Gotham Diary:
Too Clever By Half
23 September 2013

As I was getting dressed for dinner last night, my eye fell on the spine of a book on the lowest shelf of a bookcase. It was a book that I’d read in the spring or early summer, but not found a more permanent place for. Gawd, it hit me. Looking up a few books, I saw, just beneath the one on top, Geza Vermes’s Christian Beginnings, a book that I had spent hours last week trying to find. In that very bookcase. It never occurred to me to check the bottom shelf, which I seem to have forgotten rearranging. After giving up on the search a week ago, I bought the book again, this time for the Kindle. But the moment of interest had passed. I had moved on in another direction altogether, although it was also one inspired by Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Silence. Not only have I been working my way through Black’s Reign of Elizabeth, but I’ve finally got past the first act of The Winter’s Tale, a play that hitherto rebuffed me.

I see why: The Winter’s Tale is too dramatic. Too dramatic to make a good read. It begins with an explosion of jealousy for which the reader has not been prepared. Theatre audiences, of course, require no such preparation: they’re always ready for a surprise, as long as it’s really exciting. And Leontes’ insane suspicions of his queen, Hermione, are really exciting, because they are insane. Or are they? Do they not spring from misgivings about the changing role of women in the world?

Like Shakespeare’s romantic heroines, Hermione (who isn’t quite one of them) is very clever. Her wit and dash endear her to us, not least because centuries of familiarity have taught us to love Shakespeare’s dry dames. But perhaps Hermione is too clever. When, at Leontes’ instance, she persuades his oldest friend in the world, another king, Polixenes of Bohemia, to tarry in Sicilia, which Leontes rules (just for good measure and bad geography, Hermione is the daughter of the Emperor of Russia), Leontes tells her that she has never spoken better — except once. When was that, Hermione wants to know, perhaps pushing the point a bit too far.

My last good deed was to entreat his stay.
What was my first? It has an elder sister,
Or I mistake you. O, would her name were Grace!

Leontes tells her that the other occasion was her acceptance of his marriage suit. Hermione purrs,

                     ‘Tis grace indeed!
Why, lo you now, I have spoke to the purpose twice;
The one forever earned a royal husband,
Th’other for some while a friend.

And she walks off with Polixenes, holding hands. Leontes fills out her line:

                                       Too hot, too hot!
To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.

What Hermione has misguidedly mingled is her “purposed” speeches. She projects, however unwittingly, a parallelism: although her second “successful” remark earned “for some while a friend,” rather than “forever … a royal husband,” this temporal difference does not block the inference, drawn by Leontes, that what she has done with one man, she might do with the other. That this purely verbal indiscretion bears such calamitous fruit bears out Shakespeare’s belief that words are more dangerous than deeds.

We like Hermione, as I say; we root from her from the start. But Leontes has not had our advantage; he has not grown up reading Twelfth Night or Much Ado About Nothing. He is, like most of Shakespeare’s men, a medieval figure — late, perhaps, but still medieval. (Romeo and Hamlet, although clearly men of the Renaissance, have the misfortune to live under the old dispensation.) It goes without saying, in the medieval worldview, that women are lesser creatures, subordinate to men. In no way can wives be permitted to outshine their husbands.

It goes without saying, but Leontes says it, anyway, in II.3, his scene with Paulina. Paulina, a lady of the court, insists that Leontes recognize his new-born child, the baby girl who will grow up to be Perdita, and whom Leontes believes to be Polixenes’s bastard. Leontes refuses to answer Paulina, but addresses only her husband, Antigonus, whom he will later charge with putting the baby to death by exposure. He tells the man to silence his wife, and is aghast at Antigonus’s inability to do so. Frances Dolan, the editor of the Pelican edition, summarizes Leontes’s expostulations in her Introduction to the play.

The abuse he directs at Paulina in II.3 taps into persistent associations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture: (1) an assertive woman must have a weak husband, since only one spouse can wear the breeches or rule the roost; (2) a woman who cannot hold her tongue cannot preserve her chastity or refrain from violence; (3) a woman who asserts herself inevitably takes something away from men, effeminizing them and masculinizing herself; (4) domestic and political disobedience imply and promote one another.

It would not be said that Hermione cannot hold her tongue, but her cleverness suggests a certain assertiveness, and her daring wit even moreso.

So Leontes is not nuts after all: he’s just a red-blooded king of the old school. Of course, he apologizes the moment the oracle disabuses him, but it’s too late by then, or seems to be.

Now, at any rate, I have reached the altogether stranger feature of the play, the sixteen-year gap in the action that falls between Acts III and IV. (Like the Sleeping Beauty, who comes to mind more than once in this play, Perdita grows up in the interval.) Act IV, by the way, is nearly as long as the first three acts combined, and its fourth scene runs for an extraordinary thirty pages (836 lines). Take a deep breath!

***

I have two copies of the play — two copies of the same edition. I used to believe that it made more sense to have one big book of Shakespeare than lots of little ones, and it does, but only for research purposes. If you want to read a play, from first act to last, the big book will soon prove to be tiresome, too heavy to hold up for any time and too finely printed to read with comfort. (IV, iv is crammed into fewer than nine pages in the big book.) Being stupid, I took a while to understood why I had come to regard reading Shakespeare as a chore.

The Pelican singles are cheaper than almost all other paperbacks: $8.00. (Each issue of The New Yorker costs nearly that, not that subscribers pay any such freight). What I’ll do with the little book when I’m done, I don’t know. I expect I’ll have to give it away — I absolutely do not have room to keep it.

I’ve also got the paperbacks of two other plays that have given me trouble in the past, Troilus and Cressida and Cymbeline. I’m going to try to read them as if I were sitting in the theatre, too.

***

Last night, whilst Kathleen plied her needle, I read aloud from The Reign of Elizabeth and was struck, at one point, by the beauty of the near-scansion in the construction of a sentence. In his great book on style, F L Lucas cautions against metrical prose, as likely to provoke “mirth or irritation” in the reader. “Prose needs a less obtrusive, more elusive, kind of music. That’s what I liked about Black’s sentence — the meter was elusive. It was there, but not when you looked. This morning, I looked through the whole chapter, trying to find this lovely sentence, which I had repeated so many times — Kathleen quite liked it, too — that I’d entirely forgotten what it was about. All that I could be sure of was that it came from the long central chapter on “Literature, Art, and Thought.” I called Kathleen at work. Could she recall the subject matter? No. She’d know the sentence if she saw it… A few minutes later, I called her back: I’d found it. The topic was, of all things, alchemy. The beautiful part of the sentence follows the semicolon.

Doubtless there were some who practiced alchemy with honest intent; but the great majority were sharks who preyed on the credulity and greed of an acquisitive age.

Who was it said that all history is current history?