Ghost of Shakespeare

When the sense of the exotic, or of non-Englishness, appears in those early modern dramas that were written for the English stage, the descriptions are sometimes characterized by an olfactory element. Titania’s line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one example, evoking a distant and romantic foreign landscape as she recalls the “vot’ress of [her] order” whose changeling child she does not wish to relinquish to Oberon. As a whole, Titania’s speech, both in this instance and throughout the play, seems redolent with a romantic sense of what critics often describe as “the other”, which remains in keeping with both her character and with the fairies as a whole. The fairies’ manner of speaking, their descriptions redolent with a kind of immersion in the natural world, underscores the fact that they are not human, as their own consistent differentiation substantiates.

The fairies’ separate nature, as another tribe of sentient beings who seem to be variously magical, surfaces again and again in their language. Catherine Belsey’s statements that “Shakespeare’s fairies talk like no others”, and that “their voices, unique in the play itself, assume a direct access to a more vital world” (which have been touched on in previous blog posts here) seem to be particularly keenly observed.* Yet, the idea of fragrance, of Bottom’s “flowers of odious savours sweet” (3.1.78, in which he mistakes ‘odious’ for ‘odorous’), still strikes us as particularly evocative. Even in Oberon’s famous line, where scent isn’t mentioned specifically, the description seems distinctly evocative of fragrance, conjuring the scent of a profusion of herbs and blossoms:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.248-52)

Upon hearing Oberon’s words, we can almost smell the night breeze. It comes over our ears “like the sweet sound/ That breathes upon a bank of violets”.** Orsino, Twelfth Night‘s lovesick Duke, seems to conflate the auditory and olfactory senses in a single phrase. Oberon’s line does the same by describing something that appeals to the senses of both sight and smell, and which may have an auditory component as well if we imagine that we can hear the night breezes that prompt the violets to nod by bobbing their heads. Such language presents a listening audience with a sensory experience that burgeons on all fronts, and in terms of all the senses. Passages that conjure the idea of scent, which can be most evocative of memory***, in the case of drama, tend to establish and reinforce the text’s visceral links to an audience in performance.

The text of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, set on a mysterious island, offers us a banquet of potentially fragrant exotica, including Caliban’s “sweet airs”, the spirit Ariel’s “Bermoothes” or “Bermudas”****, along with a host of similar embellishments.

The sprinkling of sensory cues throughout the text not only renders the text more immediate to an audience, but also imbues a sense of romanticised exotica, if not of the exotic itself. Drama has always done this though, just as motion pictures and television series do now. By setting the action in a setting foreign to the supposed general audience, writers give their writing an additional element of shape and dimension, imaginatively transporting the audience geographically while also transporting them into the circumstances of other lives.

Dimensions like fragrance supply foundational elements to the very essence of story, in effect, to take the audience somewhere new, or to transport them in a new way. Yet, how easily we forget this, although, or perhaps because we are so constantly immersed in it–in the ongoing processing of human experience as story. As Jonathan Gottschall describes it, “Human Life is so bound up in stories that we are thoroughly desensitized to their weird and witchy power.”*****

The early modern dramatists knew this, of course, as did their predecessors across the world. Shakespeare’s plays famously feature locations like Cyprus and Verona while ranging through temporal settings from ancient Greece and Rome to pre-medieval Roman Britain, but he and many of his most effective contemporaries also repeatedly remind audiences of the immediacy of human senses in their dramas. This reinforces not only accessibility, by linking audience sense memory with that of the onstage characters, but also reinforces the experiential veracity of the ongoing drama, underscoring the “suspension of disbelief” with a kind of sensory feedback loop, where senses meld together in a way that further supports a temporary fictional reality. ******

The air redolent with exotic spices is not unique to Shakespeare, but pervades the literature of the day. In John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, the character Armusia, who has recently arrived in the islands of the play’s setting, waxes rhapsodic:

We are arrived among the blessed islands
Where every wind that rises blows perfumes
And every breath of air is like an incense.
The treasure of the sun dwells here. Each tree,
As if it envied the old Paradise,
Strives to bring forth immortal fruit – the spices
Renewing nature, though not deifying;
And when that falls by time, scorning the earth,
The sullen earth, should taint or suck their beauties,
But, as we dreamt, for ever so preserve us.
Nothing we see but breeds an admiration.
The very rivers, as we float along,
Throw up their pearls and curl their heads to court us.
The bowels of the earth swell with the births
Of thousands unknown gems and thousand riches.
Nothing that bears a life but brings a treasure.
The people they show brave, too: civil-mannered,
Proportioned like the masters of great minds.*******

Armusia’s description leads the audience on a tour of abundance from the olfactory to the visual, to the philosophical, painting a land of fulsome happiness and satisfaction.

Not that the conflation of the sensory need always lead to either the pleasant or the lush. Thomas Middleton opens A Game at Chess with the ghost of the founder of the Jesuits, portraying Ignatius Loyola as a cold and manipulative would be tyrant whose senses seek input as information:

IGNATIUS LOYOLA appearing, ERROR at his foot as asleep.

Ignatius
Hah! Where? What angle of the world is this,
That I can neither see the politic face
Nor with my refined nostrils taste the footsteps
Of any of my disciples, sons and heirs
As well of my designs as institution?
I thought they'd spread over the world by this time,
Covered the earth's face and made dark the land
Like the Egyptian grasshoppers.******** 

In this case, the character’s disapproving disappointment is underscored by a marked absence of sensory input. He “can neither see…Nor with [his] refined nostrils taste the footsteps”. Like a man in a cave whose eyes begin to blind themselves seeking for non existent light, Loyola’s entire sensory array seems crammed into a single seeking, which for the moment returns a null set. Of course, the ‘lack’ in this case remains in keeping with the character himself, obliquely reflecting his lack of morality and human concern. His will to world domination is also underscored by the metaphorical vision of his “designs as institution” being like a plague of grasshoppers that cover the surface of the earth.

That our language (used loosely in terms of our linguistic and our visual representations) necessarily derives directly from our thought and understanding, also means that our expression remains inextricably interwoven with our experience. This remains apparent in our literary and other artistic renderings, and most pointedly in the ways in which we may artistically manifest our inner landscapes in our outer world. In these presentations, one sense may effectively represent all of the senses.

Colour may be ‘felt’ as well as seen. The effect of any sense may overlap another, in some cases, making the visual somehow as palpable as that which might actually be touched. The visual and the olfactory have been widely linked to mood, and the whole of experience may not be as distinctly compartmentalised as we might have it.

Even if we limit the discussion solely to early modern literature, examples of integration are legion, as Bottom’s famous instance of synesthesia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream readily indicates:

When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer. My next is “Most fair Pyramus.” Heigh-ho! Peter Quince? Flute the bellows-mender? Snout the tinker? Starveling? God’s my life, stol’n hence, and left me asleep? I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom. And I will sing it in the latter end of a play before the duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

(4.1.199-217)

As much as this passage relates Bottom’s momentary confusion, his receding memory of his experience with the fairy queen, with a muddled Bible verse smacking of his momentary contact with the divine, it also indicates the totality of his experience, as a whole that falls outside of typical human expression. Words cannot contain the wonder of it. It really is “past the wit of man” to say what dream we really live.

Nonetheless, we continue to try to describe it. To encapsulate it. To catalog it. Our creative efforts also put forth new efforts of integrated experience every day. It is not only Shakespeare or his contemporaries who transport us to enchanted islands which are full of “noises,/ Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not” (The Tempest 3.2.129-30). The contemporary example of Monsterstorm’s Crab Rave is case in point:

In a deeply troubled world, it behooves us to remain vigilant–to be both aware and involved. We continue to define our world as we continue to strive to improve both it and ourselves. We must learn, and we must also care for ourselves, if only for our loved ones, and to be able to continue our efforts for justice and a better tomorrow.

Right now, while many of us remain confined, it is also wise to dance upon occasion. The video posted above represents a good place to start. We should not give up the fight for a better world, but we must also dance when we can. ‘Stop and smell the flowers’ may be an old idea, but “gather ye rosebuds while ye may”******** is no less valid for that. May your weekend and fortnight be full of tropical islands, music, and sweetly scented air.

*Belsey, Catherine. Why Shakespeare? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 96.

**Twelfth Night 1.1.5-6.

***https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20120312-why-can-smells-unlock-memories

****Some critics have noted that the “Bermoothes” may have been the name of an early 17th century London quarter reknowned for taverns, which might have given Shakespeare’s audience an additional laugh at the idea that Prospero would have sent his spirit servant, Ariel, to gather “dew” from the “still vex’d Bermoothes”.

*****Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston: Mariner Books, 2013, 1.

******For those with library access, a useful discussion may be found in: Walton, Kendall L. “Fearing Fictions.” The Journal of Philosophy 75, no. 1 (1978): 5-27. doi:10.2307/2025831.

******Fletcher, John. The Island Princess. Edited by Clare McManus. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017, 122-3. (1.3.16-33)

********Middleton, Thomas. A Game at Chess. Edited by T. H. Howard-Hill. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. (1.1.1-8)

*********Herrick, Robert. His poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”, may be read here: https://poets.org/poem/virgins-make-much-time

Literary landscapes stretch away from us in all directions, constantly connecting with others and twining away into the fabric of your universe. Emerging from within us, these landscapes can be generally geographical or even distinctly locative, but literary terrain also lies at the confluence of our collective mythologies, our fancies, our dreams, and sometimes our fears. Charged with thought and passion, literature reflects the heaving sea of our human experience, showing us both storms and placid surfaces of hidden pools, offering glimpses of otherwheres which are greater than ourselves. For all manner of ground lies within us, ranging from the deep woods with their confined sightlines, the storybook metaphor for possibilty, to deserts, oceans, and the contours of whole unknown worlds as well.

Our title line for this post comes to us from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it marks what seems to be one of only instances when Shakespeare uses the word “glimmering”, all of which are in this particular play.* In the love chase, the elaborate mating dance that occupies so much of the central portion of the play, a doting Demetrius pursues Hermia through the nighttime forest. When he catches up to her, she half suspects that he may have murdered her true love, Lysander, whom she cannot find. Smitten with her as he is, Demetrius cannot understand why she continues to reject his advances, and why she would think that he would do anything cruel to her. When she accuses him of wearing the grim countenance of a murderer, he responds, using the word “glimmering” for the second time in the play:

So should the murdered look, and so should I,
Pierced through the heart with your stern cruelty.
Yet you, the murderer, look as bright, as clear,
As yonder Venus in her glimmering sphere. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.2.58-61)

He has been murdered by her refusal to accept his love even while she shines like the goddess, Venus, in her ‘glimmering’ sphere.

Demetrius’ use of the word “glimmering” is bracketed between the two times in the play that the word is used by the fairy king, Oberon. At the beginning of the second act, the immortal king chides his queen, Titania, about her supposed love for Theseus, saying, “Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night/ From Perigenia, whom he ravished?” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.77). The third time the word “glimmering” appears in Dream is when Oberon uses it again near the very end of the play:

Through the house give glimmering light,
By the dead and drowsy fire.
Every elf and fairy sprite,
Hop as light as bird from brier,
And this ditty after me,
Sing and dance it trippingly. (5.1.377-82)

This last usage occurs at just the point where the play pointedly adopts the language of incantation. Puck has swept the dust behind the door in ritual preparation, and Oberon directs the faries to “give glimmering light” through the house, as an apparent blessing. The next sets of lines, in softly cadenced rhyme and meter, draw the audience into a play that has suddenly become a ritual of blessing, transformation, and renewal.

Clearly, ‘glimmering’ things are out of the ordinary. They are special. Venus’ glimmering sphere is not an ordinary sphere, else it would not require the additional descriptive. Similarly, the glimmering night through which Titania may have led Theseus is suggestive of something beyond an ordinary night, as is the glimmering light that Oberon directs the fairies to take through the house. Suggesting both a ‘gleam’ as a kind of innate lighted quality, and a fairy ‘glamour’, the word may take us in several directions at once. The night/sphere/light may each contain a fluxuating luminescence, which variously pulses or ripples. As a ‘glamour’, Katherine Briggs says:

It generally signified a mesmerism or enchantment cast over the senses, so that things were perceived or not perceived as the enchanter wished.**

In terms of an illusion, a glamour can be either helpful or harmful, depending on the dictates of the original enchanter. Many fairy tales contain characters who are not as they appear, and a glamour may make an elder appear more youthful and attractive, or may make a more youthful character appear older or more monstrous. In such cases, the glamour often takes the form of a curse, shifting a character’s physical form. These curses may endure for a specific period of time, or they may be released by a catalyst, often involving evidence of ‘true love’–sometimes in the form of genuine lover’s tears:

Or sometimes in the form of “true love’s kiss”, even if the transformation is not exactly as everyone expects in some cases:

Sometimes, both lovers may be cursed, as in the 1985 film Ladyhawke, where each lover is transformed–the man, Navarre, into a wolf at night, and his lover, Isabeau, into a hawk by day:

The point is that when a person, thing, or situation is ‘glimmering’ or under a glamour, it alters our perception of it.

Etymological searches reveal that the word “glimmering” may come from the “Middle English glim, glimme (“radiance; shining brightness”), but online etymological sources also indicate that the word is “of uncertain further origin. Perhaps from Old English gleomu (“splendor”) and/or Old Norse *glim, *glima, both apparently from Proto-Germanic *glimō, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰley- (“to gleam, shimmer, glow”). Compare Norwegian glim, dialectal Old Swedish glim, glimma.” It also seems related to the word “glamour”, which Brigg discusses in terms of fairy magic as derived “[f]rom Scots glamer, from earlier Scots gramarye (‘magic, enchantment, spell’).”***

One of the complaints often lodged against A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that once everyone else has been released from the spell, Demetrius remains enchanted by the love flower even at the end of the play. Yet, Demetrius’ early use of the term glimmering associates him, however subtly, with the idea of an enchantment before the love juice from ‘love in idleness’ changes his sight. As Lysander reminds us at the very beginning of the play:

Demetrius, I’ll avouch it to his head,
Made love to Nedar’s daughter, Helena,
And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes,
Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry,
Upon this spotted and inconstant man. (1.1106-10)

Theseus confirms having heard this same thing in his very next line, and the episode suggests that Demetrius has already fallen under a glamour somehow, before the play began. In this case, the love flower merely corrects his perception by restoring his former sight to him. Near the end of the play, he compares his crush on Hermia to snow or to an illness, like an impermanent seasonal change that had only temporarily obscured his true love for Helena:

But, my good lord, I wot not by what power
(But by some power it is) my love to Hermia,
Melted as the snow, seems to me now
As the remembrance of an idle gaud
Which in my childhood I did dote upon,
And all the faith, the virtue of my heart,
The object and the pleasure of mine eye,
Is only Helena. To her, my lord,
Was I betrothed ere I saw Hermia.
But like a sickness did I loathe this food.
But, as in health, come to my natural taste,
Now I do wish it, love it, long for it,
And will forevermore be true to it. (4.1.163-75)

Note that he ‘saw’ Hermia, but was ‘betrothed’ to Helena, who is ‘all the faith’ and the ‘virtue of his heart’. The passionate vocabulary in Demetrius’ language discovers the truth of his underlying emotion versus the surface attraction of perception in his temporary pursuit of Hermia.

Shakespeare uses the word “glimmer” (or “glimmers”) in three other plays. In Dream, however, the word is used as a gerund, signifying an activity in process. In contrast, the glimmer in Comedy of Errors is a noun, a “fading glimmer left” in old Aegeon’s eye. The verb form in Henry VI part 1 remains part of a descriptive phrase about a characteristic. In a comparison, the Duke of Somerset describes truth as something that “will glimmer through a blind man’s eye”, describing a characteristic rather than an immanent process. In Macbeth, “the west” as described by Murderer 1, “yet glimmers with some streaks of day”, which suggests not only light, but also blood, in keeping with the violent imagery and prophetic language particular to the rest of the text.

No matter what one may or may not believe about fairies or magic, the glamour of sudden enchantment or infatuation seems impossible to deny. Almost every one of us could cite examples from real life, which is why the glimmering glamour remains an irradicable part of our mythological landscapes, appearing repeatedly in our literature and culture. From the examples in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it appears that Shakespeare knew this too, and knew it well. As long as we muster enough belief to keep Tinker Bell alive, then we also know how the fairy tale will end:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMZlMw-ONQ0

The word “glimmering” seems to be used nowhere else in Shakespeare’s plays, and the play of sense between glimmer and glamour appears to be unique to the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.**** For although magic appears in other places in Shakespeare’s plays, the fairy magic in dream seems special too, a glimmering example of the promise and possibility of renewal in what may be a dangerous world. Perhaps Shakespeare felt that it was enough to touch on fairy magic wholesale in just a single play, or, more probably, he just had so much more to explore. Let’s hope that, in all our cases, our present dangers will diminish as well, and leave us with much more to discuss next time.

*Although the Shakespeare Concordance tells us that Shakespeare only uses the term twice (not, in any way to diminish the achievment of that invaluable resource), the word is actually spoken three times, as noted. It is uttered once by Demetrius, and twice by Oberon. Should anyone find another example of the word “glimmering” in Shakespeare, besides those listed in this post, please do email me and let me know. The word “glimmer” appears in A Comedy of Errors, in Henry VI part 1, and in Macbeth, but I find no case of “glimmering” except in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

**Briggs, Katharine Mary. An Encyclopedia of Fairies Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977, p. 191.

***Numerous examples may be found in etymology online and as cited in Briggs above.

****With a special note of thanks to the wonderful actor, Pete Smith, who initially pointed out to me the uniqueness of “glimmering” in this particular text when he played Oberon for me some years ago.

Anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and author, Wade Davis, writes of what he describes as the “ethnosphere, a notion perhaps best defined as the sum total of all thoughts, beliefs, myths and intuitions made manifest today by the myriad cultures of the world.” He holds that “The ethnosphere is humanity’s greatest legacy. It is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all that we are and all that we have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species.”* Although we may imagine ourselves bereft of companionship and comfort, akin to the bleak inner and outer landscape of King Lear on his heath, as reflected in the title line, we can never be wholly seperate or distinct from the web of the ethnosphere of which we are perpetually a part.

At base, strip any of us of clothes, belongings, shelter, and we become like Lear, conscious of the poor, bare, forked animal that we are. Often, even within the confines of what may be relatively comfortable lives (should we be lucky enough to have such lives), we perceive ourselves as distinct, as alone, raging with the often convulsive elements around us. Or we may believe ourselves to be isolated in a silent darkness, akin to the “the way to Destruction, which [leads] into a wide field, full of dark mountains, where [one may] stumble and fall, and rise no more.”**

Yet, even when we conceive of ourselves as entirely alone, in the sense of the ethnosphere of which we are an integral part, our isolation remains impossible. In Shakespeare’s plays where central characters often find themselves alone on stage, they are still surrounded by, not only the ongoing story of the drama in which they are imbedded, but also by the codifications of cultural understanding, ritual, and human experience. Some may soliloquise, and some may sing.

After Puck magically transforms Bottom, giving him the head of an ass, the weaver’s friends all flee in terror, leaving him alone in the woods. Choosing to sing to allay his own mounting fear has consequences. Because, Bottom only believes himself to be alone, but, of course, he is not, and his singing wakes Titania, the fairy queen, who (under the influence of juice squeezed from a magical love flower) straightaway falls in love with him. Where Rackham’s illustration clearly pictures parts of the active but invisible fairy world surrounding Bottom, Wade Davis apprehends an often unconsidered atmosphere of language, belief, cultural practice and interaction, ritual, and human understanding that surrounds us and of which we are an integral part. A deeply textured web of multiple apprehensions, the ethnosphere provides a place for nearly limitless exploration as we poor, bare, forked animals move within it and navigate our own lives.

As Davis reminds us, “just as the biosphere has been severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere — and, if anything, at a far greater rate.”**** Bear in mind that Davis spoke the following words in 2003:

When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. A language is a flash of the human spirit. It’s a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.

And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterey, fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children. They’re no longer being taught to babies, which means, effectively, unless something changes, they’re already dead. What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your language, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors or anticipate the promise of the children? And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks, because every two weeks, some elder dies and carries with him into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. 

Wade Davis, “Dreams from Endangered Cultures” TED Talk 2003.

As anyone who has read this blog in the past will know, the ghost argues that our part in this ever greater effort to respect our world, and to preserve our environment and our vanishing cultures, goes hand in hand with our preservation, cultivation, and promotion of the cultural treasures that come to us through literature and the arts. Each links to each, and each domain of our being remains inextricably linked to the next. Sometimes, we may begin to feel as though we are fighting on all fronts, and that can be wearying. Yet, it is something that we must continue to do, at all costs. Connection through our expression, through literature and the arts is our lifeline to the cultural milieu that we inhabit. Without it, our world becomes sterile, without imagination, a dead world where our eyes turn to empty spectacles on decaying billboards.

Although Winston Churchill never really uttered the words “Then what are we fighting for?” in response to a question about cutting the arts, he did value the arts. In 1938, with clouds on the European horizon, he said, “The arts are essen­tial to any com­plete national life. The State owes it to itself to sus­tain and encour­age them….Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the rev­er­ence and delight which are their due.”

These days, many of those in power argue that we might collectively be better off trimming our budgetary provision for the arts or cutting it completely. Then, we might utilise those saved funds to better promote greater safety and economic progress for all–at least that’s how the argument usually seems to go. The idea is that people benefit more from a thriving economy than they do from seeing another production of Hedda Gabler. Theatre and Cinema audiences have been in decline for decades and more people are interested in Netflix’ current Tiger King than they are in The Seagull or Huckleberry Finn. (Not that the ghost isn’t grateful to have Netflix and similar platforms, especially as they offer new venues for performing artists and creative projects. Neither would the ghost presume to attempt to legislate taste, as creativity should be and is always moving, always changing.)

Leave aside the idea that the fairy story of trickle down economics and even the emptiness of present day rhetoric about the perpetual and universal benefits of capitalism. Leave aside the evidence that the current U.S. administration appears ready to trade countless lives (especially those of the old and infirm) for the possibility of reigniting a system of monetary exchange, one that habitual gig economy underpayment had rendered on the brink of exhaustive collapse long before any virus swept across the globe. The fact is that, while we need money, and while some (or many of us) need it badly, most of the striving for maximum profit that we have built into our system still leaves us unfulfilled. While the work that consumes our days may pay the bills (even if it often doesn’t pay all of them completely), it often fails to complete us. Much of the time, our remunerative work does not allow us to touch our real dreams, our core dreams, but instead interferes with those. As the Bible says, “For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?”*****

Not that work can’t feed us in multiple ways. Our vocation can be our vacation too, and for those of us lucky enough to do what we once dreamed, or to interact in ways we love with subjects which continue to fuel our passions on a daily basis, well done. Yet, those who have managed to secure suce a life remain in the minority. And what about the rest of us? The “dog without a bone, [the] actor on a loan” as Jim Morrison would put it? What about them? Those who can’t pay the rent? Can’t eat? Can’t feed their children? Can’t sustain themselves and still dream of so much more? With all due respect to Edwin Arlington Robinson, so many go “without the meat and curse the bread”, but in spite of this Richard Cory tends to live on, and this time, he seems to be swaggering down the sidewalk, bigger than ever. He tweets offensively on an almost daily basis, and all the while, the rest of us fall further and further behind in the accounts.******

Yet, the moon still sometimes rises above the trees. Banksy’s latest piece for the NHS won’t necessarily feed the frustrated steel worker in Peoria, Illinois, or the jobless academic in Portland, Maine, but the money generated by that gift will almost certainly help save lives by helping the NHS to which it was generously donated by the reclusive artist. (Thank you to medical staff in all the countries, and to everyone everywhere who has helped or tried to help. That includes Banksy.)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/celebrity/banksys-latest-piece-pays-tribute-to-healthcare-workers-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic/ar-BB13KGwO

The fact remains that by promoting the arts everywhere, we find ourselves more connected. A society that fosters artists and the arts, and one that promotes creation and innovation, continues to sponsor more and greater creative solutions to its challenges. It does this in ways that nations which have largely abandoned their arts do not, having more resources and resourcefulness amongst its people, and hence more answers forthcoming when these are needed.

Creative expressions also bring us together–humanity as a whole. Without our arts, our rituals, our literatures and languages, our world becomes flat, dull, and impoverished as an interdepartmental memo sent via email. These multitudinous demons of loss and subversion pound on our doors and the situation is serious. The colours of our world fade even as the world is slowly submerged in melting polar ice.

Yet, even as we scrabble for bread, dicing for silver in the strange low doorways of our sinking world, at those moments when we behold those moments of cultural context that truly move us, we pause and recognise our human fellowship in its broader context. Then we remember that we move within a vast web at the intersection of environment, ethnosphere, and all the actual and metaphorical extensions of our greater universe, and that our lives are nothing more than ongoing expressions of that vital spark.

Even when they are alone, and even as their respective worlds dissolve around them, the disillusioned Lear and the blood weary Macbeth both speak in ways that resonate deeply with the essential bedrock of the human condition. The poetry in each character’s fall speaks volumes of terrible beauty to the conflagration of human error and unforgiving consequence. Special provenance or not, when the sparrow falls, the plays offer vehicles through which countless artists have been able to speak creatively to the depths of human existence.

On the other hand, when seemingly alone in the wood, Bottom, who dreams of “lofty” dramatic presentation even as he (albeit perhaps unwittingly) weaves together all the strands from the rest of the play, chooses to sing. His song of birds weaves them and their vitality into the forest around him, awakening the fairy queen and precipitating her liaison with him. Awkward and mismatched as it may seem, Bottom’s choosing to sing reflects the subsequent ritual of regeneration, where lowly mortal is touched by, and participates in, immortality.

Like each of Shakesepare’s characters, we do find ourselves seemingly alone in various settings in our lives. It matters not whether these moments are dramatic or mundane. How we interact with where we are, and how we choose to participate in the visible and invisible around us, remains our choice. There are potentially as many choices as there are people on the earth. Here is one:

Unaccommodated man, the human without culture, really is a poor, bare, forked animal. Please support literature, live theatre, and the other arts. Read. Give generously if you can afford to do so. Watch and immerse yourself in the arts if you cannot.

It behooves us, individually and collectively, for each of us to continue to experience and learn. During the shelter in place restrictions that have affected so many of us, many theatres, operas, speaking houses, and educational institutions are making some of their best material freely available to the public. Please partake and remember how essential your continued support of cultural, educational, and artistic institutions of all kinds continues to be, and will continue to be long into the future. Thank you.

*Davis, Wade. Light at the Edge of the World: a Journey through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2002, 8.

**Adapted from the journey of the Formalist and Hypocrisy, in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress iii.iv. Bunyan, John. Available online: “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Work info: Pilgrim’s Progress – Christian Classics Ethereal Library. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/bunyan/pilgrim.html.

***Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003, 81.

****Davis, Wade. “Transcript of ‘Dreams from Endangered Cultures.'” TED talk 2003. https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_dreams_from_endangered_cultures/transcript.

*****King James Bible. Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 1973, Luke 9:25.

******Robinson, Edwin Arlington. “Richard Cory” from Children of the Night, 1897. The entire poem may be read here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44982/richard-cory. Robinson’s entire second volume of poetry entitled Children of the Night may be read at project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/313

*******To read more about “Lil Buck” Riley’s intuitive dance, you can Google him. He does a fantastic interpretation of a piece of Swan Lake with cellist, Yo-Yo Ma.

Our title line comes from Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which is a play that does not appear in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, although estimations vary as to whether Shakespeare wrote half of the play or the entire thing. The line is spoken near the end of the play as Thaisa, the long lost wife of Pericles, stands in the temple of Diana as she and Pericles wondrously rediscover each other. The line neatly encompasses human experience, describing not only the characters’ mutual experiences, but also the ongoing life cycle of storms, birth, and death.

We typically celebrate William Shakespeare’s birthday on St George’s Day, April 23rd, even though we have no real record of his being born on this day. What we do have is a certificate of his baptism, which took place on the 26th of April, 1564. Because infants in the early modern period were typically baptised within three days of their birth, it is reasonable to assume that Shakespeare’s birth may have taken place on the 23rd of April. Historians also appreciate something of the neatness of this assertion, because Shakespeare died on the 23rd of April as well, in 1616.

Shakespeare’s dramatic and poetic works have become a foundational cornerstone to our understanding of literature, and of the breadth and depth with which poetry and drama may comprehend the range of human experience and understanding. Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, better known as the First Folio, was published after the author’s death in 1623, by his colleagues, John Heminges and Henry Condell. Thought to contain most of the plays in which Shakespeare had a major part in composition, the volume has 36 of the author’s plays, and is the only reliable text for about 20 of them. Although the landscape of textual authority continues to shift a bit, the only major Shakespeare plays thought not to have been included are two plays currently believed to have been lost, Cardenio, and Love’s Labour’s Won, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, andThe Two Noble Kinsmen.

Historians believe that perhaps 750 copies of the First Folio were printed, of which 235 survive today, although individual volumes continue to be ‘discovered’ in various libraries around the world, and any number of copies may exist that remain unrecorded. In 2016, for example, a copy of the first folio was found in the library of Mount Stuart House, on the Isle of Bute in Scotland. In 2014, a previously unknown copy was found in a library in Calais, France. Because of its historical and literary provenance, the first folio remains one of the most valuable volumes in the world. Only about six of the known copies remain in private hands.

Should you be armed with sufficient funds (copies of the First Folio trade hands for sums measuring in the millions–of dollars or pounds), opportunities for ownership do arise, although this happens only infrequently. For example, here’s a copy that was in the collection of Mills College which was once owned by noted Shakespeare Scholar Edmond Malone (1741-1812).

A well known liberal arts college, Mills College either will auction or has already auctioned this copy of the First Folio in order to provide the college with an infusion of much needed funds. For more information, contact Christie’s in New York.

**********************

Of course, a birthday should always include a gift or offering, even if the offering should consist (as the best often do) of merely a thought of gratitude. For the purposes of this blog, however, we thought that perhaps the gift to honour Shakespeare’s birthday should include more than a mere thought. Because our tea and coffee mugs remain in the design stages (and because shipping those to readers all over the world might prove prohibitive anyway at this point), we needed to find something else–something that might be fun, that might be useful, and that might potentially include the essence of rambling down a rose flanked Cotswold walk amidst oncoming springtide.

Here then is the recipe for “King James Biscuits” which, according to Mistress Sarah Longe in her 1610 recipe book, “King James, and his Queene eaten with much liking”. The recipe, adapted by Francine Segan from Sarah Longe’s cookbook, makes approximately 24 scones. Please note that the recipe has been adapted for an American kitchen. European measurements can be approximated, and an oven keyed to Celsius temperatures should be preaheated to around 177°, or a moderate gas mark 4. (My apologies for the way the recipe is formatted in various formats. In this case, WordPress was singularly uncooperative in terms of providing an adequate format platform for this recipe, for whatever reason. Perhaps King James is still jealously guarding his biscuits.):

7 large egg yolks, 3 tablespoons rose water, 1 cup sugar, 5 cups pastry flour, 4 large egg whites, 1 teaspoon caraway seeds, 1 teaspoon aniseeds,

1. Using an electric mixer on high speed, beat the egg yolks, rose water, and sugar for 2 minutes. Add 1 cup of flour and mix for 2 minutes. Add another cup of flour and mix for 1 minute. Reduce the mixer speed to low, add another cup of flour, and mix for two minutes. In a separate bowl, whip the egg whites to soft peaks. Add another cup of flour, the caraway, aniseed, and the egg whites to the batter and mix for two minutes. Add the remaining cup of flour and mix until smooth and elastic. (If the dough is too thick for your mixer, knead in the last addition of flour.)

2. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Drop the dough, 2 tablespoons at a time, onto a greased cookie sheet and bake for 15 minutes or until light golden brown.

From Shakespeare’s Kitchen: Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook by Francine Segan.*

This might be a bit more work if one doesn’t have an electric mixer. Please note that noted food historian Francine Segan’s cookbook is not to be confused with Pulitzer Prize nomintated author Lore Segal’s similarly titled Shakespeare’s Kitchen: Stories. Both are fine books that speak abundantly to the human life experience in ways that share threads with Shakespeare, although Segan’s book has more actual recipes for preparing food.

There’s a great deal of charm and appeal to Segan’s cookbook. Should anyone try this scone recipe, or any of the other recipes from this source, at home (assuming you can get enough flour in these challenging times), do let me know how you get on. You’ll know where to find me. Looks like the ghost may be haunting these pages for some time.

It is worthwhile to recall that while rosemary is for remembrance, it is also good for cooking. If the only thing of which we can be certain in life is change, then it may be well worth it to ‘hang in there’. Here’s wishing a happy birthday weekend to William Shakespeare, and a great week ahead to all of you.

*Segan, Francine. Shakespeare’s Kitchen: Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook. New York: Random House, 2003. The recipe for King Jame’s Biscuits appears in chapter 8, ‘The Banquet’.

Thirty spokes join at a hub: their use for the cart is where they are not.
When the potter’s wheel makes a pot, the use of the pot is precisely where there is nothing.
When you open the doors and windows for a room, it is where there is nothing that they are useful to the room.
Therefore being is for benefit, nonbeing is for usefulness.

Tao Te Ching by Laozi, chapter 11, Thomas Cleary trans.

When we consider emptiness, much of what we have historically found ‘useful’ in the world derives from what we have emptied from it. While it is true that empty space often proves more useful than solid matter, whether in vessels, in dwellings, in our theatres, or even in our writing, there can be a dark side to emptiness as well. We cut down the forests for pasture and for land upon which we can build. We drain swamps and marshland for the same reasons. We drain the ocean of whales and we drain the whales of oil. We drain ourselves in that “getting and spending” that Wordsworth mentioned so presciently.*

For the emptiness that may truly be useful to us, emptying ourselves of greed and striving, seems to have eluded us increasingly in our recent centuries. Part of this stems from basing the larger footprint and emphasis of our social and political structures solely on economic gain. And part of it stems from our own human nature as a natural engagement with the necessity of making a living, of providing for ourselves and our families, and of seeking to maximise our potential for comfortable older years. The danger lies in the fine line between emptying a small tract of wood, to provide pasture, build structures, mill lumber, make paper goods, and all the necessaries of modern life, and the cutting of entire swathes of rain forest so that our bathroom tissue can be softer and whiter. For somewhere, on those fine lines between need and want, the devil steps into our existence.

In literature and folklore, the devil may take any number of guises, most often tempting us, appearing as something that may seem good and virtuous, but ultimately steers us away from our own best interests. A hypothetical head of state may willfully disassemble an apparatus designed for dealing with a crisis, perhaps a pandemic, for example, claiming an economic savings for doing so. Subsequently, this ‘leader’ may dismiss or downplay the potential impact of such a crisis once it actually arises, even pressing that denial to the point where it exacerbates the damage of the future curve. Then, of course, once the hypothetical pandemic becomes a major threat to millions of lives, this head of state, who had previously denied the seriousness of the situation, may attempt to claim credit for dealing with it decisively or properly. Because the larger population of the country in our example has had little training in critical thinking, but have instead been well trained to believe whatever they see on television, or whatever they hear on social media platforms, many of them may rally around this leader, pushing his or her support numbers higher in the polls.

But a ghost, as Dickens notes, has lost the power to interfere in human affairs. We merely watch. We observe. Sometimes some of us comment. A focus on literary and theatrical disciplines may only lend one limited scope and basis for understanding the affairs of the larger world, after all. Perhaps these are better left to the devil himself. Certainly in the mythological structure that is so interwoven with our present human experience, the devil is to worldly concerns as God is to the celestial. The opposition of God and devil often represents (among other things) the ongoing war between the flesh and the spirit, or the body and the mind. As the Book of Revelations says:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

Authorised King James Version Revelations, 12:7

Note that the devil is cast “into the earth” (alternate translations follow this to a great extent, with the New International Version saying Satan was “hurled to the earth”), and there is a sense that Satan’s terrestrial trajectory includes an element of significant force, enough so that the character of the devil is ever after somehow marked as part and parcel of the earthly. In being ejected from heaven, Satan becomes not just a denizen of earth, but is actually propelled into it in a bodily sense so that the devil’s substance is linked or even fused with the earth itself.

Yet, the devil still reveals himself to us, or not, in curious ways. The whispering voice in the wee hours, not in our ear, but in our mind, is part of the clay from which we have supposedly been formed. Suspicion. Jealousy. Even loneliness and silent, patient rage. Dramatic stuff, to be certain, and so resonant with the everyday struggles of human existence that the story seems intertwined with our being. Temptation. Having ice cream now might taste so good, but what will I do to lose the extra pounds I gain from that tomorrow?

Indeed, Ghost. Almost all of us can recognise the struggle with temptation in our lives in some form or another. This devil we do know, and we know it well, but what of Shakespeare? Isn’t this a Shakespeare blog? Where’s the Shakespeare?

Well, as we’ve said, the very idea of the devil has become so intimately intertwined with our concepts of human experience that it is virtually inseparable. Because Shakespeare says so much about human experience, he mentions the devil frequently in various contexts. According to the Shakespeare Concordance, the world “devil” appears in Shakespeare 225 times, and “Satan” a further 8 times. Notably, each mention of Satan appears in a comedy with the exception of one time when it is used in Henry IV part 1 (which play also mentions the devil more than any other in the canon), in Hal’s description of Falstaff during the playacting scene (where Hal poses as his father, King Henry IV, who is upbraiding his son, Hal–played by Falstaff–about his questionable companions):

PRINCE Swearest thou? Ungracious boy,
henceforth ne’er look on me. Thou art violently
carried away from grace. There is a devil haunts
thee in the likeness of an old fat man. A tun of man
is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that
trunk of humors, that bolting-hutch of beastliness,
that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard
of sack, that stuffed cloakbag of guts, that roasted
Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that
reverend Vice, that gray iniquity, that father ruffian,
that vanity in years? Wherein is he good, but to taste
sack and drink it? Wherein neat and cleanly but to
carve a capon and eat it? Wherein cunning but in
craft? Wherein crafty but in villainy? Wherein villainous
but in all things? Wherein worthy but in
nothing?

FALSTAFF I would your Grace would take
me with you. Whom means your Grace?

PRINCE That villainous abominable misleader
of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan.

FALSTAFF My lord, the man I know.

PRINCE I know thou dost.

FALSTAFF But to say I know more harm in
him than in myself were to say more than I know.
That he is old, the more the pity; his white hairs do
witness it. But that he is, saving your reverence, a
whoremaster, that I utterly deny. If sack and sugar
be a fault, God help the wicked. If to be old and
merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is
damned. If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s
lean kine are to be loved. No, my good lord,
banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins, but for
sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack
Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more
valiant being as he is old Jack Falstaff, banish not
him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy
Harry’s company. Banish plump Jack, and banish
all the world.

PRINCE I do, I will.

Henry IV part 1 2.4.461-499

There is much to say about this famous scene, but in our discussion of the devil, it is interesting how devilish Falstaff is. Like the nemesis with which he is compared, as soon as he has been pointedly identified with Satan, Falstaff launches into a protestation, defending himself as one who, though imperfect, is certainly not evil. Like the devil in an argument, Falstaff props up his own character with rhetoric that smacks of virtue: “sweet”, “kind”, “true”, “valiant”, and, in a final dual appeal to seem both sympathetic and perhaps authoritative, “old”. Yet, like so many of our heads of state these days, Falstaff does not substantiate his descriptions. He offers no evidence that he embodies these virtues, he simply says that he does. He links himself to words that ‘sound’ good, however empty of meaning those terms may be in the present context.

Characterized by vice, and perennially driven by appetites of the flesh, Falstaff is often depicted either as the devil himself, or as one who does commerce with the devil. Yet, to “give the devil his due” (another phrase that Hal uses earlier in the play), Falstaff himself not only sounds reasonably good to those not paying particular attention, but he can also be witty and funny. However, he is a devil, and Hal knows it well. Hal’s promise that once he is king, he will banish Falstaff demonstrates Hal’s underlying noble character even at this relatively early point in the Henriad cycle.**

Yet, there is another subtle caution in this exchange. Some critics have made much of Falstaff’s final line, “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.” This naturally suggests that the assumption of the crown will require a seriousness and dedication that must dispense with the frivolities of Eastcheap alehouses and the ongoing parties within them, but it also reminds us of Satan being thrown from heaven, hurled to earth, into it, his essence fusing with it. As an ongoing point of contention in Shakespeare’s own day, and a point much remarked upon within his plays, is the idea that an annointed king represents celestial/heavenly power on earth. That such a ruler may be appointed by God to represents God’s interests in the world promotes some tension with the idea that heaven’s greatest rebel, Satan ‘the adversary’ inhabits that same earth.

However, Hal pointedly tells the audience that his associations in the alehouse only serve to disguise the truth of who he really is:

PRINCE 
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.

If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work,
But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promisèd,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

Henry IV part 1 1.2.202-24

Which brings us, round about, to the blog title. The saying, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” (or sometimes “better the devil you know than the angel you don’t”) has come to describe a situation where one chooses a familiar option, even if unpalatable, over a person, item, or course of action that may be a complete unknown. Familiarity feels safer to us somehow. It breeds a sense that we might pilot the craft of our lives better in familiar waters than in those we do not know. That the devil might delibarately present us with a familiar course in order to mislead us may never appear on our radar. Many of us, for example, grow up in a family where our parents adhere to a particular faith. Once we reach adulthood, many of us still profess to follow the beliefs and practices of our ancestors.

Yet, it is difficult to argue with idea that a known enemy might be more easily defeated. The classical Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu (traditionally thought to have lived between 544 and 496 b.c.e) quoted an idea that may have been old in his own day:

故曰：知彼知己，百戰不殆；不知彼而知己，一勝一負；不知彼，不知己，每戰必殆。 People say: Know the enemy, know yourself, fear not even a hundred battles. Know yourself but not the enemy, then one defeat for each victory. Don’t know the enemy and don’t know yourself, lose every battle.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Chapter 3. Author translation.

It seems that Hal’s time in Eastcheap isn’t merely a study of some of those over whom he may rule someday, but also involves a deep study of tactics and strategy on the level of human nature and experience.

Does this suggest that we may learn from our own vices? Does profitable instruction lie in our own wickedness, in the devil who sleeps within the dust of ourselves? Perhaps the devil is not simply an embodiment of our baser natures, but is also the agent of change in the human world. Restless nights, perspiring in the sheets over what we might have said. Might have done. With that forceful fall from grace, and from heaven to earth, was the devil made so much a part of us that he has become our inner unsettled grains of sand in the wind? The great agent of change sweeping across the world?

Mick Jagger’s strutting and primping aside, how much sympathy do we feel for the light that leads us on in the darkness. Is it Hamlet’s father’s ghost, or “goblin damned” as Hamlet himself wonders at the apparition. In the end, if he would know more, he must go:

HAMLET 
Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from
hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com’st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee. I’ll call thee “Hamlet,”
“King,” “Father,” “Royal Dane.” O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsèd in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulcher,
Wherein we saw thee quietly interred,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again. What may this mean
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel,
Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous, and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?
[Ghost beckons].

Hamlet 1.4.43-62

In Hamlet’s case, the apparition, which may well be a devil, is still a devil that the prince ‘seems’ to know. Yet, there is a pointed irony in this after Hamlet has only recently made a distinction between what seems and what ‘is’, and the play remains full of such contradictions. Hamlet is very much a ‘devil in the details’ kind of play, as many have noted. One great example is that in spite of Hamlet’s conviction that death is an “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns”, the central action of the play takes place because Hamlet’s father does return from the grave, in order to command his son to avenge his murder.

In productions of Hamlet, the audience often trusts that the ghost is the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Yet, even if innocent, even if the ghost is as it represents itself, it is also an agent of change that ultimately brings about a surplus of death. This may be the bursting of a contagious bubble of corruption that has been allowed to fester for too long, and it may also be a portrait of the spread of corrosive influence across a Denmark that has become the devil’s playground.

We’ve drawn the title of this blogpost from an old saying, of course. The saying was most likely relatively old when Richard Taverner recorded it as an Irish saying in his collection of proverbs in 1539. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” Devil, angel, ghost, tempter. How well one knows it may have little to do with how much of the devil lies within any given choice. What seems like the devil we know may still bring the devil down upon us. It has long been pointed out that choosing ‘the lesser of two evils’ is still choosing evil. Living our lives in a business as usual kind of way while ignoring the social plight of the multitudes living hand to mouth in an economy where we incessantly tout economic figures about low unemployment, or minimizing the ongoing environmental devastation promoted by our everyday choices, may evantually bring about our end.

Here’s an article from Business Insider about the links between climate change and Covid 19:

https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-boost-frequency-zootonic-diseases-coronavirus-2020-4

And here’s an article from Technology Review about the link between the world’s growing tendency towards nationalism and climate change, and the problems that arise as a result:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/10/998969/the-unholy-alliance-of-covid-19-nationalism-and-climate-change/

The devil we know may still be the very devil. To this ghost, it seems evident that, in terms of leadership, policy, and in terms of our next course as human beings on this earth, we need another choice. Not the devil we know. Indeed, not a devil at all. We need to choose better for all of us and for every one of us.

*(This poem has been quoted previously in this blog):

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

“The World is Too Much With Us Late and Soon” by William Wordsworth

**Usually the ‘Henriad’, as described by Alvin Kernan, includes Richard II, Henry IV part 1, Henry IV part 2, and Henry V, but this dramatic tetralogy may be expanded to include the cycle of the Wars of the Roses plays (apparently written earlier than the four plays mentioned above, although they deal with events that took place after the life of King Henry V. Those plays are Henry VI part 1, Henry VI part 2, Henry VI part 3, and Richard III. Falstaff appears in the Henry IV plays, and his death is discussed in Henry V, but he also appears in the comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Perhaps conceiving of a siege is not so difficult for most of us these days. Or perhaps some do not think of it that way. The title line for this post comes to us from Henry V, spoken by the Chorus at the beginning of Act 3 when Henry V has come to France and besieged the city of Harfleur:

CHORUS 
 Thus with imagined wing our swift scene flies
 In motion of no less celerity
 Than that of thought. Suppose that you have seen
 The well-appointed king at Dover pier
Embark his royalty, and his brave fleet
 With silken streamers the young Phoebus
 fanning.
 Play with your fancies and in them behold,
 Upon the hempen tackle, shipboys climbing.
Hear the shrill whistle, which doth order give
 To sounds confused. Behold the threaden sails,
 Borne with th’ invisible and creeping wind,
 Draw the huge bottoms through the furrowed sea,
 Breasting the lofty surge. O, do but think
You stand upon the rivage and behold
 A city on th’ inconstant billows dancing,
 For so appears this fleet majestical,
 Holding due course to Harfleur. Follow, follow!
 Grapple your minds to sternage of this navy,
And leave your England, as dead midnight still,
 Guarded with grandsires, babies, and old women,
 Either past or not arrived to pith and puissance,
 For who is he whose chin is but enriched
 With one appearing hair that will not follow
These culled and choice-drawn cavaliers to France?
 Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege;
 Behold the ordnance on their carriages,
 With fatal mouths gaping on girded Harfleur.
 Suppose th’ Ambassador from the French comes
back,
 Tells Harry that the King doth offer him
 Katherine his daughter and with her, to dowry,
 Some petty and unprofitable dukedoms.
 The offer likes not, and the nimble gunner
With linstock now the devilish cannon touches,
[Alarum, and chambers go off.]
 And down goes all before them. Still be kind,
 And eke out our performance with your mind.
[He exits.]

Henry V, 3.chorus.1-37

The martial language, replete with images of war and movement, commands the dramatic sweep of Henry’s rapid movement against the French. Celerity of thought we are told, and the siege of Harfleur is brought before the audience almost that quickly–life illustrated upon the stage in just a few broad linguistic strokes, the Chorus inviting the audience to “eke out our performance with your mind”.

King Henry V remains ahead of the words, already in place even as Chorus describes his actions. Already, his England lies behind him, as the audience are prompted to leave theirs as well, and follow him. As the Chorus’s words are spoken, we in the audience accept the events as fait accompli. Harry has already sailed, arrived in France, heard the King of France’s usatisfactory embassy, and besieged the town of Harfleur. Time and space condensed into a few breathless and breathtaking lines renders palpable not just King Henry’s movement, but also the unwavering focus of his will.

In Shakespeare’s work, as in any play, the scope and measure of events alternately compressed or extended beckons our attention through the reconstructed world. Advancement of the plot may be compacted by speeches like those given by the Chorus, or they may be teased out in protracted description, like those of Cleopatra, for whom the gazing of the very air might “leave a gap in nature” as has been discussed elsewhere in this blog. In Henry V, the process and preparation of making war is painted in the assonance of “silken streamers” and “threaden sails breasting the lofty surge, the billows dancing”. Like the Zen koan about the goose* raised in the jug, preparations and journey have finished and the siege is underway even as the Chorus stands before us, even as the Chorus urges us to follow the events already happening at a geographical and temporal distance.

Yet, even as the play attracts our focus to one aspect of the siege, dramatic expediency demands that it neglects another. For while we see Henry V and his army making siege on Harfleur, onstage events focusing on Harry and his army tend to omit events within the city walls. Certainly, the play centres on Harry, but what about the city under siege? What about the people of Harfleur? Events within the walls may be as urgent, but illustrating those would also bleed dramatic focus from the central dramatic structure of the play.

Now, however, no matter how we may habitually avoid it, we are confronted with a global shift. Extraordinary events have made the inner lining of a siege much more immediate to all of us–the view of ordinary citizens, sheltered in their homes within the walled city, waiting for the siege to end. A contagion has locked us all inside the walls, where, if we are prudent, we wait. For how long? No way to tell. Rife with doomsayers and deniers, our world lacks competent soothsayers (are there such?) who might tell us what the future holds. When might we have an effective treatment or vaccine, or when might Covid 19 slow in its virulent progress? There comes no word. If anyone truly can see the future or measure the span of our potential isolation, they either do not say, or else their voices have been drowned in the thick stew of ambient noise. Zoltar remains silent.

Of course, there are differences. Covid 19 has no silken streamers, and its invisible presence lacks the martial pageantry that often accompanies our pathetic human wars, yet it attacks more effectively than human enemies. Even with warning from climatologists and epidemiologists that such pandemic posed a likely or nearly inevitable danger to the modern world, almost overnight, most of us have become like the citizens of Troy, staying behind our walls, besieged by an invisible host that, although unlike Homer’s army of Greeks, seems no less effective in their assault. The attacker has laid us low, sugaring the petrol tank and salting the gears to grind the social and economic machinery of our world to a precipitous halt–one even more rapid than King Henry’s condensed dramatic exploits.

Our public health systems struggle to keep up as we have no effective treatment, and only rudimentary courses of prevention. Hand washing. Disinfecting. Social distancing. Keeping away from others in order to limit the contagion, keeping the relentless spread marginally at bay. To ‘flatten the curve’ in order to keep our medical systems from being completely overwhelmed at any given moment. Unlike Troy, with the enraged Achilles and his Myrmidons waiting outside, many of our homes look out on empty streets. King Henry and his lieutenants do not threaten to breach our barriers. In our case, the besieging force is a disease, comprised of a bit of genetic code that can self replicate under certain conditions, sometimes causing grievous harm to the physical host.

Yet, the virus seems a bit like the Trojan Horse (which term also applies to disastrous self replicating codes in the digital sense)–the gift that the Greeks ‘give’ to Troy, and that the Trojans bring inside their walls. Inside the huge sculpture of this horse, the Greeks sequester warriors, who wait until nightfall before emerging from the horse and opening the massive city gates which have so long kept the Greeks from entering the city.

While the Greek soldiers await nightfall in the horse, the rest of the Greek force (which has been camping on the beach before the gates of Troy) makes a show of breaking their camps, boarding their ships, and sailing away from the city. Only after dark do they return, entering through the gates that their comrades have opened, and successfuly invading Troy. The story seems aptly analogous to viral behaviour, and in a biological sense, it is frightening, because people die, both in the story and from Covid 19.

Aside from death, which is always with us, Covid 19 seems all the more frightening because there is so much we do not know. We do not understand exact transmission, prevention, treatment, and even why certain people seem to have much more serious cases than others, we know very little. Estimates of fatality rates are similarly various. We know that ‘elders’ (those over 50 or 60) and those who are immuno compromised (often because of underlying health conditions) ‘seem’ to be at higher risk, based on higher observed death rates amongst those groups. Yet, sometimes the young and healthy seem to succumb as well.

The point isn’t to raise alarms that we have all (by now) heard. We only glance again at the brief arc of this steep learning curve we all share at this moment, again emphasizing what we do know seems to help: washing hands with soap – frequently and for at least 20 seconds each time, reducing exposure – by staying at home if you possibly can, and by social distancing – staying at least 2 metres (about 7 feet) from others when you do encounter them. Doing these things not only reduces your own risk, but also reduces the risk that you might inadvertantly carry the virus to someone else.

For there is the crux of the matter. So many of us are likely to contract this disease before some treatment is available, and, for many of us, it may be mild. However, for some, it may be life threatening. For the sake of those folks, we should all do our best to try to slow the spread as much as we possibly can. Even if I may value my own health only moderately, I never want my neighbour to suffer because of me–because I may have inadvertantly brought a terrible illness to them unnecessarily. I don’t want to open the gates of Troy through my own carelessness.

Here is an informative primer on Coronavirus and what we believe it does to the human organism:

Because currently the only way to approach the problem appears to be attempting to slow the spread, huge segments of the world’s population now find ourselves ‘locked down’, unable to go anywhere, and spending all of our time at home. Almost none of us are used to this, to staying at home. It tends to open more time for personal reflection than many of us have previously known. The isolation can lead to feelings of loneliness, and even depression. In the movie, Follow That Bird, there is a moment when a captive Big Bird, who has been painted blue to represent the ‘bluebird of happiness’, is forced to perform to make money for his captors:

Introspection is not necessarily bad, of course. And our surplus of time offers ideal opportunity, in addition to playing tai chi and other yogic forms, reading, listening (really listening) to music, exercising, writing, and creating art, to reach out to others. Being digitally connected in unprecedented ways, we remain able to text and/or email our friends and associates. This is a good, and I encourage all readers of this platform to reach out to others they know, and about whom they care. Connect with them. Check on them. Send them cartoons or news articles, send them art images, send them video clips, send them your most learned thoughts, or reveal your most secret wishes or desires. Send things serious or silly. It matters not.

Yes, as many have done, read sonnets. Play music. Read Ellen Meloy’s book, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky. Read Patrick Leigh Fermor. Read George Eliot. War and Peace? Read. Even those working from home should have some time. If you can get the groceries, try a new recipe. Bake. Paint. Draw. Dance. Sing. Try to identify that small brown bird that haunts the back fence. Learn what weathers various cloud shapes portend.

Burying the hatchet is also a fine inclination. Make peace. Make good. Then pass the talking stick and listen. Not to be too dire, but if this time should mark your last hours on earth, how would you wish to spend that time? This bears consideration. Don’t abandon the future. Don’t abandon your plans. Yet, do think of the present too–the Buddhist moment of the now embraced by the child mind that only dimly (if at all) conceives of past and future. Commune with what you can and share yourself with those you love. For our creations and our connections, these are the true riches of our lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWzrABouyeE

Of course, there’s great (and also terrible) content on Netflix and Amazon. There are endless fascinating internet paths about theatre, science, history, and all the things we think we know. And there’s also great value in just being. Taking time. Talking with others (safely). Making coffee drinks. Watching the light change.

This is not to make light of the seriousness of our current situation, which may be, in so many cases, socially and economically devastating. Having steadily changed our earth over centuries, we have remained somewhat complacent about how dependent we are on it, and how the earth, in its changes, may also change us. That the U.S. corona virus ‘task force’ is made up largely of middle aged businessmen and political figures (with Dr Anthony Fauci being a beacon of expertise in medicine and public health amongst them) is deplorable. Yet, it may be as difficult to change the course of the U.S. predilection for economic and commercial expansion over human life, satisfaction, and comfort as it is to change the course of an oil tanker. Such things take a great amount of time and space, and they do not happen quickly.

Of course, this is not a problem in the U.S. alone. So many of our western capitalist ‘democracies’ have enjoyed relatively recent prosperity by hitching their collective wagons to ideas of laissez faire capitalism, not only allowing corporations to run rampant over individual rights and interests, but even promoting the process. Our world’s environment, and our collective happiness, have suffered greatly for this. And as a friend reminded me the other day, all this endless drive for continued economic activity is still based on something that, in strict terms, isn’t ‘real’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeLh29-scdk

Watts speaks of the telephone as modern technology because his age predated the internet. How much more sense his words make now.

Still the battle cry Ayn Rand’s underlying objectivism rages on, and the challenges of actually separating (in practice) the right-leaning libertarianism from the social anarchy suggested by its left-leaning counterpart. Obverse aspects of the same coin. For if we completely abandon the niceties and comforts of human life for a more streamlined economic or technologically integrated existence, if we leave our humanity behind completely, where will we be? The farm belt voters that elected Trump and his conservative cohort–are they better off? How comfortable are those farmers now?

More to the point, any ideas of actually leaving our humanity behind seems a contradiction in terms, especially in systems that have been conceived, created, and promoted by us. By humans. It seems highly unlikely that we will be able to completely leave ourselves, our humanity, behind in systems initially authored by our interests and concerns. Perhaps when the earth is empty of us, then we shall see how those systems with their underlying ‘anti-humanist’ perspectives actually function. Law of the jungle? Tennyson’s ‘nature red in tooth and claw’?

Ultimately, how any reader of this blog spends their time is, naturally, up to them. For the ghost’s part, I’m just trying to be more aware of each moment as it passes. There are always many things to do, many ways to address ourselves to our own engagement with our lives. If this plague illustrates anything to us, it may be that all our structures, our ideas of society, commerce, and even our usual concepts of meaning, are merely constructed of smoke and mirrors. We’ve been given a moment to really think about not just our lives and where we are, but also about where we want to go and where we wish to be.

How does the siege of Harfleur end in the play?

GOVERNOR 
 Our expectation hath this day an end.
The Dauphin, whom of succors we entreated,
 Returns us that his powers are yet not ready
 To raise so great a siege. Therefore, great king,
 We yield our town and lives to thy soft mercy.
 Enter our gates, dispose of us and ours,
For we no longer are defensible.

Henry V 3.3.44-50

Huddling inside our homes, endlessly washing our hands, fearing for our vulnerable companions. At present, we yield our streets, our public forums, and the bulk of our massing social constructions (concerts, sporting events, theatre, or physical gatherings of any kind) to this virus, with which our powers are not yet ready to contend directly. Have we been fools to overlook this blatant possibility that now manifests itself outside our household walls? Complacent perhaps. Foolishness may be a much more difficult condition to adjudicate.

Our slow or varied responses to a viral threat stem in no small part from the insular populism that, in the recent decade, has swept the world. When we seek to disenfranchise others from this or that, drawing lines around our (perceived as) individual engines of economic productivity, we only truncate ourselves and our own influence in the end. Inevitably, in the face of forces beyond our immediate control, we must scurry back to globalism and to unity to find an answer to our siege. In the face of the sweeping scythe, magnates and potentates cannot stand.

At the Continental Congress of 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, Benjamin Franklin reportedly remarked, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. In the struggle of economic productivity versus the value of human lives, at least we can hope that our values have not wandered so far afield. Yes, the economy going sour may cost lives too, unless we become creative in addressing that in ways we have not previously done.

Even as I finish this piece, the goal of getting the U.S. economy “open for business” has been changed, with the news now full of April 30th as a possible taget date. Getting some vision of economic productivity online by the end of April at a significant expense of human life? Although in many ways we may seem in the midst of transformation from humanists into economic storm troopers, we can hope that we are not quite there just yet.

Pushing for advancing the economy at the cost of human lives? I certainly hope not.

*Zen koans are often described as riddles, designed to ‘break the back’ of the thought processes by which we all typically live and run our lives. The idea is that our reality chains us to certain ways of thinking that may obscure many of life’s truths, focusing us on ways of thinking and understanding that remain inaccurate. As points of focus designed to befuddle the mind, koans can help the mind move beyond itself, to perceive in a way that, although positioned outside of our usual range of focus, is no less an aspect of life’s truths than our understanding usually allows:

The prominent general, Riko, asked Master Nansen to explain the koan of the goose in the bottle. ‘If a man puts a gosling into a bottle,‘ said Riko, ‘and feeds him until he is full-grown, how can the man get the goose out without killing it or breaking the bottle?‘ Instead of answering, Nansen engaged Riko in a discussion of practical matters. Then, suddenly, just as Riko was leaving, Nansen gave a great clap with his hands and shouted, ‘Riko! See,‘ said Nansen, “the goose is out.‘

Was I speaking of the wind? Was I? Or was the wind whispering about me? Standing like fire between earth and air. Smell of the river through the desert. Smell of water and parched earth. Orchards.

She transcends the earth she walks upon. Both of and beyond the world. Still, things that touch the others touch her too. Her son.

His father. Many years ago and not so many. That arm resting uneasily around her even now, even in death. Was it his military precision that made him never fit? Keeping him from melting completely? His passion stiff against her pliancy.

Each flowering became insistent conquest of new territory lying open before him. Each time a new invasion. Sometimes, it could be impressive, a man over twice her age.

Still, flattering as it might have been, and it was, it was Isolating too.

And then they said she mourned his strength. His protection. And she did. Albeit she mourned him too. Mourned him more. The soldier man. The rough deity under whom she had unrolled herself like a rug. Then such undeserved treachery. Yet, also, in an odd sense, how suitable. How he might have appreciated it. Perhaps he did. Even with the knives. Maybe especially because of them.

How often had he mentioned certain friends? Names uttered with love and admiration? Wind off the desert in the end. That’s what it all became. Perhaps that’s all it ever was. All it ever could be in this life. Perhaps in any other too.

And then the second man. This second man. O gods, how she mourned him in spite of herself! In spite of her majesty!

Like fire spirits corner prowling the dusty minds of these local Egyptians, he assumed the form of anything he chose, wind or sea or clouds. Strong stone woven into the fabric of her earth, he had curiously, amazingly, held her together even when she knew that he was just another man. Another strong man to help her. Keep her safe. But he was more than that, wasn’t he? So much more.

A Roman like the desert, ever changing and changeless. She could mold his sand. It yielded willingly to her. But she could not push the greater form of it, the expanse of spirit that lay beneath it. That wild and unimaginable authority tamed some part of her she had never known. She had never felt small and sheltered until she met that. The rock beneath the sand. A third of the world was he? No. She the Greek and he the Roman. They were half and half.

Those others, that Octavian, he was nothing. Nothing, no matter if he now should overrun her dynasty and push her son into the sea. Which he would do.

The first boy so much like his father, like the first man. Conqueror prone to ungainly charm. Confidence and self doubt tightened in a ball. Overbearing. Handsome. Occasional fits, especially when under strain. She didn’t know whether he had it in him now, and things had not gone that way. Octavian would not have it. A shame. Still, he was his father’s son. Anything might happen. Might still happen.

Not for her though. Not now. Bedrock gone cold. Loose sand rivering aimlessly. Darkening. Afterglow fading above the hills. Wind kicking up. Scented. What was it? Peaches? Old childhood favourite.

Somewhere, a solitary flute. And then a cry. She knew that there was sickness. All around them. In the midst of the people. Spreading. Some died and some didn’t. But that was the way of such things. Time and tide. Leaves. Fruit. Birds. Serpents. Flood and drouth. Her men, her last man, gone.

Sometimes birds meet the sky’s edge, her father had said. Then there would be nowhere else to go. Her Egyptians told of secret hidden ways in valleys of the souls, but she knew better. She knew these ways hung before all of them, unseen in the heaving air. She knew that if one pitched oneself into the folding of that element, then one could slip between all things.

Then the bedrock would be there again. The sand would be supported. Strong arms would wrap around her and she would find that passionate shifting flame that she had once known. That was all she sought now.

That distant flute again. More cries. Other sounds too. Perhaps someone coming.

She reached into the basket; something shifted. Best not to wait.

Wind rising again and the whispering of sand over itself. Then quiet.

Day’s final light fading from the sky.

*Romeo and Juliet 1.4.111

While the jester gambols, more and more seems to be for sale. The title line comes from Timon of Athens, where it appears in Timon’s last speech in the play:*

TIMON 
Come not to me again, but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood,
Who once a day with his embossèd froth
The turbulent surge shall cover. Thither come
And let my gravestone be your oracle.
Lips, let four words go by and language end.
What is amiss, plague and infection mend.
Graves only be men’s works, and death their gain.
Sun, hide thy beams. Timon hath done his reign.
(Timon exits.)

Timon of Athens 5.2.246-55

Of course, the “salt flood” of climate change aside, Timon’s words have increased gravity when there is an actual plague. This past week, not only have world markets plummeted due to the rising threat of a pandemic from Covid 19 or Coronavirus, but travel has become increasingly restricted while people in China and elsewhere have been almost completely confined to their homes or flats. Is this new plague some cosmic way of mending what is amiss? Is it, as Herodotus might have claimed, a kind of judgment visited upon us by the gods? Is it like the recent Pandolph and Bardo New Yorker cartoon?

“And, for being careless with the environment, put tiny, hard-to-remove stickers on all their fruit.”**

Of course, a rapidly spreading, sometimes fatal disease is not a joking matter. The deaths are terribly sobering, and the rapid spread remains alarming, in spite of the assurances given by politicians thundering that it’s “all under control” while that seems to be contradicted by a lack of concrete details about any real virus plans being in place, a lack of organisation on the ground, and a lack of any details about what really happens as the Covid 19 infection spreads.

Some wonder if it is the result of Nature thrown out of balance by our poor stewardship–not a direct judgment as much as a kind of consequence. Still, at this point, perhaps we should look at the spread of disease as Thucydides did–carefully recording the behaviour of the virus as it moves through the population–the kind of observation that might aid us in the future more than any evaluation of what the sudden appearance of the virus might mean in some larger hypothetical moral construct.

Still, it may be difficult not to see it that way too–or at least as some kind of force of nature. The plague that Timon casually invokes as a mender is, of course, usually more of a disruptor, which is part of Timon’s point. Death ultimately renders all humanity the same.

In Albert Camus’ novel La Peste (the Plague), the doctor initially finds dead rats in the hallway of his building, and believes that they have been discarded after being caught in strong steel traps. The rats have actually died of the plague, and are directly reminiscent of the historic plagues that swept through Europe at various times (including several times during Shakespeare’s life). The rats also reflect the citizens of the Algerian city of Oran in which the novel takes place, who are variously trapped by the plague that exercises an increasing hold over the lives of both sick and well alike.

In Shakespeare’s play, the disillusioned Timon has reached an end, having seen the rise and fall of human fortune and the vanity of earthly things. He largely dismisses human life, seeing it as ending only in a grave. In contrast, Camus’ Dr. Rieux fights for life, but without having a definite subscription to any given religious or moral perspective. Fighting for his patients and his community’s health against great odds seems more like something he simply does as part and parcel of his human condition. His conviction seems to be to human life itself. As he says, “I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.”***

Marina Warner notes:

Far from being a study in existential disaffection, as I had so badly misremembered, The Plague is about courage, about engagement, about paltriness and generosity, about small heroism and large cowardice, and about all kinds of profoundly humanist problems, such as love and goodness, happiness and mutual connection. Camus published the novel in 1947 and his town’s sealed city gates embody the borders imposed by the Nazi occupation, while the ethical choices of its inhabitants build a dramatic representation of the different positions taken by the French. He etches with his sharp, implacable burin questions that need to be faced now more than ever in the resistance to terrorism. Perhaps even more than when La Peste was published, the novel works with the stuff of fear and shame, with bonds that tie and antagonisms that sever.****

In the end, perhaps Shakespeare and Middleton***** in 1605, and Camus in 1947, are looking at their subject through only slightly different lenses, offering perspective slices of human experience. Humanity has always faced scary times, some of which arrive with contagious and potentially fatal diseases. Human history, and our literature, is replete with stories of disease, with tales of plague, along with the other stories of misfortune that we tell. That such stories are so common offers little consolation to those who lose their lives or to their families. But the stories do remind us that public pronouncements about epidemics being “all being under control” or “being a very small problem” are seldom based in any truth, and it remains ulikely that such reassurances may prove accurate for Covid 19 either. Plagues are like the lightning of the earth, striking where and whom they will and having no real regard for honour or degree.

In this case, there may be some comfort that Covid 19 seems to be much less likely to be fatal to the young.

Could it be worse? Of course it could. Jack London’s 1912 novel, The Scarlet Plague portrays a post apocalyptic world where a plague has killed off the bulk of humankind, obliterating most of human knowledge and understanding along with it. The only people left are largely ignorant and remain divided into rough tribes of hunter gatherers. The main character, an English professor before the plague decimated the world’s population, finds that as the only person who remembers what the world was like before it was swept by disease, his knowledge has become immaterial in a world that has regressed into a much more primitive state.

Seems like there might be something distinctly resonant in London’s largely forgotten work with our world today as well. Do universities students clamour to read Marston or Fletcher these days? How many George Herbert poems can you recall off the top of your head? Or any noted poet? Even Shakespeare? Or is the trend nowadays much more towards money than towards knowledge? More towards profit than understanding? Do we scrabble for a retirement of blissing out before a ‘boob tube’ that these days shows more boobs than ever?

Our nations seem to be increasingly specialised. The United States designs technology that then is built and/or implemented overseas. The current administration may pay lip service to the idea of bringing back a manufacturing base, but that seems likely only to the degree that we might be able/willing to subsidise both the return move and the ongoing maintenance of that manufacturing on local shores. Whatever the mechanism, we seem to have no real need for literature and the arts these days, or at least many people seem to feel that way. Even if there were desire for such diversions, who could really afford them?

Books? Well, yes. If you’ve a taste for that. They seem comparatively slow, however, and old fashioned. There are so few chases in them. And who has the patience after long days in the corporate trenches? Like “reading” a foreign film, who wants to make the effort?

Of course, the ghost strongly believes that such thinking, aside from being ridiculous is also dangerous. Dismissing literature and the arts brushes aside the historical and cultural basis of our ability to think critically, to reason our way through challenges, to address moral conundrums. Only by immersing ourselves in literature and the arts do we learn how to navigate our human experience, because these are the repository of human wisdom in that regard. Without the basis, the map, the compass they provide, we all too often end up lost, or with the leaders we seem to have currently–those blowing storms through the empty vessels of their thunder brows. Sound and fury grasp pathetically at profit alone, and ultimately signify nothing. Such clouds of steam tend to be good at the posturing part of politics (which hides the morally bankrupt rot that forms their core) until real action is needed. When true crises arrive, citizens are most frequently left wading through the flood alone. Don’t believe me? Wait and see. Anyone remember Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans? Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico? Anyone remember the administrative response? Christian lip service hang thy head in deepest shame.

In the end, perhaps what we need most is humour. Laughter will see us through almost anything. It even tends to make an inevitable end more graceful.

CUT TO: Two men having a silly discussion in the middle of the night, when the topic turns to Hamlet.

Suddenly one man notes that, in a world as wealthy as this one, no household should be without ham. “Hamless! That would be the real tragedy,” he quips. He notes that someone should write that, and perhaps someone will do so.

Well said. But we must also consider the vegetarians, for the heavenly father feedeth them in their better considerations for the earth. Vegetarian ham? Eggs? Haggis?

All good until the plant kingdom rises up to take us down. “I really got hot when I saw Janette Scott fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills.”*******

Day of the Triffids? Day of the lipids? Day of the lipstick? If the viruses don’t get us, and we don’t get us, something else will. Something will for certain.

Let’s just hope to hell it isn’t chocolate. If that goes bad, the ghost might not make it to the next post, regardless of how loathe I am to leave all of you out there on your own. Have a good week in any case and we’ll see you next time.

*The word plague appears at least ten times in Timon of Athens, and the word is only used more (13 times) in 1 Henry IV, where Falstaff uses the word repeatedly as an oath.

**Cartoon by Corey Pandolph and Craig Baldo. More may be seen on the New Yorker website: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a21426

***Camus, Albert. The Plague ; Translated by Stuart Gilbert. London: Hutchinson, 1967, p. 127.

****“Marina Warner on The Plague by Albert Camus.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, April 26, 2003. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/apr/26/classics.albertcamus.

*****Timon of Athens is thought to have been a collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton, which John Jowett stresses makes the play “all the more interesting because the text articulates a dialogue between two dramatists of a very different temper.” Shakespeare, William. The Life of Timon of Athens. Edited by John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 2.

******More about this and other interesting images at the Science photo library website: https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/300629/view

*******Lyrics from Science Fiction Double Feature. O’Brien, Tim. The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Rhino records, 1987.

Our lives sometimes seem like paths through ever changing landscapes.

Clear days succeed storms. Rain and wind alternate with quiet, starlit nights. Gale lashed cypress. Gently swaying palm. Although life really isn’t so very long, it can seem interminable when we are in it.

When we find ourselves at odds, exhausted, spirit vexed, with our emotions in tatters, we may find ourselves transforming, dissolving, often back into the elements of which we are made, or transforming into something else entirely. Hamlet’s speech, from which the title line of this post has been taken, reflects his profound fatigue, his exasperation with his ongoing circumstances. His father suddenly dead, and his mother almost as suddenly married to an uncle he despises, has replaced his father with a loathed totem, a grotesque figurehead exercising authority over his mother, his kingdom of Denmark, and himself while life around him seems to go on in a kind of mockery of what it had been before his father died. The deeper wrong–that his uncle inhabits Hamlet’s father’s throne, which should by rights be Hamlets, festers out of sight, beneath the prince’s reddened vision of his mother walking, smiling, at his uncles side.

His own mother going to his uncle’s bed constitutes a remarkable betrayal as well. The mother charged by nature to nurture and protect him has abandoned him to lodge instead within the enemy camp. Her vague attempts at soothing seem inadequate not only in the effort, but also because they always end with falling night, when she retires with his uncle. Hamlet’s bitter rage and disappointment falls on deaf ears. His mental health disintegrates, his anger falling on deaf ears.

Yes, this is a familiar story. We know it, or its like, in life as well as we know it from the play.

O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this:
But two months dead–nay, not so much, not two–
So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and Earth,
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on. And yet, within a month
–Let me not think on ’t; frailty, thy name is woman!–
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears–why she, even she
(O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer!)–married with my
uncle,
My father’s brother–but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules. Within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her gallèd eyes,
She married.–O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, nor it cannot come to good.
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.

Hamlet 1.2.133-64

Hamlet’s speech, his conception, is replete with fluidity. The world a walled garden possessed by weeds, his deceased father Hyperion, his mother Niobe, and himself, melting into dew, no more Hercules than his uncle is. His mother’s choices seem, to Hamlet, all animal, all beast that wants discourse of reason.

One of Hamlet’s first lines in the play, and the first uttered when he is alone, these lines reflect his bitter grief, articulated by frustrated anger at events. In performance, the tears may or may not be entirely internalised (in spite of the fact that acting coaches usually tell us that holding back tears on stage is more effective than crying–that it is better to maintain the unknown than to let Schrödinger’s cat out of the box entirely). However it may be performed, we see the urge towards the water, towards the dew, towards Niobe’s tears.*

Yes. We’ve been here already, visited Hamlet’s grief and rage in previous posts. Tell us something we don’t know. Tell more than the shrinking of boards at sea. Tell us more than the hunger or thirst attendant upon our own existence. Tell us more than merely how some people fight to see the world as fixed, fight to keep fluidity from being acknowledged, rage against the reed’s flexibility in the wind.

I come to be broken because of the nature of my attention
and the willingness of the picket fence.

“everything goes but the poem” by Larry Kearney**

People who experience the world from fearful perspectives often try to fence off change. Ward it off with symbols and incantations. Keep it away with garlic and a cross. Those threatened by ideas or perspectives which are different from what they see as ‘established’ often try to fix the universe in place–defining God or gods solely by particular hymns or scriptures as though the diving might be contained, prescribed, delineated. Moving a recognised capital to Jerusalem because a book says so, alternately ascribing or dismissing changes as the will of the divine. Truly believing reality to be set in particular rhythms and rhymes. Rosemarys and thymes. But what true chef ever simmered such a dish–measured in absolutes, sewn up with typefaces?

This denies a truth, and the very fluidity of our existence flies in the face of it. Rhythms change with light, winter melting into spring, absolutes becoming mere denials.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

“Darkness” by George Gordon, Lord Byron

Perception, landscape, weather, gender, race, origin, and the whole host of experience attendant on our existence is not fixed. The only book in which it can be written is the unfolding book of existence itself. Even ‘law’ remains malleable, else why would we need barristers, courts, judges, legislative bodies, changing constitutions? Much as we uphold it, if our modern world operated according to the Code of Hammurabi (of 1754 bce) or even the Magna Carta (1215 ce) most of us would not recognise it.

Today, moreso than ever, struggles between the fixed and malleable camps threaten, literally, to tear our world apart. Those who are malleable seem to risk everything, their flexible standards uprooting everything we know. Yet, this is necessary. Because on the other hand, we have those world rulers promoting economic progress at all costs, even at the cost of the world itself (without which further economic progress and continued human existence, become impossible). Those who would always remain fixed, knocking on a table, ‘what’s real is real’ standing always firm and set about them, seem to be afraid of losing themselves. So they give up their entire world by holding onto it, by gripping too tightly to the past, by steering the ship of state so firmly against the horizon of the known that they fail to see the precipice that has formed beneath the sea ahead of them. Failing to listen. Falling off the end of the world.

They fear they will be like Antony looking at shifting clouds and proclaiming their unsettled nature:

ANTONY 
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.

EROS 
It does, my lord.

ANTONY 
My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body. Here I am Antony,
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.
I made these wars for Egypt, and the Queen,
Whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine—
Which whilst it was mine had annexed unto ’t
A million more, now lost—she, Eros, has
Packed cards with Caesar and false-played my glory
Unto an enemy’s triumph.

Antony and Cleopatra 4.14.13-24

Antony becomes water in water. Without the definition lent to him by Cleopatra’s love, his self dissolves as smaller water in greater water, losing the structure that made him Antony. One of the Triumvirate, one of the three rulers of the world, becomes immediately indistinct, his shape and substance failing, his entire being becoming an act of dissolution.

By fearing dissolution, white knuckling our grip upon the known, we miss the point. With our world rapidly dissolving away from us, or out from under us (which, we have little doubt now, it is also doing because of us, or because of our actions), the time has come for us to again assume the structure of our own myths that rest upon liminality as a source of creation. Like the will o the wisp, the fairies, or those “goddesses [who] create life by dancing”, so must we.*** The time has come for us to dance, to bend, to sway, to adopt our changing postures to the changing conditions of the world. In order to save it. Otherwise, we really do just walk away across the sand. The diminishing sand of our own existence.

Sunsets may be lovely, but few people wish to see their last.

For now, although we beg Eliot’s pardon, there is no more time.

And indeed there’ll be no time,
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There won’t be time, there won’t be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There’s only time to murder or create,
Small time to save the works and days of hands.****

Else it is gone. All of it. Water in water. The dancing at an end. Our whole existence and that of all of our descendents resolved into a dew.

“Nothing will come of nothing.” In this case, Lear is right. And there will be no time afterwards for us to speak again.

*After offending the gods, Niobe’s fourteen children were slaughtered, causing her to weep ceaselessly. Subsequently turned to stone (and usually associated with Mount Sipylus in Turkey, which formation resembles a female face) she weeps to this day. A formation of limestone, Mount Sipylus is known as the ‘weeping rock’ due to the water that seeps through its porous matrix.

**Kearney, Larry. Everything Goes but the Poem + Calliope. San Francisco: Listening Chamber, 2010.

***Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013, p.39.

****Liberally influenced by “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”, with apologies to T.S. Eliot.