June 2

1874
Trilby, the ballet


One of the joys of the Internet – though I doubt whether the musicians or the composers or the recording companies are terribly joyful – is the ability to listen to literally any piece of classical music that you please, for absolutely free, and in a multitude of performances. During my years on the American continent I subscribed to Pandora, which did my choosing for me; now that I am back in Europe Pandora is unavailable, so I am surfing LiberLiber and ClassicalCat and the archives of the Vienna State Opera, or simply putting in someone's name to a YouTube search engine and seeing what comes up.

The Rich Jew
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum offers its own unique catalogue of performances, of which Alexander Ghindin's solo keyboard rendition of Mussorgsky's "Pictures At An Exhibition" reminds me what a splendid piece of composition this is, even without the massive fireworks of the full orchestral performance, which are what one normally remembers. Mussorgsky began the piece on June 2nd 1874, and finished it a modest twenty days later, on June 22nd; the exhibition in question should be included in the full title, though it never is, alas. Картинки с выставки – Воспоминание о Викторе Гартмане in the Russian, which I believe is pronounced something like Kartinki es vystavki – Vospominaniye o Víktore Hartmane, the latter phrase prousting as "A Remembrance of Viktor Hartmann". 

It is, for the information, a suite in ten movements with a recurring set of variations known as "Promenade", and it was composed for solo piano; the full orchestrated version with which you are likely familiar, replete with instrumental fireworks, was not Mussorgsky's work at all, but an arrangement decades later by Maurice Ravel (played rather mournfully slowly here by the National Radio Orchestra of Bucharest under Valentin Don), though there are other versions, the first in the 1880s by Mikhail Tushmalov, others by Henry Wood, Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Slatkin and many others, including a truly dreadful electric version with Moog synthesiser by Emerson, Lake and Palmer (listen to it here). 

But my reason for being here is to talk about Hartmann's Pictures, not Mussorgsky's musicalisation of them.
Sandomierz Jew (The Poor Jew)

Hartmann was both an artist and an architect. He and Mussorgsky met somewhere around 1870, while ancient France and newly-created Germany were tearing central Europe apart and the Abramtsevo Colony was being purchased and preserved by Savva Mamontov, beginning what would come to be known as the Russian Revival, a subject close to the hearts of both Mussorgsky and Hartmann: how to create an art, a literature, a poetry, a music, that was intrinsically Russian, when so much of what had been happening through the 19th century displayed openly its roots elsewhere in Europe, France in particular, whose language was the one preferred at Court. The meeting was probably arranged by Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov, the influential critic who followed both of their burgeoning careers with interest, and to whom Mussorgsky would dedicate the composition.



Paris Catacombs
Mussgorsky was thirty-one in 1870, Hartmann thirty-six. Three years later, on August 4th 1873, Hartmann died of a brain aneurysm. If Mussorgsky was shaken, so was the whole of the Russian art world. With Stasov at the helm, an exhibition was organized in Saint Petersburg, to celebrate Hartmann's brief but brilliant achievements as an artist; more than four hundred of his works were put on display at the Academy of Fine Arts during February and March of 1874, including works from his personal collection lent by Mussorgsky; and of course the composer attended in person. Fired by the experience, he scored "Pictures at an Exhibition". As Stasov explained in the first published edition of the work – and he knew because Mussorgsky had discussed the suite with him as he composed it - "The composer here portrays himself walking now right, now left, now as an idle person, now urged to go near a picture; at times his joyous appearance is dampened, he thinks in sadness of his dead friend. …"

The hut of Baba Yaga
Mussorgsky based his musical material on drawings and watercolours which Hartmann had produced during his travels overseas, mostly in Poland, France and Italy, though the final movement also captures Hartmann the architect, through his design for a city gate for Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Sadly, almost all of the pictures from the Hartmann exhibition have been lost, destroyed in war or by some censorious Communist official, or more likely not lost at all but simply hidden, in the vaults of somebody's private collection, where most of the world's ungalleried art ends up if it is any good. There are critics, mostly of the academic variety, for whom art lives in the lecture hall rather than the studio, and music in the seminar room rather than the auditorium, who would like to be absolutely certain that this painting, rather than that painting, is the one Mussorgsky had in mind for each section of the score; I am sorry to disappoint them in this regard, but they are no more likely to answer that question than will the Christian academics who have identified the locations of every claimed relic of the True Cross and wish to state for certain which are authentic and which merely optimistic, or those politicians who like to focus their pre-vote speeches on all the terrible things that "could" happen if the other candidate should win; hypothetical speculations all of them, absolute unknowables each one.


Design for a city gate, Kiev
The Russian musician and conductor Sergei Vladimir Korschmin is probably the leading contemporary expert on Abramtsevo, and especially on Viktor Hartmann; rather than posting all the images I can find on the Internet, I recommend my reader to go to Korschmin's page on "Pictures At An Exhibition", which you can do by clicking here, and where you will find a far more comprehensive Hartmann art gallery than Mussorgsky was able to manage. In the meanwhile, above and below are (perhaps!) the specific pictures on which Mussorgsky based his composition.










Amber pages:


Also, today in


1740, the Marquis de Sade was born


and in 1840, Thomas Hardy


and in 1857, Sir Edward Elgar


and my mother insists that I mention the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, today in 1953; though she probably won't be all that pleased if I leave a blank page for my essay on the glorious achievements of her reign (though, on reflection, her having done absolutely nothing of any significance whatsoever may actually be that glorious achievement: having a monarchy provides a set of formal boundaries round the not-terribly-democratic system that we operate, which checks it, and balances is, and keeps it safe from despotism. Imagine what would happen if we abolished the monarchy: within days there would be calls for a Presidency instead, and all the egomaniacal megalomaniacal failures of British politics lining up on the hustings shouting "me-me-me". Lord Blair of Kazakhstan. That Huguenot immigrant Farage. Sir Michael Backstab-Gove. Boris the Buffoon. God help us all and save the Queen!)


August 18

1891

Two entries resulting from my reading of Carl Sagan's splendid "Cosmos" - you can find the other on August 23 in this blog. On this date, Milton Humason (born Dodge Center, Minnesota, August 18th 1891) the mule-skinner who took the equipment up Mount Wilson and turned into Edwin Hubble's chief assistant, a story which may be about the total randomness and arbitrariness of the most important moments of history, or it may just be another tale about what some men will do for sex; I will leave you to decide that for yourself.

"During the early years of the 20th century," Sagan recounts, "the world's largest telescope, destined to discover the red shift of remote galaxies" - and to miss the discovery of Pluto by just a fraction of a millimeter, though that is the equivalent of about a billion miles in real space - "was being built on Mount Wilson, overlooking what were then the clear skies of Los Angeles. Large pieces of the telescope had to be hauled to the top of the mountain, a job for mule teams. A young mule skinner named Milton Humason helped to transport mechanical and optical equipment, scientists, engineers and dignitaries up the mountain. Humason would lead the column of mules on horseback, his white terrier standing just behind the saddle, its front paws on Humason's shoulders. He was a tobacco-chewing roustabout, a superb gambler and pool player and what was then called a ladies' man. In his formal education, he had never gone beyond the eighth grade. But he was bright and curious and naturally inquisitive about the equipment he had laboriously carted to the heights. Humason was keeping company with the daughter of one of the observatory engineers, a man who harbored reservations about his daughter seeing a young man who had no higher ambition than to be a mule skinner. So Humason took odd jobs at the observatory – electrician's assistant, janitor, swabbing the floors of the telescope he had helped to build. One evening, so the story goes, the night telescope assistant fell ill and Humason was asked if he might fill in. He displayed such skill and care with the instruments that he soon became a permanent telescope operator and observing aide.

"After World War 1, there came to Mount Wilson the soon-to-be-famous Edwin Hubble – brilliant, polished, gregarious outside the astronomical community, with an English accent acquired during a single year as Rhodes scholar at Oxford. It was Hubble who provided the final demonstration that the spiral nebulae were in fact 'island universes', distant aggregations of enormous numbers of stars, like our own Milky Way Galaxy; he had figured out the stellar standard candle required to measure the distances to the galaxies. Hubble and Humason hit it off splendidly, a perhaps unlikely pair who worked together at the telescope harmoniously. Following a lead by the astronomer V.M. Slipher at Lowell Observatory, they began measuring the spectra of distant galaxies. It soon became clear that Humason was better able to obtain high-quality spectra of distant galaxies than any professional astronomer in the world. He became a full staff member of the Mount Wilson Observatory, learned many of the scientific underpinnings of his work and died rich in the respect of the astronomical community."


Or maybe it's just one more instance of the ways in which a school education can be very useful, if you happen to be that way inclined, but by no means essential; the list of high-school dropouts who became billionaire entrepreneurs and inventors is lengthy, Einstein's personal history is illustrative, and the quality of Humason's writing, as well as his scientific understanding, despite leaving school aged fourteen, is demonstrable by his paper on "The Large Radial Velocity of N. G. C. 7619", which you can read on the NASA website by clicking here

As someone who attended school all the way to a Master's Degree and a teacher's certificate beyond that, but who never had a science lesson in his life, I do not know which of these two categories I fit into (though I do know that my English teachers would all have criticised my placement of a preposition at the end of that last sentence!). I missed out on the third element as well, the one that scientists are famous for asperging and nerding, the real point of school I suspect, and the only one left as we enter an age in which technology renders schools obsolete for any other purpose: the skills of "learning how to make friends" and "how be a gregarious social creature". Hubble was an expert in these; Humason a total failure. But my point is that, even with those years of formal education, and forty years since of trying to catch up the parts I missed, I can still tell you, without fear of contradiction, that I have read Humason's paper, twice, and I still do not understand a significant word of it, though I think this is the paper in which you will find the first "proof" of the Big Bang. 

You can watch a much fuller TV version of this section of Sagan's book, complete with footage of the telescope in operation, and a splendid actor's imitation of Humason being both brilliant and socially inept, by clicking here.


Amber pages


Max Factor Jr, born today in 1904. Son of Max Factor Sr, obviously, though really Max Factor Sr was Maksymilian Faktorowicz, which name he had when he grew up in the little town of Zduńska Wola in Poland, just like my great-grandparents - and yes, he was family; and yes, his half-brother was Al Capone's chief money-launderer, John Factor, alias "Jake the Barber"... but this is in amber, so it will have to wait.



Roman Polanski, movie director, born today in 1933, and isn't it weirdly coincidental that "Lolita", Vladimir Nabokov's novel about a man emotionally troubled by a thirteen year old girl, should have been published, in the United States, today in 1958


Ghengis Khan, Mongol conqueror, died today in 1227


The city of Reykjavik, in Iceland, founded today in 1786




August 23

1788



The American astronomer Carl Sagan, writing in "Cosmos" (see also August 18 in this blog), his populist explanation of the entire universe, tells almost as a marginal side-note the tale of Jean François de Galaup La Pérouse's 1786 voyage to Alaska.

"Benevolent encounters," he rightly states, "have not been the rule in human history, where transcultural contacts have been direct and physical, quite different from the receipt of a radio signal, a contact as light as a kiss. Still, it is instructive to examine one or two cases from our past, if only to calibrate our expectations. Between the times of the American and the French Revolutions, Louis XVI of France outfitted an expedition to the Pacific Ocean, a voyage with scientific, geographic, economic and nationalistic objectives. The commander was the Count of La Pérouse, a noted explorer who had fought for the United States in the War of Independence. In July 1876, almost a year after setting sail, he reached the coast of Alaska, a place now called Lituya Bay. He was delighted with the harbor and wrote: 'Not a port in the universe could afford more conveniences'. In this exemplary location, La Pérouse 'perceived some savages, who made signs of friendship, by displaying and waving white mantles, and different skins. Several of the canoes of these Indians were fishing in the Bay… [we were] continually surrounded by the canoes of the savages, who offered us fish, skins of otters and other animals, and different little articles of their dress in exchange for our iron. To our great surprise, they appeared well accustomed to traffic, and bargained with us with as much skill as any tradesman of Europe'...

"The Native Americans," Sagan continues, "drove increasingly harder bargains. To La Pérouse’s annoyance, they also resorted to pilferage, largely of iron objects, but once of the uniforms of French naval officers hidden under their pillows as they were sleeping one night surrounded by armed guards – a feat worthy of Harry Houdini. La Pérouse followed his royal orders to behave peaceably but complained that the natives 'believed our forbearance inexhaustible'. He was disdainful of their society. But no serious damage was done by either culture to the other. After re-provisioning his two ships, La Pérouse sailed out of Lituya Bay, never to return. The expedition was lost in the South Pacific in 1788; La Pérouse and all but one of the members of his crew perished."

A story of mild interest, no more than that, about a man who is best remembered as a 4-star boutique hotel in Nice, a suburb of south Sydney in Australia, and most especially as "Maison Parisienne depuis 1766", self-proclaiming as one of the city's finest restaurants (click here)and actually not that well remembered anyway, because the name is a matter of some dispute - was it Lapérouse or La Pérouse? And wasn't it actually just plain Galaup, with the "de" added as a status symbol, and then the La Pérouse as well, when the family bought themselves a grand estate?

A story of mild interest, until you read the formal footnote to this informal footnote, about a rather better-remembered man:

"When La Pérouse was mustering the ship's company in France, there were many bright and eager young men who applied but were turned down. One of them was a Corsican artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It was an interesting branch point in the history of the world. If La Pérouse had accepted Bonaparte, the Rosetta stone might never have been found, Champollion might never have decrypted Egyptian hieroglyphics, and in many more important respects our recent history might have changed significantly."

In many rather more significant respects, including the "Edicts of Tolerance", which effectively liberated Europe's Jews (see February 3), and paved the way...

The picture above shows the rather dashing young Napoleon, aged 23 at the time, when he was lieutenant-colonel of a battalion of Corsican Republican volunteers, four years after La Pérouse's ship went down.



Amber pages

Leitmotifs occur to me after the event; themes that I would never have written down as a "must-do" if I had planned this book, preferring to go through the almanacs and take what offers itself, and then discover something new about myself from my choices. So there are Dreyfus and Rosa Parkes and Nat Turner and Nelson Mandela, and more, and still more, of those who refused to be passively complicitous, who refused to actively collaborate in their own victimhood, who stood up, or sat down, for what they believed to be right, but who, in most cases, became victims of the wrong-doers anyway.

So, today in 1927, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti - the Massachussetts Two rather than the Guildford Four - went to the electric chair. And who were they? The lights are amber. You will have to find out for yourself, or wait till someone pushes the little button, and they become green.


Nazi Germany and Russia signed a non-aggression pact, today in 
1939 - just eight days before the invasion of Poland, but the pretext for that invasion was being set up at the time, and the man who planned and led it was also the man who went to Russia during the war, to try to renegotiate the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. So it is logical to assume that, being a Major in the Abwehr, the German Military Intelligence, that man is likely to have been a key figure in today's events too. Shame that neither Keneally nor Spilberg picked up this side of his murkiness. The name of this man was Oskar Schindler.


And today, in 1966, the first ever photographic image of the Earth from the vicinity of the Moon, taken by Lunar Orbiter 7, and a splendid partner-photo for the one Louis Daguerre took, of the moon from the Earth - see January 1 




You can find David Prashker at:



Copyright © 2016 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press

September 2

1571, 1666


1571



The  world's most sophisticated clock

On page 144 of John Banville's splendid little vignette "Prague Pictures", I read that Tycho Brahe arrived in Prague as court mathematician to the Emperor Rudolf, his task to prepare, and his fellow genius Johannes Kepler to complete, the "Tabulae Rudolphinae", the final word on astrology before intelligent thought was introduced into Europe by the Enlightenment (it was Kepler who said that astrology was invented so that astronomers could earn a living). That was in the summer of 1599; within just a few days he was received by the Emperor.

"Tycho described the triumphal occasion," Banville reports, "to his disreputable cousin Frederick Rosenkrantz..." which statement leads to a footnote: "In 1592, this Rosenkrantz, along with another Brahe cousin, Knud Gyldenstierne, travelled on a diplomatic mission to London, where they must surely have encountered one of the leading English dramatists of the day...", a statement that Banville leaves tantalisingly incomplete, allowing us to understand that obviously he meant Shakespeare, since a Rosencrantz and Guildernstern, spelled slightly differently, will turn up as minor characters, old college friends in fact, of Hamlet, summoned by King Claudius to distract the prince from his apparent madness, and if possible to ascertain the cause of it, and then to ship with him to England where he is to be murdered; though in fact Hamlet finds and reads the letter, and arranges their deaths in his place. "Hamlet" was written somewhere between 1600 and 1603, so the dates work. But who knew that Shakespeare had real Danish noblemen as his source?

credit link here
Banville's book is about Prague, where Brahe and Kepler made their names among the founders of the aforementioned Enlightenment. Prague, or at least nearby Zlin, was also the starting-point for his lifelong mission to London of one of the great modern playwrights, Sir Tom Stoppard, and it was precisely with his satirical reworking of Rosencrantz (with a "c" rather than a "k") and Guildernstern that he made his name in the 1960s, though actually he first cast them in a one-act play with King Lear before going for the full-length version, restored to Hamlet. I am taken aback that Banville failed to follow through with that literary connection, or to mention W.S. Gilbert, he who partnered Arthur Sullivan in many a fine operetta, and who also revived R&G (and also with a "c") satirically.

Gilbert's play, written in 1874, is a comedy in which Rosencrantz plots with his friend Guildenstern to get rid of Hamlet, so that Rosencrantz can marry Ophelia. They discover that Claudius has written a five act tragic play. Sadly, the king's literary work is so embarrassingly bad that Claudius has decreed that anyone who mentions it must be executed. They obtain the manuscript and convince Hamlet to perform it. When he does, Claudius decrees that he must die, but is eventually persuaded to banish him to England. Rosencrantz and Ophelia can now be together. In a 1900 performance of the play, P.G. Wodehouse of Jeeves fame played Guildernstern; a 1904 performance included George Bernard Shaw.

Stoppard's play is rather more absurd than comic (he once described it as the tale of two men who don't know why they are here, don't know where they are going, or why, but go, and then die - which seems to me to sum up the human condition to perfection), and if it is rather less overtly political than some of his other plays (the TV play "Professional Foul" remains my favourite, if only for the wonderful lecture on the untranslateability of language that forms its middle section), it is still regularly performed, and likely to remain so. The link here will take you to about ten minutes' worth of Dominic Cumberbatch's rendition of Guildernstern.

But what was the reason for the real Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern's diplomatic mission to London?

The Rosenkrantz in question was Frederik Holgersen Rosenkrantz, born September 2nd 1571, the son of Holger Ottesen Rosenkrantz and Karen Christophersdatter Gyldenstierne – yes, the two names interconnected right from his birth. Frederik died on August 18th 1602 of what Danish websites call "Krigstjeneste Ungarn" which my Google Translator insists means "War Service Hungary". The rest is probably interpretable into meaningful English, but you will have to make your own way through this next Google-translation, which is the only website I can find with information about said Rosenkrantz. This is what I have:

"Frederik Rosenkrantz (1571-1602) was a Danish nobleman and vassal. Owner of manor houses Rosenvold and Stjær Holm. His parents were Councillor Holger Ottesen Rosenkrantz and Karen Gyldenstierne. His baptism took place September 2, 1571 at Skanderborg Castle with great pomp. The father died when Frederick was only four years, why Chancellor Niels Kaas and his uncle Jørgen Ottesen Rosenkrantz since his guardians. He was like his own class on long overseas trip. In 1584, he studied in Rostock, 1586-87 Wittenberg, 1589 in Padua and in 1590 in Siena. After returning, he took 1,593 service as hofjunker. In 1595 he Giske Len in Norway. At the same time, he was betrothed to the owner of the headland, Christence Corfitsdatter Viffert that after only three years of marriage sat as the widow of Henrik Bille to Mogenstrup.
"Frederik Rosenkrantz prospects seemed so promising, especially since he seems to have had great influence on the young King Christian IV. But it ended abruptly. In the spring of 1599, Frederik Rosenkrantz Lundenæs in forlening, which certainly has been a kærkommet pretext to withdraw from hoftjenesten. Shortly after had one of the queen's maids, Rigborg Brockenhuus flee from the court to a relative on Fyn, with whom she July 24 gave birth to a son, to which Frederik Rosenkrantz was designated as the child's father. When he was already betrothed to another, it was impossible to put a lid on the scandal by Rigborg and Frederick were married. Her father Laurids Brockenhuus also called relentless punishment of both culprits for the offense that was surpassed him and his family. King supported Brockenhuus and required statutory maximum penalty than the one that had enticed a virgin in the king's farm. There came commandment to Frederik Rosenkrantz were apprehended, dead or alive. Frederik had fled from his Website and reached Hamburg, where he, however, in August 1599 was escorted home under guard. Two months later, in October, fell misjudging both. She was sentenced to lifelong imprisonment, he was to lose the honor and her two fingers. The last sentence, however, relented for him to go to Hungary to fight against the Turks. This he did too and with so much distinction, in particular by Stuhlweissenburgs conquest, the imperial colonels under which he earned in 1601 interceded for him by King Christian IV. Surely the sake of Laurids Brockenhuus refused, however, the king in very sharp terms to pardon him. The following year, August 18, 1602 died Frederik Rosenkrantz in Moravia by an unfortunate incident when he would separate two contestants. He is buried in Teinkirken in Prague. Frederik and Riborg son Holger was in 1624 recognized as a genuine Rosenkrantz.
"It is believed that it was Frederik Rosenkrantz trip to London, along with his cousin Knud Gyldenstierne that gave Shakespeare the inspiration for the use of the names Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the play Hamlet."

Neither Gilbert nor Stoppard could have written that spendidly absurd translation better!

So much for Rosenkrantz, though Wikipedia tells us, in rather better English, that the woman in his life, "Rigborg Brockenhuus (1579-1641), was a Danish noble and lady-in-waiting" - it being Wikipedia, these dates may not be reliable; though the facts that follow are much the same as the ones above


"She was the central figure in a famous sexual offence case in 1599. Daughter of nobles Laurids Brockenhuus and Karen Skrams, she was the sister of Jakob Brockenhuus and the maternal aunt of Corfitz Ulfeldt. She became maid of honor to the queen, Anne Catherine of Brandenburg in 1598. In 1599, she had an illegitimate son, Holger, with the courtier Frederik Holgersen Rosenkrantz. King Christian IV charged the couple with having broken the conduct of the royal court and the presence of the monarch, as well as the common law of seduction - an exceptional judgment against two nobles. Rosenkrantz was sentenced to have two fingers amputated and to lose his nobility. The seriousness of the sentence was deemed appropriate because Rosenkrantz had been engaged to another woman, Christence Viffert. His sentence was later softened to service in the war against the Ottoman Empire, where he died in 1602. Rigborg Brockenhuus was sentenced to life imprisonment in a room in her father's castle, Egeskov, thirty miles outside of Odense. Her son Holger was turned over to the custody of his father's family. In 1608, the queen dowager Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow obtained permission for Rigborg to leave her room to attend church once a week. In 1616, Rigborg's mother secured permission for Rigborg to live on her own estates, and when her mother died in 1625, this was realized. In 1626 she was reunited with her son, Holger."
   Not half so entertaining an account as the Danish version.

What about Guildernstern? I can find even less on Knud, though other members of his family have webpages, including a Catholic bishop in Odense who died in 1560, "the one who outwitted Christian II in Oslo", though it fails to explain how or in what. However a paragraph in "Shakespeare and Scandinavia, A Collection of Nordic Studies" suggests that Shakespeare himself may have spent some time in Denmark, a hypothesis which I have never heard suggested anywhere else, but still more plausible than the one that has either Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford writing his plays.

Apparently an English troupe was employed at the Danish court in Elsinore in 1586, probably on the recommendation of the Earl of Leicester, and that it included Will Kemp, George Bryan and Thomas Pope, all three of whom joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men upon their return; it just so happens that Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men at exactly the same time, though why this should infer that he was in Denmark with them is unclear. By coincidence, or perhaps not, 1586 is one of the "lost years" of Shakespeare's life, about which the scholars have no information – so why could he not have been in Denmark? He remained "lost" until 1592, and the next we know of him is in London in 1593, where he attended the execution of the Queen's personal physician Roderigo Lopes, and later wrote "The Merchant of Venice" by way of an angry response to that, and to the anti-Semitic riots that followed. Whether he also went to Italy during those years is likewise unknown, but he also set plays in Malta and Turkey, Greece and Lebanon, Austria and Bohemia, to name but six, and maybe he visited them too. Highly unlikely on all counts; what however is highly likely is that the three who did go to Denmark shared information about their trip with Shakespeare, and that he used it.

The same volume continues by recounting how Frederik Rosenkrantz was sent by his father Holger to study at Rostock between 1596 and 1589, and then at Wittenberg from 1598-91, the latter being the one where Shakespeare places Hamlet as a college friend of R&G.

"After completing his studies, Rosenkrantz went on a tour of Europe that took him to Italy, Sicily and Malta and in 1592 he visited England in the company of his friend and fellow student, Knud Gyldenstierne. According to a biographical account of Frederik Rosenkrantz, there can be little doubt that 'his stay in England with Knud Gyldenstierne was the occasion for introducing these two Danish noblemen into Hamlet.'"

But still no suggestion of why they were in England.

The same account then tells us that "another Rosenkrantz visited England in connection with James' coronation in 1603. This was young Holger Axelsen Rosenkrantz (1598-1647), "a member of the same powerful noble family in Denmark" - presumably the son of that criminalised affair. "He came in the retinue of the Danish Chancellor, Christian Friis, and attended the coronation. No doubt the opportunity was taken by the Danish Chancellor to discuss the forthcoming state visit of Christian IV to England. Brief mention can also be made of yet another diplomatic mission to England"... but unfortunately my "Internet sample" access to this particular text ran out there, short of my paying for a copy of the whole book just to read what was probably two more sentences, and before I could reach the footnote that told me from which "autobiographical account" the author, Gunnar Sorelius, was sourcing. I am therefore left even more tantalised than previously, certain that Shakespeare must have met Rosenkrantz and Gyldenstierne, and in London, and at exactly the time that he was writing Hamlet, and that surely the structure of Hamlet, which involves a group of tragedians travelling to Elsinore to perform a play... if anyone has any further knowledge, whether of facts or simply places in which fragments of detail might be accrued, please use the comment box at the foot of this page.



1666


Shakespeare's career ended when "The Globe" theatre burned down in 1613 (see June 29). Had it not done so, it would have been unlikely to survive the greater conflagration that destroyed virtually the whole of London, on this day in 1666. The Great Fyre began at the Thomas Faryner's bakery, the King's own bakery, on Pudding Lane in East Cheap, just by London Bridge, where the Monument to the event now stands. 1 of the clock on a Sunday morning it was, when a spark from his oven caught a pile of logs nearby, and two thousand years of history simply went up in smoke.

In his diary for this "Lord's Day", Pepys noted that "some of our maids sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast to-day, Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose, and slipped on my night-gown, and went to her window; and thought it to be on the back-side of Marke-land at the farthest, but being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off, and so went to bed again, and to sleep. About seven rose again to dress myself, and there looked out at the window, and saw the fire not so much as it was, and further off. So to my closet to set things to rights, after yesterday’s cleaning. By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower, and there got up upon one off the high places, Sir J. Robinson's little son going up with me; and there I did see the houses at the end of the bridge all on fire, and in infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge..."

Pepys' matter-of-fact, his complacency, his capacity to rubber-neck as a mere spectator, is staggering. Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome burns! The diary entry runs on to several closely-written pages, in which the most banal of episodes (Mr Moore's disappointment at the new royal closet, for example) are juxtaposed with details of human tragedy (Mr Houblon, "dirty at his door at Dowgate, receiving some of his brother's things, whose houses were on fire"). The whole episode seems to be a little more than an opportunity for an excursion, and an even better - an even more ghoulish - opportunity to fill to the last available space what might otherwise have been that most terrible calamity that can befall a diarist, which is to say an empty page: self-centred to a point of vanity given what was happening to other people, introspective beyond credulity given what was happening to the exterior world. And yet, as journalism, it provides a fascinating and historically important record:
"... down with my heart full of trouble to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it begun this morning in the King’s baker’s house* in Pudding-lane, and that it hath burned down St Magnes Church and most part of Fish-street already... everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river, or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another..."
It was Pepys, according to his own testimony, who brought news of the fire to the King, though it is hard to believe he hadn't already been informed, or simply noticed.
"I did give them an account dismayed them all, and word was carried in to the King. So I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of York what I saw, and that unless His Majesty did command houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the fire. They seemed much troubled, and the King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him, and command him to spare no houses, but to pull down before the fire every way...”
The Duke of York offered soldiers, but by the time Pepys tracked down Sir Thomas Bludworth, the Lord Mayor, "down in Canning-street", it was far too late to save the city. But he had done his duty, gained much royal esteem to cap his self-importance, and acquired useful detail for his portrait. I speak disdainfully, but while London burned, Pepys now returned home for luncheon, with Mr Wood and Barbary Shelden and also Mr Moone, who had come to look at Pepys' closet, only events had been so troubling they could not bring themselves to it. "However, we had an extraordinary good dinner, and as merry at this time as we could be..." - a dinner not even ruined by the arrival of Mrs Batelier, "come to enquire after Mr Woolfe and Stanes (who it seems are related to them,) whose houses in Fish-street are all burned, and they in a sad condition."

There is something disturbingly Marie Antoinette in this account, which moves back and forth between further ghoulish excursions to see the sights, and further returns home for sustenance (plus any number of pretexts to namedrop his relations "by appointment" with the King. Such, indeed, is his sang-froid, that even when matters turn personal there is a dispassion that defies belief:

"Poor Tom Hater came with some few of his goods saved out of his house, which was burned upon Fish-street Hill. I invited him to lie at my house, and did receive his goods, but was deceived in his lying there, the news coming every moment of the growth of the fire; so as we were forced to begin to pack up our own goods, and prepare for their removal; and did by moonshine (it being brave dry and moonshine and warm weather) carry much of my goods into the garden, and Mr Hater and I did remove my money and iron chests into my cellar, as thinking that the safest place... about four o’clock in the morning, my Lady Batten sent me a cart to carry away all my money, and plate, and best things, to Sir W Riders at Bednall-greene. Which I did, riding myself in my night-gown, in the cart..."
Pepys' house was in Seething Lane - owned by the Navy Office and his as a perk of his job - just to the west of Tower Hill, less than half a mile east of where the fire started. The house survived the fire, as did his office in the same building, where he continued working through the several days in which the fire continued raging, destroying most of mediaeval London. His diaries were written in what looks like code, but is in fact seventeenth century shorthand. But his real legacy is not the diaries - it was Pepys who masterminded that most significant of all British achievements, the Royal Navy.




In total 13,000 houses burned down in the four days of the Great Fire of London. Looking on the zero-positive side, it was the fire that destroyed the last remnants of the Great Plague of 1665 - for good.



Amber pages



Phidippides ran from Marathon to Sparta, today in 490 BCE. Given that Marathon was his staring point, and not his goal, why is not called a Sparta? Does anyone have a clue which charity he was raising funds for?


The Gregorian Calendar was finally adopted by Britain and her colonies, starting tomorrow, but officially adopted today, in 1752; so you could argue that this should appear on September 14, which is tomorrow's reformed date


And today in 1945, Japan signed its unconditional surrender. Hopefully the document has not been kept, as it is highly likely to remain dangerously radioactive for some while.