building up the support cast

I learnt to value timelines when I was a student at Sheffield University studying physical geography.  A grasp of geological ages was essential.  Eventually, I moved from the university to the Central of School of Speech and Drama in London. I found I was better at acting than I was at writing academic accounts. It was the writing that I found so difficult, not my lack of interest in rocks, crystals and old maps.

(apropos of nothing very much here is a picture)

Time lines next became important to me when I trained to be a psychological counsellor.  This was in Cambridge, after my wife, Marianne, had died. My partner, a psychologist, had suggested that such a course would help me understand the process of grief, and maybe lead to a new profession.  The process of acting on stage with Marianne who had had no more than a few months to live had put me off theatre for a while.  During counselling exercises I found that to make notes of important events in ‘clients’’ lives helped define the moment of the initial trauma.  A timeline of my own life had proved helpful.

It was when I was well on the way to becoming a registered counsellor that I realised that my previous life in the theatre was returning and making inappropriate demands – I dropped counselling like a hot brick.  Holding a prime interest in drama can seriously endanger the outcome of any psychological intervention. However, what skills remained with me added to my understanding of what Shakespeare may well have experienced after losing his one and only son. 

Because so little is known about William Shakespeare I looked to get fun out of imagining what those near to him, and about whom we do have information, might have had to say about him.  My first attempt was to jot down imaginary conversations between Sir Robert Cecil, Minister of State, and Edmund Tilney, Master of the Queen’s Revels, both of whom would have had dealing with my hero.  It wasn’t long before other men and women of the time crept into my head and demanded a say.

A structure was required on which to hang these jottings, now fast becoming stories.  Not surprisingly, I turned to creating a timeline.  It began several years before William was born and stopped several years after he had died.  I filled it up with detailed information about international and national events, the lives of people in Court and, of course, of plays and players.

My book, William Shakespeare – Dark Phoenix, had its beginning on a warm day on the Isle of Mull when I asked Marianne, my wife (d 1984) if she could recollect a line from Shakespeare of which I could only remember that it was about education and psychological projection. ‘It is the eye of childhood that fears the painted devil’ came her quick answer. The words had little to do with education, but they made up the phrase I was looking for.

It was then that I saw how useful it would be to be able to look up a quotation not by a word or a phrase, but by a feeling, or even a vague thought.   I have a notoriously slippery memory for words – for an actor, not the most useful of attributes.  On the other hand, I do have quite a good memory for emotions.

I began, not very seriously, to make my first list of quotations and their associated emotions jotted down in a cheap notebook.  With the arrival on the market of the BBC computer, my list making became serious.   Now, with powerful computing on line, my database contains some 15000 references – and these, in the main, from only three of Shakespeare’s plays.

I began to see patterns in Shakespeare’s life that I had thitherto missed and wrote these up in several essays which, in the time-honoured way, I put in a drawer to be looked at later

Several years went by before I realised that the essays held the material for a novel – not about the William Shakespeare of whom we know so very little, but about the affect of profound loss on a creative mind. 

With regard to my monologue ‘The Judge’: I was reminded this morning of William James as we sat over breakfast listening to ‘In Our Time’ on the BBC.  William, the subject of the programme, was brother of the redoubtable novelist, Henry, and their gifted, depressive, diarist sister, Alice.  William was born in the same year as Daniel Paul Schreber, the judge. 

During the time I was a Fellow Commoner at Churchill College, Cambridge, I had the run of the University Library.  It was like being a small boy being given the keys to a sweet shop – and it was while I was browsing the shelves that I hit on the works of William James. 

I had enjoyed his brother’s novels, but felt always, that I needed to be in training and have my mental sleeves rolled up to the task. I felt exactly the same last month, April, 2010, when, for the first time I worked my way through Henry’s ‘The Golden Bowl’.  May I suggest that anyone tackling this or any of his novels to buy a book mark that grips the page exactly where one left off.  I have one from a National Trust shop, that uses two tiny magnets to do the job.

William, philosopher, psychologist, wrote equally wonderful prose, but there is no rolling up of sleeves, or running a mile before I open one of his books.  In the case of Henry, often as not, it helps me to get a grip by reading it out loud to myself – I suppose this an actor’s response to prose that leaves interpretation open to judgement.  I do this with the works of Ford Madox Ford (my desert island book author) – oh, yes, an all poetry.

But as to William, I find  that  a restful stare out of the window, a sip of tea  is all that is required to absorb, if not fully understand, his friendly prose. 

I was reminded that the family had its roots in Ireland – who is left, I wondered, to carry the torch for English literature – Chaucer, Shakespeare?  Come to think of it, I am not so sure that they were not Irish, their command of the written word being so formidable.