by Greg Buzwell, Curator of Shakespeare in Ten Acts

William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream lends itself to spectacular visual excess. After all, if you can’t go over the top with a comedy set in a magical moonlit-woodland and populated by mischievous fairies then when can you? Many Victorian productions of the play concentrated almost exclusively on spectacle, cutting Shakespeare’s text and adding hosts of Amazons and allegorical processions celebrating the triumphs of Theseus, including his victory over the Minotaur. Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production of the play in 1900 even went so far in its efforts to heighten the air of woodland magic as to include live rabbits hopping across the stage.

An extract from an 1847 playbill for A Midsummer Night’s Dream Playbills Vol 262, item 261

Later, in the 20^th century, film adaptations of the play appeared. A 1935 Hollywood film of Dream directed by Max Reinhardt and starring James Cagney as Bottom included dozens of extra fairies and a Satanic-looking Oberon on horseback accompanied by a troop of bat-winged henchmen. The set included sixty-seven truckloads of trees and shrubs (including a transplanted redwood tree) and covered over sixty-six thousand square feet. Blending in with this jungle-like excess Mickey Rooney, according to one observer at least, played Puck as though he were ‘the son of Tarzan’. The spectacular dance scenes featuring Titania’s attendants were choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska, formerly of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. For Hollywood, if A Midsummer Night’s Dream was worth doing, it was worth overdoing.

A play not noted for its restraint: a scene from the spectacular 1935 Hollywood adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Warner Bros / The Kobal Collection

In 1914, attempting something different, the theatre director Harley Granville Barker staged the play at the Savoy Theatre in a fashion that eschewed extravagance in favour of suggestion and symbolism. When the production came to Manhattan in 1915 Barker explained his challenge to realism and visual excess by observing: ‘What is really needed is a great white box. That’s what our theatre really is’. The world may not have been ready for such an interpretation in 1915, but in 1970 ‘a great white box’ is exactly what it got.

Poster for the RSC’s 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring Sally Jacobs’s famous white-box set design. Courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The director Peter Brook probably knew nothing of Barker’s comment, but Brook effectively restated Barker’s challenge to illusionistic theatre a half century later. Brook, along with his designer Sally Jacobs, devised a white box setting for their 1970 production of the play in Stratford-upon-Avon. Large metal coils represented the woodland; a spinning plate on an acrylic rod became the flower containing the magic potion Puck fetches for Oberon; Puck entered the stage on stilts while Oberon descended to the stage on a trapeze. Circus tricks replaced the fairy magic. The intention was to move the play away from realism altogether and into the heightened realm of metaphor. Originally black drapes had hung behind the white box stage design but during the Paris leg of the world tour Brook removed them. Suddenly everything could be seen, including the tower-like structures from which the cables supporting the trapezes were fixed. The actors playing the fairies could be observed on the catwalk that ran around the top of the set, watching the action during the scenes in which they were not required. The creation of artifice and illusion was no longer of paramount importance.

The small cast was also at odds with traditional productions. Brook liked the dream-like associations of doubling given by many of the actors playing dual roles, recognizing that a small ensemble of performers would not only enhance the quality of actor involvement but also heighten the sense of dream-like theatrical metaphor. The costumes were far removed from the usual elaborate designs, rich fabrics and gossamer threads. Puck, played by John Kane, wore a yellow jump suit and a blue skull cap inspired by the costumes Brook and Jacobs had seen Chinese acrobats wearing in Paris. The young lovers meanwhile, the men in their tie-dyed shirts and the women in long white dresses, brought a touch of the ‘here and now’ to the production. The first staging of the play in Stratford took place in August 1970, not long after the 1967 summer of love and the student riots in Paris the following year. A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be seen as many things, but on one level it is a drama about youthful rebellion - perfect for the late-1960s zeitgeist of sexual freedom and the desire to escape stale orthodoxy.

 

Alan Howard as Oberon, Sara Kestelman as Titania and John Kane as Puck in Peter Brook’s 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Photo by Reg Wilson © RSC.

Reviews of Brook’s Dream, as it became known, were largely positive. The reviewer in the Sunday Times wrote: ‘more than refreshing, magnificent, the sort of thing one sees only once in a lifetime, and then only from a man of genius’. Inevitably there were a few dissenting voices – the New Statesman commented that Brook had ‘remoulded’ the play ‘with the help of Billy Smart, Walt Disney, J. G. Ballard and … his own sleeping, hallucinating self’ (although that in itself sounds utterly amazing). Perhaps above all else the production showed that it was possible to put a completely new spin on Shakespeare, transforming a play with a tradition of performance stretching back over 350 years into something new, strange, challenging, inventive and wonderful.

Peter Brook’s 1970 staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the productions explored in detail in Shakespeare in Ten Acts. Peter Brook will be giving a talk entitled ‘The Esoteric and the Profane in Shakespeare’ at the British Library on the afternoon of Wednesday 15^th June and there will be a panel discussion about the 1970 production of Dream, featuring Peter Brook, Sir Ben Kingsley (who played Demetrius) and Frances de la Tour (who played Helena) later that evening.

by Melissa Addey, 2016 Writer in Residence at the British Library, funded by the Leverhulme Trust

As a writer of historical fiction, my favourite item at the British Library so far has been a letter in the Treasures of the British Library permanent exhibition. It’s a dark and shadowy space, with delicate lighting placed here and there so that you can make out the precious items on display.

The letter is from both Anne Boleyn and Henry the 8^th, to Cardinal Wolsey. On a single page, Anne begins the letter, asking about the progress of the desired annulment of Henry’s first marriage to Katherine of Aragon. The second half of the page is from Henry. “The wrytter of thys letter wolde nott cease tyll she (had caused me likewise) to sett to my hand; desiring yow, thowght it be short, to (take it in good part)”. In other words, Anne has nagged him to complete the letter and add his own nudge to the Cardinal.

It’s special for a number of reasons. To actually see the item is to know that these two people, so famous in our history, both held this page in their hands. It has their handwriting on it, such an intimate thing about a person, so peculiarly theirs.

Handwriting is something we are losing: I used to know exactly what my friends’ and family members’ handwriting looked like. I now have friends whose handwriting I don’t believe I’ve ever seen. The letter has their tone of voice. Henry’s reference to Anne nagging is really quite funny. It tells you something about their relationship at the time and makes you wonder how many of these letters were sent, gradually increasing from jocular confidence to frustrated rage. The letter is dated August 1528, quite early on in Henry’s attempt to marry Anne, something that didn’t happen for another five years. Seeing something like this is to reach back and touch history, to see people as human rather than legend. 

Detail from Henry VII’s Psalter, Royal MS 2 A XVI f3r, showing Henry VII.

When researching for a historical novel, it’s these items you’re desperately searching for. Not the big dates and official accounts, the official court robes and formal proclamations, although you have to have those as your backdrop. It’s the tone of voice and the scribbled asides, the letters and diaries, children’s toys and defamatory handbills, hearing the crack in someone’s voice. These are what let us touch history.  Because of my residency I’ve been spending a lot of time at the British Library and these up-close brushes with history are endlessly fascinating.

Currently the British Library’s Literary and Creative Archives and Manuscripts team are working on trying to acquire complete archives, such as diaries, manuscripts and collections of people like Alec Guinness (one of his letters to Evelyn Waugh includes the great line: “Graham’s last play seemed BONKERS to me…”), Hanif Kureishi (see some of the Kureishi Archive on our online learning resource Discovering Literature: 20th Century) and Kenneth Williams.

A page from the diaries of Kenneth Williams

Seeing these items, reading through them, looking at the notations or signatures, the rants or the ponderings, is like sitting next to that person and watching them be themselves. Not a front put on for others but their own selves, the people they are underneath.               

 

Laurence Olivier's shooting script for Henry V 1943 British Library Photo by Clare Kendall

In the current Shakespeare in Ten Acts exhibition at the British Library I stood with earphones on and quickly pushed buttons, hearing actors from Laurence Olivier to Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant say “To be or not to be’. I didn’t listen to the whole speech, just that one line and even in that line, with over ten actors, there was such a variety of choice and meaning to just six words. It made you think about the role and the person portraying Hamlet, the decisions they must have made in rehearsals, their own understanding of the text. It was a strange and intimate auditory experience and more personal than you would expect. As is a Christmas greeting message from the Beatles to their fan club: extraordinarily unpolished by today’s standards but unmistakably them.

Touching history should not be a smooth and polished affair. It should be rough and dirty. It should leave you with your fingers bleeding, your eyes open wide and a gasp or a giggle in your mouth. I’m off to trawl through the archives again.

We are delighted to announce that the 20th century phase of the Library’s free educational resource has been launched today! The website which is aimed at A-level, undergraduate students and the general public, uses archival and printed sources to shed lights on the historical, political and cultural contexts in which key literary works were created. The launch of the 20th century phase follows on from the very successful 19th century module, ‘Romantics and Victorians’ that was launched in 2014 and the Shakespeare module which came out in March of this year.

The 20th century phase sees over 300 literary treasures being made available online for the first time. High resolution images of literary drafts, first editions, letters, notebooks, diaries, newspapers and photographs from Virginia Woolf, Ted Hughes, Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard and others provide a wonderful insight into the creative process of some of the most influential and innovative writers and poets of the 20th century. The site focuses predominately on 15 key literary figures of the 20th century - Wilfred Owen, E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Daphne du Maurier, George Orwell, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard, E.R. Braithwaite and Hanif Kureishi.

I am sure that people will be excited to see the original handwritten literary drafts many of which differ from later published editions. These include drafts of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf under its original title ‘The Hours’ and George Orwell’s literary notebook in which he recorded his ideas for what would later become Nineteen Eighty-Four . An earlier title for Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’ can also be found in successive drafts of the poet’s work on one of his most famous poetry collections.

Draft of 'St Botolph's' from Add MS 88918/1/6 © Ted Hughes Estate and reproduced with their kind permission. For further use of this material please seek formal permission from the copyright holder.

Alongside these original drafts you will be able to read letters and diaries of the period, and look at old photographs and newspaper cuttings that provide a real context for the literary creations broadening our understanding of the world in which the writers were living and working. The innovative ways in which the works were created often challenged contemporary audiences whether those audiences were made up of other authors or the general public. A good example of this is George Bernard Shaw’s letter to Sylvia Beach in which he gives his not altogether flattering opinion of James Joyce’s Ulysses. As well as commenting on the work of others letters and diaries also illustrate the hopes, doubts and aspirations of writers, particularly early in their career. In his letter to Sydney Schiff whilst he was working on ‘The Waste Land’ T.S. Eliot writes to thank Schiff for his comments saying -

‘You could not have used words which would have given more pleasure or have so persuaded me that the poem may possibly communicate something of which it intends’.

Similarly in a diary entry from 1959 Ted Hughes writes of waiting nervously to find out if he has received the Guggenheim prize for this first poetry collection, Hawk in the Rain. Whilst we can look back with hindsight on such events it is a real privilege to be able to read of the poet’s own feelings so early in his writing career.

This blog can only go some way to whet your appetite about the website but please don’t take my word for it do have a look for yourself! In addition to having everything from Wilfred Owen’s poetry drafts and Woolf’s travel writings to J.G. Ballard’s evocative Crash! manuscript and Hanif Kureishi’s drafts of My Beautiful Launderette the site also has a series of articles on the writers, their work and wider 20th century literature, short documentary films and teachers notes all free and available for everyone.

The Library’s current exhibition Punk 1976-78 is an opportunity not just to look back at the early years of punk, but also to make new connections and to build on the legacy material that the Library holds.  The exhibition showcases examples of the fanzines inspired by punk’s DIY spirit and energy.  Forty years on, zinesters are still busy writing and drawing, cutting and pasting, stapling and sticking their creations, and the Library is as keen to collect zines now as it was during the first stirrings of punk. Publicity around the exhibition has also inspired some of the individuals who produced fanzines at the time to donate them to the Library so that they can be conserved and made available in our Reading Rooms.   We are delighted to have received a donation of the full run – all two issues – of a punk fanzine produced in Cardiff in 1978, Oh Cardiff… Up Yours!, from Paul Davies who was one of its creators. One of the hardest things for the exhibition is to convey the diverse meanings of punk for the fans who espoused its ethos and participated in it through their own expression and activism.  The fanzines we hold allow access to the voices of some of those involved in the heady days of punk.  I asked Paul to say something about what motivated him and his friends to produce a fanzine.  Paul’s account is reproduced below – in his own words. As a curator I’m delighted that Paul has written this piece, both for its interest now and for anyone looking at the zine in years to come to understand how it came into being. 

 

I’m also struck by the way that producing a fanzine was a starting point for a whole range of creative endeavours for those involved. While I was thinking about how to present Oh Cardiff… Up Yours!, I came across a reference to it  from another of its co-creators, for whom it also remains significant, in a post on the urban75 blog. One aspect of my work in the Contemporary British Publishing team is to identify websites for inclusion in our web archiving programme, as part of the Library’s mission to capture a wide range of contemporary cultural and political expression. For me, it is inspiring to see this link between the punk activism of 1976-78 and contemporary social activism. Just as punk fanzines challenged the music coverage of the mainstream press,  the urban75 website was a pioneer of online activism providing an alternative to mainstream media, and it remains vital and vibrant today. It’s not always easy to explain the significance of zines and fanzines alongside the Library's more prestigious holdings. But whether for students of print journalism and the flagship magazines that have mediated Britain’s popular music and youth culture, or for future students of alternative and DIY culture, punk fanzine Oh Cardiff… Up Yours! marks the beginning of a journey into creativity and activism in print, film, and on the web, and from the record shops and venues of Cardiff to a global reach.  Paul’s account of its creation is no mere nostalgia trip: those two issues from 1978 are relevant for their part in a punk legacy that shapes cultural and political expression today, and I’m thrilled to have them in the Library.

 

Oh Cardiff... Up Yours! issues 1 and 2.

 

Paul Davies writes:

 

Oh Cardiff... Up Yours!

 

The tendrils of punk rock began to wrap themselves around my flares-festooned ankles at a precise moment in time in the winter of 1976. If I had been partial to breakfast cereals, it would have been a splutter-the-cornflakes-across-the-room moment. Preparing for another tedious day at school, as we breakfasted in our small kitchen the necessity to engage in early-morning familial badinage was scuppered by the incessant drone of the local radio station.

 

On this particular morning the apoplexy count was in overdrive, as the Anarchy in the UK tour was about to hit the hot and happening Valleys enclave of Caerphilly – a desolate urban outcrop as far away from the bondage trousers of the King’s Road as it is possible to be, and yet, in its own malodorous, disenfranchised and truculent way, absolutely perfect to welcome the burgeoning social and political tornado that was Punk Rock.

 

As the New Musical Express was my bible, handbook and calling card, I was clearly prepped about this swaggering new musical movement emanating from that London, but had yet to experience the sonic thrills that were allegedly on offer, and was still hanging on, rather apprehensively, to my copies of ‘Frampton Comes Alive’, Deep Purple’s ‘Made in Japan’, my RAF Greatcoat and my luscious shoulder length hair.

 

‘Anarchy in the UK’ changed all that, and left me gasping for more. Four decades later the opening 20 seconds of that song still sound as feral, exhilarating, revolutionary as they did back then – the crunching powerchords just softening you up before Rotten grabs you by the throat and demands that you listen up “Right Now!” and then announces and introduces himself formally as the Antichrist and the Anarchist that an army of suburban home-owners would soon be threatening to garrotte, castrate and behead.

 

You didn’t hear this stuff on the radio, ever. To hear it on a local news radio station dealt an unstoppable knock-out punch to the solar plexus. If you were 17 and of a certain disposition, you responded in only one way – you embraced it, instinctively – you didn’t quite get what was going on (yet), but you wanted in – and you wanted all your friends in as well. Year Zero was here – time to reassess everything.

 

Like the most addictive drugs, the fired-up elation of the first hit sent you reeling in all sorts of directions as you sought and consumed anything related. The Pistols and the Clash were primo Class A stuff, but we were so hungry for cheap dirty thrills we even dabbled in Class B/C/D zones – from the Lurkers to 999, Eater to The Cortinas – all with a provincial charm of their own and a happy filler.

 

Musician turned environmental activist, John Evans of South Wales punk band the Tax Exiles

 

Cultural movements bring people together and punk was no different – a small circle of friends gravitated towards each other as we fell deep into this dizzying, angry, intoxicating maelstrom. 1977 was a great time to be 17/18. We were a gang of sorts, we hung out all the time, went to gigs religiously and inspired by punk, we plotted how we would vent our energy creatively. It had to be a fanzine.

 

Cardiff was ill-served by fanzines, we were going to resolve that and make our mark on a stultifying provincial scene, which needed a cultural rocket up its jacksy. We were more than happy to oblige. Being teenage wannabe punk warrior wordsmiths, the first step seemed to be finding appropriate noms de plume – that’s what punks did, didn’t they?

 

So we became, shamelessly, Mal Function, Cess Pitt, Rick O’Shea and Dai O’Rhea. Our photographer was already called Slug, so he didn’t need one. Then we needed a name for the fanzine. It had to be current, mildly inflammatory, a call to arms. We hit upon Oh Cardiff... Up Yours! Genius. With a respectful nod to the great Poly Styrene and X Ray Spex, we were on our way.

 

Rick O’Shea, Cess Pitt and Mal Function with the first issue

 

 As most of us were happily unemployed we had plenty of time for our editorial meetings – fanzine content was shaped by the gigs we went to, the records we bought. We reviewed the gigs, singles and albums, interviewed the bands, then hastily typed it all up on an antique typewriter – with some assistance from one of our friends who could actually type. Ours was by no means a Stalinist punk manifesto – the uneasy mix of bands we covered reflected the transitioning of our musical tastes – we’d cover local punk oiks The Tax Exiles as well as bands like Thin Lizzy.

 

We devoured the ethos of punk greedily, if not the haircuts – contemporaneous photographs provide damning evidence of shoulder-length hair and inappropriate clothing not approved by the Punk Politburo. Wearing a Thin Lizzy tshirt and customising jeans with a ripped and burnt Union Jack with stencilled Sex Pistols lettering seemed somehow more punk than buying a pair of tartan bondage trousers from Paradise Garage in Cardiff.

 

Bette Bright of influential Liverpool art rock / new wave band Deaf School

 

Our prehistoric approach to desktop publishing amounted to cutting out pictures from the NME, cutting out the typed reviews and messily gluing them to sheets of A4. Page titles were hand-crafted, a few cartoons thrown into the mix, and then off down the printers to whack out a hundred copies of issue 1. This figure was later inflated when we got our first press coverage in the staid local rag – fiercely competing with a couple of other ’zines which had sprung up since we published, we brazenly bumped up our circulation to 250.

 

The thrill when we picked up those first boxes of actual fanzines was intense. We’d done it!. A few hours of stapling and we were ready to hit the streets. There were plenty of gigs taking place in Cardiff, at the Top Rank, the University and two local arts centres, so we just hung about before and after gigs, and miraculously sold the lot.

Emboldened by this, we doubled our print run, and the cover price, and did it all over again, hitting up a couple of local record shops which agreed to stock the fanzine. The reaction was almost universally positive – fearless truth-tellers that we were, we gave an uncomplimentary review to a local punk band, who seemed hell-bent on giving us a good kicking until we managed to persuade them that we didn’t actually write the thing, we just sold it.

 

And then that was it. Like all the best things that came out of punk, we blasted in for two issues and then burnt out. Circumstances conspired to separate us geographically, punk was blowing itself out and we all moved on to other things.

 

Coverage in the Western Mail, February 25^th 1978

 

Mal Function (Paul Davies @longtimelurker ) – worked as a freelance journalist for Jamming! and Q magazine during the 1980s and 90s. Now works as a Business Analyst.

Cess Pitt (John Brewer) – became a firefighter, rose through the ranks, retired at 50. Still going to see Stiff Little Fingers gigs.

Dai O’Rhea (Mike Slocombe @urban75 ) – moved to London in 1978, drummed in bands for years. Now runs Urban75 website and Brixton club nights.

Rick O’Shea (Pete Salmi) – went to film school, directed movies and TV films – now works in advertising.

Slug (Andy Rees @Andrew0145 ) – studied photography, now working as a freelance photographer in the Cotswolds.

 

Oh Cardiff... Up Yours! banner at anti-National Front demonstration

 

 Paul Davies 2016

 

The British Library is delighted to announce the acquisition of manuscript items relating to Dylan Thomas from Professor John Goodby. We are grateful to receive this contemporaneous memoir and copy of a letter by Dylan Thomas to the publican Phil Richards. These items will enrich our research resources for Dylan Thomas, which already include early manuscripts, correspondence with fellow poets such as Vernon Watkins, and other papers relating to his poetry, prose and dramatic scripts. We are excited to be able to add these items to our collections, adding a further voice to our understanding of Dylan Thomas.

Dr. Charles Barber, Prof. John Goodby, Abe Osborne and BL Curator of Performance and Creative Archives, Joanna  Norledge at the donation of the manuscripts (left to right)

Prof.  John Goodby and Ade Osborne, PHD student at Swansea University, have kindly written about the research value of these items:

A memoir, by the local G.P. to Dylan Thomas and his family during his years in Laugharne (1938-40 and 1949-53), and a copy of a letter by Thomas, are being donated by Professor John Goodby to the British Library on 13^th May 2016. The memoir is hitherto unknown, and the letter does not appear in the 1985 or 2000 editions of Thomas’s Collected Letters and is not known to other Thomas experts. Both items have been transcribed by Ade Osbourne, a Ph.D. student supervised by Professor Goodby and funded by Swansea University to work on the Dylan Thomas notebook the university acquired in 2014.

The 26-page memoir is by Dr David Hughes, the St Clears-based G.P. for the Thomas family, and was written in 1961 for Charles Barber who had recently become interested in literature and was due to give a paper on Dylan Thomas to the Literary Society; his father, a friend of David Hughes, asked him to help his son, and the two MSS were his response, the memoir being handwritten by Hughes himself, the letter being a copy made by his wife Phyllis Hughes from the original, which was addressed to Thomas’s friend Phil Richards, the publican at the Cross House Inn, Laugharne, and dated 8 December 1950.

David Mendelson Hughes was himself a man of culture, an accomplished painter and a friend of Philip and Richard Burton. His relationship with Thomas was a doctor-patient one only, but his cultural interests tinge his account in places. Thus, he admits that his first impression of Thomas, in 1938, was of someone acting as a Chelsea bohemian in order to give the impression of being an artist. But this jaundiced view had changed by 1949; Hughes stresses Thomas’s ‘shy & self-effacing’ demeanour, habit of drinking only in moderation, and dedication to his parents, on whom he called every day before visiting Brown’s Hotel (‘before the Pint, the Parents’) where he would have a drink before heading to the Boathouse to work all afternoon.

For Hughes, whose attitudes to women were the patriarchal ones of his era, Caitlin is the villain of the piece; ‘fast’ is the kindest word he uses to describe her, and he speculates that she was responsible for driving Dylan to his death in New York in 1953. To some extent, Hughes’s account is also that of a local man determined to defend Dylan’s reputation against the lurid accounts given in John Malcom Brinnin’s Dylan Thomas in America (1957) and Caitlin’s Leftover Life to Kill (1958). He finds Dylan sad rather than humorous and adopts a protective attitude towards him.

For all the limitations of its time and place, however, this is a striking first-hand account of the poet which adds colour and detail to the others we possess, from the Thomas’s packing-case furniture to Dylan’s taste for pork pies and fear of the dark. For all that Hughes’s Dylan ultimately cuts a sad figure, his account is insightful and full of humorous incident.

The short letter is in typically whimsical vein; it refers to Thomas’s forthcoming trip to Persia of January 1951, and to a pig named Wallis, bought by Thomas with his friends Bill McAlpine and Phil Richards to fatten up for Christmas. The memoir references the letter, and tells us that when the time came to slaughter Wallis, Thomas found ‘Wallis’s dying words’ too much to bear, and sought refuge in the Cross House.

The documents were kindly donated to Professor Goodby by Charles Barber at the suggestion of His Grace Rowan Williams during a Marlborough College reunion in 2015. They were exhibited at Swansea Museum until 12 May, and are the basis of a feature article to mark International Dylan Day in The Times on Saturday 14 May by Hilly Janes, the daughter of Fred Janes, Dylan’s close friend, and author of The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas.

Discover more about Dylan Thomas, including his work and life here: www.discoverdylanthomas.com

Photograph of David Hughes and David Hughes and his wife Phyllis Hughes, with kind permission of Frances Hughes.

 

Othello and Desdemona in The Works of Mr William Shakespear (1709)

 

‘I Come, unknown to any of the rest

To tell you news, I saw the Lady drest;

The Woman playes to day, mistake me not,

No Man in Gown, or page in Petty-Coat;’

These were the words that introduced the first Shakespearean performance by a professional female actor on 8 December 1660. Prior to that date all the female roles in Shakespeare’s plays had been performed by boys or men, but when Charles II was restored to the throne he broke the long-held taboo against women’s public performance and brought England in line with France and Italy who had already been appreciating women’s talents (or at least their figures) for some time. So who was the woman who took to the stage for that historic performance of Othello? Who was the first female Desdemona? Frustratingly (yet sadly not surprisingly) no one thought to record her name.

On display for the first time in our new exhibition, Shakespeare in Ten Acts, you can see the prologue speech that was delivered to the audience on that winter’s night in the hastily-converted tennis court that served as a theatre for Sir Thomas Killigrew’s company. Written by actor and playwright Thomas Jordan, the prologue pretends to profess that women can be performers and also figures of virtue, but the underlying insinuation that must have been patently obvious to the audience was that women were there as objects for the male gaze. ‘Have modest thoughts of her’ pleads Jordan, ‘pray do not run/To give her visits when the Play is done’. This line was no doubt delivered with a knowing nod and a wink, acting as an open invitation to the gentlemen in the audience to flock backstage after the play. And indeed, this was the beginning of a hard-to-shake tradition whereby men could pay four shillings to go behind the scenes and see the actresses dressing. The diarist Samuel Pepys records availing himself of this opportunity and being taken into Nell Gwyn’s dressing room where he found her ‘all unready’ and ‘very pretty, prettier than I thought’. This unseemly tradition was commented on disparagingly by the 18^th century gossip columnist ‘Mrs Crackenthorpe’ and you can also see her article from The Female Tatler on display in the exhibition.

Whilst the introduction of women was billed as an attempt to ‘civilize the Stage’ in response to disquiet about men cross-dressing as women (tantamount to homosexuality in some eyes), the real truth was that women were encouraged to perform because they were good for business. Their presence on stage opened the way for new interpretations of Shakespeare’s heroines and for the creation of new roles in adaptations of Shakespeare, but they were also at the mercy of their male managers who exploited them for profit. Pleasingly, many of them fought back and negotiated hard for their rights and we’ll be blogging more about their stories next week.

And who was the first woman to perform Shakespeare? You can see from the photograph below that Jordan’s prologue speech has been annotated by someone who mistakenly guessed her identity as one Mrs Norris – mother of the comic actor Henry ‘Jubilee Dicky’ Norris - though in actual fact Norris was a member of the rival theatre company run by Sir William Davenant. Margaret ‘Peg’ Hughes has often been identified as the woman in question but in Elizabeth Howe's excellent book on The First English Actresses (CUP, 1992) she suggests that it is more likely to have been a young actor by the name of Anne Marshall, a talented leading lady who excelled in both comic and tragic roles. Samuel Pepys saw both Hughes and Marshall perform and commented on them in his diary. He described Hughes as ‘a mighty pretty woman, and seems, but is not, modest’. Anne Marshall, according to Pepys, ‘played most excellently well as ever I heard woman in my life’ when he saw her in Dryden and Howard’s The Indian Queen in 1664. She often performed alongside her sister Rebecca, but the details of her life are sketchy and her marriage to the actor Peter Quin has led to much confusion due to the similarity between her married name and that of Nell Gwyn who performed alongside her in the same company. In the course of our research for the exhibition, portraits in which Marshall had previously been identified as the subject turned out to be misattributions when we looked closer, until it seemed as if the harder we looked, the more the supposed facts dissolved leaving us with very little to go on. Nevertheless, this is a story that deserves to be told and you can find out more about the lives of the first Shakespearean actresses in Shakespeare in Ten Acts which continues at the British Library until 6 September (book here for tickets).

The difficult thing about displaying books in an exhibition is that we can only show you a couple of pages at a time, so below is the prologue speech from Thomas Jordan's A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie (London, 1664) in its full glory, together with the epilogue spoken at the end of the play. You can also hear me being interviewed on the subject in this Woman’s Hour podcast. The book to accompany Shakespeare in Ten Acts features Hannah Manktelow’s essay ‘The Legacy of the First Female Desdemona’ and is available now from the British Library Shop, or you can read more about Shakespeare and gender on our Discovering Literature website. Many thanks to Hannah for conducting the research which underpins this part of the exhibition.

Key counterculture figure, bookshop manager, editor, publisher, author, music journalist, archivist, biographer: all of this, and more, is Barry Miles, or just ‘Miles’, as he is better known.

His archive, acquired by the British Library in 2013 and recently catalogued, is a rich and unique source of information not only to anyone interested in Miles himself, but also to those researching the Beat Generation, and the ‘60s and ‘70s culture and music.

Miles organised and arranged his papers thoroughly. Divided into correspondence, projects files, folders relating to his publications, and reference material, the archive reflects all stages of Miles’s life and career, from his time as a student at Gloucestershire College of Art in the early ‘60s to the present day.

At the centre of the London underground scene, as manager of Better Books, co-founder of Indica Gallery and Bookshop and International Times (IT), and organiser of many events, Miles developed an extensive network of contacts, within and outside the UK, many of whom were also good friends. Jim Haynes, Peter Asher, Pete Brown, Victor Bockris, Caroline Coon, Piero Heliczer, Richard Neville, Gordon Ball, Simon Vinkenoog, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Urban Gwerder, to name but a few of his correspondents.

Flyer on Indica Books limited headed paper advertising The Ginsbergs at the ICA, a recording of the reading given by Allen and his father on 22 August 1967. Reproduced with kind permission from Barry Miles.

With the same people, Miles collaborated on numerous adventures: there are over 100 files in the collection relating to projects in which he was involved, for example his work as editor of Horde and Long Hair, as London correspondent of East Village Other, as co-founder of Lovebooks, Miles, Asher and Dunbar Ltd., and ECAL, as Time Out editor, as manager of Zapple, and as music journalist for New Musical Express. The files include letters, publicity material, press cuttings, newsletters, photographs, reports, notes, press releases, events programmes, draft articles and unpublished material. 

 

Trial proof of the cover of Long Hair magazine, Lovebooks second poetry publication, 1965. Miles edited the issue and contributed to the cover drawing. Reproduced with kind permission from Barry Miles.

The first interview Miles did, published in IT on 16 January 1967, was with Paul McCartney, a friend of Miles - the two had met through Peter Asher, whose sister, Jane, was Paul’s girlfriend at the time. Later interviews that Miles did with, amongst others, John Lennon, George Harrison, Mick Jagger, Ed Sanders, and The Clash, feature in the archive, either on tape or as transcripts.

After a period as a freelance editor for Omnibus Press, Miles became a prolific writer, publishing 50 books, some of which have been translated into foreign languages. Not to mention the over 400 articles he wrote and his numerous contributions to other authors’ books. For his writing, Miles conducted meticulous research and many interviews, as it emerges from the number of research files and tapes he produced. Also included amongst the material relating to his publications are various drafts, notes, correspondence with editors, letters from fans and colleagues, publicity material, royalty statements, press reviews, and cover proofs.

Handwritten notes by Barry Miles, on airline napkin. The material from these notes was used for many articles written by Miles, for magazines such as International Times, Hot Ratz, Changes. Reproduced with kind permission from Barry Miles.

His first ‘proper book’ was the biography of Allen Ginsberg, which took him five years to complete and for which Miles recorded 40 tapes of interviews with Ginsberg, his friends and family, now part of the British Library sound collection.

Biographies of other influential figures in Miles’s life followed including William Burroughs, Paul McCartney, Frank Zappa, and Charles Bukowski. His two memoirs, In the Sixties and In the Seventies, together with his London Calling, are detailed accounts of the London underground life and his major and minor players.

Included in the archive are also some rare, limited, special or signed editions of Miles publications, including an unauthorised reprint of his article 1970 ‘The Rebirth of Joy’, the 1973 catalogue of Lilia Aaron exhibition in Switzerland, a 1963 clipping of Miles's article How To Undress a Painting in Slate 2, the magazine of Gloucestershire College of Art, and a typed copy of Horde number 1, 1964.

Unused ticket for Poets of the World / Poets of Our Time, Albert Hall poetry reading, 11 June 1965. Miles was involved in the organisation of the event.

Miles created files of reference material for items he used most frequently, mainly for publications or exhibitions. Amongst these are a Better Books paper bag, designed by John Sewell; an unused ticket for Poets of the World/Poets of Our Time, the first large-scale Beat generation reading in Europe at the Albert Hall poetry reading, on 11 June 1965, which Miles helped organise; Indica Gallery and Books photographs and flyers; and a leaflet for the party at the Roundhouse for the launch of International Times, 15 October 1966.

A few items from the Barry Miles archive, including a leaflet for The Roxy club and the first interview with the Clash, will feature in the forthcoming free exhibition Punk 1976-78, which opens on the 13th May 2016.

The catalogue of the Barry Miles archive is available online from Explore Archives and Manuscripts.

by Silvia Galotti, Manuscripts Cataloguer

Hamlet (1.3.73)

If Shakespeare had taken up the same trade as his father, Shakespeare in Ten Acts could well have been called ‘Shakespeare in Ten Catwalks’ for he may have had a successful career in the fashion industry…  so to speak. John Shakespeare by trade was a‘’whittawer’’ [someone who turned hide into leather], glover and also a "brogger” [an unlicensed wool dealer]. Records show he was found guilty for illegally dealing in wool and eventually lost the family inheritance. 

Early modern England marked a period of extreme style, when apparel made a transition into ‘fashion’. Dress, hair and cosmetics were employed to contort the body, creating dramatic silhouettes demonstrated par excellence by Queen Elizabeth. There is no doubt that dress held substantial power within society during this time, and this did not go unrecognised by the bard. In 1864, the London tailor E Moses noted:

“Shakespeare too well appreciated the importance of all external things and outward appearances, as emblematic of the unseen spirit, to deem it a profanation of the poet’s art to embody allusions to the subject of clothes in his majestic and immortal verse.”

The "Hardwick Hall" portrait of Elizabeth 1 of England, circa 1599, courtesy of Wikicommons.

Shakespeare’s extraordinary observations of the society of his age are communicated through the plays. It is no surprise then that these works are drenched in references to fashion and dress.  The survival of substantial evidence regarding early productions is meagre. However, the lines of dialogue are the very references which call into reflection the importance of costume.  Moreover, given the stringent hierarchy of style during the society of that age, audiences would have understood the role of garments to a character’s role. Changes in costume could construct a character, progress action, reflect society and manipulate perceived values.

Queen Elizabeth I

During the Elizabethan era, dress was a powerful element in the social structure. The famous portrait of Queen Elizabeth by Nicholas Hilliard shows her as the faerie queen, wearing veil gauze edged with lace pointed at the hairline and wired to wings at the back of the head. Consider this theatrical display by the queen, in comparison with the headdress worn by Vivien Leigh featured in the exhibition. While this piece was made using inexpensive materials, it is reminiscent of fashionable Elizabethan headdresses, resembling the original faerie queen Elizabeth herself.

Detail of: The Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, circa 1600-1602, attributed to Issac Oliver (1556-1617) and Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561-1636), in the collection of the Marquess of Salisbury, on display at Hatfield House, courtesy of Wikicommons.

Detail of: Vivien Leigh (as Titania) from A Midsummer Night's Dream at The Old Vic Theatre, 1937, photograph by J W Debenham, courtesy of the Mander and Mitchenson collection at the University of Bristol and ARENApal www.arenapal.com

“Clothes maketh the man” [except when he’s a woman]

Theatre allowed actors to dress outside of their rank and gender. As such the stage was a transgressive space. Legally men could wear women’s clothes, but not vice versa. This is acknowledged in the section of the exhibition ‘the First Women to act Shakespeare’, which features early female actresses; Sarah Siddons, Charlotte Cushman, Dora Jordan and Mary Frith, the latter of which  was arrested for wearing male clothing on stage! Contemporary audiences are familiar with seeing actresses play male roles, for example Maxine Peak playing Hamlet, Fiona Shaw playing Richard II, but it was these early actresses who began forging the space for them.

Engraving of Charlotte and Susan Cushman in Romeo and Juliet, presumably 1846. Courtesy of Theatrical Portrait Prints (Visual Works) of Women (TCS 45). Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The exhibition also highlights Peter Brook’s audacious production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1970. This production stripped back elaborate set design, while costume was pared down to unisex minimalist dress which visually neutralised all connotations of gender.

Photo by Reg Wilson © Royal Shakespeare Company. Re-produced with kind permission of the Royal Shakespeare Company

Costume, dialogue and the sex of the actor operate as elements of the plays which can often be overlooked. In Much ado About Nothing, Beatrice dismisses beardless males for looking like women:  “what should I do with? Dress him in my apparel and make him my waiting gentle lady?”(2.1. 29-30). The lack of facial hair is also mentioned in Hamlet, when he doubts his courage against a beardless face [signifying a woman] and calling into question his masculinity.

A 'beardless' Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, circa 1885-1900, courtesy of Wikicommons.

Hamlet’s inner turmoil then is within the dialogue and directly linked to how he looks. As early as 1776 prints exist showing Hamlet dressed in fashionable attire. In the most recent production of Hamlet, staged by the Barbican, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Prince Hamlet sports a Ziggy Stardust T-shirt. For a play about loss of belief, a man whose internalized sense of self is in flux, a play about ghosts, a character not of this world, how perfect that David Bowie made an appearance to modernize the role of costume and interpretation.

We now live in a time without Bowie & Shakespeare, but what remains are the enduring works and their relevance to the world. The semiotics of fashion and costuming choices are not inconsequential to these works or interpretations. The plays themselves are in fact littered with references to fashion and dress. Costume functions on many levels within the dramatic space, functioning not least as an agitator of authority, as Bowie and Shakespeare knew all too well.  

by Rachel Brett, Reference Specialist

The British Library's current exhibition Shakespeare in Ten Acts is a landmark exhibition on the performances that made an icon, charting Shakespeare’s constant reinvention across the centuries and is open until Tuesday 6th September 2016. Whether you’re a student, teacher, researcher, or simply a lover of literature, our new online learning resource Discovering Literature: Shakespeare will encourage critical thinking and independent learning to enrich your understanding of all-things Shakespeare.

 

Bibliography

Fashion in the time of William Shakespeare Downing, Sarah Jane, Oxford : Shire Publications, 2014 YC.2015.a.13081

Costuming the Shakespearean stage : visual codes of representation in early modern theatre and culture / Robert I. Lublin. Farnham : Ashgate, c2011.  YC.2011.a.13726

The Norton Shakespeare : based on the Oxford edition / Stephen Greenblatt. New York ; London : W. W. Norton, c2008. YC.2009.a.9148

Costumes and scripts in the Elizabethan theatres.   Jean MacIntyre, Edmonton : University of Alberta Press, 1992. Shelfmark(s):   Document Supply 92/23467

Playgoing in Shakespeare's London / Andrew Gurr. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1987. Shelfmark(s):   Document Supply 87/18040 General Reference Collection YH.1987.b.337

Shakespeare after theory / David Scott Kasten. New York : Routledge, 1999. Shelfmark(s):   Document Supply m00/25609

Costume in the Theatre. [With plates and illustrations.]James Laver, 1899-1975 London : George G. Harrap, 1964. Shelfmark(s): General Reference Collection 07812.ggg.70. Document Supply W13/1725

Shakespeare in art. Paintings, drawings and engravings devoted to Shakespearean subjects. [London]: Arts Council, 1964. Shelfmark(s): General Reference Collection W.P.12368/620

Shakespeare and the Artist. William Moelwyn MERCHANT London : Oxford University Press, 1959. Shelfmark(s): General Reference Collection 011768.pp.2. Document Supply Wq1/941

The Tercentenary; or the three hundredth birthday of William Shakespeare. Author: E. Moses & Son. London, 1864. Shelfmark(s): General Reference Collection 11765.c.39.

The diary of Philip Henslowe, from 1591 to 1609 ... / edited by J. Payne Collier.Author: Philip Henslowe, -1616. [London] : Shakespeare Society, 1845. Series: Shakespeare society. Publications, no. 28 Shelfmark(s): Document Supply 8254.586300