William Shakespeare: King Lear (1605-06)

[Cordelia (Ashley Ricard), Lear (Ron Gural), Regan (Trina Beck), Goneril (Rebecca Frank) in a Tulane Shakespeare Festival production from 2009. Photo by Brad Robbert, image sourced from http://www.nola.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2009/06/post_30.html]

[Line references are to the Series 3 Arden edition, ed. R.A. Foakes, 1997. This conflates the three scenes usually numbered II.2-4 into one tremendous composite scene that begins at dawn and ends at night (II.2).]

From The Faerie Queene, Bk II, Canto X:

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Next him king Leyr in happie peace long raind,

  But had no issue male him to succeed,

  But three faire daughters, which were well vptraind,

  In all that seemed fit for kingly seed:

  Mongst whom his realme he equally decreed

  To haue diuided. Tho when feeble age

  Nigh to his vtmost date he saw proceed,

  He cald his daughters; and with speeches sage

Inquyrd, which of them most did loue her parentage.

                                 28

The eldest Gonorill gan to protest,

  That she much more then her owne life him lou’d:

  And Regan greater loue to him profest,

  Then all the world, when euer it were proou’d;

  But Cordeill said she lou’d him, as behoou’d:

  Whose simple answere, wanting colours faire

  To paint it forth, him to displeasance moou’d,

  That in his crowne he counted her no haire,

But twixt the other twaine his kingdome whole did shaire.

                                 29

So wedded th’one to Maglan king of Scots,

  And th’other to the king of Cambria,

  And twixt them shayrd his realme by equall lots:

  But without dowre the wise Cordelia

  Was sent to Aganip of Celtica.

  Their aged Syre, thus eased of his crowne,

  A private life led in Albania,

  With Gonorill, long had in great renowne,

That nought him grieu’d to bene from rule deposed downe.

                                 30

But true it is, that when the oyle is spent,

  The light goes out, and weeke is throwne away;

  So when he had resigned his regiment,

  His daughter gan despise his drouping day,

  And wearie waxe of his continuall stay.

  Tho to his daughter Regan he repayrd,

  Who him at first well vsed euery way;

  But when of his departure she despayrd,

Her bountie she abated, and his cheare empayrd.

                                 31

The wretched man gan then auise too late,

  That loue is not, where most it is profest,

  Too truely tryde in his extreamest state;

  At last resolu’d likewise to proue the rest,

  He to Cordelia him selfe addrest,

  Who with entire affection him receau’d,

  As for her Syre and king her seemed best;

  And after all an army strong she leau’d,

To war on those, which him had of his realme bereau’d.

                                 32

So to his crowne she him restor’d againe,

  In which he dyde, made ripe for death by eld,

  And after wild, it should to her remaine:

  Who peaceably the same long time did weld:

  And all mens harts in dew obedience held:

  Till that her sisters children, woxen strong

  Through proud ambition, against her rebeld,

  And ouercommen kept in prison long,

Till wearie of that wretched life, her selfe she hong.

                                  33

Then gan the bloudie brethren both to raine:

  But fierce Cundah gan shortly to enuie

  His brother Morgan, prickt with proud disdaine,...

And so, with barely a ripple, Spenser’s chronicle proceeds; miraculous, haunting, powerful and infinitely distanced. The first three books of the Faerie Queene were published in 1590, and recognition was immediate.

Shakespeare knew the passage, and took “Cordelia” from it as his preferred version of the youngest daughter’s name; perhaps, too, the basic drift of Gonerill’s and Regan’s formal flatteries in the opening scene.

He also took the detail of Cordelia dying by being hanged (and Edmund's idea of passing it off as suicide). The old play of Leir had followed the chronicles up to the point where the king is triumphantly restored, and no further. But the overarching tranquillity of Spenser’s chronicle involves the acceptance that all happiness is temporary; that dissolution follows achievement, dissension follows peace, tragedy rears up without warning and the best that can be hoped for is calm release. In short, Spenser denies the possibility of happy endings, and with Spenser in mind Shakespeare must have felt that the structure of Leir fell short of that insight. He wanted his protagonist to experience something yet chillier than the true worth of his daughters, with its relieved conclusion that one at least is a rock. The surprisingly desolate nature of Cordelia’s end, in Spenser’s version, suggested a way of making the play a tragedy.

Lear’s own death, at such an advanced age, wouldn’t be sufficient to make the play tragic. But the play had to be made tragic, or the power of Lear’s unhinged rhetoric would be seriously undercut by a vague sense that a silly old man makes a lot of pother about nothing, and it all comes out all right by the end. (Of course I am not suggesting that Shakespeare analysed his way to this, or conceived his dramatisation in these terms. More likely the whole thing fell into place at once.)

When we read Spenser the expanses of time are so great, and the events so isolated, that we don’t know the characters. An intelligent reader is bound to wonder what it felt like for Lear to be gradually disdained, or what sort of a person Cordelia was, but we can gain no sense of integrated personalities, and chronicle flows smoothly away. We, the readers, feel an imaginative impulse to stop and “bring it all to life”, but the materials of history are sparse. Shakespeare dwelt on the suffering implied in “Too truely tryde in his extreamest state”, and on what it must then have meant for Lear to be received at last “with entire affection”.

Shakespeare’s dramatisation of chronicle entails shortening long periods of time, both for practicality of staging and for dramatic tension. The suggestion of long time having passed is allowed to remain, and “double time” is the inevitable result; seen at its most blatant in Othello, where times and dates are critical to the plot, but really a basic methodology that Shakespeare uses everywhere. *

In Spenser’s chronicle the king spends a long time reigning, a long time contentedly with Gonerill, another long time contentedly with Regan, and finally a few years contented resumption of his rule. Shakespeare is ruthless with these periods of undramatic peace. Of Lear’s past reign we learn nothing; Shakespeare blanks it. He ends the first scene with Gonerill and Regan already making it clear that the king’s amiable plans are going to be severely modified; and before Lear reappears on stage Gonerill is pushing matters to a crisis (I.3). Regan smartly avoids entertaining Lear at all by not being at home (he is, of course, not yet due); by the time Lear meets with her he has a fair inkling of what to expect (II.2), and it will take no more than an animated conversation in a courtyard to propel him out into the storm. As for the contented resumption, it is eliminated by making Cordelia lose the battle (a reversal of Spenser, or rather, a conflation with her later defeat at the hands of her sisters' children) and meet her death while in custody.  

All this hustling of the time-scheme produces a more concentrated anguish, as it did in the history plays. Someone once said that people commit suicide when three things go wrong on the same day. In Lear’s case, it leads convincingly to madness – to what we would call today, “some sort of breakdown”.

This is well prepared for. He is a man who is already accustomed to “losing it” in an imperious sort of way, as he does in the first scene. These volcanic tantrums are in fact part of how he does his job. On his own account, he feels it’s time to slow down, but retirement does not come easy to such a man. In fact he conceives his retirement not as an unobtrusive slipping away but rather as a grand abdication ceremony in which he majestically cedes kingdoms to his courtiers; a ceremony emphasizing his God-like power. He had planned to spend his retirement thereafter with Cordelia; Shakespeare presents the idea of a monthly progress between the other daughters as an improvisation after his first plan is frustrated. All of his daughters are new-married and leaving home for the first time; Lear seems to need a daughter on hand, and does not think of maintaining his own household. Nevertheless the improvised solution is a very bad idea, and it’s this as much as the treatment of Cordelia that provokes Kent to say

                                   Reserve thy state,

And in thy best consideration check

This hideous rashness.      (I.1.149-51)

No outrageous wickedness on the part of Gonerill and Regan is required for things to go wrong thereafter, as has often been remarked. The word “evil” is first applied to Lear.

I’ll tell thee thou dost evil.     (I.1.166)

But Cordelia soon enough tells us what her sisters are, and her condemnation is fresh in our minds as we listen to their subtle dialogue at the end of the scene.

Gonerill is the instigator of it. No doubt bothered by Lear’s announcement of the “hundred knights” and “The name and all th’addition to a king”**, she recognizes the need to circumscribe his authority; she also sees that this will only happen if the two sisters support each other. What she says is really unexceptionable, though clearly her comments on Lear’s “poor judgment” are designed to make a case. It is tough-minded and realistic, but that’s all; which is how wickedness generally does slip into existence. Regan hangs back; her first remark is coolly neutral:

That’s most certain, and with you; next month with us.  (I.1.287)

This is a sentence that is ready for anything. The next speech is barely more committed, since everyone would agree with it:

‘Tis the infirmity of his age. Yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself. (I.1.292)

Everyone, that is, but Lear. With these words Regan denies her own formal speech of flattery, but only to the extent of admitting that she has common sense. The hanging back is suggestive. Gonerill has every reason to be optimistic, for the sisters are close (Regan’s flattering speech had actually paid a compliment to Gonerill’s); Regan’s hesitation at this juncture could be seen as a faint hint of their future enmity, but more likely it registers timidity. If Regan were a games theorist, she should consider a clever strategy here, which would be to encourage Gonerill to commit herself, and then to betray her by supporting the king. But Regan is not so calculating. Gonerill is a dominant elder sister, and Regan is somewhat in her shadow. She has less confidence, is less confrontational, and feels her way (II.4.287, for example, is a question as much as a statement; she is seeking approval from Gonerill). Sensing her own weakness, she likes to assert herself by interrupting her husband. Her manner is more “tender-hefted” than Gonerill’s (Lear is trying to persuade himself, but this must be based on the truth), and she wears gorgeous, feminine clothes that hardly keep her warm (II.2.459 – Lear must be addressing Regan, who arrived at dawn and has had time to change her clothes; Gonerill would still be cloaked). Some have speculated that Gonerill is good-looking (II.2.355), Regan rather less so (II.2.91-3), though to push this too far might rather spoil the Fool’s remark at I.5.15, which emphasizes the extent to which Regan duplicates her elder sister.

Regan discovers her own strength, however, in the scene where Gloucester is blinded. It was Gonerill who came up with the idea that Cornwall now executes, and Regan behaves at first as a one-woman rent-a-mob, most of her speeches being shouted (her aptitude for this role was already apparent at II.1.88 and II.2.133) .

[I have not seen the following lines explained:

            (Gl.)                 ... O cruel! O you gods!

            Reg.   One side will mock another – th’other too.

            Corn.   If you see vengeance –

            1 Serv.                            Hold your hand, my lord. (III.7.69-70)

Gloucester’s cry indicates the point where Cornwall rips out his eye, presumably by hand, throws it on the ground and squelches it with his boot. Regan, having watched this, looks back to Gloucester. The pause is palpable. Then she makes a comment about his now unsymmetrical face. It means something like this: He doesn’t “match” – you’d best have the other one out too. Cornwall starts to wind himself up again. His uncompleted sentence refers back to Gloucester’s assertion that “I shall see / The winged vengeance...” (III.7.64-65) – perhaps Cornwall was going to say: If you ever do see vengeance it’ll be in hell (because I’m going to put out your other eye).]

But he’s interrupted by the servant, and Gloucester does manage to glimpse the blow that will be the end of Cornwall, at least. It’s Regan who deals with the unruly servant (stabbing him, probably twice). At this point she begins to understand her own potential, and from now on feels subservient neither to Cornwall (who is about to die) nor to Gonerill. We recognize her new independence as soon as, when she next appears, we hear her say:

It was great ignorance, Gloucester’s eyes being out,

To let him live. Where he arrives he moves

All hearts against us.                           (IV.5.11-13)

No doubt it’s her late husband’s error that she is moaning about. But “us” must mean Edmund, Gonerill and, chiefly, herself; she being now (as Gonerill fearfully predicted) potentially the apex of the triangle. There is also a hint of the royal “we”, which she certainly does use a few lines later (IV.5.16, and again at V.1.1, 34, 36, V.3.61, 62, 63). Something has changed with the death of Cornwall. It empowers Regan, who now calls no-one lord and is thus indisputably the ruler of her half of Britain (but since Lear is still alive and retains the “name and all th’addition to a king”, should Regan be using the language of a queen? I am unsure of the royal protocol for princesses). Cornwall’s demise also empowers Albany, because he is now the only male with the supreme executive (he pointedly rejects Edmund’s assumption of parity). Albany seems to use the royal “we”, at V.1.20, 22, 25 and V.3.45. But both these elevations seem rather to diminish Gonerill, who herself uses the royal “we” on just one occasion (IV.2.1).  

At present Regan is only trying out this commanding tone on Gonerill’s servant, and there is some fumbling when she tries to turn him. But she has also met with Edmund, and something, not conclusive but nonetheless constructive, has been said (IV.5.32).

[The 3rd Arden edition (R.A. Foakes,1997), misled by Regan’s question at IV.5.6, says that she has had no opportunity to discuss love or marriage with Edmund, but this is wrong. Edmund left Gonerill (IV.2.15-16) to help Cornwall muster his forces. Though he learned on the road that Cornwall was dead, he had all the more reason to go to Cornwall’s HQ (that is, either Cornwall’s or Gloucester’s home) and he was certain to meet Regan there. He has since departed, and Regan knows roughly why (IV.5.10-16). The question in line 6 (“Lord Edmund spake not with your lord at home?”) means either that they didn’t discuss this when they met, or (more likely) that they did discuss it but Regan is feigning ignorance in order to fish for an explanation of Gonerill’s letter.]

In V.1 Regan’s manner jars on Gonerill, at least according to the quarto, and Regan tries to manipulate the movements of her sister, who sees through her at once. When she regally says “Tis most convenient; pray you go with us”, it’s a reversal of Gonerill’s dominance at the end of I.1. Gonerill appears to comply, but we know enough of her to doubt what this means. By the time Regan reappears in V.3, Gonerill has already poisoned her. I forget which sister Bradley regarded as the more detestable, but Regan remains the more uncertain one, the one who feels the need to assert herself. It is not inappropriate that she should also be the sister who goes furthest in the play’s most savage episode.

I've digressed a long way down a Bradleyan road to support the assertion that in the play Lear’s madness arises from his character, but I don’t regret the digression since it demonstrates Shakespeare’s consistent and subtle character-portrayal in a comparatively minor figure.

The growth of Lear’s madness is carefully portrayed, too.  At I.4.69 he admits, fairly lightly, that he has been uneasy about his treatment, but has assumed it’s “just in his head”. And he doesn’t like people referring to Cordelia (I.4.74). This is fertile soil, but nothing unusual. From here up to the end of Act II the progress, at first slow, is remorseless; Lear never gets a breathing space in which to recover his equanimity. He blames his folly at first; that’s painful, and exposes a tension between the man and the king, but it still leaves his present poise unthreatened. At I.5.44-45 he identifies his internal adversary for the first time. The possibility of madness, at that moment, is viewed with terror. At various points in II.2 he registers its growing pressure to break out, and finally arrives at this:

                       You think I’ll weep,

No, I’ll not weep.

I have full cause of weeping, but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws

Or e’er I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad.        (II.2.471-74)

This amounts to an acceptance of madness; sanity, which would mean sobbing in front of his daughters, has now become unendurable. It’s not a matter of dignity – it’s just that they aren’t his daughters any more.

Lear is now homeless and alienated from his family, states that perhaps have always been closely connected with mental instability. From a dramatic point of view Lear is no longer an agent and his grand speeches in the face of the storm are from one point of view a compensation; he grasps at a sort of universal agency. He also becomes politicized. At the same time his wits are turning, and though this is first clearly seen in his unhinged words to “Poor Tom” (III.4.48) it may be suspected earlier in the anti-climactic inconsequence of III.2.57-60.

That there is a problem of sorts with the middle scenes of the play has been often stated and as often denied. The dramatic movement of the first two Acts exemplifies Shakespeare doing what no-one has ever done better – taking the bare bones of a chronicle (as in Spenser’s verses) and by force of imagination turning them into a wholly vivid and astonishing portrayal of character in action. But in III.2, III.4, III.6 and IV.6 Shakespeare has arrived at a dramatic situation that lies outside the action, from which Lear has become detached. Those who want to regard these scenes as the heart of the play, like G.K. Hunter in his introduction to the New Penguin edition (1972), are forced into making rather unsatisfactory formulations such as “terrifying maelstrom of words.... a world of fragmentary reactions to the present, a world without a connected past and therefore without personal purpose.... bound together by the orchestration of the scene... In this unstructured and disparate world Lear comes to know things he (and we) could not know in sanity. The whirlpools of his obsession dredge up truths that are normally concealed... ‘The reader’s attention’ is meant to be prised loose from individual motives and actions, I suspect, and attached to a different but equally dramatic sense of man’s general status, rather than his individual destiny... the language of the play is not so much an imitation of the way people speak as an evocation of the realities behind what people say... This stupendous scene (IV.6).... (Lear) the master of a torrential vein of mad moral eloquence....  the free-wheeling phantasmagoric energy of Lear....” Inspiring as much of this commentary is, the wealth of metaphors, adjectives and italics also strikes me as insecure. Does the utmost pitch of human art require so much talking up?

From a dramatic point of view there are formidable difficulties with presenting scenes in which the characters have no urgent sense of time passing and in which, though they speak, they don’t listen. There are indeed moments when we are compelled to do so; Lear’s speech about the “poor, bare, forked animal”, or “None does offend, none, I say none”. These powerful generalities arise from the logic of the play with which I began; if Lear was to be tragic at all, it had to be a “supra-tragedy” that contemplated a universal suffering. (An analogy that must have occurred to many people is Euripides' Women of Troy.)

One way of giving the scenes a “thread” might be to show them trying to contain Lear’s madness. The would-be containers are (sometimes) Lear himself; Kent; Gloucester, when he is trying to control where the king stays or when he flees; the attendants in IV.6, and so on. Naturally it is not possible to tie up the winds again, as Cordelia’s death eventually proves. I am not at all content with this idea, and perhaps the mad scenes resist theatrical interpretation as well as Bradleyan commentary. The mad scenes represent the world that we actually inhabit, and while you can leave the rest behind when you leave the theatre, you take this bit outside with you. Lear thus plays on the notion of an “interlude”. A brief scene of loopy rhetoric was always a popular thing on the Jacobean stage; but it was contained by the rest of the play.  Here, however, the “interlude” is an incursion from outside, like the sudden whine of a motor-bike, which threatens the dramatic illusion.     

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*Note on “Double Time”:

This was not Shakespeare’s invention, but is a potential device in any narrative. In unsophisticated fiction the present action is bound to be described one step after another: “and then... and then...” Time-pauses are uninteresting and apt to be elided by phrases such as “the next day”. But the implications of the imagined background are by definition not observed so attentively, and are open to manipulation. It actually takes more effort to maintain consistency than to flout it; I am thinking of those boring calculations of dates and logistics with which a novelist is familiar; the readers will never notice, but the novelist has to work out consistencies to be sure that all the narratives he does not actually recount are viable. Characters show a tendency to age at different speeds, a great deal happens to one person while another is in one of those vacant periods when their preoccupations have nothing to do with anything and even they can hardly remember afterwards what they were doing. Unless the teller deliberately focuses on the development of a community over time (as e.g. Zola), stories are so unlike the passing of real time – so selective, so heightened – that distortions such as double time are almost inevitable.

A notable earlier example is in Chrétien’s Li contes del graal, where Gawain’s foreground adventures after leaving Arthur’s court occupy around three days and we are then informed that, in the mean time, Perceval has been on his quest for around five years.  

**Note on “the name and all the addition to a king”

This use of “addition” appears (I think) 4 times in Lear and is thematically important. It means – what exactly? It means honours, of a sort, that Lear thinks important; to him they represent respect,  but does it really amount to anything more tangible than “honorific titles”?  What it does not mean, as Lear soon discovers, is power; as the Fool urges, what Lear has really retained doesn't add up to very much. At one level Lear is an examination, building on the earlier Richard II, of the nature of majesty deprived of power. The debate was current, and would shortly lead on to a quantified Divine Right of Kings that was then found to be much too tangible to be acceptable.

(2003, 2014)

On Nahum Tate's History of King Lear

King Lear in Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop

These notes on Shakespeare: full list

Prunus avium 'Plena'

Prunus avium 'Plena'.  Photos taken 15th April 2014 (a very early year), when a lot of the flowers are opening but the leaves are still small and reddish.

This a double variety of Wild Cherry. It flowers a bit later than most single-flowered Wild Cherry trees, and even from a distance has a noticeably different appearance when flowering: more tufty and irregular, the flowers less obviously sleeving the shoots.


When you get a bit closer, it's a magical tree, especially when the skies are like this. The pure white blossom has a touch of the same frilly opulence as 'Shirotae',  but here it's sprinkled through a rangy, open canopy.

[For comparison, the photo below is a single-flowered P. avium, showing the blossom sleeving the shoot:  ]

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Another year, another tree. It was 6th April
2019 and the plump buds were just beginning to open on this big tree in Frome, Somerset:

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities - "bestselling novel of all time". Allegedly.

The internet generally, and Wikipedia in particular, is obsessed with records. Consequently, you are quite likely to run across the widely repeated claim that  A Tale of Two Cities is (as the Wikipedia article on Charles Dickens puts it) "the best selling novel of all time".

It isn't the most unlikely statement I've ever heard, but when I tried to trace it back to an authoritative source, I at first got no further than a chatty review by the novelist David Mitchell  in the Daily Telegraph from May 8th 2010.

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/7685510/David-Mitchell-on-Historical-Fiction.html

"Charles Dickens’ second stab at a historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities, has sold more than 200 million copies to date, making it the bestselling novel – in any genre – of all time."

 Did Mitchell know what he was talking about? Maybe, but it seems that no-one else does.


Digging a bit more, I found a 2009 GMAT Practice Exam, where the following sentence is used for grammatical comprehension purposes:

"By the year 2000, A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens' gripping book portraying the suffering of the proletariat under the brutal subjugation of the French aristocracy had around 200 million copies in print, making it more than that of almost any other English book ever written."

(The kids are supposed to correct the clumsy grammar towards the end)

And the earliest reference I've seen so far, is an anonymous ("staff") preview article on broadway.com for the musical Tale of Two Cities (24 March, 2008):

http://www.broadway.com/buzz/97173/the-best-of-times-a-tale-of-two-cities-to-open-at-broadways-hirschfeld-theatre-on-sept-18/

"Since its inaugural publication on August 30, 1859, A Tale of Two Cities has sold over 200 million copies in several languages, making it one of the most famous books in the history of fictional literature."

That's it, so far as I can find. (And yes, I searched Google Books, too.)

To be fair, there are Wikipedists who are aware of the vacuum behind this claim. (See the talk page for "List of best-selling books"). Arriving at aggregated worldwide figures for a massive seller over a long period of time is never going to be an easy matter. Once a book is out of copyright, whose job is it to keep track of sales? No-one's. You'd struggle to obtain a list of all the separate publications of  A Tale of Two Cities, even in English. Anyone can publish it, and they don't have to ask anyone's permission. Academic bibliographers normally aren't very interested in those later reprints, because they have no textual significance. And as for obtaining the sales figures! How would you go about contacting those fugitive publishers of the "World's Library of Great Books", which flourished in the 1930s? Then there's the issue of what counts as a sale. Classic books of this sort are often given away free (e.g. by Sunday newspapers). But the newspaper pays a publisher to produce the books. The reader buys the newspaper, maybe in part because of the free book. And these free books do account for a lot of present-day readers. So does that count as a sale or not? Now multiply all these little difficulties by the fifty or so languages into which Dickens has been translated. Rinse and repeat.

All I'm saying is that arriving at such figures is not straightforward. You'd need to be a specialist, not just in literary history but in the very specific department of literary history that understands the commercial side of publishing at a global level. While ideally I'd want to know exactly how this estimate was arrived at, the very least I'd want is the endorsement of a recognized authority.

A Tale of Two Cities might conceivably be a very high selling book worldwide. Though many diehard Dickens fans would agree with me in considering it almost his worst novel, it seems there are quite a lot of  not-so-diehard-Dickensian people out there who absolutely adore it. It has had a flourishing career in film and drama, above all in Selznick's film of 1935 starring Ronald Colman as Sidney Carton. On celluloid the rather lifeless lovers of the book became transformed into blockbuster romantic heroes/ines.

Whether you think it's Dickens' worst novel or not, there's at any rate no dispute about it being his shortest. It's widely studied as a school text.* As western culture has spread across the globe, Dickens has been promulgated as one of the west's representative authors. And if you're only going to dish out a single Dickens book to your class, then leaving aside the economic and logistical claims of brevity you could maybe argue that Cities is the most "global" Dickens novel. The greater novels, especially in their comedy, require and reward a detailed awareness of 19th-century English popular culture -- an awareness that is now fast disappearing. It's a familiar paradox: the most wonderful parts of an author's writings (to local fans), are what travel least well. Byronism was international, but Don Juan is untranslatable. Scott influenced the whole world, but the Scots dialect in his novels is a major impediment even to most native English speakers.

Cities doesn't have much of Dickens' comic genius. But it does have a good handful of the kind of discussion-topics that work well in the classroom - e.g. about injustice, violence, fanaticism, self-sacrifice. Topics with plenty of of juicy relevance in India, Brazil, Nigeria and everywhere else.

(But, reassuringly, one of the novel's clearest messages is that revolutions are very bad news indeed. All governments like that sort of message.)

Anyone know anything more about this?

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* [Don't take my word for it, here's what Shmoop has to say:

Because it’s a bit more straight-forward plot-wise than many other Dickens novels, A Tale of Two Cities is also one of the most frequently-taught of Dickens’s novels today. Chances are you’re encountering it for the first time (or the second time, or the twenty-third time) in a classroom. That’s part of why we here at Shmoop are so taken with this novel: it’s an enduring testimony to the best and a searing critique of the worst of human nature. Dickens set out to make the French Revolution live in the hearts and minds of his readers. Take it from us, he’s done a pretty good job.

]

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I may as well add here what I wrote about the book before:

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Everyone should agree that the first few chapters of the book are good (up to Part II, Ch 5). And so, it seems to me, are the last few. But I keep getting the feeling that Dickens is using the French Revolution for his own ends. This is not a historical novel; it’s in a way more illuminating. His own preoccupations with prisons and resurrections are now more barely personal and psychological than they were in Little Dorrit. Yet his presentation of The Terror, something rather unlike what he had known yet extremely like some more recent societies, is deeply felt in its essence, though (or because?) it was imagined.

Psychologically, Madame Defarge and Sidney Carton are true images. The latter may need some defence, since we feel that Charles Darnay must, in logic, go to the wall and he speaks the plain truth when he says “Good could never come of such evil”. Charles and Lucie happy ever after is as impossible as Romeo and Juliet happy ever after. But still, Carton quickens the pulse; his expertise in this crisis and his flush of pride. Though he represents, perhaps, Dickens’ fantasy of a great, redeeming self-sacrifice; the fantasy of one who lives guiltily. I am certain that some have really gone to their deaths comforted by Carton at their elbow.

Of course this may seem a preposterous defence, and it needs no great effort to recall “the case against” - the tedium of those echoey footsteps in Soho, the perfunctory interest of Jerry Cruncher, and so on. Yet to flick through the pages again is to realize with what economy the book supplies scenes of great power. Since I’ve already mentioned the beginning and end, let’s review some of the inbetween: the child run over by the carriage (Part II, Ch VII); Monsieur the Marquis saying “You are fatigued” (Ch IX); Stryver’s courtship, and conversation with Lorry (Ch XII); Barsad’s visit to the wineshop (Ch XVI); Lorry’s conversation with Dr Manette about the latter’s collapse (Ch XIX); the death of Foulon (Ch XXII); Stryver’s remarks on Evrémonde (Ch XXIV).  

Still, these scenes are primarily dramatic scenes. It’s in the construction and the dialogue that the book is strong. (The construction, as we all know now, is based on an elaborate allegory of which the motif is “Recalled to Life”.) Another Dickens, the vigorous, comic, fanciful imaginer, is kept out of the book. The decriptive prose is thin, and the reason, oddly, is anger.  In the description of the grindstone (Part III, Ch 2) an account of hideous preparations for murder ends like this:

And as the frantic wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream of sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in their frenzied eyes; - eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun.

The decription of the Carmagnole (Part III, Ch 5) is another example - the author hates it, and his fancy fails him. So, in the next chapter, Darnay’s acquittal - how unlike Pickwick’s trial, and even the English trial of Darnay himself. Nothing here like the Attorney-General who “turned the whole suit of clothes Mr Stryver had fitted on the jury, inside out; showing how Barsad and Cly were even a hundred times better than he had thought them, and the prisoner a hundred times worse”.

A Tale of Two Cities lends itself to dramatization, and to changes of title, because its own is an unhelpful one. The Only Way, by Freeman Wills. Let me make my own old-fashioned suggestion: The Death Penalty. This is a feature of the punitive apparatus that plays no part in Little Dorrit, but here it is made present. Culture, and history, and fantasy, all retire. But this anger, like the “well-directed gun”, claims to be tit for tat. When the wood-sawyer says, “But it’s not my business”, we expect a twinkle in his eye. It turns out that his “jocose” gestures do not mean sympathy. His little fancy (“Tickle, tickle; Pickle, pickle”) is a joke that denies human engagement. Jacques Three and Madame Defarge underline the point - they don’t soften. And so Dickens won’t soften either. His art becomes stalled and reactionary.

Yet in the moment of execution this doesn’t matter.

And now, while he was composed, and hoped to meet the end with quiet heroism, a new action began in his waking thoughts, which was very difficult to master. He had never seen the instrument that was to terminate his life. How high it was from the ground, how many steps it had, where he would be stood, how he would be touched, whether the touching hands would be dyed red, which way his face would be turned, whether he would be the first, or might be the last... (Pt III, Ch 13).

Dickens’s anger is displaced, I think; but his guillotine is very sharp.

(2002)

Gerald Brenan, Richard Ford, Ronald Fraser

Gerald Brenan (portrait by Dora Carrington)

(Image from http://www.losgazquez.com/blog/?p=342)


Gerald Brenan, South of Granada (1957) 

This feels like it's becoming a rare occasion. I've actually finished a book, what's more a book that I haven't read before, and I've even read it in the prescribed order, from start to finish!  Dr Johnson, they say, never finished a book. I fear I'm going the same way, and can only look back with some relief at all the books I got under my belt in my twenties.

South of Granada, published in 1957 but mainly about Spain in the 1920s, is probably the most admired book in the "Hispanist" genre (i.e. books about Spain in English), notwithstanding Richard Ford. Most of it is about living in a then-remote village (Yegen) in the Alpujarras. The road from Almeria to Granada didn't yet exist, and only mule-traffic was possible. Don Geraldo is now remembered by a plaque, a circular walk (Brenan walked vast distances) and a projected museum. [Chris Stewart's popular books (Driving over Lemons etc) are also set in the Alpujarras. Did you know Chris was once a founder member of Genesis? Wikipedia can be quite interesting sometimes. Eventually everything becomes swamped by its hyperreal projection. The trivia section is what makes tomorrow's news. (In effect, the word "iconic" means "rich in trivia"; there's a vacuum at the heart of it.)]

One of the nicest things, I now remember, about writing about a book is that it gives me a chance to re-discover the pages that, by the time I finish it, are already gliding out of my memory.  Have I commented before, on the tendency of book reviewers to get hung up on the book's ending, to the detriment of their review? And sadly it's rare for the ending to be the most important part of a book.


In this case I'd be dwelling on a musical ending, an elegy and retrospect on returning to Yegen in 1955; a visit by Bertrand Russell amusingly not recounted, for the sake of the music; on the Civil War atrocities suffered by the Alpujarras as disputed territory; on the sad decline of his former servant Maria Andorra into madness and death. And the image of these final chapters does leave a long silence in which my own scurrying meditations make themselves heard.

But this is to get the emphasis wrong. I think the most valuable parts of the book are on the society of Yegen, its laws, seasons, clouds, winds, feasts, superstitions, folklore and habits. Brenan travelled widely and wrote interestingly about e.g. courtship in Granada, or the brothels of Almeria, or botanical treasures; but the book is best when least a travel book. For example, the August harvest:

Then, as darkness fell, preparations for the winnowing would begin. [There was no breeze except at night.] A group of men and women would assemble on the threshing-floor, a lantern would be lit, someone would strum on a guitar. Unexpectedly a voice would rise into the night, would hang for a few seconds in the air, and then fade back into silence again. From the poplar trees close by the trill of a nightingale answered it.

And now the wind had begun to blow. At first it came in little puffs, then it died down, then it came on again. Whenever it seemed strong enough, one or two men would take their long forks of ash or almez (the lotus or nettle tree) and begin tossing up the ears. This went on at intervals all night. The wind blew most steadily towards sunrise, and often I would come out of my room, where I had sat up reading, and climb the slope to watch the work going on. The great trough of mountains below would fill, as from a tank of water, with rippling light, the shadows would turn violet, then lavender, would become thin and float away, while, as I approached the threshing-floor, I would see the chaff streaming out like a white cloak in the breeze and the heavy grain falling, as the gold coins fell on Danaë, on to the heap below.  Then without clouds or veils the sun's disc appeared above the Sierra de Gádor and began to mount rapidly. The sleeping figures rose and stretched themselves: the men took a pull at their wine-skins, the women packed their baskets of provisions and returned home. Within half an hour they would be out again at the streamside washing clothes. 

As I copy this out, I think that the scenic description, though it reports Brenan's experience, is also essential in order to suggest, so far as it was possible for him, the experience of the unnamed threshers. It is a little idyllic, but that isn't wrong. Yegen, despite its coarse culture, its adulteries and envies, its idiots, lunatics, quiet tragedies and occasional rapes and killings, was generally a happy village.

The immemorial life of the village appeared, to Brenan, to survive continually despite the comings and goings of people. The values of the village were turned inward; nothing outside it had significance. So only the road of his own time changed it for ever. This may be an over-simplification, but reading the book you will give it some credence.

(2014)

It makes sense, I think, to add to this post what I have written previously about the books of Richard Ford and Ronald Fraser.

Richard Ford (oil after Antonio Chatelain)

(Image from National Portrait Gallery, http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw02288/Richard-Ford?)

Richard Ford: Gatherings from Spain (1846)

In October 1830, Ford (then aged 34), travelled with his family to Spain, originally for his wife’s health. They returned to England in the spring of 1833. Rarely has a stay abroad been turned to better account. Ford spent much of his time in Spain travelling from end to end of the country. He produced over 500 accurate sketches of Spanish scenes (now of importance to historians); seven years after his return, he began to write the topographical Handbook for Travellers in Spain. It took five years to write, amounted to 1500 pages, and was celebrated as a triumph. But Ford’s editors saw that he had material which would please a wider audience. The Gatherings (some 350 pages) re-used some of the best passages from the Handbook, along with much new material, but the re-structuring was crucial. Neither autobiographical nor topographical, the Gatherings was a book that sought to capture the essence of a land by focussing on topics. I am turning over a few random pages here; the running-titles say “Asses of La Mancha”, “Olla Podrida”, “Iced Drinks”, “Guerrilleros”, “The Beard”, “Music in Ventas”...

Ford was a patriotic Protestant who regarded Spain as a desperately backward, underlyingly Oriental nation. (England and Spain were, however, allied in their recent opposition to France under Bonaparte, and while he was composing the Gatherings Spain was again being threatened from the north, this time by the sabre-rattlings of the Second Empire.) Ford was also besotted by Spain and it was the centre of all his creative imaginings. The result was at the time an object lesson in dealing intelligently with the struggle to extend one’s humanity beyond a narrow localism. It was also a theme on which he improvises with great enjoyment on almost every page, being incessantly witty about Spanish improvidence, often crushing the French (largely despicable, except for hair-dressing and cookery), and not uncommonly refreshing himself with a raid on the complacent and stupid of his own nation.  

Ford’s two seasons of riding through Spain were a gentleman’s life in microcosm. Never returning, he celebrated it and meditated on it ever after. Though he was in a foreign land and in unusual circumstances, his chapters on horses and servants are an immensely illuminating insight into the mundane preoccupations of his class; the things that, in novels, are usually not mentioned. Besides, Ford’s style is a search for the admirable; a never-ending moral adventure. This seems like a good place to get a sense of that style – it needs an extensive quote:

The cook should take with him a stewing-pan, and a pot or kettle for boiling water; he need not lumber himself with much batterie de cuisine; it is not much needed in the imperfect gastronomy of the Peninsula, where men eat like the beasts which perish; all sort of artillery is rather rare in Spanish kitchen or fortress; an hidalgo would as soon think of having a voltaic battery in his sitting-room as a copper one in his cuisine; most classes are equally satisfied with the Oriental earthenware ollas, pucheros, or pipkins, which are everywhere to be found, and have some peculiar sympathy with the Spanish cuisine, since a stew – be it even of cat – never eats so well when made in a metal vessel; the great thing is to bring the raw materials, – first catch your hare. Those who have meat and money will always get a neighbour to lend them a pot. A venta is a place where the rich are sent empty away, and where the poor hungry are not filled; the whole duty of the man-cook, therefore, is to be always thinking of his commissariat; he need not trouble himself about his master’s appetite, that will seldom fail,– nay, often be a misfortune; a good appetite is not a good per se, for it, even when the best, becomes a bore when there is nothing to eat; his capucho or mule hamper must be his travelling larder, cellar, and store-room; he will victual himself according to the route, and the distances from one great town to another, and will always take care to start with a good provision: indeed to attend to the commissariat is, it cannot be too often repeated, the whole duty of a man-cook in hungry Spain, where food has ever been the difficulty; a little foresight gives small trouble and ensures great comfort, while perils by sea and perils by land are doubled when the stomach is empty, whereas, as Sancho Panza wisely told his ass, all sorrows are alleviated by eating bread: todos los duelos, con pan son buenos, and the shrewd squire, who seldom is wrong, was right both in the matter of bread and the moral: the former is admirable. The central table-lands of Spain are perhaps the finest wheat-growing districts in the world; however rude and imperfect the cultivation – for the peasant does but scratch the earth, and seldom manures – the life-conferring sun comes to his assistance; the returns are prodigious, and the quality superexcellent; yet the growers, miserable in the midst of plenty, vegetate in cabins composed of baked mud, or in holes burrowed among the friable hillocks, in an utter ignorance of furniture, and absolute necessaries. The want of roads, canals, and means of transport prevents their exportation of produce, which from its bulk is difficult of carriage in a country where grain is removed for the most part on four-footed beasts of burden, after the oriental and patriarchal fashion of Jacob, when he sent to the granaries of Egypt. Accordingly, although there are neither sliding scales nor corn laws, and subsistence is cheap and abundant, the population decreases in number and increases in wretchedness; what boots it if corn be low-priced, if wages be still lower, as they then everywhere are, and must be?

It’s a style that makes heroic use of semi-colons, is ample and even allows repetitions, which however always contribute to the enlargement of the prospect.

The paragraph ends (as not uncommonly) in a very different place from where it began, yet plainly there are connections. His interest in the travelling gentleman’s well-being is in the in end inextricable from his interest in the well-being of a people where scarcity is everywhere.

One part of his interest lays in the lack of industrialization. In Spain Ford is constantly reminded of biblical, classical and Arab ways of life; this must have been commonplace and therefore unnoticeable before the Industrial Revolution, but now it quickens his imagination, which really enjoys what his judgment as sincerely laments.

The  chapter on sherry (XIV) is one of the best (where all are good) and is still informative. When we need a pause from information a switch-sentence comes along like this: “There is an excellent account of all the vines of Andalucia by Rojas Clemente. This able naturalist disgraced himself by being a base toady of the wretched minion Godoy...”  or an image like this (on the Capataz leading a tasting): “on whom wine has no more effect than on a glass”.* One thing I don’t understand is that Ford gives the strength of fine sherry as 20-23% but today 20% is, I think, the upper limit not the lower. He despises sherries that are made to look pale by chemical means. He was also an early champion (I mean, among the British) of manzanilla, which he says the local inhabitants of Jerez much preferred to drink themselves as it was so much less inebriating (he does not seem to know of other finos). The only other Spanish wine he praises is Valdepeñas – now considered a modest table wine. Rioja and Penedés had always produced wine but it seems that their market identities really emerged in the mid-nineteenth century when they were the regions selected by French expertise who because of the Phylloxera plague could not grow grapes in France.

[The enormous Handbook is one of those volumes that one enjoys longing to possess. If you make the mistake of becoming serious about this, it ought to be the first (1845) edition; Ford, and then others, made destabilizing alterations to the later ones. In truth it is probably only a book for amazed dips, unless you plan to give up your whole life to a former existence.]

[*I have since discovered that this joke appears in Tom Jones (Bk 9 Ch 6), but Ford's version is snappier.]

(2006)  

Ronald Fraser

(Image from Melville House Press: http://www.mhpbooks.com/hail-farewell-ronald-fraser/)


Ronald Fraser: The Pueblo: A Mountain Village on the Costa del Sol  (1973). 

In the USA, this was published as Tajos: A Mountain Village on the Costa del Sol.  "Tajos" was a fictional name, in fact; the book was about Mijas, now one of the best-known villages in Spain. Fraser related his book to Julian Pitt-Rivers' People of the Sierra (1954) and to Brenan's South from Granada - all three were about isolated Andalucian mountain villages.  (Fraser and Brenan became close friends, incidentally.)  Fraser claimed, somewhat inaccurately, that his village was about 50 miles from the other two; Grazalema to the west and Yegen to the east (in fact, Mijas is a lot nearer to Grazalema than to Yegen).

Of course these villages are not isolated now. Especially Mijas, which is right on the doorstep of Fuengirola, Benalmadena and Torremolinos, and is now really a show-village though a very lovely one - about as transformed from the stories of the hungry '40s recounted here as it's possible to conceive. And part of the story of The Pueblo is a story of the unforeseen and extraordinary changes from the older world of hunger and inequality and the Civil War to the sudden prosperity that happened (almost "overnight") once the foreigners arrived, at the beginning of the 1960s.

In that respect the history of "Tajos" could be described as exceptional. But in a way it is not so; Tajos even typifies, though with exceptional starkness, the enormous changes that took place throughout the West in the course of the 20th century; the incredible technical advances and the social changes that, as this book shows, led to a profound dislocation between the experience of the old and the experience of the young.

This is what we think of as history, though the suddenness, the sense of miracle, leaves behind it a baffled sense of non sequitur; what came to pass was not something long nurtured through the dark days, but a supersession of them; - even a kind of cancellation. And I think the oral history brings this beautifully to life.

But the other great thing about oral history is that it doesn't simplify, doesn't subordinate everything to an epic theme. Coexistent with this story is a series of portraits formed of details which remind me a little of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales. And this aspect, just as much as the other, is history, though it resists historicism. The methodology of The Pueblo brings out many such details. For instance, a wastrel elder son of the owner class, Lazaro Lopez, now in his sixties:

I spent my time doing nothing -- and that's what I've done ever since. To begin with I used to get rather bored, it was monotonous. But one gets used to it in the end. ... I used to go to Gibraltar a lot on my motorbikes.

The smallholder Francisco Avila, now 76:

How else could it be when everyone was so poor? A man and his family couldn't live on a day wage of 1.50 pesetas, even if that had been the money he earned. But in reality it wasn't. His real wage was closer to 50 centimos, since two-thirds of the year he was out of work. What could he and his family eat? They didn't, and that was that. Yes, a day-labourer's life was abysmal -- but a small-holder had to work even harder. Twice as hard, I'd say. From before light until long past nightfall. A day-labourer works his fixed hours, but there are no hours for a small farmer. It had to be that way to win any sort of living from the earth... Just speaking for myself, I can tell you there have been more times than I can remember when I've worked a day and a night through without rest and gone on the next day working the same. I'd be busy digging or ploughing the terraces all day, at night the water would come and I'd irrigate by the light of an oil lamp, and the next day I'd go on digging. In those times the only rest was work.

(2014)

Ronald Fraser: Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (1979)

This brilliant book re-creates a unique succession of events in a unique historical situation – one of the lasting impressions of the book is that “the Spanish Civil War” was not like any other episode in history. This, for me, formidably validates the author’s procedure.

Nor, of course, was the war the same for any two of the hundreds of witnesses that Fraser interviewed. Yet their stories are by no means entirely detached, since they occupied a shared time and space, more importantly shared social conditions, which become clearer with each page. The book is a way of treating these (perhaps they might be identified with the war itself) without imposing a historian’s marshalling.

It’s best to read it straight through. The structure is improvised; the paragraphs and pages, though approached by the reader in a linear sequence, do not mimic the sequence of passing time. But this is a necessary discipline for the emergence of the image. Quite hard work at first, eventually compulsive. Though the book consists mainly of unliterary testimony, it becomes a seminal literary work, and characteristically so in demanding a new way of reading. It may be one of the lasting achievements of its own era, in the aftermath of ‘60s radicalism. 

Blood of Spain is a large book but one of its virtues is the impression that each narrative takes place in the open air, a solo in the midst of unrecounted life. Eschewing the inclusiveness of summary, the mastery of De bello gallico, its selectiveness is open to the gaze. The focus is on certain areas of Spain at certain times – we never, for example, enter Galicia. The interviews were conducted in 1973-1975, some forty years after the events; it follows that while those who were children at the time are well represented, there is nothing from those who were old. Other limitations are stressed in the Foreword. Fraser admits that he tended to suppress acerbic material about enemies in favour of self-criticism; that perhaps contributes, in a small way, to the overwhelming sense of shock at how such reasonable and comprehensible people could find themselves in the position of slaughtering one another.

That is one of the central preoccupations for any reader. Equally fascinating is the political situation on both sides; revolutionary Catalonia, for example, is I think the only occasion when an anarcho-syndicalist system has subsisted, or tried to subsist, on a grand scale; in a region containing one of Europe’s major cities. But the situation everywhere had unique features – in the Basque country, for example, impossible contradictions of loyalty arose. The political complexities on the Right were less turmoiled (they were winning) but no less unpredictable (see e.g. Dionisio Ridruejo’s view of Falangism).

The front line is avoided in favour of the rearguard; it is not so much the military actions as the radicalization of individuals that impresses us as the primary condition of civil war. But Guernica, Oviedo, the siege of Madrid and the terrified descent on Alicante are all here.  We also encounter (among a hundred other memorable and distressing histories) Asturian fugitives in the mountains, refugees in Leningrad, rural collectivization in Aragon, village civil war in Córdoba province...

I’m looking for a quotation, but will just pick the page I happen to be re-reading. José Avila, a labrador (farmer):

Politics, that was where the trouble lay. Everyone read a lot, everyone had his own point of view, everyone went his own way. If there had been just two sorts of politics, left and right, things would have been better. But there were so many ideologies, especially on the left: republicans, socialists, communists, anarchists. I don’t know what the labourers really wanted. I don’t think they knew themselves. But whatever it was, it wasn’t good for us farmers. At work they began to make remarks to our faces. “Not a single fascist must be allowed to live.” It became risky for us to live on the cortijos (large farms). The labourers talked of the reparto (division of estates) but was that what they really wanted? When the republic took over the duke of Medinaceli’s three estates near here, the people didn’t seem satisfied with the land they got. They wanted something else. If only there had been a strong political organization, left or right, republican or non-republican, things wouldn’t have reached the stage they did. Guarantees, rights – fine! But law and order as well. That was what was missing.

And Juan Moreno, a landless day-labourer:

What did we want? Not the sort of agrarian reform the republic was trying to make. The state and capitalism are the worker’s two worst enemies. What we wanted was the land – for the workers to take it over and work it collectively without the state intervening... The reformists, the state socialists, wanted agrarian reform, wanted everything controlled by the state. When the state said “stop” – stop; when it said “render accounts” – render accounts; when the harvest was in – it would be there demanding its share. We didn’t want that. The land must be in the workers’ hands, worked and managed collectively by them. That was the only way the workers could control their own affairs, ensure that the produce which resulted from their work remained theirs to deal with as they freely decided. Not that each collective could remain isolated, a unit on its own. No! Each would be responsible to the local CNT organization (anarcho-syndicalist trade union), the local to the regional, the regional to the national. But each would be managed by a committee elected by the collectivists themselves, each at the end of the year would divide up the surplus produced among the collectivists... We hated the bourgeoisie, they treated us like animals. They were our worst enemies. When we looked at them we thought we were looking at the devil himself. And they thought the same of us. There was a hatred between us – a hatred so great it couldn’t have been greater. They were bourgeois, they didn’t have to work to earn a living, they had comfortable lives. We knew we were workers and that we had to work – but we wanted them to pay us a decent wage and to treat us like human beings, with respect. There was only one way to achieve that – by fighting them...  In many ways we were worse off under the republic than under the monarchy; the right became even more aggressive and reactionary, and we had to defend ourselves...

(2003)