What is History For?

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.  When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

- George Santayana


You might not have noticed it, but economists aren't really scientists.  They like to pretend that they are, and that they devote themselves to the objective and dispassionate study of statistics in order to arrive at universal and immutable truths.  But that's not true.  Most of the time, they're making it up.

This has undoubtedly been the case in the past 30 years or so.  The emergence of so-called "think tanks" (like the Institute of Economic Affairs) and the neoliberal ecomomists of the Chicago School (patron saint, the loathsome Milton Friedman) allowed the political agenda to be hijacked.  The post-war consensus was thrown out.  Suddenly, economists and pundits were spouting free market fundamentalist dogma.  And a right old mess it's gotten us into.

If you look carefully at what these people say, the studies the produce and the arguments they advance, something really should strike you.  The "evidence" they quote is ... well, how shall we put it? ... selective, to say the least.  Rather as if a government department chose to prove that crime rates have fallen by citing the number of highwaymen arrested last year, these ideologues decide in advance what they believe and then seek out the "facts" to prove it.

Their studies do not proceed from the basic question, "What does the economy need?  What would work best?"  They start with a belief, an assertion, and then move heaven and hell to come up with something that looks a little bit like science.  But it isn't.  After all, the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea was able to prove by means of mathematics and logic that Achilles would never win a footrace against a tortoise.  Common sense, experience, and limitless amounts of genuine evidence tell us that, more often than not, Achilles would beat the tortoise hands down.  But if you're willing to cheat when trying to prove your point, if can be done.

"What's this got to do with history?" I hear you cry.  Simple.  We like to think of historians as being essentially scientists.  They comb the records of the past to bring us the truth of what happened.  But that's poppycock!  Just like those economists who don't care how ludicrous their methodology has to be so long as they prove their point, so many historians start out with a set of prejudices and then bend history to fit them.

A few months back, I got hold of a copy of Sir Arthur Bryant's Set in a Silver Sea, the first volume of his sweeping "History of Britain and the British People".  After reading a few pages, I felt such absolute disgust that I gave the book away.

The problem I had with the book was that, in just the first few pages, Bryant repeatedly stressed, in the ripest of terms, that Christianity was the best thing that ever happened to the British Isles.

Now, you might agree with that.  And I'm not attacking Christianity, here.  The point is that there is another side to the argument (e.g. "Christianity destroyed the native culture and plunged Europe into the Dark Ages, from which it didn't emerge until the Renaissance").  But Sir Arthur Bryant was stating his personal belief as if it was undeniable fact.

That's not how history works.  Or rather, it's not how history is meant to work.  It's the equivalent of those economists who load the dice before they write up their reports.  Everything that followed Bryant's opening remarks would naturally be skewed in support of his fundamental beliefs.  He would, in short, not be giving us an objective history of the British Isles.  It would be history as Sir Arthur liked to see it - a history which was extremely selective with the evidence.

Sir Arthur Bryant grew up in a house next door to Buckingham palace.  His father was the chief clerk to the Prince of Wales, before becoming registrar of the Royal Victorian Order.  Young Arthur was schooled at Harrow.  He was, you could say, born and raised to defend the monarchy.

As I have observed elsewhere (including my recent post, "The New Heroic Age"), aristocracy and religion go hand-in-hand.  One might say, you can't have the one without the other.  Both represent an entrenched point-of-view and a hierarchy which, so they claim, is divinely ordained.

Such an outlook is profoundly medieval.  It is hardly surprising that Sir Arthur Bryant's paean to a Britain of lords and bishops was first published in 1984.  You could hardly pick a more appropriate year for the start of the New Heroic age and the reintroduction of feudalism (by the back door, of course, and at the insistence of neoliberal economists).

By 1984, the process of social evolution was turning around.  Slavery was being hailed as "freedom", social progress as "communism".  We started heading backwards, away from equality, meritocracy, social mobility, and towards inequality and oligarchy, nepotism for the rich and inescapable poverty for everybody else.  Sir Arthur Bryant's obsessively religious-aristocratic vision of British history could not have appeared at a more apposite moment.

But here's the point: there was some history in Bryant's book, but it was not history as such.  No more than Milton Friedman's ravings were genuine economics.  Both were biased, lopsided arguments - a pickled past in which all good things sprang from the Church (and the monarchy, of course) and a ruinous future in which all good things are snatched up by private corporations.

It is noteworthy that Sir Arthur chose to entitle his revisionist puff-piece, Set in a Silver Sea.  It's a quote from Shakespeare.  I analyse it at the start of the second section of my Who Killed William Shakespeare?  The speech is routinely mistaken for a gushing hymn to England, a sort of "Land of Hope and Glory" written by our very best playwright.

But the speech is nothing of the sort.  Those who quote the "patriotic" part of it ignore the speech as a whole, it really being a furious condemnation of the betrayal of England by greedy aristocrats and self-serving lawyers.  In other words, the speech as Shakespeare wrote it is the exact opposite of what the flag-waving demagogues imagine it to be.  It is not a praise poem for merry old England.  It is a bitter critique of neoliberal economics.  And, since Shakespeare wrote it, all we have done is turn full circle.

Being selective with the evidence in order to bolster a point-of-view based on deep-rooted ideological convictions results in a false and gravely misleading message.  We remember only the "set in a silver sea" part of Shakespeare's Richard II speech and quietly overlook what was actually said.  We choose the bits we like and ignore the rest.  We rewrite history to suit our prejudices.

The period since Bryant published his attempt to airbrush reality out of British history has also been the period of neoliberal economic dogma.  It is impossible to divorce the corruption of genuine history from the blinkered and dishonest diktats of various right-wing institutions.  They are, if you will, two sides of the same coin.  One misleads us about the past, the other lies to us about the future.  The results are economic chaos, political disenfranchisement and Downton Abbey.

So this poses a crucial question.  Do we really want to return to the stagnation of medievalism and the enforced ignorance of the Dark Ages?  Or do we believe in the rights of man (and, more importantly, woman), along with science and democracy, opportunity and reward, truth and freedom?

If we want to pursue the latter course - resuming, as it were, where we were heading before the crazies took over - then we must reclaim history from the deluded pedagogues of the New Heroic age.  We must stop them flogging us their pseudo-historical religious-aristocratic nonsense.  We must demand that they tell us the truth about the past.  That way, we can make our own minds up and decide which mistakes we wish to avoid repeating.

If we don't - that is, if we'd prefer to be serfs toiling in the fields for our idiot masters, punished for having ideas and dying of preventable diseases - then we're heading in the right direction.  We're letting false prophets frame our past, our present and our future.

The decision is ours.  True history, or party political propaganda?  Evidence-based economics or ideological gibberish?  Enlightenment or fanaticism?  Democracy or feudalism?

If we're not sure, we need only do some proper research into life in the Middle Ages - because that's where one-sided history books, rose-tinted costume dramas and neoliberal economists are leading us.

The Dangerous Friendships of Princes

A few weeks back, I posted a short series of blogs examining the so-called Cobbe portrait and subjecting it to much the same detailed analysis as I carried out on the Beoley skull, the Darmstadt death mask and the familiar portraits of William Shakespeare in my runaway bestseller, Who Killed William Shakespeare?

Today, I had an email from a friend who just happens to have visited Hatchlands Park in Surrey recently, where the Cobbe portrait is on show along with a portrait of Shakespeare's noble patron, the third Earl of Southampton.  My friend remarked that he couldn't help noticing the strange bump or blister on the nose side of the left eye socket in the Cobbe portrait (which is said to be of Shakespeare).  Having read my book, he found this particular detail in the portrait "fascinating".

So I was reminded of the work that remains to be done on the Cobbe portrait.  Various features compare rather chillingly with the damage to the skull at Beoley Church, those features also showing up on the death mask, the Chandos Portrait, the Droeshout engraving and the Davenant Bust.  These correspondences would appear to indicate that the Cobbe portrait does indeed show an image of Shakespeare - one which was made posthumously, using the death mask as a model.

The image is that of a youngish man - not the middle-aged, semi-retired poet of the second decade of the 17th century, when the portrait is thought to have been painted.  This means that, though the portrait was almost certainly posthumous (witness the fatal head injuries), it presented Will Shakespeare as he had been quite a few years earlier.  Perhaps when, aged about 30, he had been friends with the Earl of Southampton.

The inscription at the top of the portrait reads Principum amicitas! - the 'Friendship of princes!'  The words come from one of the Odes of the Roman poet, Horace (Book 2, Ode 1: "To Pollio, Writing his History of the Civil Wars").  The opening verses of that Ode translate thus:

You're handling the Civil Wars, since Metellus
was Consul, the causes, mistakes, and methods,
Fortune's game, and the dangerous friendships
of princes, and the unatoned-for

bloodstains on various weapons:
a task that's filled with dangerous pitfalls,
so that you are walking over embers
that smoulder under treacherous ashes.

Now, if you've read Who Killed William Shakespeare? you'll know how relevant this verse is to Will Shakespeare.  He wrote about the "Civil Wars" and disturbances which had troubled the land ever since Henry VIII decided to tear England away from Rome.  In other words, he exposed the cruelty, the violence and the sickening oppression of the governments of Elizabeth I and James I in their efforts to destroy English Catholicism.  And for that, Shakespeare paid with his life.

Don't let the Muse of dark actions be long absent
from the theatre, continued Horace, writing to his friend Asinius Pollio, a Roman poet, playwright,literary critic and historian: soon, when you've finished covering
public events, reveal your great gifts
again in Athenian tragedy,
you famous defendant of troubled clients ...

Let us assume, then, that the Cobbe portrait really does show us an image of Shakespeare, backdated (as it were) to the time when his patron was the Earl of Southampton.  The inscription chosen for the posthumous portrait refers to a Roman poet and playwright, a "famous defendant of troubled clients", who was playing with fire by writing a history of his violent times and thereby "walking over embers that smoulder under treacherous ashes."

These words came from the Roman poet Horace, who gets more mentions in my Who Killed William Shakespeare? than any other classical poet.  The reason for this is that Shakespeare seems to have been considered - by his contemporaries - as something of a modern Horace; a writer who was inclined to quote Horace a great deal and (like Horace) a genius who was mocked and satirised by a slavish underdog (if you've read my book, you'll know who I'm talking about).

The Principum amicitas! inscription therefore lends weight to the possibility that the Cobbe portrait shows us Shakespeare, since Will Shakespeare was seen as being like Horace, as well as being a "Roman" (i.e. Catholic) poet and playwright, like the recipient of Horace's Ode.

The inscription also carries a very dark hint.  The Ode refers to the "heavy" or "dangerous friendships of princes" (grauisque principum amicitas), which has a particularly poignant significance in the context of Shakespeare's death.  The silencing of William Shakespeare, that "famous defendant of troubled clients", was - I have argued - ordered by King James I, who had no wish to see the eloquent playwright championing the cause of the king's former favourite, Robert Carr, who was about to be tried for murder.

According to a tradition passed down by Shakespeare's godson - and probably his natural son - Sir William Davenant, Shakespeare had once received a friendly letter, written in the king's own hand.  And so the inscription on the portrait serves as a reminder that the friendships of princes could be destructive.  King James was in fact a weak and paranoid king, while Shakespeare was an outspoken critic of his murderous regime.  He wrote about the "civil wars" of the English Reformation - the causes, the mistakes, the methods, the unatoned-for bloodstains on various weapons ... it's all in his writings.  He also referred repeatedly to "Fortune" as a sort of perverse monarch, the capricious and vengeful spirit of the times.  He knew "Fortune's game" and, ultimately, he lost.

We might think of the Cobbe portrait as a sort of dreadful memento mori.  Perhaps it was a gift to the Earl of Southampton (commissioned by person or persons unknown) which, in itself, sought to explain the sudden death of the Earl's former poet-protege.

For if Southampton ever thought back to his youthful days, when he had William Shakespeare as his pet poet and playmate, and wondered why Will had been so suddenly silenced, the portrait would explain it all.

Shakespeare had been walking on hot coals, writing true histories which it was not safe to write.  And so he was, in the words of Ben Jonson, "stopped", before he could plead for any more "troubled clients".

The Literary Medievalist

I just had to share this with you.  A very good Facebook friend in Texas, DS Baker, who specialises in all things medieval, was kind enough to invite me to be the first author interviewed for his new blog.

I hope his new venture thrives and prospers!  So please do pop over and have a look:

The Literary Medievalist

A Deed Without a Name

Growing up in the 70s and 80s with a curiosity about the supernatural, I was frequently disappointed.  There was, for example, one book I remember in my school library (never quite figured out what it was doing there) which took a scattergun approach to the subject.  A page or two on every aspect of the "occult", very little of which made any sense at all.

It took me many years to realise that what we call the Supernatural is, in fact, the Natural (just as the "paranormal" is actually the "normal").

What I mean by that is this: the world we inhabit is infinitely more interesting - and stranger - than we care to admit.

Do miracles happen?  Yes, all the time.  Just look around you.  Creatures are born, plants grow, wounds heal, every now and then there's a rainbow ... and while science can explain what's going on (most of the time), it still can't get to the fundamentals.  It can tells us how something happens.  It can't really tell us why it happens.

And then there are the things that science just won't go anywhere near.  These are the things which tend to get classed as "Supernatural" (or "paranormal").  But that classification is false.  It implies that the "natural" is what can be measured, dissected, categorised.  Anything else is, by definition, "supernatural" - and, as far as science is concerned, it doesn't exist.

In reality, though, the "Supernatural" is pretty much everything that our official culture wants to pretend doesn't happen.  Over time, we have gone through a situation in which certain forms of supernatural activity were tentatively accepted (by the Church) to one in which nothing of a supernatural nature is tolerated (by science).  This does not mean, however, that the supernatural has gone away.  It can't.  Because it's only natural.

Now, even I was quite taken aback when Moon Books sent me a copy of Lee Morgan's A Deed Without a Name for me to read.  Why?  Because the book ventures into what I would consider one of the most problematic areas of occultism.

The subtitle gives the game away: "Unearthing the Legacy of Traditional Witchcraft".  A Deed Without a Name makes no attempt to portray witchcraft (ancient or modern) as fluffy, in a New Age sort of way.  Rather, it goes straight to the heart of everything we were raised to fear and distrust about witches.

There has long been a debate about the accounts of witchcraft given in the many trials of witches which took place in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods.  To what extent did the inquisitors invent examples of scandalous behaviour and impose their own ideas of witchcraft onto their victims?  Or, if you prefer, were the infamous witchcraft trials of ages past really informed more by Christian prejudice and propaganda than by anything that genuine witches might have done?

Lee Morgan takes the position that the tales told by the inquisitors - and the witches they tortured and killed - might well have been true.  It's a startling angle.  If you've assumed that the witchcraft frenzy which swept through Europe around the time of the Reformation was a kind of wildly deluded displacement activity, a sort of massive outbreak of paranoid delusion and insanity, then it comes as a shock to be told that the witchfinders weren't really making anything up.

But Morgan's argument makes sense, for the simple reason that much of what the medieval witches were accused of falls within the scope of shamanistic practice.

Shamanism is probably the oldest form of religious activity in the world.  Every culture had its shamans.  They were the healers, the seekers, the walkers between worlds.  They interacted with their environment (both in its natural and supernatural forms), usually for the good of their communities.  However, as Lee Morgan makes clear, the spiritual realm is not all sweetness and light: it has its negative, as well as its positive, aspects (indeed, such definitions are wildly subjective - best to think of them as the dark and light sides of the same thing).  There were good witches and bad witches, the benandanti and the malandanti; those who worked for the community against the malevolent forces of the Otherworld and those who served those malevolent forces (both helping to preserve a form of balance, with the latter especially reminding the living community of its debts and responsibilities to the unseen forces and the dead).

Morgan takes us through various aspects of traditional witchcraft and makes a point of preventing the reader from retreating into the modernist "oh those poor women" approach to the witches of yesteryear.  She makes it clear that many of the witches - male and female - who were hanged and burned were not accused of things they had not done.  Rather, it was simply the fact that their (Christian) inquisitors did not understand the workings of traditional shamanism which created a rather skewed picture of what the witches were actually up to.  Did the witches have intercourse with the Devil?  In a sense, yes - because spiritual forces did enter them, passing on their fiery power and exchanging vital energies.  And who has never dreamed of having sexual intercourse with a stranger, a dream lover?  Such things are only natural - but, being beyond the vision and the tolerance of the churchmen, they were deemed supernatural, and therefore worthy of damnation.

Overall, then, Morgan reclaims the traditions of witchcraft from the bloody hands of the Christian inquisitors (and, by extension, from the disinfected hands of the laboratory scientist).  It might be difficult for the reader to confront the possibility that werewolves and vampires, the Revenant and the Leannan Sidhe, might actually exist.  We have adopted a strictly either-or position in recent years: either such entities are real (as certain religious fundamentalists might aver) or they are mere fantasies (as the materialist of today would suppose).  Lee Morgan indicates that neither position is strictly accurate.  The fundamentalists and the materialists bring their own prejudices and delusions to the argument.  But if we go back, to the universal experience of the shaman, we find that such entities are very much out there, demanding recognition and respect.  They are part of our world, and if we refuse to acknowledge and interact with them (or insist on damning them out of hand), then we are the fools.

The book offers much in the way of ritual activity designed to help the novice witch discover who or what their "fetch-beast" is (the animal soul-guide of the shaman), how to communicate with the demon lover, how to conduct an exorcism, how to produce healing.  On a psychological level, many of these exercises make sense - "Donning the Mask", for example, is really just a case of confronting and assimilating the Shadow, as C.G. Jung called it, which is an essential part of the individuation process.  There is, of course, no requirement that every reader attempt necromancy - and arguably every reason to recommend that they don't - but that is beside the point.  What Morgan has done here is to open a window on an ancient world, a window which had seemingly been slammed shut by intolerant propagandists of the past, but one which needs must be open if we are to recognise and acknowledge the role of the supernatural in our lives.

More importantly, perhaps, she has rescued the witch of old from both ideological extremes - that of the Church and that of the scientific materialist.  For ancient societies knew perfectly well that our world was at least as spiritual as it was material, and probably a great deal more of the former than the latter.  Today, we know only how to relate to the material side of existence (and we're not very good at that).  We have been taught to ignore and forget about the spiritual, and if we do allow it into our consciousness at all, it is on the basis that it's all rather lovely in an escapist sort of way.

Morgan reminds us that the Other side isn't entirely lovely, that demons do exist, and that some of us will always be called upon to interact with these unseen forces, some to help and some to harm.  In short, the witches of yesteryear have been misunderstood in two different ways - portrayed as the slaves of Satan by a bigoted Church and dismissed as fantastists or victims by modern commentators.  But they were none of these things.  They were our own homegrown shamans, the inheritors of traditions and practices that go back to the very mists of our earliest history.

They flew, as all shamans do.  They copulated with spirits in human, daimonic and animal form, as shamans often do.  They healed and they blighted, blessed and cursed, as shamans the world over have done.  They were part of the natural equilibrium that we upset about 2,000 years ago and have failed to reinstate ever since.  And they had much to teach us about our world, both in its natural and supernatural guises.

A fascinating book, then.  And a brave addition to the growing corpus of material which looks at our spiritual past in a way that is sensitive and sensible.

They were not witches in pointy hats with warts on their noses.  They were native priests and priestesses, herbalists and exorcists, who knew how to interact with our world in ways that we have forgotten.

And if we are to rescue our precious world from the ravages of science and religion, we must listen to their voices again and prepare to greet the darkness - before it overwhelms us completely.

The New Heroic Age

A few posts back, I discussed the new Romeo and Juliet movie, for which Julian Fellowes wrote the screenplay.

Mr Fellowes "updated" Shakespeare's language to make it more "accessible".  I queried whether Julian Fellowes was really the right choice for the job - he's not known for being down with the kids.

Well, Mr Fellowes has endeavoured to explain himself.  Apparently, he feels that he's capable of understanding Shakespeare because he had a "very expensive education" and "went to Cambridge".  Since most of us did not enjoy those advantages in life, it goes without saying that we are terminally thick and can only watch a Shakespeare play with our mouths open and our knuckles dragging on the ground.

In just a few words, Fellowes appears to have rendered the entire Shakespeare industry redundant.  If you didn't go to private school and Oxbridge, the chances of you being able to "get" Shakespeare are nil.  So the greatest dramatic works in the English Language become something that only the social elite can possibly appreciate.  The rest of us have to make do with bookmarks, T-shirts, and "adaptations" which are written down to our educational level.

There's nothing new here.  In the very first section of Who Killed William Shakespeare? I examine the intellectual (and social) snobbery of the late-18th century, which determined that the people of Shakespeare's hometown were congenitally stupid and only Londoners with money could comprehend the genius of the Bard (although, when it came to quoting him accurately, the metropolitan elite were rather lax).

So Julian Fellowes's excuses for wrecking Shakespeare's language are true to type.  Basically, he's saying "I'm posh, you're not.  Therefore, I can understand Shakespeare, while you're likely to struggle with the semiotic intricacies of Fifty Shades of Grey."

Now, bear with me here.  I touched on the work of Giambattista Vico at the end of The King Arthur Conspiracy, but it's so important, so relevant, that I revisited Vico's theories very early on in The Grail; Relic of an Ancient Religion for Moon Books.

Giambattista Vico looked back across history and identified three major phases in the development of civilisations.  The first, we might call the Divine age.  This is essentially a primitive or indigenous society.  The gods are all around us; we walk with them and talk with them, and everything we do is designed to appease them.

Then, certain individuals decide that they are descended from the gods.  They lay claim to certain areas of land and found families or dynasties, which likewise claim direct descent from the gods.  At about the same time, a priesthood appears which insists that it, and it alone, has access to those gods (or God).  The priesthood and the aristocracy work hand in hand, claiming privileges which they deny to the rest of the populace.  This, we might call the Heroic age.

Finally, the people wake up to the fact that they are every bit as human as their self-appointed masters.  They demand an equal share in the decision-making process.  We get democracy (and its corollary, scientific materialism).  We might call this the Human age.

Okay, so far so good.  We start out as "superstitious" primitives startled by thunder.  We invent a single god, so that the more wealthy and powerful can claim that there is a divinely-ordained hierarchy which cannot be challenged.  Then we discover Liberty, Egality and Fraternity.

But what happens next?  Giambattista Vico was way ahead of his time, here.  He recognised that all civilisations collapse.  There is what he called a ricorso, a "return" to the start of the process.  From the heights of science and democracy we are rather suddenly propelled back into a state of wonder at the world around us, reliant on the gods for everything.

What causes this ricorso?  Dudley Young, in his wonderful Origins of the Sacred, suggested that democracy is inherently anarchic, and so a period of anarchy results in the demolition of democratic institutions and, inevitably, the end of civilisation.  However, this theory is - I believe - fundamentally flawed.

What destroys civilisations is greed.  Pure and simple.  And how does that greed infect the carefully calibrated mechanisms of science and democracy?  Easy: it does so by reinventing the Heroic age.

In other words, once a society has developed, progressing through the primitive/magical/theocratic Divine age and the religious-aristocratic Heroic age to the democratic and scientific systems of the Human age, a form of regression starts.  Those who always preferred the certainties of the Heroic age (summed up, basically, as a landed aristocracy supported by the Church) begin to fight back against the principles of science and democracy.  They start claiming more - much, much more - for themselves.  And civilisation implodes under the weight of their regressive and selfish demands.

That is what is happening now.  In many ways, we can replace the "Church" with "Corporate Capitalism", because they amount to the same thing.  But anyone seeking enlightenment is recommended to read Naomi Klein's excellent, if chilling, The Shock Doctrine.

The post-war consensus - which was about as scientific and democratic as it is possible to be - began to crumble in the late 1970s.  A small group of fanatical economists sought to undermine the certainties of the Human age.  They argued that the State should have no involvement in everyday life.  Everything should be in private hands.  Their theories (mostly emanating from the Chicago School of Economics, which shall be forever cursed) could only be applied at the point of a gun.  So a clever new step was invented.  Naomi Klein called it "Disaster Capitalism".

Essentially, it works like this.  A group of greedy individuals either invents or quickly moves to exploit a traumatic event (like a civil war, a tsunami or a perceived economic crisis).  While the populace is too shocked to do anything about it, everything they thought they owned is transferred into private hands.  The rich grow immensely richer.  Everybody else suffers - and is tortured or "disappeared" if they dare to speak out.

No end of specious claims are made to justify these atrocities.  Some of these are rather subtle, but they are all part of the ongoing conspiracy to steal from the people what the people once owned.

In cultural terms, we all own Shakespeare.  And though a fairly decent level of education, and an awareness of history, are valuable in making sense of his rich words, there really is no barrier to anybody enjoying his works.

So the new aristocrats seek to claim him as exclusively their own.  Only those who have enjoyed the Heroic age privileges of private education and automatic entry to Oxbridge can understand Shakespeare.  He's not for the likes of you.  He belongs to the rich and powerful.

Shakespeare himself would be utterly horrified by such a suggestion.  He would be mortified.  In fact, he would realise that he was being murdered all over again by such Heroic age fantasists as Mr Julian Fellowes.

(Consider this: Downton Abbey is a worldwide phenomenon, its success proof of the popularity of its cosy vision of the Heroic age in all its pompous finery.  It hit our screens at about the same time as the most right-wing, privileged, "aristocratic" British government in living memory sneaked into office, and shortly before the Heroic age started flexing its muscles in the United States, where federal - i.e. democratic - government has been shut down by a bunch of Bible-bashing conservative fundamentalists from the Tea Party.  In these regards, Downton Abbey is symptomatic of the New Heroic age, which covers up what its real agenda is by flogging us an attractively misleading story of the past.)

Science is under attack, these days (mostly from the fundamenalists of the religious-aristocratic school).  So, too, is democracy - and the assaults are coming from the same direction: the New Heroic age.  Call it jihad.  Call it "Disaster Capitalism".  Call it the New World Order.  It's all the same.

It's the backwards-looking medievalism of the super-privileged eagerly driving us all back into a kind of feudalism.  It's the special pleading of corporate lobbyists and uber-rich tax-avoiders.  It's the old Etonians asserting their rule over the plebs.  It is naked greed masquerading as the remedy to all our problems.

We must, must, must NOT allow such people to lionise William Shakespeare and his works.  They might believe that they hold the exclusive rights to his memory - by dint of birthright and expensive upbringing - but they simply cannot be trusted with it.

Why?  Because they don't understand him at all.  They are only too quick to misrepresent him to us (see previous posts).  They bend him to serve their own ends.

So Julian Fellowes has Downton Abbeyed Romeo and Juliet.  He's selling you a false image of Shakespeare, one that surely suits his ideal of a New Heroic age in which the landed aristocracy - in cahoots with the Church of Corporate Wealth - look down from their charmless heights on the rest of us, who are just there to wash the dishes and make the beds for them (on zero-hour contracts, of course).

Remember the ricorso.  If you want our civilisation to fall apart, that's the way to go.  And everything Shakespeare was telling us will have gone unheeded, because we weren't considered capable of understanding him, and so we allowed our social "superiors" to interpret him for us. 

And they lied.  Because they always do.

Wise Words

It's October. Autumn is here, Winter just around the corner.  Halloween - or, as some of us prefer, Samhain - approaches.  Time for spooky tales to chill the marrow!

Many thanks to Louise Wise who published my short post about SHAKESPEARE'S SKULL on her wonderful Wise Words blog.

More Halloweeny goings on to follow, I'm pretty sure ...

How Conspiracies Work

Buoyed by the news that Who Killed William Shakespeare? has sold out its first print-run within two months of publication, I've been wondering what Shakespeare would think if he came back today.

At first glance, you'd imagine he'd be pretty chuffed.  Nearly 400 years on from his death in 1616, he is still far and away the leading figure in his chosen field.  No one comes near him.  Shakespeare is, without doubt, the most famous poet-playwright ever to have walked the planet.

He might find the internet exciting.  He would surely be impressed that the journey from Stratford to London can be done in two hours, as opposed to the two days it took on horseback.

But, to be honest, I think he would be appalled - and certainly very uncomfortable.  After all, it's one thing to be celebrated as the world's greatest dramatist and poet.  It's another thing altogether to be completely misremembered.

The Shakespeare industry is as busy as it ever was.  New books about Shakespeare appear all the time.  And most of them spout unadulterated rubbish about him.

There seem to be, essentially, two sides to the argument.  On the one hand, Will Shakespeare was a humble Warwickshire lad of extraordinary gifts - and, more than anything, humble and self-effacing; he went to London, made his fortune, wowed the Queen and then the King, and then he thought, "Ah well, I've had a good run, time to go home", and he sort of vanished.

The alternative argument goes something like this: That semi-transparent and quite frankly boring individual, better known for grain-dealing in Stratford, could never have been the universal genius who penned those marvellous comedies, histories and tragedies.  So somebody else must have done all the hard work.  William Shakespeare was just a frontman, a cardboard cut-out, undeservedly remembered as the greatest writer in the English language.

Both arguments are fundamentally flawed and - to put it bluntly - stupidly simplistic.  The latter arises from the former.  For as long as the academics, the Shakespeare experts and the tourism industry insist on selling us a see-through Shakespeare, a man who kept himself to himself and wrote entirely from his own imagination, steering well clear of the controversies of his day, there will always be those who cry "Foul!" and demand to know who the real William Shakespeare was.

And, if they happen to be of the all-aristocrats-are-excellent-and-infinitely-better-than-the-rest-of-us school (which dominates so much comment these days), they will insist that Shakespeare must have been an aristocrat - like the Earl of Oxford (who died while Shakespeare was still busily writing plays) or, more crazily, Queen Elizabeth I (ditto).

These are two extreme positions: Shakespeare was just an ordinary bloke, and Shakespeare must have been someone of high social standing.  They are the curse of Shakespeare studies.  Neither standpoint does any credit to William Shakespeare himself.

In a sense, what we are looking at is two sides of a conspiracy theory.  The first - and, apparently, the more innocuous - side claims that Shakespeare was just a patriotic middle-class Englishman; the second argues (quite rightly) that such a Shakespeare is a sham.  But, ultimately, both sides are wrong.

In Who Killed William Shakespeare? I examine the circumstances of Will's life and death.  It's been described as a conspiracy theory.  Which it isn't.  The real conspiracy theory continually pours out of Stratford and the cloisters of academe, fiercely countered by the fanatics who want to believe that somebody else altogether was the true genius.

Let us take a moment to consider the similarities between Shakespeare's lifetime and that of Arthur - the first historical Arthur on record, that is; not the silly and mythical King Arthur.

First of all, even though these two individuals lived a thousand years apart, their periods were subject to very similar strains.  In Arthur's day, a foreign religion (Christianity) was taking root at the same time as Germanic settlers were forcibly conquering much of southern Britain, beginning with the eastern side of the country.  In Shakespeare's day, a sort-of foreign religion (Protestantism) had entered the country from Germany, working its way across the land from the eastern counties.  One of the results of the spread of Protestantism was enormous social change.  The old gentry was almost entirely ruined, as Protestant parvenus stole fortunes and scrambled for precedence.

In other words, both in Arthur's day (late-6th century) and Shakespeare's day (late-16th century), a dangerous and disruptive movement was spreading across the country from the east and seeking to destroy and/or seize everything in its path.  The old religion (paganism, first; Catholicism, later) was under concerted and violent attack.  If you adhered to the old form faith and the social order which had obtained before the 'tempest' blew up, you were more or less doomed.

Both Arthur and Shakespeare stood for what could be called the 'true' Britain.  Arthur was no Christian, but there were Christians in his circle.  Shakespeare tried to pose as a Protestant, only to return to the faith of his forefathers when he saw just how vicious and corrupt the regime of Elizabeth I really was.  Neither of them was a fundamentalist, in any meaningful way; rather, they saw that what Britain needed was an end to the religious strife that covered a multitude of sins.  As Shakespeare had John of Gaunt say in Richard II:

"That England that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself."

I believe - and have offered evidence to support my belief - that both Arthur and Shakespeare were treacherously betrayed.  Murdered, to all intents and purposes.  Why?  Because both of them, in their different times, stood in the way of the triumph of Britain's enemies - the greedy, the self-serving, the corrupt, the dishonest, the over-zealous, the cruel and the depraved.

Now, here's where we enter the realms of conspiracy.  And the simple fact is that no conspiracy can succeed if (as is commonly supposed) it comprises just a handful of shady individuals.  Any conspiracy of that kind is likely to fail, or at least to be quickly exposed.

If it had been that simple - if, that is, the premature deaths of both Arthur and Shakespeare, had been brought about by just one or two fanatics - then we would have known the truth for some time.  But I would argue that such a scenario is pretty much the opposite of a conspiracy.

The real conspiracy requires many, many more people to engage in the cover-up.  It needs generations of commentators to collude in the crime.

In the case of Arthur, the treachery stemmed from the early Church - and, one could say, a particular religious establishment set up by one prominent churchman.  In the case of Shakespeare, the treachery stemmed partly from professional rivalry and partly from the paranoia that was loose at the court of King James.

Now, consider this: could future generations, wedded as they were to the cause of Christianity, acknowledge the role played by the early Church in the assassination of Arthur and the destruction of Britain?  Were there own beliefs not essentially the same as the beliefs which led to Arthur's death and the betrayal of Britain to her enemies?

And consider this of Shakespeare: the very people whose devious and bloody-minded behaviour was exposed in his plays ended up running the country.  Protestantism, which provided so many of these ogres with the excuse they needed to rob and slaughter their fellow countrymen, became the official religion of the land.  Future generations of scholars set out to prove that this was an inevitable and desirable process: it's what made Britain great.  And so, if Shakespeare had opposed this very kind of extremism, and his vocal opposition had led to his death, then it was absolutely necessary that the biography of William Shakespeare should be rewritten and the circumstances of his death ignored and forgotten.

The original conspiracies - the murders of Arthur and Shakespeare - required only a few determined and unscrupulous individuals to succeed.  Initially.  After that, though, huge numbers of likeminded people had to play along, to connive in the original crime, to become complicit in the cover-up (for reasons of faith and/or political expediency).  They became accessories after the fact.

It continues to this day.  There are still scholars who spout absolute gibberish about Arthur.  They steadfastly refuse to explore his northern roots.  They get unreasonably angry at the very suggestion that the first Arthur on record might have been the original Arthur.  Why?  Because they are colluding in the conspiracy that led to Arthur's death.  They are studying Arthur purely from the point-of-view of his enemies.  They are happy to continue the cover-up, because their mindsets and belief systems would have led them to participate in the original crime.

The same goes for Shakespeare.  His story is repeatedly written up by his enemies - even though they claim to love and admire him - because they harbour the same set of beliefs, ultimately, as the men who killed him (the one who wielded the weapon, the one who commissioned the crime, and the faction which kept it quiet).  So the conspiracy continues, perpetuated by the very character-type that was involved from the start.  Naturally, these academics cannot tell the truth about Shakespeare.  They might not have been there at the actual assassination, but they can continue to assassinate him by lying about his life, his works, his beliefs and covering up the harsh reality.

That's how conspiracies work.  If it were just a hugger-mugger huddle of plotters, their crimes would soon be exposed.  But it isn't.  It's an ongoing propaganda war.  Those who would have applauded and approved of the crime continue to cover for the criminals.  They misrepresent Arthur and Shakespeare and attack anyone who points to the realities of the time.

So Shakespeare, I believe, would find his visit to today's world a truly depressing experience.  His enemies triumphed.  They continue to tell his story, and to tell it all wrong.

And here's where we should take note.  Conspiracies can only prosper in a society, in a world, where there is sufficient fanaticism for the crimes to be covered up.  We don't all have to wield the knife - only to lie to ourselves and each other about what really happened.  And we do so because our belief systems are so horribly skewed.  We will justify atrocities because our blind prejudices assure us that they were justifiable.

Have you been on Facebook lately?  Read the below-the-line comments beneath any online newspaper story?  Fanaticism is flourishing.

Somewhere out there is today's Arthur, today's Shakespeare.  They will be betrayed and put to death.  And future generations will be none the wiser.  Because there are enough maniacs out there who will happily spread lies in support of their extremist positions.  And that's all that is needed for conspiracies to succeed.