Nuttall is persuasive too when it comes to convincing us about what Aristotle called ‘plausible impossibilities’ and ‘unobvious decisions’. Would Lady Anne really have succumbed to Crookback Dick so soon after he had murdered her husband? Nuttall reminds us of David Niven confessing how sexually voracious he became in his grief after his wife’s death. As for Richard himself on the night before battle seeing all the ghosts of the people he has wronged thronging round him, Nuttall tells us that the famously ferocious Dame Helen Gardner on her deathbed was visited by the ghosts of all the pupils she had failed and colleagues whose careers she had destroyed. An experimental psychologist of Nuttall’s acquaintance is quite certain too that after the shock of having been violently blinded, Gloucester could easily be made to believe that he has fallen over Dover Cliff when he has merely toppled forward on to level ground.
Could Prince Hal in the Boar’s Head be thinking aloud how well his riotous years will go down with the public ‘when this loose behaviour I throw off’? Well, yes he could. Such cold calculations by ambitious young men are now familiar to us, Michael Heseltine at Oxford allegedly tracing on the back of an envelope his flight path to Downing Street. As for a riotous youth, these days every successful political leader needs to have inhaled a little.
Nuttall has a sharp ear for social nuance, pointing out that the Boar’s Head scenes should not be played too downmarket. Falstaff, Bardolph and the rest are decayed military men, a little like Captain Grimes, and the mixture of posh and louche in the clientele requires Mistress Quickly to be given a touch of Muriel Belcher rather than Annie of the Rovers Return.
Shakespeare always returns us to earth, and to the city. The dukes driven out into the forest always go back. Celia and Rosalind toy with the idea of buying a country cottage together, no doubt pricing out local forest-dwellers, but return to South Ken, preferring hedgefunders to hedgerows. The beauty of Shakespeare’s forests is that they are full of real mud and the milkmaid’s hands are chapped from pumping at the cow’s dugs and in winter Marian’s nose looks red and raw and birds sit brooding in the snow. Shakespeare’s pastoral is proper country, not a conventional daydream of ‘when I was a child and it was all green fields round here’. In Shakespeare’s Arden there is no pathos of distance, rather a poetry of presence.
Nuttall defends old-fashioned critics who were not ashamed to speculate how many children Lady Macbeth had and old-fashioned anthologists who liked to excerpt ‘beauties’ from Shakespeare. For the dramatis personae are not like types in a masque, they are characters with background. And from the first there are ‘arias’ and ‘islands’ in the plays, passages in which a character steps forward, sometimes out of character and sings – there is no other word for it – as Mercutio does in his Queen Mab speech, or the dying John of Gaunt, or Gertrude narrating Ophelia’s death. He points out too how rapidly Shakespeare can change register, from the bitchy crosstalk of The Taming of the Shrew to Petruchio’s heart-stopping lines:
Kate like the hazel twig
Is straight and slender, and as brown in hue
As hazel-nuts, and sweeter than the kernels.
O, let me see thee walk.
A critic who called Kate’s speech in defence of wifely submission ‘the greatest defence of Christian monogamy ever written’ was none other than Dr Germaine Greer, who regards Katherina as uncommonly lucky to find Petruchio.
It is in an instant too that the backchat about Falstaff being too pissed to know what time it is provokes the old man to make his marvellous plea: ‘Marry then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty: let us be Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon.’
Nuttall insists that what catches and holds Hal’s affection, and ours, is not that Falstaff is just a charming old barfly but that he is, even in his ruined state, so blazingly articulate and intelligent.
But here comes the problem, which Nuttall candidly confesses. It is not that Shakespeare in, say, Troilus and Cressida is a Warwickshire innocent, insulated by a parochial culture, ineptly essaying a classical theme beyond his understanding. It is the modern reader who is commonly unable to match the sophistication of the Elizabethan dramatist.
For this reason there is a tinge of melancholy evident here and there in the book, a sense of coming too late on the scene. Nuttall takes on the task of showing us the full depth and complexity of Shakespeare’s thought just at the moment when we are becoming incapable of absorbing most of it, like a tennis coach who only turns up after you have developed incurable tennis elbow. A great deal of the thought in the plays is simply too difficult for us to follow, partly for linguistic reasons. Nouns and verbs have changed their meaning; the use of prepositions has altered subtly too. Meanings are often highly compacted and further obscured by poetic locutions. Nuttall takes fifty-seven words to provide a modern paraphrase for the Fool’s eight-word line in Twelfth Night: ‘Words are very rascals since bonds disgrac’d them’ – or, as they say in the City these days, you can’t trust anyone’s word since the lawyers moved in.
And if the reader is often nonplussed, the poor playgoer, who has no time to decode the knottier bits, is baffled. Ditto the actors. They shout or mumble out of sheer embarrassment when they don’t understand what they are saying. Sometimes I yearn for a kindly Dr Bowdler who would iron out, this time not the obscenities, but the obscurities. Without a little help from somewhere, I suspect that directors will increasingly give up on the words, keeping only the plot and the songs, returning the plays to the condition of mere masques.
You can already see signs of this happening. In the 2007 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Roundhouse (but originally created in India), the play is performed in seven Indian languages plus English (mostly rather broken). The actors flit up and round scaffolding, swirl and swaddle themselves in brightly coloured scarves and burst through paper screens to a rapturous reception from the audience. Now and then fragments of Shakespeare’s words break through. The programme says rather severely that Indian audiences, let alone English ones, are not to mind if they cannot understand three-quarters of what the actors are saying, because their unreasonable expectation of monolingual drama arises not only from habituation to that mode, but also from the tyranny of literary studies dependent on the reading of books printed necessarily in one, ‘pure’ language, even more so when that language is the revered Bard’s very own English.
I like those inverted commas round ‘pure’, suggesting that those who prefer to hear stuff in their own lingo are imperialist racist fascists. The director of the production, the gloriously named Tim Supple, concedes that ‘the original text has a special quality, whether Shakespeare or Schiller.’ That’s nice of him. But, the Supple One continues, ‘on the other hand, I can’t accept the superiority of any language’. Not even a language you can understand? Ah well, these insubstantial pageants do fade. Still, the punters loved it.
THE GREAT VICTORIANS
The old view of the Victorians, put about by Lytton Strachey and his gang, and inherited by the next generation, was that they were stuffy, narrow-minded prigs. Legends of their prudishness appealed to our sense of having grown out of all that – the most famous, and most fatuous, being the myth that they draped piano legs to discourage indecent thoughts. To us now, the Victorians are beginning to look rather different: high-minded, yes, but open-minded too, ample-spirited, adventurous, confident that they could improve the world and themselves.
In fact, public authorities today devote quite a bit of time and money to restoring the great public works we inherited from the Victorians – the handsome city centres of Manchester, Newcastle and Liverpool, the amazing railway stations the size of cathedrals, the neglected city parks, the long choked canals. We are also starting to tackle the reforms of those institutions shaped by the Victorians which have gone slack – the police, the welfare state, the state schools. But how gingerly and ham-fistedly
we go about it, compared with the electric energy and remorseless attention to detail of men like Peel, Palmerston and Gladstone.
Contrary to another part of the old myth, by and large the Victorians were anything but smug. The more we hear about them, the more respect we feel for their ability to confront the unwelcome and the unfamiliar. The career of Charles Darwin used to be told as a sort of biopic, the story of one man’s fight to reveal the secrets of life in the teeth of public opinion. What strikes me, on the contrary, is how quickly the early Victorians took on board the general thesis of evolution and the insistence that man was part of that process. You have only to read the lines in In Memoriam about ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ to see that Tennyson, writing before 1851 and so well before the publication of The Origin of Species, could assume in his readers some grasp of the purposeless, often brutal nature of evolution. Only a few of the thicker bishops, notoriously ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce of Oxford, resisted the implications. No dogmatic materialist can have painted more grimly than Arthur Balfour the brief and doomed tenure of man’s existence on earth. Walter Bagehot, the cocksure editor of the Economist, was anything but smug in his dire predictions about the future of democracy. He had too an unrivalled understanding of just how fragile the imposing institutions of the City of London were in reality. He even dared to ask whether Britain’s Empire in India was sustainable in the long run, and whether it might not be better to begin to dissolve it in good time.
Nor should we lump together the Victorians as if every educated adult between 1837 and 1901 shared the same mindset. It is not hard to identify a late-Victorian doubt and pessimism which could no longer muster the old self-confidence. With the crumbling of certainty came a new frivolity and an elegant cynicism, from which those spoilt darlings of the Scottish Lowlands, Archie Rosebery and Arthur Balfour, undoubtedly suffered. Unleashed into the harder world of the new century, in which neither Britain’s navy nor her industrial pre-eminence were unchallenged any more, such capriciousness was dangerous. For a single example, which was to have consequences up to the present day and beyond, look no further than the Balfour Declaration of 1917 – the last gasp of Edwardian nonchalance. It is hard to imagine Palmerston or Peel launching into such a wild promise without thinking it through.
SIR ROBERT PEEL: THE FIRST MODERN
In Britain, modern politics starts with Peel. When William IV sacked Lord Melbourne and sent for Sir Robert, this was the last time a monarch dismissed his ministers of his own accord. When Peel replaced Melbourne again, in 1841, this was the first time a government had been overturned, not by the King, not by a vote in Parliament, but by a vote of the British electorate. Peel’s manifesto to his electors in Tamworth was the first national election manifesto in British history. It was as beautifully vague as most manifestos since, but it sent a thrill through the newly enlarged electorate. They could sense that at last their interests and aspirations were to come first. The manifesto coincided with the growing use of the word ‘Conservative’ to describe the Tory party. And it was in these years too that Peel’s confidant Francis Bonham took up his private desk at the Carlton Club, dressed in a long brown coat and carrying a large strapped book full of electioneering facts, figures and calculations, and Conservative Central Office was born.
Walter Bagehot, in his scorching essay, ‘The Character of Sir Robert Peel’, immediately grasped that here was the epitome of the new age. Peel was the ideal constitutional statesman, a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities. According to Bagehot, Sir Robert was never in advance of his time. Unlike the lightning that flashed from his Harrow contemporary Byron (‘I was always in scrapes at school, Peel never’), Sir Robert’s ‘opinions far more resembled the daily accumulating deposits of a rich alluvial soil . . . You scarcely think of such a mind as acting; it seems always acted upon.’ In his most devastating attack on Peel, at the Third Reading of the Corn Law Bill, Disraeli described him as a ‘burglar of other intellect . . . there is no statesman who has committed political petty larceny on so great a scale.’ This view of Peel remains influential to this day. Again and again, in his light-footed, never less than readable Life of Peel, Douglas Hurd repeats that Peel’s was not an original mind, or as Gladstone put it, he was not a far-sighted man but fairly clear-sighted. He had changed his mind on so many things. As an absurdly young chief secretary in Ireland, he had opposed Catholic emancipation and been denounced by Daniel O’Connell as Orange Peel, not just for his opinions but for the foppery of perfumed handkerchiefs and thin shoes. Peel then believed that an honest despotic government would be by far the fittest government for Ireland. Few would have predicted his slow conversion to the belief that Catholics should not merely have the vote but enjoy the fullest part in Irish public life. The author of the act that returned Britain to the gold standard had originally voted against it. Again, he had done everything he could to frustrate the Great Reform Bill, then in the Tamworth Manifesto accepted it as a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question.
Then there was corn. The ardent early protectionist became the first great globalist, espousing free trade for Britain without demanding anything in return from other nations. He who had so long defended every tariff now confided to Prince Albert that he had an immense scheme in view for removing all protection and abolishing every monopoly. Like any twenty-first-century chancellor, he now believed that we must make this a cheap country for living and thus induce parties to remain and settle here. No wonder the Duchess of Richmond decorated her dining table with stuffed rats under a glass cover depicting Wellington and Peel. And John Henry Newman wrote from Oxford, ‘It is not pro dignitate nostra to have a rat as our member’. There might be mega-ratting to come from Newman as from Disraeli, but it was Peel who was always to be remembered as King Rat. In vain, he protested that there was no dishonour in relinquishing opinions or measures and adopting others more suited to the altered circumstances of the country. The honesty with which he exposed his change of opinion, the factual power and fervour with which he defended his volte-faces only further enraged his contemporaries.
For the unforgiving Ultras, he was worse than a traitor to the good old cause; he split the party so that it didn’t have a proper spell in power for the next thirty years. It is not the least irony of Peel’s career that this pioneer of party politics should have been such a negligent practitioner of the art. Lord Shaftesbury complained that ‘Peel has committed great and grievous mistakes in omitting to call his friends frequently together to state his desires and rouse their zeal. A few minutes and a few words would have sufficed; men would have felt they were companions in arms; they now have the sentiment of being followers in drill.’ As Hurd points out, this is an excellent description of what goes wrong when prime ministers become too grand to cultivate their backbenchers; see Ted Heath passim, and Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair in their later years.
In the recent spate of political biographies by leading politicians – Roy Jenkins on Gladstone and Churchill, William Hague on Wilberforce and Pitt the Younger – you get thrown in for your money a scattering of aperçus on the nature of political life and also quite a few comparisons between then and now. Lord Hurd is no slouch in this department, comparing Palmerston’s gunboat diplomacy to George W. Bush’s neo-colonial missionary zeal, and Peel’s dislike of sentimental compassion masquerading as argument to Margaret Thatcher’s. These comparisons do add enjoyment and sometimes illumination, but now and then they are a little forced. Yes, like Hurd’s two political masters, Heath and Thatcher, Peel could be chilly and awkward in company. Yet the similarities are surely less striking than the great difference, which is that Heath and Thatcher are remembered for sticking to their guns, whereas Peel was notorious for, in Lord John Russell’s words, being a very pretty hand at hauling down his colours.
Hurd acknowledges his debt to Norman Gash’s superb two-volume Life and sometimes, for example when describing Peel’s death and funeral, follows Gash almost word for word
. There are occasional signs of haste. When Peel makes a bet with Lord Ashburton that he can pull off a John Macnab-style feat of shooting in a single day a pheasant, two types of partridge, both sorts of snipe, a woodcock and a wild duck plus a rabbit and a hare, Gash says he won 300 guineas, Hurd only 100. The larger figure gives the lie even more dramatically to the claim that Peel was nothing more than a puritanical prig. And where Gash tells us that Lady Floyd inveigled Peel to meet her daughter, his future wife Julia, by promising to find some Dresden ice pails for Peel’s dinner service, Hurd says they were ice picks, not normally an item made in porcelain, otherwise Trotsky might have lived a bit longer.
But Hurd gives as vividly as Gash the sense of how odd Peel was, so cold outwardly, so affectionate and unbuttoned at home, the fondest of Victorian papas, apparently possessed of an imperturbable calm, yet not a redhead for nothing. He nearly fought two duels. Hurd does not quite convey the full bizarrerie of Peel’s abortive shoot-out with O’Connell at Ostend. The news of the impending duel got into the newspapers and a warrant was issued for the arrest of both men. While O’Connell was arrested in London, the chief secretary for Ireland, who had already crossed the Channel, had to skulk about the Netherlands incognito for several weeks, but enjoyed the whole business, according to his friend Croker, ‘as unaffectedly gay and at his ease as when we were going to Dover on our tour to Paris’. There was a generosity and high spirits about Peel. He was generous to painters and poets down on their luck, like Benjamin Haydon and James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd. He collected old masters by the score, including Rubens’s Le Chapeau de Paille, and had Julia painted in the same get-up by Sir Thomas Lawrence. He built the most monstrous of Victorian extravaganzas on the site of his father’s old house at Drayton, composed of, in Professor J. Mordaunt Crook’s description: ‘dull cupolas and Dutch gables, a Gothic porte cochère, and a classical arcade, a Swiss lodge and French gates and an Italian campanile. The gardens included a gaslit conservatory copied from Frogmore, an Italian garden, an American pool, an avenue of monkey-puzzle trees and balustraded terraces festooned with winged cherubs and 209 marble urns.’ Queen Victoria, who was by now entirely reconciled to Sir Robert and no longer thought him chilly and disagreeable, told Lord Aberdeen that Drayton is certainly ‘the most comfortable house I ever saw’.
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