Shakespeare Day 2024

It's Shakespeare's Birthday - always a happy day for any Merry Shrew.  Since I last posted here, I've sneaked in a further visit to Stratford for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust's 'Winter School', taking in a wonderful performance of 'The Merchant of Venice:1936' and a gloriously silly Midsummer Night's Dream, which was so good, I went back to see it again the next night from the 'cheap seats'. 

Unfortunately, I was recovering (slowly) from a really unpleasant chest infection and so I made the decision to skip the Reading Room this time: I wouldn't have liked to be in the same space as someone coughing as much as I was.  

The weather was largely rainy and cold - it was February after all - and Stratford seemed a little lack-lustre. The Shakespeare Hotel was closed 'for extensive renovation' although no work at all appeared to be going on as far as I could see, and New Place was closed for the winter as well, (although the lack of foliage did mean I could peep through the gates to check on the tree!) 

I'd had such good intentions in September, but the best laid schemes had been plotted without the family emergency that took over most of November and December and is still causing issues now with time and space.  It means that a lot of what I'd planned to do just hasn't happened, and I'm sometimes a bit frustrated.  During my September visit, I'd had thoughts that seemed to point the way I ought to go but then life got in the way.

However, the data base is always there and I've really put a lot of effort since I came back from Stratford into trying to break through the last barriers around the North, South and Midland Companies.  Despite all the wonderful stuff on the British Library website, finding this last 23% of entries is proving a challenge.  I'm getting results, but there are still huge holes to fill.  Yesterday and today I managed to fill in enough to make the total complete 80%.  It feels like something of an achievement but it has been hard fought for!

To celebrate, tomorrow I'm heading into Newcastle to the Tyneside Cinema to see the John Singer Sargent exhibition 'on screen': its actually on at the Tate in London and it is exactly the sort of exhibition which - only a few months ago - I'd have been dashing down to see.  As it is, this is the best compromise.  I won't, of course, be able to linger in front of the Ellen Terry Lady Macbeth dress the way I'd have done 'in real life' but it is better than nothing!

My second hand book hunting took me to Sedbergh a couple of weeks ago where I picked up an old  book about Stratford and a book of theatrical memoirs by Sidney Blow 'The Ghost walks on Fridays'. Blow was a young actor at the turn of the century who married Hilda Trevallyan , the actress who originated the role of Wendy in Peter Pan.  It's very gossipy and flits about from story to story, but the highlight so far has been a wonderfully catty account by Irene Vanbrugh of rehearsing at His Majesty's with Ellen Terry. written as a playscript.  There's lots of period detail of theatres in London and New York at the time the Bensons were touring and it's a very easy read.  

Tonight, no proper Shakespeare for me but there will be cake.  Happy Birthday, Mr Shakespeare!

We happy few...

Well, after a dismal summer where 'the rain it raineth every day', my 'Great Escape' to Stratford upon Avon was blessed by September sunshine and temperatures not usually seen at this time of year.  In fact, the week was glorious in every respect: exactly what was needed to mark the first week of a new school year... the first without me actually being at school

The official motive for going was to spend some time in the Shakespeare Birthplace Reading Room, somewhere I haven't been since before the Covid lockdowns.  I wanted to add to my prompt book research by looking at 'Twelfth Night' and also try to build up a better picture of the company by looking at some of the material connected to some of the company members.

The very generous Louis Marder Bursary paid once again for my accommodation in the lovely 1837 cottage where I've stayed before.  Although I was there on my own this time, it felt very much like a home from home.  It cost about the same as a guest house or hotel and it gave me the freedom to come and go as I wanted, to pop home for lunch or drop off bags after researching, as well as a couple of comfy sofas and a good kitchen table to write on!  Marks and Spencer were my caterers, saving me from having to eat out at further expense.

I spent a day and a half in the archives and the rest was divided between being a tourist and pretending I was a resident.  I set myself the task, in tourist role, of seeing how many references or traces I could find of the Benson Company and was very pleased with the final result.  Far from being forgotten entirely, there are still quite a few references to them to find around the town if you are paying attention! ( I was!)

I must have seen this before on my visits to Holy Trinity church, but maybe I'd just not read it? In the St Peter's Chapel, reserved for quiet prayer, is this on the wall, a partner to the Benson memorial window in the Swan foyer.  The lines are by Rudyard Kipling.

The plaque appears on the Imperial War Museum's War Memorial's Register and is surrounded by other memorial plaques, most of which predate the First World War.  

Holy Trinity also holds the silver processional cross donated in memory of Bensonian Frank Rodney, who died in 1903.  I'll have more to say about him - and this- later: I took a lot of photos of it.  Again, I'd walked past this many times and never really given it a glance.

High up in the panelling of what had been the library of the old Memorial Theatre - now the bar of the Swan Theatre - there's this:

Beneath it, an explanation of the fact that Benson 'would play the character of Caliban with a real fish in his mouth, rather than a prop.  If the fish was not changed regularly, it would soon smell bad.  His wife. Constance, recalled in her memoir " Sometimes, the property man would forget to renew this piece of realism,,,which was most distressing to Benson, and indeed to everyone on stage." '

The Benson memorial windows are still very much the centre piece of the picture gallery upstairs, which now hosts the annually changing 'The Play's the Thing' exhibition. The lighting conditions and weather outside made the windows slightly better than normal to photograph, although I still cannot manage to get the centre panel really clearly.  The second window is rather obscured by the displays, which is a shame. I've read in several places that when the memorial to Benson was added in 1952, there was a window also dedicated to Constance Benson.  However, there is no trace of this at all, and I've been unable to find any photographs.  The hunt continues...  

Finally, the thing I most wanted to see - Constance Benson's costume as Lady Macbeth.  The panel dates this to 1902/3, but also claims it was salvaged from the Theatre Royal fire.  As always, it is the colour that impresses me - I'm so used to seeing black and white photographs that costumes 'in real life' always surprise me with their vibrancy.  I was particularly interested in seeing how this garment compared to the famous 'Beetle Wing' dress worn by Ellen Terry at the Lyceum in 1889. 

The dress is silk and very Pre-Raphaelite in its gathering and draping. Unlike Ellen Terry's very fitted bodice, this is loose and unstructured, designed to drape like a column rather than reveal her figure.  It has similar vast sleeves to those on the Terry dress and the metal beads which have been sewn along the sleeve edges and the neck line would probably have caught the stage lights in a similar way to the beetle wing casings.

The embroidery on the bottom half of the dress is worked in satin stitch - it has faded to grey and cream, but I suspect a gold and lavender were the original colours.  This echoes the decoration on the top half of the dress which I thought at first was stencilled but is actually narrow gold ribbon, surface appliqued.

It would be interesting to see this in the context of the production, of course: to see to what extent the costume stood out on stage from the rest of the setting.

In 2016, the RSC displayed another dress from the collection as Constance's Lady Macbeth costume, stating that this had been ' thrown together from a few last minute donations, following a fire that devastated the company's entire wardrobe'  (RSC (1) Facebook)

Sadly, I didn't get to see this one 'in person'.  

I shall do such things...

It is the end of the second week of the school holidays and the second full of week of my conscious uncoupling from teaching.  I've had the leavers' speeches, the flowers, the bottles of prosecco, the cards, the tears and laughter, and I've cleared out thirty one years of accumulated stuff from the cupboards at work - and binned most of it!  I still can't quite believe I won't be going back in September.

I'm not ready to 'retire' as such - this is more of a tactical withdrawal! - and I know there's going to be a considerable gap between my salary and the amount from the pension, but I reached a stage earlier this year when I realised that time is far more valuable than money to me. I'm hoping that my pension - which I can claim in October - will cover my bills and that this will allow me some time to decide what I really want to do. 

Of course, that quote from King Lear continues with What they are, yet I know not which seems entirely fitting, under the circumstances!  At the moment, I am waiting to see what the universe suggests to me.  

Immediate plans: the first week in September will see me head to Stratford upon Avon, using the last of the money from the fabulous Louis Marder bursary.  I'm planning to do a bit of research and at the same time 'decompress' from the manic year I've had.  I'm hoping Stratford will work its magic.  I haven't been there in three years and am desperate to go back.

The following week sees an International Theatre History conference - on Victorian and Edwardian Theatre - at the Tyne Theatre, one of the two Grade 1 listed theatres in Newcastle upon Tyne.  It is more or less on my doorstep and if I had been at work, I could not have attended.  Several really significant people from the world of theatre history are going to be there presenting papers and there are all sorts of events being planned across the three days.  

After that, who knows? I want to take some time to write, to keep researching and to focus on things which make me happier.  I really want to write about Benson.  If I don't do it, who will. And if I don't do it now, will I ever?

However, before that, I still have the summer. Last Sunday I went to see 'The Taming of the Shrew' in a marquee in Durham - shades of the Benson pastoral seasons were invoked as the theatre company fought against strong winds and the bells of Durham Cathedral!  Although I’m not sure Benson would have entirely endorsed the feminist re-reading of the final scene, I think he’d have appreciated the spirit of the occasion…

Find out Moonshine...?

                          

Apologies for the long absence. To be honest, the day job has become so demanding that I've had to fight for any Benson research time and blogging my finds has slipped down the to-do list. However, I have not been idle. The data base continues to grow and I have some plans for it. After much heart and soul searching I am leaving the day job in August to explore 'other avenues' and one of my summer jobs is to create a version of the data base which others can use. (Always assuming they want to...!)

Update aside, I've been tempted back to this blog today by a photograph shared on Facebook and Twitter by the 'Everything to Everybody' project - a collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Birmingham City Council - which is raising the profile of the incredible Shakespeare Library in Birmingham. This untapped resource is calling like a siren for me to visit it - and maybe that will be possible at some point next year. They have posted several interesting photos connected to Stratford and Benson, but yesterday's was a real find.



I have copies of several of the photos which were taken beside this 'sweet and lovely wall' but I've never seen these before!

Their digitisation officer, Richard, picked it as his favourite image from the collection and added this comment " I keep coming back to this photograph. He/she (we don’t have a name) is obviously a much loved cast member where time has been taken to set up a professional photograph outside of the theatre. I wish I had seen this production. Just looking at this dog obediently posing somehow draws you back over a century to the moment it was taken."

(Richard is clearly a Merry Shrew, even if he doesn't know it yet!)

So with an unexpectedly free evening at my disposal, I've been digging to try and find out more, and I THINK I might have an identity for this delightful doggie!

Although I can't find any reference to the dog appearing in this production, I'm wondering if this might be the actor Murray Carrington's dog, 'Dick', who had appeared in Two Gentlemen of Verona in Stratford in 1910 and created something of a sensation.

J.C. Trewin mentions him in 'Benson and the Bensonians', seemingly taking his information from Constance Benson's Memoirs. Apparently, during Lance's sad speech in Act 2 to Crab the dog, Dick 'looked steadily into the audience as if counting the house' but when Launce (played by Bensonian stalwart H.O. Nicholson) 'broke into sobs, he turned and sympathetically licked his face. This little bit of realistic acting so enchanted the audience they greeted it with a tremendous round of applause. The next morning Dick found himself famous. He received the "star" notices.'

Murray Carrington played Oberon in both the 1911 and 1912 performances of Midsummer Night's Dream. He was one of the Benson Company for eight years and returned to Stratford after the First World War. He was apparently the first actor to play Hamlet on the radio! H. O Nicholson played Starveling (who becomes Moonshine), in 1911, but he had left the Bensons' Company by 1912. Nicholson, a Cambridge Classics graduate and former school master, joined Benson in 1896 and was a long-standing member of the Company as well as being one of the Bensonians who ended up with Granville Barker's Company at the Savoy in 1912-13... where he played Starveling again, only this time without a real dog!

I've no idea if this is actually Dick - the name on the collar is too indistinct to read - or whether I'm just 'barking up the wrong tree', (sorry) but it is a nice thought! And I've loved doing the searching!

One week on...

… and I might have discovered something interesting about Benson's heroics in the Theatre Royal fire.  With true Bensonian serendipity, it concerns a place where I was taken by a very lovely friend two weeks ago - a bar in Market Street  I'd never been in before - and at the time I was totally unaware that it had played a part in the story I was trying to write!  Still not quite ready to share it all, but I've been writing like mad, grazing all the source materials again and trying to make sense of all the accounts of that night, placed together.  It is amazing what we know... and what we don't.  I've spent several hours this week on this and I'm delighted with the way it is knitting together.  Just need to return to that bar with a camera, knowing what I know... EXCITED!

These are internet sourced images.  Going to add my own once I've been back...

Stand Well Back...

I've been sidelining a little by returning to the Theatre Royal Newcastle fire of 1899 and attempting to 'write it up' in an accessible way.  I've been seduced by the creative non-fiction genre and I'm playing with words on the page at the moment.

Anyway, as part of the research I've spent this evening using the British Newspaper Archives to cross reference accounts of the fire with the books I've already used.  In the process of trying to ascertain exactly what happened, I've unearthed a cat story (we love a good cat story!) and some very graphic descriptions of what the Shields Daily Gazette called the 'Thrilling Spectacle' of the Theatre Royal in flames!  Much more of all this later (I promise) : the finest gem I unearthed was on the BFI website -

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-turn-out-of-the-newcastle-fire-brigade-1901-1901-online

This is silent film footage of the Newcastle fire brigade in a publicity film from 1901 and it is two minutes of absolute joy.  Watch out for the policeman at the start, waving bystanders out of the way, the little dog (with a death wish?) running in front of the fire engines, the firemen running along with the fire escape ladder, the two naughty boys deliberately running back and forth across the road in front of the local dignitaries and the frequent re-appearance of one man with a flat cap who is much more interested in the camera than in the fire brigade!

And just when you think it's all over... the fire engines are suddenly there again, rushing around in the background!

It is rather reminiscent of a Buster Keaton film...

Enjoy!

Side-tracked by Jumbo...

I have to admit that one of the great joys of researching the Benson company is the side-tracking which often occurs when I'm looking at old newspapers on the British Library Newspaper Archive site.  Today, working my way through old copies of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, I stumbled across this:

It was December 1886 when 'Jumbo, the Great Mammoth Cheese weighing 4,172 lbs made from the milk of 3,300 cows... milked by over 300 dairymaids' was on exhibition at Lipton's Grocery Shop in Newcastle's Clayton Road, just round the corner from the Theatre Royal where the Bensons were appearing that week.

If the sight of a 'most wonderful and gigantic mountain of cheese' wasn't enough of an inducement to visit Lipton's: 'When being made numerous sovereigns and half-sovereigns - provided by Mr Lipton - were mixed amongst the curds.  The gold becomes the property of the lucky purchaser when the cheese is cut.'  

As always, the discovery of such a gem leads to a bit of further google searching, and I soon discovered that Sir Thomas Lipton's cheese was in fact a mere crumb in giant cheese terms, dwarfed in 1893 by the Mammoth Canadian Cheese sent by rail to the World's Fair in Chicago:

So heavy was this cheese that it actually smashed through the floor of the exhibition building!  In Perth, Ontario, there is even a life-sized monument to it beside the railway line...

Lipton was a self-made grocery magnate and tea importer who was born in a Glasgow tenement but rose to be 'Grocer to the King' as well as a keen yachtsman, winning a host of trophies which are now on display in his home city.   His chain of grocery shops survived in the UK into the 1970s, becoming 'Presto' before disappearing into the vast Unilever empire.  His company name still survives as a tea trademark.

Jumbo the giant cheese was mentioned again in the advertising columns of The Evening Chronicle a week later:

when 'contractors' were needed for 'digging operations' on the cheese! Extra sovereigns and half sovereigns were added to the cheese as a 'Christmas treat' before the cheese was cut.  The extra NOTICE:

'Mr Lipton will not be responsible should anyone be choked by the sovereigns or half-sovereigns while eating the cheese'

suggests that someone may well have tried that particular trick!  

I've failed to find any photo of Lipton's shop in Clayton Street although the building still stands - it's a British Heart Foundation charity shop now.  However, Newcastle Libraries have this image of Lipton's in 1920's Byker  (just down the road from the Byker Grand Theatre where FRB had laid the foundation stone and given the first performance on its stage.)

Newcastle Libraries  https://www.flickr.com/photos/newcastlelibraries/4091031058/in/album-72157622716564955/

How much more exciting does that look than a modern supermarket?

(I have had a very successful Bensonian day too - I forced myself not to attend to the cheese until I'd done a couple of hours of digging of my own!)