The History Girls

I love delving into the diary of Samuel Pepys. He left us a wonderful record of some great historical events as they were unfolding, but for me it is his casual references to the details of everyday life, which always makes me want to find out find out more.

‘Thence home to see my Lady Pen, where my wife and I were shown a fine rarity of fishes kept in a glass of water, that will live so forever, and finely marked they are, being foreign.’ Samuel Pepys, 28th May 1665

We will never know for certain what these fish were that Samuel Pepys admired, but it is likely that this is one of earliest written references to goldfish being kept in an English house.

The Ancient Romans are credited with being the first to bring fish into the home for the pleasure of their guests, keeping them in tanks made of marble. But these would have been fish such as barbels taken from rivers, rather than fish specially breed for colour and shape.

In the Middle Ages manor houses, monasteries and villages had fish ponds stocked with fish destined for the table. No doubt children got pleasure from feeding them crumbs, but even smallest child would have been aware that, like other livestock, they were there to be eaten. In manors and monasteries fish could also be seen swimming for a few days in tubs of water in the cool of the dairy until the cook was ready for them, but the concept of keeping a fish in the house that you didn’t intend to eat would have been strange to most medieval Europeans.

But in China goldfish were kept and breed for pleasure as early as the Sung Dynasty (960-1279AD). In 918AD a Chinese monk wrote, ‘if goldfish eat the remains of olives or soapy water they die, but a certain bark will prevent them getting lice.’ The writer Yo K’o (1173-1240) described fish breeders in Chung-tu (now Beijing) who could turn the colour of fish to gold.

By 1276 silver, black, red and multi-coloured goldfish were being produced for sale as ornamental fish and by the 14th century an entire porcelain factory in China was given over to the production of fish bowls. Martin Martini, writing between 1646-50 in Hangchow, became fascinated by the ‘little gilded fish’ called Chin-yü. ‘The skin glitters,’ he tells us, ‘being interwoven with threads of gold. The whole back sprinkled as it were with gold dust.’

If it was goldfish Samuel Pepys saw in the ‘glass of water’ it is likely they came into England via Portuguese traders, who were the first Europeans to bring them on ships from China sometime after 1611. But after the East India Company established a trading base in China in 1672, the British eventually began to import these fish directly from China. One such ship arrived in England with live goldfish among its cargo early in the year 1692, having left Macao in China in September the previous year. Considering Louis le Comte on a visit to China in 1696 had described these finger-length fish as highly delicate and susceptible to injury, it was amazing they survived such a rough journey, not to mention the changes in temperature, and their water can't have been replaced very often on such a long voyage.

By 1711 the Duke of Richmond boasted of owning a large Chinese earthenware bowl full of goldfish which had been imported directly from China, and Horace Walpole was so successful in breeding them in his pond, he gave goldfish away as gifts to friends, sending one man home with a dozen in a ‘decanter’.

But as Horace found out, keeping goldfish wasn't an entirely hazard free hobby. In 1747 Thomas Gray penned his poem ‘Ode on the death of a favourite cat, drowned in a tub of gold fishes.' The cat in question was Horace Walpole's cat, Selima.

Wealthy Europeans kept goldfish in the large porcelain or earthenware bowls, as they had been kept in China, but once these fish became fashionable in England, unless you had grand entrance hall, keeping these large bowls of water on the floor of an English house wasn’t practical, so the glass goldfish bowl was introduced which could stand on a small table. Early English glass fish bowls were mounted on stems like wine glasses. The idea for these glass fish bowls may have originally come from the water-filled glass globes which were placed on tables to intensify the candlelight when someone was trying to read, write or sew.

Eventually these exotic pets became so cheap that goldfish were given to children by rag and bone men in exchange for the old clothes and other recyclables they had collected. I remember as child coming home with a live goldfish I’d won at a fair. I loved and cherished ‘Goldy’ for years, though thankfully for the sake of all those poor creatures who didn’t survive, giving away fish as prizes has now been banned.

by Caroline Lawrence

What do you do when you’re supposed to write a post about Shakespeare but you’re not half as knowledgable about the Bard as the other History Girls?

Easy! You phone a friend.

I phoned Aidan Elliott.

I know him from church and we also used to attend a film analysis group. He’s just surfaced after a busy few years working on a PhD. So it seemed like a good excuse to catch up.

That’s how we found ourselves spending two happy hours discussing Shakespeare and story structure a the Southfields Starbucks. The background noise is ambient music occasionally interrupted by the clatter of cappuccino cups and hiss of steam. Aidan has brought his ancient copy of Hamlet, so well-read that it’s falling to bits.

Aidan has several occupations. One of them is as a part-time lecturer at Kings College London. Another is teaching American students from Notre Dame University (in America) on their semester abroad. For Notre Dame’s Trafalgar Square campus he teaches a class called ‘Shakespeare Through the Lens of Hollywood Narrative’. The course is a short one, consisting of three hour-and-a-quarter sessions in one week.

I kick off by asking him how he gets 19-year-old American college students hooked on Shakespeare in less than four hours tuition time.

Aidan explains that instead of suffocating them with great swathes of Shakespeare text, he shows them clips from movies and TV such as The Usual Suspects, The Big Chill, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. That’s his way of telling the kids he’s going to be talking about Shakespeare the Storyteller. He uses these clips to introduce principles of the Russian Formalists and terms like syuzhet, fabula, schemata, analepsis and prolepsis.

For those of you who – like me – are unfamiliar with the names Propp and Shlovsky, syuzhet is the order in which the elements of the the story are presented and fabula is a term for the actual chronoloical order of the events. I immediately thought of the film Memento which turns out to be a popular example. The story (fabula) of Memento is told backwards (syuzhet) in a perfect reversal. (See the diagram from Wikipedia)

As for the term schemata, Aidan defines this as the filters we apply to make sense of the narrative. Maybe you could say our assumptions. Analepsis is essentially another word for flashback and prolepsis is a flashforward.

After illustrating these concepts through film, Aidan asks his students to consider how Shakespeare uses any of these elements. So he will ask his pupils to think about how the pilot of The Walking Dead overturns the schemata (our assumptions) by showing a policeman shooting a little girl. Only the little girl is a zombie trying to eat him. Straightaway we know all our preconceptions about this world are wrong. Does Shakespeare ever ask you to apply different schemata to his plays?

Only on the second day does Aidan introduce actual clips from Shakespeare, asking the students to look out for conflict and the shape of the story.

‘Your character starts off lacking something,’ he says.

‘Stasis equals death!’ I cry, using one of the terms of a popular Hollywood script doctor Blake Snyder.

Aidan nods. ‘The protagonist knows they’re unhappy but they don’t really know what they want.’

‘Truby’s Problem/Need,’ I say, referencing John Truby, another Hollywood story structure guru.

Aidan presses on. ‘It’s really toward the end of Act One that the story kicks in.’

‘Call to adventure!’ I say. ‘The Inciting Incident.’ I point at a diagram of Freytag’s pyramid and ask, ‘Does Shakespeare always have five acts?

Yes,’ says Aidan carefully, ‘though an awful lot of that has been imposed on the text.’

‘So he doesn’t always mark the acts?’

‘Not always…’

‘But sometimes he does.’

‘Sometimes he does. A lot of times his plays are edited into five acts.’

‘Do you have any sense of how Shakespeare approached his writing?’ I ask. ‘Did have some kind of structure in his head?’

Aidan nods. ’My feeling is that he knows the building blocks he’s using, because quite often the hero gets what they’re after at the halfway point of the story.’

‘Like Blake Snyder’s Midpoint!’ I say.

‘Yes. For example, Hamlet wants to know if his uncle is guilty and he discovers that he is in Act 3, Scene 2, exactly halfway through. Macbeth becomes king half way through Macbeth. Romeo marries Juliet in Act 2, Scene 2…’

‘So it’s often a high point. Some kind of achievement.’

‘In a tragedy.’

‘And in a comedy, it’s a low point!’ I say. ‘The Apparent Defeat in a comedy, and the Apparent Victory in a tragedy.’ Again, these are all beats I know from Hollywood screenwriting. But then comes one I’m not aware of.

‘What quite often happens then is that the main character disappears after the first half.’

‘The hero disappears?’

‘Yes.’

’That’s bold!’

‘Yes. I think Act 4 shows the impact of the hero’s success on wider society. So it’s in Act 4 that you see the effect of Romeo and Juliet’s marriage on the family. In Macbeth you see what is done to Scotland. In Hamlet you see what effect his action has on Ophelia: she goes mad.’

Aidan goes on to explain that because the hero is absent in Act 4, it is frequently cut by filmmakers.

‘What do you do on the third day of your class?’ I ask.

‘That’s when we look at passages in Shakespeare’s plays and compare them with the filmed versions, highlighting which lines the filmmaker has cut and asking what might be lost. What characters have been cut? Has conflict been sacrificed? Also, what’s in the mise-en-scene that can justify the filmmaker cutting a ten minute scene to two minutes. I get them to discuss this in pairs,’ Aidan continues. ‘What we usually see is that in films, if there’s no conflict then the character or scene goes. That's why Hamlet’s gravedigger doesn’t always survive.’ (For more about the comparison of scenes, watch this YouTube Clip.)

I’ve only touched on what Aidan and I discussed that afternoon. I’d love to attend his class and I'm sure the kids adore it. He illustrates the Bard in terms of story structure applied to movies and TV because quite a lot of young people get put off by Shakespeare’s language but they are literate with film and television. That’s how Shakespeare was presented to Aidan in secondary school - as a block of text on the page that he had to read for homework.

He didn’t get it then, when he was sixteen.

He didn’t get it when doing an Open University Course when he was twenty-one.

But he figured there must be something about a playwright and poet who could maintain sustain such popularity for over four hundred years.

So he read the plays, and re-read them and watched the plays on stage and re-read them. In his mid-twenties he was being put up by his employers at the Heathrow Holiday Inn because London property was so expensive. He tells me for twelve months he ate everything on the menu and read everything of Shakespeare. He calls it ‘The Year of Reading’.

I guess Aidan finally ‘got it’ because last year he was awarded a PhD for his dissertation Shakespeare on Film: Through the Lens of Narrative Theory, and now he’s a Doctor of Shakespeare.

Aidan’s Top Ten Shakepeare:

1. Favourite play: Doesn’t have one; they’re all good
2. Favourite character: Hamlet
3. Favourite stage Hamlet: Roger Rees ‘for sentimental reasons; he was my first Hamlet and I saw him four times’ and the young Ben Wishaw ‘for acting ability’
4. Favourite film Hamlet: Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy in the 1964 Russian version
5. Favourite passage: Caliban’s ‘I cried to dream again’ from The Tempest
6. Favourite villain: Iago, who refuses to justify himself.
7. Favourite film adaptation: Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing
8. Favourite female character: Rosalind from As You Like It
9. Favourite kids’ film: The Lion King (Hamlet)
10. Favourite teen film: Ten Things I Hate About You (Taming of the Shrew)

Dr. Aidan Elliott invites to you chat with him on Twitter @Aidan1564 (Yes, 1564 is the year of Shakespeare’s birth)

Today, the tenth day of our our Shakespeare month, we welcome a return visitor, Lucy Coats. She talks here about the research she did for the second of the novels she has written about "The serpent of old Nile." What would Shakespeare have made of the youth of his fascinating Egyptian queen? We like to think he would have relished it. Welcome, Lucy!

In my last post for The History Girls, I talked about the importance of research. For the second of my two Cleopatra novels, CHOSEN, it was even more vital for me to get it as right as I could – and in some ways even harder to do so. The research I had to do for the first book took me to the depths of ancient Alexandria (almost literally), and to Philäe. This time my Cleo had a longer journey, to Crocodilopolis in the Fayum, across the White Desert and back and then on to Rome. The challenges of portraying such a wide-ranging panorama of settings in an authentic way without information overkill were considerable.

Luckily for me, there was quite a lot of information available about Crocodilopolis (now Medinet al Fayum) and its deities, Sobek and his snake wife Renenutet. I also discovered that it housed a physical representation of Sobek in the form of the holy Petsuchos, a living crocodile draped in gems and gold. How could I resist including him?

'Right in the middle, there lay a behemoth of a crocodile, its armoured coat shimmering with jewels, its claws painted gold...'

Creative Commons: Norbert Nagel, Mörfelden-Walldorf, Germany

For the trip across the desert, I pored over maps, watched endless camel-riding videos, and travel documentaries on ancient tribespeople, as well as seeking out technical advice on what to do in the event of being caught in a sandstorm (THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO SURVIVAL HANDBOOK provided the answer). The crucial figures were how far a camel could travel in a day – and the distances between oases. I could now probably find my way blindfold round the Oasis of Siwa (known then as the Oasis of the Oracle).

Cretaive Commons: Edwardwexler

My greatest challenge, however, was Rome. While there is, of course, a whole canon of literature on life and times in the Ancient Rome of Pompey, Caesar and Marcus Antonius, what I needed was more specific. I needed to know exactly where the consul Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (aka Pompey the Great) lived in Rome in 56BCE. The evidence I found from writing of the time told me that Cleo’s father, Ptolemy Auletes, had been given the villa next door to live in during his exile – and that’s where Cleo needed to get to. I could have made it up, of course, but my inner historian would not let me get away with the easy path. Although I could not go to Egypt (because it was too dangerous to visit the places I needed to see), I could and did visit the seven-hilled city. I had lived there in the late 1970s, but hadn’t been back since, and there was a lot I’d forgotten. So, armed with comfortable shoes and maps, I trudged up and down, feeling the stones of Rome under my feet, and also standing on top of the Tarpeian Rock (which I needed for a dramatic assassination attempt). There is a wonderful resource called Digital Augustan Rome which helped pinpoint the exact spot (NOT where the DK Guide has it, by the way). I stood looking down towards the Forum, and imagined Cleo’s wretched little sister, Arsinoë, attempting to push her over. A true vindictive Ptolemy, that one, from all accounts – I can’t blame Cleopatra for having her murdered in 41BCE.

But where was Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus’s residence to be found? For that I had to play geographical detective and reconstruct clues from another source – Samuel Ball Platner and Thomas Ashby’s truly heroic work, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome. Pompey’s house was not at all easy to track down – but because I knew who and what I was looking for, eventually I pinpointed him to the Valley of the Suburra, near the temple of Tellus, on the Esquiline.. I even found out that his house was decorated with the prows of the pirate ships he had defeated in 68BCE after they had attacked the port of Ostia.The next year he moved to a much grander house near to the Theatre of Pompey. I am probably a sad geek, but that was one of the most satisfying pieces of research I’ve ever done – there is nothing to beat feet on the ground, smelling the air, and seeing the flora and fauna, which don’t change much. There are still Pinoli trees and seagulls in Rome.

Did Cleopatra actually go to Rome before her time with Julius Caesar? There is a small amount of evidence to suggest that Pompey and Caesar certainly knew her as a girl – and speculation that she went to fetch her father back at the end of his exile. We simply don’t know, and never will – but holes in history are for filling, in my opinion – and I hope the way I tell this part of my Cleo’s story is at least plausible.

I’m sad to leave Cleopatra behind – but I’ve got her to the throne now, and she’s walked off into the history books. Her story from now on is one where other people have trodden a well-worn path. It’s time for me to bow out and leave her to her glory.

'Thou shalt be as mighty, divine stars in the land, and thy diadem shall shine forth as the rays of Ra.'From The Book of the Dead

You can find out more about Lucy on her website: http://lucy@lucycoats.com and she is also on Twitter and Instagram. CHOSEN is published by Orchard Books.

Thanks, Lucy, for taking Michelle Lovric's spot to write about Cleopatra, the camels, the crocodiles and the possible journey to Rome. The book certainly enabled you to write about a Marcus Antonius!

This month, while many of my fellow history girls are celebrating the Bard, I’ve been thinking about another important literary landmark: the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë.

Charlotte was born on 21st April 1816. In fact, this year marks five years of Brontë bicentenaries, with Branwell’s birth in 2017, Emily’s in 2018 and Anne’s in 2020. The Brontë Society and Brontë Parsonage Museum are celebrating with a programme of events, exhibitions and publications, including a new collection of short stories inspired by Jane Eyre, edited by Tracey Chevalier.

The Brontë sisters by Branwell Brontë, Charlotte on the right. Owned by the National Portrait Gallery.

A year or so ago, when I was contemplating setting my next novel on the Yorkshire Moors, I made the pilgrimage to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth – the house where the sisters lived and wrote – seeking something of the landscape and atmosphere that so inspired Charlotte and her siblings. The museum is filled with a fascinating collection of furniture, artefacts and personal possessions that give a real insight into the women behind the words. So, in a nod to one of my literary heroines, here are ten things I learned about Charlotte that day…

1. Charlotte’s first ambition was to be a painter.
Charlotte was a keen artist and exhibited two drawings in an exhibition in Leeds in 1834. Many of the 180 drawings that have been attributed to her are accomplished copies or adapted versions of other artists’ work and the Parsonage has several original nature paintings. But when her publisher asked her to illustrate the second edition of Jane Eyre she declined – revisiting her portfolio she reflected, ‘I feel much inclined to consign the whole collection of drawings to the fire.’

2. She was self-conscious about her height
Charlotte was small – though don't know her exact height, estimates based on her clothing suggest she was about four feet-ten inches. Dresses and shoes on display at the Parsonage certainly bear this out. George Smith, Charlotte’s publisher, describes his first impression of Charlotte and Ann as ‘two rather quaintly-dressed little ladies’ and Elizabeth Gaskell wrote 'her hands and feet were the smallest I ever saw'.

3. Lowood School in Jane Eyre was based on Charlotte’s own experience
The sisters all attended the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge, Lancashire. Conditions were harsh, rations frugal and discipline strict. An outbreak of typhus sent them home in 1825 but the two elder siblings, Maria and Elizabeth both died of tuberculosis soon afterwards. Charlotte blamed the school for their deaths and the deterioration of her own health. She even modelled Lowood School's infamous Mr Brocklehurst on her real headmaster.

4. She was almost sued for defamation
The founder and head teacher of the Clergy Daughter’s School, Rev William Carus-Wilson, didn’t take kindly to Charlotte’s unflattering representation and sought legal advice. Court action was only avoided when Charlotte penned an apology, stating that she’d exaggerated the details for dramatic effect. She gave Carus-Wilson permission to publish her retraction, but he never did.

5. She had bad teeth
Elizabeth Gaskell noticed Charlotte’s dental problems when they first met, writing to a friend that she had ‘many teeth gone.’ Charlotte supposedly spent some of her earnings from Jane Eyre on dentistry, writing woefully to her friend Ellen about a proposed visit to a dentist in Leeds.

6. She received proposals from three men
Despite her unfortunate teeth, she attracted the attentions of Reverend Henry Nussey, brother of her friend Ellen in 1838. She refused him – she wasn’t in love. Her second suitor, Rev David Pryce proposed to her the following year after meeting her only once. Despite falling for her married tutor during a stay in Brussels (an interlude that inspired the novel Villette) Charlotte eventually married Arthur Bell Nichols, her father’s curate, accepting his second proposal in 1854.

7. She was ambitious
Keen to avoid the limited work open to her as a governess or teacher (all three sisters had attempted these careers with little success or happiness) Charlotte encouraged her sisters to publish their writing. It was she who led the approach to publishers and, by outliving her sisters, experienced the most success in her lifetime.

8. Her first book sold only two copies
Writers – take heart! Despite her ambition, the first volume of poetry by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, published in 1846, was paid for by the sisters themselves and sold only two copies. After the success of their novels, and Anne and Emily’s deaths, a second edition, edited by Charlotte, was issued in 1850 and has remained in print ever since.

9. The ‘madwoman in the attic’ was inspired by real life
It’s often said that the inspiration for Bertha in Jane Eyre came from Charlotte’s 1839 visit to Norton Conyers, a 17th century manor house near Ripon that reputedly housed a real madwoman in the attic. There are other more convincing models for Thornfield Hall itself, including Ellen Nussey’s home Rydings and North Lees Hall in Derbyshire, but Charlotte’s visit to Norton Conyers must have sparked her imagination.

10. She may have died of morning sickness
The exact cause of Charlotte’s death in unknown. She fell pregnant and became very ill shortly after her marriage in 1854. Elizabeth Gaskell writes that she suffered ‘sensations of perpetual nausea and ever-recurring faintness’. Her death certificate, dated March 31st 1855, states that she died of tuberculosis, the same disease that killed her sisters, but opinion is divided and we’ll probably never know.

If you’d like to find out more about Charlotte’s life, I recommend the new biography by Clare Harman. And the Brontë Parsonage Museum website is a wealth of information, including details of the Brontë 200 celebrations.

www.katherineclements.co.uk

www.facebook.com/KatherineClementsBooks

@KL_Clements

I’m signing off as a regular monthly contributor for the History Girls so this is my last post for a while. I want to finish by thanking the very brilliant Mary Hoffman for letting me climb on board in the first place. I have LOVED the ride. History Girls – it has been a real pleasure and privilege to be one of your number. You are – and will always be - an inspiration.

So… how to end?

I ought to write something significant, I thought. I should give a profound insight into the importance of understanding our history. Talk about how the past impacts on the present and how it shapes the future.

And then there’s the focus on Shakespeare this month. Maybe I should offer a startling insight into how his plays have shaped my own, and countless other lives?

But so many people have written so eloquently on these subjects there’s not much I can add.

So - in honour of the very many exceedingly wise women I have the joy of knowing - I’m going to finish with a story about a wise woman and her cow. It seems apt.

There was once a farmer who had three sons.

When the farmer died he left instructions that the farm was to be divided between the three of them. The oldest son was to have half of everything, the middle son was to have a third and the youngest was to have a ninth.

They divided the house and the land but when it came to dividing the herd of seventeen cattle they were stuck. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t work out how to do it.

In the end, they went to visit the wise woman of the village to ask for help.

She laughed and said, “You’re wearing your brains out on a problem that would take a woman two minutes to solve! I’ll tell you what. Here’s my cow. She’s old and lame but I’m going to give her to you.”

So they took the cow back home and added it to the herd. And when they came to divide it, the task was much easier. The oldest son (who had half the cows) took nine of them. The middle son (who had a third) took away six. And the youngest (who had a ninth) took two.

And when they’d done that they discovered there was a cow left over.

Which they took back to the wise woman right away.

It's Shakespeare month on The History Girls but every month is Shakespeare month for me, as my most recent novels are set in and around his world. He even makes an appearance in my novel Watch the Lady. His language has been a rich source of inspiration for me and he is credited with coining a vast number of words and phrases that are still in common use. Here are some of my favourites.

1. WEARING YOUR HEART ON YOUR SLEEVE
This has come to mean being emotionally open but in fact Iago, one of Shakespeare’s most duplicitous characters, said it in Othello. When he says ‘I will wear my heart upon my sleeve,’ he means that he will appear to reveal his true feelings.

2. A PIECE OF WORK

Nowadays when someone is described as ‘a piece of work’ it usually suggests they are spoiled and difficult but the meaning has changed over the years. When Hamlet says ‘what a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!’ he’s musing on the complexities of God’s creation and the irony that all man amounts to in the end is dust.

3. A LAUGHING STOCK
Meaning to be the object of ridicule, Shakespeare coined the term in a comic exchange between Sir Hugh Evans and Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Its meaning has remained the same to this day.

4. BATED BREATH
This comes from The Merchant of Venice. Bated is a short form of abated, so the term means talking with in a subdued manner, or holding back one's words. When Shylock says to Antonio, ‘Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,/with bated breath and whispering humbleness,/Say this:’ he is asking why he should stoop to those who have ill treated him.

6. VANISH INTO THIN AIR
A very familiar phrase, meaning to disappear, that was not quite coined by Shakespeare, though in Othello we can find the phrase ‘Go vanish into air, away!’ and in The Tempest, ‘we melted into air, into thin air,’ the term as a whole was not put into print until 1822.

6. A WILD GOOSE CHASE

Meaning a hopeless, and often foolish, search for the unavailable, the term derives from an old game of horsemanship in which a rider made a complicated set of manoeuvres, which the other players were obliged to follow. Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet uses it to describe a passage of quick fire banter between himself and Romeo – ‘If our wits run the wild-goose chase.’

7. TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
Know that feeling when you've eaten rather a lot of cake? This phrase is used often and in all innocence these days but when Shakespeare used it in As You Like It, he had an altogether more suggestive intent. It is said by Rosalind to Orlando and ‘thing’ was a common Elizabethan euphemism for genitalia – m'thinks it needs no further explanation.

8. IN A PICKLE
Meaning to be in an impossible situation, the term was said by King Alonso to the hopelessly drunk jester Trinculo in The Tempest– ‘How camest thou in this pickle.’ Trinculo had become involved in a disastrous, drunken, attempt to overthrow Prospero, thereby getting himself in a complete pickle having gone on a wild goose chase and made a laughing stock of himself.

Elizabeth Fremantle's novel WATCH THE LADY (Penguin) is out now. THE GIRL IN THE GLASS TOWER will be published on June 2nd (Michael Joseph).

Detail from the Wynn Family Memorial in St Gwrst Church dated 1559

I am in North Wales. While not quite the town of my fathers and mothers, this town is the one where my Mum went to school. And because it was a long time ago before school buses, she boarded during the week (even though it was a state school). And before she learned to speak English had learnt, aged eleven, how to smoke cigarettes. Still, there was a war on.

Ok, Ok, I'm backing away from family history and back into the Shakespearean track. Although I have enjoyed the plays, Macbeth, The Tempest and Dream being my favourites, I cannot admit to a deep love from birth. He is a faultless, wonderful writer, and the plays, when done well, are peerless.

And Shakespeare was big in my old stomping ground in Hackney. Which was after all the home of the Curtain Theatre, as recreated in this charming children's opera by Jonathan Dove.

Sorry I lied about family history, here is my son Adam (left) and classmate Jimmy as Tudor actors celebrating the story of the old theatre..

So Wales. Surely I'll be talking about Shakespeare's use of Welsh in Henry IV (or is it V). Arguing whether he was slagging us off as fickle (despite his Welsh grandmother Alice Griffin). But no. Back to Llanwrst. You say it Llan roost in English but that didn't stop an ITV news item having it described as Llanworst earlier this year. It's a small ex market town in a strongly Welsh speaking area just east of Snowdonia. It's tucked so deep into the valley it seems to be always in the shade.

Of course Welshness was big in the Tudor court and the language was not unknown in London. Many of the important influential families around in Shakespeare's time were Welsh. John Salusbury (son of two powerful Welsh Families and related to those Wynns by marriage) is a dedicatee in one of Shakespeare's books of verse.

In Shakespeare's writing there is definitely a sense of a wider world beyond Tudor England. There's the Mediterranean and (if I remember rightly) North Africa as well as Middle and Western Europe.
We can so often forget that there were massive trading links between London and Antwerp and Holland, as well as Constantinople, the Levant and China. And at the same time Spaniards were cutting a swathe through South America looking for gold and English migrants were sailing west to set up new Jerusalems in America.

All those merchants travelling for months and years all across the globe. Sometimes I think we forget how much travel went on between cities and cultures and people.

In fact, after rift and war with Spain, trade with the Ottoman Empire boomed and London was awash with Turkey carpets and textiles, Moors and merchants from Africa and the Middle East. There were so many that Elizabeth the First said famously that there were 'Too many blacks in London'. Truly nothing changes. How do the Brexiters or anyone else for that matter think they can hold back a tide of people that began at least two thousand years ago with the Romans? Or as comedian Stewart Lee reminds us, those pesky Beaker people coming here with their pesky beakers another few thousand or more years earlier.

But back to Llanwrst. The 'big family' of the town were the Wynns, they lived in 12th century Gwydyr Castle which is still there on the far side of the river Conwy from the town. I think I've written about their private chapel with the heavenly painted roof earlier, this time I am in the town church. It's dedicated to an obscure Welsh Saint called Grwst, an ascetic who lived in a cell here close to the river apparently.

The Wynns rode high with the ascension of Henry Tudor. They had this massive alabaster memorial made in 1559, to celebrate Meredudd ap Ifan, the first of the Wynns to settle in Llanwrst, also to Sir John Wynn and his wife Sidney. It was carved and painted in London.

The Wynne Memorial

It is so totally un Welsh and un chapel. Incredibly high church and blingy - even after five hundred the colours are a little garish for modern tastes. I cannot imagine the impact of this thing all those years ago in this grey rainy little town.

They might not have had theatre but this must have been the closest thing imaginable.

Catherine

My last book, The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo is on the shortlist for the YA prize.

Greetings from North America! This month my American publisher, Candlewick Press, is reissuing the Agency quartet with new, extra-mysterious covers. These are closely based on the UK covers designed by Walker Books, to be sure, but aren't they glorious all the same?

A Spy in the House (The Agency 1)

The Body at the Tower (The Agency 2)

The Traitor in the Tunnel (The Agency 3)

Rivals in the City (The Agency 4)

To celebrate this reissue, I'm sharing share some of the ideas and moments that underpin the Agency and its world. I came to fiction-writing while completing a PhD in Victorian literature and culture, so perhaps it's not surprising that my first reference points are scholarly.

Four inspirations for the Agency:

1. An article (Laura Tabili’s "Women of a Very Low Type") about mixed-race families in late-Victorian Liverpool. The women were typically Irish-born, the men Lascars – that is, Asian sailors.

2. The Great Stink of 1858, when modern urban-industrial pollution met an intense heat wave. The stench of the River Thames was so intense that Benjamin Disraeli fled the House of Commons with a handkerchief clapped across his nose.

3. London itself. I fell in love with it while living in Bloomsbury and researching my doctoral thesis at the British Library. I was desperate to write something that reflected how I felt about the city.

4. An endnote in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, which claims that St. John's Wood was just the type of area in which a Victorian man would stash his mistress. It made me wonder what other kinds of women might live in St. John's Wood. Spies, obviously!

And here are four Victorian novels that changed the way I thought about the period, making it possible to imagine writing fiction in what is so often, for academics, a revered space:

1. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair. Brown-skinned characters everywhere, if you just keep your eyes open. They’re marginal figures and Thackeray didn’t seem to know what to do with them, but at least his panorama includes them. Brown people! In high society, even.

2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh. Aurora appears to live on her own, in Kensington, and entertains a bachelor visitor without comprising her reputation! What is going on, here?

3. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone. One of the first detective novels ever. A funny detective novel, at that, with a mixed-race physician and a surprisingly racy scene between Rachel and Franklin.

4. Charles Dickens, Bleak House. Secret love affair, illegitimate child, suicide by shame and opium, and the crushing weight of British law. And who else could get away, in a supposedly realist novel, with attributing a character’s death to “spontaneous combustion”?

The new editions go on sale on April 26 - huzzah! I am so thrilled that a new generation of readers will get to know the Agency.

---

Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Agency mysteries (Walker Books/Candlewick Press). Read more at www.yslee.com or say hello on Twitter.

Be warned - this is not a learned post about Shakespeare, our focus this month - though he will drop in at the end. It's one of those shoes and ships and sealing wax posts - a little bit of all sorts. It was set off last night at choir practice, where we were starting a new song. It's an arrangement of a poem by Tennyson - this poem.

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.

It's lovely, isn't it? I recognised the title, but I certainly wasn't familiar with it. Issy Emeney, who runs the choir and arranges the music, told us that Tennyson wrote it on a voyage, during which he became so ill that he thought he might die. 'Crossing the bar' has become a metaphor for dying. Issy also told us that not long before he died, he told his son Hallam that he wanted it to be the last poem in any future editions of his work.

I've just been to dig out the old edition of his work that I bought when I was studying English at Durham. It doesn't have Crossing the Bar at the end, or indeed anywhere. I looked for the date of the edition, but there isn't one. However, in the introduction, Elizabeth Sharp says that 'At the beginning of the present century...' ...Alfred Tennyson was born - in 1809. He died in 1892, so she must have written her introduction not long after his death (she mentions the date of his death) - and before Hallam had chance to carry out his father's instructions.

I bought this edition, along with other ancient second-hand editions of 19th century poetry, because the backbone of the study of English Literature at Durham was a rolling course which sought to cover the entirety of British literature from Chaucer to the beginning of the twentieth century. All three years attended the same main series of lectures, and it just happened that when I started, the cycle had reached the Romantics and the 19th century. We had a long list of books to buy before the beginning of the course, and I got some of mine from a second hand stall on Derby market. (Money was an issue!)

Durham

Durham has been at the back of my mind this week, because fellow History Girl Caroline Lawrence has been on a course there and has been posting photographs on Facebook. It's a beautiful place, and I loved being there. But at the time and afterwards, I thought the course was disappointingly old-fashioned. It was said to be the only university in the country where the departments of English Language and English Literature were entirely separate - and often at war with each other. They were headed by two venerable and highly respected professors, Profs Smithers and Dorsch. Once, an impish drama lecturer (who lectured brilliantly, I think in Jacobean and Restoration drama) put a notice on his door that declared 'A plague o' both your houses!' Everyone knew what he was talking about. Some of the lecturing was dismal - there was one series of three on Shelley, given by an anxious woman who read out every word with a precise, dry-as-dust delivery. She talked for almost the whole time about the introduction to Prometheus Unbound. When she announced that she was about to begin talking about the actual poem, there was a ragged cheer from those of us who'd managed to stay with her.

Even so, it was a fascinating place to be, especially for a working class girl like me. It was the early seventies, and so much was changing - even Durham itself was on the cusp; new lecturers arrived while I was there, who looked bewildered at what they found but immediately began to change things. I had a wonderful tutor in my last year whose speciality was colonial literature, and who was clearly passionate about teaching.

Arthur Hallam

It's easy to mock the old set-up, and I often have. But after Issy mentioned Tennyson last night, I got to thinking. I didn't know that particular poem, but because of my Durham education I was able to recall some things about him. We spent a lot of time looking at In Memoriam, which he wrote in memory of Arthur Hallam, a very close friend who died young and for whom he grieved very deeply - and after whom he named his first son. And there was The Lady of Shallott, and the other Arthur poems.

Nowadays, people study far fewer authors, or topics, but probably in more depth - certainly in rather different ways. But it occurs to me that what the Durham course sought to give us was an overview, and also, via literary criticism, the tools to examine the text - the actual words on the page. Literary theory, which has become so significant in the study of literature, was very much in its infancy then. At least, it was at Durham. Fashions change. I wish we'd had livelier teaching (though there were honourable exceptions - some of it was brilliant) - but actually, on reflection, I do quite like it that I have that broad sweep of knowledge - a little bit, but about a lot of things.

I promised you Shakespeare! Well - I have no memory of lectures about Shakespeare. That may just mean that they were so mind-numbingly dull that they've been erased from my memory. But I do remember a series of seminars, which we had to take it in turn to run. This was a pretty revolutionary notion for Durham, and none of us had a clue how we were supposed to go about it. So we did what we usually did. Terrified of getting it wrong, we hared off to the library, then on Palace Green in an utterly gorgeous ancient building between the castle and the cathedral. It had tiny rooms and winding staircases, and quite probably if you listened very carefully you might have heard the ghostly scratching of quills from ancient scholars who had never quite managed to leave. We hunted out all the books we could find on the topic we'd been given, and regurgitated them. Of course, the seminars we gave were insanely dull.

Palace Green - the old library

Shakespeare had been done far better at school - we'd studied the texts in depth, but we'd also gone to see lots of productions. I remember Gemma Jones and John Neville at Nottingham Playhouse in A Midsummer Night's Dream: the production was enchanting, and she was so commanding with her long golden hair, those strange hooded eyes and that rich deep voice. And there was Richard Chamberlain as Hamlet at Birmingham, in a surprisingly mesmerising performance. (Everyone knew him only as handsome young Dr Kildare in the eponymous American soap, so expectations weren't high.) And we went to Stratford, though I don't remember what we saw. I remember an actor coming to talk to us once about Shakespeare, and insisting that you could only truly appreciate him in performance. Our wonderful English teacher, Mrs Gough, gave him a very old-fashioned look, and I think she had a point; my very best experience of Shakespeare has been seeing Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet, and though that was mostly down to the quality of his acting, the fact that I know the play very well certainly helped. But I think that actor knew what he was talking about: the play in performance is really the thing.

Well, enough. 'My story now is ended', as Prospero didn't quite say. I crave your indulgence - and the rest is peace.

(I blog, mostly about books, at A Fool on a Hill.)

Dear Reader, I once stole a famous Shakespearean costume, although the crime is hard to detect. This is how my theft began:

Much of my middle-grade children’s novel, A Boy Called Mouse, is set in the world of the late Victorian theatre. My reading and researching was inspired by three overlapping interests: the working conditions of the theatre children before Fawcett and others campaigned for their safety and education; the role of the actor-managers like Irving who made theatre-going respectable for the middle-classes, and the use of Shakespeare as a vehicle for spectacle and dramatic effects.

I’d like to pretend that this work was seriously-organised study but now suspect that much of the reading was random, seeing-where-it-led pursuit with my main worry being “getting the whole thing written”, a state I’m very much in at the moment.

However, my searches introduced me to a particularly beautiful garment: the dress worn by the actress Ellen Terry when she played opposite Sir Henry Irving in his 1888 production of Macbeth. Descriptions of this or that famous actor’s costumes or props, and the cost, had long been an important part of the publicity for the production, drawing in an audience as keen to see the dresses as to see the play.

This was true of Ellen Terry’s dress. Styled like a medieval robe, it created the most spectacular sensation: this Lady Macbeth was not dressed in sultry black silk or blood red velvet but in a gown of glittering emerald-green, an effect created by the hundreds of beetle-wings stitched to the background fabric, creating a stunningly jewelled contrast to Ellen Terry’s clouds of red-gold hair.

She was delighted by the success of the gown, particularly as it was comfortable on stage, saying that “It is so easy, and one does not have to wear corsets!”

Glamorous the dress might be, but the “easy” costume had to deal with a long hard-working life, facing many hasty and less-than-careful backstage changes. Not only did Irving’s 1888 production of Macbeth run for six months, but the beetle-wing dress went travelling for tours and productions, both in Britain and across to North America.

Ellen Terry appeared in this most favourite costume personally and when John Singer Sargent painted her iconic portrait, he chose to show her wearing her famous green dress. He posed her with arms upraised, drawing attention to the long folds of the sleeves, suggesting the robe of a medieval knight. Despite the painted stance, Terry never appeared in such a pose on stage during Irving’s “Macbeth”.

I could not help falling in love with this thought of this dress, although knowing Terry’s diminutive stature knew the thing would never have fitted me. So I borrowed the fame and mood of it to inspire a stage costume in Mouse, converting the beetle wings into peacock feathers for a different Shakespeare play. Here it is, in its new guise, mentioned as part of the great actor-manager Hugo Adnam’s Press Conference on his forthcoming “Midsummer Night’s Dream”:

Newspaper men in crumpled tweed jackets visited the Albion Theatre. Supping ale and oysters, they scribbled down Adnam’s description of the forthcoming play. The ladies magazines published illustrations of Bellina Lander as Titania, trailing the iridescent cloak of peacock feathers she would wear on stage, a garment that had cost over a thousand guineas without its silk lining. Just seeing that cloak, in all its coloured glory, would be well worth the price of a good seat. The opening night had sold out already.

Or here:

"Now the hungry lion roars!" Puck began "and the wolf be-howls the moon."

Adnam and Bellina entered for their final speeches. The peacock cloak swirled out under the lights, and Adnam's deep and wondrous tones resounded magnificently.

Looking back through the pages of A Boy Called Mouse, I am now surprised how briefly Terry’s faux dress appears, given how largely the real dress still features in my sense of the history and visual memory of that period while I was working on the manuscript.

The brief entry may be because, while writing, I chose to make my fictional actress Bellinda Lander as unlike the real Ellen Terry as possible. Terry with her red-gold hair, seems to have been as warm and loveable in private as she was scandalously popular in public, with her three marriages and rumours of numerous affairs, while my dark-haired Lander is definitely not a loveable woman.

Besides, by this part in the plot, I had plenty of dramatic deception, untangling and adventure going on backstage for my hero Mouse and his friend Kitty. Maybe that is why the ghost of Terry's wonderful beetle-wing dress just whispers by on the pages?

The good news is that while I may have down-played Terry’s inspiring dress, it still exists and can be seen. Back in 2011, after long and expensive renovation and the re-stitching of many beetle-wings, the dress went on display among the collection of theatrical memorabilia at Smallhythe Place in Kent, Ellen Terry’s most favourite home, where she died in 1928. The property is now owned by the National Trust.

Penny Dolan

What country, friends, is this?

Viola asks at the beginning of Twelfth Night. What country indeed? This is Illyria, Lady the Captain answers her. Illyria is a fantasy world, created from Shakespeare's imagination, but what if it was a real place? What would it be like? Where would it be? That thought occurred to me as I settled down to watch a performance of Twelfth Night in Stratford. Not in the Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre but on an open air stage set up by the river on a very hot day in June. My presence was purely serendipitous. I live near Stratford. I go there some Saturdays to the Farmer’s Market. As mundane and ordinary as that. A student theatre company were giving an outdoor performance, barking up their play, giving out flyers. The stage was made from boards set up on poles, the amphitheatre was a natural dell with the Avon as the backdrop. The changing rooms were a couple of bushes. It was only a hundred yards from the RSC, but nearer by far to the original Elizabethan touring companies than that grand theatre could ever be.

Twelfth Night is my favourite Shakespearean comedy. It is short, actually funny and impossibly romantic, but it is the element of disguise that I’ve always loved. The heroine, Viola, is a girl who is really a boy who is pretending to be a girl who is pretending to be a boy. This ambiguity gives the play all the sexual charge and frisson of the Blur song, Girls and Boys.

Liam Brennan and Samuel Barnett

Imogen Stubbs and Helena Bonham Carter in Trevor Nunn's 1996 film adaptation of Twelfth Night

As the play progressed, I began to think: what happens next? What happens after the end of the play? The play walks a knife edge between tragedy and comedy. It is perfectly balanced, but one false move and it could all go horribly wrong. The play ends, as all comedies should, with disguises removed, couples united, but I’ve always had the feeling that they are left slightly uncomfortable with each other. Not only that, but characters stomp off swearing revenge, are sent away and banished so as not to disrupt the happiness and harmony. What if the couples are not entirely satisfied with each other? What if the troublesome characters come back? And what if Illyria was a real place?

We know where it is supposed to be - on the Dalmatian Coast.

Map showing the Roman state of Illyria

Medieval Dubrovnik

Orsino’s coastal dukedom would be very like the city of Dubrovnik, Italianate in style, a mirror of the city states across the Adriatic. A small maritime country, grown rich on trade, but a glance at the map reveals its vulnerability That very wealth would attract the greedy eyes of pirates, not to mention the attentions of its infinitely more powerful neighbours, the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Venice would be keen to annex such a strategic port to protect its Adriatic trade routes; the Ottomans would be more than happy to secure a foothold on the Adriatic. This vulnerability would inevitably affect what happened next. If the state disintegrated because of the internal tensions revealed but not explored in the play, then Orsino's dukedom would be up for grabs.
My mind was busy while the actors ran on and off the stage and changed behind bushes. By the time they joined hands for their final bow, my thoughts had linked together and I knew I had an idea for a book.

Page from my notebook

I decided to begin my book some time after Shakespeare ends his play and I immediately broke two of my own rules: not to write about real historical characters (especially not famous ones); not to set a book in Elizabethan England. Rules are made to be broken, so I decided that Shakespeare would be a character in the book. There are hundreds of books written about him, thousands, whole libraries, but there are surprisingly few indisputable facts. This gave me a way into the man and his life. He would be Will Shakespeare from Warwickshire (my own county, so I feel a kind of kinship): actor, playmaker, theatre manager; not the impossibly famous William Shakespeare, Bard, Swan of Avon, whose home is a heritage centre 400 years later, his town a mecca for tourists from all over the world. He would be Shakespeare before he knew he was Shakespeare. If he ever did. I wanted to make him real, sexy, more Shakespeare in Love, more Joseph Fiennes than the baldy bloke in the Droeshout engraving from the First Folio.

Joseph Fiennes - Shakespeare in Love

Droeshout Engraving, First Folio

He would be a jobbing writer with inky fingers, trying to make a living, juggling his life in London with his life at home in Stratford, trying to survive, keep his nose clean in the dangerous, violent, difficult and volatile world at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Hard at work, trying to keep his Company going, writing and re-writing, always on the look out for stories to keep up with the need for plays and more plays. When he happens upon two street performers, a Fool and his beautiful young girl assistant, he finds one. He meets Feste the clown and Viola’s daughter, Violetta, survivors from the wreck of Illyria, but they bring with them more than just their story and Will Shakespeare’s life is about to get a whole lot more complicated.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

The Fool's Girl is published by Bloomsbury Children's Books.

I do love a bit of urban decay - I've always envied those intrepid folk who somehow manage to get into disused London underground stations, sewers and grand buildings, to explore what has been left behind to rot. There's something incredibly evocative about walking in place that has been left untouched for years and years - for me, it's as near as can be got to actually walking in history. I could spend hours just seeing what's been left, and wondering who last touched an object, or walked in my exact footsteps.

Chapp's Mill, Slaughterford, as it is today

Out here in the Wiltshire countryside, where I live, such experiences are hard to come by. Besides the odd derelict barn (and most of these have now been converted into homes), there isn't much to trespass into - I mean, explore - besides, of course, the timeless gorgeousness of the landscape itself. So imagine my joy when the research of my latest novel led to me discover some wonderful domestic and industrial archeology, right on my doorstep. My novel is set in the By Brook Valley, about ten miles from where I live. The By Brook Valley, which also featured briefly in an earlier novel of mine, The Misbegotten, is one of my favourite places in the UK. A steep, rolling green valley, with the winding By Brook at its heart, it has small villages and isolated farmhouses all built in local Corsham stone; it's a piece of rural England from a bygone era, even if it now has the M4 to the north, and Bath and Bristol to the west.

A view of the By Brook Valley from Colerne Down, on high ground to the west. Taken back in February. In the far distance is Manor Farm, Slaughterford.

And my favourite village of the By Brook, where my book will be set, is Slaughterford. There was a Roman settlement at Slaughterford, and since Saxon times there have been mills all along the By Brook - twenty two, at its peak. They evolved from corn milling to cloth fulling, to paper, back to corn and back to paper, throughout the centuries; then, one by one, they died out. Slaughterford, whose population peaked in 1841 at 156 souls, had two mills, which by the time my novel is set were a rag mill (imaginatively known as 'Rag Mill'),

Slaughterford in about 1932, with Rag Mill in the foreground (the river is hidden by the trees), Little & Sons Brewery middle left and Manor Farm top right, with St Michael's church and the cottages winding down the lane between the three.

and a paper mill, Chapp's Mill. Chapp's Mill remained in business longer than any other By Brook mill, and was still making paper bags, and tough brown paper for grocery wrappings etc into the 1960s, employing around 100 men on two shifts so that the mill could run twenty-four hours a day. By that time the water wheel had been replaced by two turbines, and the mill was run by electricity generated on site; but the 78" Fourdrinier paper-making machine, installed there in the late nineteenth century, was still running. It's still running today, in fact - when Chapp's Mill closed, put out of business by the development of plastic wrappings, it was dismantled and shipped to South Africa, where it's still in use. Back then, things really were built to last!

The 'dry end' of a working Fourdrinier machine at Frogmore Mill in Hertfordshire. This is much smaller than the one Chapps' Mill had, which would have been around thirty meters long.

The ruins of Weavern Farm, on the By Brook near Slaughterford. Like many of the farms on the river, it also had a mill attached to it, of which nothing can be seen today except the leat. It fell out of use in 1835. The farm and house were occupied until the 1950s, and it was probably abandoned due to access by motor vehicle being all but impossible. Another of the settings I will be using in my forthcoming novel. I have plans to win the lottery, restore it and live in it. The setting could not be more lovely, and as long as you had a Land Rover...

A not very good photo of a photo of a photo, showing Weavern Farm in 1910, before it was abandoned.

Slaughterford is rumoured to have got its name after a bloody battle during which King Alfred defeated an invading Danish army. Opposite Chapp's Mill is a field still know as 'Bloody Meadow', even though archeologists now think the battle might have been at Edington, to the south. Slaughterford's church, St Michael's, was ransacked by Cromwell's troops in the early 1650s, who passed through on their way to Ireland to do even worse things. It sat derelict for centuries until it was restored in the nineteenth century. Until then, villagers were forced to walk to nearby Biddestone to worship, where they were sniffed at by the Biddestonians, and made to sit all together in a separate section. There was also a Friend's Meeting House, hidden in the trees on the steep hillside above Slaughterford. Manor Farm has a huge medieval tithe barn, which nobody quite knows the origins of. I wonder if it might date back to the 1100s, when King Stephen granted the manor and its mills to the Cluniac priory in Monkton Farleigh, to the south.

Chapp's Farmhouse. This was the house of the original farm attached to Chapp's Mill, which was absorbed into the mill as it grew. For most of the twentieth century, it was used as the mill's offices. It is now being steadily restored by the new owners, and will soon be lived in again for the first time in over a century.

In short, Slaughterford is one of those wonderful, little-known corners of the UK where just about the whole of our island's history can be seen marching through, if you know how to look. And with its two mills and a brewery as well, it had a level of industry unusual for a settlement of such small size. I'm so enjoying writing about it, and I have so enjoyed exploring the physical remains of its history. With special thanks owed to Angus Thompson and Karin Crawford, the current owners of Chapp's Mill, who are singlehandedly setting about its restoration and were kind enough to show me around, here are some pictures of my explorations:

Layers of growth, new on top of old - the many different phases of building throughout the years are easily visible at Chapp's Mill. Here's the beating house, where old paper, and the pulped rags from Rag Mill, would be pounded into fine pulp for paper making. The winch was used to hoist in huge bales of scrap paper.

Inside the old machine house, where the Fourdrinier machine would once have been. The mill stream runs directly underneath this building, and at its southern end it originally turned a sunken 'overshot' mill wheel, first wooden, then iron, then replaced in the early years of the twentieth century with two water turbines, which are still down there, in their pits, too heavy to lift out... They, too, fell out of use as the mill was increasingly run by steam and electricity.

The old stove which would have warmed the Bag Room - this room was where the paper was stitched and glued into tough paper bags for sugar etc. The room would have been immaculately clean, with an elm floor and polished walnut benches, since no dirt or grease could be allowed to mark the paper.

One of the old boilers, which would have generated steam to run the various machines. This one would likely have driven the several beaters.

Paper pulp still encrusted around the pipe that fed the 'stuff', as it was called, from the beater tanks into the stuff tank, ready to be diluted and refined, and ultimately fed into the Fourdrinier machine.

Possible miniature of Aemilia Bassano

Aemilia Bassano was a member of a distinguished family of Italian musicians who rose to prominence in England during the reign of King Henry VIII.

Henry VIII had at least one redeeming quality: he loved music. When the six sons of the musician Jeronimo Bassano arrived in England from Italy, they were welcomed at court, and by 1540 five had been given positions as royal musicians, the eldest having returned to Italy. The father, Jeronimo, was a sackbut player and musical instrument maker to the Doge of Venice, moving there from Bassano del Grappa with his five eldest sons: Jacomo, Alvise, Jasper, John, and Anthony. The youngest, Baptista, was born in Venice. In England the five Bassano brothers were given apartments by the King in the Charterhouse, a comfortable former monastery in the north of London on the edge of the country, with extensive grounds and one of the few pure water supplies in the capital, where they remained for ten years, before losing this privilege during the reign of Edward VI.

There was a wide network of musicians and musical families in London at the time. In addition to the extensive Bassano family there were the Johnsons (who produced the lutenist John Johnson and Robert Johnson, who composed the music for several of Shakespeare's plays), and the Lanyers (who produced a number of musicians, including Ben Jonson’s collaborator Nicholas Lanyer or Lanier).

Aemilia Bassano was baptised on 27 January 1569 at the church of St Botolph’s Bishopsgate, daughter of the youngest Bassano brother, Baptista, and Margaret Johnson, probably a member of the musical Johnson family. There has been debate over whether her parents were married, owing to a phrase in Baptista’s will, in which he refers to ‘Margaret Bassany alias Johnson my reputed wife’. However, the confusion may have arisen over the change in meaning of the word ‘reputed’ in the years since this was written. At the time ‘reputed’ simply meant ‘known to be’. Margaret and her daughter were unequivocally his heirs, and his daughter was recognised by him as legitimate. Aemilia was only seven when her father died and eighteen when her mother died.

A further obscure element in her family background is one of faith. The Bassanos may have been Jewish. There were both Christian and Jewish Bassanos in Italy. However, the town of Bassano del Grappa was hostile to Jews and expelled many in 1516, which may have some relevance to Jeronimo’s move to Venice, although this may simply have been prompted by the search for patronage. Whatever their origins, the Bassanos were practising Christians in Venice. In England they were firmly of the English Protestant faith. Indeed Aemilia’s mother had close links with the reforming Protestant movement, and as a young child Aemilia was sent to be educated in the home of Susan Bertie, a young widow, dowager Countess of Kent, and member of a stoutly Protestant family.

Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent

Susan Bertie and her mother, Catherine Bertie, dowager Countess of Suffolk, were strong supporters of the humanist movement and believed that girls should be given as sound an academic education as boys, along the educational principles of Roger Ascham, tutor to Queen Elizabeth (who was herself a noted scholar). In the household of Susan Bertie, Aemilia was given a wide education in the classics, becoming fluent in Latin and possibly Greek. She almost certainly learned several modern languages as well. The extent of her knowledge of classical rhetoric and literary tropes is evident in her poetry, as is her familiarity with the poetry of her contemporaries, especially Spenser and Daniel.

By the time of her mother’s death, Aemilia had shown herself a gifted scholar and musician. She was also practical and capable, for in her will of June 1587 Margaret Bassano named her eighteen-year-old daughter as her executrix, with careful instructions set out as to the disposal of her property, and the support Aemilia was to provide for her widowed brother-in-law and her nephew.

Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon

Soon after her mother’s death, Aemilia became the mistress of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, 42 years her senior. Henry Carey was first cousin to Queen Elizabeth, being the son of Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s sister. At the time of his birth, Mary Boleyn was married to William Carey, but she was also Henry VIII’s mistress, so there is a possibility that Hunsdon was in fact King Henry’s son and therefore the Queen’s half brother as well as her cousin. He and the Queen were very close, as he was one of her most trusted advisors, and he held a prominent position at court. As his acknowledged mistress Aemilia also attended court and mixed with the greatest in the land. She was to say later that she had been very happy with Henry Carey, who kept her in great state.

Carey’s affection and generosity only extended so far, however. When Aemilia became pregnant in 1592, he could not rid himself of her quickly enough. She was hastily married off to her first cousin once removed, Alfonso Lanyer, another court musician, and they moved to Westminster, to a house which must have been very humble compared with Hunsdon’s grand mansion on the Strand. It was an unhappy marriage. When the child was born and baptised Henry, Lord Hunsdon seems to have taken no interest in his son. Alfonso Lanyer quickly spent all Aemilia’s money and for the rest of his life engaged in restless and profitless escapades, even becoming involved in the Earl of Essex’s rebellion against the Queen in 1601.

Simon Foreman

After a series of miscarriages during the early years of her marriage, Aemilia consulted the astrologer and doctor Simon Foreman. Foreman kept extensive case notes and it is these which have provided most of the information about Aemilia. He was, however, a sexual predator, boasting in his private diary about his conquests of his female patients. Aemilia seems to have rejected him, to his chagrin.

Aemilia and Alfonso had one child, a little girl baptised Odillya on 2 December 1598 at St Margaret’s, Westminster. Alfonso then went off on one of his jaunts with Essex, while Aemilia moved back to the parish in London she knew best, St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, where Odillya was buried on 6 September 1599. It seems likely that Aemilia and Alfonso lived apart after this.

Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland

Lady Anne Clifford

It may have been at this period or soon afterwards that Aemilia spent some time at Cookham with Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, perhaps as a gentlewoman companion and possibly also as a tutor in music and languages to the countess’s daughter, Anne Clifford, later Countess of Dorset. These must have been amongst the happiest years of her life, for she gives a lyrical description of her time with the Cliffords in The Description of Cookham, the final portion of her volume of poetry published in 1611, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. It was also her friendship with Margaret Clifford that inspired her to publish her poetry.

Aemilia Bassano – or Aemilia Lanyer, as she now was – has been described as the first professional English woman poet. Her volume of poetry was published unashamedly as a serious, professional work. There had been a handful of English women poets shortly before Aemilia, but none aspired to be taken as seriously as their male contemporaries. The Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum is a major philosophical and religious work, exploring the nature of personal faith and relationship with Christ. It has also been seen, in modern times, as a seminal feminist work. This was not quite a concept Aemilia would have recognised. Nevertheless, it asserts the right of women to be valued, to be recognised as virtuous, and not to be perpetually damned for the sin of Eve in the misogynistic Book of Genesis. Aemilia emphasises the ‘feminine’ qualities in Jesus’ personality – gentleness, modesty, compassion – and examines how these qualities enhance women’s particularly close relationship with Him. It is a remarkable work, which gained Aemilia praise at the time, slipped into obscurity for many years, and has recently been recognised as a major achievement.

The Grafton Portrait, possibly the young Shakespeare

And what of that intriguing possibility, first mooted by A L Rowse? Was Aemilia Shakespeare’s Dark Lady? As Lord Chamberlain from 1577, Hunsdon was responsible for the Queen’s music, chapel choir, and court entertainment. It was no doubt through his connections with the court musicians that he met Aemilia. Shakespeare’s company regularly appeared at court. The players would have known both Hunsdon and the court musicians. After his affair with Aemilia ended, Hunsdon became the patron of Shakespeare’s company on the death of their patron Lord Strange. All these people are intertwined, so Shakespeare almost certainly knew Aemilia. With an Italian father, Aemilia may well have had ‘dark’ Mediterranean colouring. She was known to be very beautiful, she was exceptionally intelligent and well educated. All of this would have appealed to a man of Shakespeare’s abilities. So – it is possible. Can it ever be proved? Not on the basis of present evidence, though it is an intriguing notion.

Alfonso Lanyer died in 1613. His income as a musician died with him and Aemilia seems to have found herself in somewhat straitened circumstances. She ran a school in the area of St-Giles-in-the-Field from 1617 to 1619, but it was brought to an end through an acrimonious dispute with her landlord. She eventually secured an income through a hay and grain patent shared with Alfonso’s brother Innocent. Her son Henry also became a court musician, married and had two children: Mary (1627) and Henry (1630). He died in 1633, and Aemilia seems to have cared for her grandchildren, eventually dying herself in April 1645, at the age of 76.

It was a remarkable life. Most striking, looking back over it, are Aemilia’s resilience and courage. Despite being abandoned by her aristocratic lover and obliged to marry a man she clearly disliked, she retained her independence and self-belief. Her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum would have been a remarkable work had it been written by a man in comfortable circumstances. That it was written by a woman – the orphaned daughter of an Italian immigrant, used, abandoned, impoverished – was an heroic achievement and worthy of celebration, whether or not she was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.

Aemilia plays a small part in my most recent Kit Alvarez novel, The Play’s the Thing.

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

It may not come as huge shock to regular readers that I was somewhat of a nerdy child. I liked books more than kids my own age and found them better company. This was, to some extent, Shakespeare's fault.

I grew up in Darlington, and my parents started going to see the RSC touring productions at the Newcastle Theatre Royal sometime during the eighties. They would book tickets with friends to each show (they even held parties to arrange the bookings), and while the RSC were in town they would disappear off looking rather glamourous in their theatre going outfits and come back talking about the costumes and the actors. I was sold on the whole enterprise before I even got to the theatre.

There was quite a lot of debate as to when it was appropriate to take me and my brothers. I remember very clearly the moment Mum and Dad realised that my brother was going to be on a school trip the night they had booked him a ticket for Midsummer Night's Dream, and decided they might as well take me instead. I was eight. I put on the best clothes I had (probably something from clothkits) and Mum explained the story as we drove up.

I have no idea if I really understood it at the time, but I certainly thought I did. I fell absolutely in love with Shakespeare right then, and I must have behaved myself, because after that I was a regular addition to the party.

We used to eat out afterwards with Mum and Dad's friends, walking down to an Italian pizzeria under the huge flocks of chattering starlings which used to roost on the Victorian and Georgian frontages of the city centre.

Mum didn't think it was a good idea to take me to the tragedies - probably too traumatised by the crying fit I had when she read me Jane Eyre - but by the time I was eleven I was allowed to go to the histories, so saw the 1984 production of Henry V starring Kenneth Branagh. And that was a whole new love affair. I learned the whole of Chorus's 'muse of fire' speech just in case he ever wanted me to sub in. I was a bit pissed off when Derek Jacobi got to do it in the film version as it happens and was still performing it as a drunken party piece at University a decade later, occasionally in the voice of a newly encrushed eleven year old. Though that didn't stop me going ditching lectures to see Branagh's film version of Hamlet twice in two days when it came out.

In between times I won an essay prize at school and spent my book token (at Dressers which anyone who grew up in Darlington will appreciate), on my own copy of the collected works. I still have it. I remember when I took it round to my Grandmother's to show off, she said, 'just think, you'll have that your entire life' and I recall very clearly looking down at it in my hands and imagining the pages yellowed, and realising I would age, and eventually I'd be holding this same volume with hands which looked like my grandmother's. I hope I shall.

So Shakespeare is not just Shakespeare for me. He's my first theatre, the way I learned to love language. He's my first sonnet, he's pizzas and starlings, essay prizes, A levels and the time I saw Pete Postlewaite play Lear at the Young Vic with the man who is now my husband. He's a place of safety when the world is unkind, he's how I first understood time and desire and, thanks to my parents I got to learn and understand the rhythm of his language before it was forced down our throats in the schoolroom. I wish everyone could discover him that way.

www.imogenrobertson.com

Perhaps many of our first experiences with Shakespeare are tied up with school. Watching videos of BBC productions with shaky scenery in the library on dark and rainy winter afternoons (The Tempest). Ploughing (wo)manfully through your first part with plays read aloud in the classroom, (Shylock in the Merchant of Venice). Your first experience of Shakespeare live.

The first performance I saw was Macbeth, our set O level text in 1987. I remember little of the details, the date or the theatre, even, but I do remember the impact the production made. The text which we had pored over (I still have my copy, painstaking notes crammed in the margins), leapt from the stage. The lines we had read so often we knew off by heart sparked with life:

'When shall we three meet again?'

'... not so happy yet happier ...'

And my personal favourite: 'come fate into the lists and champion me to the utterance.'

That became something of a motto for the teenage years.

'The Tragedie of Macbeth' was first published in Folio in 1623. Books, films, plays - while they don't alter, we do. Three decades on I would be quite glad if fate let up a little. The line did not jump out at me watching the latest film production of 'Macbeth' on a flight the other night. I waited for it - it may in fact have been cut. While I admire Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, have enjoyed many of their films, this version of Macbeth didn't move me. It was undeniably epic in feel - slo mo battles, authentically grubby, swirling fires, but it felt detached, with none of the genuinely disturbing, raw and sexy darkness Macbeth means to me.

There have been many other Shakespeare productions since. A Winter's Tale at the RSC in Stratford. Romeo and Juliet en plein air ('Defy your stars' came a close second as teen motto). But none has had the impact of that first Macbeth. Huge red banners soared from a jet black stage. The play opened with all the noise and raw energy of the battlefield. And Lady Macbeth had none of Cotillard's coolness. 'Lady Macbeth is painted granite', Kenneth Tynan once said. 'It is basically a man's role'. Really? Complex, certainly. Brutal, driven, ambitious - but can't women be that too? I would have loved to have seen Helen Mirren play Lady Macbeth.

Coyly referred to as 'the Scottish play' in dressing rooms up and down the land, this is my favourite of all Shakespeare's plays, because perhaps it was my first. It's believed to be bad luck, incidentally, because a real spell is apparently written into the text, and reciting it aloud releases the curse. The theme of witchcraft was topical - in 1590 Shakespeare's royal patron oversaw trials in Scotland, and wrote a treatise 'Daemonologie' in Scottish dialect, which was translated into English shortly after he took the throne. Dr Johnson said the way to gain favour with King James was to flatter his opinions about witchcraft. Perhaps 'Macbeth' was simply one great compliment from Shakespeare to his patron.

Today is the 400-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s death (and the 452nd anniversary of his birth.)

To mark the occasion, we’ve been blogging about The Bard all month, but today we thought we’d bring you a round-up of some of our best and worst Shakespearean experiences – from ketchup-based blood and being trapped in purgatory to stunning sets and intimate ‘before they were famous’ moments.

There’s also the opportunity to see how well you know our History Girls, with our Shakespearean quiz.

William Shakespeare, 1564- 1616. Image courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

Almost all of us have some memories of Shakespeare – whether from tortuous experiences at school or inspirational moments which will never leave us. The History Girls are no exception to this rule.

When asked about her best memories, Tanya Landman says of Shakespeare’s continued ability to engage with modern audiences that she and her then 11-year-old son “came out buzzing” from the RSC/Baxter Theatre’s 2009 production of The Tempest:

“It was visually stunning, with amazing Zulu and Xhosa imagery and giant puppets… It was his first Shakespeare and a real gift to both of us – a production that really opened your eyes and made you think about colonialism and its after effects.”

Gillian Polack agrees that Shakespeare’s plays, when well produced, remain hugely relevant to today’s audiences and speaks with passion about an experimental production of Hamlet in Melbourne, nearly 30 years ago:

“They only allowed 100 people to watch, and we were in two tiers of seats in the round, so none of us were very far from the performance. The intimacy and the acting style and the bareness of the acting space (few props, no set) changed the way I saw Shakespeare: by losing the physical distancing, the play also lost the cultural distancing… Later, when the same players did the same production on a traditional stage, it was far more ordinary.”

Gillian’s experience shows that the staging of a production is all-important, and other HGs agree when thinking about their favourite experiences. For example, Adele Geras talks about the power of a production she saw in the early 1960s:

“The set, which I recall as if it were yesterday, was a hexagonal sand pit which took up the entire stage area. The actors...have faded from my memory though I remember being completely transfixed by everything that was unfolding before my eyes. What I do remember in vivid detail was that set: the sand changed and shifted as the actors walked through it, fighting, talking, embracing. It was quite wonderful.”

Or again, Lydia Syson says of her favourite production that:

“The patterning of the final dance has particularly stayed in my memory: a formal grid-formation in which dancers brushed past each other and exchanged lingering glances. Disorder had been re-ordered to create something entirely new and wonderful.”

Other HGs highlight the importance of lead actors when thinking about their favourite moments, for example Leslie Wilson says of Judi Dench in Measure for Measure in Nottingham in the 1960s:

“Dench's Isabella, hard, slightly repellent, still moved me intensely when she found herself blackmailed by Angelo; I wanted to sympathise with her, as a victim of male sexual exploitation, yet couldn't totally, which I feel was completely right for Isabella, and her personality and physicality filled the auditorium. It is a problem play, and the problems weren't bucked in the slightest.”

Other performances which left their impressions include Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet who “somehow managed to speak the verse as if he was just having an ordinary conversation - while not losing the poetry of it.” (Sue Purkiss) or Tom Hiddlestone in a ‘raw’ Coriolanus (Liz Fremantle).

But not all Shakespearean experiences are as inspirational. By far and away the play that most of the HGs had seen poor productions of was Macbeth: the opportunities for over-acting, lingering ghosts and gallons of fake blood are, it appears, endless. Both Lydia Syson and Tanya Landman saw Peter O’Toole’s ‘laughably bad’ version at the Old Vic, which has gone down in theatre history. Lydia says:

“The titters of disbelief at Macbeth began almost as soon as O’Toole staggered and swaggered onto stage, spitting and lisping. I think he must have been drunk. As the blood began to pour, the laughter shockingly swelled. Nobody could quite believe it when Banquo’s ‘ghost’ actually came on stage and sat down at the table, apparently drenched in ketchup. As he shook his gory locks, the sound of an ambulance could be heard most distinctly from Waterloo Road.”

Celia Rees also had a poor experience with

“An avant garde “experimental’ Macbeth ...I realised it was a mistake as soon as the play started but we were in the Studio Theatre and I was in the middle of a packed row. No discreet way of escaping. There was no interval, so I had to stay for the whole thing. Theatre can be magical but it can also be a special sort of purgatory.”

However Sarah Gristwood declines to point a finger at modern productions, suggesting instead for her idea of a worst production:

“practically anything from the eighteenth century, when an actor advanced to the front of the stage, took a stance with one arm upraised, and bellowed.”

And for her best?

“I'm going to choose to believe the theory, launched by Nicholas Rowe in that same early eighteenth century, that Shakespeare himself appeared as the Ghost of Hamlet's Father. That, or the version of Hamlet performed in 1607 on board the merchant ship Red Dragon, becalmed off the coast of Africa in 1607, for an audience of four tribal chiefs.”

Now, surely there’s a novel in that…

The Globe, London. Image courtesy of Gillian Polack

SHAKESEPARE AND HISTORY GIRLS QUIZ

1) Which History Girl interviewed both Kenneth Branagh and Clare Danes whilst working as a journalist?

2) Who ‘can’t abide the Bard’ (but likes Polanski’s film version of Macbeth because of its handsome lead actor?)

3) Which History Girl was inspired by the Shakespeare’s History Plays and became obsessed by the Plantagenets as a result?

4) Who was inspired by a production of Troilus and Cressida and went on to write a novel about Troy?

5) Which two of the History Girls admit to leaving poor performances at the interval?

The Minack Theatre, Cornwall. Image courtesy of Charlotte Wightwick

Quiz answers:

1) Sarah Gristwood

2) Elizabeth Chadwick

3) Mary Hoffman

4) Adele Geras

5) Elizabeth Fremantle and Mary Hoffman

It's Shakespeare month and Shakespeare is the general but not exclusive theme of this month's History Girls' blogs. Of course I may well get the sack after my particular contribution this time round!

I am going to stand up and say that I just do not get on with Shakespeare. His words of iambic pentameter have never moved me except to tears of boredom and to wonder what all the fuss is about. I do admit that he has contributed greatly to the English vocabulary. I do admit that there are lines of prose that are indeed wonderful, but entire plays? No.

I suffered having to study the Bard throughout four years of 'O' and 'A levels and emerged with top grades in English literature. I could understand and dissect and discuss, but it still didn't mean that I felt anything but a stultifying horror of boredom at having to study the material. I think it simply boils down to a matter of taste - the same as a preference or dislike of a food, a colour, a smell. I can recognise the man's talent but it's just not for me.

One of the reasons I did so well in my exams is that I had my interest in Shakespeare lifted by film and theatre. 'Aha!' I hear you say 'So you do appreciate it after all, and in the medium closer to the original experience!'

Umm... not quite. You see my interest was sparked by teenage hormones. At the time we were doing our 'O' levels, the play for study was Macbeth, and Roman Polanski had just brought out his version for the cinema with Jon Finch in the leading role. Now, I had a massive crush on Jon Finch, courtesy of watching a TV programme called Counterstrike. I had also begun writing my first novel set in the Middle Ages. So to see the dark, handsome ex SAS Finch (he turned down the role of James Bond which then went to Roger Moore) as Macbeth, robed in medieval splendour was beyond addictive. I went to see that film once with the school and I've forgotten how many times on my own. I absorbed the settings, the costumes. I memorised the speeches, got into all the nuances, but not because it was Shakespeare. Oh my goodness no. My motive was my obsessive teenage love for Jon Finch. I think some of the boys in the class got the same kick out of watching Francesca Annis sleepwalking in the nude!

Jon Finch as Macbeth.

Anyway, the result was a top grade English literature 'O' level. I also remember me and my best friend having a hilarious moment over the quote 'Out damned spot, out I say!' This was to do with the children's TV programme The Wooden Tops, about a group of wooden dolls that lived on a farm and had a naughty dog called Spot... I can never hear that line these days without thinking of THE WOODEN TOPS (Spotty dog appears just after 6 minutes into the video clip).

'A' levels saw King Lear at the top of the bill. Oh joy. What got me through that was more lusting. This time going to see the play live at Coventry with Michael Goff (who wasn't that exciting to an 18 year old) as Lear and heart throb pop star John Paul Jones as Edmund. Oh yes! Oh yes indeed! Once more, driven by hormones, I dived into my studies and again claimed a top grade 'A' level (and this was despite having Wordsworth inflicted on me as well as D.H. Lawrence. Also not to my taste. Chaucer I adored and aced).

Exams finished I haven't looked at a Shakespeare play since except to peruse the occasional line for cultural or linguistic purposes. I do have a copy of the plays on my bookshelves somewhere - passed on through the family - but it doesn't get opened very often. People might say I'm missing out, but I have accepted that when something is not to one's palate, one should try it again to make sure and then move on to other experiences more rewarding - although without Shakesepeare having written Macbeth, I guess I wouldn't have been rewarded by Jon Finch!

I’m about to become a grandmother and I’ve been wondering how to pass on my enthusiasms. A long time before the dreary experience of ‘doing’ Shakespeare at school (reading the plays around the class), I was lucky enough to be introduced to him in other ways. As a stagestruck child, when I was about ten I went to drama classes where I had to learn speeches from The Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was fat and looked and felt more like Caliban than Puck; no self respecting fairy bower would have had me in it. Did I understand all the words? Probably not, but their richness and rhythms gave me enormous pleasure and I can still remember chunks of the speeches I learned then. In the 60s I saw a lot of wonderful RSC productions, most memorably Vanessa Redgrave in As You Like It, David Warner’s Hamlet and John Barton’s extraordinary rewriting of the history plays, The Wars of the Roses. In my early teens I was taught by a brilliant woman, Mavis Walker, and learned speeches of Rosalind, Viola, Olivia, Juliet, Cleopatra, Ophelia and Imogen. After my rather wooden performances we would sit down and discuss the psychology of these women and the themes of the plays. My dramatic career reached its heights when I played Romeo in the school play but I was left with a rich sense of the life of these plays and the people who inhabit them.

So what is the right age to start enjoying Shakepeare? Ever since Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare was first published in 1807, people have been trying to simplify Shakespeare for children. They are wonderful stories and children do respond to them but what about the real thing? Cbeebies, the BBC channel for children under six, has bravely decided that you’re never too young and there is now a CBeebies interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, filmed at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool and starring the channel’s best-known presenter, Justin Fletcher, as Bottom, and his side-kick Steve Kynman as Shakespeare.

I agree with Gregory Doran, the Artistic Director of the RSC, who believes that children as young as five should be exposed to Shakespeare and argues that they aren’t put off by the complexity of the language:

“You have to let the bug bite before kids get cynical. Letting them get involved when they are 13 is much harder than getting to kids earlier, without all the prejudices and stresses and strains of the idea that Shakespeare is somehow difficult or boring or academic,” he said. “With my own experience of getting to know Shakespeare as a child, I was grabbed by the stories first of all. Then you grow up and become engaged by the language. But it’s more than just good stories and nice language. It’s about ethics and morality.”

Working with primary schools across Britain, the RSC have found that children from Key Stage 1 (aged five to seven) have been “captivated” by Shakespeare. They work with abridged versions of the plays, focusing on particular scenes, but are exposed to the original language rather than a simplified version of the text. In a recent experiment, the RSC streamed video of its production of Richard II, starring David Tennant, to more than 7,000 primary school children.

One teacher from Bolton wrote of her seven-year-old pupils: “About 20 minutes into the performance, as I looked around at all the wide-eyed little faces looking up toward the screen, I thought I was going to cry. It gave our kids the opportunity to see the RSC for the first time in their lives. As one child in Year 3 said, 'Miss, is this for real?’ ”

In 2012 Simon Schama responded to critics who claimed that Shakespeare’s plays can’t be understood by most people: “I think it’s incredibly patronising of anybody to suppose that is true of Shakespeare. I was recently on the judging panel of Shakespeare by Heart (Off By Heart Shakespeare, a recital contest for secondary school children). “We were listening to children, all from state schools, who learned long speeches by Shakespeare. They weren’t all white, they weren’t all pink or beige, they were exactly the face of young Britain that you’d expect and had absolutely no problem with the language or meaning of the plays. They were utterly wonderful. Shakespeare isn’t scary. It shouldn’t be scary. And to suggest that schools, for example, shouldn’t teach him or should teach him less because he’s not 'accessible’ is robbing children of an incredible experience with their own language and an understanding of what it means to be human.”

Shakespeare’s Globe offers exciting educational activities for families and children all year round, including backstage tours, a Family Literary Festival, a digital playground zone and interactive films. I can’t wait

The Arundel First Folio - Engraving of William Shakespeare, by Martin Droeshout

William Shakespeare and I were companions way back, from the time when I was about seven. We spent whole long days and nights together, when I had been ‘naughty’, when I was being punished for some misdemeanour or other. Our house in Kent had a spare room in it, a third bedroom, I remember. It contained little furniture but there was a single bed in it. One corner of the room was built over the stairs and was closed off with a cream-painted wooden platform about two metres square, high off the ground. I needed a chair to step up onto it. But, for me, it was my first and very own stage. My father kept rails of old costumes in that room – mainly dark evening suits that smelt musty and of hair oil. These he could hire out or offer to the dance bands that were contracted to his theatrical agency.

I already knew, and had known for some time, that I wanted to be an actress when I left home, a classical actress working in the theatre. At some point at around this age, I was given a Shakespeare jigsaw puzzle. I suppose it was a present from my father but I can't claim to remember. What I do remember is that it was very large (1,000 pieces, perhaps?) and circular and fitted perfectly onto “my stage” with just enough space at the edges for me to skirt around it, declaiming. At its centre was the head, the portrait of, of Shakespeare. Encircling him was the canon of plays, everyone of the thirty-seven. Each triangular slice offered an image, a moment from the play. Mistress Quickly, Cleopatra, Gertrude, Falstaff, Henry V... this jigsaw puzzle was my introduction to these characters who became my companions during my hours of isolation in that room. I was in there, door locked, because I had been “bad”. Shakespeare’s large cast of players kept me company, but very much more. They drew me into new worlds, new vocabularies. Soon, I had my own tome of the plays. Thick, heavy, it had a plain black jacket, cloth, I think, with only Shakespeare’s autograph in gold on the front cover.

I had – and still have it somewhere although I would have to turn my home upside down to find it – a foolscap notebook with a green cover. Into this, I began to write. I jotted down sentences I liked the sound of, even if I did not understand them. And words, lists and lists of words. My own glossary of curious sounding or incomprehensible words that I had come across in Shakespeare’s plays: coxcomb, apace, breeches, curst... These lists covered pages, always with a space left for me to fill in the meaning when I had discovered it.

From there, I moved on to other writers, poetry principally. When a sentence, a paragraph, a verse caught my fancy, I copied it down meticulously.

I read Shakespeare’s plays, ploughed my way through that great Bible from cover to cover, although I suppose I understood little of it all. I learnt speeches by heart, by rote, and up on my stage I would climb to recite them, full throttle to an audience of none unless you count the smelly old clothes. Sometimes, I would slip from the coat-hangers a jacket or moth-eaten waistcoat or any article of clothing that I felt might enhance my performance. Some of the linings were white silk and torn or stained, and were a little off-putting. Still there I was, perfectly content in a world of my own creation when as far as the family was concerned I was laying low in the dog-house. The newly-acquired television was playing in the sitting room beneath me. I heard the baritone mumble of voices, of programmes that I was not allowed to watch because I was being punished. I found the nights frightening. If I had been so bad that I was forced to stay overnight in that room, I grew afraid of the costumes, fearing they would come alive, that their original owners would re-inhabit them and come to get me in my sleep, slay me bloodily while the owls shrieked, marching towards me like the forest of Birnham Wood marching to Dunsinane Hill in Macbeth. I was not 'lion-mettled'.

The upside of this period of my young life, in a childhood that was traumatic and isolated, was that my excitable imagination and works of literature became my allies. And that has never changed.

Later, in my final years at the convent when I was meant to be studying for my A levels and university, I would play truant and skip off to London to the theatre. Most especially I loved Peter Daubeny's World Theatre Season, a spring event held at the Aldwych Theatre, which had originated as a one-off season in 1964 as part of the celebrations for Shakespeare's quatercentenary.

Such a success was it, that it became an annual event and I saved up and bought my tickets and attended whenever I was able. Even today, I am marked by the range and brilliance of the theatrical experiences I was privileged to be audience to back then.

Sometimes, daringly, I made my way to Stratford, to watch Shakespeare performed on his home territory. I saw David Warner’s Hamlet six times, at the Aldwych and in Stratford.

David Warner as Hamlet - 1965

I had heard of or read about the pub, The Dirty Duck, where the casts of actors gathered to drink. I found it and I stood one early afternoon before a matinee hovering near the door and peered in, never daring to step inside. I was sixteen, I don't suppose I had really ever tasted alcohol and my budget had been spent on the ticket and fare. All I longed for was to be close to these professional thesps, to inhale their charisma, their camaraderie. To be one of them, included.

Once home, into my notebook glossary I plunged once more and underlined fardels and bodkins.

Years later, I worked with David Warner on a couple of occasions and told him what a beacon he had been for me back then. The Angry Young Man of modern Shakespeare. How I longed to be valiant and applauded, to know the adrenalin rush of 'flights of angels'.

I chose not to go the route of university but take my chances at drama school. I was very fortunate, in the year before I was accepted at Drama Centre in London, to work backstage at the National Theatre, which at that time was housed at the Old Vic Theatre and was under the directorship of Laurence Olivier, later Lord Olivier. To describe my experiences during that period when I was so full of my own hopes and ambitions and my daily life was peopled with some of the modern greats in British drama would take several chapters of a book, so suffice it to say that to be a witness to Larry’s performance of Othello on a nightly basis, listening to his mellifluous voice over the tannoy, or peering secretly from the wings, was the best gift any young wannabe actress could dream of.

Drama Centre was an exceptional training, offering a full history of drama from the Greeks onwards, but for me, most importantly, it taught us to write, to create the inner lives and back stories of our characters. Each of us was given the opportunity to write scenarios, monologues that could be used as auditions pieces after we had completed our training and were out in the tough world of fighting for Equity cards and employment.

Within two years of leaving drama school, I found myself auditioning for the National Theatre, still at the Old Vic. It was a three-step process and I seem to sail through the first two auditions. It was the last one that was the endurance test. I was contacted to say that I had done well thus far and my final audition would be on the stage at the Old Vic in the presence of Olivier, John Dexter, Michael Blakemore, Roland Joffe and one or two other director luminaries. Franco Zeffirelli, I think, was amongst them.

Naturally, I was terrified. I was requested to perform one modern piece, for which I chose one of the monologues I had written at drama school - it had served me well in the job stakes thus far - and a speech from Shakespeare. I chose Hermione from The Winters Tale. The famous justice speech in Act III, Scene 2.

The rush of excitement and the terror I felt stepping onto that National Theatre stage that morning, fearing that my jelly legs would not carry me to down centre, heart beating like a kettle drum, cannot be described. The directors were seated about five rows back in the stalls. The stage was lit by what is called its working lights, which meant that I could not see the men clearly, while for them I was fully exposed. Olivier rose and made his way to the foot of the apron of the stage. He was charming and, most importantly, knew how to embrace my terror and without saying anything in particular, put me at my ease. He asked me a little about myself and then said:
"Would you like to do something for us?"
As though there was a choice in the matter, as though I was doing them a favour. I said I would begin with my modern speech.
"What are you going to perform for us?" He asked smiling. I announced that I had written it myself. He swung on his heels towards his companions and then back to me.
"Well, that’s a first," he joked. "Off you go then." He returned to the fifth row while I set my scene. Cigarette, chair, before taking a moment to compose myself, to get into character. And off I launched. It was a hard-hitting emotional piece.
When I had finished he returned to the foot of stage, his hands were clasped together. "Bravo, bravo, baby," he exclaimed.
He was smiling and he seemed a little amused.
"Now. What’s next? Have you also written the Shakespeare yourself?"

Laurence Olivier - 1961

I was offered a place in the company, at a junior level. What is known as 'walk-ons and bit parts'. From there you would hope to work your way up the ladder. Within six months or so I was playing Mariana in Measure for Measure directed by the wonderful and very brilliant Jonathan Miller. But at all times, Olivier took me under his wing. He sometimes stood in the shadows at rehearsals and would climb the several flights of stairs to the dressing rooms at the top of the building, known as the chorus rooms. In the early days of my contract, I shared one of those dressing rooms with six other young hopefuls, but later I was moved down a floor or two. Olivier, who always insisted I call him Larry, gave me notes, talked me through character choices. He was a mentor to me. I learned a great deal from him. Also, from watching him in rehearsals. If I was involved in a production, I would attend every rehearsal just to study the evolution of his character, the developing performance.

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

Julius Caesar Act IV, Scene 3

I knew I was in the presence of greatness every working day of my life and I was certain that however my own career unfolded, these were moments to grab by the horns and live greedily.

I leave you with Laurence Olivier as Othello and a young, sleeping Maggie Smith as Desdemona

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F96DlM3N5KQ

Before I went to drama school, one of my little duties working backstage at the Old Vic was to take the white robe of raw silk, seen in the clip above, to Olivier in his dressing room, where his dresser, Christopher, awaited it. Olivier, already blacked up for the role, would be seated before his mirror sipping a small whisky, preparing for the performance. Back then, it was an honour of such magnitude for me and on the nights when he acknowledged my presence and spoke to me, I knew the rush of 'flights of angels'.

One little after note that has amused me. While writing this blog, I went onto the internet to look for a portrait photo of Olivier and dozens of pictures of olive trees came up. I was puzzled for an instant until I realised that the word olivier is French for olive tree...

www.caroldrinkwater.com

One of the best-loved games in literary history has always been to spot the identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady - the heroine of some of the most powerful sonnets, whose magnetism and whose infidelity he laments. Never mind that she may never have existed, that she may just have been some long-forgotten woman of easy virtue, who for a moment caught Shakespeare’s eye - or that ‘she’ may have been a dark gentleman . . .

In some cases the grounds for the ‘identification’ are positively derisory. (Elizabeth Hatton? Her husband’s stepbrother once sold property to Shakespeare. That’s it. The brothel keeper ‘Lucy Negro’, who may or may not once have been the queen’s maid Lucy Morgan? She was mentioned in a Gray’s Inn masque of 1595 and sent to gaol in 1599. That’s it.)

But the idea simply won’t go away. So, let’s turn it on its head a little. Think instead of the women we know were in his orbit, at the right time. Take a date of 1593, or near offer - just ten years before the old queen’s death. The sonnets (not published until 1609) could have been written anything up to fifteen-odd years before, though the likeliest bet spans the mid 1590s.

These can’t accurately be described as women Shakespeare knew – in his London life none such exist, barring a couple of women who went up against him in dispute over property, and the landlord’s daughter whose husband called him as a witness in another row over the non-delivery of a dowry. But they are women bound to him by a tenuous web of patronage or profession - or of political hopes and fears.

One name is well known in this context. Emilia Lanier (1569 - 1645), anybody? Illegitimate daughter of a family of Venetian musicians, the Bassanos, in the service of the Tudor monarchs, Emilia was orphaned young and brought up in the household of the Countess of Kent, before becoming the mistress of Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, maintainer of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to which company Shakespeare belonged. Pregnant in 1593 she was married off ‘for colour’ to another court musician, Alphonse Lanier.

She was presumably dark and Italianate looking; musical (like the ‘dark lady’); obviously possessed of considerable sexual magnetism - and described as having a mole on her body in the same place as the heroine of the sonnets. Later in her long life, in 1611, she published a lengthy poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, defending the women of the Bible, and it has been suggested that this anachronistic piece of feminism may have been triggered by indignation at having been ‘outed’ by the publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets in 1609 . . . though maybe she just needed to make money.

But the courts saw a number of other women bounds to Shakespeare by a web of connection - women we sometime, but not always, associate with his name. Far above his station, of course - but who’d have figured in his imagination, maybe.

First of these court ladies is Mary Fitton - herself sometimes considered a candidate for the dark lady. One of Queen Elizabeth’s more adventurous maids of honour, Mary was conducting an illicit affair with William Herbert, himself a possible candidate for ‘Mr W.H.’, the ‘onlie begetter’ of the sonnets, slipping out to meet him in male disguise. In 1600 she became pregnant by him but, the baby dying, he refused to marry her, even when the queen sent him to the Fleet prison.

In 1601, meanwhile, William had become Earl of Pembroke (in which capacity he would be dedicatee of the First Folio). His father had been a patron of a company of players to which Shakespeare may have belonged. His mother the Countess of Pembroke had been Mary Sidney, sister to Sir Philip Sidney. Herself a noted writer and patron who may have entertained Shakespeare, she was also a dedicatee of Emilia Lanier’s poetry.

The other most influential woman in Philip Sidney’s life, before his untimely death, had of course been Penelope Rich - the muse to whom Sidney wrote as ‘Stella’, and another candidate for Shakespeare’s ‘dark lady’.

Born Penelope Devereux, sister to the queen’s last favourite the Earl of Essex, she had for years been unhappily married to ‘the rich Lord Rich’, but after Sidney died became also the mistress of Sir Charles Blount, later Lord Mountjoy. Together they were leading members of her brother’s Essex House circle, and deeply implicated in his rebellion of 1601.

Also implicated in the Essex rebellion was the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron and Essex’ great friend. Damaged by connection were his womenfolk: his mother the Catholic Dowager Countess of Southampton, and his wife the young Countess Elizabeth. Elizabeth (yet another putative ‘dark lady’, if Shakespeare wrote sonnets for Southampton to present to her) and the earl had fallen in love in 1598, but their secret marriage saw him flung into prison, while she went to have her baby at Penelope Rich’s house.

The Dowager Countess Mary, meanwhile, had her own Shakespearian connections. In 1599 she married, as her third husband, the younger Sir William Hervey, himself another candidate for ‘Mr W.H.’ – who, some years later, would take as his second wife one Cordell (or Cordelia) Annesley. In 1603 Cordell famously petitioned the authorities about the machinations of her two sisters, who were trying to have their father declared insane so as to obtain his lands . . . . King Lear was first performed in 1605.

And there is yet another Southampton connection. In 1597 the then-unmarried earl had been sought by one Mrs Pranell, born Frances Howard of the noble family but married off beneath her status to the son of a rich Alderman. The writer Sir William Davenant was once in youth Mrs Pranell’s page – that same young man, Jane Davenant’s child, who always claimed he was Shakespeare’s illegitimate son. Sheer coincidence? Maybe.

There is another name I haven’t mentioned here - but that one I’m not going to, actually. Let’s be clear: I don’t actually go for the game of ‘spot the dark lady’. I think we need to take Shakespeare’s power of imagination more seriously than that. But just suppose for a minute that I were going to play . . .

There’s someone else we know, who certainly moved in Shakespeare’s circles. Who fits the implication of foreign-ness, perhaps Catholicism, and whose life and death fit with what seem to be the dates of his story.

But I’m not going to mention that name - who knows, I may want to write the book some day!

Thanks to Sarah Gristwood, who is one of our invaluable History Girls Reserves. Janie Hampton will be back next month.

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