Tag: Stratford Upon Avon

MEDITATION 91

As I sit here by my candle,  I am recalling another candle, a candle in a church beside a grave. The church is Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-Upon-Avon. I was visiting there again a few weeks ago on a weekend break. I have been inside the church many times. It’s a kind of pilgrimage for me as the grave is where Shakespeare is buried.

His grave is inside the church behind the main altar. In a separate grave beside him is his wife Anne, who outlived him, and there are graves of other members of his family beside them. The church is situated by the River Avon and the large stained glass window behind Shakespeare’s grave looks out onto it.  So, he is probably laid as close to the river as possible.

You might imagine a pilgrimage to be arduous, involving a long and difficult journey on rough roads but my pilgrimage isn’t like that. It’s a lovely walk from the Theatre along a shady pathway by the river, where the willow trees reach down to the water: a walk Shakespeare must have taken himself. Of course there wasn’t a theatre in the town then: performances took place in inn yards or in the Town Hall. The troupe of strolling players, the Earl of Worcester’s Men, appeared there quite regularly. Shakespeare probably saw them when he was a boy and got the acting bug.

Just before you get to the church there is a dell, which provides a grassy space where modern strolling players can perform: students, schoolchildren and amateur drama groups from around the country in shortened versions of his plays. You can make your way to the church through the graveyard and along the avenue of trees which leads to the church door.

Whenever I stand in front of Shakespeare’s grave, I reflect for a few moments. There is always a posy or bunch flowers on the grave. I always mean to bring some myself but never do. Perhaps I will next time. But I do say thank you. After all, he has enriched my life so much. As I have mentioned in these meditations before, Shakespeare is a stream running through my life, just as the River Avon runs through the town and ran through his own life too.  

I remember visiting the church once when I was on a course with Royal Shakespeare Company’s Education department. I had stayed in an actor friend’s cottage in the village of Loxley nearby. I got to Stratford an hour before the course began, as buses were infrequent. So I called into the church which was quiet and empty – too early for tourists. The church had just opened for the day. It was very still and so very intimate standing there beside the grave: just Shakespeare and myself in the church, or so it seemed. Since then it has always seemed like that, just Shakespeare and me, even though the church may be quite busy behind me and visitors may be standing either side of me. Somehow despite that, I am able to zone in on him.

On that particular morning, I remember standing there and apologising for my production of ‘Julius Caesar’ at school a few months earlier. It was a good concept -a modern costume production – but a bit of a mess in places. This was partly because I was directed two other plays virtually at the same time. I was rather over ambitious that year. Of my three school productions of ‘Caesar’ over the years it was the second and the least successful. As I stood there, I wondered how many other directors (or actors for that matter) had stood there and apologised too: ‘Sorry for messing up your play, William!’ (I can think of a few that should have done!)

But then I thought: we did take the production to Hungary, where it did improve, and how wonderful that we did, along with four other plays of his we’d taken since we first went there in 1990. So I hope he was pleased. He never went there himself with his own company. As far as I recall, the first Shakespeare play to be performed there was ‘Hamlet’, in translation of course, in 1770.

I am sure he would have appreciated our Drama tours as he used to tour himself with his acting company, as well as appearing at the Globe on Bankside in London and at court. With him it was setting up in inn yards, with us it was setting up in schools (and eventually theatres). One thing I learnt from our school tours was that Shakespeare is so portable. You can perform him anywhere as long as you have some kind of stage, ideally a platform – and an audience.

I remember we once performed ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in a prestigious school in Budapest. It may have been prestigious but it was also a very old building and poorly equipped. This was 30 years ago so I am sure it has improved since then. We performed the play in a gym with a platform at one end and no lighting to speak of. We had to create the magic of the forest ourselves with Shakespeare’s words and our colourful costumes. However, Puck and the Fairies did ‘fly in’ from  wall bars on gym ropes!  I also remember some of their students sitting in the back row of the audience and following the performance with copies of the play in English, which I found very moving. I imagine Shakespeare would have quite enjoyed being with us on tour. He would have been an extra pair of hands in rehearsals if nothing else!

After I visited the grave a few weeks ago, I sat down for a moment in the quiet side chapel. A  volunteer in the church came over to me and began to talk to me. She asked me if it was my first visit, so I replied that I had visited the church many times and told her a little about my teaching career. When I explained to her that Shakespeare was a major part of my life, it was as if I has realised it for the first time. It made me stop and think of the enormity of what I had told her.  Yes he has been a major strand in my life. He has been an inspiration and an impetus and at the core of my teaching.

He has energised me, indeed perhaps I have fed off his energy, even though his was spent 400 years ago. I was reminded of this by the production I saw that evening. It was the comedy ‘As You Like It’. The premise of the production was that a group of veteran actors were getting together for a kind of reunion in a rehearsal room as they had first performed the play together in 1978. Despite the age of most the cast, what energy they had dashing around the stage and doing a dance number at one point. What experience too on that stage: the lines were crystal clear and the key comic and emotional moments were too.Most of all the ‘young lovers’ convinced us despite their age. And the production created a warm glow in the audience at the end as all Shakespeare’s comedies should.

How did Shakespeare cope with being retired? I thought that in the church. As far as we know he left the London theatres in 1613 at retired to Stratford where he died in 1616. What were his last three years like for him, especially if he still had so much creative energy? Or was he burnt out, or sick? Or was he slowly losing his mind to dementia? I have a feeling that underneath his great tragedy, ‘King Lear’  lies his own fear of losing his mind. Perhaps he was done with theatre, perhaps he’d had enough. Perhaps he had walked away and quietly settled into retirement. It was so long ago. We will never know anyway.

I know that I have found it difficult to be serene about my retirement. But sitting in that church the other morning, I did wonder about his. While I sat there and when I talked with the volunteer, the thought came to me that my work is done. My work is done. I have retired from the teaching profession.

But I am still teaching: I am giving a course n a week’s time at Swanwick Writers’ Summer School. And Shakespeare is still with me.  

Marcus Aurelius writes in his own Meditations, ‘ What is your profession? Being a good man.’ I would amend that to ‘Trying to be a good man.’ For sometimes it is difficult to be good. But it is a profession we never retire from.

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MEDITATION 66

The days are becoming shorter now and the evening air is chill as winter, in the guise of autumn, stealthily approaches. I have lit my candle earlier than usual to write my meditation as the skies are darkening earlier.  As the season changes, summer travels seem a long way away, even if they were only a few weeks ago. They have receded into memory, memories enlivened hopefully by photographs.

As I gaze at the flame’s light, my mind has gone back to a very different kind of light and  another memory of my stay in Castle Thirlstane in the Scottish Borders a few weeks ago. I am remembering a thin pale light in the dark, not from a candle or a lantern (as would befit a historic castle) but from a mobile phone.

The journey from the Castle to Lauder, the nearest village, is straightforward on foot. On our first evening, my friend Simon and I walked down the long drive, passing the field with grazing sheep I mentioned in my last blog and then another two fields with corralled horses on each side of the path and a field of cattle beyond. We then veered to the right and ascended a small but steep hill which took us into Lauder’s high street. What could be simpler? And a delightful saunter in the sunshine before supper, too.

However, the walk back after our meal was very different.  As we left the high street with its street lights, we slowly walked down the steep little hill again but into enveloping darkness. It was pitch black ahead of us until we could see the lights of the castle in the distance as we tentatively turned the bend. I have often wondered what it would be like to be a character in a Gothic horror tale and now I was experiencing it: walking on foot in the sombre darkness of night, my only beacon, the light from a window in a looming castle as I drew closer. It was a scene worthy of Mary Shelley and ‘Frankenstein’, Charlotte Bronte and ‘Jane Eyre’ or Edgar Alan Poe. I was truly under the ‘cloak of darkness’ and at last I understood the meaning of that cliche. 

Except that the lighted castle window wasn’t our only beacon. My friend Simon was using his mobile phone screen to light us on the pathway. Eventually we could see a glimmer of another little oblong light. It was as if this light in the distance was signalling or answering the little oblong light in my friend’s hand. The light was from the keypad which opened the wooden gate to the castle drive. Once we were there and put the code onto the keypad, the gate opened to us, in a very slow, eerie Gothic manner, to reveal the final stretch of our nocturnal walk to the side entrance of the castle, where our apartment was situated.

On that first walk home to the castle, we were so intent on finding our way that we hardly  noticed the night sky except it’s gloomy pall as we commenced our descent from the high street. Walking in that darkness and trying to see the ground under my feet made me feel a little vulnerable despite my friend at my side. I felt uneasy as I couldn’t see the path ahead of me clearly. One of my foibles is that I have a fear of falling, and fear of failing too, if truth be known. The answer is to slow down and take one step at a time, as I have had to do over the last eighteen months, indeed, as we all have had to do. We haven’t been able to see the path ahead clearly in the pandemic gloom. Fortunately we now seem to be emerging from it slowly.

I cannot remember when I last walked in such complete darkness without street lights. I do have a vivid memory of walking in the dark in the countryside when I was a teenager. I was a member of Teeside Youth Theatre then, when I was in the Sixth Form.  A group of us were on a weekend to Stratford – Upon -Avon in the summer holidays. We saw two plays in two days, I remember. Some of us also wanted to go for a midnight ramble along the streets of Stratford and ended up in some barely lit lanes till there were no streetlights at all and we were in a small wood or field. The place is probably all built up now as my teenage years were a long time ago! It was a magical walk, a kind of enchantment. I had a sense of Shakespeare whenever we ambled. Perhaps it was my youthful excitement at being there, along the lanes and paths and fields he may have trod. I was every impressionable then. No – I still get that sense of Shakespeare in and around Stratford at times when I visit.  I had no fear of falling then, wandering around in the dark with my fellow actors. But of course youth was holding me up.

We had supper in Lauder again on the final night of our holiday. So, once more we had to make our way back to the castle in the dark. This time I was more relaxed about it. We stopped to look at the night sky sprinkled with glittering stars. Simon pointed out to me the Plough constellation and some of the others. He gave me quite an astronomy lesson as we looked up into the clear night sky. He pointed to the North Star, which I found interesting  as it is mentioned in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’. ‘I am constant as the Northern Star,’ says Caesar ironically to the Senate, a few moments before he is assassinated. I remember the line well, having directed the play three times. I also played Caesar myself in the second of those productions and remember enjoying the speech. It suggests total confidence based on absolute power. So different from keeping order in a classroom – or trying to!

Looking up at the North Star in the night sky, it was larger and grander than the other stars clustered around it: like Caesar, at that moment in the play, surrounded by the senators. Perhaps Shakespeare gazed up at it in Stratford, as I was doing now in Scotland, and perhaps it gave him the image he needed to describe Caesar’s power and total self-belief. Perhaps, he stood in that field where I stood on my Youth Theatre ramble.

Looking up at the night sky made me realise, of course, that I am not in my own universe, another trait of mine! I belong to a far more expansive one, beyond comprehension. I am one tiny being in a huge cosmos. I did not feel vulnerable this time, but I did feel finite, in the face of the infinite. Just as Caesar, in his own universe, is very definitely made to feel finite when the senators stab him to death a moment after his speech.

Buddhists engage in sky meditation, looking at the sky for a length of time. I found this very useful when I was in the throes of lockdown. It helped me come out of myself, as I stood gazing at the sky from my garden. All those months in lockdown made me even more self-conscious than I usually am, and self-consciousness can be debilitating. Sky meditation is also an act of humility, reminding us of who and where we are in the cosmos; of our finiteness as one tiny being in a huge universe.

It can also be comforting. Our dear friend, Marcus Aurelius, had that same sense of being part of the Universe. The Greek Stoic philosophers called the Universe, ‘to pan’, which means ‘the All’. He writes, ‘Think of the universe as one living creature, comprising one substance and one soul: how all is absorbed into this one consciousness.’

The poet Dante (1265-1321) in his poetic masterpiece ‘The Divine Comedy’ gazes at the stars and sees, like Marcus, the unity of creation. He sees it as a volume whose pages are bound together by divine love:

                                    ‘In its depth I saw that it contained,

                                    bound up by love into a single volume,

                                    the scattered pages of the universe.’

He is seeing beyond the universe to a divine author behind it, binding the pages together: to a loving creator, which,  those of us who are religious, also see. Again it is a comforting thought: we are not a random scattered page,  blown hither and thither, or a mere cipher on it, but we are bound to the rest of the universe in grand design. In other words, we have our place. It is our role in life to find out what or where that place is.

So because of its stellar beauty on the final night of our stay, the sky did not seem bleak and foreboding like the first night. The stars and their little glittering lights, observed by Marcus, Dante, Shakespeare and countless generations as well as ourselves were warm and reassuring in the deep impenetrable blackness of the night sky. Burning thousands upon thousands of miles away, they were little flames in the darkness.   

I am reminded of some words of St Francis, ‘All the darkness of the world cannot extinguish the light of one single candle.’ We too must be little flames in the darkness like the stars.

I mentioned that quote in my first meditation, which was exactly three years ago. I would like to thank those of you who have followed my blog over the last three tumultuous years and those who have joined the journey along the way.  In particular, I would like to thank Henry, one of my former students, who set up the blog and who posts the meditations, even though now he is very busy as a producer on LBC radio.

Because he is having a holiday, the blog will be taking a break too for several weeks.

Ave atque Vale – Hail and Farewell– until the next blog!

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Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius