Barney MacFarlane
As we prepare to consider the big question of 2014, it’s germane to consider the historic struggles that got us here. As usual, Shakespeare has a word or two for it, this in the form of Helena speaking to Hermia in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: ‘And will you rent our love asunder?’.
And if not love actually, a pervading sense of Scotland and England having put up with each other these past 409 years. How James Stuart, a Scot with a trickle of French blood in his veins yet perhaps the most enthusiastic Briton of them all, might scourge himself if forced to consider the sundering of a union over which he agonised so much to perpetuate. And all against a black tide of witchcraft conspiring against him.
Yet we might forgive ourselves for believing that he didn’t care overmuch about his roots once he won the star role in the big picture in London, returning only once, in 1617, to the land of his birth once he’d become James VI and I in the union of the crowns in March, 1603.
Certainly, it has all the hallmarks of a good story, a blockbuster as exciting as any ‘Ironman’ or ‘Thor’. And for the screenplay? Why, go no farther than the Thames, on whose south bank a certain Stratford worthy certainly knew how to fill the Globe. And in place of cheapjack CGI, how about some irreplaceable, fascinating and priceless items to illustrate the tale?
Such is the conceit of ‘Shakespeare: Staging the World’, a breathtaking exhibition at the British Museum until 25 November. Using, among others, some fine items borrowed from Scottish collections, the show seeks to illuminate some of the major events from the bard’s day. Not least the momentous period following the death without issue of Elizabeth I (that’s Ist of England, natch, for the meticulous among you).
That James, when called to take up the reigns, was rather stunned by the prospect of life at the top of the heap in London is forgiveable. Overwhelmed by the vast, thriving and commercially pulsating city, a visitor to the capital four years before the coronation suggested, ‘London is not said to be in England but rather England to be in London’.
Among exhibits as one enters the show is a bear skull, unearthed from the same period when bear-baiting was another great sport, along with cockfighting at the Globe. Accompanying this, the apt lines from Macbeth: ‘Bearlike, I must fight the course’. Implicit, of course, is the notion that the bear can’t win. Then we come to a screen and audio extract, organised in conjunction with the RSC, showing Glasgow actor Forbes Masson as Jacques in ‘As You Like It’. With typical Shakespearean paradox, he announces, ‘Why, tis good to be sad’.
Scots get a mention in a book from 1573-5 entitled ‘A Short Description of England, Scotland and Ireland’. Certainly in one drawing, the Irish description is quite short enough: beside a group of well-dressed noblemen and women, a blasted nuisance of a barefoot pauper attempts to appeal to their better side – an example of the ‘wilde Iresche’ as the caption has it.
The underclass provides, conversely, one of the most beautiful exhibits, albeit perverse and shocking when viewed from a modern perspective. In a section covering Venice with its mercantile and otherwise delights discovered by adventurers from our shores, sits a moor’s head cup, a silver gilt extravaganza from 1602, with a handle attached to the rear of said head and a hinged lid. One can imagine a gargantuan potentate, inebriated by port and power, thumbing back the knob at the cup’s crown and smirking at his companions as he devoured the contents of the slave’s skull.
And then on to James I of Great Britain. Two years after the monarch conferred on Shakespeare’s players a royal patent, naming them the king’s men, things weren’t going exactly according to plan as, amid other distractions, the gunpowder plot raised its revolutionary head. To illustrate this, a battered tin lantern, said to have been seized from Guy Fawkes as the conspiracy was rumbled, is displayed. Nearby is another quote from Macbeth: ‘Dire combustion and confused events’.
As Sir Walter Scott once reported: ‘For many years the Scottish nation had been remarkable for a credulous belief in witchcraft’. None more so than James. A tempest almost wrecked his future happiness with his betrothed, the 14-year-old Anne of Denmark as she set sail to join him in Scotland. This and his own storm-pounded voyage to claim her, threatening to sink his ardour along with his fleet, was subsequently blamed on necromancy.
On his return, James fetched up at the sensational witch trials at North Berwick, where one Agnes Simpson was found guilty of using her spells to beset the royal fleet with storms. In this section, too, sits a publication ‘Newes From Scotland’, now held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which reports that in January 1591, ‘Dr Fian, sorcerer, was burned at Edenbrough’.
Magical thinking – common among the Gaels at the time – is illustrated by four magnificent charm brooches from Scotland: the Glenorchy Charmstone, the Ballochyle Brooch, the Lochbuie Brooch and the Brooch of Lorn, representing, according to the caption, all that ‘James found barbarous in the Highlands and Islands’ while he strove to extirpate the Gaelic language from Scotland.
James’ anxiety about the obstacles faced in carrying out the great duty that befell him as the sovereign of what was now called Great Britain is mirrored in Macbeth’s paranoia and the conspiracy – invoked, of course, by three more witches – to his succession.
To help James overcome his difficulties, he had a courtier make a spectacular nine-piece vellum genealogy chart, displayed here, setting out his legitimacy in lineage for the united throne: through Banquo and Fleance at the start of the Stuart line (James’ father, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley) and the Tudors (both his mother Mary and Darnley were great-grandchildren of Henry VII).
James’ unionist establishment was also underlined by the new union flag of Great Britain, designs of which from 1604, showing combinations of the crosses of St Andrew and St George, are also exhibited – loaned by the National Library in Edinburgh – alongside a quote from the Earl of Nottingham to the effect that he approved of the relationship between England and Scotland, being ‘like man and wife’.
Do we still know our place, we Scots? Will Shakespeare still have a bonmot for us as 2014 approaches?
Barney MacFarlane is a journalist now living in London, involved in freelance PR design and editing
