English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  Claire Tomalin is also more clear-eyed than Pepys’s male biographers about his conduct both in the office and at home. The little man, after all, had a large helping of all the seven deadly sins, except sloth. When he was appointed to the Navy Board, he simply knocked on the door of the house in Seething Lane that he fancied, spent a couple of nights as the guest of the inoffensive Major Willoughby and then told Willoughby to get out – behaviour more characteristic of Robert Mugabe than Sir Robert Armstrong. When he heard that Matthew Wren had been wounded in the Battle of Sole Bay, he instantly wrote to his patron Sir William Coventry asking for Wren’s job. When Coventry himself was on the skids, Pepys refused to be seen walking with him in St James’s Park.

  Nor indeed were his famous dalliances all so innocent. He forced Mrs Bagwell to have sex with him by promising to arrange promotion for her husband, a ship’s carpenter. In fact, when Bagwell is at sea fighting the Dutch, Pepys’s first instinct is to pop down for a session with Mrs Bagwell. But when she is past forty, he writes to her husband telling him to keep her away from the Navy Office. He fondles Pegg Penn’s breasts and thighs, though he finds her unattractive and suspects she has the pox, in order to get his own back on her father, Sir William Penn. And he is notoriously bad-tempered as well as congenitally unfaithful to his wife Elizabeth, whom I am fonder of than Mrs Tomalin seems to be.

  For, though she is anything but blind to her subject’s weaknesses, in the last resort, like most biographers, she finds it easy to forgive them: ‘His energy burns off blame. For a woman, it is the nearest to experiencing what it is like to be a man; it is surprisingly hard to disapprove of him.’ My own reactions, I must confess, are often more like those of Randolph Churchill reading the Old Testament for the first time, as observed by Evelyn Waugh: ‘God, isn’t God a shit?’

  If Pepys is indeed the prototype of modern man, that is not an entirely comforting thought. Mrs Tomalin thinks other diaries of the period dull by comparison, and so to the modern reader they are. Yet in reading, say, the diary of the Rev. Ralph Josselin, an Essex clergyman to whom nothing much happened except the usual ills of life, I feel the presence of a human, well, I am sorry to use the word, but soul is really the only one that will do. For all his love of music and women, Pepys does have something about him of the automata that so much fascinated him: his Tiggerish energy, his equal readiness to lie and to confess, his voracious acquisition of high-placed friends, his boasting of his fine works of art, his readiness to pounce on any woman in any circumstances. Why, who does this remind us of? I am afraid it is Jeffrey Archer. True, Pepys is a better writer and went to prison three times as against Lord Archer’s once to date, but there is a not-thereness that they share.

  Why do I feel this so much more strongly after reading Tomalin than her predecessors? I think it is precisely because her approach is so markedly different in several respects. First, the male biographers are interested primarily in Pepys as ‘the saviour of the Navy’ (to use the title of Arthur Bryant’s third volume) and in the diary as an unmatched historical record, while she is interested in Pepys’s vie intérieure and in the diary’s unique pioneering record of a self at work and play. Her previous full-length biographies have rescued women from the margins of oblivion – Dickens’s mistress Ellen Ternan being actually characterized as ‘the Invisible Woman’. And here too she beautifully resurrects lesser characters like Pepys’s old maids, Jane and the luckless Deb, whose being surprised by Elizabeth in flagrante with Pepys triggered the biggest almighty row husband and wife ever had, which is saying something.

  This biography’s golden asset is that it brings alive all the other characters in the diary and explains their relationship to Pepys and to each other in a richness of detail that even the wonderful index and companion to the eleven-volume Latham and Matthews edition do not quite achieve. Tomalin thus provides the perfect preparation for reading the diary itself.

  But Pepys himself never was invisible. He lives not only through his extraordinary contributions towards a modern navy that was properly trained, supplied and officered but also through his addictive unputdownable writings.

  And here, by what is clearly a conscious decision, Tomalin denies us our fix. While telling us over and over what a masterpiece the diary is, she doesn’t actually quote from it all that much, and seldom at length. She paraphrases, she chops up, she reorders, but she doesn’t give us Pepys’s own words and so loses the entrancing effect of the way he runs on.

  For example, she records almost every fact in the passage I quoted at the head of this review, but all except ten words – ‘as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition’ – are Tomalin’s, not Pepys’s. Somehow this technique drains Pepys of some of his magic and leaves his conduct, when so plainly recounted by another hand, more open to our censure. And now and then the lack of direct quotation leads to omission of the most brilliant detail in the middle of a passage – for example, when the Dutch come up the Medway and Pepys in a total panic sends Elizabeth off to the country with his gold, Bryant and Ollard both mention that Pepys can’t think what to do with his much bulkier store of silver and thinks in a wild moment of hiding it down the privy, but Tomalin does not.

  Again Bryant and Ollard both describe exactly how the King saves Pepys’s bacon when he is accused of trafficking in seamen’s wage tickets. In Pepys’s own words: ‘The King with a smile and shake of his head told the Commissioners that he thought it a vain thing to believe that one having so great trust . . . should descend to so poor a thing as the doing anything that was unfit for him in a matter of 0.10s.’

  There is none of this in Tomalin.

  But she really comes into her own in describing Pepys’s last years, not covered by Bryant. It is a touching picture she paints of his retirement in Clapham under the wing of his sometime protégé Will Hewer and his favourite nephew John Jackson and his not quite second wife Mary Skinner, out of the great world but still in touch with his old friends like Evelyn, to whom he wrote, ‘Pray remember what o’clock it is with you and me’ and Evelyn replied that ‘an easy comfortable passage is that which remains for us to beg of God, and for the rest to sit loose to things below’.

  Even in his latter years, Pepys had not lost his boyish enthusiasm, nor forgotten how to write. On his voyage to Tangier he goes out rowing by himself and records in his notes: ‘I know nothing that can give a better notion of infinity and eternity than the being upon the sea in a little vessel without anything in sight but yourself within the whole hemisphere.’

  No, not quite Jeffrey Archer after all.

  SHAKESPEARE AT STRATFORD: THE DIVINE PORK BUTCHER

  For some reason, snootiness I expect, I had never been to Stratford-upon-Avon before. On a chilly day at the end of March, with only a scattering of Japanese pilgrims about, the place is a revelation. How upon the Avon it is, the church so close to the river that a gale could blow its great east window into the water. When you stand at the altar rails, there slap in front of you is Shakespeare’s tomb and, ranged alongside, the tombs of his wife, daughter Susanna and son-in-law. And up above you to the left, there is the coloured bust of him, the one that the critic Dover Wilson complained makes him look like a self-satisfied pork butcher; if so, a pork butcher who has just come back from a fortnight in Marbella, because the eighteenth-century overpainting has gone an ineradicable brown. Despite this, he looks pretty much the same, except fuller in the face, as he does in the Droeshout frontispiece to the First Folio: the same domy brow, thyroid eyes and John Major upper lip. The opposite page in the Folio has the little doggerel verse by Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s longstanding rival and drinking partner, which certifies Droeshout’s version as a fair likeness, just as his family must have okayed the bust which was erected only a couple of years after his death.

  Yet still people pretend there is a mystery about what Shakespeare looked like. There was even an exhibition, ‘Searching for Shakespeare’, devoted to the subject at the National Portrait Gallery in 2006,
featuring all the alternative more romantic versions of the face, chaps with earrings and hollow cheeks and soupy expressions, none of them bearing much resemblance to the divine pork butcher, like those hopeless lookunalikes at a police identity parade. Even A. D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker, which sets out to clear away the cobwebs, uses for its dust jacket the Flower Portrait which was exposed two years ago as a nineteenth-century pastiche – the chrome yellow was the giveaway.

  Nobody could be more solidly anchored in his home town than William Shakespeare, christened and buried a few hundred yards from the house where he was born, his sister Joan and her descendants living in that same house for the next 200 years, just as Anne’s brother, Bartholomew Hathaway, and his descendants lived in their ‘cottage’, in reality a substantial timbered farmhouse, for the next 300 years. As you stand outside and look across the cottage garden to the fields and oaks of the Forest of Arden, where his mother Mary Arden came from (her family’s farm still standing too), you cannot help being moved, and also puzzled. Where’s the mystery?

  In fact, scholars are now beginning to admit that we know more about Shakespeare than about most people at the time who were not noble or royal. There was, after all, nothing obscure about his reputation in his lifetime. The wall tablet under the bust says in Latin ‘The earth covers, the people mourn and Olympus holds a Virgil in art, a Socrates in intellect and a Nestor in wisdom’. So not just a provincial wordsmith who kept London bums on seats. He was regarded in his own time not merely as the Lloyd Webber of the West Midlands but as a profound thinker. The young John Milton, one of the most learned poets who ever lived, wrote of Shakespeare’s ‘Delphic lines’ which ‘make us marble, with too much conceiving’. We remember Ben Jonson saying that his old friend ‘had small Latin and less Greeke’, but this was just a joshing prelude to comparing him to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

  Yet the mystifiers remain convinced that a glover’s son who had not been to university could not have produced such stuff, that the historical Shakespeare was not up to being ‘Shakespeare’. This is mostly snobbery, but also ignorance, for example about the demanding standards of grammar schools like Stratford’s, staffed mostly by university men. The plays show that in fact Shakespeare had read more Latin than classicists in universities today.

  I remain baffled by the obsessive labours not only of those who waste their lives trying to prove that Oxford or Bacon or Queen Elizabeth wrote the plays, but also of those who long to tie Shakespeare down, to pigeonhole him in some profession or allegiance or character which would somehow explain away his disquieting genius. It’s as if knowing what Shakespeare was like as a person would somehow relieve us from the obligation of understanding what he wrote.

  So we have the ‘lost years’, in which he was allegedly employed as a schoolteacher in the country (Aubrey’s Brief Lives) or as a soldier in the Low Countries (Duff Cooper’s Sergeant Shakespeare). The battered old ‘Theatre Edition’ that I have in front of me argues, following the eighteenth-century Shakespearean Edmond Malone, that after leaving school Shakespeare was employed in the office of a local attorney – this on no stronger ground than that he had nice handwriting and there are more legal references in his plays than in those of his contemporaries. Surely the obvious answer is that, like anyone else trying to get into the theatre, Shakespeare spent his twenties learning his trade as prompter, scene-shifter and understudy – years lost only in the sense that there would be unlikely to be much record of them. For his later life we are offered the sour, money-grubbing capitalist of Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life and Edward Bond’s play Bingo. Well, it is always a mistake to underestimate how unpleasant great writers can be – though few of us would come out smelling sweetly if the only traces left of us were our dealings with the Inland Revenue and the local planning department.

  The current favourite obsession is that Shakespeare was a secret Roman Catholic. Some of his Arden relations were undoubtedly recusants and several of the schoolmasters at Stratford Grammar were scholars who had contacts with the martyred Campion (so not just a bog-standard comprehensive then). Then there was William Shakeshafte, a player in service with the Catholic Hoghton family in Lancashire during the lost years. Could this have been the bard learning his trade under an alias (not much of an alias and Lancashire would not be very handy for dashing down to Stratford to impregnate Anne before zipping on to London to take his place in Lord Strange’s company)? And there is the ‘spiritual testament’ of Shakespeare’s father John, found hidden in the rafters of a Stratford house in 1737, full of references to Purgatory and ending with an ‘Ave Maria’. Such testaments follow a form set down by Cardinal Borromeo and are said to have been brought to England by Campion in the 1580s. But three years ago, the scholar Robert Bearman produced evidence to show that English versions of these wills did not begin to appear until the 1630s, suggesting that John Shakespeare’s one was an eighteenth-century fake. Father Thomas McCoog, the archivist of the British Jesuits, cannot see any evidence that links Shakespeare to the Jesuits at all. It remains possible that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic who had conformed in order to survive in those cruel chancy times, but if so, on the evidence of the plays he was such a secret one that the fact is no more important to Shakespeare as a writer than whether Glasgow Rangers’ new signing is a left-footer in the religious rather than the football sense. For Shakespeare is not a religious poet as Donne, Milton and Herbert were, and he is not a religious playwright either.

  Tragedies by their nature do not end in a redeeming, but was there ever such a bleak, nihilist play as King Lear? Dr Johnson declared that he could not bear to read the play through. Cordelia may be Christ-like in her forgiveness but she ends dead in Lear’s arms and there is no resurrection. And when characters in Shakespeare do come back from the dead, it is because they were never dead at all. Cymbeline is not Lazarus. Nor is Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; she has just been kept hidden away from her jealous husband Leontes and she returns with the extra wrinkles that she would have acquired in the interim. As for extracting from the plays any clue as to what Shakespeare thought about the Reformation, forget it. Which is why you will notice that what is common to the Shakespeare-was-a-Catholic obsessives and the Shakespeare-was-Marlowe/Bacon/Oxford/Queen Elizabeth brigade is that they draw their hidden messages or cunning acrostics from some bit of wordplay in the Sonnets or a minor poem like ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’. The plays themselves resist such fantastical interpretations, as does Shakespeare himself.

  It is to undo all this that Professor A. D. Nuttall devoted his last book (he died in January). Tony Nuttall was a charismatic figure at Oxford, the son of a Herefordshire village headmaster and younger brother of the sixties guru-poet Jeff Nuttall, author of Bomb Culture. He aims to restore to us the depth and brightness of Shakespeare’s thought, to undim him, like a good picture cleaner. And he has succeeded magnificently. The book starts unpromisingly with an introduction which tells us that one Oxford academic encouraged him to write the book and another one told him to stop ‘when you find yourself writing about Shakespeare’s essential Englishness’. But when Nuttall sets about his work, I immediately became entranced. He moves from play to play, at first in chronological order of their first playing or publication, later grouping them by theme, devoting no more than eight or ten pages to each, leaving out only a couple of duds like King John and Henry VIII. Each essay lights up some crucial moment or nub in the play, usually one I had not thought about and I could not wait to scurry on to see what he had to say about the next. Not since Harley Granville Barker has there been such an illuminating field guide to what Johnson called ‘the great forest’ of Shakespeare’s work.

  Nuttall contends that the greater part of this work is ‘internally generated, the product not of Shakespeare’s time, but of his own, unresting, creative intelligence’. Nuttall’s Shakespeare won’t stop still long enough to be pinned down. That is why he annoys some people. Shaw notoriously d
eclared that ‘there is no eminent writer I can despise as heartily as I despise Shakespeare, when I measure my mind against his’, which tells us more about GBS’s mind than Shakespeare’s (Ralph Richardson once said that every time he did Shakespeare or Chekhov the part came out differently, but that acting Shaw was like running on tramlines). ‘If we set aside technological advances like mobile telephones,’ Nuttall argues, ‘it is remarkably hard to think of anything Shakespeare has not thought of first, somewhere. Marxist, Freudian, Feminist, Structuralist, Materialist ideas are all there.’ Christian apologists pounce triumphantly upon each little glimpse of religious allegiance, but, as Gary Taylor says, ‘if Shakespeare has been the god of our idolatry for four centuries it is because he created scripture for an emerging secular world’. You want relativism, here’s Hamlet: ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’ Freud, himself a passionate lover of Shakespeare, took inspiration from Hamlet’s sexual jealousy of Claudius. For the dawn of introspection, see Richard II, passim. Or consider the debate between Perdita and Polixenes on plant-breeding in The Winter’s Tale. Perdita says she cares not to gather slips of carnations and streaked gillyflowers because they are Nature’s bastards, but Polixenes tells her that ‘the art which adds to Nature is itself Nature’ – pure Darwin.

  From the unpromising terrain of Henry VI, Part I, Nuttall plucks these lines: ‘One would have ling’ring wars with little cost; Another would fly swift but want the wings. A third think, without expense at all, By guileful fair words peace may be obtain’d.’ There you have the choices in the Iraq debate: Rumsfeld’s ‘invasion-lite’, shock ’n’ awe, or UN mediation. Or take Henry V listening intently to the Archbishop of Canterbury going through the arguments for Henry’s claim to the French throne. Directors fear that the scene may bore the audience and often play it for laughs, but we ought to be thinking of Tony Blair listening to the Attorney General before the war: ‘May I with right and conscience make this claim?’ – or do I need a dodgy dossier to legitimize my invasion?