Summer Time

This week sees the meeting of the 10th World Shakespeare Congress in Stratford upon Avon and London, and academics and aficionados of Shakespeare have travelled from the far corners of the globe to discuss, debate, challenge and celebrate his work and its on-going life in the theatre.  I'm not there.  I briefly toyed with the idea before I rejected it on the grounds that my academic inferiority complex is already far too well-developed and that being in a room with so many 'great ones' might just finish me off completely as a researcher!

However, that hasn't stopped me following the proceedings with extreme interest and I was delighted to hear that Gregory Doran (RSC Artistic Director) had named-checked Benson yet again in his address on Monday.  (I suspect that Mr Doran is a secret 'Merry Shrew' at heart!)

Today has been the first chance I've had for several weeks to investigate the Benson touring rep any further and I'm still trying to plug database holes from the Newspaper Archive. I've had a reasonably successful afternoon - although even small nuggets of information take a lot more digging up these days - and inevitably, my thoughts have been on Stratford in the summertime...

Usually the summer months were 'vacation' for the Benson companies, but in 1910 the decision was made to create a second 'summer' festival to encourage summer visitors to the town.  This ran for two weeks in 1910 and was then extended to four weeks in 1911, beginning on July 22nd with a performance of Midsummer Night's Dream. Thanks to the Leamington Spa Courier, I've been able to find the performances for all four weeks:

week beginning	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday m	Saturday e
24/07/1911	Henry V	Richard II	Merchant of Venice (mat) Romeo & Juliet	As You Like It (mat) Taming of the Shrew	Hamlet *	Henry V	Merchant of Venice
31/07/1911	Tempest	Hamlet *	As You Like It (mat) Richard II	Midsummer Night’s Dream	Romeo & Juliet	Midsummer Night’s Dream	Taming of the Shrew
07/08/1911	As You Like It	Tempest	Romeo & Juliet (wed) Henry V	As You Like It (Thurs) Richard II	Hamlet*	x	Tempest
14/08/1911	Romeo & Juliet	Taming of the Shrew	Merchant of Venice	Tempest (mat) Hamlet *	Richard II	As You Like It	Midsummer Night’s Dream

The performances of Hamlet were 6pm starts - this was the so-called 'infinity' version now slimmed down to a running time of around four hours.  On matinee days it was possible to see two different plays and the schedule was designed so that anyone staying for a few days would be able to see a different play each evening.

The summer of 1911 was a scorcher with recorded temperatures reaching an all-time high of 36 degrees C /98 degrees F - a record not beaten until 1990. By July 20th drought conditions had been declared - there had been no rain at all for twenty days  Newspapers ran columns listing 'Deaths by Heat' and traffic accidents were increased as the road surface melted. Without wide-spread refrigeration, fresh food went off very quickly.  In the Victoria and Albert Docks, 5000 workers came out on strike as a result of having to work in such extreme conditions. The thought of sitting in an unventilated theatre for four hours can't have been very appealing to many Stratford visitors and conditions on stage must have become unbearably hot.

On the final evening of the summer festival, the usual  'floral bouquets, chaplets of bays and boxes of chocolates' were handed across the footlights to the assembled company.  Archibald Flowers, chairman of the Memorial Theatre board reflected that 'owing to the heat there had not been such full houses as at the Spring Festival' and that 'looked at from the standpoint of an ordinary theatrical venture' - that of  £.s.d - 'the season was a failure.'  In fact, he admitted he was amazed that anyone had actually been persuaded to enter the building in such weather.

However, he concluded that the object had been 'to extend the study, love and influence of Shakespeare, and in this direction there was no doubt whatever that the summer season had been a great success.  Numerous valuable seeds had been sown, and many other links forged which were going to draw together people...from every part of the world.'

 It is a comment which applies to the whole of Benson's career, to be honest.  I hope those delegates heading from Stratford to London for the concluding three days of Congress at the Globe feel the same way about their summer stay in Stratford, even if they have experienced slightly less dramatic weather.  (quotes from Cheltenham Chronicle & Gloucestershire Graphic, Saturday 26th August 1911 accessed from the British Library Newspaper Archive)