A movie called Civil War will reflect on the U S today.  Here are some comments on civil war.

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In peace there would have been neither the pretext nor the wish to make such an invitation; but in war, with an alliance always at the command of either faction for the hurt of their adversaries and their own corresponding advantage, opportunities for bringing in the foreigner were never wanting to the revolutionary parties. The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases.

In peace and prosperity, states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes. Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals.

Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries.

In fine, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was wanting, was equally commended until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations had not in view the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition for their overthrow; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime.

The fair proposals of an adversary were met with jealous precautions by the stronger of the two, and not with a generous confidence. Revenge also was held of more account than self-preservation. Oaths of reconciliation, being only proffered on either side to meet an immediate difficulty, only held good so long as no other weapon was at hand; but when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize it and to take his enemy off his guard, thought this perfidious vengeance sweeter than an open one, since, considerations of safety apart, success by treachery won him the palm of superior intelligence. Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are as ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first.

The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention. The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish, and, recoiling from no means in their struggles for ascendancy engaged in the direst excesses; in their acts of vengeance they went to even greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the state demanded, but making the party caprice of the moment their only standard, and invoking with equal readiness the condemnation of an unjust verdict or the authority of the strong arm to glut the animosities of the hour. Thus religion was in honour with neither party; but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape.

Thus every form of iniquity took root in [these regons] by reason of the troubles. The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow. To put an end to this, there was neither promise to be depended upon, nor oath that could command respect; but all parties dwelling rather in their calculation upon the hopelessness of a permanent state of things, were more intent upon self-defence than capable of confidence. In this contest the blunter wits were most successful. Apprehensive of their own deficiencies and of the cleverness of their antagonists, they feared to be worsted in debate and to be surprised by the combinations of their more versatile opponents, and so at once boldly had recourse to action: while their adversaries, arrogantly thinking that they should know in time, and that it was unnecessary to secure by action what policy afforded, often fell victims to their want of precaution.

Meanwhile [one city] gave the first example of most of the crimes alluded to; of the reprisals exacted by the governed who had never experienced equitable treatment or indeed aught but insolence from their rulers—when their hour came; of the iniquitous resolves of those who desired to get rid of their accustomed poverty, and ardently coveted their neighbours’ goods; and lastly, of the savage and pitiless excesses into which men who had begun the struggle, not in a class but in a party spirit, were hurried by their ungovernable passions. In the confusion into which life was now thrown in the cities, human nature, always rebelling against the law and now its master, gladly showed itself ungoverned in passion, above respect for justice, and the enemy of all superiority; since revenge would not have been set above religion, and gain above justice, had it not been for the fatal power of envy. Indeed men too often take upon themselves in the prosecution of their revenge to set the example of doing away with those general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity, instead of allowing them to subsist against the day of danger when their aid may be required.

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That was written 2400 years ago about a war in Greece by a man called Thucydides.  How much may apply to the U S now is of interest.

If someone said they would take you to see a film that was both tempestuous and ethereal, you would be curious.  One is stormy – very stormy; in dictionary terms, ‘characterised by violent agitation’.  The other is light and airy, like a clear sky – perhaps even spirit-like, not of this world, celestial even.

The Tempest is widely seen as the author’s farewell to the theatre.  It is very condensed and it makes strong calls on the imagination.  It involves magic and it comes from another time. 

Much the same may be said for the painting La Tempesta by Giorgione.  Each may be said to be one of the title deeds of western civilisation. Each may also be said to be at least in part either tempestuous or ethereal.  And each has had rivers of ink spilled on it to explain the apparent contradiction. 

For the purpose of this note, I shall take each as ‘read’ – if I may be granted that latitude in speaking of a masterpiece.

Although the play starts with a tempest, it has a dream like quality throughout that is summed up in its most famous lines.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

It would require some hardihood to try to get inside that poetry.  (And it looks so apt for the painting, too.)  You may was well seek to explain the allure of Catherine Deneuve or the flipper of Shane Warne.  You do not have to have mastered Wittgenstein to say that of some things we cannot speak, and we must therefore remain silent.

But some cannot help themselves – even among the best and brightest.  Let us see what two writers say.  The American writer, Mark Van Doren:

The Tempest is a composition about which it is better not to be too knowing….it will not yield its secret easily; or it has no secret to yield…Its meaning is precisely as rich as the human mind, and it says that the world is what it is.  But what the world is cannot be said in a sentence.  Or even in a poem as beautiful and complete as The Tempest.

That sounds like rude good sense to me. 

W H Auden was a great poet, but in discussing Shakespeare, he calls to mind a remark about Milton – he was so intelligent, it was a wonder he wrote any poetry at all.  But Auden does throw light on the play by comparing it to others, except oddly the Dream, and he closes with a quote from Rilke:

Now he terrifies me,

This man who’s once more duke.  The way he draws

The wire into his head and hangs himself

Beside the other puppets, and henceforth

Asks mercy of the play.

Auden saw parallels with The Magic Flute, which too ignites bonfires of learned debate.  Midsummer Night’s Dream is closer to home in mixing the real with the surreal and requiring a suspension of analytic functions.  Mendelsohn’s Overture is both famous and gorgeous, but no one asks what it means.  In truth, if you asked the creator of the Pieta or Moonlight Sonata what they mean, your most polite response might be that you were impertinent.  

But I take some comfort from those writers in listening to this great play yet again. 

I had less luck with Giorgione.  I have a most handsome big book from the KHM Museum in Vienna.  It has two essays by German experts on the puzzle of La Tempesta.  One expert says:

Positing the presence of two levels of reality in the single phenomenal actuality of the painting has the methodological advantage of being able to observe the Subject and Not-Subject variants a work simultaneously.

I do not wish to be rude about German aesthetics, but may I give the response of Bluebottle in The Goons? ‘I don’t like this game.’

The other German scholar has a very different response.  After fastidious enquiry of ancient sources, he concludes that the warrior in the painting is Paris of Troy, and that the nude is someone called Oenone.  He even has a role for the shattered pillars.  May I say two things?  First, we know almost nothing of the artist, but it is hard to imagine an Italian Renaissance painter carrying on like Conan Doyle with a classics degree indulging in a cross between Charades and a cryptic crossword.  Secondly, I find no reference to the tempest in the analysis.

It is not surprising that we attach some mystique to what we now know to be the final works of great artists and minds – like Beethoven’s Ninth or Mozart’s Jupiter symphonies.  It is as if they finally rebel at the walls around them, and decide to take a peek over them before they go. 

This looks to me to be the kind of response of Newton and his entrancement with alchemy – that so scandalised the world of science.  Keynes, who may be said to have had an eye for genius, said:

Newton was not the first of the age of reason.  He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago…. For in vulgar modern terms, Newton was profoundly neurotic, of a not unfamiliar type, but – I should say from the records – a most extreme example.  His deepest instincts were occult, esoteric, semantic – with profound shrinking from the world, a paralysing fear of exposing his thoughts, his beliefs his discoveries in all nakedness to the inspection and criticism of the world …. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty……

Many serious people felt the need to go quietly on all this – as they did with Newton’s denial of the Trinity.

It is inevitable now with the play, The Tempest, that the focus will be on Caliban.  He stands for the curse of the United States – slavery, and the brutalised savage that leads to caste.  Prospero says he ‘profits’ from Caliban and he has the gruesome line:

……this thing of darkness I

Acknowledge mine.  (5.1.275)

And it may be worse for us down here in Oz.  How did the drop-ins seduce the one they called ‘Monster’?  With the bottle.  They got him cruelly and revoltingly drunk.  ‘They were red-hot with drinking’ (4.1.171) and giving their preview of the Rum Rebellion.

What kind of people were they that ruined the savage in this play?  The scum of the earth – Trinculo and Stefano – two drunks – that we laugh out loud at. 

In 1625, Tony Tanner tells us, Francis Bacon wrote an essay On Plantations.

It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant : and not only so, but it spoileth the plantation; for they will ever live like rogues…but be lazy and do mischief….(My emphasis.)

Yep – that is us at Botany Bay in 1788, a misbegotten colony where the only currencies would be the lash and the bottle.  So sadly for our First Nations, the warning of Bacon got lost in the great American Rebellion of 1776, and in the spellbinding hypocrisy of the colonials there vowing that all men are created equal.  Some of them could have taken lessons in deceit from the Duke of Milan and the King of Naples.

All three of them are desperate.  Their great guilt,

Like poison given to work a great time after,

Now ‘gins to bite the spirits.  (3.3.104-106)

Now, in our land of the Dreamtime, you won’t hear three cheers for this brave new world of the unworldly Miranda. 

According to the U N, as at the end of January this year, after nearly two years of war against Russia, the Ukraine had suffered about 29,000 civilian casualties, including about 10,000 killed.  Those numbers are not precise, but they are far more reliable than casualty figures in the armed forces.  I am not sure if someone has a breakdown of the women and children killed.

The figures for Gaza are disputed.  Time quotes experts in The Lancet as saying that at least 30,000 have died in Gaza in the six months of that war, including more than 10,000 children.

It is difficult to explain the difference in casualty rates, especially given that Russia is expressly intent on annihilating the nation it is making war against.  As against that, a lot of the damage in Gaza comes from the air, and the people of Gaza have no air force.  Because they have no status as a nation.

But whichever way you look at it, life is cheaper in the Middle East – a least in the eyes of some – than in Europe in a war between peoples of the same ethnic group and faith.

For the most part, the Western world has condemned Russia for its war on the Ukraine.  Its leaders are widely seen as war criminals.

The reaction to the war in Gaza has been very different. 

International concern at the casualties in Gaza has been growing.  An agency funded by the U S says more than 200 aid workers have been killed in Gaza in this war.  But it was not until recently that such concern has led to foreign heads of state demanding hard answers from those responsible.  That has happened after seven were killed who were citizens of the U S, Canada, Australia, Poland or Britain. 

That manifest infusion of European blood in the casualty lists has apparently served to concentrate minds in the West.  These people were killed in circumstances that make any defence of accident implausible and by experienced troops in armed forces that are not notorious for negligent errors.  It does not help that some blame AI, and the Prime Minister of Israel has his own version of the old defence of ‘inevitable accident.’

It is inevitable, I suppose, but so sad that we never live up to the aspiration of the Enlightenment that we should treat all people as having their own worth or dignity.

And in the eyes of at least some, that failure here is driven by forces of disunity inherent in what we call religion – which was just what the Enlightenment sought to deliver us from.

And we here in Australia are entitled to be outraged by the killing of one of ours – even when we look away from the fact that ten thousand Palestinian children have so far been killed.

Villains – and evil

There is no such thing as evil.  It is not something that you can sprinkle on or detect in your fish and chips.  Rather, it is a label that we attach to some forms of conduct.  And what we usually have in mind are people who are ready, willing and able to hurt or kill other people for the sake of it – or, as the saying goes, for the hell of it.  There may be no other apparent motive.  The pickpocket, the drug dealer, the rapist, the blackmailer, the vengeful husband, the neo-Nazi – they all have a motive.  But the villain?

At the beginning of his lecture on Richard III, W H Auden said there is a difference between a criminal and what we call a villain.  ‘The villain is an extremely conscious person and commits a crime consciously and for its own sake.’  The leading examples in Shakespeare, apart from Richard III, are Aaron in Titus Andronicus, and Iago in Othello.

In ordinary language, an evil person is one who wants to do wrong by others.  Such a person gets called a villain.  That word has apparently come down to us from villein, the equivalent of the serf at the bottom of the medieval social ladder.  Brewer (Dictionary of Phrase and Fable) says that the notion of ‘rascality, wickedness and worthlessness now associated with villainis a result of aristocratic condescension and sense of superiority’.  That is very English.  (The editor cites a passage from the opening scene of As You Like It, where both meanings are in play in the one sentence.)

There is, at least in our literature, another type of villain, if I may be permitted that term.  Some characters are so made that they cannot stand goodness.  When in Paradise Lost, Satan comes across Aadam and Eve, he ‘felt how awful goodness is’.  (And if Satan is not entitled to have a view on evil, no one is.)  Iago saw in Cassio a kind of ‘daily beauty’ that unsettled him.  The most gross example is John Claggart in Billy Budd – especially in the libretto of the opera.  Claggart is unmanned by the simple goodness of Billy. 

O beauty, o handsomeness, goodness!  
Would that I never encountered you!  
Would that I lived in my own world always,  
in that depravity to which I was born.  
There I found peace of a sort, there I established  
an order such as reigns in Hell…….
Having seen you, what choice remains to me?  
None, none! I’m doomed to annihilate you,  
I’m vowed to your destruction. ….
No, you cannot escape!  
With hate and envy, I’m stronger than love….

There is more.

But when we come to look at Richard III, we will see that some bad actors are driven by pure envy in looking at what others get in life that is certainly denied to them.  Iago drove Othello to be jealous of what he thought Cassio was up to with his wife, but Iago envied Cassio for his good fortune and success in life.  In the grizzly argot of our time, Iago, a man of ‘other ranks’ bitterly resented the elites.

In papers called Richard and Adolf and The Seduction of Seduction, I have looked at some of these issues, but here I wish to focus on what the play Richard III may tell us now about the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

But, first, I want to say something about the best-known character of Shakespeare – Sir John Falstaff.  Not in any order, Falstaff is a coward, a liar, a fraud, a womaniser, a drunk, and a rotten fat skunk.  And he is this playwright’s most popular and enduring character.  One reason is that he said things and did things to offend and upset the Establishment in ways that we would like to be able to do.  He put the boot into knighthood and chivalry as surely as Cervantes did with Don Quixote.  He was the champion of those who had missed out. 

Well, if you go to a MAGA rally, you will not find too many people successful in a profession, government, academe, or business.  (Nor will you find any at the bottom of the scale, sleeping rough.)

And we might here telegraph a warning about the significance of Falstaff.  Dr Johnson said the character was loaded with faults, ‘and with those faults that naturally produce contempt.’  But he concluded his remarks:

The moral to be drawn from this representation is that no man is more dangerous that he that with a will to corrupt hath the power to please; and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think themselves safe with such a companion when they see Henry seduced by Falstaff.  (My emphasis.)

I see the seduction as the other way round, but the point remains.  What is it that attracts us to some complete ratbags?  How do we get sucked in – conned?

In discussing Richard III, Dr Johnson said that Shakespeare was careful to suggest that the wickedness of Richard proceeded from his deformity – and from the ‘envy that rose at the comparison of his own person with others, and which incited him to disturb the pleasures that he could not enjoy’.  There is a lot of that in the Austrian corporal who was rejected by both Vienna and the German High Command.  But at the beginning of Richard III, in his opening speech, Richard says that with all his obvious defects, he is ‘determined to prove a villain.’  The author had paved the way in the prior play (Henry VI, Part III, 3.2 and 5.6), when Richard told us that he can smile and murder while he smiles – which he later does while stabbing a king to death, while saying that he has ‘neither, pity, love, nor fear….I am myself alone.’  By the end of the preceding play, Richard had happily compared himself to Judas – and you can’t go lower than that.

Here then is the triumph of the ego in the ultimate smiling assassin.  Now, that is a title that we would award to Vladimir Putin rather than Donald Trump, but that does not mean that we may not get some guidance on how to deal with the latter, from the insights into our humanity of the greatest playwright the world has known.

Here are some points of resemblance and distinction.

Each comes from a background that is on any view ‘privileged’ – and each knows little about the rest of the world, and each cares even less.  Neither really cares for anybody else.  The self is all in all.

Each is in his own way childlike.  Each has a view of the world that is at best superficial.  Neither could imagine a world without himself.  Nothing in the world is relevant unless it relates to him.  Somehow. the ordinary rules do not apply to him.

Each disdains anything remotely resembling book learning.

Richard, like Trump, did not care for others, but he could seduce them.  In this they both resemble Don Giovanni.  The seducer is amoral and it’s as if their victims had some sort of death wish.  If these seducers have any conscience, and it is a real issue for both, it just does not work.

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe;

Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!  (Richard III, 5.3.310-312)

That is the credo of the fascist.

People rarely get close or remain close to either of them.  They are mostly front.  Their egos do not allow much time out for others.  If someone breaks through, it is just a matter of time before they are ejected – with extreme prejudice.  Buckingham was Richard’s most loyal supporter in winning the crown.  When he feels the rift, he is ‘off while my fearful head is on’ (4.2.121).  With Trump, the rift comes when the lackey gets caught, and Trump drops him cold – and in the slammer.

You could not reason with either.  They create their own reality.  Both resemble spoiled children who never learned better, or grown up.

They enjoy the game of plotting to get power.  They are born gamblers.  Why not?  They take huge risks because they don’t mind if others get hurt.  But they are very bad on the job when they get it.  They were not made for responsibility in government – or anything else.  In this and other respects, they are like spoiled children who have not known what it is to be accountable.

Revenge for them is very personal.  This is because the loyalty they expect is very personal.  People owe loyalty not to the office or the nation, but to the leader personally.  This was the great error of the German High Command in dealing with Adolf Hitler, and it is the beginning of the shredding of anything like the rule of law.  What you get is personal power of someone above the law.  The old term was ‘tyrant’.

There was a beautiful example with the singer, Taylor Swift.  She was a threat because she might prove more popular than Trump.  And she had backed the other side.  Trump said there was ‘no way she could endorse Crooked Joe Biden’ and would never be ‘disloyal to the man who made her so much money’.  Congress had passed an act giving financial aid to singers, but to Trump, it never gets above the personal.  In Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, the last chapter is headed ‘The Grammatical Fiction.’  There is no such thing as ‘I’.  In the world of Donald Trump – and Richard III – it is the other way round.  There is ego – and that is that.  The Oxford English Dictionary happily defines egomania as ‘the insanity of self-exaltation’. 

The personal nature of the rule, and the grubby means by which these people  come to power, feeds on and promotes division and conflict, and simple hate.  They are a form of cancer on the community.  Indeed, that is the underlying thread of these plays leading to and from the Wars of the Roses.  Trump just went one further by denying that he had ever lost power.

These people appeal to those who feel they have missed out in the race of life.  This is more Trump’s schtick than that of Richard.  The scenes where Richard says that he has to be enlisted for the benefit of the common weal are frankly comical – but, in truth, no more incredible than what Trump’s ‘base’ salutes him for.  His followers think that they have been treated unfairly, and that this gives them a moral right to seek retribution.  And they are quick to identify those who they think should answer for their ill treatment – although they do not use the word ‘scapegoats.’  Their leaders go along with this.  It brings the loudest cheers at the rallies.  This is more like Jack Cade than Richard.  The oppressed believe that their leader is the one to look after them, and preserve what they have managed to retain from the wreckage wrought by their opponents.

They both play rough.  They know no other way.  They just ride roughshod over any doubter or opponent who gets in their way.  Bluff is built into their persona.  And if you are going to lie, lie big.  It is as if there is nothing left solid in the relative ether, and people have always preferred fiction to history.  This braggadocio is just another part of the intimidation, and it is always the scheme of the dictator to involve as many as possible in the dirty work, so that they get locked in by their own complicity.  There is the sleight of hand of those we used to call mountebanks.  Here is Brewer on mountebank:

A vendor of quack medicines at fairs…who attracts the crowd by his tricks and antics; hence any charlatan or self-advertising pretender.  The bank, or bench, was the counter on which traders displayed their goods, and street vendors used to mount on their bank to patter to the public.

That description brings us from the post-medieval morality plays and commedia dell’arte to Richard III – and it is also very apt for a MAGA rally.

Now for some differences. 

Richard was a worthy soldier in battle, and prepared to do his own murders.  But Richard does not delude himself as Trump appears to do.  On the contrary, he takes great pride in his machinations and the pure malice that drives them.  When he seduces Anne, a process that is revolting, he challenges the audience to come with him.  He is celebrating a win for the misfits.  ‘And yet to win her, all the world to nothing’ (1.2.237) . Auden said (in 1946) of the opening monologue of Richard that it was ‘not unlike Adolf Hitler’s speech to his General Staff on 23 August 1939 in its utter lack of self-deception.’  That is a remarkable analogy.  Some were more than troubled by the apocalyptic and brazen tripe of Trump in his (first) inaugural.  Was this the same nation that gave the world Abraham Lincoln? 

Auden also said that Richard was not ambitious in the ordinary sense of that term.  ‘He’s not interested in becoming king for the position of power, but because becoming king is so difficult.’  Well, others might put differently that description of the pursuit of the prize. 

But we come now to the bad news.  Dr Johnson, as we saw, warned against the dangers in succumbing to the whiles of Falstaff.  Sir Anthony Quayle played Falstaff and fairly described him as ‘frankly vicious.’  Why do we fall for him?

The problem is that Richard takes the audience with him and at least in part seduces the audience.  I referred above to the old morality plays.  They appeared in England in the 15^th and 16^th centuries – to set up the triumph of virtue over vice.  Vice was a central character – generally named after a particular vice, like pride or greed, who wore a cap with asses’ ears (so prefiguring Bottom). 

Richard expressly makes a reference to Vice.  ‘Thus, like the formal Vice, Iniquity, I moralise two meanings in one word’ (3.1.82-83).  I need to set out what Tony Tanner says here in full.

The Vice was the self-avowed mischief-maker, if not chaos-bringer, and we should remember that one of his Satanic privileges was to inveigle the audience into laughing at evil.  The figure of the Vice was clearly invaluable to Shakespeare when it came to depicting inexplicable evil, evil which seems gratuitous, unmotivated, simply for its own sake.  From any point of view, Richard’s behaviour is profoundly irrational, and is finally both horrifying and incomprehensible even to his closest accomplices (in fact, no one is close to him at all; simply some accompany him further into his evils than others.)  Richard is, as he has told us, an expert Machiavel; he is also a Senecan tyrant and a Marlovian villain (closest to Barabas in The Jew of Malta).  But he is primarily a Vice.  However – and this is crucial – he is a Vice who acquires (no matter how foully) the legitimate robes of a king.

Those insights round off this discussion.  ‘Chaos-bringer’ is so apt.  And remember just how vicious, how horrifying, Richard is.  The murderer of the children is unmanned by this ‘most arch deed of piteous massacre’ (4.3.2).  The king can hardly wait until after supper to hear ‘the process of their death.’

It is then that we recall that the playwright has subjected us to hours of flirtation with our taste for violence and deceit.  It is followed by a set piece of our theatre – the judgment of the Furies, the mother and two wronged queens, one of whom is a world authority on cursing.  We need to remember that Richard got to the crown not by guile or rebellion, but by murder in cold blood.  It makes The Godfather look pale – but we get a kick out of that, too.

So, as we watch in trepidation the possible revival of Donald Trump, despite all his offences against humanity, we should ask again – just why do we fall for some kinds of ratbag? 

And while doing so, we might recall that it does not require anything like the incandescent genius of Shakespeare, or the craftiness of Satan, to induce our undoing.  And despite his trysts with the ghosts, Richard goes down swinging, like Don Giovanni, but sans cheval.  And there were some in the cinema who cheered him on even there.

May I finally say something about the condition of the United States now?  In discussing Julius Caesar, Auden said that Rome was not doomed by the passions of selfish individuals, but ‘by an intellectual and spiritual failure of nerve that made the society incapable of dealing with its situation’   Angela Merkel said that ‘Sometimes my greatest fear is that we have somehow lost the inner strength to stand up for our way of life’.  The phrase ‘inner strength’ catches the eye.  A German man called Stephen Haffner lived through the twenties and thirties and the rise of Hitler.  He described the failure of Germany in very simple terms as a kind of ‘nervous breakdown’ that flowed from the want of a ‘solid inner kernel.’

The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding’.  This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial….  At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed.  They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown…

That is just how major battles and sporting events are won and lost.  Sadly, it does not help either us or the U S that we have seen it all before.

Trashing the Establishment

Well, if you write thirty-eight plays, even your most ardent fan will be disappointed in a few of them.  We are familiar with the problems modern audiences have with the early comedies uncut, and with Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice (and Portia is just the kind of smartie pants in a power suit that really winds the boys up.  Judi Dench can’t stand the play either).  Cymbeline is plain silly in parts, and Cloten is a frightening preview of  the whole Trump menagerie.  The prospect of having Volumnia for a mother-in-law casts a pall over Coriolanus, but the big one I can’t stand is Othello. 

The problem came on about twenty-five years ago, when I listened to all the plays on a few occasions walking between Darling St, South Yarra, and 101 Collins Street – about half an hour each way.  You could do all the plays in about four months.  Cyril Cusack played Iago, and it got to the stage where if I heard that sibilant whining insinuation once more, the cassette player was going into the Yarra.  Then there was the ghastly inevitability of it all.  And those bloody strawberries did as much for me as they did for Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny.  And just how did the daughter expect dad and the town to react when she turned up with a black man on her married arm?  Then Hollywood did the unspeakable – they cast Irene Jacob as Desdemona and made her look awful.  I had formed the considered view after Trois Couleurs Rouge, my favourite modern film, that that was impossible.

But there are two plays of Shakespeare that I can barely bring myself to read or listen to (and I have seen both on the stage – one in both London and Melbourne – and on film).  They are Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida. 

These plays are both fiction pieces set in the ancient world.  Timon is the kind of man who thinks money can buy anything, and is predictably let down when he goes broke by what the cast list refers to as ‘flattering lords and false friends.’  The other play is a love story gone wrong when the main players from the Iliad run a very close race to see who can behave the most vilely during the Trojan War. 

Curiously, the Everyman edition lists Troilus in Tragedies, as you would expect.  The sparkling and gorgeous new Folio edition puts it in the Comedies.  It would be interesting to know their view of the funniest part.  The play concludes with Alcibiades, who has a shocking press in the history texts, meditating on the epitaph of the dead hero who sounded mad when he died:

Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft.
 Seek not my name. A plague consume you, wicked caitiffs left!
 Here lie I, Timon, who, alive, all living men did hate.
Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait.

Our playwright is no less frank in Troilus.  The Prologue ends:

Like or find fault; do as your pleasures are;

Now good or bad, ‘tis but the chance of war.

It ends when the utterly loathsome Pandarus says:

Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,

And at that time bequeath you my diseases.

Don’t say you weren’t warned, or that the author did not know what he was doing.

When we speak of ‘the Establishment’, we speak of those people in the community who have power or influence in matters of policy or opinion.  They are usually thought to be opposed to change.  It is not easy in Australia now to locate what the technical cognoscenti – the Swifties – call ‘influencers’.  (People used to point to the Melbourne Club, but those days are long past.)

In the Bronze Age, the royals and warriors controlled the scene.  In the time of Alcibiades, at least in this play, we speak of ‘lords’ and men of capital who trade in negotiable paper.  That is more like the governance of England in the eighteenth century.

Each such version of the Establishment is trashed in these plays.  The so-called heroes of the Trojan War are seen as slippery politicians, and their biggest hitter, Achilles, is a boastful, stupid, coward and killer. 

This is not the first time this playwright has put a bomb under the notion of chivalry, and in my view, the targets deserve all they get.  This goes especially for the ‘heroes’ – whose ‘glory’, after the Napoleonic model, is built over the bones of the innocent and wasted dead.  The whole idea of the ‘hero’ in the ancient world is the reverse of what might decently be called ‘civilisation’.  It is as bogus as their religion.  It was an ugly myth fostered at Oxbridge by people who were not brought up to know any better, and by Kenneth Clark mooning over the David of Michelangelo, with its thrusting, piercing, and brutalising arrogance.

In truth, Troilus is a drive-by shooting of the of Homer’s heroes.  Agamemnon is petty and past it; Ulysses is a crashing bore and know-all; Ajax is crackers; and Achilles is a fake.

The Establishment in Timon is easier for us to see.  We saw it in the writings of Tom Wolfe, especially Bonfire of the Vanities.  You can see it now in who gets the best seats at the Australian Open – what we might, and perhaps should, call ‘the usual suspects.’  It is I suppose a matter of taste, but some do remind me of what Mark Twain had Huck Finn do to his black runaway companion: dress him up with a sign: ‘Sick Arab.  Harmless unless provoked.’  Timon is a preview of Gordon Gecko – ‘Greed is good’ – and Elon Musk – if you are rich enough, you can afford to be mad.  W H Auden said Timon showed a maniac in two phases: first he gives money; then he gives curses.

And as well as trashing chivalry, Troilus may be the most savage indictment of war ever put on the stage.  The war began with the abduction of a young woman, and the play ends with the forced transfer of another young woman in the other direction.  The whole war was about ego and face – and nothing else.

The chivalry of the Middle Ages was also associated with what was said to be an ideal of romantic love.  ‘Romance’ is the term.  Both Troilus and Cressida shred the notion, and leave us with moonshine made to cover the appalling treatment of women by the medieval church.  In writing of this elsewhere, I said:

What of women?  As we saw, the scholastic mind could see women as the gate of hell, while Mary was the queen of heaven.  Medieval views on women came from the Church (celibate men, but ultimately from St Paul rather than from Christ) and the aristocracy.  The first saw women as a source of evil; the second could be gracious about seeing women as having some ornamental value, something to be celebrated in chivalry.  Both concurred in holding women down.  The women were expected to be obedient like good working dogs.  This subjection is precisely set out by Katharina at the end of The Taming of the Shrew, and at the heart of our marriage vows until recently. 

Now, Shakespeare and Cervantes had ripped into the mystique of chivalry with the two most famous characters in our letters – Sir John Falstaff and Don Quixote.  But those two characters are also the most popular. 

It is very hard to find anyone who is half way decent in either of the plays here discussed.  And the only role of some characters – like Apemantus, Pandarus, or Thersites – looks to be to drive us to the exit or the ‘Off ‘button.  And the problem with listening to them on Arkangel is that they have a policy of serving up the whole text.  It might run for three hours.  A director who did not cut heavily for the stage would not do a good job.

A gloomy air of unseemliness, dirt, and hopelessness pervades each play.  Is anything untainted?  One braggard Greek speaks of a man ‘having’ Helen and not ‘making any scruple of her soilure’ – being soiled (Troilus,4.1.56).  What does the audience take home apart from despair?  Is it like reading something like The Outsider by Albert Camus?  You wash your mouth out, and wonder why you bothered.  Tony Tanner thought one play Shakespeare’s ‘bitterest’ and the other ‘sour and abrasive’ and ‘disturbing and disconsolating’.  He could have said either of both.

It is very odd.  As Judi Dench says, the playwright is the man who pays the rent.  Were either of these plays good for business?  Compare, say, Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra for love stories or gripping dramas about rifts in the community.  They come from another world.  If a playwright now did to Cressida what Shakespeare did – take her in twenty-four hours from that pretty girl next door to a wanton slut fondled by a procession of lecherous old Greeks whose ideas of personal hygiene were not ours – the best PR company in town would have trouble keeping him afloat.

This does suggest to me that we have a very blurred view of the market – the tastes of what we might call Shakespeare’s target audience.  It takes some courage to put on Titus Andronicus now, but my understanding is that it was very popular during the author’s lifetime.  Do we know what the record has been with the two plays discussed in this note?

We should not be surprised that the target market, as we now call it, was different in Elizabethan or Jacobean London.  Alternative entertainments for the people included bear-baiting, public whipping or mutilation – nose or ears – or hanging, drawing and quartering.  The world was far from being set for the Swifties.

Hamlet without end

(Some random reflections on hearing and reading Hamlet for the nth time – listening to the Arkangel recording with the Folio Edition text open in front of me)

Remarrying in less than a month was absurdly, indecently and insultingly too fast for Claudius and Gertrude.  It shows a complete lack of judgment.  It was bound to wound the sensitive son, the intense and cerebral uni student in Germany. 

It might also prompt the question: When did this all start?  How long has this been going on?  The two of them now hit the grog every night before rushing back to those incestuous and enseamèd sheets.  ‘Is this my mother that I see before me?’  (The ghost accuses Gertrude of being ‘adulterate’ as well as incestuous.  When and how did the ghost learn of the first?)

But could it drive Hamlet to think of suicide – just like that?  Was the young man troubled before all this?  Were things not working out with Ophelia?  Or was he just another idle and impatient heir?  Or did he have what Churchill called ‘the black dog’, and what some might call a ‘bi-polar’ condition?  King Lear certainly goes mad, by any definition, but it would seem trite to dismiss the issue in Hamlet with a diagnosis of clinical depression – even by someone qualified to make such a diagnosis.

The king knew what he had done – the primal sin of Cain.  The queen knew that they were wrong to marry too fast.  Why on earth would the guilty queen and the guiltier king want to keep this unsmiling and morbidly inquiring son at home while they celebrated a tasteless, raunchy, boozy honeymoon?  Why not pack him off back to the Germans as he wished?  (It was all the go then for the children of the Establishment to go elsewhere in Europe to sow their oats – and preserve the chastity of the girls who stayed home.)

You have to pity the young man.  His whole world falls apart.  First, his mum desecrates the memory of his dad by marrying his uncle.  He says she has been ‘whored’.  Then dad comes back as a ghost and tells the prince to murder his king.  But not to trouble the queen.  That mission, should he choose to accept it, does look impossible. 

And just what did the ghost think all of that might all do for Denmark?  Or its prince, Hamlet?  If you get charged with murder, it won’t get you far in court to plead superior orders – from a ghost.  That would at best be taken as a coded plea of insanity. 

And Hamlet did of course have the father of all motives to kill the king – to win the crown claimed by a brash interloper.  (I have never understood the answer to the remark of Dr Johnson that the ghost left Hamlet ‘seeing no means of redress but such as must expose him to the extremity of hazard’.)

Polonius and Laertes share the customary male hypocrisy about sex outside marriage – except that the old man in his dotage has become quite the voyeur – but their advice to Ophelia about the risks in dating a prince is very sensible.  And the prince is about to show just how sensible that advice was.

The ghost is something that you and I will never have to deal with.  Some of us have a problem with dealing with the supernatural on stage (or film).  But in Shakespeare, as in James Bond movies, you just have to accept some premises of the show as given.  This is a play put on to entertain us.  Once you accept the premises, the rest just follows.  What you get is what Greg Doran described as a ‘thriller.’

Claudius says Hamlet’s breakdown comes from the loss of his father.  Gertrude tells the truth about their ‘o’er hasty marriage’.  (And that is another premise we must accept.)

Hamlet spends four hours a day walking in the lobby of the palace.  Shakespeare does mangle times, but Hamlet has not been lazy in feigning madness.  Just what he hopes to achieve is a mystery – but it does give the audience some relief, and for longer and more often than that offered in the other tragedies.  (Listen to the Broadway audience after they have been seared by Richard Burton – they almost cheer with relief when he toys with Polonius.)

Hamlet gets down and dirty with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in what is called ‘locker room banter’ about girls and sex.  But he disdains both of them from the start and he mocks them.  He can wipe people off like a dirty bum, but that does not stop him telling the players not to mock Polonius. 

You can run into scions of the Establishment like this.  They can be cruel to lesser people without apparently knowing it.  In a bad case, the mockery masks contempt.  There are streaks of cold, superior nastiness in this young scion of Denmark.  People who feel a need to lionize the hero in my view demean the play.

The famous soliloquy ‘To be or not to be’ reminds us that suicide has been in the air from the start.

Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia is both brutal and unexplained.  Doctor Johnson said it seemed ‘wanton and useless cruelty.’  And it is shockingly crude.  (‘It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.’)

Hamlet’s praise of Horatio is difficult to parse, and too little noticed.  Horatio has what Hamlet craves – plain common sense and ordinary decency – a simple life outside the purple.  For us, he is also like a Greek chorus.  Hamlet is left to ask – why me?

After the play on the stage, we get to the vortex of our play.  Claudius is like Macbeth – he has gone so far in blood, he cannot stop.  He must keep going.  Hamlet is the opposite.  He can’t start.  (And I don’t blame him.)  Each is on his own wheel of fire.  This, then, is tragedy.  Humanity is confronting its frailty and mortality.  This is where the players on the stage earn their money.

Then there is the scene with the mother.  It might be the most intense scene on our stage.  Hamlet is again brutal, but at least this time he has some ground for complaint.  Gertrude starts with an own goal by saying that he has ‘much offended’ his father.  Does he then just treat his mother as a slut?  (Yes, in the 1969 Richardson film.)  Poor Ophelia is just collateral damage, who becomes another dead victim. 

Hamlet is, perhaps, naïve about his mother’s sex life – Freud must have mused – but he shows all the viciousness of the Puritan.  And the hypocrisy stinks to heaven, as usual.  (God knows that his creator was not shy about talking about sex.  A lot of it would be far too much for the maiden aunt.)

Hamlet suggests to his mother that he is not mad – as he had with his mates.  (How else could he seek to bend her to his will?)  He does seem to enjoy toying with people, and showing off.

Hamlet kills Polonius in hot blood – but when he lugs the guts to another room, he is as cold as ice.  As he is with the deaths of the two mates – deaths he procured in a manner, coldly orchestrated murder, that does not touch his conscience.  This royal prince has a mean and Spartan streak in him.

Claudius is dead right that the rapier could have got him and not Polonius.  Hamlet has to go.

Claudius has to be careful because the prince is a crowd favourite.  But Claudius can still afford to be droll when Hamlet says it is good that he is going to England.  (You bet – if you know fate what awaits you.)

The soliloquy about going to war for the sake of honour may have been OK not so long after the Spanish Armada, but not after Waterloo, the Somme, and Hiroshima.  It is now pure tripe.

It is a cruel irony that the fake madness of Hamlet leads to the real madness, and death, of Ophelia.  Her obscenity is now as bad as his.  What a falling off was there.  If his mother had been whored, that was her choice.  That was not the case with the girlfriend.

Laertes mounts a coup.  Some say that Hamlet should have done that.  But it is hard not to believe that all Elsinore knew that Hamlet had killed Polonius.  He had convinced them all that he was completely mad, and the palace whisked him out of the country on the same night.  It is a palace cover up.  All Denmark knows Hamlet was sent away because he was mad.

The king now coldly manipulates the queen.  Sex makes way for security.  Claudius is a numbers man.

Hamlet returns with the king’s death warrant in his pocket – the king’s commission to England for his death.

Laertes comes back breathing fire and he is hot for blood.  He and Fortinbras are counterpoises to the hesitant Hamlet.  But Laertes now sells out to the bad guys – and pays the price.  His family becomes extinct.

The grave-digger scene is a masterly comic interlude – and time of philosophical reflection.  Hamlet reflects on Alexander and Caesar, and the certainty of mortality.  (Sportsmen speak of golfers ‘managing the golf course’.  This is a case study in managing the theatre.) 

It was not a good idea for the court to put on a sword fight between two sworn enemies.

Hamlet tells Laertes a bare-faced lie.  He says that if he did anything wrong, it was because he was mad.  (Bradley, whom I admire, is at his suppositious Agatha Christie worst on this.  He is trapped in his Edwardian view of ‘the peculiar beauty and nobility’ of Hamlet’s nature.)

Claudius is presiding over a twice assured murder, but that does not stop him going through his customary Elsinore Rotary Club routine – which of course involves grog.  Which then kills his wife.  Claudius is, among other things, a crushing bore.  (It is remarkable the number of English critics who feel the need to say something positive about the author of all the evil in the play.)

When Hamlet finally gets to kill the king, the crowd immediately cries ‘Treason!’  This is a reminder of the dilemma that the ghost posed for Hamlet.  (When the king first heard of the uprising, he had referred to the ‘treason’ of infringing the ‘divinity’ that hedges a king.  There was not much divine about this electoral lottery.)

Horatio is dissuaded from adding his own body to the pile, and lives to discharge the role of the Chorus, and talk of ‘accidental judgments and casual slaughters.’

And as he expires, Hamlet finally becomes the real prince of Denmark – he takes care to discharge his duty and make provision for his kingdom.

The rest is silence – except for the closing martial ceremony to mark the death of the prince.

Well – there it all is. 

Palace and dynastic intrigue; adultery and incest; eight corpses, I think; suicides, both threatened, and effective; covert surveillance in what looks like a prison state; lewd or comic scenes; a couple of swipes at the home team; mad scenes, bloody vendettas, a foreign war, an uprising and rebellion, and a play within the play; a ghost, a fight in a grave, and a duel that is fixed – twice.  What more could you ask for in a night out at the theatre? 

(W H Auden said that ‘Hamlet is destroyed by his imagination.’  Later he says Hamlet ‘is fundamentally bored, and for that reason he acts theatrically.’  Both propositions are well above my pay level.)

Oceans of ink have been poured in expounding theories or justifying labels in this play.  Some even want to tell us what the play ‘means’ – which is about as helpful as asking what the Moonlight Sonata, the Pieta, or the Fighting Téméraire may mean.  Some behave as if they God’s spies inquiring into the mystery of things.  That kind of exercise is fraught with any playwright, much less this one.

We risk making the error that historians forever warn us about – of thinking that because something happened, it had to happen. 

Some years ago, now, I acted for a Jewish lawyer who woke up one day, and found that a partner of his had been murdered in Thailand.  The next day, he found that $40 million was missing from his trust account.  He would later ask me whether I would have done anything different that would at least have reduced the risk of that kind of loss.  I could not think of anything – which was very sobering for me.  If it could happen to him, it could happen me to me.  (Like a fly to a wanton boy.)  His response?  ‘Shit happens.’  There’s not much of use I can add to that.

My first Summer School at Oxford was on Shakespeare and Verdi.  We looked at the structure of the last act of Othello, and saw what might appear to be an application of the Golden Rule, or Fibonacci series.  Was this by design or instinct?  Being innately suspicious of theory, I of course plumped for the latter.  When I look at the ravishing paintwork of our ladies of acrylic colour in Yuendemu, I fancy that a spectroscope might reveal patterns not obvious to the white consciousness – as happens so often when we watch their people at our football.  They can do things the rest of us just can’t. 

So, I wonder what you might get if you took the script of Hamlet, and using colour codes, then proceeded to distinguish scenes of passion, tension, action, comic or other interlude, plot development, declamation, climax, and so on.  Might we get something like the instinctive harmony in paint of that great lady, Emily Kngwarreye? 

We might ask the same of the art of Ann Thompson.  I am not keen on labels, but ‘abstract expressionism’ suggests to me a defiance of articulation.  Ann Thompson’s work, of which I am mightily fond, seems to explode in colour in front of you.  A French critic remarked of this kind of art that ‘gradually, through the thousand facets of an elusive structure, one learns the deep, secret logic of composition.’  Should I try to spot the syllogism in the paint?  ‘Words, words, words’ – as the man said.  What can they add to the joy of paint?  Well, they might lead you to a bad accident with your own posterior.

One English critic, Philip Brockbank, the mentor of Tony Tanner, said of Hamlet: ‘Nothing in the play goes according to plan, but everything happens by significant accident when the time is ripe.’  That sounds just right to me – not just for this play, but for the whole history of England.  It certainly has the zeitgeist of the common law – and so many of the brawls in those courts of law on which that common law was built – as if by an accumulation of chance that challenges if not defies logical analysis.  ‘Significant accident’ is a very fine phrase, indeed. 

And by the end of the play, Hamlet has given up on fighting chance and surrendered himself to the will of Providence.  And we the audience are left with what one critic finely called ‘the alarmingness of the Universe’ (albeit, at the conclusion of King Lear).

In evaluating, say, a work of art, or a political policy, or even a legal argument, the Anglo-Saxon response is not to ask whether it conforms to some theory, but the more prosaic question – does the bloody thing work?

Hamlet is a play that is put on to entertain us.  It works for the same reason that Casablanca and the opera Othello work.  It comes down to us from the best in the business, and everything just happens to come together in a way that both dazzles and binds us.  Like my Emily or Ann Thompson paintings.  Or that try that Greg Inglis scored for the Storm in that NRL Grand Final.

After wrestling with this play for about half a century, I have changed my mind about it.  I have now come to share what I think is the view prevailing across the world of theatre – that Hamlet is the best play there is on our stage.

*

Bloody nights

(A ramble through Macbeth, not a favourite, yet again)

You get it in your face immediately in the first scene.  There are three witches.  They start, in the first line, by asking when will they three meet again?  What have they been plotting so far, before we got there – with their gray cat?  (A cat on the ‘blasted heath’ in Scotland?)  Something to do with Macbeth.  And the scene – all eleven lines – closes with the witches’ specialty – charmless, equivocal double speak.  ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair.  Hover through the fog and filthy air.’  Very Scottish.

We learn about Macbeth in the second scene.  He is the valiant warrior in the old heroic mould.  He disembowels vertically –‘from the nave to the chops’.  The king pronounces the death of a traitor and invests the hero of the hour with that title.  (This play is snappy – about half the length of Hamlet.)  The reference to Norwegians suggests that the Vikings are still about.

In the next scene, the witches give their prophecy to Macbeth – and Banquo.  Banquo is struck by the intensity of Macbeth’s reaction.  When part of the prophecy is immediately realised, Banquo fears it may incite Macbeth to claim the crown.  And then he cautions his ‘noble partner’ about the duplicity of ‘instruments of darkness’.  (They tell minor truths to betray people when it really counts.)  But Macbeth does not want to know.  He just looks ‘rapt’ to his partner, and is already seized by ‘horrible imaginings’.  He even refers to the ‘imperial theme’ – which Henry V teachesus is way above ‘regal’.

When, in this scene, the witches approach Macbeth, they give themselves a title that sticks – the ‘weird sisters’.  ‘Weird’ is a weird word.  The Everyman annotation is not helpful – ‘destiny-serving?’  The OED refers to the sisters: ‘Having the power to control the fate or destiny of men; claiming such power.’  We are more used to the secondary – pertaining to the supernatural, mysterious, or unearthly.  Not of this world – beyond our experience.

(While we are dealing with definitions, most people in a profession politics, or business want to move up, and for that reason may be said to be ambitious.  But the dictionaries stipulate something excessive – ‘eager or inordinate’.  I wonder about that – as did Mark Antony in Julius Caesar when he descanted on that epithet.)

Scene 4 deals with the execution of the traitor and then the king promotes his son Malcolm to be his successor.  Macbeth already sees this as an impediment to the prophecy about the crown and to his ‘black and deep desires.’

In the fifth scene, we meet the wife.  She immediately fears that her husband is not nasty enough – he does not have the ‘illness’ – to fulfill his ambition.  She determines to suppress her humanity.  The king must die that night in their abode – where he will come in ‘double trust’.  She will be in charge of the ‘business’.  The scene closes.  ‘Leave all the rest to me.’

Well, there you have it.  Macbeth gets sold a pup.  Twice.  Banquo was right.  The witches lead Macbeth up the garden path, and then his drive for promotion, and then survival, makes him fall right in.  (It’s like people investing in Bitcoin – their greed blinds them to the obvious truth that increased return means increased risk.) 

Then his wife says she is up to this ‘great business’ – but she isn’t.  Instead, it is Macbeth who supresses his humanity.  His wife, like Ophelia, goes mad and kills herself – the difference is that Ophelia did not bring about her own fall.  In the end, the husband destroys his conscience; his wife is destroyed by hers.

If you go back to the cast list, there is no one there standing for the church.  Compare that to the English history plays.  And God hardly gets a look in – the church or the pope is just not there. 

The historical events occurred not long after 1000 CE.  That was in Shakespeare’s time within the ‘Dark Age’ – the complete breakdown of law and order after the fall of Rome, showing all the grim horrors of Beowulf.  In the High Middle Ages, the one Catholic Church reigned supreme over the universe.  Just look at King John and Henry VIII.  Not here.  Nothing like it.  And we are about half a millennium before the arrival of Knox and the Presbyterian Church.

In calculating the consequence of their actions, Macbeth and his wife make little reference to the hereafter.  Rather, darkness pervades.  According to my laptop, ‘blood’ occurs 43 times and ‘night’ 48.  We are, as in King Lear, in a dark primitive time, and the audience then would have seen the natives of Scotland as hardly one rung above those poor wretches over the water.  This, then, the is the stuff of a very grim and very bloody opera.  Blood will have blood.

When Macbeth is torturing himself about the consequences of the murder, he thinks that if the murder could end the business here, he might pass on the afterlife.  ‘But we still have judgment here in this life’.

The murder scene is riveting theatre.  They are both on the verge of cracking.  The confidence of the lady was unjustified, but Lady Macbeth holds them together.  The alternative is madness.  (And he drops her before she goes mad.)  She commits a shocking faux pas –‘What, in our house?’ – and then faints.  He gives a prepared speech that Cleopatra could have written.  But the sons have no doubt that they are next.  They take off immediately.

The famous scene with the porter is not just light relief.  He speaks of equivocation and inducements that provoke action but make it at best tricky.  The witches are to Macbeth what alcohol is to sex – ‘it provokes and unprovokes…it sets him on and takes him off.’  The playwright is unrelenting in his themes and he is at the top of his game – to have a seriously drunk Scottish porter take a swipe at an English tailor, while the mutilated corpse of a dead Scots king awaits discovery.

Banquo of course suspects Macbeth.  But he, too, fancies part of the prophecy.  He is in the game – and ensures his son is a target in the next hit.  Banquo is a real threat – he has a ‘royalty of nature’.  From then on, Macbeth is playing catch-up – but he never makes it.  He never got his Ekaterinburg.  Lenin and Stalin would play in another league.

There is a shift in the balance of power.  Lady Macbeth is unsettled.  But Macbeth will do what he must – and his wife need not know.  He shows signs of guilt when the ghost appears when ‘then comes my fit again’  She holds him up – and then she just fades away.  Her remark ‘This is the very painting of your fear’ may recall an equally tense family moment – ‘This is the very coinage of your brain.’

It is all downhill to a brutal Stalinist state.  Macbeth goes back to the sisters and goes after Macduff – and children.  Macbeth says ‘We are but young in deed’.  A droll observer says ‘Men must not walk too late’.

That brings us to Act 3 Scene 5 – the end of the first of two discs on Arkangel.  That is about enough for me.  The slide is inevitable.  The sleepwalking scene has the line of the play: ‘Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?’  (But what sort of ‘doctor’ practised in the Highlands before the time of Magna Carta?)  Macduff and Malcolm are either incredible or intolerable.  Macduff abandons his family, which might be thought to have a stronger claim on him than his tribe, and the reticence of Malcolm to step up insults the intelligence of the audience. 

The embittered Macbeth realises he was on the wrong side of a Faustian bargain.  His end is as dignified as that of Adolf Hitler.  Although he is alert to the duplicity of the witches, he, like a gaming addict, relies on them to the last.  When he is disabused of the final prophecy, his first sulky refusal to face Macduff is Trumpian nonsense. 

You need only refer to the lists of active participants and the crescendo of the finale in Hamlet and King Lear.  At the risk of being charged with blasphemy, I may say that playwrights like other artists and journeyman can tire of a project, and just fail to polish it off with their customary flair.  Shakespeare was nothing if not human.

In truth, Macbeth is for me the victim of what may be called the Eroica, Tosca, or Swan Lake syndrome.  They go above the clouds in the second act or movement – and they never get near them again.  Up to the scene of the dinner with the ghost, the theatre in Macbeth is as gripping as you can get.  Worth every cent of the cost of admission, and more – if the players are up to it.  But no one, not even Shakespeare, could sustain that wonderful intensity to the bitter end.

Verdi was devoted to Shakespeare.  Macbeth was his first Shakespeare opera.  (The others were Otello and Falstaff.)  Verdi thought it one of ‘mankind’s greatest creations.’  It was and is very popular.  Italians call it l’opera senza amore – the loveless opera. 

Verdi involved himself in all aspects of the production.  He by then had enough runs on the board to get his own way.  He wrote to London to find out how Banquo’s ghost comes on the stage.  He found that the King of England in 1039 was a Dane.  He wanted to know about Odoardo il confissore.  He demanded full dress rehearsals.  He nearly drove them mad.  They did the duet in the first act 150 times.  He wanted to develop the role of the baritone and to inject much more drama into opera.  This took time, since the Italians went to opera to sit in a half-darkened arena and talking through all but their favourite arias.  The premiere was a great success, but the show fell out of favour until about a century ago.  You don’t hear much of it in the concert hall.

It would I think be fair to guess that opera fans now would be likely to go home more satisfied than theatre fans for Macbeth.  If it matters, I much prefer Verdi’s Falstaff to both – even though his is not the real Falstaff, but the ersatz version of Merry Wives, the onethat the Shakespeare purists look down so fiercely upon.  Verdi makes Falstaff perfect for opera, in what many see as his masterpiece of fusion of music and theatre – in this case, comedy.  Although purists might query that term, too.

So, this is a ramble around Macbeth on hearing it for, say, the twentieth time.  That and similar rambles around King Lear and Hamlet have brought home to me what we that are involved constantly with Shakespeare forget. 

Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616 – mostly under Elizabeth I.  The population of England then was above three million – about half a million in London, and a thousand at Stratford, two days away by horse.  People had no sense of sanitation, and the stench in town would make us throw up.  We pass over personal hygiene in silence.  You did not go out at night in London.  The world was cruel.  Masters beat servants, and husbands beat wives.  People were maimed or executed in public in the name of God.  You could be fined for not going to church and burned to death for denying a doctrine that few understood.  Most people were illiterate.  Shakespeare probably left school at 14.  The word ‘civilisation’ was a chimera for all except a small group. 

Two acting companies drew audiences of 15,000 a week in London.   They averaged six plays a week, with just one rehearsal.  Boys played the parts of women.  There were no loos at the Globe.  Blackfriars was smaller, but more profitable.  We really have a very low understanding of what life meant there back then.

Shakespeare was in the business of writing plays and producing shows.  As an American student at Oxford said, he did it for the mortgage.  (Judi Dench speaks of the man who pays the rent.)  He was only interested in getting people to go to the theatre to hear his plays.  There was no other form of reproduction of his work, and very few except the actors got to read the scripts.  We only have the roughest idea of the composition of his audiences, but those who had persisted in school had been taught Latin, grammar, rhetoric and logic – and this kind of education is reflected in all his plays.  He was comfortable in putting on history – ancient, and English – tragedy and comedy, and he was equally at home in writing about all classes in the community and the supernatural.  He thought he was safe in holding an audience in the theatre for three hours ( and there is no ground for fearing that he had one ounce of the arrogance of Wagner).  The notion that his plays could be taught at schools or discussed in universities or learned journals would have been regarded as madness.  He was well known in some quarters in London, but applied to him, the term ‘iconic’ would be as ridiculous as the term ‘entrepreneur’ would be provocative.

It is hard for us to bear this in mind when we talk about the plays in the way that we do.  What we can say is that it is most unlikely that Shakespeare had anything remotely like it in his mind when he wrote the plays.  For him, people like me may as well have come from Mars.

*

Politics, now and then

Henry VIII – the play

They look like they are play acting – and a lot of the time, they are doing just that.  There is much emphasis on front – and face.  It is very blokey, and, say what they will, the girls do not reach the same heights. 

They live in their own world, known as ‘the bubble’.  Others don’t understand it.  One problem is that that they don’t fully understand others.  They do things and act in ways that others don’t.  Most want to go higher on what some call the ‘greasy pole.’  This subscription to ambition leads to posturing, nastiness, and betrayal.  It also leads to faithless sycophancy. 

The commitment of the main players is life defining – and destroying.  This is in part because they play rough.  Booze and sex are brutal occupational hazards.  These are the times that power gets abused, and any trust gets even more fraught and suspect.  Other relations just hit the fence.  And some nights, just before dawn, they wonder what on earth it is all about.  Who counts for more – they, or those they think they govern?  This is not a happy place.  Whoever said ‘Put not your trust in princes’ was right on the money.

John, called Jack, is the leader of the government.  He enjoys having power and using it, but he is careful to keep advisers – counsellors – around him whom he can blame if something goes wrong. 

The chief of these is William, a senior departmental head.  Bill can never get Jack’s position, but his ambition is obvious, and that driving ambition and his rapid ascent from a very ordinary background put him right on the nose with the more staid members of the Establishment.  They are ready to blame him for what they see as any failure of governance – such as getting Jack to go on too lavish a world tour to posture, as they see it, with foreign potentates.  And when a new tax goes down badly with some hot shots who count, Jack pleads ignorance and blames Bill.  Bill takes it on the chin, and then gets his staff to put it about that he is the one responsible for the revocation.

At this time, Bill also gets to shaft a party elder, Bob, who may be a threat to Jack.  Bill gets someone who did a job for Bob to say that Bob had said that Jack was not up to it and that he, Bob, could do a better job.  It all looks badly contrived, but any express threat to the power or office of Jack gets him right where he lives.  And the result is inevitable – Bob has to go.  But the mutterers say that this is just another scalp for Bill.

Bill therefore needs to be careful.  He is walking over a sea full of sharks.

There is another issue that calls for the utmost care.  Jack’s head of personal staff is Kate.  Her loyalty and faithful service over half a lifetime are utterly beyond question.  She comes from the highest background in a foreign state, and has connections at the highest level internationally.  But one reason that Jack took her on in the first place is that she was thought to have the power to effect a merger that Jack thought, very reasonably, was in the national interest.  And through no fault of her own, Kate has not managed to bring it off.

Jack then feels duty bound, as they say, to suppress his personal affections and loyalty.  He is looking for an excuse to fire Kate.  She of course is horrified, and gets much sympathy from people at large.  But the job naturally goes to Bill to get rid of her – one way or another.  He finds a very dodgy argument about her initial appointment, but he has trouble making it fly, and Kate will not have it.  And she has powerful connections.

Bill is in trouble.  He throws a lavish party, as is his PR want, where there is a lot of grog and womanising.  At which the eye of the despondent Jack falls on a pert young thing called Anne – and he falls for her utterly. 

Bill then makes two fundamental errors.  He opposes any union between Jack and Anne – by this time, Jack’s pants are on fire.  And by mistake, Bill sends Jack a list of his accretions to wealth in office.  He is immediately fired with extreme prejudice.  He is destroyed.  Kate is disposed of.  She then dies in misery – but not before Jack marries Anne.  At that point, the political world falls apart.

In what looks to have been a quick succession, Bob. Kate and Bill have fallen.  Jack is OK, but how stands it now with Kate?

Now, that is the kind petty drama you might see in Downing St, or in Canberra, or on the TV.  It is also the story of Henry VIII by Shakespeare.  As so often with that playwright, he shows again that there is nothing new under the sun.

We get told immediately that we will see how ‘soon this mightiness meets misery.’  Buckingham is the first to go.  (It ran in the family – his dad felt ‘the long divorce of steel’ from Richard III.)  In the first scene, Buckingham asks if any pie is freed from the ‘ambitious finger’ of Wolsey.  In the next scene, Wolsey seeks the credit for the tax reversal.  The randy chatter at the party comes when Harry falls for Anne (‘the spleeny Lutheran’) – one courtier wants to see red wine rise in the ‘fair cheeks’ of the ladies.  When someone says the marriage comes too close to the conscience of the king, the response is that ‘his conscience has crept too near another lady.’  Harry oozes claptrap about his conscience making him leave ‘so sweet a bedfellow.’ 

Katharine’s resistance is heroic.  This is the centrepiece of the play.  She turns drops of tears to sparks of fire and calls on a judge that ‘no king can corrupt’.  When Wolsey falls, we get the drift of the whole play.

Oh how wretched
Is that poor man, that hangs on Prince’s favours?
There is betwixt that smile we would aspire too,
That sweet Aspect of Princes, and their ruin,
More pangs, and fears then wars, or women consume;
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again  (3.2.366-372).

At the end, there is a plot against the king’s favourite that resembles a drive-by shooting, but it comes undone in so recognizable a fashion, and a play loaded with pageantry closes with outright banal jingoism.

And that about brings us up to the dreadful machinations within our two parties here now in Victoria and New South Wales, and the searing tragedy of a rape trial born out of the Canberra maelstrom. 

As Harold Macmillan said, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’

Note on Elton and Wolsey

The leading historian on the Tudors was G R Elton.  He says that because the king had other interests, Wolsey effectively ran the government for fifteen years.  He had a great love of pomp and display.  He was arrogant and showed off.  He angered both nobility and gentry by his intolerable pretensions.  He was vain, shallow, and greedy.  And he made a fortune.  The king got by with his boon companions – fellow wrestlers, card players, and dicers.  Wolsey’s tax policies made dangerous enemies.  He represented all that needed reform in the Church.  No priest was richer.  ‘Celibacy sat lightly on the man who had probably several daughters…In one way and another, therefore, Wolsey dug the grave of the institution from which he derived his own greatest glory.’.  The irony was that because of Katherine’s closeness to another foreign potentate that the Vatican was close to, the pope could not give a divorce, and Rome lost England.  There was a footnote.  ‘The snobbery of the sixteenth century insisted on Wolsey’s low birth, and made his father a common butcher; the snobbery of the nineteenth found this unpalatable and elevated old Wolsey to the status of a ‘prosperous grazier.’’  The perfect prescription for the perfect fall.

The Vikingur Olafsson concert of the Goldberg Variations at the MRC was majestic.  The five-star review in The Age was right to say that the audience was in awe – they paused long at the pregnant ending before erupting.  He plays with a cool matter of fact manner that I find engrossing.  When I put the Leicas on him, I was surprised to see he had patent leather shoes under a lounge suit and a Myers tie.  He wears glasses and needs a  haircut – as do I.  It was a privilege to be there.  The warmth and support of the audience felt tangible.  He is also a natural with the mike.  By the time he had finished, he could have walked  back to Iceland.

I knew what the producers of 37 at the Sumner Theatre wanted to say about race and footy in Oz, but I am not sure that they had determined the type of vehicle they were driving for that purpose.  I am familiar with the blokey tone of small-town footy clubs, and I have seen and heard at first hand the vile abuse directed at Adam Goodes in pubs 100ks from the Big Smoke.  37 gets it for both, but I personally did not need the reminder.  I thought it veered from corny to gauche to crass.  But the full house sounded like they loved it.  They must have been more in the mood for a homily than me.  And the coach did a great imitation of Justin Langer in the toils.

At least it was better than Meet Me at Dawn – but that tells me nothing.  The halt and infirm of the MTC crowd – including me – are very loyal.

The three plays of Henry VI resemble the three parts of The Godfather – escalating violence and vendettas between warring clans or tribes in generational conflicts about power.  At least with the fourth play and the next quartet, they stand for the following propositions.

First, politics are commonly about people, not policies.

Secondly, if you take power in government unlawfully, you debase your own currency by leaving your title to be impeached by someone doing the same to you.  After Lancaster deposed Richard II, this was the flaw, like a curse, that house had to live with in dealing with the house of York.  This led to the Wars of the Roses.

Thirdly, the violence and killing may escalate to the point where the whole raison d’être of the ruler has gone.  He cannot do his primary job of keeping the peace, and chaos reigns.  It is, someone said, as if Christ and his angels slept.

And fourthly, when that happens, the agony of the nation, and the natural abhorrence of a vacuum, may lead not just to a change of regime, but to a form of revolution in all the rules of the game – what we call the constitution. 

That is just what happened in Rome when the Republic brutalised itself, and Augustus, whom Gibbon dubbed the ‘crafty tyrant’, by stealth converted the exhausted state into an empire, and in England, when the Tudors reintroduced the exhausted magnates to the concept of absolute royal power.

Just how gruesome that whole process may be is set out in blood curdling detail in the three parts of Henry VI.  A new pinnacle of murderous horror is reached in the finale of the quartet in Richard III, when three ragged old crows on a barbed wire fence bark out their lamentations and curses before the ensainted heir of the Tudors finally slays the Yorkist dragon.  (And the birth of his son’s heir is positively hymned at the close of Henry VIII.)

It is with the horrors of these wars in this quartet that our playwright begins his career long descant on chivalry.  The prime warrior of the English, Talbot, threatens whole towns with the fury of his ‘three attendants’ – ‘lean famine, quartering steel, and climbing fire.’  He anoints his fighting heir as ‘the child of chivalry’, and then gives his old arms as young Talbot’s grave.  Then a ‘giglot wench’ on the French side, before she is burned at the stake – as either a saint or a slut – mocks his corpse ‘stinking and flyblown here at our feet’ (Henry VI, 4.7.76). 

What, then, was ‘chivalry’?  Murdering a child in front of his mother or father before cheering lords and prelates?  Well, we would get a different answer from this writer’ s most famous character in the next quartet.

We may not have given enough attention to the first point – that politics are mostly about people, not policies. 

As it happens, that was I think precisely the point made by works of history that were seen as revolutionary in the last century – Sir Lewis Namier, The Politics of England at the Accession of George III, and Sir Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution, which dealt with the birth of Imperial Rome.

Here is Sir Lewis:

……parties at all times rest on types and on connections rather than on intellectual tenets….The division between Whigs and Tories….was latent in temperament and outlook, in social types, in old connexions and traditions.  But it was not focused on particular problems, and did not therefore supply clear lines of division in politics….The territorial magnates are usually described as an oligarchy or a nobility, which are misleading names, as they suggest exclusiveness based on inherited wealth…..The territorial magnates were the nucleus of that governing class, whose claims even now are based on rank, wealth, experience, and a tradition of social and political pre-eminence (or, according to George Meredith, are ‘comically built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and an air’).

Here is Sir Ronald:

Though concealed by craft or convention, the arcana imperii [secrets of power] of the nobilitas cannot evade detection.  Three weapons the nobiles held and wielded, the family, money, and the political alliance (amicitia or factio, as it was variously labelled)….The Roman constitution was a screen and a sham ….The ramifications of this oligarchy were pervasive, its most weighty decisions taken in secret, known or inferred by politicians of the time, but often evading historical record and baffling posterity….Persons not programmes came before the People for their judgment and approbation.  The candidate seldom made promises.  Instead, he claimed office as a reward, boasting loudly of ancestors, or, failing that prerogative, of his own merits….The best of arguments was personal abuse.

Our fourth and final point is the subject of The Roman Revolution, which was, like the work of Sir Lewis Namier, a work of outstanding and game-changing scholarship.  The author summarised it on page two.

It was the end of a century of anarchy, culminating in twenty years of civil war and military tyranny.  If despotism was the price, it was not too high; to a patriotic Roman of Republican sentiments, even submission to absolute rule was a lesser evil than war between citizens.  Liberty was gone, but only a minority at Rome had ever enjoyed it.  The survivors of the old governing class, shattered in spirit, gave up the contest….Yet the new dispensation, or novus actus, was the work of fraud and bloodshed, based upon the seizure of power and redistribution of property by a revolutionary leader.  The happy outcome of the Principate might be held to justify, or at least to palliate, the horrors of the Roman Revolution: hence the danger of an indulgent estimate of the person and acts of Augustus.

Well, they don’t write history like that anymore.  Nor do they write plays like Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra, which round out the Roman story, any more. 

But we might query ‘the happy outcome’ of the Principate.  If the constitution of the Republic was shaky, that of the Empire was no better.  Very few emperors died in their beds.  Rome never dealt with the succession issue properly.  In a history of that time, I wrote:

Augustus was disappointed with his own family, and nominated a seasoned soldier Tiberius as his successor.  A grandchild, who may have been seen as a successor notwithstanding his banishment, was promptly murdered on the news of the death of Augustus.  The new era started with a form of dynastic murder, and historians still puzzle over the nature of the ruling power, and the means by which it was transmitted on death.  There is, however, little reason to doubt that from this time on, the army and the provinces were looking at an emperor whose rule looked just about absolute.  Succession then hinged on death, and unhappy subjects in the right place generally were all too happy to arrange the death, and leave the choice of successor to the army in the form of the Praetorian Guard.

Gibbon was customarily majestic on the accession of Augustus.

Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.  A feeble senate and enervated people cheerfully acquiesced in the pleasing illusion, as long as it was supported by the virtue, or even by the prudence, of the succession of Augustus.

And he was customarily caustic on the Empire itself.

Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same.  A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.

So much for the myth of the civilisation of the Roman Empire.

And there is some ripe irony there in the failure of Rome to deal with succession in its own backyard – adequately, or at all, as lawyers are wont to say.  The Tudors, and in particular Henry VIII, well understood the categorical imperative of securing succession to the Crown after the horrors of the Wars of the Roses.  Those wars broke out under the weak King Henry VI.  And they so amply fulfilled the dire prophecy of Warwick.

And here I prophesy: this brawl today,
 Grown to this faction in the Temple garden,
 Shall send, between the red rose and the white,
 A thousand souls to death and deadly night.  (I Henry VI, 2.4.124-127).

But when King Henry turned to Rome to aid him to secure the succession to the English crown, Rome could not accommodate him.  Rome had a conflict of interest – that happened to involve that phantom body called the Holy Roman Empire.  That failure of the Vatican led England to break from Rome.  And that was the biggest revolution of the lot.

The group of plays about Henry VI concludes at the end of Richard III with the battle at Bosworth in 1485.  In one sense, Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, finished what Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Lancaster had begun in 1399 with the deposition of Richard II.  The scale of the breach of royal descent was celebrated by Shakespeare in the passion play Richard II, and in Henry V, even the king reflects on the flaw in his title on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. 

The scars left on England by the Wars of the Roses may not have matched those left on Germany by the Thirty Years War, but the lessons of a weak crown were fearful.  We need not trouble about labels like Medieval, Renaissance, or the Tudor Revolution to see how great was the difference in the governance of England at the time of Bosworth in 1485, and when parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534.  If you are going to pick a fight with God’s anointed, you want a better rock on which to stand than a wobbly crown.  It was parliament that would now define the role not just of the church, but of the crown itself.  That is a massive shift in under two generations. 

In a previous statute, the English in the preamble had indulged one of their customary divagations from veracity, when they had recited that ‘Where, by diverse sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire…’  The promotion involved in ‘empire’ would be canvassed in Hemry V – on both sides – but from then on, the focus of the English shifted from the old world of Europe to the new world of what assuredly would become an empire.*

The actual working of government in ancient Rome and England in the eighteenth century was not prescribed by law or in writing.  It was customary and turned on what the Romans and the English both called ‘patronage’ and we call corruption.  Syme said that under Augustus, ‘political competition was sterilised and regulated through a pervasive system of patronage and nepotism.’  You could say that of the Mafia.  Namier said that ‘the idea that the politically active part of the nation had a claim to maintenance on the State was generally accepted, even if it remained subconscious.’  That does sound very English.

But for our part, we may go back to the suggestion that politics are generally about people, not policies.  The phrase may be altogether too glib, but what if your system of governance relies on two political parties, and you can’t tell the difference in what either party stands for? 

And the sensible politicians know what the answers are, but they are too scared to put them to the people.  What use is your democracy then?

Well, whatever – when we hold these plays about Henry VI in our hands, and we speak our parts, we are living history, our history – and it may be as well to listen to what we hear. 

This is very much so if the whole shebang turns on a state of mind and we think that we are losing ours.  It’s all very well to talk of people and policies – what if you don’t have much of either?

*To understand this shift in England, we might compare England to France, the most constitutionally advanced state in Europe.  The Wars of the Roses occupied England in the 15^th century.  The French version, the Fronde, occurred in the 17th.  After the wars of the magnates, England saw the rise of parliament, the Reformation, and the beginning of the nobles acting with the commons against the crown.  France saw the rule of Cardinal Richelieu and the absolute rule of the Sun King.  The English had their main revolution in 1689, and it was comparatively bloodless.  The French started theirs in 1789 and then endured  about a century of horrors.  Among the main differences, the English had started house training their kings in 1215 with Magna Carta; about then, their lawyers and judges started developing their own native law common to all England, and produced king-baiters from hell; they had also been developing a parliament that would become the model for democracy for the world; and they had given themselves religious Home Rule in the 16^th century.  Russia knows none of those things.  And if you even hinted at them in Beijing, Cairo or Teheran, you would bring the house down.

Eight jurists of my pantheon look down on me as I write this.  One that no-one gets is Sir Henry Maine.  He published his book Ancient Law in 1861.  That year saw the start of the American civil war and the emancipation of Russian serfs.  That timing now causes us to reflect how backward each such nation was then.  Maine wrote when scholarship could be broad and its product literary.  He referred to the ‘vigorous controversy still carried on upon the subject of negro servitude’.  ‘Where old law fixed a man’s social position irreversibly at his birth, modern law allows himself to create it by convention’.

Two propositions in this great work have stayed with me.  One was the warning that ‘division into classes which at a particular crisis of social history is necessary for the maintenance of the national existence degenerates into the most disastrous and blighting of all human institutions – Caste.’  The other was that ‘we may say that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.’  There is an obvious link in the two propositions.

The recent (2020) book, Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson,is a little precious and preacherly, but it touches on raw nerves that matter. 

A nation that could elect someone like Donald Trump looks to have something rotten in its core.  He never sought to conceal his weaknesses.  A nation that could elect him the second time, after all that he has done, looks to be cursed, and headed for the status of a failed state.

White Americans have long looked down on three types of people – native Indians; Negroes; and, now, Latin Americans.  We all apparently want someone to look down on – even inmates of jails have their hierarchies.  ‘The mill worker with no-one else to ‘look down on’ regards himself as eminently superior to the Negro.  The coloured man represents his last outpost against social oblivion.’  That is so true.

The slavery in America was unique.  It made people into currency, or beasts of the field, and brought violence, rape and torture into the mainstream.  It debased humanity and it contradicted the essential premise of the Enlightenment – that each of us has our own dignity merely because we are human.  How can any nation, so conceived, remove such a stain?  How can any such nation endure?

The Nazis admired Americans for what they had done to the natives and the Negroes.  They studied their laws and borrowed the word ‘subhuman’ – Untermensch.  Hitler especially marvelled at the American ‘knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.’ (I regard that as the most chilling phrase in a long book.  The wording is not I think that of Hitler – it is too subtle.)

Caste involves narcissism – as does Donald Trump.  Big time.  The psychoanalyst, and refugee from the Nazis, Erich Fromm said:

If one examines the judgment of the poor whites regarding blacks, or of the Nazis in regard to Jews, one can easily recognise the character of their respective judgments.  Little straws of truth are put together, but the whole which is thus formed consists of falsehoods and provocations.  If the political actions are based on narcissistic self-glorifications, the lack of objectivity often leads to disastrous consequences.

Fromm said the working class was the most susceptible.  The lowest worker was at least white, or Aryan, a ‘part of the most admirable group in the world and superior to another racial group singled out as inferior.’ 

There you have MAGA.  And God help those who deride it.  The function of Trump is to ensure that lower class whites continue to have a caste that they can look down on.  (My wording.)

Indians of lower caste in the US do not look those of higher caste in the face.  They are frightened.

In Germany, you can get three years for displaying the swastika.  In the US, the confederate flag is all over the place.  They had the solution for slavery.

The American attitude to heath care and violence is a blot on its psyche and standing in the world.  Both are linked to the Negro and slavery.  Why pay tax to support the Negro – against whom we must have protection?

Einstein moved to Princeton.  Marion Anderson came to sing there.  As a person of colour, there was no room for her at the inn.  Einstein put her up at his home.  The greatest mind of his time with one of the great singers of all time.  Both rejected in their own country.  Hannah Arendt reflected on the banality of evil.

Then came the greatest insult of all.  Some piteous, misadventured white people put a Negro at the top of the pyramid – in the White House.  And the most insulted white man of all was a fraudulent property developer named Donald Trump – who could not lie straight in bed.

The U S is falling apart before our eyes.  I see no reason for confidence.  Nor do I see any for India, which is even less willing to confront caste in its past – compared, say, to the U S, much less to Japan or Germany, two of our strongest allies.  When you look at the most obvious sources of threat – China, Russia, and Iran – the future is not bright.

The American Confederacy was dedicated to the continuance of slavery.  The civil war was fought on that issue.  Lincoln abolished slavery during the war.  The defeat of the Confederacy, at a cost of more than half a million lives, entailed the repudiation of the premise of slavery – that the Negro was inferior to the white man – an Untermensch. 

What now looks to be a fatal flaw in the Union is the failure by so many white Americans to accept the judgment of the nation on this issue.  The cancer of caste remains.  And too many now support a white man who has never read a book or seen a play, but who has made a career of refusing to accept the judgment of the nation on any issue.  His whole being depends on conflict. 

There you have the hallmarks of the American tragedy.

Caste is mandated by religion in India.  In the U S, it is merely tolerated by religion.  Which is worse?  You may not want to put this on a sandwich board in Washington or New Delhi, but it is hard to regard as ‘civilised’ any nation so engaged with caste.

Both the U S and Australia were founded by British rejects – Puritans in one and convicts in the other.  We got the better deal, and we at least avoided the stain of slavery. But after the failure of the First Nations referendum, have we avoided the stain of caste?

For reasons I have often given, I avoid using terms like ‘racist’ or ‘homophobic’.  They are too broad in their application and too often used as a form of abuse.  On their own, they are unfair.  If I do not know just what I am alleged to have done, how can I defend myself against whatever the actual charge may be?

It’s like saying I did something ‘inappropriate’ to a woman or a boy.  What?  Suggesting they should barrack for Melbourne Storm?  Eating spaghetti off a knife – or while on the mobile?

Charging someone with racism is often worse in my eyes than the conduct said to give rise to the charge.  Among other things, it is usually done in very cold blood, and with real malice – the intention to hurt another person.

Events in the sporting world this week show what mischief these charges can bring.

Sam Kerr is now about the most popular person in Australian sport.  She was charged with saying something to a police officer that was in some way ‘racist’.  A very sensible and experienced journalist spent a column discussing the implications.  He did not say what law was broken.  That would be likely to be in general terms and not detail the actual conduct alleged. 

When that was disclosed – ‘you stupid white bastard’ – the sane part of the nation was convulsed with laughter.  What a picnic for those who enjoy pure bullshit.  The ABC was driven to report on ‘a test case in the culture wars’.  In the prosecution of a crime? 

One paper went so far as to quote an ‘expert’.  Prof Fethi Mansouri, an expert in intercultural communication at Deakin University, said ‘it is very difficult to see how this can amount to being a serious racist incident’. 

Now I see that a public spokesman on the subjects of racism and soccer has publicly apologised to Sam Kerr.  His penitence derives from considering the Diversity Council of Australia’s definition of racism – it refers to ‘race-based societal power.’  The critic says ‘racism could not be committed against a white person as they are not a member of a marginalised group.’  Is it seriously suggested that judges should deprive people of legal rights by reference to this kind of Moonshine?

If the English are serious about this charge, can we ask what were the terms of imprisonment imposed on the flower of the English Establishment who jostled and abused a Muslim player of colour live on international television – thereby disgracing themselves, their nation, and the game of cricket?  (A one-way ticket to Botany Bay would have been ideal.)

A person of colour in the NRL used an unfortunate term during a match about another person of colour.  He has now repented.  He says everyone knows he is not ‘racist’ and that he did not mean his remark to be ‘racist.’  Some call for a twelve-match suspension.  It is likely that he has no other source of income.

A very experienced AFL coach made an abusive remark about the sexuality of a bruising idiot who could have killed the captain of the coach’s side.  He said he was sorry, and he copped a $20,000 fine.  That is about a quarter of the average income here.

These lapses of taste or judgment are a part of life.  Those responsible for responding to them judgmentally and with the weight of the law may think that they are high minded, but there is an aura of both unreality and unfairness in all the reactions now agitating the press.  Thinking that one race is superior to another involves a failure of logic.  Expressing that view to hurt others involves a failure of courtesy.  You cannot deal with those failures by legislation.  Unless you are in regimes like those in China, Iran, or Russia.

You debase the very currency you seek to preserve when you use the criminal law to whack people hard as a punishment for failures of judgment or taste at the fringe.  Punishment is a measure of despair.  Ask any candid judge.

And this is all blood to a tiger for the enemies of common sense and decency in the press.

Coppers are a bit like lawyers.  They may be a pain in the bum, but someone has to do it.  But those who do it for love are another matter.  As are those do who it for profit – like those who work for Rupert Murdoch.

The word vigilante comes to mind.  (Another bad one is ‘crusader’.)  The OED refers to members of a ‘vigilance committee.’  Brewer tells us that a vigilance committee was a privately formed citizen group taking upon themselves to assist in the maintenance of law and order – such as dealing with loyalists to the North in the U S, or whose function it was to intimidate Negroes.  And so we can see the seeds of the progress from the posse, to vigilante, to the lynch mob, and the KKK.  And now we have MAGA as an appalling throwback under a red baseball cap.

It is hard to think of a decent connotation.  The Macquarie is more up to date.  A ‘vigilante’ is ‘a private citizen who, usually as one of a group of such citizens, assumes the role of guardian of society in maintaining law and order, punishing wrongdoers, etc.’  That is to say, the vigilante usurps the power of the state – and in so doing, the vigilante becomes liable to being corrupted by that power.  Trump is just a hideous example.  

Ominously, the Macquarie says of ‘vigilantism’ – ‘the methods, practices, and attitudes associated with vigilantes, such as intolerance, bigotry, racism etc’.  (My emphasis.) 

In my view, the rot set in with talk-back radio, got worse with Facebook and Twitter and the like, and has now been made a most malignant cancer on us all by the spread of illiteracy and the influence of Fox News and the like here.

It is a great shame if those seeking to deal with ‘racism’ resort to means associated with its grosser culprits.  It is an old cliché, but a true one – the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  Virgil put it more crisply, I see – facilis descensus Averno (the descent to hell is easy).

For myself, I would think that if any of this stuff has to be aired in public, it could be quickly resolved by common sense, tolerance and restraint, and plain human decency – and as far away as possible from anyone remotely resembling a preacher – or an intellectual.

But with Sam Kerr looking to a four-day jury trial two years after the alleged offence, the English have completely lost the plot.  The ageing mother country has finally succumbed to the evil of banality.

Sam Kerr – racism – homophobia

(Random impressions on hearing and reading King Lear once more)

This is a play.  It is about two old men who are betrayed by their children after they pick the wrong ones to favour.  It opens with a fruity discussion about the conception of the bastard.  Did that word have its bad sense back then? 

Edmund is a bastard in both senses.  He is also the pivot between the stories of the two old men.  In a play of black hats and white hats, he is about the blackest.  He is a glitch in the social fabric – and he sets out to rip the whole thing to bits.

The reticence of Cordelia is odd.  But we must remember the remark of Bradley.  She was brought up with Goneril and Regan for sisters.  And then there is the old chestnut – but for that, there would be no play.

It is immediately obvious that the king is past it all.  He looks and sounds sclerotic.  He has left his ‘retirement’ far too late.

And King Lear betrays his office.  The first duty of a king is to preserve the kingdom.  The next is to ensure a safe succession.  Lear fails in both.  His is a shocking and dangerous folly.  And he dresses up his indulgence in a stupid and pointless game of charades.  There is more than enough fuel, here, for a tragedy.

His explosion is almost as quick as that of Leontes.  In less than ten minutes, he casts off his favourite daughter and his most trusted counsellor.  Their fault?  They declined to take part in his silly games.

The King of France has a very white hat.  (Which may be as well, because France probably did not exist then.)

The sisters show their evil immediately.  Their first moves are not to look after their father, but to protect themselves against his excess and distemper.  They are cold and loveless.  You wonder how they got and now treat their husbands.  Their protestations of love were of course faked.

One husband is a kind of corrective.  The other is as bad as his wife.

Kent is a model of loyalty.  He gives as good as he gets.  He does a great line in invective.  He is someone the audience can support.

Gloucester is cut from other cloth.  He is the journeyman courtier and politician, and he is gullible.  But he does not sell out.  He is certainly more sinned against than sinning.

Edmund, the bastard, is a poor man’s Napoleon.  He is the ultimate gambler and anyone else is just a piece that he seeks to move about the board for his benefit.  Other people serve no other function.

The fool is a kind of chorus, a mirror to the cracked king, and a source of relief to the audience.  He is also a throwback to the older and more popular forms of theatre, like the morality plays – or commedia dell ‘arte.  It may also be as well at times that he reminds us that we are watching theatre.  Auden thought that the fool uses humour as ‘a protection against tragic feeling’.

Edgar, the innocent son of Gloucester, is a white hat, and targeted for that reason.  He becomes another fool (who can bang on too much for out taste).  He will live to triumph over evil.

Oswald is a greasy shocker, the complete opposite of Kent.  Kent’s denunciation of him is a precious highlight of invective, which is nearly a lost art.

The bastard’s betrayal of his father is pure evil.  He does it for his advancement.  And it leads to horrifying results.  Who said that ‘motiveless’ malignity was the worst kind of evil?

Lear is now quite mad, but not so mad that he cannot reflect that he has taken too little care for the poor and oppressed.  (That may be an unusual reflection for a king of that or any other period.)

The storm scene is like an explosion of Mahler or Jackson Pollock.  Is man no more than this?  (It is usually far too long and too loud – even on CD.  It has to be grotesque, but not in volume.)

The revenge on Gloucester is a deliberate affront to the audience.  Cornwall speaks of revenges ‘we are bound to take’.  So – here is a categorical imperative for evil – derived from Satan?

Goneril and Regan are now beyond redemption.  Regan gets the most nauseating line on our stage about how a blind man may get to Dover, but the line ‘tigers not daughters’ comes from a husband.  (Indeed, we now recall from an earlier tragedy the ‘wilderness of tigers’ that was so inhumanly cruel to another faded commander in his stricken condition.)

And so, on to Dover.  It is about now, if you are like me, that survival becomes a life and death issue for the audience.  It may to some resemble surviving Apocalypse Now.  Who can say ‘I am at the worst’?  ‘It is time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.’  Reality and morality all dissolve in chaos.  The very notion of humanity is repudiated.  We have returned to the primal slime we thought we had left behind.

Has our stage seen this since the Greeks about two thousand years beforehand?  The descent is spattered with lines that stay with you.  ‘It smells of humanity.’  At times. the audience in the stalls shares with the characters on the stage the sense that they are going where no one has been before.

The predators are now fully engaged in preying on each other.  Do they do this in the jungle?

As in the Roman plays, the repeated reference to the ‘mighty gods’ reminds us that this ‘great stage of fools’ has nothing of what we call religion at all.  (Not that the current models supply workable armour against evil.)

When Cordelia returns, she is a paragon.  Of what?  Her inability to play the game led to all Hell breaking loose.  Now she is a model of perfection.  Who has to die.  A heretic might ask whether it has all been worth it.

Near the end, the evil of the sisters and the bastard teeters on caricature.  (‘An interlude!’  ‘If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.’)  But the duel is good theatre – and a form of relief.  The Greeks never made it to this kind of drama.

Edmund convinces a captain he appoints to murder Cordelia of the merit of the defence of superior orders – and he then fires Albany.  Some may take with a grain of salt his apparent contrition at the end.

There has long been contention about the blinding of Gloucester and the murder of Cordelia.  It is all too much for some.  It is as well to remember the caution of Dr Johnson that ‘our author well knew what would please the audience for which he wrote.’  They did not just whip and put people in the stocks back then.  They hanged, drew and quartered them in public.  It was a very popular event – as would be the guillotine much later in France.

And Goneril has the perfect bell-ringer for Donald Trump.

So if I do. The laws are mine, not thine.

Who can arraign me for’t?

‘Is this the promised end?’

Well, at least Albany has been released from one of the worst marriages ever – and he has lived to tell the tale.  That in itself is something.

Philosophy does not have much to say about Shakespeare, but Auden quotes Pascal to good effect.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.  The entire universe need not arm himself to crush him.  A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

All our dignity, then, consists in thought.

And ‘thought’ is not a term that comes readily to the mind when we reflect on King Lear.  But it is something to bear in mind when we think of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or Donald Trump – not one of whom has ever seen this play, or heard its poetry, or absorbed its teaching.