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.

My discussion with colleagues whose views I respect has not produced a satisfactory explanation of the conduct of Walter Sofronoff, KC, let alone a defence.

I wish to raise three issues.

1.  ‘Bias’ is defined in the Compact O E D as ‘an inclination or prejudice in favour of or against a particular person or thing.’  In bowls, it is the tendency of the ball to deviate from the straight because of the way the ball is weighted.  You can control the level of deviation by the weighting you apply to the ball.  Albrechtsen had fifty-one goes at it in her secret or ‘private’ correspondence with Sofronoff.  She could not have asked for more from him in his public findings.  I follow that you can regard the correspondence as incidents giving rise to an appearance of bias.  But is it not also evidence of the existence of actual bias?  I have no doubt there are loads of authority on the point, but I ask the question on behalf of the people on the 605 bus.  I suspect that any answer may savour of the metaphysical, which is not the way of our law.
2. Whether the bias is actual or apparent, why were not all findings against Sofronoff sufficient to warrant an order of the court vitiating all findings against the victim of the bias?  Mr Drummond is aggrieved by a serious failure of due process.  Has the law done enough to vindicate him?  The answer is No, if you look at the venom unleashed in the Australian today.  As to the conduct of Albrechtsen, in The Common Law, O W Holmes said that ‘when we call an act malicious in common speech, we mean that harm to another person was intended to come of it, and that such harm was desired for its own sake as an end in itself.  For the purposes of the criminal law, however, intent alone was found to be important…’
3. Who paid for the lunch?

If you have looked at the findings of Justice Kaye on the dealings between Walter Sofronoff, KC and Janet Albrechtsen, you may have thought that the latter might keep a low profile about the singular debacle wrought by the two of them in the administration of justice in this country.  It was staggeringly inept.  If you thought that, you were wrong.

The page one report in The Australian today is headed ‘DPP’s reputation remains in tatters.’  The first par. reads:

Shane Drumgold has won a Pyrrhic victory because he has failed to restore his reputation.

The last par. reads:

Each day we are learning more about prosecutorial overreach not just in the ACT, but in other jurisdictions.  If not for the work by many journalists at this newspaper, the Australian public had little idea about deeply troubling issues concerning the criminal justice system.  There is more to do on that front.

Any apology?  Au contraire.  The lady is a victim.  Her right of privacy has been infringed.

Although the finding of apprehended by Justice Sten Kaye of apprehended bias against Sofronoff is of great interest to some because it involves delving into the private communications between the former judge and myself, Drummond’s legal challenge in the ACT Supreme Court amounts to yet another own goal.  Drumgold got an order for costs, but he didn’t get his reputation back.

The rest of the piece is a diatribe against Drumgold.  There is no pretence of any balance.  The lady is a known crusader.

The effrontery and divorce from reality is Trumpian.

The piece supports the following propositions.

1.  Albrechtsen was a loaded gun – viciously loaded – against Drumgold from the start.  She still is – now, more so, in self-defence.
2.  Any pretence of impartiality on her part was just that.
3. Sofronoff must have been or should have been aware of both of the above.
4. If follows that his conduct in dealing with her is an affront to our notions of fairness and common decency.
5. As a result, public faith in the findings of this inquiry and the administration of justice has fallen.
6. As a further result, the apprehension that many judges feel about some in the press will now be seen to be justified – Albrechtsen will be seen as lowering confidence in the press (except of course for the base).
7. The Australian is not worth the paper it is written on.  (And yes, here I own up to prejudice.  I have held that view for very many years.)

But what really gets to us is just how brazen people like Rupert or Lachlan Murdoch or Donald Trump are.

Whatever else may be said of the two protagonists, they are not novices.  There were 51 communications ‘off the record’.  Sofronoff was obliged to act fairly and openly.  He entered into this correspondence on the condition that it would not be revealed to the subject of the inquiry.  Are we really asked to believe that neither saw that this was as elemental a case of conflict of interest as you could find? 

Why is not the whole report now as vitiated in law as it is in public opinion?

I was involved in conducting public hearings for thirty years.  You only have to do one to know that what happened here was outrageous.

Let me put it this way.  Your professional conduct is the subject of a public inquiry conducted by an eminent lawyer with all the credentials for that purpose.  You are being pursued in the press by someone who makes a living from that kind of campaign and public vilification.  The person hearing the matter then finds against you in very grave and personal terms.  Then you find he has been secretly corresponding with your enemy all the time.  Which of them do you want to throttle first?

‘Racism’ is a fraught term.  I try not to us it. It involves two elements – an assertion that people can distinguished from other people by reference to their racial origin or colour, and that they can be denied rights or opportunities as a result of that distinction.  A clear example would be a club or theatre denying entry to people of colour – that is, by allowing entry only to white people.

A theatre in London will put on a play about slavery and on some nights allow entry only to people of colour – on those nights, they will deny entry to white people.  That course falls squarely within the definition of racism.

What is the rationale?  Because of the treatment of people of colour in the past, they are entitled to pursue a course that they would otherwise condemn.  Some might call this ‘playing the victim card.’

That looks to me like: ‘We are entitled to be racist in this case because we have suffered from racism in the past.’  And that looks to me to be a simple invocation of the notion that the ends justify the means.  And it apparently matters not that the people complaining of racism are now promoting it.

And that looks to me to be snapshot of a lot of the evil of the world today.

I knew him….

‘Someone must have traduced Joseph K, for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.’

What we have just done to Justice Lasry defies both belief and all decency.

Yes, we have dreadful problems in the way we dispose of cases in our courts, but reacting in anything like this way can only dint confidence in our judges even further. 

And make it harder for them to do their job, and for us to get the best people.  Why accept a position where you are accorded the dignity and respect not of a figure out of Franz Kafka, but of a Commissar in a novel by Boris Pasternak?

I have some experience of these things.  Good judges don’t run scared.  Nor should any judge be seen to owe fealty to the civil service of the government.

There is something rotten in the State of Victoria.

Romeo and Juliet is a play about a tragedy brought about by the meeting of two rivers – the cyclical hate and killing of the blood feud, or vendetta, and the loss of judgment than can afflict teenagers when they first feel hot passion.  One is a force for life; the other a force for death.  Both involve heat.  And in that part of the world that brought us Boccaccio and Petrarch, and the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and the Mafia, neither was in short supply.

The great American judge and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said that ‘the Roman law started from the blood feud, and all the authorities agree that the German law began in that way.’  The phrase ‘German law’ there means our law, since English law grew not from Roman law, but from the laws of the Angles and Saxons.  The compact OED has for vendetta ‘1 a prolonged bitter quarrel with or complaint against someone 2 a prolonged feud between families in which people are murdered in revenge for previous murders.’  That fits the Capulets and Montagues.  The problem about breaking the cycle had been looked at two thousand years before in the Oresteia.

Sex is, well, sex.  We would cease to exist without it, but all hell can break loose in that period described as puberty – which is where the thirteen-year-old Juliet, still minded by her nurse, finds herself.

When those two currents meet, you may get mayhem – of precisely the kind described in this play.  We learn immediately of ‘ancient grudge’ and ‘new mutiny,’ where ‘civil blood makes civil hands unclean,’ so that ‘a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’ – and these ‘misadventured piteous overthrows….with their death bury their parents’ strife’. 

How else could that strife end? 

There are three key words in the lexicon of those in a blood feud – respect, insult, and honour.  You may recall the scene in Godfather III when one Mafia don quits a meeting hissing that the Godfather has not shown him enough respect – and then all hell break loose, and the building is raked with machine gun fire.

At the start of the play, Romeo thinks he’s in love with Rosaline.  That she is a Capulet does not appear to trouble him.  He’s more worried about what usually troubles boys – her commitment to ‘chastity’ (1 1 213 and 221).  His mate Benvolio suggests they gatecrash a Capulet party so that Romeo can compare Rosaline with other young women (and as we know, with one look at Juliet, Rosaline goes clean out the window).  The Montagues know this will be seen as a mortal insult by the Capulets.  They will go masked – like the trio in Don Giovanni – but Romeo knows this is not a good idea – his mind misgives (1.4.47 and 106).  Such is the rashness, and price, of the young male ego.  Another mate, Mercutio, who has about him a kind of death wish, launches into a speech about nothing, and the troop marches on – and in.

Inevitably, they are sprung, and by the Capulet point man, a very nasty piece of work called Tybalt, who immediately calls for his rapier to answer this ‘scorn at our solemnity’ (1.5.59 and 65).  Capulet talks him out of it at the party, but Tybalt is not satisfied.  He serves a written challenge on Montague. 

So, when the day is hot, and the Capulets are abroad, and the ‘mad blood’ is stirring, Benvolio knows a brawl is inevitable and suggests to Mercutio that they retire (3.1.1-4).  But Mercutio is as hot for a fight as Tybalt, and you know the rest.

This happens while Romeo meets, falls for, and marries Juliet in some of the most gorgeous and best-known language in our letters. 

In the result, we may overlook that within a couple of days, Romeo has killed two people, the first a Capulet, the other a relative of the prince who was scheduled to marry Juliet, and who appears to have been beyond a reproach for a young noble of that time.

Romeo kills twice in hot blood, but that was not a legal excuse then – it flouted the edict of the prince – and it was only a moral excuse if you subscribed to the law of the vendetta.  Romeo did not do so – he had seen it all before and he had had enough (1.1 174-186).  His first killing, Tybalt, is the vendetta tit for tat, pure and simple.

He kills Paris when mad with grief and bent on suicide – but only suicide in stage-mannered way.  Paris had every right to arrest Romeo as a felon – if not a ghoul – but the crazed Romeo can only respond ‘Wilt thou provoke me?  Then, have at me, boy!’  The insults flow in even in death found in heat.  (‘Boy’ was the final insult in Coriolanus.)  Then Romeo sees who he has killed and recalls that his servant had told him that ‘Paris should have married Juliet’ and he says that he will bury Paris ‘in a triumphant grave’(5.3.78 and 83) – whatever that means.  He even comes to terms with Tybalt.

Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet?
O, what more favour can I do to thee,
Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain
To sunder his that was thine enemy?
Forgive me, cousin!   (5.3.97-101).

It is almost Wagnerian, but it does not strike us like that.  We are wrung out – and in less than half of five hours.  We find it easier to come to grips with the youth of Juliet than that of Romeo – in practice, it is the other way around.  Girls mature faster than boys.  The difference here is I suppose, that when it became for the killing, it was the boys who went for their rapiers.  The vendetta was male thing.

Such is the power of the playwright, that it does not occur to us that had our hero not killed himself, he may have faced two counts of murder – even putting to one side the edict of his ‘moved prince’ and the ineluctable force of the vendetta.  All we know is:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe.
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

If the producers of the Arkangel set of the complete plays of Shakespeare had set out to show The Merchant of Venice as the worst play ever written, they have succeeded.  The problem is not so much Shylock, as the boring ordinariness and vanity of the rest of them.  And W H Auden in his Lectures on Shakespeare does not help.  He says ‘The only racial remark in the play is made by Shylock, and the Christians refute it.  Religious differences in the play are treated frivolously: the question is not one of belief, but conformity.’  That is a false dilemma, and the whole play is riddled with expressions of contempt going both ways – and taking a pound of flesh by due process of law does not sound ‘frivolous’.

There is no doubt that Auden was very seriously bright.  I at first thought he could have made a brilliant advocate.  The lectures are full of lightning flashes.  But too often, the lightning hits the dunny.  And that is fatal in advocacy. 

And if he expressed his views on Desdemona to a modern U S audience now, they would burn the place down.

But here he is on the fall of Rome as shown in Julius Caesar.

It was a society doomed not by the evil passions of selfish individuals, because such passions always exist, but by an intellectual and spiritual failure of nerve that made the society incapable of coping with its situation, which is why the noble Brutus is even more at sea in the play than the unscrupulous and brutal Antony.

A failure of nerve led to the collapse of Europe in the 1930s, and threatens the U S now. 

After the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, Antony’s funeral oration is probably the best-known speech in Shakespeare.  Antony is utterly unscrupulous, and the results are utterly brutal.  The two subsequent scenes in that play are in my view the best displays of just how vicious politics can get on our stage.  The first scene is a lynching.  The second is a Mafia like settlement of the death list compiled in the coldest blood by the winners.

(But when we come to Antony and Cleopatra – Auden’s favourite of these plays – Antony is a bored playboy, unable to break with his ‘Egyptian dish,’ and he is put away in straight sets by the man Gibbon described as a ‘crafty tyrant.’)

But his remarks on Prince Hal, later King Henry IV, really caught my eye.  He agrees with the observation of Falstaff that I do not think is sufficiently noticed: ‘Thou art essentially mad without seeming so.’

Hal has no self….He can be a continuous success because he can understand any situation, he can control himself, and he has physical and mental charm.  But he is a cold fish……The most brutal scene in Shakespeare is Henry’s wooing of Katherine. 

Whacko!  Prince Hal is all front – and nothing else.  Think of the seriously bad bastards in history, and then ask how apt that description might be for them.

Or try this for an exam question:

Sir John Falstaff is a ratbag, but if you want the real deal of the complete ratbag, go to Prince Hal.  Discuss.