A Tower of Strength

It is a familiar enough phrase, but what does it really mean and where does it come from?

To answer the second question first - it’s one of many expressions first coined by William Shakespeare. It comes from Act 5 Scene 3 of King Richard III. Richard is preparing to do battle against Henry Tudor at Bosworth and is considering the relative strength of the opposing forces. He is told that Henry’s army amounts to “six or seven thousand” and he replies:


“Why our battalia trebles that account!
Besides, the King’s name is a tower of strength,
Which they upon the adverse faction want.”


In other words, men who fight for the rightful king will be stronger in battle than those who do not – an interesting and somewhat flawed concept, one might imagine.

Shakespeare’s source for the expression might well be the Old Testament, namely Proverbs 18, verse 10:

“The name of the Lord is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.”

We know that Shakespeare – writing during the reign of Tudor Queen Elizabeth I – was convinced that Richard III was a villain who deserved everything he got. It is therefore entirely possible that when he made Richard misquote the Book of Proverbs he was implying that Richard was committing a form of blasphemy – the “name of the Lord” has become “the King’s name”. One wonders how many members of his audience at The Globe Theatre would have picked this up?

The misquotation from “a strong tower” to “a tower of strength” might imply that Richard was using empty words. The image of people running into a strongly built tower for protection is clear enough, but the literal meaning of “a tower built from strength” does not make a lot of sense.

On the other hand, Shakespeare might simply have used those words for the purpose of scansion in a poetic line and considered that “a strong tower” is what Richard was implying.

Even so, it is quite a leap from the notion of people relying on the name of God as a protection from evil to soldiers gaining strength in battle because they know that they are fighting for a King.

© John Welford

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: a play by Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard took the title of his 1966 play from a line towards the end of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. All the main characters are dead, which leaves the concluding lines to be spoken by Hamlet’s friend Horatio and the Norwegian general Fortinbras. An ambassador from England announces that he has come too late to tell the Danish king that his orders have been obeyed and that “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead”. 

These two minor characters appear much earlier in the play as spies sent by King Claudius to try to work out what is in Hamlet’s mind that could explain his bizarre behaviour. They are old friends of Hamlet and are greeted warmly at first but then less so as Hamlet is clever enough to work out their true purpose and taunts them about their duplicity. 

Later on, Claudius sends Hamlet on a ship to England, accompanied by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are bearing a letter from Claudius that requests that Hamlet be killed on arrival, but Hamlet is able to switch the letter for one that condemns his two former friends to death. Hamlet is able to escape from the ship when it is attacked by pirates and return to Denmark, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not so lucky.

Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 but has lived in Britain since 1946. His widowed mother married a British army major, which therefore gave Tom and his brother Peter British citizenship. He began writing plays in the 1950s and in 1964 wrote a one act play entitled “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear”, which evolved into the three act play in which King Lear plays no part.

Stoppard was interested in the many unanswered questions arising from “Hamlet”. Clearly, the characters were used by Shakespeare for a specific purpose, and they always appear as a pair with little to distinguish one from the other. They are also overshadowed by the much stronger character of Hamlet. However, what if they were put in the limelight and the other Shakespeare characters played bit parts? Also, what if their actions were seen in a comic light as opposed to being elements of a tragedy? These were the possibilities that inspired Tom Stoppard to write his play.

Stoppard turns everything on its head by concentrating on the times when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are off-stage as far as Shakespeare’s play is concerned. One can imagine that the main action of Hamlet is happening on another stage in parallel to what one is seeing here. At times the two plays interact and a scene from “Hamlet” appears in Stoppard’s version.

One of the main themes of “Hamlet” is the main character’s musings on the nature of existence and the purpose of life, as exemplified by the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. For Stoppard, the same questions apply to his main characters, and much of the comedy of the play comes from their introspections and conclusions on these matters.

Act One

The play opens with the two courtiers flipping a coin and betting on heads or tails, which immediately poses questions about fate, chance, and the nature of reality. The coin always comes down heads, 92 times in a row, thus prompting the characters to reckon that they are subject to unnatural forces. The scene is therefore set for happenings that are beyond their control and which they will struggle to understand.

When the pair are summoned by Claudius and Gertrude to undertake their mission to spy on Hamlet, great play is made of Shakespeare’s apparent inability to tell them apart. This even extends to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern themselves. Hamlet’s central question of “Who am I?” is thus presented with a comic twist.

The travelling players from “Hamlet” also make an appearance in this act. Just like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern they spend a lot of time off-stage, so Tom Stoppard imagines that all these bit players might get together at such times. However, the play that they put on for the courtiers is a lot more bloodthirsty than the wordy and courtly performance they enact in “Hamlet”. During their “time off” they clearly have other preferences.

Act Two

In Act Two there are many interactions between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the chief player, the king and queen, and Hamlet. Questions of reality and unreality crop up with confusing frequency, aided by the contrast between what the players do on stage and off (they produce a dress rehearsal of “The Murder of Gonzago” which they perform in “Hamlet”), and always against the background of whether Hamlet’s madness is feigned or real.

Issues of life and death arise when the players foretell the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the couple are asked to find the corpse of Polonius after Hamlet has killed him in error, thinking that his victim was Claudius.

Act Three

Act Three takes place on the ship to England as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern escort Hamlet to England, sent there by Claudius in a bid to have Hamlet killed. Questions of existence arise at the outset because the pair have no idea how they got there and need proof that they are actually alive. They open Claudius’s letter and thus discover the king’s true purpose. However, Hamlet switches the letter while they are asleep.

Also on board are the players, who have decided to escape the expected wrath of Claudius. They have stowed away in barrels on deck, which also prove to be good hiding places for all the characters when the pirates attack. After the pirates have gone, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern discover that Hamlet has gone too.

When they look again at the letter they learn the truth about Hamlet’s treachery and have to face the fact that their fates are sealed. However, they cannot understand why they deserve to die. The chief player offers Guildenstern an intended consolation along the lines that everyone must die, but this enrages the courtier who takes the player’s dagger and stabs him with it. The player falls but then rises again, because his dagger is a theatrical one with a retractable blade. This provides another approach to the question of the reality of life and death.

In the final scene the two main characters muse on the existential issues that have pervaded the play but still fail to come to any satisfactory conclusions. Could things have been different? Could they have changed the course of events in either their own drama or the parallel one that keeps impinging on theirs? The lights go out on each of them in turn and the line “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and dead” sounds as the final moment of the play.

Although this is a comedy, it has a number of messages and poses many questions. Just as there are no easy answers in “Hamlet”, so there are none here. An audience member will come away with the uneasy feeling that, as well as being the main character in his or her own life story, they are also a bit player in that of every other person they know, to a greater or lesser extent. 

Would a patron of this play who did not know “Hamlet” reasonably well get as much out of it as someone who did? The answer to that is probably No, because there are so many subtle references to Shakespeare’s play in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”. Also, it would be difficult for someone who was completely ignorant of “Hamlet” to be aware of the points of contact between the two plays, or even of the significance of the title. That said, the play is entertaining and enjoyable in its own right, and might be an interesting point of entry (if somewhat confusing!) to “Hamlet” for someone who had not seen it.

© John Welford

Bowdlerising: a family's attempt to sanitise Shakespeare

How a pre-Victorian family made the works of Shakespeare acceptable in polite society by producing a sanitised version that was far removed from the spirit of the original.


Bawdy Shakespeare

It has long been recognised that the works of William Shakespeare contain scenes, dialogues and language that are earthy, suggestive, crude, and full of sexual innuendo. They were, after all, written for audiences that were far less prudish than later generations, and whose idea of humour was much less sophisticated than our own. One reason for Shakespeare’s popularity in our own age is that we have come nearly full circle in our liberal appreciation of bawdiness (in the United Kingdom, at least).

However, this aspect of Shakespeare has caused problems down the years, especially where introducing his works to children is concerned. While appreciating that there is great drama and considerable beauty in his words, which should appeal to young audiences, there is also much that they either would not understand or which is too adult, in a sexual sense, for their ears.

It was quite common in the late 18th and early 19th centuries for family entertainments in middle-class British households to consist of readings of Shakespeare plays, and for scenes to be enacted. The Bowdler family of Bath was one such, with Thomas Bowdler senior reading to the family, which comprised six children, including Henrietta Maria (1750-1830) and Thomas junior (1754-1825).


Amending the text

When it came to the awkward passages, Thomas senior would cleverly substitute other words or skip lines or scenes that were “over the top”. In this way, the children were protected from the bawdiness and profanity that would have amused Shakespeare’s original audiences of “penny stinkards” but were less suitable in more modern times. However, the younger Bowdlers were still left with an abiding love and appreciation of the works of the Bard.

It was Henrietta who first had the idea of taking her father’s custom a step further and producing a version of Shakespeare that was suitable for family reading. She produced the first edition of “The Family Shakespeare” in 1807, comprising expurgated versions of twenty of the plays. She omitted, for example, “Hamlet”, in which the chief character makes so many sexual references that it would be a real challenge to sanitise them without destroying his character completely.

Thomas junior took credit for this work, not so much out of sibling jealously but in order to protect his sister from any accusations of impropriety. After all, if you are able to change a line that makes a punning reference to sexual intercourse, you must be able to appreciate the innuendo yourself. Thomas was, after all, a medical doctor, and a man, and it would not seem improper for him to have been the editor. That said, there is little doubt that most of work of that first edition was done by Henrietta.


Thomas junior takes over

However, Thomas now took the project very much into his own hands and in 1818 published a second edition of “The Family Shakspeare”, with the changed spelling being deliberate. This included virtually the whole Shakespeare canon as recognised at the time, although some of the plays gave him more problems than others. “Measure for Measure”, with its themes of sexual infidelity and prostitution, and “Othello”, in which the sexual relations of Othello and Desdemona are a constant driver of Iago’s innuendo, proved particularly tricky.

Dr Bowdler had a second target, which was profanity. As a convinced Anglican with Puritan leanings, any taking in vain of the name of God was definitely out, so all such exclamations tended to be replaced by “Heavens!” and Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot” became “Out, crimson spot!”

There is a story to the effect that, when editing “Othello”, Thomas Bowdler substituted “trumpet” for “strumpet” in the line “she has played the strumpet in my bed”. Were it true this would be gloriously funny, but unfortunately this would appear to be the invention of a 20th century humorist.

Dr Bowdler’s method was not so much to substitute words of his own but rather to cut whole passages, and even characters, when they offended him by their language. As far as he was concerned, “many words and expressions occur which are of so indecent a nature as to render it highly desirable that they should be erased”. His motivation was to improve Shakespeare by removing text that he believed detracted from the quality of the original.

Thomas actually restored some passages that Henrietta had cut. If she thought that a passage was tedious or absurd, out it went, even if it contained no indecencies. Thomas was therefore trying to be loyal to the original except when he found it impossible not to be.

At first, neither edition excited much attention. However, when Thomas’s edition was at first condemned and then defended in the literary press, sales took off and the book continued in print for many years after the death of its progenitor. It was hugely influential, with many buyers convinced that this was the “true” Shakespeare and other versions should not be given house room.

Another approach was simply to retell the stories of the plays as opposed to censoring the texts. The best example of this is “Tales From Shakespeare”, first published in 1807 (the same year as the first “Bowdler”) by another brother and sister team, namely Charles and Mary Lamb. As a way of introducing young children to Shakespeare, this would seem to have more to recommend it than the Bowdler method.


How should we regard the Bowdlers today?

Today, most people look back on “Bowdlerising” with horror, regarding any tinkering with the words of a great writer as an act of literary vandalism. It is true that virtually every stage production of a Shakespeare play will make adjustments to the text, with scenes and speeches being omitted where they add little to the plot, but these are made for dramatic effect and not because they contain too many “naughty words”. Audiences who watched a Bowdlerised staging of Shakespeare would soon wonder what on earth was going on, and they would certainly miss much of the “light relief” that the minor characters provide with their near-the-knuckle banter.

On the other hand, it is also true that generations of young children have grown to know about Shakespeare from versions that have been severely edited. Even today, one would not expect young children to read some of the racier scenes from his plays, but then we do not normally start children on Shakespeare at the sort of age that the Bowdler children presumably were when their father started reading to them.

On balance one would have to say that Bowdlerising is wrong in principle. Any work of art should be judged as a whole and as the artist intended it to be, assuming that this intention can be ascertained. We should certainly not experience Shakespeare in a form that is so cut about and perverted that it cannot be regarded as his work any longer, and that is what we are faced with in “The Family Shakspeare”. If Shakespeare is unfit for public consumption unless sanitised to a pale shadow of its former self, it should not be staged or read at all.

© John Welford