Lear, Pickwick and Dr Charity

There are few plausible connections between King Lear and The Pickwick Papers. Only one man seems to have found a bridge between the two. He was Dr Alan Charity, late of York University.  Alan Charity was a brilliant academic. It was said his doctoral thesis was so recondite that no-one else could understand it, not even him some years after it was written.

Dr Charity was aptly named. For apart from being a deeply erudite scholar who could quote enormous passages from The Prelude (which he frequently did), he was a lovely man. To me he seemed benevolent, witty and perpetually amused. Perhaps he was inwardly laughing at my habitual incompetence. He was also of a charitable disposition, for it was he that gave me access to York University.

On arrival for interview, I found myself outside a door which had FR Leavis on its nameplate. I waited, expecting some fierce interrogation from the angry patriarch of Eng. Lit. and was relieved instead to find a somewhat tired and dishevelled man waiting to interview me. He explained that FR Leavis was a visiting professor and spent most of his time in Cambridge. I subsequently attended a talk given by the great man shortly before his death. It was in a small room accompanied by two other people. We listened as he ranted for what seemed like several hours against the failings and impertinencies of other academics and critics, before he slumped back into his chair. But that is another story.

I doubt FR Leavis would have been kindly disposed to me. Dr Charity was in more amiable mode. I think he probably wanted to get home. We chatted in a general way about books for twenty minutes or so, and then he offered me a place. Not having anything else to do, I accepted.

Some months later I found myself outside Dr Charity’s office, waiting for an early morning tutorial. It was 10.00am. This was a problem. I have never been an early morning person and my first term at university was not a moment to begin. I was not profoundly ready for discussion of King Lear.

If Dr Charity’s first big mistake had been to offer me a place at York, his second obvious error was to offer me a glass of sherry. I was anyway barely sentient. The sherry rendered me catatonic. As it happens, Shakespeare was the reason I wished to study literature. Even before university I had read more or less the complete works, pretty much only The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry VIII having eluded me. Perhaps for understandable reasons, they still have. I was well acquainted with King Lear. I had much to say about the play. It was just unfortunate I was incapable of coherent speech or thought. 

It didn’t take Alan long to assess the situation. ‘Let us see what light The Pickwick Papers can throw on King Lear,’ he announced. Sipping his sherry, he then read to me for the remaining hour of tutorial. I was entranced. Staggering from his office, I went straight to the university bookshop and bought a copy of Pickwick which I then read and later re-read many times.

Much has changed since then. I suspect that interview procedures are no longer so informal. I’m pretty sure tutors would be forbidden to drink sherry at 10.00am and I’m almost certain that Alan’s successors would have to write schemes of work and produce tutorial plans and tick a million bureaucratic boxes, before each encounter with a student. I doubt there is scope for an impromptu reading from The Pickwick Papers while notionally discussing King Lear. And with students paying thousands of pounds a year in tuition fees, they may rightly feel entitled to more rigour. 

All of which is a shame, since that tutorial transformed my appreciation of Dickens. Having read Pickwick, over the next few years I went on to read all of his novels, re-reading favourites several times, as well the short stories and other works. Alan wouldn’t have been happy writing schemes of work or ticking boxes (or not drinking sherry, frankly), but what he communicated was a passion for literature, sharing his love for Wordsworth and Shakespeare and Dickens and a multitude of other writers. He was a lovely man and a great teacher. I owe him much and honour his memory.

PS. I emailed the alumni association to see if a photo of Alan could be found, but didn’t hear back. Instead, I’ve used a picture of me in student days. Sorry about that. If anyone has a picture of him, I’ll post it up.

 

 

Shakespeare, Dylan and self-creation myths

 

‘No artist can accept reality,’ Nietzsche observed. This is not surprising since artists live in fictional worlds. They make things up for a living, so it’s also not surprising they should make things up about themselves. Everybody does it in minor ways, but the scale of deception deployed by Bob Dylan when he first emerged on the New York music scene was heroic. For one thing, he wasn’t Bob Dylan at all, but Robert Zimmerman, though that seems of minor importance compared to the elaborate tales he told of a wild boyhood spent roaming the US.

 

Interviewed in 1962 he claimed, ‘I was with the carnival off and on for six years… I skipped a lot of things and I didn’t go to school for a bunch of years.’ Two years later he was explaining to Nat Hentoff of the New Yorker, ‘I started running when I was ten. But always I’d get picked up and sent home. When I was thirteen, I was travelling with a carnival through upper Minnesota and North and South Dakota, and I got picked up again. I tried again and again, and when I was eighteen, I cut out for good.’
 

It now seems astonishing that the scale of his self-invention wsn’t challenged. Didn’t anybody think to check with his high school, or maybe ask his parents? That he was able to spin the same stories for over two years suggests nobody bothered to question them. In part, this must have been because his extraordinary talent was unquestionable so an extraordinary genesis was to be expected. He was also a young man at a point where youth was taking over the world. His was the voice of the future and no-one wanted to examine his past.
 

Had they done so, they would have found he’d been born in a decaying mining town on the edge of a lake in the far north, in 1941. Two years later the Zimmermans moved from Duluth to nearby Hibbing where he was brought up by a loving family in which he was indulged by aunts and uncles. He joined the boy scouts, wrote affectionate poems to his mother and father and didn’t run away to join the carnival even once.
 

There are many explanations why Dylan might have wished to create an exotic backstory. He may have thought it would help sell records. Perhaps telling lies to journalists was a form of self-protection. Or perhaps the stories helped bridge the gap between where he’d started and what he’d become. It was easier to invent a pack of lies than try to explain how it was that the child he later described in Chronicles as a ‘skinny, asthmatic introvert’ had so quickly become the man who would change popular music for ever.
 

He wasn’t alone in self-mythologizing. John Lennon posed as a working class hero when really he’d been brought up by nice Aunt Mimi in Menlove Avenue, David Bowie created a whole new persona in Ziggy Stardust while at least in song, Hendrix proclaimed that the ‘night I was born, I swear the moon turned a fire red’ and Jagger claimed to have been ‘raised by a toothless bearded hag’. Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t. It could just be that if you’re a rock superstar and international sex god, but until a few months ago you were a pimply, reserved student at the LSE and your dad is a PE teacher in Dartford, then the distance between where you’ve arrived and where you started from is too great to comprehend. Even with the help of mind-bending drugs. In which case a self-creation myth answers all needs.
 

And what has any of this got to do with Shakespeare? It’s my belief he suffered a similar dislocation of reality, which he helped adjust by inventing a new family history for himself. For while he had abundant talent he lacked pedigree, and though by the mid-1590s he was becoming seriously rich he was without social position. Unlike Christopher Marlowe, from a similar background, he didn’t even have a Cambridge degree. This situation had to be addressed. Instead of claiming he’d run away to the carnival (though ironically it's likely he did go off with a band of travelling players after he'd married Anne Hathaway), he made the equally preposterous claim that he came of gentlemanly stock.
 

So to prove this, in 1596 he set about acquiring a coat of arms - though not for himself, but his father. This may have been an act of filial thoughtfulness towards an ailing old man, since John Shakespeare had applied for a coat of arms himself in 1576, before financial ruin. It’s more likely though, that his son was attempting to legitimate his right to armigerous status – an inherited coat of arms, after all, has slightly more lustre than one bought off the shelf.
 

And buying a coat of arms is what Shakespeare did. The cost of a ‘patent of gentility’ was considerable, ranging from £10-£30, depending how monstrous the claim. Even at the lower end, it was more than most people earned in a year. But that was only the start of the expenses, since there was no point having a coat of arms unless you blazoned it above the entrance to your house, had it carved into furniture and embroidered onto hangings and canopies. And since gentlemen were entitled to wear silk, you probably had to buy new suits of clothes to display your gentle condition.
 

When it came to the coat of arms itself, Shakespeare went for a visual pun, something typical of the nouveau riche in Tudor England. It was relatively simple in design – a shield displaying a gold spear on diagonal black band with a gold background. The tip of the spear was silver, the use of silver and gold connoting wealth, while the spear itself was the kind used in jousting tournaments, suggestive of chivalric deeds.
 

The shield was surmounted by a silver falcon, its wings part outstretched. In falconry this is termed ‘shaking’, the movement just before the bird takes flight. Since it also holds a spear in its right claw, the visual pun is complete.  But according to Katherine Duncan Jones in ‘Ungentle Shakespeare’, this use of a falcon might have occasioned the rift between Shakespeare and his early patron, the Earl of Southampton. His coat showed four silver falcons in profile and he may well have thought that in choosing to adopt the courtly creature, his upstart protégé had gone too far.
 

In his choice of gold and silver, depiction of a jousting spear and aristocratic bird, Shakespeare was certainly making a bold claim to gentle birth. This was further emphasized by his choice of motto in medieval French, NON SANZ DROICT. This translates as ‘not without right’, though his right to gentlemanly status was dubious at best.
 

It was claimed that John Shakespeare’s great-grandfather had given ‘faithful and approved service to the late most prudent prince King Henry VII of famous memory.’ This was spurious - again according to Katherine Duncan Jones – since Richmond’s army at Bosworth mostly comprised Bretons, not Midland yeoman. And if the alleged great-grandfather’s service wasn’t at Bosworth, it’s hard to see where it could have been.
 

Although by 1597 Shakespeare had bought his father the coat of arms and himself a swanky house, New Place, in Stratford, his assertion of gentility was shaky. Two years later in 1599, perhaps to substantiate his claim, he appears to have unsuccessfully applied to have his arms quartered with those of the Arden family. This attempt to incorporate the arms of a well-born family into his own was another piece of social bluster since although an Arden, his mother was the youngest daughter of a junior branch of the family, yeoman not gentle. And even if she had been, the fact that she was female meant she couldn’t confer gentle status on her husband since things didn’t work that way.

 

 

 Genius though he was, Shakespeare couldn’t get around the fact that he came from humble stock. And his attempts to prove otherwise rendered him ridiculous. In 1599, Ben Jonson wrote ‘Every Man Out of His Humour’, performed by Shakespeare’s company The Chamberlain’s Men. In it, the uneducated Sogliardo arrives from the country in London to make himself a gentleman, having sold a few fields for the purpose.  Discussing a coat of arms, Puntarvolo tells him the motto should be ‘Not without mustard’ – a direct allusion to ‘Non Sanz Droict’.
 

It’s possible that Shakespeare had come to recognize the absurdity of his situation for in ‘Twelfth Night’ we see Malvolio punished for his social ambitions. Deceived by a letter he thinks from Olivia, he reads that ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em …cast thy humble slough, and appear fresh.’ As importantly, he is tricked into wearing cross garters with yellow stockings – a colour Olivia ‘abhors’ yet one often used to represent gold in heraldry. The dress also created a mocking visual pun, the black diagonals of the garters against the yellow stockings a reminder of black band on a gold background of Shakespeare’s arms. Later, when pleading with Sir Topas to be released from his cell, Malvolio cries out for ‘a candle, and pen, ink, and paper’ – emblems of the writer’s craft – and adds, ‘as I am a gentleman, I will live to be thankful to thee for’t.’
 

If by 1600 when he was writing ‘Twelfth Night’ Shakespeare still had any pretensions to gentility, his tenuous claim was finally undermined when Sir William Dethick, the herald that had granted him the patent, was suspended from the College of Arms in 1604. Argumentative, bullying and corrupt, Sir William was finally sacked for bringing the college into disrepute in 1606. Perhaps significantly, that was the year Shakespeare wrote ‘King Lear’ in which the Fool asserts ‘he’s a mad yeoman that sees his son a gentleman before him.’ The game was up.
 

I first became aware of both Shakespeare and Dylan in the 1960s and one way or another they have been in my head ever since. In the early 1970s I was on the top deck of a bus in London when my girlfriend began reciting The times they are a changin’, particularly emphasizing the verse, ‘Come mothers and fathers/Throughout the land/And don’t criticize/What you can’t understand/Your sons and your daughters/Are beyond your command/Your old road is rapidly agin’./Please get out of the new one/If you can’t lend your hand/for the times they are a-changin.’
 

What strikes me now is how naïve we were. Not just us, but pretty much a whole generation. Quite what we believed and how we thought things might change is obscure, but it seemed to involve Love (which we’d been assured was all we that we’d need), flared trousers, a few beads and lentils. In retrospect, not a very rigorous manifesto.
 

On the other hand, America now has a black president, Maine and Maryland voted to introduce same sex marriage, Colorado and Washington legalised smoking cannabis for recreational use and Wisconsin elected the first openly gay senator. Perhaps the times really were changing after all. And maybe on some level Dylan really had run away with the carnival. And Shakespeare was a gent all along.

 



Words, words, words: Shakespeare's neologisms

 

Shakespeare's world was exploding in all directions. England’s population was rising rapidly, London was booming, New Worlds were being discovered, religion and politics were in ferment (again), science was beginning to be scientific, capital becoming capitalistic and at least according to John Donne, the new philosophy was calling all in doubt. As if this wasn’t enough, Guy Fawkes tried to explode the Houses of Parliament on November 5 1605.

 

Given all these explosions, metaphorical and near literal, it’s not surprising there should have been a similar explosion of words. New things require new words to describe them, or at least new meanings ascribed to old words. Shakespeare alone is credited with over 2000 neologisms. This sounds like a heroic quantity, though it has to be said that many were not particularly exciting and mostly seemed to involve adding a prefix or suffix to an existing word. He turned ‘lone’ into ‘lonely’ and ‘gloom’ into ‘gloomy’, for example, which at least widened vocabulary for those of melancholy disposition everywhere.

 

It should also be said that while he is credited with the first usage of thousands of words, this doesn’t mean he actually invented them. What it simply reflects is that more of his work survives than that of any other writer. Hundreds of plays by his contemporaries have been lost, so that when compilers of dictionaries such as Dr Johnson made reference to first use of a word, it was often in his work they found it.
 

The lexicological fossil record also only shows words when a word first appeared in print. We have no reliable means of knowing when one first entered spoken language. Thus the earliest recorded use of ‘charmingly’ is in Cotgrave’s Dictionary of French and English Tongues, published in 1611, yet for it to have found its way into a dictionary implies a currency in everyday speech.
 

We may not know with certainty when a word first entered the language, or who coined it, but we can be sure that English was expanding at an astounding rate in the late Tudor and early Jacobean period. Shakespeare’s work reflects this.
 

Each of the comic book versions of the play I produce has an accompanying Teacher’s Book and each of these has a section on Shakespeare’s use of language. In that there is always a worksheet on words he is credited with coining. To produce this, I simply work through the comic book edition of the play in question trying to identify words he is likely to have invented. This generally comes to about forty. I then check these in the mighty Oxford English Dictionary, now a much easier task using the online edition.

 

 

For all kinds of complicated and frustrating reasons, there hasn’t been a new comic book or teacher’s book for several years. The last of these was The Tempest in which I identified 43 words perhaps first used by the bard. Of words on my list, four were very wild guesses – continuance dating from 1374, enjoined (1382), correspondent (1460) and hourly (1470).
 

Fifteen others had first had a recorded use up to a hundred years before Shakespeare wrote his final unassisted play. These were brutish (1513), gabardine (1520), inveterate (1528), unwillingly (1531, though unwilling- Old English unwillende - was first recorded in 897), abhorred (1533), malignant (1542), hollowly (1547, though as a verb hollow appears as early as 1250), bashful (1548), disgrace (1549), unwonted (1553, though unwont dates from 1400), surpasseth (the verb surpass first appeared in print in 1555), hoodwink (1573, from the game hoodmanblinde, otherwise known as ‘blindmanbuf’) and  twangling (1576), with incensed and marketable dating from 1577.
 

Of all these words, I was most disappointed to see Shakespeare hadn’t coined twangling, simply because it is such a beautiful and expressive adjective. In fact, while it had first been used adjectivally in 1576, it made an earlier appearance as a verb in a translation of Erasmus’ ‘Apophthegmes’ of 1542 by N Udall in which it’s said of a minstrel that he was the ‘wurste that euer twanged’.
 

Seven further words were originally used in the thirty years before 1610-11. These were bedimmed (1582), indignity (1584, though indign a verb meaning ‘to treat with indignity’, from the latin root indignari first appeared in 1490), thunderstroke (1587), overprized (1589), disproportioned (1597), deboshed (1598, from the French débauché) and expeditious  (1603).
 

I naturally hoped that Shakespeare had invented deboshed, but it turned out that honour goes to King James VI. Writing in the ‘Basilicon Doron’ on the subject of dress he advises subjects not to be ‘ouer superfluouse lyke a deboshed uaistoure.’ It is tempting to suppose that his spelling of ‘waster’ was due to his deboshed condition, but since he was King of Scotland and soon to become James I of England he could presumably spell anything the way he jolly well wanted.
 

Of the 43 words I initially identified as perhaps Shakespeare’s coinages, sixteen turned out to have been so, though not all were first used by him in The Tempest, others were merely the first use of a word in a new meaning while two might have been used by someone else contemporaneously.
 

Into the former category fall amazement (‘Troilus and Cressida’), bemocked (‘Coriolanus’), incapable (sonnets) and unbacked (‘Venus and Adonis’). The second category comprises bravely, insubstantial, invulnerable and suppler.  Of these, the earlier meaning of bravely had been ‘valiantly’ or ‘fearlessly’, while the OED gives Shakespeare’s usage as ‘gaily, splendidly, finely, handsomely’ – and I certainly wouldn’t argue with that. Insubstantial had formerly been used in 1607 to mean ‘not real’ or ‘imaginary’ while Prospero’s meaning is given as ‘void of substance’ or ‘unsubstantial’ which seems to be quite a fine distinction. Suppler was originally used in 1597 as a noun. It appeared in J Gerard’s ‘Herball’, a suppler being something used to make another thing more supple. Shakespeare uses it as an adjective when Gonzalo urges those ‘that are of suppler joints, follow them swiftly.’

Of the words used by others contemporaneously, invulnerable features in Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queen’ published in 1596, the same year that Shakespeare is thought to have written ‘King John’ in which King Philip declares, ‘Our cannons’ malice vainly shall be spent/Against the invulnerable clouds of heaven.’ As earlier noted, charmingly was first recorded in Cotgrave’s French and English dictionary of 1611, around the time Shakespeare was writing The Tempest.
 

This leaves seven words that the bard originated and used for the first time in the play. These are baseless, footfall, footlicker, murkiest, printless, rootedly and sea-change (OK, I know the latter is hyphenated, but it’s a lovely word, is expressive of the play’s central theme and is still used today).

Seven words may not sound like a huge number, but I can’t claim to have identified every possible new coinage. Even if I did, the comic book editions are edited and present only 50-60% of Shakespeare’s original text. This means there could be another seven completely new words in the passages that had been cut. If that were the case, then the whole play would contain fourteen entirely new words, or thirty two coinages including those words used for the first time in a new sense.

Thirty two words added to the lexicon seem to me to be quite a high return in what is one of his shortest works, written quite late in life (by Jacobean standards). Some years ago academics at the University of Toronto studied a selection of Agatha Christie’s novels written between the ages of 28 and 82. These were analysed for the numbers of different words, indefinite nouns and phrases used in each. They found that her vocabulary size decreased significantly towards her eighties, dropping by as much as 30% - while the repetition of phrases and indefinite words (‘something’, ‘thing’, ‘anything’) increased substantially.

Whatever the reasons for reading Agatha Christie, and there must be some, linguistical pyrotechnics was probably never going to be one. Even so, what the Toronto study indicates is that her vocabulary and language use contracted sharply towards the end of her life, possible reflecting the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

The Tempest was the last play Shakespeare wrote without collaboration. What a study of his neologisms show is that he was as fecund as ever, perhaps near the top of his form (though one would have to study every one of his other plays to establish if there had been any drop in new coinages). But you don’t need to study his word use to know that he was at the peak of his powers in 1611-12. The Tempest is, quite simply, one of his finest creations.

Shakespeare is said to have contributed over 2000 words to the language. New words haven’t stopped arriving, many driven by changing technology. Tweet enters the OED for the first time with its new meaning ‘to post (a message, item of information, etc.) on the social networking service Twitter’ while crowdsourcing is defined as ‘the practice of obtaining information or services by soliciting input from a large number of people, typically via the Internet and often without offering compensation.’

Another new entry is unfriend, in its latest sense of ‘To remove (a person) from a list of friends or contacts on a social networking website’, though in its earliest use as a noun meaning an ‘enemy’ it dates from as long ago as 1275 and as a verb from 1659 when T Fuller wrote, ‘I Hope, Sir, that we are not mutually Un-friended by this Difference which hath happened betwixt us.’ Everything changes. Everything stays the same.

 



Shakespeare’s menagerie 2: ten whales, five caterpillars and a rhino

 

Shakespeare wasn’t right about pigs. But while whizzing through his plays to locate references to swine, sows and hogs and trying to decide if hogs-heads of wine counted as hogs or not, I thought I would see how other animals fared in his work. Twenty six creatures were selected for analysis on a purely subjective basis. Without being mad or risking madness, it wouldn’t have been possible to cover all the others, since it’s said there are mentions of over 600 different species of bird alone in his plays. I don’t know the truth of this, not having counted them. The only one on my list was the eagle, of which there were 37 instances.

Animals were excluded from the list for different reasons. Crabs, for example,  don’t feature because while it’s pretty clear that the roasted crab in the gossip’s bowl described by Puck was a crab apple, it’s less certain whether the crabs referred to by Caliban when he promises to show Stephano and Trinculo ‘where crabs grow’ are a variety of sour apple or a species of marine decapod crustacean. Given this ambiguity, it seemed easier just to ignore them.

Bears were excluded on the grounds that there were too many cup bearers, people bearing news of one sort or another and those of both sexes with beards. Since the search facility couldn’t distinguish between any of the foregoing and the plantigrade mammal of the family ursidae, I decided to dispense with them also. It was bad enough hunting for rats (22 references). In Hamlet I came across several interesting words of which rat was a component, such as ‘implorators’ and ‘ratifiers’, but also 202 instances of ‘Horatio’ which slowed the search down considerably.

Some figures are distorted. There are 145 lions, but 30 of these are accounted for by Snug’s role as Lion in Pyramus and Thisbe. Similarly, the number of boars is almost doubled by Richard III, since the boar was his personal badge (accounting for 11 out of 23 references). Somewhat arbitrarily, the Boar’s Head tavern was excluded from this count, which seems particularly unfair since there is a celebrated pub of that name in Oswestry (and probably many other towns up and down the country).

But this list was never meant to be scientific. Of the animals on it, a few were exotic (25 tigers, 10 whales, 8 elephants, 7 dolphins, 5 crocodiles, 1 alligator and a rhinoceros), while most are familiar and domestic. Many of the animals have emblematic qualities, so foxes (of which there are 38 mentions) are generally cunning or stealthy; wolves (54) are rapacious, while goats (15) and monkeys (14) are associated with lechery – and not just by Othello. Although I have never seen a renaissance painting of the Virgin Mary with a goat tethered to her ankle, she was frequently depicted with a monkey chained to her leg to indicate she had shackled her lustful nature.

The Bible and the bad press it gives to serpents may have accounted for their relatively high score of 33, though none are positive. Antony and Cleopatra accounts for seven of these references, and her relationship with snakes was at best unfortunate.

The Christian tradition with its imagery surrounding Christ the shepherd, Lamb of God, congregations as flocks etc. may have boosted the numbers of sheep (62) and lambs (47) that feature in the plays, but it could also reflect their economic importance to medieval Europe. Although sheep evolved over the dusty plains of the Middle East (with consequent tendency to foot rot on our wet hillsides), by the 1300s the wool trade was driving England’s wealth. Huge churches were built in East Anglia, as much to glorify the power of their patrons as to the glory of God, while newly enriched peasants such as the Pastons of Norfolk helped erode the old feudal hierarchy. (As it happens, the wife of a fifteenth century John Paston was probably related to Sir John Fastolf, thought to be inspiration for Shakespeare’s Falstaff).

Although not the engines of such wealth, medieval agriculture was powered by oxen, and they along with cows, cattle and kine receive 39 mentions. This is still more than the lamentable 37 given to pigs, swine, hogs and sows, though considerably ahead of 7 for the humble chicken. Of the rest, there were 49 cats, 19 mice and 5 caterpillars.

Based on the list of animals for which I searched, it’s hard to spot any patterns in Shakespeare’s plays. The comedies average 10 different animals per play, the histories 11.3 and tragedies 12.4. Similar results are to be found depending on when the plays were written. The early plays (1589-97) averaged 10.5, those from the mid-period (1598-1605) 11.7 while late plays (1606-14) score 11.6.

Predictably enough, therefore, an early comedy has the lowest number of animals mentioned in a play. That’s the The Comedy of Errors (1593-4) with only six different creatures referred to, but this abysmal record is equalled by Richard II (1595-6), Measure for Measure (1603-4), Pericles (1608-9) and The Winter’s Tale (1610-11). King Lear is a definite winner with 18 animals referenced (Coriolanus comes in second with 16), but it’s hard to draw conclusions as you only find what you’re looking for. The Tempest, for example, is brimming with wildlife including marmosets, barnacles, scamels, bees, moles and perhaps crabs, though none of those  were on the list. Similarly, The Winter’s Tale would have been lifted from its ignominious shared bottom place if bears had been included, containing as it does the most famous stage note of all time, ‘Exit, pursued by a bear.’

It’s not too surprising that horses should top the list with 350 references. In part this is because they were high status animals, associated with the nobility. When Macbeth destroys the natural order by murdering Duncan, one manifestation of this abnormal state is that the old king’s horses,

Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race

Turned wild in nature as they would

Make war with mankind.

Another, more prosaic reason for the high horse count is simply that they were the means by which people were conveyed around. Thus Richard III scores three easy horse points during the Battle of Bosworth when he cries, ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.’

Dogs came in second on the list with 205 mentions. Again, this is not surprising, since dogs were everywhere in medieval society. Though as Macbeth pointed out to the murderers he enlists, not all dogs were equal.

 

    Hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,

    Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept

    All by the name of dogs.
 

In other words, there were dogs and dogs. At the noble end were the hunting dogs, prized like Theseus’ hounds, ‘so flewed, so sanded’ their heads hung ‘with ears that sweep away the morning dew.’ At the other are the curs and mongrels, the ‘demi-wolves’ that snarl and scavenge. When Mark Antony cries havoc and lets slip ‘the dogs of war’ he is not releasing docile, house-trained pooches but the rabid, sharp-fanged creatures of nightmare. Shakespeare, incidentally, uses the word ‘creature’ 116 times in his work (mostly to describe humans, as in ‘fair creature’), but only employs the word ‘animal’ 8 times – while ‘beast’ turns in a creditable score of 104.

Although the globe was becoming explored in Shakespeare’s time, most of it was unknown territory harbouring peculiar creatures of all kinds. In a world in which fabulous and improbable animals such as the narwhal, giraffe and rhino were known to exist, it must have been easy to accept the reality of less plausible creatures, such as the phoenix, centaurs, satyrs, cockatrices and dragons - all of which crop up somewhere in his work.

There are no giraffes or narwhals in Shakespeare, but the animals were known about and narwhal tusks had been traded since Viking times. Queen Elizabeth, it seems, was presented with a carved and bejewelled tusk said to have been worth £10,000. At the time that money was enough to buy you a castle, so somebody must have liked her very much.

A widespread belief in medieval times was that the narwhal tusk in fact came from a unicorn. In many ways it must have been easier to believe in the existence of a horse with a single horn growing from its head than a blubbery creature living in the cold waters of the Arctic able to grow a spiral tooth more than three metres long. Apart from which, unicorns look better on a coat of arms.

So any conclusions? Not really, except that Shakespeare’s observation of animals was as quick and acute as his perception of people. He knew their natures, so that when Falstaff says ‘I do here walk before thee like a sow that hath overwhelmed all her litter but one,’ it’s a simile striking in its unexpectedness. It’s also reflects Shakespeare’s knowledge of natural life, since sows have a tendency to roll onto their piglets and suffocate them (hence the fact that intensively farmed pigs are forced into farrowing crates before they give birth, to restrict their movement).

In an equally telling image Antonio assures Sebastian that when they have killed Alonso and Gonzago their followers will be readily won over, taking ‘suggestion as a cat laps milk.’ It’s a wonderfully domestic picture to express the cynical realities of power. In that one phrase he has captured the essence of cat and corruptible humanity. I think of it every time I see our cat lapping at her bowl. Pigs excepted, Shakespeare gets things right. That’s why he’s Shakespeare.

 

An appendix showing what animals feature in which of Shakespeare’s plays is to be found in the Blog section of www.shakespearecomics.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Shakespeare's menagerie 1: the mysterious absence of pigs

 

 

There is a serious shortage of pigs in Shakespeare. This terrible fact only became apparent  in the last few months, since we borrowed three from friends to clear brambles and weed from our field. Never having had a great deal to do with the animal before, I found them sociable, intelligent, hardy, playful and affectionate. And having found them delightful creatures, I wondered why they featured so rarely in the plays.

There is of course one very good reason why nobody refers much to pigs, because until the nineteenth century, ‘pig’, from the Old English ‘picq’, designated the young animal, rather than the adult. Mercutio talks of a ‘tithe-pig’s tail’ (a pig being given as a form of tax to the church), Caliban mentions pig-nuts and Llewellyn extols the pig saying, ‘Why, I pray you, is not pig great? The pig, or the great, or the mighty, or the huge, or the magnanimous, are all one reckonings, save the phrase is a little variations’ – but since he is Welsh he is a figure of fun and talking palpable nonsense, which is only what Shakespeare’s audience would have expected.

 Apart from Llewellyn, who was actually talking about Alexander the Great, not pigs at all (though we needn’t go into that here), there are only four other references to pigs in Shakespeare – or seven if you count the hedge-pig in Macbeth, boar-pig in Henry IV part 2 and Caliban’s pig-nuts. Of the rest, two are from Dromio in The Comedy of Errors and two from Shylock.

In other words, not a great deal of pigs. The commonly used words for the adult animal were either ‘swine’ or ‘hog’. Sadly, these make few appearances either. There are fifteen references to swine in the complete plays, nine to hogs and four to sows. That means there are fewer mentions of pigs, swine, hogs or sows than there are plays. This of course is deeply distressing to anybody who loves pigs. It is also surprising, since the animal was ubiquitous in medieval England.

Omnivorous, it was able to live quite happily either in countryside or towns, where it was of great value chomping up waste left in the street. Unlike sheep or cattle that only the more prosperous peasants could afford, virtually everyone could own a few pigs, their salted meat a vital source of protein through the lean winter months.

Perhaps the ubiquity of pigs made them invisible, so much a feature they were barely remarked upon. It is also possible that Shakespeare disdained to mention them because of their lower caste associations. This might have been the case if he’d been the Earl of Oxford, which he wasn’t, or could be a reason why his noble characters barely speak of them, but how come so few of his lower-class characters allude to them when they were an integral part of daily life?

Chaucer was different. In the Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner kept ‘pigges bones’ in a glass jar which he sold as holy relics. And when he suggests the Host should kiss the bones because he was the ‘moost enveluped in sinne’, the Host becomes furious and declares,

   I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond
   Instead of relikes or of seintuarie.
   Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie;
   They shul be shrined in an hogges toord!

No translation is required. Any man proposing to cut off another man’s ‘coillons’ and bury them in an ‘hogges toord’ is clearly not happy.

There is nothing of this verbal energy in Shakespeare regarding pigs, almost all his references to the animal being in connection with their lowliness. In King Lear, Cordelia laments the fact her father was reduced to ‘hovel thee with swine’, while Orlando demands to know of his brother, Oliver,

   Shall I keep your hogs and eat husks with them?
   What prodigal portion have I spent, that I should come to such penury?

Since pigs were low status creatures, it follows that herding them should have been a low status job, as apparent in the parable of the prodigal son. That unfortunate young man is referred to by Falstaff in Henry IV part 1 when complaining the men he’s recruited for the king’s army are nothing but ‘tattered prodigals latterly come from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks’ (‘draff’ being ‘pig swill’, ‘refuse’ or ‘garbage’).

 

This lowliness is also implied by Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale when he says that tinkers, near the bottom of the social scale, bear a ‘sow-skin budget’ – a ‘budget’ being a leather pouch or wallet. And since it is famously known to be impossible to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, one supposes such a pouch to be of inferior quality. 

Added to this, there’s a servant in the same play who says, ‘Master, there is three carters, three shepherds, three neat-herds three swine-herds, that have made themselves all men of hair; they call themselves saltiers, and they have a dance which the wenches say is a gallimaufry of gambols’. Even if you didn’t know that ‘the men of hair’ they have turned themselves into are ‘hairy men’ or ‘satyrs’ (and why should you?), you would guess their performance is a ‘gallimaufry’ (a jumble or hodgepodge) because undertaken by carters, swineherds, shepherds and neat (cow)-herds. What else could you expect?

Their dance may have been called a 'pig's breakfast' except that the term as used to mean something unattractive, a muddle or mess wasn't first recorded until 1933. 'Pig-headed' meaning 'stubborn' or 'stupid' dates from 1647 while expressions such as 'sexist pig', 'chauvinist pig' or 'capitalist pig' are obviously modern - though calling somebody a pig of any sort has never been a compliment. Richard III is denounced by Richmond as 'this foul swine' while Queen Margaret calls him 'Thou elvish-marked abortive rooting hog' - but since Richard's personal badge was a boar, he was probably asking for it.

 It's hard to think of any linguistic associations with pigs that aren’t pejorative. ‘Lazy pig’, ‘ugly pig’, ‘greedy pig’, ‘smelly pig’… the list is endless. Most such expressions in Shakespeare identify the animal as either lazy or greedy. In The Taming of the Shrew Lord says of the drunken beggar, ‘How like a swine he lies!’ and in The Two Noble Kinsman Palamon argues that to delay action would be to allow people to think he ‘lay fatting like a swine’.

 

Lady Macbeth does little to enhance the animals’ image when she tells her husband she’ll induce a ‘swinish sleep’ in Duncan’s grooms with wine and wassail. And as if their PR couldn’t get any worse, Macbeth also associates pigs with witchcraft when the First Weird Sister stirs in the blood of a sow ‘that hath eaten/Her nine farrow – while the Second Weird Sister reports she’s been ‘killing swine’ when asked by the first what she’s been doing with herself of late.

On top of all this, two world religions regard the animal as unclean, a fact touched upon in The Merchant when Launcelot complains, 'This making of Christians will raise the price of hogs; if we grow all to be pork-eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money.'

Why pigs are regarded as unclean is open to question, but perhaps simply because they will eat anything, however apparently disgusting. One might have thought this a virtue. It’s precisely because pigs will eat practically anything that they are ideally suited to a peasant economy - nothing is wasted.

For centuries, pigs were a vital part of rural life. Of her childhood in the nineteenth century, Flora Thompson wrote in Lark Rise to Candleford, ‘A good pig fattening in the sty promised a good winter...  The family pig was everybody’s pride and everybody’s business… The children on their way home from school, would fill their arms with sow thistle, dandelion, and choice long grass, or roam along the hedgerows on wet evenings collecting snails in a pail for the pig’s supper.’

Pigs remained important well into last century. A few years before his death in 2002, Alf Davies recorded reminiscences of his Bronygarth childhood in the 1920s. His father was a miner and on the pig-sty wall were two stone carved Celtic heads, now in the British Museum. Of the pig, Alf said, ‘They cut its throat and they drained it out and Mam would be there with a big pan, stirring the blood to stop it curdling. She made black puddings with that, and sausage. We lived like lords for a fortnight.’

The killing of the pigs was not necessarily pleasant. Flora Thompson said it was ‘a noisy, bloody business… but country people of the day had little sympathy for the sufferings of animals.’ Ours went to the local abattoir. It was under half an hour’s drive from home and looked like a jumble of farm buildings. It was only small and our pigs went through together. They didn’t seem distressed and their end would have been swift. I was sorry to see them go, but that was always part of the arrangement. 

They were great companions and it felt a privilege to get to know them. Friendly and gregarious, they were rarely away from one another’s company and there were never any serious disputes. It’s true that we only had sows and that a boar amongst them might have been more disruptive, but they were incredibly tough (surviving the coldest spring for fifty years with several feet of snow on the ground for weeks), inquisitive (though mostly because they liked to find out if anything new was edible), and intelligent (on hot days they quickly learnt to upend their bucket of water so as to make a wallow). They were also great softies and loved being scratched, one of them almost instantly rolling onto her side and closing her eyes with pleasure.

Shakespeare was right about almost everything but he was wrong about pigs. Thanks to Colin and Cath Stevens for letting us have them on our land. Three more arrive shortly…

Photos: Kevin Hall

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



The Bard, the Fool and the Private Dick: Shakespeare, Wodehouse and Chandler

PG Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and Shakespeare are not obvious buddies. Yet all were populist writers, all masters of figurative language and all with a connection to the Elizabethan stage since both Wodehouse and Chandler attended Dulwich College - a school in south east London founded by Edward Alleyn in 1619. A contemporary of Shakespeare’s, he was an actor for whom Kit Marlowe wrote many title roles, though he made his fortune through ownership of theatres, beer-gardens and perhaps brothels. He was also ‘Chief Maister of Beares, Bulls, Mastiff Dogs and Mastiff Bitches’, so quite a guy.

  Seven years apart, Wodehouse and Chandler were equally happy at Dulwich. Their later work has much in common. They exude a gift for language, especially the vernacular; they voice their work through first person narrators and their main protagonists inhabit male milieu in which females frequently represent complication or threat. Their novels are intricately plotted (though you feel Chandler is sometimes unsure where things are headed) and their fictional worlds are eerily unchanging. The first Jeeves and Wooster novel was written in 1915 and the last in 1974, yet the stories contain no hint that the twentieth century was a problematic time to be alive.

  Chandler’s gritty crime novels are predicated on the fact that times were tough, but the settings of his novels vary little from one to another – the swimming pools and manicured lawns of the rich, the police cells and endless mean streets are all familiar territory. The context is almost incidental. What counted for Chandler was character. His great protagonist was Philip Marlowe, his name a conflation of Philip Sidney (paradigm of Tudor chivalry) and Christopher Marlowe (atheist, spy, dramatist, provocateur).

  As it happens, Chandler was a student in Marlowe House at Dulwich and the name he gave to his battered hero can’t have been accidental. Choice of name rarely is. Sharing a classical education, he and Wodehouse were conscious of literary heritage and their novels are scattered with references to earlier literature. In Wodehouse’s  Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, for example, there are more than thirty allusions to Shakespeare – though some of these are almost incidental, since phrases such as ‘cheek by jowel’ or ‘into thin air’ have entered everyday usage.

  Much of Wodehouse’s fiction turns on the complications of love (as does about 90% of all fiction, come to that), so it’s not surprising that Othello should put in three appearances (generally personifying jealousy), while  Hamlet features eight times (mostly brooding melancholy), and Romeo and Juliet also get a mention - ‘I clutched the brow. I am a pretty astute chap, and I could see that this was not the language of love. I mean, if you had heard Juliet saying a thing like that about Romeo, you would have raised the eyebrows in quick concern, wondering if all was well with the young couple.’

  Wodehouse’s humour typically relies on comic incongruity. In the passage above we have Wooster’s misperception of himself as a ‘pretty astute chap’ when even his doting Aunt Dahlia knows him as a blithering dunderhead as well as the implied comparison between the mutually ghastly D’arcy ‘Stilton’ Cheesewright and Florence Craye and Shakespeare’s immortal lovers.

  Comic incongruity is equally central to the relationship between Wooster and his manservant. It is Jeeves who is the brains of the outfit. And it is Jeeves who supplies Bertram with his range of Shakespeare reference, although much of the time his master seems to think his man the author, not the Bard,

‘There is a method by means of which Mrs Travers can be extricated from her sea of troubles. Shakespeare.’

                 I didn’t know why he was addressing me as Shakespeare, but I motioned him to continue.

This confusion of Jeeves with Shakespeare appears only a few paragraphs later, to equally comic effect,

                ‘Let’s go. If it were - what’s the expression of yours?’

                ‘If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly, sir.’

                ‘That’s right. No sense in standing humming and hawing.’

                ‘No, sir. There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.’

                ‘Exactly,’ I said. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Although Hamlet is referenced more often, Macbeth is quoted at fuller length and a theme develops around Lady Macbeth’s lines to her husband when urging him to murder Duncan – though hardly to such dark and intense effect,

Halting abruptly, as if he had walked into a lamp-post, he stood goggling like a cat in an adage. Cats in adages, Jeeves tells me, let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, and I could see with the naked eye that this was what Stilton was doing.

‘Goggling’ is a great word. In the next chapter the cat makes a return,

He will have to continue to maintain the non-belligerent status of a mild cat in an adage.

before showing up finally at the conclusion of the novel  when Florence’s new suitor is about to declare himself and love finds its true course,

For a moment he stood there letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’. Then he spoke.

Chandler also references Shakespeare in The Long Good-bye, though more sparingly. In one scene, the alcoholic writer Roger Wade is put to bed by Marlowe, drunkenly muttering, ‘Stop thinking, stop dreaming, stop loving, stop hating. Good night, sweet prince. I’ll take that other pill’ echoing Horatio’s words on Hamlet’s death. Not surprisingly, Wade later ends up dead.

  An extended reference to Hamlet features again towards the end of the novel and there are many reasons why Wodehouse and Chandler might wish to quote from or make allusion to Shakespeare. In the case of Wodehouse’s creation Bertie Wooster, the allusions would have been in keeping with his background. For although an idiot, he was an expensively educated idiot, having been to Eton and Oxford (though more in debt to Jeeves, than either).

  Apart from allusions to Shakespeare, Wooster also quotes from Tennyson, Byron, Keats, EW Henley and the Bible. Marlowe’s list is as varied, including mentions of T.S. Eliot, Dante, Kafka and Kierkegaard – as well as to musicians Katchaturian, Hindemith and Toscanini.

  On one level these many references help establish character. In Wooster’s case his constant misquoting or inappropriate context or mixture of serious quotation with casual colloquialisms defines him as good-natured imbecile while adding comic value. With Marlowe, they provide depth. He may be able to take a punch, handle a gun or cope with a stretch in the slammer, but he knows Katchaturian, Kierkegaard and Hindemith. Who doesn’t? In other words, he’s not just a Private Dick, he’s a sensitive Private Dick.

  These namedrops also flatter the reader. They reassure that although you might be reading light humour or crime fiction it’s OK because you know that ‘My strength is as the strength of ten’ is a quotation from Tennyson’s Sir Galahad or that as a musical theorist, Paul Hindemith opposed the twelve-tone technique – and that even if you didn’t, it’s still OK because the author does. And if the author is that smart, what you’re reading must be superior to other varieties of low-brow literature.

  Chandler seems to like playing games. Wade’s phrase, ‘Goodnight, sweet prince’ is itself a near echo of T.S. Eliot’s borrowing from Hamlet, ‘Goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight’, lines which close A Game of Chess (another passion of Marlowe’s) in The Wasteland. Later, Marlowe has a chat with his client’s chauffeur who drops him home,

I offered him a buck but he wouldn’t take it. I offered to buy him the poems of T.S. Eliot. He said he already had them.

This motif returns many pages further on when the chauffeur asks, ‘”I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” What does that mean, Mr Malowe?’

  ‘Not a bloody thing. It just sounds good.’

Chandler was evidently conflicted about his writing, upset that in the US his work was regarded as little more than pulp fiction – so perhaps the literary and other cultural references were as much to reassure himself as his readers. Wodehouse was far less troubled, happy to turn out almost a hundred books as well as film scripts and musicals. Much was lightweight and forgettable, but he didn’t agonize about his status as a writer of low-brow work. In this he was probably much closer to Shakespeare, who wasn’t critically regarded during his lifetime and was much less celebrated than Ben Jonson.

  What each of them show is that it isn’t a question of high-brow or low brow, it’s about good writing and bad writing. Wodehouse and Chandler were brilliant exponents of their genres, widely loved, much parodied and instantly recognizable. Chandler liked to sign off his chapters aphoristically, the way Shakespeare closed scenes with a rhymed couplet, so he can have the last quote.

The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say good-bye is to die a little.

Hard to argue with that. Top stuff.

Richard III and Iraq

History teaches us many things. One of them is that it goes on for a very long time. Sometimes nothing much happens for a lot of that long time and occasionally all sorts of things pile on top of each other. It doesn’t stop. One event unfolds into the next and carries on doing so until somebody comes along and tries to make sense of it all.

Shakespeare had a shot at this in his history plays. Although not written in chronological order, the earliest of his kings was John (1199-1216) and the last Henry VIII (1509-1547). The cycle thus recounts almost three hundred and fifty years of English history and covers, amongst other things, foreign wars, civil war, regicide, infanticide, fratricide and much else. In other words, quite a lot of stuff.

But Shakespeare was writing plays, not history books, inevitably altering events for dramatic effect. Henry VI’s widow, Margaret, for example, left for exile in France following his death and never returned to England. She died in 1482. Yet in Richard III she returns to Edward’s court to heap curses on all around her, and pops up again after Richard has become king in 1483 to trade laments with two other widowed queens, a year after her demise.

As it happens, Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard has only recently been reassessed, since for centuries it was assumed his depiction as a hunchback was part of Tudor propaganda to discredit the Plantagenets and affirm their legitimacy. Yet when Richard’s body was found beneath a car park in Leicester last year it revealed pronounced curvature of the spine.

Of all Shakespeare’s Histories, I am best acquainted with Richard III having spent about nine months working on a comic book version in 2007. When it was summarily removed from the list of three texts to be studied for the Key Stage 3 SATs exam early in 2008, the project was abandoned. Later in the year the KS 3 SATs were abolished altogether, but that is another story.

Having worked on Henry V in the lead up to the Iraq war in 2003, I was at work on Richard III at the height of the Iraq insurgency which raged worst between 2006 and 2008. And as there had been parallels between the sophistries used to justify Henry’s invasion of France and the US led invasion of Iraq, so there seemed unsettling symmetries between the slaughter and turmoil of Shakespeare’s history plays and the insurgency several hundred years later.

Richard’s defeat at Bosworth brought to an end the Wars of the Roses that had seen bloodshed and mayhem in almost all parts of England. Although intermittent, the civil war lasted for more than thirty years and involved extremes of violence - the Battle of Towton being the bloodiest ever fought on English soil. It took place in a snowstorm on 29 March 1461. After hours of savage fighting, 28,000 men had been killed, more even than on the first day of the Somme in 1916, the single worst day in British military history.

After the Lancastrian defeat at Towton, Henry VI retreated to Scotland. It was one of a series of battles which saw power change hands and allegiances shift - shifts made all the more confusing because so many of the protagonists were called either Richard or Edward.  Explanation is thus required when in RIII Act 4 Scene 4 Margaret rebukes Elizabeth,

‘Thy Edward he is dead, that killed my Edward;

Thy other Edward dead, to quit my Edward.’

Elizabeth’s Edward was Edward IV, son of Richard Duke of York, who had been captured and murdered after the battle of Wakefield, stabbed to death by Margaret and Clifford after they had earlier murdered Edward’s brother, Rutland. Richard’s death was avenged by his son Edward at the Battle of Towton, where he was supported by Richard, Earl of Warwick. Warwick later fell out with Edward and joined the Lancastrians, but he was killed at the Battle of Barnet in 1471 at which Margaret’s husband, Henry VI, was captured. He died shortly after, believed murdered by Edward’s brother Clarence.

Margaret’s Edward was Edward, Prince of Wales, killed at the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 by Edward VI. Elizabeth’s other Edward had been Edward Prince of Wales, but on Edward VI’s death had became Edward V before being murdered along with his younger brother, Richard, by his uncle, Richard, who was now Richard III. After becoming king, Richard married Anne, daughter of Richard, Earl of Warwick. She had previously been engaged to Edward, Prince of Wales (Margaret’s son, not Elizabeth’s). She and Richard had a son, Edward, another Prince of Wales, but he predeceased them. Richard was then killed at Bosworth by Henry VII, who promptly married Elizabeth’s daughter Elizabeth, thus uniting the Houses of York and Lancaster. All pretty clear, I think.

The situation in Iraq in 2007 seemed no less bewildering with the country split between Sunni and Shia factions such as Ansa al Sunna and militias like the Mahdi Army led by Muqtada al-Sadr. For a time it looked either as though the country would separate into independent states; or that after years of instability a single figure would seize power and unify the country under an authoritarian regime of repression and torture. Much like Saddam Hussein, in fact – and not unlike Henry VII who ruled by repression and fear and nearly bankrupted his barons and merchants - periods of anarchy often being followed by autocracy.

Figures are unclear about how many civilians were killed as a consequence of the Iraq war, but in 2006 the Lancet Journal estimated them to be 654,000. These deaths were our responsibility. Of the many stupid mistakes made by the Coalition, perhaps the grossest was its assumption that the war would be over quickly with a grateful Iraqi population so delighted to be free of Saddam it would spontaneously sprout democratic institutions. The de-Ba’athification of the civil service and disbanding of the army were aspects of this miscalculation, resulting in social breakdown and widespread looting.

Tony Blair has insisted that ordinary Iraqis are now better off than they were under Saddam. This is certainly true if they happen to be a Kurd or Marsh Arab. But for many, perhaps most citizens, life remains considerably worse. Some of their voices were heard in a series of programmes on Radio 4 to mark the tenth anniversary of the war. One said, ‘They brought chaos and violence and left rubble.’ Another commented, ‘Then we had only one dictator. Now we have hundreds.’

It is perhaps facile to equate Blair with Richard III, though tempting. For all his toothy smiles and ‘Call me Tony… I’m a pretty straight sort of guy’ charm, he was ruthless in pursuit of power and determined to hold onto it once achieved. You don’t win three elections in a row by accident, even against a discredited Conservative party. He was also an arch manipulator, the Commons vote in favour of war allegedly won through a combination of flattery, bribery, intimidation and deceit. In other words, parliamentary business as usual.

If it’s not quite fair to see Blair as Richard, it is only too easy to see Richard as a master of what would now be called spin. His words could soften his bitterest enemies, except perhaps Margaret, and in Act 1 Scene 2 he woos Anne - despite the fact that she is a Lancastrian and that as a Yorkist he was part responsible for the brutal deaths of her father, fiancé and his father. Reader, she marries him.

He’s equally good at working a crowd and in Act 3 Scene 7 he appears before the people of London reading a prayer book, between two clerics. He’s supported by Buckingham, his spin doctor. Together they persuade the populace that Richard is pious and humble and reluctant to become king. Having done so, Richard then goes off to arrange the murder of his nephews.

It’s not subtle, but the play itself is a form of spin, a Tudor fabrication to blast Richard and justify Henry’s usurpation of power. Spin isn’t new, but Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell refined it to lethal effect. Richard and Buckingham fell out and Buckingham had his head chopped off. He returns late in Act 5 to haunt Richard, which must have been some consolation.

Blair and Campbell have had no such falling out. They remain defiant in defence of the actions which led Britain to war. The war cost the US at least $802bn. Some economists put the true figure at $3trillion. It cost the British tax payer £9.24bn. It cost the lives of tens of thousands of people, with millions more displaced and damaged.

And it is not over. April 2013 saw the largest number of violent deaths in Iraq for more than five years. Figures for May are likely to be worse. It could be many years before peace unfolds and the country is finally allowed to heal.