Reputation

I feel for creative people who shun the limelight, who try and keep their private lives that way, who don't court fame but prefer to let their works speak for themselves. I suppose it's an attitude that accords with my own preference. Such individuals often acquire a  reputation  for being reserved, elusive, even reclusive characters.

Names that spring to mind include the authors J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, film-makers Stanley Kubrick and Yorgos Lanthimos, musicians Van Morrison and Keaton Henson, painters Edward Munch and Georgia O'Keefe...and Banksy, who seems intent on remaining a complete enigma as his reputation grows, to the extent of never appearing in public and not even disclosing his real identity. 

The reasons I've zeroed in on Banksy are partly because he's topical with his series of nine animal-themed artworks appearing over consecutive days around London (supposedly in response to the recent unrest) and partly because my elder daughter works at London Zoo, which establishment found itself the last to be Banksy'd in the series, with an artwork spanning one of the three shuttered entrance gates to the Regent's Park zoo (below).

It is presumed that the Zoo authorities knew this was going to happen, maybe even gave tacit approval, because the entrance is under 24-hour cctv surveillance, Banksy's 'team' returned in the early hours to lacquer the artwork, and a briefing email went to all employees even before start of business. 

The immediate problem it gave London Zoo was one of security, for there have been attempts to deface or steal others of the nine murals. They covered the artwork with Perspex and put a cordon and a two-man guard on the gate, so that the thousands of people who turned up each day to photograph it - not just visitors to the Zoo - could do so from a safe distance.

The more challenging problem was that at one of the busiest times of the year, they couldn't open one of their three gates. They made the decision that they would have to remove and replace the Banksy'd shutter without damaging the artwork and this they did on Friday night. A new shutter is now in place, and all three gates are in use again. The original shutter is locked away for safe keeping while the Zoo decides where and how best to display it somewhere on site. There was talk that a non-Banksy replica of the mural would be applied to the new shutter, but I don't know if this was done, because of the possibility of some idiot trying to angle-grind it out!

Of course London Zoo (or the Zoological Society of London to give its full title) has been keen to use this publicity to re-affirm its own credentials as a leading animal conservation centre, countering any suggestion that the message on the mural was that wild animals should not be kept in captivity. (Many interpretations are possible.) ZSL is approaching its 200 year anniversary. It was founded in 1826 by Sir Stamford Raffles and Sir Humphry Davy as a centre for scientific research and London Zoo opened in Regents Park in 1828 as the world's first scientific zoo, dedicated to the understanding and preservation of wild animals and endangered species. Its international reputation as a leading charity in animal welfare, breeding and conservation is one it is justly proud of. 

My daughter's one criticism of London Zoo's Banksy is that the gorilla looks rather thin.  

I'll leave you with this poem by Blanksy... J

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Reputation

I’m not really qualified to comment on the Taylor Swift album ‘reputation’ which is the main result of searching google for the subject. I’m not qualified to comment on the reputation of Shakespeare either but found myself being curious as to whether he was as famous back in his day as he was just a few years after his death.

bust of William Shakespeare

Apparently it is difficult to assess Shakespeare's reputation in his own lifetime in England so the facts about his reputation can only be judged from his name being mentioned in documents such as a list of contemporary lists of leading poets. Shakespeare's poems were reprinted far more frequently than his plays; but Shakespeare's plays were written for performance by his own company, and because no law prevented rival companies from using the plays. His company tried to prevent his plays from being printed.

I came across the story of the publisher Thomas Pavier whose bookstall was near the Royal Exchange in London. In 1608 he was selling ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’ a play about real life murders. And the name of the author splashed across the front page was ‘W. Shak(e)speare’.

the fake play

It was, of course, a fake but the point is that WS had by then developed, quite literally, a name.

So, if he was established by then as a playwright let’s go back a bit and we find that when he first came to the notice of readers he was far better known as a poet whose most important works were 'The Rape of Lucrece', 'Venus and Adonis', and the 'Sonnets'.

For the purposes of this article I had a go at reading some of 'Venus and Adonis'. If I could have understood the (very) long poem properly I have a feeling it was rather in the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ territory.

Anyway by 1592 he was sufficiently well known to be subject to the famous attack on him by Robert Greene i.e. an vp=start Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. And even though the attack seems a bit daft now Greene and his group were not stupid people. They were England’s first professional writers but I don’t know enough about them to further this argument.

The Poems of William Shakespeare

We can tell what Shakespeare’s contemporaries thought about his plays by looking at their manuscripts. (Well, I can’t but those who know can). These were handwritten documents where they would jot down notes, accounts, poems, and snippets from plays. According to the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, early readers didn't prefer Shakespeare over other popular writers of the time, such as Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson.

One of the earliest commentaries we have on Shakespeare comes from Gabriel Harvey, a scholar and writer, who noted in the margins of one of his books that 'the younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; but his Lucrece and his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them to please the wiser sort'.

However, it was his history plays that seemed to make the breakthrough, to really seal his reputation. According to the Database of Early English Playbooks, the two most published plays (and likely the most popular) from the 1590s to the 1630s were 'Henry IV Part I'  – published eleven times – and 'Richard III', which was published ten times.

Henry IV part i

Although we can only guess at why early audiences were so drawn to the histories, it could be that the histories held an importance that is hard to imagine today. In a country where power was centred on the throne, the issues of sovereignty and power, dramatised in Shakespeare's history plays, would have been at the centre of society, affecting everyone within it.

I should add that the various We’s and I’s above are drawn from loads of sources on the web and are not me.

From: As You Like It

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow.
Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth.
And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part.
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound.
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Thanks for reading. Comments/feedback welcomed.

Terry Q.

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Sharks!

"Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water..." has to be one of the most famous taglines in movie history, slicing like a dorsal fin through the surface of our collective cultural consciousness, instantly recognisable even by those (like me) who never saw 'Jaws 2' - from which it derives - or any of the other three horror films in the franchise starring man-eating  sharks!  But then I don't swim, and have never thought it particularly safe to go in the water in the first place, at least not beyond waist height in some quiet corner of the sun-kissed Mediterranean. 

'Jaws' certainly did much to give sharks a worse reputation than they already had, and the obvious question that sprang to mind when I saw this week's blog theme was: is it a reputation that is deserved? I took a bit of a dive into the topic and was surprised by what I found.

 

Sharks have a cartilaginous rather than a bony skeleton (which is why there are no fossil remains to be found) and are of the order of fish known as chondrichthyans. They have five to seven gills on either side of the head and pectoral fins that are not fused to the head. Being dominant in their domain, they have not been required to evolve much from Shark Mark I, though there is great variety to be found.

In fact there are over 500 species of shark swimming around the world's oceans (which, remember, gives them access to 70 per cent of the planet, while land-based life is limited to the other 30 per cent). They have been around for over 400 million years, which means they pre-date (and have obviously outlived) the age of the dinosaurs, presumably because of the protective nature of their watery environment.

It is sad to reflect, therefore, that 143 of the 500 species which have existed so happily for all those millions of years are now classified as endangered thanks largely to the malign impact of mankind on the planet in the last 200 years. That's quite a shocker. One could quite understand if some sharks did have it in for human beings!

So what about all the scare-mongering over shark attacks on people? In reality, although they are apex predators, i.e. top of the ocean food chain, and cold-blooded killing machines of the seas, there have been  a mere 2,785 confirmed reports of unprovoked attacks by sharks around the world since 1958, when official recording of such incidents began. That averages out at 45 a year, less than one per week. Furthermore, the number of fatalities per year is in single figures, in other words little higher than zero in statistical terms; one might almost call that a drop in the ocean, unless you happened to be one of the handful of victims.

On top of that, a mere dozen out of 500 species of shark are truly considered dangerous and of those, only 3 types have even clocked up double-digit death tolls since records began in 1958. They are the Great White, Tiger and Bull. It is true that the number of attacks per year is increasing and the reason for that is thought to be the directly related to an increase in the number of people who go swimming  in coastal waters (e.g. around the USA and Australia) that sharks have traditionally regarded as their own. As in so many other areas, we are the invasive problem.

Leaping fresh from the imaginarium, this week's new poem, again dashed off in haste at the end of another less than successful away day.

In Vinegar Shallows

We'd burst late upon the scene

in sharp sharkskin suits

with cold avaricious eyes

and calculating machines.

In terms of the planetary clock

evening was already under way.

Sun swung low over still waters

as we swaggered down to the shore,

liked all that we saw

and proceeded to royally

fuck everything over

without a care for consequence.

The last few basking sharks

circling in vinegar shallows

clearly knew the chips were down,

the game was up. You could tell

as they meandered mournfully

there would be poaching tonight.

I was going to post a link to the cult 'Baby Shark Song', but thought better of it.

Thanks for reading. Stay dry! S ;-)

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