In the Aeneid, Virgil wrote Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius alium, which tranlates as “Rumour, than whom no other evil thing is faster.” Fifteen centuries later, William Shakespeare expounded upon this at great length in Rumor’s prologue to Henry IV, part 2. Two centuries later, Jonathan Swift wrote “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” A century later C.H. Spurgeon said “Falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia while truth is pulling her boots on,” but it would appear that he was quoting Fisher Ames, who said the same thing thirty years earlier.
Perhaps unhappy with having lifted the quote directly, in 1859 Spurgeon wrote “A lie will go ’round the world while the truth is pulling its boots on.” Eighty years or so after that, Winston Churchill slowed falsehood a bit, and then vastly improved the quote with a different article of clothing when he said “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
Within four hundred years, however, truth could not find the airlock. In a stroke of irony, the previous pedigree was lost, which means that not only did all copies of The Yale Book of Quotations go missing, but now falsehood spread throughout the galaxy while truth never left the house. Also, somebody deleted this footnote.
Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary, 2012-11-18
September 7, 2013
QotD: Truth, rumour, and sketchy footnotes
August 31, 2013
The modern monarchy in Spain
In an older post at the Guardian, Miguel-Anxo Murado looks at the place of the monarchy in Spanish society:
King Juan Carlos of Spain must be one of the most Shakespearian kings, ever. His grandfather was ousted from the throne like Richard II, and like Richard III, his brother was killed (though in Carlos’ case it was a tragic accident). Like Hamlet he had a difficult relationship with his father, and like Macbeth, he arrived at the crown by way of an evil creature (General Franco). It sounds inevitable that, like King Lear, in his old age he would be cursed with troublesome daughters. Now, one of them, Princess Cristina, has been summoned by a judge. She has to answer for allegations that, together with her husband the Duke of Palma, they misappropriated millions of euros in public funds. Some say this scandal, the latest in a long series of royal mishaps, threatens the very institution of monarchy in Spain. But is it so?
The rule of King Juan Carlos of Spain is a very interesting example of how the essence of monarchy is not history, but a story — and how tricky that is. The Spanish monarchy is a literary institution. It was born outside and above the law. Its legitimacy was based on symbols, metaphors and, first and foremost, on storytelling: a mostly imaginary tale of continuity and exceptionality. Modernity changed this a bit, but not by much. Like theatre, monarchy had begun like a religious cult and ended in a popular spectacle. That was all. In stable systems like the UK, this transition from statecraft to stagecraft could be done more or less effectively, but in Spain it was pushing the trick too far.
[…]
Like with all story-telling, there’s some truth in this fiction. Yes, the king did assist the transition to democracy, and he stood against the 1981 military coup. Yet the often overlooked fact here is that he had no alternative if he wanted to reign. It was true that he was not ostentatious, but he wasn’t austere either. It is true that he seems a likeable person, but not exemplary. He was a patron of the WWF, but he also loves hunting elephants. He needed not to be perfect, but now he has to, because that was the nature of the narrative his friends concocted.
July 15, 2013
If you’re bored with the Stratfordians versus Oxfordians, here’s a new debate
In the Guardian, Saul Frampton looks at the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works:
Sometime in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell published Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies — what we now know as the First Folio. It was the literary event of the century, recording for all time the sound of Shakespeare’s English and the sweep of his imagination: Elsinore, Egypt and the Forest of Arden; a balcony, a spotted handkerchief and a skull.
Yet despite this shrine to Shakespeare’s memory, erected by those who knew him, sceptics have continued to doubt his authorship of the plays. He was, they insist, inadequately educated, insufficiently travelled, and didn’t know how to spell his own name. A range of alternative candidates have come and gone over the centuries, including Anne Hathaway, the Jesuits, and more recently Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, the subject of Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous. As always, conspiracy is more fun than consensus, and the doubters have the internet on their side. Shakespeare has thus become the focus of a global conspiracy industry, joining company with reptilian elites, self-destructing lightbulbs and skeletons on the moon.
Scholars have recently fought back against this scepticism, however. Books such as James Shapiro’s Contested Will and Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare Beyond Doubt marshal facts, allusions and funeral monuments to prove that Shakespeare did indeed write the plays and poems attributed to him. Or as Iago says at the end of Othello: “what you know, you know.”
So Shakespeare wrote “Shakespeare”. The printing of the First Folio, however, raises another, ultimately more interesting, question. Without the Folio, Shakespeare’s plays — scattered around in playscripts or in smaller quarto editions — might have been lost to posterity. But did Heminges and Condell edit the text?
H/T to Tim O’Reilly for the link.
November 29, 2012
Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time
In History Today, Paul Lay talks about the power of well-written historical fiction to raise interest in real history:
The case of Richard III was long ago examined in a historical novel, which has come to recent public prominence due to its championing by the High Tory journalist Peter Hitchens and the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, an incongruous pairing if ever there was one. The subject of their mutual admiration is Josephine Tey’s 1951 thriller, her last, The Daughter of Time. It takes its title from Francis Bacon’s adage — ‘Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority’ — and features Tey’s fictional detective, Inspector Alan Grant. At the start of the novel he has broken his leg and is recuperating in hospital. There he is handed a reproduction of a contemporary portrayal of Richard III. Grant fancies himself as a great judge of character and is convinced that the king he sees before him is a kindly and wise character, the very opposite of the Shakespearean monster. With his leg on the mend, Grant heads off to the British Museum to research the truth about the king’s life.
Grant’s conclusion makes The Daughter of Time a firm favourite with members of the Richard III Society, apostles of the last Plantagenet, for the inspector convinces himself that Richard III is indeed a victim of the Tudor propaganda machine. We can believe that or not, but what makes The Daughter of Time such a compelling read is not its rather flimsy conclusion but its extraordinary depiction of process, for few books have so vividly brought to life the historian’s quest, the desire to reveal exactly what happened in the past and the methods used to discover that truth. That’s why historians love it. Beard found it an inspiring work: it ‘partly made me a historian’, she claims; while Hitchens praises Tey’s ‘clarity of mind’; her ‘loathing of fakes and propaganda are like pure, cold spring water in a weary land’.
November 26, 2012
“[W]e must rewrite the history distorted by that, ahem, writer from Stratford”
More on the project to determine if the remains discovered in Leicester are those of Richard III:
Whether the bones prove to be Richard’s or not, the discovery in September has already set academic journals, websites, university lecture circuits and the mainstream media abuzz across Britain, sparking intense and occasionally impolite exchanges. On the floor of the House of Commons, members of Parliament are eloquently clashing, with representatives from York — for whom Richard was the last hope against rival Lancastrians in the War of the Roses — demanding the restoration of his tarnished image. One organization of die-hard Richard III supporters (there are at least two) is running a national ad campaign to clear the king’s name.
There are even calls for a state funeral, giving the medieval king a send-off steeped in the pomp and circumstance of contemporary Britain.
“I suppose we won’t dash off to the Folger Library in Washington and destroy the First Folio, but we must rewrite the history distorted by that, ahem, writer from Stratford,” Hugh Bayley, a member of Parliament from York, said with tongue only partly planted in cheek. “The fact that a Mr. Shakespeare decided to write some play about a hunchback shouldn’t blacken the name of a fine, upstanding defender of country.”
Yet if the remains are indeed those of the long-lost sovereign — something archaeologists call extremely likely — it also raises a conundrum: Where to bury one of England’s most demonized characters?
Under Church of England protocol, the bones, should they prove to be Richard’s, appear destined to end up in the cathedral at Leicester, the city where the remains were found. But many insist they should instead go to the Anglican cathedral in York, the city where history suggests that he wanted to rest. Still others question whether burial should be in an Anglican cathedral at all, as he died a Roman Catholic, reigning by the grace of God and the pope.
September 26, 2012
Shakespeare’s Henry V: public choice theory in the 15th century
In The Freeman, Sarah Skwire points out that the opening act of Shakespeare’s Henry V — while boring to those hoping for battle and carnage — explains the public choice economic theory of rent-seeking:
Shakespeare’s Henry V — a favorite of theater companies and movie studios — begins with an invocation of the muse of fire, presumably because only her powerful heat and light can provide the inspiration necessary for Shakespeare’s great task of bringing forth so “great an object” on “this unworthy scaffold.” The prologue promises, after all, that we are about to see the armies of two great monarchies clash at the famous battle of Agincourt. A plea for divine aid seems only reasonable.
After all that buildup, however, the opening scene of the play has to be one of the dullest stretches in all of Shakespeare’s writing. Promised a ferocious battle with knights and horses and blood and thunder, we are given instead more than one hundred straight lines of a highly technical legal discussion between the Bishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely. It is historically accurate. It is important. And it is exceptionally tedious.
It is tedious, that is, unless you are familiar with one basic piece of Public Choice theory.
Gain without Mutual Benefit
One its core concepts is the idea of rent-seeking. Unlike profit-seeking, which aims at mutually beneficial trade, rent-seeking is the attempt to use the political process to capture a bigger slice of wealth for oneself. Unlike trade, there is no mutual benefit. No wealth is created. The only profit is to the rent-seeker, and possibly his cronies. With that in mind, the opening scene of Henry V is gripping. It is no longer more than one hundred lines of fifteenth-century legal trivia. It is more than one hundred lines of some of the most explicit, uncensored, behind-the-scenes rent-seeking action in literary history.
September 20, 2012
Over-hyping the importance of the Richard III archaeological dig
At the History Today blog, Linda Porter points out that some of the breathless claims about the historical significance of the Leicester archaeological dig are rather overblown:
Major finds don’t come along very often and this would certainly be one of the most significant in the last hundred years. But the huge claims being made for it are not the sort that sit well with most historians. Assertions that, if DNA tests prove positive, this discovery ‘has the potential to rewrite history’ and is of ‘global importance’ make me sigh.
Historians have long known that the Tudor narratives on Richard III are propaganda. Shakespeare’s compelling villain may still resonate with the man on the street but has nothing to do with a measured analysis of the past and anyone with even a general interest in the late fifteenth century will be aware of this. And ‘global significance’? Cross the Channel and I’d be surprised if you found anyone outside the academic world who knew about Richard III and the saga of the Princes in the Tower. Those involved in the project, which appears to have been rigorously conducted from the archaeological perspective, clearly want headlines. As someone who has worked in public relations herself I congratulate them on a successful communications campaign — it has to be acknowledged that the Richard III Society is very good at this kind of thing — but wearing my historian’s hat extravagant claims make me uncomfortable.
April 23, 2012
Shakespeare’s plays as Soviet samizdat
An interesting bit of Soviet history in the BBC’s post on Shakespeare in the former Soviet Union:
In Soviet-era Lithuania, there were productions of Shakespeare for which people queued through the night for tickets. Shakespeare was culture with official approval, but as one of the few alternatives to tales about earnest Soviet heroes, it was also a way for theatre directors to symbolically address forbidden issues. Going to the theatre had an excitement it perhaps lacks nowadays, says Mamontovas.
“I miss those secret messages… there were always little secret messages from the artist to the audience. But there’s no need for that now because you can say what you want openly — it’s more entertainment now.”
[. . .]
Then there is the history of Hamlet in the Soviet Union. An early landmark of Lithuania’s professional theatre was a production of Hamlet by Mikhail Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton.
But Hamlet then fell out of favour. Stalin, it was understood, had turned against the indecisive Prince of Denmark. The uncomfortable comparisons between the setting of Hamlet, the dark world of Elsinore and the Kremlin, was perhaps too close.
Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, had usurped the throne, depriving the young Hamlet himself, and there were parallels — for those who wished to see them — in Stalin’s seizure of Lenin’s leading role and his demolition of rivals such as Trotsky.
There was also another layer of symbolism. Stalin, a keen theatregoer, took against the renowned director Vsevolod Meyerhold and had him arrested and tortured, and executed.
Meyerhold dreamed all his life of staging Hamlet, his favourite play, but somehow never managed it. He was renowned for having said, with bitter irony, that he wanted his tombstone to read: “Here lies a man who never played or directed Hamlet“. From the day he was killed in 1940, Hamlet and the death of Meyerhold became intertwined in the public imagination.
Stalin’s death in 1953 prompted a series of new Hamlet productions that tested the boundaries of how far the post-Stalin thaw had gone, and so the play gained a symbolic status of freedom of expression.
December 23, 2011
Correcting Shakespeare’s sources: the real Richard III
Robert Fripp talks about the historical Richard III and the vicious caricatures that Shakespeare drew upon to produce his famous play:
In 1983, I was working a high-stress job pulling together CBC TV’s weekly investigative program The Fifth Estate. I still ask myself: Why, on top of that, did I spend my nights and weekends imitating a long-dead playwright? My labour of love was a play called Dark Sovereign, which I wrote in the four-century-old English of William Shakespeare and his 17th-century contemporaries.
The same year, 1983, also happened to be the 500th anniversary of King Richard III’s accession to the English throne. Richard III, the last Plantagenet king, is widely believed to have murdered his two nephews in the Tower of London, usurping the elder boy’s crown and reigning just 25 months before the upstart Henry Tudor (Henry VII) killed Richard in battle in 1485 and displayed his body for three days.
King Henry went on to inflict judicial murder on many whose claim to the throne was better than his. Nearly 20 existing portraits of Richard III were disfigured after his death to show humps painted onto the subject’s back. Writers, principally Sir Thomas More and Raphael Holinshed, gave the dead king a hostile press.
Then Shakespeare borrowed from Holinshed to write The Tragedy of Richard III. (It may be significant that the first edition’s title omits the word “King.”) Shakespeare wrote his character assassination around 1591. It was probably performed first for the Court of Queen Elizabeth I shortly thereafter. Tudor monarchs had been ruling for more than a century by then, but their tenuous claim to the throne still seemed to trouble them. Having denied Richard a decent burial a century earlier, they still had need to heap dirt on his reputation.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I portrayed the Earl of Northumberland in the 1983 re-enactment of the coronation of Richard III (at the Cathedral Church of St. James in Toronto) on local TV, and I portrayed the Earl of Lincoln in the (non-televised) version on the actual anniversary date. You could say I’m biased in favour of the revisionist view of the character of good King Richard.
November 3, 2011
So who did write Shakespeare’s plays?
Jonathan Kay tackles the crank-infested ground of Shakespeare’s works:
‘There are three infallible signs of the crank,” Catholic intellectual Joseph Bottum has written. “The first is that he has a theory about the Jews. The second is that he has a theory about money. And the third is that he has a theory about Shakespeare.”
Very true. Take, for instance, Ignatius Donnelly, perhaps the greatest crank in American history. In the late 19th century, Donnelly wrote books such as Ragnarok, which argued that Atlantis was destroyed by a passing comet and that the contours of our Earth were formed by splatterings of extraterrestrial “gravel.” He also believed the secret identity of the Great Bard could be discovered by counting and multiplying all the different words in his plays. In his crank manifesto, The Great Cryptogram, he claimed to have discovered a secret cipher that proved Francis Bacon was the true author.
[. . .]
And then there was Sigmund Freud, one of the small handful of thinkers whose influence on Western culture arguably can be said to stand alongside Shakespeare’s.
For Freud, it all began in 1898, when a Danish literary critic named George Brandes published a book outlining the connections between Shakespeare’s life and literary works. Hamlet, for instance, was said to grow out of Shakespeare’s grief for his own father’s passing in 1601. Freud became fascinated by this theory at a critical point in his life — his own father had died in 1896. And he incorporated the notion into The Interpretation of Dreams, in which Freud argued that Hamlet “is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus Rex”
Of course, all the back-and-forth among the Marlovians, Baconians, Oxfordians, and Stratfordians misses the point completely: the plays were clearly not written by William Shakespeare, but by a different chap of the same name.
February 19, 2011
QotD: “Would Shakespeare Have Survived Today’s Copyright Laws?”
Turow, along with Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken and Authors Guild board member (and apparent Shakespeare expert) James Shapiro, have an op-ed piece in the NY Times that a whole bunch of you have been sending in, in which they assert that Shakespeare might not have been able to survive the web era, because of all of this “piracy.” The argument is quite a bit stretched, but see if you can follow me: because playwrights had physical scarcity, in that they could keep people out of the playhouses unless people paid to enter, it allowed playwrighting to flourish. They call this a “cultural paywall.” Then there’s some sort of bizarre leap about how copyright is really the same thing. It’s not. And, then it leaps to something about how stricter copyright laws are, ipso facto, better. The evidence for this? Shhhh, don’t bother the Authors Guild bosses with logic! And, of course, the inevitable punchline is the idea that Shakespeare wouldn’t have survived in this online era with all this piracy and stuff.
Of course, it’s difficult to think of a worse example than Shakespeare for this argument (and sort of bizarre that Shapiro would sign off on an op-ed that so thoroughly misrepresents Shakespeare). Of course, as most of you know, an awful lot of Shakespeare’s works are copies (sometimes directly) of earlier works. Sometimes they’re derivative, but other times, he copied wholesale from others. So the bigger question might not be if Shakespeare could survive all the file sharing going on today, but whether or not he’d be able to produce any of his classic works, since they’d all be tied up in lawsuits over copyright infringement.
Mike Masnick, “Would Shakespeare Have Survived Today’s Copyright Laws?”, Techdirt, 2011-02-18
November 18, 2010
QotD: On the quality of writing, mediated through technology
I own a computer. I don’t use the Internet very much. I’m not a technophobe. It just doesn’t help me very much. Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn’t help you. I’ll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?
P.J. O’Rourke, “Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2010-11-18
October 30, 2010
Shakespeare in the original pronunciation
It doesn’t sound much like your traditional Shakespeare production does it?
Like an archeologist reconstructing the fossilized skeleton of an ancient species, a University of Kansas theatre professor has pieced together the bones of a form of English that has never been heard in North America in modern times — the original pronunciation of Shakespeare.
Thanks to the work of Paul Meier, audiences can get a sense of what it might have been like to eavesdrop on opening night of “Hamlet” or “Romeo and Juliet” at the Globe Theater in London or to listen in on a shipboard conversation on the Mayflower as it approaches the shores of the New World.
“What did English sound like back then?” Meier said. “Was it posh or down to earth? Was it anything like today’s British or American English? Would we understand it?”
H/T to A Blog About History for the link.
September 9, 2010
QotD: Why football is king in America
You probably remember the pain, the feeling of deja voodoo.
You probably remember a sense of disbelief, as the Vikings and Brett Favre blew another epic game.
If you can forgive the Vikings their sins of that day — the 12th man in the huddle, the five turnovers, that fateful Favre pass — what you should remember is this:
The Vikings’ 31-28 loss to the Saints in the NFC Championship Game stands as the latest, best demonstration of why football is king in America.
Baseball is a beautiful and comforting game. Basketball showcases the world’s most spectacular athletes. Football reaches into our guts, reaches into the most evolved and most prehistoric portions of our brain, combining all of the elements of our greatest dramas, from violence to pathos to unpredictability to intricately interwoven plots.
What happened in the Superdome on Jan. 24 was Shakespearean. Not Shakespearean in the popular use of the word, meaning “effete” or “intellectual.” Shakespeare became popular by writing plays filled with blood and revenge, lust and greed.
And tragedy.
Shakespeare would have loved Favre.
Jim Souhan, “Take your seat, the big show is about to resume”, Star Tribune, 2010-09-09
