Improvising Shakespeare: My Father as ''Not a Detail Man'' and New Meddling with the Sonnet by Richard Price

Vivien Leigh (as Titania) from a Midsummer Night's Dream at the Old Vic Theatre
Source http://www.bl.uk/

It’s four hundred years since Shakespeare was alive. There are celebratory commemorations across the world, not least at my workplace, the British Library. We have a whole programme of activities from our major exhibition Shakespeare: In Ten Acts to Discovering Literature: Shakespeare, an online trove of beautiful digitisations and specially-commissioned articles.

Image: From the first illustrated edition of The works of Mr. William Shakespear (1709), six volumes edited by Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718). The illustrations were designed by the French-born artist, François Boitard (1670–c.1715), and engraved by the British Elisha Kirkall. Reproduced from the British Library’s Discovering Literature: Shakespeare

My own association with Shakespeare has been unusual. Like most people, I did not grow up in a bookish household at all, or one that went to the theatre. My parents did own a multivolume encyclopedia and several guides to the British countryside, and they had about forty volumes in the curious series of abridged bestsellers, The Reader’s Digest Library of Condensed Books.

My mother had perhaps half a dozen books – a selected Shelley, Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam, a selection of Christina Rossetti’s poems, a large and beautifully illustrated guide to British butterflies, a Bible and, yes, a single volume collection of the complete Shakespeare. I think they were all gifts to my mother in the 1930s and 40s when she was in her teens and early twenties. My mother associated poetry with romantic liaisons and love: I suspect that some of these books were presents from boyfriends.

I guess it’s likely that many twentieth century households in England, and perhaps further afield, would have had Shakespeare even if they did not in fact have many other books: it would be second in some households to the Bible. This tradition is reflected, and perhaps almost enforced, in the quaint default in Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, where the celebrity is given no choice but to take scripture and the Bard to his or her ocean hideaway. Since so much of their essence, for good or for ill, would be in your head already, this feels like two wishes wasted to me.

My father had a large set of Charles Dickens and again the complete Bard. He also had a small collection of unbound acting copies of Shakespeare and these give the game away. No, my parents were not ‘literary people’ – neither had been to university, for instance - but Shakespeare was important to them both and especially to my father, who lived and breathed him.

Fire at Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. 1926.

Warwickshire County Record Office reference PH352/172/37. Photo by F.J. Spencer.

My father had a personal reason for owning not only Shakespeare’s Collected, but those individual acting editions: he had grown up in Stratford-upon-Avon. This could have affected him in one of two ways: giving him a special affection for Shakespeare or, simply because of over-familiarity and commercialisation, a sense of claustrophobia, of revulsion.

Affection was my father’s reaction. This was for an unorthodox reason:  a practical thinker and do-er he was born into Stratford’s family builders, The Price Brothers. They, he would recall, had been involved in some way in the re-building of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford in the 1930s. Details were vague, my father not being known for his powers of recollection (“I am not a detail man” was his attitude for many challenges of memory).

Fire at Memorial Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. 1926.

Warwickshire County Record Office reference PH352/172/125. Photo by Antona.

My father’s own father, who had the gloriously old-fashioned forenames of Merton Percival, had been particularly proud of the connection to Shakespeare via the family firm. Later, this at times bad-tempered man, would fall out with his brothers in the business. He left Warwickshire altogether to start his own business in Kent. Not to be deprived of literary heritage by territorial claim, Merton Percival found another source of vicarious pride in his new county. This time it was with Charles Dickens, hence the only other Collected in my childhood home: Dickens at length.

My father loved Shakespeare. As a teenager he became very involved in amateur theatre, with Shakespeare the staple, and this explains the acting copies of plays. Knowing my father’s notoriously bad memory this would, on the face of it, seem most unlikely. When I was growing up he was often tongue-tied trying to remember the names of his own children, and, stumped, sometimes added “Sandy”, the name of his mother’s dog, as a workable substitute. Yet he could quote numerous chunks of Shakespeare to his dying day and had clearly immersed himself in the language.

Perhaps too much so, too abstractly at least. He recounted how his poor memory was indeed a factor in his acting in those days – he may have memorised a lot of Shakespeare but “a lot” is not really enough for a stage performance: a minimum expectation of the audience is surely that the actor knows all of his role, rather than a pretty good percentage. Fellow actors would reasonably have such an expectation, too.

But my father – not a detail person, remember - simply couldn’t remember everything. Worse, when he did ‘run out of Shakespeare’ he wouldn’t just freeze on stage, which would have allowed a prompter to rescue matters. Instead, without the blink of an eye, he would simply improvise, continuing the theme and rhythms of the passage he had remembered, propelled, as it were, by a serviceable fantasy that Shakespeare was, more or less, speaking through him. There was also a sense of duty: a drama had been requested and a drama would be delivered; the show must go on.

His fellow actors were not as bothered with the sacrilege of this as perhaps they should have been. Rather, they were exasperated by the erasure of their cues. They waited and waited for the phrase that would trigger their response, their entrance or their exit, but it never arrived. Worse, my father, encouraged by their immobility would deliver more and more quality Price-Shakespeare. Perhaps this was, in a way, like the duet between Natalie Cole and her dead father Nat King, who, thanks to the miracle of recording technology, managed to record a ‘new improved’ version of “Unforgettable” together.

It couldn’t last. The director, presumably besieged by irate actors, quietly suggested that perhaps stage lighting would be a better channel for my father’s undoubted enthusiasm for Shakespeare, a proposal he, actually a mild and sensitive man in a way his own father was not, accepted philosophically.

Though the details are hazy, I don’t think it was this change of function that ended my father’s involvement with Shakespeare, but in a way the War itself. It was a difficult time to be a tall young man who looked as if he should be in the Forces even though he was only a teenager, at school and then technical college.

 Once, coming home on a busy bus and managing to find a seat, he was accosted by an elderly woman – wasn’t he ashamed to be a civilian, wasn’t he ashamed to be on the bus at all, nevermind taking a seat obviously better suited for someone of five and sixty like herself? The next thing he remembered he woke up in hospital – he had collapsed with what they called in those days ‘nervous exhaustion’. Clearly the incident on the bus tipped my father into breakdown, a trivial trigger and the War its real, overwhelming weight.

Anne Hathaway's cottage in Shottery, Stratford-Upon-Avon
Source http://www.shakespeare.org.uk/

My dad skipped over all this lightly enough in the retelling. Outwardly he seems to have recovered soon enough. Perhaps another Shakespeare connection helped him heal – some years after the War he proposed to my mother on Midsummer’s Day in the garden of Anne Hathaway’s cottage.

My own relationship to Shakespeare can’t but have some of that irrational, unjustified pride in somehow being - just, almost, nearly - associated with Shakespeare’s place of birth (by paternal line of builders, by maternal line of cottage garden enthusiasts). Like my father, I too, have an awe for the Bard tempered with a working irreverence, almost as if Shakespeare himself would have approved of the liberties taken with his work. The most obvious of these is my ‘translation’ of Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare the to a summer’s day” –

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date: 

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; 

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st; 

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 

- which in my hands becomes

Freehold 

A summer’s day? – you’re

lovelier... You’re… more gentle.

 

Gales shake May’s sweetheart buds,

summer holds a short-term lease –

one minute the sun is foundry hot,

the next all gold is lost.

 

The season’s fairs, too, so easily decline – bad luck reigns, 

rivers reclaim their rightful plain.

 

But your summer won’t dim, won’t flood,

you won’t lose, love, the celebration

your self-contained self, almost by itself, contains.

Death won’t claim you mooch in his twenty-four hour mall.

That boast is nearer mine –

in these eternal lines you walk right by my side.

 

So long as folk can breathe or eyes can see

so this will live, and this gives life to you and me.

The rewriting of the rhythm and imagery of that most famous sonnet seemed right for my ambitions for Rays(2009), the book of modern love poems my version of Sonnet 18 introduces.  An alternative conception of the sonnet is also part of that book: my recasting of the sonnets of the French Renaissance poet, Louise Labé, offer a more troubled, more physical, and hopefully more musical glimpse of the sonnet’s possibilities.

To meddle in this way, and to imagine new horizons for this ancient form,  is surely close to the impulse driving Philip Terry’s radical renderings in his Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as it is in the celebrated modern sonnets of Ted Berrigan, Edwin Morgan, and Bernadette Mayer.

I’d already tinkered with the sonnet in Lucky Day (2005). “The world is busy, Katie”, is dedicated via that title to my daughter Katie, who suffers from a deficiency in her chromosomes, Angelman’s Syndrome. The poem has only thirteen lines, as if, short of the usual fourteen, it mirrors the genetic lack Katie has: it still ‘sings’ though, and Katie has her own music, too.

Later, with the difficult subject matter of Small World, where families and lovers are bent out of shape, I explored increasingly jagged sonnets,  taking off from the innovation of Wilfred Owen’s remarkable double sonnet, “Dulce et Decorum Est”. The two different poems with the same title “Compartment” in Small World, one for Katie, and one for my younger daughter Ellen, are each radically stretched sonnets, the line length in Ellen’s wildly extending as the poem proceeds down the line, having to fold its expansion in, only to bring it back through an anchoring rhythm and rhyme in the basic structure (I recently discovered the Language poet Lyn Hejinian also uses this technique, which is very close to a jazz extension and variation of a particular motif).

Katie’s “Compartment” proceeds in the same way, paying out a line so that the page has to take it over two or three indentations, but it is, symbolically, more restricted, more about immediate sensation than the theme of memory in Ellen’s “Compartment”, as if it reaches a limit in the sonnet akin to the ‘compartment’ of genetic bad luck.

Small World also features a sonnet, “Storming” that is meant to be at the same time severely stripped back, with very very short lines, and yet with ‘solos’ of jagged expansion where, again, the lines are folded and folded in on themselves as they freefall down the page, (again, I think often of certain self-lacerating stabs of jazz saxophone in these pieces). It’s a poem about the fevered fits that coma patients sometimes have, an upsetting phenomenon for family at the bedside to witness (in this case, the adored patient does, though, come through).

Finally in Small World there is a “tennos” –loosely an inside-out sonnet, a form I’ve invented. Instead of pentameter for fourteen lines, the tennos inverts that, becoming a ten line, fourteen syllable poem, on the border between prose and poetry. The result, the poem “São Paulo is no city for walkers” counterpoints the potential of the breezy long line with internal short sentences, a formal commentary on the foreshortened reality of disability in contrast to the memory of touring the world as an unburdened, able-bodied traveller. It’s a reminder that maybe, as Shakespeare said, All the world is a stage, but not easily, and not for everyone. 

 #Shakespeare400

@S400events

The Carcanet Blog Sale

With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.

For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Philip Terry's Shakespeare's Sonnets and Richard Price's Rays

All books come with 10% off and and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk so to claim your extra discount, use the code BLOGBARD for Terry and BLOGRAYS for Price at the checkout (case-sensitive). Happy reading!