Anatomy of Murder

Before I could start on my revised list for January I had one of the far too many crime novels that I read over the holiday period to finish; this one for my Wednesday morning book group.

In fact, Imogen Robertson's Anatomy of Murder is a cut above a lot of the other books I read over the Christmas period. Set in 1781, it is her second novel and like the first, Instruments of Darkness, deals with the fortunes of Mrs Harriet Westerman and Mr Gabriel Crowther, a sort of CSI team of their day. These two characters were brought together by force of circumstances and the coincidence of their locale in the first book to solve the mystery of the Earl of Sussex and his missing heir after the discovery by Harriet of a dead man bearing the Sussex family coat of arms. The second in the series finds them in London where Harriet's Royal Navy husband is hospitalised having sustained a blow to the head while pursuing the King's enemies.

The thrust of the story is to do with the uncovering of a spy-ring set on revealing the secrets of the country's forces to any foreign government that is prepared to pay. In fact one of the things that makes much of the book ring true to modern ears is the accommodation that has to be reached with villains who are apprehended because of the service they have done the British Government in the past. In the course of discovery Robertson takes us into the world of Georgian opera and the public's love affair with the castrato voice as well as introducing us to some very likeable low-life Londoners who fortunately look set fair to reappear in future volumes.

There are several reasons why I'm actually very glad to have read this book. Firstly, I am always pleased when a good first novel is followed by an even better second. No one book wonder here then. Secondly, this is a period about which I know very little and when linked with my third reason that is important because the other feature that makes this a book worth reading is the quality of the research that has gone into it. The acknowledgements make it clear that Robertson has gone to considerable trouble to make sure that her facts are correct and the accuracy of what she has to say about the one area I do know something about, the theatre of the period, suggest that her other background reading has been put to similar good use.

There is a third book due out in April, Island of Bones, and although in general I want to read less crime fiction this year, that is one that will be on my library list as soon as it becomes available.


Annie

Great Tennis Novels

I've had the most strange e-mail this afternoon asking if I would like to lead a discussion at some point during the summer on a (and I quote) good novel in which tennis plays a central part. One of our local galleries is staging an exhibition this summer on tennis in art and as a complementary activity they want to run a monthly book group centred on books that feature tennis.

Now, I have to admit that titles didn't exactly come flooding to mind. In fact the group of friends I happened to be with, several of whom belong to the same reading group as I do, racked their brains for a good hour but could only come up with Lionel Shriver's Double Fault, which had not been a universal favourite, and Stephen Fry's The Star's Tennis Balls, which we weren't sure was necessarily referring to the sort that bounce!!! There are novels like A Room with a View and The Thirty-Nine Steps where a game of tennis plays a very peripheral role and I wouldn't mind leading a discussion on either of those, but I'm not certain that they would be deemed relevant enough.

So, a plea for assistance. Are there obvious books out there that I'm missing? Are you all yelling "What about......?" Or is this something that the gallery education team has not thought through properly and an idea that is really going to be a non-starter?


Annie

Shakespeare and the King James Bible

Over the last three mornings the BBC have been broadcasting a series of programmes commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible. We are no longer supposed to refer to it as the Authorised Version as apparently officially it never was, authorised that is.

The story of how the King James Version came about is fascinating in itself but far to long and complex for a single post. However, listening to the discussions over the last few days I've been reminded of a lecture we had last term from a scholar who has been working on the text in preparation for this year's celebrations. He came to speak to us on the subject Did Shakespeare Have a Hand in the King James Bible.

Of course, there has always been speculation. When you look at the published works of the people who were responsible for the translation it is hard to understand how the beautiful language which is the hallmark of the text ever came about. Indeed, it is all the more remarkable when you remember that the work was given over to a committee. This group gets to work on these books, that group on those! When I think of some of the committees on which I've served the wonder is that they ever came up with a text at all, let alone one that has inspired artists, composers and writers ever since. And, let us not forget that Shakespeare was King James own personal playwright. He was the company writer for the King's Men and while James didn't exactly pay his wages pleasing the monarch was definitely the way to go.

But, speculation is not evidence and much as it would make a wonderful story to be able to say that the bard was involved the general thought is that it would be just that, a wonderful story. However, our speaker did say that he had got a little excited, enough to wonder perhaps if one of the translators wasn't an ardent playgoer paying tribute to his hero, when he discovered that the forty-sixth word from the beginning of Psalm 46 was shake and the forty-sixth word from the end was spear. Shakespeare, of course, was himself forty-six when the King James Bible was published.

Alas, even that much of a link was denied him when he went back to earlier translations and discovered that the words shake and spear have always been rattling around somewhere near the beginning and the end of that particular psalm. And we all know what would happen if we were to leave a monkey alone with a typewriter for long enough, don't we?

Nevertheless, the mystery of the magnificent language contained in the 1611 Bible remains and it would be nice to think that all the scholarly attention that is bound to be given to the text over the course of the year might come some way towards explaining it.


Annie

Corral de Comedias

This morning I finished reading Woza Shakespeare, the account of the South African Titus Andronicus and reached the section where Doran and Sher describe the time the company spent in Almagro in Spain. Here they are taken to see the Corral de Comedias, a courtyard theatre with timbered galleries in which productions were being staged at the same time as Shakespeare and The King's Men were Performed at The Globe. This isn't a reconstruction like our own Bankside Globe, this is the real thing.

As you can see, in design it is rather more like the indoor theatres, such as Blackfriars where Shakespeare and his company moved for winter seasons after 1608, than the polygonal Globe, but like The Globe it is open to the elements, so perhaps the more apposite comparison would be to the inn yards that preceded the purpose built theatres of the 1570s and later. And its preservation is simply stunning. Of course, given the Act of Parliament in 1648 which not only banned public performance but also made it illegal to watch plays it's not surprising that none of the London playhouses survived. Nevertheless, I can't imagine that we would have gone out of our way to preserve a theatre building as this has been; the theatre has just never been seen as that important.

There is another tantalising link to be drawn here. Almagro is in La Mancha, the home of Don Quixote. I always have to shake myself to remember that Cervantes and Shakespeare lived and wrote at the same time and that Shakespeare knew the Spaniard's great story. Robert Shelton's translation of the first part hit the St Pauls' bookstall in May 1612 and at the end of that year Shakespeare and the new young playwright, John Fletcher, presented their joint venture, Cardenio, based on one of the episodes in Cervantes book, in two performances at court. Apart from a 1727 version very much bowdlerised by Lewis Theobald, called Double Falsehood, we have no record of the play. However, there have been a couple of attempts in the past two or three years to reconstruct the original and this Spring, Greg Doran, the director of the South African Titus, is going to have another go at staging Cardenio in The Swan Theatre at Stratford.

Only time will tell how successful this will be. We have had a number of speakers at the Shakespeare Institute and at the Birthplace who have all drawn attention to just how difficult it is to decide which lines in Double Falsehood belong to Shakespeare, which to Fletcher and which to Theobald. There is also the question of the missing sub-plot. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of the extant plays from that period have a sub-plot of one sort or another but Double Falsehood does not. It rather looks as though Theobald didn't so much adapt Cardenio as fillet it. I'd like to think, though, that Doran's attempt might be successful and then perhaps the production could be taken to Almagro and staged at the Corral de Comedias, returning its characters at least to their spiritual home.




Annie

Thoughts on Macbeth

Even though today is officially a bank holiday in the UK, I really felt that the time had come to get back into my normal workaday routine. What with the snow and Christmas it has been far too long since I last did any real study or preparation for my upcoming teaching commitments. So, bearing in mind the fact that I still have three sessions to take on Titus Andronicus, I spent the morning finishing Greg Doran and Antony Sher's account of the production they staged of that play, with the Market Theatre of Johannesburg, in 1995, Woza Shakespeare.

Once they'd got the play up and running there was the opportunity to go and watch other productions being staged or rehearsed in the Johannesburg district including Umabatha, the Zulu Macbeth. Sher writes:

I'm on the edge of my seat from the word go, when a tiny figure dashes from the back of the vast, open stage, kneeling at the front, muttering and shivering, and then sneezes. She is one of the witches and the sneeze is a ritual in Zulu witchcraft...Seeing the play done in this context, in a society with a real relationship to witchcraft - like Shakespeare's society - makes me realise why ninety-nine per cent of modern British Macbeth's fail.

And, reading what Sher has to say about this production made me realise why, when the publicity handouts came last week for next season's repertoire at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, my heart fell at the announcement of yet another Macbeth. In all my years of theatre going I have only once seen a production that completely stopped me in my tracks and I have seen several that have been so awful that the only remedy was to laugh.

The worst of these was perhaps twenty or twenty-five years ago and starred an actor so famous both on stage and in Hollywood that were I to name him I could guarantee that you would all know to whom I was referring. Given just how terrible his performance was I'm not going to do that. It would have been bad enough had it just been the lead who was so appalling, but it wasn't. If the entire cast had been replaced by a pack of Daleks they could not possibly have been more wooden and disjointed, in speech and movement both. And the props! Suffice it to say that when Macduff held up Macbeth head in the final scene the entire audience collapsed in gales of laughter. It was embarrassing.

The only Macbeth I've seen that really worked was the RSC's production with Ian McKellen and Judi Dench which was originally staged in the company's small theatre, The Other Place, when it was still housed in an old hut with a corrugated iron roof. (You tried to avoid performances when it was raining and those of us who knew the town well never went on a Tuesday when the local church had bell-ringing practice!). This production has been immortalised on DVD, so you may have seen it, but you had to experience it actually in the space for which it was devised to really appreciate the intensity of the original concept. The audience formed the outer ring of concentric circles, the actors were the middle ring and performing space was at the heart of the action. Played without an interval, the evil invoked grew in that inner arena and was trapped and intensified by the people around it. It was one of the most mesmerising theatrical experiences I've ever known.

Between those two extremes I must have seen at least a dozen other productions none of which have been particularly satisfactory and so I have to say that I'm not exactly leaping up and down with excitement at the thought of yet another foray into this most difficult of plays. I notice that the publicity handout doesn't say who is going to play Macbeth. I wonder, is this because of the company's policy of emphasising the ensemble nature of their work? Or is it, perhaps, that they haven't yet succeeded in persuading any actor that he wants to take the risk?


Annie

I'm Making a List.......

I've just been listening to Howard Jacobson, the winner of what is now last year's Booker, talking with a selected BBC audience about his earlier novel, The Mighty Waltzer. When The Finkler Question won the Booker award someone told me that as I'd never read anything by Jacobson, The Mighty Waltzer was probably a better place to start and hearing him discuss the more autobiographical aspects of the book this afternoon, I can see why they might have thought that to be the case. So, my first reaction was, as always, a quick trip to the local library website to see if they had a copy that I could add to a list of requests that is already long enough to keep me in reading matter for the rest of 2011. And that was when realised that if I'm going to read more selectively this year trips to the library website have got to start to be more discriminating. As a consequence, while I didn't make a Christmas list I have just made a January reading list that I hope will ensure that I don't get stuck reading only one genre and that my reading will not be dictated by the return dates stamped in library books.

There are some books that I have to read for groups to which I belong and the first two

Gifted ~ Nikita Lalwani
Felicia's Journey ~ William Trevor

come into that category. I shall also have to make an early start on

Daniel Deronda ~ George Eliot

to be ready for the meeting in February when I'm leading the discussion on it. Because I realise that I'd bitten off rather more than I could chew expecting myself to read

Middlemarch ~ George Eliot

as well I've swapped the print version for an audio recording and that will take care of the hour before bed each night quite nicely. In addition I've added a Virago, a Persephone, a children's novel, a detective and the latest book by one of my favourite current novelist so

The Weather in the Streets ~ Rosmond Lehmann
Saplings ~ Noel Streatfeild
Reckless ~ Cornelia Funke
Trick of the Dark ~ Val McDermid
and
The Death of King Arthur ~ Peter Ackroyd

complete my list. As I finish each one another can be added to replace it and again, I'll take stock at the end of the month and see how this has worked out. I may be asking myself to be far too organised but I am really ashamed of where my lazy reading habits have taken me over the past year and I'm determined to try and put things to rights.


Annie

To Resolve or not to Resolve

On the question of resolutions, the New Year variety or any other, I very often look back and find myself asking with Montaigne, "Is it not stupidity to let myself be fooled so many times by one guide?" Every year I catch myself making the same resolve I made the previous year with the same optimistic intent that this year I am going to do so much better. What makes me think I am going to succeed? I didn't listen to myself last time so why on earth do I think I'm going to fare any better this time round?

Such occasions haven't always fallen on the first of January. When I was teaching it would often be the last day of the school year, when I would look back over the many ways in which I felt I had fallen short and failed the children or students I had been teaching and determine that the following year would be the year when I would get it right. The fact that I came back and made that same resolution over and over again is evidence enough that I never did get it right and being realistic I was probably being more than optimistic thinking that I ever would. Teaching is one of those jobs where however much you put into it there is always more, and more than more, that you could do.

So, perhaps I should not be considering making any New Year's resolutions at all but just let the year unfold as it will? I don't think I could bear that. Imagine not hoping that you could make your life at least a little better in just one aspect. Surely, that has to be the perfect recipe for depression? If I was challenged then the one thing I know I would claim is that I want to use my time more productively in the coming year than I have done over the last twelve months, but as a resolution that is no use at all, far too woolly and with no hope of measuring any sort of success. What I need to do is find a way of turning that generalisation into meaningful specifics.

However, if I try and tie myself to too many objectives then I know that I'm doomed to failure; perfection is unlikely to be achieved in an afternoon. So what I've decided to try is creeping up on myself bit by bit, one resolution this month and if when I get to the end of January there seems to have been an improvement, then adding in another and just seeing how we go. As a starting point I'm going to try each day to read the same book for an hour without allowing myself to be distracted and without having the radio on. I ask you, how can I possibly hope to concentrate on what I'm reading when there is another voice battering away in my head? If I can get to the end of the month and find that I've managed to make that a habit then I'll think about where to go next. Maybe, just maybe, this might be the year when the guide turns out to have been worth listening to.

Annie