Shakespeare's Rebel (57 page)

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.