There have been many learned pigs in history but only one, to the best of my knowledge, that has claimed credit for writing the plays of William Shakespeare. Indeed by 1786, when The Story of the Learned Pig, by an officer of the Royal Navy was published, complete with its claim regarding the authorship of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and certain other plays knowledgeable animals of one kind or another were in danger of becoming somewhat passé. ‘Marocco the thinking horse’, for example, had made his appearance in the late 16^th century and was able to follow the commands of his owner William Bankes with uncanny ability. Marocco could play dead, walk on his hind legs, urinate on command and even, apparently, separate and indicate the innocent maids in the audience from the disreputable harlots. Clever, certainly, but not as clever as writing The Tempest.

The first performing pig didn’t arrive on the scene for almost another 100 years later. Trained by a Scotsman, Samuel Bisset, the original learned pig used cards printed with individual letters and numbers to answer questions - indicating particular cards with its snout to respond to enquiries about the number of people in the audience, the time of day and even on occasions enquiries about what certain ladies in the audience were thinking at any given time. The show was a great success, and after Bisset’s death the pig went into new management with a Mr Nicholson who exhibited the pig in Nottingham in 1784 and then in London in 1785. Tours of provincial towns and a trip to Europe swiftly followed. The interest aroused by this trail-blazing learned pig caused considerable debate regarding how the pig had been trained and the extent of its cognitive abilities. Was the pig really answering questions, or was it simply responding to certain sounds or movements made by its owner in order to give pre-determined answers? Whatever the truth of the performance the idea of pigs as intelligent creatures took hold in the popular imagination. One only has to think of the pigs Snowball and Napoleon being the driving intellectual forces in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) for a modern literary example.

     

(Above: The Downfall of Taste and Genius, or, The World as it Goes by Samuel Collings – a satirical print from 1784 lampooning the public’s taste for performing animals. Here a learned pig leads the charge against the arts with a copy of Shakespeare’s plays lying abandoned in the assault)

Further learned pigs soon followed, including William Frederick Pinchbeck’s ‘Pig of Knowledge’, which was displayed in America in 1798 and even met President John Adams. Curiously Pinchbeck’s pig inspired considerable discussion, some of which took a fairly dark tone with many believing Pinchbeck had used witchcraft to control the animal while others claimed the pig’s ability to answer questions was evidence of reincarnation – the pig being inhabited by a soul that must once have animated a human being. Later, in the early 19^th century, ‘Toby the Sapient Pig’ was exhibited in London by the illusionist Nicholas Hoare. Indeed such was the interest in Toby that in around 1817 he even published his autobiography – The life and adventures of Toby, the sapient pig: with his opinions on men and manners. Written by himself – although interestingly this was not the first time a learned pig had seen his memoirs appear in print, something which takes us back to 1786, The Story of the Learned Pig, by an officer of the Royal Navy and, perhaps even more strangely (if that’s possible) to William Shakespeare.

 

(Above: The Story of the Learned Pig by an Officer of the Royal Navy. London, 1786.)

In the Shakespeare in Ten Acts exhibition The Story of the Learned Pig is displayed in a section exploring 'bardolatry' – the word used to describe the often uncritical fascination that accompanies all things Shakespearean, and how sometimes that fascination takes a turn towards the bizarre. In The Story of the Learned Pig a soul describes how he has successively migrated through various humans and animals before finally ending up in the body of a pig. Earlier incarnations had included Romulus, one of the mythical founders of Rome and Brutus, the murderer of Julius Caesar.  At one point the soul was reincarnated as a man called ‘Pimping Billy’, who worked as a horse-holder at a playhouse (where Shakespeare was regularly in attendance) and was the real author of the plays – the Immortal Bard having simply stolen Pimping Billy’s ideas and words. Finally the soul moves into the body of a pig, who then presents his personal reminiscences to the author. As the pig remarks Shakespeare ‘has been fathered with many spurious dramatic pieces: Hamlet, Othello, As You Like It, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ of ‘which I confess myself to be the author’.

Although humorous, and a satire upon how our fascination with performing animals, circus tricks and the seemingly magical often exceeds our fascination with great art, the book plays profoundly upon our interest in all things relating to Shakespeare. After all, a pig that claimed to have written the works of John Fletcher or Francis Beaumont would be one thing, but a pig that claimed to have written the works of Shakespeare? Now that’s a whole different level of porcine achievement and greatness.

Shakespeare in Ten Acts runs until September 6^th 2016.

by Ian Cooke, Head of Contemporary British Published Collections

The call for entries to the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets 2016 is now live. Each year, the awards celebrate publishers, illustrators and authors of new poetry pamphlets. For the 2015 awards, we invited our shortlisted poets to record readings from their pamphlets at the British Library. These recordings are now available on Soundcloud. Here are more details on the poets and readings:

Gill McEvoy, our award winner for 2015, reads from her pamphlet ‘The First Telling’, published by HappenStance press. The poems relate an experience of rape, the ‘tellings’ being sessions with a counsellor. In this recording, Gill McEvoy reads, ‘The First Telling’, ‘There’s a grey parrot’, ‘I touch the cigarette’, ‘Magpie’, and ‘In the bathroom, scrub skin’. The judges for the 2015 award commented, ‘we admired the way this pamphlet deals not just with trauma and its aftermath, but with the difficulty of articulating what has happened, the challenge of finding the right words. Form and content mesh together perfectly in poems that use the power of silence as well as the power of language’.

Anja Konig, was shortlisted for her first poetry pamphlet collection, ‘Advice for an Only Child’, published by Flipped Eye press. Anja reads ‘Not the Last Chapter’, ‘Triple Negative’, ‘She’s Good with her Hands’, and ’We are the Bees of the Invisible’. In shortlisting this pamphlet, the judges commented, ‘Anja Konig’s debut pamphlet is witty and inventive. There’s a surprise on every page – her short poems look slantwise at relationships, the female body and what it means to write. We found these poems unsparing, yet lifted by a light touch’.

Peter Riley’s ‘The Ascent of Kinder Scout’ is a pamphlet-length poem that refers to the Kinder Trespass of 1932; a protest against the permanent enclosure of land for the purposes of grouse shooting. Published by Longbarrow Press, this is the eleventh section of a work provisionally entitled North. Describing this work, the 2015 judges said: ‘Evoking the Dark Peak in Derbyshire with startling clarity, we felt this pamphlet brilliantly captured what it’s like to look to landscapes for resolution, only to be humbled by the scale of them. Expansive but exact, it takes in the history of a trespass, the ghost of a lost friend and the future of a broken nation’.

Alan Jenkins reads two poems from ‘Clutag Five Poems Series No 2’, published by Clutag. The poems in this pamphlet are all linked by the Thames and places close to it in South West London, and the memories and personal associations that these places hold. In this recording, Jenkins reads ‘Beckett’s Wharf’, and ‘Upper Mall’. Our 2015 judges wrote, ‘Set against the backdrop of the Thames, these are haunting, understated elegies that often find the narrator challenging his own grief, trying to explain the source of it, trace it beyond the immediacy of loss. Assured and elegant, these poems moved us deeply’. In addition to these poets, the judges also shortlisted David Tait’s ‘Three Dragon Day’ for the 2015 award. David, who works as a teacher in China, was unable to attend the 2015 awards. The title of his collection refers to a Chinese phrase for describing heavy fog. The awards, supported by the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, celebrate the vitality, diversity and sheer talent of poets and poetry publishers in the UK. The shortlisted poets for 2015 demonstrated the range and power of contemporary poetry. As the entries start to come in for 2016, we are looking forward to an equally rich, exciting and moving collection of pamphlets.

The final co-curator of Shakespeare in Ten Acts, Greg Buzwell, Curator of Contemporary Literary Archives, tells us about his favourite item in the exhibition.

One of the comments frequently uttered during curatorial meetings for the Shakespeare in Ten Acts exhibition was ‘You can’t go wrong with Vivien Leigh’. Hundreds of potential exhibits were discussed, considered and discarded during the planning stage but whenever something relating to Vivien Leigh cropped up – a costume, a photograph or even an idea for a display panel – it would somehow always make the final cut. After all, Vivien Leigh was cinematic and theatrical royalty – winning awards for her performances in iconic screen roles such as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche duBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and achieving critical acclaim on the stage, not least for her appearances in Shakespeare – Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth among them. Leigh achieved that rare combination of both critical and commercial success. Whatever the indefinable nature and mix of qualities that, taken together, combine to make someone a star she possessed in abundance. When it came to finalising the poster for the exhibition there were several choices but, unsurprisingly, the design featuring Vivien Leigh was the one that ultimately came to represent the show. After all, you can’t go wrong with Vivien Leigh.

Above: The poster for Shakespeare in Ten Acts. Vivien Leigh as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Old Vic Theatre, London, 1937. Photography by J W Debenham, Mander & Mitchenson / ArenaPal

One of the sections in the Shakespeare in Ten Acts exhibition looks at performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in detail, focusing primarily on Peter Brook’s revolutionary production of the play at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1970 but containing a prelude in which the rich romantic history of Dream is explored. It is this section that contains my favourite item in the show, namely the headdress designed by Oliver Messel and worn by Vivien Leigh in the 1937 staging of the play at the Old Vic, the very headdress she is wearing in the photograph reproduced on the poster.

The director of this staging, Tyrone Guthrie, along with his designer, Oliver Messel, deliberately set out to recreate the romance and visual spectacle of the great Victorian productions of the play, productions that had been swathed in opulence and excess. Guthrie and Messel strived to ‘make a union between the words of Shakespeare, the music of Mendelssohn, and the architecture of the Old Vic’. Indeed Guthrie felt that the well-known music written for the play by Felix Mendelssohn was ‘redolent of crimson and gold opera houses, of operatic fairies in white muslin flying through groves of emerald canvas’. Messel’s designs, of which the headdress is a fine example, perfectly echoed Guthrie’s vision.

Above: Fit for a Fairy Queen, The dazzling headdress, currently on loan to the British Library from the V&A, made by Oliver Messel and worn by Vivien Leigh in her performance as Titania. 1937. © Victoria & Albert Museum

Messel understood that theatre is an art form which thrives on heightened realism. It doesn’t especially matter, in terms of design, what a fairy crown is made of so long as, under the lights and in performance, it looks sufficiently dazzling for the audience to believe it is what it claims to be. The headdress Messel designed for Leigh has a wire base concealed by brown paper tape painted silver. Pink flowers, again made from paper, are tied by thread to the wire base along with black, gold, green and silver leaves, made from a mixture of metallic paper, painted paper and gauze. Gold-coloured beads, rhinestones and imitation pearls are also used, along with strips of silver ribbon. Parts of the headdress are even covered in clear sellotape. The materials could hardly be more prosaic, and yet the headdress is a sublime example of the set-designer’s art. Under lights, on the stage, during the magical spell cast by a theatre performance (and, yes, worn by someone like Vivien Leigh) this fragile collection of everyday materials appeared entirely appropriate, and suitably magical to adorn a fairy queen.

The 1937 production at the Old Vic, which also starred Robert Helpmann as Oberon, Ralph Richardson as Bottom and Anthony Quayle as Demetrius brilliantly realised its intentions. As the critic Herbert Farjeon observed upon witnessing the final scene of the play ‘You can almost see our young Queen [Victoria] leaning forward in one of the boxes’, such was its success at recreating 19^th-century theatrical spectacle although, in fact, it was actually the young Princess Elizabeth who was in the audience on one occasion, brought along by the Queen Mother to witness her first Shakespearean production. Genuine royalty in the audience undoubtedly, but the real romance and magic was taking place on the stage.

Shakespeare in Ten Acts runs until the 6^th September 2016.