Sitting on my new couch, purchased to replace the three year old futon which got too stiff and slanted for my old back, I was reading Margaret Atwood’s recent memoir of this name, hard to put down because of 1) its transparent prose style 2) the out-loud laughs its humor continually elicited 3) my love for  her books as they appeared during the 1970’s when we were newcomers to Canada and 4) its references to people I had met (Bev Howard Gibbon) and places I had been or been involved with (North Bay, Camp White Pine) and later, the Northrop Frye archive at the University of Toronto.

But when I came across her mention of an obscure place not in Canada but in Provence, France, where she’d stayed in 1971, I stopped reading and started remembering:

Mention of this location, the scene of gatherings of  superstars of British and French Cinema, brought me up short. “Grimaud” has remained in my porous memory ever since I spent two days there in Summer 1962, age 20, nine years earlier than Atwood and her husband. It was  at the summer home of Frank Green, another famous British film personage, together with my ephemeral traveling companion, Sarah. Not wanting to lose hold of that passing interlude, I described it in a letter to my parents shortly afterward which they kept and gave me in my 50’s in the packet they’d saved, that I scanned and copied into this blog  during the 2010’s, and today converted from script to the text below, using Google Drive and Macmail applications.

[transcribed with Google Drive] And no amount of retracing steps, grubbing through burning sand, etc. would be of avail. What to do again? We started to hike to the nearest town with the intention of going to the Gendarmerie, telling our sob story and refusing to leave till they thought of something to do. But as the car in  which we hitchhiked into town stopped in front of a scooter repair shop, I thought better of the project, of our Independence, the humour of the situation, the fact that since our luck couldn’t be any worse it had to change for the better. I told the mechanic what had happened, asked if he were good safe cracker, rode back with him to the scene of the crime, smashed the lock and returned with Lambretta to pick up Sarah and get some breakfast. When I arrived at the shop a man was there with a rickety old car and two children with whom he spoke English. I asked him for a light and started a conversation. Sarah charmed him and within 5 minutes we were good friends, invited for lunch, a shower and shave and rest with his family in a little villa in the middle of town he had been renting for vacation. It was Manna from heaven for us. After freshening up, we both felt like new people, joined the family and found that Frank Green, an Englishman, was the freelance producer of a very good film which Benny had told me about–The Day the Earth Caught Fire– had a wonderful family, lived on a shoestring, and was as happy to have us as guests as we were to be them. I suspect that he fell slightly in [transcribed from spoken word to text in Macmail] love with Sarah. After lunch, the Greens invited us to let the scooter rest for a day, accompany them to a delightful little beach on the coast where they always went and that very few people knew about, have dinner with them and stay over to get a fresh start in the morning. After swimming in the Mediterranean one wants to swim nowhere else. The town of a Grimaud where we stayed was perched on a hill topped by the the untouched ruins of a ninth century château, overlooking more hills, farm land, and sea coast. We talked long into the night with the Greens and the next morning after a delicious breakfast set off for  Aix-en-Provence to try to get in to the festival performance of Don Giovanni the same night.

The name of the individual featured in Atwood’s account, Rick Salutin, also rang a bell.  Someone we must have known in the late 60’s, early 70’s at Columbia, Camp Wabikon, or Vancouver.  Jan suspected that he was the person who’d interviewed us in New York for the summer position we’d applied for  in northern Ontario as a way to escape the City and the Country after having quit our jobs and University apartment and reduced our possessions to what could fit into the Ford Econoline van prepared as a mobile living space.  Her web prospecting revealed that as a grad student, radical Rick was involved with the Columbia strike and with Gordy Wolfe, the Toronto based Director who’d revived the shuttered old summer camp with staff from Camp White Pine and who hired us at Rick’s recommendation as Drama and Nature counselors at the start of our nine-year residence in Canada.

This scholarly article from 1999 quotes and analyses the personal acknowledgements in the Preface of Youth Against Age, the 1985 book version of my dissertation, which was completed 1981, fifteen years after it was started. The relevant passage is found on page 265 of the article.

Abstract

The Droeshut and Chandos portraits, two familiar images, embody two contrasting representations of Shakespeare in Ben Elton’s  biofictions, Upstart Crow and  All is True.

The Droeshut engraving evokes the comic TV sitcom character played by David Mitchell.

The resemblance is short of literal, belied by the presence of a beard absent in the engraving, but richly suggested by the bulbous forehead and receding hairline, topic of a running gag throughout the series.  The actor’s typically bewildered expression conveys what some authorities have found to be a clownish cast in the image.  John Dover Wilson called it “a pudding faced effigy.” Northrop Frye said it makes Shakespeare “look like an idiot.”

The Chandos image renders the melancholy film character played by Kenneth Branagh. The resemblance of images here is unmistakable, confirmed by facial hair and costume, by inclusion of the portrait at the opening of the film, and by Branagh’s statements in interviews that this was his intent and inspiration. Nevertheless, the large prosthetic nose and angry eyes convey a much harder expression than the serene watchfulness of the oil painting. The discrepancy prompts the film viewer to collaborate with its producers in fleshing out a dark view of what Shakespeare’s late years in Stratford might have been like.

This essay explores these correspondences in light of encryption theory, an analytical framework derived from computer science, semantics and evolutionary psychology.

Encryption involves “an oblique method of communication” that entails a relationship between the surface content of an utterance and an unstated “implicature,” or key, which is known by both the sender and the receiver, and without which the intended meaning of the message cannot be understood.

In formal encryption, the key resides in a secret code that translates the surface message to the intended one. Formal encryption functions to restrict access to the meaning of messages requiring confidentiality and validate their truthfulness.

Rhetorical encryption encompasses injokes and allusions. The key resides in unstated information shared by members of an in-group and unknown by others. Rhetorical encryption functions to create intimacy and trust among sender and receivers and sensations of pleasure, self-esteem and bonding attendant upon privileged access to information.

In Upstart Crow, the encryption consists of injokes and allusions with distinct but overlapping keys for lowbrow and highbrow audiences of the show. Elton has appealed to both in a genre-crossing-career as standup comedian, actor, director, lyricist, and novelist, employing both crudeness and sophistication.

Upstart Crow often portrays Elton’s fictional writers and actors encrypting injokes and allusions and his fictional audiences enjoying or disdaining them. On this level, it references Shakespeare’s own habit of metatheatrical representation, including staging plays within a play, role-playing, and disguise.

In All is True, the encryption consists of allusions informed by literary and historical scholarship, sympathetic responsiveness to Shakespeare’s texts and subtexts, and an intention to elicit sympathy and tears rather than ridicule and laughter. Consistent with its focus on the poet’s later life, it employs the tragic-comic narrative arc of the last plays and the ironic demand for suspension of disbelief conveyed in its title.

On Oct 31, 2025, at 6:36?AM, Shormishtha Panja <[email protected]> wrote:

Dear Steven

How are you?  I hope this finds you well.  I heard from Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury Publishing) yesterday about  the volume Shakespeare/Image for the Arden Shakespeare Intersections Series to which you so generously agreed to contribute an essay.  Unfortunately the editors regret that they cannot go forward with the project.  I quote from the excerpt of the reviewers’ comments sent by Arden: “It does not engage with recent and current debates… about how cognitive diversity, identity politics or digital technologies are changing how Shakespeare signifies, or is re-presented, as ‘image’ and across visual media….”

The reviewers do appreciate the fact that the volume brings together young scholars and senior ones from all across the globe but that is clearly not enough.  I thought that that was the volume’s greatest strength, bringing together academics not just from Spain, Germany, Italy, France, UK and USA but also from China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Turkey and India.  I have not come across such a truly global range of academics and theatre practitioners in any other Arden volume.

I know that you share my disappointment at this outcome.  I do hope that you will go ahead and write that fine essay Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow and All is True of which you sent an abstract.  I am sure that it will find a home in a journal and an anthology of repute.  I learned so much about Shakespeare traditions across the world just by reading your abstract and those of other scholars. It has been a pleasure to interact with you as always, and I am sure that our paths will cross again in the future.

Thank you again for your patience, co-operation and friendship.

Warmly,

Shormi

Shormishtha Panja

Former Professor of English

Department of English

University of Delhi

India

We breakfasted in the basement of Hotel Gama Stan whose walls and vaults formed part of the ancient City walls.

Further under ground on the way to City Hall, we rode an escalator 100 feet down to the Kungstradgarten Subway station

and were astounded by what we found down there:

We got the requisite portrait at City Hall.

While Jan stayed at the cafe, I roamed the grounds that I recognized from the Hendrik Willem Van Loon alphabet book I’d treasured as a five year old.

As an inscription in it shows, my parents rescued the battered volume and gifted it to our daughter Claire when she was 9.

I rented one of the ubiquitous Lime electric scooters, planning to ride to a beach along the shore a couple of miles away for a swim. But I soon lost heart because of the traffic and confusing road alignments and walked over to check out one of the Culturfest events:

Jan and I reconnected in the mid afternoon and agreed to visit the National Museum. We wound our way through the ever more crowded streets filled with young Swedes whose beauty appealed to my art conoisseur’s eye.

We arrived with just enough time to catch some highlights before it closed for the day.

Over the entrance we both found the PreRaphaelite mural by Carl Larsson visually appealing  but  bizarre in subject. “Midwinter Sacrifice” portrays a legendary naked king being willingly beheaded for his subjects by a red-cloaked priest in the effort to end a famine. Inspiring ongoing controversy, it was removed and then returned over a period of several decades.

Only briefly distracted, we hunted down the less controversial, but no less affecting Rembrandt portraits of youth and age.

With only a half hour or so left, we came upon the featured exhibit entitled “Hannah Hirsch Pauli, The Art of Being Free.” We both loved the work and the life story of this relatively unknown Swedish painter (1864-1940) who came from an assimilated Jewish family, spent several years in Paris with the Impressionists, married an artist and bore children, lived a sane and productive life and died before being exiled or murdered by the Nazis. Like Rembrandt’s, I particularly liked her portraits of Youth and Age.

This image of fulfilled exhaustion befitted our mood as we left the museum and hiked back to Kungsradgarden for dinner in a cafe neatly tucked in a tight grove of linden trees.

Somewhat refreshed, we braved exuberant crowds gathered before the Opera House to hear a concert by a big star we didnt know, but whose lyrical enthusiasm I greatly enjoyed.

Jan and I again parted ways in front of the Royal Palace, she on her way back to the hotel and I in search of one last taste of mainstream Culture that I wished the one I was returning to in the morning was more like:

As I stood with the crowd, my phone dinged notice of a text from Jan.  It was a picture and the caption, “Best dessert I’ve ever eaten.”

It felt liberating to be on our own for the last two days in this City we had come to love.  To reach the coffee shop arranged to meet Ruth, Jan’s undergrad roommate, we took a pleasant busride through neighborhoods inhabited by locals, all of which gave evidence of an extensive and prosperous middle class.

Ruth was late so I left Jan waiting and walked up the hill in a nearby public park which offered wide views

and the preserved structure of the Stockholm astronomical observatory, built in the mid 1700’s at the behest of the Swedish Academy of Sciences which included major researchers whose names are still familiar like Celsius and Linnaeus.

Back at the coffee shop, Jan and Ruth were deep in reminiscence and catch-up.

After graduating Stanford in 1967, she had opted to move to Sweden, gone to medical school there, became a specialist in oncology, married a fellow physician and pharmaceutical executive, and recently retired.

Her husband, who had come along to the coffeeshop, invited me to visit their nearby apartment, in the middle of major renovation but still notably comfortable.

Jan and I returned downtown to retrieve our suitcases and walk through the steadily increasing crowds assembling for “Culturfest,” a weeklong festival of free concerts at multiple outdoor venues. We arrived at Hotel Gamla Stan, relieved to check in to the modest room overlooking an ancient alley.

Refreshed by a siesta, we crossed the street, found a restaurant and sat at a table again overlooking the water. Before we had a chance to order, a shabby-looking fellow and two sidekicks entered the terrace and set up instruments. Then he started to sing

At that point we stopped thinking about food, captivated by his voice and personality. The large respectable looking party sitting nearby sang along with him.

And people along the quay outside the restaurant gathered to listen and shoot video.

During a brief set break we ordered from the waitress and I asked who is this guy.  “Tommy Nilsson,” she said, “Look him up.”

That I did, and on the iphone popped this:

and this

Next morning, after loading up on the Scandinavian staple of pickled herring and lox, our small group assembled to meet the local guide, Gaby, a former high school history teacher, who spoke with knowledge and enthusiasm.

After passing a synagogue built in 1870 and apparantly not destroyed by the Nazis, she stopped at at a memorial honoring slain Jews and the gentile Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who risked his life to provide safe passage to people fleeing the murderers throughout Europe. After the Allied victory in Europe, he was imprisoned by the Soviets and never heard from again.

The prostrated figures reminded me of the memorial in Vienna I saw last year.

Next, with no waiting necessary, we boarded a comfortable electric bus headed toward the Vasa Museum.  It houses a huge sailing ship that sank in Stockholm harbor in 1628 and was salvaged almost fully intact 333 years later.

It was commissioned by King Gustavus Adolfus, who at the time was fighting wars with Denmark, Russia, and Poland-Lithuania,  a nation  ruled by his cousin and Sweden’s former king who’d been exiled during wars of religion because he was Catholic. “Richly decorated as a symbol of the king’s ambitions for Sweden and himself, upon completion she was one of the most powerfully armed vessels in the world. However, Vasa was dangerously unstable, with too much weight in the upper structure of the hull. Despite this lack of stability, she was ordered to sea and sank only a few minutes after encountering a wind stronger than a breeze.”*

Just as memorable as that story was the one of the sunken ship’s discovery in Stockholm harbor and its recovery and restoration between 1961 and 1990 presented in the museum’s film theatre.

A tiring walk through the crowded streets of Gamla Stan, the well preserved old section of the City

ended with a short ferry ride back to the harbor

and dinner in a cafe served by cheerful young waitstaff,

and return to our opulent hotel room.

Arriving in sunny Stockholm, I was energized by the luxury of the room we were assigned at the Hotel Kungstradgarden, complete with a large chandelier reflecting moving lights on the walls and 12 foot ceiling.  Originally an adjunct to a royal palace, it was renovated recently to retain its 18th century decor.

Its location on a little sloped plaza allowed us to reach the King’s park in minutes and stroll  down  a treed alley to the harbor.

We scanned the waterfront in search of an optimally situated restaurant to take in the spectacular views. Across a graceful stone bridge and surrounded by palatial buildings we saw a treed terrace with tables and umbrellas jutting into the water. Wary of long flights of steps, we found a cylindrical outdoor elevator accommodating those with knee issues.

At a table by swiftly flowing tidal currents we realized that this City, like Venice, was an archipelago equally composed of land and water.

A panorama of majestic buildings adjoining the King’s Park spread across the opposite bank, the  most imposing being the Royal Opera House, perhaps, I surmised, in competition with those of Copenhagen and Oslo.

Behind us and beyond the bridge stood the austere but elegant royal palace.

And across the road from the elevator rose the less fortress-like parliament building.

On the way back to the King’s Park, we noticed a young man fishing.  As in Oslo, we were told, all the waters here were clean enough for angling and swimming.

Fabled Scandinavian design was evident everywhere, from a brightly colored local church

to the sculpture of lamposts and lions

From Jan: 

Sick in bed, poor Steven completely missed seeing Bergen.

So, I set off bravely on my own. First I went to the Bryggens Museum.  I was blown away by the unique tapestry series “Åsmund Frægdagjeva” by Ragna Breivik.

These ten magnificent tapestries created by Norwegian textile artist Ragna Breivik were woven over a period of more than 25 years. She dyed the wool with natural dyes, spun it and wove the tapestries on a loom of her own design, on display at the museum.

The tapestries are based on the medieval ballad of Åsmund Frægdagjeva, who rescues Princess Ermelin from trolls in Trollebotn where the sun never shines.

These visually stunning woven images reawakened my long ago love of  Viking and Icelandic sagas–as retold in medieval poetry and storytelling traditions–when I studied them in my Comparative Medieval Literature MA program at Columbia.

The story begins as many fairytales do: the fair princess has been captured and imprisoned in a faraway castle, and the King commissions a hero, in this case Åsmund, to rescue her.

He and his brothers take the King’s flagship vessel to the castle of the ogre, where the princess is imprisoned.

He finds the princess walking through the castle, and immediately falls in love with her. But she, under a spell of the ogre to believe that he is her mother, will not leave with Åsmund.

He then takes her by force. On his way out, the ogre appears. They fight a long battle both physically and with curses and spells, but Åsmund eventually kills him.

The princess being free from the spell, they plunder the castle and return home with all the ogre’s treasure.

Next I headed to the Hanseatic Museum.  I was excited to see the well preserved historic Bergen headquarters of the Hanseatic League. A whole block of wooden buildings dating back to the Hanseatic era, comprising no less than 62 buildings, has been preserved.

This was a thrill for me because as a student I had studied and explored several of the ports dominated and operated by these 13^th Century merchants from Northern Germany. They sailed into Bergen to exchange grain for stockfish from Northern Norway. Their trading activities made Bryggen and Bergen one of Northern Europe’s most important trading hubs for the next 400 years.

The Hanseatic League, using the power of the purse, supplanted the kingdoms and governments of Germany and Norway. The Bergen seal symbolizes this shared governance, half German heraldic eagle and half “King Codfish.”

The Hanseatic trade routes went as far West as Greenland and as far East as the Holy Land.

The tour’s itinerary included a railway trip to Flam, an outpost at the head of a fjord on the super-rugged west side of Norway.

The route followed a steady ascent from sea level through farmland up to 2800 feet at Myrdal, a mountaineering, hiking and cross country skiing area where glaciers are visible nearby in midaugust.

There one changes trains to the Flamsbana, a railroad enthusiast’s classic operation that descends along a hair-raising right of way down to the fjord

At one point the train stops briefly at a tiny curved bridge crossing  over a wild cascade

Through the windows one sees the rushing river and numerous waterfalls

interspersed with isolated farms and homesteads, many inhabited for centuries

At the terminus, after walking through a riot of tourist shops, we arrived at a rustic-styled hotel fronting on a cruise ship wharf thankfully unoccupied during our overnight stay

I felt a cold coming on and stayed in through through dinner, but next morning took a walk on one of many trails surrounding the village.

I had to cut it short to board another ferry that  carried us for the rest of the day through inland waterways

and for a short while in the open ocean to the historic port of Bergen. Again under the weather — now gray skies and intermittent rain–I went back to bed and slept until the next afternoon’s flight to Stockholm, while Jan explored the City’s preserved heritage of the Hanseatic League, established there by Germans in 1350.

A morning boatride around the harbor along with the tourist hordes we joined

preceded departure on the overnight ferry, including sleeping cabin, for Oslo.

Another literary association brought the significance of this passage in view. It was the location of The Surgeon’s Mate, the seventh in the Aubrey-Maturin series of 21 novels by Patrick O’Brian I’ve become addicted to.  Set during the Age of Sail and the  Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800’s, these blockbuster books have been called “the greatest historical novels of all time.”

The often narrow passage between Denmark, Sweden and Norway, control of which has been contested since the Viking age, provides the only sea access from the Atlantic and beyond to Germany, Eastern Europe and Russia.

At at a table in the congenial bar on the rear deck I noticed a man writing notes on a pad next to a thick book stuffed with multicolored stickies.  Aha,  I thought, an academic! Despite fifteen years since retirement from the profession, I felt no reluctance in striking up a conversation.  It turned out he was a professor of African-American studies, working on his third book.  His wife was heading a Social Work program, and they were riding up to Oslo and returning to Copenhagen the day after arrival.

Jan joined us for a heated happy conversation, and next morning we exchanged hugs and contacts. But I’ve lost the information.  It was another of those travellers’ meetings, sufficient in itself, reminding me of the phrase I had learned from our tea ceremony host in Japan in 2010: “One life, one encounter.”

Upon arrival in Oslo, we were greeted by the local guide, a moonlighting building contractor who hailed from a village north of the Arctic Circle, hired to lead a City tour. Regaling us with sordid gossip about the Royal Family, he drove us in a van to the out of town hilltop location of an Olympic ski-jump training facility–not a place of pressing interest for me–and then to  a reputedly world reknowned sculpture park exclusively featuring the work of Gustav Vigeland. It was impressive to be sure, but left both of us cold. The last stop was the Fram Museum, containing the preserved ship built and led for the first successful expedition to the South Pole in 1911 by Roald Admundsen. Wandering upon and below decks vaguely recalled the account of that trip and the brilliant heroics of its leader that enthralled me in the 1952 Landmark book and affirmed that positive aspects of the Viking spirit have remained.

After checking in at the portside Radisson Hotel reserved by the tour, we searched for a place to eat in another jam packed and very expensive tourist district. We ate  falafel pita at a dirty sidewalk table and ended up crashing early.

Again the selected luxury hotel offered a lavish breakfast leaving behind mountains of food waste. However, it did offer advice on how to behave sustainably.

Before departure to the train station, I explored some of the new monumental buildings at the waterfront, including another Opera House, financed by Norway’s vast North Sea oil production.