Miscellaneous Musings on Shakespeare and Bishops

July continues apace.

Shakespeare in the Quad

After apparently endless weeks of  sweltering heat, the weather finally changed yesterday, and Oxford is once more cold, wet, and overcast - just as I like it!

Actually, yesterday morning was beautiful - a glorious morning after a night of rain, it was cool, crisp, and bathed in benign sunshine.  As I walked to my new favourite breakfast spot I felt positively la Bourboulian!

The week past started with a highlight - Sunday evening I went to 'Shakespeare in the Quad', where the Royal Shakespeare Company perform plays in the central quad of the Bodleyan.

A friend who works in the Bodleyan and knows about things had invited me, and I hoped I could finally make some headway with my Shakespeare scarf theatre challenge, which I had started in 2014 - see link and photo below.

But I was not to be so lucky - the play we saw - 12th Night - is not featured on the scarf.

The setting was absolutely stunning, and one had the feeling that this was exactly the sort of setting the Shakespeare himself would have utilised.

The performance of the play was, frankly, weird - I felt confused the whole time.  It was not possible to prepare oneself, as the choice of play had been left to the audience, who was invited to shout out at the mention of their preferred play.  This took about ten minutes.  The final choice remained a mystery to me until about half way through the play - the acoustic of actors standing on the side furthest away from me was not good, and the actor who announced the title of the chosen play was standing in an auditory blindspot (so to speak).

As a result I continued to analyse the play in three tracks - was it 12th Night, The Merchant of Venice, or the Taming of the Shrew?  Each theory had something to support it, especially since I had only a vague notion of the contents of each play.

My confusion was not helped by the choice of actors and actresses.  Men played women, young people played old people, black people played white people, and ugly people played beautiful people.

I am not sure to what extent all this was planned by Shakespeare, and I am not wasting my time finding out!

The most exciting part happened half way through the play, when a woman fainted and the play had to be stopped to give her medical attention.  Having opined to my neighbour that I didn't think the play was bad enough to warrant a physical breakdown of this nature, I used the opportunity to go to the loo - first in the queue! - and to quiz other viewers on what the heck we were watching.

Despite my non-enjoyment of the play, I am happy to report that other people seemed quite happy with, including the reviewer sent by the Oxford Times, whose review I link below, so you can gain a more balanced view of the play.  S/he went on Tuesday, not Sunday, but the content and performance of the play was probably the same, minus the fainting incident.

Shakespeare-scarf-theatre-challenge



Oxford Times review-twelfth-night-shakespeares-globe-on-tour-at-the-bodleian-library-oxford-impressive-celebration-of-sexual-and-other-confusions/

Bishops in the Church of England - Peter Ball

So what else happened?  I have been following with great interest the news reporting about Peter Ball, the disgraced Church of England Bishop, now doing time for having sexually abused young men and boys.

Now, people in authority who abuse the trust people put in them by sexually assaulting them seem to be a dime a dozen these days, but this case interests me particularly because I actually met this man in the early 1990s.

The chaplain of my college was a lovely man, and humble to a fault.  He considered himself to be too poor a speaker to give the Sunday Evensong address, and always invited other people to do so in his stead.  After Evensong there was dinner in Hall, and then we met up in the Old Library for coffee and a discussion of the talk given by the guest speaker.

I always enjoyed these occasions, because it provided the opportunity to ask all the questions I had to suppress during the sermon - one isn't allowed to ask questions in chapel, you see.

I must have attended almost a hundred of such events, because I continued to go even after I had completed my studies.  But Peter Ball stuck in my mind, because this was an instant where I immediately and instinctively took against someone who I was supposed to like and admire.  Mind you, I was in good company - the only other person who disliked this man was the wife of the chaplain, who also attended the event.

Peter Ball was already a bishop when I met him.  He came across as aggressively humble and sanctimonious, the sort of person who makes a big deal out of being no one special.  My thoughts ran along the lines of, If you really are so insignificant, how did you manage to become a bishop?  Why play this dumb game with us, can't you just own what you are?

I ask a few questions about his sermon, which was about us having to be humble and forgiving and get along with others - wasn't that an open invitation for others to run rough-shot over us?  His response was more sanctimonious drivel, which was backed up by one of his new acolytes, who quoted something from the Bible where lions would stop eating lambs and eat grass instead.  My point that this would kill the lion because he didn't have the stomach needed to digest grass was dismissed as in the wrong spirit, and I slunk back to my skeptic corner in deep disgrace.

But now the chaplain's wife took up the cudgel, and I realised how intelligent and combative this lady, who usually stayed in her husband's shadow, really was.  She assailed Peter Ball with numerous passages from the Bible, and even had the audacity to voice my unspoken thought that one didn't get to become a bishop by being humble and turning the other cheek.

It was quite a meeting, which is probably why I remembered the name of this bishop, despite my notoriously bad memory for names.  The experience continued to niggle at me, and when the name of Peter Ball started to crop up in the news in connection with sexual abuse I was both deeply shocked - because I did not expect that sort of moral bankruptcy! - and vindicated - so my instinct was right after all.

Frankly, I find it incredulous that Peter Ball's colleagues in the church, not to mention Prince Charles and other members of the establishment, were so completely taken in by this man.  They knew him for many years, I only met him once - yet I immediately sensed that he was fake, yet they believed his sanctimonious drivel?  Granted, it was not obvious to me that he was a sexual predator, but he certainly came across as untrustworthy, and definitely not as bishop material!

Bishops in the Church of England - Richard Hare

Lest you think I have an issue with bishops, I also met a most remarkable and admirable man during these college religious events, and that was Richard Hare, then Bishop of Pontefract.  I immediately trusted him, despite being an atheist at the time, and after we had a little chat after everyone had gone he asked whether he might give me his blessing, and I gratefully received it - my one and only blessing.

If you are interested, I post his obituary in the Church Times below:

The Rt Revd Dr Colin Buchanan writes:

THE Rt Revd Richard Hare, who died on 18 July, aged 87, was one of the most colourful and unforgettable bishops of the 20th-century Church of England.

Born in 1922, he was of age to do war service in the RAF, although he finished his training as a pilot just as the war finished; afterwards, he took an Oxford degree in philosophy, politics, and economics, before he joined Hugh Montefiore and Robert Runcie in both studying at Westcott House, and being ordained to a curacy in Newcastle diocese.

After serving as chaplain to Bishop Greer in Manchester, he served as a young canon residentiary in Carlisle, and then, in 1965, as a young arch­deacon in the same diocese. As far as I gathered from him, he remained a cool, respectable, mainstream West­cott high churchman.

It was that man, still under 50, whom the Bishop of Wakefield, Eric Treacy, summoned in 1971 to be Suffragan Bishop of Pontefract. For reasons set out below, there he was to remain for 21 years. He would later report how Bishop Treacy had been 20 years older than he; Treacy’s suc­cessor, Colin James, had been his contemporary; and James’s suc­ces-sor, David Hope, had been 20 years his junior — but he had loved and served them equally. And, however controversial he may have become to others, his diocesans could not but love and respect him deeply, too.

In the early 1970s, Richard gained an astonishing public front. This arose from a life-changing experi­ence early in his time in Wakefield diocese.

As he described it, it was some­thing like this: “I found that, along­side the public worship of the church, there were Charismatic prayer groups meeting in various places. I found my way into them. They looked some­what astonished and sceptical that

a bishop should appear amongst them. They asked me why I had wanted to come. I told them that God had two main ingredients of revival — one being the wind of God, the other being the dry bones; and I had come to contribute the dry bones. And I received the wind of God.”

He emerged as extrovert and hallelujah-singing, unembarrassed by any kind of God-talk, and with an opportunist eye and bouncing energy. He hardly accorded with average ex­pectations of a bishop; but he had many years still in front of him — and, the Church of England being what it was, he was going to remain in the see of Pontefract until he retired. He had ceased to be “safe”. Although some traditionalist Anglo-Catholics in Wakefield parishes now found him uncomfortable, other doors of ministry opened to him all over the country.

He had become an unashamed, ebullient Charismatic. Each day, he revelled in the joy of the Lord, and ensured that all around him got the message; and this uncalculating step­ping on the spiritual accelerator encouraged thousands — for, if a bishop need not be trammelled in his love of the Lord, why need any­one? So, through him, the C of E began to offer hope even to the most restive of the renewed.

He became an unofficial epis­copal patron to the Fountain Trust in the mid-1970s, and took up a similar role for St John’s College, Notting­ham, where I was on the staff. He confirmed Tom Smail (a former Church of Scotland minister who be­came director of the Fountain Trust), and later preached at his ordination in the chapel at St John’s. “See”, he said, “what a ripe plum has fallen into the lap of the Church of Eng­land” — but he had helped to pluck it.

Nevertheless, the colourful public figure whom many saw was far from all there was to the man. Richard spent many of his Wakefield years as Diocesan Director of Ordinands (in that capacity he was frequently on our college premises), and his pas­toral care and sustaining of contact with his ordinands was outstanding.

He was in the first batch of suf­fragan bishops elected to the House of Bishops when that synodical op­portunity came in 1975, and con­tributed memorably and often amusingly to the Synod. He had in­stant recall, and could repeat whole pages of verse — and even prose — after a brief perusal. This gift per­meated and enriched his preaching.

Similarly, he could conduct an ordination service without reference to the book, and accurately name 30 confirmation candidates, not only when laying his hands on them, but also later when administering com­munion to them.

While he sought to walk with God in each part of his life, he also had a family pride in his great-grandfather Thomas Hare, after whom he was named.

This Thomas (1806-91) had been a friend of John Stuart Mill, and originated proportional representa­tion by the single transferable vote, based on the “Hare quota”. He quite possibly led the Church of England indirectly into its own later adoption of this fair-voting system, by marry­ing as his second wife the sister of Edward White Benson, and dining regularly with leading ecclesiastics. Richard Hare came three years ago from Cumbria to name the Electoral Re­form Society’s offices in South­wark “Thomas Hare House”.

Richard had remained a bachelor until he was past 40. He was then wonderfully repaid for his earlier restraint by finding and marrying Sall. They lost a first child soon after birth, but he is survived by three children and seven grandchildren.

Sall, with Richard, made their home in Sandal a place of great hospitality and refreshment. When Richard retired, they moved back to the Lake District, where he had many ties, not least through his having been in 1974 a founding trustee of the Calvert Trust, a Lake District pro­vision for active holidays for the physically disabled.

Sall died in 1999; and he then lived on his own, becoming lame in the legs, but with never a limp in his spirituality. He deliberately orientated his ministry in retirement to be one of constant encouragement to all who came his way. He officiated at the weddings of each of his three children, and baptised each of the seven grandchildren, the last one only days before Richard died.

He was God’s gift to the Church of England as a great Christian leader, but he was also a wonderful, timely joke whom God had bestowed on us all with an indulgent smile.