Shakespeare's Sonnets & Simon Callow

Simon Callow was performing Shakespeare’s sonnets at the Tonbridge Arts festival. Simon Callow, on locally, how could we pass this up. “Shakespeare’s sonnets contain some of the most famous lines in the English language and yet nothing is known of the story behind them” reads the blurb.

In presenting this one man show, Master/Mistress of my Passion, Callow tries to show the audience that in fact Shakespeare’s sonnets tell a tale – they are a narrative that charts Bill’s infatuation with the ideal of beauty.

Apparently, Shakespeare met and admired Mary Sidney, the Earl of Pembroke’s mother and whilst at her pad saw a painting of her son, William Herbert, and was mesmerised. This boy came to personify the ideal of beauty to Shakespeare although he had yet to meet him. And this is where the sonnets start.

These are poems that praise the beauty and disposition of his young idol and are passionate poems of unrequited love:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

Shakespeare, the poet, is not the same as Shakespeare, the playwright. In the latter he is the writer of brilliant and entertaining plays that explore character. In the former, he is a philosopher investigating the question of Time and its effect. “Time triumphs over flesh, and Love over all”

Callow was quick to point out that Shakspeare’s crush was not a homeoerotic one but solely a passion for beauty. Eventually he met the beautiful young man who was not very impressed with Bill’s ardour and admiration. Young Herbert did not reciprocate the passion Shakespeare felt and Bill was miffed.

Slowly Shakespeare’s passion waned although one is hard pushed to tell from the contents of the sonnets. At the time, he had a mistress and some of the sonnets are addressed to her. Like many poems of the day the content was often very bawdy and, if we could have followed them a little more slowly, we might have been a little more shocked. Finally, Simon says, Bill and Will became good friends. Although, to me, Bill still seemed a little struck.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Simon’s reading of the sonnets were interspersed with madrigals sung by Quintus. These obviously suited the period but also gave the audience a break from the intensity of Callow’s rendition. With two bass, two sopranos, one counter tenor, one tenor and one contra-tenor it was quite a large group who sang the fugues quite beautifully without musical accompaniment. A lute player also performed at intervals although we found this rather tedious.

To really understand and appreciate the sonnets it needs a great deal of scholarship, attention and experience. To hear Shakespeare’s sonnets rendered so theatrically – in true Shakespearian actor style – meant that they were a little difficult to absorb. To have followed the written word would have helped or, if we had known what homework to do, we could have read them beforehand and got our ear in. It meant that much of it went over our heads.

In fact, our group of ten found the entire programme a little long. I suspect that many of us were remembering Callow’s excellent show on the life of Dickens. It had been on in the West End and the costume and content was really quite splendid. This show, it was felt, was but a pale imitation.

But Simon Callow did get me thinking: here was a reason to read the sonnets again armed with a little more knowledge about their background. And to have a man of Callow’s fame and ability, here, in the sticks, spouting Shakespeare: we would have been Philistines not to go.

Lucy
www.lucyannwrites.blogspot.com

Poetry is for life

Several years ago, when my elderly father had to undergo an operation, I looked up some poetry and prose that I thought would be nice to remember him by in the awful event he might not survive the op. I knew that if that happened I'd be a wet and sniveling wreck, incapable of doing the necessary research.

And, strangely enough, very satisfying research it was too. I left out any flowery or sickeningly sentimental pieces and discounted any that were overly religious, morbid or dirge-like too. Instead I found some that either touched on my feelings or were in some way relevant to his life.

The most obvious poem was Dylan Thomas', Do not go gently into that good night, because my father hung on to life tenaciously and "Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light" most definitely applied to him.

And the poem, All That I Have by Leo Marks, beautifully expresses love and loss as does Anne Bronte's poem, Farewell,

Farewell to Thee! But not farewell
To all my fondest thoughts of Thee;
Within my heart they still shall dwell
And they shall cheer and comfort me.

Life seems more sweet that Thou didst live
And men more true that Thou wert one;
Nothing is lost that Thou didst give,
Nothing destroyed that Thou hast done.

Choosing a poem by my father's favourite poet - and I think the only one he knew - John Keats, was more of a challenge because the sonnets and poems are either too long, too melancholy or just downright miserable. He had been introduced to Keats' poetry by some girls when up at Oxford and I think that coloured his regard for the poet! Finally I did find one (strangely) entitled Sonnet: On Leigh Hunt's poem "The Story Of Rimini" which does express quite subtly a love of nature and a place of peace.

Of course the poem, Remember by Christina Rosetti - of pre-Raphaelite fame circa 1870 - is very well known and, I think, beautiful, although others tell me that they find it maudlin. But what it expresses so well is the selfless encouragement that the living should live:
"Better by far you should forget and smile
Than you should remember and be sad."

And another equally famous example that does just that is Death is Nothing At All by Henry Scott-Holland, 1847-1918, Canon of St Paul's Cathedral, and one that suited my father in particular because he definitely wanted to be remembered and he liked to laugh. Here is an extract:

Whatever we were to each other
That we are still
Call me by my old familiar name
Speak to me in the easy way you always used
Put no difference into your tone
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes we always enjoyed together
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me
Let my name be ever the household word it always was
Let it be spoken without effort
Without the ghost of a shadow in it
Life means all that it ever meant
It is the same as it ever was

Having done all the above I understood how terminally ill people – people who have no influence or power over the ravages of their disease or condition – must achieve a precious feeling of control by choosing the content of their final ceremony: by picking out readings, poems and music that they love they're able to personalize the service and imbue it with a particular atmosphere, whether that be one of beauty or one with an upbeat and positive tone.

And this exercise was a salutary lesson for me: I should read poetry more. The resulting introspection can be intense if the poems are moving and occasionally they're difficult but equally many are beautiful and some great fun. Certainly, poetry should not just be for special occasions, it should be for life.

Lest we forget: poetry and prose.

'Lest we forget' is the final line of the poem, For the Fallen (1914), by Laurence Binyan. Today, 11 November, is Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War when the 'Ode of Remembrance' – a favourite recitation at memorial services for the fallen of the 1st and 2nd World Wars throughout the Commonwealth - finishes with these words.

The 'war' poetry of the Great War in particular often expresses deeply felt emotions very poignantly (see my blog archive, Flanders Fields, 29 July) but prose of the period can do the same. There are many memoirs and novels by men who served in this war that recount the politics, battles and tragedies of it all and their memories of fallen comrades, lost brothers, dead sons are so very moving.

But for every young man that died there was a woman – whether mother, sister, daughter or lover - who suffered years of loss. Not that it was only young men that served in the 1914-18 war: women didn't fight but they did do everything but. Many took over the jobs of the men who had left to fight and it's well known that their contribution – not to mention skill, dedication and bravery - during the war finally (in 1928) scotched the arguments against womens' suffrage.

Many women wanted to be in the thick of it, so to speak: some joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) either doing all sorts of 'manly' jobs or nursing - often risking their lives in on the front line. Others became members of the Women's Auxillary Corps (WAR), engaged on military services at home and abroad.

I make mention of two of these women who subsequently became journalists and writers: both gave up their hard won places at Oxford University to serve their country in time of war. They later met whilst studying there and became firm friends. Winifred Holtby served in France in 1918 as a volunteer in the Signal Unit of the WAR and Vera Brittain became a VAD, nursing in London and then in a field hospital at the front line in France.

Vera Brittain fell in love with Roland (a friend of her brother's) who was unfortunately killed in 1915. Sadly, her beloved younger brother, Edward, was then also killed (in 1918): many of their friends also met their death in the Great War. The first part of Brittain's autobiography, Testament of Youth (1933), chronicled those years: the story of 'the lost generation' and the changes it brought about in the lives of so many turned Brittain into a pacifist and an active member of the peace movement.

Some of the material that Brittain drew on when writing her autobiography was eventually published in 1998: Letters from a Lost Generation was a collection of the letters of Brittain, her brother and their friends, Richardson and Thurlow. These are a moving personal record of the terrible effects and results of a war that destroyed so many lives.

Winifred Holtby was also a committed pacifist and feminist; unfortunately she too died tragically young in 1935, just managing to complete her best known novel, South Riding, before she did so. It won her the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (posthumously) in 1936. This is a novel that encapsulates life in rural Yorkshire in the years between the two world wars: it gives telescopic view – looking through the wrong end of the lens to what life was like before 1914 and through the other end to the 1920's when women were making a mark as never before.

Both Holtby and Brittain were women of their time: university graduates, journalists and writers in what was then very much a man's world. They were increasingly confident that their views should count and that there was a need to change politics for the better. After Holtby died Brittain wrote Testament of Friendship (1940), a tribute to her friend and a chronicle of their relationship.

I came across both these writers again whilst researching my novel, A Little Blue Jacket. Holtby lived in South Africa in 1926 for a while and championed, among other things, the unionization of black workers: Brittain describes this South African experience as a watershed in Holtby's life. Her own interest in politics and womens' rights was influenced by reading Women and Labour, by the South African novelist and feminist, Olive Schreiner.

The writing of both Holtby and Brittain are still in print and are even enjoying a renewed interest: it's not just the many thousands of men who died that we remember today but also the thousands of women who served their country. And some who wrote about it, lest we forget.

Lucy
www.lucyannwrites.blogspot.com
lucy.ann.white@hotmail.co.uk

Book Note: I find the poems of AE Houseman particularly moving and here is a simple, understated one that sums up what so many bereaved women must have felt, and sadly, are still experiencing in our war torn world today when no body is repatriated.

The half-moon westers low, my love,
And the wind brings up the rain;
And wide apart lie we, my love,
And seas between the twain.

I know not if it rains, my love,
In the land where you do lie;
And oh, so sound you sleep, my love,
You know no more than I.