All this is reflected in the play. But I also believe it was a highly personal work to its creator, and filled with his life. If you look at my bibliography, you will see how much I endorse the theories of the brilliant Stephen Greenblatt in his Will in the World and of James Shapiro in his equally majestic 1599 (though I am convinced he gets the year wrong! There is much debate and no certain answer, but evidence points to the play first being performed in 1601). I believe Shakespeare’s loss of his son four years before, the impending death of his father, his inability to bury and mourn them as he might have wished to do in the ‘curtailed rites’ of the new Protestant ascendancy, fills the play with parents and children. (I am not saying he was a closet Catholic as some believe, but I think it is possible to still be a good Protestant while missing some of the luxuriant ritual of the old faith.) As a father myself, and as a son (the actor who played Old Hamlet in our production had my own recently deceased father’s eyes, bringing tears to mine on that first wild ride!), I see him as both, and try to understand the pain of loss he must have felt and how he fed that into the creation of the greatest game-changer in literature: The Tragedy of Hamlet.
I have said enough about it in my book. I will only add that each time I read, see or hear it, something changes. My wife complains that if I go away and haven’t taken a copy with me, I invariably buy another because I have just reassessed some speech and need to verify. But it is so . . . malleable. I heard it once described as the ultimate straight role. I think that’s true; each actor brings himself, his history and attitudes to it and that’s why performances vary so widely. I have been changed by some great ones – on stage, Jonathan Pryce’s, Derek Jacobi’s, Ian McKellen’s, my friend Simon Russell Beale’s. On screen, Laurence Olivier’s, Kenneth Branagh’s majestic vision, Mel Gibson’s (his pure talents as an actor so often submerged in his controversies). Each time, something in me shifts, something new is discovered.
It seems appropriate that I should be writing at least part of this note on 23 April 2012 – the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death in 1616. Quite likely the anniversary of his birth too, in 1564. As I write, England explodes with a Shakespearean Olympiad to precede the athletic one. All his plays are being done over the next few months, not only by British companies but by troupes from all across the world. I would love to see the Urdu Taming of the Shrew, the Belarusian King Lear or the Palestinian Richard the Second, to observe how relevant Shakespeare still is to people, their times and circumstances. Many of these will be staged at the extraordinary Globe Theatre in London. My several visits there took in the museum, some fight demonstrations and a quite wonderful production of Dr Faustus. This so helped me in imagining what the whole experience might have been like for a playgoer in 1599. I had an ale and a pie – though I was spared the smell of groundling piss. They have rather nice toilets there these days!
Shakespeare’s words and visions thrive, continuing to be produced everywhere. There is something very special about the Bard of Avon that he is performed still, not as heritage theatre but as someone contemporary, holding the mirror up to this age’s concerns, in whatever country, just as he did in London in 1601. I have no time for the Oxfordians (have you seen the abomination that was Anonymous? I nearly had to be escorted from the cinema!), or any other crew that would take his genius away from him and hand it to someone . . . smarter, better educated, higher class. To me, it’s the worst of conspiracy theory allied to snobbism. For the point of genius and imagination is that they transcend limits. He may have been a glover’s son, but he had a rigorous classical education in Stratford. Marry that to his imagination, feed that through the explosion in the theatrical form of the last two decades of the sixteenth century – another rigorous education – and consider the development of his work from the simplistic Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors to the wonder of his later tragedies and comedies . . . there is no doubt for me. He was the man.
But who was the man? So little is known, not much written down. Great writers have extrapolated him and his preoccupations from his work and the very few biographical clues. He is something of a blank canvas – fortunately for the novelist. He could be any number of characters, from the litigious, penny-pinching scrivener, to the bisexual Catholic aesthete. I have taken a few clues, allied them to my sadly limited experience of playing him (a brace of Lysanders, Oberon, Don Pedro, Oliver, Salanio and, of course, the Dane) and then bent him, as any writer will, to my own purposes. He was ‘sweet William’ to me. He was not ‘a carouser by nature’ – as a writer myself, I know how hard it is to carouse at night and then produce the goods in the morning! He was also, I suspect, a pretty good actor.
I only get to practise that craft of theatre myself once in a while now. Whenever I do, I rediscover again the instant quality, the excitement of knowing that these people will never again be gathered in one place, that between them they must create the moments, actors and audience. When it works – and God knows it often doesn’t! – it is like nothing else. Like any player – like my man John Lawley, with his limp! – I know some of the tricks. Yet I have also, occasionally, participated in the magic.
So that first phrase in a moleskin notebook – Hamlet and swords, for fuck’s sake! Hamlet and swords! – has now expanded into the book, physical or electronic, you are holding. I’ve dealt with the Hamlet side a little – but what of swords? Well, I became an actor mainly because I wanted to leap around with bladed weaponry. I’ve been fortunate enough to do my fair share of it, on stage and screen. So when I discovered the whole ‘backsword versus rapier’ controversy of the late sixteenth century, it was irresistible.
I mentioned feeling very indulgent with this novel and its themes – extending into this, an indulgently long Author’s Note! – but I do need to mention a last one – the link between my earlier ‘French Executioner’ books and my later ‘Jack Absolute’ ones. I have been inspired by Wilbur Smith and his Courtenay family saga. Like me, I doubt he set out to write about one family across the centuries. Yet there is something very satisfying in it, and I did sow that seed when I gave Jack the middle name of Rombaud in the novel Jack Absolute, with little further explanation. With John Lawley I have linked the two, and I have no doubt I will be able to create more Absolutes later in my storytelling life. For my readers it might add a little something. For those new to me – hie thee to a bookstore!
There’s one last personal story here, concerning drunkenness. Not my own – though I probably supply details from a few examples! But I was delighted to discover the quote I use here at the book’s opening, concerning the martin drunkard: ‘when a man is drunk and drinks himself sober ere he stir . . .’ Because I met one such, in Clifden, Connemara, Ireland, a few years back.
He was Peter Fitzwilliam. (The names have been changed to protect the inebriated.) I was on a solo pub crawl there, and Peter was on the next bar stool. He told me he had been drinking for a month, ‘on the whisky’. Apparently he did this once every five years, though between these binges he was teetotal. After a month he would pass several days drinking nothing but Guinness – till he had drunk himself sober again. It was touch and go, but if he stayed out much longer he believed his fiancée, to whom he’d been engaged for eleven years, would not take him back this time. I enjoyed many a rambling tale, and the odd snatch of song – which mainly concerned the drinking exploits of lads from a certain hilly part of Clifden. He had a very tall and equally intoxicated companion who he referred to as Peter the Poacher (‘Yer man if you want a salmon’), who said nary a word but would grunt and raise both arms occasionally in support. When I got back to my hotel, I mentioned the encounter to the receptionist. ‘Oh, Peter Fitz,’ she said. ‘Yes, I heard he was off on one.’
Little did I know I had met a martin drunkard. All I did know was that I filed him away – to be used, later, for John Lawley, who is ‘yer man’ for me to pursue one fantasy to the fullest. For I put him there, the place where I would set the time machine’s dial for,
were I given three hours. There, that afternoon in Southwark, standing in the pit of the Globe, a leather tankard of ale in one hand, a bag of nuts in the other, gazing up at the platform as someone asks, ‘What’s this new play called, then?’ There, when a trumpet sounds and a sentry walks out, shivers and whispers, ‘Who’s there?’
I think I would even swap that first time I played the Dane for the opportunity to witness Burbage as the son, Shakespeare as the father, and the world changing before my eyes.
Now that would be indulgence indeed!
C.C. Humphreys
April 2012
Salt Spring Island, Canada
BIBLIOGRAPHY
My shelf groans with books. Before I begin I look at them and think how my novel is in them, somewhere. Here’s where I hunted for it. Some I devoured, some just picked at. The most influential perhaps, for the times, Shakespeare’s life and the influences on the play, were the Greenblatt and the Shapiro. I believe the term for them is ‘magisterial’. My main Hamlet was the much marked copy I used to play him, the New Cambridge version. The introductory essay is brilliant!
SHAKESPEARE
Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt
1599, James Shapiro
Shakespeare’s Words, David Crystal and Ben Crystal
Shakespeare on Toast, Ben Crystal
THE TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE
Shakespeare’s London on Five Groats a Day, Richard Tames
A Shakespearean Theatre, Jacqueline Morley
Shakespeare’s England, ed. R. E. Pritchard
London, Peter Ackroyd
Religion and the Decline of Magic, Keith Thomas
The Elizabethan Secret Services, Alan Haynes
Sex in Elizabethan England, Alan Haynes
Robert, Earl of Essex, Robert Lacey
Wotton and his Worlds, Gerald Curzon
Roaring Boys, Judith Cook
THE PLAYS
Shakespeare, Complete Works, RSC, eds Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Hamlet, New Cambridge, ed. Philip Edwards
Hamlet, Sourcebooks Shakespeare, ed. William Proctor Williams; series eds Marie Macaisa and Dominique Raccah
Henry the Fifth, New Penguin Shakespeare, ed. A. R. Humphreys
Julius Caesar, New Penguin Shakespeare, ed. Norman Sanders
THE FIGHTS
Paradoxes of Defence, George Silver
English Martial Arts, Terry Brown
The Complete Renaissance Swordsman, Antonio Manciolino, trans. and ed. Tom Leone
Sword Fighting, Keith Ducklin and John Waller
The Flintlock, Torsten Lenk
THE PHILOSOPHY
The Elizabethan World Picture, E. M. W. Tillyard
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, Sarah Bakewell
‘Hamlet, Duellist’, S. P. Zitner, in University of Toronto Quarterly, 1969
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As always, there are so many people to thank for their help in the creation of this book.
At my publishers, editorially there was as ever the super-smart Jon Wood, whose notes stimulated me to focus, and to expansion, not contraction (for ‘edit’ does not always mean ‘cut’!). Also Jemima Forrester, who added a well-reasoned and welcome alternative perspective. While at William Morris Endeavor, Simon Trewin continues to skilfully – and amusingly – chart my professional course.
There is my family – my wife Aletha, who saw me play Hamlet in our courting days, still married me, and knows the level of my obsession enough to completely support me through this phase of it, as well as giving useful notes. And my son, Reith, eight now, whose talk and presence so stimulated my imagination about parents and their children.
Perhaps especially with this story, there are the swordmasters. I was fortunate to stumble into the extraordinary Academie Duello in Vancouver, a medieval martial arts school. These are serious and skilful people, exemplified by their leader and founder Devon Boorman, who crossed swords with me privately and whose brains I picked extensively. He also organised a Sword Symposium in February 2011 where I studied the sword and buckler techniques of the sixteenth-century Italian master Achille Marozzo, under the tutelage of the brilliant twenty-first-century Italian master Tom Leoni. Grazie, maestro! And I must also thank my fight partner during those days, Jennifer Landels, for her patience and skills – I am older and slower than I was, and, an excellent swordswoman, she coached me through it all.
One of the most extraordinary bouts I had was in the prosaic surroundings of a council flat above Boots the Chemist on Mill Hill Broadway, London. There resides the world expert on George Silver, Terry Brown, a superb martial artist who, well into his sixties, could destroy me with a breath. In his small front room converted into a salle d’armes, he took me through many aspects of the English master’s work. ‘Simplicity is efficiency’s best friend,’ he said that day, and I have tried to apply it, not only to John Lawley’s sword-fighting but to my writing as well. Over a session sword in hand and another in the pub armed with pints, he generously shared his deep understandings.
Lastly there is the man to whom the book is dedicated. John Waller has always been an inspiration, from when he was my stage combat teacher at drama school through to today, decades later, when he will shoot crossbows with me in his Yorkshire garden. His knowledge of all things medieval is extraordinary: a master bowman, swordsman, hawker and hunter. And as a fight arranger for stage and screen, he always emphasised the principle I have tried to uphold in my writing: at any moment in a fight you should be able to take a still photograph of the action that looks great! Simple and sweet. Thanks, Master Waller, always!
To these, to all who’ve aided me, much gratitude.
C.C. Humphreys
April 2012
Salt Spring Island, Canada
ALSO BY C.C. HUMPHREYS
Novels
Blood Ties
Jack Absolute
The Blooding of Jack Absolute
Absolute Honour
Vlad: The Last Confession
A Place Called Armageddon
The Hunt of the Unicorn
Writing as Chris Humphreys
The Fetch
Vendetta
Possession
Plays
A Cage Without Bars
Glimpses of the Moon
Touching Wood
Screenplay
The French Executioner
Copyright
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Orion Books.
This ebook first published in 2013 by Orion Books.
Copyright © Chris Humphreys 2013
The right of Chris Humphreys to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All the characters in this book, except for those already in the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 1491 8
Orion Books
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Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
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www.orionbooks.co.uk
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