Published in Literature, Poetry, and Books

James Collins makes the case that "[T]o write brilliant novels was not Jane Austen's foremost goal: What was most important to her was to provide moral instruction."  He concludes, "Jane Austen's principles are of transcendent value, they are not 'priggish,' and her novels illustrate and advocate a way of being in the world that is ethical, sensitive and practical."

A scholar got the clever idea of collecting Alexis de Tocqueville's letters home from his nine-month stay in the U.S. Here's a sample that will make you want the whole volume.

I'd like to see someone turn Democracy in America into an opera. And evidently Tocqueville was quite a dancer, too. (No, I don't think the late Michael Jackson would have made the best Tocqueville.) But shouldn't this description of his shipboard amusement, from the new collection, be put into song?

One moonless night, for example, water began to sparkle like an electrifying machine. It was pitch black outside, and the ship's prow slicing through the sea spewed fiery foam twenty feet in either direction. To get a better view, I shimmied onto the bowsprit. From that vantage point, the prow looked as if it were leaping at me with a forward wall of glittering waves; it was sublime and admirable beyond my ability to evoke it. The solitude that reigns in the middle of the ocean is something formidable.

And like foreign visitors today, Tocqueville marveled at the huge amount of food Americans consume and complained about the lack of wine at meals. Toward the end of his journey he writes to his future wife: "If ever I become Christian, I believe that it will be through you. What I write here, Marie, is not an improvisation; these are thoughts long harbored…" Did this English woman read Jane Austen?

Concluding his love letter, the Frenchman presents himself as more a man of Mars and thus a better man of Venus:

I don't know why, Marie, men are fashioned after such different models. Some foresee only pleasures in life, others only pain. There are those who see the world as a ballroom. I, on the other hand, am always disposed to view it as a battlefield on which each of us in turn presents himself for combat—to receive wounds and die. This somber imagination of mine is home to violent passions that often knock me about. It has sowed unhappiness, in myself no less than in others. But I truly believe that it gives me more energy for love than other men possess.

In the NRO symposium on Barack Obama's first year, Bill Voegeli observes, "The Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez often said, 'I'd rather be lucky than good.' One of the problems in trying to assess Barack Obama is that he has been such a lucky politician over the past six years that it's still hard to know how good he is."

This reflection calls to mind the extraordinary Charles McCarry novel, Lucky Bastard. McCarry was for many years a CIA agent, stationed abroad, and is justly hailed as the master of his genre. His hilarious 1998 spy novel recounts the career of the bastard son of John F. Kennedy, who blazes like a comet from obscurity to a serious presidential contender--aided every step along the way, from his days at Columbia University, by Soviet intelligence. David Skinner recently wrote an appreciation of McCarry's work in The Weekly Standard (subscriber only).

With his eye on John F. Adams' sexual adventures, McCarry of course had the then-incumbent president in mind. But his description of how Soviet intelligence paved the way for Jack Adams' rise reminds us how easily American media and other institutions can be swayed by shallow elite opinion. The 1998 novel is a highly instructive work for our time.

Brutal murderers on death row or imprisoned politicians get themselves nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in order to prove their continued worth to humanity.  To see how this is done, check the process for nomination, and the qualifications for nominators.  Peter Schramm should nominate the Ashbrook Center--for something.  He and many of his academic colleagues are qualified to do so.

A better nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize would have been this Romanian (try to ignore the frightening photo) who writes mostly in German about life under Communism.  Herta Mueller snagged the Nobel Prize in Literature instead.

Polansky and Letterman may approach Jean-Jacques Rousseau's depravity, but they could surely not withstand his withering criticism of the terpitude of actors and other artists.  That is the tension Richard Reeb explores, at that Rocky Mountain mainstay, Backbone America, founded by the redoubtable John Andrews.  Artists regard themselves as "creative" gods, when in fact they are typically puerile reflections of their times. That postmodernism lies at the heart of Obama's writings, too, for he is at heart an artist. 

Much ink has already been spilled over Yale University Press's descision not to publish the now famous Danish Cartoons.  In the latest commentary on the affiar, James Kirchick notes that Yale's decision grew from fear of violence:

I believe deeply in the principles of the First Amendment and academic freedom," said Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and a member of Yale's governing board, in which capacity he advised the Press not to publish the cartoons. "But in this instance Yale Press was confronted with a clear threat of violence and loss of life."

Zakaria's comment raises a question that ought to be addressed head on.  It seems to me that Zakaria gets it backward.  In normal circumstances, a responsible member of Yale's board ought to make safety a central concern.  But protecting the free press is precisly the kind of thing for which it is worth taking risks.

When this controversy started, one commentator at National Review (I cannot recall who it was) pointed out that, as a general rule, in polite society one ought not to mock another's religion, and one should shun those who do.  Similarly, newspapers ought not to publish such cartoons, as a rule. The trouble with this controversy, is that it creates the case that is the exception to the general rule.  When the right to mock someone's belief is the issue, the right thing to do changes.  In this case, in other words, courage meets prudence.

(It might be this piece by Andrew Stuttaford that I am recalling. Stuttaford also gives some background into the origns of the controversy. The cartoons were done deliberately, to prove a point about free speech, and not simply to anger Muslims).

London
May 5, 2009

Old Friend,

I write from the British Library, which, like the Globe theatre, also didn't exist in those old days when you and I rubbed elbows with the Indian Hindus, and Pakistani Muslims, and Persian princesses, and easily-offended Irishmen at the International Students House at 10 York Terrace East. Remember the excruciating embarrassment watching the evening news with fellow students in the common room as James Earl "Jimmy" Carter became the Democratic front runner in the presidential elections. As I recall there was nothing partisan about it, just the shame that such a small-souled sanctimonious squirt of a man could conceivably be president of the United States. I like to remember that our Pakistani friends, especially keen on questions of honor, would politely change the subject--"let's watch Starsky and Hutch!" Fortunately we got out of town before our future president confessed the lust in his heart--to Playboy!

But I do not mean to talk politics, even old politics. The British Library was conceived before our York Terrace East days, but gestated slowly and came into being only in 1998. It's just a few stone throws from where we would have hung our hat if we could have afforded one between us--near St. Pancras Station on Euston Road. If it had been around back then, we would have spent many of our days here. It combines, along with other important collections, what had been the library holdings of the British Museum, which--to give an idea of scope--Lenin said held a better collection of Russian books than he could find in St. Petersburg or Moscow. It's very easy to get a reader's card, and there's free wi-fi for whoever wants to stroll through the front doors. The manuscripts on display are splendid--some of your students would like to trace with their eyes the straight lines of Jane Austen's hand-written pages, resting on her personal writing desk. There's a well stocked café, tables all over the place to sit and read or eat or have coffee and talk. And for those who know, there are secret balconies where one can sit and enjoy a Henry Clay--or, on a quest like mine, a Romeo y Julieta--if one is so disposed, and still have wi-fi.

But you don't have to be here to enjoy some of the library's wonders. Following the Shakespeare trail, while sipping a white Americano among throngs of happy and lively folks also sipping various brews and speaking countless languages at the dozens of sprawling tables or reading books or tapping away at their laptops, I wander on my free wi-fi to a wonderful feature online. Here can be found "the British Library's 93 copies of the 21 plays by William Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642." The page I link to compares the first page of the first quarto of 1597 with the first page of the fifth quarto, 1637, of Romeo and Juliet. Flip through the pages, zoom in, and marvel.

I, for one, am inclined on occasion to stand astride History and say--"Well done!"

Cheers,

CF

I begin with a digression: I have visited the Wallace Collection yesterday and today in Marylebone, just north of Mayfair--an astonishing, and most amusing, personal 19th century collection of 17th and 18th century European art (you can get some sense of it on line). Even you, no lover of museums, would enjoy it. But that's because it's not a museum. It's a rich personal collection displayed in the great town house in which it was originally displayed. Besides they serve breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks in a beautiful courtyard. Stop in, have a bite, smile with the "Laughing Cavalier," laugh at the lady in The Swing, and compare her with The Lace Maker--the one with a whimsical slipper in the air, the other with two domestic shoes on the floor.

Now, a little more on Stratford-upon-Avon and how Yankee enterprise helped our English cousins develop reverence for their greatest poet.

Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford, visited by Jefferson and Adams in 1786, was sold with the attached buildings in 1805 for a mere 210 English pounds. In the announcement of the sale, no mention was made of any association with Shakespeare. In 1809 The Times of London reported perfunctorily that Shakespeare's birthplace had become a butcher's shop. There was no English lamentation or outrage. It seems the Brits did not feel an urgency to cherish the home of their greatest poet until . . . the Americans threatened to take it to America! (For these and the following facts I'm indebted mostly to that Sturgess book you suggested, which I carry with me here.)

Here's how the great American Shakespeare heist almost happened. Many Americans, following in the footsteps of Adams and Jefferson, continued to make what Washington Irving called the "poetical pilgrimage" to Stratford, even though all they found there was a butcher's shop with a room in it designated as Shakespeare's birthplace, and a tomb, with no name on it, in the nearby church. They seemed to share James Fenimore Cooper's sentiment, that Shakespeare was "the Great author of America." It was not an easy journey before the railroads, which nowadays get you there from London in a little over ninety minutes. Irving visited Stratford a few times and wrote a "Sketch Book" which became a "quasi-official guidebook" for later American visitors. Henry Clay visited in 1815, Martin van Buren some years later, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hawthorne, etc. It was common for them to join Irving in calling it a literary "pilgrimage."

OK. In 1844, P.T. Barnum--yes, THE P.T. Barnum--comes to Stratford-upon-Avon. He asks a native for guidance to the local scene. To his surprise, he is handed a pamphlet written--not by some British authority--but by his countryman Washington Irving. Not a man known for missing an opportunity, Barnum grasps immediately that the Yanks are more interested than the Brits in making the Shakespeare pilgrimage. He records in his autobiography what he does next: He "obtained verbally through a friend the refusal of the house in which Shakspeare was born, designing to remove it in sections to my museum in New York." He was going to buy Shakespeare's house, tear it down, ship the parts to America, put it back together in New York, and let Americans--and the rest of the world--make their Shakespeare pilgrimage to the Big Apple!

This awakened the sleeping bulldog. As Barnum records, word of his plans "leaped out. British pride was touched." A movement arose in the British popular press and in social and literary circles to save the great Bard's home from these foreign predators. Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, got involved, and made a substantial donation, as did other gentlemen of mark, and an English Shakespeare association bought the home for the highly inflated price of 3000 pounds. Ownership was transferred to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. The home of Shakespeare was safe from the reverence of P.T. Barnum. As Mark Twain wrote a generation later, "from that day to this every relic of Shakespeare in Stratford has been sacred, and zealously cared for . . . ."

Cheers,

cf

Stratford-upon-Avon

May 1, 2009

Old Friend,

If you've visited Jefferson's Monticello lately, you might see displayed there a small chip of wood, with this humorous note from Jefferson:

A chip cut from an armed chair in the chimney corner in Shakespeare's house at Stratford on Avon said to be the identical chair in which he usually sat. If true like the relics of the saints it must miraculously reproduce itself.

Mr. Jefferson and myself, went in a Post Chaise to Woburn Farm, Caversham, Wotton, Stowe, Edghill, Stratford upon Avon, Birmingham, the Leasowes, Hagley, Stourbridge, Worcester, Woodstock, Blenheim, Oxford, High Wycomb, and back to Grosvenor Square.

Edgehill and Worcester were curious and interesting to us, as [scenes] where Freemen had fought for their Rights. The People in the Neighbourhood, appeared so ignorant and careless at Worcester that I was provoked and asked, "And do Englishmen so soon forget the Ground where Liberty was fought for? Tell your Neighbours and your Children that this is holy Ground, much holier than that on which your Churches stand. All England should come in Pilgrimage to this Hill, once a Year." This animated them, and they seemed . . . much pleased with it. . . .

Stratford upon Avon is interesting as it is the [scene] of the Birth, Death and Sepulture of Shakespear. Three Doors from the Inn, is the House where he was born, as small and mean, as you can conceive. They shew Us an old Wooden Chair in the Chimney Corner, where He sat. We cutt off a Chip according to the Custom. A Mulberry Tree that he planted has been cutt down, and is carefully preserved for Sale. The House where he died has been taken down and the Spot is now only Yard or Garden. . . . There is nothing preserved of this great Genius which is worth knowing -- nothing which might inform Us what Education, what Company, what Accident turned his Mind to Letters and the Drama. His name is not even on his Grave Stone. An ill sculptured Head is sett up by his Wife, by the Side of his Grave in the Church. But paintings and Sculpture would be thrown away upon his Fame. His Wit, and Fancy, his Taste and Judgment, His Knowledge of Nature, of Life and Character, are immortal.

Cheers,

cf

London
April 29, 2009

As promised on arrival, I have been stimulating the Global Economy like no tomorrow. This is easy to do in a place where your hotel breakfast sets you back forty bucks, if you skip the orange juice. If I understand the approved G-20 recovery program, the principle is spend, spend, spend. Especially spend what you haven't got. This puts you in debt, and debt is the key. Once everyone gets comfortable being in debt up to their eyebrows again, there will be confidence. Then people will lend, lend, lend, and Bob's your uncle. Useless spending, if I've grasped the essential idea, is best. People will keep buying useful things despite the crisis--they have no choice. It's the buying of useless things at exorbitant prices with money you haven't got that really falls off in a crisis like this. Government's role is to assist you in not having the money you must spend, by raising your taxes.

The second prong of the travel campaign is juicing up the Special Relationship, and a pleasant trip to Oxford the other day provides a great opportunity for some juicing up. P.G. Wodehouse, of course, was not able to go to Oxford because, though "Plum" was a cracker-jack student of Greek and Latin, his father couldn't afford to support him in university. Unlike Shakespeare, however, who despite earning the title of America's Greatest Poet also did not attend Oxford, Wodehouse actually became an American. Put it on your patriotic calendar: he made it official on 16 December, 1955, if I've got my facts straight. On the joyous occasion, with his usual keen syntactical sense, he wrote a friend: "Thank God for being an American (I don't mean God is, I mean I am)." Anyone who knows Wodehouse knows what an effusion of strong passion is expressed in the title of his memoir of gratitude to his adopted country: America, I Like You.

Plum's biographers say that as a lad he could write Greek and Latin sentences as rapidly as he could write sentences in English, and Wodehouse acknowledges that his boyhood study of Greek and Latin shaped his writing. This is a good advertisement for the classical languages, because Wodehouse's English sentences are wonderful works of art. Sometimes they entertain just by making you keenly interested in seeing how they are going to turn out. No matter what roof he throws them off of, they always land on their feet. Before winning fame for his Jeeves and Bertie stories, he was a great lyricist for American musical comedies in their golden age. You might be interested to learn, if you hadn't heard it in some bar already, that Wodehouse once said that Harry Leon Wilson's Ruggles of Red Gap "made a great impression on me and ... may have been the motivating force behind the creation of Jeeves." No small contribution to Western Civilization!

But we were in Oxford. ... (Maybe some of the stuff above, and certainly some of the stuff below comes from the recent Robert McCrum biography and David Jasen's 1974 portrait, and I apologize for muddling the quotations--I don't have a Kindle so I can't carry all my books with me.) Wodehouse was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature (D.Litt) by Oxford University on 21 June, 1939. The annual ceremony for these awards was called an Encaenia. The university's Public Orator (PO) customarily delivered a Latin salute to the honorands on these occasions. The PO, Cyril Bailey, had never read Wodehouse, and was given some of his writings to prepare him for the salute. According to Wodehouse's recollections of the ceremony, his fellow honorands received "tepid applause" while he "had to stand for quite three minutes while thousands cheered." (McCrum)

The Public Orator saluted Wodehouse with

a brilliant and witty celebration of Wodehouse's gifts composed in faultless Latin hexameters after Horace. Having made ingenious reference to Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Mr. Mulliner, Lord Emsworth, the Empress of Blandings, Psmith and Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bailey concluded in prose that Wodehouse was 'our Petronius, or should I say, our Terence?' (Petroniumne dicam an Terentium nostrum?) a tribute that provoked more wild applause. (McCrum)

Terentium nostrum, indeed! Vice-Chancellor of the University, George Stuart Gordon, presented the degree to Wodehouse with these words:

Vir lepidissime, facetissime, venustissime, iocosissime, ribidundissime te cum turba tua Leporum, Facetinarum, Venustatum, Iocorum, Risuum, ego auctoritate mea et totius Universitatis admitto ad gradum Doctoris in Litteris honoris causa.

Which meant more or less:

Wittiest of men, most humorous, most charming, most amusing, full of laughter, by the authority vested in me and the entire university, I hereby admit you and your whole crowd of witty, humorous, charming, amusing, uproarious creations to the degree of honorary Doctor of Letters.

(Jasen, McCrum, and a bit of Flannery)

Now there is an honorary degree worth having! At formal dinner for four hundred at Christ Church afterwards, the undergraduates began "to bang the tables, chanting 'We want Wode-house ... we want Wode-house.'" Amen.

But isn't it most wonderful to think of those thousands of undergrads bursting into wild applause at the Latin jokes?

As a beginning young writer in London at the turn of the 20th century, Wodehouse dreamed of sailing to America, to the New World. His dream came true in 1904, when he was just 22. As Robert McCrum says, he "fell in love with Manhattan at first sight." Wodehouse:

To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven, without going to all the bother and expense of dying.

When he returned to London several weeks later, he found that he was regarded as an expert on America (a very different kind of Tocqueville, no!?), and his writing on the subject of America was in great demand: "After that trip to New York, I was a man who counted. ... My income rose like a rocketing pheasant." So, it's not just that his American readers love his idyllic England; his English readers are charmed by his mythical America! (McCrum) What could be better for the Special Relationship?

Wodehouse lived the last 30 years or so of his life in America--Long Island--and died on Valentine's Day 1975. The names of Psmith, Lord Emsworth, Mr. Mulliner, Bertie Wooster, and Jeeves are inscribed on his tombstone, the way Jefferson had inscribed on his tombstone his greatest accomplishments. I gather tourists can have a rough time finding Wodehouse's grave, but it is behind the Remsenburg Community Church in Long Island.

Oh yes, Oxford. It takes you only 50 minutes to get there from Paddington Station in London on a perfectly pleasant train. And if you haven't packed your four course lunch as half the veteran passengers seem to do, and you're especially peckish when you arrive, stop by the Brasserie Gerard 5 minutes into the 10 minute walk into town from the train station. Try the croque madame or the quiche Lorraine. It's not Anatole's best, but you won't regret it.

Tinkerty-tonk,

CF

London
April 27, 2009

Old Friend,

The world turns. Here, let it turn around the Globe, where the season of "Young Hearts" is under weigh. For a few days now, beginning with a closed rehearsal on the afternoon of Shakespeare's birthday--not even staff admitted (to reveal any truth or beauty, you must conceal some!)--the players have submitted to being the instrument twice a day of the revelation of The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.

Young hearts! It still breaks my old heart a little with sympathy to be reminded again that Juliet is ... thirteen! I mentioned that Shakespeare's brother Edmund was granted burial in what is now Southwark Cathedral, down the street from the Globe--the sort of stories told by local street musicians and jugglers say that he might have been the first boy to play Juliet. The boys, remember, still played the girls back then. He died when he was 27--still a boy!--and his big brother seems to have arranged for him to have the honor of being buried in the church, rather than outside.

I asked a local authority whether the (open air) Globe Season always opened with Shakespeare's birthday. He said no, that this had been done only the past two seasons, which opened on April 23 and ended in mid to late October, and that originally and for the first ten seasons they had opened in mid-May and ended in mid to late September. "It's too cold in April and October!" he said. "You have to wear three layers of clothes in the evenings. Sitting down is the coldest. Go to the matinee!"

I go to a matinee in a few days. In the meantime, I carry my little Yale Romeo and Juliet around London with me. My older sister Linda gave me the set when I was in college. Remember her? She was high school friends with Natalie Wood, who came over to our house one time that I remember, and stayed behind the closed door of my sister's room down the hall while the two of them giggled, and my heart broke a thousand times. Or that's how I remember it, but I was only seven, and my heart was too young for lamentable tragedy. Linda was prettier anyway!

On Saturday, I carried R & J over to Regent's Park, spread, as ever, along the northern horizon of the old haunt at 10 York Terrace East where you and I lived and listened to IRA bombs going off in those more innocent days. Lunch unfolded at an effortless pace al fresco in the park at the Garden Terrace Café, where the goat cheese and spring onion tarte with toasted pine nuts was like Anatole's best. Everything about the scene and the moment offered anecdotal proof (the only kind available!) that perfection is constantly repeated in infinite variety and irreducibly particular places and times, and always has been and always will be. The day was so stunning it stopped you in your tracks like a beautiful girl walking by, except it didn't walk by--it surrounded you and was everywhere. The temperature was probably 18 or 19 (as they say here in the world of Celsius--mid-60s Fahrenheit), gentle pampering breezes, thick white cotton clouds scudding in a celestial hush across skies so blue they make you squint, shade and sunshine rolling and breaking like silent waves across the landscape. And the park--an English paradise of spring-blooming flowers and trees arranged as if by nature's gardener on a majestic scale. OK. I won't start naming flowers. But I could! What does one do in paradise? I open my Shakespeare at random, like a man of endless leisure, a man of scholê with a timeless book, a schoolman forever.

Juliet:

Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus' lodging: such a wagoner
As Phaethon would whip you to the west,
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaway's eyes may wink and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen.
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties; or, if love be blind,
It best agrees with night. Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match,
Play'd for a pair of stainless maidenhoods:
Hood my unmann'd blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.
Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven's back.
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
O, I have bought the mansion of a love,
But not possess'd it, and, though I am sold,
Not yet enjoy'd: so tedious is this day
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them. O, here comes my nurse ...

There are no clocks in the Paradise Café. Some measureless time later, still at school, maybe because of the Havana cigar that is sending rich aromas from the table next door, I put down my Shakespeare and muse of Hemingway's cafés in Paris. One café is for writing. This café is inviolable. Each writer has his own. A man who intrudes on you there is either ill bred or drunk. It is inconceivable that he would be just misinformed. Then there is the café where you meet your mistress. This too is inviolable. A man who descends upon you there is a fool. Even a beating will not improve him. Then there is a neutral café where you might go with your mistress to meet friends with their mistresses. I make this up from bad memory (note to self: re-read A Moveable Feast, after memorizing Shakespeare). Having no mistress, I need only one café. In any case, I'm in the café, without a mistress. What does one do in the Paradise Café without a mistress? I sigh and pick up my Shakespeare again and ask my wife if she would like coffee. She is reading Emma right next to me and sends her warm regards.

CF

April 24, 2009

Old Friend,

As I was telling the Customs lad the other day, who was more hungry for lunch than for literary history, America has in some ways shown Shakespeare more regard over the years than has the land of his birth and life and work and death, the land he immortalized, where I now sojourn:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
...
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world...

As old dying Gaunt says in Richard II. And says so gloriously as to make generations of readers forget Gaunt's pitiful lament and condemnation of Richard, that this dear, dear land

Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!

Speaking of which, I arrived in this dear land at the very moment when the Labour government seemed to be announcing that England was leasing itself--to the next generation or to world creditors, I'm not sure which--like to a tenement or pelting farm, taking on more debt than at any time since World War II. But as you know, such matters are beyond me, and I digress.

When you and I were here, "a lifetime ago" as you say, there was no Globe Theatre in London. That there is one now is due mainly to the efforts of that American I mentioned yesterday, Sam Wanamaker. And the story of his interest in such matters is an American story that Sam Clemens would have loved. It originated near your neck of the Heartland woods, in Chicago:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.

It was in the Chicago World's Fair of 1933 that the fifteen-year-old Wanamaker encountered the "first reconstruction of a Shakespearean 'Globe style' theatre" in America. He said "he was struck by 'the avoidance of the sort of hushed quality you had to have when you went to the theater'" (NYT, July 9, 1987). This boyhood experience awakened a dream in Wanamaker that he didn't begin to fulfill until the last couple of decades of his life, the dream of rebuilding Shakespeare's original Globe Theatre. And here's the part Sam Clemens would have loved:

Following the close of the Chicago fair, the complete 'Globe' theatre building was moved to Dallas, Texas, and in June 1936, as part of that state's official centennial celebrations, a quasi-religious ceremony 'consecrated' the newly re-erected stage for the citizens of the Southwest. Earlier that year the American vice consul to the UK and a party of local dignitaries in Stratford-upon-Avon had gathered to collect soil from the garden at Shakespeare's Birthplace and river water from the Avon, in preparation for the Dallas ceremony. The soil was placed in a box made from charred wood saved from the recently destroyed Stratford-upon-Avon theatre and the water secured in a pristine aluminium bottle, ready for shipping across the Atlantic by Cunard liner. On its arrival in New York, a member of the British consulate met the package prior to its final onward journey to Dallas.

The Dallas Morning News of 3 June 1936 reported the previous day's 'rites' of sprinkling the earth and water on the replica Globe stage before an audience of six hundred, transmitted via a live radio broadcast to the many listeners of station WFAA. With the stage symbolically consecrated the citizens of Texas were invited to the Globe to watch a Shakespeare play performed 'every hour on the hour' for the next 177 days.

What an orgy! Shakespeare, Texas style! Apparently, since the Chicago example, at least nine other Globe theatres popped up in America, while England continued to have none until 1997--and that one only because of the reverence and determination of Sam Wanamaker.

I know some of these things because of the book you called to my attention, Shakespeare and the American Nation (Cambridge, 2004), by Kim Sturgess, which is where all the quotations come from unless otherwise noted. It is an informative book, as books of that sort can be, concerning itself not with anything intrinsic to Shakespeare's plays or poetry but with a certain aspect of the reception of Shakespeare over the centuries. And it is also a typical academic book in that it can't help sneering at its subject gratuitously with a little intellectual contempt. Somehow the American "appropriation" of Shakespeare can only be explained by some kind of "nationalism" that seems to leave one's hands dirty to touch--the "establishment," for the usual unsavory variety of alleged or implied reasons, fearful of losing its advantages, conscripts the Bard to defend itself against foreign influences, etc. In any case, how déclassé for a country or a people to consider itself heroic or to consider a poet as something possibly even greater than a hero. But these sentiments are really unnecessary for Mr. Sturgess's book, and one feels reading it as if they are there because they are expected, almost required, by the Guild for which he labors. So one overlooks them. But I further digress...

It is natural for people to puzzle, at least for a moment, over how America, who owes its existence and its essence to radical revolution against England, can with any consistency treasure England's greatest poet. But America, of course, never ceased cherishing or revering or respecting and being grateful for many things British. The essential thing we threw off was the tyrannical idea of feudal monarchy and aristocracy--that some men were born with saddles on their backs and others booted and spurred to ride them by the grace of God. Where did Shakespeare stand on this? Well, that's a long story about which Walt Whitman, among others, has some entertaining things to say, but John Adams, I believe as early as 1765, likened British tyranny to Lady Macbeth.

There are many examples of America's incorporation of--and dependence upon--good old things in its Novus Ordo Seclorum. For an example of America interweaving its newness with old English threads, consider the patriotic song, America, popularly known as My Country Tis of Thee.

My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims' pride,
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring!

My native country, thee,
Land of the noble free,
Thy name I love;
I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills;
My heart with rapture thrills,
Like that above.

Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees
Sweet freedom's song;
Let mortal tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let rocks their silence break,
The sound prolong.

Our father's God to Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing.
Long may our land be bright,
With freedom's holy light,
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God our King.

Not exactly Shakespeare. But I've always loved it, including the melody, taken without blushing from the English national anthem, God Save the Queen: American words sung to British music. What could be more American! Shakespeare in America seems to me like English words set to American music. Al Pacino's Looking for Richard is an amusing, if unnecessarily foul-mouthed, short film on Americans trying to "do" Shakespeare.

Financial support for the Globe Theatre effort--and for many other similar efforts to preserve British culture--came mainly from Americans. "That," said Mr. Wanamaker [twenty-some years ago], "is in the nature of the American character. The British are much more cynical and regard the idea of a Globe reconstruction as an Elizabethan Disneyland. But the Americans have a real hunger for what they see as their history, their culture and their Shakespeare." (NYT July 9, 1987)

So Sam Wanamaker gets a memorial plaque next to the Shakespeare monument and window on the south side of the nave in Southwark Cathedral. I visited it yesterday, while waiting for a counter-tenor to sing Dryden lyrics to music by Purcell in honor of Shakespeare's 445th birthday and St. George's Day. "In Thanksgiving for Sam Wanamaker whose vision rebuilt Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in this parish," it says, while a full-size statue of Shakespeare reclines on its elbow just to the left of it. But what about such memorials and such monuments, what about the Globe itself, what about the Lincoln statue I have hardly begun to talk about? Do they remind one of Crito's touching concern about how Socrates will be buried, forgetting what Socrates had been telling him for so many years--that Socrates' foot is not Socrates?

They could. But I am inclined to think of them more as an important kind of secular sacrament: outward and visible signs of an inward and elusive beauty and truth.

So, more to follow, on Shakespeare, young hearts, Juliet and Shakespeare's younger brother, Southwark Cathedral (if I have not exhausted it), Walt Whitman (and Shakespeare's esoterics and exoterics), the Special Relationship, Lincoln in London, etc.

Cheers,

CF

UPDATE: Also worth reading is this interview with Hugh Hewitt and Consumer Product Safety Commission Chair, Nancy Nord.

"The national situation continued to decline: plunging stock market, soaring prices, inflation running at 18 percent. This last factor, combined with six consecutive quarters of negative growth, officially signaled stagflation. The U.S. Treasury was furiously printing dollars, while the dollar itself had lost 40 percent of its value over the last six months. The Federal Reserve, meanswhile, had announced yet another hike in the discount rate, to 14 percent. Amid this calamitous economic news, the Congress adamantly--some said magnificently--refused to cut federal spending, with the result that the year's deficit was not projected at $1.1 trillion.

"Hold on--there's a typo in that paragraph. "$3.6 trillion budget" can't be right.The entire national debt is--what--about $11 trillion? He can't actually be proposing to spend nearly one-third of that in one year, surely. Let me check. Hmm. He did. The Wall Street Journal notes that federal outlays in fiscal 2009 will rise to almost 30 percent of the gross national product. In language that even an innumerate English major such as myself can understand: The US government is now spending annually about one-third of what the entire US economy produces. As George Will would say, "Well."

Lincoln was a conservative, Krannawitter argues, but a conservative who believed profoundly in a future of social mobility and self-improvement, to which nothing was more contradictory than a world constructed according to fixed hierarchies of race and slavery. Progressive politics (so-called) compliments itself on looking to the future; in fact, it is promoting a restoration of patrician feudalism, and its hostility to free-market economics differs not at all from what Richard Cobden called "the mock philanthropy of the Tory landowners." No wonder Lincoln kept a portrait of John Bright, Cobden's ally, in his office.