Shakespeare / Anarchy / Revolution
1. Shakespeare, The World as Stage, by Bill Bryson.
Is your work underappreciated? Are you throwing pearls before swine? Take heart:
At the time of Shakespeare’s death few would have supposed that one day he would be thought the greatest of English playwrites. Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Ben Jonson were all more popular and esteemed.
But also remember when Bob Dylan sang,
Well, I rapped upon a house
With the U.S. flag upon display
I said, “Could you help me out
I got some friends down the way”
The man says, “Get out of here
I’ll tear you limb from limb”
I said, “You know they refused Jesus, too”
He said, “You’re not him.”
Shakespeare’s contributions to the English language need no review, but even knowing this, I found these lists surprising:
Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). [But...]
His real gift was as a phrasemaker [...]: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, ... play fast and loose...be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness...If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception.
One can revere great writers too much, or credit them too little. Alexander Pope was the most misguided Shakespeare/meh partisan. “Edit” means “prepare for publication,” and also “change or correct,” and when Pope edited a set of Shakespeare’s works, he also edited the works themselves:
Where, for instance, Shakespeare wrote about taking arms against a sea of troubles, he [Pope] changed sea to siege to avoid a mixed metaphor.
That’s bold.
2. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, by William Godwin (1st edition, 1793).
Less well-known in many circles than his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, or his daughter Mary Shelley, Godwin was a proto-anarchist:
It were earnestly to be desired that each man was wise enough to govern himself without the intervention of any compulsory restraint; and, since government even in its best state is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is, that we should have as little of it as the general peace of human society will permit.
He had a way with words. Some argue that, because we do not protest or revolt against them, we “implicitly consent” to laws and government actions. Godwin retorted,
If I walk quietly to the gallows, this does not imply my consent to be hanged.
He thought promising an indefensible practice. What could justify sticking to your word, when an otherwise morally superior option might come along? That would be
to disarm my future wisdom by my past folly.
On the subject of free speech Godwin was for the free exchange of opinions in the marketplace of ideas, and against the government favoring some ideas over others. Like Milton, Godwin held that
The contest between truth and falsehood is of itself too unequal [that is, in truth’s favor], for the former to stand in need of support from any political ally.
One might doubt that truth has such an advantage, but also hope that the case for free speech does not require it.
This is not a book about death, but Godwin does make this dry observation:
Death has hitherto been the common lot of men, and I expect at some time or other to submit to it.
3. The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, by Stacy Schiff.
I am not one to denigrate the ideals or accomplishments of those who led the American Revolution. But the most famous among them had serious and, to some, unforgivable flaws. Even the best had a full tank of self-love, collecting their papers and reputation and freeze-drying them for future reconstitution and consumption. But Samuel Adams, “the only downwardly mobile of the Founding Fathers,” was content to burn his letters and disappear form history.
Still, Adams had other features that might blunt your admiration. He would not let truth stand in the way of his propaganda campaign for colonial rights and (eventually) independence. When some of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s letters were secretly leaked back home (by Benjamin Franklin no less), they ended up in Adams’ hands, and Adams “turned [these] half a dozen harmless letters into a great crime.” He made out that Hutchinson had urged Great Britain to further abuse Massachusetts, including by way of a military occupation. When Adams was done, “Hutchinson’s reputation lay in tatters”:
never had an American annotator achieved such extravagant results with so shabby a remnant of truth.
Adams’ critics called his committee on correspondence a “proto-terrorist cell”; they might have complained that his belief in the Cause was so firm he was willing to force his compatriots to be free.
Nevertheless, Adams comes off rather well in this book, and may inspire the middle-aged late-bloomer:
Here comes Samuel Adams then, a graying widower, inexpensively and unremarkably dressed, familiar with nearly everyone who crosses his path. He is all loose ends and blighted promise. He has held off his father’s creditors, but his house is in disrepair. He has run the malt business into the ground. Charges of financial impropriety cling to him; a potential prosecution stubbornly follows him around. He could be embarrassed by his brushes with bailiffs but, cheery and congenial, has elected not to be. He has time to talk. Suffused in and affirmed by his faith, he offers up religious wisdom for any occasion. He carries himself with the serenity of someone on intimate terms with another world. He is devoted to his children, whom he arranges to have inoculated this spring against smallpox. He is a favorite of his friends’ children. If you look closely you notice that a quiver has crept into his hands. He appears to be shambling his way to obscurity. His fortunes will not improve but events are about to meet him halfway; the House of Commons is on course to blast him from his aimlessness. Hutchinson would gripe that—having miraculously escaped the wreckage of his tax-collecting—Adam’s improbably ascendancy began now, in 1764. Soon he will preside over Boston by, as one woman deemed it, falsehoods and subterfuges. He is forty-one years old.
From the precipice of obscurity Adams became the man who named the Boston Massacre, organized the Boston Tea Party, and stage-managed public opinion about every major political event in Boston in the lead up to the war.
Adams had a pulsing, Old Testament writing style, much different and far better than his cousin John’s stuffy pretentious latinate prose. Samuel Adams was not a poet, but he was not insensitive to poetry: he’d “carried a couplet” about marriage “in his head ever since his youth”:
Sure is the knot religion ties
And love well-bounded never dies.