JOHN  TURNBULL,  director,  introduces  the  play
1613 was a momentous year for William Shakespeare. A year after the first production of his last solo-authored play The Tempest (which we shall see later this season) he appears to be living in semi-retirement, and according to The Herbal Bed, declining health, in Stratford-upon-Avon. There he will have received the news that the Globe Theatre had burnt down on June 29th, set on fire by a spark from a cannon used in the production of his co-authored Henry VIII. He may have been working on The Two Noble Kinsmen with John Fletcher.

Stratford was a small market town with a population of only about 1,500. It must have seemed a quiet and conventional place compared with the crowded bustle and filth of Southwark and the hedonism of King James’s Court, which had a distinctly homoerotic flavour. But who knows what private passions lurked beneath the little town’s calm respectability?

The Puritan faction was gaining ground in the Church of England, though the King had sided with the bishops and the "high church" party. Roman Catholics were highly suspect after the Gunpowder Plot, and morality was strictly enforced by the Church courts, the "bawdy courts" as they were known. Public penance and humiliation was the price for sexual transgression, and people, especially women, regularly sued each other for casting aspersions on their reputations.

The events in Herbal Bed are from the sixteenth century but it is not a play about the sort of history that you may have read about or studied even though the characters are real people, shown here with a truthful representation of life as lived.
The GWT last presented a Whelan play, The Accrington Pals, set in the trenches of the Somme, in 1983. It is high time we saw some more from this gifted writer.

But it must have been a bombshell for Shakespeare when his married daughter Susanna was publicly accused of infidelity and of having venereal disease. The story was spread by a young gentleman, Jack Lane, who asserted that she "had the runinge of reynes and had been naught (meaning "naughty") with Rafe Smith".  Rafe Smith was a married local haberdasher, well known to the family.

The scandal would have been all the more serious because Suzanna was married to the respected local doctor and herbalist, John Hall, some years her senior.  We know a lot about his practice which he recorded painstakingly in his Casebook. In an age when medicine was on a watershed between superstition and science, with a hefty dose of country folklore thrown in, some of his cures seem bizarre (involving spiders’ webs and sliced radishes), others ahead of their time.

He seems to have adopted something of a scatter-gun approach to prescribing, in the hope that at least one of the ingredients of his complicated remedies would work. Sometimes he resorted to the tried and tested: after his herbal concoction failed to cure his wife of the colic, he "injected" (sic) her with "a pint of sack made hot", which seemed to do the trick!

A doctor was an important person in a community which lived in constant fear of disease. The plague killed up to 200 - one seventh of the population - in Stratford in the second half of the year of Shakespeare’s birth, 1564, and was still raging. It closed the theatres in London for four out of the first six-and-a-half of King James’s reign, which could explain why Shakespeare was spending more time in Stratford. And if the plague didn’t get you, the "pox" might.  Venereal disease was rife, and as the play suggests, Shakespeare might himself have been suffering from the "nameless" affliction. There are hints of this in some of the Sonnets, and of an earlier scandal which may have attached to his name.

Although Will seems to have been somewhat less than faithful to his older wife Ann Hathaway, it is the theme of unfaithful wives and false accusations which is a recurring one in his later plays, such as The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, as well as that of self-imposed exile in Timon of Athens. So too are the themes of fathers and daughters as in The Tempest and especially  in Pericles, written in the year Shakespeare’s only granddaughter Elizabeth was born.

Peter Whelan’s play, based on these true events, was commissioned for the RSC and first performed in 1996. Set in the garden of the Halls’ home in Stratford, which still stands today, it is a love story, a courtroom drama, a moral thriller, and a fragrant evocation of life in Shakespearian England.

BILL  BRAY  introduces  Peter Whelan
Born in the potteries in 1931, Peter Whelan began writing when he was almost 40.  After National Service and university, he worked in advertising and several other jobs for over ten years before writing Captain Swing, a study of the agrarian unrest which swept parts of England in the 1830s.  Staged in 1978 starring Zoe Wanamaker and Alan Rickman, this was the first of seven plays written for the Royal Shakespeare Company, including The Herbal Bed which transferred from Stratford to the West End and Broadway in 1996. 

It would not be wrong to categorise Whelan as a writer concerned with historical themes, but he is more concerned with the lives of individuals, rather than the broad sweep of history. As director and writer Dominic Dromgoole put it in his book The Full Room: "Most writers, when they delve into the past, use it as a shortcut to myth. Everything is suddenly battles, romance, large-scale oppression or revolution. Whelan's characters are more likely to go shopping."

The events in Herbal Bed are from the sixteenth century but it is not a play about the sort of history that you may have read about or studied even though the characters are real people, shown here with a truthful representation of life as lived.

The GWT last presented a Whelan play, The Accrington Pals, set in the trenches of the Somme, in 1983. It is high time we saw some more from this gifted writer.