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/)