twitter.com/berghahnbooks/status/1151869587442556932

On this day in 1381 the leader of the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’, Wat Tyler, was killed in Smithfield. As Labour propose a new ‘garden tax’ in order to dispossess landowners, this extract from Graham Holderness’s Meat, Murder, Malfeasance, Medicine and Martyrdom: Smithfield Stories recalls the revolt, and shows how the opportunity of reform can be thrown away in the pursuit of violent insurrection.

Mile End, 14 June 1381, Night

Richard by the grace of God, king of England and France, and lord of Ireland, to all his bailiffs and faithful men to whom these present letters come, greetings. Know that by our special grace we have manumitted all our liegemen, subjects and others of the county of Kent; and we have freed and quitted each of them from bondage by these present letters. Henceforward no man shall be a serf nor make homage nor any kind of service to any lord, but shall give four pence for an acre of land. And no man shall serve any man except at his own will and by means of regular covenant. Henceforward all my subjects shall be free to buy or sell throughout the realm of England. We also pardon our said liege men and subjects for all felonies, acts of treason, transgressions and extortions performed by them or any one of them in whatsoever way. We also withdraw sentences of outlawry declared against them or any of them because of these offences. And we hereby grant our complete peace to them and each of them. In testimony of which we order these letters of ours to be made patent. Witnessed by myself at London on 14 June in the fourth year of my reign.^[i]

Sitting under the canvas of a tent, by the light of a fire, Tyler had read the letter a dozen times, studied every clause, pored intensively over the stamp of the Great Seal. Usually, he knew, the king would use his own privy seal. But by Sudbury’s resignation Richard held the Great Seal in his own hands, conferring on these letters the unique and potent joint authority of state and crown, Chancellor and King.

As soon as the royal party had left Mile End, Tyler had taken a troop of Kentishmen and raced towards the Tower. There he found little or no defence, and they were able easily to penetrate the fortress and search for the traitors. They soon discovered Sudbury and Hale, dragged them unceremoniously onto Tower Hill and subjected them to summary execution. The king’s sergeant-at-arms, a physician and a lawyer met the same fate. Tyler had hoped to find John of Gaunt’s son Henry, and to take him hostage; but somehow he had been spirited out of the Tower and away. They chose not to return to the fortress, having no intention of being trapped inside the Tower as the king and court had been. And so Tyler rode to re-join the Essex rebels in their camp at Mile End.

The camp was a carnival of feasting and rejoicing. Word of the king’s concessions had spread through the host, and most of the rebels considered their objectives achieved. They were free; England was free; the young King was a true king. Who are you with? With King Richard and the true Commons!

But Tyler was gnawing at his lower lip. It had been too easy. He would like to have suspected treachery, but the letters patent lay undeniably in his hand, signed by the King, carrying the wax impression of the Great Seal.^[ii] Absolute, ultimate, irrevocable. Why then was he dissatisfied? Had they not realised their vision, the dream of John Ball, a free people in a free realm?

No, he thought to himself. It cannot be so. The nobles still possess their lands, the rich their wealth, the powerful their armies. The people may be free to work and trade, buy, and sell, but still there was no equality. Sooner or later those in power would find new ways of oppressing the poor.

We have to cut deeper. We must have more than freedom; we must have power. Where does power lie? In land, in the law, in armies. The people had shown they could raise an army, and take London by force. They had shown they could wrest the law to their own ends, by executing the enemies of the people. But they had no land.

There had been a balancing, but not a reversal. The commons must expropriate the land, or they would never be truly free. All land to the commons. Agriculture, commerce, government, the military, all must be taken into public ownership. All power to the people. We will have a king bound by constitution to rule on behalf of the people. Or better still, no king at all, but a republic, ruled by a senate. Senatus atque Populus Anglicus. The Senate and the people of England.

‘How goes it, Wat?’ asked John Ball. ‘You are pensive and pale. What ails you, my man?’

‘The battle is won’, Tyler said, ‘but not the war. We must force the king to forfeit the land, to take it away from the lords and the church. All land to the commons. If he countermands, then we shall depose him, and throw down his throne. A council of the Commons shall rule in his stead’.

‘But he is our king!’ protested Jack Straw.

‘And what does it mean, to be our king? What do you mean by it, you, Jack Straw? The king who binds us in fealty’s fetters? The king to whom homage we’re forced to pay? The king to whom basely we bend the knee? If truly our king, he belongs to us: he is our creature; our puppet; our servant. We need a king to do our bidding, against the nobles, against the church. A king who’ll oppose all those who oppress us’.  

‘A King of kindness, liberty, love’, came the dreamy voice of John Ball. ‘Who will bring us back to the golden age. Back to the garden; back to God. As the prophets sang: ‘a little child shall lead them there’’.

‘Too far you go, man’, cried Straw to Tyler. ‘Miles too far. This follow a fantasy. Damn you, the only end to this, is death to all’. 

Tyler leaned over and seized Straw by the cloak, his white face incandescent in the firelight, his wild black eyes staring like those of a madman. ‘All power to the people’, he gabbled feverishly. ‘All land to the commons. If you are not with us, you are against us. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. Now the time is come. Now the time is come. Now the time is …’.

‘Back to Essex I mean to take my men’, interrupted Jack Straw. ‘Now. Tonight. This is folly, and follow we will not. It is not for this that we have fought’.

Tyler leapt to his feet, pushed Straw aside and stood in the doorway of the tent. ‘Send word to the king. On the morrow we’ll meet him. There is more to be said’. He thought for a moment. ‘Close to the city. Smithfield. Quickly, send’.

---

[i] The text is the letter issued by Richard to the men of Hertfordshire, and copied into Walsingham’s Chronica. See R.B. Dobson, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970) 180-1.[i]

[ii] See Juliet Barker, England, Arise: the People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381 (London: Little, Brown, 2014) 256.

This notorious anti-Semitic mural continues to haunt the Labour leadership, as more and more senior members are exposed as having endorsed or admired it. The mural features in this extract from Graham Holderness’s forthcoming Meat, Murder, Malfeasance, Medicine and Martyrdom: Smithfield Stories, in which a young butcher undergoes radicalization and eventually joins ISIS.

It was a Saturday night. After their evening meal the boys would usually wander along the canal to Camden Lock, and meet up with a group of their compatriots. Together they would walk around the streets and estates, smoking cigarettes, looking at girls, or kicking a football around in an empty school playground. There was a certain aimlessness to these activities, and at school Tariq had found himself envying the Saturday nights of his white school-fellows, who would look forward all week with growing excitement to a night of drunkenness and sex. This troubled him a little, but after a while there were no more white kids at the school, so the temptations of alterity were no longer there.

This night was destined to be different.

‘Come on’, said Yusef, wiping his plate clean with a piece of bread. ‘We’ve got an appointment’.

Together they walked down the road. The fabric shops were closing, the grocers still optimistically staying open. The air was thick with the spices of Indian cooking: hot oil, turmeric, garlic. Tariq paused for a minute by a huge mural that decorated a blank brick wall. He had often studied it, and rarely passed without another admiring glance. Seated in a semi-circle, staring towards the viewer, were six figures, with a large flat board spread before them. The square surface was marked out as a kind of board game, at its centre a pile of green American dollars. Among the counters were miniatures of the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Gherkin, monuments of western capitalism.

A global game of money and power. The board rested on the painfully bent backs of a circle of bald, brown-skinned men; and the faces of the players displayed the enlarged noses, grey beards and heavy moustaches of cartoon Jews. Above them the artist had depicted, in lurid colours, images of industry: chimneys and cooling-towers venting black smoke, a sky lit by the orange glow of blast-furnaces. Below them, metal cog-wheels intersected to symbolise the global economic system, driven by greed and racial hatred, run over the backs of the prostrate brown masses.

On either side appeared emblems of resistance. ‘The New World Order is the Enemy of Humanity’ proclaimed a slogan on a placard held up by shouting figure in paramilitary fatigues, his right hand raised in a clenched fist salute. On the other side was the face of an oriental woman, a dark-eyed and heavy-lipped beauty, holding a baby whose skinny little arm was also raised in clenched defiance. Gazing down at this scene from above was the great all-seeing eye, set in the apex of a pyramid, Tariq had seen on US dollars: the eye of global surveillance.

The New World Order. The godless, materialistic West, allied with the Jews, playing games of money and power on the bent backs of the brown-skinned masses. Tariq took a parting glance at the baby. Weak, vulnerable, yet charged with an indomitable spirit. Suckled on the milk of jihad; born into resistance. Then he ran to catch up with his brother, who was already further down the street.

---

I remember a time when British culture among the educated was thoroughly European. Everyone listened to French music, wore Italian clothes, watched European films, smoked French cigarettes, drank German beer and French and Italian wine. Everyone owned a fondu set, and burned their mouths on hot melted cheese. At school I studied French, German and (unsuccessfully) Russian; read Dante in Italian and Flaubert in French. People started to holiday in Spain and Portugal (no visa required), following the men of my father’s generation, who had virtually all visited Europe (visa-free) in less salubrious circumstances, but to the considerable benefit of European citizens. I lodged a French student in my house, and looked after a group of Germans on a study-abroad programme. I was the first member of my family to travel to Europe, on an educational visit, and without a military uniform and a rifle.

When were these halcyon days of European harmony? In the late 1960s and early 1970s: before the UK joined the EU.

The point of this wander down memory lane is that there are more ways of being European than belonging to the EU. The UK was European before the EU, and will remain European outside it.

Indeed, to claim Shakespeare as ‘European’ could provide no better illustration of the possibilities of cultural reciprocity and symbiosis without economic and political union. If it was possible to be as European as Shakespeare was 400 years ago, then European-ness can scarcely be identified with membership of the European Union.  

Let’s remind ourselves that shortly before Shakespeare’s birth Britain exited from Europe. It was partly in resistance to limits on national sovereignty – taxes, tributes, foreign political interference – that Henry VIII effected his break with Rome, or ‘Brexit 1535’ (strictly speaking this should be ‘England-exit’, but ‘Exit’ is pretty meaningless). In my book The Faith of William Shakespeare (Lion Books, 2016) I argued that Shakespeare was as much a product of the English Reformation as he was of the European Renaissance.

Shakespeare was thoroughly European, international and global. He was steeped in European culture, especially that of Italy, where a third of his plays are set. He may well have spoken Italian, and read Boccaccio and Bandello for himself; and he knew enough French to make fun of the language in Henry V. He knew at least small Latin, and less Greek. His scenes are set in Italy, France, Austria, Denmark, Spain, Greece: Verona, Messina, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Roussillon, Navarre, Sicily, Bohemia,  Padua, Ephesus, Athens, Troy. His sources were European: Homer, Ovid, Plutarch, the Italian novella. His characters are often strangers lost in another country – Viola, Perdita, Imogen. He wrote sympathetically of European minorities, such as Jews and Moors in Venice. In the section of Sir Thomas More thought to have been written by Shakespeare, Londoners are condemned for attacking ‘strangers’  from other countries. Everyone is a foreigner outside his or her own borders:

Go you to France and Flanders

To any German province, Spain or Portugal,

Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,

Why you must needs be strangers.

Shakespeare probably wrote this while lodging with an expatriate family of French Huguenots, the Mountjoys, in Silver Street: exactly the kind of migrant workers deserving, according to Shakespeare’s More, of London’s protection.

But these Protestant refugees were living and working in London because they had fled from religious persecution in Europe, and were welcomed by the English state, on grounds of religious affinity and economic utility, if not unanimously by the common people. Then, as now, London offered these refugees from Europe shelter, protection, freedom of worship, economic opportunity; and in return they contributed to the economic boom triggered by the ‘fiscal stimulus’ of expenditure following Henry VIII’s confiscation of church property. Under an ‘Australian-style points system’ they would have scored highly. Yes, Shakespeare’s lodging with the Mountjoys is an illustration of his own cosmopolitanism. But it is also a story of a family turning its back on a European project that had become oppressive and constrictive, and instead integrating into a new, successful Protestant nation-state.

The Calvinist Mountjoy household provided Shakespeare with a congenial cultural space as well as a comfortable lodging. He increasingly made use of the Geneva Bible, and his later plays converged on the Protestant Christianity of the Book of Common Prayer. When Hamlet delivers his famous line ’there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ he is literally quoting Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (‘speciali Dei providentia’). Luther and Calvin were also European, and the Protestant Reformation was a European movement. But one of its effects was to engender national churches, seeded by European ideas, but flowering within the native soil of the nation-state. Such was the Church of England to which Shakespeare belonged, and which remains both a global and a local institution, a world-wide communion, yet always rooted in a particular parish. The Christian language through which Shakespeare absorbed his religion – not just from the Bible, but from the Book of Common Prayer and the Homilies – was not the Latin of the Roman Church, but the language in which he spoke, thought and wrote – English.

Shakespeare’s faith, like that of Elizabeth I herself, probably resembled was what we now call ‘Anglo-Catholicism’, a hybrid of diverse European influences. But it was the faith of a Protestant church. It was national, as well as international; the faith of the Geneva Bible, but also the faith of the English Book of Common Prayer.

Graham Holderness, The Faith of William Shakespeare (Lion Hudson in November 2016).

An Anglo-Saxon tomb near Southend, between a pub and a supermarket, has been excavated to reveal a noble burial with treasure-hoard. Read a translation of Beowulf’s funeral from the English epic.

BEOWULF’S FUNERAL

They gathered the gear then, those Geats in their grieving,

To pile up a pyre, high-up and heavenward,

Hanging with helmets, shiny with shield-boards,

The brightest of byrnies, just as he’d bade.

Then weeping those warriors laid him upon it,

So famous a fighter, the lord they had loved.

Quickly they kindled a blaze on that barrow,

Fuelled a fire of baleful flame. Up went the woodsmoke,

Black on the brightness. Windswept and woven

With woe and with weeping, till the blaze in its

Burning bored through his breastbone

And hissed at his heart. High on the headland

The Wederas wrought him

A tomb on the topmost, where sailors could see it,

Wide on the waves. Ten days and ten nights

They were building that beacon, the battle-chief’s ashes

To shore in a shelter, as clever a construction

As any you’d come across, among the most artful

Makings of men. Then brooches to the barrow,

And rings they restored, such trinkets and trappings

As foes had filched from the well-hidden hoard.

Earth they endowed with the treasure of heroes

To have in its hold, the gold with the grit,

Where it stops still; useless to us

As ever it were.

From Graham Holderness, Craeft: Poems from the Anglo-Saxon (Shoestring Press, 2002).

According to the Daily Express (23 April 2019) these ‘unearthed’ signatures (who knew they’d been ‘earthed’?) raise questions about Shakespeare’s identity and the authorship of the plays. Read my reflections on the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

Shakespearean Selves

Graham Holderness

“Are you the author of the plays of William Shakespeare?”

• Shakespeare in Love (Madden 1998)

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes its self; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came. (Hopkins, 1996: 115)

Hopkins’s magnificent poem is the most extreme statement of identity as ‘self’: intrinsic, unique, irreplaceable selfhood. Every living creature has within it, ‘indoors’, its own essence, its ‘being’ (‘being indoors each one dwells’). But ‘being’ is also doing, since each thing speaks its individuality by ‘doing’ itself, performing its being. Action expresses essential being: being functions in utterance, in speaking and spelling. Creation is an immense multiplicity of individualities, of differences that emanate from a great commonality, a great simplicity: each thing does ‘one thing’, which is also ‘the same’: being itself.

Though a contemporary of Marx, Darwin and Freud, Hopkins of course inhabited a world of mediaeval philosophy and theology divorced from the great intellectual currents of the time. While the dominant modern thinkers were refashioning the self as socially constructed, naturally conditioned, internally self-divided and alone in a godless universe, Hopkins continued to speak from a much older agenda in which the self is interior, immanent, essential and god-given.

Literary biography is however largely based on such older notions of the self and of human being. What is the relationship between the writer and his work? Who was the man who wrote Shakespeare’s plays and poems? The biographer seeks to offer a coherent ‘account of Shakespeare’s life, writings and afterlife’. (Wells 2002: xviii) Here the author is sovereign, the originator and shaper of the writing, the driving imaginative force, the controlling artistic authority. The writer precedes the work, so the relationship is from writer to work, the writer signing and stamping the work with his/her own character. The writer is cause, writing the effect. Shakespeare must have possessed an intrinsic being that expressed itself in a unique voice. The work should ‘speak’ and ‘spell’ the intrinsic Shakespearean self, that ‘being’ that ‘indoors each one dwells’; the writing should fling out broad the name of ‘Shakespeare’; and the literary biography should be able to delineate the character of the man who invested the works with that distinctive and unique quality of being.

Most contemporary Shakespeare criticism and scholarship derives from Marx and Darwin and Freud (through Barthes and Foucault and Lacan) rather than from the pre-modern philosophy celebrated by Hopkins; which is why Shakespeare biography was of little interest to Shakespeare criticism of the 1980s. There the reading relationship was backwards, as it actually is in practice, from writing to writer. The work precedes the author: the writer is an effect of the writing. Barthes and Foucault had declared ‘the death of the author’: the ‘author’ was in reality a function of the text. Because the literary work is constructed in the act of reading, and in relation to the context in which it is read, ‘authorship’ is just one element of that process, and the primary link between the writer and the work is broken. What matters is not what the author meant by the words he/she wrote, but what we mean by them when we read them.  

Quite a lot is known about Shakespeare’s life: but never really enough, as the life as we know it doesn’t adequately seem to explain the poetry. For modern Shakespeare criticism, that hardly seemed to matter. Twenty years ago my critical anthology The Shakespeare Myth addressed’Shakespeare’ not as an author, but as an institution or cultural apparatus. This was the position on ‘authorship’: 

We cannot rely, when addressing the work of a Renaissance dramatist, on the apparent clarity and simplicity of a direct, controlling relationship between author and written text. These plays were made and mediated in the interaction of certain complex material conditions, of which the author was only one. When we deconstruct the Shakespeare myth what we discover is not a universal individual genius creating literary texts that remain a permanently valuable repository of human experience and wisdom; but a collaborative cultural process in which plays were made by writers, theatrical entrepreneurs, architects and craftsmen, actors and audience. (Holderness 1988: 13)

Much of this still stands. The production of literary drama is a collective and collaborative activity; the dramatic work, whether being performed in the theatre or reproduced through the printing house, is rarely if ever under the author’s sole control; and above all, we can’t get outside our culture’s recognition that writing turns into meaning not when it’s under the control of the writer, but when it’s activated by the reader. ‘Shakespeare’, I said in The Shakespeare Myth, in a much-quoted sentence, ‘is, here, now, always, what is currently being made of him’. (Holderness 1988: xvi) This approach has since been labelled ‘presentism’. Our reading or viewing of the plays constructs the meaning of the work, between the horizons of our understanding, within the context of our experience, and answering to the deepest needs of our being. In which case the authority of the author inevitably diminishes in proportion to the empowerment of the reader. The Author is dead; long live the reader.

According to presentism, an interest in the Shakespeare biography is not a question about history, or reality, or truth; but a question about contemporary preferences and priorities. It’s about what sort of man we would prefer Shakespeare to have been.  We go to the past to answer questions that are asked in the present; we seek our own reflections in the glass of history. Agnes Heller called this attitude to the past ‘nostalgia’.  Her image is that of a well, into which we peer, and to the surface of which we seek to draw the elusive shapes of the past.  Nostalgia ‘cannot resurrect the dead…but it makes the dead speak and act as if they were alive.  Having been brought to the surface from the well, which mirrors our faces whenever we lean over it, these dead are everything we desire to be’. (Heller 1993: 40) While we imagine that what becomes visible in that long, receding tunnel, that well, is the past itself; we find that in actuality we are engaged in a narcissistic contemplation of the reflection of our own wishes and desires in the surface of the water.  

 One of the most powerful voices of the 1980s wrote in very similar accents:

I began with the desire to speak with the dead…[but] I never believed that the dead could hear me … I knew that the dead could not speak … It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those textual traces make themselves heard in the voice of the living … (Greenblatt 1988: 5)

The opening of Shakespearean Negotiations of course. For Greenblatt both literature and history consisted of ‘textual traces’ from which the life has disappeared, but which remain capable of living expression. They are not however ‘sources of numinous authority’, but ‘signs of contingent social practices’. (5)  Greenblatt states this as a paradox: he is interested in early modern texts, and frequents them to find out what they mean.  At the same time he believes that there is no transhistorical human nature; that history is a contemporary narrative, a story we tell ourselves about the past; and that language is no transparent and unmediated window onto an objective and independent reality, but rather a closed system within which all our perceptions and interpretations – including those of history and human nature – are contained.  A word or object from the past exists and has meaning only within the system and structure, the perpetual contemporaneity, of living language. The author is still here in this process, but assuming a diminished role; and the emphasis is resolutely ‘presentist’, since the voices of the dead can only be heard when mimed by the voices of the living.

But almost twenty years on, in 2004, Greenblatt published Will in the World: how Shakespeare became Shakespeare, an attempt to bring those dead back to life. The reception of this biography is already a well-known story. The book is a formal biography, using the established facts and traditions, reading the plays and poems in the light of them, and producing potential explanations of how the life and the works might be interrelated. The book was alternately praised and criticised as a popular/academic crossover text. It was seen both as a fulfilment of Greenblatt’s New Historicism, and as an act of ‘apostasy’ against it. It was celebrated for the quality, and castigated for the poverty, of its scholarship. Above all it was attacked for investing more in speculation and invention than in historical evidence; and lauded for exactly the same thing. It’s just a ‘biographical fiction’ said Colin Burrow (2005: 9). The book is ‘entirely Greenblat’s fiction’ said Richard Jenkyns (2004: 22), and indeed ‘an improbable fiction’. Alistair Fowler, in one of the most hostile reviews received (in TLS), suggested that Greenblatt might have been better off making ‘a crossover into historical fiction’ where he could freely have fomented conjecture with even less respect for evidence. This should not be the case in a literary biography: here the ‘subject veers too much between Shakespeare’s imagination and Stephen Greenblatt’s own’. (2005: 5)

On the other hand plenty of reviewers lined up to praise Greenblatt’s imaginative and inventive approach to his subject. The book should be read as   ‘imaginative writing’ (Aune 2006).  Greenblatt’s ‘chief allegiance is to imagination’, says Lois Potter (2005: 375), and the book rightly stresses ‘the importance of imagination in our approach to this supremely imaginative writer’. Charles Marowitz calls the book an  ‘extended flight of fancy’, but of a valid kind: ‘a speculative leap into the murky life of Shakespeare, using one’s knowledge of the period, hints from the collected works and a creative use of conjecture, is a perfectly legitimate endeavour’. (Marowitz 2005)

Now apart from Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (which was a companion volume to the full-blown biography and mythography Shakespeare’s Lives) there is no such thing as a speculation-free biography of Shakespeare. How could there be? Greenblatt’s challenge to orthodoxy was to be much more overtly fictional or metafictional in his method, much more self-reflexive in declaring the conjectural and speculative character of his writing. The best-known example is the possible meeting Greenblatt provisionally stages between Shakespeare and Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion, which he invents as a possible event in Shakespeare’s Lancastrian and recusant lost years. But the episode is clearly signalled as a piece of story-telling: ‘Let us imagine the two of them sitting together’ (Greenblatt 2004: 108) Are you sitting comfortably? If not; if you don’t want to join the author in his flight of fancy; then don’t bother.

Will in the World has two main methods: reading from documentary facts or recorded traditions towards the works; and reading back from the works in an attempt to bestow distinguishing features on the life. In short Greenblatt uses the author and the writing as both cause and effect. He posits a Shakespearean ‘self’ that drove the writings: but he accepts that this ‘self’ is ‘obscure’ and impenetrable. He accepts that the channel of causation from self to work is hard to map; but presupposes that some such transference must have occurred.

This book … aims to discover the actual person who wrote the most important body of literature of the last thousand years. Or rather, since the actual person is a matter of well-documented public record, it aims to tread the shadowy paths that lead from the life he lived into the literature he created. (12)

Some of these paths seem very shadowy indeed. Take the long chapter called ‘Speaking with the Dead’, which focuses on Hamlet and on the deaths of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet and his father John.  As Gary Taylor (2004: 9) points out, although this is all about Shakespeare’s imagined attempts to speak with the dead, the phrase is the famous one used by Greenblatt himself in his earlier work: ‘I began with the desire to speak with the dead’. So who’s speaking here? And who’s dead? 

The biographical basis of the chapter rests in a few documentary facts. Shakespeare’s 11-year old son Hamnet died in 1596. His father John Shakespeare died in 1601. Between these two deaths Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. The play is of course permeated by all sorts of emotions and questions a bereaved father might feel and ask. But the hero of the play, Hamlet, is haunted by the ghost of his dead father, not afflicted by the loss of a son.

Greenblatt tells a story (adumbrated earlier of course by James Joyce) that aspires to explain the play that lies between these two momentous departures. Shakespeare ‘undoubtedly’ returned to Stratford for Hamnet’s funeral. (312) There he heard the words of the burial service that echo eloquently in the play. But there, Greenblatt suggests, he became acutely aware of how much he and his family missed in being deprived of Catholic rituals for the dead: the Latin memorial prayers, the candles, bells and crosses, the alms-giving and requiem masses. Shakespeare wanted, Greenblatt suggests, to mourn his son in the traditional pattern of worship, and was unable to do so. ‘What ceremony else?’, he must have thought as he stood by the grave-side, unable to pray for his son’s soul.

The Roman Catholic ‘spiritual testament’ signed by John Shakespeare and hidden in the rafters of his Stratford house requested those he leaves behind to ‘vouchsafe to assist and succour me with their holy prayers and satisfactory works, especially with the holy Sacrifice of the Mass, as being the most effectual means to deliver souls from their torments and pains’. Greenblatt goes even further and suggests that John Shakespeare may have pleaded with William, ‘appealed urgently to his son’ (316) to have masses said for the soul of Hamnet. This is of course pure invention, but Greenblatt makes it sound convincing enough: ‘The arguments, or pleading, or tears that may have accompanied such appeals are irrevocably lost’. (316)  This is of course the anguished pleading we also hear from the Ghost in Hamlet, who comes from Purgatory.

Greenblatt is drawing on historical work that assessed the impact of the Reformation on the relationship between the living and the dead, and which earlier formed the basis for his Hamlet in Purgatory. He also echoes his own earlier work in Shakespearean Negotiations: ‘What mattered’ he says in Will in the World, ‘was whether the dead could continue to speak to the living, at least for a short time, whether the living could help the dead, whether a reciprocal bond remained’. (315) But out of these diverse roots, Greenblatt creates imaginatively a vivid drama in which a father, perhaps nearing death, appeals to his son to maintain a practice of traditional piety; and the son is perhaps unable or unwilling to do so. Now this is not just about Shakespeare.

In the ‘Prologue’ to Hamlet in Purgatory Greenblatt writes about his father, who died in 1983. Scarred by the painful death of his own father, Greenblatt Sr. lived in a perpetual denial of death. Yet, ‘when we read his will’, Greenblatt  says, ‘we found that he had, after all, been thinking about his death. He had left a sum of money to an organisation that would say kaddish for him – kaddish being the Aramaic prayer for the dead, recited for eleven months after a person’s death and then on certain annual occasions … the prayer is usually said by the deceased’s immediate family and particularly by his sons … Evidently my father did not trust either my older brother or me to recite the prayer for him’. (Greenblatt 2001: 6-7)

Kaddish is a central Jewish prayer, praising the power and glory of God, one version of which is used as a memorial prayer for the dead. So all this talk of bereavement, and maimed rites, and fathers appealing for ancient observances, and speaking with the dead, is certainly about Shakespeare, and about Hamlet. But it’s also about Stephen Greenblatt. John Shakespeare and other Catholics, he says, in requesting requiem masses ‘were asking those who loved them to do something crucially important for them’. (Greenblatt 2004: 317) Greenblatt’s father did not ask him to say kaddish, and that in itself was clearly doubly painful for the son. But he says it anyway, ‘in a blend of love and spite’ (Greenblatt 2001: 7), and ends the preface to Hamlet in Purgatory: ‘this practice then, which with a lightly ironic piety I, who scarcely know how to pray, undertook for my own father, is the personal starting point for what follows’. (9)

‘What purports to be an image of Shakespeare is only an idealised image of the biographer himself’. Greenblatt, says Gary Taylor (2004: 9), has ‘mined his own life to supply the emotional raw materials that energise this book’. So there is a ‘personal starting point’ for this exercise as well as a starting point in the author, and innumerable others in the historical context. By the end of this chapter in Will in the World all these are merged together:

Shakespeare drew upon the pity, confusion and dread of death in a world of damaged rituals (the world in which most of us continue to live) because he himself experienced those same emotions at the core of his being. (Greenblatt 2004: 321)

The world of damaged rituals is that of Protestant early modernity, which killed off the old Catholic consolations of purgatory and efficacious prayer for the dead. But it is also the world of secular modernity, in which the son of a pious Jew involuntarily absorbs his culture’s agnosticism and feels a consequential loss. Shakespeare lived in this world, Hamlet lives in that world, and so too does Greenblatt.  All experience these fundamental emotions of irreparable loss, aching nostalgia and the desire to speak with the dead, ‘at the core of … being’.

We’ve clearly reached a significant point here, the ‘core of being’, the ‘heart of the matter’. Once Greenblatt would not have talked about the ‘core of being’. It’s a phrase that speaks to pre-modern ideas of human nature and essential being. In the universe of post-structuralist criticism and theory, identity is unstable and changeable (cp. Renaissance Self-fashioning); the reality of human existence lies in the externalities of language and social context; literature is not about personal experience but about the circulation of social energy.

To return to the ‘core of being’ is to revert to much more traditional notions of the self, identity, existence and essence. But interestingly what lies at the core of being is not the isolated autonomous and disconnected individuality that Marxist theory attributes to bourgeois ideology. Instead what we find in those depths of human emotion and desire is – another. In Greenblatt it is the father; in Shakespeare the son; in Hamlet father and son. Greenblatt can admit that he has a core of being because someone else has, by his death, penetrated it so deeply. He reads and hears the self-same ache of painful love in Hamlet; and from there he speculates that it must have lain at the core of Shakespeare’s being too.

Like all of Shakespeare’s work, this is a story that can’t be proved (or disproved). It’s a story woven between the pegs of certain documentary facts: the death of Hamnet, 1596; the death of John Shakespeare in 1601; the composition of the play Hamlet, first published in 1603; John Shakespeare’s Spiritual Testament. But it’s also a story mapped between certain poles of emotional truth: first what we read in the play, the anguish of the father, the grief of the son; and secondly Greenblatt’s own sense of bereavement and obligation. These two points are then triangulated against a third that cannot be known in the same way, the condition of the author’s heart and soul; what was passing in the core of the Shakespearean being.

Where does this leave us? We’ve got the author back from the dead. His emotional experience predicates the writing, causes it to be. But that remains an inferential relationship impossible to prove or demonstrate. So the critic has recourse to his imagination, and creates a narrative consistent with the documentary facts, and with the emotional truths embedded both in the writing, and in the heart of the critic. As one critic puts it, he ‘lets his imagination loose in the fields of his knowledge’. (Middlebrook 2005: 16) No-one disputes Greenblatt’s knowledge: but for some readers the result remains unclear as to whether it’s ‘fact or fiction, criticism or history’.  (Fowler 2005: 3)

In trying to account for the effect great literature has on him then, the critic is to some extent making it up as he goes along. But this is not just a sort of opportunistic appropriation of the work, perverting it from its original meaning: since the motivation for doing it comes from a very deep source, what Greenblatt calls the ‘core of being’. Literature touches us so deeply that we’re driven to presuppose that the author must also have been touched in some comparable way, depth calling to depth.

Now this method can be challenged: we can say, as many readers have, that this is nothing to do with the author of Shakespeare’s plays, and that the critic is just writing about himself. In defence of the method we could say that the documented facts of Shakespeare’s life are so sparse that it is impossible to avoid filling the gaps they leave with invention. If the result is a consistent and plausible way of explaining the evidence: the poems, the facts, the traditions – then it will do, it’s the nearest we ever really get to the truth.

But clearly this opens up other possibilities as well. If what happened at the core of Shakespeare’s being to generate Hamlet was much the same as what happened at the core of Greenblatt’s being at the death of his father, then there is nothing unique about the experience. Similar things obviously happen at the core of everybody’s being. And if we reach out from our own being to complete a story that lies dormant among the tattered traces of historical fact, then there are many other stories that we could tell, stories that might equally convincingly, or even more convincingly, account for the evidence.  

But did we not start with the ‘self’ as something individual, intrinsic, unique, irreplaceable?  Let me return to G M Hopkins. In the second part of ‘As kingfishers catch fire’, all things, including human beings, are ‘selves’. But in human beings there is something ‘more’. For the individuality that occupies humanity is also an Other – the God who, as creator, indwells all human beings. Man can ‘be’ godlike, expressing a god-given grace, which for Hopkins means ‘acting’ out the nature of Christ. So individuality is now multiple, since human being is also sharing in the being of God through the human Christ. ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places’. ‘Plays’ like a light, like an actor, like a child, human and divine at once. And since this is of course a poem of Trinitarian Christian theology, the grace that human beings can participate in is a grace given from ‘the Father’, and returned to the Father in the performance of Christ-like action, ‘graces’. This is what we’re here for. For that I came.

Intrinsic, unique, irreplaceable individuality turns out to be multiple, relational, a family affair. Inside the human self are God the father, God the son and God the Holy Spirit as well as the unique human self. Human beings are linked to one another through their common creation at the hands of the maker of all things. Action expresses being as interaction. The ‘self’ is after all a busy, crowded place.  Biography is not intrinsic but relational.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is-
Christ-for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

 Works Cited

Aune, M.G., 2006. “Crossing the Border: Shakespeare Biography, Academic Celebrity, and the Reception of Will in the World”. Borrowers and Lenders 2(2), n.p.

Burrow, Colin. 2005. “Who Wouldn’t Buy It?” Review of Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt. London Review of Books, 27.2, 20 January, 9-11.

Duncan-Jones, Katherine. 2004. “Will-o’-the Wisp Forever.” Review of Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt. The Spectator, 9 October, 54.

Fowler, Alastair. 2005. “Enter Speed.” Review of Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt. Times Literary Supplement, 4 February, 3-5.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 1980. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Greenblatt, Stephen, 2001. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 2004. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: Norton.

Holderness, Graham, ed. 1988. The Shakespeare Myth. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Holderness, Graham, 2001. Cultural Shakespeare: essays in the Shakespeare Myth. Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press.

Hopkins, Gerard Manly. 1996. Selected Poetry. Catherine Phillips (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jenkyns, Richard. 2004. “Bad Will Hunting.” Review of Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt. The New Republic, 22 November, 21-24.

Madden, John, dir. 1998. Shakespeare In Love. Performers Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush, Tom Wilkinson, Anthony Sher, Judi Dench, Gwyneth Paltrow. USA. Miramax.

 Marowitz, Charles, 2005. “Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World”. Swans Commentary, 25 April.

Middlebrook, Diane, 2006. “The Role of the Narrator in Literary Biography”. South Central Review 23.3. 5-18.

Potter, Lois. 2005. Review of Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt. Shakespeare Quarterly 56.3: 34-76.

Taylor, Gary. 2004. “Stephen, Will, and Gary too.” Review of Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt. The Guardian, 9 October, 9.

 Wells, Stanley, 2002. Shakespeare: for all time. London: Macmillan.

---

During the years 1963 to 1968 Anthony Burgess was living in Chiswick, West London. He moved there with his first wife Lynne the year after A Clockwork Orange was published, and stayed there for five years, writing 6 novels, 3 books of criticism and several translations. A few months after Lynne’s death in March 1968, Burgess left West London and England for good.

This period was a time of great creativity for Burgess. He wrote several novels, including his biographical novel about Shakespeare Nothing Like the Sun[1], thriller Tremor of Intent and the comic sequel Enderby Outside. He was also composing piano music at this time, and in 1968 he wrote the script, lyrics and music for an unmade Hollywood musical about Shakespeare, under the working title ‘The Bawdy Bard’.  

1964 was the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth in 1564, and Burgess’s major contribution was the publication of his novel Nothing Like the Sun. He’d rushed to finish it the previous autumn it so it could be published in April 1964 to coincide with the Shakespeare anniversary; and he wanted to be in London to promote the novel.  

Nothing Like the Sun is a fictional biography of Shakespeare. So its plot derives from the known historical facts about Shakespeare’s life and work: his Stratford social and family context; his parentage, marriage and children; his success as a poet and playwright; his connection with the Earl of Southampton; his participation in the business side of the London theatres; his death in Stratford in 1616. In his autobiography Burgess wrote:

I had been reading pretty widely, ever since my student days, in books about Shakespeare, in Elizabethan documents, in scholarly background history. I had taken a lot of notes feverishly, making a chronological table which related the known facts of Shakespearean biography to the wider events of the time.[2] 

But you can’t make a novel with this set of facts. So Burgess used invention, speculation, imagination, fantasy and a biographical interpretation of Shakespeare’s own works to fill out a fictional life for him, partly by providing answers to all the questions thrown up by the facts. Why are there two names in the records of Shakespeare’s marriage? Why did a 17th century anecdote claim that Shakespeare had been ‘a schoolmaster in the country’? How did Shakespeare find his way from Stratford to London, and enter the theatre as a professional writer? Burgess weaves stories to account for the problems in the documentary record, in much the same way as Shakespeare’s biographers do. Because the facts don’t make sense unless you embroider them.

The main source for the story of Shakespeare’s life in Nothing Like the Sun is however Shakespeare’s own writing, his plays and poems, especially the Sonnets, which do seem to tell a story about the poet’s love affairs, first with a man, the ‘fair friend’, then with a woman, the ‘dark lady’. In the novel Shakespeare has a full-blown affair with the Earl of Southampton, and is infected with syphilis by the ‘Dark Lady’, who is a black woman from Malaya, named Fatimah. Shakespeare encounters her first in a Bristol brothel, and then later as a London lady. On a visit home to Stratford Shakespeare finds that his wife is having an affair with his brother.  In this scenario much of Shakespeare’s work becomes autobiographical: the ‘fair friend;’ and ‘dark lady’ of the Sonnets are identified; all the emotions in the Sonnets, lust and love, heterosexual and homosexual, sexual disgust, jealousy, are explained; and even the story of sexual betrayal in Hamlet becomes Shakespeare’s own story (as it is in James Joyce’s Ulysses).  Of course there’s no real evidence for any of this; but it makes good fiction.

Burgess is doing two things here. He’s writing a historical novel about Shakespeare’s life, though its one that’s full of invention, speculation, imagination as well as historical fact. In other words, it’s a historical novel. He’s also writing a Shakespeare biography, but from the inside out: searching out the inner truth of experience that can attempt to explain the documentary facts.

In 1970 Burgess published an illustrated biography, Shakespeare, that simply inverted the novel, working from the outside in, foregrounding documentary and historical records and pushing interpretation into the same fictional territory as that explored in the novel.[3] In one sense Burgess’s literary biography and his novel mirror one another, since in Shakespeare the life illustrates the plays and poems, while in Nothing Like the Sun the plays and poems illuminate the life. Burgess distinguished between the two texts by calling the novel ‘deliberate invention’ by contrast with the ‘painfully amassed factuality’ of the biography. In my view, not so you’d notice. But then ‘deliberate invention’ has always been the business of Shakespeare biography, though its practitioners tend to deny it, and claim the authority of historical record. By starting with factual fiction and moving on to fictionalised fact, Burgess really blew the lid off the whole Shakespeare biography enterprise.

In between the novel and the biography there lies another work, this time one that was never published or performed. In early 1968, Burgess flew to Hollywood to discuss what he hoped would be a film script for his first major motion picture.  Nothing Like the Sun had been noticed in Hollywood, and this project was to be an offshoot of that, a life of Shakespeare that would also be a film musical. From its inception, the project had two titles, Will!, the title Burgess preferred, and The Bawdy Bard, the title preferred by Hollywood. 

1960’s Hollywood was riding a wave of very successful British musicals, like My Fair Lady and Camelot, and historical blockbusters like A Lion in Winter and A Man for All Seasons. Warner Brothers Seven Arts was eager to create a similar success with Burgess’s Shakespeare. In You’ve Had Your Time, Burgess describes how he warmed to former actor, now producer William Conrad, who, he noted, was ‘a true actor, in that he knew Shakespeare’ (143), and they became friends. Burgess was however amused but put off by Conrad’s improvisation of a song for the movie that began To be or not to be in love with you,/ To spend my life hand in glove with you (143). This pretty much sums up his experience of this project.

The film was to be a major studio project involving millions of dollars.[4] A successful film would make Burgess’s name as a marketable Hollywood script writer, a valuable credential since he was also working on a script for a film production of Enderby, and hoped to see other books become film projects. (YHYT 185)  He wrote about twenty songs (both music and lyrics) that were recorded with full orchestration by Warner Brothers, but he was nevertheless concerned that the story was damaged by the songs, that Shakespeare’s genius was diminished by the imposition of the standard lyrics of the 1960’s musical, no matter how good the lyrics and music might be. Later he described the whole enterprise as ‘ghastly.

The film was to be directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who had directed All about Eve, a film Burgess ‘considered a masterpiece’ (YHYT 186). Mankiewicz had directed the acclaimed Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando as well as a film version of Guys and Dolls. Mankiewicz needed a big successful movie after the flop of Cleopatra. He’d had already made some casting decisions – Maggie Smith as Anne, her husband Robert Stephens as Will, James Mason as Philip Henslowe, Peter Ustinov as Ben Jonson, Jessica Tandy as Queen Elizabeth. No decision was made about the Dark Lady, although Burgess somewhat facetiously suggested Diana Ross (YHYT 157). 

There is only one manuscript of Burgess’s screenplay of Will or the Bawdy Bard, Burgess’s papers at the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas. The manuscript  includes all the lyrics that were later cut when Mankiewicz decided, somewhat to Burgess’s relief, that the film was not to be a musical (YHYT 185).  Burgess’s doubts about the screenplay and the project in general were reinforced by a growing sense he had that the film would never be made. ‘Desperately trying to finish the script, I yet knew that it was not going to reach the screen’ (YHYT 190). His premonition proved correct: Warner Brothers was being sold and even though studio executives supported the project, all existing enterprises were scrapped when the new regime started’, as Burgess explained in an interview.  In 1969, Burgess  contracted to write the ‘brief biography of Shakespeare which should be sumptuously illustrated’ so that he would not waste the research he had done for the film (YHYT 109). This is his ‘coffee table’ book, called simply Shakespeare, published in 1970.

Would Will! have been as successful as Shakespeare in Love if it had been made? Who knows. In any case the screenplay eventually found a home in Burgess’s final Enderby novel, Enderby’s Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby.[5] This is a hilarious satire in which Mr Enderby, who has published a short story about  Shakespeare, the Gunpowder Plot and the King James Bible – the story appears at the beginning of the novel – is travelling to Indiana to produce a stage musical on the life of Shakespeare. Burgess recycles the whole process of his involvement in the unmade film. The lyrics and the plot of the musical that Enderby creates in Indiana are all straight from Will!, and the story of the stage production satirises Burgess’s own experience in Hollywood and with Americans. But there’s also a love story for Enderby as he falls for April Elgar, a black singer rather like Diana Ross, who is to play the Dark Lady in this stage production.  

You get a sense from all this of what an innovative writer Burgess was. Between 1963 and 1968 he revolutionised Shakespeare biography, bringing together fact and fiction as no-one else had ever done. He made a significant contribution to the historical novel, opening the way for that double perspective, simultaneously ancient and modern, that characterises the form today. And he wrote a musical version of Shakespeare’s life, unluckily never produced, that was a precursor of the hugely successful and influential Shakespeare in Love.

I’ve found Burgess’s work on Shakespeare immensely inspiring and influential. In my Nine Lives of William Shakespeare I was able to bring together fact and fiction in a similarly original way.[6] Nine Lives of William Shakespeare accepts that Shakespeare’s lives are multiple and discontinuous, and yet are facets of a single life. It speculates freely about Shakespeare’s life, but admits that the exercise is one of speculation. Half of the book deals in historical facts, showing how much and how little we know about Shakespeare; and showing how these facts have been interpreted and embroidered by biographers. The other half is fiction. Each chapter gives the facts and their interpretation, then adds a fictional component. Some are historical stories; some reflect on Shakespeare’s ‘afterlife’: his reputation, his mythology.  Other fictions quit the territory of biography proper, in those cases where the historical record  actually contains very little evidence. I’ve followed Burgess in resorting to fiction to write about the legends of ‘Shakespeare in love’ with the Earl of Southampton and the ‘Dark Lady of the Sonnets’, since there is virtually no evidence at all. Hence it seems legitimate for a fictional commentary to take the form of invention. Which is why people might be surprised to find in the book characters like Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, Ernest Hemingway and so on. Roger Lewis, another biographer of Burgess, reviewing the book in the Daily Mail, called Nine Lives ‘the best and most enjoyably imaginative book based on Shakespeare since Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun’.

And my novel Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter[7] begins with what is virtually a plagiarism of Anthony Burgess’s work. I mentioned the short story on Shakespeare and the Gunpowder Plot that appears at the beginning of Enderby’s Dark Lady: it’s supposed to be the work that gets him noticed in America, just as Nothing Like the Sun got Burgess noticed in Hollywood. In Burgess’s fantasy it’s actually Ben Jonson who pretends to be part of the Plot, but he’s really acting as a government informer. I’ve taken the germ of the story and played it quite differently, with Shakespeare himself becoming one of the key conspirators in the Plot, indeed its architect. Some of my scenes, such as Shakespeare meeting with Robert Cecil, are stolen from Burgess.  Roger Lewis wrote of this book: ‘It’s as if Hilary Mantel, Anthony Burgess and Bram Stoker got together at a diabolical writers’ conference and after a few too many bottles in the witching hours came up with the rollicking manuscript’.

Making Shakespeare a vampire hunter isn’t perhaps the sort of thing that Anthony Burgess himself would have thought of attempting. But who knows? Enderby’s Dark Lady concludes with another, loosely related, short story called ‘The Muse’. The mode of this tale is science fiction. It’s the 23rd century, and people can travel round in time and space, navigating by the use of musical instruments. But Time is ‘plastic’ and ‘curved’ and ‘warped’, there are innumerable parallel universes, and you can’t be sure where you’re going to end up. A literary historian called Paley is trying to get to Shakespeare’s time, taking a copy of the First Folio with him. He finds Shakespeare writing, laboriously and painfully, plays we’ve never heard of. Paley is then arrested as a madman, and Shakespeare left with the book, which he starts to copy out:

            The Merchant of Venice. A Comedy

            Then on he went, not blotting a line.

Apparently all Shakespeare’s good plays have been smuggled from the future in the same way. So here Burgess uses sci-fi fantasy to explore the intricate and complex ways in which we reach out to history and to the writing of the past. How do we engage with the past without taking our own baggage with us? Do we not, when reading literature of the past, make up a lot of what we supposedly find?  

---

[1] Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun: a story of Shakespeare’s Love Life (London: Heinemann, 1964).

[2]  ‘Genesis and Headache’, in Afterwords: Novelists on their Novels, edited by Thomas M. McCormack (NY: Harper, 1968), 28-47.

[3] Anthony Burgess, Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. New edition London: Folio Society, 2015).  

[4] See Kay Smith, ‘Burgess and Will!: Anthony Burgess’s Cinematic Presentation of Shakespearean Biography’, Anthony Burgess Newsletter 4 (August 2001), 32-53.

[5] Anthony Burgess, Enderby’s Dark Lady: or, No End to Enderby (London: Hutchinson, 1984).

[6] Graham Holderness, Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2011).

[7] Graham Holderness, Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter (London: Top Hat Books, 2015).

Preached at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 23 April 2018

Today we celebrate two things: William Shakespeare’s Birthday, and the feast of St George. We don’t know for sure that Shakespeare was born on 23 April, only that he was baptized on the 26th April, 1564, here in this church. But it’s a useful coincidence that juxtaposes, on the same day, the birthday of our national poet with the feast day of our patron saint.

But St George is of course the national saint of a nation that doesn’t exist, and has perhaps never existed: England. Before the English had formed anything like a national state or government, they had already started colonizing other nations – Wales, Scotland, Ireland – so Britain came into being before England. England was an empire before it became a nation, always looking outwards, always expanding, never looking inwards, never reflecting on its own identity. Now England co-exists in the United Kingdom with other nations that have their own government and parliament and national culture, while England has none of these. Our nationality is British; our passports are issued by the United Kingdom. We belong to a church, the Church of England, the national church of a nation that doesn’t exist.

So who was St George, this national saint without a nation? He came from Cappadocia, which is now in Turkey, and was martyred in Palestine in the early 4^th century AD.  We don’t even know what he did, except that as a Christian he defied the Roman state during the persecution of Diocletian, and was beheaded. By the 11th century he had become in Eastern Europe the dragon-slayer, and a warrior saint. As such he was adopted by Western crusaders. By the fourteenth century the cross of St George had become a sort of uniform for English soldiers and sailors, and St George’s Chapel in Windsor was a spiritual home for English chivalry. On April 23rd the flag of St George flies proudly from the roofs of our parish churches because, in 1416, the year after the Battle of Agincourt, St George’s Day was made a great feast in the calendar of the Church of England. ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more’, says Shakespeare’s Henry V: ‘Cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”’ Harry, England, St George; king, country, church. Monarchy, patriotism and faith, a little late in the day defining the national identity of the ‘noblest English’.

This year, 2018, we are commemorating the final stages of the First World War. This year the celebration of the Armistice on 11 November will be 100 years since the first Armistice. A celebration of peace, not war; a commemoration of loss, not victory. Remembrance Day was of course founded shortly after the First World War, and the poppies we wear in November invoke the flowers of Flanders Fields.

But let’s go back a bit further, to the same region, but to a different time in history: to 1415, to the Battle of Agincourt, where an English army of just over 2000 men defeated a French army of 50,000 in an astonishing against-all-odds victory.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

That of course is Shakespeare’s dramatized Henry V, addressing his men before the battle. The words of this speech in Shakespeare’s 1599 play have become inseparable not only from our historical memory of Agincourt, but from other wartime emergencies in which this nation has stood and fought alone against insuperable odds. In 1940 Winston Churchill echoed Henry V when he celebrated the airmen who won the Battle of Britain – ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’. ‘The few’ – another moment in history where the British military defended the nation with extraordinary courage and heroism. Laurence Olivier’s great film of Henry V was released in 1944, and dedicated to the soldiers, sailors and airmen who took part in the D-Day landings.

Now most of that great speech in the play, when you look at it more closely, is not about the present moment, the moment on the battle-field where you’re facing the enemy: but about future commemoration. Shakespeare’s Henry V is virtually inventing Remembrance Day long before its time. Shakespeare looked back across nearly two centuries to Agincourt, and imagined Henry V looking forward to a future in which Agincourt is remembered as a great historical victory, an annual Remembrance Day. Those who fight and survive will remember the day with pride, recall their deeds, show their wounds (just as today we wear the poppies that symbolise a wound). But Agincourt will live not just in the memory of the soldiers who fought there, but as a permanent festival in the national memory:

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d …

And the battle won’t endure in memory just as a military victory. Henry sets out to transform a feast of French Catholic martyrdom – the feast of Saints Crispin and Crispian – into an anniversary of English national triumph. In future this annual ‘vigil’ will memorialise not the wounds of the executed martyrs, but wounds acquired in the course of achieving an English victory. The litany will not enumerate the names of saints, but the names of the heroic English, which also happen to be English place-names: ‘Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,/Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester’ (4.3.53-55) shall all in our ‘flowing cups’ be ‘freshly remembered.’ The link between ‘flowing cups’ of wine and commemoration inevitably suggests Holy Communion. But in this ritual the ‘host’, the consecrated body of Christ, will be replaced by a new sacrament in which the ‘host’ (4.3.34) of heroic English soldiers will be ‘familiar in [the] mouth’ (4.3.52) of each communicant. This narrative will be repeated until the end of the world, like the narrative of the Passion that informs the Eucharist in the Book of Common Prayer – ‘a perpetual memory of his precious death, until his coming again’.  Like the Passion, Agincourt will seal itself into sacramental remembrance by the shedding of blood: ‘For he today that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother’ (4.3.61-62).  This image of the royal blood commingling with that of his followers indicates that Henry is not offering himself as a martyr-leader to replace the Catholic saints, but rather insisting that the whole English army can collectively achieve such status by their willingness to shed blood for their country.  Shakespeare’s Henry V is a very Protestant king; but he’s also a very theatrical one: since the play itself is one of the ways in which the ritual of commemoration is kept.

Now people will tell you this is all jingoistic, and xenophobic, and Henry had no business to be in France anyway. But this is not just about war. It’s really about the nation, and the unity of the nation. The band of brothers we see on the battle-field, or the troupe of actors we see on the stage, stand for the nation as a whole.

And it’s also about the Church of England. The language Henry uses about the need for unity on the battlefield is largely drawn from the Book of Common Prayer, where it works to exhort the people to participate in the Eucharist, and in doing so to set aside all social differences and community divisions, and to become one in Christ. So this kind of Remembrance concerns the nation, and the need for the nation to remember together, to share memories, to meet on common ground. It also politically concerns the Church of England, and the way in which the church binds its community together, not by dogma, but by common action; not by doctrine, but by common worship. But Remembrance is also universal: since it concerns that sacrifice made once for all upon the Cross for all humanity.

Agincourt is any moment in history when the nation needs to stand together, speak with one voice, act with one purpose – the crisis of the Spanish Armada; Waterloo; the Battle of Britain. And today we still commemorate those soldiers and sailors and airmen because they did, and do, risk their lives to defend the nation, to defend its culture (including its church, its religion), to defend its freedom.  In November wear our poppies with pride in honour of those who shed their blood, of those who can show their wounds: because such sacrifice lies at the heart of our faith. As Jesus himself said: ‘Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for a friend’.

As long as Britain was a warlike, imperial power, colonizing other nations, Henry V, victor of Agincourt, was an unproblematical hero, and St George fitted the bill as a patron saint: the mediaeval knight, the crusader, dragon slayer, chivalric rescuer of maidens. St George was Britain, the dragon anyone we didn’t like, the maiden anyone we wanted to rescue or liberate. Today, in a Britain paralyzed by guilt about the Empire, conflicted about military virtues, and convinced that women should be saving themselves, he is more often a source of embarrassment. He’s marginalized in official culture, and tends to be taken up by minority groups of little Englanders opposed to immigration. His flag is often flown as an act of defiance.

But this really should not be so. In New York there is a wonderful statue of St George outside the United Nations building by the East River. St George is transfixing the dragon with his lance, and the dragon’s body is made from the casing of a German V2 rocket left over from the 2nd World War. Here St George is peace conquering war; the strong nations uniting to defend the weak against aggression; the savior binding the dragon of violence, as in the Book of Revelation. This international symbol of St George is one we as a nation should be able to relate to. Strength used to help the helpless; power employed to save. In this emblem of sacrifice, deliverance, redemption, St George the martyr and St George the warrior are re-united. This is not St George the logo of the British Empire, but St George the soldier of Christ, who bears the cross of Christ on his breast, and who bravely stands up to violence and injustice to save the weak and oppressed who need his help. As poet Edmund Spenser put it, describing his version of St George, Redcross:

For on his breast, a bloody cross he bore,

The dear remembrance of his dying lord

For whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore

And dead, as living, ever him adored.

Was William Shakespeare a Metropolitan Intellectual or a Provincial Butcher Boy?

Announcing his discovery as to the exact location of Shakespeare’s tenure in Bishopsgate, historian Geoffrey Marsh depicts him as part of an Elizabethan Notting Hill set.

“Within a few years of migrating to London from Stratford, he was living in one of the wealthiest parishes in the city, alongside powerful public figures, wealthy international merchants, society doctors and expert musicians. The merchants had connections across Europe and the doctors were linked to the latest progressive thinking in universities in Italy and Germany. Living in what was one of the power locales of London would have also enhanced Shakespeare’s status as he developed his career, sought a family coat of arms and planned to buy an impressive and expensive house in Stratford. It’s the equivalent of today’s Notting Hill businessmen, living alongside artists, particularly musicians”.

At the time Shakespeare was a tenant of the Company of Leathersellers. Many early biographical traditions about Shakespeare, such as the famous deer-stealing legend, identity him as a boy from an agricultural trading family, who worked with livestock; who turned up in London looking for a job; and who set to work applying the skills he had learned in the management of domestic animals. In a later book, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753), it was asserted that ‘Shakespear, driven to the last necessity, went to the playhouse door, and pick’d up a little money by taking care of the gentlemens’ horses who came to the play’. The author traced this story back to William D’Avenant, who claimed he was Shakespeare’s godson (and even perhaps his illegitimate son). Shakespeare is described as prospering in this business and expanding it, and so coming to the notice of the company, whose bosses brought him in as actor, and then writer.

Shakespeare’s first biographer Nicholas Rowe also has Shakespeare arriving in London’s theatre land as a poor young man.

It is at this Time, and upon this Accident, that he is said to have made his first Acquaintance in the Play-house. He was receiv’d into the Company then in being, at first in a very mean Rank; But his admirable Wit, and the natural Turn of it to the Stage, soon distinguished him, if not as an extraordinary Actor, yet as an excellent Writer. (Some Account of the Life of Mr William Shakespeare, 1709).

The story is further corroborated from another source. It appears in a letter of 1693, written by a Mr. Dowdall, who had visited Stratford, and was told by the elderly parish clerk that ‘this Shakespeare was formerly in this town bound apprentice to a butcher; but that he ran from his master to London, and then was received into the playhouse as a serviture, and by this means had the opportunity to be what he afterwards proved’.

The idea that John Shakespeare was a butcher, and that his son worked in the business, assisting in the slaughtering of animals, was set out in John Aubrey’s Lives of Eminent Men (1696), the source of many Shakespearean biographical traditions.  According to Aubrey’s notes, John Shakespeare was a butcher, and his son a butcher’s boy: ‘I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade … When he killed a calf, he would doe it in a high style and make a speech. There was at that time another butcher’s son in this towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a naturall wit, his acquaintance, and coetanean, but dyed young.’

Scholars have dismissed as impossible to believe the image of the young Shakespeare practising rhetoric while slaughtering livestock. Poetry and butchering? Literary greatness in a slaughterhouse? The great scholar Samuel Schoenbaum (William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, OUP, 1977), for instance insisted that John Shakespeare could not possibly have been a butcher, because he was a glover who ‘served out his apprenticeship’, and indeed probably ‘undertook an apprenticeship of at least seven years’. His son William would also have served the same seven-year apprenticeship. Nor could he have mixed trades that were legally kept separate: ‘stringent regulations governing the wholesomeness of meat kept the two occupations separate’.(p. 14) ‘Glovers, as we have seen, were restrained from looking after their own slaughter­ing’. (p. 60) John Shakespeare is certainly mentioned in various historical records as a glover: when he was sued for £8 in 1556; and when he set his mark on a bond in 1592. An early piece of tradition, dating to c. 1657, places John Shakespeare in his glover’s shop, a ‘merry-cheeked old man’ who spoke jovially of his famous son as someone he could always crack a joke with. (Schoenbaum, pp. 30-1)

Here Schoenbaum appears to be placing a barrier of solid historical facts between ‘Shakespeare and Son’, and the unpleasant trade of butchering. Clearly for him it is preferable to think of Shakespeare’s father as a respectable tradesman who served his apprenticeship and then worked in fine leather, a craftsman or artisan, rather than a mere tradesman, or even worse a slaughterman who slit the throats of squealing pigs and bleating calves. That merry-cheeked old man, standing in a provincial shop full of fine leather gloves, provides a safe and respectable haven for Shakespeare’s youth. As we have seen, Schoenbaum claims as fact what turns out to be more like prejudice. While claiming to disperse the gossip and rumour of tradition, and replace it with hard solid fact, he in fact weaves the facts together with inventions of his own. He does this with the confidence of academic authority, convinced that his critical and sceptical analysis of the historical records is much more substantial than some of the records he is analysing.

In fact, however, there is no evidence whatsoever that either John or William served any kind of apprenticeship; and much evidence that John Shakespeare did not restrict himself to one trade. Schoenbaum does not quote the regulations he cites as keeping trades separate, but refers to an old Shakespeare biography, Shakespeare’s Family and Friends (1911) as a reliable source of historical evidence. This earlier book mentions 16^th century legislation that sought to maintain divisions of labour between trades such as skinning, butchery, tanning and working in leather. The existence of laws on the statute book is taken as evidence that they were scrupulously adhered to. Yet those laws existed precisely because people worked across different trades, resulting in a long history of competition and mutual recrimination between the craft guilds.

John Shakespeare was fairly typical of his time in having a finger in a number of economic pies. The historical records shows that he was a glover, but also a farmer (‘agricola’), a dealer in wool, and a tanner.  He is described in records of 1573 and 1578 as a ‘whyttawer’, one who prepared the hides of deer, calves and sheep to make white leather. (Schoenbaum p. 30) A man who made his living from farming, and from processing and selling animal skins and wool, might also have slaughtered and skinned and fleeced animals he himself reared. For his eldest son to assist him in his work would have been the most natural thing in the world. And if John Shakespeare had scrupulously adhered to the laws of the land, he would have stuck to his trade of glove-making, and not dealt in wool, or lent money at interest, and get into trouble with the law quite so often.

This analysis points us towards a particular view of William Shakespeare’s origins, which is that they were rural and bucolic, having to do with field and cattle-market; and that they involved the rearing and exploitation of animals, which were slaughtered for their meat and for their skins. It places him in a peasant environment, where agricultural divisions of labour were not yet well established. It locates him in a context of hard and unpleasant labour that entailed what many people today would think of as extreme cruelty to animals.

So little credence is given to the story of Shakespeare reciting poetry while slaughtering, not in my view because it is inherently improbable, but because academic critics and biographers simply cannot imagine so close an intimacy between intellectual and physical labours. Speaking of the memorial bust of Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, editor and critic John Dover Wilson insisted that he could not have looked like this: ‘This might suit well enough with an affluent and retired butcher, but does gross wrong to the dead poet’ (John Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare: a Biographical Adventure, CUP 1932). It seems to have slipped Wilson’s mind that Shakespeare might well in his later years have resembled his father, who very likely was an ‘affluent and retired butcher’.

Yet this plebeian background is what produced the greatest dramatists of the age, butcher-boy Shakespeare and bricklayer’s son Ben Jonson. Closer to home in Stratford, John Shakespeare traded with a tanner called Henry Field, and took him to court for the price of some barley. Field’s son Richard was apprenticed to a London stationer, and then a printer, whose business he took over (together with his French wife) when his master died. This was the Richard Field who published Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis. The stink of tanning that surrounded these country boys in their youth, did not stop them from making these substantial and complementary contributions to the literature of the Renaissance. And although, as writer and printer, they worked of course in paper, it could be more than coincidental that their fathers’ trade backgrounds might also have included the manufacture of vellum and parchment from animal skins.

From Graham Holderness, Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury 2011). For more adventures in the skin trade, see Graham Holderness, Meat, Murder, Malfeasance, Medicine and Martyrdom: Smithfield Stories (Edward Everett Root, 2019).

This week Sgt Alexander Blackman, late of the Royal Marines, publishes his memoir Marine A (Mirror Books, 2019). Blackman achieved notoriety as the soldier who fired a bullet into the body of his Taliban captive while quoting Hamlet. He was the first British soldier to be convicted of murder on a foreign battlefield. Read here about the deeper links between Marine A’s experience and Shakespeare’s tragedy of Hamlet, in an extract from an article ‘Hamlet in Helmand’ by Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey. The full article is published in Critical Insights: Hamlet, edited by Robert C. Evans (NY: Salem Press, 2019).

Hamlet in Helmand: Wild Justice (EXTRACT)

Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey

“Shuffle off this mortal coil you c***.

It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us.”[1]

This is a quotation from the recorded speech of Sergeant Alexander Blackman of the British Royal Marines as he fired a bullet into the body of a captured Afghan insurgent in Helmand Province in September 2011.

Inside that quotation lies another much more familiar quotation, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

Must give us pause. (3.1.67-9)

Sgt Blackman was identified not as a soldier who killed his prisoner, but as a soldier who quoted Shakespeare while doing so.

In September 2011 Sgt Blackman was on patrol in Helmand Province with 42 Commando Royal Marines, and came across a Taliban insurgent who, in the course of attacking a British forward post, had been mortally wounded by an Apache helicopter. MP Richard Drax, introducing a Parliamentary Debate in 16 September 2015, said:

Sergeant Blackman and his patrol were directed to an insurgent who had been fatally wounded by gunfire from an Apache helicopter. Horribly exposed in a known hotspot for enemy activity, they knew that other insurgents were in the area. They dragged the fatally wounded man to cover.[2] 

The Apache is equipped with the M230 chain gun, which fires six-hundred-and-twenty-five 30 mm rounds, each capable of piercing an armoured vehicle, a minute. Blackman and his comrades pulled the fatally wounded (or dead) man out of sight of a surveillance balloon. The whole operation was filmed via a helmet camera worn by one of the Marines who accompanied Sgt Blackman. The audio component of the video recording (the former was publicly released in 2013, the latter in 2017), shows clearly that the Marines debated whether or not to administer first aid, and tried to keep their actions shielded from the sight and surveillance of other army personnel. They also show that Blackman shot the insurgent with a 9mm pistol, admitted that he had “just broke the Geneva Convention”, and enjoined secrecy on his comrades – “obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas.”

A year later, five Marines were charged with murder. Charges were dropped against two, and proceeded with against three, including Blackman. A court-martial found Blackman alone guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment (minimum ten years) and discharged in disgrace from the Marines. He lost his appeal, though his sentence was reduced from ten years to eight. He was the first British serviceman to be convicted of the murder of an enemy combatant on a foreign battlefield.

Following Blackman’s conviction, support for the Marine sprang up from various quarters, both within the military and the general public, producing a press campaign, social media support groups and petitions to have him released, or his sentence reduced. In 2017 Blackman’s conviction was reduced from murder to manslaughter with diminished responsibility, the “disgrace” stigma was removed from his dismissal, and he was released from prison.   

There are two interpretations of this complex and difficult case. The court-martial convicted Blackman of murder, a verdict supported by senior military officers, the court-martial judicial system, the Ministry of Defence, and implicitly the House of Commons. Within this perspective Blackman acted both illegally and dishonourably, since it was his duty under the Geneva Convention to protect the wounded prisoner.  

The opposing argument, which is one of mitigation rather than defence, was the basis for the campaign of public support for Blackman. At his trial Blackman admitted that he had shot the man, but claimed that he believed him to be already dead. In the audio recording, several of the soldiers offer the opinion that he was already dead, supporting Blackman’s contention. He had tried to take out his anger on a corpse, he claimed, and felt deeply ashamed of his actions.  

There is however a third way of interpreting this incident, via the Shakespeare play alluded to in Blackman’s battlefield citation. The context of the quotation is of course Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy, and the prince’s meditations on suicide. Hamlet, however, is not a play about eschatology, but a play about revenge and justice: in particular about whether they can ever be the same thing. We can infer that this aspect of Hamlet was very much in Sgt Blackman’s mind from his subsequent remark, addressed to the dead or dying prisoner: “It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us.”

This follow-up remark is not of course a quotation from Shakespeare, but it certainly operates as a citation, by irresistibly invoking Hamlet’s prior justification, confided to Horatio, for killing Claudius:

Does it not, think’st thee, stand me now upon –
He that hath killed my king and whored my mother,
Popped in between th’election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage – is’t not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is’t not to be damned
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil? (5.2.64-71)

Horatio implicitly agrees: “Why, what a king is this!” In the same vein one of Sgt Blackman’s comrades endorses the validity of his talionic assertion – “It’s nothing more than you would do to us” – with the laconic “I know.”

Nothing you wouldn’t do to us. “In Afghanistan”, observed Richard Drax in the Parliamentary Debate, “the enemy were clever, motivated, difficult to identify, ruthless and cruel. Torture and death faced those who fell into their hands”. (Hansard Column 339WH)  Hamlet’s list of charges against Claudius amounts to an insistent protestation that in this case revenge and justice are perfectly aligned: “is’t not perfect conscience / To quit him?” (5.2.70) The Royal Marines might well have been engaged in a very similar effort of self-justification.

“Revenge,” wrote Francis Bacon, “is a kind of wild justice.” (Bacon 9). Revenge is no more a part of the modern judicial system than it was in Shakespeare’s day. But it remains, over 2000 years after the Sermon on the Mount, an obstinately enduring element of popular culture.

Hamlet is sent by his father’s ghost on a mission of revenge; but he interprets it as one of justice. Most analysts of the play have agreed with him. Sgt Blackman was also sent, it could be argued, by his political leaders, on a mission of revenge, for the atrocity of 9/11. The 2001 invasion by the Anglo-American coalition was triggered by the Taliban government’s refusal to surrender Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists, and expel Al-Qaeda from their territory. The coalition was joined in due course by NATO and United Nations forces. But notwithstanding the political motivation of the war, in common with all other military personnel involved in this campaign, Sgt Blackman was expected to operate within the parameters of British and international justice. As Colonel Bob Stewart, former UN Commander in Bosnia, said in the Parliamentary Debate:

… the law is clear. Servicemen and women have a duty and a right to kill the enemy, until that enemy comes under their control—de facto, a prisoner. Once the enemy is under control, they have a responsibility to care for that person. In this case, clearly, Marine A did wrong by killing, or assuming he was killing, someone. That is against the law of armed conflict and the Geneva convention. (Hansard Column 355WH)

There was no space then within this sphere of responsibility for the kind of “wild justice” permissible in Hamlet, and indeed advocated by the revenge-based plot of thousands of popular films.

Filming the event via a helmet-mounted camera made it a form of theatre. Quoting Shakespeare inside such a theatrical environment renders the action a kind of performance. Clearly the Marine who did the filming never expected his little play to gain an audience; rather it was staged for his own private satisfaction. But once the film was released – fully in audio and partially in video – it became nothing less than a revenge tragedy played out among the cornfields of Helmand.

In legal terms, the distinction between drama and real life is absolute. In real life you cannot “poison in jest” (3.2.220): murder is murder. In the initial trial, according to the army, the courts and the MOD, Sgt Blackman murdered a man he should have saved. To Blackman’s supporters, a soldier who had been pushed beyond the limit by the terrible circumstances into which we ordered him made a vindictive but justifiable error of judgement. They stood on the principle that on occasion that which belongs inside the theatre may, even should, be permitted to operate outside it. In the event the law was found to concur with this principle of poetic justice.

Works Cited

Bacon, Francis. “Revenge”. The Essays of Francis Bacon. London: George Sawbridge, 1696.

House of Commons Hansard, 16 September 2015. [Available at] https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2015-09-16/debates/15091640000001/SgtAlexanderBlackman(MarineA) [Accessed 20 September 2018)

---

[1] From transcript of the ‘Helmand Province Incident’ audio recording, published by The Guardian, 25 October 2013. [Available at]  https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/25/royal-marines-court-martial-video-transcript [Accessed 20 September 2018]. The video recording was released in 2017 and is accessible on Youtube. [Available at] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKxCZxPmvN8 [Accessed 20 September 2018].

[2] Richard Drax, MP. House of Commons Hansard, 16 September 2015. Column 339WH.