decent collection of recipes in its own right.
Elisabethan London was a fascinating city of immense historical importance. It was the period in which, following her father Henry VIII’s victory in his power struggle with the Catholic church, Elisabeth set about constructing a recognisably modern state.
So Shakespeare was the chronicler – although in almost all cases he disguised this in “historical” or fantastical settings – of a time in which momentous changes were taking place. London, the capital city of one of Europe’s most powerful nations, was a lively and prosperous place, though of course this prosperity was extremely unevenly shared.
The empire was scarcely in its infancy but London’s arms were long. Among the things they grasped and brought home were foodstuffs from all over the British Isles, Europe and the entire known world. Sweet potatoes and spices such as cinnamon and caraway were highly valued by those who could afford them.
Coupled with an explosion of culinary ideas was a rapidly-developing book trade. While the vast majority of Londoners were both illiterate and very poor, enough were not to enable what The Shakespeare Cookbook calls “a flowering” in the English book trade.
The upshot was that new recipes were being constantly created and cooking methods developed and through the printed word these spread amongst the better-off and their kitchen servants.
Though it took the tin ear of our own age to invent the revolting word “foodie,” this is the period in which the species itself began to evolve.
This is itself a nice parallel to Shakespeare. What tends to be emphasised by our individualist culture is his “genius,” and I would be the last to deny the extraordinary abilities the man possessed.
Yet equally important was the culture which surrounded him. While the Elisabethan poor may have been illiterate, they do not seem to have been inarticulate.
Punning, riddling and other forms of word-play and jest were the general entertainment of the streets. “Geniuses” tend to grow from a mass culture which values what they do. If Elisabethan London had not loved words, there would have been no Shakespeare.
The book’s recipes can be a little heavy on foods now seen as unhealthy in excess, such as cream and fatty meat. This is partly because of developments in knowledge but it also reflects the different times.
Even the better-off might have what we would consider a fairly frugal diet most of the time, so that the richer foods found in this book would largely have been for special occasions approved by the Church for feasting.
There are also a number of vegetarian recipes, perhaps because the feasts were matched by fasts, when meat and fats were forbidden.
Many of the foods and even some of the recipes will be familiar, especially as the authors have “translated” a lot of the latter, using not only modern spelling and terminology but also equivalent ingredients. When all else fails they give a modern dish which is sufficiently similar to the one which Shakespeare may have eaten.
Most of the ingredients, even in the originals, will be familiar enough. You may not have eaten a capon or pike, though I had both as a child on the almost rural fringe of Manchester half a century ago. Medlars and quinces have also fallen out of favour while even back then eating swans, though known, was considered bad form.
In the weeks to come the Star‘s Commie Chef column will present a couple of these recipes. In the meantime, below left is one of my favourites, simple as you like. And you can also win a copy of the book by entering the competition below.
The Shakespeare Cookbook by Andrew Daulby and Maureen Dalby is published by The British Museum Press, price £10.99
Winter pears poached in cider
- 4 cooking pears (or any pears as long as they’re still good and hard)
- 400 mls/14 fl.oz sweet cider
- 4 cloves or a piece of a cinnamon stick (about 3cm, or just over an inch)
You might not be able to buy “cooking pears” if you don’t have your own tree, so I’ve suggested an alternative.
The book also states simply “cider,” but I’d say sweet is best.
Peel, core and halve the pears.
Put them in a saucepan with the other ingredients.
Cover and poach gently for 40 minutes or until the pears are tender.
Remove the spice and serve hot or cold, with cream.
Competition
Courtesy of the British Museum we’ve got two copies of The Shakespeare Cookbook to give away as prizes in our competition. All you have to do is send your favourite recipe, which may be featured in a future edition of Commie Chef if it wins, to arts@peoples-press.com or by post to: The Shakespeare Cookbook Competition, Arts Desk, Morning Star, 52 Beachy Road, London E3 2NS.
On April 23rd 2012 – Shakespeare’s birthday and the launch of the World Shakespeare Festival – a group of merry players known as the “Reclaim Shakespeare Company” took unexpectedly to the stage in Stratford-upon-Avon, just before a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of The Tempest. This piece of guerilla Shakespeare aimed to challenge the RSC over its decision to accept sponsorship from BP in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster and the oil company’s decision to start extracting highly polluting and destructive tar sands in Canada. Find out more here.
Filmed by Zoe Broughton
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Here’s the script in full:
At a time when the world should fear much more the heat of the sun and the furious winter’s rages, BP is conspiring to distract us from the naked truth of climate change, and by pursuing a future powered by more and more extreme fossil fuels, like tar sands, deepwater drilling and Arctic exploitation, with its daring folly burn the world.
Something is rotten in the state of Stratford
The Royal Shakespeare Company have chosen to put BP’s money in their purse. Yet he’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf. BP is doing everything in its power to let not the public see its deep and dark desires – fossil fuel expansion and ecological devastation. BP is the harlot’s cheek, beautied with sponsoring art. It is the greenwash monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on, and the RSC have made themselves complicit in its crimes. If this were play’d upon a stage now, we could condemn it as an improbable fiction!
Enough! No more!
Times are tough. Ay, there’s the rub. But all that glisters is not gold. And whilst comparisons are odorous, we do well remember the dropping of tobacco companies as sponsors by a host of cultural institutions. The arts continued, and so shall the RSC, freed from the grasp of this smiling damned villain. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!
We believe that action is eloquence
We say to the RSC: to thine own self be true. Be nothing if not critical and forgo your damaging relationship with BP.
Author Jeanette Winterson told the Arts Council sponsored forum that art has a “moral” purpose. “I’m not one of these people who thinks it’s just idleness and entertainment. It’s there to change things, to make things better,” she said.
Eloquent words, but her resolute commitment has been met only with the reality of significant cuts to the cultural sector, a legacy of Tony Blair‘s Third Way project which encourages a “hand-up rather than a handout” to the arts.
That continues the political shift from state to market which defined Thatcherite Britain, with new Labour adopting the policy language of “investment” not public spending and “indicators” rather than intrinsic value.
The consequence is that last year, under the new coalition government, 206 arts organisations were informed they would no longer receive regular Arts Council funding. Around the same time “philanthrocapitalism” quickly became the Con-Dem buzz word when speaking about the arts.
But for those 206 arts organisations great art became secondary to the search for support and survival.
The Poetry Book Society, stunned by a 100 per cent cut, turned to investment firm Aurum Funds to carry forward the annual presentation of the TS Eliot Award.
But following the announcement of that sponsorship in December last year, two poets withdrew their collections from the shortlist, not wanting to align themselves with profit over morals. “My instinct, at a time when people are crying out for change,” poet Alice Oswald wrote, “is to position myself with them rather than with Aurum.”
The £350,000 slashed from London’s Tricycle Theatre resulted in the loss of the theatre’s artistic director Nicolas Kent after 28 years in which the Kilburn-based arts complex was at the forefront of politically and socially engaged theatre.
Kent expressed anger at cuts made to local arts organisations. Larger establishments “have enormous clout with both commercial sponsors and philanthropic givers who want to be associated with big national institutions,” he charged.
While the effects of cuts on artists and organisations are clear, the deepest consequences are felt by the public themselves. The arts in Britain have, for the most part, always depended on patronage in one form or another through individual donors, private institutions or state funding.
The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, the earliest incarnation of the Arts Council which existed throughout the second world war, was funded by the Ministry of Education to provide cultural access for all in times of war and austerity.
From 1946, the Arts Council of Great Britain reported directly to the Treasury and subsequently chose to favour “high arts,” with the Royal Opera House and Sadler’s Wells accounting for more than half its grant expenditure in 1960.
Under the Conservative government from 1979 to 1997, the arts suffered a loss of government subsidy, forcing organisations to seek private sponsorship or to aim for greater box-office success.
The cuts were positively framed as combating complacency, diversifying income streams and maintaining autonomy.
But the reality is that excellence and freedom of expression is compromised by a need to pander to markets and mass appeal.
As the Bristol Old Vic theatre’s artistic director Tom Morris recently commented: “I work in a subsidised theatre because subsidy enables me to escape the strictures of the marketplace.”
Ways in which state funding is so essential include investment in experimental work, preserving cultural memory and national heritage and, most vital of all, arts subsidy “so that those members of our society whom the marketplace has failed can have access to them.”
His words are echoed by Max Stafford Clark of the critically acclaimed touring theatre company Out Of Joint who had their grant slashed by nearly a third. “We are commended for excellence, yet condemned to mediocrity by removing the structure that makes excellence possible,” he said.
All this is in sharp contrast to the announcement of the 18 recipients of the Arts Council Catalyst Fund endowments.
The fund is Jeremy Hunt’s “hand-up” to the arts, a new £100 million private-giving investment programme aimed at helping cultural organisations attract – although the word used is “access” – more private funding.
In an Arts Quarterly survey on private giving to the arts over 80 per cent of theatre respondents questioned whether the Catalyst Fund would encourage philanthropic giving.
That’s borne out by the list of successful endowment applicants who received £55 million between them – Royal Shakespeare Company, English National Opera and London Symphony Orchestra. You would be forgiven for assuming that these were funds restricted to such organisations, who already have the “brand” and capacity to attract funding.
These are safe bets – they are well-established, unlikely to fund art that offends or threatens their major donors and will continue to turn out blockbuster events.
Nationally, the picture is equally bleak, with 81 per cent of all individual giving concentrated in London, leaving little hope for regional organisations.
More telling is that during the designated “year of corporate philanthropy” business investment in the arts dipped for the fourth year in a row and now stands at £134.2m. “It is significant how many more “development staff” arts organisations now have,” Out of Joint’s education manager Panda Cox observes. “Work is not just being sold to an audience but to sponsors.”
What is the future for arts organisations who want to “change things, to make things better”?
For those not offered endowments, long-term funding remains ambiguous at best. Studies show that there is virtually no evidence of pure altruism in corporate philanthropy. Businesses adopt the arts as an instrument of marketing and/or legitimation. When the arts no longer serve a purpose that suits, they will be dropped.
Without public funding for arts practitioners, only an elite with private funds will be able to participate.
And the shift from government to “governance,” with the state taking a back seat, sacrifices a deeper social engagement with arts producers and audiences. As playwright David told the launch of the Lost Arts campaign last year, companies benefiting from endowments “could ignore national policy on outreach, education and diversity.”
The campaign is a consortium of eight unions whose members are directly affected by cuts to the arts – Bectu, Equity, the Musicians Union, the NUJ, Prospect, PCS, the Writers Guild of Great Britain and Unite.
One of the aims of Lost Arts is to catalogue the cuts to come and their impact in the lead-up to the 2015 spending review.
But it seems at present some arts organisations are too preoccupied with finding pennies to replace the pounds to do very much more. Out Of Joint are not in a position to refuse whatever funding comes their way. “A determination to survive means that the early question that organisations face is how do we get it, not should we,” Out of Joint’s Panda Cox says.
That’s an understandably realistic approach but restoring outreach, education, diversity and access to the arts will require more than pragmatism.
The Top Five Most Hypocritical Corporate Sponsors. Alyssa Figueroa, AlterNet in the USA: “Many non-profits and other charities rely on corporate sponsorships to keep them afloat – and some of those partnerships seem as counterproductive as KFC’s and Komen’s ‘pink bucket’ campaign”: here.
The quote that opens this remembrance of Mr. [Robert] Hughes came from his 2008 documentary film for Britain’s Channel 4 television, The Mona Lisa Curse. The film explored, in the words of Hughes, how “the entanglement of big money with art has become a curse on how art is made, controlled, and above all – in the way that it’s experienced”: here.
A fierce debate raged in the press and the coffee-houses of London when Double Falsehood was first published in 1728.
By Jonathan Bate, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick
Published: 8:00AM GMT 16 Mar 2010
Had Lewis Theobald unearthed the holy grail of literary scholarship, a lost Shakespeare play? Or was he boldly conning the public with a forgery?
Theobald always maintained that he had worked from an authentic manuscript, but he did not include the play in his subsequent edition of Shakespeare’s complete works. What accounts for this seeming inconsistency?
The simple answer is that Theobald always knew that the play was not Shakespeare’s original, but rather a rewriting of the script to make it conform to the conventions of the Restoration theatre.
This was common practice – everyone knew that in the 1680s Nahum Tate had rewritten King Lear with a happy ending.
The title and the characters’ names were changed not by Theobald but by the unknown Restoration adapter. Double Falsehood is only an indirect version of Shakespeare’s lost Cardenio.
The more complicated answer to the question of why Theobald went cold on his own discovery paradoxically offers the proof that the play was not a forgery.
One argument of the doubters who attacked Theobald was that the style of the play was closer to that of John Fletcher than that of Shakespeare.
Theobald, who knew the repertoire of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama exceptionally well, could not deny this.
But here’s the thing: no one in Theobald’s time knew that Shakespeare and Fletcher also collaborated on two other plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen.
How could Theobald have set out to forge a Shakespeare play and produced a script in a style that is two parts Fletcher to one part Shakespeare when he did not know that Shakespeare and Fletcher were collaborators? Rather, the very Fletcherianness of the play proves that is in some part Shakespearean.
Since the time of Theobald, scholars have found the rock solid evidence that Shakespeare and Fletcher co-wrote Cardenio soon after the publication in 1612 of the first English translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
The play was performed to acclaim at court. The original script is lost, but the publication of Theobald’s adaptation in the Arden Shakespeare series is to be welcomed.
And even more exciting is the news that Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, is working towards a production of a conjectural reconstruction of the original.
The plot of Double Falsehood contains all the ingredients of an intriguing play in both the Elizabethan and 18th century periods.
By Richard Alleyne
Published: 8:30AM GMT 16 Mar 2010
It stars two beautiful female protagonists Violante and Leonora and two contrasting leading men, one honourable and of modest birth, and the other an aristocratic villain.
It is the latter Henriquez who is the perpetrator of the “double falsehood” of the title, nearly raping Violante and then courting Leonora, the betrothed of his lower born male rival Julio.
The lively plot contains an interrupted marriage, cross dressing and crude and unwelcome sexual advances to keep audiences hooked from start to finish.
There is a final grand confrontation and reconciliation scene at the play’s end which results in Julio and Leonora being happily reunited and a repentant Henriquez wanting to marry Violante to make up for his crimes.
Meanwhile all that is known about the play Cardenio was that it was performed by London theatre group, The King’s Men, in 1613 and appears to have been based on the character of the title from Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
But the full text of the play has disappeared, leaving scholars with just the music and lyrics to one or two songs.
