On Living in an Old Country

Britain is an old country. History is everywhere. When I look up from my computer, I see straight across the Ceiriog Valley to a wooded hillside surmounted by Chirk Castle, which dates from 1295. A couple of hundred yards up the road, two stone carved Celtic heads dating back two thousand years were found near an old well. In Oswestry, our nearest town, there is a beautiful Iron Age Hill Fort, a school that dates back to 1407 (the second oldest in the country, after Winchester), and the remains of a Norman Castle built in 1086 and destroyed by Roundheads in 1644.

All countries are old, of course, and most have been peopled for tens of thousands of years – though many native cultures lived lightly on the earth and left few traces. We have lived more heavily and left many marks. We are encumbered with ancient buildings, antique institutions and mouldering traditions, more than a few of which were invented by the Victorians and are deeply bogus.

Shakespeare is now part of the national myth. In a 2002 BBC poll to find our 100 Greatest Britons, he came in fifth (behind Winston Churchill, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Diana Princess of Wales and Charles Darwin), two places ahead of Elizabeth I and three before John Lennon.

Shakespeare is part of our national myth, but he also did much to embed or create it. Henry V, for example, is based on largely accurate historical sources but manages to make fun of the French (always good sport), foster Henry’s reputation as a war hero (when today he might be indicted for war crimes), helped define our national self-image as backs-to-the-wall fighters (it was written only a few years after Drake had defeated the Armada, another great victory against seemingly impossible odds) and offers first hints of Britain as a united kingdom (perhaps anticipating James I’s likely accession - unifying the country was amongst his great ambitions).

The latter aspect is of interest, since in Act 3 Scene 2 Shakespeare introduces Captains Gower (English), Macmorris (Irish – and, incidentally, the only character from Ireland to feature in any of Shakespeare’s plays), Jamy (Scottish) in addition to Fluellen from Wales. Their part is small and only Fluellen features much in the play, but their appearance is significant.  Shakespeare must have wished to suggest a sense of a Britain united against a common enemy – a theme obviously picked up in Lawrence Olivier’s film version of 1944.

There are also echoes of this scene in AG MacDonell’s novel England Their England (1933). Its opening chapter is set in Flanders (not greatly far from Agincourt, itself near the Somme) in 1917. It is a wet October (the same month Agincourt was fought, also wet) and two officers are discussing the English, Cameron from Scotland and Davies from Wales. The tone is light and amusing (echoing the comic elements of Henry V) and though the narrator explicitly states Shakespeare will not be referenced, his presence is evident. He is inescapably tied to our sense of nationhood.

For generations Shakespeare’s History plays helped define our sense of the past – even when they bore little relation to fact. His depiction of Richard III as a hunchback with withered arm and murderer of nephews has become part of the national story – despite the play being a propaganda piece to bolster Tudor claims to the throne (though Richard probably did order the killing of the Princes in the Tower; morally deformed, he was physically well-shaped).

Shakespeare found numerous ways to flatter monarchs. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream he alluded to the famously chaste Elizabeth I as ‘a fair vestal throned by the west’ and as ‘imperial vot’ress’ – thus helping consolidate her reputation as the ‘Virgin Queen’. He was equally skilled when it came to flattering the groundlings, reflecting back to them their image of themselves as drunken, lecherous, witty, prone to violence and contemptuous of all things foreign.

Shakespeare didn’t create these archetypes, but in giving them dramatic life he gave them a certain validation. You will still find Bardolph, Nym and Pistol in almost any pub, in any number of soap operas and on tour in Poland and Ukraine this month, supporting the England football team. Everything changes yet everything stays the same.

This sense of historical continuity was vividly evident with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee at the beginning of June. Remember that? Already it seems distant. The 1,000 boat flotilla that sailed down the Thames on Sunday 3^rd was a conscious echo of Canaletto’s painting of The River Thames with St Paul’s Cathedral on Lord Mayor’s Day, painted in 1746, and other similar galas in the 17^th Century, its symbolism inescapable.

The Thames is the reason London became what it is. In Shakespeare’s day the river was considerably wider than today (the Victorians built its modern embankments) with only one bridge, London Bridge, with its many piers and jumble of shops and houses and the heads of traitors impaled on spikes at its gates. In Tudor times, roads became muddy and impassable in winter, so travel by water was the obvious alternative; when Elizabeth I journeyed from Whitehall to her birthplace at Greenwich Palace, she did so by boat.

Layer is built upon layer, as the Roman quays were replaced by Tudor shipyards. It was from the Elizabethan docks at Rotherhithe that many of the Pilgrim Fathers had embarked in 1620, before sailing on to Southampton and from there to the New World and it was to Rotherhithe that the Trafalgar battleship, Temeraire, was taken to be broken up in 1839. From faraway exotic lands tea, spices, sugar, cloth and porcelain poured into London on the Thames and it was from Mill Bank that convicts were transported to Australia. When Sir Winston  Churchill’s coffin was carried down the river in 1965, the dockyard cranes dipped towards the water in respect, and when the Queen opened the newly finished Globe in 1997, she travelled to the ceremony by boat.

Layer is built upon layer. Organizers of the flotilla must have been aware of historical resonances. The Queen’s barge was named the ‘Spirit of Chartwell’ (Chartwell being Churchill’s country home in Kent) its prow adorned with gilt covered figurehead of Old Father Thames. Havengore, the ship that carried Churchill’s coffin was in the flotilla, along with a maori war canoe, a gondola (a nod to Canaletto), 50 Dunkirk ‘little ships’(Dunkirk high on the sacred war litany) and Belem, a merchant vessel launched in 1896 and used to transport sugar from the West Indies and coffee and cocoa from Brazil.

The only boat purpose built for the occasion was ‘Gloriana’ (remembering Elizabeth I), smothered in £4000 worth of gold leaf. Costing £1m altogether, it was rowed by eighteen royal oarsmen and must in part have been inspired by Cleopatra’s barge,

  The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,

  Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold,

  Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

  The winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver,

  Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

  The water which they beat to follow faster,

  As amorous of their strokes.

Reality is never quite as gorgeous. Although bands played ‘God Save the Queen’ and other loyal tunes from neighbouring boats, there were no flutes to help the rowers keep their stroke and nothing burned on the water – it was a chill and wet day. Tradition must be maintained and almost any outdoor occasion has to be marred by torrents of rain.

Rain affected the Children’s Diamond Jubilee Party in Bronygarth as well. Everything changes and everything remains the same. The local celebrations had echoes of previous centuries.Writing of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, Flora Thompson in Lark Rise to Candleford observed,

The Queen, it appeared, had reigned fifty years. She had been a good queen, a wonderful queen, she was going to celebrate her Jubilee, and, still more exciting, they were going to celebrate it, too, for there was going to be a big ‘do’ in which three villages would join for tea and sports and dancing and fireworks in the park of a local magnate… ‘Fancy her reigning fifty years, the old dear, her!’ they said, and bought paper banners inscribed ‘Fifty Years, Mother, Wife, and Queen’ to put inside their window panes.

Many local houses remain hung with flags and bunting and a few have posted pictures of Elizabeth II in the windows. Rain ruled out the running races and outdoor games that had been organized, but the fancy dress was unaffected and children dressed up as kings and queens, princesses, guardsmen and knights – much as they have before. Remembering back to the Peace Day celebration of his childhood in 1919, Laurie Lee recollected in Cider With Rosie,

Apart from the Squire’s contribution Marjorie had been busy for weeks stitching up glories for ourselves and the neighbours… I was John Bull… I remember the girls stuffing me into my clothes with many odd squeals and giggles… I wore a top-hat and choker, a union-jack waistcoat, a frock-coat and pillow case britches.

Everything changes and everything stays the same. Our neighbourhood squires have long gone, to be replaced by a bouncy castle – but even that had to be abandoned because of the adverse weather. Instead we made do with tea and beer and cake and handed out commemorative mugs to the children and generally made the best of things.

The widespread feeling seems to be the Queen has done a good job. Republican sentiments have been muted, though online a few weeks ago I saw a picture of her opening Parliament in all her regalia with a caption: ‘Old woman in £1m hat delivers speech on austerity’ along with some other amusing if treasonable pictures.

Most republicans seem to be waiting for the Queen to pass away before questioning the monarchy. She is personally popular, but as towards the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, there are questions about the succession. Some people think Elizabeth II will outlive Charles while others insist the crown should pass direct to William. I suspect the Royal Family will survive, if only because no-one could stand the thought of President Tony Blair.

In part it may also survive because the British Establishment is adept at renewing itself. It assimilates and neutralises troublemakers; at the marriage of William and Catherine, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ was sung. The mad old nudist dissenter and visionary would have been aghast at the appropriation of his poem by royalty, the Women’s Institute and English cricket supporters.

Royalty is also good at inventing new traditions; at the Golden Jubilee concert Brian May played the national anthem on the roof of Buckingham Palace. This year Madness performed ‘Our House’. From now to eternity every jubilee will feature an aging pop star on the roof, while the concert ended when the queen lit a six metre high beacon (harking back to the Armada beacons of 1588 and all those since). Everything changes and everything remains the same.

Except of course they don’t. Many millions of years ago Bronygarth was on the equator and thousands of feet underwater. The limestone on which ash trees now flourish was laid down in warm seas. I understand we are still moving in a north-westerly direction and that in several more millions of years we will have reached the Arctic regions. Even then, I suspect there will be a Windsor descendant on the throne, Cliff Richard will still hobble about on stage to celebrate whatever anniversary it happens to be and it will certainly be raining. Hurrah!

How to be a Literary Genius - Part 2

If you wish to be a literary genius, it helps to come of humble parentage. It is also an advantage to be working in a new artistic form in an age of imperial expansion, during the reign of a long-lived female monarch. That, at least, is the pattern set by Shakespeare and Dickens – and their genius is beyond dispute or compare.

So what difference does having a long-reigning monarch make? Well, for one thing an extended reign implies stability. People will make art as long as there are people, but the kind of art they choose to make will depend on the circumstances of their time. Elizabeth I’s reign followed centuries of turbulence and the years after the dissolution of the monasteries had seen terrible religious hostilities.

Her sovereignty must have seemed comparatively tranquil, despite plots, rebellions, foreign wars and threats of invasion. After centuries of warfare against the French, Victoria’s rule also saw a long period of relative peace with only one major conflict (Crimean War, 1853-56) which to everyone’s surprise was not against France but Russia.

The comparative stability of Tudor England allowed theatre to become one of the principal forms of public entertainment, along with sword fights, bear baiting and public executions. Happy days. Relatively full employment, rising wages and freedom from wars, famine and disease all helped Shakespeare develop his art and swell his earnings – though when 30,000 people died of the plague in London in the early 1600s, The Globe was temporarily closed with all other theatres.

Shakespeare was fortunate in the timing of his birth; before the foundation of the first modern playhouse, The Theatre, in 1576, actors had toured the country performing in courtyards. Had he been born earlier, there would have been no theatres in which to enact his plays. Had he been born a few years later, there would have been no theatres at all. When the Puritans seized power only a few years after his death, they were banned - along with Christmas and anything else vaguely enjoyable.

If Shakespeare’s art was favoured by socio-economic conditions, Dickens was equally advantaged. Rising levels of literacy meant greater numbers of people could read novels, growth of the middle class meant more people had leisure to read, while private lending libraries (and from 1850 onwards, the spread of public libraries) reduced the cost of books to the reading public. Even railway travel contributed to the rise of the novel – long journeys required distraction and the first WH Smith stores were sited at stations selling books to passengers. Railways featured frequently in his stories, and while mighty locomotives helped distribute his work round Britain, steamships carried it around the world. Almost all his novels were published in monthly instalments and huge crowds waited on the quay in New York to learn what had happened to Little Nell (she died, as they really should have guessed she would).

The times Shakespeare and Dickens lived helped shape their art; in a largely illiterate society, the theatre was an ideal form of mass entertainment while in a more individualistic age of wide literacy, the novel became pre-eminent. Yet if the worlds the authors shared were characterized by their stability, they were also, paradoxically, periods of intense social upheaval - for although they might have been stable, they were not static. By the time of Shakespeare’s birth, feudal society was well in decline. Early capitalist enterprise had begun and social boundaries were breaking down, precisely giving chances to ambitious men of talent from the provinces like him.

The same was true of Dickens’ era. Huge populations moved from the countryside into constantly growing cities like Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow, all with their terrible poverty, sweated labour and slums. Vast fortunes were made and lost, dynasties created and smashed. Such times can be as full of distress and confusion as they are exhilarating. At times of rapid change we need art more than ever. And Dickens and Shakespeare both made the most of this.

On top of everything else, the reigns of Elizabeth I and Victoria were characterized by imperial expansion. Elizabeth’s rule saw the beginnings of the empire in India with patents granted to the East India Co, the first circumnavigation of the globe by Drake, early colonization of the Americas and, more darkly, the start of the slave trade. Victoria’s reign saw further massive expansion of industry, trade and imperial possessions and by the end of her long life Britain’s empire was the largest the world has seen.

Although the expansion in these periods is touched on by both writers, notably Shakespeare in The Tempest, it is not imperialism as such that seems significant. Rather, it is as if the energy and confidence that drove the exploration and expansion were also driving the huge energies of Shakespeare, Dickens and their fellow writers. And these were numerous. Shakespeare’s contemporaries counted Marlowe, Kyd, Dekker, Middleton, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher while Dickens’ saw Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Wilkie Collins, Trollope and many others. In other words, conditions that allowed Shakespeare and Dickens to thrive supported numerous friends and rivals – competition between them further fuelling their energies.

It could be that some of that energy was also driven by the excitement that always comes when working in a new artistic form (note all the ‘isms’ that sprung up after Picasso kick-started modern art in the early 1900s – cubism, fauvism, futurism, vorticism, expressionism, constructivism…). The Tudors didn’t invent theatre, yet up to the 1570s in England there had been little beyond morality and mystery plays. After the creation of the first purpose built playhouses in London, things began to change and the theatrical explosion that followed Marlowe’s early work was extraordinary. He bashed the door down. Others followed him through it, Shakespeare leading the charge.

The same is true for Dickens and his contemporaries. The English novel dates back to the publication of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719 and later authors such as Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding established a wide readership. Dickens took from them all. Like Defoe, he was a journalist and had an acute eye for detail; with Swift he shared an intense political engagement and like Fielding he delighted in the picaresque and playful. He helped forge the novel in its ‘heroic age’, becoming in the process one of the most celebrated public figures of his day.

We are in times of rapid change now. We also have a long reigning female monarch. So where is our contemporary Shakespeare or Dickens? What seems to be lacking is the confidence of their eras. Elizabeth II’s reign has seen the dismantling of empire and continued erosion of Britain’s role as a world power. As a nation we lack belief in our institutions and are fearful of the future.

Yet during her sovereignty, there was a brief bubbling of optimism. That was in the 1960s, a happy interlude of amazing innovation and creativity which threw up the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Cream, Pink Floyd and many more. We may not have had Shakespeare or Dickens, but at least we had Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards. They fit the template  – children from lower down the social hierarchy but with access to education (three were at grammar school. Richards had to be different and went to a tech, but there became a boy soprano and sang for the queen at Westminster Abbey). They were also working in a new artistic medium, rock and roll.

Their genius was in combination, not individualistic, specialising in the three minute pop song rather than the five Act play or four volume novel. Does their work count as literary genius? Who cares? Let’s just be grateful for Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt Pepper’s and Abbey Road, Let it Bleed, Beggar’s Banquet, Sticky Fingers and the rest. Vivat Regina.