Post 600: Permission to Not Understand Shakespeare

I would like to thank linguist John McWhorter for his permission to not understand Shakespeare, and will pass it on to you. McWhorter has far better credentials than mine, and he doesn't get it either.

The plays of Shakespeare, performed in their original Early Modern English, are not understandable on first hearing. Or second hearing. By anyone. If they weren’t also in iambic pentameter, which makes them even less conversational in tone, some few of us might have a shot at it. Even if one has read and studied a dozen of his works, it is likely that an unfamiliar work will throw you off. It is not that you will understand none of it – most of us can get some idea what is transpiring on stage. Okay, he seems to be wanting to trick the old guy. I think because he wants that girl over there in the green. She seems to be a princess or other nobility. Her maid seems to be making a lot of sexual jokes that they giggle about. Those other guys are his friends, and one of them never has any money. The old guy a jerk, but a smart jerk. But truth is, you can get a lot of that if you’re watching a play in a foreign language, too.

We understand some of what is said, or think we do, and try to figure out the whole scene from those sparse clues. And there are certainly phrases – whole sentences – that we understand.

“First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

(Henry VI, Part 2 – Do you have any way to keep those Henry plays straight?) That seems clear enough. But look what follows:

Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.

We can make something of this. Laws or contracts or something written on parchment have enormous power over us. But with the lambs and the bees in there, it’s tough sledding. It’s worse when you’re hearing it rather than reading it, too.

It’s worse than a foreign language, because we don’t even understand what we think we do. It turns out we don’t even understand that “kill all the lawyers” line. It is often reported that this is actually a compliment to lawyers. The speech is uttered by a criminal, and this interpretation suggests that it is only lawyers that stand between comity and criminals taking over. But even that tortured explanation turns out to be wrong. One character says that when he’s ruler of all, everyone will have plenty of food and drink – it will be heaven. The criminal suggests that it will really be heaven if they can get rid of the lawyers. Sort of like Woody Guthrie telling the hoboes there will be no police in heaven.

Had enough? Of course you haven’t.

“O sweet my mother, cast me not away! Delay this marriage for a month, a week;”

(Romeo and Juliet)

Okay, that we understand. This Juliet doesn’t want to marry somebody her mother wants her to. But she clearly wants to marry this Romeo character we just saw a minute ago. I think I’m getting it. Not so fast. Read how she begins her next speech.

“My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven;
How shall that faith return again to earth,
Unless that husband send it me from heaven
By leaving earth?”

Ben points out that this nonsense starts right away in Romeo and Juliet:

Sampson: Gregory, o’ my word we’ll not carry coals.

Gregory: No, for then we should be colliers.

That was a joke. A big laugh line. Get it? Neither do I.

I was long embarrassed at my inability to understand The Bard. I was a theater major. I studied Old English, Middle English, and History of the English Language. I can still fight my way through Chaucer – even Beowulf in simpler sections. I can read the KJV. I can read pilgrim diaries and the Geneva Psalter. But I can’t get Shakespeare without notes and explanations. I did three scenes from King Lear in acting lab every evening for six weeks in rehearsal. At the end, I still had no idea what was going on except that Lear was losing his mind. Which I knew anyway. I really like Shakespeare when someone explains it to me. I should have suspected that something was up, because right after college I went to a production of Shakespeare and laughed at some jokes that no one else got. But I still couldn’t figure out the action onstage.

Thus, it was a great relief when McWhorter acknowledged he doesn’t get it either. I should be a purist, insisting that Shakespeare be preserved in its original for performance, because no one could possibly translate the text into Modern English with sufficient strength of poetry. Yeah, that’s true, no one could. And it does seem that every time someone tries to do a modern interpretation of Shakespeare, it just stinks. I recall the head of the theater department at W&M, an immensely talented but aging alcoholic queen pronouncing with dripping disdain “The Toronto Shakespeare Festival. Last year they did Hamlet in motorcycle leathers. The year before that Macbeth ended up with his head down a well or some such. Revolting.”

But the other choice is to not understand it at all. Maybe my idea of Macbeth done on schoolyard playground equipment wasn’t so bad after all.

Not Understanding Shakespeare - Again

I have returned several times over the years about how hard it is to understand Shakespeare, particularly in performance.  John McWhorter, who I listen to, has come back to it a few times as well, as you will see at my link. I am pulling this out from one of his about five years ago plus some additions of my own. 

To begin with it is poetry, which we are not only unused to but is often committed to using indirect phrases or allusions to other knowledge we might not share with the original audience.  We have similar difficulties with Chaucer or Beowulf. There are prose works in those earlier versions of English we understand more readily. Next, it is in Early Modern English, only debateably our language. Even when we think we know words, simple words, we sometimes get them wrong.  In 1600, "let" could mean forbid, which is an opposite of how we understand the word now. It can throw you off for a whole section trying to work that out.  Directors and actors often downplay the parts they know the audience is going to get confused by, hammering home the parts they think will be easier. In this monologue of Edmund's in King Lear, the chimes are rung on "base," "bastard," "illegitimate," and by tone conveying that his self-descriptions using I, me, my are Edmund stating how he is just as worthy.  It helps. We miss that "generous" actually means noble, and have no clue what nations could possibly be curious about (try "silly customs" there), but we get the general sense.  And then when we get to something like the part I italicised, we have great joy that we understand it! The myth* that Appalachian English is closer to Elizabethan still persists, yet what do we think the average Appalachian lad would make of the phrase "twelve or fourteen moonshines?" If we doubled back to explain it he would readily get it, but he would have to fight against his initial impression. 

So modern audiences don't get it, even when they are educated and pretend to.  I have to guess that Shakespeare would disapprove of our clinging to his phrasing at the expense of people getting the story. ("Give me that quill, you ignorant fools!")

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me?
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? With baseness, bastardy? Base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops
Got ‘tween asleep and wake? Well then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund
As to th’ legitimate. Fine word-,’legitimate’!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow, I prosper:
Now gods, stand up for bastards!  

And there's this soliloquy of Macbeth pondering whether he should kill King Duncan, which begins with a famous phrase. I recall a Sports Illustrated article from the 80s lauding some college basketball coach who considered himself an educator as well as a coach using the first line and a half during a time-out near the end of the game and being proud that his team, mostly urban blacks understood what he was getting at when he said the words. "Yeah, we get it, coach.  Get the ball in to the big man." Well, fine, it's a good story and all that, but that's about the only easily understandable part.  And this is, remember, one of the most famous soliloquy's, the sort of thing that and audience would have to have some clue about to understand the play. In writing, you can get single words in the margin that trammel means "tied," and surcease means "death," but you don't get that in the seats.

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,
With his surcease, success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends th’ ingredience of our poison’d chalice
To our own lips. He’s here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
And falls on th’ other.

Sometimes giving just a word here or there can give you more of the sense. 
"That but this blow might be the be-all and end all here" is clearer just by subbing in "that if this blow..." You slide past whatever the jumping is about in the life to come with an idea that it's something about risking judgement in the afterlife, which is confirmed by the next lines.  But commend, commend, what's that about?  If we had the word "returns" in there we could hold it better. "Justice returns the ingredients of our poisoned chalice." And so on.  We get the idea that Duncan is virtuous, but knowing that "faculties" means authority would give us a head start.

I did find an explanation, if you want to work your way through it. 

People object to any change in Shakespeare's words (even though there are sometimes multiple manuscript variants and we went from 1650-1850 with practically every production altering what it liked, even putting in happy endings.  This went on until the 20th C) as if they were scripture.  Perhaps having no scriptures they believe in, they need to find some words to revere in similar fashion. When translating Shakespeare is mentioned, there is an immediate defensiveness of sneering at the worst examples they have ever heard of: "What up, Romeo?" or the like. But alterations here and there - a word or two every few lines - would give audiences a fighting chance of understanding what is really happening, not just getting the general thrust of the plot and character traits plus recognising some phrases. 

I have also read the suggestion that a dozen or so words should be part of core curriculum with the specific intent of being used to understand Shakespeare and other older material: nailing down what the formal and informal thou's and thee's and you's are, teaching that "science" and "wit" meant any knowledge, not chemistry or humor, and of course, getting it straight right off the bat that "wherefore" doesn't mean "where," but "why."

*Have I ever explained why that persists?  I should.

Conference

I was worried that the Inklings/Shakespeare/Bible conference at the Presbyterian Heritage Center might be too geared to academics and specialists, leaving me to be always sneaking onto DuckDuckGo to see what their references were, but it was more of the opposite problem at first. It was more like a Road Scholar gathering, of retirees who were fans of Lewis or Tolkien or things Renaissance.  Average age about 70, knowledge base uneven. The first day - what I saw of it when not arguing with a call center in India about swapping out my rental car (it took 8 hours and was almost certainly no more than the battery in the key fob, which I should have just gotten with a ride down to CVS) was a lot of inside jokes about being Presbyterian and grand historical narratives that were already being stripped down when I was an undergrad. I was unhappy. No new facts or ideas, and while my conversations were pleasant, they were not inspiring. The 1632 First Folio and other old books drew a crowd, but I am no longer much interested.

Side Note: My worry about The Inner Ring played out in interesting fashion, which I will write up soon.

The second day went better. There was Hannibal Hamlin of Ohio State talking about Shakespeare and the Bible, with especial reference to King Lear and Hamlet; Sorina Higgins focusing on the Grail Quest*, Charles Williams, and the influential occultists in English Lit starting around 1880 - she is less spooky in real life than she looks online; Sarah Waters of University of Buckingham, who has a book nearly finished on Shakespeare in Narnia and several papers on that out already; and Joe Ricke from Taylor University, who did not present but is known for both presentations and conference-gathering and was present, cheerfully conversing. All of these put out information that set me thinking in new directions, which I will have a go at over the next two weeks.

*This will show up in the next post on Fair Questions

Shakespeare Says "Hold My Beer."

I have never read "As You Like It," nor even heard it described. I just listened to the Great Books podcast on it and was amused.

In the Elizabethan theater, women's roles were already being played by boys.

The comic value of a woman disguising herself as a man was known well before the time of Shakespeare.  Back to Aristophanes at least once, and persisted after as well.  I acted in a lab theater production of an 18th C comedy and was cornered at swordpoint by a woman pretending to be her brother, arrived from a distance to defend his sister's honor against an older man trying to blackmail her into marriage. Adventurous girls very much liked those roles, and I imagine still do.

So when Rosalind goes into the Forest or Arden disguised as a male, Ganymede, we already have a boy-playing-a-young-woman-playing-a-young man. Not unheard of, but pushing our luck a bit.  Shakespeare decides he is going one better, and when Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, meets her true love Orlando in the forest - he of course doesn't recognise her...they never do in these plays - she/he helps him by letting him practice his courtship conversation on him as if he were Rosalind. Which of course, he is Rosalind.  Being played by a boy. Those who got the joke at the Globe Theater proabably thought it was all very clever, but those who weren't paying close attention might have been asking their friends what exactly was happening.

If you aren't confused yet, there is also Phebe, who falls in love with Ganymede, who does not encourage this. She is imploring, and near the end of the play "he" agrees to marry her if he turns out to be a man, but if he turns out to be a woman, she must marry Sylvius.  Phebe must not be too quick on the uptake here, or is so smitten she will agree to anything, and she agrees. I think most of us would be a touch suspicious at that point.

Best of January 2007

I was fully involved in my Cultural Tribes series. I don't generally link to something from any extended series in my "best ofs," but I do here. It was a literary month.

Permission To Not Understand Shakespeare. I would like to thank linguist John McWhorter for his permission to not understand Shakespeare, and will pass it on to you. McWhorter has far better credentials than mine, and he doesn't get it either.

Pedantic Language Lesson

The Science & Technology Tribe in humor Who does make fun of themselves? It is usually a marker of emotional balance.

Though I would write it differently now, I still like to reprint The Big Bad Three. When editorialists and online commenters want to illustrate for you how bad Christianity is, and how much it has contributed to the misery of man, there are three examples that are trotted out: the Salem Witch Trials, the Inquisition, and the Crusades. Keep in mind...

How Shall The Country Be Run? A longer piece, not so much fun, focusing on great changes in framing resulting from subtle changes in how a question is asked.

After the 2006 elections, I asked for a do-over on the basis of deceptive campaigning by Democrats. Rather pertinent for 2010.

Understanding Conspiracies by looking for blue hats.

Four book discussions: one of playwright Sir James Barrie's The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, using his wonderful dialogue of charwomen discussing WWI as a jumping-off point to contemplate current discussions. I keep hoping for a Barrie revival of something other than Peter Pan. (Which I also liked. I played Nana the dog.)

two I liked - Greg Easterbrook's The Progress Paradox, How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse.

For the first 80 pages, Easterbrook hammers home how much better life keeps getting. Each cynic wants to deny it, searching for exceptions in education or international relations, but the list is impressive, and its supporting evidence powerful.

and John McWhorter's The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Languages.

and one I thought ludicrous - Holyoke: The Belle Skinner Legacy by Jack Dunn. A sample of that book...

Knowing that George Bush and his administrators had never, and would never in the future, consider adhering to any of these [Just War] conditions, Maggie nearly burst into tears too. She suspected that Bush and company did not have the ability to understand complex matter.

Can you imagine Sir James Barrie writing such tripe? (Never mind Shakespeare)

A Thought About Youths (and then perception)

I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting. (Shepherd in "The Winter's Tale," Act 3, Scene 3.) 

The play is otherwise notorious for the amazing stage direction in this scene "Exit, pursued by a bear." There is endless discussion whether there was an actual bear used in earlier productions.  This is unlikely but not impossible.  Though it seems an improbable request from a playwright, my own thought is that Shakespeare was humorously challenging his friends directly. See what you can do with this, John! (Heh)"  This was not Shakespeare's first rodeo. I found a few scholars suggesting that Will had a particular producer/director in mind that he was irritated with and wanted to punish with plausible deniability. Sounds possible, but it's just speculation.

Yet in the context of the play it makes good sense. Until that moment, the play has been serious, even threatening to be tragic. Then it is suddenly comic, fanciful - a whole different mood. This stage direction is the pivot point, a suddenly jarring moment when the audience is jerked awake asking themselves "What is going on?  Have I missed something important up to this point?" It's another one of Shakespeare's "Hold my beer" moments. 

It reminded me of about half of Tom Stoppard's plays, come to think of it. There is often a moment when the audience thinks (and this is intentional) "Wait.  I thought I knew what was going on here. Now I am at sea. Which part is the play and which is the reality? Whose side is she on? Is he her stage husband or her real husband?  Or maybe...both? Is this just comic, or is this person about to die? Okay, this has got to be comedy, except..." 

While I am just pursuing idle thoughts in this vein I think someone should write the play "Exit, Pursued By a Bear." Stoppard himself, preferably. Maybe it has been done.

Story

When my oldest son was in his early teens, he used to help out when Tracy and I would take our turn in church nursery. He would tell stories off-the-cuff to the 3-4 year-olds, and I would notice over my shoulder how long he could hold them in rapt attention.  I mentioned once that he must have a real gift for extemporaneous storytelling and should start to hone the craft. He smiled and shook his head. "It's pretty simple really.  You just get a princess in there and a dragon, or maybe a sword, and a knight and a horse and you can go ten minutes without anything but some exciting action and some dramatic sayings and they just love it."

Something like this is at the heart of Tolkien's Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. A serious scholar and translator of the work himself, he was nonetheless frustrated with what other scholars focused on, examining the transition from paganism to Christianity, noticing the syntax and vocabulary, or speculating on the oral-formulaic structure of verses. He commented on all of those things himself in other places, but he took pains to stress what had made the poem popular to begin with, and what continued its popularity.  It has great monsters. With monsters, of course, go warriors and heroes. It's no good if the monsters aren't very terrible.  No one goes for a second listening if the heroes aren't amazingly heroic.

Relatedly, I remember being irritated and insulted when I learned that a maker of horror films was going to be directing Lord of the Rings. I felt something precious in literature was being tainted.  Note, this was long after I had read Tolkien's 1936 essay. I must not have absorbed the proper sentiment from it, not down to the bone, anyway. Monsters are the story in LOTR.  Very good monsters, too, of great variety and subtlety.

There is something very similar in CS Lewis's address to scholars of Shakespeare when he discusses the popularity of Hamlet, year upon year, even though critics keep finding things wrong with it. He begins with a humility which I think is more than half-sincere, as he was always careful to note where his areas of expertise were and weren't.  Yet I think he is also having some fun at their expense.  He was, after all, the sole author of the Oxford History of English Literature volume English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama). He might be expected to have a little thought or two about Shakespeare. Just an off chance. He notes the state of criticism in 1942 seems agreed that Hamlet is very important, but when pressed to describe why it is important, the critics are are in entire disagreement, and each of them is at pains to show that whatever it was that Shakespeare did, he didn't do it very well.  It is important for character development, but then they say Hamlet doesn't much develop. They declare Will is at the height of his poetic strength but find fault with scene after scene.  Lewis, I think very much echoing Tolkien, offers a simpler explanation:  It's a whopping good story. It begins with the ghost of a man's father appearing to him and laying a heavy charge on him. Murder is planned, there is eavesdropping on royalty, a beautiful woman dies tragically.  It starts off with a friggin' ghost!  Why are people getting lost in the weeds of nuance? Princess! Swords! Monsters!

In parallel, I was at school in the era when all literature of a previous era had to be interpreted psychosexually.  Womb imagery, Oedipal desires, and phallic symbols were found in the most unlikely places. Swords were, predictably, one of the highest rated phallic symbols.  My younger brother, also studying literature at the time (he stayed with it, I did not) noted with a smirk and a shake of the head. "Yes, it could be a phallic symbol.  But I think they mostly used it because it was a pretty good weapon."

The Reduced Shakespeare Company

Last in a series about British lefties.

Parodists often pride themselves on skewering both parties of a controversy. When the RSC pokes fun at liberals, they accuse them(selves) of being over-intellectual.

Ooh, I'll bet that stung.

If you go to London, going to the RSC's humorous abridgement of all of Shakespeare's plays -- 37 plays in 94 minutes -- will be one of the high points of your trip. But do not bother to see their other production on the history of America. There are genuinely funny moments. There are even genuinely funny left-slanted moments. But it is mostly an adolescent harangue, trying to correct all the false impressions of our history that Americans supposedly have. Selecting a stereotype and attacking it by pointing out that it is so stereotypical is not a recipe for humor. Or humour, either.

Did you know that some Americans once owned slaves? Had you heard that the USA has sometimes gone to war? That women did not originally have the vote? Really? You knew that? You're not shocked at the contrast between American ideals and American practice?

Of all the bits, one stood out for me even as it was being performed as revealing far more about the prejudices of the performers than they knew. To represent the 1950's, they did a send-up of "I Love Lucy," with a heavy McCarthyism theme (Oh yawn. That's the best that professional writers could do? Sure. Cf. this year's Oscar's). They did the scene in black-and-white, as best as can be in the theater. I have commented before about the odd connection of my generation between the ideas black-and-white morality and black-and-white photography. Condensed version: we attribute black-and-white morality to the people in the black-and-white pictures. We do this for two reasons. We were children then, and the rules for us were simpler. Second, we didn't like some of the rules, and sought some way of putting ourselves above them. So we prided ourselves on our great moral advance by trying to slip-stream in behind the technological one, convincing ourselves that our predecessors were simplistic and unsubtle. I cannot find an example of the phrase "black and white morality" before 1970. (If someone finds one, please let me know)

The Polaroid Swinger was the pivot point, for those of you scoring at home.

So the RSC embraces the same self-congratulatory myth that my whole generation has foisted upon the world. Surprise.

Tangent: I claim that the central idea of the RSC's abridged Shakespeare is taken from Tom Stoppard's one-act "Fifteen-minute Hamlet," especially as that jewel is actually 13-minute Hamlet followed by 2-minute Hamlet. My brother remembers seeing the prototype for RSC at Renaissance Faires in California in the 1970's, and thinks not. He is the theater professional, having made his living in this for 30 years and currently teaching at Smith, while I am a merely a pedant, so he is likely correct. Still, it would be nice to be proved right if anyone knows anything about it.

Series summary statement: The emphasis in the phrase “making the world a better place” moves easily from the word “better” to the word “making.”

Understanding Shakespeare

Following McWhorter's comment about the changing meaning of words in a particular speech in "Hamlet," I went to the scene in question to see what I could see. I have noted before that Will isn't as understandable as people claim.  In fact, I noted it the last time I listened to McWhorter on the subject a decade ago. My other mentions of Shakespeare are at the link - some fun stuff.

At best,  we get the general meaning from context, though with difficulty.  At worst, a recognisable word has changed enough in meaning that we think we understand what we actually do not. As in "censure," below. Entirely different now.

Polonius's speech to Laertes. Note that we have some advantages here.  It is Shakespeare's most famous play, and often considered his best.  The speech itself is known even outside the context of performance and study.  We don't get all the rules for thou and thee when creating speech, but we get the idea reading, because of the King James. There are common sayings that have entered the language, even cliches, near the end of the famous speech. But I submit it is a tough go.

Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!  (Does he mean here in place, or time? mostly time?)

The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail (Metaphor for Laetertes' destiny, or just the physical sail?)

And you are stayed for. There, my blessing with thee. (Waited for.  I think.)

And these few precepts in thy memory (...is he being quizzed on this, Polonius?  Ah!  You mean you are going to give him some precepts!  Got it.)

Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,  (No clue.  Character is a good thing?  I should have good character?  I should look for it in others?  Then, keep silent?  Don't let anyone know what I'm thinking?)

Nor any unproportioned thought his act.   (I'm betting an unproportioned thought is...extreme? Not thought out?)

Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar.  (Be chummy, informal, but not curse or tell dirty jokes?  Or does this mean to be friendly, but not with lower classes.)

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, (Adoption. Waiting period on real friendship? Then you take themm for good? )

Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel,  (Grapple...hoops.  Cling to them even if they don't like it?  Or just be loyal.)

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment (Is this a masturbation joke?  Or about spending money, like greasing a palm.)

Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware (Okay new.  Poetic. But is it the youth of the person or the newness of the relationship?)

Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, (A quarrel with an individual?  Between other individuals?  Political or religious quarrels?)

Bear ’t that th' opposèd may beware of thee. (Don't fight unless you think you can win, or at least wound.  Got it.)

Give every man thy ear but few thy voice. (So, act like a spy among your peers.  Or maybe you think I should just shut up, Polonius?)

Take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgment. (So everyone can criticise and insult me without reply.  Don't come to any conclusions about others, really.)

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,  (Buy only the best wine, tobacco, restaurants. Seems like bad advice.)

But not expressed in fancy—rich, not gaudy,  (Gaudy wine? You've lost me here.)

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,  (Ah, clothes, clothes!  Now I get it.  Wear the best you can afford, so that people will think you drive a Mercedes or Volvo.)

And they in France of the best rank and station  (Like the French, who are really big on this style and wealth thing.)

Are of a most select and generous chief in that. (Generous chief...you're losing me again. Are they forgiving, or disapproving?)

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,  (Yeah I've heard that.  Seems good)

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,  (Actually, I've had that happen to me.  You're right.)

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. (I'm not in 4-H and not raising animals, so I'm thinking that "husbandry" is a more general term for working.  And that Tom Lehrer joke occurs to me.)

This above all: to thine own self be true,  (Do what I feel?  Don't kid myself? Is this like my best self, a kind of Virtue Ethics?)

And it must follow, as the night the day,  (Universal law.  Not sure it is, though)

Thou canst not then be false to any man.  (Sure I can.  Watch me.)

Farewell. My blessing season this in thee. (Because you say this nicely, it is more likely to sink in.)

	LAERTES Most humbly do I take my leave, my lord.  (Why humbly?  Is something up, or is this just the usual way they talked?)
	POLONIUS The time invites you. Go. Your servants tend. (Are we back to that sail thing at the beginning again?  The time is ripe.  Time is gesturing to me impatiently?  The hired help is completely ready and getting itchy?  What the hell?)
	LAERTES Farewell, Ophelia, and remember well  (This is clear. Finally) What I have said to you.  (Wink wink.)   Here's a fun comparison:  There is an English creole, Gullah, created by rice plantation slaves in Georgia and South Carolina.  Some written work has been drawn out of it, but it is largely an oral language.* There are sill a few speakers of it. In terms of reputation for elegance, it is at the opposite end of the continuum from OMG! THE BARD! But it is just about as understandable to us now. If you went and lived among them for a few months it would be easy, just as it would be similarly easy for a time traveler to converse in the London dialect of 1600 after just a few months. We are close enough that it is a fairly straightforward adjustment.   Brer Lion bin a hunt, an eh spy Brer Goat duh leddown topper er big rock duh wuk eh mout an der chaw. Eh creep up fuh ketch um. Wen eh git close ter um eh notus um good. Brer Goat keep on chaw. Brer Lion try fuh fine out wuh Brer Goat duh eat. Eh yent see nuttne nigh um ceptin de nekked rock wuh eh duh leddown on. Brer Lion stonish. Eh wait topper Brer Goat. Brer Goat keep on chaw, an chaw, an chaw. Brer Lion cant mek de ting out, an eh come close, an eh say: "Hay! Brer Goat, wuh you duh eat?" Brer Goat skade wen Brer Lion rise up befo um, but eh keep er bole harte, an eh mek ansur: "Me duh chaw dis rock, an ef you dont leff, wen me done long um me guine eat you". Dis big wud sabe Brer Goat. Bole man git outer diffikelty way coward man lose eh life.   *Though Shakespeare wrote his works, Elizabethan English, more properly called Early Modern English, was oral as well.  There were few manuscripts and actors were required to display much more power of memorisation than they do today, because they had less time, and less opportunity to refer back to manuscripts while learning lines. The audiences were not at all reliably literate.  It was still largely an oral language. Some modern actors would fare well.  In college, Glenn Close would attend first read-through with most of her lines already in place, and knew them all at first rehearsal. I heard others describe (with amused shock) when she had dropped a line and needed a prompt, but I never heard it myself. Not that I was there for even a quarter of her rehearsals. I have heard that Michael Caine was similarly stunning.

Post 4900 - Education

This came up in an email exchange.  It is not well-edited on my part, yet I though it would have some interest.  If you have been reading here long, not much will be new to you.  The link to a previous post of mine includes a couple of you in the comments section, in fact.

The occasion for my response was an essay by Patrick Dineen at Notre Dame, How A Generation Lost Its Common Culture.  I remember it when it came out this winter.  It is a good example of a standard theme in discussing modern students.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno? Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? What are the Federalist Papers?

My response:

First, most people have never known these things, even in our previous ages of supposed great educational system and common culture. ED Hirsch and Allan Bloom were moaning about this 30 years ago as if the collapse had already occurred and we could just now be brought back from the brink. CS Lewis says something like it in his 1954 Inaugural lecture De Descriptione Temporum at Cambridge where he was appointed to a chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature near the end of his career.   Think of that:  At one of the two elite universities in England in 1954, in a much more hierarchical culture where the middle and lower classes seldom qualify, speaking to students who are actually studying many of the great works of common heritage, Lewis is conscious of a divide between his culture and theirs - a loss of common ground that is new in the world with their generation. And Lewis pushes it very far back indeed. "As for the area and the tempo of the two deaths, if one were looking for a man who could not read Virgil though his father could, he might be found more easily in the twentieth century than in the fifth."

A personal example.  You may remember that I went to College with Glenn Close, back when she was Glennie Wade.  She was a year ahead of me at W&M in the Theater dept and we had four courses together.  She ended up Phi Beta Kappa, and was generally knowledgeable about Stuff.  When she did that movie...hmmm...hmmm..."The Big Chill" they played Trivial Pursuit on the set a lot which was one of the things that launched the game in popularity, and she was known to be very good at it.  She was also something of a missionary kid, as her family joined Moral Re-Armament a rather cultish Christian groups when she was 7.  When we discussed John Osborne's play "Luther" in class, she barely knew who he was.  She had no idea what the 95 Theses were, and this would have been her senior year.  Nor did several others in the class.  So even among those who know a great deal about our common culture, there are gaps  We falsely remember that we "knew about" Plato when we were 16, when the reality is we had heard of him at 16, and gradually added bits of knowledge about him over the years.  The common culture of even the wealthy sons who read Greek and Latin was pretty narrow.  They all read Livy in high school, and no one reads Livy anymore, so it looks very impressive when they publish entrance exams or graduation tests from the 19th C to intimidate the modern reader into how smart those previous students were and how little we know now.  Whoa, look, there's Livy, who is a really obscure Latin writer that they apparently knew a lot about. Wow, they musta been really smart! Not really.  I wrote about it a couple of years ago, when discussing William James Sidis, who supposedly had the highest IQ ever.  (Sidis didn't, BTW.  He was very smart, but the claims are overstated.)

I don't think, as is blithely claimed, that every age thinks that the previous eras were smarter and the rising generation poorly educated, but there's no difference every century really.  I believe something of both claims.  We are much smarter now, and since nutrition started improving for the general population in the past few centuries, we are smarter every decade.  I think that accelerated about a hundred years ago and topped out in the late 20th C.  If you traveled in time to 1880, nothing would impress you so much as what dolts people were, and how hard it was to find an intelligent conversation.  On the other hand, the amount of common culture among the educated and even partly educated was much greater than now. Everyone, absolutely everyone in America read the King James Bible and Shakespeare.  Even when they misunderstood what was in front of them, because they extracted what meanings the could from single texts - "Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit" - it was at least a single stewpot that everyone was eating from.  Did you ever wonder why memorising single verses and relying on proof texts is so common in the Church, and most of what we know of Shakespeare is individual phrases that have embedded into the language, even though we forget where they come from?  That's why.  There were two things people read, plus maybe Pilgrims' Progress or something about agriculture or etiquette or a copy of the Constitution, and if you were lucky a book of ancient history might show up. And newspapers once/week. Only if you had a tutor or later schooling did you hear about Plato or Marcus Aurelius.  Though if you did have a tutor or later school, that's who you got.  There weren't many choices on the menu, as there are now.

So everyone had that as shared culture.  We have a much more fragmented culture now, so that only popular culture is held in common.  I think that will increase.  I hate it, but I think that is what is. This is also the response when activists against the Eurocentric, Dead White Males version of civilisation complain that there are no women, no blacks, no gays, non Eastern philosophies, no Latinas, no indigenous peoples represented in our culture.  They don't know the half of it.  Tolkien fought to have English Literature added to the syllabus at Oxford in the 20th C!  Beowulf, Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, were optional add-ons. American authors were not even mentioned, and that was largely true even in America until after WWII.  You read those things on your own, or got together with like-minded others to discuss them.  Those were not considered required material to be held in common. The Bible and/or the Book of Common Prayer were read by everyone who could read - on their own. That was largely true for Shakespeare as well, though he had made inroads. At school for the educated it was Latin and Greek. Ancient History.  Trigonometry.

The fragmentation of our shared literary and historical culture, then is simply a place farther down the road we started traveling decades ago. 

The Taming of the Shrew

Dr. Marilyn Simon over at Quillette has an essay Game, Set, Match about "The Taming of the Shrew." I know about the play, but have never read it.  You know, because it's Shakespeare. She notes that everyone sees it as deeply misogynistic these days - and I always thought from what I could see on the outside that this was likely - but that this is a deep misunderstanding of the play. She sees the interactions as much more fun and high-spirited romantic, competition than would be apparent at first.  In that light, her title for the essay, which I thought just ordinary cleverness, turns out to be absolutely brilliant when taken apart word by word.

She may not convince you, but it was loads of fun. Personal note: looking at the chosen photo for the article, I am reminded that when my wife was in her late teens, an older woman told her that she "looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor." She has held that compliment dear for fifty years.

Update: I wish I had waited to include this right from the start.

Everything in Shakespeare, and especially every strong female character set in any age in his plays, is colored by Queen Elizabeth. Even though it is the Elizabethan Era, we tend to regard that as just a name and disregard its impact. While it is true that not all women attained anything remotely like equal status with men, it is true that she illustrated that a very clever and capable woman could not only succeed, but dominate. Likely, the status of all women, even the poorest, went up a little because of her reign.

Early in her reign there was all sorts of noise that she was not married, as a woman should be, and that offense against the natural order might be costly to the English in the cosmic realm. But the parallel worry was that she might marry, and clearly have a royal husband who was capable of ruling something or another, and that she would be expected to obey him.  They were not fools.  they knew there were queens on the Continent who were more capable and powerful than their husbands, but it would have been a natural disadvantage that she started from.  If she had to obey a husband from another country, at least on the surface or in part, what might that mean for England?

She handled it with breathtaking brilliance. "I shall be married to England, and a more obedient wife you shall not find."

At the time of the Spanish Armada, as the attack was on and going well for England but the issue was still in doubt, Elizabeth went to Tilbury to address the troops and was again breathtaking in her ability to combine unassailable femininity with what would have been called masculine attitudes.

I know I have the body but of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

(Whole article here.)

Such things are not necessarily even being consciously intended by the playwright - though they in all likelihood were - but they were part of the air that he breathed. So if you burn with resntment for the plight of poor Kate and all the clever women of her day and ours, you might imagine her lines on the lips of a young Queen Elizabeth and hear them in a different light. 

David Hackett Fischer

James has an alert pickup that there is a new book by the author of Albion's Seed, a book on colonial history that came out in the late 80s has developed a cult following since. African Founders: How Enslaved Peopled Expanded American Freedom. I admit I have grown a bit weary of people trying to shoehorn race into all historical topics, but I very much trust Fischer and am looking forward to this. I don't know what his politics are, though I doubt he is conservative.  He is, however, a straight shooter with the data and is very solid at looking at what it might, and might not, mean. I am betting there is a significance to his use of the word "freedom," instead of "freedoms."

Even before he was a well-known historian he made himself useful by naming the historian's fallacy, which cautions us about retrospective analysis, unconsciously assuming that those in the past were aware of their place in it, and that they must have (somehow) anticipated what came immediately after, because it looks so obvious to us now.  Shakespeare didn't know he was Shakespeare, for example. This is useful especially in studying military history.

He must be over 80 now - I didn't know he is still writing. I just looked it up.  He turns 86 in a few weeks.  This book is likely his last, then. 

Straight to Christmas list. I doubt it's going to ever come out in large print, which I increasingly think I am going too need, so I will have to go to Kindle, which I am able to use but not fond of.

George Bernard Shaw

I never much liked him while studying him in college.  Shaw was considered second only to Shakespeare, but he always bothered me.  I was gratified when I started reading CS Lewis to find that he also found Shaw irritating, but I could never put words to it until long after.  (I did like "Pygmalion," possibly because of My Fair Lady, and I didn't find "Major Barbara" so bad. ) I now get what bothered me: playwrights can create a false reality. (Yeah, duh, but bear with me.) They can make a priest be a hypocrite by the lines thy put in his mouth and the actions they make him perform.  They can make Chinese inscrutable, blacks shiftless, businessmen greedy, wives innocent, husbands oppressive, children wise, and politicians corrupt, however they choose.  This is all rather obvious, but if it is done skillfully the reader or audience is taken in, accepting the prejudice of the playwright as if it were a fact.

Shaw does this rather clumsily, but taking all in all, it's not entirely his fault.  He came out of the tradition of melodrama, and was one of the first to pull away from it. Pioneers don't have the advantages of knowing the tricks of those who come later.  They are the inventors of the tricks. If we compare GBS to those who came after he is certainly cartoonish. Yet compared to those who came before he shows a more realistic character. Still, it is worth noting that an artist who deserves credit from scholars may not be worthy of the effort of a production now.  It was a favorite theme among my theater friends in the 1970's that Sarte had stolen everything from Artaud, and it's sorta true.  Nonetheless, Sarte did it better and remains at least watchable/readable.  Artaud is not that interesting anymore.

As for Shaw, John Osborne thought him a complete fraud.  I don't know that this is true, but I am figuring that Osborne has some credibility here. More than, say, me.  Or you. Others disagree, and I suppose they have more credibility than me also.  It's fascinating to read the Wikipedia article and realise that the collective critics pretty much boil down to one critic who has successfully fought off the others.  In this case, whoever controls the Wikipedia legacy of Shaw has decided that Fred S Crawford's opinion is the bee's knees.  Crawford insists that everyone who criticises Shaw was nonetheless influenced by him, no matter how far he has to stretch to illustrate that. Everyone owes everything to Shaw, it st seems.  Coward, Ayckbourn, Stoppard, and all the absurdists. Even Osborne who disliked him. Crawford finds it not only significant, but definitive, that the cahttering classes talking about Shaw gave birth to the word shavian, which is still in use today.  Except it isn't.

Welcome to the petty world of artistic criticism.  What remains is that we can examine Shaw for his ideas and see how those have held up.  I'll give that summary to George Orwell, who makes a genrral observation that is also quite good, then narrows it to Shaw.

As it happens, George Orwell in his 1946 pamphlet James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution does shed light on the Glenn Beckish claim that Shaw’s dual embrace of communism and fascism was broadly typical of Fabians or other sorts of socialists:

  

English writers who consider Communism and Fascism to be the same thing invariably hold that both are monstrous evils which must be fought to the death; on the other hand, any Englishman who believes Communism and Fascism to be opposites will feel that he ought to side with one or the other. The only exception I am able to think of is Bernard Shaw, who, for some years at any rate, declared Communism and Fascism to be much the same thing, and was in favour of both of them.

 I have complained about  the teaching of Shakespeare as well.  He's next.  If you want to get a head start, read Polonius's speech to Laertes.

Oh, THOSE Anglo-Saxons

I don't know how I missed the obvious association between two recent posts: The Woody Allen clip  and the knuckleheaded decision at Cambridge to start declaring that Anglo-Saxons didn't exist.

It was Allen who said "Shakespeare didn't write all those plays.  It was somebody else named Shakespeare." I think we are in the same territory here. However much we fuss that they weren't really Angles, or weren't really Saxons, or weren't all that related and associated, or that they stayed too long or left too soon, or there weren't enough of them, or the ones who came were assimilated (or weren't assimilated. That works too) we come up against the brute facts that something involving a movement of people from NW Europe to the east of England occurred, and a new language took over the east of England.  We could call it English for convenience' sake.

If that wasn't the Anglo-Saxons, then it was somebody else called Anglo-Saxons.

Arts & Humanities Clans

Many people who are not, or are no longer, A&H members have positive memories and historical affection for this tribe. The surgeons who played the viola, the attorneys who were in highschool drama, and the many English or History majors who went on to be employed in other fields were often born into the tribe and retain association. These folks sometimes go to considerable lengths to retain good standing and become patrons of the arts or part-time participants. They are often talented and treated well, but in important attitudes are not regarded as in full membership.

These often have better descriptors in other popular culture names: Yuppies, DINKs, Bobos, and whatever else Time is telling us is trendy this year. I recognize these clans (when Newsweek announced yuppies in the mid-80’s, William and Mary had representatives on 5 of the 7 pages), but I’m still breaking things down differently.

I am increasingly convinced that I will change the naming from A&H to Humanist Tribe, or Humanist Class.

There are A&H subgroups, with varying degrees of adherence to the larger group’s values. Musicians are clearly eligible for membership in the arts community, but their social and political beliefs are more idiosyncratic than A&H in general. Because folksingers and boomer rockers are liberal to radical and classical musicians retain an affection for NPR, we tend to assume a general leftist slant for the whole clan. Think church choir directors. Think country musicians. Think barbershop, brass quartets, ethnic performers, piano teachers, and the whole evangelical music subculture. These are not hotbeds of liberalism.

Theater, especially academic and professional theater, is a liberal to radical core. Highschools in the very blue area of western Mass might do a production of The Vagina Monologues,or . There is no musical or film equivalent to this, even among highschool garage bands or cameraheads. Community theater groups don’t get this radical, because they depend on, uh, actually selling tickets, but the participants are reliably liberal in outlook. This may result from the snob hierarchy in theater, which grants pride of intellectual place to those who have participated in the avant-garde and transgressive. On the other hand, theater people have contributed one of the great acts of cultural preservation by continuing to perform Shakespeare despite the language difficulties. It is true that they have a fondness for reworking the Great Elizabethan into motorcycle leathers or banana republics, but this may be something of a plus. While the attempts are usually ridiculous, it remains true that live Shakespeare is almost impossible to understand in its original.

One would expect technical theater people to be different, and they usually are in personality. On social and political issues, however, I don’t see a gap.

Dancers, like musicians, are more eclectic, but tend to track like theater people on social issues.

Visual artists, the painters and sculptors, have something of the same snob hierarchy that one finds in theater, elevating the controversial and and inaccessible to prominence, and that sector is beyond liberal. The great majority of painters are more representational, capturing understandable things like light, mood, and contrast. Their social and political views are all over the map, though they have a disproportionate share of liberals.

Photographers and filmmakers I don’t think I have enough of a handle on to comment. What I have seen of famous work would suggest they run leftward, but that is true for the more prominent artists in other arts. Poets? I don’t know and I don’t care.

Teachers of the arts and humanities are clear tribe members, and it is among these that the continuity with the older iterations of A&H are preserved. This is hardly surprising, but it is worth mentioning, as they are also among the most aggressively political liberals, considering it their duty to “awaken” the consciousness of their charges to ideas they would not otherwise have encountered. There is some truth to this, of course, as there are many children who are exposed only to traditional, unadventurous, conservative ideas at home and in the cultures they move in. But there are also children that are only exposed to traditional, unadventurous, liberal ideas at home, and somehow it seems less important to teachers to rescue them from this. There is a some tendency in this clan to group all values which are not theirs as “conservative.” If their students are pop-culture, gadget-obsessed, and shallow, overly focused on romance and boy-girl relationships, this is seen as popular American materialist culture, and part of what they need to be rescued from with alternative ideas. That’s fine, but it’s a short jump from there to regarding all of it as somehow “conservative.” Cars, driving, and consumption are not environmentally focused and so can’t be liberal; they must be conservative. Pop-culture and boy-girl focus have too much cultural stereotype and so can’t be liberal; they must be conservative. Acquisition and materialism must be derived from evil free-market attitudes – there’s those conservatives again, mucking up a potentially beautiful world.

That’s not everyone, of course. I went through another crisis of thinking that I was unfairly generalizing about this group, when right on schedule in less than five minutes, I saw a minivan with four bumperstickers and a decal. (Multiple stickers used to always mean fundamentalists. It more often means liberals now.)

Decal: local highschool.

Bumperstickers:

Feminism is the radical notion that women have rights

Peace through Music

It’s too bad that the people who know how to run the world are too busy teaching school

This is what a feminist looks like.

What I have described above applies more to teachers of highschool and college. Middle school and elementary school teachers shade away from this. Elementary school teachers have their own clan and clan-markers: clothing with familiar objects embroidered, appliqued, or woven onto them; jewelry in the shapes of animals, pins with cute sayings. For the men, there are silly ties. As this group is A&H trained (they were seldom science or math majors) and members of government unions, they are reliably Democrat in their voting. They are not, however, especially radical. They are not especially marxist or anti-military in their opinions, and they have a focus on deportment and the primacy of reading that conservatives get along with pretty well. Call them Liberal Lite, if you will, often caught up in the various rescuing, multi-culti, environmental, and self-esteem movements, but not bomb-throwers.

Librarians, my wife assures me, continue to be quite liberal. I see this as becoming more intense in the power areas of the clan, where the journals are published and the officers elected, but I don’t doubt it’s pretty widespread. In addition to their initial A&H tribal membership, they have several other factors which push them leftward. They have gotten themselves into a froth that even challenging a book’s presence or appropriateness for its location is censorship and a threat to freedom of speech everywhere. Though they encounter many conservatives during each day, they don’t especially perceive it unless a book or program is challenged. They attribute these challenges to conservatives, which is only partially true. Many of the challenges are of course silly, stemming from portions of works taken out of context or stretched to sound like something different. As librarians are more knowledgeable about a variety of topics than the average bear, the people challenging them are often less articulate, system-savvy, or socially adept. Thus, stupid, rigid, or dangerous, because one shouldn’t be challenging books anyway.

Secondly, an enormous percentage of librarians rely on governments for their salaries. It is a tendency of human nature, not just artists, teachers, and librarians, for those who are receiving support to regard those managing the purse as not quite understanding the situation. This is usually true. Even brilliant and supportive people, it they are at a distance, seldom know as much about your job as you think they should. So trustees, budget committees, and taxpayers can come to seem like opponents. Opponents who know less than you do. It is hardly surprising that people in these positions seldom become fans of tax revolts and drastic cutbacks in the system. To librarians, all these attacks come from people who can be labeled “conservative,” often because conservatives are prominent among the voices of challenge.

Received Pronunciation vs Original Pronunciation

There is a lot of nonsense written about how things were pronounced in Shakespeare's plays, mostly based on people having imprecise ideas of how the pieces fit together in time. If something is "old," then someone is going to announce that it was "in Shakespeare's day" even if it was in 1812 and only halfway back to his time. It is the same vagueness that causes people to imagine that Henry VIII, Robin Hood, and King Arthur were all about the same time, with the thought they might possibly have known each other.* Sometimes times even more recent or more remote than that get shoved in, so that just before WWI or Romans in togas might be considered contemporaneous with one of the characters mentioned above.

Yet we can know Elizabethan pronunciation in London with fair precision. We can tell from what words rhymed when the changes from Middle English to Early Modern English occurred (key item Great Vowel Shift), and what compromises printers made in response to the variations they heard around them.

So from about 13:00 to 17:00 in the above you can hear the prologue from "Romeo and Juliet," first in Received Pronunciation, the newscaster English in Southern England, then in Original Pronunciation, researched with precision by David Crystal, followed by his son Ben Crystal, who reads here.

So now you know. This would be very much the time period of the Authorised Version of the Bible, which we know as the King James Version. 

*Robin Hood would be much closer to Henry II, who would himself be a little more than halfway back from now to King Arthur, when there were no Henry's at all, not even in France or Germany.

Trilemma

CS Lewis wrote a version of an older argument in Mere Christianity.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

I have always found it powerful, but many find it unpersuasive. There is a significant amount of back-and-forth discussion about it by people with more intelligence, learning, and focus than I have. This can be found online in many places if any of you feel compelled to pursue it with more rigor.  However, my experience is that in the end they do come to the same place. The usual objections are 1) Jesus did not actually claim to be God and 2) The possibility that he was neither deceptive nor mad but simply wrong is still in play.

Over at Neoneocon, I used the analogy of a Pachinko game, in which the balls do eventually have to fall down into one of the holes, but upgraded that to a pinball machine, where there is one ball, and effort by the player can prevent it from falling into one of the holes for some time. I still like that image. Ultimately, the ball does go into one of the slots. Yet this is only learned by experience, and it is not foolish for person new on the scene to believe that a ball can be kept aloft, bouncing between alternatives skillfully for an indefinite period, or even forever.

The first objection looks as if it could be solid if one could artfully show that some texts may be unreliable, or others misinterpreted for a dozen reasons, including translation or cultural misunderstanding. Yet like the pinball, I think that even the strongest version of this becomes a quibble.  It is all well and good to say "Jesus never exactly came out and said..." but by any account he directly said many things that come awfully darn close to whatever one might put out as a description of deity - Whoever has seen me has seen the father, before Abraham was I am, claiming to be able to forgive sin.  Others rent their clothes as one does in the presence of blasphemy "calling himself equal to God," or claiming to be the Son of Man, so the people on the scene certainly thought so as well.  Whatever verses textual critics may uncover that are suspect or better translations found for, it is not merely a verse or an episode here or there which must be discarded, but huge swaths of the Gospels. Yet those closest to him, though far separated in distance after his death, continue to be martyred for the claims we are asked to question.  We begin to get into the territory of what Woody Allen said about another set of texts: "Shakespeare never wrote all those plays.  It was somebody else named Shakespeare."

Most claims that Jesus didn't exactly say He was God derive - no, first, most claims derive from people who don't really know what Jesus said, but have picked up some vague knowledge about legends and folk-tales and hero-worship and assume that something of this nature must be what happened with Jesus, which I find no need to answer but note in passing - from verses about the difference in roles among the persons of the Trinity, that the Father does this and the Son does that.  I don't pretend to sort that out for anyone, because I haven't sorted it out form myself.  But puzzling* is not the same as false.  It is as if some definition of being God is thought to include wearing a blue cap, but we have no record of Jesus wearing a blue cap, so he can't be God.  It is up far enough into deity range that I can't tell whether it's one star or a galaxy with the naked eye. The flippers finally miss.  down the hole it goes.

The second objection can similarly be held aloft for extended periods. History is full of religious figures making claims about themselves that we consider overblown and excessive.  Yet we still regard some of them as being generally sane, even wise persons, worth listening to on many other topics. We are unwilling to declare them lunatics, or demonic, and don't see any compelling reason to believe they were trying to deceive others in any way. Those who object to the Trilemma think that Jesus falls into this category.  I can see why they might think so.  Yet this requires not only a superficial reading of Jesus, but a superficial reading of all the other nice guys and gals as well. Charles Taze Russell put in a lot of effort, but he was a man with questions who didn't ask them of anyone else, just decided that he could do fine on his own and would not listen to criticism. He ultimately had to tell people he was a Hebrew scholar even though he was unable to identify all the letters in its alphabet. Joseph Smith seems to have intentionally set out to create a story.  (His immediate followers were considerably more honest and honorable, though perhaps not so demanding of evidence as they should be.)

Down through the long, sordid list, back through Sabbatai Zevi relying on a forgery, even to Simon bar Kochba, who had Jews who refused to join him executed, many of these innocents were not so.  I must be fair and note than many seem to have been simply killed before they showed anything liar or lunatic about themselves that I could find.

Jesus, on the other hand, made larger claims but doesn't seem to have done much from an objective viewpoint that would disqualify him.  He beat the moneylenders out of the Temple.  He withered a tree.  He spoke harshly to many people. Yet he provoked people to dramatic hatred wherever he went. The other possibilities of the trilemma occurred to them quickly.  They thought demon or possessed by demons was a possibility.  His own family thought he was crazy and came to bring him home where he wouldn't any trouble anymore. We don't have much in the way of examples of people sitting down with Jesus and saying "See here, son.  A lot of this doesn't add up and you seem to be going too far. Here's what God is like, agreed? Are you following me here?" Nicodemus, a teacher of the law and among the very few best equipped to do that, asks questions instead.  Perhaps only Pontius Pilate comes near that sort of reasoning, concluding "I don't see what all the fuss is about here.  Nice young man, perhaps misguided.  Why don't we just punish him a bit and be done with it?" Though of course, he'd received inside information from his wife that something more was up with this one, but he didn't want to pursue it. He drew no conclusion, hitting the flippers for a bit before walking away and saying "Wherever the ball goes, it goes.  Nothing to do with me anymore."

We could keep the flippers going with other messiahs and seers as well.  The ones we think saner, like the Buddha, made no claim of divinity, nor anything like it.  The ones who did make those claims fall into the other Trilemma bins, quickly or slowly. Looking more closely at the data, we find that the others drop off or move aside (such as Baha'u'llah, a nice-enough fellow who claimed to be a Manifestation of God, which is pretty high up there - but even he claimed was not the same thing as Deity), Jesus moves up into another category. Perhaps if went about in history more, we would find one...

Have a go at it, if you like. I'm taking the trend as enough to go on at this point.

*Or more exactly, mysterious.