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.

Nelson Mandela, Shakespeare and The Robben Island Bible

The world is full of extraordinary people. Mostly they are unknown outside their immediate community. Occasionally they enjoy a brief renown. More rarely, their lives will be remembered for centuries to come. Nelson Mandela is one such person. Along with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he is one of the truly great leaders of the last century. Without him, South Africa might have faced decades of bloodshed. Its future is still uncertain, but he gave his country freedom and continues to give it hope.

Mandela’s recent health scare was in part due to the fact that he is now an extremely old man. It was also due to a lung condition related to the tuberculosis he suffered whilst in prison on Robben Island. His twenty seven year incarceration is now part of the Mandela legend. Less familiar is the important role Shakespeare played in his captivity, as well as the lives of fellow inmates.

What was to become known as the Robben Island Bible belonged to prisoner 183/72, Sonny Venkatrathnam. Imprisoned during the 1970s, he disguised his copy of Shakespeare’s complete works by pasting Deepavali greetings cards onto its covers using porridge for glue. He then told the Afrikaner warders it was his bible, knowing that ‘There are two things he’s scared of: his God and his Bible… They did not touch it.’

Conditions on the island were always tough, but harshest between 1962 and 1966. A hunger strike brought some improvement, as did an International Red Cross inspection of the island and testimony given to the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid by former inmate Dennis Brutus. Further hunger strikes finally gained prisoners the right to study.

Such rights might be arbitrarily withdrawn. Warders could be obstructive.  And even once right to study had been granted, there were other obstacles to learning such as an absence of chairs in the prison cells. This at least had the advantage that students were less likely to fall asleep whilst reading.

Education was taken just as seriously by inmates who had had little or no formal education. Books were secretly made out of cement bags. Teachers or those with specialist knowledge used to hold lessons whilst working in the limestone quarry while prisoners organized groupings in the communal cells into those who wished to learn and those who did not. C1, a cell housing up to fifty men, thus became the study area. According to Sedick Isaacs,

‘Somebody clapped his hands and quiet descended over the cell. It was study period… An hour later the same person clapped his hands to signify the study period was over and conversation started again… At eight o’clock the bell rang to tell prisoners that they must now sleep. Only those with study privileges were allowed to stay awake till ten o’clock when a warder would come and flick the lights to indicate it was time to sleep.’

It was into this world that Sonny Venkatrathnam arrived with his ‘bible’. As he approached his release date, Venkatrathnam passed the book around some of the senior prisoners, asking them to mark the passage they felt had most resonance. Nelson Mandela chose lines from Julius Caesar. This was not a surprising choice, since the play had profound significance for black African Nationalists. The first president of Tanzania, Julius Nyere, translated it into Swahili and in 1944 the Youth League of the African National Congress ended its first manifesto with the lines,

‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

But in ourselves that we are underlings.’

A young Nelson Mandela was one of its signatories. The lines he was to mark in the Robben Island Bible three decades later were these,

Cowards die many times before their deaths:

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear;

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come, when it will come.

The passages marked by Mandela’s comrades in the Robben Island Bible were varied. Walter Sisulu chose from The Merchant of Venice,

‘For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe;

You call me mis-believer, cut-throat dog,

And spit upon my Jewish gabardine.’

Born of a Xhosa woman and white father, Sisulu clearly knew what it was to be despised. Billy Nair, who spent twenty years on the island, marked off a passage from The Tempest. Again, the implications are immediate,

‘This island’s mine…

… and here you sty me

In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me

The rest o’ the island.’

For a person dispossessed of his land by whites, imprisoned on a barren island, kept in a bare cell and forced to work the hard rock of a quarry the passage is staggeringly apt.

Andrew Masondo also chose from Julius Caesar,

‘Oh, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,

That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!

Thou art the ruins of the noblest man

That ever lived in the tide of times.

Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!

The words are powerful, but become multiply more so once placed in context of the treatment Masondo received. It is described by Dennis Brutus,

‘He had been tied to a stake in the centre of his working group…and he had been left there for some time, in the sun… the guards were armed with batons, or leather straps…they waded into the prisoners with batons and straps and sticks and then grabbed wooden pick handles and staves from a nearby storing shed… It was an indescribable fury unleashed.’

After such an experience, Masondo’s take on bleeding pieces of earth and costly blood, is likely to be notably different to that of the average academic.

Most of the information in this piece has been taken from Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island, by Ashwin Desai. It’s a fascinating and at times very moving book, placing Mandela amongst others with whom he shared both the struggle against apartheid and prison. After the years of his presidency and retirement, it has almost come to seem as if he was the only important activist or the ANC the only protest movement.

Reading Revolution reminds us otherwise. Prisoners on the island belonged to the Black Consciousness Movement, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Pan African Congress, Azanian People’s Liberation Army and many others.

The portrait that emerges of Mandela is of a man of huge intelligence, thoughtfulness and strength of character though not an easy person to know. Richard Stengel, who ghosted Mandela’s autobiography, said of him, ‘The man and the mask are one.’ Ahmed Kathrada, who spent twenty five years in prison with Mandela put it more simply, ‘He’s impenetrable.’

Ashwin’s view of post-apartheid South Africa is also questioning; only too aware of the corruption, violence and persistent inequality marring his country. Sonny Venkatrathnam is even more critical,

‘I am bitter. I don’t deny that. I think I’m bitter that so many years of struggle seem to have gone down the drain… we’ve got the right to vote, we’ve got the right to free speech… but we don’t have the right to free education; no free medicine; no free housing or anything like that; which is the crux of democracy. If you don’t have that, to have the right to vote is meaningless.’

Sonny Venkatrathnam’s Robben Island Bible was one of the concluding exhibits at last year’s Shakespeare: Staging the World exhibition at the British Museum. Having to hurry through the final sections, I missed seeing it. It was a shame, but not a great one. It was after all, just another Complete Works, though one with Deepavali greetings cards pasted to its covers with porridge, admittedly.

The value of any book isn’t in its materiality, but in its content. Forced into exile on a ‘rotten carcass of a butt’, Prospero took with him the most precious volumes from his library, prized ‘above my dukedom.’ They lined his bare cell and Caliban knew them as a source of power, urging Stephano and Trinculo, ‘First to possess his books; for without them/He’s but a sot, as I am.’

The warders on Robben Island were also aware that knowledge is power, one of them telling Alcott Dumelelo Blow, ‘If we give you education, we are sharpening the spear against us.’ Having won the right to study, prisoners took degrees in law, accountancy and computing - even though they had no computers.

Yet books have power beyond equipping us for law or accountancy, however important these are. They also feed the soul; fire the imagination. They set us free, even from the worst of prisons. As Mandela’s colleague Eddie Daniels put it,

‘Shakespeare was a voyage of discovery. I never knew about Shakespeare, never heard of Shakespeare at primary school, but when I discovered Shakespeare it was beautiful, it was beautiful you know. It was a voyage of discovery for me… to read books which I never ever dreamt of reading was beautiful.’

Henry V, Churchill, and the rhetoric of war

For much of his presidency, a bust of Sir Winston Churchill was placed in George W Bush’s Oval Office. On coming to power in 2008, Barrack Obama had it removed. While Bush may have seen Churchill as a heroic defender of democracy, Obama regarded him as an imperialist oppressor, his father’s family having suffered during the Mau Mau rebellion. One man’s celebrated war hero was another’s colonial tyrant.

He was both. A complex and troubled man, Churchill’s career was marked by a series of mistakes, controversies, disasters and tragedies. Yet in 1940 he was the single man able to lead Britain’s fight against Nazism. At times it seemed his only weapon was the power of his rhetoric. Speaking in April 1963, President John F Kennedy said of Churchill’s oratory, ‘In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone… he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.’

Churchill’s gift for speech making was not innate. As a child he spoke with a lisp, was considered a dunce at school and twice failed exams to get into Sandhurst.  Hope for us all. It was whilst with the army in India that he began a serious study of rhetoric, working his way through the speeches of Gladstone, Disraeli and other notable speakers, analysing their construction.

He learnt well; his great wartime speeches deploy every rhetorical device. They featured repetition (We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender), lists (I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat…), inversion (This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning), colloquialisms (Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job), metaphor (Now the old lion… stands alone against hunters), quotation (‘Every morn brought forth a noble chance/And every chance brought forth a noble knight’ Tennyson), contrast (Broad, sunlit uplands… the abyss of a new Dark Age), his lines of rolling grandiloquence (Wickedness, enormous, panoplied, embattled, seemingly triumphant, casts its shadow over Europe and Asia) generally offset by sentences of short monosyllables (These are not dark days; these are great days).

Like almost anyone from his background, Churchill would have grown up familiar with both the bible and Shakespeare. In one of his earliest wartime speeches he referred to freedom as ‘a house of many mansions’ and there are frequent echoes of Shakespeare in his phraseology.

He consistently referred to Britain as ‘our Island’ – the noun always capitalised in his typescripts. This helped emphasize both Britain’s isolation in its opposition to Nazism, but also its special destiny. It was not part of the continental landmass dominated by the ‘barbarisms of Nazidom and Bolshevism’.

This constant reference to our island evokes John of Gaunt’s ‘sceptred isle’ and, less flatteringly, Britaine’s disparagement of that ‘nook-shotten isle of Albion’ in Henry V. We have always defined ourselves against the French, even when not at war with them. Even when they were on the same side.

The sense of Britain as a beleaguered nation battling against superior forces was conjured by Churchill in his ‘House of many mansions’ broadcast when he said, ‘Certainly it is true that we are facing numerical odds; but that is nothing new in our history. Very few wars have been won by mere numbers alone… Numbers do not daunt us.’ In the minds of many of his listeners would have been Henry’s speech before Agincourt when his bedraggled army faced the flower and might of French chivalry. In Act 4 Scene 3 he tells his followers,

From this day to the ending of the world

But we in it shall be remembered –

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
 For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition.

Consciously or not, Churchill was to echo Henry’s words in two of his most celebrated speeches. Speaking in the House of Commons following Dunkirk and the fall of France, he said,

‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’

Henry’s timespan ‘from this day to the ending of the world’ may be a little more expansive than Churchill’s ‘thousand years’ but both suggest an enduring moment of glory. Only a few weeks later, at the height of the Battle of Britain in August 1940, Churchill was to reference the Agincourt speech again when he told the Commons,

‘The gratitude of every home in our Island… goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

Churchill’s ‘few’ – ‘undaunted by odds’ - is a clear restatement of Henry’s ‘happy few’. It is a tellingly simple word on which to end a speech packed with alliteration, assonance, repetition and grand phrasing.

In many ways Henry V is a patriotic hymn, showing us at our heroic best. It is therefore not surprising that Churchill’s government wished to enlist it as part of the war effort - and in 1943, Jack Beddington, a civil servant in the Ministry of Information invited Laurence Olivier to produce a film version of the play. A sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve, Olivier had yet been regularly touring the country with a medley of rousing speeches, always ending with ‘Once more unto the breach dear friends…’

He both starred and directed, cutting Shakespeare’s text from 3,000 to 1500 words, in the process shaving anything that would detract from Henry’s stature as war leader. His threat to the governor of Harfleur to have ‘your naked infants spitted upon spikes’ is omitted. So too is his order that ‘every soldier kill his prisoners’ after the French have attacked the baggage boys, while Bardolph’s execution also goes unmentioned. This is Shakespeare as propaganda.

When released in 1944 the film was dedicated ‘To the commando and airborne troops of Great Britain’ and its first audience would have been conscious of the parallels between Henry’s battle and their own. By trivial coincidence, the early theatres shared use with cockfights, dog fights and bear baiting shows which is why in the Prologue Shakespeare referred to the ‘cockpit’ that now holds ‘the vasty fields of France’. By 1944, the words ‘cockpit’ and ‘dogfight’ had taken on a very new and different meaning, both intimately familiar to the ‘few’ of Churchill’s speech.

Although the play is stirringly patriotic, it isn’t merely a celebration of war. In one of its key scenes, a disguised Henry moves amongst his troops on the eve of battle. In conversation with ordinary soldiers, one of them tells him, 

‘If the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, ‘We died at such a place,’ some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey, were against all proportion of subjection.’

Strikingly, Shakespeare gives the speech to a character called Michael Williams. Unlike Bardolph, Pistol and Nym whose names reflect their comic oddity, Michael’s is the name of Everyman. There must be hundreds of Michael Williams in any large town. By choosing the name for him he did, Shakespeare is giving him respect. Its ordinariness deflects ridicule.

He speaks for the common man and tells of ‘wives left poor’ and ‘children rawly left’. Death in battle is not glorious. It is bloody and brutal, with ‘all those legs and arms and heads chopped off’.

In his speech before Agincourt, Henry said that those who fought with him would ‘gentle their condition. At Harfleur he appealed to the ‘good yeomen’. In other words, making it clear he was leading a whole nation, not a narrow military caste of noblemen.

The Second World War has been described as ‘the People’s War’, though the patrician Churchill did not refer to it as such. At its end he was voted out of office, Labour winning the election by a landslide. Churchill had been an indispensable war leader, but the people chose Clement Attlee to lead them into peace.

Roads to War: Henry V and Iraq

Another tenth anniversary approaches. In March 2003 the US led coalition invaded Iraq. It was a disaster on almost every level. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and many continue to die every year in continuing instability; opinion in the Arab world hardened against the west, pushing countless young men towards militancy and Al-Qaida; in Iran the liberal, western leaning opposition was hugely damaged and its theocracy strengthened; crucial resources were diverted from Afghanistan at a time when that country was beginning a fragile recovery after years of Taliban rule; thousands of Coalition service personnel were killed or damaged by the conflict; at home disillusion with politicians and our political processes intensified.

Defending his decision to invade, Blair now cites the removal of Saddam Hussein as an unquestionable good. Few would argue otherwise, but Parliament didn’t vote for regime change as a stated war aim. Ironically, had Bush and Blair waited a few more years, he would probably have been deposed in the Arab Spring anyway, along with Ben Ali of Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt, Gadaffi in Libya and Saleh in Yemen.

As we built towards what seemed an unstoppable invasion in February 2003, I was beginning work on a comic book version of Henry V. Parallels were intense. For one thing, the play opens with Henry questioning two Archbishops on the legality of his claim to the French throne, and hence of his planned incursion into France.

This claim was tenuous, based on the fact that his great-great-grandmother Isabella was daughter of Philippe IV. The case was weak in law, partly because Isabella’s son, Edward III had renounced his right to the throne in return for substantial territories, but more importantly because French law denied inheritance through the female line. Henry asserted it did, ignoring the fact that should inheritance descend through the female line, his cousin Philippa had a better claim to the English throne than he did.

The intricacies of Salic Law are bewildering, but slightly more understandable than whether or not we had the right to invade Iraq under United Nations Resolution 1441. In a memo of 30 January 2003, Blair’s Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, had declared the war wouldn’t be legal without a further UN Resolution. Blair knew this would not be forthcoming. We shall probably never know whether political pressure was placed on Goldsmith, but in final advice written on 17 March he deemed the war to be lawful.

This was not a view shared by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who in September 2004 said it was ‘not in conformity with the UN Charter… from the charter point of view, it was illegal.’ Henry’s claim was supported by his Archbishops. Blair’s invasion of Iraq was condemned by another, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who in 2003 described the decision to support Bush as ‘mind boggling’ and in 2012 called the invasion of Iraq ‘morally indefensible.’

The case for war was made on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, which according to Blair could be used against the United Kingdom within 45 minutes of a decision to deploy them.

In the months leading up to the war, Dr Hans Blix had led a UN team searching for WMD. No evidence of their existence was found. Blix had pleaded for more time to continue his investigation in an attempt to avert the conflict, but this was disregarded.

There was clear pressure of time. The US had tens of thousands of troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and the Pentagon knew they had to go into action before the onset of summer when desert conditions would have become impossibly hot. Any delay meant either holding them in base or returning them home.

Henry V faced similar campaigning constraints. Arriving in France in August 1415 he immediately began a siege of Harfleur, but this took longer than anticipated and the town didn’t fall until September 22. Although this was late in the season and his army strength had been diminished by dysentery, Henry was reluctant to return home without further reward. He therefore headed north, for Calais. As the French army moved to block this advance, the two met at Agincourt on October 25 1415.

Here, the lateness of the campaign was to Henry’s advantage as the field of battle had been recently ploughed and days of heavy rain turned it to mud. As the leading French knights were felled by English and Welsh archers, the weight of numbers following behind meant the second wave stumbled into the fallen and tumbled into the mud. Many drowned in it or were crushed by those pushing on them behind.

The slaughter of French knights was immense, but even at the time Henry’s victory was tainted by his decision to have massed prisoners put to death. On balance, it was felt to be a legitimate decision, given his fear that the prisoners might re-arm and attack again. Less easy to justify was Henry’s conduct at the siege of Rouen in the winter of 1418-19 in which twelve thousand starving women and children left the city in the hope of safe passage. Henry refused this, leaving them to die of cold and hunger in the perimeter ditch.

In modern terms, this would certainly have been considered a war crime or crime against humanity. There is still faint hope that Blair will be dragged before the International Court in The Hague on similar charges. The concept of a ‘just war’ was much discussed in 2003. It is also a key aspect of Act 4 Scene 1 when the disguised King Henry talks with ordinary soldiers on the eve of Agincourt. One of them tells him,

If the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, ‘We died in such a place,’… I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle… Now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it.

The soldier’s words are impressive and moving. It is indeed a ‘black matter’ for any ruler to lead his country to war without good cause. In Blair’s case, everything turns on the weapons of mass destruction and the extent to which evidence of their existence was inflated.

In February 2004, Dr Blix accused the British and US governments of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq’s WMD to justify invasion. He was not alone in this view. Dr David Kelly, a member of the weapons inspectorate clearly felt the case had been ‘sexed up’ – to use Andrew Gilligan’s infelicitous phrase.  Less sensationally stated, Major General Michael Laurie told the Chilcot Inquiry in 2011 that the purpose of the intelligence dossier ‘was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.’ Since Major General Laurie helped compile the dossier, I guess he should know. His deposition echoed an earlier finding by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2008 when it stated the Bush administration had ‘misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq’.

It is possible that the Chilcot Inquiry into the war will give us a clearer understanding of what happened in the days preceding the invasion. This is uncertain, since in July 2012 the government vetoed release of Cabinet documents to the Inquiry, at the same time that the Foreign Office successfully appealed against disclosure of phone calls made between Bush and Blair.

On February 15 millions of people around the world marched to protest against the impending war. In London, there were perhaps as many as two million marchers, myself amongst them. It was an extraordinary and inspiring occasion. We failed.

It is hard to know why a politician as astute and sensitive to popular opinion should have committed himself so completely to the disastrous American led invasion of Iraq. There are various theories. One argues that by allying himself to the US, he believed he could exert a moderating influence on policy (if true, a humiliating delusion); another suggests that a successful and applauded intervention in Sierra Leone had given him a taste for military solutions. It is possible that after two election victories, a huge majority in parliament and seven years in power he had simply gone mad; a messianic sense of purpose intensified by a growing Catholic adherence and belief in his own infallibility, whatever the evidence or opposition.

On March 17 Lord Goldsmith gave his opinion that the war was legal. Two days later the bombing of Iraq began. Overnight Tony Blair became what he has remained, a figure of hatred and ridicule.