Around this time every year, when Madrid can get up to 40 degrees and it’s too hot to do anything, I return to Britain for a month to visit family and friends.
By happy accident, my summer tour this year has had a Shakespeare theme, as three places I visited are linked with England’s most famous actor/director/playwright/poet. So, I’ve penned my own historical trilogy, exploring places tied to The Bard’s life and work.
So, if you can lend me your ears over the next few weeks, let us begin.
Act 1: Lancashire
“My friends are in the North”
Richard III, Act IV, Scene IV
The first stop on our travels is Merseyside/Lancashire; my ancestral home, but probably not the first place you’d associate with Warwickshire lad William Shakespeare.
Arriving in a cold and damp Liverpool in the middle of July, the weather was more tempest-like than a midsummer’s dream. To lift our spirits, my friend Lesley had the great idea of visiting The Shakespeare North Playhouse, somewhere I’ve been meaning to visit for a while.
“Is there no play, to ease the anguish of a torturing hour?”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene 1
Opened in 2022, the building looks brand new from the outside with a cafe, bar, shop and rehearsal spaces, just like any modern theatre. But venture into its heart and you’ll find a reconstruction of a cockpit-in-court style wooden playhouse, the only one of its kind outside London and with all of its 470 seats mercifully indoors.
On this dark Tuesday night, we enjoyed ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’; performed brilliantly by a cast of only four women from The Handlebards, a group of traveling actors that move all their costumes, sets and props by bicycle. Their production was as madcap and funny as the play itself, with rapid costume changes, lovers getting dosed with the magic potion from water pistols, and audience participation that included snatching sweets thrown from the upper gallery.
dressed in orange ponchos to represent the fairy spirits in the play. In cheeky sprite style, they stole a few sips from our wine glasses too!
But what is a Shakespearean theatre doing a few miles east of Liverpool, in the small market town of Prescot? Well, back in Tudor times, there was also a theatre here, on the edge of the vast estate of the key players in our story: The Earls of Derby.
“Saw you the king to-day, my Lord of Derby?”
Richard III, Act I, Scene III
The 4th Earl of Derby, Henry Stanley, was one of the most powerful men in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. In the 1580s he was Ambassador to the court of King Henry III of France, a Privy Council member, and was directly involved in both the trial of Mary Queen of Scots and the negotiations following England’s clash with the Spanish Armada.
He was also a theatre buff, supporting the construction of Prescot’s playhouse in the 1590s. Built by local gentleman Richard Harrington, it is thought to have been the only purpose-built indoor playhouse outside of London. Sadly, it was only used for a few decades and has been lost to history, demolished at the end of the 1600s. As no original plans survive for this Prescot Playhouse, the new theatre’s layout was based on a 1629 design by architect Inigo Jones for the theatre inside The Palace of Whitehall in London.
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”
As You Like It, Act 2, Scene VII
So who played at this Prescot theatre? We do know that the leading touring English acting companies of the day did travel the 200 miles from London up to Lancashire. They were paid to perform at Stanley’s main seat at Lathom House near Ormskirk (the town where I, in fact, was born) as well as other great houses of the northern gentry. These companies included The Queen’s Men, as well as Lord Strange’s Men, named after their patron Fernando, Lord Strange, the 5th Earl of Derby. This troupe, who with Shakespeare, would go on to form the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, based at the Globe Theatre in London.
This million crown question is did William Shakespeare himself ever leave London and perform some of his plays in Lancashire? This is a theory that scholars and historians have been debating for years, and the speculation is more wishful thinking than proven fact. No written records have been found that prove he ever came up this far. One of many ideas is that he stayed with his old Lancashire-born schoolmaster John Cottom as a young man. Perhaps he wrote and acted under the patronage of the Earls of Derby during his ‘Lost Years; the gap in Shakespeare’s life between his twin’s birth in 1585 and appearing in London in 1592. That one will probably remain a mystery, for all time.
Next time: We travel down to London to lost theatres and lively pubs in the back streets of Southwark.
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