The Sir John Ritblat gallery houses the manuscript treasures of the British Library. These include letters written by Jane Austen, Handel’s scores, Shakespeare’s sonnets and a First Folio of his complete works. The room is a bibliophile’s paradise: the heavy glass cases and dim sepulchral lighting (for the protection of ancient pages) turn it into a veritable literary temple.
The venerable relics have been joined by a temporary exhibition of material from Britain’s greatest living dramatist, Sir Harold Pinter. The British Library recently purchased Pinter’s entire archive for £1.1 million.
His Own Domain, the Pinter exhibition, is perfectly presented and comes complete with the now compulsory multimedia element in the form of some interesting sound recordings of Pinter himself and his lifelong friend Henry Woolf. If any reminder of Pinter’s immense stature in the theatre were needed it is there in the personal correspondence with Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller and David Mamet.
The display case could only ever hold a fraction of the decades of material provided by Pinter which includes his emails. Electronic documents are likely to become the bulk of future archives and the ease with which such data can be stored and searched will be a boon to students and researchers. With Facebook seemingly hellbent on never deleting anything and the Government happy to hurl millions of people’s personal information into the public domain willy nilly, perhaps the very concept of archiving will itself become a thing of the past: everyone will know everything about everybody everywhere all the time.
Almost nothing is known about Shakespeare’s life. Argument about the authorship of his plays will continue to be bread and butter to bickering academics well into the electronic age. Disputes rage as to the authenticity of the signatures on the deeds to a house he bought and the will in which he famously left his second best bed to Anne Hathaway. If you visit his house in Stratford you can admire a garden that might look like one that Shakespeare might have planted. We just don’t know. The lack of detail and the ensuing swathes of conjecture this absence of information has engendered have contributed greatly to the enduring success of his plays. We cannot look into his almost non-existent archive so we must keep returning to his works.
It is no accident that the British Library’s copy of the First Folio stands open at Ben Jonson’s dedication to his friend and contemporary:
Thou art a Monument, without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy Book doth live,
The First Folio has an almost totemic quality; they sell for millions at auction, there are very few still in existence and it was the first time the Bard’s complete works were published. However, unlike Austen’s, Handel’s and Pinter’s papers, Shakespeare never touched, saw or even heard about his book. He had been dead for several years before it was conceived so, in one sense, the Folio has nothing to do with him.
There is something inherently strange about displaying a dramatist’s published works at all. Plays are not written to be read but to be performed. They are scripts not texts. Theatre is one of the most difficult arts to practise. Any fool can jot down a story or scribble a sketch or butcher a song and you can make a film with a mobile phone but, for a play to come into being, you need actors, audience and an auditorium at the very least. (Some would say a healthy dollop of Arts Council cash is also a prerequisite).
When I first began to use a computer many years ago I quickly became aware of my own ignorance – and not just of modern technology – I could not understand why Word kept drawing a red squiggly line under the word ‘Playwrite’ every time I typed it. After much clicking and cursing I discovered in high dudgeon that Bill Gates had the audacity to be suggesting, with his red line, that I was spelling the word wrong! Fuming with indignation and muttering darkly about ‘bloody American spellings’ I snatched up my leather bound (it wasn’t really) copy of the Oxford English Dictionary whilst composing a stern letter to the Daily Telegraph in my mind. To my surprise and chagrin I discovered what you know already: there is no such word as ‘Playwrite’, it is Playwright.
The term ‘wright’ has fallen out of common use in our post-industrial society (so much so that Word has just squiggled it again!). We do not have much use for wheelwrights nowadays and the word only really survives in the wrought-iron gates that rich people like to have outside their houses. Wrought iron suggests a burly blacksmith labouring at a fiery forge; sparks flying, hammer blows, bellows, perhaps even a pile of swords and spears leaning against the wall of a bothy. This sort of ferocious masculinity does not sit well with modern notions of luvvies (another squiggle) but it is the idea of physically shaping things that is useful. Plays are not written at desks but made in rehearsals and theatres.
Dramatists’ archives contain much more than just their documents; the scripts are just one of the tools that go into the making of a play. How wonderful it would be if Yorick’s skull or Othello’s handkerchief or Bottom’s ass head were on display. It is unlikely that these things would have weathered the storm of time but we may be luckier in years to come. The same technologies that are replacing the very concept of writers’ ‘papers’ could conceivably furnish footage of first read-throughs, early rehearsals and even the opening nights of future classics.
The British Library is to be applauded for acquiring Pinter’s archive (which is not just his writings: a lot of photographs, programmes and theatrical memorabilia are in there too) and keeping it in this country. Perhaps they might have sent some of it down the road to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden had it not closed permanently a year ago. Not the books though; they belong in the library.
