You might also enjoy: ‘Thus let me wipe dishonour from my name’: Peg Woffington as Lothario in The Fair Penitent.

I am still reeling from the news that Robert D. Hume, the American theatre historian, died last week. I debated whether to write anything about him here because I was not a colleague or friend and did not know him very well – beyond the exchange of a few emails. But at the same time, I feel like I knew him incredibly well, because I have been consistently reading him for more than a decade. His research on performance in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, often in tandem with Judith Milhous, completely revolutionised the way we think about theatre history. He took a subject beleaguered by romanticised anecdotes and gave it a hard-headed, economic basis.

I saw him at a conference once (his magisterial beard was unmissable) and was too shy to introduce myself. When I was researching the life of Peg Woffington, I felt like I was in mental dialogue with him. I did not always agree with his take on things, but he could be relied upon to be informative and insightful (even now I have a stash of his papers to read on early 18th-century opera). He did not suffer fools gladly – this can be detected in his occasionally withering asides – and I suspect he had little time for biography. Yet I have so much to thank him for, and struggle to believe that we won’t have any more gems from this original scholar.

I was excited to finally see Kenneth Branagh in King Lear at Wyndham’s Theatre last night, having booked months ago. I last saw him live in a Shakespeare play (Hamlet) in 1992, so was nostalgic about his return to the boards.

The production is set in ancient Britain and the action cut down to two hours (without an interval). I loved Jon Bausor’s set and costume design, with a gigantic eye hovering over the action. There is so much eye imagery in the play and the subtle use of projection and lighting changed its appearance, making it look at times as if it was full of tears (“As pearls from diamonds dropp’d”). On other occasions it looked more like the eye of Gloucester’s pitiless gods: who “kill us for their sport”. And just before the scene where Gloucester is blinded, the eye turned into a total eclipse.

Branagh’s young cast was excellent, with particularly enjoyable performances from Joseph Kloska (Gloucester) and Doug Colling (Edgar). As for Branagh himself, he was charismatic but perhaps a little too energetic to fully capture the bleakness of Shakespeare’s conception. He emphasised the humour of some lines (I have never heard an audience laugh so often in King Lear) and he looked, well, young. It was difficult to believe that he was either a “foolish, fond old man” or physically broken.

Yet some of his directorial decisions were inspired, and the production came across with an almost filmic energy. I was impressed by the decision to put the auditorium into darkness during Gloucester’s words immediately following his blinding (there had been some jigging of the text to make this a transitional point). King Lear is a play partly about empathy, so it felt right to put us directly into Gloucester’s shoes.

Because of the cuts, the action seemed sped-up as it reached its close, with the consequences of Lear’s capricious treatment of his daughters crashing in on us at alarming speed. Some of the subtleties of Edgar’s character were lost, but this is perhaps inevitable, given the time constraints of a live performance. Branagh’s cuts, as well as his acting, also raised for me a central question about the play, namely, how nihilistic is it? His Lear is a man who grasps at straws of hope and learns true compassion in the end.

This article is dedicated to the memories my former literature lecturer, Bill Hughes, and the theatre historian, Robert D. Hume. “Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither.”

You might also enjoy: Macbeth at the RSC (2023).

Last night we went to see Handel’s Jephtha at Covent Garden. On the way, we stopped for a drink at the Hercules Pillars.

On August 7th 1718, Sir John Vanbrugh wrote to the Duke of Newcastle:

I am to acquaint you, That the Tate a Tate Club reviv’d last night, at the Hercules Pillars Alehouse, in high Holborn. There was Stinking fish, and Stale cold Lamb for Supper with divers Liquours made of Malt in an execrable Manner. We drank Your Graces health in them however (Bumpers) to shew (to one an another) our great regards and respects to you.

The pub is not an 18th-century building but is probably on the site of the one Vanbrugh mentions. Needless to say, there was no stinking fish and we didn’t drink too many bumpers because I wanted to be conscious for Allan Clayton’s performance. It’s a great pub, though, and I’ll certainly be back.

Source: The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, vol. 4 (letters), ed., Geoffrey Webb (Bloomsbury: The Nonesuch Press, 1928), p. 100.

You might also enjoy: Icons of British Fashion at Blenheim | Seaton Delaval Hall | Operatic foundations: A relic of the Haymarket theatre | Domestic Baroque: Vanbrugh House | Birthday Blenheim.

We also saw Shakespeare’s seal-ring: found in a field next to Holy Trinity Church in March 1810. The initials W.S. appear on the 21-carat-gold face and extensive research in Stratford’s archives suggests that it could only have belonged to Shakespeare. Chatting to one of the volunteers in shop afterwards, he helpfully explained that rings were often worn on top of gloves, and that the poet probably lost the ring while taking his glove off at his daughter’s wedding at Holy Trinity Church in 1616.

This object was accompanied by perhaps my favourite item: a tiny 17th-century notebook filled with handwritten quotations from the First Folio. It came to light in 2017 when John Markham bought it to BBC1’s Antiques Roadshow. It was billed in the exhibition as belonging to “the first Shakespeare geek”.

You might also enjoy: All the Sonnets of Shakespeare (Review’d).

I chose to spend my birthday this year visiting an architectural masterpiece by Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor. One of the Baroque qualities of Blenheim Palace is the way it incorporates a sense of movement. Here, the columns of the portico seem to punch skywards, right through the pediment and into the clouds. The building uses a mixture of Doric and Corinthian orders on the North Front – the Doric gives the building a martial quality, and the Corinthian, a touch of flamboyance.

I think it’s no surprise that this building is frequently likened to a theatrical stage set, although you have to stand in front of it to really appreciate how the facade acts like the flats that were used in 18th-century playhouses. There’s a constant game of hiding and revealing, as you move around the North Front, that’s like no other building I can think of.

You might also enjoy: Icons of British Fashion at Blenheim | Seaton Delaval Hall | More Operatic Foundations | Operatic foundations: A relic of the Haymarket theatre | The Hercules Pillars | Domestic Baroque: Vanbrugh House.

On Friday we saw Macbeth at the RSC (the Wils Wilson production with a completely Scottish cast). I liked some things about it and disliked others: it was a mixed bag, but an enjoyable evening overall. I should say that Duncan and Banquo were played by women (Therese Bradley and Anna Russell-Martin, respectively) and the original Thane of Cawdor, we were led to understand, was female. This problematised several things about Macbeth including his courage on the battlefield (and, as Mark Lawson has pointed out, in a world where women could seize power, why would Lady Macbeth need to push her husband towards kingship?)

These annoyances aside, the witches were gratifyingly disturbing (one actor was substituted and I don’t have her name but the other two were Amber Sylvia Edwards and Dylan Read). They emerged from what looked like boils that bubbled up on the stage. Atmospheric music: tubas, a trombone, sousaphone, bagpipes etc., combined with murmurings of Scottish Gaelic made for a disturbing soundscape. Curiously, the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech was interrupted and Reuben Joseph had to start it again, though his glaring was so terrifying as to seem totally in character. I couldn’t quite see what happened, but the groundlings must have been misbehaving.

You might also enjoy: Kenneth Branagh’s King Lear | What is the source of Macbeth’s evil?

But how do you drag Donne from his hiding place in poetry anthologies back onto the cultural agenda? If anyone can do it, it’s Katherine Rundell. A few months before picking up her biography, I stumbled across To His Mistress Going to Bed, which I found so dazzling and utterly hilarious that I read it aloud to my husband at breakfast (‘O my America! my new-found-land,/My kingdom, safelist when with one man manned’).

This piqued my interest in Super-Infinite, which I’d heard trumpeted as the 2022 winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Jumping eagerly into the book, I was quite surprised when, just 12 pages in, Rundell bowled us a poem. “Wait a minute,” I thought, “I’m not ready for this! I haven’t even finished the introduction!” but Rundell was firm: “You cannot claim a man is an alchemist and fail to lay out the gold”.

You can see why Rundell calls Super-Infinite “both a biography of Donne and an act of evangelism”. Part of the joy of reading it is her gift as a teacher; she knows why Donne is brilliant and somehow infects you with the same enthusiasm. She does not let you brood over every footnoted detail (her own notes are all tidied away at the back of the book), but chucks you headlong into Donne’s world, knowing that you’ll begin by thrashing about in the water and end up doing the front-crawl.

Rundell’s authorial voice is strong and, dare we say it, somewhat eccentric. Take, for example, her description of Donne’s work: “if allowed under your skin, [it] can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you”. At times she is funny (paintings of Anne Boleyn make her look like “an unimpressed headmistress”). Elsewhere, she kicks the metal out of your knees by saying it was common in counter-blazon verse to say your rival’s mistress was sweaty; it was less common “to suggest that your mistress’s sweat was like the fat eked out of the boiled shoes of the starving”.

By using some kind of alchemy, Rundell merges herself with her subject, a feat that Donne himself – a great coiner of words –might have called ‘super-biography’. The result is that Super-Infinite probably won’t be seen as the definitive scholarly biography – it most certainly is scholarly, but academics are liable to be disappointed by Rundell’s hidden footnotes and her refusal to chase down every single piece of evidence. I suspect she never set out to write this kind of book anyway; her strength is her vivid storytelling, which brings the poet to life on every page. Many readers (she says) have disliked Donne’s work “in the way you would dislike a tooth in a basket of flowers”, but his poetry is “quick on its feet and angry at you”.

After this, who could resist reading him?

Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (Faber & Faber, 2022).

You might also enjoy: All the Sonnets of Shakespeare (Review’d).

Peg Woffington: The Female Rake. 27th May 2023, 11am, Bromley House Library, Nottingham.

I had a great time visiting Bromley House Library in Nottingham (a hidden gem) to give a talk on Peg Woffington. This beautiful subscription library moved to Bromley House in 1821, a four-storey townhouse built in 1752. It’s on Angel Row, a few doors up from a pub associated with Lord Byron.

It was a pleasure to visit and speak to the friendly audience of subscribers, not to mention look around the library itself and visit its garden. At the end of my talk, library staff even brought out a 19th-century copy of Charles Reade’s novel about Peg, which was fantastic to see.

You might also enjoy: ‘Thus let me wipe dishonour from my name’: Peg Woffington as Lothario in The Fair Penitent.

When the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon wanted the actor, David Garrick, to hold a Jubilee in its town, it gave him a box carved from the wood of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree. ‘I have long made it my observation,’ wrote a newspaper correspondent sniffily, ‘that no gifts are in general so pernicious as those composed of wood.’

I might have said the same about a cutting from Dr Johnson’s willow, given to me by a friend last year. We are both members of the Samuel Johnson Society of Lichfield, and my friend is an expert on this tree, which stands by Stowe Pool in our small Staffordshire city. Its ancestor was planted around 1700 and became famous for two reasons: firstly, because it was unusually large, and, secondly, because it was the favourite tree of the great writer and lexicographer. As a boy, Sam Johnson played beneath its branches (the tree stood next to his father’s parchment factory) and he never failed to visit it on trips from London, calling it the delight of his early and waning life.

Much like Shakespeare’s mulberry, Johnson’s willow has had a rich afterlife. Following Johnson’s death in 1784, the First Willow became the focal point for literary pilgrimages, even spawning new works of literature. The 18th-century poet Anna Seward mentioned it several times in her writings, and, in 1785, an American writer called Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson penned ‘Two Odes on the Litchfield Willow’, in which she claimed the lineage of Johnson’s willow stretched back to the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden.

By the early nineteenth century, the tree was decayed, which led to its being blown down by high winds in 1829. Here the legend might have ended, but the following year a Second Willow, grown from the cutting of the original, was planted in the same spot. This tree was destroyed in a great storm of 1881, and so another descendant was planted in 1898. The Third Willow survived until 1956, when it was found to be unsafe and subsequently felled, and the Fourth Willow (another relation) was planted in 1959, during celebrations on the 250th anniversary of Johnson’s birth. This tree was felled in October 2021, being in a state of decay, and the Fifth Willow took its place the following month.

Therefore, when my friend appeared one day in my garden, bearing a sapling in a pot, he was gifting me a cutting from the Fourth Willow: not only a direct descendant, but a plant that is biologically identical to the original tree.

The arrival of the cutting was initially a worry. I am not green fingered and had never picked up a trowel in anger. This little tree – so freighted with meaning – was now in my care and it not only symbolised a titan of English letters, but friendship itself. ‘Willows,’ said a neighbour breezily, ‘are impossible to kill’. But what if I did manage to slay this ‘vegetable and unparalleled wonder’?

The first thing my husband did was to order a slate nametag off the internet reading ‘Dr Johnson’s Willow’. I settled down to letting him look after the garden, while contributing verbally from afar. One day, insects were discovered to have eaten a good deal of the leaves. I flew into a panic while my husband removed them with his fingers on the grounds that pesticides might be harmful to the cat.

After that, something odd happened; I started to take an interest in my cutting of Johnson’s willow. I enjoyed sitting underneath its rapidly spreading branches, and I watered it regularly, sometimes even watering our other plants at the same time. On advice from friends, I bought slow-release food for the following year’s growing season and when the tree got an aphid infestation, I Googled non-chemical pesticides.

Reader, I became a gardener.

However, it’s nice to know that even if I do mess things up, the lineage will continue. The Parks Department of Lichfield District Council keeps a stock of Johnson’s willows which it carefully maintains. Cuttings were recently sent to the United States, where they’re being quarantined ahead of a planting at Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s former home in Philadelphia. Walsall Arboretum has a sapling. Other recipients include the Duke and Duchess of Bedford (Johnson’s tree is a Salix russelliana or Bedford Willow) and Buckingham Palace has been offered a plant to mark the Coronation of King Charles III.

There’s also a tradition of carving objects from the willow, similar to the many Shakespeare-related items made from the mulberry tree. On a research trip to Harvard University, I came across an exquisite figurine of Dr Johnson in the Houghton Library, carved from the wood of the Third Willow.

Meanwhile, I’ve enjoyed watching our cutting of the Fourth Willow sprouting catkins and I’ve got plans to add a bark mulch to the soil to help retain moisture (they are thirsty creatures). Dr Johnson could never have imagined his favourite tree would become emblematic of friendship, but it’s now the focus of an annual friendship walk, taking place in Lichfield every summer. ‘Friendships should be kept in constant repair’ he famously remarked.

And so, I might add, should willows.

You might also enjoy: David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity by Leslie Ritchie |  Planting Ceremony for The Fifth Johnson’s Willow (video).