Shakespeare and I

He was not of an age, but for all time!

~

 Ben Jonson

Frontispiece to the First Folio

Unless you live under a rock, you are probably aware that today is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. It is also, according to folklore, the 452nd anniversary of his birth. His actual birth date is, like so much of his life, a mystery, but we do know he was baptised on the 26th April; in the sixteenth century children were usually baptised around three days after birth, so by counting backwards we arrive at the 23rd. 

The 23rd April also happens to be St George's Day - despite never having set foot on English soil, St George is the country's patron saint. As with Shakespeare's life, the details of St George's are murky, comprised chiefly of folklore, myth and legend. Shakespeare, however, was at least English, and his plays - despite their huge variety of settings, from ancient Rome to the fictional Illyria - are saturated with the sights, scents and sounds of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

I was introduced to Shakespeare at the age of eight, at a production of The Tempest at Huntingdon's George Inn. The George is a seventeenth-century coaching inn, with the four walls surrounding an inner courtyard:

via

It is thought that touring play companies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used such courtyards as performance spaces, and the George still stages a play in this manner every summer:

via

This year, fifteen years after I first saw the play, it is the turn of The Tempest again, and I just happen to be visiting England in late June/early July, so... watch this space!

I understood very little (if any) of that first Tempest, but I remember three things very clearly: the shipwreck (which was rigged up - pardon the pun - at the back of the raked seating, so that the sailors came down through the audience onto the stage); Ariel's singing; and Caliban, who emerged from under a piece of sacking munching on a huge slice of watermelon. Even now, whenever I think of The Tempest that image of Caliban and watermelon is the first thing that comes into my head.

Similarly, The Merchant of Venice, which I saw at the George a couple of years after The Tempest, also left me with one over-riding image: Shylock approaching a bare-chested Antonio with a knife and a set of weighing scales to extract his pound of flesh, which frankly terrified me.

After that I could never garner much fondness of The Merchant of Venice, but "going to see Shakespeare" remained very much a part of my life. It has become a family tradition to go at least once a year to open-air summer productions, either at the Pumphouse or at Auckland University (or both!). I also remember going to see A Midsummer Night's Dream on a very cold and wet winter's night at the Dolphin Theatre, and The Winter's Tale on a similarly dreary winter's night at a tiny little theatre in Ellerslie.

Although I visited the London Globe in both 2002 and 2015, actually seeing a play there has so far eluded me (I will one day!). But this summer Auckland has hosted the Pop-Up Globe - a scaffolding replica, claimed to be accurate to within about an inch, of Shakespeare's second Globe. It is a good deal smaller than the London Globe, and sixteen-sided rather than twenty. Scholars have been arguing about the dimensions of the Globe for decades. The Pop-Up Globe boffins argue that theirs is the correct size (well, they would say that, wouldn't they!) and that the London Globe is too big. Needless to say, the scholars behind the London Globe are not too happy about this, but recent archeological excavations there do seem to suggest that it was built too large.

My scrapbook from 2002: visit to the London Globe

Me as a ten-year-old twinkie at the London Globe

As regular readers of this blog will know, I have spent many happy hours at the Pop-Up Globe as an usher, managing to see Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra and (as a paying audience member) The Tempest. Twelfth Night is by far my favourite. So far I have seen it four times, and tonight will be the fifth :D

The Pop-Up Globe has been an enormous success in terms of tickets sold (most performances have been sold out or nearly so), but also (and arguably more importantly) in making Shakespeare accessible and enjoyable. One of the best things about working there has been watching the school children watch the plays. Very, very few of them have been bored or disinterested; most of them look as if they are having the time of their lives. 

Maria and Sir Toby Belch entertain school children at the Pop-Up Globe

So Shakespeare has certainly come to life for me this summer. As I overhead one small girl saying after a school matinee of Twelfth Night, "my life has been enriched!"  But although the plays are meant to be watched, not merely read, years of studying the plays, and working very closely with their language and text, has made watching them now even more enjoyable. I spent the three years of my high school exams working on Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. 

My school copies of Hamlet and Twelfth Night. Yes, I like to scribble in my books.

Because I know them so well, these plays are among my favourites. At university I studied many more of the plays, but in too much of a hurry; in three 12-week courses we got through  Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, and The Comedy of Errors, mixed in with several other Elizabethan/Jacobean plays - the result being that I have a passing acquaintance with each of these texts but know none of them nearly as well as I would like. For what it's worth, I do think that university undergraduate English courses should teach fewer texts in more detail.

The Shakespeare section of my bookshelf

My favourite Shakespeare play? For years it was Hamlet, with Twelfth Night a close second... but the Pop-Up Globe has reminded me how much I love Twelfth Night, with the result that Hamlet is perilously close to being knocked off the top spot!

I love Shakespeare's works for their power, beauty and truth, and for the never-failing charm of the language's poetry and rhythm. I meant to include some of my favourite Shakespearean speeches, but this post is already far too long, so I will put them in another post.

My Shakespeare at the George bookmark - a souvenir of that first Tempest which has been with me all over the world.

We defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is't to leave betimes. Let be. 

 ~

Hamlet V.2.204-8