Let’s boost links with Bard

Glasses filled with malmsey and sack will be raised to “the immortal memory”, following a procession from the Lord Mayor’s Parlour to the famous Painted Room.

It is difficult to think of a more suitable place to mark William Shakespeare’s official birthday on April 23 with a toast than the 16th century rooms above the bookmakers at No. 3 Cornmarket. For the room is just about all that remains of the Crown Tavern, an Oxford inn where Shakespeare is believed to have stayed on his journeys between London and Stratford-upon-Avon.

But this year the dignitaries gathering in the Painted Room perhaps should indulge in a second toast: “To Oxford, a city that rejoices in its links with the Bard.”

To say that Oxford has been reluctant to get in on the act, when it comes to publicising its rich connections with our greatest poet and playwright is something of an understatement.

Just about any other town and city you suspect – or at least one that did not happen to have been home to many of Britain’s greatest writers, scientists and statesmen with more history per square foot than anywhere outside central London – would surely have embraced its Shakespearian links, nurturing the cultural and commercial benefits.

Unlike Dr Johnson, Shelley, Oscar Wilde, Yeats, Auden, T.S. Eliot CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, Shakespeare the glovemaker’s son, never attended Oxford University.

But he knew the city well enough, stopping over as a guest of his Oxford friends, the Davenant family, as he repeatedly travelled between the theatres of London and his home town in Warwickshire. Not only that, we now know there is every likelihood Shakespeare saw his plays staged here, performing in them as an actor.

Commemorations of Shakespeare’s birthday, traditionally celebrated on April 23, began in the Painted Room in 1937, when Oxford civic dignitaries took the chance to wear their finery and capitalise on the city’s greatest visitor, whose connections were distinctly Town rather than Gown.

Dr Emma Smith, the Hertford College English don and co-author of 30 Great Myths about Shakespeare, said: “It was an opportunity to imitate what had become a successful birthday pageant tradition in Stratford. The procession of city and university bigwigs across from the Lord Mayor’s Parlour in the Town Hall to Cornmarket rapidly became too big for the Painted Room, and convened instead to other venues around the city, where sack, the favourite tipple of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, was drunk and a speech on Shakespeare delivered.”

But the tradition died out in the 1960s, being revived in 2013 apparently as a one-off opportunity for local schoolchildren to connect with Shakespeare, with visits and singing in the Painted Room.

Now the Oxford Preservation Trust (OPT) is determined to restore a more extensive birthday celebration in Oxford, and on a permanent basis.

OPT director, Debbie Dance, said: “In some ways this year will be a something of a trial for next year, which will be the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. But we want to ensure there is a proper celebration in Oxford every year.

“The story of Shakespeare and Oxford is good and strong. There are are so many stories and accounts about Shakespeare published based on myths and very little evidence. But Oxford has the evidence – yet in true Oxford fashion, it has not made anything of this connection.”

In his bestselling biography of the Bard, Peter Ackroyd observes: “There are somewhat implausible suggestions that Shakespeare used the Bodleian Library that was established in1602 – but it is clear enough that he habitually stopped at Oxford on his journeys between London and Stratford. We now know this from three separate sources. One was a diary kept by an Oxford antiquary, Thomas Hearne, in which he states that Shakespeare ‘always spent time at the Crown tavern in Oxford kept by one Davenant’.”

The first association of Shakespeare with the tavern in Cornmarket was recorded by the antiquary Anthony Wood decades after the poet’s death. Wood’s friend John Aubrey added to the story, telling how the innkeeper and Lord Mayor of Oxford John Davenant became a friend of Shakespeare’s, as did Davenant’s wife, said by Aubrey to be “a very beautiful woman, and of a very good wit”.

Whether the Oxford inn witnessed the real story of Shakespeare in love continues to be disputed. When William Davenant was born Shakespeare was his godfather at the baptism in St Martin’s Church, sadly demolished in 1820, save for the 13th-century tower, know as Carfax Tower.

But rumours persisted in Oxford that Shakespeare himself was the father of young William Davenant, who went on to become a playwright and Poet Laureate.

In later life Davenant did nothing to dispel gossip that he was Shakespeare’s bastard son, as claiming such distinguished parentage could only have stirred interest in his own work.

Interest in the Davenant link was reawakened with the discovery of 16th-century wall paintings in a room that would have formed part of the Crown. The Painted Room is thought to have been the principal chamber, reserved for important guests, perhaps such as Shakespeare himself.

But academics point to Oxford links extending beyond the Crown to the plays themselves.

The doctrinal student Elizabeth Sandis, of Merton College, explains: “Archival research has unearthed two important documents which describe the plays performed in Oxford by Shakespeare’s company of actors, the King’s Men, in 1610, who paid for them and who went to watch them.”

A letter in Latin found in the archive of Corpus Christi College, contains a fascinating description of the Oxford performance of Othello. The letter writer Henry Jackson, a theology fellow at Corpus Christi, lingers on the death scene, recalling how the male actor playing Desdemona deeply moved and “implored the pity” of spectators.

For Ms Sandis the 1610 production provided by Shakespeare’s company was an occasion when ‘town and gown’ intermingled for the experience of a theatrical entertainment.

Prof Stanley Wells, one of the world’s most distinguished authorities on Shakespeare, speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival last month, said: “Shakespeare was himself an actor. He could easily have performed in Oxford.”

On Sunday, April 26, there will be tours of the Painted Room with talks by experts. But in recognition of the importance of the Corpus Christi letter, Desdemona’s death scene from Othello will be performed in the Painted Room by members of the Oxford University Drama Society, with “pop-up” theatre performed in Cornmarket.

Hopefully, all this will prove only the first act in the efforts of Oxford to reclaim its role in Shakespeare’s story, so studied, yet so steeped in mystery and myth.

By happy coincidence, the Bodleian Library’s First Folio of Shakespeare plays will be exhibited in the newly opened Weston Library. Originally given to the Bodleian in 1623, it disappeared some time in the 1660s, perhaps sold having been replaced by the improved Third Folio. The whereabouts of the First Folio remained unknown until 1905, when to huge relief it was re-acquired by the Bodleian after the first public fundraising campaign in the library’s history.

So perhaps the return of an annual Shakespeare celebration should not be considered the first time the Bard has been restored to his rightful place in Oxford, but it promises to be a great encore.