Nick Asbury

White Hart Red Lion: The England of Shakespeare's Histories

Nick Asbury

To this day The White Hart and The Red Lion are two of the most popular names for a public house in England – both talismans that served as the insignia for Richard II and the banished Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, who usurped the throne in 1399.Nick Asbury acted in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s famed Histories cycle which staged Shakespeare’s vision of the deposition of Richard II through to the notorious Battle of Bosworth in 1485. With fellow RSC actors for company, Nick travels the country visiting the buildings, landscapes and former sites of war and intrigue that feature in the plays, and asks the question: what is it about the England of Shakespeare’s Histories that continues to fascinate? From Alnwick to Eastcheap, Windsor Castle to a Leicester car park, this is his snapshot of England and its people, then and now.‘John Shakespeare, William’s father, was an Ale Taster before he was a glover and luminary of Stratford-upon- Avon, so in his footsteps I and my travelling players will be exploring the hostelries and byways of an England forged on the battlefields, triumphs and betrayals of TheHistories: on the one hand, Red – be it a pub or bloody Rose. On the other hand, White – be it the alabaster tombs of broken Princes or the quill of a playwright from Stratford-upon- Avon.’‘This bloody MG is so light it’s like driving a roasting tin. At the next turning, forewarned this time, I make the corner cheering victoriously and drive straight into a snow driftft that could swallow a bus let alone the mid-life crisis that is this MG. It turns out I am in the one area where it is as bad as they say it is. I dig myself out and reverse back on to the mainroad, all the time thinking life would be much better on a horse.’‘England, the tolerant bearer of religion that was the flower of the Northern Renaissance, was fast becoming a useless fist clothed in an old glove. It was fighting a war abroad, the cause of which it was not party to, and the execution of which was undermined by in-fighting at home. Plus ça change.’‘Geoffrey and I are swept like pooh sticks into Rouen. The road keeps tumbling down and the one time we want traffic lights to stop us, to catch our breath and to establish where we are, is of course the one time we are carried along on a river of green. We swoop into thecentral town square over cobbles that surely can’t be for everyday access, and on a hunch we turn right, only then realising that our hotel is in front of us and we have arrived. It’s the most remarkable entrance to a town I have ever made. We haven’t stopped once fornavigation, traffic lights or junctions and yet here we are.’

Exit Pursued by a Badger: An Actor's Journey through History with Shakespeare

Nick Asbury

We are engaged in performing four shows by night and restaging four different shows by day. And restaging all the understudy work as well. This is a lot of work. And my mind has turned to slush.Nick Asbury was in the ensemble from the Royal Shakespeare Company who, over the course of two and a half years, performed eight history plays by Shakespeare in repertory, beginning with the overthrow of Richard II and ending with the death of Richard III: a sequence of productions both critically acclaimed and watched by over 250,000 people. To keep a record of his involvement in this extraordinary and ambitious project, Nick wrote a Blog which was posted on the RSC website. This in turn became a massive success, regularly notching up 6,000 hits a week from avid followers around the world. Through Nick's engaging, observant, often hilarious words, we experience the camaraderie of actors, the terror of forgetting lines, technical difficulties, money problems, finding strange things in the bath, thirty-three broadsword fights and, and, of course, the ever-present threat of being assaulted by demented badgers after a performance.Nominated as one of 'Six Inspiring Biographies or Memoirs Every Actor Should Read' by Drama Bookshop New York, this really is a must have book for all actors and theatre fans.