'Shakespeare the Thinker'
Sir, – I was bemused by David Wootton calling me “Sir Brian” four times in one
letter (January 18). I excuse him from such deference in future. No titles,
please!
His reply to my letter is even more bemusing. What on earth have the recent
National Theatre productions of Euripides, or the Iraq war, got to do with
his claim (taken from a recently published dissertation) that the cutting
off of Lavinia’s hands in Titus Andronicus refers to “Jesuit martyrdoms”?
Katie Mitchell’s anachronisms are intentional, those in Elizabethan drama
accidental. I mentioned Peele’s co-authorship of Titus (a fact now generally
accepted) to show that even a diligent Elizabethan Latinist could refer to a
Roman custom and a medieval costume in the same breath, with no sense of
incongruity.
Wanting to teach literary critics a lesson, especially those who dare to
“argue about anachronisms with historians”, Wootton disputes my statement
that Lavinia’s mutilation is based on Ovid’s story, in Metamorphoses VI, of
how Tereus raped Philomela and cut out her tongue to prevent her identifying
him. In the poem, Philomela weaves the story into a cloth, a recourse hardly
practicable on the Elizabethan stage, so Peele and Shakespeare have her
write the name of her assailants in the sand, holding a stick between her
stumps. Wootton professes to find Titus Andronicus a “quite wonderful play”,
but he seems not to have noticed that three scenes identify Ovid as the
source. In Shakespeare’s Act II, scene iii, the villainous Moor Aaron gloats
that Bassianus faces a “day of doom”, for “His Philomel must lose her tongue
today”, when Tamora’s sons “make pillage of her chastity”. In Peele’s Act
IV, scene i, Titus’s son Lucius drops his schoolbooks, Lavinia picks up one
of them and “turns the leaves”. The boy identifies it: “’tis Ovid’s
Metamorphoses; / My mother gave it me”, and Titus sees that his daughter has
located “the tragic tale of Philomel”, which “treats of Tereus’ treason and
his rape”. He asks whether she was “thus surprised, sweet girl? / Ravished
and wronged, as Philomela was”, in a gloomy spot “Patterned by that the poet
here describes”. In Shakespeare’s Act V, scene i, Titus tells Tamora’s sons
that “worse than Tereus you used my daughter”, before killing them. When I
wrote that “everyone knows” that the mutilation came from Ovid, I was wrong:
David Wootton didn’t.
A historian intending, as Wootton wrote in his review (January 4), to catch
out literary scholars who think that they can “get away with almost any sort
of ahistorical thinking”, might have been expected to check his facts. In
that review, he rightly faulted the late A. D. Nuttall for stating that the
phrase “Et tu Brute?” in Julius Caesar derived from Suetonius, who in fact
records Caesar’s last words in Greek. Eagerly displaying his mastery of the
latest online resources, about.com, Wikipedia and EEBO (he can’t resist
taunting Nuttall for not having been “as familiar with EEBO as with the
Riverside Shakespeare”: considering that the former consists of several
thousand volumes, who could be?), Wootton devotes four paragraphs to
reporting his electronic quest for knowledge. He is pretty pleased with the
result (“Everything fits neatly together”) apart from having been informed
that the phrase “Et tu Brute?” first occurs in “the first edition” of
Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part III (1595). Wootton finds it “very puzzling,
indeed . . . almost incomprehensible”, that Shakespeare, who “is still the
first person to use the phrase”, should have done so in such “a throwaway
fashion in 1595 (or rather earlier, since the play was staged before 1592) .
. .”.
Here the confident historian commits an embarrassing howler. The work to which
he refers is The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke . . . as it was
sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his
servants. But, as Peter Alexander showed in 1929, this is a badly mangled
version of 3 Henry VI, put together by actors, who left out over 700 lines
of the authentic text, misremembered others and inserted odds and ends of
their own, probably selling the text to a printer when the company went
bankrupt in 1593. Literary scholars have known for some time that the Latin
phrase was in general circulation by 1592, and that its appearance in the
True Tragedie was not due to Shakespeare. Rather than condemning Tony
Nuttall for “ahistorical thinking”, David Wootton should consider with due
modesty the limits of his own knowledge.
BRIAN VICKERS
7 Abbot’s Place, London NW6.
Body-snatching Adam Smith
Sir, – Richard Bourke is right in his review (January 18) to protest against
Iain McLean’s apparent body-snatching in his Adam Smith, Radical and
Egalitarian, aided and abetted by the foreword by Gordon Brown. Bourke takes
us back to what Smith meant at his time. But this is either a somewhat
limited vision or it is disingenuous not to explore why there is
body-snatching from both the Left and the Right. Yes, intellectual history
must, on the one hand, contextualize; but, on the other, it must explain why
the general theory propounded by such a writer must be, if it is a theory at
all, applicable to different circumstances in later times. The problem is
the same as famously with Rousseau and Rousseauism, Hegel and Hegelianism
and (God save the mark!) Marx and Marxism. What creates different readings
of such writers? They all create political waves.
Bourke does say that “the combination of scholarship and politics comes at a
price” and that Maclean and others “are part of a more widespread endeavour
to retrieve Smith from the deforming clutches of Hayekian economic dogma”.
Indeed. But he seems to think that it is reasonable to conduct a debate with
Hayek himself. Perhaps. Yet he ignores the extraordinary extent to which
Adam Smith is invoked by Hayekian radical advocates of an unfettered free
market who may not have read The Wealth of Nations at all, almost certainly
not The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The price for the inevitable combination
of scholarship and politics does have to be paid – a certain open-mindedness
to the view not so much that texts are reinterpreted over time but that the
applicability of important theories will always be open to politically and
morally differing interpretations in different circumstances.
BERNARD CRICK
8A Bellevue Terrace, Edinburgh.
Krays on Tyneside
Sir, – Sean O’Brien’s enthusiastic review of Crusaders by Richard T. Kelly
(January 18) needs some correction, not least because of the danger that
newspaper reports have a tendency to become accepted as fact or, worse, as
history.
Jack Carter may well be “Tyneside’s best-known fictional criminal, memorably
played by Michael Caine”, but in the book he came not from Newcastle upon
Tyne but from Hull.
The author, Ted Lewis, grew up in Barton-on-Humber, attended art school in
Hull and set his novel – originally called Jack’s Return Home – there. It
was the director Mike Hodges who, intrigued by gangland stories emanating
from the North East at the time (plus the fact that Newcastle was, and is,
far more photogenic than Hull), opted to relocate the story to Tyneside.
I was a young national newspaper reporter (Daily Mirror) at the time,
covering, inter alia, local crime and corruption (notably T. Dan Smith and
John Poulson) as well as the thriving local nightclub scene in the North
East. I met Lewis many times on the set when his book was being filmed as
Get Carter, and he told me he had been unaware when he wrote it of the
amount of organized crime on Tyneside. There had been a widely reported
murder of a fruit machine distributor and a memorable misprint in the Newcastle
Evening Chronicle described one of the perpetrators as having been
“convicted of the murder of a one-armed bandit”.
The second point, which your reviewer admits is no more than a “proud part of
traditional hearsay”, is that “when the Krays tried to make inroads on
Tyneside they were shown the door and didn’t come back”. This actually
happened in Manchester, when the Kray twins arrived by train and were met by
members of the city’s CID who escorted them across the footbridge and put
them on the next train back to London.
The Krays did make at least one incursion into Newcastle, when they were
involved with the promotion of the former boxer Joe Louis who was doing a
form of cabaret act in nightclubs, chiefly answering questions from the
audience about his fights. As an entertainment it was a total flop and the
Krays (Ronnie had travelled with the performer as a sort of manager-minder)
believed that, at 300 miles north of their home manor, Newcastle was simply
not worth the bother.
REVEL BARKER
Belvedere, Hamri Street, Ghansielem, Gozo, Malta GC.
REM
Sir, – I sit down with interest to read Hugo Williams, but must say something
about his most recent column (Freelance, January 18), which is full of
generalizations. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes browsing the
Surrealist paintings at Tate Modern realizes that the movement was not
concerned with the dreamlike but with the space in between waking and
dreaming – the space occupied by, say, mythology in contemporary society;
Williams’s “problem of Surrealism” is actually its point. We know quite a
bit about sleep and dream – more than Freud did, in fact, considering that
the most significant discovery in sleep research last century, rapid eye
movement (REM), was made some fourteen years after his death. A recent study
by Kenton Kroker, The Sleep of Others and the Transformations of Sleep
Research (2007), reminds us that the discovery of REM pointed to the
physiological necessity of sleep and dreaming, making the argument that
Williams presents concerning the exhibition – “we know very little about
sleep or dreams” – seem illegitimate.
EVAN JONES
8 Elmswood Avenue, Fallowfield, Manchester.
David Gascoyne
Sir, – I am currrently writing for the Oxford University Press a Life of the
poet and translator David Gascoyne (1916–2001), whose net of influence and
friendship spread far and wide. I would be interested to hear from those who
knew him, or have papers relevant to my undertaking. I can be contacted at
R.Fraser@open.ac.uk
ROBERT FRASER
English Department, Open University, Milton Keynes.
Ass with ears
Sir, – As most of the TLS is still written in British rather than American
English, Leo A. Lensing’s translation of “Arsch mit Ohren” as “an ass with
ears” (January 11) calls for comment, since most readers would naturally
expect an ass to have ears. The couplet to our American friends, attributed
to James Morris (as I think she was then), is apposite: “Across the ether
th’ electronic message hums: / Asses are donkeys, arses are bums”.
MARTIN A. SMITH
1 Sandfield Road, Headington,
Oxford.
