Counting to a hundred …

I’m fully aware I neglect this web-site. And that inertia has been greatly exacerbated by the inability to operate wordpress through a Safari browser.

Still, I’m seeking a way to fill space and occupy time.

I’m going to emulate, and I hope improve the multitude of webpages which tell us, with one or another level of credibility, the hundred books we all should read. Correction there: there cannot be a canonical list of the books anyone should read. My choice is subjective, the result of sixty years as a reader (and before that it was Biggles and worse). Give anybody a decent library, and turn that individual loose, to choose and reject.

Most of those definitive efforts are wholly vacuous. A dead give-away is listing both Hamlet and the Complete Shakespeare. I’m not convinced I’ve done the second of those — it was only in the last year or so I attended a performance, and then read the text (which was significantly different) of The Two Noble Kinsmen. I’d argue that one is as much John Fletcher as yer ackshul Uncle Bill Shagsper.

But let me get him out of the way to start.

1. Julius Caesar

I give this one priority because it was the first that really ‘got’ to me. 

I’d been fed Midsummer Night’s Dream in a mixed-class at Fakenham Grammar School (now defunct, for good or ill). Perhaps it was all those fairies that were supposed to ‘sell’ this to a captive audience, but it didn’t ‘sell’. Only decades later, when a daughter was doing that play for A-level, did I go back and have another try. That’s when I came across the editorial suggestions that MND is a deep political satire. Which opens a proverbial can-of-worms — but that wasn’t presentable to early adolescents.

Then, for Irish Leaving Cert, we had to do a deep-ish study of Julius Caesar. Which meant learning large chunks of text. This time it all came together. If ever a play was made for all times and all societies, it’s this one. The characters are well-defined. The issues are authoritarianism, ambition, loyalty and opportunism. Assassination is a blood sport that constantly interrupts the flow of history. The structure of the play is impeccable: it fits Freytag’s pyramid precisely:

2. Antony and Cleopatra

I swear if you cut me, I’d bleed A&C. I had to teach it to two groups in two college years. That meant for sixteen hours a week I lived and breathed it. Without realising, I can still place much of the text, even to a particular page of the New Arden edition.

I’d maintain one of the funniest scenes in all Shakespeare is the one on Cleopatra’s tomb (the close rivals for that distinction are the two ‘assisted suicides’ in J.C.) . I could never read those without corpsing.

Judy Dench once reckoned the most difficult speech in all the corpus was Cleopatra’s ‘O!’ — and she does it repeatedly.

For sheer political cynicism there’s always Antony in J.C. and Octavius in A&C.

You may notice I don’t list any of: 

• King Lear, which is based on the most eccentric pretext of a decaying monarch dividing his kingdom, has plenty of gore, includes the (unconscious) hilarity of the cliff-top scene, and comes with a truly gooey ending.
• Hamlet, if only because Omlette is far too complex for my mind (or those of the many critics) to fully comprehend. On top of which the treatment of Ophelia is even more gynophobic than Katerina in Shrew (for which, see below).
• Macbeth, because the play is so incomplete it barely holds together (we clearly have the shortened version, for royal entertainment mainly). I cannot truly engage with any of the characters — each is incomplete, and lacks real depth. The witchery is too crude for words. And I’ve had to teach it to the unwilling far too often.

3. Kiss Me Kate

Fair enough, unlike the above, not really a text.

It is, though, so wonderfully structured it is exemplary.

Kate/Katerina/Lilli is a remarkable part, and demands an equally-remarkable actor. In the original, in 1948-9 on Broadway and then in London, she was [Eileen] Patricia Morison — just one generation out of Belfast, and feisty with it. I saw the 2001 London transfer (after 9/11 did for Broadway) with Marin Mazzie and again the 2012 Chichester transfer, with Hannah Waddington.

To make the thing work, Kate/Lilli has to be in control all the way through — something the Kathryn Grayson/Howard Keel MGM movie doesn’t consistently achieve.

There was a magnificent moment, one worth borrowing, in the 2013 Toby Frow Globe production of Shrew which made the whole farrago make perfect sense. In the first meeting of Katerina and Petruchio they exchange a mutually-knowing look (Beat … Beat …), as if each is recognising a worthy opponent.

And, with Kiss Me Kate, there are always the superb lyrics of Cole Porter.

Now, on with the motley, and some fiction …

To the Elephant

I once reckoned Shakespeare named several inns.

The Boar’s Head

This is the best recognised, the usual resort for Falstaff and his cronies.

Hold it right there: the two references in II Henry IV are only in stage-directions (II.iv and III.iii) and similarly a stage direction in II Henry IV (II.iv). A bit earlier (II.ii) in II Henry IV, there’s a cryptic reference:

PRINCE HENRY: Where sups he? doth the old boar feed in the old frank?
BARDOLPH: At the old place, my lord, in Eastcheap.

This allusion, says A.R.Humphreys, editing the now-discontinued Arden text:

is the nearest Shakespeare comes to naming the Boar’s Head Tavern — ‘the olde Taverne in Eastcheap’ of F[amous] V[ictories of Henry V — i.e. the ur-text ].

Humphreys then quotes from Shakespeare’s England; an Account of the Life and Manners of his Age, a source-book from 1916-1917 which has been ruthlessly pillaged, often without attribution, ever since:

This famous hostel … was on the N. side of Gt. Eastcheap.  … The tavern abutted at the back on St Michael’s in Crooked Lane, and was just where the statue of William IV now stands.

However, says Humphreys, further pillaging that source:

There is no evidence that it existed in Henry IV’s time; the first reference to it as a tavern dates from a lease of 1537.

Malcolmian aside

Oh, and by the way, don’t go looking for the statue in that location. When the King William Street traffic was sorted (You think? Never travelled on the Route 43?) in 1936, the sailor king was shifted to Greenwich Park. Worth a visit, because, if approached from the left side, William’s telescope could be misinterpreted.

The miscue might be suggested by William’s curious sex-life. He shacked up with Dorothea Bland, a.k.a. Mrs Jordan, an actress from Waterford. Together they had a brood of at least ten children, all illegitimate, and collectively (from the father’s title) the Fitzclarences.

To alleviate his debts with a parliamentary subscription, William was induced into a legitimate marriage to Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, from whom the Australian city takes its name.

Other named Shakespearean resorts

One play that didn’t, just didn’t appear on school syllabuses was Measure for Measure. It was treated as a ‘problem play’,  not just because of the sexual theme, but because its structure is dodgy, and no-one is wholly convinced it’s a ‘comedy’.

In Act II, scene i Pompey, servant to Mistress Overdone, is interrogating Froth, a foolish gentleman, before Duke Angelo:

He, sir, sitting, as I say, in a lower chair, sir; ’twas in the Bunch of Grapes, where indeed you have a delight to sit, have you not?

The Bunch of Grapes is a generic name for boozers — and this one is implied to be a low dive:

this house, if it be not a bawd’s house, it is pity of her life, for it is a naughty house.

In The Taming of the Shrew, Act IV, scene iv, Tramio encounters ‘the Pedant’, outside the house of Baptista. ‘The Pedant’ claims a previous association:

… but I be deceived Signior Baptista may remember me,
Near twenty years ago, in Genoa,
Where we were lodgers at the Pegasus.

The Comedy of Errors has Antipholus of Ephesus telling Angelo to rush home and collect a chain that will be a way of seducing mine hostess there:

Get you home
And fetch the chain; by this I know ’tis made:
Bring it, I pray you, to the Porpentine;
For there’s the house: that chain will I bestow —
Be it for nothing but to spite my wife —
Upon mine hostess there: good sir, make haste.

Finally, in Twelfth Night, Act III, scene iii, we arrive at one that we ought to be able to locate. Antonio is none too keen to be seen in the streets because of ‘previous’ with Duke Orsino. He passes his wallet/purse to Sebastian and tells him:

Hold, sir, here’s my purse.
In the south suburbs, at the Elephant,
Is best to lodge. I will bespeak our diet
Whiles you beguile the time and feed your knowledge
With viewing of the town. There shall you have me.

Which, too often, the schoolmen try to associate with the Elephant and Castle, in Southwark. Just down the road from the South Bank and Shakespeare’s Globe. After all, The Globe was put up around 1599, and Twelfth Night dates from a couple of years later.

That Bill Shagsper would have needed a hostelry in the neighbourhood.

Too convenient, I fear.

The Elephant and Castle would, indeed, have been a coaching inn, serving routes to Kent and the south coast: it sits conveniently at the junction of the modern A2 (the Dover Road) and the A3 (the Portsmouth Road). Unfortunately there is no record of a pub of that name, at this site, before the reign of George III.

Those medieval misericords and choir-stall ‘poppyheads’ include several elephants. The earliest seems to be at Exeter, from around AD1240. There’s another at Manchester, and one at Chester. The latest, early sixteenth century, is down the road here at Beverley Minister — but better is the elephant in Beverley’s St Mary’s Church. All derive from medieval bestiaries.

That takes us to the liveried companies, each of which would have a strong church connection. In the late sixteenth century the Worshipful Company of Cutlers was granted a crest: an elephant bearing a castle.

There was, it seems, a cutler’s shop nearby — and that’s a better origin than various perversions of La Infanta de Castilla, for one or other royal bride.

But here’s an off-the-wall thought

Georg Ludwig became George I, King of Great Britain and Ireland, by default:

• his nominal religion fitted the job description;
• cousin Anne spawned regularly, but none of her brats made it to adulthood. Even William, Annes’ son and the Great Protestant Hope, fell foul of meddling medics, shuffled off his mortal coil, aged eleven, and so provoked the Act of Settlement, 1701;
• the Scots were suborned by English threats of trade embargoes to go along with a continued joint monarchy (the Act of Security, 1704);
• a whole catalogue of uncles, who would nominally have preceded him, disqualified themselves by premature deaths, failures to produce male heirs (that dratted Salic Law, which prevented Little Vicky getting Hanover) and penchants for boyfriends;
• mother Sophia (by most accounts, quite a bright lady) pegged it a few weeks too soon;
• nobody came up with the idea of a potion to squelch Georg and the Hanoverian males, and so improve the royal gene pool, and tgive his sister, Sophia Charlotte (another bright lady, who had to settle for being Queen of Prussia) a clear run.

So Georg got his regal crown by Anne’s death (1 August 1714). It took him until 18 September to show up in England, with a company of eighteen cooks and — note this — two mistresses. He never learned to speak English, which suited his Whig ministers very nicely, thank you. To show their gratitude the Whigs amended the Act of Settlement to allow Georg leave to make repeated trips back to Hanover.

The Elephant and the Maypole

Georg had particular tastes in his female company, all on the ‘substantial’ side. Arlene Foster would have been in with a chance.

The very-political marriage to his cousin Sophia Dorothea, then aged just sixteen (another bright lady) was — shall we say — ‘open’. She was short of avoirdupois, and a bit of a looker, which is more than any image of Georg ever managed to convey. She resisted the marriage as much as she could, and fainted when she was introduced to her prospective groom. Sophia Dorothea, scorned and neglected, formed an over-close attachment to dashing Swede Philip Christoph von Königsmarck (and his saucy and revealing letters to her became public knowledge). Sophia Charlotte and Philip Christoph were on the point of flitting off, when he was cruelly done down by the court guards, and she was whisked off to spend the rest of her life in captivity. On her death-bed she cursed Georg, and predicted he would die within a month: he obliged.

Georg’s tupping-list included Sophia Charlotte von Kielmannsegg (as right: and that would be a posted up image), the married daughter of his father’s mistress — and, to common gossip, thereby his own half-sister. The sexual relations between Georg and Sophia Charlotte were always formally and firmly denied: but the courtiers knew and chattered about the bedroom goings and (err) comings.

Sophia Charlotte came wholesale, a large lady: hence, when the English were able to snigger, ‘The Elephant’.

The ‘official’ mistress was Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg, by whom he had three illegitimate daughters, all to be awarded titles. Melusine acted the part of Georg’s spouse, but — to those sniggering English detractors — was ‘The Maypole’ (by the look of her portraits, only because she was a whit less gross than ‘The Elephant’).

There was, it seems, a risqué line about Georg and Sophia Charlotte: ‘the king in his castle’.

 Sarf Lunnen humour could easily twist that.

Lightening a grim day

I dozed off early (Neil Gaiman can be as soporific as Mr. MacGregor’s lettuce). Only in the early hours did I hear of the Manchester horror.

So, come this morning, it was good to have some light relief:

Catty uncornered

Years ago, we were doing the chateaux of the Loire, and stopped off at La Flèche.

Just as we were moving on, a dispute broke out between two authentic French ladies of certain years. Madame A’s lap-dog had taken offence at Madame B’s cat. The cat had taken refuge in the nearby tree, and was spitting down at the dog.

The cat was not coming down. Words were being exchanged.

The aid of les pompiers was called for.

The first stalwart arrived on a bicycle, with what looked like a window-cleaner’s ladder. Too short. An appreciative audience was growing.

The next reinforcement was a small van, with a longer ladder. The boy apprentice was sent up the ladder. The cat headed higher. The quite considerable circle of on-lookers were warmed by such an act of resistance,

Finally, the full panoply of les sapeurs-pompiers de La Flèche showed up with a resplendent red carriage and extendable ladder. Cheers all round.

As the ladder was being raised, the cat came scampering down the tree, and was quickly purring in Madame B’s bosom.

Excitement over, we headed on our way.

Doggy doo-dah

Perhaps it was on that summer trip we composed the game to entertain young daughters along the kilometres of routes nationales.

The dog on a string is a frequent feature, wherever one goes.

We established that every French dog had to come in one of three types: rat, rug or demi-cheval. Because the daughters, even at that early age, were perceptive creatures, very quickly those simple definitions were not enough. Depending on size and hairiness, long disputations ensued to determine a ratty-rug from a ruggy-rat.

No: I do not claim ownership of this entertainment. We simplified it from Macbeth:

Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves, are ‘clept
All by the name of dogs: the valued file
Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,
The housekeeper, the hunter, every one
According to the gift which bounteous nature
Hath in him closed.

Sheer Rattiness

When canine distinctions palled, we reverted to the on-going rat-wagon competition.

Those were the days when progress along any route nationale could regularly be impeded by being stuck for long periods behind a trundling and corrugated Citroën van. There were after all the better part of half-a-million of these.

Doubtless those which are not serving moules avec frites along the Belgian coast, or gussied up as crêperies on London’s South Bank, now serve duty as chicken hutches.

Not only were such automotive slugs obstinately slow, they had an even greater propensity to rust than any Lada or Kawasaki.

A true rat-wagon had to be not just rust-streaked (they all came that way) but pitted and — preferably — see-through.

So we designated local champions, provincial champions, and — at the end of the trip — a national champion.

Ulster’s “New Men”, 1610

Here I am again, slip-sliding gently towards a promise on Sir John Poo Beresford, (1766–1844).

Getting there involves getting my mind around the Beresford family, and that was where I was starting.

New Men

What was in my mind was how the Ulster Plantation represents another dimension of the “New Men” of the Renaissance and its aftermath.

The conceit starts in ancient Rome. A novus homo would be, precisely, the individual, the first person in a previously-undistinguished family, elected to the Senate.  Seneca, in Epistle XLIV, laid down the rules (or lack of them):

… who is well-born?  He who is by nature well fitted for virtue. That is the one point to be considered; otherwise, if you hark back to antiquity, every one traces back to a date before which there is nothing. From the earliest beginnings of the universe to the present time, we have been led forward out of origins that were alternately illustrious and ignoble. A hall full of smoke- begrimed busts does not make the nobleman.  No past life has been lived to lend us glory, and that which has existed before us is not ours; the soul alone renders us noble, and it may rise superior to Fortune out of any earlier condition, no matter what that condition has been.

The notion was serially revisited by Boethius (a civil servant under Theodoric), Dante (whose background is cloudy), Petrarch (son of a lawyer), and Chaucer (a background from Ipswich shoe-makers). It regains currency in the Italian fifteenth-century, and the ideas are current in Elizabethan England.

Enter the Beresfords

Another point of departure was John Lodge, The Peerage of Ireland, revised by Mervyn Archdall, vol 2, pages 296-7:

Tristram Beresford, Esq., the third son, was born before the year 1574, and coming into Ireland as manager for the corporation of Londoners, known by the name of the society of the New-Plantation in Ulster, at the time they made the plantation in county of Derry, in the reign of James I, settled at Coleraine in the coiunty of Londonderry, having issue by the daughter of _____ Brooke [*] of London, two sons and three daughters, viz:

(1) Sir Tristram, his successor.

(2) Michael of Dungarvan and of Coleraine, Esq., who was constituted, with his brother, and others, commissioners in the precinct of Derry, for examining the delinquency of the Irish, in order so the distinguishing of their qualifications for transplantion; and in 1654 he was sheriff of the counties of Derry, Donegall, and Tyrone, of which he was also a commissioner of the civil survey and revenue. He married Mary, daughter of Sir John Leake, Knt. and by his will, dated 5 July 1660, directed his body to be buried in the church of Coleraine, in his father’s sepulchre, which was done accordingly; and he had issue by her, who was buried at Temple-Patrick in the county of Antrim, one son Tristram, who died young; and four daughters his coheirs, viz: Anne, married to Thomas Whyte, of Redhills in county of Cavan, Esq.; Olive, first to _____ Thornton, and secondly to Sir Oliver St George, of Headford in Galway, Bart.; Elizabeth to captain Robert Shields; and _____ to Arthur Upton of Temple-Patrick, Esq.

(1) Daughter Anne was first married to Sir Edward Doddington, and secondly to Sir Francis Cooke, Knt, and was buried at Coleraine.

(2) Jane, to George Cary of Redcastle in the county of Donegall (descended from the Carys of Clonelly in Devonshire) and by him, who died 22 April 1640, had five sons and four daughters, viz. Francis of Redcastle (who married Avice, sister to Captain Henry Vaughan, and they both lie buried in the church of Redcastle, having had issue Francis; Chichester, who died unmarried; Margaret; Avice; and Letitia); George; Edward of Dungiven in the county of Derry, (who died 4 June 1686, leaving issue Edward, George; Tristram; Elizabeth; Mary; Anee and Jaen); Robert of Whitecastle in the county of Donegall, (who died in March 1681, leaving Robert; George; Edward; Tristram; William; Anne; Letitia and Mary);

(3) Susanna, married to _____ Ellis.

[*] Elsewhere there ‘s “genealogist” gossip which identifies her as Susannah Brooke or Elizabeth Brookes. Note the naming of the third daughter, which may help.

Already we can outline four generations, and we haven’t ventured beyond the seventeenth century.

We can start to draw some “conclusions”

The most obvious is that the leading Ulster planters were — very definitely — young men (typically younger sons) on the make.

[1] Many were sprung, like Tristram Beresford, from the London guildsmen. This again makes perfect sense. The London liveried companies were not over-pleased by having the whole plantation scheme descended on them:

When the embryo project was unveiled to the liveried companies in July 1609, and individuals invited to adventure, there was a marked lack of enthusiasm. The Mercers were perhaps the frankest. While thanking the king for his offer, they pointed out that ‘they are for the most part men that live by merchandise and therefore are very inexperienced in managing business of that nature and withal want means and ability for the accomplishment thereof. [So] this company are not willing to have a hand or intermeddle in the same’. The Ironmongers expressed their ‘desire with our best means to help the state and commonwealth, but what we would we cannot in respect of weakness’. When it came to attempts to generate subscriptions, members were curiously absent or unavailable because they were dwelling out of the city. Of the 46 men on the Ironmongers’ subscription list, 9 were absen, 10out of the city, and 2 allegedly ‘not of ability’. The story was much the same elsewhere.

[Source: Ó Ciardha & Ó Siochrú (eds): The plantation of Ulster, Ideology and practice, page 82]

Hence any overseers put in place by the London companies would be hungry young thrusters, hard of complexion and temperament.

[2] This was a new, a frontier society. The blueprint was already well-defined. It was a society of incorporated cities and boroughs, which is a prime reason why the liveried companies of London were the chosen means of delivery:

This use of urbanity for colonial purposes was not the mere product of over-ripe imaginations. Rather it was borne of experience and practice. Just as corporations were a crucial dynamic in the plantation of Ulster after 1610, so they had figured prominently in the wide-ranging social and economic reforms initiated in England since the 1540s. The origins of these reforms were many, complex and varied. However, in terms of sanction by central government, the driving force — including urban incorporation — was [Sir Thomas] Smith, [William] Cecil and other members of their sprawling Cambridge mafia who dominated the higher echelons of royal power for much of the Edwardian and Elizabeth eras. More to the point, one of the outcomes by the turn of the seventeenth century was a discernible ‘corporate system’ by which cities and boroughs — or ‘little commonwealths’, as contemporaries described them – had filled the topography of provincial England.

[Source: Ó Ciardha & Ó Siochrú (eds): The plantation of Ulster, Ideology and practice, page 69]

Consequently a main requirement imposed on the planters was the establishment of boroughs: 25 corporate towns (though by 1613 only 14 had been established — and only 16 were to happen) across the plantation. Derry was to have 200 houses, and room for 300 more; Coleraine to have 100 and room for 200 more (that came down to a quibble over what constituted a “house”) [see Ó Ciardha & Ó Siochrú, pages 84-85].

[3] The success (and failure) of the plantation was this focus on ‘urbanity’. Derry and Coleraine (the third largest borough was Strabane) may have been puny in global terms; but they were all that the planted territory could boast. Not that they didn’t do well enough:

… although they didn’t become the thriving metropoloi envisaged by the propaganda of 1609-10, they did enjoy a significant mercantile presence. Merchants from Scotland, Chester and London were soon frequenting the two ports, while as early as 1614-15 a merchant fleet of seven ships accounted for 18.5% of Londonderry’s exports. London derry boasted urban amenities not available elsewhere. Its street were paved: it had a town hall costing between £500 and £1,000; its school was founded by the London merchant Matthew Springham, its master receiving a salary of 20 marks per annum through the London Society; its cathedral church of St Columba, the first purposely built Protestant cathedral in the three kingdoms, costing at least £3,800 opened in 1633 with a capacity of 1,000 people. True, Londonderry lacked other key features found in Englishtowns: there was still no bridge; a recommendation that a bridewell should be built was resisted; and there were no almshouses: indeed there was little sign of any charitable activity at all. A key variable in determining the relative success of Londonderry and Coleraine was the fact that the landlord was directly involved in building whereas elsewhere in the plantation urban development was promoted through the granting of building leases. Urban settlements elsewhere were terribly under-capitalised.

[Source: Ó Ciardha & Ó Siochrú (eds): The plantation of Ulster, Ideology and practice, page 85]

In passing, I suffer a slight cringe over the attempt there to apply anachronistic and economic-history evaluations: “18.5%”, “a capacity of 1,000 people”, “key variable”, “under-capitalised”.

One could — in a more romantic spirit — extrapolate into group psychology. This is the earliest seventeen-century. The minds involved are still accustomed to think of social advance in terms of acquiring lands, rather than anything ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘proto-capitalist’. Just as in Virginia and the Carolinas, a century later, that kind of social position is going to be found, carving out estates in the countryside.

[4] These interlopers efficiently established themselves, and built networks — those daughters seem to have been seeded very effectively to generate a nexus of power and possession.

Note, though, as far as Beresford genealogy goes, that it is a “west” Ulster concentration: Derry, Donegal, Cavan and Galway. There is not, as yet, a social top-tier: distinctions and titles beyond mere baronet or knight are not yet present. That will come a generation or two still further on.

We can look to a precise contemporary, the glove-maker’s son from Stratford, for the definition of the “new men”. He puts the words into the mouth of Brutus, the old republican patrician, somewhat scornful of the arriviste Caesar — but they could easily apply to himself, his generation, and the aspiring and arriving Ulster ascendancy:

But ’tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round.
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend.

Easy on the madeleines

We each have triggers for involuntary memory.

I’ve just recovered some lost time.

It was a prompt from a prompt about Tesco and the Great #Brexit Threat of a Marmite Famine.

So I had to rush out and buy a pot.

Ah, but it brought back the Old Times.

For, you see, there was a time in my chequered career when “lunch” was a couple of Ryvita, with a smear of Marmite, washed down with two mugs of tea-bag tea (as likely as not, both made from the same tea-bag) — milk optional. Then back to the chalk-face.

When retirement intervened, I lost the taste, in large part because the Lady-in-my-Life remains sternly anti-Marmite.

Now the pot is almost empty, and I may be suffering withdrawal symptoms.

Stratford and Hook Norton

Recently I was down to Stratford-upon-Avon for a double header: Aphra Benn’s The Rover for the p.m. matinee (which I would gladly see again), and back for the evening session for Two Noble Kinsmen from Bill Shagsper and John Fletcher (though the new Arden edition puts those two names in alphabetic order).

I have to say, it came close to reversing the old Himalaya pun: “Loved her; none too keen on them”.

Which isn’t the point; because the pub on the corner of Bridge Street (where Lady-in-my-Life and daughter expect to find me when I go AWOL) is The Encore. And the beer on the bar was Old Hooky. At 4.6%, the odd decimal point or two above a sessional quaffing beer; but just what a drouthy man needs during and after a culture-fest.

Also, another memory trigger, rewinding the counter many years to a well-spent day being driven around the Cotswolds with a long, leisurely, late and liquid lunch at the Pear Tree, within sniffing range of that excellent brewery itself.

 

 

The gaps in heroes … and Europe

Yesterday I heroically strutted abroad with a badge on my jerkin:

Cry God for Harry, England and St George!

Red text on white. You can buy them for a few bob at the RSC.

After all, the coincidence of a quadricentenary and the annual non-saint’s day will come around just the once in my lifetime.

In my strutting I had (as one does) to visit the local Oxfam book-shop: an eclectic lot, these York literati, so a prime place for Autolycan snapping-up of others’ unconsidered trifles.

And, lo! it was so. Here’s Peter Stanford’s The Legend of Pope Joan. Only when home did I realise it was a duplicate, a re-title for the American market of The She-Pope, already on my shelf, a gap between the weightier Peter Heather and John Julius Norwich.

The co-incidence of these events prompted an extended (and inconsequential) musing. Hence this post.

Bill’s words:

Curiously, leave aside Much Ado About Nothing (where she is a character), the word “hero” is not much in evidence in Shakespeare. If challenged, about the only reference I could offer would be Hamlet:

Hamlet: A dream itself is but a shadow.
Rosencrantz: Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
Hamlet: Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretched heroes the beggars’ shadows. Shall we to the court? for, by my fay, I cannot reason.

[Act II, scene ii]

Hold about! On second thoughts there’s Parolles in All’s Well:

Noble heroes, my sword and yours are kin.

[Act II, scene i]

The nature of a “hero”:

Well, they come cheaper now than they used to.

The “epic hero” had to fulfil a set of criteria.  When I had to stand before a chalk-board and vamp them, it would go something like this (assuming one were still allowed to get away with such arrant sexism):

• a noble birth;
• overlooked in childhood, although even then he might be capable of a marvellous deed;
• he has to go wandering, on a mission;
• he is scorned by his lady-love, but eventually wins her over;
• he becomes recognised as a great warrior, usually by an act of conspicuous individual opposition to overwhelming (but overwhelmed) odds;
• he has a magical weapon, or a supernatural power;
• he also has some congenital defect or weakness;
• despite his achievements, he remains humble, “one of us”;
• he saves his people;
• he dies in the moment of his greatest triumph.

Not every tragic hero has to show every characteristic, but the template applies from Beowulf to Superman (and even to “real” people, such as Nelson or Churchill). Doubtless, as a homework, Year Ten would then be told to write a short homework essay explaining which of those (or other) points makes their chosen subject “heroic”.  Alternatively, try to construct a similar check-list for the ideal female hero (with optional reflections on what that says about in-built cultural prejudices).

Filling the gaps

The problem comes when we cannot be satisfied with our hero, when we feel the need to generate fillers for the gaps in the story. Back to Bill:

Enter Rumour, painted full of tongues

Rumour: Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
I, from the orient to the drooping west,
Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth:
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.

Henry IV, Part 2: Act I, scene i, Prologue

If you believe that process has gone away with the arrival of wholesale literacy and 24/7/365 rolling “news”, wake up and hear the gossip. So we have everything from “local tradition says” to the “infancy gospels” of Jesus’s childhood, which seem to have become current as early as the fifth century, and persisted well into early medieval times, and even to EU banana myths. Then, as now, when the “authorities” (i.e., the Church in the earlier case) control the information, Rumour, painted full of tongues, will fill the void. As John Julius (a good Roman Catholic lad, comprehensively dismissing the Pope Joan story — see pages 60-67) ambivalently observes:

Rome, sacked by the Saracens in 846, was still going through her Dark Ages. All was confusion, records were few and untrustworthy, and the notion of a woman Pope was, perhaps, just conceivable …

Nevertheless, that story had by then been firmly established in the popular mind; and there for centuries it remained.

Which brings me back to Stanford and Pope Joan. For Stanford makes play of an apparent gap in papal succession, mid-9th century, between Leo IV and Benedict III. And where there are gaps, Rumour, painted full of tongues, likes to insert some Polyfilla. Even if Joan didn’t exist, she might need to be invented on that ground alone.

Hapax legomenon

Huh? Well, if you’d done your Greek under Dr Reynolds at the High School, you’d know that means “a once-reading”, a word that crops up just the once, so therefore we have to reach for its precise interpretation. Such a word, in Shakespeare is Europe: which, to my momentary confusion appears … ahem! … twice. In Henry IV, Part 1, there is Falstaff’s laboured (running) joke about Bardolph’s nose:

Thou hast saved me a thousand marks in links and torches, walking with thee in the night betwixt tavern and tavern: but the sack that thou hast drunk me would have bought me lights as good cheap at the dearest chandler’s in Europe.

[Act III, scene iii]

Why a European chandler might be more costly then a local one, let’s leave to the Kippers.

The one I wanted to exploit there is Bedford making his promises at the start of Henry VI, Part 1:

Farewell, my masters; to my task will I;
Bonfires in France forthwith I am to make,
To keep our great Saint George’s feast withal:
Ten thousand soldiers with me I will take,
Whose bloody deeds shall make all Europe quake.

[Act I, scene i]

My question is: what was the Elizabethan concept of “Europe”? What did the term mean to Shakespeare, with his notorious geographical illiteracy?

Ours is the 28 states of the European Union — though a glance at the stylised map on €-note suggest even that is wider than we at first grasp — there’s that strange little hieroglyphic at the bottom, beside 𝜠𝜰𝜬𝜴, reminding us of the DOM-TOM. For most of my life, “Europe” was Western Europe. and ended violently at the Iron Curtain. Geographical Europe, in the Atlas, extends to the Urals — yet I struggle to find Russia “European”. I’ve taken the ferry across the Bosphorus from Istanbul, stood on two continents within an hour — and not appreciated any great difference.  If my — our — concept of “Europe” is so vague, what would it be 400 or 1200 years ago? What is it for those unfortunate refugees from Syria, and elsewhere, leaving all (including, for many, life itself) to find “Europe” — which is at best going to be a dingy suburb of Mannheim, Mons or Manchester.

So, for the last time, back to Pope Joan. She is, according to version, English or German, particularly from Mainz. Stanford goes to lengths to make a road for Joan from the convent at Wimborne in Dorset, via the shadowy St Lioba, to Fula, on to Athens, and back to Rome. Joan, then, ticks at least some of those boxes for the popular/epic hero.

She may be Hamlet’s dream… but a shadow, but we need her to fill in the gaps of our “knowledge”.

The joy of … whatever

It’s called serendipity, making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. In itself, a serendipitous word — a “sleeper”, like one of those books, pieces of music or any other cultural trivia that emerges into wider appreciation after long hibernation.

Horace Walpole coined it — and we can date that with unusual precision, because the first OED citation is one of his letters, 28th January 1754. Only in the 20th century did the term achieve general currency. Joyce’s Shem is a semisemitic serendipitist [page 191].

My serendipity is finding good writing at random. Oddly enough, those fillers in the travel and property-porn pages often rise above the chuck-away stuff regurgitated by wannabe journos. And the ultimate “filler” is the Sunday supplement, usually worthy articles to space out the prestige advertising.

Which is my case in point, here.

The New York Times Magazine is the gold-medallist among Sunday supplements. It provides a regular piece, Letter of recommendation, which is a direct descendant of the essays of Addison, Charles Lamb, or even of Montaigne, the form’s true inventor.

This week’s was Avi Steinberg on Squirrels, 900 words of well-hewn prose. I recognise Steinberg from two earlier, longer, works: Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian and The Lost Book of Mormon: A Journey Through the Mythic Lands of Nephi, Zarahemla, and Kansas City, Missouri. Steinberg might readily be approached through an online Harvard Magazine profile. he’s well worth the effort.

Steinberg on squirrels:

… regardless of how you answer the Squirrel Problem, the key just might be its perfectly ordinary premise: It assumes proximity between human and squirrel, and it also assumes that this close relationship means something. And why not? Because our daily paths are inevitably crossed by running squirrels, shouldn’t squirrels run through our philosophical questions too?

… we are a party to an unusual social contract with the squirrel. She is the only mammal who lives free and works in open, direct contact with humans. Rats and raccoons hide in the shadows. Coyotes lurk on the periphery. The deer and the bunny might as well occupy a kingdom of thin air. Dogs and cats, noble souls though they are, have been turned into a class of indentured clowns.

Squirrels, though, are right there with us. They live on our level and toil on the same schedule as humans, in every season. They share our approach to life’s problems: They save and plan ahead, obsessively. They make deposits and debits (of nuts and seeds, mostly); build highways (returning to well-known routes in and around trees); manage 30-year mortgages (they can inhabit a single nest for that many years); refrigerate their staples (in their case, pine cones); and dry their delicacies for storage (mushrooms, as we do). They work the day shift and live in walk-up apartments. And like stock traders, they gamble in the marketplace. While most animals breed as food becomes available, squirrels have developed the ability to predict a future seed glut and reproduce accordingly, like bullish investors.

I differ from Sternberg in two essentials. First:

Squirrels are scarce in literature, but the few appearances they have made are telling. Herman Melville identified the flying squirrel as the fiction writer’s model for a realistic character: The creature is exactly as weird and incongruous as an actual person. One of Kafka’s most unsung creatures was a squirrel whose “bushy tail was famous in all the forests,” and whom he describes, in a jot in his notebooks, as “always traveling, always searching.”

Shakespeare — only the once, but nevertheless in a well-known context — had a squirrel. It lurks in the Queen Mab speech:

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.

That speech, by the way, (and I suspect because of the Prick’d) is where the school internet porn-filter cuts in. Then, I’ve long argued that, were the Powers-That-Be aware just how filthy — filthy I tell’ee! — Bill Shagsper can be in the classroom of a dissident teacher, the whole oeuvre would  instantly be proscribed.

And who, with any sensitivity, could overlook the Greatest Squirrel escapologist of them all — Squirrel Nutkin:

The other issue is red versus gray.

The prime culprit is — but of course — a banker. In 1876 Thomas Unett Brocklehurst, a Victorian banker decided to ornament his estate at Henry Park, Cheshire, by releasing a pair of American gray squirrels (which is why I eschew “grey” in this context). Other landowners found this charming, and copied Brocklehurst. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

The British — and Shakespearean — revenge was and is the common starling.

Again, we can name and shame the villain: Eugene Schieffelin, who was a drug millionaire and a Bard-nut. In 1890 he released into New York’s Central Park five dozen starlings. The fool was inspired to reproduce in America every bird-species mentioned by Shakespeare.

 

Odd man out

Unlike every pollster, snake-oil salesman, journalist, bean-counter and Uncle Tom Cobbley, I haven’t a clue what transpires after Thursday’s General Election.

I somehow suspect Sinn Féin will cling on in West Belfast, Labour in Liverpool, Walton, and the Tories in Richmond, Yorkshire. I like to think North Down kept Lady Sylvia as their elected Member. Beyond that, all is speculative.

What I do know is that stuff like this is wind-and-piss:

There are two precedents here.

The first was 1945.

The result then came through during the Potsdam Conference. Attlee, as the new Prime Minister, and his equally-new Foreign Secretary, Ernie Bevin (not, as generally expected, Hugh Dalton — and there are several stories in that), flew into Berlin prontissimo. Only a handful of senior Cabinet posts had been filled; and Attlee instructed the pro-tem Tory ministers, occupying the lesser posts (including some of Cabinet rank) to stay put, and carry on. It comes as a small shock to find that, as the War in Europe wound down, as the atomic age began, as hostilities continued in the Far East, the Commons did not meet between 15th June and 1st August, 1945.

The British Civil Service, at its best, ensured continuity.

Then, the most recent, 2010

By the dawn of 7th May, 2010, we all knew the Labour Government of Gordon Brown looked unlikely to survive. The BBC finally wrung its withers and declared, at breakfast time, we had a hung parliament.

Then the fun began.

The Cabinet Secretary became the ring-master, and in effect ordered Gordon Brown to stay put. Brown did so until the evening of 11th May, formally went to the Palace, tendered his resignation, and advised the Monarch to send for David Cameron.

That weekend there was a quite-extraordinary, and duplicitous campaign against Brown by the Tory press. Th Cabinet Office had briefed all and sundry on the state-of-play, and why it was a constitutional obligation for Brown to rest in his place. That didn’t quell the shrieks that Brown was a “squatter in Number 10”:

 Can’t Ya Lova Plurabumma

Which,

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to

another arm of Murdoch’s grasping media- octopus, and today’s Times first leader:

Occupy Downing Street

If Ed Miliband tries to oust David Cameron from No 10 with SNP supportthe public will cry foul. The prime minister is right to warn he will stay put

David Cameron is defying Ed Miliband to book removal vans. That is the logistical significance of Conservative signals at the weekend that Mr Cameron plans to stay in No 10 even if he has no overall majority. The political significance is that he is staking an advance claim on legitimacy, because that is what the post-election battle will be about.

And the only response is any thinking Gofer’s:

‘Up to a point, Lord Copper”

The point being when the parliamentary arithmetic is >323, Cameron (or Ed Miliband) has lost it. However, any party leader able to mobilise those 323 votes is legitimate. But until then. over a long-drawn out political argy-bargy, whether the Tory Press like it or not, public opinion wouldn’t wear it. If Cameron tries to sit it out, all the way to a defeat over a Queen’s Speech at the end of the month, he will discover the painful truth:

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

In the throes

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
[Julius Caesar, Act II, scene i]

Never so true as when one is having domestic building work done. Or, in today’s case, when — despite promises of an early arrival — it is not being done.

And when an hour in the dentist’s chair is imminent.

Furthermore:

Today, Jan. 9 is National Static Electricity Day! It is a day to have fun and give your friends and family members a shocking experience.

The New York Times goes quite Bardian

Just found the New York Times daily taster e-mail in my in-box.

Of late, it always kicks off with the weather. Here’s today:

A Scorcher, for Real

A sticky Wednesday morning to you.

It is already 80 degrees.

It’s been 280 days since the temperature last hit 90 in Central Park.

Some time in the midafternoon, as the sun bakes down, we should reach that magic number again.

It is easy to forget how shocking it feels when the city shifts into high summer: A sullen violence hangs in the sultry air, the normal borders between things peeled away.

Tuesday, with a high of 89 degrees – the hottest day so far this year – gave a little taste.

On a sidewalk table at a cafe on loud, listless Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn sat a stainless steel bowl filled with water balloons and a sign taped to it: “It’s time.”

Try reading that aloud, especially:

A súllen ví-lence hángs in th’ súltry áir,
The nórmal bórders b’twéen things péeled awáy.

Not only (almost) natural iambic pentameters (as least the way I read it), but an internal rhyme and some nice assonances.

Now consider:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head …

That’s Romeo and Juliet, Act V, scene iii, lines 315-6.

Spooky, huh? (Or possibly, deliberate or not, the husks from a good education in there, still).