The local sixteen year old’s are sitting their English Literature exams this month and the set text play at least some of them are covering is Romeo and Juliet so I thought I would also give it a go although in a somewhat finer edition than they are using. I even found an appropriate quote by Romeo from Act 2, scene 2.

Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books;
But love from love, towards school with heavy looks.

This is going to be a different sort of blog to normal as reviewing Shakespeare feels strange, the Bard rarely puts a foot wrong, it’s quite possible to review a performance but the plays themselves are genuinely some of the finest literature in English. So instead I’m going to treat it a a school exercise and for the first section summarise the play picking up on significant points, before moving on to describe the very special edition I am reading.

Shakespeare sets up the emnity between the two families of Capulet’s and Montague’s right from the first scene where servants from the two houses confront one another in the street, draw weapons and come to blows before being stopped by Benvolio who is part of the Montague family and happens to be passing. However Tybalt (Capulet) then arrives and seeing Benvolio with his sword drawn assumes he is part of the fight and likewise draws his sword to attack Benvolio, various citizens then arrive with clubs and it is only the arrival of Escalus, Prince of Verona, who orders all weapons to be dropped and the fighters disperse that finally brings peace to the streets. So the position of the rival families is well established within the first half dozen pages, a Montague and a Capulet, and even their servants, can barely be allowed in close proximity without trouble starting. Yet by the end of the first act Romeo, son of the head of the Montague family had entered the Capulet household at a masked ball, which means he is initially not recognised, and this leads to the fateful meeting between him and Juliet, daughter of the head of the Capulet family, which will bring such tragedy upon them both.

Act two begins with Romeo deciding to dump his current girlfriend, Rosalind, and giving his friends, Benvolio and Mercutio, the slip to enter the garden of the Capulet home where he spies Juliet high up in the house and this leads to the famous balcony scene, of which more later. During their conversation Juliet agrees to consider marrying Romeo the next day, a headstrong decision partly due to impetuous youth, for she is still two weeks short of her fourteenth birthday and also partly following on from her mothers conversation with her earlier that day encouraging her to look for a husband, although she was thinking of Count Paris, who has already indicated his interest in Juliet to her father. This act concludes with Romeo talking to a friend who is also a friar who agrees to perform a secret ceremony so that they may present their status as a married couple as a fait accompli to the two families and possibly through this heal the rift between them.

Amazingly for a Shakespeare tragedy we are now roughly half way through the text and nobody has died yet, most unusual, but all that is about to change. Everyone knows that “the star-cross’d lovers” (yes this is where that phrase comes from) don’t make it to the end of the play but the body count starts in act three of the five. Romeo and Juliet are now married, but nobody knows yet, and Tybalt is hunting for Romeo to avenge the dishonour of him appearing at the Capulet masked ball. When he finds him in the company of Benvolio and Mercutio he challenges him, but Romeo will not fight a man who has within the hour become his cousin, even if he isn’t aware of the relationship. Mercutio draws on Romeo’s behalf and is mortally wounded by Tybalt who then runs away but soon returns whereupon Romeo kills him in revenge. So before the end of scene one of the third act we have two dead and Romeo exiled from Verona by the Prince for the death of Tybalt. Delaying his exit from Verona Romeo manages to spend the night with Juliet and consummate the marriage but in the morning leaves quickly before her father arrives and tells Juliet that she is to marry Paris in this very week, she refuses but does not dare explain why however her father is insistent and says he will drag her to the church if necessary. The act ends with Juliet going to Friar Laurence to consult him on the way forward.

Act four sees Juliet coming home and as agreed with Friar Laurence submits to her father and declares she will go go through with tomorrow’s marriage, however he has also provided her with a drug that will simulate death for forty two hours which she is to take when she goes to bed. This she duly does and is discovered the next day apparently a corpse which is believed by all. We have amazingly for Shakespeare got through another act without anyone actually dying but that is all going to change in act five, the final part of the play.

Act five is where all the action occurs however it starts in Mantua with Romeo seeing the arrival of his manservant and asking him news of Verona. Balthazar tells Romeo that Juliet is dead and distraught Romeo decides to buy poison so that he can also die. Meanwhile Friar Laurence receives his messenger who should have given Romeo a letter explaining what was really going on but has failed to deliver it. Friar Laurence decides to head for the vault where Juliet is lying to see what is going on. Romeo has meanwhile arrived at the vault and is seen by Paris who has also gone there to lay flowers by Juliet, thinking Romeo means to disturb the corpse he attacks him and is in turn killed by Romeo. Romeo breaks into the vault and takes Paris’s body in there, seeing Juliet apparently lifeless he drinks the poison to join her in death. Friar Laurence then arrives and finds the two men dead but Juliet coming round, she then sees the bodies and before Laurence can take her out of the vault grabs Romeo’s dagger and stabs herself. Making a total of five dead in the play, but no when the lords Montague and Capulet arrive Montague reveals that his wife had died that night of a broken heart due to Romeo’s banishment. Friar Laurence reveals to all that Rome and Juliet were actually married and the two families resolve to end their rivalry in memory of those they have lost. The play ends:

Prince. A glooming peace this morning with it brings.
    The sun for sorrow will not show his head.
    Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
    Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished;
    For never was a story of more woe
    Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

Now let’s compare the two copies of the play provided in the box, The smaller version bound in buckram with the paper label is actually a good size (8¾˝ x 5¾˝) hardback edition of the relevant volume of The Oxford Shakespeare series of all the plays bound to complement the much larger Folio edition. This is the copy you turn to if you want the academic learning around the play. It is 450 pages long of which the first 134 pages are the introduction. The play itself is broken up with a huge number of notes explaining the text and reading it feels very much like being at school and analysing a play to within an inch of its life. I studied ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ like this at school and whilst I’m sure it’s an excellent read I’ve never been able to bring myself to pick up a copy since. See below where you can see that Juliet barely gets going before being interrupted by half a page of double column notes.

In complete contrast the much larger Folio limited edition is in a very clear large font (16-point Baskerville with Caslon display) letterpress printed on over-size pages (14˝ x 10¾˝) on beautiful paper and with a complete absence of notes, which to quote The Folio Society at the time “Allows to text room to breathe”. This makes reading the play much more pleasurable, as not only looking gorgeous the book feels fantastic as well with the fine leather and hand marbled paper binding. Removing all the notes and introduction takes this edition down to 113 pages. Here is the same section in this version, it is of course part of the famous ‘balcony scene’.

I have sixteen of the plays in this format, the tragedies are bound in red, the comedies in green and the history plays are blue. I was tempted to get more but at £295 per play it was turning into a major investment so I just got a selection of my favourite works by Shakespeare. Even so with each box measuring 15˝ x 11˝ x 2¾˝ (38cm x 28cm x 7cm) the sixteen buckram bound boxes take up a lot of shelf space. If you are interested in the production process used to print this book have a look at these Folio Society videos on the production of the Letterpress Shakespeare firstly the printing process itself and this one on how the marbled papers were made.

I recently watched the 1974 film Akenfield directed by Peter Hall which is based on Ronald Blythe’s best seller ‘Akenfield, Portrait of an English Village’, a book that has remained in print ever sine it was first published in 1969. The film covers three generations of people from the fictitious village of Akenfield in Suffolk including its most famous bucolic scenes of farming life that has long since disappeared and the horrors of losing so many men to the World Wars. It is particularly unusual in that there are no professional actors and no script just an eighteen page synopsis by Blythe with the people in the film making their own lines up as appropriate for the scene. The film was made at the weekends so as not to impinge on the actual working week of the people taking part and Blythe himself appears in it, playing the part of the vicar of Akenfeld, you can see the trailer here.

I loved the film and was sure that somewhere on the shelves was the book which was memorably reviewed by Jan Morris for the New York Times:

“Ronald Blythe lovingly draws apart the curtains of legend and landscape, revealing the inner, almost clandestine, spirit of the village behind. His book consists of a series of direct-speech monologues, delivered by forty-nine Suffolk residents, and interpretatively linked by the author. The effect is one of astonishing immediacy: it is as if those country people have looked up for a moment from their plow, lawnmower or kitchen sink, and are talking directly (and disturbingly frankly) to the reader. This is a brilliant and extraordinary book which raises disquieting second thoughts when the poetry has faded—as Mr. Blythe says, it is like a ‘strange journey through a familiar land.”

Sadly I couldn’t find it but I did locate the next best thing, a 126 page shortened version of the original 288 page Penguin Modern Classic from the set English Journeys which came out in 2009. This only has twenty one of the original forty nine interviews and the linking passages are largely missing but in the absence of the complete work it is an excellent substitute. The variety of people interviewed by Blythe is a cross-section of village life from a thatcher, blacksmiths and a wheelwright, a nurse, a couple of orchard workers and even one of the gardeners from the big house who describes the problems of working for the old couple that owned it and the professional pride that he got from a job well done. In fact there was a lot of pride in what people were doing right up until the younger generation and a tractor driver who no longer cared about straight furrows just how much land he could cover in a day, in total contrast to the horse ploughman who wanted everything just so.

The saddest, and most difficult to read, interview was the first one in the book, Leonard Thompson age seventy one and listed as a farm worker but most of his narrative covers being called up in the First World War and having to go to The Dardanelles to fight the Turks before ending up on the Somme in the thick of the fighting. He describes first arriving in Turkey and asking about friends from the village who had gone before only to be told that they had all died in combat and then moving on to a trench which was full of corpses and stinking from the decomposition.

One of the more interesting interviews was with a saddler who admits “Our harness lasted forever, as you might say. It was our downfall, wasn’t it! We made these things so well that after a while they did us out of a living.” But even the wheelwright says that there were wagons around the village that were over a century old they were made that well that they never needed replacing. So different from modern products which have built in obsolescence, it was only the coming of tractors that would gradually drive those fine wooden wagons off the farm and into the history books. The retired district nurse describes arriving in Akenfield in 1925 and being the first medical professional that would actually turn out at a house as the local doctors weren’t interested in house calls, you had to go to them and be ready to pay or they wouldn’t see you at all. She saw it all from births to sitting up by a death bed as the person in it took their final breaths and had to work hard to gain the confidence of the people. She eventually covered nine villages and because of this was one of the few people with a car so she could get round but she was very struck by the poverty of the general population with large families in tiny properties so there would be five or six children sharing one bedroom with the latest baby in the other room with the parents.

The final person is appropriately William Russ, aged sixty one and the gravedigger. He started digging graves when he was just twelve years old, “People would look down into the hole and see a child”. One of the problems with his job was one I had never thought about and that was the high water table in Suffolk which meant that the graves would start filling up with water almost as soon a they were dug and coffins had to be held down with poles to stop them floating away until enough heavy soil was on top of them to force them down to the bottom of the grave.

All in all it’s a fascinating document of social history and I just need to keep hunting the shelves to find the full work although I have a feeling that I lent it to someone and never got it back. But I recommend either edition of Akenfield, or even the film, if you want a glimpse of a rural life that wasn’t that long ago but has now completely vanished.