Strong history - and some coincidences - for today
Thursday, March 4, 2010
IT’S QUITE A STORY. The Head of State narrowly escapes a massive terrorist bomb, strategically placed right under him, amid a ceremonial gathering of all his nation’s top leaders (think State of the Union night in the Capitol Building).
Suspects in the conspiracy are arrested - and tortured - and the Head of State puts the nation’s leading writer on the government payroll. His job? To produce a work of propaganda extolling the triumphant way that the nation has been saved from peril.
As the writer researches the story he discovers all is not as the government would have the public believe … he finds his own integrity challenged and the credibility of his nation’s leaders torn to shreds.
What a parable for our own times. It’s in fact the premise of a new Broadway play (it opened two days ago) called Equivocation, by Bill Cain, and it’s ostensibly about England’s Gunpowder Plot of 1606. Then it was religious militants – Catholics – who tried to kill the Protestant (and incidentally Scottish) King James I of England, using a reported 36 barrels of gunpowder in the cellars of Parliament.
The co-opted writer in this roughly plausible but compelling account is William Shakespeare (or "William Shagspeare", one of the many contemporary variants of his name’s spelling, used here for its titter-value, apparently). “Shag” for short - played knowingly and somewhat world-wearily by John Pankow - and his band of players at London’s Globe Theater are considered the best available populist communicators for the King’s party and its purposes. It’s a similar apologist function that many ascribed to Fox Television’s “24” series during President George W Bush’s “War on Terror”.
The stage-play is, in all, a richly enjoyable, and not too academic, romp through late Shakespeariana, plus some skilful weaving-in of what biographical knowledge we have about the man. There’s much clever humor, and yet also some horrifying theatrical moments that convey the distilled violence and power of state terror.
It’s no real spoiler to report that in Equivocation, the intended propaganda play never gets produced as such, but much of the author’s research ends up permeating Macbeth, the play (centering upon a Scots king, of course) that in real life appeared not long after the near-bombing.
Among those traces are telling references in “the Scottish play”, voiced by that memorable character The Porter, which point to an un-named personage whom he labels “an equivocator”. Scholars have often theorized this to be Father Henry Garnet, who was a leading Jesuit member of the alleged bombing conspiracy, and who had famously written a self-defense guide for persecuted Catholics of the time. It was called A Treatise of Equivocation - hints for undergoing interrogation, in other words.
In Cain’s piece, with another of its searchlights directed at our murky modern politics, Father Garnet emerges - certainly in Shakespeare’s own view - as a man valiantly struggling with the task of “telling the truth in difficult times”. That’s never easy, but when the state is ready to kill to keep the truth hidden, it becomes a task for only the bravest of us.
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SHAKESPEAREAN SPECULATION prompts me to stare again at a not-especially famous - and nowadays American-owned - group portrait (above left) that features the world's greatest dramatist. It was painted by, coincidentally enough, a Scottish artist - John Faed, who devoted himself in his Victorian heyday to retrospective visual expressions of Bardology.
The painting is titled Shakespeare and His Friends at the Mermaid Tavern, a drinking-hole in east London for a gang of writers called The Friday Club, who took their name partly from the pub’s street address (it sat at the corner of Friday and Bread Streets) and from their mainly end-of-the-week get-togethers.
For journalists like me speculation has to be tethered in fact, so I’m glad to report that contemporary sources do exist for this attractive notion of a bunch of prominent Elizabethan and Jacobean authors all hanging out together. The sources notably include Shakespeare’s fellow, and lighter-weight, playwright Francis Beaumont, mentioning the get-togethers in his poem Master Francis Beaumont's Letter to Ben Jonson … club-member and travel-writer Thomas Coryat reminiscing in his letters back to the pub from India … and the generally reliable historian Thomas Fuller, documenting much detail in his History of the Worthies of England, published not too many years after the fact (for credibility’s sake) in 1662.
It is Fuller in fact who first gave the celebrated account of Shakespeare enjoying frequent “wit combats” at the pub against that same Jonson, his close-ish rival as dramatist and poet – in which Will emerged as less laden with academic knowledge than Ben, but mostly still victorious in these verbal jousts thanks to “the quickness of his wit and invention”.
It’s from Coryat that we get a less-known but well-attested linkage between Johnson, Shakespeare and John Donne as participants in The Mermaid revelries. He hails them by name in his writing from abroad.
That extra inclusion of Donne, the greatest "metaphysical" poet of them all, but also later in life the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, conjures up a surprising, fairly unlikely pairing of talents. The verbally brilliant Stratford glove-maker’s son who wrote plays and sonnets … sharing cakes and ale (and who knows what else) with the dazzling London-born spinner of erotic and yet complex, intellectually challenging verses (Donne was highly educated formally, unlike Shakespeare, and spent three years at Oxford and another three at Cambridge University) - who moved on when older to deep and stirring sermons on mortality?
These two very different geniuses carousing together - really?
The possibility was convincing enough, or simply appealing enough, for Faed the painter to position Donne, who was eight years younger, as the closest figure to Shakespeare (as in the detail above right, with Donne just behind the Bard) for that convivial scene at The Mermaid Tavern.
THE JUXTAPOSITION SEEMS ONLY RIGHT to me this week, since by neat coincidence Tuesday (the day Bill Cain’s speculative take on Shakespeare was launched) was also US publication date for a bold new title from British novelist Maeve Haran, which imaginatively develops a poorly-recorded portion of Donne’s life.
The Lady and The Poet (from St Martin's Press) recounts the story of Ann Moore, the teenage daughter and niece of senior royal courtiers, who gave her body and her heart to the young Donne (young, but twice her age) when he was regarded as a dangerous man to know, because of his Catholic background. She ended up - against all odds - marrying him. The book arrives trailing critical praise like “vivid and unforgettable”, “unmatched for authenticity of time and place” and “an inventive and delicious feast of passion, wit and intrigue” – that last commendation coming from The Times of London. I have to say myself that Haran makes a much greater, and successful, effort than dramatist Cain does in capturing late 16th and early 17th century English idioms, and yet can still grip a modern reader’s attention.
Haran’s heroine, through an often tempestuous relationship with Donne and some bitter fights with her own family, finally died after bearing him twelve children (and all this is historically verified) in 1617 … well into her husband’s Mermaid drinking days. Four years later, having finally renounced Catholicism, Donne was given his high Anglican Church office.
IT WAS THAT EXACT SAME TIME, of course, when the Pilgrim Fathers were determining on their seaborne trek westward to our New World, as an escape from religious persecution in King James’ England. Eye-opening time-travel back to that period is a hallmark of NBC’s new genealogy-based TV series premiering tomorrow (Friday) night, and called with commendable directness Who Do You Think You Are? (To be a stickler for detail, the earliest the programs reach back in this first run is actually 1635. Descendants go back to Shakespeare and Donne in the next run, perhaps?)
The episodes I’ve seen ahead of time trace a selection of American celebrities’ family trees with enthusiasm and affecting emotion. They are a lot more engaging than the more ponderous effort called Faces of America that’s been recently mounted by PBS, under the more overtly guiding and rather obtrusive hand of Henry Louis Gates from Harvard University.
In the NBC show, it’s truly heart-stopping to watch Dallas Cowboys rushing back Emmitt Smith as he journeys back in time, and to see this powerful black athlete felled by what he calls grimly the sheer “power” of segregation. That power leaps out at him when he consults a leather-bound courthouse records-book that’s embossed with the title “COLOREDS”. Still more affecting is his astonishment and pain at reading a will written by the nineteenth century owner of his slave ancestors, inventorying his own family-members’ names as property, along with mahogany chairs and silver tablespoons.
The series is based on highly popular BBC television shows of the same name, created and executive-produced by Alex Graham of London’s Wall to Wall Television. Graham (another Scot of course, obvious from such a name) is co-executive producer of the new series over here, along with one of NBC’s favorite actresses, and a production company-owner herself, Lisa Kudrow - who incidentally traces her own family history back to a massacre in Belarus.
In another nice coincidence, producer Graham and novelist Haran just happen to be married to each other. That makes this first week of March 2010 quite a celebratory time, with shared US debuts for this more than abundantly talented couple from the UK.
I’m showing my bias, but I say “Cheers” to the history-minded Brits!
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