Essays in Life

Foreword

All but nine of the essays in this selection have been previously published in on-line media – most notably in openDemocracy. Writers being tinkerers by nature, I have not resisted the temptation to update some of them and thereby to give them, I hope, added coherence and accessibility. Those marked with an asterisk are published here for the first time. Sharp-eyed readers may spot that on two occasions a quotation reappears in a subsequent essay. Repetition is not a favourite device but in both cases my inability to conjure alternatives has prevailed.

My aim in presenting these pieces is no different from that of the Spanish poet and essayist Juan Gil-Albert (1904 – 1994): I write to clarify what I think, and offer these words in the hope that they may be of use to others.¹

1 «…escribo para aclararme las cosas y doy a conocer lo que escribo por si este camino que hago puede ayudar en algún caso a los demás.»

The Arts

1. Shakespeare the Revolutionary

Watching a performance of King Lear at London’s Barbican Theatre, I was struck not for the first time by Shakespeare’s awareness of poverty and inequality. Though his popularity and sheer brilliance during his lifetime kept him safe from the Tower, he was something of a revolutionary, an egalitarian long before the word or any of its strident political equivalents had found their way into our vocabulary. Passages, not only in Lear but in other plays too, show evidence of a strong social conscience – at times stated quite bluntly and at others more subtly through the treatment and shaping of character.

In King Lear, part of the learning experience forced upon the eponymous hero, and also on the Earl of Gloucester, is recognition of economic injustice and of their own failures to address it during their long careers as powerful members of the elite – one a monarch, the other an aristocrat. Thus Gloucester, intent on suicide, hands his purse to his son Edgar, whom he believes to be a beggar, with these words:

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man

That slaves your ordinance, that will not see

Because he does not feel, feel your pow’r quickly;

So distribution should undo excess,

And each man have enough.

It is a recipe for progressive taxation, for a generous benefit system, for a National Health Service, for what used to be called the welfare state.

King Lear on the heath in the midst of a violent storm goes further, as his sudden material impoverishment brings him awareness of the plight of others so afflicted:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm.

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this! Take physic pomp,

Expose yourself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,

And show the heavens more just.

Lear’s reflection on his own lack of concern for the poor I have ta’en too little care of this… could not be other than a contemporary reference. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536–1541) and the acceleration of land enclosures in Tudor England which left many people unemployed, the number of vagrants and vagabonds had mushroomed. In 1594, the Lord Mayor of London estimated the number of beggars in the city at 12,000, while tens of thousands more roamed the countryside either as smart-assed rogues like Autolycus in A Winter’s Tale, or ragged vagabonds such as Edgar pretended to be in Lear. Both would have been familiar figures to an Elizabethan/Jacobean audience. Altogether at least a third of the entire population of Shakespeare’s time was estimated to be poor, including those who were nominally in work but badly paid.

Today, with countless refugees from Africa, Asia and the Middle East pressing at Europe’s gates, while homelessness, hunger and distress grow within the European citadel, Lear’s and Gloucester’s cry against inequality seems as shockingly relevant to our own time as it undoubtedly was to Shakespeare’s. How did Shakespeare come to write such lines? Whence the extraordinary range of his sympathies?

We know that he had read Montaigne’s essay ‘On Cannibals’ – from which he derived the name of Caliban in The Tempest. In the 16th century, the process of discovery and conquest of the New World was in full swing, and stories abounded of the strange creatures who lived there. Though Shakespeare portrayed Caliban as a savage, he also understood native indignation at having their land and inheritance taken by a ‘colonial’ usurper: This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me, Caliban tells Prospero.

In Montaigne’s essay, the author writes of an encounter with three natives of Brazil during which the visitors offered a stinging rebuke of the inequality they had observed in France:

…They noticed how some men were replete with every imaginable commodity while others, impoverished and hungry, went begging at the doors of the rich. And they found it strange that the poor tolerated such injustice and wondered why they didn’t seize the wealthy by the throat or set fire to their houses.

It is a theme that Montaigne goes on to address at length in a subsequent essay – ‘On Inequality Among Us’ – in which he questions why we value people by their wrapping and packaging…which merely hide the characteristics by which we can truly judge someone. Here, in one of Hamlet’s exchanges with Claudius, is a Shakespearean dramatization of the same issue:

Hamlet: A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

King: What dost thou mean by this?

Hamlet: Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

And here is Lear echoing Montaigne:

There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office… Robes and furred gowns hide all.

Socio-political injustice was, therefore, neither strange nor novel in 16th-century European thought or literature. Our playwright did not, of course, write didactic dramas, nor build his plays as illustrations of good and evil, right and wrong behaviour, or – as one academic put it to me – to induce salutary reactions in the audience via catharsis or laughter. Had he done so he would have been following a long tradition in which dramatic characters had first and foremost a symbolic or illustrative function, that is they represented an idea, or a set of dispositions or feelings that audiences were expected to approve or reject. Such was the case with both Roman and medieval drama – the major influences on Elizabethan playwrights. Not even Marlowe, among Shakespeare’s contemporaries, contravened this schematic framework. If we examine Marlowe’s treatment of character in Tamburlaine, or The Jew of Malta, or Faustus, we find that the symbolic role of the protagonists takes priority over their qualities as recognizable individuals – flesh and blood human beings.

What Shakespeare did was to reverse the conventional procedure by building from character to meaning, from the individual to the universal. The philosophical equivalent would be inductive rather than deductive reasoning. This is why his characters work so powerfully on our imagination, why Marlowe’s Jew remains a stereotype while Shakespeare’s (despite the prejudices of the age) is full of personality, why we love Falstaff despite and because of his all-too-human failings, why Hamlet puzzles, angers and frustrates because like us he is insecure, by degrees passionate, cruel, witty, honest, dissembling – a thoroughly human profusion. We meet Shakespeare’s characters in the street, those of his predecessors in our minds. Stage figures of what we might call ‘human complexity’ are a Shakespearean innovation. Only in poetry do we find obvious precedents – for example in Chaucer’s wonderful gallery of portraits and François Villon’s verse Testaments – and there are hints also perhaps in early Spanish picaresque fiction such as the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes. But Chaucer and Villon were solely accessible to a select few – those who could both read and were able to acquire books, while Shakespeare worked in a universal medium of communication where only ears were needed.

Why was this ‘inductive’ technique revolutionary rather than merely innovative? I believe the answer lies in the fact that, for the first time, the individual became a focus of public and artistic attention. Shakespearean drama brought previously unattended elements of human nature and of political and social life to the forefront: the quixotic nature and psychology of motive (Cervantes belongs here, too, of course), the individual validity of the common man, human rights of the kind both Ariel and Caliban² demand in The Tempest, and so on. Little of this is to be found in other playwrights of the period.

In the 18th and 19th centuries Shakespeare’s plays were criticized for their excesses, and attempts were made to improve them by pundits who thought they knew better. What were the objections? Low-life subject matter (unfit for polite society), lack of taste, improper language – features we might recognize, nowadays, as coming from EastEnders rather than Yes Minister. Editors and amenders tried to excise precisely those features that show the commonest citizen as the moral equal of the greatest monarch. They were uncomfortable features. Whoever witnesses the downfall of Angelo (Measure for Measure) or the rise of Bolingbroke (Richard II) knows that the high and mighty are not necessarily to be trusted. Perhaps not to be trusted at all. And here we are not just speaking of a lust for and abuse of power (a familiar Elizabethan theme) but about corruption of a kind that brings to earth the moral authority of the powerful. Much more important, though, is that the Shakespearean common man is as full of humanity as a monarch.

Shakespeare wasn’t a pamphleteer aiming to bring about political change. But his view of people was more revolutionary than anything a pamphleteer could achieve. Elizabethan stage convention unthinkingly accepted class values as fixed (as did French classical theatre). Shakespeare did not; though, his originality in this respect may sometimes pass unnoticed because it seems so natural. Since the plays deal so powerfully with human emotions and states of consciousness, we can easily overlook the implicit socio-economic and political views that, like scenery, colour their background.

My argument then is that Shakespeare was a revolutionary in the way he treated the individual – and that is precisely why he forces an attentive reader or playgoer to re-examine the basis of his or her beliefs, prejudices and social attitudes. Whatever Elizabethan England thought about Jews, for example, the import of Shylock’s words in The Merchant of Venice can’t be avoided:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

The speech was quietly but firmly revolutionary, and Shakespeare must have known as much. Revolutionary not because the writer wanted to change contemporary attitudes towards Jews – that would be a crudely anachronistic fallacy – but because no one in Shakespeare is ‘merely’ anything, not a Jew, nor a peasant, nor a soldier, nor an innkeeper, nor a bawd, nor a king.

This great idea – that of not being ‘merely’ – has been the basis of much of the political change that has taken place in Europe, North America and elsewhere since the 17th century. It lies at the heart of modern democracy, and forms a backcloth to political movements like Marxism and socialism that are founded on ideals of equity and distributive justice.

What Shakespeare helped to bring about was a fundamental change in European consciousness concerning the human condition in the social and political context. I doubt this was his intention; but it is a consequence of his work – of his quiet persistence in giving his characters their head and refusing to censor either them or his own pen.

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2 Neither of them strictly human in the play though their roles and voices certainly are!

2. Hamlet and King Lear*

³

Hamlet

Nietzsche maintained that the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet:

Both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits actions; for their actions could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities, does not get round to action.⁴

Hamlet the play is not about restoring an injured world, but about something more taxing to the mind and spirit – how to find meaning in the face of certain death, how to find truth – if indeed such a thing exists – when nothing, neither words nor things nor people mean or are what they appear. I paraphrase – and in so doing lose much of what Shakespeare intended – his being a far greater mind and pen than that of a modest playgoer such as myself. Hamlet, as Harold Bloom notes, is cosmological drama of man’s fate, and only masks its essential drive as revenge.⁵

Shakespeare’s play set a precedent in Western culture. Nothing like this exploration of human consciousness had ever been attempted before; and it set the pattern for much of what came after – Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, the Romanticism of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly, and Byron, the psychological commentaries of Freud, and Jung, the thread-sewn minutiae of James Joyce (who was much influenced by Hamlet) right up to Samuel Beckett and beyond.

Perhaps the first solid indication of Hamlet’s attempt to expose what lies behind surface appearance comes in his early exchange with his mother:

Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor the customary suits of solemn black,

Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath,

No, nor the fruitful river in the eye

Nor the dejected haviour of the visage.

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief

That can denote me truly. These indeed seem

For they are actions that a man might play,

But I have within which passes show,

These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

He says – and we believe him – that he is not what he seems. Nor, with the exception of the stalwart Horatio and a few minor characters, is anyone else. Hamlet lives behind a mask, several different masks, each one an antic disposition. The other characters likewise dissemble: Claudius lives with murder, Gertrude with emotional betrayal; Polonius – as corrupt in his way as Claudius – spies on his own son, and plots behind the arras:

Your bait of falsehood take this carp of truth,

And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,

with windlass and with assays of bias,

By indirections find directions out;…

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern mask betrayal with friendship, Laertes lends himself to murder. Ophelia – what of Ophelia? At her father’s bidding, she suppresses her own love for Hamlet, pretending to be other than she is.

Deception has wider implications. Humans lie and cheat to achieve their ends – a Weltanschaung for which Hamlet and all the other principals eventually die. Hamlet alone penetrates the masks worn by others – but what he sees on the other side is not the authentic faces of those who surround him, not the truth (where is the truth after all?), but death; not …the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; but Yorick, this quintessence of dust…. That is the challenge presented by the play. What do we signify, if, indeed, we signify anything? What lies behind the mask?

Much of what that meaning might include Hamlet rejects, for he sees that it can’t be separated from or cleansed of evil. Polonius promises to look after the actors according to their deserts, to which Hamlet snaps: …use every man after his desert, and who shall ’scape whipping?.

It is the elusiveness of meaning – and the terrible insight that there is no escape from the violence and corruption with which life is identified – that causes Hamlet to hesitate, to doubt. Doubt, hesitation are the trappings of the intelligent mind; certainty in an unstable world is a refuge of the blind and the foolish; words are merely another form of disguise, a cloak in which to lose the name of action:

Why what an ass I am! This is most brave,

That I, the son of a dear father murdered

Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,

Must like a whore unpack my heart with words…

Even his father’s ghost cannot be believed:

…The spirit I have seen

May be a devil and the devil hath power

T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps,

Out of my weakness and my melancholy,

As he is very potent with such spirits,

Abuses me to damn me…

Doubt and indecision lie at the very core of the play and of Hamlet’s terrible penetration of the human dilemma. Hence why…

…conscience does make cowards of us all

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought

And enterprises of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action.

Thought – the realization of the futility of human action – destroys enterprise:

Sure He that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and godlike reason

To fust in us unus’d. Now whether it be

Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple

Of thinking too precisely on th’ event

A thought which quarter’d hath but one part wisdom

And ever three parts coward – I do not know…

To act at all you must be deceived into thinking your actions will make a difference, and that they represent your intentions. But – as the Player King suggests in one of the most astonishing speeches in the play – a speech often ignored but which summarizes much of the thematic discourse and which we must assume was written by Hamlet himself:

Our wills and fates do so contrary run

That our devices still are overthrown,

Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

A sentiment that Hamlet overtly approves when later he admits in Act V:

Our indiscretion sometime serves us well

When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends

Rough-hew them how we will.

Here he presages the end. He will not kill his uncle otherwise than casually, at a moment when he ceases to think and instead acts in a fit of passion, or at the behest of fate. He could have performed the deed dispassionately in Act III, while Claudius is trying to pray. He refused the chance not because he had not yet unmasked the king’s treachery – but because he questioned the validity of the act itself:

…And am I then revenged,

To take him in the purging of his soul,

When