The Wastes of Time Talk by Lord Gawain Douglas at September's meeting.

Thanks to Alan McKinna and Jonty Driver for the following appreciations of a memorable meeting:

As We Liked It

On Friday 21st Septmber, Lord Gawain Douglas came to the Court Hall to recite to an audience of WLS members from his capacious memory some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and to talk about learning, remembering and understanding them.  His recital of the sonnets was enriched by quotation of several of the most famous of the speeches from the plays: the “seven ages” and the “poor player”, for instance, and he sang to us too, “Blow blow thou winter wind” from As You Like It..  Listening to him makes one realise again the advantage of a musician’s training:  the words mean, but they also sing.

Some of us had heard Gawain’s reciting before, as a contributor to the JAM Festival in  past years: the whole of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land, and – even more impressively – all of Eliot’s Four Quartets.  Since I am a better reader than listener, I went to the last-named with a text, and can confirm that the Douglas memory is not merely prodigious but very accurate:  in reciting the Four Quartets, he made just one transposition of adjectives, but otherwise was word perfect. Perhaps even more impressively,  this is not just memorised work: this is work memorised and understood.  Similarly with the sonnets: obviously, there was no way he could have managed all 156 in a single session, but he gave us a good selection of some of the famous and some of the less-known, ending as is only proper with perhaps the best-known of all: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds...”

It was a triumphant evening, a tour de force by a talented musician and poet.  CJD

The Wastes of Time

Over the weekend I looked again at “Shakespeare” by Ivor Brown (1949 Collins) in which Chapters 9 and 10 (‘My Lovely Boy’ & ‘Woman Colour’d Ill’) are devoted to The Sonnets. He writes..."The Sonnets are rarely a source of strikingly original opinion or emotion. But thought and feeling, at least in the best of them, have been delivered with such vehemence of spirit as well as such virtuosity of phrase that the reader, mystery or no mystery, must hang on every line, rapt by the splendour of the words and music. A volume which contained only Nos. 18, 87, 94, 97, 98, 116 and 129 would stand on the peak of English poetry. It is surely idle to worry overmuch about the identity of the persons: it is enough that they were the cause of writing which raises language to a higher power...."

A little later he writes... "Like most schoolboys I had been sickened of Shakespeare by education. I was wearied almost to revolt by this examination business of commentating and annotating. All too well did I know and was able to repeat on paper what the Rialto was;.... By the age of eighteen I was allergic to Shakespeare almost beyond hope of therapy. But cure did come...by way of a weekly paper called The New Age in which, under the signature of Jacob Tonson, Arnold Bennett commented on books of the day with a frankness and liveliness unusual at the time. When Frank Harris’s book, The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story, appeared in 1909 Bennett cried its merits high... as an admirable alternative to Dry-as-dust and professorial or pedagogue's Shakespeare of those days and bored young people into a total hatred of ‘Eng.Lit.’... some teachers of ‘Eng.Lit.’ are now discovered working in theatres and producing his plays with gusto and with excellent results."

Certainly we were privileged to hear Lord Gawain Douglas’s vehemence of spirit and impressive faculty of memory  –  ending as he did with an Ode from Horace to Sussex and Hastings.... how many more such odes has he written, I wonder? 

AMcK