Q & A with Robert Fripp

Welcome to On the Tudor Trail Robert! Could you share with us a little about yourself and your background?

Thank you, Natalie. Well, I suppose I have a Gothic, rather than a Tudor, background. One of the best ways for a boy to get a good education in 1950s’ England was to win a choral scholarship into one of the big cathedral choirs. I tried out for Westminster Abbey, and Salisbury Cathedral. I was a short-listed reject at Westminster Abbey (which meant I didn’t get to sing the Coronation), but I won a place at Salisbury. That got me five years of chanting, singing and reading sixteenth century English (good practice for writing Dark Sovereign), as well as a good education.

Ten years later I went with my American fiancée back to New York, where we got married. Just in time, because the American Army decided it could use a British immigrant for cannon fodder in Vietnam. So we packed our newly acquired Land Rover and headed north to Canada. That was in 1965. We, and the Land Rover, have been here, mostly in Toronto, ever since.

When did you first become interested in the life of Richard III?

That’s easy. 1983. By then I was the series producer of CBC Television’s investigative series, The Fifth Estate. As an investigative producer and journalist the Richard story fascinated me: Here was a guy who had served as a very handy butt for negative Tudor propaganda through a full century before William Shakespeare laid hands on him and wrote him down again for a Tudor queen.  And the story stuck! Amazing, and shocking to a journalist who values accuracy in reporting.

Dark Sovereign by Robert Fripp

‘Dark Sovereign’ is a modern play written in the English language, as it was available to William Shakespeare. What inspired you to write this play?

First and last, I was figuring out how to correct a flagrantly abused chunk of mis-history. How to go about doing that was a massive intellectual challenge. I did a lot of thinking, from journalistic, communication and PR points of view, before I decided how to act. Plenty of books by worthy authors have maintained Richard’s relative innocence while making next to no impression on public opinion. The only communications vehicle that keeps Richard in the gutter is Shakespeare’s play, a hugely successful piece of negative propaganda that has overstayed its usefulness by four centuries.

It didn’t take long to realize that the only vehicle that might make a dent in the credibility of Shakespeare’s play would be another play, a good play, closer to historical truth, and written in the English language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In short, “Dark Sovereign” is intended to compete directly against the other fellow’s baggage, in his own language.

Do you have particular actors in mind for a stage adaptation?

I dare not let names slip. One agent, in Toronto, is hard at work, and a second in London. Their primary goal may be to get a production, and let the producers chase the talent. Or, as you suggest, maybe they want to land appropriate stars and let them help chase up a production. It works both ways.

Your play has been described as, ‘the result of painstaking research and remarkable patience’. Tell us a little about the process you followed when researching Dark Sovereign.

My composition of Dark Sovereign is—to the syllable—precise. It is written in the vocabulary, idioms and syntax in written use between about 1579 (Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia) to precisely 1626, in which year “the last great Tudor,” Francis Bacon, died. This interval of forty-seven years—in reference to Dark Sovereign I call it “the Period”—marked the renaissance of English letters. Every word in Dark Sovereign, each syllable, word-sense, expression, verb ending, tense and function, as well as word order, metaphor and construction patterns, are present because I found precedents for them in written English before the year 1626.

Here is one specific example of linguistic precision in this play: Both words in the phrase ‘salt tears’ date from Anglo-Saxon times. So, was I free to use that phrase? Not necessarily. I had to prove to myself that those words had combined to form that phrase before 1626. That meant I had to leave a blank in my manuscript for months before finding ‘salt tears’ in a translation by John de Trevisa, circa 1385. (Months later it leapt from a page in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)

Why did I insist on syllable-to-syllable accuracy? Because the odds against achieving the ring of authenticity when writing an antique tongue are enormous. Early in the four year marathon of crafting Dark Sovereign I stumbled on a sentence by Ben Jonson. Commenting on Edmund Spenser’s attempt to emulate Geoffrey Chaucer in The Fairie Queene, Jonson suggested, “Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no language.” I couldn’t afford to make the same mistake. Hence the rigorous limits I imposed on myself throughout the text of Dark Sovereign. I reduced the odds against myself. In a real sense this play is an authentic Period piece that could not have been written later than the year 1626.

Do you believe that both of Edward IV’s sons perished in the Tower of London or is it possible that Richard, Duke of York, survived?

Even Rumour, the third speaking character on stage in Dark Sovereign, isn’t sure whether the princes are alive or not. Standing beside their bed she says: “If these [two murderers] were ghosts, / their work was woven of the many’s mind, / and you shall live long years beyond tonight. / Be you in this world, or in another, brothers, sleep! / It is not given me to understand / whether this work [possible murder] were done, or no.”

There is a good possibility that a controversial theory proposed by Jack Leslau is correct: namely, that Hans Holbein the Younger painted the princes, as young men, very much alive, into a portrait of Sir Thomas More’s family. Holbein’s portrait, moreover, is full of visual clues, rebuses that he would not have painted into the canvas without his client’s instruction. Such things were dangerous, especially during the reign of Henry VII. I still have a cutting of that story from an airmail edition of The Times, written by Geraldine Norman (25th March 1983).

I might put less faith in Leslau’s theory if I didn’t have evidence of Sir Thomas’s independent fondness for rebuses—in at least one written example. I discuss this in a footnote during the scene in which Hastings meets his end.

Have you visited locations associated with the characters in your play?

No. Although I grew up in the South of England I have been living in North America since 1965. My wife and I retain my late parents’ home in Dorset, but we spend most of our visits to the U.K. keeping up our house and garden! I am more familiar with places associated with Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose memoirs I wrote under the title “Power of a Woman”—in modern English, I hasten to add!

What book/s do you recommend for people wanting to learn more about Richard III and the Wars of the Roses?

Remember that I started writing “Dark Sovereign” in 1983 and finished, with the exception of one scene, in 1988. Therefore you will not be surprised that many of my reference sources were written to mark Richard’s anniversary in 1983. Copies of several of the “Ancient sources” were kindly loaned to me by the late Michael Powicke at the University of Toronto.

Ancient sources:

Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland, London, 1854.

Mancini, Dominic, The Usurpation of Richard III, Oxford, 1969.

More, Sir Thomas, More’s History of King Richard III,

Pitt Press Series, Cambridge University Press, 1883.

Vergil, Polydore, The Anglica Historia of Polydore Virgil.

Royal Historical Society, Camden series, lxxiv, 1950.

Modern sources:

Gairdner, James, History of the Life and Reign of Richard III, Cambridge, 1898.

Hanham, Alison, Richard III and his Early Historians 1483-1535, Oxford, 1975.

Ross, Charles, Richard III, English Monarchs Series, Eyre Methuen, London, 1981.

St. Aubyn, Giles, The Year of Three Kings 1483, Atheneum, New York, 1983.

Williamson, Audrey, The Mystery of the Princes, Alan Sutton Pub., Gloucester, 1981.

Seward, Desmond, Richard III England’s Black Legend, New York, 1984*

*I read this, but do not recommend it. Seward seemed more eager to justify or vindicate Thomas More’s account of Richard III, than to establish his own independent judgment.

Share with us a favorite quote from your play.

“The law’s a sword, an iron thing and cold.
She cuts no deeper than the might of him who would uphold her.”

ON EXCESSIVE TAXATION:

“Thievery sans law is theft;
and theft, all have it benefit of law,
is tyranny.”

ON THE SPIRIT WITHIN:

“I am the darkness in thee, Lord.
I am thy soul of light.”

ON THE SLEEPLESS CARES OF KINGSHIP:

“Endue our mind with that affair, which,
ringing in our night-stopp’d ears,
doth murder care-bestriding sleep.”

ON THE SEDUCTIVE POWER OF WOMEN:

“If chastity be sorcery
there’s many a woman’s a witch
for many’s the man bewitched withal!

TRUTH DESCRIBES HER TWIN SISTER, RUMOUR:

“…she was my sister, Rumour.
I am Truth. Where she is gaudy, I am plain.
Where she would put impediment to history,
I, without dissembly, answer truly,
when the course gives me to understand.”

RUMOUR DESCRIBES HERSELF TO THE AUDIENCE:

“I, friends, am Rumour. Ye still still tell my fames:                            [s. s. = constantly]
Men say! They say! ’Tis said! Holla, now you discern me:
I am each man his concubine, the envy and report of every she.
I am whatever company I keep.”

DOES THE WILL OR REASON MAKE A CRUCIAL DECISION?

“Whether doth the Will or Reason urge me fasten on occasion of this night
to sway the rule on England? If either door gaped wide,
mankind would wholly righteous be – or damn’d.
How stony is the way ’twixt Reason and the Will,
to judgment.”

A DESIRE FOR VENGEANCE:

“Dearth reward the doing of it; death revenge the act;
the Devil pick the scraps!”

ON GLORY:

“Glory! Thou art neighbour’d by the Gordian knot
we humains labour ceaselessly t’unloose,
to find in fine thy kernel mortified as stone.”

ON THE CONSEQUENCE OF FOLLY:

“A doubtful enterprise is through and throughly folly’s way
…which men infirm of conscience may not turn,
but if to carry to their end,
impell’d to be impal’d on grief.”

ONE DEFINITION OF OLD AGE:

“Ah me, when youth seems yesterday,
when yesterday’s forgot, this then is age.”

A VARLET’S LAMENT:

“On my grave they’ll ’grave the epitaph…
He fetch’d.
And he fetch’d
Until God did him fetch.
Here lies Thomas, fetch’d up,
His old life fetch’d again.”

Visit Robert’s official website here.