Henry V - William Shakespeare

In this essay, I will examine the rhetorical and dramatic effectiveness of King Henry’s speech to the Governor of Harfluer in Act 3 Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s play Henry V,  looking closely at how this scene emphasizes the ballistic capacity of language in a world that has become untethered and morally ambiguous. A close reading of this scene will emphasize the use of strategic opacity1 that Shakespeare employs, challenging our notion of an admirable Christian King by juxtaposing the mercy of the Christian with the valor of the epic hero and savagery of the pagan. 

As the play opens, the chorus uses a simile to equate Henry with Mars, the god of war:

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,

Assume the port of Mars, and at his heals, 

Leashed like hounds, should famine, sword and fire

Crouch for employment…

(1.0.5-8) 2

In scene 3.4 we see Henry as the human embodiment of  these very words. The last lines of 3.3 spoken by Fluellen  are ‘…I know the disciplines of war. And there is an end.’ While this is ostensibly talking about the parley that has been sounded, it ominously gives credibility to the verbal assault that is about to take place. There will be an end to discipline if Harfluer does not yield and the rules of military engagement will be suspended.

 Yet, the chorus also cautions us to avoid the binary trap, this won’t be a play about a Christian King or a pagan war criminal but rather a combination of both: a man divided into a ‘thousand parts’. (1.0.24) 

They sell the pasture to buy the horse,

Following the mirror of all Christian kings

With winged heels, as English Mercuries.

(2.0.5-7)

This is a perfect example of language steeped in equivocation: Is the mirror then reflecting an admirable Christian King? Or the patron god of thieves? Is this a sign of England’s dedicated citizenry running to join the war effort? Or the purchase of pasture (or war), with an absurdly high cost beyond sustainability and without foresight?  Behind the fantasy of victory and the rhetoric of brotherhood are the bloody yeoman, ‘none else of name,’ (4.8.99) struggling to survive the brutality of war, ‘leashed like hounds’ and crouching for employment.’ 

The Dauphin has sent tennis balls to Henry, and this becomes the perfect provocation to unleash the English army: 

…For many a thousand widows

Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands,

Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down,

And some are yet ungotten and unborn

That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin’s scorn. 

(1.2.285-89)

What we see in 3.4 is the metastasizing of this rhetoric. Once again, none of the subsequent violence will be his fault if the governor refuses to surrender, the men of Harfluer will be “guilty in defense,” (3.4.43) becoming a scapegoat for the violent consequences of Henry’s actions. 

The verbal puttering of weaponry beginning to ready in the ‘mock, mock,…mock….mock’ has now reached its climax. This ‘mock’ has become weaponry, capable of ripping families apart and tearing limb from limb. The ‘dear husbands’ have become the revered silver-bearded men with their ‘heads dashed to the walls.’ Their age and wisdom, alluded to by ‘silver beards’, will be unable to save their families, and the violence perpetrated against their ‘heads’ exposes the impotence of their wisdom.  The ‘mothers’ have been transformed to ‘mad mothers’ howling and deranged by anguish. By invoking the confused and howling Jewish mothers, rhetorically Henry has moved the setting into biblical proportions of grief.  The Harfluer mothers are compared to the first century Jewish mothers who, like the Old Testament Rachel, will weep for their children without comfort. 3

The ‘ungotten and unborn’ infants of Act 1 have become:

Your naked infants spitted upon pikes, 

While the mad mothers with their howls confused

Do break the clouds…

(3.4.38-40)

A frenzy of sexual sadism is unleashed through the imagery of infant-spiking, while the alliterative ‘fresh fair virgins’ are metaphorically mowed ‘like grass’ and budding infants are deflowered.4 The ‘wasteful vengeance’ is now no longer directed at widows and mothers (1.2.285-88) but adding to dramatic effect has been unleashed upon entire families in a progression of verbal brutality.

Before the gates of Harfleur, Henry has ‘assumed the port of Mars.’ This is a different Henry than the one of Act 1.2 who appeals to God and in whose name he avenges himself. In the first act the violence of war ‘lies within the will of God.’ (1.2.290) In Act 3.4 there is a stark theological absence, no longer are these acts of war carried out in the name of God, but in the name of Henry: 

‘…For as I am a soldier,

A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,

If I begin the battery once again,

I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur

Till in her ashes she lie buried. 

(3.4.5-9)

Before any democratic, band-of-brother type sexual violence can proceed, Henry begins the battery himself. The innuendo is that he will have his way through reckless force on the body of Harfleur. His rape of the city proceeds the rape of the daughters and virgins and ultimately is a reflection of his union with Katherine, who becomes a metonym for France as a whole, bending to the power of the English throne.

There’s a type of echoing anaphora between the lines that begin ‘What is it then to me if impious war…’ and ‘What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause…’ with the responding lines that begin ‘Whiles yet’. The ‘what is it to me’ lines serve to separate cause and effect. Henry is not responsible for the collateral damage that will befall Harfleur. The violence and ‘licentious wickedness’ (3.4.22) is out of his control. It would be easier to summon the sea monster leviathan to do one’s bidding than to control these ‘enraged soldiers’ (3.4.25-6). Once having been released there is no way to reign in their ‘career’, or gallup. While ‘war’ has become human, anthropomorphized and ‘arrayed in flames like to the prince of fiends,’(3.4.16) the humans have been rendered animals. 

And then, amidst the crescendo of violence, there is a shift in atmospheric pressure, a brief pause, the hope of cool air and the mercy of a king:

Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command,

Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace

O’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds

Of heady murder, spoil and villainy. 

(3.4.29-32)

After this brief reprieve, the dramatic effect is heightened by a quick return to what Harold Goddard describes as an orgy of bloodlust.5  As the alliterative ‘blind and bloody soldiers with foul hand’ (3.4.34) have their way with the daughters of Harfleur. And in a surprising simile, Henry has exchanged the god of war, for a human rendition: Herod, the first century  ‘bloody-hunting slaughterman.’ This seems to be a strange allusion to make for a ‘Christian king’…to equate himself with the king determined to murder the ‘Christ’? 

What say you? Will you yield and this avoid?

(3.4.42)

Henry’s rhetoric has been successful. The governor of Harfluer surrenders and in exchange Henry offers them mercy. 

And yet, this mercy is not without casualties. Hidden between the lines is the reminder that the cost of this war is cataclysmic loss. There is no winning, only losing. Henry’s metaphor of ‘contagious clouds of heady murder, spoil and villainy,’ ironically alludes to the plague that would befall both France and England, spreading with impunity as a result of over a hundred years of endless fighting and poor hygiene. In reality the pestilence isn’t in the clouds above but in the fetid standing water below, while the city sits precariously on a fault line of subterranean trenches with ‘sickness growing.’ (3.4.55)

The complexity of this passage points not only to a man divided into a ‘thousand parts,’ but a subversiveness within the play that refuses to hold still. It’s brutality challenges not only our expectations of nobility and valor but also of genre. To go from this scene to the next in which Katherine is practicing her comically obscene English words feels cognitively dissonant, which is arguably what Shakespeare was going for. As the chorus proclaims the idealized propaganda of an epic hero, the poetry of the play undermines this with it’s gritty realism, revealing a complex world where justification for war hinges on definitions of masculinity measured by ‘balls’ and ‘gun-stones.’6 (1.2.282)

1. Greenblatt, S., 2010. Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, p.324.

2.All Henry V quotes found in: Shakespeare, William. Greenblatt, S., Cohen, W., Howard, J., Maus, K. and Gurr, A., 2008. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, pp.1544-1611.

3. Jeremiah 31:15, Holy Bible: New International Version. 

4.Rubinstein, F., 1989. A Dictionary Of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns And Their Significance. Hampshire: Macmillan, p.339.

5. Goddard, H., 2009. The Meaning Of Shakespeare, Volume 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p.237.

6. Rubinstein, F., 1989. A Dictionary Of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns And Their Significance. Hampshire: Macmillan, p.145.

Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare

The past couple weeks I have been reading Twelfth Night. As my seven year old said: “It’s basically a play about a boy pretending to be a woman who is pretending to be a boy!” Already his literary analysis is far superior to my seven year old obsession with PeeWee Scouts…

Up until recently that’s probably about where my knowledge of the play had been as well. But for the last two weeks I have slowly traced literary rabbit trails from one theme to the next, only to end in delirious ambiguity and confusion…which I think means I am reading it well. The thing about Shakespeare, as I am beginning to learn, is that he refuses to be easily defined. There’s always the subliminal complexity and the subversive ambiguity to wonder if what you think just happened really happened. Take the end of this play for example: my class had to discuss if we thought it had a happy ending or a sombre ending…I think the class decision was evenly split. 

I argued for a sombre ending the first week. Malvolio, the steward, has had an extreme practical joke played on him orchestrated by Maria, Olivia’s gentlewoman; Sir Toby, Olivia’s uncle; and Sir Andrew, the fool that Toby is trying to marry off to Olivia, but really is just using him for a bit of fun and extra cash. As Harold Bloom says: 

“…The mystery of Twelfth Night may well be Shakespeare’s enthusiasm for a practical joke so fearsome that the wretched Malvolio, at the play’s end really would be better off dead. Shakespeare the thinker- as gifted as Shakespeare the creator of personality, of language, of wisdom - challenges our ethics and our moral psychology by compelling us to realize that what we enjoy is the guilty pleasure of a solipsism in which we haplessly say: “This cannot happen to me.” (Bloom, 13) 

By the second week after reading R.W. Maslen’s essay "Twelfth Night, Gender, and Comedy" (Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion, 2006) …I saw it from the opposite side. While the play does end with Malvolio in disgrace, Count Orsino has someone run after him and attempt to repair the damage that has been done. Both Orsino and Malvolio have shifted throughout the play, Orsino has shifted to realize that there is a world outside of himself and that people are capable of feelings (like for example women in general) and have complex emotions beyond his own narrow vision. He has realized he needs these people and has shifted to a posture of social cohesion rather than isolation. 

Malvolio has also realized he needs people. Throughout the play he is arrogantly above the hilarity of the festivities. He wants to reign the others in and create order…but his world is also one of isolation, best illuminated by his fantasy of marrying Olivia and spending more time itemizing his new luxury items (velvet! Day beds!) than actually appreciating Olivia as a multidimensional person of value. By the end, as he is running away yelling: shame on you all! I will have my revenge! He has learned that in dire situations you must have people to rely on. In the sense that the comedy has been propelled forward by the centripetal force of those in isolation and ends with cohesion…the play has a happy ending. 

All of that to say there are so many ways to look at everything…that I almost wish this was a 10 week class on a single play and we just spent our time carefully going through diametrically opposed criticism. 

So…without further ado…here we go:

The title Twelfth Night refers to the Feast of Epiphany or the Feast of Fools, A celebration that involved role reversals and merriment. The second title: or What You Will is a somewhat ambiguous play on words that preemptively sets the stage for a romp of complex dualities and mistaken identities. There is a general “twin-ness” about the play where we see the doubles or inverse of both characters and themes such as passive and active, male and female, agency and impotence. 

This duality immediately becomes apparent as the play begins: instead of merriment we find melancholy as Orsino pines over the unrequited love of Lady Olivia. Orsino is lovesick and moody, trapped in a world of his own creation. His metaphors and similes are intense: Music is the food of love, love is like insatiable hunger, love is like a stormy sea. We see unpredictability within his own emotions as he tells the musicians to “play on” and then moments later demands that they stop. The end rhyme “no more!/ before” perfectly highlights his fickleness. 

In this depressive verbal seascape, everything is shape shifting and unpredictable, (1.1.14) and yet it isn’t holiday cheer/ale that has inebriated him (like it has for Sir Toby) it is his own insatiable solipsistic love: “…give me excess of it.” (1.1.2) 

When asked if he will go hart hunting, he says he already is hunting the noblest hart/heart he has: his own! Using a homonym points to the duality and complexity within language itself. When Olivia surfaces within his narrative, it is only to “purge the air of pestilence” (1.1.19) so that his cruel hounds of desire can pursue his own hart/heart with better clarity. When she has shifted her cloistered devotion from her brother to himself and he is finally the proprietor of her “liver, brain and heart” then his “sovereign thrones” will be “supplied and filled” with “Her sweet perfections.” (1.1.32-38) He is so delighted by this mirage that he goes off to find the perfect bed of flowers to lie in.

Both Orsino and Olivia engage with love in a similar way. Orsino describes love as something almost unexpected and perhaps unwanted that came upon him and now holds him hostage. (1.1.5) A sentiment that will be echoed in Olivia’s surprising and unexpected affection for Cesario which she describes as catching a plague (1.5.178-80).

Throughout the play love has the potential to blur rather than provide clarity, as Orsino has suggested (1.1.19). It is the glue that holds the mistaken identities together as each character in their own way imputes meaning to the imaginary world they have created for themselves. Instead of the give and exchange of love, we see both Olivia and Orsino passively cloistered within their castles, discrete elements within a broken system, mirrors of each other’s emotional excess. 

By the end of the first Act the stage is set for an active hero (Viola/Cesario) to confront the imaginary worlds Orsino and Olivia have created and to move the action from contemplation and isolation into cohesive relationship. As to be expected, Viola isn’t the only hero capable of selfless love, she has a double, mirroring her action: and that is Antonio, the sailor who has rescued her twin brother Sebastian.

In researching Twelfth Night I went down an informative rabbit trail on the Cult of the Ideal Friendship. This type of friendship was built upon the classical notions of virtue and reason and required dedicated pursuit. (A concept that is almost cognitively dissonant for the modern person.) According to Cicero it demanded loyalty in times both prosperous and adverse;  a type of loyalty willing to defy all social norms and constraints. It was exclusive; an intimate bond between men 'who came together in good will. '  It was a relationship that you choose rather than had forced upon you, (Montaigne).

It was also a relationship that demanded proximity. You wanted good things, continued joy and happiness for your friend, and you desired to live with him in order to more fully share in his joys and sorrow. For Aristotle this type of friendship was almost like having another self.  

In De Amicitia  Cicero argues that "so spirited is the union and so closely joined are the two friends that their souls mix together and they can be considered as one person."  This mixing of souls became a type of mirroring, aimed at the self-improvement through the alter ego "mirror" of his own virtue. 

That being said, I think Antonio has the wrong twin. 

In his soliloquy Antonio is willing to risk danger and even loss of life.  His friendship with Sebastian has been the catalyst to heroic action. This is all very classical and echoed in Viola's response to Orsino: "And I most jocund, apt and willingly/ To do you rest a thousand deaths would die." (5.1.125-6) 

I read  that "to die" could be an Elizabethan euphemism for achieving orgasm? (Maslen, 2006) That might be a little extreme, but what Maslen suggests is that Viola is willing to publicly admit her love and defy social norms in doing so.  Sodomy was punishable by death. 

The Cult of Ideal Friendship within Elizabethan society was a well known concept. What was also well known, (and as Montaigne points out), this type of relationship was supposed to be impossible with women. As Orsino references (2.4.90-99), women lacked constancy and  there would be far too much sexual tension between men and women for it to translate into true friendship. Friendship was the purest form of relationship, unhindered by sexual desire, or the 'frenzy of love'. 

R.W. Maslen describes Cesario/Viola as:

"Neither male nor female, neither man nor boy, and in the end neither servant nor master, he is kind of riddle, a pun or double entendre in human form, testifying to the power of comedy as a means of disrupting settled notions and complicating illusory certainties." 

I love that. 

In a world where men and women were practically considered different species, Viola’s ability to pass as a man is quite remarkable… And prompts the questions: Is there something inherently unique about Viola? Is she more masculine than the average woman...or are preconceived notions of gender at stake and being rigorously challenged? 

Women, according to Aristotle, lacked the ability not only for ‘Ideal Friendships’ but also for rational thinking, they were subservient to men on all accounts and even considered to be a type of deformed male. Their socially acceptable verbs would be: passive, showing sexual restraint, submissive (both verbally and behaviorally)...or of course there were deviant women: shrews, drabs, scolds, and whores. Those were the options for most women.

Maslen argues that even for women to speak in many situations would be considered immodest, and he describes the plight of the dramatist as being how to have women speak without seeming indecent!

Maslen describes the women of Twelfth Night as a "trio of articulate women." While this articulation in some sense could be considered as a challenge to the status quo, in another it follows a socially acceptable pattern of behavior: Viola is allowed to be articulate because she is mistaken for a man. Olivia is allowed to be articulate because she represents an Elizabeth like figure of the ruling class, but she must also be virginal and chaste. Maria is allowed to be articulate by occupying the role of "female trickster." If there is a status quo element I wonder if it is in the predictable marriage of all the articulate women? In the end they all neatly fall beneath the headship of their husbands...

At the end of the play, having realized that Viola is actually female, Orsino still calls Viola "boy" one last time and she leaves the play in male attire…some critics take this to be symbolic hope for an egalitarian union…

Whether or not that is the case, as the play ends the reader/ viewer is left feeling the whiplash of social constructions never quite being fully discernible, themes riffing off each other and then subtly disappearing and characters that perpetually shape shift beyond definition. 

Montaigne, M. D., & Frame, D. M. (1979). Of friendship. In The complete essays of Montaigne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Howard, E. (1674). Poems, And Essays: With A paraphrase on Cicero Laelius, Or, Of Friendship. London.

Maslen, R. W. (2006). Twelfth Night, Gender, and Comedy. In G. A. Sullivan, P. Cheney, & A. Hadfield (Authors), Early modern English drama: A critical companion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Shakespeare, W., & Bevington, D. (2003). Twelfth Night. In The complete works of Shakespeare. New York: Longman.

Macbeth - William Shakespeare

Last week I started a 10 week course on Shakespeare. I’ve read a little Shakespeare in high school, I even had to memorize lines for the Second Witch of Macbeth and recite them for the class, probably overdoing it a bit with a hump and spitting out the infamous: 

“Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” 

But in high school, my critical reading abilities were superficial at best. (This was back when I thought a good analysis of The Great Gatsby was: “He wasn’t that great and his name wasn’t Gatsby! Mic drop.) 

We've been studying Macbeth this week and I've begun to look into the themes of gender and tyranny. I have just scratched the surface in my research and so what follows is kind of scatter-shot of ideas. 

One of the things I find peculiar is how despite the fact that Macbeth is a tyrant, he seems so relatable. Harold Bloom, in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations, describes him as: “a villain, indeed a monster of murderousness far surpassing the others.” (Bloom 1) And yet…assigning him culpability isn’t as simple as it should be.

In his Poetics, Aristotle argues that a tragic hero must be neither villainous nor virtuous but exist as a "character between these two extremes ...a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty."  The witches, through their equivocations, create the potential for an error. There was no reason to think that the kingship would not fall into place as easily as the Thaneship of Cawdor. And as Steven Greenblatt mentioned in his introduction to Macbeth: "Virtually everyone is subject to terrible dreams and lawless fantasies...but not everyone crosses the fatal line from criminal desire to criminal act. “ (Greenblatt 2712)

Macbeth, unlike Richard III, for example, is incredibly introspective, and we witness him wrestling through what these vague auguries could mean. 

This supernatural soliciting

Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill,

Why hath it given me earnest of success

Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. 

If good, why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs

Against the use of nature? Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings. 

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man

That function is smothers in surmise

And nothing is but what is not. 

1.3.141-44*

I would argue that the emphasis in the above passage isn’t that he has contemplated murder,  but rather that he has begun to fracture, and with his new identity as Thane of Cawdor, he has been dressed not only in "borrowed robes" (1.3.108) but also in the subsequent cowardice and treachery of his predecessor.  

The imagery of ill fitting clothing permeates the text and illustrates the idea that Macbeth is playacting a role that is not the right fit. The description paints a picture of a “small man enveloped in a coat too big for him” (5.2.15) while “his honors fit ill upon him like a loose and badly fitting garment belonging to someone else,” (1.3.144)

Caroline Spurgeon argues in Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us that this clothing imagery gives us a portrait of “a small ignoble man encumbered and degraded by garments unsuited to him.” (Spurgeon 326)

While Macbeth seems almost like a victim of fate, Lady Macbeth seems to be the most evil/culpable. We see no wrestling or moral oscillating, she is instantly in a place of "direst cruelty.” (1.5.41) 

Come, you Spirits

That tend on mortal thought, unsex me here, 

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood, 

That no compunctions visitings of nature 

Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between

The ‘effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts

And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances 

You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the funnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark 

To cry, “Hold, hold!”

1.5.37-52

Perhaps, in a play thematically wrestling with succession and sterility the one successful embryonic growth would be one of ambition. In a gender reversal, Macbeth is the one, “unsexed” with the seed of ambition in need of fertilization. Can we read Lady Macbeth’s incantation as a type of insemination? 

Hie thee hither,

That I may pour my spirits in thine ear 

And chastise with the valor of my tongue 

All that impedes thee from the golden round,

Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem 

To have thee crowned withal. 

1.5.24-28

Instead of the liquid of men, Lady Macbeth ‘pours’ her ‘spirits’ in his ear.  And the place of implantation rather than a womb, is the mind, which will soon bring forth a brood of scorpions. (3.2.35) In any case, what we witness throughout the play is the birth of a tyrant, a birth in exchange for moral sterility. He personally murders King Duncan. He has Banquo, his closest friend and ally murdered. He has Lady Macduff and the children murdered. He has spies planted in all the castles listening for treachery..he has become a suspicious malevolent monster within a few acts, drowning in a solipsistic world where he exists as the “be all end all."

And yet…why doesn’t this seem so appalling? Have tyrants lost the ability to shock us? All of this brings questions of tyranny to the forefront and in need of a good exploration. 

Here’s a quote from Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics:

“The institutions of a free society are designed to ward off those who would govern, as Buchanan put it, “not for their country but for themselves, who take account not of the public interest but of their own pleasure.” Under what circumstances, Shakespeare asked himself, do such cherished institutions, seemingly deep-rooted and impregnable, suddenly prove fragile? Why do large numbers of people knowingly accept being lied to? How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne? 

Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest. Why would anyone, he asked himself, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving, or indifferent to the truth? Why, in some circumstances, does evidence of mendacity, crudeness or cruelty serve not as a fatal disadvantage but as an allure, attracting ardent followers? Why do otherwise proud and self-respecting people submit to the sheer effrontery of the tyrant, his sense that he can get away with saying and doing anything he likes, his spectacular indecency?” (Greenblatt 2)

Despite feeling eerily familiar…these are all good questions to ask. 

Obviously Macbeth is propelled on in some way by the witches and Lady Macbeth…but where is everyone else? How is villainy allowed to metastasize in a vacuum?

When Macbeth and Banquo meet the witches on the heath, Macbeth seems to be the picture of ambivalence. He is described as “brave Macbeth- for well he deserves that name-/Disdaining fortune with his brandished steel.” (1.2.16-17)

Macbeth as a soldier seems to have no algorithm for dealing with these weird sisters. Within their initial encounter Banquo is given descriptive lines, observing the choppy fingers and the beards, while Macbeth three times asks for verbal clarification:

Speak, if you can. What are you?

Stay you imperfect speakers tell me more.

Speak I charge you.

It seems when confronted with the immaterial, Macbeth takes a tactical pause, he needs more information to proceed. But after the news of Cawdor, he switches into a tactical analysis: Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor! The greatest is behind. Thanks for your pains. (1.3.19)

Banquo, after observation, seems to have determined on the explanation of insanity. His ‘prophecy’ makes no concrete sense and as such there is no tactical way to implement it. It seems throughout the exchange he has observed more closely an otherworldly realm beyond the corporal, observing:

But ’tis strange,

And oftentimes to win us to our harm,

The instruments of darkness tell us truths,

Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s

In deepest consequence. 

1.3.125-128

And perhaps this is the problem: we fail to see the fractures and insecurities within our heroes. We miss the fragility hidden behind their armor and battle scars. How could this man of valor, this man who “disdains fortune” transform into a murdering tyrant? It’s implausibility creates a vision problem for those closest to the would be tyrant. Since Banquo doesn’t see the impending doom strobe lighting before him, he does nothing to fight against it. Granted, the window of opportunity is rather small…but there is a window.

Again Greenblatt suggests: “The tyrant, Macbeth and other plays suggest, is driven by a range of sexual anxieties: a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence. Hence too, the vulnerability to taunts, especially those bearing latent or explicit sexual charge.” (Greenblatt 99)

Again, fighting alongside this heroic warrior, watching him “unseem” his enemies from the “nave to the chops,” (1.2.22) how would you possibly expect a little sexual taunting to drive him to the point of regicide? Lady Macbeth says: “If you be a man” in a handful of offensive ways. Is his manhood really so at stake? The manhood of a warrior? And yet it seems as if it is. 

With the suspicious and seemingly too convenient murder of King Duncan, Banquo has a choice. He could confront Macbeth..who already seems to be laying it on a little thick…or he can go along and pretend that everything is as it seems. Macbeth murders the soldiers on guard duty, the scape-goated perpetrators of the crime, in a fit of patriotic rage and passion, subsequently tying up all the loose ends. And Banquo does nothing. As Macbeth is crowned King, Banquo, whether out of cowardice or loyalty chooses to step into the imaginative world held together by the centripetal force of Macbeth’s villainy. 

“Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld.” (Greenblatt 100) 

This seems to be a necessary reminder to choose to see our leaders, to choose to look critically even when we’re afraid of what we might find. 

All quotes from Macbeth from The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edition, 2016.

The Day of the Owl - Leonardo Sciascia

This month I'm reading Leonardo Sciascia's Day of the Owl and going down a rabbit trail researching the Sicilian Mafia:) Book report to follow.

Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell

One day in December of 1936, Eric Arthur Blair did what many young idealists of the time were doing: he made his way from England to Barcelona, (wife in tow) to join the Spanish militia to fight against Franco and the global specter of fascism. As a journalist, he had originally anticipated writing articles documenting the brutal civil war, but almost immediately the revolutionary atmosphere of Barcelona persuaded him to abandon his pen and join arms with his fellow revolutionaries. The International Brigade, comprised of volunteers from around the world, were taking their stand to fight for the “last great cause.”

Blair would eventually adopt the pen name “George Orwell,” and his experience would be written into a short memoir, Homage to Catalonia, but at this exact moment in time, Orwell was standing in line to register for one of the “kaleidoscope of political parties” and somewhat arbitrarily getting assigned to the POUM or the The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. Not knowing there were differences to each political faction, the “plague of initials” and the myriad of political parties seemed chaotic and unnecessary. Weren’t they all revolutionaries? Weren’t they all there to fight against the Hitlers and Mussolinis that had slowly been sucking the countries of Europe (and Abyssinia) into their vortex? The democratic peoples of the world had stood by and watched their governments do nothing, one altercation at a time and then the people of Catalonia had decided to take their stand, and volunteers from around the world had traveled to stand with them. 

“If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: ‘To fight against Fascism.’ and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: ‘Common decency.’ I had accepted the News Chronicle-New Statesmen version of the war as the defense of civilization against a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel Blimps in the pay of Hitler…

As a militiaman one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between two political theories. When I scrounged for firewood on the mountain-side and wondered whether this was really the war or whether the News Chronicle had made it up, when I dodged the Communist machine-guns in the Barcelona riots, when I finally fled from Spain with the police one jump behind me- all these things happened to me in that particular way because I was serving in the POUM militia and not in the PSUC. So great is the difference between two sets of initials!” [p. 198]

And so, like Alice, he fell down a rabbit hole and emerged into a type of Wonderland that festered with chaos and disorganization and perpetually defied reason.

Ostensibly, he was volunteering for the Republicans, (a coalition of pro-democracy left wing parties,) but this ‘plague of initials’ had ominous implications. He was joining forces with an “idea” that had been fractured by internal division amongst the many differing views of socialism and communism, and without a unifying stance the infighting amongst the left was precariously poised to collapse. Stalin had greatly reduced his military commitment to the leftist rebels, out of fear of becoming overextended in territorial disputes closer to home, practically this resulted in lack of supplies and an impoverished militia, forced to cobble together weaponry to throw at Franco’s Nationalists (comprised of right-wing conservative Catholics), well supplied by Hitler and Mussolini. 

“I have spoken of the militia ‘uniform’ which probably gives a wrong impression. It was not exactly a uniform. Perhaps ‘multiform’ would be the proper name for it. Everyone’s clothes followed the same general plan, but they were never quite the same in any two cases.” [p.7]

Frequently without blankets, guns that worked or the ammunition to fire with, the revolutionary battalion seemed to have materialized from another era, if not an entirely different dimension.

‘On my second day at the barracks there began what was comically called ‘instruction’. At the beginning there were frightful scenes of chaos. The recruits were mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen from the back streets of Barcelona, full of revolutionary ardor but completely ignorant of the meaning of war. It was impossible even to get them to stand in line. Discipline did not exist; if a man disliked an order he would step out of the ranks and argue fiercely with the officer. ” [p.7] 

Drill practice usually dissolved into a swarm of men stopping over at the corner grocers and drinking cheep wine. There was the occasional troop transport that got lost en route with the volunteer militia wandering in the mist for hours looking for their battle station. The disorganization was epic. 

With attacks from the enemy infrequent and rarely concerning, Orwell finds the majority of his time taken up with matters of survival rather than war, as he forages for kindling, food, tobacco, candles and the enemy. 

“War, to me, meant roaring projectiles and skipping shards of steel; above all it meant, mud, lice, hunger, and cold. It is curious, but I dreaded the cold much more than I dreaded the enemy. The thought of it had been haunting me all the time I was in Barcelona; I had even lain awake at nights thinking of the old cold in the trenches, the stand-to’s in the grisly dawns, the long hours on the sentry-go with a frosted rifle, the icy mud that would slop over my boot tops. I admit, too, that I felt a kind of horror as I looked at the people I was marching among. You cannot possibly conceive what a rabble we looked. We straggled along with far less cohesion than a flock of sheep; before we had gone two miles the rear of the column was out of sight…It seemed dreadful that the defenders of the Republic should be this mob of ragged children carrying worn-out rifles which they did not know how to use.” [p18]

The trenches were filled with excrement; the weaponry was so awful that Orwell spends a good deal of time recording in detail the specific atrocities: one machine gun to fifty men, twenty year old Mausers that continually jammed, ammunition so scarce that each man was issued only fifty rounds…total, no tin hats, no bayonets, grenades that only detonate half the time, etc. 

But perhaps the most inconvenient and troublesome thing became the perpetual trouser louse. 

“The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives continually in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seems of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of their own at horrible speed. I think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed! In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles. “ [p. 54]

In April, after four months at the front, Orwell is given leave and returns to Barcelona to find his wife. The lice had been multiplying in his trousers faster than he could kill them, he had no socks and his boots had worn such a variety of holes that he was essentially barefoot. He wanted a hot bath, to fall asleep between clean sheets and for a few days re-emerge into civilized society.  Despite the lack of adequate…everything, he had retained an aura of hope: 

“When we went on leave I had been a hundred and fifteen days in the line, and at the time this period seemed to me to have been one of the most futile of my whole life. I had joined the militia in order to fight against Fascism, and as yet I had scarcely fought at all, had merely existed as a sort of passive object, doing nothing in return for my rations except to suffer from the cold and lack of sleep. Perhaps that is the fate of most soldiers in most wars. But now that I can see this period in perspective I do not altogether regret it…They formed a kind of interregnum in my life quite different from anything that had gone before and perhaps from anything that is to come, and they taught me things that I could not have learned in any other way.” [p. 86] 

What he learned was that despite the deprivations, despite their lack of experience and having virtually done nothing of military value: “One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.”  [p.87]

During his absence, the atmosphere of Barcelona had changed. No more revolutionary spirit, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” had been exchanged for disparity. Hierarchies had reemerged between class and the bourgeoisie had reinstated itself. While food and commodities were scarce for the working class, the wealthy luxuriated in their blackmarket goods and pleasantries. Perhaps more disturbing was the militarized in-fighting between the Communists and the Marxists. Barricades had been erected and the communists accused the POUM of being fascist traitors. 

The political turmoil is disillusioning. The division between the left is far greater than he had initially realized, it is fractured beyond repair and threatens to cripple the Republicans’ war effort against the Nationalists. Rather than idealists fighting for home in humanity, the communists have been revealed to be undemocratic manipulative aggressors, like any other political party vying for power. 

And while the civil war rages in its own Spanish way, and while the political factions are bent on tearing each other apart, the general population has grown indifferent. Their attention span for war and deprivation has run its course and they seem less enthused about revolution than they are about the occasional trip to the beach for a quick sunbathe. The ‘front’ had become a sort of ‘mythical far off place’ where men and boys went off and disappeared or returned home with wealth (their back pay) if not glory. In just a few short months, being a revolutionary was no longer fashionable. 

Orwell returns to the front and is subsequently shot in the neck. Once again he makes his way back to Barcelona where the political infighting has now spilled over into the citizenry. There is an atmosphere of “suspicion, fear, uncertainty and veiled hatred.” The war that seemed impossible to find has now emerged in the streets of Barcelona.

“The whole huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a nightmare of noise without movement. The sunlit streets were quite empty. Nothing was happening except the streaming of bullets from barricades and sandbagged windows…What the devil was happening, who was fighting whom and who was winning, was at first very difficult to discover.” [p.117] 

The rest and luxury of Barcelona has been exchanged for the deprivations of the frontline, and Orwell and his wife live off the occasional sardine and bits of goat cheese. Orwell had picked the wrong political party and now his membership in POUM has made him a fugitive. His friends and compatriots are being thrown into jail en masse, in what can only be described as a reign of terror. The law, for now, was what the police decided to make it. 

As the Spanish hope for democracy seems to be over, the only hope seems to be if Franco and his mercenaries can be driven into the sea and exchanged for any other form of stifling dictatorship, even that would have been worth fighting for. 

Orwell and his wife miraculously manage to get on a train and leave the country, escaping to France, only too eager to leave the chaos of Barcelona behind them. Despite the horror, despite all of the mess and disorganization, as Orwell looks back on his experience rather than disillusionment or horror he has a sense of hope and in a strange way a cemented “belief in the decency of human beings.”  In every climate, on every battlefield, there exists the potential for both the cowardly and the heroic. And despite the odds, people will continue to fight for what they believe in.