Category: Shakespeare

Cakes and ale

Twelfth Night; the end of Christmas by ancient tradition was marked by feasting and revelry. In unreformed nations they give gifts today rather than at Christmas.

The revelry of Twelfth Night was winked at by the unreformed Church – their monkish clergy were shocked by any sort of pleasure, out of jealousy, but realised there can be no life without joy and approved it by making it an exception. It was eventually suppressed under Puritan influence, and yet the warring tendencies never got it right, because trying to fix a rule makes balance impossible, and rules are vital if you are to avoid the burden of thinking, or praying.

Whether revelry was part of the religious devotion or in defiance of it historians will never agree.  Then in stepped Shakespeare:

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

The scene in the play is not set on any particular night, and scholars will argue until the end of time about why the Bard chose the name for his play, it is easy to imagine it as taking place at least in the spirit of the eponymous 6th day of January. On that night the two knights, Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek, ate, drank and caroused with the clown so loudly as to wake the household – or at least those of the household who were not with them, or at least Malvolio. The scene is pictured beautifully, the broken, tipsy  conversation perfectly framed, so that the imagination can do the rest. For all the nonsense and the hasty threats and more nonsense again, they are clearly having a riotous good time, committing no sin either at that point, and in storms Malvolio the steward, angered at the disturbance, or at his own jealously at others’ happiness. He has the moral high ground in his eyes and commands them to quieten down.

He is though only a steward; ultimately a servant:

Out o’ tune, sir: ye lie. Art any more than a steward?

(Those who command others to silence in our own censorious age should be send away the same way: “Our of tune – Art any more than a keyboard tapper?” Regrettably they will not shut their mouths, any more than Malvolio did.)

There is more to this that a spat between a kinsman and a servant in far off Illyria. Shakespeare built his theatre in Southwark because the Corporation of London was governed by Puritans who would have no bawdy playhouses within their city. “The devil a puritan that he is, or any thing constantly, but a time-pleaser; an affectioned ass” says Maria after the Steward has left the stage.

Ultimately, coming back to the calendar and the twelfth day of Christmas, what is the Church to do? Christianity is not about solemnity and the banishing of all joy, or separation from the world: the Gospel is all about God in the World, and about Joy – a spiritual joy greater than anything that even cakes and ale and produce. Drinking and carousing though can slip soon into bawdy songs and immorality so the Church should have nothing to do with it. Then again, was not the Last Supper a chaste Passover meal celebrated with wine and good company?

The Romans in their old religion talked of virtue but practiced shamelessness, so that when the Gospel came among them its first job was to impose a new morality, and it was imposed by the first class to accept the gospel, namely virtuous, modest-living, middle-class shopkeepers and merchants (the very same who made up the Corporation of London in the Bard’s day). That is still needed, but in every generation it leads to the assumption that any enjoyment is too carnal to be permitted, and every generation needs a correction to remind the Gospellers that joy is woven into the Gospel. Real joy is found in filling the senses with the wonder of God’s creation and love: ale-joy is a dulling of the senses against it.  The Romans in their old religion did have ideas of religious restraint connected with their idols, but they also found a need for a release of this on occasions.  The unreformed Church followed suit irreligiously.  Hobbes observed the comparison:

They had their Bacchanalia; and we have our Wakes, answering to them: They their Saturnalia, and we our Carnevalls

I can understand the Puritans in that context. Like Hobbes, they saw the heathenness coming out of old practices and determined to stamp out all  from church practice that was not strictly Biblical – and the revels of Twelfth Night after Christmas are nowhere in the Gospels – nor actually is Christmas as a festival, so they stopped that too. They went on to build a hedge around the law, to prevent immorality before it could get its boots on (or off).

Where does that leave the pursuit of enjoyment? Gathered round a family table, giving blessings for the bounty the Lord has allowed to us and the bond of family; no one can condemn this, surely. Gathered round with friends in the same manner must be a blessing too?  But drunkenness, roistering and debauchery – that is unholy. Now, how does one find a line?

There are some thinks fundamental to British life lived with any degree of enjoyment, and cakes, most of all are the universal comfort in all circumstances essential to life amongst our nation. It is all innocent, in moderation, so if the puritan instinct is about to grip me, I ask:

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

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Books

Measures, four Measures

The chaos of unruled juvenility in the heart of government has been known about for many years, and it took this lockdown car-crash to expose what should have been a scandal long before.

Whether events took place during the lockdown or not is irrelevant – that is just a hook to hang confected moral outrage on – what matters is that the behaviour described should be scandalous whenever it happened, and that it went by with impunity. That culture of impunity must be dealt with, with zealous severity.

Boris is not the one to do it. He has allowed himself to become the root of the problem, because he is the smiling, hands-off boss who avoids confrontation and can never be cross with anyone for long.  He is though aware of a literary precedent for sending in a strict regent to do the job which must be done.

The appearance, from Sue Grey’s frank, excoriating report, is of staff out of control.  The private sector could not work like that – if I were to get drunk in the office or assault a co-worker and swear at support staff, I would be out on my ear with little prospect of a replacement job on the horizon – in Number 10 it appears that SPADs and junior civil servants have been enjoying the liberty of impunity, which confusion of responsibility brings.

It would be bad enough in a normal office where it all happens only on a personal level. In an office which wields the powers of peace and war, which reshapes vital structures of government and controls 40% of the nation’s GDP, this behaviour goes beyond internal discipline and becomes a vital public interest.

How it happens we can guess. The Downing Street machine contains ministers, civil servants and special advisers, and who controls whom is where the issues begin. Each group has its own chains of command, and if those chains are not pulled tight, they will run out of control. The staff whoever they may be are people, after all. The civil servants cannot command the SPADs and the SPADs cannot command the civil servants outside their specific responsibilities – they have separate priorities, separate duties and codes of conduct, and no way for misconduct to be pulled up tight if the relevant chief is out of the room.  This should have been foreseen when Tony Blair introduced the concept of political special advisers.

For the special advisers, if criticised by senior staff they can always thumb their noses and say their boss is the Prime Minister, and this particular the Prime Minister is a hands-off boss whose very manner encourages the taking of liberties.

Boris Johnson is reluctant and now unable to control the staff. Now let him turn to a play.  The Bard places Duke Vincentio of Vienna in the same position.  He saw himself as the problem, as under his liberal rule the laws had become laxly observed:

We have strict statutes and most biting laws.
The needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds,
Which for this nineteen years we have let slip;
Even like an o’ergrown lion in a cave,
That goes not out to prey. Now, as fond fathers,
Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch,
Only to stick it in their children’s sight
For terror, not to use, in time the rod
Becomes more mock’d than fear’d; so our decrees,
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead;
And liberty plucks justice by the nose;
The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart
Goes all decorum.

Vincentio therefore left the city in the hands of Lord Angelo, “A man of stricture and firm abstinence”, with the command to restore respect for the laws of morality, which Angelo did with zeal until his own bodily temptations drew him. Boris is Vincentio who has let his people get away with excessive liberties. He needs an Angelo, preferably one less corruptible, to take command and apply excessive zeal to restoring the government machine. Like Angelo, he must receive absolute authority, and like Vincentio, Boris must withdraw to a distance so that his staff will not queue up to appeal to his mercy over the heads of grim Angelo.

The task then for Angelo is to take command and fundamentally, not to be Boris.  Measures he or she can take to bring order should start:

  • A command across all of government: no alcohol may be consumed nor provided for consumption in any government office even after hours in any context, even high-level receptions (those at the top must set an example);
  • Senior civil servants in each ministry and in Number 10 to be given specific authority to rebuke and discipline special advisers in their ministry for breaches of the advisers’ code or for illegal conduct, and vice versa.
  • Whistleblower protection, along the lines of that introduced by Stephen Harper in Canada – no civil servant or special adviser should be afraid to report wrongdoing to his or her supervisor and if necessary to a Public Sector Integrity Commissioner. This must apply just as much to devolved administrations and local authorities as to Whitehall and its quangos.
  • Omerta: Blabbing is damaging to the smooth working of government.  Misconduct should be stamped on but privately: both civil servants and SPADs work in a confidential atmosphere and must not leak. The current crop of chatty rats sap our confidence in the integrity of the process and make it look as if Whitehall cannot be trusted with the privacy of our  personal information, if they are blabbers. Anyone can be self-righteous about openness, but private discipline is the most effective, and effectiveness is what is needed. A minister can give a good kicking to a wayward underling in private that he would not do in public. Working with a good, statutory whistle-blower protection, it will clear out the system like nothing else.

The Thick of It is not meant to be a training film. That culture must be ended, without mercy.

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Books

Whatsoever thou art, thou art but a scurvy fellow

Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek are social media trolls. Packed into the scenes are follies, misunderstandings, fake identities, error, jealousies and malice which are the weave and weft of all human society, and this is what is displayed in its rawest form for us on social media, which makes it so compelling and repelling. That modern medium revolts us, but it is only a reflection of humanity.

The Bard understood, long before Zuckerberg or Dorsey or any of the others. Antonio, ashore in Illyria, declares Sebastian to be ‘unfriended’. Nothing is new.

Being skilless in these parts; which to a stranger,
Unguided and unfriended, often prove
Rough and unhospitable

I know how he feels. I do not follow social media and its memes and challenges and pranks, reading about them afterwards. It would be not beyond the usual bizarreness to find pranksters persuading their victims to “come smiling and cross-garter’d to you, to put on yellow stockings”. Then there is “and to frown Upon Sir Toby and the lighter people”; which shows that the ‘cancel culture’ is a social activity; a meme.

The play even has a Metaverse moment:

If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

A less regarded scene in Twelfth Night is actually very germane to its theme. In this, Sir Toby goads his easily led friend, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, to write a letter effectively challenging the young man Cesario (Viola) to a duel. Sir Toby is too much the coward to do it himself, but goads a patsy to do the dirty work. The excuse is that he believes ‘Cesario’ is making a play for Olivia’s hand, which Sir Toby hopes will go to Andrew Aguecheek (a hopeless vanity). It shows a lot about the characters of the men involved, and holds up a mirror to ourselves, and our online selves.

Therefore they set about a letter, a ‘malicious communication’ we might say, which makes sense only in the raucous, self-indulgence of drinking men’s society, and which could be deadly.

These are educated men though, not illiterate Tweeters, and some sense of caution is there to temper the words; a game which must have been familiar among disputing Jacobean swells in Shakespeare’s day who knew that the Assizes measured disputes which ended at the point of a sword:

Still you keep o’ the windy side of the law

The letter itself (excising the boisterous interruptions) runs like many an ill-thought accusation of our own day:

‘Youth, whatsoever thou art, thou art but a scurvy fellow. Wonder not, nor admire not in thy mind, why I do call thee so, for I will show thee no reason for’t. Thou comest to the lady Olivia, and in my sight she uses thee kindly: but thou liest in thy throat; that is not the matter I challenge thee for. I will waylay thee going home; where if it be thy chance to kill me, thou killest me like a rogue and a villain. Fare thee well; and God have mercy upon one of our souls! He may have mercy upon mine; but my hope is better, and so look to thyself. Thy friend, as thou usest him, and thy sworn enemy, ANDREW AGUECHEEK.

The misunderstood positions are in the comedy:  Cesario / Viola is not after Olivia though Olivia has fallen in love with ‘Cesario’, or rather with the shadow of Viola’s brother whom she imitates; Andrew Aguecheek has only his own self-delusion as to his suit or his abilities with a sword; and of course Cesario is not even Cesario.

If all this clash of misunderstood ideas, accusation, worked-up fury and half-thought posting sounds too familiar and personal, then log out from InstaTwitFace and whatever: while I will not say ‘be more of a human being’, because that is the problem, do try to think outside yourself.

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Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars

There is not a field of human strife in which Shakespeare did not dip his pen to enrich our understanding of ourselves and to beautify the harsh or the common. His patrons were amongst the greatest in the kingdom and ultimately he received patronage of the King himself, but Shakespeare’s subject was mankind, the individual, who in the most ordinary state are of such beautiful complexity that any drama of princes and generals is just a reflection of the politics which is played out over the milking-stool, and worldly greatness is but a surface show which will not endure beyond the span of a man’s life and fortune may end at a moment, but whatever gold leaf titles there may be, the man or woman beneath is the reality.

Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,
Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most.
Great princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread
But as the marigold at the sun’s eye,
And in themselves their pride lies buried,
For at a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foil’d,
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toil’d:
Then happy I, that love and am beloved
Where I may not remove nor be removed.

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In praise of plagiarism

Many books, poems and art are fine, but in need of improvement by a more skilful hand, or just a different voice. Some great authors have built monuments which define style and art, but most have slips that could benefit from a brush-up or are in places a semi-tone off. Another hand could step in and make it perfect, but modern sensibilities condemn this as a cheat’s trade.

Without constructive plagiarism, we would lack several great plays by Shakespeare: Hamlet was a complete lift from Thomas Kyd’s version, which itself was from Saxo Grammaticus; the Merchant of Venice is largely swiped from Marlowe’s grim The Jew of Malta. Each was written when the original writer was barely cold in the grave, but each was turned inside out and improved immeasurably.  Bach swiped others’ tunes continually and magically transformed them into something new. A great artist need not be completely original when he can be an alchemist, performing transmutation of weak material into gold.

In the modern day though, this treatment of another’s work unless radically undone and rewritten is looked down upon as if it were a sort of theft.

We do permit radical film adaptations, because it is such a different medium. I never hear complaints against Coppola that he stole from Conrad when he made Apocalypse Now, because it is a new work of art adopted from Conrad’s work. It can be an improvement: Ray Bradbury said that the changed ending in the (original) film version of his most celebrated novel was possibly a better conclusion that the ending he wrote. (That is a curse for a writer who creates such perfect fluidity of plot – how can it end? The ending is where many great works fail.) As a book, I would count Fahrenheit 451 amongst those great works which should not be bowdlerised, of which it would otherwise be in danger because at least a shadow of it has become part of common culture, and because what was when written a work of wildly fantastical dystopian fiction is becoming, horribly, prescient. For film adaptation, changes are necessary for the medium.

Not all works deserve such reverent preservation: the books that fade out in the middle; the poems that have a couple of great lines and an idea but then turn mediocre; the film which wastes its premise; the music that find a pretty section and repeats it endlessly for want anything better – I would argue that we should be happy for an artist to improve on these.

It is part of our preconception of art and literature that it should be a single, inspired piece. That is an attractive idea, but I would say it comes more from a superstitious desire for purity than from rational consideration. As we know though, the love of purity is at odds with the creative spirit.

If a fine house is built, but the garage at the side is poorly proportioned, we do not insist that the whole house be demolished and started from the foundations:  we get a new builder to knock the poor bits down and build then better. If a good book has almost been written but goes wrong somewhere, it makes sense to let someone write it. Editors of cheap novels arrange that more than you might think: they are not daft. In the film world they understand this very well: when a film goes awry, the studio sacks the director or the scriptwriters, but keeps as much as possible of the good work they have already done. (Sometimes they get it wrong, which is why the Director’s Cut is often better than the original. There is, for a true artist, such a thing as purity of conception.)

Shakespeare did not face copyright claims, so he could do what he liked with other people’s work. Today we would need permission, and the profit of any ‘improved’ book would go mainly to the original author whose donkey-work has provided the bulk of it. That accepted, there is no other reason not to revisit works which could be improved markedly by others. I read plenty of poetry I would like to rewrite.

It is not cheating but perfecting; not dishonouring an original author, but making their hard work flower into what it deserves to be.

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Books