Mad about Shakespeare

From Classroom to Theatre to Emergency Room

Jonathan Bate

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780008167493
• eBook ISBN: 9780008167479
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

1.

My Father’s Shakespeare

My father’s Shakespeare was the New Temple Edition. Pocket-sized, with bright-red boards, they sat in a row on their own little shelf above the mahogany wireless around which we gathered as a family to listen to the plummy voice of Roy Plomley’s weekly presentation of Desert Island Discs on the BBC Home Service. ‘And what book would you take, apart from the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare, which are already there?’ I wish I had asked my mother and father what book they would have chosen, but the presence of the Bible by their bed and the New Temple Shakespeares in the living room readied the house for the castaways who were regularly invited into our home.

My mother believed that hospitality was a duty; her mother had taken in evacuees during the war. Once a month on a Sunday afternoon we entertained a boy from the local school for the blind, a reminder to me and my brother how privileged we were to have our sight. And every Christmas we welcomed a lonely Australian or Malaysian student via a scheme organized by the Commonwealth Institute in London. That was the only time of year when another wartime rule – a frugal table – was broken.

We didn’t have a television at the time of Winston Churchill’s funeral, so we watched it at a neighbour’s home. I laid out an imitation of the procession through the streets of London with my toy soldiers on the dining-room table. Even at the age of six and a half, I sensed that it was the end of the era that had shaped my parents.

Four years later, in 1969, we were propelled into the future, watching the moon landing on our first black and white television. It had taken the place of the big old radio with its visible valves, white knobs and the red line on the dial that moved across the names of stations near and far. The incomplete set of the New Temple Shakespeares remained on the shelf above all through my teens, as if in a shrine. I didn’t open them until it was too late.

Much Ado About Nothing has never been my favourite Shakespearean comedy. Over the years, my personal number-one comedy spot has flipped between A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale and Twelfth Night. But there is one speech in Much Ado that I can never get out of my head. Claudio has been tricked into believing that his fiancée Hero has been unfaithful to him on the eve of their marriage. His gullibility in this regard is a black mark against his character, so he is forced to pay a heavy price. A Friar assists in a cunning plan to make him believe that Hero has died of shock and shame because of the way in which he has denounced her as a whore in the middle of their wedding ceremony. The Friar then delivers a homily that includes the lines

for it so falls out

That what we have we prize not to the worth

Whiles we enjoy it; but, being lacked and lost,

Why, then we rack the value, then we find

The virtue that possession would not show us

Whiles it was ours.

You never really value what you have until you have lost it. Until it is too late. Or who you have, and what their virtues were. This is especially true if you are a teenager, hormonally programmed not to value the virtues espoused by your parents.

It was the summer holidays in early August 1978, the long vacation after my first year at university. I was running a show called Magic Circus. We were a small company of student actors who toured around the village primary schools of Kent, taking the children off their parents’ hands for an afternoon. Things always went best when the weather was good, allowing the children to run around and the theatre games to fill the playground while artwork could be created inside. The afternoon in the village of Weald was a tough one because it never stopped raining. In the evening, I flopped in front of the television and chatted to my mother and father. For some reason, we found ourselves looking through albums of old black and white photographs of their wedding and my childhood. I told myself that it was time to ask my father to tell me about his life before getting married. Something of which I only had the sketchiest outline: childhood in Frinton-on-Sea, Classical Studies at Cambridge in the late 1920s with the alcoholic novelist Malcolm Lowry as his friend, schoolteaching in Eastbourne and Warwickshire, then the war. But it was late by then, and I was tired. We could pick up the conversation tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow.

I wasn’t paid for directing the Magic Circus, so I also had a morning job, teaching English language to a class of Greek schoolchildren who had taken up summer residence in Walthamstow Hall, the local girls’ school. That next day, in the middle of second period, a wasp appeared. I got up to chase it and knocked a book off the table. At that moment Costi Dardoufas, the teacher who organized the summer school, came through the door. I thought he was going to tell me off for horsing around. But he just said, ‘There’s someone to see you.’ He led me up the passage, in silence. It was Tom Mason, one of the teachers at my school and also our next-door neighbour. He told me it was my father’s heart.

‘How bad is he?’ I asked. I knew in my heart that he was dead. Besides, that would be better than a long illness – there had been enough of those in the family. Better death than a half-life of confinement. Uncle Tom, as we used to call him when we were children, said briefly what had happened as he drove me home, after Costi had put his arm round my shoulders and told me I needn’t work again.

The drive up the town had never seemed longer. I remembered the previous weekend: Dad had played his last game of cricket on a beautiful village ground nestling below the Downs. He had made twelve runs and was delighted to hear in the evening that I had scored a fifty on the same day. It was my parents’ twenty-fourth anniversary, so we had gone out to dinner – a very rare treat in the 1970s. That must have been why the wedding album was still on the coffee table a few nights later.

At home, there was the family doctor and a policeman. Dad had been dead on the doctor’s arrival. He had been tutoring a boy in the dining room and had apparently called Mum to come quickly. The boy was sent home. Typical Dad, teaching till the last minute. He had said that there was a terrible pain above his heart and he couldn’t breathe, so he went and lay down while Mum phoned for the doctor and ran next door to Beryl Mason, who had been a nurse. She was with him when he died, while Mum was waiting at the window for the doctor.

I didn’t go straight in to see Mum. First, I answered the policeman’s questions and talked a little to Dr Harrison. Twenty years earlier, he had delivered me to life in the very bed on which my father had just died.

I failed in my attempt to leave a message for my brother, who was living away from home, but succeeded in telling my friends that I wouldn’t be able to do Magic Circus that afternoon. I put my father’s watch and wedding ring in a drawer, then went in to see my mother. She wept but was never hysterical. ‘But why so soon?’ she asked. I remembered a friend of hers saying, just a few weeks before, ‘Enjoy him while you have him.’ I began to wonder whether I had failed to heed that advice myself.

The policeman asked me to identify the body for the coroner’s case, because it was a heart attack and Dad had no previous cardiac history. Then I realized that he had seemed tired the last few days, and apparently he had told Beryl that he felt a bit off on his bike one day, which made me feel guilty that through the summer I had too often hogged the family Mini.

The room was cold and dark with a musty smell. He was wrapped in the counterpane, more like a thing than a person. Dr Harrison removed the cover and I saw the head. Mouth open as in sleep, face thin and blue. At least there was no sign of pain. Later, Mum talked of him ‘lying on that bed, sweating’ – but he had said nothing.

I made the first phone calls to the wider family, then sat with Mum, who was in her chair staring at the blank television screen and the New Temple Shakespeares, until the policeman came to say that the body had been taken away. I put his clothes and shoes in the wardrobe, went downstairs to tidy away the books with which he had been teaching. His typewriter was on his desk, a piece of writing half finished. What would we do with all his books?

That night I wrote out two quotations from King Lear:

But his flawed heart –

Alack, too weak the conflict to support –

’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,

Burst smilingly.

And

Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! He hates him

That would upon the rack of this tough world

Stretch him out longer

If you’re patient enough to persevere with him, Shakespeare will give you the words.

When I got round to sorting his books, I opened the New Temple Shakespeares for the first time. They were beautiful little things, each adorned with an Eric Gill woodcut on the title page. Then I made my discovery: always a methodical man, my father had written on the endpapers of each volume a note of the productions he had seen.

At random, I picked out his Romeo and Juliet: ‘27 Oct ’34 Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne (Touring Company).’ There wouldn’t have been much culture in Eastbourne during the dour years of the early 1930s. That ‘touring company’ bringing Shakespeare to the seaside resort’s Victorian theatre, which had been given a makeover by the prolific theatre and music hall architect Frank Matcham, would have offered a rare treat. I suspected that it would not have been a distinguished version. So what must it have been like for my father to see the play again two years later in the West End? ‘7 Jan ’36 New Theatre, London.’ The legendary production in which, halfway through the run, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier switched between the roles of Romeo and Mercutio. The young Peggy Ashcroft was Juliet and grande dame Edith Evans perfectly cast as the Nurse. I cursed myself for never having had the curiosity to discover that my father had seen it. Now it was too late to ask him which way round Olivier and Gielgud had played it on the night he was there.

As for the film with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer, next on his list, I didn’t even know that it existed. All I knew about Leslie Howard was that when my mother was a girl she had a crush on him in ‘Pimpernel’ Smith. That was one of our favourites when she and I used to while away rainy Saturday afternoons watching old black and white movies on the television. Another was, naturally, Brief Encounter, romanticized by steam trains and Rachmaninov, her favourite composer. But that was with Trevor Howard, not Leslie.

I did recall my father once saying that after he moved from Eastbourne to a school in Warwickshire, he and a girlfriend used to bicycle over to the Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Romeo on 4 June ’38 must have been one such excursion. I had never asked for stories of these expeditions, but in a rare moment of revelation about that distant past my father did once say that the relationship petered out when he went off to war. I imagine the girl as the school matron, with dark curly hair, jolly voice and floral dress, bicycling gamely to keep up with him as they whirled along lanes verged by tall grass and Queen Anne’s lace.

His life was punctuated by war. ‘What’s your earliest memory, Dad?’ my brother Michael had asked. ‘Going out on to the sand dunes at Frinton, when I was six, and hearing the guns of the Somme booming across the sea.’ I still find it a cause for wonder that, because my father only married in his forties, I am the grandchild of four Victorians, all born in the 1880s. My father was forty-eight when I was born; I was forty-eight when Harry, my youngest child, was born. If he and the planet stay well enough, he might live into the twenty-second century, and in that sense I will have touched four centuries. Which makes the four centuries since Shakespeare’s death seem not such a long time after all.

When the second war came, my father had no hesitation in joining up. Loyal to his county, he was commissioned in the 85th (Essex) Medium Battery of the Royal Artillery, under the command of Major J. D. R. T. Tilney. If you were in the Artillery and you weren’t sent to join Monty’s Desert Rats in the North African theatre, you would have spent most of the war hanging around. Training, and waiting for the opening of the Second Front. While sorting through my father’s books in that grieving summer of 1978, I discovered that the Battery had kept a diary in the Officers’ Mess and that my father had been delegated to write it up after the war.

Several officers from his band of brothers had come to his funeral, including Major, now Sir John, Tilney. My brother’s godfather, he was Member of Parliament for Liverpool Wavertree and an intimate of his recently elected party leader, Margaret Thatcher, something for which, in the circumstances, I forgave him. Over tea following the service, during which I had honoured my father’s classical credentials by reading an elegiac ode of Horace in my own translation, his army friends invited me and my mother to their next annual regimental reunion, where they would toast his memory. ‘Your father was the bravest man I served with,’ one of them told me. ‘He was mentioned in dispatches three times and really should have got the Military Cross, but he was too modest and self-effacing to let them write about what he did in that Forward Observation Post.’ In the early days of the Normandy campaign he had climbed on to the roof of a church, binoculars strapped round his neck and headphones over his ears in order to radio the position of the enemy. This meant that he didn’t hear the sound of the snipers firing at him, so a Canadian officer had to pull him down by the ankles. Later, as they advanced towards the Rhine, he took over the controls of a tank while under heavy fire. Finally, just as everyone was preparing for victory and being demobbed, he volunteered to join the still-unfinished war in the Far East. This earned him a medical check to establish that he was in his right mind.

The stories...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• 1. My Father’s Shakespeare
• 2. Erecting a Grammar School
• 3. Falling in Love with Shakespeare
• 4. Let Me Not Be Mad
• 5. The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet
• 6. The Understanding Spirit
• 7. Dr Johnson’s Prescription
• 8. The Black Dog
• 9. Like Mad Hamlet
• 10. Essentially Made or Essentially Mad?
• 11. The Man from Stratford
• 12. Shakespeare’s Sister
• 13. Ariel and Cal
• 14. There’s My Comfort
• 15. Voyage to Illyria
• Footnote
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Also by Jonathan Bate
• About the Publisher