Electric Shivers

This year’s allotment of Shakespeare included four plays and fifteen sonnets. I continue to think that the plays I read over and over (about half the canonical list) are worth revisiting. By contrast, the sonnets more and more seem to include a handful of standouts and 140-something that I can ignore for the rest of my life.

About King Lear and Richard II, I will only say that I went into them this year as usual, thinking that they wouldn’t hold my interest so much this time, and I came out of them as usual, happy that they had each riveted my attention for five full acts.

Yes, Much Ado About Nothing is about nothing (it says it right in the title!), but it’s so good! Benedick and Beatrice are hilarious as they insult each other in lieu of admitting their mutual love. Their friends’ gentle trickery works quickly, with hardly any drama or farcical confusion, and the reader is glad that the pair don’t have to suffer any more than they already have. The Bard gives Claudio and Hero more of an actual plot: Don John arranges cruel deceptions in order to ruin their wedding. The dialog may briefly give a reason for his nastiness somewhere, but it seems to me he causes pain just because he’s a jerk. That wedding scene is intense, extremely so for a comedy. But remember that it’s all a big fuss about nothing. As soon as Don John’s schemes are revealed, Claudio and Hero are reunited.

The show-stealer, though, has nothing to do with young couples who eventually get married. Dogberry, a very English constable in a supposedly Italian setting, is surely the inspiration for every pompous but confused representative of the law that comes after him, from Oliver Twist’s Mr. Bumble to Mayberry’s Barney Fife. His malapropisms (Wikipedia says they can be called dogberryisms!) mostly take the form of substituting prefixes in Latinate words: “Dost thou not suspect my place?” for instance, in place of “Dost thou not respect my place?” In an aside about nothing, I will mention that they made me think this time about Slip Mahoney from the Bowery Boys movies. (Ah! Saturday afternoon TV in the ‘70s!) More to the point, they’re funny! And his pretentious repetitions are funny! “Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths.” Wonderful! But the best joke of all is his way of insisting that all the culprits’ untruths and insults be put into the record accurately: when the sexton, who’s taking it all down, leaves for a moment, one rogue calls Dogberry an ass, upon which Dogberry exclaims, “O, that he were here to write me down an ass! But masters, remember that I am an ass, though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.”

Now, when I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream right after Much Ado, I noticed that Bottom calls himself an ass, actually becomes an ass, and indulges in malapropisms. This is the same character, I thought! I’ll bet they were played by the same actor! So I looked it up, and sure enough, Dogberry was expressly written for William Kempe, whom Britannica calls “one of the most famous clowns of the Elizabethan era,” and scholars suspect that he also played Bottom. I will now send electric shivers through the world of Shakespeare scholarship by announcing with 99.2% certainty that, whether Kempe played Bottom or not, Shakespeare must have written the part with Kempe in mind. When that news becomes a well known truism, please remember that you read it here first.

Oh, Dear!

Or as Nicky from the Great British Bake Off 2023 would say, “Oh, dearie me!” Fourteen years ago, I started this project of reporting publicly on my reading. In 2017 I decided that the internet was, for me, no place to hold political discussions. But I keep reading political things! What do I do?

I heard about Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here in an article by a writer who finds parallels between the events in the novel and the dangers he associates with a certain current figure in U. S. politics. I, too, see this figure as potentially dangerous. So I read the book. In this novel, the fictional Buzz Windrip is elected President of the United States in 1936 by grievance-feuled voters. (The book was written in 1935, so Lewis didn’t know yet how the U. S. would vote in their upcoming referendum on how Roosevelt was handling the Depression.)  In his campaign, Windrip has outlined his agenda, which includes banning all immigration, keeping most women at home, barring minorities from higher-paying jobs, and giving all legislative and judicial power to the President, Congress being reduced to an advisory board and the Supreme Court stripped of its veto power. He challenges election results in an election he won. After inauguration, he immediately claims emergency powers and begins to enact his authoritarian program. The Supreme Court can’t stop the coup because Windrip has placed them and all his other political enemies under house arrest. With his new, unchallenged authority, Windrip abandons any plans for helping the hungry and unemployed, creates a police state, and essentially turns the government into a crime mob.

For most of the details, Lewis merely translates steps in Hitler’s rise to events in his alternate America. Windrip has his own militia groups, for instance, outlaws all other parties, and makes every news outlet a purveyor of Windrippian propaganda. But the goal of the dictator’s totalitarianism is the very American goal of making money by taking money rather than the very German (or at least Prussian) goal of leading a military juggernaut.

Lewis doesn’t prove anything. Stories aren’t about proving things. But he immerses the reader in a situation that seems plausible. (I suppose I’m only saying that he fulfills the function of a novelist.) I’ll admit that I thought of stopping halfway through; Lewis had made his point, it seemed, and the middle’s long, dry litany of tawdry, unilateral revolution – Windrip did away with states and appointed his cronies to oversee new districts; he redesigned the executive departments and appointed toady X to newly created office Y, where he enacted policy Z; and so on – lacked the vivid, conversation-driven scenes of the first few chapters. But I’m glad I stuck with it. The journalist Doremus Jessup returns to the fore in the last third of the book, and his struggles with the conflict between the duties of resistance and of family safety provide a moving, suspenseful build to the climax.

The U. S. survives in Lewis’s dystopian daydream. But only barely.

Yes and No

Among the special treats on this year’s reading list is a book I had looked forward to for decades: Peter Abelard’s Yes and No. Most people who read Abelard want to read his correspondence with Heloise. I was much more interested in the work that laid the foundation for the University of Paris. Abelard taught his lessons in odd corners of the cathedral of Notre Dame, and scores of students came and – bless them! – voluntarily paid Abelard for his services. And from these meetings arose the concept of Education in France.

What I thought I understood about the book was this: That Abelard wished to explore certain questions of Christian doctrine in search of authoritative answers. That he had compiled great numbers of quotations from the Bible as well as from Fathers and Doctors of the Church that purported to answers these questions. (Or rather that he had challenged his students to find all these passages.) That the authorities cited routinely differed in their answers, so that each question could, with support, be answered both “yes” and “no.” And that Abelard got in trouble for leaving his students in a muddle about essential tenets of the Christian faith and for never saying, “But of course the real answer to question X is this.” Now having read the book, I have to say my preconceptions were slightly wrong.

First of all, the only thing Abelard actually wrote in the volume is an introduction in which he provides several reasons for seemingly contradictory language in the Church's authoritative writings: ambiguity of words, false writings with a saint's name attached, corruption in text, statements later retracted by the writer, misunderstanding on the part of later readers of when an authority is quoting or speaking in the voice of a heretic, taking opinion for fact, and everyday use of speech that departs from literal truth (e.g., “this cup is empty”). We should not accuse the saints of lying, he says, but only Scripture can be said not to depart from truth. Even the saints themselves (especially Augustine) tell readers not to follow the statements they make in which they have erred. So Abelard prefaces the long litanies of conflicting quotations with a statement that none of the problems the reader is about to face mean that the Christian faith is a sham or that the Bible is not true or that the saints all just made things up.

Secondly, the core doctrines of the Christian faith are never questioned. None of the 158 questions touch, for instance, anything in the Nicene Creed. Abelard never sows doubt about the existence of God, his role as Creator, his existence in three persons, the divinity of Christ or of the Holy Spirit, the virgin birth, the actual death and resurrection of the Lord, or the efficacy of that death and resurrection toward salvation. Many of the early questions have to do with understanding the Trinity and the inadequacy of language to describe the Three-in-One. Is God triple, he asks? Well, as the title says, yes and no. Other early questions regard God’s foreknowledge, exactly how Christ took on humanity, etc. Starting somewhere around 40% of the way in, the questions begin to concern such questions as when the angels were created, whether Mary doubted Gabriel, the order of post-Resurrection appearances, which apostles had wives, which evangelist corresponds with which animal face on the cherubim, whether one baptismal immersion is enough, if James the Just was the son of Joseph, whether intinction is a suitable form for receiving communion, when and if one can remarry, whether Cain is damned, which sin is the second most serious, etc. I must admit that he does address whether baptism is necessary for salvation, whether infants have sin, whether works justify, the true presence of Christ on the altar, and whether grace comes before our good will or not, but I think most Christian students will have to admit that the answer to each of these questions is complex and cannot be summed up in a single word: yes or no.

Now I’m not a twelfth-century Parisian, so I don’t know how it came across at the time, and I wasn’t in Notre Dame to hear Abelard’s oral presentation of his lessons, so I don’t know what subtle nuances of meaning he may have supplied. But reading through Yes and No, I didn't get the impression that Abelard was thumbing his nose at doctrine or denying the truth of Christianity. However, the overall effect of the relentless verbal tennis does make it seem as if he thought the Church placed too much stock in authority, especially in proof texts taken out of context. Question: Did (and does) the Church depend too much on proof texts taken out of context? The answer is not “yes and no.”