Brian Sewell on Shakespeare: Staging the World, British Museum

Some may not have much to do with the Bard but a collection of evocative objects and paintings still work their magic
2 October 2012

The British Museum’s contribution to the Olympic Beano of 2012 is an exhibition devoted to Shakespeare, of which the catalogue should be in every school library in the land. Indeed, every such library should have 20 copies in armour-plated bindings that will survive a century of careless handling.

Indeed, I shall go further and suggest that every student of English literature should have his own copy and that the book should never go out of print. Would that I had had it when introduced to Macbeth at 12, to the Merchant of Venice at 13, to Henry IV Parts I and II in preparation for School Certificate, and then on to Much Ado, Twelfth Night and Lear.

We had nodding acquaintance with others of Shakespeare’s plays, but never their context, and my generation read these monuments of English literature, drama and the stage in virtual isolation from English history, knowing only of the Chronicles of Holinshed — nothing of his borrowings from Ariosto, Bandello, Fiorentino, Cervantes, Montemayor or any other Italian or Spanish source — and were taught, with a nod to Beowulf and Chaucer, that he was the fons et origo of all modern English literature.

To London from Stratford-upon-Avon was Shakespeare’s only significant journey. For him there was no sitting at the feet of philosophers and theologians in the universities of the Low Countries and Paris; nor was there a Grand Tour to inform his imagination (what would he have made of the hostile grandeur of the Alps?), and what he knew of Italy from Venice to Messina, he knew by proxy from others who had travelled there, or from visitors to London, implied by the British Museum to have been an entrepôt that was at least a match for Constantinople, Venice, Seville and the Hanseatic ports of northern Europe.

He was, perhaps, further informed by maps, a not entirely new source of knowledge and mystery, but one greatly expanded in the 16th century and increasingly available, not just to the rich and educated, but to wider reaches of society. The merchants of once parochial London, through trade with the Far East and the new riches pillaged from the Americas, in Shakespeare’s day ringed the globe with their enterprise and began her conversion into a world city.

The untravelled Shakespeare, enchanted by old tales of Troy and ancient Rome, and by new of Bohemia, Sicily, Cyprus and the Caribbean, imagined the faces and places there, became their atlas and geographer, and dubbed the new theatre of which he was a housekeeper (the Elizabethan term for any owning part or all of a theatre), The Globe. “All the world’s a stage,” said the authentic voice of Shakespeare in the role of Jaques, the philosophical idler of As You Like It; he could as readily have said, “A stage is all the world,” for in his hands that is exactly what it was.

So much more can be said and demonstrated in a catalogue than in an exhibition, and this is more of a spirited and fast-paced book than a close examination of the exhibits, brilliant in its tying Shakespeare’s words less to objects than to such topics of the day as exploration, executions, the divine right of kings, the condition of Jewry, Latin verbs, shoes, ships and sealing wax. It tells of a London that is both a city of the late Renaissance, courtly, worldly, literate and cultured, and every bit as vile and cruel as Hogarth’s Gin Lane more than a century later; even without Shakespeare as its core this would be a useful introduction to English history at the beginning of the 17th century, but with him, it is exceptional.

The exhibition, on the other hand, is above all things evocative. There is nothing amiss with evocation — such gentle magic rekindles memory, conjures feelings, summons spiritual energies, prompts the mind to release things lost in deep recesses, and can be hauntingly romantic. The shadowed silences of the museum’s great round Reading Room, a sleeping beauty discarded and forgotten, embrace, suitably, this exhibition’s womb. To distant music tranquillity abeys; to Shakespeare’s significant texts too, spoken by actors whose pale ghosts loom spectral in tenebrity, and we stand in the presence of objects precious and quotidian, those rare in their day now rarer still, and let them work their magic.

And there’s the rub — we stand in awe of things, hoping for enlightenment. Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in 100 Objects has done a great mischief: since that extraordinary exercise in postmonition, sentience and feeling, anything can now stand for almost any other thing or, by degrees, even be persuaded into a philosophical abstraction — all we need is a chain of associations and the Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis (the longest surviving Etruscan text) leads us to a Berlusconi rumpy-pumpy party. This exhibition is perhaps marginally less Neil MacGregor than William Blake and his romantic notion of the world in a grain of sand, heaven in a flower, infinity in the hand and eternity in an hour, but with such pretty nonsense we are seduced by the shaman and the conjurer and are required to believe in the power of the relic and the fetish.

Many of these things are beautiful — none more so than Christoph Jamnitzer’s Moor’s Head Cup, made in Nuremberg in 1595-1600 or c.1602 (the curators seem confused), shortly before Shakespeare wrote Othello, with which the curators make a loose connection. Shakespeare cannot have seen it or anything like it; there is no reflection of it or of its kind in English art or craft; and it has nothing to do with the play. To the question we are persuaded to ask — was Othello a Moor, that is of north African mixed Berber and Arab stock, or a Blackamoor, that is sub-Saharan and black? — there is no answer. How are we expected to respond to such an object? Falsely, as in some sense connected with Othello? Or intellectually and aesthetically as an extraordinarily refined and beautiful example of late Mannerist goldsmiths’ work at the court of Rudolf II, and perhaps as an expression of sympathy and pathos in an example of the black man as a continuing subject in the history of art, here more one of the three kings than an intriguing slave? If the latter, then it is irrelevant.

The inclusion, too, of the more or less lifesize portrait of Richard II enthroned (from Westminster Abbey) may seem irrelevant, for, painted in c.1395 when he was 28, this last truly legitimate monarch of England, King at 10, deposed and disappeared at 33, belonged to late medieval times and Shakespeare, two centuries on, was a Renaissance man. It is a rare and mightily important document in the history of western European portraiture, and to some extent Tudor royal portraiture reflects it, but its relevance here is one of argument rather than iconography.

Richard was erratic and imperfect in his judgments, but he was the king. In personal appearance it is often claimed that he was handsome, “a delicate beauty in his features”, though the sane man might argue that in so lopsided a face with hooded eyes (confirmed by his tombstone effigy) this is today difficult to perceive. Within his lifetime he was accused of “obscene familiarities” with favourites — lending authority to the BBC’s recent evocation of the man as winsome, camp and queer, justification enough for usurpation by his cousin Henry IV, first of the Lancastrians, sodomy a fatal flaw. Was Shakespeare himself queer? It is a question often asked.

The really interesting thing is, of course, that the divine right of kings, for which Richard argued, was a sacramental concept and when (and if) Queen Elizabeth I claimed in 1601 “I am Richard, know ye not that?” she laid claim to his authority by descent. The legitimacy of the Tudor monarchy, however, was doubtful, and the legitimacy of the Stuart more doubtful still, and if Richard’s genuine claim brought about his hidden death — by privation in the Tower, we must suppose — the kindred arguments of Charles I in the generation after Shakespeare’s death in 1616 very publicly lost him his head.

These were intoxicating political matters in Shakespeare’s day and prompt serious enquiry into the subtexts of his history plays, for in telling the heroic and dark tales of England’s dynasties he was a philosopher as much as an historian.

I have just played the MacGregor trick and extrapolated from a medieval object a course of events and ideas that must stop with Shakespeare but which could easily be brought into the present day. This leads me to suspect that this Shakespeare exhibition is addressed not to the art historian and the amateurs so often puzzled by their jugglings, but to the plain historian, the literary bloke and those for whom the play’s the thing upon a well-trod stage.

Shakespeare: Staging the World is at the British Museum, WC1 (020 7323 8000, britishmuseum.org) until November 25. Open Sun to Thurs, 10am-5.30pm, Fri until 8.30pm. Admission £14, concs available. Catalogue £40, paperback £25.

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