Cawdor Castle: by Sue Purkiss

 In the early summer of 2022, we were staying in the Cairngorm National Park. It was our first time in the north-west of Scotland, and we were wowed by the ancient Caledonian Forest, the gaunt hills, the sparkling rivers, and the variety of wildlife. However, on a day that was forecast to be wet and windy (in fact it was the latter but not the former), we decided to find somewhere that would offer shelter if necessary. So we went to Cawdor Castle.

All we knew about the place was that Macbeth, at the beginning of Shakespeare's play, was told by the witches that he would become Thane of Cawdor - and thereafter, of course, King of Scotland. So we were expecting somewhere dark and forbidding, probably half-ruined, and naturally haunted by ravens croaking in a doom-laden sort of way.

But the castle turned out to be none of those things. Built of grey stone, with a turreted square tower at its centre, the house is softened by the lawns, gardens and woodland that surround it. Inside, it has the feel of a comfortable home, in which you can imagine a family living happily - though reminders of a dark and bloody past do emerge. And in fact, we were told that the Dowager Countess, who manages the house, does live there in the winter, and even sleeps in the centuries-old scarlet four-poster. "Sooner her than me," commented the volunteer who told us this with a shudder. 

You enter through the drawing room, which is warm and colourful, with comfortable looking chairs and sofas and lots of lamps. There are also lots of portraits, which of course you don't tend to find in the average family home. In an alcove on a staircase there is a bold piece of wall-art, which at a second glance you see is a fan-shaped arrangement of nineteen rifles. (Why only nineteen? What happened to the twentieth?) I imagine these are a consequence of the aristocracy's strange desire to kill great quantities of wildlife, rather than earlier generations' propensity for killing their enemies, or sometimes their relations. But I could well be wrong...

The house is filled not only with interesting objects which generations of Campbells have collected on their travels - pictures, ornaments, sculptures, porcelain - but also with family photographs and some very lovely modern art. The tower is the oldest part of the castle, and was built with a view to defending the castle against enemies and marauders; but now, the top floor is a relatively small, very pleasant living room.

But go down the narrow winding staircase, and you will find this reminder of the building's long history. The castle was founded round about the end of the fourteenth century. Tradition has it that the site was chosen - bizarrely - by a donkey, which was set free and allowed to wander where it would. In the place where it stopped, there the castle would be built. And so it was.

I suppose it's just possible that this may not be entirely true - but what is certainly true is that the tower was built around a tree. The evidence is in the picture below - the tree is still there. It was said to be a hawthorn, but when samples were analysed recently, it was found to be a holly. This seems to make more sense: holly has a place in myth and legend. Certainly it has been credited with protecting the castle from destruction at various dangerous times in its history.

And dangerous times there certainly were. Cosy and comfortable as the castle seems now (apart from this basement, which has a bijou little dungeon tucked away on one side - just the place for unwelcome visitors), the family that lived there were, over the centuries, involved in some very nasty goings-on indeed. For example - in the early sixteenth century, the heiress was a child called Muriel. She was kidnapped by the Earl of Argyll, and, the guidebook tells us: 'For future recognition, she was branded on the hip by her nurse with a key. and the top joint of the little finger of her left hand was bitten off.' When she was twelve, she was married off to Argyll's younger son, Sir John Campbell. Surprisingly, the marriage was apparently a happy one. But this wasn't the end to the drama: Sir John's sister was married to one Lachlan Maclean. Wearying of his wife, he had her chained naked to a tidal skerry; she was supposed to drown, but was in fact rescued by passing fishermen. Sir John then knifed his brother-in-law to death in Edinburgh. He was pardoned, but deemed it a good moment to retreat to Muriel's far-distant ancestral home in Cawdor.

And that was only the beginning. There's far more blood-letting, feuding and killing people in hideously brutal ways - much too much to include in this post.

And talking of blood-letting, what of Macbeth? Was he really the Thane of Cawdor? We asked a guide. She sighed. One might almost have thought she'd been asked this question a million times before. "No. Macbeth was a real person - but he lived long before the castle of Cawdor was built, long before there was even a thane. What's more, there's quite a lot of evidence that he was a VERY NICE PERSON. He and his wife were very well-loved."

So there.

We certainly shouldn't leave Cawdor without a visit to the gardens, which are quite beautiful -see also the top picture. And the woodlands are lovely too, with rhododendrons and some very old trees, and a stream running through. Times have changed since the castle's founding - and in some ways - though not all - very much for the better. (I do wonder how the peasants were getting on while the aristocrats were whirling around killing each other...)

PS For anyone who's enjoying the new Netflix series, The Empress, you might be interested in this post which I wrote about her six years ago, after we'd been to an exhibition about the Empress Sisi in Vienna.

Cawdor Castle by Katherine Clements

I’ve recently returned from a writing retreat in Scotland. For most of the trip I was stuck indoors behind a laptop, somewhere in the 17th century. But one glorious Sunday morning I decided to take the air. I needed some historical inspiration. I settled on a trip to Cawdor Castle.

Now, I’ve been there before, two years ago, but I wanted to go back. Given the abundance of both natural and historical beauties in the area (Braemar, Balmoral and Blair Athol Castles, Culloden Battlefield and the Cairngorm National Park, to name a few) why did I feel so drawn? I pondered this as I sped up the A9, but at first sight of the castle, I remembered why. 

Cawdor looks like a fairytale – the kind of place you’d find Cinderella scrubbing pots in the kitchens and Rapunzel spinning gold in the tower. It’s picturesque, intimate and brimming with personality. And it looks so very Scottish.

Cawdor is very much a home. Owned by the Campbell family, the current resident is the Dowager Countess Cawdor, who inherited it from her husband, the 6th Earl of Cawdor, in 1993. The death of the 6th Earl sparked a much-publicised family feud involving court battles and the publication of scandalous memoirs, but nothing of that unfortunate soap opera is evident to the visitor. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

A friendly, knowledgeable guide tells me that the family uses all the rooms open to visitors. That’s evident in the clutter of family photos and knickknacks amid the impressive Restoration furniture and stunning Georgian portraits. The Countess collects art and an eclectic mix of paintings and sculpture grace the rooms and gardens. There’s a whole corridor dedicated to modern works and recent portraits sit next to 17th century ones. They should look out of place, but they don’t. The main rooms have the air of personal space – a TV in the corner, a pile of magazines – as if someone’s just left the room to fetch a cup of tea.

The Countess lives here all winter when the castle is closed to the public, my guide explains, and she comes back and forth throughout the summer. I ask if the castle is ever full of guests, imagining weekend shooting parties worthy of Downton Abbey. ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘There’s another ten bedrooms you won’t see, and a fabulous bathroom. I’ve known it full up, all the fires blazing.’ 

‘But which rooms are hers?’ I ask. 

‘That room you’ve just been in, the one with the huge bed – that’s her bedroom’.

I’m not sure how I’d feel about having thousands of people traipsing passed my knicker drawer, there does seem something intrusive and voyeuristic about it, but I’m nosy (of course I am – I’m a writer!) and the longer I stay and chat the more fascinated I become by the practical detail of these people’s lives, almost more interesting than the history itself.

And what about the history? What of the infamous connection to Macbeth? 

‘There is none,’ my guide says, looking slightly bored of the question. ‘The castle was built 400 years after the real Macbeth lived. Shakespeare took liberties with the history.’

No surprises there.

Continuing the fairytale atmosphere, he then tells me about the mysterious thorn tree, around which the original tower house was built. Legend has it that the Thane of Cawdor, who had a small castle about a mile away, decided to build a new, stronger tower. Following instructions he received in a dream, he loaded a coffer of gold onto the back of a donkey and let it roam for a day – wherever the donkey lay to rest for the evening would be where the new castle would be sited. The donkey chose a holly tree and it’s around this tree that Cawdor Castle was built.

This story is told in the Thorn Tree Room, a dark, dank fortified space, complete with small hidden dungeon, where it’s explained that radiocarbon tests date the tree to 1372. The earliest documented date for the castle doesn’t appear until 1454 – a license to fortify, granted to the 6th Thane of Cawdor (or Calder as the name was originally spelt). So although this was certainly the Cawdor seat, it’s far too late for the 11th century Macbeth. 

The good humour of the staff is matched in the information available in each of the rooms. This isn’t a place with interactive displays and quizzes to entertain the kids, but it doesn’t need it. Slightly dated typed panels, filled with facts and scattered with informal quips are charming and fit the atmosphere perfectly. Of course, the whole estate is run as a commercial enterprise, and there’s the obligatory tearoom and gift shop, well stocked with tartan, but there’s nothing sterile or too corporate about it. I felt I’d been invited to snoop around a private home, one with 600 years of stories in its walls, and what could be more inspiring than that?

Cawdor Castle is open every day until 2nd October.

www.katherineclements.co.uk

@KL_Clements

www.facebook.com/KatherineClementsBooks

Belated Shakespeare Musings

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I'm a month late with my Shakespeare post. Forgive me! It wasn't my turn to post in April, but initially I thought it was, so I wrote this.

I was extremely fortunate, growing up. I had a mother who loved the theatre and we lived near enough to London to get to the London theatres, which were, in those days, not so unaffordable for ordinary people.

My first experience of Shakespeare was on the stage - where he is best enjoyed. I was around ten and was taken to see a Comedy of Errors. I don't think I understood much, but enough to laugh, and I remember a young Judi Dench parading the stage very clearly. 

I then saw A Midsummer Night's Dream, where again, I didn't catch much but loved the experience of being in the theatre, Bottom's antics made me laugh and I remember loving all the happy pairings at the end (it's the romantic in me - it started young!)

But the stand-out Shakespeare memory was the Macbeth production I was taken to around a year later at the Young Vic in London with Judi Dench and Ian McKellan, neither of whom were remotely as well known then as now. 

It was a small, intimate staging and venue and breathtakingly powerful. I had no trouble understanding this and I think it gave me a life-long love of both Shakespeare and the theatre generally. And I think that when I came to study Shakespeare in school, I was immunised against hating or finding him difficult. Because....Macbeth. It was so real to me. It was also the first play we read in school.

The production I saw was filmed and is excellent:

I'd encourage any parent who wants their children to appreciate Shakespeare to take them off to see a good production or two before they come across him in school. Standby tickets will do fine!

I've seen so much fabulous and not-quite-so-fabulous Shakespeare since, including King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream with Kenneth Brannagh and Emma Thompson - outstanding - and Lennie Henry's Othello - interesting - and Tim Piggott-Smith in Julius Ceasar - the whole production was rather dull. Derek Jacobi as Malvolio in Twefth Night - such comic timing! 

Another unexpected performance was A Midsummer Night's Dream where the actors switched between English and various Indian languages, and some very rude stuff was done with a butternut squash. Trust me to remember that bit.

Shakespeare is so many things. But if he can possibly be enjoyed in the theatre, he should be. My ambition now is to attend a performance at the Globe. But I doubt that performance of Macbeth will ever be beaten.

I'VE GOT THAT END OF YEAR ROUND-UP FEELING – Elizabeth Fremantle

2015 has been a year of rich historical pickings and here are some of my highlights:

FILM

Of the numerous wonderful films I've seen this year a few have truly stood out. Justin Kurzel's Macbeth with the magnetic Michael Fassbender and the utterly captivating Marion Cotillard as the wicked couple, was a pared down rendering of one of my favourite of Shakespeare's tragedies. Kurtzel conveyed the brutality of the world whilst also giving context to the monstrous acts of the protagonists.





I was completely beguiled by Carol, Todd Haynes rendering of Patricia Highsmith's novel 'The Price of Salt'. As both a Haynes and a Highsmith fan I had high hopes for this one and was not disappointed. It has all the usual exquisite Haynes lustre, with a languid pace and a phenomenal performance from Cate Blanchett in the title role.




ART 

Having spent a week this summer on a jaunt around The Netherlands looking at seventeenth century art as research into quotidian life in the period I was delighted to discover that the Queen's Gallery have put on an exhibition devoted to just that, Masters of the Everyday: Dutch artists in the age of Vermeer, so I could revisit my favourites.





The Goya Portraits exhibition at the National Gallery is simply a must-visit exhibition. The sheer intensity and intimacy of his portraits makes you feel as if you are in the room with people from the past. Truly inspiring.





THEATRE

Sally Cookson's dramatic adaptation of Jane Eyre at the Lyttleton theatre is steeped in madness, passion and atmosphere. Cookson has taken the essence of a story that is in every book-lover's DNA and pared it down into an electrifying drama.




Kenneth Branagh's theatre company will be doing a year of plays at the Garrick and the first is Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, a play I have never seen before. Often labelled as one of the 'problem plays' because it's first half is complex, psychological and carries all the potential for tragedy, yet the second half is light and comic in tone. A lasting and heartbreaking image for me was a bundle, the abandoned baby, left alone on the otherwise empty stage. Judi Dench was, as ever, masterful.







NON FICTION


Mary Beard can, in my mind, do no wrong. Her latest book SPQR is not only a brilliantly researched but also a wonderfully pragmatic and engaging take on the story of ancient Rome. She brings the quotidian to vivid life and deftly debunks many popular myths.







Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro has delivered once more with his 1606: William Shakespeare and the year of Lear. He looks at the period in detail teasing out insights from events and demonstrating ways in which they can be found in Shakespeare's work. The effect is one of exploring the mind of the playwright. Clever, witty and brilliantly argued it also covers my period of research – hooray!








FICTION


I met Rebecca Hunt at the party for the Astor Prize (an award for the best second novel) for which her Everland was shortlisted – and, in my humble opinion, should have won. I took her book home and read it in a single sitting, completely captivated. She intertwines two stories of Antarctic exploration a hundred years apart. A disastrous mission to a desolate frozen island in 1913 has lured a research group back there in 2012 and in placing her characters in such a dangerous and hostile place, Hunt is able to drill down into the dynamics of people living on the edge. A memorable book.



Black Rabbit Hall is the debut novel of Polly Chase and is another that interweaves parallel narratives from different times. Partly set in Cornwall in 1969 and otherwise thirty years later, a house becomes the site of a mystery that unravels. With echoes of old favourites, 'Rebecca' and 'I Capture the Castle' is is a delightful read and I look forward to many more from Chase.

Shakespeare's 1606 - Interview with James Shapiro

Photo Credit: Mary Cregan

We are delighted to welcome James Shapiro to the History Girls as our October guest.

James Shapiro, who teaches English at Columbia University in New York, is author of several books, including 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (winner of the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize in 2006), as well as Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? He also serves on the Board of the Royal Shakespeare Company. 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear is published by Faber and out now. Find out more at www.jamesshapiro.net

Mary Hoffman: Thank you so much for agreeing to appear on our blog. We know how busy you must be with your new book 1606 out this month and your academic teaching.

Confession time: you are being interviewed by a fan, who has read 1599, Contested Will and now the new book. Like you, as you said in your YouTube interview about 1606, I never tire of thinking about Shakespeare’s work.

OK, on to the questions: First 1599 and now 1606; what do you think it was about those two years, one Elizabethan and one Jacobean that turned them into such fruitful periods for Shakespeare?

James Shapiro: The great challenge for Shakespeare in 1599 was writing plays that would draw Londoners to the Globe his company’s newly erected theatre in Southwark, rather than to the plays of their rivals, the Admiral’s Men, who were well established at the adjacent Rose Theatre. The pressure to write a string of box office successes, culminating in Hamlet, must have been intense. 1606 turned out to be a great year for Shakespeare—one in which he wrote three remarkable tragedies—in large part because it was such an awful year in England: he made much in the plays he wrote this year of the tumult of the times. Shakespeare seems to have written plays in inspired bunches—though the sources of inspiration, and the pressure to produce, necessarily changed over time, as they do for all writers.

The new Globe on Bankside

MH: You’ve said that you hated Shakespeare as a kid and didn’t acquire your addiction until you were a young man visiting London and saw the plays performed. Have you encountered any of Shakespeare’s plays first on the page or did it take seeing them to bring understanding and enjoyment?

JS: Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed, not read; so I’ll take Shakespeare onstage rather than on the page any day. I reread and teach the plays every year but it is only when I see them staged, or work with acting companies in rehearsal (something I am doing more and more these days), that I really get excited or discover new things in them.

MH: I watched your BBC4 series “The King and the Playwright” about Shakespeare as one of James the First’s King’s Men acting company. Did 1606 grow out of your research on that?

JS: I’m glad that you had a chance to see it. After finishing 1599 on the Elizabethan Shakespeare I realized how little I knew about the Jacobean one who wrote plays—including some of his greatest tragedies and romances--from 1606 to 1613. So I was very lucky to be asked to co-author and present that 3-hour BBC series. It forced me to learn a great deal in a brief time period—and do so in a vivid way and imagine the period visually. There was a lot to learn. So, yes, 1606 definitely grew out of the research for that documentary and is a much better book because of that.

MH: Your chapters on Lear made me look at the play afresh, even though I’ve known it since it was a set text for my English Literature ‘A” Level exam. Stupidly, I had never made the connection between Lear’s dividing of the kingdom and James’s pressing for Union. Can you outline that argument briefly?

Lear and Cordelia by William Blake

JS: The play famously begins with a discussion of Lear’s “division of the kingdoms.” Everyone in the playhouse in 1606 would have heard echoes of what was going on at this moment outside the Globe: King James’s plan to unite his kingdoms into a Great Britain. Should the kingdoms unite or remain divided? James, as King of Scotland and now England (and by extension Ireland and Wales and even France), complained that he would be a bigamist were he married to more than one nation. His efforts to create the Union this year failed. He would create an identity crisis where none had existed before, one that Shakespeare was quick to exploit, turning in his plays from questions of Englishness to those of Britishness. The fault lines that threaten to divide Scotland and England today can be traced back to the bitter debates over Union in 1606, and which powerfully inform King Lear.

MH: You set the three plays, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony & Cleopatra, in the political and social context of that year: the influence of debates on Union, the aftermath of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, the plague and the visit of Queen Anne’s brother Christian of Denmark to London. It all makes perfect sense. Why do you think no one has taken quite this approach before?

JS: Many, many scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which these plays respond to their times, and my long bibliographical essay at the end of my book acknowledges my debt to them. But they tend to do so in studies or editions devoted to one of the plays or have done so in scholarly articles or books that aren’t intended for broader audiences. Academics aren’t rewarded for writing popular books or for taking more than a few years to complete a monograph. I’ve drawn on a lot of scholarship, added to it some of my own, and, as with 1599, tried to frame it within a more gripping narrative, tried hard, as well, to bring that moment to life, using the plays to illuminate the times, and the times to illuminate the plays.

MH: You’ve been a Sam Wanamaker Fellow at the Globe in London and have clearly been involved in the new indoor theatre there. How closely do you think it replicates seeing Shakespeare performed in the indoor theatre at Blackfriars where the later plays were staged and perhaps written for? (though later than 1606 of course).

JS: As plague raged in late 1606—and threatened the survival of the boys’ playing companies, including the one renting the indoor Blackfriars Theatre—Shakespeare knew that it would only be a matter of time before he and his fellow players would acquire Blackfriars (they were already in negotiations for it). I love the indoor Wanamaker stage at the Globe thetre, and am thrilled whenever I get to stand on the stage there (though always worry about banging into the candles when I do). It’s probably the closest we will ever get to recreating the experience of Blackfriars, and seeing productions of Jacobean plays like The Duchess of Malfi in that space has been thrilling. I can’t wait to see Pericles there next month.

(NB: I wrote about the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse here last year. MH)

MH: From the hideous executions of the Gunpowder Plotters in January to Lancelot Andrewes’ Christmas sermon “of warning and consolation” 1606 was a dark year. Is this the reason ultimately that all three of the great tragedies written in that period end so bleakly? Even with Malcolm taking the throne in the Scottish play we know his line will be overthrown by Banquo’s heirs.

JS: It certainly was a grim and divisive year. I agree that the three plays he wrote this year all end tragically, though I would say that the endings are not dark in quite the same ways. The ending of Lear is certainly unrelievedly grim, with the deaths of Lear and his three daughters (all the more grim when we remember that in his source play, King Leir, the king survives and is reconciled with his youngest daughter). Macbeth ends more hopefully, if equivocally; as you rightly note, we are left wondering why Malcolm and not Banquo’s heirs, are in power at play’s end. Antony and Cleopatra ends on a surprisingly different tragic note: yes, the two title characters commit suicide, but there is something defiant and even nostalgic in Shakespeare’s portrayal of their ends.

MH: Most of the members of this blog write historical fiction, covering many different periods. Hesitantly I ask if you ever read books in that genre and whether you have ever found fiction or narrative non-fiction illuminating in your study of Shakespeare? (I’m thinking of books like Jude Morgan’s The Secret Life of William Shakespeare)

JS: I’m friends with quite a few writers of historical fiction (I’m thinking especially of Grace Tiffany, author of The Turquoise Ring and Andrea Chapin, who recently published The Tutor). I enjoy their books and hugely admire their gifts. But it is very important for me to draw a line (one that they can cross and I cannot) between fact and fiction. Given the scarcity of facts about Shakespeare’s life, especially during the so-called “Lost Years’ of his early adulthood, it is a boundary that many scholars all too often ignore. So what I mostly feel about historical fiction is jealousy.

MH: Finally, can we expect a 1611? I’d love to read that.

JS: 1599 took me fifteen years to research and write, 1606 another decade. I’ll have some challenging decisions to make about what’s next. I’m not sure that I have many more books (given how long these ‘years’ take to research) in me. But if I undertake another about another slice of Shakespeare’s life, 1610-11, in which he wrote The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest would definitely be it.

MH: I hoped you'd say that! I have a sort of PS for you: I had always taken the Fool’s metaphorical egg in King Lear to be a boiled one, not raw, because of eating the “meat” or yolk. But your analogy with the jagged edges of the shell resembling crowns has got me thinking. Thank you!

JS: You are very welcome—these were terrific and engaging questions. I hope that I have done justice to them. (And am glad you like the image of the broken egg with the pair of jagged crowns)

MH: You certainly have! Thanks so much for being our October guest. And readers look out for the competition to win 1606 on 31st.