Shakepeare’s Birthday brouhaha
Today’s Happy Returns to William Shakespeare became soured this morning on Radio 4’s Today programme as historian and art expert Roy Strong contemptuously dismissed Professor Stanley Wells’s claim that the Cobbe portrait is almost certainly that of the Bard of Avon.
We already know that RSC associate director Greg Doran is happy to comply with Wells’s view, as Doran finds the fellow in oils distinctly dishy and attractive in his light ginger face fuzz and silver earring.
The painting is on show this weekend during the Shakespeare Birthday Celebrations and I shall certainly wend my way to the Birthplace to take a look for myself. So will Michael Billington, who is to be honoured for his contribution to Shakespeare studies at the big civic lunch that takes place each year on the banks of the Avon in a grand marquee.
It’s a great weekend, this, every year in Stratford, and I fully intend to enjoy as much of it as I can. But I won’t be going to the lunch as I’m running in the half marathon race on Sunday morning and I want to improve on my best performance so far, when I breasted the tape in 793rd place out of three thousand entrants five years ago.
I haven’t taken part at all for two years, so this, my fourth appearance, is my comeback. And I’m feeling good, sharp and perky, just like my theatre notices.
This weather has been perfect for the final few days of outdoor training and my reserves of endurance should be well tested in advance by the all-day programme of plays about Afghanistan at the Tricycle, Kilburn, tomorrow. Not an ideal warm up, maybe, but possibly a suitable warm down, and a welcome change of pace in the build-up.
Stanley Wells often gets in a pickle at these birthday dos. He sounded crestfallen after Roy Strong’s broadside this morning — Strong noted that not one of the team of experts in the field of portraiture at the Tate or the National Galleries had yet come forward to comment on the Cobbe protrait; and the formidable academic Katherine Duncan-Jones has already poured scorn on the claims in the Times Literary Supplement.
Six years ago it fell to me to propose the traditional toast to the Theatre at the birthday lunch and I spiced my stream of happy anecdotes about coming to Stratford over the years with a broadside against the RSC and especially its (then) policy of spending too much time and money pursuing corporate sponsorship and tenuous links with second-rate American universities.
The audience gave me a standing and resounding ovation but Wells — who is a genial, ever mischievous old rogue of bardolatry — was mightily unimpressed and branded me a traitor in the local press.
I’m sure Billington won’t be as ungraciously controversial as I was, but I do hope he doesn’t bang on for too long about his own student performances on the river banks during the summer festivals of his distant youth.
I always relish his tales of Bartholomew Fair in a production with Dudley Moore and John McGrath on the greensward, but the Stratford burgers like a bit more sauce with their chicken surprise. And, as I discovered to my delight, they don’t mind it up ‘em, either, even if Stanley does. Happy Birthday, Will. And we don’t really care what you look like: what you will, or as you like it.