Shiver me timbers

The Ghosts of Lynn

Goodnight, sweet prince,

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Hamlet

 Act 5, Scene 2

The town of Lynn, once Bishop's Lynn and then, thanks to Henry VIII, King's Lynn, might possibly be related to Dublin and Lincoln, through their connection with pools of water, which may have been used to collect salt. It probably isn't related to Linford Christie, Gary Winston Lineker, my old cock linnet, or Der Lindenbaum, 

Am Brunnen vor dem Tore,

Da steht ein Lindenbaum;

Ich träumt’ in seinem Schatten 

So manchen süssen Traum,

But those are other stories.....  What you may be surprised to know is that there is a very plausible connection to William Shakespeare, probable author of such witticisms as:

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest 

Act 4, Scene 1

And what, I hear you cry, is this? The Swan of Avon, washed up on the banks of the Great Ouse?

Sweet Swan of Auon! what a sight it were

To see thee in our waters yet appeare,

And make those flights vpon the bankes of Thames,

That so did take Eliza, and our Iames!

Ben Jonson

Yes, well, the likelihood is giant. And its footprint is in King Street, in St George’s Guildhall, which is owned by the National Trust and managed by King’s Lynn Borough Council and which is now confirmed to be the oldest working theatre space in the country.....

Until recently the interior of St George's Guildhall looked like this:

Currently, it looks like this:

And you may visit it any day (except Sundays) until August 31st to see and hear about the history of the building (built in 1419 and containing the largest area of 15th century timber floor in the country).  

So, what's this got to do with his Bardship, you moan? Well, this is the thing. Tim FitzHigham, Creative Director of the archaeological project to restore the theatre, has this to say: These are the boards used by Shakespeare’s company during the plague closures of 1592/3, making it a site of international cultural significance.....

And for proof we have....?  Well, this is what the Guildhall's website has to say:

There has been a long tradition that Shakespeare played at the Guildhall in King’s Lynn. People in King’s Lynn were told this by their parents who were told this by their parents and grandparents. This is not new. For example, in 1766 the pub next to the Guildhall (now called Shakespeare House) was named the Shakespeare Pub and had a picture of Shakespeare on the front of it to reflect these links. There are several things which support the oral tradition of the town. In 1592/3 the company associated with Shakespeare, the Earl of Pembroke’s Men, were paid to play in King’s Lynn when the theatres in London were shut due to the plague. At this time Shakespeare was an actor as well as a writer according to a work by Robert Greene of 1954 [1594?   Ed.] calling Shakespeare an ‘upstart crow’ [Not to be confused with D Mitchell's creepy smug TV stuff.  Ed].

Shakespeare’s comedian Robert Armin [Not to be confused with his grate nuncle, Idi.  Ed]  was born in King’s Lynn one street from the theatre..... Armin was a very close collaborator of Shakespeare’s and was the first person to play many of the most famous comedic roles Shakespeare created ['Til Deaf us do part; Dad's Barmy; Faulty Powers; et al. Ed]. Documents from Shakespeare’s lifetime reference an event that occurred in the theatre in ‘Linn, Norfolk’ which is said to have inspired Shakespeare to write part of the plot of Hamlet....

So, it is more than a random chance that Shakespeare actually ducked through this doorway (notwithstanding the semblance that they could be bricked up - Crollalanza era un mago!):

And maybe even this one:

Peered out of this window:

Stepped through this passageway:

And took the air (or had a pipe) in this courtyard:

Which includes an Art Gallery in memory of Lord Fermoy, whose wife provided for the until recent theatre seating, thereby ensuring the survival of the building through the latter part of the twentieth century and into the current secolo..... 

If it be now, ’tis not to come: if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

Hamlet

Act 5, Scene 2

All the world's a stage

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances; 

And one man in his time plays many parts.

As You Like It

Act 2, Scene 7

So, what else was there in Lynn 400 or so years ago?

The Minster and Priory Church of St Margaret, St Mary Magdalene and all the Virgin Saints was founded as a Benedictine Priory in 1101 by Herbert de Losinga, the first Bishop of Norwich. For 400 years it was the monks’ home as well as the Parish Church for the town. It was always known as St Margaret’s and would not have been very different, despite efforts by H8 [You mean Henery the Eighth; not hate, surely?  Ed] in Shakespeare's time from what we see now:  

I am one who loved not wisely but too well.

Othello

Act 5, Scene 2

[No.... that's a different story....Ed.]

So we also have the largest chapel-of-ease in England, St Nicholas Chapel (rebuilt between 1380 and 1410 but currently closed because of a problem with one of the roof beams [Elf and Safety gone mad?  Ed]) which would have been architecturally (if not from a glassware point of view) much as it is now.

Another building that was definitely here in the time of WS, is the Red Mount Chapel. It was built in 1485 as a wayside chapel for pilgrims landing at King's Lynn; a place to stop and pray before undertaking the overland journey to Walsingham, or to pray before leaving England after a visit to the shrine. It was/is known as the Chapel of Our Lady of the Mount, and is to be found in The Walks.

Then, although wrecked and suppressed (in 1538) by Enery and his 'enchpeople there would have been at least the Tower of the Greyfriars' Priory:

And while in the late 16th century the Trinity Guildhall housed a prison, the finely windowed first floor would have been there.....

And below stairs in several of the riverside buildings there were cellars which originally may have had direct access to the quayside or even to the river with the potential for rewarding import/export businesses.....

And all compacted into a relatively small area alongside the Great Ouse, making Lynn one of the most important ports in England.  From the 13th century Lynn had been a part of the Hanseatic League, and, though trade had declined by Shakespeare's time it was (and still is) an active port.

With narrow lanes leading to the riverside.

Out, out brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Macbeth

Act 5, Scene 5

Back in the undercroft of the St George's Guildhall, it isn't hard to sense the spirit of Crollalanza in the blind arches and niches, in the ancient timbers and hand-made bricks. Is that the ghost of Banquo?

Prithee, see there. Behold, look! How say you?

Macbeth

Act 3, scene 4

Or does King Hamlet lie there?

Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak. I’ll go no further.

Hamlet

Act 1, scene 5

So....  What does this add up to?  Does it matter?  Well, in my 'umble opinion, yes it does.  We need to recognise our past and to learn from it.  Without history and heritage we are lesser creatures, with little reference by which to gauge our actions. Whether William Shakespeare himself ever actually drew breath in Lynn is, in itself, not necessarily going to alter what we do or think, but to register the continuity of human endeavour and to recognise the achievements, and the mistakes, of our forebears, inevitably makes us richer in many ways.  And had St George's Guildhall been pulled down and turned into a car showroom, for example, we would all be, in some ways, poorer.

Is this nothing?

Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing:

The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,

My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,

If this be nothing.

Leontes

The Winter's Tale

 Act 1, Scene 2

So, if you can get to see the exposed timbers and be guided round St George's Guildhall you won't regret it. Then, perhaps in 2028, we will all be able to enjoy performances in the restored oldest working theatre in England.  

The rest [For now. Ed] is silence.

Hamlet 

Act 5, Scene 2

*****

For further information, please see:

https://stgeorgesguildhall.com/heritage/

Dedicato alla memoria della nonna di CJS 

(ed anche a CJS stessa)

Winterreise

 A sad tale's best for winter....

These are the last words spoken

Soon I’ll be out of sight

A simple farewell message

Good night, my love, good night

I am sure there are those who know about these things, but I still find it fascinating that Black-headed gulls simply do not have black heads in winter......

Also, it may be perverse of me.  But the fact that Common gulls are not that common perks me up, just a little......

However.....  Here we are.  Life is not necessarily what we expected, or wished for, and winter conditions exacerbate that dull numbing feeling that swimming from the Titanic tends to excite....

There are clouds on the horizon.  They may not eventually blow our way, but they instil in us a sense of boding that exceeds the usual fore.....

Dark clouds are drifting

Across the bright blue sky

Soft breezes gently sigh

In the dark forest

But then the sky can suddenly be filled with the blare and honk of passing V signs, v signs to cold, to coronas, to contrariness.  We should go with the flock.....

Lynn (does it need the King's?) is cold and empty - of life, or trade, of laughter, as is to be expected in these ghastly days.

In 'my' village (how presumptuous can you get after three weeks?) no one knows what to do with themselves....  It could be worse.  It may well be colder, or wetter, or darker, or more infected, tomorrow, but we will worry about that..... tomorrow.

At least the Herdwicks don't grumble....

And on the coast there's Dunlin in good numbers to remind us that the essential is food.....

Not far away Castle Rising stands clear of the snowy carpet.  It's a hulking lump of masonry with some of the most splendid earthworks for sledging anywhere in these troubled isles. 

I photographed this keep one summer long ago for Treccani, the Italian Encyclopaedia of Medieval Architecture, and, for some reason I thought at the time that this had been the last home of Henry VIII's surviving wife, Catherine Parr, to whom I can claim a link. 

Funny how time plays tricks?  Catherine never lived here.  She died, aged 36, at Sudeley Castle, from complications following the birth of a daughter.  We are still related, but not quite as I remembered!

Not far away, close by another well defended castle, is Castle Acre Priory.  A Cluniac foundation that dates from 1049, and which was destroyed on the orders of Henry VIII in 1537.

These 'romantic' ruins stand empty in the winter snows.  We are finding our way around this corner of England, exploring as far as we dare, without the excesses of a Cummings. Our daily exercises are not distant from our new home, but we go just far enough to call it a winter journey. 

Schubert's song cycle Winterreise is painfully beautiful and perfectly fits my current mood. I listen to Ian Bostridge's interpretation, and read something he wrote about it in The Guardian....

Winter Journey – a cycle of 24 songs for voice and piano based on poems by Wilhelm Müller, was composed by Franz Schubert towards the end of his short life. He died in Vienna in 1828 aged only 31. Piano-accompanied song is no longer part of everyday domestic life and has lost its one-time primacy in the concert hall. What Germans know as Lieder – is a niche product, even within the niche that is classical music; but Winter Journey is an indispensable work of art that should be as much a part of our common experience as the poetry of Shakespeare and Dante, the paintings of Van Gogh and Picasso, the novels of the Brontë sisters or Marcel Proust.

The 24 songs are forerunners, in a sense, of all those songs of love and loss that have been the soundtrack of generation on generation of teenagers. But the loss of love, which is only sketched ambiguously in the first song, “Goodnight”, is just the beginning of it. Schubert’s wanderer embarks on a journey through a winter landscape that leads him to question his identity, the conditions of his existence – social, political and metaphysical – and the meaning of life.

Schubert himself wrote the following, in a manuscript of July 3rd 1822 entitled My Dream: With a heart filled with endless love for those who scorned me, I ... wandered far away. For many and many a year I sang songs. Whenever I tried to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love.

There are no trains at Wolferton Station.  The snow lies untouched across the rails.  No Queen steps from the royal carriage.  No fat controller punches my ticket.  There is no journey here.

Is this nothing?

Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing:

The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,

My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,

If this be nothing.

The Winter's Tale

(Leontes, Act 1 Scene 2)

Prague 2017 - A Winter's Tale

A sad tale's best for Winter.....

  

Our street is all snow and ice.  Unseasonable winter weather.  For the time of year.  We skid the car out and skate downhill at four a.m., gingerly making it to Heathrow, heading for the fridge of Eastern Europe.

Prague.  Winter.  Whatever possessed me to think this was wise?  But we are presently surprised.  It’s chilly, but dry.  Not a snowflake in sight, not an icicle to behold.  Cloudy but charmingly bearable.  And so: Christmas markets, chimney cake and punch, baubled trees and little pens of sheep and donkeys.  The very essence of kitsch, but the absolute lie to Wenceslas  - nothing at all deep or crisp or even.

Our Hotel - Art Deco ceramic dining room, slivers of walnut walling the lift – warmly welcomes us.  Old Town Square is filled with cheer; Charles Bridge thronged with tourists, like us, bleary with travel, unconscious of history.  The Castle, St Vitus dancing at the summit, that vast complex of styles and masonry that slips down to the Vltava as if it were marzipan that had not quite set. The Castle, a chess piece in the Czech story, capable of nothing but straight moves, either black or white.

I was in Scotland in August 1968 at the time of the Soviet invasion.  I had no idea what was going on, though I remember being shocked.  Black and white television images of tanks were scary, and the very word invasion had connotations with so many of the bad things I had heard about in history.  It was shocking too because this invasion crushed the flowers that had begun to grow so hopefully in what is known as the Prague Spring.  Coming so soon after the Parisian barricades and the student activities of Daniel Cohn-Bendit and others, it seemed as if the world was suddenly a repressive place.  The world of peace and love was in jeopardy.  Not for nothing (perhaps?) did the Beatles release Revolution that month.

And then, as interest in Prague declined with the end of the summer, autumn dissolved into winter.  A strange sense of darkness enveloped me as I returned to Scotland after Christmas, into almost perpetual night, until, on January 16^th, 1969, 20 year old history student Jan Palach set his petrol soaked self alight on Wenceslas Square to wake us all from our slumber.

His painful death still disturbs me.  And yet it was another twenty years before the country emerged from the communist grime with the Velvet Revolution. 

From Jan Hus to Vaclav Havel, the story of Prague and what is now known as Czechia, or the Czech Republic, is complex and bloodstained.  Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale takes place in this imagined Bohemia.  Under the Austrian Hapsburgs it wasn’t happy, with the German language imposed on its indigenous culture.  As Czechoslovakia there was an uneasy mix until the Nazis bludgeoned it into submission.  After that war it was miserably subsumed into the Soviet Bloc, before the famous Spring, and the Winter of Discontent. 

Now, as the year turns, we hear of a new Prime Minister, right wing billionaire Andrej Babiš (mini Trump to his supporters?)  A new Spring? 

We’ll see.  As Jakub Patočka wrote in The Guardian in October: The best the country can realistically hope for is a kind of chaos. The worse, but very likely, possibility, is an emergence of an authoritarian regime managed by a ruthless oligarch supported by neo-fascists or whoever is willing to sell him their votes. Almost 30 years after the Velvet Revolution, democracy is in danger.   

Plus ça change…. In the meantime, our brief holiday was a delight.  We were tourists.  Ignorant, uncaring, rested, well-fed and away from the snow on the M25…..  On the third day the sun shone and the river sparkled under the medieval bridge.  

Almost Spring-like.  A fitting advertisement for our friend Simon Mawer’s new novel, Prague Spring, due out on August 2nd, 2018. As the pre-release blurb on Amazon has it: It's the summer of 1968, the year of love and hate, of Prague Spring and Cold War winter….. a first secretary at the British embassy in Prague is observing developments in the country with a mixture of diplomatic cynicism and a young man's passion. In the company of Czech student, Lenka Konecková, he finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth, its hopes and its ideas. 

For more Mawer, please see 

http://www.unitedagents.co.uk/simon-mawer

I can’t wait…..  Enough of this Winter!

Our street is all snow, and ice.....

[Like Mozart's......]

*     *     *     *

{We flew from Heathrow with BA - and M&S! - and stayed at the Art Deco Imperial Hotel, Na Porici 15, Prague 1.

It is worth considering a Prague City Card if you wish to explore: https://www.praguecard.com/index.php?lang=en

There are so many places to eat and drink that it is fine to wander and take your pick, but we enjoyed the relative peace of the centrally located Pizzeria Café Bar "U Budovce" at Týnská 7, budovecjazz@email.cz

For a more 'authentic' locale, you could try
Pivnice U Švejků
Praha, Újezd 424/22, 11800

where the two of us ate and drank very well for €27}

*     *     *     *

For more pictures from this trip, see: http://www.richardpgibbs.org/p/prague-1.html

*     *     *     *

Do you have a travel blog?  Would you appreciate expert advice on your travel writing?  Contact Peter Carty, at travelwshop@gmail.com,  or see his website: https://www.travelwritingworkshop.co.uk/

*     *     *     *