How to say a year . . .

To sum up a year is an impossible thing. This year has brought us joyous joys and heart-rending sorrows and the  host of ordinary, nondescript days that have stitched them together.

So I will let the words of others capture the spirit of this year for us. And because it is poetry most of all that has the power to compress and crystallize and and illuminate human experience, these words come in the form of three poems.

We lost our last two old dogs this year, in quick succession as the nights grew longer at the tail end of the year. From his volume Aimless Love (Random House, 2013) former poet-laureate Billy Collins offers us "A Dog on its Master:"

As young as I look,
I am growing older faster than he,
seven to one
is the ratio they tend to say.

Whatever the number,
I will pass him one day
and take the lead
the way I do on our walks in the woods.

And if this ever manages
to cross his mind,
it would be the sweetest
shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.

(to hear Collins read this poem, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVc10aF7_gw

And I always remember the words of Martin Luther, incised on the tombstone for a dog named Spritz in a tiny German graveyard.

"Fear not, Little Dog, for in Heaven you shall have a tail of gold"

We also celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary, with good food, glorious performances of Shakespeare's comedies of mis-aligned lovers, Love's Labours Lost and Much Ado about Nothing, and time spent on 'the remembrance of things past.'

Young poets Sarah Kay and Phil Kay (both b. 1988) are with others co-founders of Project V.O.I.C.E, which "uses spoken word poetry to entertain, educate, and inspire," motivating young people to find their own voices and to share the stories of their lives. (See the Project V.O.I.C.E. website at http://www.projectvoice.co/project-voice-our-program and Sarah Kay's TED talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_how_many_lives_can_you_live)

Their own poetry gets something of the serendipity of love, its fragility and its strength. This, the last stanzas of  Sarah and Phil Kay's long poem "When Love Arrives"


Love is not who you were expecting, love is not who you can predict.
Maybe love is in New York City, already asleep;
You are in California, Australia, wide awake.
Maybe love is always in the wrong time zone.
Maybe love is not ready for you.
Maybe you are not ready for love.
Maybe love just isn’t the marrying type.
Maybe the next time you see love is twenty years after the divorce, love is older now, but just as beautiful as you remembered.
Maybe love is only there for a month.
Maybe love is there for every firework, every birthday party, every hospital visit.
Maybe love stays -- maybe love can’t.
Maybe love shouldn’t.

Love arrives exactly when love is supposed to,
And love leaves exactly when love must.
When love arrives, say, “Welcome. Make yourself comfortable.”
If love leaves, ask her to leave the door open behind her.
Turn off the music, listen to the quiet, whisper,
“Thank you for stopping by.”

In October Vermont poet-laureate and Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Galway Kinnell died (1927-2014). His work combines a love of nature, the destructiveness of cruelty and indifference, and a spare unwavering gaze toward the deepest human relationships. Our lives this year have been filled with books and authors and words old and new, and from his 1990 collection When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone, Kinnell's poem "Oatmeal" captures some of the delight we have found in our long-time literary companions:


I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health
if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have
breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary

companion. 

Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal -- porridge,
as he called it -- with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him: due to its glutinous
texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unsual willingness
to disintigrate, oatmeal must never be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat
it with an imaginary companion,
and that he himself had,enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund
Spenser and John Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as
wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the
"Ode to a Nightingale."
He had a heck of a time finishing it -- those were his words -- "Oi 'ad
a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through his
porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his
pocket,
but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas,
and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they
made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through
a hole in his pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,
and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a
Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay
itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move
forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about
the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas
of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal
alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn."
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words
lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there
is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field go thim started
on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their
clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours," came
to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him -- drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering
furrows, muttering -- and it occurs to me:.
maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and
simultaneously gummy and crumbly,
and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.


So that is our year in three poems. As I write this, I hear of the death of Joe Cocker (1944-2014), whose gritty voice (someone said he was sure that Cocker gargled gravel every morning) was for many of us of the Woodstock Generation the sound that in an instant could bring so many memories flooding back.

And, like Cocker, we too "get by with a little help from our friends," this year and every year.

And for each and every one of those friends, at this the darkest time of the year, we are truly and everlastingly grateful.

Radio Days

Ok, I'll admit it. I'm a radio junkie. I have been a radio-lover since the 1950s, hooked for life by the first radio I can remember: a 1938 Zenith console which lived in an alcove in the house in which I grew up. To me it was a box of wonders. A flying carpet. In addition to a regular AM band, it also had multiple long-wave bands, each one designated by a faraway and exotic place-name: Moscow, Jakarta, Paris, Havana, London, Lisbon.

From about the time I was 8 years old, I was a sort of  latchkey kid. And upon arriving home to the empty house, I would grab a glass of milk and then I'd park myself in front of the Zenith. Fiddling with the dial, I would catch snatches of foreign languages on the long-wave bands until the time would come to tune in to the radio version of The Guiding Light, which came on each day just before my parents arrived home from work. This peek into the adult world in Selby Flats, California was both exhilarating and terrifying. That world, too, was a foreign country.

Even after the first television appeared in our house, I continued to be drawn to the radio. I would have completely agreed with the child who, when asked which she liked better, radio or television, answered, "Radio, because the pictures are better."

But before long, my radio-life would be transformed, because in 1957 I was given my first transistor radio, a Raytheon 8-TR-1. For the first time I could carry my radio-world around with me and, much more importantly, I could listen to the radio in bed, which has been unfailing my habit for nearly 6 decades now.

At every significant historical moment, it has been the radio that has brought me the news: the death of John F. Kennedy, routed from the office radio through the intercom system into my junior high school classroom; the death of Bobby Kennedy while driving from Massachusetts to Detroit;  the release of Nelson Mandela from Robben Island prison broadcast by the BBC to my table radio in Cambridge, England; the attack on the World Trade Center, heard through a sleepy haze first thing in the morning on the small Sony radio that lived under my bed-pillow in Fort Worth, Texas. And as I write this, National Public Radio is being streamed through my computer, and I am hearing about run-off elections, roller derby tournaments, newly-published novels, and monks in Tibet. As it always has been for me, the radio is a box of wonders, even when the box has become something else entirely.

Very few of us, I think, have much understanding of how the essential devices in our lives actually work, and it is no different for me with radio. My friend Howard Stone, an ardent collector of old radios and student of radio technology (http://www.stonevintageradio.com), seems to comprehend it all thoroughly, and has tried to explain it to me several times. Howard especially knows all about Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), the inventor and engineer who worked tirelessly on long-distance radio transmission. For this work, Marconi was awarded the Noble Prize in 1909 (with Ferdinand Braun), "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy."

It was Marconi who developed the system of antennas and receivers that were the underpinnings of wireless radio transmissions, who sent the first ever wireless message across the Atlantic Ocean, who developed radio systems for ships at sea, making travel by ship a much safer prospect that it had ever been, and it was Marconi who broadcast the first radio entertainment program.

With all of this to his credit, Marconi should be a genuine hero to me, given the impact of his work on the past 60 years of my daily life. But sadly, he presents something of a problem: it seems that the great man was a bit of a villian. He was active in the Italian Fascist movement and a member of its Grand Council (Mussolini was the best man at his wedding), he supported Italy's invasion of Ethiopia (1935-1936) during which the Italians bombed Red Cross field hospitals and used poison gas on civilians. (For more on Marconi the Fascist, see Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy [Cornell, 1997]).

Marconi was also an ardent anti-Semite who blocked Jewish applicants from joining the Royal Academy of Italy, and was involved in  a series of fairly shady business ventures. Lest we think that this was just a matter of intellectual 'compartmentalization,' Marconi's radio work and his politics were clearly and inextricably linked: he often argued that the fervor with which one pursued the scientific enterprise should have the same intensity with which one pursued the Fascist enterprise.

So what do we do with our tarnished heroes? Of course this is not only our problem: it was a problem for the Greek tragedians, for those whose stories underlay all the world's Sacred Scriptures, for Shakespeare, for Cervantes, for Dickens, and it continues to be a problem for all the truly great creators of complex characters in literature, on stage, and on film and television. (Doc Martin, House, and Doctor Who all come to mind.) Much as we would like it to be different, the perfect hero is just not a very interesting hero.

But is there a tipping point? Is there a point at which our hero causes so much harm to others that any positive accomplishment is rendered null and void? When is the wounded-healer too wounded to heal? When is the tarnished hero too tarnished to shine?

Of course these are the questions that shape our lives, and sorting them out is our life's work. Conflict, ambiguity, uncertainty are necessary to that grown-up world that I glimpsed as a child in The Guiding Light. Our grown-up world is a world where the good characters are good (most but not all of the time) and the bad characters are bad (most but not all of the time), and the task of the whole and sane person is to negotiate all of this intelligently and fairly. Because to fail in this task puts so much at risk: our personal relationships, our politics, our interfaith and international relations, the future well-being of our planet.

So perhaps we must look upon Marconi as the "patron saint" of the Modern World: so many good things for which we must be ever-grateful, and so many dreadful things which we justly condemn. In himself, Marconi represents the modern predicament. And to find a way of allowing complexity and ambiguity to be what it is, without either simplifying it out of existence on the one hand, or collapsing it into a one-dimensional cartoon on the other, is the main challenge of being alive in the 21st century.

So: Salute, Marconi! (And shame on you.)

Two Hundred and Thirty-Three!!

The town of Saint-Omer in northern France (current population 15,700) is back on the map. Of course it was never really completely off the map. But to whom it belonged was the subject of a long series of struggles, and from the late 10th century it was passed back and forth between France and the Low Countries several times, and was besieged, plundered and looted over and over again. Internally, disputes also raged, in this case between two rival monasteries, Saint-Bertin and Notre Dame, for 900 years.

the abbey of St Bertin

A few events have left a lasting impression on the historical record. The Jesuit Robert Persons founded a College in Saint-Omer 1593, which had as its mission the education of refugee Catholics after the English penal laws were put into place. And it was from Saint-Omer that Henry VIII imported an expert swordsman to insure that the execution of Anne Boleyn would go smoothly.

But things have been relatively quiet in Saint-Omer for the past 200 years or so; that is, until last Saturday. Last Saturday, Eric Rasmussen was in Saint-Omer to verify that a book found in the town library (the Bibliothèque Municipale) was indeed one of the few original First Folio editions of the works of Shakespeare (Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, 1623).

Rasmussen’s qualifications for this task are impeccable: professor and chair of the department of English at the University of Nevada, author (with Anthony James West) of The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), developer of the Internet Shakespeare Project and editor of the RSC Complete Works of Shakespeare series. No wonder it took him less than 5 minutes to determine the authenticity of the book!

The Saint-Omer First Folio was found by the Library staff during a hunt for volumes to be included in an upcoming exhibition of English-language books. It had been catalogued as an 18th century edition of Shakespeare works,”and it was just sitting on a shelf alongside other books by English authors,” the library’s Rare Books librarian Rémy Cordonnier said. The town library retains some of the books originally held by the Abbey of St Bertain, but this is likely from the library of the College of St Omer. The Bibliothèque Municipale also has one of the 48 surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible, although its copy is incomplete. (Were these deemed not worth moving when the College relocated to England in 1794?)

The newly-discovered Omer First Folio bears the name ‘Nevill,’ a Catholic family name with a rich pedigree in the highly-charged religio-polical world of the 16th and early-17th centuries. It was the Nevilles (along with the Percys) who had been at the center of the Revolt of the Northern Earls in 1569, which aimed to depose the Protestant Elizabeth and to replace her with the Catholic Mary. The revolt ended in disaster, and members of the Neville family fled into exile abroad. Like Shakespeare, the Nevilles had Warwickshire roots, and Warwickshire was known to be a hotbed of Catholic sedition. An Edmund Neville (1605-1647) is known to have been educated at the College. And members of the Scarisbrick family also adopted the alias 'Neville;' Edmund Scarisbrick (1639-1708) was also a student at Saint Omer.

One wonders what the network of spies in Elizabeth’s court, who were always looking for signs of religious treachery and who make the TSA look like rank amateurs, would have made of this First Folio in the collection of renegade Catholic institution? Would Will Shakespeare have had to answer some probing questions? 

"Jean-Christophe Mayer, a Shakespeare expert at the University of Montpellier III, France, cautioned against making too strong a connection, but noted that a library in the northern French town of Douai also owned some early transcripts of Shakespeare’s plays. 'It’s interesting that the plays were on the syllabuses at these colleges,' he said. The new folio, he added, “could be part of the puzzle of Shakespeare’s place in Catholic culture.'”  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/arts/shakespeare-folio-discovered-in-france-.html?_r=0

We await with interest the further insights of the serious Shakespeare scholars, but in the meantime we rejoice at this remarkable discovery. Check your attics, everyone!

The Eyes Have It!

I'm having warm thoughts about ophthalmology these days. My spouse has just had a cataract removed, and over the past several weeks we have seen (and been seen by) more different kinds of eye specialists than I imagined possible. The eye is a remarkable structure, and the science of the eye has a long and rich medical, bibliographical, literary history. But as a focus within the history of Islamic medicine, it has a particular status.

The earliest systematic treatise on the eye is attributed to the Islamic scholar and physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809-873), who spent much of his storied career translating Greek and Syriac manuscripts, and thus spreading classical influence throughout the Muslim world. His Ten Treatises on the Eye is not, however, one of these translations, but rather among his works of original medical research. It describes the anatomy of the eye in exquisite detail, and discusses treatments for, among other things, cataracts.

But for nearly a thousand years this treatise was lost, although secondary references to it gave scholars some sense of its contents. The great historian of medicine Julius Hirschberg (1843-1925) discovered a Latin manuscript of The Ten Treatises bound into a collection of works by Galen (c.129-200 or 216), and Orientalist Max Meyerhoff (1874-1945), the preeminent student of Arabic medical literature, discovered a (rather corrupt) Arabic version of the text in the Islamic library of Ahmed Taimur Pasha (1872-1940) in Cairo. It was Meyerhoff who managed to produce a full critical edition by comparing the Cairo text with another more complete manuscript in Leningrad.

Max Meyerhoff

Meyerhoff described the growth of the Muslim study of medicine, launched by those like Hunayn ibn Ishaq who began by translating classical manuscripts:

“At the end of the period of translation, the physicians and scientists of the Islamic world stood on a firm foundation of Greek science, increased by a large share of Persian and Indian thought and experience. Their work had been learned but was not very original. From this time on they begin to rely upon their own resources and develop from within. The sciences, particularly medicine, now pass rapidly from the hands of Christians and Sabians into the possession of Muslim scholars, mostly Persians. In medicine, in place of pandects compiled from antique sources, we find imposing encyclopedic works in which the knowledge of former generations is carefully classified and set against that of modern times.” (Meyerhof, Science and Medicine: The Legacy of Islam, 322)

It was clear to Meyerhoff and others that ophthalmology was a respected profession in medieval Islamic society, which was not the case in Galen's Rome, where the 'occulist' was deemed a second class medical professional. The crafting of precise specialized medical instruments for the study of the eye (described in the Ten Treatises) combined with theoretical experimental work, resulted in rapid innovation in the care of the eye. The treatment of cataracts described by Hunayn was aided by the development of instruments such as the 'injection syringe,' a hollow needle invented in the 11th century by Ammar ibn Ali of Mosul, which made possible the extraction by suction of soft cataracts.

Hunays writes about performing surgery for a cataract:

"Then I operated on him with the hollow needle and extracted the cataract; and he saw immediately and did not need to lie, but slept as he liked. Only I bandaged his eye for seven days. With this needle nobody preceded me. I have done many operations with it in Egypt."

Throughout the Middle Ages, Islamic physicians advanced the knowledge and treatment of eye diseases, and treatises by Averroes, Ali ibn Isa al-Kahhal’, Jibrail Bukhtishu and Ibn al-Nafis provided solid ground for the field of ophthalmology. A splendid account by Cyril Elgood details this period of medical science: http://www.amazon.com/Medical-History-Persia-Eastern-Caliphate/dp/1108015883

A Medical History of Persia

But sadly, most of this Islamic scholarship in the field of ophthalmology (from the Greek ὀφθαλμός = eye) was lost to Western physicians, and as a distinct medical specialty in the West, ophthalmology dates its origins only  from the appointment by St Bartholomew's Hospital of the first eye surgeon in 1727, from the founding of the ophthalmological hospital i London (later Moorfields Eye Hospital ) in 1805, and from the founding of the American Ophthalmological Society in 1864. Ten years earlier, in 1854, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) had (re)invented the ophthalmoscope making direct observation of the interior of the eye again possible..

Moorfields Eye Hospital

The  continuing quest for the treatment of diseases of the eye and the reduction of blindness is a noble and often-overlooked aspect of Islamic history. And our experience over the past several days of a return to eye heath after a routine outpatient operation is a thing for which we are enormously grateful, grateful to the giants of both Muslim and Western medical practice. But we wonder if the ophthalmological science of the Muslim world had not been ignored (and, in most cases, despised) by the West, if the quality of life of generations of our forebears with eye disease would have been vastly improved.

In his 1995 novel  Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (= Essay on Blindness), Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago (1922-2010) describes an epidemic of blindness that seizes an unnamed city. We follow the characters as their social fabric unravels and as they attempt to create new forms of community. Sight and sightlessness become an extended metaphors for the ability to form human connections, and we observe the anxiety, apathy, violence, and despair that attends the loss of sight. Many of the characters are named by their disability: the boy with the squint, the girl with dark glasses, the man with the eye patch.

And throughout the novel we are called to appreciate, as we ourselves do this week after cataract surgery, the various deep meanings of the phrase "I see."

All Six Every Year . . .

Someone once asked philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) if he ever read novels. "Yes, certainly," he replied. "I read all six every year."

The 'six' to which he referred were, of course, the six novels of Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Persuasion (1817 posthumously), and Northanger Abbey (1817 posthumously). Although they received relatively few reviews in her lifetime, they soon became fashionable reading for the taste-makers of the day, and by the time of her death had been translated into French, German, and Swedish. Although it was not until the mid-20th century that the academic world acknowledged her as one of the great English novelists, the memoir written by James Edward Austen Leigh published in 1870 gave readers a sense of the personality behind the novels, leading to the burgeoning of cultivated readership which has lasted until the present day.

 James Edward Austen-Leigh

There is also reason to think about Austen on this the 100th anniversary year of the outbreak of the 1914-1918 War. It was Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) who coined the term 'Janeites' for Austen's admirers. In one of his Great War stories entitled "The Janeites," a secret-society of Austen-lovers recall having taken her books with them into the trenches. And in Kipling's evocative dialect prose, they banter about Austen's stories and characters. This from a soldier named Humberstall, recalling his reading of Emma: "And—oh yes—there was a Miss Bates; just an old maid runnin’ about like a hen with ’er ’ead cut off, an’ her tongue loose at both ends. I’ve got an aunt like ’er. Good as gold—but, you know.’

Kipling also penned a bit of doggerel in her memory:

Jane lies in Winchester—blessed be her shade!

Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made!

And while the stones of Winchester, 

      or Milsom Street, remain,

Glory, love, and honour unto England’s Jane!

(You can read "The Janeites" on the website of the Jane Austen Society of North America: http://www.jasna.org/membership/janeites.html )

Since then, Austen in every generation has continued to find new audiences all around the world. A great number of sequels and prequels to the "six novels" have found their way into print, and the most recent crop of Austen films  (graced by such stars as Kiera Knightley, Emma Thompson, Donald Sutherland and Colin Firth) and have increased popular interest in Austen and her work. Even Bollywood has gotten in on the act!

Just a few days ago at Sotheby's London sale-room, a 1st edition of Pride and Prejudice sold for a record price of  £139,250 (that is, $218,898.22). That was 150K times more than its original cost of 90pence in today's money.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1325055/Early-edition-Jane-Austens-Pride-Prejudice-auctioned-140-000.html 

And in case you really want a first edition for yourself (as originally published in in three volumes), you can have one: Jonker's Rare Books in Henley-on-Thames near Oxford has one currently for sale at just $93,392.64: https://www.jonkers.co.uk/authors/detail/authorid/2599

But, for me, I'm happy with my tatty old set of Penguin Classics of Austen, each one read every year for more than a decade. And now that winter is beginning to close in, I'll begin my reading of "all six" for this year with Emma.

Love's Labours Won?

Our heads are filled with Will Shakespeare these days. Not only is 2014 his 450th birthday year, but we have just returned from 4 days in Stratford-upon-Avon, walking in his footsteps and seeing his words come to life on stage. It was our wedding anniversary, and Romantic Providence conspired for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) to lay on performances of both Love's Labours Lost and Love's Labours Won in a tandem production in their new performance space.

                                set of Love's Labors Lost at the Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre

Yes, I can hear you saying, "Love's Labors Won? Did I miss something? I don't remember anything about a Love's Labours Won from Shakespeare 101." Of course you are right. And there's a real mystery about Love's Labours Won (here forward LLW), with much academic ink being spilled by Shakespeare scholars proposing various solutions. Here's the synopsis of their problem:

A play called LLW was included in a list of Shakespeare plays in a book entitled Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), a sort of commonplace book by Francis Meres (1565/6-1647), which contains the earliest references to Shakespeare's plays. The Palladis was used as a schoolbook in the 1630s and refers not only to the plays of Shakespeare, but also to the death of playwright Christopher Marlowe ("the tragicall death of our tragical poet").

Of course, in making up his list Meres could have been mistaken, or he could have invented the title LLW, although his Palladis was reprinted so many times that one of the editors in his lifetime (and Shakespeare's) would surely have caught and corrected the error. So, with this possibility generally discounted, what are we left with?

Many scholars have thought that LLW is simply a lost play of Shakespeare, a sequel to Love's Labours Lost [LLL] (which does rather cry out for a sequel, given its rather unsatisfactory ending) written sometime before 1558 - thus included in Meres list - but not included in the First Folio or the successive early compilations of Shakespeare plays. This is not an absurd idea at all. In their day Shakespeare plays were ephemera, never written with the intention that they would be published, or even completely duplicated as full scripts to be handed around to the players. Indeed each individual part, with its individual speeches and cue lines, was produced on a long, narrow roll of paper for each player (thus, some argue, the use of the term role for an actor's part). So the possibility of one or more 'lost plays' of Shakespeare is a very real one. [Those of you who are fans of the BBC television series Doctor Who will remember just how it came to be lost. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shakespeare_Code and it is featured in the plot of Edmund Crispin's wonderful academic mystery Love Lies Bleeding (1948)]

The third possibility, is that LLW is the alternative name (or a sub-title) for another Shakespeare play. For many years scholars suggested The Taming of the Shrew (missing from Mere's list) is the play to which LLW refers. But in 1953 London antiquarian book dealer Solomon Pottesman discovered bookseller's list from 1603 used as binding material for another book. This list does contain both Taming and LLW ("marchant of vennis, taming of a shrew, …loves labor lost, loves labor won") so the argument that Shrew and LLW are one and the same play has been rather abandoned. This leaves the front-runner at this point Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1558), with its sniping lovers and mistaken identities, and this is the choice made by the RSC in the productions that we saw last week. So under the title Love's Labours Won we saw a brilliant production of Much Ado.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the 1914-1918 War, the RSC chose to set the two plays, LLL and LLW, just before and just after the war, LLL in August of 1914 and LLW in the late-November-December following the Armistice. With both plays set in a Downton-Abbey-esque country house, the pre-war setting gives the comedy of LLL a sort of undertone of urgency and menace, and the return from war in LLW makes real sense of the senseless malevolence of Don John, who in this production returns wounded.  Lines which tell us that one cannot "patch grief with proverbs" have an added depth and power and resonance. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/11167470/Loves-Labours-LostLoves-Labours-Won-Royal-Shakespeare-Theatre-review.html

Both productions were magical, and Stratford-upon-Avon was magical. And the glover's son, born in a Warwichshire backwater town, educated at an ordinary grammar school, eyes and ears open to the world and not enough words in the English language to say what he had to say, remains a magician. And we were completely taken in.

For my part, in reflecting on this time in Stratford, and the marking of our 20 years of marriage, I will take as my own the words of Claudio on hearing that Hero will be his bride (LLW/Ado, 2:1): "Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much."

     motto board posted in Shakespeare's boyhood schoolroom, Stratford-upon-Avon Grammar School

If You Don't Know the Meaning of Eschatology, it's Not the End of the World

When we lived in Texas, we commonly saw cars bearing the bumper-stickers saying, "In case of Rapture, this car will be unmanned." (And very occasionally we would see cars belonging to the 'loyal opposition,' whose bumper-stickers read: "In case of Rapture, can I have your car?") A visiting English friend, who happens to be a noted New Testament scholar, asked us what "all this Rapture business" was all about. Pointing her to various biblical texts upon which those with an apocalyptic bent rest their convictions, she exclaimed, "People don't really BELIEVE that, do they??!" Thus spake the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity of the University of Cambridge.

                                                           Lady Margaret Beaufort 1442-1509

But, mainstream New Testament scholars notwithstanding, the end of the world is big business. The recent reboot of the Left Behind film made $6.5 million on its debut weekend (October 3-5, 2014) http://www.leftbehindmovie.com/about/, and the the original series of 12 Rapture-related books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (Tyndale House, 1995-2007) has exceeded $75 million in sales, not counting the royalties on its various spin-offs: video games, graphic novels, children's books, and music collections.

Predictions of the precise date and time of the final apocalypse, signs by which one might identify the Anti-Christ (Barack Obama? The Pope? The United Nations?), and the fate of those who will be 'left behind' when Christian Believers are taken up bodily into heaven are matters that occupy the minds of a particular subset of American Christians. And they seem to be willing to part with substantial amounts of their hard-earned dollars to have some sense of certainty about their ultimate fate and about the signs by which they can identify the approach of the End Times.

But for most of us, the eschaton, Armageddon, the Rapture and the various predictions surrounding the Final Conflagration are simply human socio-religious curiosities. Despite the efforts of millennialists to scare the living daylights out of us (or perhaps more aptly, to scare the hell out of us), we are just not, as the new catch-phrase goes, "Rapture Ready." If we wish to be, however, there are numberless books, websites, videos, televangelists, and chat-lines that will help us prepare.


But even those who are convinced that they are "Rapture material" have certain post-Rapture needs, and a whole service-industry has gown up to meet these needs. As an animal-lover, my favorite Rapture-related service is meant to deal with Left Behind pets. After the Rapture Pet Care. ("After the Rapture, who will care for your pets?") http://www.aftertherapturepetcare.com/ is a service that identifies "Christian-owned pets," and provides a network of non-Christians (those, obviously, not destined for life everlasting) who "have agreed to rescue and care for our members’ pets if we all disappear."

Sharon Moss, who is the brains behind this service, says that she was motivated by the need for her Raptured clients to have the peace-of-mind of knowing that their stewardship of their pets will continue after they disappear. She also offers a range of rapture-related merchandise through her site to spread the word about the need of pet-related Rapture-readiness.

After the Rapture has endured a fair amount of mocking commentary since it was first established: from Believers who argue that Rapture-ready people should be spending their time trying the convert the non-Rapture-ready, not worrying about pets, and from non-Believers who claim that what Moss is doing is simply scamming the gullible. But I am not about to join in with the mockery, because Moss seems to be a happy anomaly in the world of Rapture-ready Christianity.

In Texas, where nearly 60% of inhabitants think that Jesus is returning in the near future and that they will be taken bodily from the earth before the final Tribulation, we provided foster-care for Golden Retriever Rescue, a non-profit breed rescue society that re-homed abandoned, abused and neglected dogs. http://goldenretrievers.org/

We we were up to our eyeballs in maltreated Retrievers. And when I asked myself why that should be so, it occasionally occurred to me that if you really believe that your future and the future of your children and grandchildren is not an earthly one, then your duty of care to dependent animals (as the After the Rapture Pet Care website says "It’s true God loves all animals, but there is nothing Biblical about pets being raptured.") will be diminished.

The same principle likely applies to the environment: what does it matter if the water is polluted, the air unbreathable, the ice-caps are melting? Very soon, the Raptured just won't have to worry about any of it, because they will be extracted from the Earth, leaving it to burn in the final conflagration.  Neither is the plight of the poor likely to be a high priority. The Believing Poor will be Raptured; the Unbelieving Poor won't be, so what's the problem?

Rapture-readiness is not just a personal theological choice; as a life-stance it has very real consequences, personal, local, and global. On a national scale, where Rapture-ready politicians and opinion-makers are advocating public policy based on their extractionist eschatology, it bears the seeds of real disaster.

I'm not a political animal, but it does seem to me that we should be thinking about these matters when we decide  who will get our votes in November. And as for Rapture-readying our pets: it is a kindness, and not to be despised.

"The Caterpillars of the Commonwealth"

This week I've been digging into the first cycle of Shakespeare's history plays: Richard II, Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2) and Henry V, having watched again the BBC's astonishing television series The Hollow Crown. Populated by the cream of British stage actors, and produced as part of the UK's 2012 "Cultural Olympics" (to coincide with the London Summer Olympics), The Hollow Crown (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHia1zu_YNI) garnered both rave reviews and a host of awards for its cast and crew.

But it is a tangled web (no, not a quote from Shakespeare, as it is so often thought, but rather from Sir Walter Scott) that we enter when we get into the history plays, and for a scorecard of the players  I've relied on Peter Saccio's dense but in informative Shakespeare's English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama (Oxford University Press, 2000).

As Shakespeare draws him, Richard II is the flawed, doomed and (eventually rather demented) king surrounded by self-promoters and scoundrels and sycophants. The man who would eventually take his crown, Henry Bolingbroke, describes Richard's advisors as "caterpillars of the commonwealth" (2.3.11), munching their way through the lush and lovely garden that is England.

The phrase 'caterpillars of the commonwealth' was not new with Shakespeare. In 1577 A Description of Elizabethan England has a chapter on "The Provision for the Poor" (Book III., Chapter 5) which differentiates between the "godly poor" and the "ungracious rabble," and rebukes those who are strong and able-bodied but refuse to work:

"But in fine they are all thieves and caterpillars in the commonwealth, and by the Word of God not permitted to eat, but they do but lick the sweat from the true labourers’ brows, and bereave the godly poor of that which is due unto them, to maintain their excess, consuming the charity of well-disposed people bestowed upon them, after a most wicked and detestable manner."

The Description is a polemical tract by the English Calvinist William Harrison (1534-1593) and was included in Raphael Holinshead's Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande [1587], a principal source for Shakespeare's English history plays. (For more about Harrison see G.J. R. Parry, A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation of Elizabethan England [Cambridge University Press, 2002 http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/302]).

But it is no wonder that Shakespeare plucked the juicy phrase "caterpillars of the commonwealth" for his own use. As a word-picture it is sublime! The root word 'pil' in caterpillar is the same as that in pillage: i.e., “to rob, plunder, or ravage.” Caterpillars of the Commonwealth  evokes the ravaging of Eden, the despoilation of what is fruitful, the ruination of the orderly and the good by greedy predators.

But it is interesting that Shakespeare intentionally shifted the referent of the phrase from the "undeserving poor" of Harrison/Holinshead to those involved in political intrigue, plotting, and malice.  And Richard II is not the only place that this derogative use of caterpillars appears in the history plays to refer to politics.  In Henry IV a messenger to the king also refers to an approaching rebel troop of “scholars, lawyers, courtiers, gentlemen”  as “false caterpillars.” As an insult, caterpillars of the Commonwealth is as fit for the Elizabethan Court as it is, at times, for the American Congress or the English Parliament.

So, if you are hunting for an insult for your favorite crop of politicians, Will Shakespeare is your man! (Do have a look at the do-it-yourself Shakespeare Insult Kit at http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Shaker/)

The Book-Lover's Regrets

All book collectors, book lovers, and booksellers live with a host of regrets: the books you didn’t buy, the books you sold and shouldn’t have, the books you bought and wish you hadn’t. And when book-people get together, the conversation often turns to conjuring up the ghosts of these regrets. It becomes a kind of bonding exercise.

I got thinking about this as I was going through our  little collection of books by the writer-illustrator Maurice Sendak (1928-2012). I have loved Sendak’s work ever since my son was given In the Night Kitchen (Harper and Row, 1970) for his third birthday. Winner of the Caldecott Medal for 1971, In the Night Kitchen instantly became required nightly bedtime reading in our house. We knew every word by heart, my son and I, we rejoiced together in little Mickey’s journey through the bakery, and we laughed together – every night, as if we’d never seen it before – at the image of the little boy emerging from the cake batter.  

But to my surprise, not everyone thought I was showing sufficient parental care in allowing my son to be exposed to this book. Because our young hero Mickey is occasionally nude, In the Night Kitchen is enshrined at number 24 on the American Library Association’s list of 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books for 1990-2000, and has been banned from school libraries all around the country. The ALA Banned Books Week, just finished for this year, always brings naked Mickey to 

mind

But banned or not, I was hooked on Maurice Sendak. And here’s where the regret comes in. A few years after I had started my personal collection of Sendak books, I was in a second-hand book shop in Chicago and in a section of $3-apiece clearance books (mostly well-used and out-of-date textbooks) I found the most difficult-to-find of all Sendak books: Atomics for the Millions (McGraw-Hill, 1947). An ordinary grade-school science book, it contains Sendak’s very first illustrations in a published book. Truth be told, on that day in Chicago there was not one copy but two copies on the shelves.  And I bought only one of them. It seemed to me then that spending 6 dollars on two identical copies of the same book was a trifle reckless. And I have regretted it ever since.

Evidently, I didn’t learn much from my mistake. And since then the regrets have just kept on piling up: a pristine 2-volume set of Fridtjof Nansen’s In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times (William Heinemann, 1911) left at a charity bookstore in Cambridge, England, a small collection of scholarly books on the Radical Reformation at a going-out-of-business sale in Arlington Texas, a copy of Robert Ridgway’s Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (Privately Published, 1912) left behind at a library book sale in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

The books that got away. The books I turned my back on. The books that my mother’s voice in my head (“You don’t really want THAT, do you?”) kept me from buying, The books that the wide streak of Puritanical self-denial in me wouldn’t allow me to have. The trail of book-lover’s regrets that litter the past.

I’d like not to think that all this is some sort of metaphor for life. But I’m afraid that it just might be exactly that.