Cornwall’s famous Minack Theatre is an impressive achievement. Built against the cliff-side at Porthcurno, this open-air theatre was created almost single-handedly by one woman: Rowena Cade. Her dream was to create the perfect setting for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, although since the 1930s the Minack Theatre has also hosted numerous productions of other works. By building her theatre on the Cornish coast, Rowena Cade aimed to use the cliffs of Porthcurno as the ideal background for Shakespeare’s drama, in which a storm at sea leaves a ship stranded upon the shores of a mysterious island.

View from the Minack Theatre, October 2014

Staging The Tempest against a background of real-life wind and waves is an attractive idea, but also draws attention to an important theme in Shakespeare’s play: human control over the elements. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, The Tempest was probably performed in both indoor playhouses and at the Globe, an open-air amphitheatre, but its first recorded performance took place at King James I’s court in 1611. At this indoor court performance, the tempest that frames the play’s narrative could have been represented by a wave machine, as well as the rumbling sound-effects that typically signified a storm on-stage: the playing company would have controlled the introduction and duration of such effects. When Shakespeare explores the theme of human control over the elements within his play, there may be an implied link to these original circumstances of production: Shakespeare, as dramatist, possesses imaginative control over the storm that he introduces into his fictional narrative.

Within the narrative of The Tempest, the idea of human power over the elements is explored through the figure of Prospero. Many years ago, Prospero was exiled to the mysterious island on which the play is set by his treacherous brother, who usurped his former position as Duke of Milan. Yet Prospero has been able to use his magical ‘art’ to acquire control over the spirits of this island; as the play begins, this power enables Prospero to invoke a supernatural storm that maroons a ship carrying his brother on the island. Ultimately, through this device, Prospero is able to bring his brother to repentance, and reclaim his rightful position as Duke of Milan.

The alignment between Prospero’s magical control over the elements, and his ability to reassert his political authority, is striking at a time when Shakespeare’s England was exploring new possibilities for overseas expansion. It was during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the concept of an ‘empire of the seas’ gained significance, as literary critic Claire Jowitt has demonstrated in her book The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630 (2010). A number of English writers responded to this relationship between marine power and political authority: Sir Walter Ralegh, for instance, argued that ‘whosoever commands the sea, commands…the world itself’ (Discourse of the Invention of Ships, c. 1615).

Shakespeare draws upon this association between command of the seas and imperial domination in The Tempest. His control over the elemental spirit Ariel is one striking example. Ariel is associated with the air and water, and he controls these elements on Prospero’s behalf to create the supernatural storm that carries the ship to harbour ‘in the deep nook where once / Thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew / From the still-vexed Bermundas’ (1.2.227-9). Ariel’s reference to the Atlantic islands echoes the ambitions of those in Shakespeare’s England who hoped to establish a new empire in the Americas. Like Ralegh, a key proponent for such expansion, Prospero aligns such imperialism with command over the seas. Ariel, spirit of the water, is repeatedly characterised as Prospero’s subject: he is described as the latter’s ‘industrious servant’ (4.1.33) or even ‘slave’ (1.2.270), and responds by saluting Prospero as his ‘great master, grave sir’ (1.2.189). Another inhabitant of the island, Caliban, directly attributes Prospero’s colonial power over the island he inhabits to his command over such elemental spirits: ‘I must obey. His art is of such power’ (1.2.371).

Prospero is able to command Ariel, and hence the seas, thanks to the magical arts that he has acquired through his ‘secret studies’ (1.2.77). This association between book-learning and conjuration invites association with the ‘art’ that Shakespeare possesses, as dramatist: the ability to create new worlds of the imagination. In this way The Tempest, a play that reflects on human control over the elements in relation to political ambitions, also highlights the power of the imagination in creating and shaping such dreams of imperial expansion – or of theatrical magic, as in the case of Rowena Cade and the Minack Theatre.

St. Michael’s Mount, the harshly beautiful island of granite that studs the coast deep within western Cornwall, has a surreptitiously important place in the history of literature. When John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, wrote the famous elegy ‘Lycidas’ in memory of his drowned friend Edward King, he imagined King’s body swirling in the oceans around Britain, denied burial and mourning. Legend had it that the archangel Michael had appeared in a vision on ‘the guarded mount’ of St. Michael’s, and Milton poetically cried out to the supernatural figure to ‘look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth [pity] / And…waft the hapless youth’ back to his friends and family.

Right at the heart of English Literature therefore – in the middle of one of the most important poems of one of most important poets – we have St. Michael’s Mount, an angel, and Cornish fable.

You would imagine the severe grandeur of the Mount would have attracted the Romantics some 150 years after Milton, but despite the fact that John Keats’ family history was probably Cornish, and that Lord Byron visited Falmouth, there is little contact between the county and the most famous Romantics. Nevertheless, there are plenty of other fascinating minor poets of the era (both Cornish and non-Cornish) who are very much drawn to places like Land’s End, Carn Brea, the banks of the Tamar – and, of course,  St. Michael’s Mount.

One of these is William Lisle Bowles.  He is perhaps best known for being one of a set of ‘pre-Romantic’ poets who reinvigorated the English sonnet, which had fallen somewhat out of fashion. Yet I’m particularly interested in his longer 1798 work, simply and straightforwardly entitled ‘St. Michael’s Mount: A Poem’ – and his engagement with Cornish landscape.

Like so much Romantic verse it begins with a walk:

While Summer airs scarce breathe along the tide,
Oft panting, up the Mountain’s craggy side
We climb: – how beautiful, how still, how clear
The scenes that stretch around! – the rocks that rear
Their shapes, in rich fantastic colours drest
The hill-tops where the softest shadows rest;
The long-retiring bay; the level sand…

But Bowles knows that the rocky scene opening up as they ascend, however glorious, would not be to everybody’s taste in the eighteenth century: particularly if imagined under the very different aspect of a stormy day, dark and lonely, with squalls driving in and the coast ‘wet with the hoar spray of the flashing tide’.

Reflecting on those who only really enjoy a tranquil nature – sun-dappled, blue-skied, graceful and soft – he notes that St. Michael’s Mount is probably not for them: ‘No sunny meadows at thy feet are spread / No streamlets sparkle o’er their pebbly bed’. The granite is too stark, too brutal, and too associated with the danger and peril of Cornish mining, ‘sunk fathoms beneath the rolling brine’. Bowles’ poem is all about respecting the savagery of the Mount’s beauty.

Savage beauty had a particular name in the days when Bowles was writing: it wasn’t actually beauty at all, but ‘the sublime’. When appreciating anything from landscape to Greek sculpture, an educated eighteenth-century person would instinctively map their aesthetic responses on to these two opposed categories, which were formalised in dozens of essays and treatises. The beautiful was soft and graceful. The sublime was harsh and angular. The beautiful relaxed and soothed. The sublime exhilarated and shocked. Beautiful landscapes were verdant, lush and welcoming; sublime landscapes were bleak, remote and dangerous.

There is no doubt that Bowles’ poem on the Mount is full of classically sublime qualities and things, and privileges them over the beautiful. Better the lash of the wind than a calm sunset:

the howling hurricane, the dashing wave
More graceful, when the storm’s dark vapours frown,
Than when the summer suns in all their pomp go down!

The Mount is a ‘stern monument amidst the delug’d plain’; the castle that crowns its peak sits ‘in the dark terror of thy ancient reign’. It is best seen – and appreciated – on a stormy night, wreathed in moonlight or sharply lit up by lightening. The feelings of awe and even terror are all part of it.

One other typically sublime thing is great antiquity – anything old, be it an ancient stone-circle or the Egyptian pyramids – was invested with a certain breathtaking reverence. Bowles picks up on this in his poem too, imagining ‘the dim record of thy early days’ and imagining the long, sometimes bloody history of the Mount and the castle. That druidic rituals were carried out on the Mount in ancient times merely adds to the aura: ‘the shadowy Druid throng, the darksome wood, / And the hoar altar, wet with human blood’. Things take a gothic turn!

As Bowles lets his imagination run riot through the history of St. Michael’s Mount, he does one final, quite clever thing. He brings together nature and history. The raging seas that batter the Mount become – symbolically – the great surges and swells of time. The violence of storms stands for the violence of human conflicts and invasions. The Cornish landscape becomes something to read symbolically, to provoke reflection and meditation: ‘O might we thus from Heav’n’s bright battlements / Behold the scene Humanity presents’.

It’s not a coincidence that this poem was written by Bowles at the end of the 1790s: the decade of the French Revolution. The ‘seas’ of historical change were indeed surging – and not always peacefully. You can see why the poet might have history and violence on his mind. Yet Bowles draws something consoling from the way the Mount resists all the natural forces thrown at it: it still stands, ‘wearing graceful the grey tints of Time’ as the waves settle and murmur at its base. The Mount is indomitable, strong, and unchanging against the storms of nature. And you get the strong sense that, amidst the storms of history, Bowles wants the human spirit to be the same or – at least – to draw some inspiration from the savage beauty (that is, the sublimity) of Cornwall’s magnificent granite forms.

A precious painting, a class of children, and writing or painting tasks might sound like a very bad idea, but not if you live in Cornwall. As part of the ‘From a Cornish Window’ mini-festival of Being Human 2014, small groups of undergraduate students and University staff organised workshopping sessions to promote the humanities and creative thinking in local primary and secondary schools.

The training and planning offered us a lot of freedom to take the themes and the central piece of art work which the Royal Cornish Museum would be bringing to the class room and come up with a creative way of making the children think differently about art. My group (Gemma, Aisha and myself) wanted to encourage unnatural, mismatched portraits and unearthly figures in the creative writing. So for our starter task we devised an exercise which encouraged the creation of unusual faces. We marched around the University to find faces in magazines; this was slightly more difficult than we first imagined but we succeeded none the less. Then we cut the faces into strips so we had different sets of eyes, noses, mouths, chins and foreheads. As you can imagine we were quite pleased with ourselves and couldn’t wait to see what the pupils made of it.

We arrived at the Primary school, yawning a little, at 8.45 and were swiftly directed to the first classroom we would be stationed at. Then we were told that the day starts with a brief aerobics session! We were invited to join and our supervisor Dr Andy McInnes started the day with an awful lot of star jumps. It was great to see the school doing something so active in the mornings and I think we should implement that idea at University! There would definitely be fewer droopy eyes of a morning, but I don’t think there is enough coffee in the world that could convince students to join in!

Initially I was slightly worried about the painting we would be showing Years 1, 2, 3 and 4. The Figure (1955) by Roger Hilton is not the easiest of paintings to explain. Follow this link to see for yourself: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/figure-14566. I thought we might end up with a lot of blank faces but I was wrong!

After our starter resulted in some very bizarre and funny faces, Jane from the Royal Cornish Museum unpacked the carefully transported painting and showed it to the class. As soon as she asked them what they thought almost every hand flew into the air. The responses we got were amazing, ranging from the general agreement that it was “weird” to the stunning descriptions of “a half remembered figure” and one of my particular favourites “a pirate from Malta”. The children saw “wine glasses” and “chicken legs”, a “space man hat” and “a face on his t-shirt”. It was impressive to see their minds at work and their responses were definitely more creative than my original interpretation that it was a dog, sitting on a book on a chair… I think I’ll stick to writing about books; becoming an art critic is probably not a career path for me! By the time Year 3/4 started writing we realised it was a pretty talented group. The stories they came up with were so imaginative, funny and beautifully written. I cannot wait for them to be displayed so everyone can enjoy them and the children can show their parents.

When we started the next session, the painting workshop, we were again impressed with the skill and inventiveness, this time of 5-7 year olds. They took to the idea of mismatched faces at once and there was a lot of giggling as they decided their portraits would have arms coming out of the head where the ears should be or an ear for a nose or huge eyes. At the end of the session, the final pictures were stunning and the classroom even escaped relatively unscathed by our artists. Some really captured Roger Hilton’s style and others were finished with such care and detail you would never realise how young the painter was.

Overall we were treated to a fantastic day at Mawnan Primary School with some talented and creative kids who definitely thought about Cornwall and art in an interesting way and encouraged us to do the same. The final pieces of artwork and creative writing were fantastic and will be on display at the Royal Cornish Museum between the 17^th and 22^nd of November.

By Kathryn Clark

T.S. Eliot was one of the first poets to take cities seriously. By the time Eliot published his first collection of poetry in 1917 he was living in London, and it is often London that provides the focus for his poetic eye. Eliot was from St Louis, USA, and he had studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne, before going to finish his PhD at Oxford in 1914. He hated Oxford though, deeming it provincial and the university faculty to be dully predictable and tasteless. He soon came to spend as much time in London as possible and the city filled his imagination.

For Eliot, London was not simply a city; it was the city. It contained multitudes: symbolising both the heart of the literary world in which he desperately wanted to belong (and soon would) and the decadent state of a Western civilization. In Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), it was the latter, envisaged as an ‘Unreal City’, barely holding together the fragmented and moribund lives of its post-war and apparently post-religious populace. However, in the mellowed imagination of Eliot’s later children’s poetry, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), London’s leafy, genteel streets are a playground for Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, Bustopher Jones, and Cat Morgan.

When I think of Eliot’s London though, I think of the young Eliot – he was just 26 when he moved to London — wandering the streets as a stranger uncertain of his future. The first poem in his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), is titled ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and it focuses on one such wanderer. Prufrock walks the ‘half-deserted’ backstreets of the city at night in an ecstasy of unrequited love. He is a flaneur – a wanderer in the city who watches its people and takes in the atmosphere — drawn to the dark underside of the city which contrasts starkly with the bourgeois interiors in which he is more at home. To be precise, Eliot’s poem focuses on a flaneur but it is not a poem about being a flaneur. Rather, it is a poem, at least in part, about a flaneur who is not walking the city streets. The poem begins with these lines:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question….

Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’

Let us go and make our visit. (1-12)

Eliot’s repetition of the arrested entreaty (‘Let us go’) along with the jarring metaphor (‘etherised’ – meaning to be artificially rendered unconscious) in Line 3 indicate Prufrock’s inability to go out with gay abandon into the streets that so compel him with another person: ‘Only one is a wanderer; two together are always going somewhere’ to borrow a line from Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Sharing his night time walks through the city is a fantasy that Prufrock can never realise. We know that Prufrock is a flaneur when alone because Eliot offers a tantilising glimpse at this side of his life, as Prufrock imagines how he might address his beloved:

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…    (70-2)

Perhaps to experience the tawdry and erotic sights of London’s night time backstreets with his would-be lover would simply be too intimate or perhaps he wants to put her on a pedestal above such scenes as Soho has to offer. Either way, Prufrock takes refuge instead in the mannered meetings with her ‘over the taking of a toast and tea’, never daring to tell her about the scenes of narrow streets at dusk that haunt his imagination. In Eliot’s companion poem to ‘Prufrock’, ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, the title character also fantasises about initiating a new freedom with her unnamed lover out in the streets:

— Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,

Admire the monuments,

Discuss the late events,

Correct out watches by the public clocks.

Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks. (36-40)

Stifled both by awkward English tea ceremonies and her illness, such an adventure is rendered as unrealisable in ‘Portrait’ as it is ‘Prufrock’. Whilst the streets offer the longed-for possibility of sexual liberation and intimacy, the poetic eye is held inside the apartment, in stasis.

In unpublished sections of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ Eliot’s narrative does trace Prufrock’s wanderings alone in the streets of London:

   In the fan of light spread out by the drugstore on the corner

Then I have gone at night through narrow streets,

Where evil houses leaning all together

Pointed a ribald finger at me in the darkness.

Whispering all together, chuckled at me in the darkness. (13-17)

These lines, from a deleted section titled ‘Prufrock’s Pervigilium’, imbue the street with a menacing life of its own. Here, personification – typical of Eliot’s evocations of the London streets — reflects Prufrock’s lascivious guilt: he is scolded by the ‘ribald finger’ for his fascination with these houses of prostitution. Perhaps this section was excised by Eliot to distance himself from the Decadent verses of those such as Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons, which often focused on the flaneur’s impressions of the city streets. But perhaps Eliot’s primary desire was to remove his readers’ means of escape from the poem’s claustrophobic interior spaces. We, like Prufrock and the eponymous lady of ‘Portrait of a Lady’, desperately want to escape the formalities and patterns of life inside to go out into the streets, to become a flaneur in a city which is teeming with possibilities for liberation from convention and decorum.

Our poster for ‘From a Cornish Window’ is ready, and looking beautiful. Thanks to our former student Elle Romaine, who has created this fantastic design. Click here to book for our forthcoming talks: http://beinghumanfestival.org/event/cornish-window/

‘From a Cornish Window’ Poster

This is the view which greets me at 9 am on Friday mornings. I teach academic skills workshops all day in a little room, Seminar B of the Daphne du Maurier building at the University of Exeter, Penryn Campus. It is tucked away from the other seminar rooms, and not on any map (apart from the fire exit plan – the way I first found my way to the classroom). The workshops cover the foundations of scholarly work: how to start researching texts and cite the relevant sources; the fundamentals of close reading and analysis; beginning archival and historical research; engaging with visual culture and performance. It can sound like dry work – struggling to understand the demands of an alien referencing system: where to put the commas, colons, and full-stops; the speechmarks and the italics – but, for me, it is a privilege to assist young adults’ first steps into a community of scholarship.

But let’s look at that view: the full-length windows of the Daphne du Maurier building offer a sweeping panorama over the campus, across Penryn, towards Falmouth and the sea. It is early morning, so only a trickle of students and staff flow between the Stannary refectory and the original Tremough House. This beautiful building dates back to the 1700s, and housed a Catholic convent school from 1943, before the university campus took over 10 years ago. The lush greenery of the Tremough gardens carries the eyes over to Penryn, a small town which has been flooded with new life from the overspill of students from the campus. Eclectic, bohemian, increasingly multicultural Falmouth lies beyond. The sea glimmers in the distance. This view takes in the business and busy-ness of a developing university campus, still intimate but more and more diverse; a small town transformed by its contact with the world of study; and an old, international seaport forging new connections with academia.

In Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1906 miscellany From a Cornish Window, the title of which inspires our mini-festival ‘From a Cornish Window: Individual, Landscape, Community’, he describes the view from his own window:

My window… looks out from a small library upon a small harbour frequented by ships of all nations—British, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Russian, French, German, Italian, with now and then an American or a Greek—and upon a shore which I love because it is my native country. Of all views I reckon that of a harbour the most fascinating and the most easeful, for it combines perpetual change with perpetual repose.

Quiller-Couch’s combination of a perspective rooted in locality, in love for his native country, with international reach – fascination with ease, change with repose – informs both the work of Penryn Campus, a world-class university in the heart of Cornwall, and our own view ‘from a Cornish Window’: a mini-festival forging connections between local institutions, the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro and the Cornish Studies Library in Redruth, and an international community of scholars, thinking about our imaginative responses to living by the sea; our poetic connection to landscape; the familiar spaces of our homes and faces; and living amongst crowds in cities transformed beyond our understandings.

Welcome to the ‘From a Cornish Window’ blog. Over the coming weeks, we will be blogging about the research which goes into our public talks, which will take place in November at the Royal Cornwall Museum and the Cornish Studies Library. We will be talking about literary and cultural representations of the sea, the landscape, portraiture and domesticity, the city and the crowd, as viewed from Cornwall, and also from a more national and international perspective. We will be thinking about how looking at the world ‘from a Cornish window’ connects Cornwall to these wider currents of thought, and vice versa!

We will also be sharing our experiences of the schools workshops, encouraging primary and secondary school children to make artistic and creative responses to objects and texts which inspire our work. The results of these workshops will be displayed both on the website and at the Royal Cornwall Museum. The RCM will also be hosting a related exhibition and accompanying trail.

We are excited to collaborate with the venerable local institutions of the Royal Cornwall Museum and the Cornish Studies Library, and with local schools. We look forward to welcoming you to view the world ‘From a Cornish Window’!