Positive Liberty

The new library down the street has the complete William Shakespeare on CD, so I’ve decided to try to go through them all. I’ve finished As You Like It (not bad), All’s Well That Ends Well (lousy), Comedy of Errors (dumb), Coriolanus (one of my favorites), Cymbeline (silly), Hamlet, and am now going through the Henrys. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of the plot, since it’s only in audio, but of course there are moments of such marvelous poetry, or such clever wit, that I wish I could memorize them perfectly.

Even in those that I’ve read before, I’ve discovered some passages I’d forgotten, like in Hamlet’s graveyard scene, when Hamlet asks Horatio, “Is not parchment made of sheepskins?” and Horatio answers “Ay, my lord, And of calveskins too.” Hamlet replies, “They are sheep and calves which seek out assurance in that.”

I’ve never read the Henry plays before. I enjoyed Henry IV a great deal, particularly the Falstaff scenes. Shakespeare, as Harold Bloom has often said, is at his best depicting interactions between common folks. I enjoyed particularly Henry IV’s advice to his son on the dangers of being too familiar and too common with people. It reminded me of a passage from Boswell’s London Journal, when Boswell says his worst fault is his willingness “to sacrifice anything, even myself, for a laugh.” Henry IV explains to his son the dangers of “vile participation” with common people:

The skipping King, he ambled up and down
With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled and soon burnt; carded his state;
Mingled his royalty with cap’ring fools;
Had his great name profaned with their scorns
And gave his countenance, against his name,
To laugh at gibing boys and stand the push
Of every beardless vain comparative;
Grew a companion to the common streets,
Enfeoff’d himself to popularity;
That, being dally swallowed by men’s eyes,
They surfeited with honey and began
To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much.
So, when he had occasion to be seen,
He was but as the cuckoo is in June,
Heard, not regarded- seen, but with such eyes
As, sick and blunted with community,
Afford no extraordinary gaze,
Such as is bent on unlike majesty
When it shines seldom in admiring eyes;
But rather drows’d and hung their eyelids down,
Slept in his face, and rend’red such aspect
As cloudy men use to their adversaries,
Being with his presence glutted, gorg’d, and full.
And in that very line, Harry, standest thou;
For thou hast lost thy princely privilege
With vile participation.

At the end of Henry IV Part 2, when the king has died and his son becomes Henry V, the whole conflict of the young prince’s improper cavortings comes to a beautiful climax in the parade from the coronation, when the lovable scamp Jack Falstaff, the prince’s best friend among the ruffians, cries out to him and the prince, now king, treats him very differently:

FALSTAFF. God save thy Grace, King Hal; my royal Hal!
PISTOL. The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!
FALSTAFF. God save thee, my sweet boy!
KING. My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.
CHIEF JUSTICE. Have you your wits? Know you what ’tis you speak?
FALSTAFF. My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
KING. I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane;
But being awak’d, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men-
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest;
Presume not that I am the thing I was,
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots.
Till then I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evils;
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform’d the tenour of our word.
Set on.

Perfectly rendered. Exactly what the new king ought to do. Sad, but that’s that.

In the Henry VI cycle, where I am now, I was intrigued by Jack Cade’s rebellion against the king. Cade, leading the commoners, tries to revolt, and the scene was amusing, no doubt, in the 1590s. Today, however, it has more than a tinge of ironic darkness. Cade says to his followers,

There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves
sold for a penny; the three-hoop’d pot shall have ten hoops; and
I will make it felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be
in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass. And
when I am king, as king I will be–
ALL. God save your Majesty!
CADE. I thank you, good people- there shall be no money; all shall
eat and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one
livery, that they may agree like brothers and worship me their
lord.

This bears a startling similarity to the actual economic policies in most communities in the United States. We impose price controls that seek to eliminate poverty by simple decree: from now on, every person whose labor is worth $5 per hour must be paid $6 instead! If we simply force businesses to pay people more, we won’t have any poverty! We can just make it felony to drink small beer. Next comes a scene when Cade and his followers execute a clerk for being literate:

SMITH. The clerk of Chatham. He can write and read and cast accompt.
CADE. O monstrous!
SMITH. We took him setting of boys’ copies.
CADE. Here’s a villain!
SMITH. Has a book in his pocket with red letters in’t.
CADE. Nay, then he is a conjurer.
DICK. Nay, he can make obligations and write court-hand.
CADE. I am sorry for’t; the man is a proper man, of mine honour; unless I find him guilty, he shall not die. Come hither, sirrah, I must examine thee. What is thy name?
CLERK. Emmanuel.
DICK. They use to write it on the top of letters; ’twill go hard with you.
CADE. Let me alone. Dost thou use to write thy name, or hast thou a mark to thyself, like a honest plain-dealing man?
CLERK. Sir, I thank God, I have been so well brought up that I can write my name.
ALL. He hath confess’d. Away with him! He’s a villain and a traitor.
CADE. Away with him, I say! Hang him with his pen and inkhorn about his neck.

Amusing, until you recall the Khmer Rouge, and China’s Cultural Revolution, when literacy and education were declared crimes, punishable by death or exile. ” More than that,” says Cade at one point, “he can speak French, and therefore he is a traitor.” The Khmer Rouge really did execute people for knowing French, or even just wearing glasses.

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