Will power

     I've been immersed in Elizabethan England for the last few days, reading Christopher Rush's remarkable, powerful Will. I had to surface for air once or twice, so dense is the writing and so raw the subject-matter - he leaves nothing out, and what is in is graphic, shall we say - but that should not be allowed to detract from what is a bravura performance.

     Shakespeare recounts his own story to his lawyer as he makes his will - "A man's will is his life, Francis" [an interesting thought] - and re-lives every scene from rural Warwickshire to hellish London and back to prosperity in Stratford and the sad emptiness of his later years. "Give sorrow words. The grief that will not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break". The death of his only son Hamnet haunts him, and his loveless marriage provides no succour; he lives for his art and speaks through it.

"All the same it's Feste I stand with in the end: the Fool who stands outside love, stands in the wind and the rain and sings of all three sadly..... I remember the early days, when I believed in the illusion that I could come in from the wind and the rain and join the cakes-and-alers in the castle. Now...I know the truth of it."

     This is a bold, brilliant, bawdy account of a remarkable life. Exuberant, vibrant and saturated with rich imagery and ripe language, it gives flesh to the man behind the poems and the plays. The actor/ businessman/ wordsmith lived in tumultuous times which informed his writing and he drew on the mood and the spirit of his age, just as on his personal experience to create his dramas, his influences all identified here.

     But who was he really? In the Epilogue he says "Identity itself is play...Is there really an essential you, or are you nothing but the roles you play? Does truth exist in action or in thought?" He saw himself, ultimately, as Prospero, writing The Tempest as his farewell to poetry and giving one of his most moving speeches:

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air: and, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."   

Comments

[Peter the Flautist]

Dark Puss is certainly into role play and fantasy (some of which I keep strictly to myself, some of which is a little more public to those I know and trust). However I do believe that underneath it all there is an essential core, primarily of intellectual and moral integrity, that proscribes me. As to musings on truth, well that's a big challenge to a natural philospher, and its something that we are honour bound to keep questioning and testing to the best of our ability. However the closest I get is providing some of the tools. Now where are the My Dying Bride CD's, Lady Morgana, and Onyx when you need them?

[Donna]

I have been anxious to hear about this book. I think this will be rather near the top of my must read list. Thanks for posting.

[Harriet]

I wonder if I would enjoy this? I'm always a little wary of fictionalised biogs and in fact can't bring to mind any that I've read and enjoyed all that much. I'd better have a flick through in Waterstones and see if it grabs me!

[Tui M.]

Thanks for this review, Karen. I had been wondering about this one, having enjoyed "How Shakespeare came to be Shakespeare".

I always felt the Epilogue in The Tempest was his farewell to all of us:
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.