Berlioz by David Cairns Book Review by David Coward

27 June 2016

On Fri 10 June, the British Library welcomed a host of expert speakers to discuss the global agreement of our 'national' poet. And it turns out Shakespeare is the poet of many nations. Information technology would be impossible to practise justice to the richness of the presentations in a blog post, yet all of our panels shared the fundamental idea that Shakespeare'due south writing is at the heart of every culture. Adaptations and translations are not so much secondary to the original just offer a radically different entry into, and a potentially much more direct admission to, a Shakespeare play that will e'er signify something detail to dissimilar nations in different social and temporal contexts.

Prof. Jerzy Limon (photo below) opened proceedings with a view into the establishment of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre, designed by Renato Rizzi, at once a huge black modernist edifice in stark contrast to the red brick Northern European architecture (its 90 tonne retractable roof opens fully in 3 minutes), and a gothic castle-like structure, alluding to the city's mediaeval Bazylika Mariacka.  We saw videos of the theatre's opening ceremony and of varied productions, showing how the space can be adjusted to both traditional Elizabethan stage pattern and experimental advanced interpretations.

Stuart Gillespie and Graham Holderness offered us insights into the sources and settings of Shakespeare'due south plays. Dr Gillespie explained how French and Italian were the languages of culture and how European (mainly Italian) sources – epics, essays (Montaigne's predominantly), romances and novellas – were in the atmosphere around Shakespeare's time and were inevitably absorbed and adapted in his works. Professor Holderness spoke of the 'reciprocal relationship' between Shakespeare and Venice and how the playwright had already created much of the myth around the metropolis earlier it was (re-)created in 19th and 20th century literature.

The British Library's Julian Harrison gave united states a glimpse of the 'Our Shakespeare' exhibition currently at the Library of Birmingham, dwelling to the second largest Shakespeare collection in the world. The collection was resurrected afterwards a fire destroyed the old library building in 1879 and the collection was soon expanded thank you to donations from effectually the globe. Julian highlighted the beautifully produced photo anthology of High german Shakespeare scholars (1878), the photo album donated by Laurence Olivier, and a Russian edition of Romeo and Juliet presented by a Soviet delegation at the summit of the Cold War. Julian also managed to testify the importance of Warwickshire to the bard, only before the study twenty-four hours moved to more tropical climes.

Philip Crispin opened the afternoon'due south proceedings with a rousing presentation on Une tempête ('A Tempest'). In this 'adaptation for a black theatre', Aimé Césaire, i of the founders of négritude, recasts Ariel every bit a mulatto slave and Caliban as an articulate black slave in revolt, reflecting the racial politics of his native Martinique. Michael Walling, Artistic Managing director of intercultural, multimedia theatre company Edge Crossings, presented an insider perspective of staging Shakespeare in India, and translating and staging Dev Virahsawmy'due south Toufann, a Mauritian adaptation of The Tempest, in London. The linguistic choices fabricated past both author and translator in the example of Toufann were fascinating: the play is written in Mauritian creole, but the title is in Hindi – Prospero is from the dominant Indian diaspora customs in Republic of mauritius, and seeks to impose this new give-and-take into the play. Philip and Michael showed how these two postcolonial adaptations of The Storm epitomise translation as creative interpretation.

Charles  Forsdick introducing Philip Crispin and Michael Walling (Photo by Ben  Schofield)

From considering simply iii performances, Paul Prescott encouraged united states of america to look at hundreds in his cyclone road trip presentation across the Usa. The phenomenon of the Shakespeare festival was evidently to come across in the sheer spread and eclectic formats of these festivals. The bard'south work is not simply made for the World Theatre simply is at home anywhere and mayhap more at home in the small and distant communities of the American Due west. The 24-hour interval's underlying theme once again: Shakespeare is attainable universally. The thought was explored further by Marker Burnett, who showed how a constant industry of Shakespeare accommodation in moving-picture show across Europe and South America sees in the plays stories that utilise to a vast array of national settings, from gypsy versions of Hamlet (Aleksandar Rajkovic, Serbia, 2007) and King Lear (Romani Kris – Cigánytörvény, Bence Gyöngyössy, Republic of hungary, 1997), to a Brazilian Romeo and Juliet set up in the favelas of Rio (Maré, Nosse Historia de Amor, Lucia Murat, Brazil, 1997).

The day concluded with a circular table on the 'cultural politics of European Shakespeare'. Aleksandra Sakowska talked about the long history of interaction between Poland and Shakespeare, a presentation which touched on the starting time black actor to play Othello in Great britain, Ira Aldridge. Nicole Fayard drew our attention to Shakespeare's relevance in mod French society from the Vichy regime to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, showing how fifty-fifty in the latter situation Shakespeare managed to forcefulness his manner into public consciousness. Keith Gregor described how Shakespeare productions in Kingdom of spain still far outnumber those of the Spanish Gilded Age playwrights, and how, later on Franco'southward reign, Shakespeare began to exist appropriated by Espana's autonomous communities in overtly political advanced productions. Emily Oliver presented a view of Shakespeare effectually the fourth dimension of German reunification, particularly through the challenging production of Hamlet/Auto in 1990, directed by Heiner Müller (photo to a higher place past Ben Schofield). Hamlet could be seen building and jumping over a wall on stage in a non-so-subtle apologue of the political context. Erica Sheen chaired the discussion that followed which situated Shakespeare as the most significant figure of international cultural substitution and at the heart of every nation's self-expression. Shakespeare gives voice to political counter-currents and his work is continually adapted to inhabit culling, minority, and simply 'strange' positions.

 Final panel of the seminar. Photo by Ben Schofield

'All the world is a stage' begins Jacques'due south monologue in As You Like It, and this study 24-hour interval left no dubiousness that will e'er be true for Shakespeare's work.

This study day, organised by the European and Americas Collections section of the British Library, was supported by the AHRC 'Translating Cultures' Theme, the Shine Cultural Institute and the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library.

Pardaad Chamsaz, Collaborative Doctoral Student, British Library/University of Bristol

14 June 2016

 Visitors to the current exhibition Russia and the Arts at the National Portrait Gallery (until 26 June) may notice themselves pausing, among portraits of well-known figures such as Tolstoy, Chekhov and Tchaikovsky, before that of a less familiar author. Painted in 1871 past Vasilii Perov, it shows a man in his late forties but looking considerably older, wearing a fur-lined coat and gazing at the viewer with an expression combining weariness with compelling intensity. This is Aleksandr Ostrovsky, who died 130 years agone on 14 June 1886, and is widely credited with almost unmarried-handedly creating the Russian realist schoolhouse of drama.

 Portrait of A.N.Ostrovsky  from N. Dolgov,A. N. Ostrovskii: zhizn' i tvorchestvo 1823-1923 (Moscow, 1923) 010795.a.26.

The historic period in which he lived provided him with rich opportunities to portray the snobbery, corruption and ludicrous pretensions of the rising Moscow merchant grade and the efforts of former serfs to gain a foothold in society post-obit their emancipation in 1861 past Alexander II. His 47 plays represent a link between Gogol'southward satirical Revizor (The Government Inspector; 1836) and the dramas of Chekhov, combining skilful utilize of dialect with a diction which Turgenev praised as 'glorious, tasteful and clear'.

Born on 12 April 1823 in the Zamoskvorechye district of Moscow, Aleksandr was destined for a legal career like his father and enrolled on a law course at the University of Moscow in 1840. Yet, his literary experiments and growing passion for the theatre distracted him from his studies, and in 1843 he failed his Roman Law examinations and became a legal clerk. His experiences provided him with a wealth of fabric every bit he observed cases in which bribery and other abuses were rife, and in the late 1840s he began to publish scenes and sketches based on the life of the local merchant community. Although his readings of his works were popular, gaining him a wide following among every grade of society, he faced a perpetual struggle with the censors when he attempted to get his plays published, and it was not until 1850 that the first, Svoi liudi - sochtemsia!  ('Proceed information technology in the family!') appeared in print. Information technology was another x years earlier information technology was licensed for performance in the purple theatres, and he had no better luck with his translation of Shakespeare'due south The Taming of the Shrew(1852), condemned by the censor for its coarse language. As the decade progressed, though, he gained increasing success, with his plays being staged in the Maly and Bolshoi theatres and even winning the approval of Nicholas I.

Certain critics, however, connected to object to Ostrovsky'due south depiction of the seamy side of Moscow life, immorality and drunkenness, forehandedness and duplicity, as in Bednost' ne porok ('Poverty is no Criminal offence'; 1853). Pop culture became a major element in his plays as his Slavophile sentiments grew stronger, with elements such as carnival customs and folktales featuring prominently, and the presence of peasants clad in sheepskin coats and similar humble garb was considered a hallmark of his work.

Championship-page ofBednost' ne porok (Moscow, 1854) RB.23.b.4335.

A journey downward the Volga in 1856 as part of a team of writers gathering demographic information for naval recruitment reforms furnished him with cloth for the play for which he is possibly all-time known outside Russia, Groza ('The Storm'; 1859). Over again Ostrovsky clashed with the conscience, struggling to convince him that the tyrannical mother-in-law Kabanicha was not a portrayal of Nicholas I. The Czech composer Leoš Janáček would in 1921 bring the play to new audiences in his opera Káťa Kabanová, the proper noun of its tragic heroine whose thwarted love sends her to her death in the Volga.

Illustration by Ivan Andreevich Maliutin showing Katia Kabanova fromGroza, from V.  G. Sakhnovskii,Teatr A. Due north. Ostrovskago(Moscow, 1919) X.908/14152.

The lively folkloristic colouring of Snegurochka ('The Snow Maiden'; 1873), with incidental music by Tchaikovsky, inspired adaptations for the ballet too as Rimsky-Korsakov's opera (1880-81), and enabled the story to travel outside Russia. English translations began to appear as early equally 1898, with Constance Garnett's version of The Storm (12205.de.eight/2.), though his plays were slow to proceeds ground on the British stage despite their verve, pungency and merciless mockery of the universal vices of hypocrisy and ignorance. Educatee or amateur theatre groups, withal, were inspired to endeavour them, every bit in the case of Diary of a Scoundrel, which was not simply staged by the Cardinal School of Voice communication and Drama  in 1964 but by the Abingdon Drama Club  in November 1960, where a review in the club'south magazine noted the subtle and fierce satire of 'this Ostrovsky goulash', and 'the impassioned cry of a liberal protesting against the injustice and corruption of his own order'.

Throughout his life Ostrovsky was dismayed past the moral corruption of the regal theatres and its effect on their actors, the growing discrepancy between social and political values in Russia and the West which he observed on his travels through Europe in 1862, the stranglehold exerted by censorship on liberty of expression, and the philistinism and desire of taste of those who preferred vaudeville and operetta to serious drama, as when Tsar Alexander II paid a surprise visit to the Alexandrinka theatre in January 1872 to run into Ne vse kotu maslennitsa ('Non All Shrovetide for the Cat'), a satire about a domestic tyrant, but appeared lukewarm.

Exhausted by his struggles and fiscal cares, and by the attacks launched on his work by critics in the 1870s, he developed angina, not helped by the taxing duties which he causeless on beingness appointed repertoire director to the royal theatres in 1885 as a result of his bold plans for theatrical reform, including advocating the institution of independent theatres. Not until 1884 was he finally granted a personal pension, though a pocket-size one, which came besides tardily to save his declining health. On 14 June he died at his desk a few days after a serious asthma attack, working on his translation of Antony and Cleopatra – a fitting conclusion to a life spent in the service of the theatre.

Susan Halstead, Content Specliast (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement

13 June 2016

The Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin is often chosen 'the Shakespeare of Russia'. For Pushkin, Shakespeare represented an fine art that was in tune with the 'spirit of the age' and put the people at the eye of the concept of the earth. Pushkin admired the 'truthful' presentation of Shakespeare's characters, as although they were part of the grand scale of historical events, they were captured past the playwright as individuals.

In 1825, simply before the Decembrist uprising, Pushkin wrote the tragedy Boris Godunov 'according to the arrangement of our Father Shakespeare'. Set in Russia at the cease of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries, when the Rurik dynasty terminated with the death of Tsar Fedor Ioanovich, who inherited the throne after his father Ivan the Terrible, the play is focused on the problem of the struggle for power and responsibility for it. Being Fedor's blood brother-in-police and having de facto ruled instead of him for a number of years, Boris Godunov is 'appointed' tsar.

Icon of Tsar Boris Godunov (image from Wikimedia Commons)

In Pushkin's tragedy Boris is shown as an ambitious but competent ruler who feels remorse for allegedly giving orders to kill a child – Tsarevich Dmitrii, Fedor's younger blood brother and legal heir. In the final months of his life Boris has to deal with claims to the Russian throne made by an imposter claiming to be Dmitrii, who had apparently miraculously survived the assassination. Boris dies suddenly in the midst of political turmoil, but his son and heir Fedor II becomes a victim of this 'False Dmitrii'. The play ends with Fedor's expiry while the Faux Dmitrii is ascending the throne. The full circle of the power struggle is completed, and 'the people are silent' – the words with which Pushkin chose to cease his play.

Past dramatizing the historical power struggle Pushkin referred to the current state of play and the political situation in Russia, and it is not surprising that the play was not published until 1831 (with a print run of 2000 copies) and first performed but in 1870.

The first edition of Pushkin's Boris Godunov (St Petersburg, 1831) C.114.n.8

The British Library copy has its own fascinating history. It comes from the famous collection put together by Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929)  in the last years of his life. Nearly of Diaghilev's books were ancestral to his friend and protégé Serge Lifar, who then sold the collection at sale in 1975. The Diaghilev copy was acquired past the Library for 12,000 francs (= £ 1,333.nineteen).

Information technology is interesting to note that Diaghilev normally did not marker his books. Lifar did so inconsistently, but on this copy one can run across his stamp and a label for the exhibition "Pouchkine 1837-1937" (Paris,  Salle Pleyel, 16 March-15 April, 1937), organised past S. Lifar.

Lifar's ownesrhip marks

Before Diaghilev endemic it the book was part of a collection of 3,500 items assembled past Vladimir Nikitich Vitov, an economist and member of the Moscow Bookplate Lovers Society.

Vitov'southward bookplate and postage

His ownership postage stamp was designed by the graphic artist Vladimir Belkin (W. Bielkine) (1895-1966), who was at some point shut to the circumvolve around Serge Soudeikine (1882-1946), an creative person and set up-designer associated with the Ballets Russes and the Metropolitan Opera. Belkin left Russian federation in 1918, travelled effectually Europe, and in the late 1920s settled in kingdom of the netherlands. Some of his theatre designs for Dutch companies are now held in the Theatre Museum in Amsterdam.

To wrap up my pretty random stream of associations, I would merely say that of course i of these productions that Belkin designed in Holland was The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare. Through the history of the book we made a total circumvolve, and the tragedy of a medieval ability struggle turned into our favourite comfy and funny comedy. It is life, I promise.

Katya Rogatchevskaia, Lead Curator Due east European Collections

References/farther reading:

Due south. Lifar. Serge Diaghilev: his life, his piece of work, his legend. An intimate biography. (New York, 1940) 010790.i.76.

N. Mar, "Knizhnyi auktsion five Monte Karlo: rasskazyvaet medico iskusstvovedeniia I.South.Zil'bershtein," Literaturnaia gazeta, February 11, 1976, half-dozen.

Catherine O'Neil, With Shakespeare's Eyes: Pushkin's Creative Appropriation of Shakespeare. (Newark, Delaware, 2003) m03/27059.

The Salon anthology of Vera Sudeikin-Stravinsky, edited and translated by John East. Bowlt. (Princeton, 1995) LB.31.b.12787.

Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: A life, translated by Jane Hedley-Prôle and S.J. Leinbach. (London, 2009) YC.2010.b.205.

09 June 2016

Shakespeare's Hamlet has been filmed on numerous occasions, just surprisingly the version which many of the world's greatest Shakespearean actors consider to be the finest of all was performed non in the original English language merely in Russian. In the 1964 motion picture Gamlet, directed past Grigorii Kozintsev with a score by Dmitrii Shostakovich, the Prince of Denmark was played by Innokentii Smoktunovskii, whose business relationship of the role was acclaimed by Sir Laurence Olivier.

The translation of Hamlet used for the film was by the poet Boris Pasternak, and dated from 1940. At this time restrictions on artistic freedom led him to confine himself largely to translation, and knowing that if he were to accept any hope of seeing information technology performed in the Stalin era he would have to modify the plot, he suppressed sure tragic aspects of the play. The obvious parallels betwixt the abuse rife in Elsinore ('something is rotten in the state of Kingdom of denmark') and the every bit pernicious political and moral climate of the USSR allowed him at the same fourth dimension to indicate up the likenesses between them in a class of subtle commentary, and this appealed to Kozintsev, whose Hamlet is the antithesis of the generic heroes of socialist realism. His letters to Pasternak reveal, frequently at his own risk, the vision which he sought to present in an historic period of rigid and paralysing censorship.

Boris Pasternak in 1967. Portrait by Yuri Pimenov from Wikimedia Eatables (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike iii.0 Unported licence)

Translations of Shakespeare into Russian had fallen foul of the regime always since Nikolai Karamzin's version of Julius Caesar was banned for political reasons in 1794 and Wilhelm Küchelbecker translated Macbeth and a selection of the history plays in prison house following the Decembrist revolt of 1825. Although it was not until 1865-68 that the get-go consummate Russian translation of Shakespeare's plays appeared (11764.i.six), his works proved a powerful influence on authors throughout the 19th century from Pushkin to Turgenev, whose Hamlet and Don Quixote (1860) described the pass up of the 'Hamlets' of the 1840s into scepticism and egoism which rendered them incapable of fighting evil. A notable exception, however, was Tolstoy, whose contempt for Shakespeare led him to remark to Chekhov 'You lot know, I cannot stand Shakespeare, but your plays are even worse'.

Pasternak, though, had been inspired and fascinated by Shakespeare from the fourth dimension when he beginning began to write. His offset collection of poems Sestra moia-zhiznʹ ('My Sister Life', 1917; the BL has a 1922 edition, Ten.908/25229.) includes 'English language Lessons', in which the figures of Desdemona and Ophelia sing their lives away, while at the other farthermost of his artistic life his 'novel in prose with a supplement in verse', Doktor Zhivago (Milan, 1957; YF.2007.a.31460), concludes with a sequence of poems purportedly written by the hero. One of these, 'Hamlet', expresses the existential loneliness of the solitary effigy who pleads, like Christ, for the cup of his inexorable fate to laissez passer away from him, and concludes,

But the plan of activity is adamant,
And the end irrevocably sealed.
I am lone; all round me drowns in falsehood:
Life is not a walk across a field.

In the first issue of the annual Literaturnaia Moskva (1956; W.P.13695), Pasternak also published an essay entitled 'Translating Shakespeare' (an English translation is included in his autobiography I Think(Cambridge Mass.,1983) X.950/34754) which provides valuable insights into his working methods and perspectives on the viii plays which he translated: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, Henry IV (I and II), King Lear and Macbeth. Although he acknowledges the 'inward and outward chaos' which shocked Voltaire and Tolstoy in Shakespeare's blank verse, he suggests that his verse derives its strength from its abundant and disorderly nature. He analyses the utilize of rhythm to characterize private figures, comparison it to a musical leitmotif, whereas he claims that in Romeo and Julietmusic plays a negative part. While some of his assessments may be controversial, as when he describes Antony and Cleopatra as 'the story of a rake and a temptress', they are never glib or hackneyed. Above all, he allows the reader access to the translator's mind every bit he 'finds himself reliving the circumstances of the author' and being drawn into his secrets through experience.

Translations ofOthello,King Lear andRomeo and Juliet by Pasternak from the British Library'due south collections

Pasternak's translations in their plough inspired other artists. The composers Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Slonimskii and Rodion Shchedrin drew on them for settings of Shakespeare'due south words and incidental music for the plays, bringing Cleopatra, King Lear and Village to life in new guises. This was peculiarly plumbing fixtures as Pasternak, himself a gifted musician, compared tragedy and comedy in Shakespeare to the minor and major keys in music, and the transitions between poetry and prose to musical variations.

Though brief and epigrammatic, the essay contains letters almost Shakespeare'due south dramas which are however fresh and challenging today. Pasternak places him firmly within the European tradition as 'the father and prophet of realism', a major influence on Pushkin, Goethe and Victor Hugo, and the predecessor of Chekhov and Ibsen. He roundly rejects the hypothesis that Bacon could have written the plays, detects a Dostoevskian spirit in Macbeth, which 'might well take been called Crime and Punishment', and claims that productions of King Lear are 'always likewise noisy'. On the one mitt, he compares the milieu of Shakespeare's early on years in London with the Tverskoy district of Moscow in the mid-19th century, with its 'troikas, publicans, gipsy choirs and educated merchants who patronized the arts', appropriating him for a Russian public; on the other, he emphasizes his timeless universality, every bit 'and so neat an artist must inevitably sum up everything human in himself'.

Susan Halstead  Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement

31 May 2016

Among the videos of performances in our current exhibitionShakespeare in Ten Acts is a puppet product of Der bestrafte Brudermord ('Fratricide Punished'), a slapstick version of Village. Its origins and its relationship to Shakespeare'southward text are still matters of debate among scholars, simply it seems to accept been known and performed by travelling players in Deutschland from the early 17th century onwards.

German speakers who wanted to run into Village played in a formal theatre under Shakespeare's ain proper noun had to wait until 1773 when the Court Theatre in Vienna put on a phase version by Franz Heufeld. This was based on Christoph Martin Wieland's translation, the commencement endeavour at a major translation of Shakespeare into German, covering 22 of the plays and published between 1762 and 1766 (8 vols, 11762.c.14.). All the same, although Heufeld's Hamlet lacked the slapstick elements of Der bestrafte Brudermord, information technology still was inappreciably a faithful version of Shakespeare's play.

Wieland's translations were in fact non entirely consummate or true-blue. He made some cuts and, nigh notably, rendered the plays in prose, something that would give the young writers of the 'Sturm und Drang' generation an exaggerated idea of Shakespeare'due south 'naturalness' compared to the formal verse of classical French drama. But Heufeld took much greater liberties cutting many characters and episodes and Germanising many of the names: Horatio becomes 'Gustav' and Polonius 'Oldenholm'. The nigh surprising omission is the character of Laertes, leaving Hamlet nobody to duel with in the the concluding act. Instead, the Queen (neither Gertrude nor Claudius is named here) still drinks poisoned wine, but makes a dying confession of her own and the King'due south guilt. Village kills the King and is apparently left to become the new ruler of Kingdom of denmark.

Heufeld's abbreviated and Germanised bandage list for Hamlet, from Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark (Vienna, 1772) 1607/2063

For all its infidelities, Heufeld'south Hamlet helped to start a boom in German productions of the play. The actor and theatre director Friedrich Ludwig Schröder saw a production in Prague which inspired him to set his ain version. His translation follows Heufeld in many ways, simply he restored Laertes to the activeness, although at that place is still no duel and Village and Laertes are reconciled.

Championship-page of the showtime editon of Schroder's translation of Village (Hamburg, 1777) RB.23.a.18775. The frontispiece shows Franz Brockmann as the Prince.

More radically, Schröder also restored the gravediggers' scene, something by and large frowned upon past critics and included only reluctantly by Wieland. Notwithstanding, although the scene appears in the kickoff published edition of his translation, which is fleshed out to 6 acts in order to adapt it, the gravediggers do not appear in the cast list printed in that location, so may not accept fabricated information technology into bodily performances. Nor is the scene present in afterwards published editions of Schröder'southward translation.

The opening of Schroder's 6th human action with the gravediggers

Schröder'southward Hamlet was the sensation of the 1776 theatre flavor in Hamburg and made a star of Franz Brockmann who played the championship role (Schröder himself played the Ghost). It added huge momentum to the interest in Hamlet sparked past Heufeld'due south work. No doubt thanks to this early enthusiasm, as the High german passion for Shakespeare grew over the following decades, a detail fascination for Hamlet and identification with the Prince himself became one of its hallmarks.

The British Library holds first editions of Wieland'due south, Heufeld'due south and Schröder'south translations. However inadequate they may seem today equally renderings of the original, they played a key role in bringing Shakespeare and Hamlet to Frg, and helped to pave the manner for Wilhelm Schlegel's verse translation, offset staged in Berlin in 1799, nearly a quarter of a century after Schroder'south triumph in Hamburg.

Susan Reed, Pb Curator Germanic Collections

25 May 2016

No author'southward piece of work has been translated, performed and transformed by as many cultures across the earth equally Shakespeare's. Equally role of the programme of events accompanying the current British Library exhibition Shakespeare in Ten Acts, the British Library is holding a seminar 'All the Earth'south a stage: Shakespeare in Europe and the Americas' on Friday x June from 10.15-17.15 in the Briefing Heart.

A troupe of travelling players in 17th-century Germany. From the Album Amicorum of Franz Hartmann, MS Egerton 1222.

This study day brings together leading specialists to explore Shakespeare's global cultural presence from Europe to the Americas via the Indian Ocean. Themes include Shakespeare'south source cloth; postcolonial adaptations; operation on stage and film; and the cultural politics of European Shakespeare.

The plan for the report day is:

10.15-x.45 Registration; Tea/Coffee

10.45-10.55 Welcome: Janet Zmroczek (Head of European and Americas Collections, British Library)

x.55-xi.xl Keynote: Presentation and Interview (Chair: Aleksandra Sakowska, Worcester)
Jerzy Limon (Gdańsk), '"The actors are come up hither" - 400 years of English language theatrical presence in Gdańsk'

The Gdánsk Shakespeare Theatre

11.forty-11.45: Suspension

11.45-12.35 Console 1: European Sources and Settings (Chair: Line Cottegnies, Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Stuart Gillespie (Glasgow), 'Shakespeare's European Sources: Epics, Essays, Romances, Novellas'
Graham Holderness (Hertfordshire), 'Shakespeare and Venice'

Giovanni Battista Giraldi, De gli Hecatommithi (Mondovì, 1565), Thousand.9875-6, a drove of stories including sources ofOthello andMensurate for Measure, from our Discovering Literature Shakespeare site

12.35-xiii.00 Julian Harrison (British Library) '"Our Shakespeare" exhibition at the Library of Birmingham' (Chair: Janet Zmroczek, British Library)

13.00-14.00: Lunch.  A sandwich tiffin will exist provided.

14.00-14.50 Panel 2: Translating The Tempest: Postcolonial Adaptations (Chair: Charles Forsdick, Liverpool/AHRC)
Philip Crispin (Hull), 'Aimé Césaire'south Une tempête'
Michael Walling (Border Crossings), 'Tempest-tossed in the Indian Ocean - from Indian Tempest to Mauritian Toufann'

fourteen.l – 15.40 Console iii: Shakespeare in Performance (Chair: Ben Schofield, King'southward College London)
Paul Prescott (Warwick), 'Bard in the USA: the Shakespeare Festival Miracle in Northward America'
Mark Burnett (Queen's Academy Belfast), 'Shakespeare on Film: Europe and Latin America'

xv.twoscore-16.00 Tea/Coffee

sixteen.00-17.xv Roundtable: The Cultural Politics of European Shakespeare (Chair: Erica Sheen, York)
Short presentations followed past a roundtable give-and-take with Keith Gregor (Murcia), 'Shakespeare in postal service-Francoist Spain'; Nicole Fayard (Leicester), 'Je suis Shakespeare: The Making of Shared Identities on the French Stage'; Emily Oliver (King's Higher London), 'Shakespeare Performance and German Reunification';  Aleksandra Sakowska (Worcester), 'Shakespearean Journeys to and from Poland'

17.15- 18.00 Wine reception sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies

The report day has been organised by the European and Americas Collections department of the British Library in partnership with the AHRC 'Translating Cultures' Theme, The Smooth Cultural Establish, and the Eccles Centre for Americas Studies at the British Library.

Y'all can volume by following the link to our What'southward On pages or past contacting the British Library Box Function ( +44 (0)1937 546546; boxoffice@bl.u.k.). Total price is £25 (concessions available: see 'What's On' for full details).

06 May 2016

Travelling home from a screening of the recent Kenneth Branagh /Judi Dench Winter's Talein Oxford, I overheard a conversation between two other passengers who had also attended it. 'Were there actually bears in Bohemia?' one of them was earnestly request her neighbour, referring to i of Shakespeare'south nigh famous phase directions as Antigonus meets his fate: 'Exit, pursued past a bear'. We could, of course, take debated this and ended that information technology was indeed entirely possible that Antigonus might have encountered such a creature in the territory which nosotros now know as Bohemia, merely that would have missed the point. Equally shortly equally Antigonus addresses the Mariner who has brought him to this desolate spot to abandon the baby Perdita on his rex's instructions, information technology is articulate that we take been transported beyond the realms not just of Leontes' Sicilia just of reality itself: 'Thou art perfect, so, our ship has touched upon / The deserts of Bohemia?'

This glaring geographical error – attributing a ocean-shore to the landlocked territory of Bohemia – has often been cited every bit an case of Shakespeare's ignorance of Fundamental European topography, and provided Derek Sayer with the title for his study of the Czech lands, The Coasts of Bohemia: a Czech history (1998; YC.2000.a.2603). Attempts have even been made to suggest that 'Sicilia' is a mistaken substitute for 'Silesia' – though this only compounds the mystery of why Antigonus would need to travel past ocean to another expanse with no coastline.

Instead, we might practice meliorate to consider the growth of Shakespeare's reputation in the real Bohemia and the contribution which he fabricated to the development of theatre inside Czech civilization, from the earliest translations and imitations to the growth of the Prague Shakespeare Company and Summer Shakespeare Festival.

Fittingly, The Wintertime'south Tale was performed as part of the entertainments surrounding the nuptials of James I'southward daughter Elizabeth to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, in 1613. Six years later, life would imitate art as the immature princess did in reality go Queen of Bohemia when her husband ascended its throne. Even so, the championship of the play was tragically applicable to their situation, every bit the reign of the 'Winter King' and his espoused lasted simply a few cursory months before they went into exile. These events raised awareness of Bohemia and its identify in European politics with the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War, and it is possible that plays past Shakespeare were performed past the members of an English company which visited Bohemia in 1617 and over again in 1619-20, though concrete evidence that Shakespeare'southward works were known there cannot be found before the later years of the century.

A Czech travelling theatre of the kind that took Shakespeare to audiences around the country until the late 19th century. Picture show by  by Adolf Kaspar, reproduced in Miroslac Kačer & Mojmír OtrubaJosef Kajetan Tyl (Prague, 1959) 10601.y.6.

All the same, in the course of the 18th century the permanent stage theatre gradually arrived in Prague, with the opening of the V Kotcích theatre in 1738 and the Estates Theatre  (Stavovské divadlo) in 1783. Performances at that place were usually in German or, in the case of opera, Italian, merely in 1786 the Bouda (or 'Shed'), a wooden theatre, was constructed in Wenceslas Square. Here audiences could see regular performances in Czech, including two plays published in 1786 by Karel Hynek Thám – adaptations of Schiller's Dice Räuber and Shakespeare's Macbeth, followed in 1791-92 by Hamlet and King Lear.

Josef Kajetan Tyl, who translated and performed in Shakespeare plays in the 19th century. Portrait from Voytěch Kristián Blahnik J. K. Tyla had z raze (Prague, 1950). 10794.c.37.

The bad luck traditionally associated with the 'Scottish play' did non appear to affect the Bouda – if one discounts the fact that the theatre was knocked down after but three years – or halt the growing enthusiasm for Shakespearean drama. The poet Karel Hynek Mácha was an enthusiastic amateur actor and joined the dramatic order founded by Josef Kajetan Tyl which performed at the Cajetan theatre in Malá Strana (1834-37), including plays past Shakespeare in its repertoire. Other major literary figures of the 19th century were also profoundly influenced past Shakespeare. Josef Jiří Kolár (1812-96) translated a number of Shakespeare'southward plays (Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice; 11762.bbb.25), while Jan Neruda (1834-91) drew on his writings as a rich source of quotations and references to support his own opinions. Like other members of the 'May generation' (Májovci) he prized the optimism and vigour which he saw in Shakespeare's writings, and frequently reviews performances of his plays in his capacity as a drama critic. Although he did not learn English until much later, he was already reading translations of Shakespeare every bit a schoolboy in 1851, when merely four published examples in Czech existed (Macbeth, The Comedy of Errors, Othello  and Romeo and Juliet). As a journalist, he used Shakespearean phrases to upbraid the Old Czech members of the National Assembly whom he felt were betraying the country's interests by their lassitude and torpor.

Title-page of Josef Jiří Kolár's translation of The Merchant of Venice (Prague, 1883) 11762.aa.half-dozen.

The timeless relevance of Shakespeare's works provided an invaluable resource in times of political and ideological repression, allowing writers to use his plots and characters as a ways of commenting on contemporary situations. Vladimír Holan (1905-80), unable to publish his poetry in print, reflected in Noc s Hamletem ('A Nighttime with Hamlet', 1964; X.908/5000) on the paradoxes and uncertainties of human and political being in a work which would go the most translated poem in Czech. Similarly Václav Havel (who launched the Summer Shakespeare Festival at Prague Castle in 1990) returned to play-writing after many years when his energies had been claimed by his political duties with Odcházení ('Leaving', 2007; YF.2008.a.17785), in which he acknowledged the influence of King Lear in his portrayal of ex-chancellor Vilém Rieger's reactions to the crisis which follows his relinquishment of political power.

Shakespeare's 'Bohemia' may not be on any map, just in a broader sense it does not have a sea-coast considering it is also without boundaries and frontiers. It is a single part of a limitless globe which claims as its citizens all those who prize the power of words to inspire, to portray the human predicament and to join people of every linguistic communication and nation.

Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Enquiry Engagement

04 May 2016

Karl Marx's magnum opus Das Kapital (Hamburg, 1872; C.120.b.1.) may have a reputation as an exceedingly dry and difficult volume (causing William Morris to suffer acute 'agonies of confusion of the encephalon' in his reading of the great critique of political economy), but the toil is lightened by his frequent and ofttimes comic allusions to classical and European literature, from Aeschylus to Cervantes and Goethe.

His favourite though was always Shakespeare. Eleanor Marx, Karl'south girl, described Shakespeare'southward works as the Bible of the household, 'seldom out of our hands and mouths', and the German socialist biographer of Marx Franz Mehring pictured the whole family unit as practising 'what amounted practically to a Shakespearian cult'. Marx reportedly read Shakespeare every 24-hour interval, and the family would entertain themselves on the walk dorsum from their regular Sunday picnics on Hampstead Heath by dramatically reciting extracts from Shakespeare's plays.

Marx'southward friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, co-author of the famous Communist Manifesto (London, 1848; C.194.b.289), displayed a similarly fierce passion for the bard in a letter of the alphabet to Marx, with characteristic invective, later the German dramatist Roderich Benedix  criticized Shakespeare's overwhelming popularity:

That scamp Roderich Benedix has left a bad odour behind in the shape of a thick tome against 'Shakespearomania.' He proved in it to a nicety that Shakespeare tin can't concur a candle to our slap-up poets, not even to those of modern times. Shakespeare is presumably to exist hurled down from his pedestal just in order that fatty Benedix is hoisted on to it…

Marx and Benedix: United by the beard, divided by the bard. (Images from Wikimedia Commons)

Much has been written of Marx's use of the 'old mole' from Hamlet as a metaphor for revolution in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (for an interesting word of this theme see the article by Peter Stallybrass cited below), merely also noteworthy is Marx'south repeated apply of a passage from Timon of Athens which, he says, shows how 'Shakespeare excellently depicts the existent nature of money':

Gilded? Xanthous, glittering, precious gilded?
No, Gods, I am no idle votarist! ...
Thus much of this volition make black white, foul fair,
Incorrect right, base of operations noble, old young, coward valiant.
... Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Volition knit and break religions, bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them championship, knee and approbation
With senators on the demote: This is it
That makes the wappen'd widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-firm and ulcerous sores
Would bandage the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day once more. Come, damned globe,
Thou mutual whore of mankind, that put'st odds
Amongst the rout of nations.

1829 watercolour by Johann Heinrich Ramberg depicting Timon 'laying aside the gold'. (Image from Wikimedia Commons, original at the Folger Shakespeare Library).

Many literary critics have written interpretations of Shakespeare from a Marxist perspective, and several prominent commentators on Shakespeare (like George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht) drew on Marxian ideas in their understanding of his trunk of work. The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, unusually steeped in European literary civilisation for a Bolshevik, sought to explicate what was so interesting nearly Shakespeare to Marxists:

In the tragedies of Shakespeare, which would be entirely unthinkable without the Reformation, the fate of the ancients and the passions of the mediaeval Christians are crowded out by individual human passions, such as love, jealousy, revengeful greediness, and spiritual dissension. Simply in every one of Shakespeare'due south dramas, the individual passion is carried to such a high degree of tension that it outgrows the private, becomes super-personal, and is transformed into a fate of a certain kind. The jealousy of Othello, the appetite of Macbeth, the greed of Shylock, the love of Romeo and Juliet, the arrogance of Coriolanus, the spiritual wavering of Hamlet, are all of this kind…

For Trotsky, Shakespeare represents the birth of modern literature by placing the individual man, his own personal desires and emotions, in the centre of the narrative, symbolizing the equally progressive and destructive aspirations for personal emancipation characterizing the bourgeois revolt against feudalism. After Shakespeare, he writes, 'we shall no longer accept a tragedy in which God gives orders and human submits. Moreover, there will exist no one to write such a tragedy.'

Mike Carey, CDA Student

References

Julius Roderich Benedix, Dice Shakespearomanie (Stuttgart, 1873) 11766.g.14.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (London, 1970). X.519/4753.

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, On Literature and Art (Moscow, 1976). Ten.809/42007.

Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (London, 1936). 010709.e.52.

Peter Stallybrass, '"Well Grubbed, Old Mole": Marx, Hamlet, and the (United nations)Fixing of Representation', Cultural Studies 12, i (1998), 3-xiv. ZC.9.a.1419

Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York, 1925). 011840.aa.17.

eighteen April 2016

During the early years of the 19th century Shakespeare was largely known in in France through the immensely successful versions of some of his plays by Jean François Ducis (1733-1816), which began with Hamlet in 1769 , followed by Romeo and Juliet (1772), Rex Lear (1783), Macbeth (1784), and Othello (1792). Ducis, astonishingly, knew no English language and had to rely on translations of Pierre Letourneur (1736-1788) and Pierre de la Place (1707-1793). They were all heavily cut, and their plots adapted to contemporary French tastes and sensibilities. Ducis' version of Hamlet,  for example, omitted the scenes with the ghost and the gravediggers. Their popularity is attested past the many editions published during Ducis' long life, either singly or in nerveless editions of his works. They remained in repertory at the Théâtre français until the mid-1850s.

The opening – very different from Shakespeare's original! – of Ducis' Village, tragédie imitée de l'anglais... (Paris, 1770) C.117.b.72.

By then other translations of Shakespeare plays, besides taking liberties with the original plots, had appeared. They included those of Alfred de Vigny whose Le More de Venise, a verse translation of Othello, was performed during the 1829-30 season (De Vigny also translated The Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet), and Alexandre Dumas and Paul Meurice's version of Hamlet, first performed in 1846. François-Victor Hugo's translations of the consummate works of Shakespeare were published betwixt 1859 and 1866 (11765.f.).

Parisian audiences were too familiar with Rossini's Otello, an opera with a libretto based on Ducis' accommodation; like many operas at the time, it as well had an alternative happy catastrophe! Premiered in Naples in 1816, it quickly became one of Rossini's most popular works, until it was near eclipsed by Verdi's Otello in 1887. It was offset performed to cracking acclaim in Paris on 5 June 1821 at the Théâtre Italien, with Manuel García equally Otello and Giuditta Pasta as Desdemona.

Title-page of an early on song score of Rossini'due south Otello, ossia l'Africano di Venezia (Mainz, 1820) Hirsch Iv.1265.

But information technology was Maria Malibran, García's daughter, who became the slap-up Desdemona of the Romantic era. Her performances of the melancholy Willow Song (sung by Desdemona shortly before Othello kills her), accompanying herself on the harp, became legendary. Afterwards triumphing equally Desdemona, in 1831 Malibran too started to sing the role of Otello, sometimes alternating betwixt the 2 roles. Alfred de Musset celebrated Malibran in various poems, particularly in Le Saule and A la Malibran, the long verse form he wrote a few days after her tragically early on expiry in 1836, at the age of 28.

Maria Malibran every bit Desdemona in Rossini'southward Otello. Portrait by Henri Decaisne (ca 1831) Paris, Musée Carnavalet. (Paradigm from Wikimedia Commons)

In 1822, a few months subsequently the triumph of Rossini's Otello in Paris, there was a outset attempt by an English company, led by Samson Penley, to perform Shakespeare'due south plays in English to a French audition. After a disastrous performance of Othello in the Théâtre de la Porte Saint Martin which concluded up in fighting, the company had to move to a smaller hall, where they performed Village, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard 2 before an audience of subscribers.

This débâcle prompted Stendhal to write Racine et Shakspeare [sic] two pamphlets published in 1823 and 1825 (1343.m.17) that questioned the precepts of French classical theatre, specially the unities of time and identify, and called for a theatre that would appeal to a gimmicky audience. Two years afterwards, Victor Hugo's preface to his play Cromwell (Paris, 1828; 11740.c.35), advocated a drama that would combine tragic and comic elements, and be complimentary of the formal rules of classical tragedy. These qualities, he felt, were to be found in the plays of Shakespeare, whose name had by then become synonymous with Romanticism.

The Théâtre de l'Odéon, Paris, ca. 1829

Like Stendhal, Hugo was prompted to write his preface by the visit of another company of English actors performing in their native tongue. In September 1827 Charles Kemble'due south company gave a serial of performances of Shakespeare plays at the Odéon theatre in Paris. After performances of Sheridan and Goldsmith, the stage was set for one of the great dates in the register of French Romanticism, a performance of Hamlet with Charles Kemble in the title role and Harriet Smithson as Ophelia. In the audience was the crême de la crême of literary and artistic Paris – Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier, Eugène Delacroix, Eugène and Achille Devéria, Louis Boulanger, and Hector Berlioz. Although the performance was in a language very few in the audition understood,  the ability of the players to cross language barriers was clearly electrifying.

The functioning was a triumph. The near popular scenes  were the play-within-the-play, Hamlet's come across with the ghost, Ophelia's madness, and Village and Horatio in the graveyard.

Hamlet,  Act 3, scene 2, the play within the play. Analogy by Eugène Devéria and Achille Boulanger from One thousand. Moreau, Souvenirs du théâtre anglais à Paris (Paris, 1827). Bachelor via  Gallica

Hector Berlioz was left thunderstruck and in his Memoirs vividly described the outcome of these performances:

…at the time I did not know a give-and-take of English … the splendour of the poesy which gives a whole new glowing dimension to his glorious works was lost on me. ... Just the power of the acting, especially that of Juliet herself, the rapid flow of the scenes, the play of expression and phonation and gesture, told me more and gave me a far richer awareness of the ideas and passions of the original than the words of my pale and garbled translation could exercise.

He also fell in dear with Harriet Smithson, and his Symphonie fantastique (1830) was inspired by his infatuation with her. They were married in 1833 merely their union proved to be unhappy. Berlioz composed his 2 great Shakespeare-inspired works much later, Roméo et Juliette in 1839, and Béatrice et Bénédict, an opéra comique, based on Much Ado About Nothing, in 1862.

Chris Michaelides, Curator Romance Collections

References

Edmond Estève, 'De Shakespeare à Musset: variations sur la "Romance du Saule"', Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 1922.  288-315.  PP.4331.abb

Peter Raby, 'Fair Ophelia': a life of Harriet Smithson Berlioz.  (Cambridge, 1982 ) X.800/34510.

Hector Berlioz, The memoirs of Hector Berlioz ... translated and edited by David Cairns (London, 1977). X.431/10397

April Fitzlyon, Maria Malibran, diva of the Romantic Historic period (London, 1987)  YC.1988.b.226

John Golder, Shakespeare for the age of reason: the primeval stage adaptations of Jean-François Ducis, 1769-1792.  (Oxford, 1992) Ac.8949.b.(295).

The British Library'southward current exhibition Shakespeare in Ten Acts is a landmark exhibition on the performances that made an icon, charting Shakespeare's abiding reinvention across the centuries and is open until Tuesday 6th September 2016. You can discover more well-nigh Shakespeare and his works on ourDiscovering Literaturewebsite.

27 February 2015

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was built-in on 28th February 1533, and by the time of his death 59 years later had enriched French literature with a new genre – the essay. Brought up by his male parent to speak Latin as his first linguistic communication, he apace lost his mastery of it when at the age of six he was despatched to the Collège de Guyenne  in Bordeaux and then that, by the fourth dimension that he left, he claimed that he knew less than when he arrived. However, throughout his life he retained a dearest and reverence for classical authors including Cicero, Plutarch and Seneca, which shaped not but his philosophy simply his chosen form of literary expression, and ultimately made him one of the nigh beloved and accessible authors to readers outside his native land.

The title-page of the outset edition of Montaigne's Essais (Paris, 1580) British Library G.2344.

Witty and aphoristic, the collection of essays, first published in 1580, comprises iii books divided into one hundred and 7 capacity on topics ranging from coaches, cruelty and cannibalism to thumbs and smells. Their discursive nature reveals many details about their writer and his milieu, drawn from his experiences every bit a Gascon landowner and official who rose to become mayor of Bordeaux, his travels through Italian republic, Germany and Switzerland, the turbulent years of the Wars of Religion, and his family life, in which we catch glimpses of his masterful female parent, his wife Françoise, and his only surviving child Léonor – a household of women from which, at times, he would retreat to the peace and solitude of his tower, fitted with curving shelves to accommodate his library, to relish the company of his cat – another female – who has achieved immortality through his observations of her at play.

Marginal picture of a man with a true cat, fatigued past Pieter van Veen in his copy of Montaigne's Essais (Paris, 1602) British Library C.28.one thousand.seven.

The Essais rapidly achieved wide popularity, and not just in France. They ran into five editions in eight years, and in 1603 an English translation appeared, the work of John Florio. Florio, born in 1533 as the son of an Italian begetter and an English female parent, had left England equally a small-scale child when the accession of Mary Tudor to the throne had sent his family unit into exile, and every bit they wandered effectually Europe he caused a knowledge of languages which equipped him to earn his living on returning to England as a teacher of French and Italian and the writer of an English-Italian dictionary (London, 1578; 627.d.36).

It was at the behest of his patroness, the Countess of Bedford, that he set about translating the Essais, assisted past a multitude of collaborators who, through the Countess'due south offices, tracked down quotations and publicized his work, earning fulsome dedications by doing then. His lively and spirited version contains colourful turns of phrase which sometimes aggrandize the original, as when, in Book 1, chapter eighteen, 'des Loups-garous, des Lutins et des chimeres' sally equally  'Larves, Hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellowes, and other such Issues-bears and Chimeraes' – a catalogue which, every bit Sarah Bakewell points out in her How to Alive: a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an respond (Bath, 2011; LT.2011.10.3266) is  'a slice of pure Midsummer Nighttime'southward Dream'.

Shakespeare did in fact know Florio, and Bakewell speculates that he may have been one of the first readers of the Essaies, possibly even in manuscript form. Scholars take taken pains to detect echoes of Montaigne in Hamlet, which was written before the published translation appeared, and oftentimes cite a passage from his concluding play, The Tempest, which, as Gonzalo evokes a vision of culture in a perfect state of nature, is strikingly close to Montaigne's account of the Tupinambá, an indigenous people from Southward America whom he encountered when a group of them visited Rouen.

Messages should non exist known; riches, poverty,
And employ of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, jump of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No utilise of metal, corn or wine, or oil;
No occupation, all men idle, all.

Montaigne remarks of the Tupinambá that they have 'no kind of traffike, no knowledge of Messages, no intelligence of numbers, no proper noun of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, just mutual, no wearing apparel only natural, no manuring of lands, no utilize of wine, corn or mettle'.

Such passages were eagerly seized upon in the controversy in the 18th and 19th centuries virtually the authorship of Shakespeare'southward plays, and in 1901 Francis P. Gervais published his Shakespeare not Bacon: some arguments from Shakespeare'south copy of Florio'due south Montaigne in the British Museum (London, 1901; 11765.i.18.). However, Edward Maunde Thompson countered with Ii pretended autographs of Shakespeare (London, 1917; 11763.i.37), which argued that non but the signature 'William Shakespere' in an edition of the Essaies in the British Museum Library (but also that in a book of Ovid in the Bodleian Library) was simulated, subjecting both to rigorous calligraphic analysis.

Alleged signature of William Shakespeare on the flyleaf of The Essayes, or Morall, Politike, and Millitarie Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne ... Now washed into English past ... John Florio. (London, 1603) C.21.due east.17

Whatever the truth of the matter may be, we can brand an educated gauge at Montaigne'due south response. An even-handed and balanced man who needed all his reserves of philosophy and Stoicism to face up the horrors of a century which saw the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre and decades of conflict springing from religious extremism, he would no dubiousness accept advocated a similar perspective on the resurgence of similar dangers in the 21st. And to those who argued about the authenticity or otherwise of these notorious signatures, he would certainly have recommended the phrase from the Greek philosopher Pyrrho which became his motto, engraved on his medallion:  'Epekhō – I suspend judgement'.

Susan Halstead Curator Czech & Slovak

saladinowithful.blogspot.com

Source: https://blogs.bl.uk/european/shakespeare/page/2/

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