Judges and politicians
Sir, – The review by Stein Ringen of Anthony King’s The British Constitution
(April 4) refers to the judiciary as having metamorphosed into a group of
political activists, thanks in part to the influence of European Union law
and the incorporation into British law of the European Convention on Human
Rights (and Fundamental Freedoms). Professor Ringen’s observations
concerning judges may well be true of the United States, where a very
different set of conditions hold sway. Yet in the United Kingdom both the
application of EU law and incorporation of the ECHR were brought about by
the Executive, and the claim that political activism on the part of the
judiciary has been engendered is difficult to reconcile with the total
absence of any apparent judicial policy on a primary “political” issue such
as war or peace, diplomacy, economic management, farm subsidies, and so on.
This perhaps illustrates the need to distinguish between the everyday conduct
of politics, on the one hand, in which no judicial hand intrudes, and
conduct by the judiciary which maintains internal restraints between
different branches of the constitutional power and, as Martin Loughlin and
Stephen Holmes among others have argued, serves ultimately to strengthen the
whole. Professor Ringen’s assertion of judicial activism also ignores the
extent to which other arms of our constitutional settlement have faced an
almost unprecedented series of incursions or attempted incursions by the
Executive on constitutional convention. Accusing the judges of becoming
politicians is dangerous, not only because it is wrong, but because it
elides the important role the law plays as a source of predictability and
restraint in the conduct of state affairs, and therefore as a source of
strength and legitimacy to the wider constitution. As Bracton noted,
expressing a paradox which is still with us, the king may have no man above
him, but is truly a king only where he reigns through law.
ERIC FRIPP
Mitre House Chambers, 9 Gower Street, London WC1.
Shah Jehan
Sir, – Ruth Morse’s belittling review of my novel The Enchantress of Florence
(April 4) would carry more weight if she had read the book more carefully
and knew a bit more about her subject.
First, the schoolgirl howlers. As the “enchantress” Qara Koz is clearly and
repeatedly described in the text as the sister of the emperor Akbar’s
grandfather, the first Mughal emperor, Babar, she would obviously be Akbar’s
great-aunt; yet twice in Professor Morse’s review she is called his aunt.
Also, even more laughably, Morse describes the emperor Jehangir, Akbar’s
son, as the architect of the Taj Mahal. But the Taj Mahal, as every Indian
schoolchild and Western tourist knows, was built by Jehangir’s successor,
Shah Jehan. It is difficult to take a critic seriously when her inaccuracies
are of this order.
Next, the ignorance. I did not invent the Mughals’ excessive fondness for
opium, or Jehangir’s rebellion against his father, or the scheming world of
the royal harem; nor is it my idea that the senior – and, yes, sexually
inactive – women of the Mughal court were figures of authority; nor did I
falsify the nature of the marriage of Niccolò Machiavelli and his wife
Marietta, which was characterized, as all historians agree, by her devotion
and his philandering. These are matters of record, and it’s surprising that
Ruth Morse doesn’t know it.
Finally, the prejudice. Underlying her review is a primitive feminist attack
whose thrust is that I take “revenge” on women in my books, which
collectively amount to an “assault” on the female sex. Like all
beating-your-wife accusations, this is hard for me to disprove. I can only
deny it, and point to the many readers, many of them female, who have
greatly appreciated the strength of the female characters in my work, from
Amina Sinai to Aurora Zogoiby and Vina Apsara. And I must hope that my novel
will find more generous and less clumsy readers than Professor Morse.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
c/o Wylie Agency, 17 Bedford Square, London WC1.
Changing gender
Sir, – I read with interest my husband Michael Greenberg’s Freelance of April
4, about our dinner with my transgendered friend. After my friend left,
Michael asked me why I thought someone might choose to change genders. I
replied that the evening’s revelation for me was how my friend spoke of her
decision in ideological terms, as though it was part of a radical stance
aimed to unleash oneself from societal strictures. “What if you made a
decision to have gender-change surgery on ideological grounds, and twenty
years later realized that you regretted it?” I asked Michael. I did not say,
nor do I think, that my friend “jumps from one fad to the next”.
PAT CREMINS
241 West 108 Street, Apartment 3a, New York 10025.
Simonides
Sir, – It was with great surprise that I read the letter on Simonides (March
14) from the architect Haris Kalligas. Her assertions strike me as faintly
comical. She writes: “one other claim of his was that (even though he was
born in 1820 – or 1824) he [Simonides] had been among the students in the
atelier of the great French painter Jacques-Louis David (who died in 1825)”.
In the 1986 articles about Simonides’s family home (which she cites in her
letter), Kalligas herself wrote: “ . . . he learnt painting from a pupil of
the great painter David”. However, I too wrote that Simonides learnt to
paint from the pupils of David (Il papiro di Artemidoro, Laterza, 2008,
pp52, 428–9).
I must, anyway, confess to being greatly impressed by the palaeographic skills
which, as an architect, Kalligas demonstrates in her letter.
LUCIANO CANFORA
University of Bari, Bari.
By Anon?
Sir, – Michael Egan believes that the anonymous manuscript play Thomas of
Woodstock is an early work by Shakespeare and prefers to call it Richard II,
Part One (Letters, March 28). In the journal Medieval and Renaissance Drama
in England, 14 (2002), I set forth evidence that Woodstock was composed in
the seventeenth century, probably by Samuel Rowley, author of When You See
Me You Know Me (1605), a chronicle history play on Henry VIII. Egan devoted
a substantial part of the introduction to his edition of Woodstock to
attacking my article, which he seemed to me to misrepresent. In Research
Opportunities in English Renaissance Drama, 46 (2007), I have responded to
Egan’s arguments, shown that Woodstock cannot be an early work by
Shakespeare, and strengthened the case for Rowley’s authorship and a
seventeenth-century date of composition.
MACDONALD P. JACKSON
English Department, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland.
Faustus translation
Sir, – I share L. D.’s concern (NB, April 4) that there has been no discussion
of the controversial attribution to Coleridge of the 1821 Faustus
translation in the Letters pages of the TLS. One would certainly have
expected it following the less than rigorous review in your pages. The
problem may be that letters need to be cut down to printable length, and,
when a detailed and lengthy argument has to be presented, the internet has
the advantage of space over a letters page, and the advantage of rapid
dissemination over a printed scholarly journal. How these different media
can work in parallel is still being learned by all of us. The page on
www.friendsofcoleridge.com/Faustus.htm (referred to by L. D.) is available
for anyone who can bring forward overlooked evidence that has a bearing on
the Burwick/McKusick attribution claim after the objections raised by Roger
Paulin, William St Clair and Elinor Shaffer have shown how speculative it
is, in its present form. To give one example: the only known contemporary
source claiming Coleridge was translating Faust is Johann Heinrich Bohte, a
German bookseller based in London, in a letter to Goethe. If more was known
about Bohte it might be possible to evaluate whether he was passing on
hearsay to gratify Goethe, or was a reliable and well-informed witness.
PAUL CHESHIRE
74 Wells Road, Bath.
Elgar
Sir, – It is misleading of Leofranc Holford-Strevens to characterize Anthony
Payne’s “elaboration” of the sketches of Elgar’s Third Symphony as a forgery
(April 4). Payne has been quite open about his contribution, and has even
written a book about it. It is surely also wrong to imply generally that
completing unfinished musical works cannot be a virtuous activity. Musical
works exist through performance, and many of us would rather hear a
completion than not hear the work at all or hear it as a fragment. And
sometimes another hand can indeed complete a work along the lines the
composer intended. Examples include Tovey’s completion of the final fugue of
Bach’s Art of Fugue, and Cerha’s of the orchestration of the last act of
Berg’s Lulu. As for Schubert’s Newly Finished Symphony, about which
Holford-Strevens is pleased to sneer, it has long been argued that the B
minor Rosamunde entracte either is, or serves well as, the last movement.
The Schubert scholar Brian Newbould orchestrated the sketch of the scherzo,
filling in a patch with other Schubert material, thereby completing the
symphony. The result has been recorded several times, and I, for one, prefer
to hear the symphony in this form. If a completion is unsatisfactory it is
open to others to devise a new one, as a number of scholars, notably Robert
Levin, have done for Mozart’s Requiem. Admittedly some completions need more
conjecture than others, such as Deryck Cooke’s of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony,
the two main completions of the finale of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, and
Robert Levin’s version of Mozart’s C Minor Mass, but the fact that the
attempt is hazardous does not mean it should not be made.
STEPHEN BARBER
Greystones, 37 Lawton Avenue,
Carterton, Oxon.
Nathaniel Mist
Sir, – In his review of Valerie Rumbold’s edition of The Dunciad, Henry Power
makes reference to “the Whiggish periodical”, Mist’s Weekly Journal (April
4).
The most notorious Jacobite on Grub Street, Nathaniel Mist was far from being
a Whig. In 1728, soon after the spat with Pope, Mist found himself exiled in
France after managing to libel George II, his late father, the Prime
Minister Robert Walpole, and the Duchess of Kendal in one go. His household
was arrested, his printshop ransacked, and his paper relaunched in his
absence as the slightly more temperate Fog’s Weekly Journal. Pope may well
have been justified in attacking Mist and his paper, but I have just spent
the last few years ploughing through every single issue of both Mist’s and
Fog’s and still don’t think the paper deserves to be called tedious, let
alone Whiggish – whichever may be the worse.
MATTHEW SYMONDS
14a Cholmeley Lodge, Cholmeley Park, London N6.
