Plays Three - Edward Bond

Bingo was the one here that I already knew. I bought a copy when it first came out in the Seventies, but it was fun to read it again after more than half a lifetime.

Bingo, a title with no apparent sense to it, is about the death of Shakespeare.  The great man has retired to Stratford to ignore his demented, bed-bound wife, fall out with his daughter Judith, get embroiled in unpopular enclosure and generally upset the local puritans.  His one visitor is Ben Jonson, who is a complete boor, and after an evening with him the Bard of Avon decides the only answer is to kill himself.

I was big on Shakespeare back when I was a fresher at Hull.  Four graduations later, I no longer care if I never see one of his plays again.  There are three I would be willing to attend if pressed, but the rest...  No thanks.  The problem, however, with having studied the life and works over a period of I some fifty years, I know too much to be able to ignore the liberties Bond has openly taken with the facts.  Ann Hathaway might well have been ga-ga for all anyone knows, and it is an effective way of establishing the considerable age-gap between the spouses; Judith may well have been a scold; but Shakespeare is shown as old, forever complaining about his age, drained of inspiration and even meaningful conversation.  But as we all know, until the day he died he was only fifty-one, and having been watching and reading his plays for longer than that, I can confirm that fifty-one is not old.  More importantly, it wasn't in Elizabethan times either.  We are taught, or allowed to believe, that the human span was shorter then.  Bullshit.  The average age at death was lower because well over half the children born died in infancy and a woman could expect, sooner or later, to die in childbirth.  Disinfectant put a stop to all that.  But for those who survived to the menopause, and all men, the length of life was more or less what it is now.  Most could expect to live to seventy and very few septuagenarians, then as now, are senile.  That said, Bingo is full of dramatic set pieces - the gibbeted girl, Shakespeare lost in the snow.  I enjoyed it yesterday every bit as much as when I bought it hot off the press in 1974.

Next up is The Fool, written around the same time and also featuring a troubled bard - in this case John Clare, who also finds himself embroiled in the agrarian revolution.  In his case it is the destruction of the traditional rural life (labourers and lords of the manor), which literally drives him mad. To my surprise, I found it more enjoyable than Bingo.  The characters are better drawn and I for one was drawn in emotionally as well as intellectually.  As to whether it is more accurate than Bingo, I have no idea.  All I know about John Clare is that he wrote pastoral verse and died in an asylum.

The third play is The Woman, the one I knew nothing about, the one I bought the collection for.  I hated it.  It is based on Greek legends of the Fall of Troy, which is something I have often toyed with doing myself and which I am always fascinated with.  It is an attempt at epic theatre.  Again, something that appeals to me.  And I say again, I hated it.  It has the unforgivable flaws of boring one dimensional characters who arguing absurdly over something of no consequence whatsoever, a votive statue of a female deity.  Did I mention I hated it?

On the other hand, the final playlet, Stone, which is something I normally avoid, I thoroughly enjoyed.  It is another of Bond's pseudo Brechtian works, in this case a parable for the theatre, but redeemed by not one but two charismatic characters, the Tramp and the Girl.

The book is padded out, unnecessarily, with various essays, stories and poems.  These add nothing and in my opinion are best avoided.

The Late Mr Shakespeare - Robert Nye

Nye (1939-2016) was one of those poets who, like Ted Hughes and Peter Redgrove, fed their imagination with the deep dark mythos of the British Isles, often as channelled through Robert Graves's concept of the White Goddess.

Like Hughes, Nye was also fascinated with Shakespeare. Hughes crammed all his Shakespearean considerations into the vast and dense Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Nye found what I suspect was a much more lucrative outlet in rumbustious fiction. His career-changing hit was Falstaff (1976); he also wrote Mrs Shakespeare and, late on in his career this, which we can consider to be his final word on the subject.

The novel purports to be a life of the poet compiled, fifty years after Shakespeare's death, by the octogenarian Pickleherring (real name Robert Reynolds), the bastard son of a bishop and a bawd, discovered as a boy in Oxford by the great man himself and enlisted to play the female roles in his greatest plays.

Some seventy years later, Pickleherring subsists in the attic of Pompey Bum's whorehouse on the South Bank of London, sucking pickled mulberries and spying through his peephole on the girl in the room below. He clings to life purely in order to finish his life of Shakespeare, the researches for which he keeps in a hundred boxes. His life is, as it always has been, inseparably bound up with his subject, so we ricochet around the decades with little seeming order. Pickleherring has lived long enough to know all the barmy theories that have sprung up since Shakespeare's death. He has visited Stratford many times and been on terms, of a sort, with the great man's widow and daughters, though he did rather disgrace himself at the bard's funeral, when he dressed up in Ann Hathaway's clothes and became intolerably aroused.

They are all here, discussed in detail. Mr W H, the rival poet, the various Dark Ladies. Nye flaunts his scholarly researches through Pickleherring's scandalmongering pen. And great fun they are - Lucy Negro, 'Rizley'. The description of Christopher Marlowe and his wretched murder is profoundly moving. John Florio, the source of so many Shakespearean plots, springs from the shadows of centuries and the notion that John Shakespeare was his son's inspiration for Falstaff is resoundingly made. What the fat butcher may or may not have got up to nine months before Will's birth scarcely bears thinking about - nor indeed what Mary Arden might have done to the boy in infancy.

By having in effect two settings - the Elizabethan Golden Age and the early years of the Restoration when the censorious hand of puritanism still weights heavily - allows a play of stark contrasts: licentious pleasure versus bluestocking constraint. Nye makes the absolute most of both. His romps are Rabelaisian, the darkness of the 1660s sometimes very bleak indeed (for example, what are we to make of the actions and fate of Pickleherring's late wife, Jane?).

The Late Mr Shakespeare is a book of enormous richness. I loved it because I am a scholar of such matters. Four degrees in drama - you can't avoid Shakespeare no matter how hard you try. Importantly, though, I loved it because of its style, the characters, the brilliant way he establishes the famous gentleness of Will whilst at the same time revealing nothing of what really goes on in his head, because Nye is clearly of the opinion that genius is unfathomable.

Essential reading and great entertainment. Nye is now very much on my reading list.