Worlds Elsewhere (4 page)

I sat there in the reading room, working methodically through references and articles, returning every so often to the Keeling manuscript: a single sheet of leathery paper, the colour of silt. It looked unbearably fragile, like a Roman or Etruscan object entombed for thousands of years and only recently prised from the loam. Trying to remember the palaeography lessons I had been forced to do as a postgraduate student, I peered closely at the page, willing it to turn up something new. The tight-knit Jacobean secretary script was cussed and dense, the paper pocked with a shrapnel of holes. I could pick out fragments – ‘the Consent sett sayle from Tilbury', ‘being bound for London' – but little overall narrative. The text cascaded down and down, before being enveloped by a long, juddering tear. The final letters were identifiable only by their summits, a few scribbled minims and curves in brownish ink. The rest disappeared into oblivion, as if beneath the waves.

It seemed revealing, I thought as I left the library: whether as nineteenth-century colonialists or twenty-first-century postmoderns, we were keen to find Shakespeare everywhere, even places that bore no trace. It was a useful cautionary tale, one a pilgrim would do well to bear in mind. In any case, the Foreign Office advice on visiting Sierra Leone was none too encouraging because of the bitter aftermath of the long civil war. Whatever the realities of the visit made by the
Dragon,
a visit of my own would have to wait.

Still, it didn't dent my enthusiasm. I'd always been faintly distrustful of travel for its own sake: now, having found a reason to slip away, I could barely wait to be gone. My flights were booked; my diary cleared. I made my excuses to friends and family and put my London life on hold. I was surprised to realise how desperate I'd been for my horizons to be expanded. With the itchy skittishness of all travellers about to embark – somewhere between brittle excitement and plain terror – I suddenly wanted to be on my way.

In the months leading up to 23 April 1864, the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, plans in Great Britain are – as is traditional on such occasions – in almost total disarray.

In Stratford-upon-Avon, a Tercentenary Committee is industriously attempting to make the Warwickshire town where Shakespeare was born and bred the focus of worldwide celebrations. Led by the local brewing magnate Edward Fordham Flower, the committee declares that ‘the eyes of every lover of the Poet will … be turned mentally to Stratford-upon-Avon … beyond all question the locality in which the auspicious day should be specially observed'. A draft programme centres on a week-long extravaganza of public events; money will go to two worthy causes. One is King Edward VI school, usually assumed to be Shakespeare's alma mater. The other is a project to erect an ‘enduring monument' to the poet in the town.

Unfortunately, Stratford – and its monument – have competition. Down in London, a journalist called W. Hepworth Dixon has spotted an opportunity for that enterprise most beloved of newspaper editors: a moral campaign. It is obvious to anyone who cares to look that a one-horse Midlands town, for all that it may have spawned Shakespeare, is unable to do justice to his supernal genius. It should surely be in the nation's capital – the great world city where this world-beating dramatist forged his career – that the National Poet be celebrated on the tercentenary of his birth.

Only one solution: another committee. Dixon publishes a call to arms in the magazine he edits, the
Athenaeum,
announcing the formation of a National Shakespeare Committee to marshal the festivities. ‘All parties would consent to a statue of Shakespeare being the first thing
secured,' Dixon writes – this rival statue to be raised, naturally, in London. ‘We do not think,' Dixon adds airily, ‘that there would be any great difficulty in either amalgamating the various committees or in harmonising the several projects.'

There are in fact a great many difficulties, and harmony is the last thought on anyone's mind. Determined not to lose face, the Stratford committee announces an impressive line-up including ‘Dramatic Readings and Representations,—a déjeûner—A Grand Miscellaneous Concert,—An Oratorio,—Excursions to various places in the neighbourhood in connexion with the Poet's life and history,—A Banquet and Grand Fancy Ball'. In retaliation, Dixon recruits an expeditionary force of dukes, earls and viscounts. Stratford insists that it has numerous backers of its own, and anyway – the town of Shakespeare's birth and death currently lacking a theatre big enough to perform his plays – it will be erecting a tercentenary pavilion by the banks of the Avon seating 5,000 spectators, an engineering marvel of the age.

The arms race escalates. Dixon makes it known that he is masterminding a Shakespeare season across the West End. Flower instructs agents to scout for London actors who will decamp to Stratford.

The press is gorged with material. The mocking verbs ‘to tercentenerate' and ‘tercentenerise' become current. Every scintilla of gossip is reported with glee. Dixon suffers a public-relations catastrophe when he snubs the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, who makes the insult incurable by dying. Flower falters when fundraising efforts fail to keep pace with mounting expenses (the pavilion will end up costing £4,500, over four times the projected amount – perhaps £400,000 in today's money).

In January 1864, a coup is mounted to topple Dixon, but he fights back. In the recriminations that follow,
The Times
wearily announces that ‘our sympathy, in so far as we have any sympathy with the movement, goes to Stratford'.

By then, however, Stratford is at crisis point. With quite remarkable cack-handedness, Flower's agents have managed to promise the highpoint of the festival, a commemorative production of
Hamlet,
to two actors simultaneously – Samuel Phelps, the most esteemed English thespian of the age, and the dashing Frenchman Charles Fechter. No one appears to have noticed they are deadliest rivals. Grievously affronted, Phelps pulls out. Fechter dithers, then, sensing that a patriotic British
public is not on his side, turns tail. In late March, with just a month to go, it looks as though Stratford will have no Shakespearian drama to put inside its luxuriously appointed Shakespearian pavilion.

In everyone's minds is one of the most mortifying episodes in British literary history. Seventeen years earlier, in 1847, Shakespeare's birthplace on Henley Street was on the point – it was reported – of being sold to the American showman P. T. Barnum and shipped brick by brick to New York. Only after a last-minute campaign led by Charles Dickens and the actor William Charles Macready was national pride salved and the Birthplace saved.

With April 1864 just weeks away, history looks set for a farcical repeat.
Punch
publishes a ‘tercentenary number' poking sarcastic fun at everything from the
Athenaeum
's priapic Bardolatry to the saga of the rival memorials. As the big day approaches, an editorial in a London magazine plunges in the knife. ‘[Shakespeare] has been commentated, expurgated, purified, nullified, annotated, edited, improved, disproved, approved … illustrated, painted, drawn and quartered' out of existence, it argues. Why should anyone bother to tercentenarise him too?

When Saturday 23 April finally dawned on the English Midlands, things were not as calamitous as many had feared. The one thing the Stratford Tercentenary Committee had not been responsible for, the weather, turned out beautifully. Crowds came in their thousands, attracted by free fireworks and an exhibition boasting a remarkable twenty-eight different portraits of Shakespeare. Even the pavilion predicament was resolved: at the last minute (and even more expense) performances of
Twelfth Night
and
Romeo and Juliet
were procured from the West End. The grand opening banquet – each dish themed after a play – was accounted a success.

Still, a bitter taste lingered, not least when an anonymous handbill appeared on Stratford's streets pouring scorn on Flower's efforts. Headlined
SHAKESPEARE, THE POET OF THE PEOPLE,
it criticised the ‘profitless swells' clogging up the town and called for a festival less dismissive of Stratford's working-class inhabitants. When the journalist Andrew Halliday paid a visit for Dickens's magazine
All the Year Round,
he, too, scoffed at what he found, accounting the fireworks ‘per se, not so very bad', but regretting the fact that the Birthplace (‘a
general tea-garden aspect') was guarded by ‘two huge Warwickshire policemen in full uniform, whose presence was suggestive of a murder, or a robbery'.

Other British cities did the National Poet proud. Liverpool mounted a ball for 1,400 dressed in Shakespearian costume. Unimpressed by the fetish for statues and likenesses, Birmingham's Shakespeare Club outclassed its Midlands neighbour by laying the foundations for a monument much more fitting: a Shakespeare Library ‘open freely to all Shakespeare students, from wherever they may come'. (It is still very much going, having reopened inside the new Library of Birmingham in September 2013.)

In London, however, the big day went wrong almost from the off. Dixon's committee produced a so-called official programme, but it was pointed out that nearly everything in it – from revivals of
The Merchant of Venice
at Sadler's Wells to
Henry VI Part II
at the Surrey Theatre in Lambeth – had been organised by other people. More confusion was sown when the Crystal Palace, the vast exhibition space in south London, announced it would hold its own tercentenary celebrations, featuring Shakespeare himself (the actor Arthur Young with bald wig and heavy make-up) rising from the dead from a replica of the Birthplace.

But the nadir came on Primrose Hill in north London, where yet another subcommittee, the Working Men's Shakespeare Committee – hurriedly formed to ensure something actually happened – had arranged to plant an oak sapling in Shakespeare's memory on the anniversary day itself. The planting went to plan, but was swiftly overtaken by a left-wing protest in support of General Garibaldi, then making headlines in Britain. When crowds began to drift on to the hill from the working-class neighbourhood of Chalk Farm, the authorities panicked. Only police intervention prevented a riot.

In a scathing account,
The Times
branded Dixon's event ‘ridiculous' and ‘pathetic'. ‘Notwithstanding this 300th anniversary,' it concluded frostily, ‘Shakespeare is not a whit more admired this year than he was last year, or will be next year.' There wasn't even a Shakespeare monument to show for it.

One afternoon, I spent an agreeable few hours in the archives of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford, sifting through the
wreckage: newspapers, architectural plans, photographs, printed post-mortems.

The thing that caught me had not often been remarked upon by theatre historians: the tercentenary was an international incident. Britain's grief was all the more humiliating because it was by no means private. In 1864, the world was watching, in fact eager to join in.

In France, Victor Hugo (having turned down an invitation to visit London by the hapless W. Hepworth Dixon), published a sprawling encomium of the poet. Originally intended as an introduction to his son François-Victor's translation of the complete works, it grew into a 300-page meditation on the nature of literary genius. Hugo's ‘Comité Shakespeare', formed with George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, Hector Berlioz and nearly every leading writer of the day, achieved a
succès de scandale
when Baudelaire denounced it in
Le Figaro.

In Prague, meanwhile, the leading lights of Czech culture mounted a celebration that culminated in a performance of Berlioz's choral symphony
Roméo et Juliette
and a pageant of Shakespearian characters two hundred strong, to music specially composed by Bedřich Smetana. Ottawa went in for speechifying and an address. Even the Americans, despite being in the midst of a savage Civil War, put on a decent show: Boston held a ceremony, and after a spirited fundraising effort New York City got what London and Stratford so craved (and would not each get for many years) – a public statue of Shakespeare, the cornerstone of which was laid in Central Park in 1864.

Yet, in the archives that day, I was caught by the prominence of another nation entirely. The
Morning Advertiser
led its report from Stratford with the arrival at the birthday banquet of a ‘special deputation from Frankfurt, to present an address on behalf of Germany'. The renowned philologist Professor Max Müller began by stating that ‘when honour was to be done to the memory of Shakespeare, Germany could not be absent', and continued in even more rapturous vein:

‘[We] will always have in Shakespeare a common teacher,' Müller added, ‘a common benefactor, a common friend.'

Müller's compatriot Professor Leitner picked up the baton, affirming the living influence of Shakespeare on German literature. Interestingly, he went further: ‘After a century of revolutions in which [Shakespeare's works] were almost forgotten in his own country,' he continued, they ‘restored to the mother's strand of Germania old Teutonic strength … finish[ing] their conquest by creating that new manhood which forced its way through storms and oppression into light.'

Despite the strangulations of his English, Leitner's message was unambiguous. This was a reminder to his Stratford audience that for all the decades – some would say centuries – Shakespeare had been neglected in Britain, in Germany his influence had only intensified. Speaking in response, the Earl of Carlisle acknowledged that ‘[Germany's] boast is that she reveres, understands and fathers [Shakespeare] even more throughly than ourselves'.