Johnson's Life of London

by Boris Johnson

  And what did he ask them to perform? Richard II.

  For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground,

  says the King, before he is sent away by his usurper to starve to death in a castle,

  And tell sad stories of the death of kings;

  How some have been deposed, some slain in war . . .

  The story of the deposition of Richard II may or may not be sad. But it was dynamite.

  Like Julius Caesar it was never printed in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and 1,500 copies of a history of the life of the usurper Henry IV were seized and burned by the Bishop of London. We don’t know how Shakespeare and Co. felt to be asked to perform this seditious theme; we don’t know the response of the audience. The following day Essex and his supporters left his house on the Strand and marched through Ludgate to the City, calling on Londoners to join them as they went. The citizens, on the other hand, looked out of their houses and shops and decided that it was a risky proposition. Essex realised his revolt was over, decided to have lunch and waited to be arrested.

  A few days later the repentant earl had his head chopped off in the Tower of London. The Queen herself went into a decline, sitting in the dark and moping about the treachery of her favourite. It wasn’t long before she was dead and James I was on the throne—the outcome that everyone had been hoping for. The established order prevailed. As feminist scholar Germaine Greer has pointed out, Shakespeare constantly subverts that order for dramatic effect.

  He was the first dramatist to write a play with a black man as the hero, and inferiors—children, servants, fools, vagabonds—are constantly instructing their betters. He shows us a vast pageant of regime change and revolution; and yet the overwhelming message of the Shakespearean sermon is in favour of the status quo. Primogeniture. Orderly inheritance. Dynastic succession—all the proper rewards of good kingship.

  Claudius the usurper is punished, and so is Gertrude, and though the election eventually lights on Fortinbras, not Hamlet, we have been laboriously told at the beginning that Fortinbras also has a reasonable claim to Denmark. Caesar’s conspirators get their comeuppance, Lear’s daughters and their loathsome husbands are all deservedly slaughtered for their ill treatment of an aged ruler (one of the reasons that tragedy remains so huge in Asia) and things don’t go at all well for Macbeth. Throughout the comedies, all manner of confusion and gender swapping and mistaken identity is resolved with Mozartian harmony and multiple weddings. Things turn out all right in the end, and if a new king ends up on the throne he has seized, it will almost certainly mean that he was a better king than the last one.

  What was behind this pro-establishment streak in Shakespeare? Was it nervousness, perhaps, of the censors? It was that interplay between the text and real political events that gave the plays their electric tension, that drew the crowds and that sometimes provoked the fury of the authorities. Ben Jonson was imprisoned and almost had his nose and ears cut off for making what were thought to be anti-Scottish cracks round about the accession of James I. Thomas Kyd was broken by torture on the rack, and Marlowe’s death has often been ascribed to the secret service.

  In 1597, two years before the first performance of Julius Caesar, the Privy Council actually requested that London’s theatres be shut down, claiming that they contained nothing but “profane fables, lascivious matters, cozening devices and scurrilous behaviours.” When Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, performed Richard II for Essex, on the eve of his hopeless rebellion, they were brought in for questioning and were thought lucky to get away with it.

  In all the circumstances, you might suppose, it was simply prudence that drove Shakespeare to give his plays their essentially pro-monarchy, pro-establishment veneer. Yes? Conceivably.

  But it is surely more likely and more satisfying that his dramatic worldview reflected what he really felt about the world, and what he felt his audience wanted from him. This was a time of uncertainty about England’s global prestige. Ten years after the triumph over the Armada there was still paranoia about a Spanish invasion.

  In 1598 a merchant reported back angrily from Brussels, where he had seen a dumb show enacted. Instead of Gloriana Imperatrix, Elizabeth of England was portrayed as a fawning, flattering woman who attempts to eavesdrop on conversations between France and Spain, tugging at the sleeve of the King of France, with the audience laughing at the conceit. It was a long time since England had been kicked out of France, and even longer since Dick Whittington had given the King his banquet for Agincourt.

  So Shakespeare gave us a certain idea of England, as a place apart, a precious stone set in a silver sea, and in Henry V he harks back to that triumph in one of the most rip-roaringly jingoistic plays ever produced. What a glorious thing it was, said Thomas Nashe, to have Henry V represented on stage, leading the French king prisoner and forcing both him and the dauphin to swear fealty. That was the stuff to give the troops.

  If the Spanish tried to invade again, they would find a nation prepared to defeat overwhelmingly more numerous foes—just as the English had done at Agincourt. “We few, we happy few! We band of brothers!” says the King on the eve of battle, setting up an English idea of the heroic ratio—few against many—that was to serve England well through the Napoleonic period and into the Second World War.

  And insofar as it was a time of anxiety about the monarchy, and fear of what might happen on the death of the Virgin Queen, Shakespeare naturally played with those fears to stimulate the interest of the audience; but he always gave them reassurance in the final act.

  Perhaps it has something to do not just with politics or the demands of the audience, but with the fundamental character of the man. We know so little about his family life—how he felt about the death of his son, Hamnet, how much time he spent back in Stratford, what his relations were like with his wife and Susanna and Judith, his daughters. We don’t know whether he was indeed a hoarder of malt, or what affliction brought his life to an end at the age of fifty-two.

  We will never finally pin down the identity of the “Dark Lady” of the sonnets, any more than we can say for certain what he meant by leaving Anne Hathaway his “second-best bed.”

  But we do know one revealing thing: that he went to a surprising amount of trouble to get a coat of arms, going back a second time to the rather reluctant College of Heralds, and using some ingenuity to claim kin with the Arden family, who were thought to be posher than the Shakespeares.

  In other words he was not only the greatest writer in the English language, he was also a little bit of a snob. He was a bohemian actor-playwright who must have consorted with all manner of drunks and desperadoes and fallen women, and yet he ended up with the second-largest house in Stratford, with five gables, ten fireplaces and a frontage of over 60 feet. In May 1602 he paid the vast sum of £320 for 107 acres in Old Town in Stratford, as well as a cottage in Chapel Lane, and in 1605 he paid £440 for a share in the tithes of Stratford, worth £60 per year and about one-fifth of the total value.

  He died a rich man, by the standards of the time; his life was a triumph of entrepreneurship, and he wanted the coat of arms to prove it. His works were taken around the world in the boats of the Elizabethan merchant adventurers, and they helped to create an ideology of Englishness that was to last for centuries: self-deprecating, sceptical of constitutional change, fond of the monarchy and the countryside and capable of drinking any other nation under the table.

  The Shakespearean inflorescence coincided with the beginning of the empire, and for a nation that came to think of itself as uniquely blessed, he acquired the status—which he has not lost—of the world’s top author. He coined more than 2,500 words, and to prove his ubiquity in our speech and thought, I leave you with this tribute by Bernard Levin. Try reading it aloud.

  If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be m
ore sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play . . . it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

  Yes, you are quoting Shakespeare and you are certainly not quoting Francis Bacon. It has always seemed odd to me that people claimed Bacon as the author of Shakespeare.

  To be sure, he was a distinguished man and a great scientist, who died of a chill after trying to stuff a chicken with snow. But there is no evidence whatever that he wrote Shakespeare’s plays, and in any case, Shakespeare is remarkably light on science, or “philosophy,” as it was called.

  As Hamlet says dismissively to his fellow Wittenberg student, as they scout around for the ghost: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  Shakespeare famously introduced an anachronistic clock into Julius Caesar’s Rome; and yet his audience had no watches, they had no real understanding of the function of the heart or the lungs, they didn’t have a clue why an apple fell from a tree towards the centre of the Earth and they found it hard to find a route across the oceans without a grasp of longitude.

  When they walked home over London Bridge after a three-hour Shakespearean performance in the early years of the seventeenth century, they saw a world that was technologically almost identical to the world of King John four hundred years earlier. Certainly, fashions had changed, and people wore ruffs and boasted codpieces and smoked New World tobacco in pipes, but the houses on either side were still heated by coal or wood, and the privies emptied noisomely down the backs into the river, and the wherries below were still powered by nothing but muscle, and the grisly heads were still there on their spikes.

  A Dutchman named Peter Morris had installed a water pump on the bridge, using paddles to take up water from the stream—but it was nothing that would have surprised the Arab polymath Al-Jazari, who installed a similar device in Damascus in the twelfth century. The houses, the streets, the sanitation, the transport systems—all were still essentially medieval in design.

  But as London’s merchants became more adventurous and competitive, they needed ever better technology. Time is money, and so they needed timepieces more efficient than primitive rope-based escapements. They needed better muskets to fire at the recalcitrant natives; they needed better compasses in order to prevent their ships from foundering.

  “Knowledge is power,” said Bacon, and pressed for a Ministry of Science. He may not have written Shakespeare, but by the time he died in 1621 his enthusiasm and drive had paved the way for the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.

  It was that scientific revolution that led in turn to the industrial revolution that catapulted England ahead of her rivals and turned London into an imperial cosmopolis.

  And that scientific revolution was powered by exactly the same engine as the Shakespearean theatre—the frantic desire for praise, recognition and money among a small group of highly competitive Londoners.

  Like the emergence of Marlowe and Shakespeare, it was a scrabble for prestige that was to produce towering talents—and one of the very greatest was almost forgotten.

  The King James Bible

  * * *

  “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” says Genesis 1:1, and there are large numbers of Americans—perhaps millions—who believe that to be literally true. They hold that the world was created in 4004 BC, and that God fashioned every creature that walks or crawls on the face of the Earth, and that He plonked them there in their current form. They therefore dispute the most important theory of the last two hundred years (evolution; formulated by Charles Darwin in London), and they hold their beliefs with rocklike certainty thanks to the power and persuasiveness of a single book.

  When the pioneers lurched in their wagons across the prairies, shooting Indians and buffalo, they did so armed with the same book that British missionaries took to India and China and Africa. It was a London book—or at least the London version of an ancient book. The story of the King James Bible, or the Authorised Version, begins in 1604, shortly after the accession of the stuttering and sexually ambiguous Scottish monarch.

  The Church of England was still new and plagued with factions of all kinds. So in a stroke of genius James brought the clerics together for a conference at Hampton Court, and though they bickered about this or that point of doctrine, they agreed on one thing: that it was time to produce a single and authenticated version of the Word of the Lord. Six companies, or committees, of scholars were formed, in London, Oxford and Cambridge, with forty-seven translators altogether, almost all of them members of the clergy.

  The leader of the London operation—charged with rendering Genesis to Kings II—was Lancelot Andrewes, and if there is one man who can be said to have been in overall control of the mission, it was Andrewes. He was a bishop, scholar and preacher of famous sermons, a man of such naturally poetic diction that T. S. Eliot ripped him off without acknowledgment in “The Journey of the Magi” (“A cold coming we had of it . . .”).

  The work of translation went on for years, and though the scholars were disrupted and dismayed by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605—a failed attempt to kill James by blowing up Parliament—James urged them on in the name of religious harmony. In 1609 the Revising Committee met in Stationers’ Hall, in Ave Maria Lane in London, and as linguistics scholar David Crystal has pointed out, the Bible was written in a London dialect that had been moving towards standardisation since Caxton’s day.

  All sorts of criticisms have been made of the King James version. Many of the most familiar quotations are in fact from William Tyndale’s 1534 edition: let there be light, the truth shall make you free, let my people go, am I my brother’s keeper?, the powers that be, the signs of the times, blessed are the peacemakers . . . Even for 1609, it was written in archaic-sounding language. People had by then stopped saying “verily” and “it came to pass,” and they said “you” instead of “thee” or “thou” and “appears” instead of “appeareth.”

  Hebrew experts said it had failed to capture the original, with fourteen different Hebrew words all being rendered in English as “prince.” One learned Hebraist said he “would rather be torn in pieces by wild horses than that this abominable translation should ever be foisted on the English people.” Even though the government proclaimed that this was the only edition appointed to be read in churches, it took some time for the text to become truly accepted. One unfortunate printing of 1631 left the word “not” out of one of the commandments—“Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

  But it was the King James Bible that took hold in men’s hearts, perhaps because of an inspired feature of the revision process. It was agreed that a selection from each company should edit the other company’s work. This was done by reading out the entire text for a revising panel to review.

  So the work was written to be spoken aloud, and the words gained their matchless euphony. “It lives in the ear,” said the hymn writer F. W. Faber, “like music that can never be forgotten.”

  The King James Bible has contributed 257 idioms to the language, more than any other work. Tony Blair and George W. Bush allegedly studied it together. So they knew what it meant to have “feet of clay” or to “reap the whirlwind.”

  * * *

  Robert Hooke

  The greatest inventor you’ve never heard of

  By Wednesday, 5 September 1666, it was over. The fire was out, as if the gods had eaten their fill of destruction. Medieval Lond
on was no more. After 1,600 years London had finally discovered an enemy more potent than the Normans, the Danes, the Saxons—a man who was single-handedly responsible for burning down more buildings and destroying more livelihoods than Boudica herself.

  He was Mr. Thomas Farriner, the baker of Pudding Lane, who forgot his tray of buns. But for sheer boneheaded incompetence, I am afraid he is beaten by Sir Thomas Bloodworth, the Lord Mayor.

  By the standards of the time the blaze at Pudding Lane was still unremarkable on the Sunday morning when this municipal mugwump arrived at the scene. He found an argument taking place.

  The constables wanted to stop the spread of the fire by the usual means—hauling down the adjacent buildings with fire hooks. The tenants protested. Since the owners of the houses could not be found, Sir Thomas Bloodworth decided that it was all too complicated. He told the constables to keep going with their water buckets.

  “Pish,” he said, turning on his heel, “a woman could piss it out.” As the fire spread over the next two days, it was as if the citizens went into a trance of despair. The fire has been compared to an animal, leaping across the street from one wooden gable to the next, hiding under the thatch before exploding into view, ambushing the firefighters from behind.

  Tuesday, 4 September, was perhaps the worst of all, as the blaze finally reached the thousands of books and manuscripts that had been stored for safekeeping in the cellar of St. Paul’s. The stones of the dilapidated medieval structure shot up like cannonballs and the lead from the roof ran like water in the streets.

  The following morning Samuel Pepys ascended the spire of All Hallows Barking, by the Tower, and looked amid tears at the desolation. London had lost 87 churches and 13,200 houses, the homes of 70,000 people. The Royal Exchange, the shops of Cheapside—all had been incinerated, and the damage has been estimated in today’s money at billions of pounds. Modern historians refuse to believe the official death toll—eight—and suggest that hundreds if not thousands of nameless paupers were carbonised in the fireball. As Pepys looked at the curling wisps of smoke, he could see people scrabbling pathetically for their cremated possessions. Huge encampments of refugees had been created at Moorfields and Islington, and angry mobs were roaming the remaining streets in search of the French and the Flemings and other foreigners who (as ever) were blamed for the fire.