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.

Werewolves

by Marie-Louise Jensen


I had a new book out in late July. Which was weird because I didn't see it until mid August because I was in Europe when it appeared.
I arrived at a friend's house in Germany and she (being a wonderful friend) had ordered a copy. That was my first glimpse of the print edition. Cue squeaks of excitement.

The book is a short novel for younger readers and was originally written as an interactive e-book for 10-11 year olds in schools.
Educational publishing - that strange animal, where not offending religious schools takes precedence over what people believed in the past.

Because let's not beat about the bush; the Norse believed in shape-shifting. In the saga of Egil Skallagrimson (not a tale for the faint hearted and certainly not for children) we are told in quite a matter of fact way that Egil's grandfather was known to be a shape-shifter. He was even called Kveld-Ulf (Evening Wolf.) Egil himself has beserker tendencies and behaves a lot more like a werewolf than a man a lot of the time, splitting enemies heads open with axes and other charming incidents.

The Christanisation of Iceland happened peacefully shortly after his death and his son had his body exhumed and reburied near the chapel that was built on his land. I can't believe he'd have been happy with that. He was a true pagan. Forgiveness and meekness were totally alien to him.

By all accounts, the official acceptance of Christianity in Iceland was a formality. The country was threatened with conversion by force from Norway if the population didn't accept the new god. Sensibly, they accepted him and privately continued with their worship of the Norse gods for many years. To this day, the majority of Icelanders confess to believing in 'The Hidden Folk,' - elves.

But my 'werewolf' wasn't allowed to be real. Which was fine. It made for a perfectly good mystery story anyway. But the people of Viking-age Iceland would have had no trouble believing in werewolves. I should think they'd have been more astonished if you said such things didn't exist. Even after the arrival of Christianity. Werewolves, trolls, elves, ghosts and other supernatural beings were an indisputable part of the rich and brutal fabric of their world.

Vik and The Night Raider

by Marie-Louise Jensen

One of the first questions I tend to ask myself, once a story has formed in my mind, is where is it set? I need to be able to see it. I've mentioned this in connection with Runaway in my last post, but it's true of everything I write. Sometimes it's a wonderful excuse to revisit a place I love.
When I wrote The Night Raider for the Fiction Express website last year, I wanted to choose a different location in Iceland to my two teen novels. There, I fictionalised the settlement of Husavik on the north coast. For this story for younger readers, I chose another place in Iceland that made a big impression on me.
I don't know whether it was the incredible weather we had the first time I visited Vik on the south coast, the sky cloudless and the deepest blue I've ever seen, or whether it was the incredible black volcanic-shingle beach:

"Reynisfjara, Suðurland, Islandia, 2014-08-17, DD 163" by Diego Delso. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reynisfjara,_Su%C3%B0urland,_Islandia,_2014-08-
17,_DD_163.JPG#/media/File:Reynisfjara,_Su%C3%B0urland,_Islandia,_2014-08-17,_DD_163.JPG

This is a beautiful picture, but it doesn't fully depict how black the shingle is to stand on, and no picture can communicate the sound of the beach - the roar and rattle of the stones as the wild North Atlantic ocean surges against it. 

Another thing I loved about Vik, was that it was the first place I saw puffins flying from the cliffs. I saw plenty later, but this was my first sighting of the funny, charming, awkward fliers:

"Puffin002" by T.Müller - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puffin002.jpg#/media/File:Puffin002.jpg

A third thing I loved about Vik was the campsite was right below bird cliffs, so the second time I visited, and camped, we had kitiwakes and other gulls nesting right around us. Of course Vik also lies close to one of Iceland's big volcanoes, Katla. It is due an eruption soon  and the town is on permanent alert. 
The Vikings settlers in my story don't know about the volcano; it's lurking beneath the glaciers. They are more concerned with a mysterious thief who is stealing livestock in the night...


The Night Raider is print-publishing at the end of June and is suitable for ages 9-11. 
Follow me on twitter: @jensen_ml

Romantic Heroes (and how we perceive them)

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I'm writing this post on St Valentine's Day having just run the gauntlet of the pink-and-heart-strewn aisle of my local supermarket. And as Catherine Johnson so rightly says, on the blog today what single person wants to be reminded of Valentine's Day?

But what with the day of romance and all that plus a great conversation I had on twitter yesterday, the thought of romantic heroes and how they've changed has been going over in my mind.

I'm a Georgette Heyer addict. I admit that without shame or excuses. Whenever the going gets tough, the tough hide under the bedclothes and read Georgette Heyer. I discovered her historical fiction novels (almost exclusively Georgian or Regency) at 14 and have returned to them in times of illness and trouble ever since. They've also influenced my own writing.

But rereading a few of them more recently with a more heightened awareness of gender and power balances within relationships, a few of the male protagonists, the way they are portrayed and the female responses to them, make me uncomfortable.

Heyer's female characters are, like most women of their time in fiction, entirely concerned with finding a husband; a genuine constraint in a society that doesn't allow women autonomy. The desirable husbands were a range of dashing blades, dissolute bucks, witty dandies, brave soldiers and the like. Quite a swoony collection of men, in fact.

The ones that make me uncomfortable are the 'masterful' men - and the women who like to submit to this mastery, because it's what they've secretly been desiring all along. What makes me so uneasy is just how close 'masterful' is to 'controlling and abusive' and how close this submissiveness is to 'she likes it really'.

There's a difference, I feel, between a strong male character and one who is imperious and dominating. It's a fine line, and just which side of it we tread and find acceptable has changed enough in the last few decades to make a few of these older books (Heyer was writing mainly from the 1930s to the 1960s) jar with the modern reader. Strangely there is more that jars with me in Heyer's historical fiction than there is in Austen, the Brontes, Gaskell, Burney or even Radcliffe - many of whose heroes are positive paragons of virtue.

I've become gradually more aware, over the years I've been writing, of the need to portray mutual respect between the genders and around issues of consent. This is especially the case writing for a young adult readership. Romance writing is a responsible business. The romances you read as a young person are likely to shape your attitudes to and understanding of romantic relationships.

The rise of teen 'dark romance' with its borderline-abusive relationships, including stalking, voyeurism, danger of imminent death and other unsavoury ingredients, portrayed as romantic, trouble me very deeply. I know I'm not alone in this.

I've reacted by making my own male protagonist in my most recent historical novel, Runaway, more respectful. I probably need to go much further down this path, in fact and make my girls more assertive, although this is harder to achieve convincingly in historical fiction, where social norms were different. But consent and mutual respect are vital to portray. In fact, I think I'll end this with the wonderful words of one of the university guides my eldest son came across a year or so ago: "Consent is setting the bar too low, guys. Hold out for enthusiasm."

The Packhorse Trains

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I posted last month about the slowness of wagons on narrow rutted roads in the 18th Century. There was another form of transport that was far quicker and less affected by the poor roads. All over Britain trains of pack horses carried loads of goods from city, countryside or coast to city.
Pack horses were much faster than wagons and for this reason were more suited to transporting fresh goods that would spoil on the journey. In the early 18th century, London was growing fast and food and raw materials needed to be brought in from all over the country.
There was a pack horse train for example, that travelled down every night from the North of England with fresh fish. Trains of pack horses carried fruit and vegetables into the city from all over the country. And from the West Country came a continuous supply of wool to be processed in the city.
All these goods were ideal to be transported by packhorse, being small and relatively light. Bulky and heavy items were better suited to wagons.
The pack horses could avoid the worst of the ruts, not get stuck in the mud like a heavy wagon, take shortcuts and they could also evade the new tollgates that were springing up all over the country, by simply leaving the road for a spell, which the wagons couldn't do, making pack horses cheaper.
It amazed me to find that pack horses were so widely used in the UK and until so recently. I should have guessed, of course, from the number of pubs called the packhorse. I live in the wool-producing West Country and there's one pub with that name within walking distance.
Gradually, the improved roads and the new four-wheeled carts, not to mention canals, put them out of business. But until the mid-18th century they were very much in use.
It was impossible to resist including the pack horses in Runaway once I found out about them, so my character Charlie gets a job with a packhorse train which travels between London and Bradford-on-Avon.
She and her employer (a woman - I checked, and there really were a few women known to have been working the packhorse trains, sometimes dressed as men for protection) walked beside the horses with a stick, one at the front of the train, one at the back and used voice commands to direct them. The horses knew the route by heart and would speed up as they got closer to the inn where they were to be quartered that night. Their stabling would be booked, including feed, at convenient inns on the route, depending on how long the journey was.
My research taught me wisdom such as 'a badly tied pack ruins a horse quicker than bad roads' and a lovely collection of words that have now long ago passed out of the language, such as 'sirsingles' and 'wantyres' which were part of pack horse harness, the wantyre being the strap that fastens around the horse's tail to help secure the load. They are still in the OED with a wide variety of possible spellings.

Democracy, Law Enforcement and Honour

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I'm currently writing a new Viking e-book for Fiction Express and it has set me thinking again about just how unusual a country Iceland was and is.
When Iceland was claimed and settled by the Scandinavians in 800-900, it became Europe's first republic (or commonwealth) and first democracy. Without a feudal system of Kings, lords and land ownership, this new land forged its own way. All the settlers came from monarchies, but this model wasn't how they chose to shape or build their new country.
Land was claimed by the settlers as they arrived (apparently according to how many bonfires you could light within view of each other in a day if you were a man or how much land you could lead a goat around in a day if you were a woman, but I'm sure it was also a matter of what you could grab!) As the land became settled, a number of regional councils were set up which met in spring to agree laws and settle disputes. And ultimately a national council was set up at Thingvellir, (council valley) in the rift valley outside Reykyavik. These type of councils had already existed elsewhere in Scandinavia but there they were ultimately subject to the king. Men (yes, I'm afraid it was almost all men, though women in Scandinavia were far from powerless) met inside a circle into which they could bring no weapons and there they talked.

 

This annual meeting - the largest in the Icelandic calendar - was held with all the side shows such a gathering would naturally attract: booths, food, trade, horseracing and so on. A lawmaker was appointed to serve for a number of years and he would recite the laws of the land as agreed by the council. Disputes were settled, and important decisions taken, such as the occasion on which Iceland faced the ultimatum from Norway: convert to Christianity or be invaded from Norway. The Icelanders democratically appointed a man to take the decision, and he opted for a peaceful conversion.

This sounds idyllic and in many ways it was. It worked. The problem was that there was no independent law enforcement to ensure the sentences passed at the Thing were carried out. If a sentence such as outlawry was passed on an individual (typical for the crime of killing a man), it was up to the guilty party to abide by it. If he did not, he could lawfully be killed by anyone.
Some people openly flouted the law and stayed on their farms or didn't pay their fines. Then a posse of vigilantes (often the families

who had been injured in the first place) would get together and kill him.
The real problem here came with the Icelandic notions of honour. If someone in your family has been killed, your honour is in question until you have avenged him. This didn't theoretically apply to lawful killings, but in practice often did. And then his family would be honour bound to take revenge in their turn.
From this stemmed many blood feuds that over generations wiped out whole familes. Many of the Icelandic sagas centre around feuds and their resolutions. Gradually, a few powerful familes gathered most of the country's wealth and influence into their hands; never a healthy situation.
Tragically, violence and killing reached such a pitch by the  thirteenth century, that the Icelanders decided to call the Norwegian crown to restore peace. This was their undoing and led to a long period of colonial oppression, poverty and starvation, even worse than the initial problem. The darkest period of Iceland history was when Norway and Iceland came under the Danish crown and were treated with heartlessness and cruelty.
Iceland didn't become a democratic, monarch-free state again until Denmark was occupied by Germany during World War Two. They then seized their opportunity and who can blame them?
Thus from its earliest history, Iceland led the way for democracy. I find it fascinating to note that recently they have led the way again, by refusing to be crushed for several generations by the unscrupulous business practices of a few Icelandic bankers. Instead of agreeing to accept their debt as a nation, they rejected the notion of national guilt and (as I understand it) democratically rewrote their constitution online. As a result, after a brief but severe recession, the country is thriving while the rest of Europe is groaning under the yoke of austerity.
This view of Iceland's history is of course open to debate and not everyone agrees they made a right or fair decision. But as far as I'm concerned the message is: Long live democracy! (but you do need law enforcement...)

Georgian Beauty Remedies

by Marie-Louise Jensen


I'm not adverse to a few moisturisers and beauty treatments from time to time, but I can be quite lazy about anything that takes much effort.
I was looking through my copy of Eliza Smith's The Compleat Housewife (first published in 1758 and invaluable for describing food in Georgian books) the other day and came across the various beauty remedies towards the back of the volume. I fear if I'd lived in Georgian times, I'd have lacked the motivation to try for any semblance of beauty at all.
A Remedy for Pimples runs thus:
"Take a quarter of a pound of bitter almonds, blanch, stamp them, and put them into half a pint of spring water; stir it together, strain it out; then put it to half a pint of the best brandy, and a pennorth of the flour of brimstone; shake it well when you use it, which must be often; dab it on with a fine rag."
Honestly, I'd rather be spotty. And who could afford those ingredients?
To Whiten and Clean the Hands, Smith suggests the following recipe:
"Boil a quart of new milk, and turn it with a pint of aqua-vitae; and take off the curd; then put into the posset a pint of rhenish wine, and that will raise another curd, which take off; then put in the whites of six eggs well beaten, and that will raise another curd, which you must take off, and mix the three curds together very well, and put them into a gallipot and put the posset in a bottle; scour your hands with the curd, and wash them with the posset."
Next time I read in an old book that a character brews a posset, I will have a lot more respect for the time it would take! I definitely would have been spotty AND lacking white hands!
And I think, looking at Smith's remedy for scurvy of the gums, her readers would have done better to have ignored the long, time-consuming recipe for a gargle and just eaten the six oranges she recommended putting in it.
The cure for breast cancer could come in handy one day though; apparently if you collect the warts from a stone horse and powder them, you can also brew something as a cure with them. Hmm. I suspect you'd be more likely to be trampled to death by the stallion if you tried scraping his warts off than cured of cancer.

Cant

by Marie-Louise Jensen

In early Georgian times it became fashionable, especially for well-to-do young men to speak 'cant' or slang; the language as spoken by the poor or more especially by the less-respectable members of society. Namely, the sharpers, the sharks, the bites, the wild-rogues, the varlets, the queer-bluffers, the rascals and scoundrels.

There is a lot of fun to be had. I've not yet been able to master the vocabulary fully enough to create a canting character, and in any case I think it might be bewildering for my young readership, but I do like to throw in a few Georgian expressions now and again. Some of these are cant and some are simply expressions that have fallen out of usage.

We had some discussions about some of these at the copy-edit stage recently. Because most are outdated and unheard-of now. Where would be the fun if they were still current? But who today knows about job horses, match-bays or wantyres? Horses are no longer our form of transport.
Nor do we any longer have such widespread suffering from gout, so the expression 'in the gout' to depict an ageing gentleman rendered grumpy, difficult and at times incapacitated by a painful condition is no longer familiar.
I also wanted a character to use the expression 'sick as a cushion' for comic effect. Then when called upon to defend it, I couldn't find it anywhere. One of my editors did track it down in the OED (hurrah!) but in the end we settled for 'sick as a parrot' which is probably more comic.
I haven't yet managed to work in 'farting crackers' to a manuscript (a cant term for breeches) although I fully intend to one day. But I did have to track down an era-appropriate term for a man's privates. I found tool, which I thought was comic without being crude. And did you know that a cant term for testicles was 'whirlegigs'? I don't even want to think about how that might have originated...
 Here is the cover of the new book (publishing next June) that provided the fun:

1940's Knickers and Ruby Slippers - Celia Rees

I recently visited the Hollywood Costume Exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum*.  It was very popular. I went with my daughter and we were reduced to a shuffle as we wound round the different areas of the exhibition but that didn't matter. The slow progress gave us more time to look. I have to admit to being as star struck as anyone and standing in awe in front of the most iconic outfits: Scarlett  O'Hara's dress made from curtains, Marlene Dietrich's top hat and tails and Audrey Hepburn's Breakfast at Tiffany's Little Black Dress.

'Look!' We whispered to each other. 'That's it. The real one!' 

It put one back in touch with favourite stars, favourite films, favourite film scenes. It was also sobering to think that many of the stars who wore these costumes were dead while the clothes they wore lived on.  

For me (once I'd got past the boggling stage) the most interesting aspect of the whole exhibition was the research process that the designers went through to create these costumes, their painstaking attention to detail. The History Girls routinely post about costume. Marie Louise Jensen did a piece about Men's Clothing in the 1700's just this week. When you are writing historical fiction, it is important to know what your characters would be wearing. Finding out is often uppermost in our minds, that is why we blog about it. We look at different sources, just as the film designers do. Museums, like the V & A, with specialist departments can be very helpful, and then there are books on costume. There is also, of course, the internet. Sometimes helpful. Sometimes not. An internet search for '1940's knickers', for example, can take you to some very strange places. The garments featured under 'retro' bear little resemblance to my granny's pink bloomers or to the rubber roll ons I remember women struggling into in the Fifties. But one has to persist. it is important to know what one's character would be wearing, right down to their underwear.

As I shuffled round the exhibition, I realised that there was another dimension to this. It is not just important to know what a man or woman would be wearing in 1789, for example, but it is important to know what your character would be wearing. We have to know who our character is before we can decide what clothes he or she would put on in the morning. It is important to get the period right but clothes tell us a great deal about personality as well as position and status in life. I'd always instinctively known this, but here it was spelt out for me. One whole area was devoted to just this: Deconstruction.

'On every film, the clothes are half the battle in creating the character. I have a great deal of opinion about how my people are presented. We show a great deal by what we put on our bodies' 

Meryl Streep

One is always attracted to areas of special interest and one of mine just happens to be pirates. When I first saw Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, I immediately thought of Blackbeard. The pigtails and plaited beard, the stance. But the designers also channeled Keith Richards for both his 'look' and his personality. That was interesting. With care, one can improvise. An insight like that can make a character a whole lot more than a historical clothes horse. 

I was also halted at another point on my shuffle round. In front of the costumes for Shakespeare in Love, there was a quotation from Joseph Fiennes who played Shakespeare. When contemplating the part he looked for:

'[The] human element - all things [one] wouldn't associate with being a genius... I put aside all reverence and adopted the attitude that as soon as I put on those tights I was Will Shakespeare.'

Even though I had no idea that was how Joseph Fiennes found his way into the part, I immediately identified. When I was writing The Fool's Girl, I had to discover my own way round Shakespeare the genius. I did so by finding my Will Shakespeare in Mr Fiennes. When you see something like that, it is a good feeling, as though your insight is vindicated.

I found much to think about as I went round this exhibition. Just as it is on the screen, so it should be on the page.  Nothing is accidental. Everything is there by design and clothing should suit the character, not just by being right for the period but right for the person. 

Once in a while, costume and clothing can do something more.  One of the last exhibits is Judy Garland's costume from The Wizard of Oz. It is worth the long, slow shuffle. The power and magic of L. Frank Baum's fantasy is eloquently expressed in the contrast between Dorothy's faded, dusty blue gingham dress and the dazzling brilliance of the ruby slippers. It is all there in the costume. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

*The Exhibition is on until 27th January, so you still have time to catch it if you are quick.