WRITERS AND ACTORS - THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT

The 22^nd September is rather a mixed bag for me. It marks the end of the 60’s. That is to say I am 69 today and am entering my 70^th year.  Not sure what to make of that, but there are various things theatrical which occurred on this day. To wit:

On the 22^nd September 1598, the playwright Ben Jonson killed an actor in a duel and was indicted for manslaughter. He was not  stranger to difficulties with the law. In 1597 a play which he co-wrote with Thomas Nashe, The Isle of Dogs, was suppressed after causing great offence. Arrest warrants for Jonson and Nashe were issued by Elizabeth's so-called interrogator, Richard Topcliffe. Jonson was jailed in Marshalsea Prison and charged with "Leude and mutynous behavior", while Nashe managed to escape to Great Yarmouth.

A year later, Jonson was again briefly imprisoned, this time in Newgate Prison, for killing another man, the actor Gabriel Spenser, in a duel on 22 September 1598 in Hogsden Fields, (today part of Hoxton). Tried on a charge of manslaughter, Jonson pleaded guilty but was subsequently released by benefit of clergy, a legal ploy through which he gained leniency by reciting a brief bible verse (the neck-verse), forfeiting his 'goods and chattels' and being branded on his left thumb. In 1598 Jonson produced his first great success, Every Man in his Humour. William Shakespeare was among the first cast.

It appears history does not relate what the duel was all about, but it is not too difficult to image what might bring a writer and an actor to blows. There is a scene from All About Eve (1950) which demonstrates the problem.  Note the dialogue between actress Margo (Bette Davis) and  writer Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe).


Continuing with matter entertaining, on 22 September 1910, the Duke of York’s Picture House opened in Brighton, and is now the oldest continuing operating cinema in Britain; and on the 22 September 1955 the UK television channel ITV went live for the first time.

I also share this birthday with the following: Erich von Stroheim (1885), John Houseman (1902), Joseph Valachi (1903), Arthur Lowe (1915), Dannie Abse (1923), Rosamunde Pilcher  (1924), Fay Weldon (1931), Ann Karina (1940), Nick Cave (1957), Andrea Bocelli (1958), Bonnie Hunt (1961), Rupert Penry-Jones (1970) and my ‘twin’ Marlena Shaw born in 1942. Here she is with a rendition of a Ramsey Lewis number.