Start the Week

25/04/2011

Andrew Marr talks to the theatre director Greg Doran about the literary detective work involved in his production of Cardenio - a play he's described as Shakespeare's Lost Play re-imagined. Nicola Shulman turns to the court of Henry VIII to explore the influence of Thomas Wyatt's poetry. While Neil Astley brings together contemporary poets from around the world in an anthology dedicated to 'Being Human'. And as the Guardian launches a new website for book reviews by readers, its literary Editor, Claire Armitstead says there will always be a place in newspapers for the professional critics.

Producer: Victoria Brignell.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 25 Apr 2011
Audio Format:: other

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. At King Super's, an annual Boost Membership just got even better. Now you can choose from Disney+ with ads, Hulu with ads, or ESPN+ on us when you sign up. Plus, enjoy unlimited free delivery, double fuel points, exclusive offers, and free items. Sign up for a Boost Membership today. It's an easier way to save, including new streaming options to relax with, while we deliver your groceries. King Super's, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Thank you for downloading the Start The Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello. We're going to wallow in words today, talking about poetry from Tudor Times, right up to the present day, and about its audience. Later on, I'm going to be talking to Neil Astley, founder of Blood Axe, the poetry publisher from Northumberland, whose anthologies, the new ones called Being Human, have brought contemporary poetry to huge numbers of new readers, and Nicola Shulman, who's written a life of one of the first famous English poets, but a man who puzzles many modern readers, Sir Thomas Wyatt, courtier at the Dangerous Court of Henry VIII. Part of the problem there is about who he was writing for, and how they read his poems and Claire Armistead, books editor for The Guardian, the Observer, and their websites, has views on today's readers and critics, the democratisation of opinion. Well, we're going to start with a play which has fascinated all the critics. Shakespeare's Cardenio. You haven't heard of it. That's because it was lost, and though it hasn't been found again, but Greg Doran of The Royal Shakespeare Company is putting it on anyway. Greg, you call Cardenio reimagined. So let's talk about what you're reimagining. We're pretty sure that this was a play that was performed, and at least part of which was written by Shakespeare. We think so. There was a court record for the winter of 1612, 1613, which says that among the plays performed were The Temper Stand, much to do about nothing, and a play called Cardena, or later on Cardenio. And then in 1653, the publisher Humphrey Mosley attempted to register for publication, a play called The History of Cardenio by Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare. It was then adapted, apparently, by a guy called Lewis Tibalt in 1727. Now, he claims that he had been handed the manuscript of this Lost Shakespeare Play by the old prompter from The Royal Lane Theatre. And we looked at this play. It's called The Double Faulthood. And I believe that it is, in fact, it does have the DNA of Shakespeare within it. It is an adaptation, I believe, of what must have been Cardenio that was written in 1612. And which was itself an adaptation of a story by Cervantes? It was. That same year, Don Quixote had been published for the first time in its first translation, first translation ever, in any language by Thomas Shelton. So it seems that Shakespeare and Fletcher, always in search of a good plot, plundered on Quixote. Leave out Don Quixote, I might say, in centric patterns. Yes, he's not there. He then appeared. And tell the story of the young love Cardenio and how he is portrayed by his best friend and how he rushes off into the Sierra Marina Mountains and goes mad. And ultimately, of course, being a Shakespeare play reunited with his loved loss of love. You say Shakespeare play, but this is a period when Shakespeare is collaborating with Fletcher, who he sort of handed over the reins of office to. Yes, and I think we've got to be careful about understanding what collaboration was in those days. It's possible that Fletcher, for instance, collaborated by doing the words and that Shakespeare developed the plot, that he was a good plotter. It's possible that they split up and some did, one did some scenes and one did the other. The first Shakespeare I ever directed for the RSC was Henry VIII, All Is True. And we didn't spend a lot of time, I have to say, going, oh, that's a bit Fletcher and that's a bit of Shakespeare, because presumably when they were collaborating, part of the point was to cover over the cracks. So you saw a piece that had a kind of integrity to it, if you liked that. Reading it myself, I mean, this is clearly a completely plausible Jacobian play. You would sit there and say, I'm enjoying this and it's got lots of the tropes of the Jacobian theatre inside it. There are only moments I felt when I, oh, you get that little shiver with the eye, yes, those words are surprising. It seems to me you can recreate or you can re-imagine very easily, if you're good at this stuff, the sort of 90% which is a Jacobian play, the 10% which is pure genius on top of it, or the unexpected 10% is much harder. It's harder. And in a way, I suppose, as we've been working on our script, our reimagined script, most of which is Louis Tibault, and some of which is Shelton's translation of Cervantes, because there were clearly in the double falsehood several missing scenes, several crucial missing scenes. There's a scene where the one of the heroines is seduced and possibly raped by the villain. There's a scene where the other heroine is abducted from a convent, and those scenes have been left out of the double falsehood. So in order for it to work, we had to put them back in. There were lots of moments when I was trying to work out whether this is a modern idea or not. There's one bit where there's a possibility of a bit of a sort of rent boy right at the end, where Cardenio is, this chap comes and questions whether it's a girl or a man, which seemed to me to be a modern playing with what was going on in the Jacobian stage of a boy's dressed as a girl. It's very good, Andrew Handock, you noticed that. But yeah, no, you're right. There is a moment at the end where the villain is meant to identify the page that he has wronged and it is, in fact, a girl dressed as a boy. That's right. Very late Shakespearean way. Yeah. What about, and some of the language, were you imitating? Were you consciously imitating Jacobian language or are you allowing some modern language in as well? No, I hadn't done any pastiche Jacobian stuff. Most, I would say, what? Out of the 2000 lines, I would say perhaps 400 have been derived from elsewhere and the rest is double falsehood. So those 400 lines, we took from Thomas Shelton's 1612 translation and those scenes have been rendered in the Shelton in dialogue quite a lot. So we were able just to, in a way, put it into iambic pentameter, I suppose. And where there were missing bits, we've looked at other plays that Fletcher wrote based on Cervantes. So there are other similar incidents where a woman is recovering from a moment of being skewsed or whatever, where we borrowed odd lines. And ever so occasionally, I've done a sort of John Barton and written in a little conjunction between two bits. But this play already has a writing credit list that's longer than a Hollywood blockbuster. So I didn't want to do too much extra writing. And given that everything else by Shakespeare, pretty much that we think was collected and published quite soon afterwards at the time, do we know how the play was lost? Well, I think fire comes into play. Three weeks after the performance for the Duke of Savoy's ambassador in June 1613, the Globe Theatre burnt down. Now, during that fire, those plays of Shakespeare's that hadn't been published up to that point, and there were 18 that hadn't come into Cotto, could have been lost in that fire. So we wouldn't be talking about one lost Shakespeare. We'd be talking about 19 or 20 lost. There's the Great Fire of London, in which Humphrey Mosley's stock was probably stored in some faiths under Paul's, which was the station as church. And it seems that when the church burned, six acres of lead melted off the roofs, crashed through the vault of some faiths, and that stock was burning, you know, a week later. It could be, we hear that double falsehoods, the manuscript that Tibalt says he has, was in the Theatre Covent Garden Museum Library of the Covent Garden Theatre, the Covent Garden Theatre burnt down in 1808. And even Lewis Tibalt's stock in his estate seems to have been traced back to a house called Stradone House in Southern Ireland, which was bombed by the IRA in 1921. So, there are many, many ways in which this place could have been lost. That's a plausible incendiary list. What did Matt Restner's make of this? Well, I went to see this actually on Saturday, and I hugely enjoyed it, but it is certainly, one does, is aware that it is diluted to some considerable degree, because you've not only got Tibalt, but you've also potentially got the idea that the manuscripts that Tibalt was working from were not, in fact, the 16th century manuscripts, but were 17th century manuscripts done by the Cavalier Pope William Davenant, and some people think that. This is the same Cavalier Pope who kept claiming that he was Shakespeare's natural son. Exactly, and you had, I think, a metal nose, unfortunate accident with syphilis cure. So then what you've got is you've not only got that, you've also got savantes, and you've, so then you've got what is effectively a homeopathic dose of Shakespeare, which you're actually watching. Some people think homeopathy works. Well, that's what I was thinking. Is that going to make it more powerful? When I was watching the play, what I thought was, if I don't concentrate, this is exactly like Shakespeare, but partly because of the brilliance of the staging, the wonderfulness of the acting, the particular kind of diction that the actors are using, the way that they manage to sort of make Shakespeare-y and jokes out of what perhaps is not very Shakespeare-y and material. And when I concentrated on it, I thought, does that really sound exactly like Shakespeare? I think that's why we called it a reimagining rather than a reconstruction. I think a reconstruction would have sounded as though we were being somehow altered to do. Actually, the jokes are a giveaway. If it was real Shakespeare, it would be a series of completely impenetrable and unfunny jokes that would suddenly appear. The thing that always strikes me is how much Shakespeare embodies sort of paradoxical attitude that we have now towards him, that we are obsessed with digging him up as if he's a relic. And yet the point about him is that he was an amazing coiner of the new. He absolutely embraced an era when everything was unfolding. And one of the, one of the expirations that's been done of this text was about the words that only he had ever used. And that's where the Shakespeare DNA is. He could be the blogging bar on your website, do you? Yeah, that's the way he'd probably be into text-speak, wouldn't he? Well, I think he would. I mean, that's what's so glorious about his language is, you know, the English language grew by, we think, 100,000 words in Shakespeare's, you know, lifetime. And if you compare the vocabulary of the King James Bible, which is about 6,000 words with Shakespeare's vocabulary, which is probably 29,000 words, part of his, part of his appeal is that he's creating words for a sort of novelty value, creating words to, to set off kind of electrical charges in your brain and excite you. And I think that's what makes watching a Shakespeare play. So thrilling, in a way. Leastly. Yeah, I thought as well as reimagining, he could almost call it a remix in a sentence. And I wish I'd thought as a remix. I think it works for an audience. But one thing that interested me particularly was all the literary detective work that you used. And I know there have been other scholars who've worked on trying to piece it together. Gary Taylor, who had it produced in New Zealand, and there was a performance, I think, at the Edinburgh Fringe. How much did you also look at what those other people had done? I specifically didn't with Gary, because I didn't want to tread on toes there. And what I'd had heard was that he had included Don Quixote as a character who appears obviously in the, as the interlocutor in the Cardenio story in the original. So I, I didn't look at those, because I didn't, I didn't want to, as it were, plagiarize from those. But I think what we were trying to do was try it out with actors. For instance, we did a workshop as courtesy of the University of Michigan, who invited us over there. And we did it with some Spanish American actors, who really got that, that, that sort of, that Shakespearean cone is into it, if you like. And that was fascinating. So we were trying it out on the, on the, on the floor rather than in the library. Well, in a way, we've been trying to, to make judgments about Cardenio. And that is the, been the job, not just of audiences, I suppose, but traditionally of critics, and Claire Armistead, books, editor of the Guardian Observer, and the website, you're going to be at a UNESCO conference next month on the future of publishing, part of which is going to be the future of the critic, because the world you now inhabit is rather different. You, you will have sent a critic to Stratford to look at this who will do a traditional critics piece. But more and more of the analysis of plays or books of poetry or books of any kind is coming through the sort of democratized, unmediated, often much criticized world of Twitter and the internet and, and all the people who log on to your site. We've actually just relaunched our books website to include at its absolute heart reader reviews. And we've come in for a lot of stick. A lot of people say, Oh, well, look at the Amazon reviews. They're rubbish, aren't they? But what we fund is two things. One is that readers read in their own time. So for example, we had a fantastic review of Revolutionary Road, The Richard Yates book novel. Well, we wouldn't review that now because it's been out for 30 years. But it's, you know, it's really interesting that they chose it. But also it's interesting that they, that they're displaying taste in choosing that book. It's a, you know, it shows the, the things that last. To what extent do you have to invigilate those reviews though, because it would be very easy, for instance, I'm sure, I mean, he wouldn't dream of doing it, but Greg could organize a great clack of supporters to pour in with rave reviews all over Twitter and so on. Swam. He will, he will, he will. Yeah. Yeah. So we don't mediate these, these particular reviews, reader reviews. We, we're, we're giving the community of readers the credit of being intelligent enough to tell which ones are a log rolling and which ones aren't. Yeah. It wasn't long ago that I recall lots and lots of newspapers were saying, well, we're cutting down in our books pages. Book reviews, reviews of all kind, bit old hat, people can make their own judgment now, instant judgments being made all over the place. And we were discussing on programs like this, the end of book reviews, the end of literary magazines. And it's, it's great and interesting that it hasn't happened. No, it hasn't happened. I mean, I, I do this little lecture for various colleges in which I, I look at the, the future of book reviewing, you can't tell where we don't know where we're going. But if you go back to the beginning, you say the first act of criticism was the cake was cave art. And it was when one caveman came along and said, Oh, no, that's not how you draw a trunk. You know, elephants don't look like that and made a different mark on the wall. That is what, so as soon as there is art, there is criticism. And that will always be the case. It's not going to go away. Whether the, you're going to have paid critics is a different case. And I think there's in a lot of publishing industries, there's a lot of anxiety about the big institutions that have grown up around criticism or writing. The, the columnist Matthew Parris said recently that he thought the days of the kind of very carefully constructed rhetorical political column were coming to an end because of the instant and more brutal judgments being made by people on the internet and Twitter and so on. And I wonder whether you think the same is true of the great set piece article by, as it were, the Kentinan Denougeur or who, or, or Michael Billington or whoever it might be, the critic with, you know, a certain amount of literary pretension, if I can put it that way, who expects to be read. No, I don't think that that's true. I think that there was a stage where is it true that they're going to disappear or not? I think it's not true that they're going to disappear. And partly that's, I think there was a stage where everything was to do with brutality and speed of delivery and brevity. But actually, I think what we, what the internet also opens up is infinite space, the possibilities of infinite space. And, you know, we've got a huge unemployment problem among graduates, all of whom have intelligent thoughts and, you know, have been trained to think. And there's, there are big opportunities for them. If they set up their own blog, for example, and they do it very well, that's going to be a very good calling card. And they're also not going to have many other things to do with their time. I'm going to set up a version of Twitter for people who, as sort of verbally incontinent like me, I'm going to call it babble. Everybody's obsessed with Twitter and Twitter is the, but the point about Twitter is it's 140 characters that gestures to a much bigger reality. It's not actually about just those 140 characters. That is a mistake of the people who don't use it. Hmm. It's, it, okay. All right. What about, what about the question of anonymity on the internet? Because it can get unbelievably abusive and vitriolic. And a lot of people say, well, why not just insist that everybody uses, you know, a distinguishable, either a true name or an internet handle that can be reached. And then people will behave a little, with a little bit more sort of dignity and normality as, you know, people don't insult each other to the face very often. Because their own personality, their own reality is out there as well. But on the internet, you can hide and you can just sort of throw things at people. I had a very interesting conversation with my daughter who's 17 about this the other day, where someone had been very rude to me anonymously about something I'd written. And she said, but mom, you have to understand, this is just how the internet is. It's, it has a different currency. And I could sort of see that. However, on the other hand, I would say that one of the things we're trying to do at the Guardian is to train our readers to be more responsible and to, to develop a continuity. You begin to know who, which, even if it's not their real name, you begin to know, Harry Oatcake is a bit of a frustrated artist or any time Francis. And your name is, is there, Francis. So, so I think that these things are very, are very contradictory. And the other thing is that they're, you know, don't let's forget the tradition of anonymity and reviewing, which, Nicola, you would know all about, wouldn't you? I mean, that a lot of the big literary magazines in the last century involved anonymous reviews. And that's why the reviewing was so ferocious. And I think that there's a very interesting movement back to anonymity and reviewing, where the organ has the authority and the individual person is, is subsumed into that, that sort of branding. We call it branding now. I think the Edinburgh Review was a good example of that. Wasn't it incredibly abusive? Byron's English Bards and Scott's Reviewers was partly a furious response to anonymous. They, they guessed at the end who had reviewed what? Yes. Yes. Well, Keats, Keats were supposed to have been killed by an anonymous review. There is a theory that the review of, and Imion was so ferocious, he, he didn't survive it. Now, whether that's true or not, it's a good story. And the person was outed, actually, a little bit later. So, this program, I now get an awful lot of books as sort of e-books or on my Kindle and so on. And that's, that's another part of the world that you have to deal with. Advantages, disadvantages, they don't have the heft and beauty of a book. They may be harder, but at the same time, clearly huge numbers of people are now reading via, via downloaded. Well, actually last week, we had figures through from the US that e-books had overtaken paperbacks in February for the first time ever. This is massive. I think that the, there are challenges in it. The challenges are, how do you pay for editors? It's really important that we keep editors, people who are going to make sure that the best possible books go up. But I think there are also fantastic opportunities. I went to South Africa last year and you can't afford, people can't afford to buy books. There isn't a distribution system. This is a fantastic opportunity for literature to be available on a small machine that can be download, stuff can be downloaded onto. But ultimately, and I'm looking at Neil Ashley of Bloodaxe at this moment, it asks what publishers are, what publishers are for. If people can publish their own books or put their own books onto the internet and have a selling system so people can buy them. Is the publisher going to? I mean, because that's one of the people, you know, one of the things people said, publishers like cinemas, like record companies are all under threat from this. Well, publishers still have their brands and they will still be publishing the books in a conventional format as well as in e-books. And I think the prediction of the states is that e-books will probably plateau off at about 50% of the market and we're a bit behind that. I mean, one thing that interests me particularly as someone who's trying to broaden the readership of poetry is that there are three main things which sell the book. One is word of mouth. That's the most significant seller. The second is the name of the author, the reputation of the author, and the third is reviews. And with using the internet as the medium now, you're actually combining reviews with word of mouth because once something is up there on a site like the Guardian, it'll get shared and posted everywhere. And so the whole word of mouth gets fed by this new reviewing network and I find that very exciting. I suppose it's the authority of the review. I mean, clearly from a theatre point of view, I will value, say, Michael Billington's review because I know that the huge experience behind it and the range therefore of comparison that he's got, I might still regard critics as you said, Claire. Wonderful that they are actually vultures but they are part of the cultural ecology. I like that very much. But there's... Sacred birds, we are. But it's, at least, you know, it's coming from... I might disagree with the opinion but the opinion has a sort of weight and authority behind it and that's what I value and that's what I would miss and would hate for us to lose. But that's not going to go because actually people will always gravitate to the people who know what they're talking about. And so a critic is the sum total of the accumulated hours he or she has sat in the given art form watching it and processing its various forms. What about the point that was being made by Neil that in the end word of mouth is the most important thing? I'm just wondering about the world of theatre, if that's true, that there are plenty of examples. There are examples of plays which have come, I mean, even recently, which have gone on, got a pretty universal thumbs down or at least a sort of 70% thumbs down from aggressive critics and word of mouth has carried them into great successes. Oh indeed, I mean in the musical theatre Les Misérables was panned when it opened and Wicked was panned. To some extent it depends on who you are and what you're doing. I mean we're selling very well on Cardenium, we haven't opened to the reviews yet. So I think it spreads the word. I think critics inform opinion and inspire debate don't they? I mean that's how they focus the reaction in a way. Well let's move now to one of the unthreatened publishers in the ecology at the moment, Bloodaxe books which was created by Neil Astley in Northumberland. And for a very, very long time Neil, you know, I have to say, if you see Bloodaxe on the spine of a poetry book you're more likely to pick it up because Bloodaxe is there, you've done a great job for poetry. But we're going to be talking particularly about the trilogy now of anthologies, staying alive and being human. Is that right? Not quite the right order but that's right. Not okay, right. I'm one of many people who've got them on the bookshelves and there's been something about these anthologies that caught people's imaginations really from the off. And therefore the first simplistic question is what was it? What do you think was worked in your recipe? Well staying alive when it came out was primarily designed to show all those people that are interested in different art forms but weren't really interested or reading contemporary poetry, that there was poetry which was accessible, relevant, exciting. And not just the kind of poems people think about extremes, about grief and love but poems which relate to every part of life. But what I was also trying to do was to create an anthology which would show existing poetry readers a much wider range of poetry than you get from the single collections published by the publishers. Poetry publishing is in general quite angrocentric. There's very little American poetry published, very little poetry in translation, very little poetry from other continents. And so in a sense it was those two things combined in the one anthology which really caught people's imagination. So very few poems about poems about poems. Poems about instead poems about things that we can relate to. And how much did you have to, how difficult was it to go out there and find the interesting new poets in you know France or Africa or Russia or wherever and then get them well translated. Do you have to do all of that? No using existing translations from published books but it's a continuing thing. I've been reading widely in world poetry for many many years and so these anthologies have come along at various stages and each one draws in poems which I've come across in the course of that reading. But being human has this other aspect to it in that when I publish staying alive and being alive, I've got an extraordinary mailbag of people writing in to say particular poems have been really helpful to them in their life or they've given this poem to a friend and so on. And these are kind of poems which which I call talismans, the poems that people put on their fridges have on their noticeboards in their wallets. And as well as wanting me to know about particular poems in the books they were also wanting to tell me about poems which have been important to them which weren't in the books. And so for the third anthology I've incorporated into it poems which have come from all kinds of readers all over the world. This is beginning to sound rather analogous to the world of criticism that we were talking about with Claire a moment ago in the sense that the anthologist like the really good theatre critic is somebody who gets authority by how much time, how much bum time you've spent sitting crouched over poetry books or reading poetry books rather than watching plays. And yet you also need the word of mouth, you need the reactive audience involvement as well. Yes and the books are really grown by people buying them giving them to each other's presence and it's just snowballed from the word of mouth where the mouth has been very important. We spent a bit of time talking about poetry and maybe we could just actually have you read something from the book. I mean there are thousands of hundreds of examples we could choose but you've chosen a turkish. Yeah and this is a poem by a turkish poet, post-war poet Edith Janseva translated by Julia Claire Tillingast and Richard Tillingast. And they've said actually in print when I first read this poem in a magazine they said that this was a talismanic poem for turkish readers and I felt it's just a universal poem, table. A man filled with the gladness of living put his keys on the table put flowers in a copper bowl there he put his eggs and milk on the table he put there the light that came in through the window sound of a bicycle sound of a spinning wheel the softness of bread and weather he put there on the table the man put things that happened in his mind what he wanted to do in life he put that there those he loved those he didn't love the man put them on the table too three times three makes nine the man put nine on the table he was next to the window next to the sky he reached out and placed on the table endlessness so many days he'd wanted to drink a beer he put on the table the pouring of that beer he placed there his sleep and his wakefulness his hunger and his fullness he put there now that's what I call a table it didn't complain at all about the load it wobbled once or twice then stood firm the man kept piling things on it's great and for me that it's a kind of poem that an English poet wouldn't write it's a way of thinking it's a totally other kind of perspective and I find as an editor to actually introduce not just readers but also writers to different ways of writing poetry is enormously invigorating clear I really like the fact that it's a table and you've got three poems about bread side by side I love the use of commonplace objects yeah and I I orchestrate the poems in the book so that they they talk to one another there are some poems which are written from one poet to another which are actual links but in many cases I have images and themes bouncing from one poem to another and you can read a whole string of poems in the anthology which actually go from one to the other and it makes it a much more kind of lively read as well to to bounce along from poem to poem in that way yes and I really like the way that you have lots of poems that are about objects and the fact that that that bit ends with a poem by James Fenton about leaving his life on a skip which is a poem that I've always liked very much and finding all a person's life when they think it puts that on I think so well maybe that'll do well I very much liked about this anthology apart from the fact that it's full of wonderful poems that I've never read before was that if you're brought up in the sort of English literature tradition which I suppose is what I'm trained in if I'm trained in anything you'll talk that it's almost a sin to look for yourself in poetry I mean there's a terrible sentence by Nabokov at the beginning of one of his essays on literature saying that this is the most absolutely foodling thing to do is to look for yourself in literature to try and find a personal connection and what this but of course sneakily we all do that and I should think probably lots of our favorite poems are probably ones which have you know which have spoken to us in this way and what I really like about this is the way that it sort of encourages you know and enables one to you know to free you to have people up to think about poems in this very in this very personal way because they're both universal and personal because they are both universal and personal Greg I think poetry is useful in that way but it makes it personal but there's something about what afterwards thought but now so well expressed the good poems are the ones you you kind of go yes I think that and that's what makes them life enhancing in a way I find that Shakespeare gives me the words to describe things like a beautiful April day the other day and I'm out thinking that lovely line from Merchant of Venezuela he says a day in April never came so fair to show how costly summer was at hand and it's sort of just somehow gives you the words to express which you can't quite find yourself the exuberance and the richness it just on their way yeah yes and your mind is full of these things and so if you're ever in a terrible situation I often think of hostage situation you know then you'll have you'll have these things you will or even just or even just being bored you have these things at hand I actually pay I pay my children to learn poems if they want if they want a fiver I say put learn a poem and you can have one it's a great a bribery bribery well let's turn finally to a poet that anybody who has studied english literature university will know and some of them will love Sir Thomas Wyatt who always appears right at the beginning of traditional anthologies or nearly the beginning a little while after Chaucer and the and Dunbar and the Scottish Chaucerians and so on Sir Thomas Wyatt and part of the problem with Wyatt is understanding who he was writing for and who he was this is a rare example of needing to know a poet's biography and circumstances in order to understand and enjoy his poetry I think it's a very extreme example of that critics particularly the critics of the of a few years ago so it all works more or less gave up on Wyatt because they they couldn't see that he was art they wasn't like Shakespeare he didn't have a rich language he wasn't often very beautiful although of course he sometimes is and one of them dismissed him in fact by saying you know these poems belong to the realm of sociology not art well now I think that the way we look at literature has changed quite a lot and we you know we're quite we look at it often from you know from the point of view of sociology and so and what are you know what what a poem is written for or who is reading and what are they actually doing and in order to understand what Wyatt's poems are doing you have to put them back into the context of his life he was caught here at the court of end of the eighth the poems that he wrote were manuscript poems so it was this was before print so he was writing for his friends he was writing for his cronies he was writing on pieces of paper that were passed from hand to hand an audience of about how many people do you think probably small audience 30 maximum audience about 100 and everybody that he read them to would know everybody else and everybody else's business so then what you see is that these were these are poems they're a mixture of entertainment and gossip they're a way of commenting on what was actually going on in the court and this is quite interesting because the court was not a place of paper transactions the court was a place where people just talked to one another so in fact when you talk about you know the court and the cut the social drama of the court the only thing that is left are these poems of Wyatt's which do seem sometimes sort of you know quite obscure well they're not quite obscure there it's not that it's more that they're simple than that they're obscure but if you put them back in the context and you and for example you might put uh they they were performed there's a there's a there's their chamber their chamber poem so you you would be talking to somebody and that person would know that when you say she everybody know who she was yes yeah so they say I mean you say performed and um the description that you give of Henry VIII's court apart from it being an extremely dangerous place where everybody is obsessed by what the king and the people around him almost a totalitarian place in in many respects but it's also a place of constant dramas, masks, deliberate puttings on of of show and a lot of the poems refer to that as well yes um and the strange castles built to be sort of defended by ladies throwing flowers and knights charging up them with exactly and these and these poems were part of that but those were very large performances and really what's interesting about Wyatt's performances is that they were for very few people and that enabled him to say secret things so for example the only place where when Anne Berlin was arrested along with her five lovers supposed lovers um it's now thought that there was a certain amount of horse trading about who it was who's going to get the chop and who wasn't going to get the chop and the oh and this was you know something which of which there is no mention whatsoever um and if there's any letters on the subject they just the person in charge Cromwell just says well I'm sorry it's too awful to talk about the things that the queen has done the only place where there is any reference to this having gone on is actually in these manuscript poems written by Wyatt and his and his contemporaries where which I have sort of discovered in this book and that that's a bit that's a bit that's a bit complicated but um you know in one of the in one of the books the manuscript poetry that are going around there is this poem which indicates that there are there were people that were you know that that hid away and other people who got the job because Wyatt was has been claimed from time to time to be at one of Anne Boleyn's lovers and watched her being executed is that right? The Wyatt and Anne Boleyn's story is very very interesting you have sort of start at the end with that um where um in Elizabeth Rain records and Catholics were trying to discredit the Protestant church and they put around a story about um about Anne Boleyn's um adulterous behavior and the person that they chose to mate her with was Thomas Wyatt which is quite a strange person actually because considering that five people went to the death with her you would have thought that they could have chosen one of them but no there is this question of Wyatt so I thought well why is it always Wyatt and Anne um so uh I looked into it and um it's there it there is a certainty that Wyatt was breaking on Anne and at the beginning and then later on he had an enemy who put around this rumor that they had been found in bed together and Wyatt was banished from court and then later on when Wyatt when Anne was arrested Wyatt ended up um being arrested along with with the lovers was in the tower and this was again his enemy the Duke of Suffolk who was trying to revivify these rumors and get him executed and he watched her execution from the window of the bell tower and he wrote a poem about it which was so hot that it vanished then for sort of 400 years and only reappeared very very very recently no wonder then that his poems were a little enigmatic and full of riddles what do the rest of you make of this I love the sense that the that the plays were the poems rather were were poems in performance I I loved the story you heard about that one reference to a heart and the heart was a sort of a sort of whoopee cushion that was being handed round and the poem was printed on it I thought that was fantastic and really brought the poem the piece to life well I've got one here actually that's I felt a bit a bit a little bit blue peterish it's in fact a dog toy um it doesn't look like a dog toy I have to say but if I can read just one just one just one line to waste in size were pitious death and comfort by self thy woeful heart or shortly on thyself thee reek for length redub with deadly smart why size thou heart and will not break okay so if you why size thou heart and will not break but if you've got a little plus a little heart like this and we're going like that all the time why size thou heart and will not break to waste in size were pitious death alas I find thee faint and weak so then I think with when will not break I think at the end when I said will not break they smashed it and there was a balloon inside and then they would pass it round it's a cool thing game and once you understand that it will come but at the same time these poems were then because they were so elusive they were then used to talk about much more desperate and dangerous things um when the treason act came in came into play because they because they enabled somebody like Wyatt to complain um about their situation which which is something that became impossible to do new but what interested me in particular about your book I mean I studied uh Wyatt at university but I hadn't got the sense then about the courtly love poems actually being much more than that um that uh he's writing about being in his mistress's power but at the same time he's writing about being in the power of the king and um Alice Oswald edited in a selection of poems for Fabo of Wyatt's recently and she talked about the sonnets being collisions between a love poem and a fear poem and you need to read them in both registers you need to read them light and courtly and tired and grief-stricken and the same poems can be read in a totally different way and I make the connection with some of the poets I've published over the year from Eastern Europe I was going to say where they're writing on the despots writing on the dictatorships and they're writing uh parables which are tolerated by the despots because they entertain the people and they don't realize that um you know this poem about a bull is not a poem about a bull uh as Tom Paulen wrote in in one of his poems and I love the coding the way in which you know he's influencing the other people in the court and he's also embodying the sense of powerlessness that they feel they don't know who's going to be next and well we are outside the power of despots here except for the despotism of time which concludes the program I'm afraid so thank you to all my guests Greg Doran's production of Cardenio Shakespeare's Lost Play reimagined or remixed is at the Swan Theatre Stratford upon Avon until October the 6th. Claire Armistead will be speaking at the UNESCO conference the book tomorrow the future of the written word in June Elastli's anthology Being Human and the Nicholas Schulman's Grave and With Diamonds the many lives of Thomas White are both out now. Next week a special program on empathy and cruelty with Simon Baron Cohen Gwen, ads head Julian Bajini and Val McDermitt but for now thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Victoria Brignell.