Maggie's bar

Hoops of steel
All most people want to know in the Covid-19 lockdown is when you can mingle freely with loved ones. I’ve had the revelation during recent months that meeting friends to chat and drink and eat is more important to me than cinema or theatre, both of which I miss mightily. So this week’s easing of “lockdown rules” found me gathered round a garden fire pit…. with folk who readily dressed up as Shakespearean characters for a Zoom chat on the great writer’s birthday. Aristotle said that a true friend is “another self” and Shakespeare, of course, has the perfect quotation about friendship:
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel
So it was a deep, abiding pleasure to drink wine, eat smoked salmon blinis, sausage pasta and homemade brownies – beneath the lights of Maggie’s bar, twinkling in the twilight, warmed by the coals, with
companions
That do converse and waste the time together,
Who souls do bear an equal yoke of love

Socially distanced meetings between Julius Caesar, Juliet's Nurse, Portia, Emilia from The Comedy of Errors and Lady Macbeth

The Once And Future King

Consistently in my Top Ten books, read at a formative age!

The Sum of the Parts

Like many Great Works (all of Shakespeare’s plays, for example) a modern editor could improve on individual sections of The Once And Future King, not least of which would be better scenes for the women in the stories. But the achievement of the entire work definitely fulfils Aristotle’s notion that the Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts. Why did it strike such a chord with me when I first read it? In The Sword in the Stone Wart’s surprising destiny taps into the common childhood fantasy that you are fated for greater things. Then along comes a great teacher to release innate qualities inside you, as Merlyn does for Wart or, in other famous fantasy books, Dumbledore does for Harry Potter at Hogwarts and Aslan the Lion does for the Pevensey children in Narnia.

Every parentless child in literature needs a "teacher figure"

The "Evil Austrian"

After the whimsical comedy of The Sword in the Stone, subsequent books see the deeper exploration of White’s bigger purpose – a plea for Right over Might. White was alarmed by the rise of Nazism during the composition of the novels and an "evil Austrian" is clearly referenced at one point; in context it is obvious White is thinking of Hitler. TH White had expressed to his friends that he thought the Matter of Britain (the Arthurian cycle) was the British version of the Greek Oresteia, a mythological tragedy that could capture the spirit of the nation. Thus jousting is equated with cricket, for example. The whole of The Once and Future King is an “antidote to war” (White’s own words) and a plea for fair government. Fair government! Now, THAT’S an idea!

Poster for John Boorman's film and Morgan Le Fey

The Queen of Air and Darkness

In Book Two, the Round Table is formed, King Pellinore goes in search of the Questing Beast and Arthur grows into his kingship. Most chapters take place in Orkney where Morgause, the Orkney Queen referenced in the book’s title, brings up her four sons: Gawain, Gaheris, Agravaine and Gareth.

Plenty of domestic wrangling, rough-and-tumble behaviour and derring-do takes place between the four brothers and, inevitably, being the youngest of four brothers myself, these four characters kept me turning pages to find out what they got up to next. In fact, their different personalities and their fates affect the rest of the work profoundly. It was easy to become hooked on an epic read with four brothers vying for their mother’s attention. I found The Queen of Air and Darkness very easy to identify with, not that my brothers and I ever beheaded a unicorn!

The Ill-Made Knight

And just when you thought you knew everything about the Arthurian tales, White’s third book provides a portrait of Sir Lancelot that defies all expectation.  He is ugly and tortured, yet becomes lovable and beloved, partly because of his critical self-awareness and partly because of his aspirations to be the best that he can be, in all things, despite his hideous appearance.  He is a relentless perfectionist.  Gareth, the youngest Orkney brother – me, in my imagination – remains loyal to Lancelot even when it is clear Lancelot’s love for Guinevere and his relationship with Elaine are causing painful complications and repercussions.

Lancelot, Guenevere and Arthur, the archetypal love triangle

Sir Galahad

Lancelot’s and Elaine’s pure son, Galahad, emerges as different to his father, not so much a perfectionist but an impossibly fine white-hot-blue-ice god-on-earth. Galahad is eye-hurtingly dazzling and annoying in his sheer uncompromising goodness. Lancelot never fulfills his own quest to be the best knight in the land because he cannot control his heart (and balls), but his illegitimate son, Galahad, attains physical and spiritual perfection.

The pure Sir Galahad and Santiago Cabrera as Sir Lancelot from the BBC TV series Merin

The Candle in the Wind

Before Elton John’s song was ever conceived, the phrase The Candle in the Wind was the title of White’s originally-published finale to The Once and Future King – the unravelling of the painfully sad outcomes for the legendary characters. The book ends with a poignant and witty encounter between Arthur and “Tom of Warwick,” the future Sir Thomas Malory, who is commissioned to write an account of all that has befallen – the book that becomes Le Morte d’Arthur.

King Arthur and "Tom of Warwick" in the musical Camelot

The Book of Merlyn

Published posthumously (1977) this additional volume of The Once and Future King is White’s explicit exploration of his anti-war sentiments.  Merlyn returns to Arthur on the battlefield and presents more evidence of the Laws of the Natural World (animals are harmonious and productive; humans are primitive and destructive.) The Circle of Life, in Merlin’s philosophy, is superior to the Ravages of War. Boyhood should beat American Sniper. Right should always beat Might and Mankind is doomed until he learns the lesson.

Themes and a warning

So what is The Once and Future King about beneath its Epic Narrative, its Giddy Satire, its Domestic Melodrama?  The Tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table? Themes include War, Peace, Justice, Chivalry, Love, Marriage, Families, Adultery, Incest, Friendship, Loyalty, Betrayal, Education, Ignorance, History, Fate, Self-determination, Courage, Cowardice, Magic and Time itself; one of TH White’s funniest conceits is that Merlyn lives his life backwards through Time.

Right is, or should be, Might.  Might should not rule Right.

Sleeping under a hill…. In Glastonbury, maybe?

The Once and Future King seems to mark the end of the Dark and Medieval Ages and bring the reader into Modern Times and it also seems to be warning, in the same vein as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, that if the Holocaust and the Atomic Bomb are amongst us then we are no further forward than we were in the Dark Ages. Right is not yet Might everywhere. Might often still prevails. Somewhere though, on the island of Avalon, King Arthur sleeps with his Knights of the Round Table, ready to emerge when Britain needs them most and re-establish a metaphorical Camelot for our time.

The Round Table hanging in Winchester Great Hall

I shall lose my life for want of language

The Renaissance 
Just as the visual arts in Italy gave Europe a High Renaissance 1490 to 1530, so England produced a Language Flowering 1580 to 1625 during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. This period turned the remnants of Middle English into Early Modern English and the wordsmiths were fed hungrily and fed each other with a kaleidoscope of utterances as a result of:

• the expansion of printing
• the import from abroad of goods, ideas and foreign phrases
• the agitations and traumas of the religious and parliamentary schisms

It was essential, as Warwick advises Henry IV, that

                             ....to gain the language

‘Tis needful that the most immodest word

Be looked upon and learn’t

Influences on Language in Jacobethan times

Shakespeare’s contemporaries
Hugh Craig in the Shakespeare Quarterly Spring 2011 reported admirable computer-based research on a good number of Shakespeare’s fellow writers to compare how many unique words they used. Guess what? Shakespeare didn’t come first! Does this diminish him? Not in my book. It just shows in what an extraordinary linguistic cauldron he was living. Shakespeare came SEVENTH!  After Webster, Dekker, Peele, Marlowe, Jonson and Greene. Shakespeare’s vocabulary numbers are often quoted as HIGHER simply because of the VOLUME of work he produced. But if you only count the average numbers of UNIQUE words, then Shakespeare is by no means top.

Marlowe, Webster, Dekker, Peele, Jonson and Greene

How crucial was a university education? (Not a lot!)
Not only that, but the snobs who deride Shakespeare’s authorship because he didn’t go to university should be flabbergasted to know that John Webster, the most linguistically able of the Jacobethan playwrights  didn’t go to university either. He was a coach-maker’s son. Ben Jonson, prisoner, mercenary and bricklayer as well as playwright, who teased Shakespeare about his classical learning, also never made it to university. Going to university (then and now) was no guarantee of linguistic ability, talent or common sense.

Commemorative stamps: Tennant, Sher, Oyelowo, Scofield, Kestleman, Annis, McKellen

Greater than the sum
Aristotle’s Metphysica contains the concept that the Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts. That’s the way I feel about Shakespeare. Knowing that he didn’t go to university, knowing that he suffered family tragedy, knowing that he got tangled up in financial disputes, knowing that he nicked a lot of his material, knowing that some bits of his work are vulgar or rubbish, knowing that he didn’t use as many unique words as six other writers at the time – all these factors make him more culpably human. Or should I say admirably human? Or vulnerably human? Or disgustingly human? Or splendidly human? Or just human? His soundscapes and landscapes seduce me and inspire me. Because if nothing else his work shows the many sides of everything it is to be human.

He was “not of an age but for all time!”
Ben Jonson’s words (in the subheading above) in the Preface to the First Folio speak truth. Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well says “I shall lose my life for want of language.” I say I don’t know how my life would be without Master Shakespeare. After my family and friends, he is the greatest love of my life. Sad, maybe, but true.