Charity Drops

Another move imminent, and time to send some more things to the charity shop. I've at least dipped into most of them.

Beaumont and Fletcher are author-names that will always be paired, like Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. (And that's a rather inelegant way of contriving to mention The Man Who Went Up In Smoke, another recent and speedy read that was moved on too swiftly to even get in the photo; books like that circulate fast. It's the second in their 10-novel sequence, maybe not as searching as Rosanna but more satisfying overall; a month later I'm still turning over the immaculate design in my mind, the floundering Martin Beck finding his way through tiny details, dissonances, possibilities... In one respect the novel describes a definitively lost era, when passport photos were hardly checked because they never looked like their subjects anyway. But is our world better now?)

Anyway, Francis Beaumont's career as a dramatist was brief and he mostly wrote with his friend John Fletcher but The Knight of the Burning Pestle seems to be by him alone. It's a play I'd never really tuned into until I found this book (in a charity shop), and I was quite surprised to learn of its enduring popularity and how many times it's been staged, especially in the last 100 years. Without repeating the details you can look up in Wikipedia, it's basically a fantastical fourth-wall-breaking burlesque city comedy, and is probably a lot of fun to act in. Beaumont's style, witty without malice and prone to sheer enjoyment of different registers and melodies, is very appealing. An interesting thing is the clear influence  of Cervantes' Don Quixote, not long after the publication of the First Part and some years before the first English translation. (See especially Don Quixote Chs 17-18; even the title of Beaumont's play springs from here.) It's a less reverential and predictable influence than we're used to. The pairing of the distracted Don Quixote with the down-to-earth Sancho Panza became a template for later English authors to build their own master-servant teams; to interrogate, moderate, and in the final analysis usually celebrate the class distinctions of their time. Once a book becomes an established classic our readings tend to align with each other, like the helpless tweeters we are. The well-born Francis Beaumont was certainly no enemy to class distinctions, but his untutored reading of Cervantes found other potential, and his own fantastical knight is a romantic grocer's apprentice.

Something else I can't help wondering. The Wife tells us this story about Ralph:

When he had lost our child, (you know it was strayed almost alone to Puddle-Wharf, and the criers were abroad for it, and there it had drowned itself but for a sculler,) Ralph was the most comfortablest to me: "Peace, mistress," says he, "let it go; I'll get you another as good." (Act II Scene 6)

Calling to mind an anecdote about Alfred Jarry: 

Jarry also took to carrying a loaded revolver. In response to a neighbour's complaint that his target shooting endangered her children, he replied, "If that should ever happen, ma-da-me, we should ourselves be happy to get new ones with you." (Wikipedia .)

Could the inventor of absurdist theatre have been an admirer of The Knight of the Burning Pestle? Surely not? And yet it wouldn't be wholly inappropriate... 

Online text:

 https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/beaumontfletcher-knightpestle/beaumontfletcher-knightpestle-00-h-dir/beaumontfletcher-knightpestle-00-h.html

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From the incomplete Happy Families pack. The game was invented in 1851. On older packs the pictures are often grotesques like these ones, which were not credited but are reminiscent of Sir John Tenniel's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland (1865).

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I'm still waiting for the day when I truly connect with Tennyson's poetry. I need an angle, even just a single poem that I more than enjoy and more than admire, a poem I really care about. But it still eludes me. Take Morte d'Arthur, much of which I know by heart. 

So all day long the noise of battle roll'd
Among the mountains by the winter sea...

Tennyson discovered life at its most intense -- or perhaps most picturable -- within the chamber of death, when the life that was a life has come to feel like a vain dream. But I'm thinking: How comes it that Arthur and Bedivere are alone by the mere? What happened to everyone else? Tennyson himself felt the question pressing, and when he later came to write the Idylls of the King he fully described this strangest of battles, yet even added to its mysterious power. 

The three queens come, and the tallest and fairest rests Arthur's head in her lap, but I'm aware that their own powerful presence arises from being voiceless, and that Tennyson's poem is consciously at the end of an era, centuries of exclusive conversation within the male mind. 

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The suffragettes were willing to die to change that, and some did. Reading them now, I still find a spirit of radicalism beyond what would be expressed in any modern newspaper. Not the first wave, who tried to make their case within the established structures of society. That seemed to go nowhere, because MPs didn't need to care what women thought, but probably without the first wave there couldn't have been a second wave who committed to going further. The case was made, but only revolution could implement it. Once implemented, society tried to forget all about the revolutionaries and their disagreeable behaviour; even more so, the disagreeable counter-measures of outraged authority. But in the west, whatever your politics, it's hard to imagine a democracy in which women have no share. (And doubtless in some parts of the world that's a very cogent reason for not having democracy at all.)

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From the Apocrypha (passed on to me by my Dad, who found it useful when studying ancient coins), I decided to sample the Book of Judith, vaguely recalling a host of sensational paintings and frequent references to the story in medieval literature.  

But taak kepe of the deeth of Oloferne;
Amydde his hoost he dronke lay a-nyght,
Withinne his tente, large as is a berne;
And yet, for al his pompe and al his myght
Judith, a womman, as he lay upright
Slepynge, his heed of smoot, and from his tente
Ful prively she stal from every wight,
And with his heed unto hir toun she wente.

(Chaucer's Monk's Tale)

The Book of Judith is very good reading. It starts off like chronicle history: 

In the twelfth year of the reign of Nabuchodonosor, who reigned in Nineve, the great city; in the days of Arphaxad, which reigned over the Medes in Ecbatane ... (Judith 1:1)

But this Nabuchodonosor is king of the Assyrians (1:7), and that can't be right: the name isn't Assyrian but Babylonian (e.g. Nebuchadnezzar II, whose reign began a few years after the final collapse of the Assyrian empire). 

The name Arphaxad isn't Median either; it's been repurposed from a son of Shem in Genesis. 

No wonder some people have suggested that the Book of Judith is best seen as a pseudohistorical adventure story. It's a well-shaped treatment in 16 chapters of a single storyline, building up our expectation by a circuitous approach (totally unlike real chronicle histories that record diffuse events). The first couple of chapters describe how the Assyrian king comes to be offended by all the peoples along his western frontier and orders a fearsome retribution, to be carried out by his top general Holofernes at the head of a massive army. Only in the third chapter do we home in on the Israelites and the dire implications for them. A mildly interested Holofernes asks "So who are these Israelites anyway?", and the heathen Achior says, basically, "Pretty tough cookies, don't take them for granted" and nearly gets himself killed for his negative attitude. Holofernes first has to deal with the border hill-town of Bethulia*; he cuts off the water supply and waits. After a while the suffering townsfolk start barracking the town authorities to capitulate. And only now, at the eleventh hour and half-way through the book, do we hear of a pious and beautiful widow named Judith... 

You can see the sort of cheaply effective artistry on display here. There's a certain fittingness to one of the earliest American feature films being Judith of Bethulia (1914); though I must say compared to Thomas Bailey Aldrich and D. W. Griffith the original Book of Judith seems quite subtle. It survives in Greek, but was perhaps originally composed in Aramaic c. 150-100 BCE. It isn't in the Hebrew canon. Catholic and Orthodox Christians accept it as scriptural, but not Protestants. 

* Fictional place-name; commonly identified with Shechem. 

An excellent account of Judith of Bethulia by Nitrate Glow: https://nitrateglow.wordpress.com/2024/03/28/beauty-vs-beast-thoughts-on-judith-of-bethulia-1914/ .

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Liverpool's Hidden History is about Catholicism in SW Lancashire, especially under the Persecution of Elizabeth I and later. Liverpool was still a very small town. The whole area was a centre of staunch recusancy. Church services took place in secret. The government considered a practising priest as equivalent to a traitor and hence liable to execution by being hanged, drawn and quartered. 

That happened to Ambrose Barlow in 1641. He was perfectly prepared for martyrdom. Here's some extracts from a friend's memoir:

A notable thing he told me at Easter was two years. That he had been about 20 years in England and no one day thereof omitted to celebrate. ...

His house was the only sure refuge that I knew for poor folk and penitents. His solemn days of invitation were three; Christmas, Easter and Whitsunday, and then he entertained all that would dine with him. Their cheer was boiled beef and pottage, mince pies, goose and groats, and to every man a grey coat at parting. ...

When he travelled abroad he went the ordinary way, and even through the town of Leigh when his business was that way, and I think he was as well known there as their parson. Some talk much of discretion, but his fortitude hath sure brought out good fruit. Upon a time speaking of some of the gentry, that would not be seen by any at Mass, he said: I like not those that will be peeping at God. ...

Although it be a common thing amongst many good men that would be loath to fight to wear swords, yet our martyr would wear none; and thus merrily he answered me when I took notice thereof, saying: Indeed I dare not wear a sword, because I am of a choleric nature . . . he loved to observe how time passed, but he had no pocket watch; and once I asked him why he had not a watch to take abroad with, as it was usual; and he answered me that it was pride, pride . . .

At that time, being Easter was two years, when I had his last blessing, he told me upon occasion, as oft he had done before, that they would not leave till they had him at Lancaster; whereat I did wonder that he should have such a conceipt,  things going so well with Catholics that there was great hopes of better and better . . . But he told me that Mr [Edmund] Arrowsmith, the last martyr at Lancaster, had appeared to him and did bid him to have a care of his words when he came before the judges; to which I answering in these words: I am sure, Sir, that you will talk to them . . . at my blunt reply he did laugh heartily...

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Maria Goretti was another martyr, one of the youngest recent saints. She came from a poor but devout family who were sharecroppers near the Lazio coast, south of Rome. At 11 she was running the household so her mother could work in the fields with her brothers, when another farm-labourer, 20-year-old Alessandro, tried to coerce sex with her. She said "No, God doesn't want this. If you do this you'll go to hell." It was July 5th, 1902; the threshing was in progress and hid all sound. He stabbed her 14 times. On her death-bed she forgave him; so did her family. Years later Alessandro fully repented and after release from prison spent the rest of his long life as a lay brother. 

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I suppose the era of field guides is coming to an end, replaced by smartphones. Anyway, I felt I didn't really need John Gooders' bird guide any more, though its clarity and vast information have been much admired. It's forty years old now, and some things have changed dramatically; kites, rare then, are now an everyday sight. You are far more likely to see an egret than a hawfinch. The Yellow-Legged Gull is now a thing. 

Like every field guide it has its eccentric moments, electing to call the dunnock the Hedge Accentor and describing the wren's explosive song as a warble. 

There was an art to describing bird-song in books, and we still need it; without it we can hear recordings on our smartphones but we can't talk about the songs or share our impressions or how we recognize them. You can use onomatopoeic coinages like tuk-tuk-tuk (often surprisingly unhelpful) or you can attempt descriptive words; John Gooders writes of the Grasshopper Warbler's "ventroloquial reeling". Perhaps "ventriloquial" means that it sounds like mimicry even though it isn't. He's talking about the song's uncanny resemblance to the sound of a fly-fisher's reel.  

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That copy of A Doll's House witnesses to my vague feeling of wanting to read Ibsen again, but I didn't manage it this time. However, a timely cold meant that I did finally read The Great Gatsby, something I promised myself a few years ago. Of course I read it hungrily and with delight -- Well, who doesn't? The world probably doesn't need any more thoughts on such an exhaustively discussed book, but if I think of anything I'll put it in another post.

To add to the enjoyment, my copy (rescued from the paper-recycling skip at the dump, as were the suffragettes) was prismatically annotated by an enthusiastic student. 

[I did write that other post:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2026/04/picturing-great-gatsby.html .]

George Peele: David and Bethsabe (early 1590s)

 

The servants of Absalom killing Amnon, 1540 engraving by Heinrich Aldegrever

[Image source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/428353 .]

George Peele's David and Bethsabe is one of just two surviving plays from Shakespeare's time with a biblical subject. However, we can see from the titles of lost plays that biblical subjects became popular in the early 1590s. (The other surviving play is A Looking Glass for London and England by Lodge and Greene, which is based on the book of Jonah.) When permission to put on Wilde's Salome was refused in 1892, the London examiner of plays (Edward F. Smyth Pigott) used the pretext of a sixteenth-century prohibition on stage representation of biblical characters, but evidently this had not been much regarded. 

David and Bethsabe recounts scenes from the history of David's reign: basically 2 Samuel 11-19. And what history! If you haven't read 2 Samuel recently, suffice it to say that there's places where even Peele tones it down a bit. On the whole, though, it was exactly his kind of thing: David's power-grab of  Bathsheba, his elimination of her husband Uriah, his son Amnon's rape of his half-sister Tamar, Absalom's revenge, insurrection and eventual death by multiple stabbings while dangling from a tree, to name a few highlights.  

[From now on I'll be using the names that appear in the play: Bethsabe, Urias, Thamar, Absalon...]

David and Bethsabe was entered in the Stationers' Register in May 1594. Various hypothetical composition dates have been thrown around but, so far as I can see, this is the only hard evidence. There appear to be borrowings from Tamburlaine (1587?) and from Book I of the Faerie Queene (1590). So "early 1590s" is likely. Irritatingly, that's not enough to determine if it antedates or postdates any of Peele's other plays of that period, i.e The Battle of Alcazar, Edward I, The Old Wives' Tale and his part of Titus Andronicus. 

The surviving text is rather a mess, and there are indications that some scenes are missing. Possibly Peele revised the play to make a reading text, adding the Du Bartas borrowings in the first and last scenes.

Nevertheless the play is more impressive and coherent than you might gather from its reputation. 

Earlier scholars had tended to accuse Peele, here as elsewhere, of poor plot structure. But as far as David and Bethsabe was concerned, Inga-Stina Ewbank surely put an end to those accusations in 1965 (details below).

The section Peele picked out of the book of Samuel is what biblical source critics call the "court history" or "succession narrative". It's unified by a focus on David's ill deeds and his subsequent troubles.

Peele made the focus more explicit than the bible does. He begins with the most notorious of David's offences, and proceeds to show him suffering the death of three of his sons (the infant son of Bethsabe, Amnon, Absalon) before ending with the education of Solomon, the son who will be his true successor. David, Nathan, and Semei all interpret the family turmoil as punishment for David's sin. The bible frames only the infant's death in that way, but Peele was unconsciously in line with a strand of Jewish commentary that understands David's "fourfold" retribution (2 Samuel 12:6) as realized in his infant son, Amnon, Tamar, and Absalon. 

In the bible the events of the play take place over a considerable stretch of years. Peele eliminates these time lapses, and interleaves the stories. Sometimes this leads to strange effects, e.g. when David, having just heard of Amnon's crimes through Absalon, doesn't seem to think there's anything odd about Absalon wanting Amnon to come to his sheep-shearing feast (Scene 5). But the time-compression can also work really well, as here:

Bethsabe. One medicine cannot heal our different harms;

But rather make both rankle at the bone:

Then let the king be cunning in his cure,

Lest flattering both, both perish in his hand.

David.  Leave it to me, my dearest Bethsabe,

Whose skill is cónversant in deeper cures. −

And, Cusay, haste thou to my servant Joab,

Commanding him to send Urias home

With all the speed can possibly be used.

(Scene 1)

Bethsabe is still resisting David's move on her, but with "let the king be cunning" there's a hint that her uncompromising chastity is turning into resignation. David, at any rate, takes it that way, and immediately sets about bringing Urias home from the wars. In the bible this plan arises from Bathsheba's pregnancy (2 Samuel 11:5-6); the idea is apparently to ensure that Urias sleeps with his wife as soon as possible, so he will believe that David's child is his own. Peele, tolerating no time gaps, brings the decision forward to the seduction scene. That is, his David already anticipates making Bethsabe pregnant, and sets about covering his tracks. 

The biblical narrative is quite tight-lipped about what's going on here, and Peele is more so. (Evidently, he relied on his audience knowing the story well.) But the absence of spelt-out motives makes for compelling drama. 

In Scene 5 it takes a comic turn, with David practically begging Urias to take a night off, then resorting  to making Urias so drunk that he might at least not remember whether he slept with Bethsabe or not. Here's the carouse in full swing:

Urias.  Cusay, I pledge thee all with all my heart. −
Give me some drink, ye servants of the king
Give me my drink.
[Drinks.]
David.  Well done, my good Urias! drink thy fill,
That in thy fulness David may rejoice.
Urias.  I will, my lord.
Abs.  Now, Lord Urias, one carouse to me.
Urias.  No, sir, I’ll drink to the king;
Your father is a better man than you.
David.  Do so, Urias; I will pledge thee straight.
Urias.  I will indeed, my lord and sovereign;
I’ll once in my days be so bold.
David.  Fill him his glass.
Urias.  Fill me my glass
[He gives him the glass.]
David.  Quickly, I say.

Despite abundant signs of growing intoxication, Urias is resolute in not going home to his wife, like the proud soldier he is. It's time for David to roll out Plan C. 

The drinking scene is all the funnier because we understand that it holds Urias' life in the balance. (It shows that Peele had learnt from Kyd's stagecraft  as well as Marlowe's.) 

In passing, the drunk Urias even intuits Absalon's longing to outshine his father, a theme that still lies in the future. 

It's a small example of how Peele brings his stories to life by interlacing them. Larger examples are  Amnon's story getting under way (in Scenes 3 - 4) while Urias is still on the way back to base, and David being told of Amnon's death at the very moment he's crowing over his victory at Rabbah (Scene 9). 

At such moments we recognize the kinship of David and Bethsabe with the history plays of the same period. Here (as in Shakespeare's Henry plays) foreign war is succeeded by civil war, and the ultimate cause of national turmoil is a monarch's sin.  

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This post was inevitably going to happen, following on from my post on Tom Raworth's "West Wind", which unexpectedly quotes from the superb parasol song that begins David and Bethsabe.

Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air,

Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair:

Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me;

Black shade, fair nurse; shroud me, and please me:

Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning,

Make not my glad cause cause of mourning.

Let not my beauty's fire

Inflame unstaid desire,

Nor pierce any bright eye

That wandereth lightly.

Elsewhere Peele writes a ringing, regular iambic pentameter, with few feminine endings or inversions, mainly end-stopped. It's ornamented with copious alliteration and gorgeous imagery, but it has better things to offer than a monotony of riches. 

[David.] Bright Bethsabe gives earth to my desires ...

(Scene 1)

[Amnon to Thamar.] 

Hence from my bed, whose sight offends my soul

As doth the parbreak of disgorgèd bears!   

(Scene 4)

[Nathan to David.] 

Urias thou hast killèd with the sword;

Yea, with the sword of the uncircumcised

Thou hast him slain: wherefore, from this day forth,

The sword shall never go from thee and thine ...

(Scene 7)

[Cusay to Absalon's council of war.] 

... To gather men from Dan to Bersabe,

That they may march in number like sea-sands,

That nestle close in one another's neck ... 

(Scene 11. Dan and Bersabe (=Beersheba) describe the northern and southern limits of David's kingdom)

[Achitophel, about to commit suicide.] 

Let all the sighs I breathed for this disgrace,

Hang on my hedges like eternal mists,

As mourning garments for their master's death. 

(Scene 13)

[Joab to Absalon.] 

Hold, Absalon, Joab's pity is in this;

In this, proud Absalon, is Joab's love.

        [Stabs him again.]  

(Scene 15)

Doubtless Absalon was suspended from a stage arbour, like the one in the 1623 illustration showing the hanged body of Horatio in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. The same property (looking like a fire-screen with painted branchwork) would also have been e.g. what Benedick and Beatrice eavesdropped behind. 

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We are very lucky to have Peele's plays online, with copious annotation; they (and many others) are on the site elizabethandrama.org, a labour of love by Peter Lukacs:

http://elizabethandrama.org/the-playwrights/george-peele/david-bethsabe-george-peele/

(If you just want to read the play, choose the un-annotated text.)

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Inga-Stina Ewbank, "The House of David in Renaissance Drama: A Comparative Study". Renaissance Drama vol 8 (1965), pp. 3-40. 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41913890

Defence of the structure of Peele's play (saying most of what I said above, but better); with numerous analogues from European sources. 

She also wrote an earlier note (not online):

Inga-Stina Ekeblad (later Ewbank), ‘The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe: A Note on George Peele’s Biblical Drama’, English Studies 39 (1958), 57-62 (57).

Annaliese Connolly, "Peele's David and Bethsabe: Reconsidering Biblical Drama of the Long 1590s". Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 16 (October, 2007) 9.1-20.

https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/si-16/connpeel.htm#

This essay gives a lot of useful background. Connolly argues that biblical history was a speciality brand of the Admiral's Men, and that David was just the kind of role in which Edward Alleyn excelled. But it's odd that it's totally absent from Henslowe's Diary, unless connected with the payment for "poleyes & worckmanshipp for to hang absolome" in October 1602. (The 1599 quarto claims that it had been frequently performed.) 

Peter Auger, British Responses to Du Bartas’ Semaines, 1584-1641 (D. Phil. Thesis, 2012 (Merton College, Oxford)). 

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/catalog/uuid:be0f89c2-c2e4-482d-ac8f-e867985ff72e/download_file?file_format=application%2Fpdf&safe_filename=British%2BResponses%2Bto%2BDu%2BBartas%2BSemaines

Provides a detailed account of how Peele uses Du Bartas in the first and last scenes of David and Bethsabe. See especially pp. 189 - 197. 

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On King David:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/11/king-david.html

On Titus Andronicus, by William Shakespeare and George Peele:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2015/11/william-shakespeare-and-george-peele.html

Complete list of posts on Shakespeare and his contemporaries

King David

A postcard from my Mum and Dad, which recently re-emerged from the pages of one of my books. They'd been at the British Library with some friends to see the exhibition Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination; this was about ten years back.

The picture is King David playing the harp. It comes from the Westminster Psalter (BL Royal MS 2 A XXII), produced for the Benedictine monastery at Westminster in around 1200. The manuscript is "royal" because at a later date it was acquired from a collector by Charles II (or was he presented with it?). After all, Westminster Abbey was where coronations and other royal ceremonies took place. 

The artist who contributed this and four other full-page miniatures (ff. 12v - 14v) was, it's speculated, an itinerant specialist, not a monk. His work has also been identified in a manuscript from St. Albans. He may have learned his trade at Winchester, judging from the Byzantine style of e.g. King David's face.

As ever, the mixed perspectives are fascinating. The throne is seen more or less head-on, but the footstool is apparently seen from an angle, or rather from two angles. (Assuming that both structures are basically oblong.) The artist's picture of the Virgin and Child (f. 13v) contains a similar footstool, except you can see one of its back legs. With or without the back leg, these footstools seem to float in space. There's no single point of view. But the play-off between symmetry and asymmetry is evidently important to this picture. Playing the harp necessitates an unsymmetrical way of sitting and placing your feet. David's pink cloak covers one knee but not the other. At the same time the picture captures the full-frontal impact of majesty, like the picture of Christ in glory on the preceding page (f. 14r). 

And also as ever, medieval art asks questions about audience. Who was going to look at this picture? Not the general public, of course. Only the monks who used the Psalter would ever see these full-page illustrations. And even then, not often. Their attention would be on the working pages. And yet the importance of the book, and the prestige of the abbey, cried out for top-quality illumination. Are we looking at a connoisseur abbot's household decoration, or at a pious communal devotional work whose "audience" is God himself? 

But to even ask these questions it to become aware that our concept of audience is historically-bounded. The invention of printing was one crucial step on that journey. Now we live in an era where audience has become distributed, but where it's almost felt to be a human right, and where one of our chief unsatisfied needs is to get attention, more and more attention . . .

 

Westminster Psalter, f. 14v.

Here's the picture in situ and with uncropped border. (You can flick through the whole manuscript here: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=royal_ms_2_a_xxii_fs001r ; or read it, if you want to!)

On the facing page, the psalms begin:

Westminster Psalter, f. 15r.

The beginning of Psalm I:

Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum et in via peccatorum non stetit in cathedra pestilentiae non sedit.
Sed in lege Domini voluntas eius et in lege eius meditabitur die ac nocte.

Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence.
But his will is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he shall meditate day and night.

The later Latin text has "cathedra derisorum", and later translations reflect this, e.g. "the seat of the scornful" in the King James Version.

For medieval Christianity, King David was the author of the Psalms.

According to the traditional Hebrew headnotes, 73 of the 150 Psalms were written by King David; this isn't one of them. But the headnotes are late additions anyway. If David did exist, he would have lived around 1000 BC. A psalm like this was perhaps from around 500 years later. 

When I was at university, one of my teachers said that the oldest biblical story that was likely to be true was the disgraceful one about David, Bathsheba and Uriah (2 Samuel XI). That was because it ran counter to the evident propaganda in David's favour; it would only have been included because the facts were too notorious to conceal. I'm not sure how serious he was being, but others have certainly noted the circumstantial details in this part of 2 Samuel, the remarkable impression of being a narrative from within David's own court circle.  

And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand : so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him. (1 Samuel 16:23)

The kinnor was evidently a kind of lyre: its trapezium-shaped appearance, with the strings attached to a yoke, is illustrated in the Nineveh relief in the British Museum, and the same shape of lyre existed thousands of years earlier in Sumeria. 

In the Westminster picture, King David is playing a triangular harp (like a Celtic harp): with a column to take the tension, and a curved neck (to keep the strings equidistant). As was normal in Britain (though not elsewhere) the harp leans against the left shoulder. The left hand is playing the treble and the right hand the bass: modern harpists do the opposite. 

Imperialism and the early church

Rudyard Kipling (Photograph by Elliott & Fry, c. 1932)

[Image source: https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudyard_Kipling#/media/File:Rudyard_Kipling,_by_Elliott_%26_Fry_(cropped).jpg]

“The Church that was at Antioch” 

 

Online Text

HIS mother, a devout and well-born Roman widow, decided that he was doing himself no good in an Eastern Legion so near to free-thinking Constantinople, and got him seconded for civil duty in Antioch, where his uncle, Lucius Sergius, was head of the urban Police. Valens obeyed as a son and as a young man keen to see life, and, presently, cast up at his uncle’s door.

‘That sister-in-law of mine,’ said the elder, ‘never remembers me till she wants something. What have you been doing?’

‘Nothing, Uncle.’

‘Meaning everything?’

‘That’s what mother thinks. But I haven’t.’

‘We shall see. Your quarters are across the inner courtyard. Your—er—baggage is there already. . . ("The Church that was at Antioch", opening lines)

The roots of imperialism lie in the "boys' books" of the time, specifically the history of classical Rome, in Livy and others. The New Testament was more troublesome; it presented a view of empire from without.

The title of “The Church that was at Antioch” comes from Acts 13:1, and this story, like “The Manner of Men”, evinces close reading of the New Testament. Antioch can be considered the very birthplace of Christianity, for “the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch” (Acts 11:26). It was not one of Paul’s own churches, but he was often there and it was the first place where the practical issues of mingling Jews and Gentiles in one congregation were seriously confronted. This is of course a major theme of Kipling’s story. In the Acts of the Apostles, the food question is resolved, temporarily at least, by letters sent from Jerusalem to Antioch by Silas and Judas Barsabas (Acts 15). Peter’s part in this account is limited to the Jerusalem end, where he appears to speak up in favour of Paul’s ecumenicism (“And put no difference between us and them” (Acts 15:9)), no doubt because of his own experience with the centurion Cornelius. But the narrative in the Acts of the Apostles doesn’t square very easily with Paul’s account in Galatians (2:11-14), in which Peter is (most unexpectedly) said to have been present in Antioch at the height of the food controversy and to have reneged on his initial liberalism the moment that other seniors from Jerusalem showed up, until publically taken to task by Paul. Kipling, I think, makes admirable sense of all this; he sees that Peter’s weakness, notably his tendency to go against his own conscience in order to fit in with those around him (as when he denied Christ) can also be the basis for a credible moral authority.

 

In Kipling’s story the Christians are seen within a frame of Roman colonialism. Sergius, the head of urban police, and his nephew Valens, have all-too-obvious analogies with the British Empire-builders of his other stories; they speak Empire English and our perspective at the beginning of the story involves identifying ourselves with the Roman administrators and seeing the Antioch Christians as an alien and characteristically troublesome rabble. But as his readers are themselves Christians this perspective is always under threat, and by the end of the story it is reversed – Valens is being discussed by the two saints as a variety of “noble heathen”.

 

In truth Serga and Valens are far from being doctrinaire Romans; both have had corners rubbed off in the East. Kipling suppresses the alienness of Roman civilization, its appetite for mass public killings and its tendency to regard non-citizens as non-humans (Pliny the Younger’s famous exchange of letters with Trajan confronts us with quite different ideas). Both here and in “The Manner of Men” Kipling locates us in a mixed-race environment  on the outposts of Empire where, as he believed, men often speak humanly. As for the Christians, their friendliness is proverbial, and in “The Manner of Men” the suspicious Quabil says of Paul, “he had the woman’s trick of taking the tone and colour of whoever he talked to”. Considering Paul’s propensity for making enemies (e.g. his eventual falling out with Barnabas over John Mark, or his address to the Jerusalem Jews), this might seem unlikely. Quabil is perhaps registering, in a thoroughly unsympathetic spirit, the Christians’ determination to turn the other cheek and to comply with earthly authority, though an alternative explanation appears below.  

 

Valens comes to Antioch as a young man “keen to see life”, and he finds death. (Kipling idealizes him, rather along the lines of such imperialist stories as “The Tomb of His Ancestors”).  His heroism, which includes a too-overt vein of Christ-analogy, provokes a competition of grief, in which those who loved him seek to appropriate his power – I'm sorry that this is such a chilly way of describing natural human reactions. Serga threatens dire vengeance, the Byzant slave-girl throws herself on his body, and Paulus thinks he should be baptised. Petrus, who has been less personally affectionate towards Valens in life, is able to be more purely respectful. But the excellence of the story does not lie in this climax but in the credibilty of the fictional context.

 

“Father Serga” plays a large part in this, from his first remarks (“Your – er – baggage is there already..”). Genial as he is, there is a certain malice in the remark, as in the statement about Valens, “He rather fancies his legs”. Once fuelled with the “strong cup”, he enjoys singing the song about “Pickled Fish” to his Christian audience; he cuts the tremendous significance of the centurion’s conversion down to size by speaking of Cornelius as a formative drinking companion; and having put a flushed Valens on the spot chips in with a remark about “a young Sabine tush-ripe boar”. He has an easy consciousness that his squirming audience are in no position to take offence. But this mild sadism, because it reveals a sensitivity to how other people feel, wins our sympathy for “Father Serga”, at least in comparison to Petrus, who seems utterly absorbed in his own affairs. The Christians are unworldly in ways that are not beyond the story’s criticism: “...they were all extremely pround of being Christians. Some of them began to link arms across the alley, and strike into the ‘Enthroned above Caesar’ chorus”. It’s the criticism that Serga implies when he says: “Can’t either of you two talking creatures tell me what I’m to tell his mother?”  

 

Much of the story takes place in the evening, at twilight or dusk; Kipling here showing a true instinct for Mediterranean life. For Serga this should be a time for reconciliation, for drinking, talk and sleep; for Valens and his girl it develops into love-making; for Paulus and Petrus it remains a time for work. The Christians, in fact, have difficulty in subsiding naturally; Valens has to organize them. In Kipling’s imperialist vision these too-exalted children have to learn to be natural men.

 

Dusk, like the urban spaces of the inner courtyard and the Little Circus, are important manifestations of the story’s inner construction (what I have called elsewhere, the performance). It would be a shame to leave nothing for another reader to explore, so I leave aside the puzzle of what Paulus means when he says, finally, “Moreover there is the concubine”.

“The Manner of Men”


Online text




HER cinnabar-tinted topsail, nicking the hot blue horizon, showed she was a Spanish wheat-boat hours before she reached Marseilles mole. There, her mainsail brailed itself, a spritsail broke out forward, and a handy driver aft; and she threaded her way through the shipping to her berth at the quay as quietly as a veiled woman slips through a bazaar.




("The Manner of Men", opening lines.)

 

For the same reason I'll leave “The Manner of Men” almost untouched. The title refers to 1 Corinthians 15:32, which begins “If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts...”. It is a puzzling verse; most modern commentators, I think, interpret the conditional as “If I had fought with beasts”, on the grounds that people who enter the arena with the beasts do not survive to tell the tale, and also on the grounds that Ephesus had no amphitheatre. But if the phrase is purely hypothetical why would Paul specify Ephesus at all? Perhaps Kipling is right to imagine that something happened there; for example that someone set the dogs on Paul, but not in a public show.

 

The opening lines of the story, which describe the serene arrival of a ship in harbour, are very beautiful, and Kipling’s “performance” involves an extensive use of nautical terms throughout. The story of the shipwreck at Malta (based on the later chapters of Acts) appears unconnected to what happens in the frame (where the narrators Quabil and Sulinor are talking over the wine with the young Spanish captain Baeticus) but in one respect at least there is an important link. We discover eventually that Quabil lost his son three years ago. Baeticus at this point realizes who Quabil is. This interruption in the narrative is dealt with very cursorily, but it seems that Baeticus, who has been brought up by foster-parents in the Balearics, is also some kind of “son” to Quabil.

 

The important link, however, is that the disastrous voyage to Malta took place two autumns ago, when Quabil’s grief was still fresh. This then is the explanation for some of his doubtful decisions on that voyage, his intense desire to leave the Eastern Mediterranean and his unwonted lack of care for himself and his ship. One can also infer that his rejection of Paul’s conversation and “cheer” arose because Paul intuited his state of mind and tried to speak to him about his son. Whereas Sulinor welcomed Paul’s approaches and the probing of his phobia about the beasts, Quabil set his face against Paul’s psychotherapy. The title of the story refers, therefore, not just to the everyday work of men (in this case seafarers) but also to their hidden motives and mental struggles. The serenity of the opening image includes the notion of concealment. 

 

First edition of Limits and Renewals (1932), Kipling's final collection of short stories

[Image source: https://www.yesterdaysgallery.com/pages/books/16286/rudyard-kipling/limits-and-renewals]

 

Additional Note on “Proofs of Holy Writ”.

 

Limits and Renewals is Kipling’s last collection, but his last story, too late to be included in it, is "Proofs of Holy Writ", which is available on the alarmingly professional website of the Kipling Society. It isn’t much of a story. Ben Jonson visits Will Shakespeare in semi-retirement at New Place, and over the wine Will (assisted by a strangely compliant Ben) works out a rendering of some verses of Isaiah on behalf of the divines who are putting together the King James Version. The notion for the story arose over dinner with John Buchan, and a sentence like this shows how comfortable Kipling was with Buchan’s image of clubmen playing with the fates of nations: “...(T)he betterment of this present age – and the next, maybe – lies, in chief, on our four shoulders.” This is supposed to be Shakespeare talking to Jonson! As you may gather, “Will” sounds more like Kipling than Shakespeare; and “Ben” is a huge disappointment. The setting of the conversation is skeletal, and the discussion of renderings seems to go on for ever – one verse of Isaiah, rather than five, would have said everything that was required. I would gladly believe that a fitter Kipling would have enriched and disrupted this bald narrative beyond recognition. What the story does show, however, is the sort of logical terminus to which a late performance such as “The Manner of Men” is tending. Both pieces are (unusually for Kipling) harmless yarns, but it’s as if the author now believes that a story about great men inherits sufficient justification from its chosen topic.