A Breve History of Time

On By CalmgroveIn observation11 Comments
CredoPlainsong
The Credo as plainchant in neum notation; the C on the second line down represents the position of note C, and the lower case ‘b’s or flats indicate that the Credo is in what we’d call the key of F.

Wandering among Words 3: Time

Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment,
Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie.
— Words by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1784), music by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini

In the dim and distant past I sang plainchant. When Latin was the lingua franca for the Catholic Church my school would congregate on high days and holidays to massacre Gregorian chant. Then along came the Vatican Council in the 1960s, vernacular tongues were after nearly two millennia now allowed in Catholic rituals — and plainchant went out the stained glass window. Protestant hymns became more acceptable in services, and in time songs which some call happy-clappy (‘happy-crappy’ according to cynics) came creeping in.

I must admit as a schoolboy I was never much an admirer of plainchant: throughout practices and services I usually had to stifle yawns. Though musically literate I found the old notational conventions bizarre by modern standards, particularly over how long notes needed to be held for – however did any one know how long to hold a note? One of the few conventions seemed to be that a note with a dot after it had to be held a little bit longer.

I knew where I was with modern notation. Semibreves, minims, crotchets — they all made sense to me, having had them drummed into my head from the age of five. It wasn’t till I began to teach music as an adult that I realised that these words made as much sense as calling them Fred or Mary or Voldemort. (Maybe not the latter.) So here’s what I pieced together after some research and the application of guesswork masquerading as logic.

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Corbels and the Raven King

On By CalmgroveIn books, observation20 Comments
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Corbel in the form of a grotesque, Quakers Friars, Broadmead, Bristol (© C A Lovegrove)

Wandering among Words No 2: Corvid

You will often find them if you glance above you in a medieval church, high up on nave or chancel walls. Corbels are those stone brackets that project from the wall; they were designed to support a cornice, or more often the springing of an arch that rises like a slender tree trunk, curving and sprouting liernes to join other stone ribs so as to form a tracery of slender branches, supporting in their turn the distant vault.

They’re the counterpart of the capitals on freestanding pillars, those stone approximations of mighty trees; the capitals are sometimes plain (like Doric capitals) or abstract (like the ‘eyes’ on Ionic capitals) or even representational (as with the foliage on Corinthian capitals). Romanesque masons had fun carving shapes out of them: amongst them we might observe a grotesque face or an acrobatic exhibitionist, a shiela-na-gig or an angel, maybe even a foliate head or Green Man.

The name however comes via French (corbeau means crow) from the Latin corvellus, a little raven. Supposedly the corbel’s shape resembles a crow, raven or even a beak, but I don’t see it myself; and in a quick scan of my books on Romanesque sculpture and online I’ve come across precious few beaked carvings (Kilpeck church in Herefordshire has one such, a splendid beaked monster).

Be that as it may, the Latin corvus has supplied the collective term for the crow family: corvid. In Britain this family is represented by the raven, the carrion crow, the rook, the chough and the jackdaw — all predominantly black — while the magpie and the jay each have a more motley plumage. All have fascinating stories to tell.

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Danger: water!

On By CalmgroveIn books23 Comments
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The River Usk looking upriver from Crickhowell bridge, Powys.

Wandering among Words No 1: Water

Water. It’s something most of us take for granted — for drinking, for cooking, for washing, for cleaning, for rituals.

It drops out of the sky, wells out of the earth, erodes our coasts and scours the earth. Without it we would cease to be, in fact wouldn’t have come into being at all.

Is it surprising that so many stories and associations and legends are attached to this sustainer of life?

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Autism, Bullying and the Child

On By CalmgroveIn popular science, psychology25 Comments
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Autism, Bullying and Me:
The Really Useful Stuff You Need to Know About Coping Brilliantly with Bullying
by Emily Lovegrove.
Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2020.

This is not a review – but it is a notice about a useful and accessible self-help book for those who feel different, written by my partner, but unfortunately published at the height of the COVID pandemic in May 2020.

Five years after its first publication I couldn’t pass up on an opportunity to again promote Emily’s book; not only am I inordinately proud of what she has achieved but her work and the way she has presented it continues, I believe, to be of huge importance in helping all who’ve felt bullied.

Whether on the spectrum or not, whether young or old, whether because of particular circumstances or by life in general, saying how and why bullying happens goes a long way towards offering options in how to cope with it.

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Ugly duckling to swan

On By CalmgroveIn literary criticism, review42 Comments
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“Shakespeare” (1623) by Martin Droeshout.

Contested Will:
Who Wrote Shakespeare?
by James Shapiro.
Faber and Faber, 2010.

Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James! — Ben Jonson

When I was nowt but a lad I read Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence’s Bacon is Shakespeare (1910) in the school library, which is when I first came across the notion that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. According to Sir Edwin the plays are full of cryptic clues asserting that Francis Bacon used Will as a mask for writing all those plays.

Typical is the nonsense word in Love’s Labour’s Lost, “honorificabilitudinitatibus,” which Durning-Lawrence claimed was an anagram in Latin for hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi (“these plays F Bacon’s offspring preserved for the world”). For an impressionable young mind there was much to mull over, but I wasn’t gullible enough to be convinced, and especially not by that coded ‘message’ – how many other phrases or sentences, in Latin or otherwise, can be concocted from that word?

Yet the fancy that Shakespeare was too much of a country bumpkin to be capable of writing such gems was one I was to come across again and again, with a bewildering array of candidates paraded for acceptance. Where was the comprehensive and informed rebuttal which would take all the claims seriously while marshalling killer counter-arguments?

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Soul of the age

On By CalmgroveIn books, Shakespeare3 Comments
Chandos portrait
Chandos portrait.

“… Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise! …
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.”
— Ben Jonson, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare’.

This valedictory poem by fellow playwright Ben Jonson summons up a contemporary estimation of the worth of William Shakespeare, whose death-day (and possibly birthday too) is annually celebrated – if that’s the right word – on April 23rd, St George’s Day. 

There can’t be many lovers of literature who weren’t aware that 2016 marked the 400th anniversary of his departure from this world, leaving it a richer place for what he left to us.

I’ve discussed the man and works a few times in these pages, and now may be a fitting time to draw your attention to the occasionally dark but sometimes floodlit corners that I’ve explored over the years, with links to the posts that deal with these matters.

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“Blossoms passing fair”

On By CalmgroveIn natural history, review18 Comments
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Wild roses (photo C A Lovegrove).

An illustrated introduction to Shakespeare’s flowers
by Dr Levi Fox,
Jarrold Colour Publications, 1977.

A slim 32-page booklet with colour photos on all but a handful of pages, this introduction is designed to emphasise that Shakespeare’s acquaintance of flowers “was not that of a botanist or horticulturalist but rather of a countryman gifted with an acute sense of observation”. He knew the colour of his plants, the seasons they appeared in, the folklore associated with them. In addition the poet ascribed uses to them (some made up, some genuine) and delighted in descriptions of them, in adjectives, simile or metaphor.

Here you’ll find quotes from Cymbeline and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost and the history plays, The Winter’s Tale and the poems; the late Dr Fox also includes an endpiece with mentions of Shakespeare’s herbs, from balm to savory, marjoram to wormwood and much in between. As with the flowers botanical names are included, relevant quotes, and interpretations or clarifications of a few more obscure names the poet uses.

Above all the author includes passages from Will’s works with brief commentary giving context, all supplemented by the opening essay. As an historian, archivist and then director of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Fox was in a good position to give an authoritative summary of the Swan of Avon’s familiarity with blooms.

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Uncover his face (part 2)

On By CalmgroveIn history, literary criticism, review, Shakespeare11 Comments
Droeshout engraving
Engraving of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout.

The True Face of William Shakespeare:
The poet’s death mask and likenesses from three periods of his life
by Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel.
Translated from the German by Alan Bance.
Chaucer Press, 2006.

Having established, as thoroughly as she could, their documented provenance Hammerschmidt-Hummel arranged for the four primary candidates for Shakespeare’s genuine likeness – the Chandos and Flower portraits, the Davenant bust and the Darmstadt death mask – to undergo various scientific and technological investigations.

These included computer montage, photogrammetry, trick image differentiation technique; the idea was to compare the four likenesses to see if there were enough correlations to establish that they were all of the same person.

This proved to be the case in terms of proportion of features, head contours and so on.

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Uncover his face (part 1)

On By CalmgroveIn history, review, Shakespeare15 Comments
eyes

The True Face of William Shakespeare:
The poet’s death mask and likenesses from three periods of his life
by Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel,
translated from the German by Alan Bance.
Chaucer Press, 2006.

Here is my kind of book: a true life tale of literary detection that outshines fictional mysteries, however well written they may be. Sadly, it is also a piece of research that exposes at least two more mysteries: what has happened to two very probable Shakespeare likenesses in very recent times, centuries after the playwright’s death? But there is also pleasure and satisfaction that any lingering doubts expressed by anti-Stratfordians (“Did Shakespeare actually write Shakespeare’s plays?”) have finally been put to sleep … one hopes.

Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel is a determined Shakespearean academic who, in this closely argued study, examines two portraits, two sculptured busts and a death mask in great forensic and documentary detail. She gives the cultural context for the 16th- and 17th-century creation of accurate, true-to-life, warts-and-all representations of illustrious people before then going on to describe her selected images. Then she describes the various scientific tests she applied to those images (with the help of experts in several disciplines) using procedures available in the 1990s, and then summarises the results. Finally she puts those results back into historical and biographical context.

What were those images?

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Playing the innocent

On By CalmgroveIn Cymbeline, review, Shakespeare7 Comments
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  • Repost of a review first published in April 2014, first dusted off as we approached the fourth centenary of his death on 23rd April 1616 and now republished (for the last time?) in April 2025.

Scholars suggest that Cymbeline was composed by Shakespeare and an unnamed colleague between 1609 and 1610, and first performed in 1611 — though not appearing in print for a dozen years until the First Folio.

I have no competency to discuss which passages are by him and which by his collaborator, so I’ll treat the whole text as though by a single author, whom I shall call … “the Author”.

In this final post about the play – originally marking the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s baptism on April 26th 1564 – I would like to draw out some of the strands that make up the fabric of the play before discussing its merits as drama.

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Cymbeline, Act V

On By CalmgroveIn Cymbeline, review, Shakespeare4 Comments
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The model for Belarius? Horatius Cocles, a fanciful 1586 engraving by Hendrick Goltzius.

The Tragedie of Cymbeline by William Shakespeare.
Act V in five scenes.

Before we cut to the chase, Shakespeare presents us with a stupendous battle between the Britons and Romans. Unhistorical though it is, we may imagine this as happening in the 30s of the 1st century CE, when Cunobelinus was indeed a mighty king of Britain.

The place isn’t specified, but it’s implied that this notional battle is near Milford Haven. Though it was well known as a deep-water harbour — George Owen, a local man, called it “the most famous port of Christendom” in 1603 — in choosing this port Shakespeare may have had in mind Henry Tudor: the future Henry VII, who landed here in 1485, mustering more troops on his way to Bosworth Field before taking the crown from Richard III. The outcome here, however, is rather different.

This is a complex plot, made more so because we have several individuals who are not as they seem. Shall I list them all?

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The geography of Cymbeline

On By CalmgroveIn Cymbeline, Shakespeare9 Comments
Roman Britain according to Ptolemy c. 90--168
Roman Britain according to Ptolemy c. 90 — 168.

The first thing to remember is that The Tragedie of Cymbeline is, despite its published title, a comedy. It’s certainly not a Shakespearean ‘history’ so we mustn’t expect any degree of accuracy or verisimilitude.

If anything it belongs to a genre we’d nowadays happily accept as Fantasy if it was to be written up in modern language.

And its sources, particularly Geoffrey of Monmouth’s so-called History of the Kings of Britain, were pure fantasy, in the broadest sense, albeit with some authentic pieces like nuts or fruit included in the baking of a cake.

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Cymbeline, Act IV

On By CalmgroveIn Cymbeline, review, Shakespeare11 Comments
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Rocky tor on Preseli Hills skyline  (author’s photo).

The Tragedie of Cymbeline.
Act IV in four scenes by William Shakespeare.

I’ll say this for Will: he knows how to lead you to sometimes expect the expected but then takes an unexpected turn which, in retrospect, you could also have expected. For example, in Act IV a certain villain gets their hoped-for come-uppance, but not in the manner that we might have imagined — and while that comes as a bit of a shock it is entirely appropriate.

The action is still switching between Cymbeline’s court (in London, one assumes, as Lud’s-town gets a couple of mentions) and the cave where Belarius and his two young wards, Guiderius and Arviragus, reside under assumed names — on a mountain near Milford Haven, which I’ve suggested could be the Preseli Hills (highest point: 1760 feet).

Cloten has arrived hotfoot on the trail of Imogen, following directions reluctantly given by Pisanio, and while in Posthumus’ garb is still fixated on her insult comparing him to underpants, working himself up mightily to fulfil his bloodthirsty boasts.

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Cymbeline, Act III

On By CalmgroveIn Cymbeline, review, Shakespeare4 Comments
Hoopoe
Hoopoe: clipart courtesy Florida Center for Instructional Technology.

The Tragedie of Cymbeline by William Shakespeare.
Act III in seven scenes.

The story so far
Imogen’s story is that of the Calumniated or Slandered Wife, whereby she is wrongly accused of being unfaithful to her husband. This results from Shakespeare’s use of the folktale motif of the Wager on the Wife’s Chastity, linked to the theme of the supposed lover — here played by Iachimo — hidden in a chest in the heroine’s bedchamber.

The tale Imogen was reading before retiring to bed was from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and concerned the Thracian tyrant Tereus. His Athenian wife Procne asks Tereus to allow her to see her own sister Philomela. Tereus, seized with lust, rapes Philomela, and cuts out her tongue to stop her reporting his violence.

However, Philomela weaves a tapestry which reveals the rape and sends it to her sister. Procne metes out a bloody revenge on her unfaithful husband before she and Philomel turn into birds, Procne becoming a swallow and Philomel a nightingale. Tereus also transforms into a bird, the hoopoe, which laments with a distinctive cry while wearing a distinctive crest to mark it out.

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Cymbeline, Act II

On By CalmgroveIn Cymbeline, review, Shakespeare4 Comments
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Cowslip (C A Lovegrove).

The Tragedie of Cymbeline by William Shakespeare.
Act II in five scenes.

“… On her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I’ the bottom of a cowslip …” — Cymbeline II ii

Most of the principal characters having been introduced in Act I, Act II settles down to working out some of the scenarios that have been triggered: so the mystery of the chest supposedly filled with treasures for the Roman emperor is now revealed, and Iachimo’s trap is sprung.

The Queen’s son, Cloten, who has been revealed as a strutting coxcomb in Act I, continues to display what a complete clot he is: having heard that an ‘Italian’ (Iachimo from Rome) is newly arrived, he expresses his intentions to beat him, perhaps cheat him, in some game or other.

Though he never gets to meet Iachimo, we don’t doubt the outcome of that match. It is in the next scene, in Imogen’s bedchamber that the apparent ‘tragedie’ of the drama is played out.

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