In Blood Stepped in so Far

I love Shakespeare for his words, his poetry and his great theatrical dramas, high and low, tragic and comic.  He may have been a poor player but he did not strut and fret his hour upon the stage and then was heard no more.  He has been heard down the ages; he will be heard through time, for as long as English is spoken and the theatre exists.  That’s the other reason why I love Shakespeare – his abiding relevance. 

His plays can be read on so many levels, read in such a way that they bring out novel and dynamic interpretations.  Last year, in his directorial debut, Ralph Fiennes created a striking Coriolanus.  The setting is Rome and not Rome; the setting is a war-torn world which could easily be Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Chechnya or even Serbia, where it was shot on location. 

Incidentally, to go off at a slight tangent, that same play once caused a riot in Paris!  It was even banned for a time.  Yes, that’s right.  In February 1934 the government of Eduard Daladier, reacting to an anti-parliamentary interpretation that had been placed on a new production of the play by the right-wing pressure group, Action Française, banned further performances. In the growing heat engendered by the Stavisky Affair, a scandal that exposed extensive political and financial corruption, members of the group had appeared in the theatre in force, cheering on the play's denunciations of political leaders.

In Action Française, the movement's newspaper, praise of Coriolanus was used as an excuse to attack French democracy; to hurl accusations of corruption and villainy against the republic and its institutions in the light of every fresh revelation about Alexandre Stavisky, a Jewish financier and embezzler. Circulation shot up as Action Française urged people to come and protest in large numbers at the Chamber of Deputies, the first time in history, so far as I am aware, that Shakespeare contributed towards a major political riot - and a French one at that!

Anyway, let me get back to my theme, which is the abiding topicality of Shakespeare’s work.  I watched a performance of Macbeth last week on BBC iPlayer, and what a performance it was, the Scottish Play as I’ve never seen it before.  Directed by Rupert Goold and starring Patrick Stewart (think Star Trek!) in the title role, it brought out so many nuances.  The play’s central themes of ambition, treachery and guilt are all there, but there was something more – a brilliant dissertation on the nature of tyranny and the moral corruption it engenders.

The setting, and the costumes, as well as some old news footage of goose-stepping soldiers, make it clear that Stalinist Russia has become Stalinist Scotland!  Macbeth has been transformed from the courageous soldier, whose reputation travels ahead of him, to a bloody dictator.  The growing body count seems to merge into one great purge.  People live in fear and fear engenders suspicion. 

The whole atmosphere is suffused with menace, as the terror takes deeper hold.  Even Shakespeare’s own words take on added meaning.  I’m thinking here of the lines in Act Four, Scene Two, where the earl of Ross speaks to Lady Macduff, whose husband has not long fled the country;

I dare not speak much further;

But cruel are the times when we are traitors

And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumour

From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,

But float upon a wild and violent sea

Each way and none.

Cruel indeed are the times when we are traitors and do not know ourselves.  Macbeth’s hired assassins come like an NKVD death squad.  Lady Macduff and all her children are butchered.  Earlier we see Banquo being murdered by means of a lethal injection and Ross being interrogated in what could easily be a cell in the Lubyanka. 

The lead performances were excellent, Kate Fleetwood’s depiction of Lady Macbeth as good as that of Patrick Stewart as the king, dammed by delusion and equivocation.  Even the lesser roles I’ve never seen performed more brilliantly.  How wonderfully sinister the three witches were, the three weird sisters who appeared as just that – sisters, hospital sisters to be exact.  My goodness, these are no angels of mercy!  

The setting itself is kind of hospital come hell’s kitchen come hotel come lunatic asylum which serves as Macbeth’s castle.  The atmosphere is intensely claustrophobic.  As the play enters into the dénouement we are no longer in Stalin’s Russia but in Hitler’s bunker.  Yes, the references to Downfall are obvious!  There were other movie references I recognised.  At the very end, an end after the end, in a nice little touch by Goold that I feel sure Shakespeare himself would have admired, we see the Macbeths, holding up their bloody hands in an old-fashioned caged elevator.  It's on its way down.  This is Angel Heart; this is the descent into hell. 

It will be on iPlayer until 4 July if you are able to get it.  Incidentally, in the programme notes it says that the play is set in an “undefined and threatening central European world.”  I assumed this meant that all of Shakespeare’s geographical references had been removed, but no, Scotland still stands where it did…even if it is part of an undefined and threatening central European world! 

A Question of Equivocation

I don’t watch a lot of television.  In fact I hardly watch it at all; I don’t even have a television set in my rooms at college.  When I’m in London or elsewhere there is just far too much to do, places to go, people to see, books to read, premiers to attend, parties and more parties!  Besides most of what’s broadcast is complete rubbish, a form of death by entertainment, the kind of mind-numbing real live life shows anticipated with stunning prescience in The Year of the Sex Olympics, a play I wrote about here a couple of years ago (The Live Life Show, 9 June, 2010.)

I do, however, use catch up services like BBC iPlayer, just to make sure I’ve not missed anything worthwhile.  My viewing tends to be a bit sporadic, though, depending very much on what else is happening in my life.  I had some time to spare at the weekend and decided to see what was on offer.  I’m so glad I did because each broadcast has a limited shelf-life. 

There was an excellent documentary by Professor Mary Beard on life in ancient Rome.  It’s not that I want to talk about, though.  Rather it’s The King and the Playwright: a Jacobean History, presented by Professor James Shapiro.  Hitherto I’d never heard of Schapiro, an American specialist in Shakespeare based at Columbia University. 

It was quite brilliant, an exploration of the way in which the transition from Tudor to Stuart rule impacted on Shakespeare’s drama.  In plays like Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens and King Lear Shapiro shows how the dramatist, now part of the King’s Men playing company, both flattered and subtly criticised James I, the new monarch. 

But it was in the second episode, touching on ‘equivocation’ that really opened my eyes.  In placing Macbeth, the Scottish play, in the context of English history, Professor Shapiro delivered a real wow-me effect.  He brought out contemporary nuances that I was completely unaware of, matters relating to the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot.  For an American professor of literature to alert me to a novel dimension of English history really is something! 

The key here is the word ‘equivocation’, which entered general usage during the early Jacobean period.  It acquired a particular resonance in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, when a nation was beset by uncertainty, by fear of terrorism and the even greater fear of potential terrorism. 

Even as the principle plotters were executed in January, 1606 the authorities continued to look for the mastermind behind a scheme that, if successful, would have killed not only the king but virtually the whole of the English establishment.  The man they alighted on was Henry Garnet, a Jesuit priest, who had been charged with keeping the faith alive in England.  Now the Plot acquired a whole new dimension, implicating the Catholic community at large.

In the course of investigating Garnet’s alleged complicity a document was discovered, quite explosive, appropriately enough, on the question of equivocation – namely, the justifiable lie.  A Treatise of Equivocation was really just a guide for Catholics living in a hostile Protestant environment.  As Shapiro explains, it was a ‘how to guide’ for English Catholics, torn in their loyalties between the King and the Pope, on evading direct questions by subtle forms of dissimulation; lying, in other words, without lying.  The government had its mastermind. 

The trial of Garnet was a sensation.  He was accused of being involved in not just the Gunpowder Plot but other treasonable schemes going back some fifteen years.  Equivocation was used as a fundamental part of the prosecution’s case.  In parrying the accusations Garnet said that even Jesus himself had equivocated, which doubtless deepened the offence.  The jury took a mere fifteen minutes to reach a verdict.  As a contemporary said, Garnet would equivocate even so far as the gallows, but he will hang, without equivocation.

Shakespeare, in his brilliance, caught both the word and the national mood in his new play – Macbeth.  Those who know the play will immediately call to mind the supposedly comic devil porter scene.  It’s night.  To the gates of Macbeth’s castle comes an unknown visitor, who proceeds to knock loudly at the door. The porter arises and enters into a mood of devilish reverie, as if at the gates of hell;

Here's a knocking indeed! If a
man were porter of hell-gate, he should have
old turning the key.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock, knock! Who's there, i' the name of
Beelzebub? Here's a farmer, that hanged 

himself on the expectation of plenty: come in
time; have napkins enow about you; here
you'll sweat for't. 

Knocking within
Knock,
knock! Who's there, in the other devil's
name? Faith, here's an equivocator, that could 

swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God's sake,
yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come
in, equivocator.

Knocking within
Knock,
knock, knock! Who's there? Faith, here's an
English tailor come hither, for stealing out of
a French hose: come in, tailor; here you may
roast your goose. 

Knocking within
Knock,
knock; never at quiet! What are you? But
this place is too cold for hell. I'll devil-porter
it no further: I had thought to have let in
some of all professions that go the primrose
way to the everlasting bonfire. 

The whole play, which centres on a regicide, had a tremendous topical relevance.  The porter is alert to treason and equivocation.  James himself would have recognised who the principle equivocator was, the traitor who could not equivocate his way to heaven. 

Macbeth is full of equivocation, of evasions in the face of the truth.  Macbeth equivocates, Lady Macbeth equivocates, dissimulation in multiple forms, high and low.  In the end Macbeth realises that he himself has been the victim of the witches’ equivocation;

I pull in resolution and begin

To doubt th' equivocation of the fiend

That lies like truth.

How carefully Shakespeare walked here.  To deal with such sensitive issues with such directness carried potential dangers.  A play centring on regicide might have been fatal in less skilful hands.  But Shakespeare balances equivocation with flattery, holding up a mirror to the king when the play touches on the issue of the succession.  Now the witches stop equivocating.  Macbeth sees into the future; he sees James himself; his treachery has been fruitless; the rightful line will prevail.  There is no more equivocation. 

Finding Ophelia

The first story that caught my eye yesterday morning when I glanced through the days reports was one concerning Shakespeare, still making the news hundreds of years after his death! Actually the story concerns one Jane Shaxspere (sic), who was found drowned when she was just two years old, her body floating in a pond in Upton Warren in Worcestershire, just twenty miles from where her near namesake lived in Stratford.

The details of Jane’s death were discovered by historians from Oxford looking at sixteenth century coroners’ reports. She died in 1569, when Shakespeare was approximately five years old, accidentally falling into the pond while picking marigolds. The suggestion is that she was the bard’s cousin. It’s certainly possible, given the near similarity of their names and the proximity of their locations, at a time when people did not travel much, and extended families could be found across a fairly limited area.

It’s further suggested that Shakespeare, many of whose characters and plots were based directly on his own experiences, may have used this tragedy as the basis for the death of Ophelia in Hamlet, one of the most haunting scenes in his whole canon. There the Prince’s former lover, driven mad by the death of her father, falls into a brook, floating for a time before being dragged down by the weight of her saturated clothes;

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.


Hitherto academics believed that the inspiration behind this scene came from the death of Katherine Hamlet, a friend of the Shakespeare family, who fell into the River Avon and drowned when she was sixteen years old. It was believed by some at the time that she had committed suicide because of the breakdown of a relationship. Ophelia in Hamlet is certainly mad, though it’s uncertain if she committed suicide or not, at least by Queen Gertrude’s account to Laertes, her brother, softened possibly to spare him the full horror. In the play the church is under no doubt that she took her own life, denying her a full Christian burial.

The whole thing is certainly quite intriguing, though a precise link is almost certain to prove elusive. Though the researchers have enthusiastically embraced little Jane, there is no need for the tragedies to be mutually exclusive. The drowning of Katherine may very well have resurrected memories of the earlier event, linking possible death for love with death for love of flowers.

The researchers are looking for further clues that might possibly identify Jane as the original Ophelia. Dr Emma Smith of the faculty of Language and Literature at Oxford has said that “It’s interesting to think of Ophelia combining classical and Renaissance antecedents with the local tragedy of a drowned girl.” Yes, it is, though I would hazard that it’s never likely to be much more than that. But it’s comforting to believe that Jane, and Katherine, have been transfigured and immortalised in great art.

Don’t ask me what I think of you

I have a beastly cold, one that came on suddenly towards the end of last week. No matter; cold or no cold, nothing could stop me going to see Derek Jacobi perform King Lear at London’s Donmar Warehouse on Saturday, my tickets having been bought long since!

Charles Spencer, in his Telegraph review says that Lear is perhaps the greatest of all Shakespeare’s dramas. Oh, Charles, why so mealy-mouthed? Drop the qualification and damn the devil: it is the greatest! It is also arguably the most demanding part of all, far more demanding than Hamlet or Macbeth and slightly more demanding than Othello. It requires considerable maturity for an actor to carry the role off well, descending by stages from the conceited king to the broken man, old before he was wise. Jacobi, quite simply, is outstanding, full of emotional intensity. Behold the king, behold the man, behold the actor.

And there is Cordelia, wonderfully played by Pippa Bennett-Warner, perhaps the one female character in Shakespeare that I identify with most (well, there is Lady Macbeth, but I think I’ll just keep quiet about that!). I would be Cordelia; I would not flatter; I would tell the simple honest truth without hope of gain, because truth here is the test of virtue. Don’t ask me what I think of you I might not give the answer that you want me to. She does not give the answer that her father wants her to, unlike Goneril and Regan, hypocritical and self-serving harpies; and Gina McKee as Goneril was a particularly scheming harpy, the perfect wicked sister! Lear disinherits Cordelia, casting her out, only to discover all too late that her stark honesty contained the greater love.

Lear is a play about despair, tragic and unrelieved despair. Indeed the message was so stark that previous generations simply could not tolerate the heart-break: it conflicted too much with established notions of poetic justice. In the early 1680s it was rewritten in a version by Nahum Tate, a future poet laureate, in which Lear does not die, the wicked sisters are punished, and Cordelia marries Edgar. Amazingly this version was still playing on the English stage as late as 1838. But now we can despair at be at enmity with false hope; now we can feel the raw emotion.

The production by Michael Grandage is tremendous- precise, taut, unadorned, all adding to the intensity of the words, more sound less fury. Christopher Oram’s stage design, stark in the extreme, adds so well to the overall effect of the performance. There is nothing excessive here, nothing that distracts from a full understanding of the unfolding tragedy. I was sniffing at the end. I assure you, it had nothing to do with my cold.

An English Genius

There are sometimes rare moments in time and history, times of upheaval and transition, times of renewal; times that are given particular shape and meaning by the happy coincidence that they fall within the lifetime of an individual of rare genius.

The century in which Shakespeare was born was one of profound change; of reformation in religion and reshaping of manners. It was a time when the old medieval certainties were giving way to new ways of thinking; to a whole range of new attitudes about people and their place both in this world and in the world beyond. Shakespeare was born on the cusp of history, when the focus of history was moving away from the ancient centres of civilization, towards the new world of the Atlantic seaboard. It was in Shakespeare that the old and the new were combined. He was born at just the right time, when the Gothic world of Medieval Christianity had not quite given way, and when the modern world had not fully taken shape. It was given to Shakespeare to create that world; to create its consciousness and to create its language.

Think about the nature of drama before Shakespeare. We are dealing, in the main, with character 'types', representing not so much the complexity of human action, but an attitude, either of virtue or of vice; of perfection or corruption; of salvation or damnation. But Shakespeare humanises and combines these attributes in the single individual; in a unique personality, expressed in both in forms of exterior action, and in moods of interior thought.

He gives shape to new and more complex forms of human psychology; in weakness and in strength. His greatest contribution is to shape characters, like that of Hamlet, whose tragedy is one of indecision; or Othello, whose tragedy is one of manipulation; or King Lear, whose tragedy is one of blind pride. They, and so many others of his creations, are 'perfectly imperfect', not bound by time of space, characters who are able to offer something new, from generation to generation.

His 'natural' quality may not have appealed to the mannered tastes in drama that gained favour after his death; but he was almost bound to speak anew to those who came after; to the Romantic sensibility which emerged in the eighteenth century, when notions of the human begin to acquire their definitive form. If I were to try to define the true greatness of Shakespeare it would be in this: it was he who invented what it means to be mortal, and to stand alone in that mortality.

Shakespeare's time was also that in which the English language, as we understand it today, is beginning to acquire its final shape and structure. In translating the Bible into English William Tyndale began this process by introducing a whole new range of words and phrases. But Shakespeare surpassed Tyndale as a miner of our language. His vocabulary is simply huge; the words he draws out, the combinations he makes astonishing in their range and power.

There are people today, people who have never read Shakespeare, or seen a performance of one of his plays, who quite unconsciously use words and phrases invented by the Bard. He coined so many new words that it is difficult for me to know where to begin. Did you know, taking just a few at random, that 'into thin air', 'time-honoured', 'be-all and end all', 'breathed his last', 'crack of doom', 'dead as a doornail', 'good riddance' and so many other like expressions, some which people have come to accept as 'proverbial', were all created or first used by Shakespeare? So, too, were words like 'addiction', 'cold-blooded', 'critic', 'denote', 'bedazzled', 'birthplace', 'belongings', 'eventful', 'full-grown', and 'zany', yes, zany. There are too many others to mention here.

Finally, and from a purely English point of view, he might be said to have created a popular sense of patriotism and love of country; a love that goes beyond mere loyalty to the monarch. I am thinking specifically here of John of Gaunt's This England speech from Richard II. The one that moves me most, though, is the speech given by Henry V on the eve of Agincourt, the one I have come to think of as the 'Band of Brothers' speech;

This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Great speech, great writer, great man. Supreme.

The Man who would be King

I’ve long loved the plays of William Shakespeare. I’ve seen so many good performances, both in London and in Stratford. Good performances bring out all of the nuances of the drama. But I also enjoy reading them for the pleasure of reading, for the pleasure I take in Shakespeare's mastery of words. I love words; I love to play with words in the way that Shakespeare played with words.

I also love the writing of Lev Tolstoy…most of his writing. I read his essay on Shakespeare, published in 1903, not so much criticism as demolition. It irritated all hell out of me, not simply because he seemed to completely miss the point but because – I must confess- I thought it presumptuous for a Russian, a foreigner, to attack a poet who wrote in a language that was not his own.

I assume Tolstoy read English, though I have no information on the point. But no matter how good he was I doubt if he understood the subtleties of seventeenth century speech, or the way in which Shakespeare contributed to the evolution of English. Just imagine how Russians would feel if I, or any other English person, presumed to rubbish Pushkin!

The issue of language and comprehension was bad enough. But even more unsettling was the meanness and smallness of spirit shown by the author, qualities I don’t normally associate with Tolstoy. What I do associate him with, for all his genius, is selfishness and overwhelming egoism. The egoism, something that most writers suffer from, could have been disregarded, disregarded, that is, if he had not presumed to write in such terms about Shakespeare. Egoism here is the key, as George Orwell recognised in Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool, his brilliant rebuttal of the Russian master.

In his essay Tolstoy rails against King Lear with particular animus. Here Orwell spotted the psychological clue behind his ranting on the blasted heath: Tolstoy hates King Lear because he is King Lear; he reproduces Lear in life. Lear’s renunciation was Tolstoy’s renunciation: Lear fled; Tolstoy fled. His end also was curiously like Lear’s:

And though Tolstoy could not foresee it when he wrote his essay on Shakespeare, even the ending of his life--the sudden unplanned flight across country, accompanied only by a faithful daughter, the death in a cottage in a strange village--seems to have in it a sort of phantom reminiscence of LEAR.

The simple fact is that the play held a mirror up to Tolstoy, showing back a disturbing reflection. The theme is about renunciation, renunciation of power, renunciation of land, the renunciation of wealth, the very core of Tolstoy’s philosophy. Tolstoy renounced the world because he believed that in this, in serving the will of God, he would achieve happiness.

But his renunciation brought him no more happiness that Lear’s gratuitous act. Like Lear he gave up power…but also like Lear he still wanted to be king. Shakespeare, it might be said, had shown the weakness in Tolstoy’s own thought. Perhaps Tolstoy, too, should have been accompanied like Lear by the Fool, someone to tell him that he deserved to be beaten for being old before his time; that he should not have been old before he was wise.

Will Power

If there is one thing that makes me fume it’s the suggestion that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare! Not only is the controversy, which dates back to the nineteenth century, entirely bogus but it’s also tinged with obvious overtones of condescension and snobbery. No ordinary man, the argument goes, could possibly be so literate and so accomplished as William Shakespeare of Stratford, no; so the plays and poetry had to be written by, say, Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, or William Stanley, sixth earl of Derby.

Oh, but one mustn’t overlook the fact that some commoners have been roped into the ‘who wrote Shakespeare?’ industry. There is Christopher Marlowe, also a playwright of humble origins, a man who wrote, amongst other things, The Jew of Malta, and then proceeded under the pseudonym of Shakespeare to write The Merchant of Venice, a play with a similar theme but vastly superior in every way.

Francis Bacon is another candidate, undeniable one of the greatest scholars of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age, a man with a remarkably full life as a philosopher, politician, scientist and courtier who somehow managed to find time to compose the whole Shakespearean canon! He was first put forward as a possible candidate, interestingly enough, by one Delia Bacon, herself a failed playwright. For her Shakespeare, the real Shakespeare, was a “third-rate actor” without the “highest Elizabethan breeding”, suggestions that clearly reflect her own lack of success.

The defenders of the aristocrats are, if anything, even more self-deluding in their sheer loopyness. Those who advance the Oxford claim, known collectively as the Oxfordians, clearly believe in drama after death, because their man shuffled off this mortal coil in 1604, years before Shakespeare’s greatest plays were published. Chief among the Oxfordians, wait for it, was one J. T. Loony!

But not all loonies were, well, Loony. Sigmund Freud took the absurd view, in accordance with his psychoanalytic theories, that works of art are essentially confessional, and that an ordinary man could not have imagined himself among kings. I see in this yet more condescension, coupled with a belief that his own notions could be projected back through history; that an unconscious oedipal conflict was the solution to Hamlet.

I have to say that this is the point of deepest irritation for me, the notion that all art is autobiographical; that if Shakespeare wrote about courts and courtiers he had to be familiar with courts and courtiers. It’s a view that becomes increasingly absurd if projected back through time and on to others. Do we assume that Sophocles, Aeschylus and Ovid consorted with gods and heroes? Bacon, Loony and, yes, Freud, are ranged with all those who would deny the power of the imagination, the power of genius, the power of an ordinary individual to reach sublime heights.

As I have said before that it’s almost impossible to knock down a good conspiracy theory when it’s up and running. There will always be people, no matter what, who believe that aliens built the pyramids, Richard III did not kill the Princes in the Tower, the moon landing was a hoax and Elvis, like King Arthur, somehow never really died! There will always be people who do not believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

Shakespeare Causes a Riot!

In February 1934 the government of Eduard Daladier, reacting to an anti-parliamentary interpretation that had been placed on a new production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus by the right-wing pressure group, Action Française, banned further performances of the play. In the growing heat engendered by the Stavisky Affair, a scandal that exposed extensive political and financial corruption, members of the group appeared in the theatre in force, cheering on the play's denunciations of political leaders.

In Action Française, the movement's newspaper, praise of Coriolanus was used as an excuse to attack French democracy; to hurl accusations of corruption and villainy against the republic and its institutions in the light of every fresh revelation about Alexandre Stavisky, a Jewish financier and embezzler. Circulation shot up as Action Française urged people to come and protest in large numbers at the Chamber of Deputies, the first time in history, so far as I am aware, that Shakespeare contributed towards a major political riot-and a French one at that!

Age and Wisdom

I'm reminded of the brief exchange between Lear and the Fool;

Fool: If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I'ld have thee beaten

for being old before thy time.

KING LEAR: How's that?

Fool: Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst

been wise.

Alas, my trouble is that I am wise before I am old. :))

William Shakespeare, Playwright of the Third Reich

Did you know that Shakespeare was favoured by the Nazis? Well, he was, performed even when Schiller, one of the greatest German poets and playwrights was not. Consider some of the following.

In 1934 the French government banned, in permanence, performances of Coriolanus because of its perceived negative qualities. In the international protests that followed came one from Germany, from none other than Joseph Goebbels.

Although productions of Shakespeare's plays in Germany itself were subject to 'streamlining', he continued to be favoured as a great classical dramatist, especially so as almost every new German play since the late 1890s onwards was the work of left-wingers, of Jews or of 'degenerates' of one kind or another. Politically acceptable writers had simply been unable to fill the gap, or had only been able to do so with the worst kinds of agitprop. In 1935 Goebbels was to say "We can build autobhans, revive the economy, create a new army, but we...cannot manufacture new dramatists."

With Schiller suspect for his radicalism, Lessing for his humanism and even the great Goethe for his lack of patriotism, the 'Aryan' Shakespeare it had to be. Of Hamlet one critic wrote "If the courtier Laertes is drawn to Paris and the humanist Horatio seems more Roman than Danish, it is surely no accident that Hamlet's alma mater should be Wittenberg." A leading magazine declared that the crime which deprived Hamlet of his inheritance was a foreshadow of the Treaty of Versailles, and that the conduct of Gertrude was reminiscent of the spineless Weimar politicians!

Weeks after Hitler took power in 1933 an official party publication appeared entitled Shakespeare-a Germanic Writer, a counter to those who wanted to ban all foreign influences. At the Propaganda Ministry, Rainer Schlosser, given charge of German theatre by Goebbels, mused that Shakespeare was more German than English.

After the outbreak of the war the performance of Shakespeare was banned, though it was quickly lifted by Hitler in person, a favour extended to no other. Not only did the regime expropriate the Bard but it also expropriated Elizabethan England itself; a young, vigorous nation, much like the Third Reich itself, quite unlike the decadent British Empire of the present day. And why did Germany not produce its own Shakespeare? Why, the answer to that was easy: England, unlike Germany, had been free of Jews for three hundred years prior to his birth!

Clearly there were some exceptions to the official approval of Shakespeare, and the great patriotic plays, most notably Henry V were shelfed. But interestingly the reception of the The Merchant of Venice was at best lukewarm (Marlowe's The Jew of Malta was suggested as a possible alternative) because it was too ambigious and not nearly anti-semitic enough for Nazi taste. So Hamlet it was, along with Macbeth and Richard III.

Mention of that particular play allows me to finish on a note of humour; for you see the leading Nazis were not beyond scoring points against each other. In 1937 the Prussian State Theatre, under the control of Herman Göring, put on a performance of Richard. To the visible astonishment of the audience the King was depicted in Fascist style uniform with a club foot! As he shambled about the stage, malevolent, poisonous, murderous, it was all too clear to all who this was meant to be. Göring beamed!