February

 

Поети перетворюються на ліхтарників
у місті, пересвіченому електрикою,
схожі на ветеранів великої війни,
що вихаркують серед ночі
подих чергового літнього наступу.

(Serhiy Zhadan, extract from a tweeted poem of 3/2/22)

Poety peretvoryuyutʹsya na likhtarnykiv 

u misti, peresvichenomu elektrykoyu, 

skhozhi na veteraniv velykoyi viyny, 

shcho vykharkuyutʹ sered nochi 

podykh cherhovoho litnʹoho nastupu.

Google Translate: 

Poets turn into lanterns

in a city lit by electricity,

look like veterans of the Great War,

sputtering in the middle of the night

breath of another summer offensive.

Two more poems by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Valzhyna Mort:

https://pionline.wordpress.com/2016/12/17/two-poems-by-serhiy-zhadan-translated-by-valzhyna-mort/

Extract:

Now we remember: janitors and the night-sellers of bread,
gray, like wrapping paper,
burglars,
taxi drivers with klaxons instead of hearts,
children who grew up
among the old furniture
(furniture smelled of poplar trees and sea).

Our city of workers and ugly middle-men,
tear-jerking market beggars
they cleared
the autumn fog
with their shouts.

The tree trunks are obliterated by hail lashing on the glass.

Outside there's a crust of hail and a bench lies on its front, 

and a tall cypress buffets sideways, why are you looking? 

For was it not so that evergreens

should slow bejewel mountain streams?

I am happy now with the curse of a corpse

and You you strip away the berries from huts

"The more shall Clan-Alpine exult"

The gravel the locks swing blue, there's alteration in stupidity.

A light blinks on and off. 

February 

                              Upon the banks of the eternal river.

                                                            – Lina Kostenko

The lengthy winter’s final month we will

Survive. And after all, we have our share

Of guilt as well. A knife emerges from

The darkness like the moon. And a guitar

Twangs on about the copses and the corpses.

The voices on the tape-cassettes are ours.

Those less at fault are more so. And conversely,

The guiltier are less. The years slither

Like worms out of your hand. And all the same,

For everything there comes a punishment.

Unhappy land of captive dreams,

Abominable words, and severed heads,

And acid-scalded skin!

They’ve ripped out your nightingale’s tongue,

And whistles, curses, drunken shouts are all

You hear from underneath the princely purple.

My princess, consort of the frogs and fishes!

Your every son’s a blackguard or a slave!

Whom can you marry and whom can you love?

Upon the banks of the eternal river –

Bookkeepers, majors, and their wives…

With children studying abroad.

And what can grow from scattered ears of wheat?

It’s been our fate to see the field denuded.

But someone, all the same, will see the harvest

And the striding foeman’s scythe pass through it.

And they will flail it on the threshing-floor.

And upon the embroidered cloth, the bread

Will lie before us like a severed head. 

Natalka Bilotserkivets, translation by Andrew Sorokowsky

[Poem source: https://peacockjournal.com/natalka-bilotserkivets-six-poems-translated-andrew-sorokowski/ .]

Les Baux

 

Photo of Alistair MacLean, by Clayton Evans, on the rear jacket of Caravan to Vaccarès (1970) 

[Image source: https://www.bonanza.com/items/search?item_id=139916921&q[search_description]=1&q[search_term]=Caravan%20to%20Vaccares .]

I mentioned Les Baux-de-Provence when I wrote about Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon moulin. In his time it was remote and impoverished. These days the tourist literature tends to describe it as one of the most beautiful villages in France.  

In the opening to Caravan to Vaccarès Alistair MacLean put a different spin on it, appropriate to his action thriller: 

‘The cliff battlements of Les Baux, cleft and rent as by a giant axe, and the shattered, gaunt and terrible remnants of the ancient fortress itself are the most awesomely desolate of all ruins in Europe.’ Or so the local guide-book said. It went on: ‘Centuries after its death Les Baux is still an open tomb, a dreadful and dreadfully fitting memorial to a medieval city that lived most violently and perished in agony: to look upon Les Baux is to look upon the face of death imperishably carved in stone.’

Well, it was pitching it a bit high, perhaps, guide-books do tend towards the hyperbolic, but the average uncertified reader of the guide would take the point and turn no somersaults if some wealthy uncle had left him the place in his will. It was indisputably the most inhospitable, barren and altogether uninviting collection of fractured and misshapen masonry in western Europe, a total and awesome destruction that was the work of seventeenth-century demolition squads who had taken a month and heaven alone knew how many tons of gunpowder to reduce Les Baux to its present state of utter devastation: one would have been equally prepared to believe that the same effect had been achieved in a couple of seconds that afternoon with the aid of an atom bomb: the annihilation of the old fortress was as total as that. But people still lived up there, lived and worked and died.

Soon there will be a relentless "on the run" sequence among the moonlit ruins of Les Baux. 

Caravan to Vaccarès (1970) has its irresponsible way with this part of Provence, but it's at least as much about hotels as about Camargue white horses and bull dancing. (I don't want to even begin on its stereotyped gypsy villains.)  MacLean had himself had a go at the luxury hotel business; it didn't work out, so he went back to bestsellers. The Hotel Baumanière, setting of these opening pages, is a perfectly real hotel (and it does indeed have three Michelin stars). The novel is dedicated to the hotel's owners. 

MacLean had a BA in English from the University of Glasgow, but he knew he didn't write particularly well, and didn't care. Sales of his books are estimated at over 150 million. (Irrelevantly but interestingly, his mother tongue was Gaelic.)

Perhaps Chaucer's Temple of Mars had stuck in his head during those undergraduate days:

Ther saugh I first the derke ymaginyng
Of Felonye, and al the compassyng;
The crueel Ire, reed as any gleede;
The pykepurs, and eek the pale Drede;
The smylere with the knyf under the cloke;
The shepne brennynge with the blake smoke;
The tresoun of the mordrynge in the bedde;
The open werre, with woundes al bibledde;

(The Knight's Tale, ll. 1995-2002)

At any rate that's what shows up here:

‘I still don’t understand.’ He gazed forward through the windscreen. ‘Could it be that the fair Miss Dubois is in the process of falling in love?’

‘Rest easy,’ she said calmly. ‘The fair Miss Dubois has no such romantic stirrings in mind.’

‘Then why come along with me? Who knows, they may all be lying in wait – the mugger up the dark alley, the waiter with the poison phial, the smiler with the knife beneath the cloak – any of Czerda’s pals, in fact. So why?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

He started up the Peugeot. ...

But the allusion might not be directly to Chaucer. Nicholas Blake's The Smiler with the Knife was the fifth Nigel and Georgia Strangeways mystery, published in 1939 (Nicholas Blake was the crime-writing pseudonym of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis). 

Comparing it to distant memories of the dog-eared MacLean novels I picked up at school (HMS Ulysses, The Last Frontier, Where Eagles Dare), Caravan to Vaccarès feels more like a comedy-thriller, its hero dressing up in gypsy costume, then as a polka-dotted white-sombreroed guardian (Camargue cowboy) and finally as a clown in the bullring.  It's distinguished by a sort of ponderous humour of overstatement and understatement and spelling out the obvious, which runs alongside the hectic action and clipped dialogue. It keeps suggesting Wodehouse's phrasing, but without the sharpness or purpose.

He moved very slowly and very quietly on rubber soles and kept to deep shadow. There was, of course, no positive reason why the gypsies should have any watcher posted: but as far as this particular lot were concerned, Bowman felt, there was no positive reason why they shouldn’t.

I'm unclear how in control the author still is. MacLean had never enjoyed the labour of writing and something, his alcoholism perhaps, was seriously impacting his prose just a couple of years later. But here we're still teetering. 

Bowman waited no longer: if there was one thing that had been learnt from dealing with those men it was that procrastination was uninsurable. 

So it's time to make that lung-bursting ascent to Les Baux. 

A small cemetery lay to his right. Bowman thought of the macabre prospect of playing a lethal hide-and-seek among the tombstones and hastily put all thought of the cemetery out of his mind. He ran on another fifty yards, saw before him the open plateau of the Les Baux massif, where there was no place to hide and from which escape could be obtained only by jumping down the vertical precipices which completely enclosed the massif, turned sharply to his left, ran up a narrow path alongside what looked like a crumbling chapel and was soon among the craggy ruins of the Les Baux fortress itself. He looked downhill and saw that his pursuers had fallen back to a distance of about forty yards which was hardly surprising as his life was at stake and their lives weren’t. He looked up, saw the moon riding high and serene in a now cloudless sky and swore bitterly to himself in a fashion that would have given great offence to uncounted poets both alive and dead. On a moonless night he could have eluded his pursuers with ease amidst that great pile of awesome ruins.

And that they were awesome was beyond dispute. The contemplation of large masses of collapsed masonry did not rank among Bowman’s favourite pastimes but as he climbed, fell, scrambled and twisted among that particular mass of masonry and in circumstances markedly unconducive to any form of aesthetic appreciation there was inexorably borne in upon him a sense of the awful grandeur of the place. It was inconceivable that any ruins anywhere could match those in their wild, rugged yet somehow terrifyingly beautiful desolation. There were mounds of shattered building stones fifty feet high: there were great ruined pillars reaching a hundred feet into the night sky, pillars overlooking vertical cliff faces of which the pillars appeared to be a natural continuation and in some cases were: there were natural stairways in the shattered rock face, natural chimneys in the remnants of those man-made cliffs, there were hundreds of apertures in the rock, some just large enough for a man to squeeze through, others large enough to accommodate a double-decker. There were strange paths let into the natural rock, some man-made, some not, some precipitous, some almost horizontal, some wide enough to bowl along in a coach and four, others narrow and winding enough to have daunted the most mentally retarded of mountain goats. And there were broken, ruined blocks of masonry everywhere, some big as a child’s hand, others as large as a suburban house. And it was all white, eerie and dead and white: in that brilliantly cold pale moonlight it was the most chillingly awe-inspiring sight Bowman had ever encountered and not, he reflected, a place he would willingly have called home. But, here, tonight, he had to live or die.

Or they had to live or die, Ferenc and Koscis and Hoval. When it came to the consideration of this alternative there was no doubt at all in Bowman’s mind as to what the proper choice must be and the choice was not based primarily on the instinct of self-preservation although Bowman would have been the last to deny that it was an important factor: those were evil men and they had but one immediate and all-consuming ambition in life and that was to kill him but that was not what ultimately mattered. There was no question of morality or legality involved, just the simple factor of logic. If they killed him now they would, he knew, go on to commit more and more heinous crimes: if he killed them, then they wouldn’t. It was as simple as that. Some men deserve to die and the law cannot deal with them until it is too late and the law is not an ass in this respect, it’s just because of inbuilt safeguards in every legal constitution designed to protect the rights of the individual that it is unable to cope in advance with those whose ultimate evil or murderous intent is beyond rational dispute but beyond legal proof.  ...

[Basically this is the same argument as Suffolk's in Act III Scene 1 of 2 Henry VI. But Suffolk deploys it to rationalize the murder of the innocent Duke Humphrey.]

The chasing gypsies do the whole run with their knives held in their hands, which doesn't seem like a great idea. I suppose it's just a picturesque detail for the reader, and a reminder that they are to be regarded in the light of villains rather than as fellow humans.

Jacket of the UK first edition of Caravan to Vaccarès

[Image source: http://www.alistairmaclean.com/First-Editions.html .]

Online text of Caravan to Vaccarès:

https://www.rulit.me/books/caravan-to-vaccares-read-661489-1.html

Two sites that entertainingly review all Alistair MacLean's novels:

http://www.alistairmaclean.com/ (author anonymous: appreciative and restrained.)

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/?s=Alistair+MacLean (by Simon -- an enormous site -- he also surveys Samuel Beckett, Christopher Marlowe, Gustave Flaubert, and who knows what else.)

Both surveys describe an oeuvre whose standout works come quite early, and whose quality then declines, at first slowly and then precipitously. 

It's a trajectory whose shape reminds me, of course, of Sir Walter Scott's, that first bestseller of adventure stories. Caravan to Vaccarès is in the still-good-but-not-quite-so-good part of the curve; the MacLean equivalent of, say, Quentin Durward. 

It's difficult to be a one-person franchise. How can you not change, if you're alive? But then how can you change and still pull in the money? 

The one who never changes

becomes another.

(Gösta Ågren)

This comparison is disconcerting in some ways: one of the greatest of novelists with one that hovers in vacuity only just above Jeffrey Archer. But still, Scott's novels were a highly commercial enterprise; he shared his printers' view of them as product, and he had convictions that predisposed him to feel all right about this; an aversion to artistic pretension in himself, a profound belief in the honest dignity of commerce. 

And for MacLean, you have to admit that reaching so vast an audience makes him sociologically important, at least. Books such as his promoted social continuity at all costs: that blind bedrock needed a lot of topping up. In civilization there was a great deal of inner violence to be soothed, a great many pills to be swallowed lightly each morning. 

Jeffrey Archer's combined sales, Wikipedia says, are 275 million copies. 

 

Bashō’s plants

 

Lithocarpus edulis (Pasania) in bloom

[Image source: http://www.okinawa-kaeru.net/wild/plant/matebashii-2.html .]

Summer grove --

pasania tree and I

find shelter.

                                                  Travelling Kiso road,

                                                  through the heart

                                                  of pasania blooms.

Pasania is an older name for the genus Lithocarpus, also known as the stone oaks (they are related to our oaks and have acorns). 

Does it help, reading these haiku of Bashō in the beautiful translations of Lucien Stryk, to learn what a pasania looks like? I don't know. Logically, it should do. A haiku names, it doesn't describe. So it feels like it rewards acquaintance with what's named. And yet, after all, seeing a photograph of a plant on the other side of the world doesn't give us deep acquaintance with that plant. And yet, too, I must have read these poems fifty times, finding them completely satisfactory, before it ever occurred to me to find out what a pasania tree is. 

My imagination swapped in something from my own memory. Not so much any specific tree, as my corresponding emotion, a feeling I attach to certain memories, not of scrutinizing but of being suddenly struck by e.g. paulownias along a street in Spain, or large rhododendrons somewhere in Sussex. In a way the image of a real pasania tree gets in the way of that personal re-ignition of emotion. And I wonder, too, if Bashō's seventeenth-century experience of the tree would be anything like our experience of what's shown in a modern photograph? Photos tend to record midday sunshine. But the conditions in the poems (or the ones we conceive as we read them) are often quieter and more nuanced. 

But for this post, anyway, here are a few more. 

Castanea crenata, the Japanese Chestnut, aka Kuri, Korean Chestnut

[Image source: http://www.asianflora.com/Fagaceae/Castanea-crenata.htm .]

                               Chestnuts of Kiso --

                               mementoes for

                               the floating world.

Japanese chestnuts (Kuri)

[Image source: https://www.oishii.sg/wiki/5897/ .]

Bush Clover (Lespedeza species)

[Image source: https://www.thegardenofzen.com/2016/10/hagi-lespedeza-flowers-kaizo-ji.html .]

Moon-daubed bush-clover --

ssh, in the next room

snoring prostitutes.

The bush-clovers (Lespedeza) are a group of shrubby and climbing species in the pea family, many of them native to Japan. 

Japanese Hardy Banana (Musa basjoo)

[Image source: https://matthewmeyer.net/blog/2017/10/14/a-yokai-a-day-basho-no-sei/ .]

                                             Banana leaves hanging

                                             round my hut --

                                             must be moon-viewing. 

The poet born Matsuo Kinsaku adopted the name Bashō, which means a banana plant. A follower had given him one to plant beside his hut. In this haiku he thinks of it, while away on one of his many journeys. 

It wasn't such a commonplace plant in Japan then as it is now. The "Japanese Hardy Banana" (Musa basjoo) is actually native to southern China. I think this is the same banana species that is becoming quite common in gardens in the British Isles.

[All quotations from On Love and Barley: The Haiku of Basho, selected and translated by Lucien Stryk (1985).]

Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613)

Moll and Touchwood Junior's first attempt to marry (III.1)

[Image source: https://www.angelfire.com/realm/mine2/johncastle/A_Chaste_Maid_in_Cheapside.html . From William Gaskill's production at the Royal Court in 1966. Moll was played by Barbara Ferris, Touchwood Junior by John Castle, and the Parson by Roger Booth.]

Moll

I suppose that Moll is the "chaste maid" of the title; at any rate no-one else fits that description. Chastity being apparently a rare commodity in Cheapside, she's pursued by Touchwood Junior and Sir Walter Whorehound, not as just another lay but as a wife. 

MAUDLINE.

      Have you played over all your old lessons

      O' the virginals?

MOLL.                      

                                  Yes. 

(I.1.1-2)

The Oxford editor prints this as verse, like all the play except for some passages that are wholly or partly in Latin. Actually it's a flexible medium that sometimes has the swing of verse but very often doesn't. Anyway, Moll's monosyllabic reply leaves the half-line hanging expectantly. Her mother is not impressed:

MAUDLINE.

      Yes? You are a dull maid o'late, methinks;

      You had need of somewhat to quicken

      Your green sickness -- Do you weep? -- a husband.  ...

That might be true, but Moll's taciturnity continues all through the play. For instance, her one-line commentary on the final scene is "I am silent with delight" (V.4.46-47). Touchwood Senior says she'll be voluble enough to the maid servants now she's mistress of her own house. He seems almost embarrassed. 

Sir Walter, her intended, addresses her several times, but she never says a word to him. She is, in fact, as shy of speaking to strangers as Ward in Women Beware Women. Like him she's an adolescent. She speaks only to her mother, her father, her lover and his brother. Her longest speech is four lines (V.2.25-28). She does sing a song in the same scene; it's the only time she might appear a romantic heroine, but she's singing it because of her mother's badgering, and disclaims it immediately. Most of the time neither her parents nor her lover are particularly keen for her to speak. Touchwood Junior, sure of her "blood" (i.e. desire) wants her to silently absorb messages and to respond with her "liking in three words", and her parents order her about. But despite her lack of speech, she's quite active. She's driven by feeling, but is minimalist in her verbal expression of it.  Typical speeches by Moll:

O death! (I.1.109)

O, were I made of wishes, I went with thee! (I.2.200)

Good sir, do; we cannot be too safe. (IV.3.27)

The play even emphasizes this silent centre to a very verbal play. When Allwit asks who Sir Walter means to marry, Davy Dahumma replies: "E'en the same was gossip, and gave the spoon" (III.2.198). That's apparently enough to identify her to Allwit, who met her in II.3. But we never see Moll with the other gossips, nor giving a spoon. Maybe it's the gilt one that Sir Walter presents with other gifts (III.2.38), but Sir Walter gives the impression that all the gifts are from him alone. 

As a virtually wordless adolescent, Moll brings together many other elements in the play. As still half a child who calls all men "Sir" she connects to the infants with which the play abounds (including two on stage, presumably represented by dolls), and to Nick and Wat, two of the seven Allwit children. Perhaps she would not be much more at ease with the gossips than her brother Tim is.

But as an impassioned sexual being she also connects with a lot of the adult goings-on. And as a supposedly subservient daughter, she connects with the various servants and maids who glide around the background of the play. There are no elderly people here. Sir Oliver talks in an elderly way but his youth is magically restored when his wife becomes pregnant. When Sir Walter starts to have premonitory thoughts about death, he is promptly ejected from the comedy by the Allwits, who retain their own presence in it by unstinted material drive. The world of the play is one of "getting", it has no room for the thoughts of age. 

Middleton might have originally intended to call her Mary (as in one speech prefix), signifying chastity. But if he did he soon switched to the nickname version Moll, which already had a racy association (as in Allwit's "molls and dolls" (II.2.64) -- compare those later heroines Moll Flanders and Molly Bloom). (And of course it matches the hints of her mother's name "Maudline".)

Moll's name is only used twice in the spoken text, by her mother during the scene where Moll "dies" (V.2). It's a token of affection that's only skin deep. When Moll sings the song she requested, Maudline's enjoyment of the music makes her forget about its dire context. After Moll is "dead", her parents' sorrow is comically brief: there is the practical matter of limiting reputational damage, and the consolation of their son Tim's imminent wedding. (Meanwhile Tim's chief concern is Moll's dying too quickly, before he has written his Latin epitaph.) 

Moll is pulled about a lot. The scene where her mother drags her on stage by her hair is distasteful to Sir Walter's sensibilities (and to the boatmen, and to Yellowhammer). Nevertheless, the suggestion is that mother and daughter understand each other very well:

MOLL. 

      O, my heart dies!

MAUDLINE. 

                                   I'll make thee an example

      For all the neighbours' daughters. 

MOLL.       

                                                             Farewell, life!

MAUDLINE. 

      You that have tricks can counterfeit. 

(IV.4.21-23)

Well, yes, Moll undeniably does have tricks and she does counterfeit. Maudline knows it, because she was just the same and sometimes still is. You want something, you go for it.  

Actually, it's a tough call to pick the most distasteful moment in a play that revels in slipping them past us with sunny insouciance. I think I would choose Moll's father's reflections on her fiancee being revealed as an arrant whoremaster.  

YELLOWHAMMER. 

      Well, grant all this, say now his deeds are black,

      Pray, what serves marriage, but to call him back;

      I have kept a whore myself, and had a bastard,

      By Mistress Anne, in anno --

      I care not who knows it; he's now a jolly fellow,

      H'as been twice warden, so may his fruit be,

      They were but base begot, and so was he;

      The knight is rich, he shall be my son-in-law,

      No matter so the whore he keeps be wholesome,

      My daughter takes no hurt then, so let them wed,

      I'll have him sweat well e'er they go to bed.

(IV.1.237-247)

No doubt the Yellowhammers are keen to benefit from their economic property as soon as decently possible. Tim, at Cambridge, might be 18 and Moll (we tend to assume, illogically) about the same age. But Tim is sexually backward, Moll is not. 

By the same vague process of assimilation, we assume that Touchwood Junior is not so very much younger than Touchwood Senior, who has evidently been married quite a long time. Mid-twenties, anyway. But like Moll he isn't notable for florid language. To Sir Walter's elegant anger he replies rather haplessly: 

                                          Like enough, sir.

     You have ta'en me at the worst time for words

     That e'er you picked out: faith, do not wrong me, sir.

(III.1.52-54)

When the lovers meet their speech is functional, almost arguing with each other in the excitement.

TOUCHWOOD JUNIOR

                                  What made you stay so long?

MOLL

     I found the way more dangerous than I looked for.

TOUCHWOOD JUNIOR

     Away, quick! There's a boat waits for you; and I'll

     Take water at Paul's wharf ....

(IV.3.23-26)

     

When Touchwood Junior says "O sir, if ever you felt the force of love, / Pity it in me" (III.1.1-2), he's evidently laying it on thick to get the Parson on side. I can't think of any Jacobean play that's more firmly focussed on sex, but A Chaste Maid doesn't speak the language of passion: that's relegated to the songs. 

Touchwood Junior has been accused of taking a basely material view of his relationship with Moll 

                                                    her blood's mine,

      And that's the surest. Well, knight, that choice spoil

      Is only kept for me.   [He catches Moll's attention from behind.]

MOLL

                                       Sir?

TOUCHWOOD JUNIOR

                                               Turn not to me

      Till thou may'st lawfully; it but whets

      My stomach, which is too sharp-set already.

(I.1.134-138)

But it doesn't sound as if Moll and he are out of harmony on this. They have an understanding, so enough of the flimflam. And besides, there's the matter of concealment. "Love that's wise / Blinds parents' eyes" (I.1.186-187).

At any rate, Touchwood Junior isn't in the same class as his rival when it comes to sexual materialism. Here he tots up his prospects:

SIR WALTER

                                    I never was so near my wish

     As this chance makes me: ere tomorrow noon 

     I shall receive two thousand pound in gold

     And a sweet maidenhead worth forty. 

(IV.4.47-50)

Perhaps Sir Walter when he says this is already showing some signs of revulsion from the whole business. Nevertheless it's brutal. 

Touchwood Junior doesn't make such explicit reference to the gold that comes with Moll, but he is certainly aware of it: "an you'll follow my suit and save my purse too", he says to his brother, egging him on in the outrageous scheme to disinherit Sir Walter by assisting the childless Kixes. 

After all, the Touchwood brothers are cash-strapped. Touchwood Junior manages to buy a fine wedding-ring, but he has to ask Touchwood Senior to stump up for the license. Understated as his expression is, he does seem to love Moll primarily for herself, or for her body anyway. But the Yellowhammers' wealth is a fact of life. 

 

Moll and Touchwood Junior

[Image source: https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/a-chaste-maid-in-cheapside . Press photo (not credited, but probably by Bethany Blake) for the 2015 production by Mercurius at the Rose Playhouse, London, directed by Jenny Eastop. Moll was played by Beth Eyre and Touchwood Junior by Harry Russell.]

Online text of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, on Chris Cleary's valuable site:

https://tech.org/~cleary/chast.html . It puts completions of verse lines in the left margin, as Middleton himself was apparently wont to do. Richard Dutton, in the Oxford English Drama text I've been reading (1999), lays them out in the orthodox way: i.e. a speech that starts midway through a line of verse is  indented. Not that the lines often bear much meaningful resemblance to verse, as I mentioned before. 

Mrs Allwit and the gossips (III.2)

[Image source: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/feb/20/frances-cuka-obituary . From William Gaskill's production at the Royal Court in 1966. Mrs Allwit was played by Frances Cuka.]

I've been dipping into JStor's resources A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Here's a few papers that I enjoyed reading. 

Chatterji, Ruby. “Theme, Imagery, and Unity in ‘A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.’” Renaissance Drama, vol. 8, [University of Chicago Press, Northwestern University], 1965, pp. 105–26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41913895.  Useful for parallels across Middleton's wider oeuvre, and I was struck by the glancing reference to Wycherley. Chatterji's characterizations of the Allwit's household, and of the Yellowhammer parents, are interesting, because I read them both a bit differently. She implies that in 1965 the play had yet to be revived: that was about to change. 

Wigler, Stephen. “Thomas Middleton’s ‘A Chaste Maid in Cheapside’: The Delicious and the Disgusting.” American Imago, vol. 33, no. 2, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, pp. 197–215, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26303131. "In A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (as in most Middleton plays), delight and distaste perpetually contaminate one another." Considers the relentless nature of Middleton's content and language, and the discomforts of laughing along with what Wigler calls the "comic-grotesque". 

Huebert, Ronald. “Middleton’s Nameless Art.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 95, no. 4, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 591–609, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27545804. A lively account of Middleton's major plays. A Chaste Maid is characterized as a play about sexual management and mismanagement. Particularly insightful on the striking character of Allwit, I thought. Also interesting is his remark that Middleton is the "first great secular playwright in English drama" (some other commentators have linked him with Puritanism). Huebert ends: "I think he is serving a warning, not about what will happen to sinners in the hands of an angry God, but about what we are capable of doing to one another and to ourselves".

Van Den Broek, A. G. “Take the Number Seven in Cheapside.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 28, no. 2, [Rice University, Johns Hopkins University Press], 1988, pp. 319–30, https://doi.org/10.2307/450555. I don't quite concede to the theory about the symbolic significance of the number seven, but this is a vivid  reading of the play which considers aspects of the action that are often overlooked. For instance the possible hint of Allwit's reformation in his final lines, and whether Touchwood Senior will continue to increase the size of the Kix family. An acute suggestion about Allwit's name, too: it is not just a reversal of "wittol". 

Complete list of posts on Shakespeare and his contemporaries

Where I'm living

Fromefield House, Frome

Since November I've been living in this rather grand house: Fromefield House. The house is now broken up into some fifteen flats. Down in the common entrance hall I noticed a couple of historical pictures, one showing the house entirely surrounded by countryside (very different from today, when it's embedded fairly centrally in modern Frome, opposite the big Co-op on the main road to Bath). The other picture is a portrait of a former occupant, Mary Sneade Brown (1780 - 1858). 

Mary wasn't really an occupant.  Her later years were mostly spent in Hertfordshire with her eldest daughter Ellen, but she also spent time here with another of her daughters, Emma (b. 1814), who unlike Ellen gave her lots of grandchildren. Emma was married to George Sheppard and they in turn had moved to Fromefield House to look after his aged father, as described below. The Sheppards were a local family of clothiers. Emma was a good guitarist and singer, so I hope to inherit some of her spirit while I'm here. 

I know all this because the portrait is also the frontispiece of Carola Oman's Ayot Rectory (1965), a biography of Mary Sneade Brown and her family based on Ellen's incomplete memoir, part written and part archive. The memoir was brought to Carola Oman's attention, herself a long-time resident of Ayot St Lawrence (Herts). Ellen had moved there in 1831 when she married the vicar John Olive.

[There's apparently no connection between this John Olive and the Olive family of Frome, whose tomb stands in splendid isolation on the north side of St John's church.]

It's a quietly seductive book: we join this sprawling Romantic-era family (Sneades, Browns, Olives), an ordinary comfortable family, devout and dedicated but without the distractions of fame or genius, and we soon become entangled in the fragile web of their lives. It's freely borrowable on the Internet Archive. [I already knew the name Carola Oman: in 1973 she published a biography of Walter Scott, Wizard of the North.]

*

Mary Brown, née Sneade, had been brought up in Shrophire; she was "the Belle of Ludlow".

She met Joseph Thomas Brown in December 1805 -- he was seeking a new wife and had been tipped off about Mary's qualities by his father. 

Mary reported the ball thus: "I was not well, father, and did not dance. And I was followed about the room by a great big Nabob, Mr Brown's eldest son, just come from India. My head ached and his voice was loud. I was glad to come home" (p. 34). Brown Senior was a merchant, at 157 Cheapside. Joseph and the other Brown sons made their fortunes in the East India Company: this was colonialism. But Joseph himself drew distinctions, e.g. commenting on the new gentlemen's houses in the Lake District that these were "Liverpool merchants who made their fortunes in the Africa trade and are retired from dealing in human blood" (p. 48). The couple lived happily at Winifred House in Bath. They had five children (one born posthumously), but the amiable Nabob collapsed and died, aged fifty, in 1817. 

Here's a longer extract, to give a flavour of the book's style and content. (The Hannah of this extract, who had become very attached to Mary, was one of Joseph's children by his first marriage. She had gone to India where she almost immediately met and married Monier Williams.) 

The home-coming of Hannah was the leading event of 1822. Uncle Charles at Whitestone Rectory took the first shock. Colonel Williams had bestowed his residence (Umjat Bagh at Broach in the province of Gujerat) on his parsee butler, Cowajee Nasawanjee, and taken passages for himself and household in the Ogle Castle (500 tons burthen). The ship was old, the captain sick, the mate a drunkard. At Penzance, after a painful passage, they left her to proceed up Channel, and made for Exeter. After causing a sensation in Devonshire, they came to Bath. Ellen never forgot the arrival of the Monier Williams at Winifred House. It was highly picturesque. A train of Indian servants in turbans and tunics carried in four little dark-eyed boys -- George, Charles, Monier, Alfred -- and one little girl, Mary. Hannah had grown quite tall and was a fine woman of thirty, collected and serious, with much sympathy and natural grace. She wore a blue satin bonnet with white feathers. But her composure left her when she saw the assembled family in the familiar room unaccompanied by the noble figure of her father. Laughing with joy to be home, and crying for him in the same moment, she had to be laid on the sofa, hysterical. Her husband stood by her sadly. Colonel Williams, who had left India perfectly well, had been ill on the voyage, and felt himself a wreck. He foresaw a greater sorrow than the loss of her father might be appointed to his wife. In truth, he had left joy and health behind him, at the age of four and forty. 

After the birth of their last child, little Hannah, the restlessness of his malady, which was atrophy, led the family to Naples for which they embarked from Marseilles in November 1823. Again they had a fearful passage. The crew of the Neapolitan brig became paralysed with fright. Colonel Williams' coolness and knowledge of navigation helped the Captain to make the port of Toulon. A further fortnight elapsed before they entered Naples Bay, and Colonel Williams, who had risen from a mattress to assist the Captain, was prostrated by the fatigues of the journey. He died the day after they landed. The bereaved family were obliged to stay in Naples for the next six months. 

Hannah found herself in a strange country with five young children and a sixth at her breast. Her melancholy journey home became quite a family legend. With the aid of the British Consul, she engaged a large roomy calèche, and a contract was made on her behalf with a Swiss courier, a vetturino, to convey her and her little troupe the whole way from Naples to London, for a stated sum. The contract provided that the man should find horses and provide and pay for all hotel and other expenses throughout the journey, and that the accommodation should be of the best. The Pontine marshes between Naples and Rome were a nest of brigands, so a mounted escort was hired for that part of the route. The Simplon was blocked with snow, necessitating sledges. The vetturino not only performed his contract faithfully but saw the widow and fatherless deposited at their own front door. Hannah said that the name of Louis Mignard should be written in letters of gold. 

(Ayot Rectory, pp. 78-79)

*

From a poem by Sam, Mary's eldest son, parting from Winifred House in Bath (1824): 

I gained a little eminence, and took

   One long last glance of spots to me so dear.

'Twas then, that as the lightning's dazzling ray

   Which sudden darts the earth and heaven o'er

Illumes the brightened universe like day

   And scarcely is created ere no more,

Or as those transient moments of delight

   Which reason gives to soothe the maniac's pain

When scenes long past flash on the waken'd sight

   And Memory opes her treasures once again,

To my young mind there rushed a mighty tide,

   Of scenes long steeped in dark oblivion's stream

And as I gazed, and sorrowfully sighed

   O'er fleeting infancy's delusive dream,

With sadden'd heart I viewed in that bright hour

   The spot endeared by childhood . . .

(p. 83)

*

At Hot Wells in 1830, John Olive "handed Ellen into dinner, and they were soon conversing with all the freedom of a long-established acquaintance. Emma also had admiration. Charles Olive from the West Indies decidedly flirted with her, leaning over her, requesting her to sing, etc. and there was another young man with a squeaky voice who followed her about the room agreeableeing with all his might" (p. 109). 

*

The same October, in Bath.

Ellen was touched with her book. For with all his perfections she had to confess J.O. was not literary. He had been adrift when the Browns alluded to Anne of Geierstein, Rashleigh or Lucy Grey as if they were neighbours who might walk in at any moment. But he had noticed she liked to read. He had given her a book. "Still," wrote Mary to India, "He has not yet said 'Will you marry me?'." Mary walked up to call on Mrs Oates and saw "Winifred House School" on the gateposts of her old kingdom.  It distressed her, but it was better than having the place empty, and running to seed. She had been in to look at it in June. The rose trees had been blooming profusely, but the long grass had reminded her of the works of Ossian. She had mounted to the nursery, and sat a moment in her beautiful bedroom where her six had been born, and felt she ought to ring for tea and remain there. She never meant to go again.  (p. 114)

*

As for Emma, she can be introduced in her own words (in a letter to elder brother Sam, now living in India):

Emma's Picture of Herself, May 1831.

Shall I, dear Sam, describe myself? I should be pretty if my skin were clear and teeth good, which they are not. My hair is nicer, and I dress it well. My figure is naturally good, but I stoop. My hands are large, but my fingers, since I left off biting my nails, are not ugly. I am about half an inch shorter than Ellen. 

My mental accomplishments are not very brilliant. I do not take to accomplishments; yet I pursue them, and can play Handel's and Mozart's music and sing tolerably well. I can draw, but in no decided style. But I can sit all day sans ennui with a book, and when the work is valuable I make notes. When at Clifton I was allowed to read some novels, and in one week devoured Richelieu, Darnley, Inheritence, Marriage, Thaddeus of Warsaw, Marie Antoinette, Romances of History, Highways and Byways -- and for the present I am satisfied. Now I am reading with interest the Family Library. Sir Walter Scott is ill and I fear will add no more to my twenty-four volumes . . . (p. 121)

*

Within the family Mary Brown was known as Minnie (it was John Olive's pet-name for her).

There is actually not very much about Fromefield House in Ayot Rectory. 

It was built in 1797 by George Sheppard senior (1773 - 1855), the Frome clothier and proprietor of a factory at Spring Gardens.

At this time [c. 1830], and for many years after, the most unbounded hospitality prevailed at Fromefield House, and every stranger, and especially clergymen, were ever welcomed there, the Reverend Mr. Phillot, then vicar of Frome, but generally a non-resident, always had a room kept specially for him, and such was the style of the house, that a merchant of Frome said that the grocer's bill there was larger than Lord Cork's, [at Marston House] of that day, and a banker informed me that at the time of the one pound notes, the firm had out of the bank every Saturday morning, one thousand one pound notes for wages and weekly expenses ...

(John Webb Singer in The Somerset Standard, 25th March, 1893. Quoted in Frome Through The Ages: An Anthology in Prose and Verse (1982), ed. Michael McGarvie.)

There's an interesting Wikipedia entry on the Sheppard family of Frome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheppard_family_(clothiers) 

This is from around 1850:

Emma and George Sheppard had left Berkeley Court and gone to live with George's old father. Fromefield House, embowered amongst woods and hills and meadows, was a charming home, a regular comfortable old family gathering-place. As Emma had always been remarkably tactful and guileless the new arrangement was a perfect success. The only drawback from Minnie's point of view was that the greys had to be ordered out whenever she wanted to go to church. It was too far for her to walk nowadays. (p. 193)

Oman's "Berkeley Park" or "Berkeley Court" is Berkley House, a couple of miles NE of Frome. Minnie often stayed there with Emma and her growing family between 1834 and 1850. 

Emma became interested in workhouse reform and a year after her mother's death she published a book about it.  One of her abiding beliefs was in keeping the aged out of workhouses, e.g. by subsidizing families to look after their old folk. Perhaps that was the thinking behind Frome's new dementia day-care centre being named the Emma Sheppard Centre. 

Fromefield House in the late nineteenth century.

Facing p. 216 there is the sketch of Fromefield House I mentioned earlier, by Grace Sheppard, Mary Sneade Brown's great-granddaughter. So I suppose it dates from the late nineteenth century. Her vantage point was the large field that gives Fromefield its name: for many years the site of Frome's annual cheese show, and now partly occupied by Frome hospital.

In her last letter to Ellen "Minnie wrote that the view from her window at Fromefield House was all road-colour, lawns and fields alike, no verdure at all." (p. 217).

She died while staying here, on August 10th, 1858. 

Central hall of Fromefield House, Frome.

The roof lantern above the central staircase of Fromefield House, Frome.