History -- Off The Shelf -- by Sheena Wilkinson

Like most people, the history I studied at school was mostly about men and wars and politics. Public history, if you like.  I liked it better when we got occasional insights into the mundanities of everyday life. I didn’t always remember dates or get excited by laws and treaties, but I was forever putting my hand up to ask questions like, What did they wear? What were their bathrooms like? What did they eat? 

My personal history bookcase, built up over years, reflects this early preference.  There are a few worthy tomes on political history, mostly things I have bought with good intentions or inherited from my father (who almost certainly didn’t read them either). But mostly it’s social history. Private history, if you like. Books about how ordinary people – and some extraordinary people – lived and loved and looked after their families in earlier centuries. There are books about suffragettes and spinsters, the WI and the Girl Guides, sex and schooling. These books are well-read, often more than once. These books are where I go when I don’t feel like fiction. 

The bookcase has its own history of course. For a start, it was made by my late father. When I photographed it for this blog, I thought I should remove the clutter, but then I realised that these bits and pieces are part of my own history and my family’s. The carriage clock is hideous and doesn’t work, but it was presented to my grandfather on his retirement in 1977 and thus I can’t bear to throw it out. The tweed mouse, favourite toy of a long-dead cat, was made by my best friend from school, Elizabeth. And the little doll, a seventies favourite called Jenny-my-best-schoolfriend, was a Christmas present from my granny when I was eight. And history doesn't stop -- the suffragette doll was a present for my fiftieth birthday last year, and bought to mark my 2017 novel Star by Star. 

So, the history is in the books, but not only in the books. History is never only in the books. 

Ancient Egyptian Gallery - Joan Lennon

This month marks the 200th anniversary of the National Museum of Scotland (then the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland*) acquiring its very first ancient Egyptian artefact.**  So it is fitting that they are opening the new Ancient Egyptian Gallery ...

... and it is fabulous!  Every cabinet and display has something riveting.  From Nubian horses -

c1550-1295 BCE

c1390-1186

to a long-kilted wealthy man -

c1855-1650 BCE

to a tiny bewigged woman -

c1550-1295 BCE

But perhaps, as many of us are writers, I should share the headless scribe with the lovely ripply belly, with these words on the information board:

"In an ancient Egyptian poem, a father advises his son to become a scribe to avoid hard physical labour, declaring, 'I will make you love writing more than your mother!'"

c1479-1425 BCE

Says it all.

The next time you are in Edinburgh, give it a visit if you possibly can.  If that isn't likely to be anytime soon, the links below offer a taste of what's on offer, and also some more in-depth information about individual objects.

Explore Our Collections: Ancient Egyptian Collection
Things to See and Do:  New Ancient Egyptian, East Asia and Ceramics Galleries


* Founded 1780.
** The Egyptian collection now contains around 6,000 objects.

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.

A Fine Song of Love - Katherine Langrish

The past is a different country which requires a great deal of research and imaginative effort to recreate in its multilayered richness of sights, sounds, smells, textures and tastes. Visiting the  Chiltern Open Air Museum a few years ago I found myself shouting to be heard over the almost unbearable thunder of iron-rimmed cartwheels rolling over cobbles. I’d had no idea carts were so loud – and that was one single, large, four-wheeled wagon pulled by a single horse. Imagine the din around the warehouses of London Docks in the 1880s! 

Music goes beyond natural sound, though. Music is a cultural construct full of meaning; it reflects, interprets, and to a large extent creates the manners and desires of its own time. It's natural to refer to music as we construct history. Swingtime, jazz, rock and roll, punk, reggae, hip-hop – all tell something about the decades in which they flourish. Impossible to imagine the sixties without the Beatles or the Kinks. The same must be true for the deeper past. I once thrilled to a British Museum reconstruction of a Roman trumpet call, and what about the prehistoric bone flutes that were played in caves like Lascaux?

My children’s novel DarkAngels (HarperCollins) is set on the Welsh borders in the 1190s, and features a flawed heroic figure, Hugo of La Motte Rouge, Norman warlord and ex-crusader who believes his dead wife may – just may – not be dead after all, even though seven years have passed since he buried her. She may have been spirited away by the elf-folk and taken into the tunnels under the hill. In which case, there may be a chance he could rescue her.

There are a quite a few 12^th century legends on this mysterious subject, the idea of lost lovers re-encountered in some fairy land of the dead. Walter Map, a courtier at the court of Henry II, tells the story of a Breton knight who rescued his dead-and-buried wife when, months later, he saw her whirling in a fairy dance. And the retelling of the Orpheus myth, Sir Orfeo, probably also ultimately dates from this time, from a Breton lai subsequently translated into Middle English.

So there I was with the idea that my knight Lord Hugo would be a sort of Orpheus figure. Therefore he needed to be musical. Now the Breton lais are lengthy stories in verse; they were performed by minstrels who probably chanted them with a musical prelude and interludes. And of course the 12^th and 13th centuries were also the time of the troubadours of southern France, whose songs were primarily songs of fin’ amour – of romantic love in high society.

Garden of Pleasure, Harley 4425, 15th C.

It’s been suggested that the notion, even the emotion of romantic love was created by the troubadours, a product of the hot-house needs of often very young noblemen and noblewomen living with nothing much to do in close proximity in small castles, spending time together every day, yet with sex strictly off-limits - marriage being a formal matter of property and alliances arranged by their elders. So this new music arose, a music of youth, full of expressions of forbidden desire: subversive, exciting, dangerous and fashionable.

Many troubadours were high-born men and women, whose songs would usually be performed by a joglar or jongleur, a professional singer. Still, it seemed to me quite possible that my own Lord Hugo might on occasion be prevailed upon to sing his own songs – especially if he thought that doing so might help win back his wife from the dead land.   

So now I needed to listen to troubadour songs. Here's one anonymous 13th century song, performed by Conjunto de Camara de Porto Alegre. They don't sing it all: as you can see, below, it's quite long. I made a free translation to get myself in the mood for writing songs for Lord Hugo.

Volez vous que je vous chante             Would you like me to sing you

Un son d’amours avenant?                 A fine song of love?                          

Vilain nel fist mie,                                By no peasant it was made,               

Ainz le fist un chevalier                       But a gentle knight who lay

Sous l’ombre d’un olivier                    With his sweetheart in his arms

Entre les bras s’amie.                          In an olive tree’s shade.

Chemisete avoit de lin                         She wore a linen chemise,

Et blanc peliçon hermin                      A pelisse of white ermine –

Et bliaut de soie                                   Of silk was her dress,

Chauces ot de jaglolai                         Her stockings were of iris leaves

Et solers de flours de mai                    And slippers of mayflowers

Estroitement chauçade                        Her feet to caress.

Ceinturete avoit de feuille                    Her girdle was of leaves

Que verdist quant li tens meuille,        Which grow green when it rains,

D’or est boutonade                             Her buttons of gold so fine,

L’aumosniere estoit d’amour              Her purse was a gift of love

Li pendant furent de flours                  And it hung from flowery chains

Par amours fu donade.                       As it were a lovers’ shrine.

Et chevauchoit une mule                     And she rode on a mule,

D’argent ert la ferruere                       The saddle was of gold,

La sele ert dorade;                              All silver were its shoes;

Sus la croupe par derriers                   On the crupper behind

Avoit plante trois rosiers                     To provide her with shade

Pour faire li ombrage.                         Three rose-bushes grew.

Si s’en va aval la pree                         As she passed through the fields

Chevaliers l’ont encontree                  She met gentle knights

Beau l’on saluade:                              Who demanded courteously:

“Belle, dont estes vous nee?”             “Fair one, where were you born?”

“De France sui la louee,                     “From France am I come.

De plus haut parage.”                        And of high family.”

“Li rossignol est mon pere                  “The nightingale is my father

Qui chant sor la ramee                       Who sings from the branches

El plus haut boscage.                          Of the forest’s highest tree.

La seraine est mon mere                     The mermaid is my mother

Qui chante en la mer sale                   Who sings her sweet notes

Li plus haut rivage.”                           On the banks of the salt sea.”

“Belle, bon fussiez vous nee!               “Fair one, well were you born!          

Bien estes emparentee                         Well fathered, well mothered

Et de haut parage.                               And of high family.

Pleüst á Dieu nostre pere                    Might God only grant

Que vous ne fussiez donee                   That you should be given

A femme esposade.”                           In marriage to me!”

Could a song be more sensual, the object of desire more dangerous? The lady in this chanson is a headily-erotic blend of wildwood flowers, songs and the fairy world; that purse which hangs from her girdle on flowery chains ‘like a lover’s shrine’ is certainly a metaphor Freud would have recognised. No wonder the young knights acknowledge her ‘high degree’ and long for her hand in marriage. It’s enough to turn their parents’ hair grey.  

Lady out riding, 16th C, by Gerard Horenbout

Troubadour songs often use images such as the coming of the green leaves in spring, and the song of the nightingale, to express the pain and delight and longing of love. Here’s Guillem de Peiteus, Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, comparing love to a hawthorn bough:

As for our love, you must know how

Love goes – it’s like the hawthorn bough

That on the living tree stands, shaking

All night beneath the freezing rain

Till next day, when the warm sun, waking,

Spreads through green leaves and boughs again.

(Tr. W. D. Snodgrass.)

In the end I wrote this for Hugo to sing of his love:

When all the spring is bursting and blossoming,

And the hedge is white with blossom like a breaking wave,

That’s when my heart is bursting with love-longing

For the girl who pierced it, for that sweet wound she gave.

And I hear the nightingale singing in the forest –

Singing for love in the forest: “Come to me, I am alone…

Better to suffer love’s pain for a single kiss

Than live for a hundred years with a heart of stone.”

It’s Hugo’s love and pain that drives the plot of Dark Angels and I really needed the plangent, beautiful music of the 13^th century to get it right.

Exploring a beautiful book (part one), by Gillian Polack

Right now, caught up in the rather interesting Australian elections, I feel as if we’re in the middle of history. Some years are more significant than others for story purposes and for interpreting people over time and this one is a good example. I’m not going to describe it today, however. Being in the middle of big events is not so comfortable. What I want today is safety.

I have a few volumes (not nearly enough volumes) of British Parliamentary Papers about Australia and they are what my history-soul craves. At times like this I find peace in enjoying the beauty of a book and then opening a page at random and reading the documents. I’ll enjoy the external beauty with you today and then do the internal exploration next month.

I only have a few volumes of this exceptionally large series and all the volumes I own are about Australia. The Irish University Press put them out about fifty years ago, and when many of my books were stolen, these beautiful green leatherbound books on archival quality paper were some of the first I looked for. I was so worried they had gone and so relieved when I found them.

The first volume to come to hand is from 1850.

Opening at random, let us explore. Or rather, let me explore and report the exploration as I go. So often readers see what fiction writers have done after the exploration, when we have caged and domesticated and reshaped what we find. It’s fun to see what happens on the job from time to time.

Before I can explore the content, you need to meet the book. Paper books each have their own personality, and volumes as exquisitely made as this are rare these days. It’s solidly and well-bound, with more leather than a good pair of shoes and with tooling to render a plain cover library-worthy.

One of the things I love about books is finding miscellaneous paper tucked away. The paper I found when I opened my 1850 volume is paper I’ve seen before, and each time I find it I stop and remind myself why it has to stay there. It’s not extraordinary, but it illuminates the volume’s reason for existing in an extraordinary way. Ephemera can give us critical historical data.

There are two different documents hiding in the front of the book. One is a reprinted page from The Times Literary Supplement, July 24 1969. It consists of two full newspaper-size pages explaining the Parliamentary Papers. 

It tells me that there are thirty-four volumes just for Australia: I only have six of them. The complete set of volumes for Australia cost $2,110 in 1969, which was enough to buy a small house in suburban Melbourne. This amounts to over 19,000 big pages of dense text. 

The content of the thirty-four volumes walks the reader through the colonisation of Australia and some papers about New Zealand (for New Zealand was governed from Australia back then, but there are another seventeen volumes just for New Zealand, enough to buy, I suspect a 2 bedroom flat). My life feels incomplete and my bookshelves bereft and I need a cup of tea.

The other sets of papers include ninety-four volumes on the Slave Trade (worth a much better house in 1969, which is sad and ironic) and three volumes of collected material from 1834-7 about Australian Aborigines. 

I need to read those fifteen hundred pages of those three volumes one day more than I need to read anything else in this vast series, but I don’t own any of them. Those early days set up a lot of problems for everyone who lived in Australia when colonisation began and I don’t understand them enough to write about them.

I suddenly need another cup of tea, because this is a reminder of how little I know about things I ought to know very well indeed. I encounter this often when I read the fiction of those who don’t quite do their research. We’re all influenced by what we were taught (all kinds of prejudgements flood our writing and the people left out of history seldom enter it) and unless we think ourselves past the problems given to us by our culture and our education, we carry those problems into our fiction. 

There’s a library only fifteen minutes away by bus where I can see those three volumes – it’s now on my ‘must do’ list.

The other two pieces of paper are an inspection slip and its duplicate. They tell me a lot about how much care was spent crafting these books. They’re some of the best quality volumes I’m ever likely to own. This particular volume was inspected by “H.J.W.” and the inspector had their own stamp to announce this on the dotted line. Filling in the form may have been a bit rushed, for in fact, the stamp is on a slope halfway to the next line and right near the wrong edge of the page. The date was 6 January 1970, and below the date is this wonderful announcement. “In the unlikely event of this volume being found faulty in any particular of manufacture, please send full details of the nature of the complaint and this Inspection Slip to THE PUBLISHER AT SHANNON IRELAND.” The duplicate means that no-one ever sent a complaint. I suspect that I’m the only owner, however, since I bought my volumes from a bookseller who’d bought them from someone who found hundreds of them in storage and who wanted to clear the space, so this is not useful knowledge. 

I love the way some tidbits are fascinating but not at all useful. It’s as easy to overinterpret ephemera as it is to underinterpret ephemera.

For me, this inspection slip (number C11203) brings the whole volume to life. The advertorial is informative and very useful, but the small piece of paper with it shows just how much the Irish University Press spent on the volume. The volume itself backs up the claim of perfection in publishing. You can see that from the pictures.

Now that you’ve met this marvellous volume… you have to wait a month to find out what’s in it.

Shakespeare's Dark Lady by Mary Hoffman

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare."

This was probably the first "Dark Lady" sonnet you ever read or heard of and it is well used in the play Emilia,* currently showing at the Vaudeville theatre in London's West End and written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm. She takes the facts known about Emilia Bassano, or Lanier (or Amelia, Aemilia, Lanyer and many variations thereof) and "fills in the gaps."

The play is a triumph of positivity about women finding and using their voices in the past and now and brings audiences to their feet at every performance.

Emilia Bassano is just one of the many candidates proposed to have been Shakespeare's Dark Lady, to whom a couple of dozen of his sonnets are written. Here are some of the others:

Mary Fitton (Thomas Taylor 1890, Bernard Shaw 1909)

Mary Fitton

1578-1647, a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth the First, Mary Fitton certainly had an eventful sex life, giving birth to the illegitimate son of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and three other illegitimate children before marrying the father of the last, a son. In the late 19th and early twentieth century Mary was a top choice as Dark Lady, since Herbert was prime candidate for "Mr W. H." the dedicatee of the sonnets.

The theory was scuppered, according to Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson in their book Shakespeare's Sonnets (2004): "her star waned when she was discovered to have been fair." I don't know, she doesn't look very fair in her portrait above, painted in about 1595.

George Bernard Shaw wrote a play called The Dark Lady of Shakespeare's Sonnets, with Mary Fitton as the woman in question. However, there is no evidence that Mary Fitton knew Shakespeare.

Jane Davenant
Jane was the wife of an Oxford innkeeper, at whose inn, the Crown, Shakespeare sometimes stayed en route between London and Stratford. There was a rumour that Shakespeare stood as godfather to Jane's son, William. And more than a rumour - a claim made by the man himself - that William was in fact Shakespeare's son, born in 1606. The claim was also made by Arthur Acheson in his book Mistress Davenant:the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1913). And it is true that the Earl of Southampton had also stayed at the same inn and would have met Jane.

Lucy Morgan (G B Harrison, Duncan Salkeld)

In Shakespeare among the Courtesans (Ashgate 2012), Salkeld returns to the theories of G B Harrison in his book Shakespeare at Work (Routledge 1933) that the Dark Lady was a Clerkenwell prostitute also known as Black Luce or Lucy Negra. He bases this on a connection he has found to Philip Henslowe of Gilbert East, who was an associate of Lucy Negra's.

Aline Florio (Jonathan Bate, Dr Aubrey Burl)
Jonathan Bate in The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador 1997) plumps for the wife of John Florio, who he declares to be nameless. Since so many writers since have produced the forename Aline, I have used it here. It's certainly true that Shakespeare knew Florio. And that Florio was Southampton's language tutor, so a part of his household.

In Shakespeare's Mistress: The Mystery of the Dark Lady Revealed (Amberley 2012), the archaeologist Aubrey Burl reviews the usual suspects and he too goes with "Mrs Florio."

Earl of Southampton himself (S. C. Campbell)
This one is right out of left field but Campbell, in her otherwise excellent book, Only Begotten Sonnets (Bell & Hyman 1978), suggests that the Dark Lady was just another aspect of the young man Shakespeare wrote the sonnets for. - his shadow self. Take a look at the poem this post started with, above, and see if you think this theory has legs, let alone breasts.

Earl of Southampton dressed as a woman

But to return to Emilia Bassano, her role was championed by A. L. Rowse in 1973 in his book Shakespeare the Man (HarperCollins) but with very little evidence.

?Emilia Bassano by Nicholas Hilliard

The known facts are few: Emilia was born in 1569, the daughter of Baptista Bassano, a Venetian court musician, and Margaret Johnson. Her father died when she was seven and, when she was eighteen, Emilia became the mistress of Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon, who was Lord Chamberlain to Elizabeth l.

Now this Henry Cary was certainly the son of Mary Boleyn and possibly even the son of Henry Vlll, who had an affair will Mary before his interest passed to her sister Anne. So Henry was at least first cousin and maybe half brother to Queen Elizabeth.

Henry Cary, 1st Baron Hunsdon

He was much older than his half-Italian mistress and he did not offer to marry her. Emilia was instead married off to her cousin, Alfonso Lanier, another court musician. The marriage does not seem to have been a happy one but Lanier brought the child up as his own son. A second child, a daughter, Odillya, was born five years later, after Carey's death, but died before the end of her first year.

Shakespeare's Sonnets were first published in 1609 and Emilia's volume, Salve Deus, Rex Judaeorum was entered into the Stationer's Register the next year. It was published in 1611, Alfonso died in 1613 and Shakespeare in 1616. Emilia's son Henry Lanier died in 1633 but Emilia lived on to 1645.

From these bare bones, Lloyd Malcolm has created a drama in which her heroine has written ever since she was a child, meets Shakespeare and even has her second child by him, and gives him inspiration not only for the sonnets but several of his plays.

It's an all female cast, with Emilia played by three different actors representing different stages of her life. (Charity Wakefield, Mary Boleyn in the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall novels, has a nicely comic turn as Shakespeare).

The desire for publication and recognition of her own voice is what drives this version of Emilia. She teaches other women from "south of the river" (which gets a laugh), ordinary washerwomen, who use their literacy to write their own pleas for acceptance and equality. Their work showers down on the audience.

Although Shakespeare and Lord Chamberlain (Shakespeare was a Player in The Chamberlain's Men) appear in the play, there is no mention of the Earl of Southampton, the now generally agreed dedicatee of the main sonnet sequence, who appears also to have had an affair with the Dark Lady.

Clare Perkins, who plays the older Emilia, ends the show with an impressive rallying cry for women to go out and create and demand their place in the world. It's perhaps a pity that the playwright sees equality mainly in terms of women's anger but it is a strong ending and one that audiences relate to.

It certainly works as a piece of theatre.

William Shakespeare, the "Cobbe Portrait

* Full disclosure: my daughter Becky Barber-Sharp is Associate Producer for NB Productions on this show, which runs at the Vaudeville in the Strand till the end of May.