A familiar story from Scottish history?

I am sure most of us have heard about the assassination of James I in
1437 and how his Queen tried to save him by thrusting her arm through
the door. Here comes a little surprise......
Her maiden name was Joan BEAUFORT, after her aunt (Richard's
grandmother) - indeed she is mentioned in a certain yellow booklet.
Until recently, my principal source was Castelli who has something of a
blind spot about Scotland.

You are quite right about James I's queen being Joan Beaufort - she was the daughter of John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, eldest of John of Gaunt's Beaufort brood. However, the lady who sought to bar the door by using her own arm in place of the bolt (which the conspirators had removed) was a lady-in-waiting named Katharine Douglas.

Ann

Stephen Lark <stephenmlark@...> wrote:
I am sure most of us have heard about the assassination of James I in
1437 and how his Queen tried to save him by thrusting her arm through
the door. Here comes a little surprise......
Her maiden name was Joan BEAUFORT, after her aunt (Richard's
grandmother) - indeed she is mentioned in a certain yellow booklet.
Until recently, my principal source was Castelli who has something of a
blind spot about Scotland.

From The Guardian newspaper

Traduced in context

It may be in the public interest to introduce a
revisionist character to major historical works

David McKie
Thursday October 5, 2006
The Guardian


John Drummond played Baldock in a student production
of Marlowe's Edward II, not Shakespeare's Richard II
(Obituary, September 8). Baldock does not appear in
Richard II - Corrections and Clarifications, September
30.

I read these words with astonishment. How can they be
so sure? The severed heads of Poseidon, Jesus, Buddha
and Muhammad do not appear in Idomeneo as envisaged by
Mozart, but it seems that despite all the protests
they are still due to feature in the new production
for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. When it left Giuseppe
Verdi, La Traviata contained not a single reference to
late 19th-century Dublin - but it does now, thanks to
Conall Morrison's staging for the English National
Opera. No hairy man in drag appears to deliver a
prologue in Shakespeare's original text of Cymbeline,
nor does Posthumus don a fish-decked boat as if it
were some kind of skirt; but that, according to
Michael Billington, is what happens in the new
Kneehigh production at Stratford.

Of course, the student production in which John
Drummond appeared would have taken place long ago, but
let no one suppose that directors did not get up to
such tricks long before Kneehigh. Dr Thomas Bowdler's
famous 10-volume rewrite of Shakespeare's plays,
omitting "those words and expressions which cannot
with propriety be read aloud in a family", was
published in 1818, but long before that the Irish
hymnodist and sometime poet laureate Nahum Tate had
rewritten King Lear to give it a happy ending.

So it seems by no means impossible that some 1950s
student producer should have come across Baldock in
Marlowe and decided that smuggling him in among the
Surreys and Salisburys of Richard II might pep up
proceedings. Baldock isn't exactly a meaty part, but
Marlowe does give him one splendid speech in which he
explains that if he looks and behaves like a cautious
pedant, that is only because he'd learned to do so to
please his previous master; while "curate-like" in his
appearance, he is "inwardly licentious enough, and apt
for any kind of villainy". One can well imagine a
student producer drawing a ring round these words,
writing in the margins "an archetype!", and informing
young Drummond that though Baldock hadn't been in the
script of Richard II for the previous 350 years, he
was now.

It's instructive, though, that while monkeying around
with these sacred texts (and I haven't even mentioned
Calixto Bieito) is often approved, even lauded, as
enriching the audience's experience, the work of
Bowdler and Tate is habitually sneered at. Yet where
often with modern amendments, such as the severed
heads, the motive seems partly, if not mainly, to
shock, Bowdler and Tate were driven by a kind of
philanthropy. They simply wished to make the reading
or theatre-going experience more palatable to the
consumer, and introduce the plays to people who might
otherwise have turned away in repulsion, or been
shielded by their parents.

That raises another problem with Shakespeare, and
especially with the new comprehensive season at
Stratford. Already we've had the War of the Roses
plays, and soon we'll have Richard III, introducing
fresh generations to the vicious, twisted, hunchback
king who killed the innocent princes locked up in the
Tower. You don't have to be an adherent of the Richard
III Society to regret that Shakespeare should have
swallowed so uncritically the spin of Tudor
chroniclers. As a celebrated book by Paul Murray
Kendall established at around the time when Drummond
was playing Baldock, Richard of Gloucester was
scarcely a saint, but he was certainly not the
out-and-out villain whom Shakespeare portrays.

Since I saw that David Hare had rewritten his play
Stuff Happens to adjust his portrait of Colin Powell
to what he now thinks is the truth, I've been
wondering whether a similar process might in the
public interest be applied to Richard III. The trouble
is that you can't get closer to historical fact simply
by adjusting the lines assigned to his enemies:
Richard himself, in his opening lines, proudly
proclaims his dastardliness.

But I think I now see a solution. A new character
could be written into the script who, whenever the
king is roughly traduced, even when he traduces
himself, might be given a speech that said of the
passage just spoken: "T'were better set in context."
In time, this revisionist figure would take his place
quite naturally among the Buckinghams, Norfolks,
Oxfords and Hastingses who already frequent the pages
of Richard III. To signal his separate status as a
representative of a later age, I think I might call
him Milton Keynes.

McElsewhere@...





"a winner is a dreamer who just won't quit"



"a winner is a dreamer who just won't quit"

Yes, I remember now but last read this story about twenty-five years
ago. My corrected point is that the heroine was in the service of
Riichard's mother's cousin - a small world, also the third
significant Anglo-Scots Royal wedding.

--- In , A LYON <A.Lyon1@...>
wrote:
>
> You are quite right about James I's queen being Joan Beaufort - she
was the daughter of John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, eldest of John
of Gaunt's Beaufort brood. However, the lady who sought to bar the
door by using her own arm in place of the bolt (which the
conspirators had removed) was a lady-in-waiting named Katharine
Douglas.
>
> Ann
>
> Stephen Lark <stephenmlark@...> wrote:
> I am sure most of us have heard about the assassination
of James I in
> 1437 and how his Queen tried to save him by thrusting her arm
through
> the door. Here comes a little surprise......
> Her maiden name was Joan BEAUFORT, after her aunt (Richard's
> grandmother) - indeed she is mentioned in a certain yellow booklet.
> Until recently, my principal source was Castelli who has something
of a
> blind spot about Scotland.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

--- In , A LYON <A.Lyon1@...>
wrote:
>
> You are quite right about James I's queen being Joan Beaufort - she
was the daughter of John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, eldest of John of
Gaunt's Beaufort brood. However, the lady who sought to bar the door
by using her own arm in place of the bolt (which the conspirators had
removed) was a lady-in-waiting named Katharine Douglas.


The original "Katy, bar the door?"

Katy