Shakespeare's Restless World Read online

  Looking at the title page and contents gives us a sense of what we owe to Heminges and Condell. Thirty-six plays are listed, with only Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen omitted. The Folio is the only good source we have for about twenty of the plays. Without it, we would not have Twelfth Night or As You Like It, The Tempest or The Winter’s Tale, Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus or Macbeth – and so most of Shakespeare’s great female roles would be unknown to us. In an alternative universe without the First Folio, Shakespeare would be known principally as a writer of history plays, with a tranche of early comedies and an impressive but smaller run of great tragedies – Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello – and there would be relatively little ‘Jacobean’ Shakespeare for us to read. Would this alternative Shakespeare hold the dominant position he holds for us today? Or would he merely be part of an Elizabethan triumvirate, his much smaller Collected Works sitting between those of Marlowe and Jonson?

  The so-called First Folio (London, 1623) was brought together by Shakespeare’s colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell ‘onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive’.

  The book contains the early apparatus for building the cult of the celebrity writer: the famous woodcut portrait of Shakespeare, the dedication and letter to the reader and the celebratory poems lauding his genius: Shakespeare as ‘happy imitator of Nature’, the ‘Soul of the Age’, ‘Fresh to all Ages’: these are all phrases coined by his contemporary admirers and included in the Folio. In their opening letter Heminges and Condell address the reader with a eulogy of Shakespeare:

  Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our province, who onely gather his works, and give them you, to praise him. It is yours that reade him. And there we hope, to your divers capacities, you will finde enough, both to draw, and hold you : for his wit can no more lie hid, then it could be lost. Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe.

  With this book, people everywhere, people who had never seen Shakespeare played in the theatre, could make his works part of their lives, as Heminges and Condell exhort. They could read him again and again. And, from the beginning, we know that they did.

  The First Folio allowed Shakespeare to travel out of the theatre and into the world. One copy that has survived belonged to a William Johnstoune, who lived in Dumfriesshire in Scotland. Written in the margins are observations (presumably Johnstoune’s own) on the text of the plays, and when we look at them we are peering over the shoulder of one of Shakespeare’s earliest readers, alone in his study in Dumfriesshire in the 1620s, underlining phrases that interest him and commenting on them in the margin. Looking at these notes, we are watching Shakespeare become part of William Johnstoune’s world. He marks Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking, ‘The distracted queene goes writes & talkes sleeping’, and he observes ‘unnaturall deedes trouble the mind unnaturallie’. Reading Richard II, Johnstoune raises a very Scottish eyebrow at John of Gaunt’s speech about ‘this scepter’d isle…This precious stone set in a silver sea’, and you can almost see his lips purse as he scribbles in the margin ‘extreame high praise England’.

  On this page from the Meisei University First Folio, a Scottish reader in the 1620s reacts to Julius Caesar’s thoughts on death: ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths…’

  Sitting hundreds of miles from the jostling crowds of the Bankside theatres, shelling their oysters and flaunting their rapiers, Johnstoune is a founder member of a new kind of audience for Shakespeare: a worldwide public composed of anybody who can read the plays and make them their own. When Shakespeare was turned into a book, the man behind the Globe became a global figure.

  And that means global in the most up-to-date sense: Johnstoune’s copy of the First Folio is now in Meisei University in Tokyo, but I can read it in London on my smartphone. In fact anybody can read it pretty well anywhere. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as we saw right at the beginning, Puck puts a girdle round the earth in forty minutes; but in the world of modern magic, online Shakespeare circles the globe instantly, and on every circling the words mean something new. In 2012, the very new state of South Sudan found echoes of its post-conflict recovery in an officially sponsored production of Cymbeline, performed in Juba Arabic. A hundred years earlier, a New York film studio had reimagined Romeo and Juliet with a star-crossed Huron brave and a Mohican princess. It was love. It was doomed. It was America. It was a new medium. But Shakespeare, as always, was there.

  In 2012 the new state of South Sudan sponsored a production of Cymbeline, which was also the first Shakespearean translation in Juba Arabic, and sent it to the World Shakespeare Festival at the Globe in London.

  Memorably he was there too on Robben Island, the infamous South African jail, where in the 1970s leaders of the African National Congress were imprisoned during the struggle against apartheid. Sonny Venkatrathnam was one of them:

  When I got to Robben Island we had no access to a library or any other reading material. I applied to buy some books and the reply came that I am allowed only one book. Eventually I decided the only book that would keep me going for some time would be The Complete Works of Shakespeare – well I knew they wouldn’t allow me to have the Das Kapital or something.

  In order to keep his mass-produced copy of Shakespeare with him in his cell, Sonny Venkatrathnam disguised it by sticking Hindu cards sent to him for Diwali over the covers. The Robben Island ‘Bible’, as it has become known, is now part of the legend of the battle against apartheid:

  Nelson Mandela also chose Julius Caesar’s thoughts on death when he made his annotation to the Robben Island Bible.

  About six months before my due release date, I circulated The Complete Works of Shakespeare and asked my comrades there to select a line or a passage that appealed to them and sign it. All of them chose lines or passages that inspired them and strengthened the resolve for the struggle.

  On 16 December 1977, the disguised Robben Island Shakespeare reached Nelson Mandela. He signed his name beside this passage on courage and death from Julius Caesar:

  CAESAR: Cowards die many times before their deaths:

  The valiant never taste of death but once.

  Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

  It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

  Seeing that death, a necessary end,

  Will come when it will come.

  The same passage had moved William Johnstoune in Scotland 350 years earlier: ‘Death a necessarie end will come when it will come and is not to be forefeared.’

  The prisoner Walter Sisulu, pondering racial injustice in South Africa, fascinatingly did not choose as his passage words spoken by Othello, the Moor of Venice, and victim of many racist slurs. He chose instead the Venetian Jew, Shylock:

  SHYLOCK: You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,

  And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,

  And all for use of that which is mine own.

  Well then, it now appears you need my help.

  Go to then. You come to me and you say

  ‘Shylock, we would have moneys’ – you say so,

  You that did void your rheum upon my beard,

  And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur

  Over your threshold. Moneys is your suit.

  What should I say to you? Should I not say,

  ‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible

  A cur can lend three thousand ducats? Or

  Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,

  With bated breath and whispering humbleness,

  Say this:

  ‘Fair sir, you spat on me on Wednesday last,

  You spurned me such a day, another time

  You called me dog…’

  Imagining Sisulu reading these lines is to imagine Shakespeare conjuring the humiliations of apartheid South Afri
ca. The Robben Island Bible resoundingly vindicates the great truth that everyone can see in Shakespeare the mirror of their own predicament.

  In the First Folio, his contemporary Ben Jonson paradoxically described Shakespeare as the ‘soul of the age’, but also as ‘not of an age, but for all time’. Jonathan Bate says:

  I think the key to Shakespeare’s endurance, and the fact that in every culture and every age he seemed to speak to the present, comes from that paradox. On the one hand he was the ‘soul of the age’, all the great conflicts and innovations of the age, the sense of the discovery of new worlds, new ways of looking at the world, it all is there in Shakespeare. He was the soul of the age, but at the same time he never confined himself to the particularities of his historical moment, and that meant that, because he sort of plugged into the fundamental questions about human society and human life, he speaks to every age. Shakespeare is always our contemporary.

  Shakespeare’s plays were written for a new medium, the public theatre of Elizabethan London. In the 1920s, Shakespeare took to another new medium: radio, an ‘airy nothing’, where, as in a theatre like the Globe, with little scenery and few props, words alone have to spark the imagination. When the BBC’s new building, Broadcasting House, opened in 1932, the architects, searching for an emblem to symbolize world broadcasting, turned of course to Shakespeare. And so over the door of BBC Broadcasting House are two sculptures by Eric Gill: a young naked boy stands on a globe protected by an older bearded man – Ariel, the invisible spirit of the air, who serves Prospero in The Tempest. The actor who originally played Ariel would have required wires to fly over the theatre stage, but the wireless – still in its infancy – would finally set Ariel free and carry Shakespeare himself across the globe.

  Prospero and Ariel by Eric Gill. Shakespeare has been at the heart of the BBC since its foundation, and this sculpture has presided over Broadcasting House, London, since 1932. The airy, often invisible, spirit Ariel was a fine metaphor for radio waves.

  PROSPERO: These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

  Are melted into air, into thin air;

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

  And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on.

  Shakespeare began as a purveyor of what was considered by many a vulgar form of popular entertainment, describing the world he and his audience inhabited in linguistic Technicolor; he deployed tormented ghosts and spectacular swordplay, clowns and caricatures, and he made lots of jokes – good, bad and rude. He wrote song and dance into his plays and he set his words to the great popular hits of the day. And yet, centuries later, in the Warsaw ghetto or in a South African prison, Shakespeare almost uniquely speaks to the unsettled condition of modern times. For those living the dark moments of history, as for those exploring the wilder or the sweeter shores of love, Shakespeare’s words console, inspire, illuminate and question. More simply, they capture for us the essence of what it is to be restlessly human in a constantly restless world.

  List of Lead Objects

  CHAPTER ONE

  England Goes Global

  Object: silver medal

  Location: British Museum

  Dimensions: H: 67cm / W: 67cm

  Inventory No.: 1882,0507.1

  CHAPTER TWO

  Communion and Conscience

  Object: silver cup

  Location: Holy Trinity Church

  Dimensions: H: 12.7cm / W: 7.2cm / D: 7.2cm

  Inventory No.: N/A

  Note: Although this 1571 communion cup is currently held at Holy Trinity church, the parish church of Shakespeare’s Stratford, this was not its original home. Presumably Holy Trinity did receive a communion cup at around this time, but it no longer survives. This cup is too small a vessel to suit such a relatively large congregation as would have been present there. It was originally deposited in a Stratford chapel at Bishopton, a former chantry preserved as a chapel of ease. It is nevertheless certainly possible that Shakespeare could have taken communion from this cup, given Bishopton’s location.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Snacking Through Shakespeare

  Object: iron fork

  Location: Museum of London

  Dimensions: H: 22.1cm

  Inventory No.: SBH88<611> [783]

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Life Without Elizabeth

  Object: Allegory of the Tudor Succession, Lucas de Heere. Oil on panel.

  Location: National Museum of Wales

  Dimensions: H: 131.2cm / W: 184cm

  Inventory No.: NMWA 564

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Swordplay and Swagger

  Object: rapier and dagger

  Organization: Royal Armouries, Leeds

  Dimensions: H: 128cm and H: 46.3cm

  Inventory No.: IX.1494 A and X.1764

  CHAPTER SIX

  Europe: Triumphs of the Past

  Object: Funeral Achievements of Henry V

  Location: Westminster Abbey

  Helmet

  Dimensions: H: 42.5cm / W: 25.4cm / D: 32.4cm

  Inventory No.: 839

  Sword

  Dimensions: H: 89.5cm

  Inventory No.: 840

  Shield

  Dimensions: H: 61cm / W: 39.4cm

  Inventory No.: 838

  Saddle

  Dimensions: H: 39.3cm / W: 54.6cm / D: 67.3cm

  Inventory No.: 837

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ireland: Failures in the Present

  Object: Derricke’s The Image of Irelande: with a discouerie of vvoodkarne

  Location: Edinburgh University Library

  Dimensions: H: 20.5cm / W: 32cm

  Inventory No.: De.3.76 no.11

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  City Life, Urban Strife

  Object: woollen cap

  Location: British Museum

  Dimensions: H: 6.3cm / W: 25cm

  Inventory No.: 1856,0701.1882

  CHAPTER NINE

  New Science, Old Magic

  Object: obsidian mirror

  Location: British Museum

  Dimensions: H: 22.4cm / W: 18.6cm / D: 1.3cm

  Inventory No.: 1966, 1001.1

  CHAPTER TEN

  Toil and Trouble

  Object: wooden ship model

  Location: National Museum Scotland

  Dimensions: H: 65cm / W: 64.5cm / D: 29cm

  Inventory No.: H 1993.666

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Treason and Plots

  Object: Carleton’s A Thankfull Remembrance

  Location: British Library

  Dimensions: H: 20cm / W: 15.4cm / D: 3cm

  Inventory No.: 807.c.22.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sex and the City

  Object: glass goblet

  Location: British Museum

  Dimensions: H: 22.1cm / W: 12.6cm

  Inventory No.: S.853

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  From London to Marrakesh

  Objects: gold objects from Salcombe hoard

  Location: British Museum

  Dimensions: H: 2.85cm / W: 2.85cm

  Inventory No.: 1999, 1207. 30

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Disguise and Deception

  Object: pedlar’s trunk and contents

  Location: Stonyhurst College

  Dimensions: H: 34.5cm / W: 85cm / D: 37cm

  Inventory No.: N/A

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Flag That Failed

  Object: Union flag designs

  Location: National Library of Scotland

  Dimensions: H: 29cm / W: 42.5cm / D: cm

  Inventory No.: MS.2517 f.67

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A Time of Change, a Chang
e of Time

  Object: clock

  Location: British Museum

  Dimensions: H: 59cm / W: 26cm / D: 23.3cm

  Inventory No.: 1958, 1006.2139

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Plague and Playhouse

  Object: proclamation issued by James I

  Location: British Library

  Dimensions: H: 384mm /W: 283 mm

  Inventory No.: C.112.h.1. (23.)

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  London Becomes Rome

  Object: Print from The Arches of Triumph, Stephen Harrison, London 1604

  Location: British Museum

  Londinium

  Dimensions: H: 26.8cm / W: 23.1cm

  Inventory No.: 1880, 1113.5777

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Theatres of Cruelty

  Object: eye relic mounted in silver

  Location: Stonyhurst College

  Dimensions: H: 6.2cm / W: 4.6cm / D: 1.7cm

  Inventory No.: N/A

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Shakespeare Goes Global

  Object: Robben Island Bible Owned by Sonny Venkatrathnam

  Dimensions: H: 21.5cm / W: 15cm / D: 5.5cm

  Inventory No.: N/A

  Bibliography