Ten things you may not have known about Shakespeare
How did he cause 62 deaths? Why did his theatre stink? Which of his plays did Julius Nyerere translate? Greg Doran takes an alternative look at the Bard on the 450th anniversary of his birth this week
HITLER DESIGNED A SHAKESPEARE PLAY
In one of Hitler’s 1926 sketchbooks, there is a design for the staging of Julius Caesar. It portrays the Forum with the same sort of “severe deco” neoclassical architecture that would later create the setting for the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg.
Hitler’s admiration for the Roman Empire was immense after a visit to the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Baths of Caracalla, and his drawing of the Forum suggests his appetite to create a platform worthy of his oratorical skills, paralleling Brutus and Mark Antony, and establish an arena in which to glorify the Third Reich.
In 1937, Orson Welles opened his Mercury Theatre Company in New York by directing a production of Julius Caesar that evoked both contemporary Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
MOZART NEARLY WROTE AN OPERA OF 'THE TEMPEST’
We know that Giuseppe Verdi spent much of his later life trying to write an opera of King Lear, but it is a lesserknown fact that Mozart contemplated writing a version of The Tempest .
Verdi struggled with his Re Lear project for many years. He told one of his two librettists: “This will be our masterpiece.” The four-act libretto, by Antonio Somma, still exists. But, finally defeated, Verdi offered the material to fellow composer Pietro Mascagni.
GIUSEPPE VERDI
Mascagni asked him why he did not write it himself. He replied: “The scene in which King Lear finds himself on the heath scared me.”
Tchaikovsky rejected the idea of writing an opera of The Merchant of Venice, but toyed with the idea of writing one (as Verdi in fact did) based on Othello.
SHAKESPEARE CAUSED AN AIR CRASH
On October 4 1960, a Lockheed Electra aeroplane setting off from Boston airport in the US stirred up a flock of 10 000 starlings on the runway. It flew straight into the avian cloud, which choked the engines and brought the aeroplane down. The crash claimed 62 lives.
The starling is not native to North America. It was introduced in 1890 by a Shakespeare nut called Eugene Schieffelin, who wanted Central Park in New York to be home to all the songbirds mentioned in Shakespeare. The thrushes and blackbirds struggled to acclimatise, but the starlings thrived.
Now they are found from Alaska to Florida. They have ousted many native species, forming gigantic flocks of up to a million birds.
But where does Shakespeare mention starlings? There is only one reference. It comes in Henry IV Part One when Hotspur, forbidden by the king to mention the name of Mortimer, declares that he will train a starling to say his name and sing it continually in his majesty’s ear.
SHAKESPEARE’S THEATRE STANK
When Thomas Platter visited London in 1599 and saw a production of Julius Caesar at the new Globe Theatre, he also watched bear-baiting.
Afterwards, he went behind the theatre and saw the dog enclosure, where there were 120 English mastiffs, and stalls containing 12 large bears, one of which was blind, and several bulls.
He said of the stench: “And the place was evil-smelling because of the lights [offal] and meat on which the butchers fed the said dogs.”
The Hope Theatre, built on Bankside two months after the Globe burnt to the ground in June 1613, alternated bear-baiting and plays.
In Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair , the stage-keeper complains about having to share the arena with the bears and the shocking smell: “The place be as dirty as Smithfield,” he says, “and as stinking every whit.”
SHAKESPEARE HAD TWINS
“Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splen- dour on my brow:
But out alack he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.” ( Sonnet 33) On February 2 1585, Shakespeare’s twins, Hamnet and Judith, were baptised. It was the feast of Candlemas.
Fifteen years later, on Candlemas 1600, Twelfth Night was performed at Middle Temple.
In that play, a pair of twins are separated in a shipwreck and each assumes the other has perished beneath the waves. At the end, Shakespeare reunites them in one of the most moving moments in the entire canon. His own son, Hamnet, had died in the late summer of 1596.
CATHERINE THE GREAT TRANSLATED SHAKESPEARE
In 1786, Queen Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russias, did her own adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, titled What it is to have Linen and Buck-baskets.
It was the first Russian play to credit Shakespeare’s influence. Catherine also translated Timon of Athens.
Other world leaders have attempted to translate Shakespeare’s plays. Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, translated both Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Swahili.
THE FIRST AMATEUR PERFORMANCE OF A SHAKESPEARE PLAY TOOK PLACE IN 1623
In the Folger Library in Washington is a handwritten manuscript of an adaptation of two Shakespeare plays, performed by a household in Pluckley in Kent in 1623.
Sir Edward Dering put together the two parts of Henry IV for a private performance at his home, Surrenden Manor.
He paid the local rector to write out the play and laid out the princely sum of 17 shillings and 8 pence “for heads of hair and beards”, which were presumably wigs and false beards for Falstaff and the rest.
This same amateur theatre enthusiast was the first person we know of to buy a First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays when it hit the bookstalls in 1623.
Sir Edward bought not one copy, but two, at the substantial cost of £2 (oh, and the bookseller threw in a volume of Ben Jonson’s works at 9 shillings).
The Folio had been listed in a catalogue at the Frankfurt book fair in the previous year, but the first impression rolled off the press only in February 1623 and continued to be printed through to November, just a few days before Sir Edward bought his copies.
The only item that cost Sir Edward more during that trip to London was a beaver hat and band that set him back £2 6s.
SHAKESPEARE WAS PERFORMED ON THE STUMP OF A GIANT REDWOOD TREE
In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain describes how two swindlers posing as English actors on their way down the Mississippi stage a night of Shakespeare in a one-horse town in Arkansas. When the audience drift away before the end, one of them declares: “Arkansas lunkheads couldn’t come up to Shakespeare!”
Shakespeare followed the Gold Rush west in the 1840s. There are stories of pioneer companies of actors playing among the ore-rich gulches to mining camps full of desperados and sharpers of all nations.
They would set up a stage in some saloon or store, with candles in bottles to serve as footlights. But if they expected an audience unresponsive to Shakespeare and the classics, they were wrong.
If they paraphrased lines, the miners would shout out the right ones and fire their pistols or fling daggers.
If they performed the Bard well, the miners would thunder their applause and throw buckskin purses full of gold dust.
An actor called McKean Buchanan was a great favourite with the miners. He played Macbeth and Richard III in a slouch hat with a great drooping feather, a long black cape and a large yellow gauntlet, and would roar his way through every role.
On tour in California, in Calaveras Grove, a suitable theatre could not be found, so he was persuaded to perform on the stump of a giant redwood tree. The stump, of the great Discovery tree, is still there.
THE GREAT ACTRESS SARAH BERNHARDT MODELLED FOR A STATUE OF LADY MACBETH
The Gower statue of Shakespeare, which stands in front of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, has four supporting figures that surround the plinth.
These bronze characters represent four elements of Shakespeare’s genius: Falstaff chortles for comedy; Henry V holds the crown aloft for history, Hamlet with Yorick’s skull broods for philosophy, and Lady Macbeth wrings her hands for tragedy.
Lord Ronald Gower sculpted this assemblage in his studio in the Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris.
When the actress “the divine” Sarah Bernhardt visited him one day, she advised him precisely how Lady M should wring her hands. She would play the part later in 1899.
SHAKESPEARE WAS DESCRIBED AS ‘OUR STAR OF POETS’
“Take him and cut him out in little stars
And he will make the face of heaven so fine,
That all the world will be in love with night.”
( Romeo and Juliet, Act 3 Scene 2)
Ben Jonson called Shakespeare “our star of poets” and there are satellites named after Shakespeare characters.
William Lassell began the practice of naming planets’ satellites after Shakespeare’s characters in 1851. There are moons called Titania, Oberon and Puck, Prospero, Ariel, Caliban and even Sycorax (Caliban’s mother), but not a single astral body — moon, satellite or star — is named after the man himself.
As the Hubble telescope reveals ever greater depths of space, perhaps a new star can be found that will bear Shakespeare’s name in time for the quatercentenary of his death in 2016. — © The Daily Telegraph, London
ý Doran is the artistic director of Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company