Thomas Middleton, Your Five Gallants (c. 1606)

[This month my colleague Richard Stacey interviewed me for his brilliant Honours course, Dragged off the Street: Queer Players on the Renaissance Stage. He asked me to talk about Thomas Middleton’s play Your Five Gallants, which gave me a chance to read it in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s monumental edition, Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford, 2007). Years back I edited Middleton and Dekker’s plague pamphlet News from Gravesend for this edition, so it was a delight to get the chance to explore it again. All references are to Ralph Alan Cohen’s edition of the play, and I also used Taylor’s life of Middleton, ‘Lives and Afterlives’, and Scott McMillin’s essay on ‘Middleton’s Theatres’, all in the Collected Works.

The questions are Richard’s, the answers mine.]

Thomas Middleton

Q: Your Five Gallants (c. 1606) was written by Thomas Middleton. Could you tell us a little bit about Middleton’s theatrical career?

A: The son of a London bricklayer who became a building contractor and made himself a gentleman, Middleton described himself as a gentleman for the rest of his life. His Dad died when he was five, his Mum married again, but her second husband seems to have been a bit of a monster and she spent the whole of her marriage fighting him over ownership of her property. She won.

Middleton went to the University of Oxford, but like Marlowe he didn’t graduate. He wrote and published poems while a student, and one book of his poems was burned for breaking a law against writing satires. After that he started writing for the theatre. He also wrote civic pageants for the City of London authorities and masques for the royal court. He wrote a lot, in fact: the Oxford Middleton is bigger than the Bible.

Unlike Shakespeare, who wrote for just one company, Middleton was a freelance playwright who wrote for all the major playhouses and theatre companies in London. At the beginning of his career he co-wrote with other playwrights, or made additions to other people’s plays – such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth, to which he added some rather rubbish extra scenes involving the witches, or Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1580s), to which he added some scenes extending the madness of Hieronimo – one of the servants in Your Five Gallants (1607) is called Hieronimo, as if in homage to this little job of his. His favourite collaborator was Thomas Dekker, his worst enemy Ben Jonson – who also happened to be the son of a bricklayer. In 1603 the theatres were closed for a year, first because of the death of Queen Elizabeth, then because of the plague. While they were closed he got married and wrote some terrific pamphlets about the plague (with his friend Dekker) that got reworked by Daniel Defoe in his novel A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).  After this break, his career as a playwright really took off. Here’s a list of his finest plays:

  • A Trick to Catch the Old One (1607), a comedy about a young man tricking an old one out of his cash.
  • The Roaring Girl (1611), a comedy about the real-life cross-dressing female thief, Mary Frith or Moll Cutpurse. She attended some of the performances and exchanged banter with the audience.
  • A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613), a satirical city comedy about a girl who doesn’t want to marry an older man called Walter Whorehound, for obvious reasons, dies of grief, and then – but that would be telling.
  • The Revenger’s Tragedy, an extremely bloody revenge tragedy, in which a Duke is murdered by kissing a poisoned skull.
  • Women Beware Women (1621), another extremely bloody revenge tragedy which culminates in a masque whose participants are all killed, some of them by Cupids shooting poisoned arrows.
  • The Changeling (1622), about multiple murders in a castle, purportedly in defence of a woman’s honour.
  • A Game at Chess (1624), a satire on the court machinations around the proposed marriage of Prince Charles to a Spanish princess. This seems to have been his last play – he may have been banned from writing when it was thrown off the stage by order of the Privy Council.
The American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia

Q: Your Five Gallants was performed at Blackfriars theatre. Would it be possible for you to tell us a bit about this particular playing space?

A: There were two kinds of playhouses in Jacobean England: the public playhouses, like Shakespeare’s Globe, which had a large capacity – up to around three thousand spectators – and the private playhouses, like the Blackfriars, which held a few hundred. The public playhouses were unroofed, relying on daylight for lighting, while the private ones were roofed and heated, and had artificial lighting: lanterns, rushlights, candles etc. The public playhouses were quite cheap – especially if you were prepared to stand in the pit rather than pay for a seat. The private playhouses were quite expensive. As a result, the public playhouses had a very diverse audience, while the private ones were attended by the middle and upper classes only – ‘gallants’ or gentlemen of the play’s title, gentlewomen, lawyers from the Inns of Court, ladies, well-off merchants, etc. etc.

You’ll notice the way Your Five Gallants plays on class. For instance, it’s got a lot of Latin in it – the masque devised by Fitzgrave in the final act includes a Latin prologue spoken by Pursenet’s thieving boy, as well as Latin mottos for the shields presented to the five fake gallants or gentlemen of the title, whose lower-class status is indicated by their ignorance of the language. And the plot of the comedy is based on class. Fitzgrave, whose name suggests he is the bastard son of a (possibly dead) gentleman, but a genuine gentleman all the same, aims to prevent any of the five fake gentlemen from seducing and marrying the woman he loves – and who loves him – Mistress Katherine, a genuine lady (as against the various fake ladies, most of whom are prostitutes, who populate the play). At the same time, the interdependence of the classes is demonstrated by the way valuable objects circulate among them (a string of pearls, a jewel, a cloak, an expensive salt cellar and a lot more) and the difficulty of distinguishing genuine from fake gentlefolk. King James had degraded the status of the nobility and gentry by selling knighthoods and other honours for cash. Fitzgrave’s struggle to assert the difference between true and false gentry is a genuine struggle, and not guaranteed to come off.

Some commentators suggest that the proximity of the players and the spectators in the private theatres – you could pay for a stool, if you wanted, to watch the play from the stage itself – explains why the plays performed there switch so readily between intimate asides to the audience and dialogue between the actors. There are certainly plenty of these asides – like Piamont’s in Act 4 scene 7, ‘See yonder’s the rogue I suspect for foul play. I’ll walk muffled by him, offer some offence or cause of a quarrel, only to try his temper’. But this is true of many plays performed in public playhouses too, where the spectators were milling around the actors’ feet, so I’m not convinced. On the other hand, another play written for a private playhouse, The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont, has the most elaborate interplay between audience and players I can think of, as a citizen and his wife emerge from the audience to send the play in an entirely new direction. So they may have a point after all!

The most striking thing about the Blackfriars was that the actors who performed there were young boys: choristers who performed at the Chapel Royal and whose voices had not yet broken. This meant that music was important in this theatre; you’ll notice that there are several calls for music in the play, including the extended musical interlude between Acts Two and Three, when two mini scenes are acted out by Tailby to illustrate how he has all his needs provided for by the many women who appreciate his sexual attentions. The boys were accomplished professional musicians, and the playhouses did all they could to take advantage of the fact.

In addition, the fact that the boys were not paid for their acting (they were funded by their roles as choristers) means that the plays written for them often have large casts. The Oxford Middleton has helpful suggestions for reducing this number by giving the same actors multiple roles, but that wouldn’t have been necessary in the original production. Another thing you might notice is that they often don’t have a central role that lays an enormous amount of stress on a single actor. Your Five Gallants divides the action among multiple main actors, with all the five gallants having plenty of time in the limelight, as well as the ‘true’ gentleman Fitzgrave, Mistress Newcut, the thieving boy, four courtesans, and so on. The public playhouses often featured famous stars of the Jacobean stage – Richard Burbage, Edward Alleyn, Will Kemp and so on – playing roles like Hieronimo, Tamburlaine the Great, Hamlet, Falstaff and the rest. The private playhouses may have had a faster turnover of actors, and were more reputed for ensemble work than individual performances – at least, that’s what I guess.

Q: Have any of the early performance elements of Your Five Gallants been preserved in the script? How do we think the play might have been originally staged?

 A: I’ve given quite a few examples in my previous answer, haven’t I? There’s the music, the large cast, the Latin, and the attitude to class. There’s the frequent use of asides, if you think of that as specific to the private playhouses. And the writer of the introduction to the play in the Oxford Middleton, Ralph Alan Cohen, has some interesting things to say, in particular, about the crowd scenes in the play.

There are three of these crowd scenes: a scene in Primero’s brothel, in which Primero acts as a kind of circus master, concealing Mistress Newcut to enjoy her favourite activity of voyeurism, reintroducing the pawnbroker Frip to his latest prostitute, and overseeing the musical performance that accompanies the various seductions and acts of thievery that go on in his establishment. Then there’s a scene in the Mitre Inn, which focuses on a game of dice but keeps breaking away to follow the various player-gallants who have to raise money by illicit means to continue their gambling – suggesting a chaotic economy of theft and counter-theft, all of which culminates in the purloining of the Mitre’s most precious item, a gilt goblet, by the con-man Goldstone. And finally there’s the masque in Act Five, which is danced by the company to music and so has far fewer words than the action in the other acts, while also gesturing towards the high standard of education in the audience through its use of the ‘high’ art of masque as well as the Latin speeches. The masque announces the return of the world to harmony and balance, as the five gallants are exposed by being given their proper names and ranks for the first time in the action. That was the function of masques, according to their most celebrated practitioner, Ben Jonson, so the music in it would have been ravishing.

Each of these crowd scenes plays to the strengths of the playhouse as well as to the boy company that performed there. They’re indoors scenes at which the crowded nature of the venue would be a positive asset. They take advantage of the highly trained boy’s company by using their special talents in music, dance and concerted movement. They also take advantage of the boys’ youth to involve numerous female parts (an adult company only had a few boys in it capable of playing women). And the multiple separate actions taking place at once in the first and second crowd scenes would mean that different sections of the playhouse audience might well be expected to notice different activities going on in different parts of the stage, leading to a satisfying variety of reactions perfectly in tune with the illicit goings-on we’re witnessing.

One can imagine all three scenes as ways to demonstrate the boys’ virtuosity in various ways; a virtuosity that gets underlined by the gallants’ intense anxiety over whether their own boy, the thieving servant of the thieving gallant Pursenet, will be able to remember his lines in the final masque (the masquers in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost have the same anxiety about their own boy prologue, Moth). There’s no real doubt over whether the Children of the Chapel Royal will remember their lines; it’s a skill that’s been thrashed into them since they joined the choir.

Edward’s Boys in John Lyly’s Gallathea

Q: Your Five Gallants is quite a male play, in that a lot of the actors are tasked with portraying boys or men. Critics tend to associate the practice of boy playing with cross-dressing and gender play, almost by default. Are there any particular effects which are generated by boys playing men on stage?

A: This is such an interesting question, and not one I’ve thought about before! Long ago I made a study of the earlier phase of the children’s companies, when their main playwright was a talented man called Lyly. In those days John Lyly made the most of his company’s childishness. In his comedy Sapho and Phao (1584), for instance, the titular ferryman Phao – with whom the poet-queen Sappho falls in love – is consistently referred to as ‘my child’, ‘foolish boy’, ‘fair boy’ and so on; while in Gallathea (1588), in which two girls disguise themselves as boys to avoid being sacrificed to a monster, their youth is constantly emphasized. Gallathea tells herself at one point ‘Thy tender years cannot dissemble this deceit, nor thy sex bear it’, and the other girl disguised as a boy shortly afterwards calls the disguised Gallathea ‘a pretty boy and a fair, he might well have been a woman’, which of course he is (or rather the character is, not the actor). Men’s parts in Lyly’s plays seem sometimes to have been played by grown men – possibly the boys’ teachers. Sir Tophas in Endymion (1588) is obviously much larger and more powerful than his page Epiton, though not half as clever. At the end of the 1580s the children’s companies shut down, but Lyly’s plays were remembered in the Jacobean period: the boy’s company play The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) begins (at least in its printed version) with a version of the prologue to Sapho and Phao. But the later children’s companies went a different way, giving audiences the spectacle of children playing adults using adult language.

At the same time, there are times when the youthfulness of the players acting as men would have produced some amusing effects in Middleton’s plays, quite apart from the basic pleasure of seeing the city’s adult affairs played out in miniature. The enjoyment shown by the pawnbroker Frip’s enjoyment of the opportunities for dressing up made available by his trade could be described as boyish: ‘Let me see now, whose cloak shall I wear today to continue change?’ And the pleasure of the other gallants in their own ingenuity has a similar air of youthfulness. After Tailby has gambled away his clothes, his infectious pleasure in being supplied with new clothes by the women who adore him makes him seem like a spoiled boy whose every need is provided for by doting relatives. And Cohen has pointed out how naïve the thief Pursenet is when he plies his trade, delighted with Tailby for giving up his valuables so easily (‘that shows a good nature, sir’), unreasonably shocked by Fitzgrave’s resistance to being robbed – he keeps asking him to play fair – and outraged by Piamont’s discourtesy in keeping one hand in his pocket at all times, preventing Pursenet’s boy from picking it: ‘Unpractised gallant! Salute me but with one hand, like a counterfeit soldier?’ (The joke is that Piamont is a ‘genuine’ gallant or gentleman, so the idea of a fake gallant telling off a true one for not being gallant is highly amusing.) Pursenet’s repeated telling off of his boy for bad manners would also be amusing if done by a larger boy, who is presumably subject to similar tellings-off at other times from his own elders. So would Fitzgrave’s comment on him after he beats him in a fight: ‘O thou world, / How art thou muffled in deceitful forms!’ The fact that the fake gallants are played by children would make their fakery or deceitfulness very obvious at every stage of the action; and the fact that Fitzgrave is himself a child, and that he’s in disguise for most of the play, would help to emphasize the difficulty of distinguishing ‘real’ fakes from ‘fake’ fakes in Jacobean urban life.

There’s another pleasure to be had from the notion of the five gallants being played by boys. They are members of the Elizabethan criminal underworld, which had been the subject of many pamphlets by Robert Greene and Middleton’s friend Thomas Dekker. Those pamphlets achieved popularity by posing as the products of men with inside knowledge of the secret lives of con artists and tricksters. The notion that children might possess such inside knowledge when in fact they are still imbibing more conventional knowledge at school would add to the wit of Middleton’s plot. And the fact that they are beaten at their own game by another child – Fitzgrave – who has clearly spent longer at his lessons than they have, since he knows Latin and they do not, would add another layer of wit to the performance. The humour to be got from this situation only applies if the actors are boys playing men, of course, since most girls and women did not have access to the same educational opportunities. Around 80% of women in Jacobean London, including Middleton’s mother, signed their names with a mark.

The ‘Last Boy PLayer’, Edward Kynaston

Q: Your Five Gallants is quite a bawdy play, in line with other child company pieces. As critics, what can we make of this type of early modern dramaturgy?

A: The plays performed by the children’s companies were famous for being risqué, arousing the disapproval of the moralists for their tendency to have many female roles – the idea of the male putting on the garment of the female being expressly forbidden in the Bible – and for the conviction that they corrupted both the children who acted in them and the audiences who went to see them. In Middleton’s time, too, they frequently engaged in topical satire, something that had theoretically been banned in print – as I mentioned when I pointed out that Middleton’s own verse satires were burned, along with other offensive books, by order of the Ecclesiastical High Commission, the Elizabethan censors of printed books. Children’s companies may have been banned from performing for ten years before they began performing again in the first decade of the seventeenth century; though whether or not this was the result of a ban is not certain. They had powerful patrons – children’s companies were at different times very popular for entertainment at court – but the powerful antitheatrical lobby, led by the City authorities, did not approve, and this doesn’t seem too surprising from the perspective of the twenty-first century, given the sexually explicit content of some of their plays.

I suppose the question of knowledge comes into this too (and when I use this word I think of Henry James’s great novel of childhood, What Maisie Knew). There might perhaps have been an assumption that schoolboys would not know exactly what they were talking about when they spoke about sex, just as they wouldn’t if they talked in the cant terms of the criminal underworld. So the explicit allusions would add to the humour of the performance, from one point of view, while the fact that they were made by boys could be held up as a way to defuse them, so to speak – to drain them of their poison. You may remember the puppet play in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), which is thought by the fool Bartholomew Cokes to be performed by a children’s company because the puppets are small, like children. When attacked for performing profanities by a religious zealot in the audience, the puppets respond by pulling up their garments and displaying their puppet bodies: they have no genitalia, of course, and therefore cannot be accused of indulging in sexual acts – or of inciting them, the puppet master implies. Cokes’s confusion of puppets with boy players may suggest that boy players, too, were seen as in some sense sexless and genderless – which explains their skill in acting both men and women, since they have not yet acquired the physical characteristics of either gender. That’s a bit of early modern biology, by the way: you grew into your gender as you grew up, you weren’t exactly born with it, they thought. Their view of gender identity was therefore somewhat flexible in comparison with the views, say, of Victorian biologists at a time of imperialist expansion.

One thing the plays demonstrate, down all these years, is the remarkable skill of those boy players. They could perform highly complex scripts, deploying a combination of complex physical and musical skills; they could chop and change from one disguise to another, play elaborate tricks on stage, dance, sing, cavort and juggle, fight with swords. That’s another thing the plays would have given their audiences: the opportunity to be amazed that such young boys could be such consummate performers. This suggests, perhaps, that there would always be a little bit more of a distance between the boy players and their roles than in an adult production. They were so much more obviously not the people they played, not doing the things they pretended to be doing, not involved in the politics or the business decisions or the plots or sexual antics they were acting out on stage. The children’s plays tend not to have deep emotion in them – at least, not the ones I can think of (though the boy players could do deep emotion if they wanted to, if Antony and Cleopatra is anything to go by). They were so much more obviously plays as a result; playful play-acting; hence perhaps the Jacobean tolerance for the bawdy material they contained.

The Globe Young Players in The Malcontent by John Marston

Q: What role do objects play in Middleton’s comedy?

 A: In a discussion with me after completing the podcast, you suggested that Elizabethan theatre has objects in it that contribute to the symbolic order: the sword the guards swear on in Hamlet, the crown in Henry IV Part 2, the pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice, the magic flower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the armour pursued by Hector in Troilus and Cressida, etc. I suggested in response that there’s a far greater diversity of heterogeneous objects in Jacobean drama, which represents a change of order under James I – often thought of at the time as a wholesale loss of order. Think of the revolting list of things described in Ben Jonson’s Volpone as the contents of a mountebank’s (fake) elixir of youth (‘a sheep’s gall, a roasted bitch’s marrow, / Some few sod earwigs, pounded caterpillars, /A little capon’s grease, and fasting spittle’); or the even more disgusting list of substances used by alchemists to trick their customers out of their money in Jonson’s The Alchemist (‘your broths, your menstrues, and materials, / Of piss and egg-shells, women’s terms, man’s blood, / Hair o’the head, burnt clouts, chalk, merds, and clay, / Powder of bones, scalings of iron, glass, / And worlds of other strange ingredients’). The elixir is supposed to impart long life; the potions are supposed to refine the alchemist’s customers into suitable recipients of limitless gold; but both are sickening when broken down into their constituent elements, and symbolize a market-driven society that’s sickly as well as disordered, no longer capable of distinguishing the good stuff from the bad, the fake from the genuine, in food and objects as well as in people.

Your Five Gallants opens with a scene in which the exchange of heterogeneous objects is used to represent the breakdown of the early modern class system and the symbolic order connected to it. People of all classes pawn their things to raise cash – the things are mostly clothes – and the pawnbroker-gallant Frip collects them and puts them to use, transforming himself in the process from his earlier condition as a hard-up, put-upon servant into one of the five fake gallants of the title. During the play we witness other objects being passed from hand to hand, including the precious things exchanged as love tokens at the beginning of the play by the genuine Lady Katherine and the genuine gentleman Fitzgrave, a string of pearls (signifying chastity) and a jewel (signifying fidelity). At the end of the Mitre scene, the gilt goblet stolen by the con-artist-gallant, Goldstone, is thought to have miraculously disappeared: presumably this is a mocking reference to the miracles wrought in medieval romance by the Holy Grail, the cup Christ used at the Last Supper; and the name of the tavern, the Mitre, strengthens the allusion. The draining of meaning from objects by their random exchange symbolizes a draining of conviction from religious practices, a forgetfulness of the virtues that drove the Arthurian knights on their lonely quests, a draining of value itself from the Jacobean economy.

At the end of the play, however, objects are restored to their role in the symbolic order by the devices Fitzgrave uses to expose the true nature of the five fake Gallants: an upside-down purse to signify the thief-gallant’s thieving and whoring, three silver dice to signify the con-artist gallant’s cheating and opportunism, a pearl in a cave to represent the pimp-gallant, who sells the virginity of young women and can’t appreciate beauty or value of any kind, and so on. When the devices are formally presented to the five fake gallants in the final masque, the languages of value and social order are restored to meaningfulness again. The promise of this ending is held out throughout the performance by the applicability of the names of the characters – Pursenet the fisher for purses, Frip the pawnbroker who thrives on other people’s frippery, Goldstone the con artist, who converts anything he touches to gold for his own uses, Tailby who lives by his (front) tail, and so on. The masque dances these names into their correct position in relation to meaning; so for a while at the end of the play the Jacobean audience would have felt reoriented and comforted – until they stepped out of the playhouse door and re-immersed themselves in the seething city streets.

Jacobean gilt goblet (standing cup), 1607

Play Houses: Alasdair Gray, Poor Things and A History Maker. Part 1

[This is my belated contribution to Gray Day 2022, which took place last Friday, 25 February. Today is World Book Day, which also seems appropriate, since Poor Things is an embodiment of the delight in books. What follows is the first of two posts; the second will appear later in March.]


The 1990s: a rich decade for fantasy, and a suitable subject for mixed metaphors. The new millennium, that phantom barrier between the twentieth century and an unforeseeable future, was flinging out a backwash of apocalyptic premonitions, from the Millennium Bug to the End of the Civilised World. The Cold War had abruptly come to an end, and the hunt for a new enemy of late capitalism was in full cry. Not surprisingly, fantasy literature stood on the brink of reinvigoration. His Dark Materials and Harry Potter were bubbling away in the soup of their creators’ brains. The New Weird was stirring its tentacles, and a league of brilliant women from Pamela Dean and Robin Hobb to Ursula Le Guin, Nalo Hopkinson, Terry Windling and Jane Yolen were rapidly remaking the fantastic along new-old lines, while male fantasy authors too (Gregory Maguire, Geoff Ryman, Michael Swanwick as well as Pullman) found themselves reimagining the power dynamic between women, men and others in response. An end and a beginning: the 1990s.

As brilliant as any of these male authors was the Scottish writer-artist Alasdair Gray, who had made his name with the publication of Lanark in 1981. The 1990s saw the publication of his finest novel, Poor Things (1992), and a novella called A History Maker (1994), both of which could be described as science fiction. In the same decade he wrote the novels Something Leather (1990), McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990) and Mavis Belfrage (1996), and the short story collection Ten Tales Tall and True (1993). All these texts gave a prominent place to women, and to the sense that the experience of women at the end of the twentieth century was undergoing a transformation. Poor Things did this by examining the last two decades of the nineteenth century as a parallel moment in the history of women’s experiences, as well as of socialism and industrial capitalism. A History Maker did it by examining a moment of near-revolution against a worldwide matriarchy, two centuries or so in the future. Between them, the two books suggest a pair of parentheses bracketing the calamitous twentieth century – the Century of War, as Doris Lessing calls it in her SF novel Shikasta (1979). For Gray, women were stationed at the points of arrival and departure of the century, and throughout the century had always offered the best hope for a turn towards a better tomorrow.

A History Maker came out two years after Poor Things, and can be read as a witty appendix to that book. The novella feeds parasitically on the novel, replicating its form and some of its content while also performing ingenious acts of reversal and inversion on both. As if to reinforce the association with appendices, exactly a third of A History Maker is made up of notes and a postscript, parasitically feeding on the lifeblood of the ‘central’ narrative. Poor Things, too, has a hypertrophied paratext, its introduction, notes and postscript hollowing out the central narrative’s intestines from within, so to speak, like the segments of a hungry tapeworm. To understand A History Maker, then, we need to start with a consideration of Poor Things; while understanding Poor Things benefits from setting it alongside what might be loosely termed its sequel. Taken together, these books represent Gray’s meditation on the end of an era: the close of the twentieth century, the termination of the twentieth-century version of the socialist dream as embodied in the Soviet Union, the seeming lull after a period of global warfare which had extended from 1914 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Both books, too, are about parasitism of various kinds, above all in the form of complicity, and in particular the complicity to which all citizens of the First World are inevitably doomed by virtue of their location within an increasingly unbalanced global economy. So Poor Things is where I’ll begin in this post, before moving on in a second post to its neglected younger sibling. And afterwards I’ll move on again, to their status as representations of beginnings.

Poor Things consists of a series of backward glances, each provided by one of its myriad narrators and commentators. The central narrative, as written by the Public Health Officer Archibald McCandless, looks back on the events of the last decade of the nineteenth century from 1911, when he bequeaths his memoirs to his wife just before his death. McCandless’s memoirs are then ‘edited’ in 1990 or so, under the title Poor Things, by an irascible version of Alasdair Gray himself. Gray looks back in his introduction to the 1970s, when the manuscript was first ‘discovered’ by Michael Donnelly, co-curator with Elspeth King of the People’s Palace Museum in Glasgow. Along with the memoirs themselves, Gray reproduces a letter from Victoria McCandless, Archibald’s wife, written in 1914 when she first read them after the death of her husband in 1911. Gray also adds notes incorporating various documents such as a letter from 1945, in which Victoria celebrates the election of a Labour Government as the beginning of a new epoch of social justice in the United Kingdom. The novel, in other words, is an elaborate exercise in reminiscence, so that even the hopes and political ambitions articulated by the forward-thinking Victoria McCandless are strongly tinged with nostalgia for the more committed, less irony-tainted epoch in which her life began.

Irony, however, pervades the narrative, because these successive backward glances expose the past century of human existence as a complex tissue of fabrications. Victoria insists, for instance, that Archibald’s account of their first meeting and her subsequent adventures is not just fictional but fantastic, implying as it does that Victoria herself was assembled from parts of different human beings according to the ‘Frankenstein method’ by an eccentric surgeon called Godwin Baxter (p. 274). Archibald confected this alternative origin story for his busy wife, she suspects, both to grab her attention and to coerce her into co-authoring his book by issuing some sort of denial or correction, either in her thoughts or in a covering letter of the kind we are given by the editor before the notes. But the reader knows that Victoria’s vision of a socialist future – as expressed in her later letter of 1945 – is also a fantasy. Poor Things was first published in 1992, after twelve years of Tory rule during which social justice was for the most part conspicuous by its absence. And Victoria’s letter of 1914 shows that her socialist dreams were fantastic then, too, since she predicts that the Great War will be averted by the workers of Great Britain by means of a General Strike. Victoria’s first name, meanwhile, identifies her brand of socialism as a product of the nineteenth century, and the endurance of her and her name into the mid-century (she died, we’re told, soon after writing that letter about the election of the Labour government) symbolises the continuing legacy of Victorian cultural attitudes into the middle of the twentieth century – and beyond, thanks to the publication of the manuscript by its ‘editor’, Gray.

The batters of Poor Things, adorned with a thistle motif and a Gray proverb

Victorianism itself, meanwhile, is described by Victoria as an ornate fantasy, best understood through its embodiment in such ‘sham-gothic’ buildings as ‘the Scott Monument [in Edinburgh], Glasgow University, St. Pancras Station and the Houses of Parliament’ (p. 275). The ‘useless over-ornamentation’ of these buildings, she claims, ‘was paid for out of needlessly high profits: profits squeezed from the stunted lives of children, women and men working more than twelve hours a day, six days a week in NEEDLESSLY filthy factories; for by the nineteenth century we had the knowledge to make things cleanly’. And for Victoria, her husband’s memoir is as sham-gothic and hence as needless as any of these extravagant works of architecture. Archibald paid a high price for it to be printed in a single copy, illustrated with etchings by the well-known artist William Strang, so it is over-ornate and expensive. The first edition of Poor Things, too, with its dustjacket sporting mock reviews by made-up magazines and newspapers, its hardback covers or ‘batters’ stamped with a silver thistle motif and Gray’s personal motto, its typeface and page design both created by Gray himself, and its many illustrations, some of which have been purloined from Victorian publications while others are misattributed to Strang (in fact Gray did them), must have been hugely expensive for the publishers Bloomsbury to produce. Poor Things, then, looks backward in its ornate aesthetics and the economics that drive them, as well as in its narrative and commentary. The fictionalised memoir it contains is parasitic on the working classes, because Archibald’s late-life prosperity depended on their labour, which made possible the investments on which he drew to support his ‘idle, dreamy[,] fantastical’ middle-class existence, as Victoria tells us (pp. 251-2). And it is doubly parasitic on Victoria McCandless, whose life story Archibald falsified to produce his memoir, and whose notes Alasdair Gray purloined to create his book.

18 Park Circus, Glasgow

The Gothicism of Poor Things is of the domestic variety. It uses the household as a synecdoche for society, instead of the monumental public buildings listed by Victoria. In this it recalls the great Gothic novels of the period in which it’s set, from Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (largely set in a doctor’s house) to Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray (set in a fashionable London townhouse with a large attic) and Dracula (which is all about real estate). It focuses on the house of the surgeon Godwin Baxter, 18 Park Circus, where he either builds a woman in his father’s private laboratory (p. 33) or nurses her back to health, depending on whose version of the story you choose to accept – Archibald’s or Victoria’s. Victoria tells us she grew up in needless poverty in a cramped apartment before marrying an abusive husband, fleeing from his London house and being offered shelter and support in the Glasgow mansion of the surgeon Godwin Baxter. Archibald tells us she committed suicide in the Clyde, when pregnant, and was afterwards restored to life through the grotesque process of implanting her unborn baby’s brain in her skull – the resulting adult/infant hybrid being christened Bella Baxter. In both versions of her life story, Godwin’s house provides Victoria/Bella with intellectual stimulus as well as shelter: through the personal example set by its various inhabitants, through the political and medical instruction it provides, and through its architectural and economic organisation. The medical instruction comes from Godwin’s knowledge, books, instruments and conversation, while the political and economic instruction is provided by a ‘big doll’s house’ modelled on the house itself, which is present in both Archibald’s (p. 28) and Victoria’s versions.

‘See me open the hinged front of this big doll’s house and fold it back,’ Godwin tells Victoria in her own version of her life story:

‘This is a type of house you will find by thousands in British cities, by hundreds in the towns, and tens in the villages. […] The servants live mostly in the basement and attics: the coldest and most crowded floors with the smallest rooms. Their body heat, while they sleep, keeps their employers in the central floors more snug. This little female doll in the kitchen is a scullery-maid who will also do rough laundry work, scrubbing and mangling the clothes. She will have plenty of hot water to use if her master or mistress is generous, and may not be overworked if the servants set over her are kind, but we live in an age when thrift and hard competition are proclaimed as the foundations of the state, so if she is meanly and cruelly used nobody will remark upon it. Now look into the parlour on the first floor. Here is a piano with another little female doll sitting at it. If her dress and hair-style were changed for the scullery-maid’s she might be the same girl, but that will not happen. She is probably trying to play Beethoven’s Für Elise without a wrong note – her parents want her one day to attract a rich husband who will use her as a social ornament and breeder of his children. Tell me, Bella, what the scullery-maid and the master’s daughter have in common, apart from their similar ages and bodies and this house.’

‘Both are used by other people,’ I said. ‘They are allowed to decide nothing for themselves.’ [pp. 262-3]

For Godwin, the house is a machine designed to replicate the Victorian class system. Its human inhabitants, represented by the models of the two young girls, have been slotted into their domestic places – each attached to an instrument they must master, the mangle and the piano – like components of the machine, their bodily energy contributing to the smooth functioning of the house and of the hegemony of which it is part. The scullery-maid is an integral part of the house’s heating and cleaning system, the piano-playing girl the inert guarantor of her class’s continued ascendancy. The girls represented by the dolls are as much ‘things’ as the dolls that portray them.

Bella/Victoria as the embodiment of Bella Caledonia, Bonnie Scotland

Victoria herself is often treated as a doll-like ‘thing’ in Poor Things. Her life is manipulated by her husband Archibald McCandless as grist for his fantastical mill. Even the words she utters are reported by him as half-understood fragments, representative of the gradual assembly of her mind over time after the swifter assembly of her body by the surgeon Baxter. Archibald accuses Baxter of constructing Victoria/Bella for his own sexual gratification (pp. 36-7), so she is twice a ‘thing’ from his point of view: as a woman driven to suicide by one man (her first husband), and as a patient intended as a plaything by another (Godwin). Archibald also hints that Baxter himself is a ‘thing’ constructed by his surgeon father, and that Bella/Victoria’s abusive first husband – when he shows up to claim her – is a ‘thing’ reassembled by surgeons after the multiple injuries sustained by his body in the course of his military career. Even Archibald is a ‘thing’, a self-made man who has been awkwardly put together from ill-fitting parts: a neglectful farm servant mother, an absent landowner father, clothes paid for by an unknown benefactor, a regional accent that sounds out of place in the gentlemen’s club of the medical faculty at the Victorian University of Glasgow. All the people in the book are ‘things’, their status as mostly damaged or defective mechanisms reinforced by the images from Gray’s Anatomy scattered through the text, each carefully placed at a point in the narrative when the portion of the body shown in the picture (nose, tongue, brain, genitals, pelvis) comes briefly to the fore in the narrative.

Illustration from Gray’s Anatomy in Poor Things

The thing-ness of Poor Thing’s characters – their resemblance to dolls – is compounded by their affinity with the people who for the most part play with dolls – young children. Nearly all retain childish traits, and nearly all have had damaging childhoods. This is most obvious in Archibald’s version of Bella/Victoria, a grown woman with the transplanted brain of her own baby, who greets everything and everybody with surprise, delight and curiosity. But her supposed maker Godwin Baxter, too, though vast and powerful in stature, resembles a baby in his physical proportions. When Archibald first meets him he notes this resemblance at once: ‘Despite the ogreish body he had the wide hopeful eyes, snub nose and mournful mouth of an anxious infant’ (p. 12); and when he later spots him at a distance on the hills he tells us: ‘I saw what seemed a two-year-old child with a tiny puppy approaching from the Cambuslang side’, which on closer approach turns out to be Baxter ‘accompanied by a huge Newfoundland dog’ (p. 16). His powerful voice has the shrillness of a baby’s, and the hand he holds out to Archibald in friendship is so unusual that Archibald cannot bear to shake it:

The hand I intended to grasp was not to so much square as cubical, nearly as thick as broad, with huge thick first knuckles from which the fingers tapered so steeply to babyish tips with rosy wee nails that they seemed conical. A cold grue went through me – I was unable to touch such a hand. [p. 25]

Baxter’s neglected childhood and lonely adulthood, as the illegitimate and ugly son of an eminent scientist, makes his mind childishly needy too, in its longing for an unprejudiced companion who will not be disconcerted by his strange appearance; this longing, perhaps, is what suggests to Archibald that he may be another Frankenstein’s creature, constructed in his father’s laboratory, then abandoned to the whims of the world. But Archibald, too, is childish in his quest for a father figure he never had (which he finds in Godwin) and a loving, powerful woman to replace his less than loving mother (whom he finds in Bella/Victoria). He is constantly harking back to his boyhood in rural Galloway. He ascribes his lack of sexual hang-ups, for instance, to growing up on a farm, and informs Victoria/Bella of his fighting prowess on the strength of having proved his courage ‘in the playground of Whauphill School’ (p. 63) (Whauphill being a tiny hamlet close to Wigtown). The dustjacket of the book’s first edition shows Archibald cuddling Bella, who is cuddling Godwin, who sits facing out of the picture, huge and implacable, with his baby’s hand planted on his knee: three children clinging together in the face of a hostile world.

Victoria/Bella’s abusive first husband, General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington, is a child too. The offspring of abusive parents and an abusive education system, who continues to seek out abuse in the brothels of Europe as an anonymous masked client by the name of Monsieur Spankybot, who likes to pose ‘first […] as a baby, then as a little lad on his first night in a new boarding-school’ (p. 181). Even Victoria/Bella’s lover, Duncan Wedderburn – the man with whom she elopes to seek adventure and travel the world – is still devoted to his mother and the female servants who raised him, returning to them after the tour to resume his role as the spoiled child of the household. These men’s damaged childhoods are lodged inside them, unnurtured and underdeveloped, rendering them as fixed and helpless and eternally infantile as the dolls in the instructive doll’s house in Baxter’s living room. The doll theme continues in Victoria’s notes at the end of the book, where she describes the soldiers about to leave for the Great War as ‘young men marching in regular rows, each imitating the stiff movements of a clockwork doll’ (p. 253). Victoria herself claims to have been educated by nuns in a Swiss convent school ‘to be a rich man’s domestic toy’ (pp. 258-9) – though her subsequent education at Baxter’s hands has since liberated her from doll-like rigidity and silence. Stocked from end to end with dolls, Victorian Britain would seem to be populated by several generations of male and female citizens in various states of arrested development.

The continuing childishness of all these characters has the effect of stressing the importance of the home environment in fashioning a healthy adult mind and body. For Godwin Baxter, the need for good housing in wholesome surroundings is paramount. To Archibald he expresses the opinion that all social ills could be healed by three key elements: ‘Sunlight, cleanliness and exercise, McCandless! Fresh air, pure water, a good diet and clean roomy houses for everyone’ (p. 24). A little later he diagnoses the mental illness running rife in Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the effect of ‘an epidemic brain fever which, like typhoid, was perhaps caused by seepings from the palace graveyard into the Elsinore water supply’, and goes on to explain how he would have treated it as the family’s physician:

I imagined myself entering the palace quite early in the drama with all the executive powers of an efficient public health officer. The main carriers of the disease (Claudius, Polonius and the obviously incurable Hamlet) would be quarantined in separate wards. A fresh water supply and efficient modern plumbing would soon set the Danish state right and Ophelia, seeing this gruff Scottish doctor pointing her people toward a clean and healthy future, would be powerless to withhold her love. (p. 40)

In Godwin’s version of Hamlet the diseases of the state, which originate in the Danish royal palace, could be eradicated at once by putting in place the infrastructure that makes pure water and clean houses available to everyone – an infrastructure of the kind installed in Glasgow in the 1850s, and commemorated by the erection of the Stewart Memorial Fountain in Kelvingrove Park immediately below Godwin’s dwelling in Park Circus, the place where Archibald first kisses Bella/Victoria. What Godwin omits, however, from his list of essentials for a nurturing home environment, is affection; the sort of affection he dreams of obtaining from Ophelia in this passage, and which he lavishes on and receives back from that other unfortunate drowned woman, Bella/Victoria. In both versions of her life story, affection in the domestic context is more crucial than cleanliness and shelter to her wellbeing, and it’s affection (or what she calls ‘cuddling’) that she positions at the centre of her medical philosophy when she trains as a doctor and puts her skills at the service of the city that (re)made her.

Thanks, in fact, to the domestic affection with which she is surrounded – the affection of Godwin’s many dogs as well as the people in his household – Bella/Victoria is the only person in the book whose inner childishness is allowed to grow to a healthy maturity, not stunted by neglect or arbitrary boundaries. In Archibald’s version of the narrative, the baby’s mind which has been surgically transplanted into her adult body develops rapidly under the tuition of the free-thinking Godwin (whose name, of course, recalls the great anarchist thinker, Mary Shelley’s father William Godwin). With his support, she encounters the world with fresh pleasure and bright new ideas at every stage of her preternaturally rapid mental maturation. In Victoria’s version, her complex childhood is what gives her an unusually clear understanding of how the world works, before Godwin’s affection (along with his schooling in medicine and politics) completes the process. This version of her life story tells how she was raised by a hard-working mother in a Manchester slum, then transplanted to a sumptuous house by her newly-wealthy father before being transplanted again to a Swiss convent school and afterwards to the London house of an ice-cold military husband. From London she escaped to the Glasgow house of the friendly surgeon who had treated her for sexual hysteria on her husband’s orders. By this time she had witnessed both extreme poverty and excessive wealth, both the community-based discipline of religious women and the martial discipline of aristocratic men, both the Manchester slums and the mountains of Switzerland, the elegant streets of central London and the splendid suburbs of industrial Glasgow. Five households made her – if you include the convent school – each with its economic and emotional peculiarities, most strikingly the profound interdependencies each entails between the house’s owners and their employees.

Each of Bella/Victoria’s households, in fact, fosters close sexual and cultural relations between social classes which are supposed to live in strict segregation from each other. Her father grows wealthy while leaving his wife to live in poverty, like a servant, before transferring her to a grand house in which she feels useless. There is a strong suggestion that the father has been having an affair with the housekeeper of that house, since she wears ‘a brighter dress than worn by housekeepers I met in later years’, as Victoria notes (p. 257), while her father observes that the woman has taught him ‘a few new tricks’ (p. 258). Later, Victoria’s soldier husband gets a young servant pregnant through the sexual attentions he denies his wife; while Godwin Baxter’s household includes another servant who had her master’s child: Godwin’s mother, Mrs Dinwiddie. As we’ve seen, Archibald is the child of a servant who slept with her master, while Duncan Wedderburn got his early erotic education at the hands of a servant in his household named Auld Jessy. If the female dolls of different classes in Godwin’s doll’s house can be readily exchanged for one another, they closely match the experiences of the women in Victoria/Bella’s households, the bulk of whom are treated by men like servants – providing labour for inadequate wages, no matter what their class. Victoria’s understanding of the class system stems from her position as a woman who has first-hand experience of its operation through the set-ups of the houses she has lived in, which served as real-life equivalents of the doll’s house.

When Godwin opens up the front of that doll’s house, then, he could be said to open up her world, much as an expert anatomist (like the author of Gray’s Anatomy, from which so many of the book’s illustrations have been purloined) opens up a corpse to show its inner workings. The beginning and end of Archibald’s narrative take place in Godwin’s ‘tall, gloomy terrace house’ in Park Circus (p. 22), in the West End of Glasgow. But the house also anchors the middle section of the narrative, which moves away from Glasgow but never leaves it behind.

More illustrations from Gray’s Anatomy in Poor Things

Bella/Victoria’s travels are described in two letters delivered to the Park Circus address, the first from her lover Duncan Wedderburn, the second from herself. The letters are opened and read aloud by Godwin to Archibald in Godwin’s living room, to which the narrative returns us often as the two readers exchange observations before moving on. The formal properties of these letters – some in verse, the rest in prose, distinguished visually from the rest of the novel by being printed in italics – mark them out as created objects or ‘things’ which will eventually find a place for themselves among Godwin’s domestic possessions. The middle part of Bella/Victoria’s letter is even reproduced in her handwriting, ‘printed by a photogravure process which exactly reproduces the blurring caused by tear stains, but does not show the pressure of pen strokes which often ripped right through the paper’ (p. 144). We are never allowed to forget the materiality of these epistolary travelogues, and their Glasgow roots, no matter how far from Glasgow their contents take us.

In fact, despite the global wanderings they chronicle, the contents of both letters are as Glaswegian as the location in which they are read. Wedderburn’s letter obsessively ascribes Bella/Victoria’s behaviour (she enjoys sex with him but has no interest in marrying him) to the devilish influence of her Glasgow mentor, Godwin Baxter (or ‘GOD-SWINE BOSH BACK-STAIR, BEAST OF THE BOTTOMLESS PIT’ as he inventively dubs him [p. 95]). This culminates in an elaborate list of parallels between Godwin, Bella, the Park Circus building they live in and the biblical Book of Revelation. Twice Wedderburn mentions theatrical performances he has seen in Glasgow, and throughout their travels he funds himself with money drawn from his Glasgow-based accounts, with the Scottish Widows and Orphans Company and the Clydesdale and North Scotland Bank. In Bella/Victoria’s letter, meanwhile, a betting shop in Germany reminds her of the Glasgow Stock Exchange, with its ‘fluted columns, cream and gold’ (p. 110). Later a ‘huge’ flight of steps in Odessa (made famous by The Battleship Potemkin) seems ‘very like the steps down to the West End Park near our house’ (p. 115), while Wedderburn splashing about in a ‘puddle’ of his winnings recalls ‘little Robbie Murdoch with a mud puddle’ (p. 121) – Robbie being the grandson of Godwin’s housekeeper. The journey as a whole reiterates the earlier stage of Bella/Victoria’s education when she toured the world with Godwin, visiting a selected set of tourist destinations with the aim of giving substance to his teachings in the front room at Park Circus. Every stage of her journey with Wedderburn, in other words, has close links to Godwin’s home.

The ‘huge’ flight of steps down to the West End Park (now Kelvingrove Park), Glasgow

At one point in the journey, the doll’s house model is briefly replaced by another, and for a while Godwin’s vision is threatened with less democratic ideas, presenting Bella/Victoria with a range of socio-political perspectives from which she must choose before she decides on her future course of action. On her cruise round the Mediterranean Bella/Victoria meets two ‘gentlemen’ who seek to supplement or correct the home-schooling Godwin gave her. The first is an American missionary-cum-government-spy called Dr Hooker, the second an English businessman-cum-government spy named Astley. Each seeks to convert her to his own way of thinking – Astley as a cynical Malthusian, who thinks that keeping large groups of people in poverty is the only way to keep the world in balance, Hooker as a Christian eugenicist who thinks the world should be run by what he terms the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ (p. 139). In the interests of demonstrating the inferiority of non-Anglo-Saxon peoples, Hooker invites the young woman to disembark with him at the port of Alexandria, where she will see for herself the decline of the once great Egyptian people and thereby learn the necessity for Anglo-Saxons to take charge of the global economy. Before disembarking, Bella/Victoria remembers her previous visit to Egypt under Godwin’s watchful eye: ‘When God took me to see the pyramids,’ she tells Hooker, ‘we left the hotel in the middle of a crowd’, but she did not see the people at the fringes of the crowd who were calling out for money (p. 142). This makes it clear that Godwin had been keen to shelter her from the most brutal facts of politics and economics; his teachings were suitable for the child in Bella’s brain, not the mature young woman she has rapidly become. At Alexandria the dolls in her mind are replaced with actual girls: she sits with Astley and Hooker on a hotel veranda ‘among well-dressed people like ourselves’ while a crowd of ‘nearly naked folk mostly children’ scramble for coins tossed by the wealthy on the dusty ground below the veranda, kept in order by men with whips (p. 173). Among the children is a pair who strike an instant chord in Bella/Victoria (and her tendency to resonate in sympathy with others is indicated by the name Godwin gave her, Bella, the bell – though the name has other resonances too, such as the bell of revolution, the Beauty to Godwin’s Beast, church bells, etc. etc.). The two children are ‘a thin little girl blind in one eye carrying a baby with a big head who was blind in both’ (pp. 173-4). Bella/Victoria takes them at once for her lost daughter and a young sibling, lost to their parents just as Bella/Victoria’s unborn child was lost to her. These Egyptian youngsters, in other words, are immediately identified by Bella/Victoria as citizens of Glasgow – miniature versions of herself and her lost baby – and she at once attempts to take them back to Glasgow with her, only to be prevented by Astley and Hooker on the grounds that they will not be allowed out of the port and onto the ship. The section of her letter reproduced by photogravure, with the ‘blurring caused by tear stains’ and the rips in the paper caused by the pressure of her pen strokes (p. 144), carries material evidence of her immediate reaction back to Glasgow, as a substitute for the children and her yearning to be of use to them.

Bella/Victoria’s letter reproduced by photogravure

Later, Astley points out that the scene in which Bella/Victoria saw the girl and baby might be substituted for the Glasgow doll’s house as a miniature model of capitalist society. In seeing it, he tells her, Bella/Victoria has

seen a working model of nearly every civilized nation. The people on the veranda were the owners and rulers – their inherited intelligence and wealth set them above everyone else. The crowd of beggars represented the jealous and incompetent majority, who were kept in their place by the whips of those on the ground between: the latter represented policemen and functionaries who keep society as it is. (pp. 175-6).

For Astley, this model is like the doll’s house in its inertia; there is no better practical structure to replace it with, though he scrupulously lists the alternative political movements Bella could join in her futile quest to change it, each with its own shortcomings, or so he claims. Then after finishing his list he offers her another doll’s house to play with – a real one. After listing the political choices available to her, he proposes marriage: ‘Marry me,’ he prompts, since

My country estate has a farm on it and a [whole] village – think of the power you will have. Besides caring for my children (who we will not send to public schools) you can bully me into improving the drains and lowering the rents of a whole community. I am offering you the chance to be as happy and good as an intelligent woman can be on this filthy planet. (p. 163).

Bella/Victoria refuses, on the grounds that he has merely offered her ‘the most cunning inducement to lead a wholly selfish life you could offer a woman’ (p. 164). Instead she commits herself to one of the political options he listed – Socialism, whose adherents aim ‘to tax the surplus of the rich and make laws to give everyone productive work in good conditions, along with good food, housing, education and health care’ (p. 161) – a vision pretty much consonant with Godwin’s. And having made this choice, she returns to Glasgow to take her place once again in the ‘tall, gloomy terrace house’ in Park Circus (p. 22), and transform it into a model for the Socialist state.

After all, the house is part way there already. In his medical career Godwin has treated factory workers and animals there for free, while he always uses the back door intended for servants as his preferred entrance (p. 26), and presents the former housekeeper Mrs Dinwiddie to strangers as his mother, despite the fact that she conceived him out of wedlock (he can afford to do this, Bella/Victoria points out, because of his private income). The social hierarchy, in other words, has been partly excluded from this building, though Godwin remains master there in legal terms. Godwin’s affection for and education of Bella/Victoria brought an end to his philanthropic activities, but on her return from Alexandria Bella kick-starts them again, first by demanding to return to Egypt to find and adopt the girl and infant. Godwin informs her that this is impractical, but that there are hundreds of equally destitute children in Glasgow’s East End. He brings home this fact, so to speak, by pointing out that the worst slums can be found on the spot where the nearby University once stood in the East End of the city – its move to the West End, on the next hill along from Park Circus, having been precisely designed to remove it from the dispiriting sight of crowded slums in the University’s back yard.

The ‘sham Gothic’ University of Glasgow, facing the Park

But Godwin also suggests that it is no good adopting children you cannot train to look after themselves in adulthood, and that before this can be done you must learn to look after yourself; the often tritely-used Victorian proverb ‘charity begins at home’ is recalled throughout this section of the novel. Bella/Victoria determines to train as a doctor, and it’s from 18 Park Circus that Godwin plots her difficult path to a medical degree at the University. It’s at 18 Park Circus, too, that he suggests the best role for her husband-to-be, Dr McCandless: he is to be a public health officer because there are ‘no better public benefactors than those who [strive] to make Glasgow better watered, drained and lit – better housed, in fact’ (p. 198). In fact, Victoria’s postscript tells us, Archibald held this role for only a year, after which he effectively became a househusband (Victoria even describes him as ‘a very good wife’ at one point [p. 303]), focusing his energies on improving his home, above all for the benefit of his children. Under his eye the house became what it was before – a place of practical learning – and the couple’s three sons were trained there in socialist principles, and treated to affectionate cuddles (by their father at least) till the age of ten. After this they were sent to Glasgow High School, where they came disastrously into contact with military training and imperialist propaganda.

The editor’s notes at the end of the book trace the future history of the house in Park Circus, in the process developing its significance as a representative part of society in the first half of the twentieth century. Its connection with Socialism continued, so the notes suggest, from the 1890s to the 1920s and 30s, when literary figures like H G Wells (with whom Bella/Victoria had a brief affair) and later Hugh MacDiarmid (with whom she didn’t) and political figures like the revolutionary socialist John Maclean were frequent visitors. The fortunes of the house were depleted by the amount of money Bella/Victoria poured into her clinic in the Cowcaddens, where working-class women and children could go for medical treatment and training, safe and sanitary childbirth, or abortions, paying only what they could afford. By the 1920s Bella/Victoria’s residential space in the Park Circus building was reduced to the basement, to which she moved her clinic after the Scottish medical establishment conspired to have the Cowcaddens clinic shut down. The rest of the house – no longer needed as a family home since the death of her three boys during and after the Great War – was let out, first to university students, then to artists and dancers, turning it from a medical and political hub into ‘one of several unofficial little arts centres flourishing in or near Sauchiehall Street’ during the Second World War (p. 315). In this way it embodies the successive processes of expansion and shrinkage to which the ambitions of British Socialism were subjected in the first half of the twentieth century, from the confines of a single building to the world, from the circuit of a city to the bounds of the United Kingdom, ending on the seeming fulfilment of those ambitions with the election of a Labour Government in 1945. Bella/Victoria hails this moment in a letter to MacDiarmid, while also describing the diminution of her own household to a single Newfoundland dog, and of her client list to a few children’s pets and a couple of hypochondriacs (p. 317). On this sweet-sour note the novel ends, as Bella/Victoria confidently predicts the emergence of a ‘worker’s co-operative nation’ that never came to pass. It’s a vision that will have seemed as improbable in the Tory-governed Britain of 1992, when the novel was published, as the suggestion put forward in the final paragraph that when she died Bella/Victoria’s brain was 66 and her body 92.

Drawing and plan of Park Circus, Glasgow, from Poor Things

Meanwhile the editor’s notes have also identified the house in Park Circus as a site of historical contention. The archivist Michael Donnelly who discovered Archibald’s manuscript uses it as evidence that Archibald’s story is a fabrication. While the manuscript describes the house as having a ‘narrow garden between high walls’, Donnelly’s visit to the building confirms ‘that the space between back entrance and coach-house is too small and sunken to have ever been more than a drying-yard’ (p. 280). The editor Gray, equally determined to prove the manuscript truthful, retorts that this only proves that the coach-house was erected at a later date. The historical-architectural bickering continues in a subsequent note, where the editor tells us Donnelly has shown him the architect’s plans for 18 Park Circus, which include the coach-house, and responds that the fact ‘an architect designed such a feature would not prevent it being built much later’ (p. 285). These different readings of the ‘gloomy terrace house’ transform it into a Frankenstein’s creature of a building, cobbled together in various shapes according to the desires and interests of those who ‘read’ it, a museum curator and a writer-artist, both involved in an imaginative engagement with the intersection of past and future, the known and the unknown, the hoped-for and the actual, the remembered and the forgotten.

Overlapping, too, in the space of the house is the playful utopian space conjured up by Archibald in his memoirs – where he, Godwin and Bella/Victoria cohabit ‘in perfect equality’, having undergone what Victoria calls an ‘equality of deprivation in their childhood (p. 274) – and the unequal space it becomes in Bella/Victoria’s postscript and the editor’s notes. The postscript is devastatingly honest about Bella/Victoria’s contempt for Archibald, for his series of useless self-published books (including a play about Burke and Hare, an epic poem about the Borders cannibal Sawney Bean, and a volume of childhood reminiscences), and for the state of dreamy idleness into which his medical career descended, leaving him a homebody unconcerned with anyone’s happiness but his own and his little family’s. The notes, meanwhile, expose Bella/Victoria’s own decline into obscurity, from being the first female graduate of the medical school at the University of Glasgow, with elevated Socialist convictions, to a solitary idealist whose entire family has predeceased her, dreaming of an impossible future in the narrow confines of a West End basement. Like Archibald’s career, Bella/Victoria’s could be said to go nowhere, side-tracked by idle dreams; and like Archibald she compensates for its increasing irrelevance by self-publishing a series of texts which have as little practical effect as any fantastic narrative.

The subject of Bella/Victoria’s self-published pamphlets is domesticity. After the Great War she is riddled with guilt for what she considers to be her part in the deaths of her sons, blaming herself for the relentless busy-ness that meant she gave little time to their emotional needs, and driving them by neglect into the service of the British Empire. She is convinced their deaths had their roots in her own behaviour, believing that she somehow managed to instil in the boys a sense of the profound contempt in which she held the male body and mind, and which she had imagined herself to be directing only at her husband. For her, their attraction to the military offered perfect proof of their self-disgust. To placate her sense of guilt, she publishes the last of her pamphlets under the title A Loving Economy – A Mother’s Recipe for the End of All National and Class Warfare. The word ‘economy’, as A History Maker reminds us, derives from the ‘Old Greek word for the art of keeping a home weatherproof and supplied with what the householders need’ (p. v). Bella/Victoria’s pamphlet extols the virtue of ‘cuddling’, which refers to the practice of a child sharing a bed with its parents, where ‘it will learn all about love-making and birth control by practical example’, and grow up ‘free of the Oedipus complex, penis envy and other diseases discovered or invented by Doctor Freud’ (p. 308). Contemporary reviews of the pamphlet – accusing Bella/Victoria of erotomania – force her to close her Cowcaddens clinic and retreat to the confines of the West End house. Most of the pamphlets remain undistributed and unread, like Archibald’s literary efforts. Victoria’s recommendation of a new household economy diminishes her influence largely to the circuits of her own household – where her childrearing had already proved ineffectual against the influence of imperialist propaganda. In the process she is effectively erased from a public history which is not yet ready to recognise how ‘private’ domestic practices may lie at the roots of all that is rotten in twentieth-century public life.

Equestrian statue of Lord Roberts near Park Circus, Glasgow. An inspiration for General Blessington?

At this point it’s worth returning to the concept of complicity. How we live, Gray’s novel suggests, on the smallest social scale – as single people, couples and families – makes us complicit in innumerable ways with the large-scale political failures and successes of the community we inhabit. We are made by our environment, yes, but we also make the environment that makes us and our children; our household economy interacts with the larger economy of our neighbourhood, nation and world. The novel traces the way Godwin’s household both reflects on the global economy as it is and offers hope for a new economy as it might be; several new economies, in fact, depending on which version of his household we choose to accept. Alongside his household there are others which reflect a desire to live quite differently, and whose influence can be clearly seen in the archives of history. The most interesting of these alternative households is that of Bella/Victoria’s first husband, General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington, a great man of history – like the brilliant scientist Godwin Baxter – who has been removed from history, thanks to the disgrace of his suicide. Sir Aubrey is famous at the time of his death for acts of brutal destruction, having waged war on the enemies of British imperialism all over the Empire. As we learn more about him, however, it emerges that Sir Aubrey has been bred to wage war on himself; he is consumed with self-loathing, disgusted by his own body and its ill-managed desires, and correspondingly disgusted by the women to whom he feels attracted. His damaged limbs are a consequence of repeated efforts at self-destruction on the battlefield; his penchant for sado-masochism in brothels stems from the same impulse; while his ruined marriage is the result of an inbred contempt for the affections that bind one human being to another, and for the anatomies that propagate those affections. At the end of Archibald’s narrative occurs a scene in which Sir Aubrey seeks to snatch Bella/Victoria back from Godwin; the scene begins in Lansdowne Parish Church but quickly transfers to 18 Park Circus. It culminates in a chapter, titled ‘Blessington’s Last Stand’ (p. 234), in which Sir Aubrey barks out orders and wields a weapon as if on the battlefield, all in the living room of Godwin’s ‘tall, gloomy terrace house’, before being defeated by the powerful woman he seeks to control. At the moment of his defeat, Bella/Victoria snatches his pistol from him and aims it at his chest and Sir Aubrey bellows at her in a kind of ecstasy, ‘SHOOT! I ORDER YOU TO SHOOT!’ At this moment, Archibald tells us, ‘to my ears the order rang backward in history through Balaclava, Waterloo, Culloden and Blenheim to Agincourt and Crécy’ (p. 236). ‘This historical command and passionate plea,’ he goes on, ‘were so powerful that I imagined all the men killed in his battles rising from their graves to shoot him where he stood’ (p. 237). Sir Aubrey’s cry knits the field of battle to the living room carpet, just as Bella/Victoria’s pamphlet knits it to the bedroom by prescribing a capacious double bed as an antidote to war. History has its roots in the household, the space that for so many generations history did not acknowledge, the little space that makes us.

Page design for Poor Things, Chapter 22, with section of lost Who’s Who entry for General Blessington

As it happens, that historical figure General Blessington does not feature in British history. He was erased from Who’s Who after his suicide, either because he disgraced himself by this final act of unauthorised self-destruction (as against authorised self-destruction in military action) or because he had the temerity to die for personal reasons, for causes rooted in the household rather than the state. His disappearance from the history books renders his presence in Gray’s novel an irrelevance, and the book itself a luxury item, filled as it is with fantastically imagined things and people who do not feature in the factual narratives that bestow cultural capital on their readers. Godwin Baxter, Bella/Victoria, Archibald McCandless, all exist (imaginatively speaking) in the forgotten corners of the archives, as shadows at the edges of the old etchings with which the editor fills the last pages of the novel. Spending time and money on them would seem to be an act of reckless self-indulgence, on the part of both the reader and the writer-artist. The care and artistry that have been lavished on the hardback edition of the book – all that strictly unnecessary labour – render it more self-indulgent still, an item to be rejected by pragmatists: financiers, scientists, evangelists, politicians. Except that the book exposes the dreams and desires that suffuse economics, science, politics and evangelism, binding them together with our ungainly bodies and the material conditions of our lives, identifying them as the energies that drive us. It invites us to reconsider what history is, and how it relates to the fantastic. And that’s a story that gets continued in its fine appendix, A History Maker – the subject of a follow-up blog post in a few weeks’ time.

 

Magical Journeys in Sixteenth-Century Prose Fiction

Ulysses and the Sirens, by Herbert James Draper (1909)

Journeys in the sixteenth century were woven around with magic. Classical precedent meant that any educated sailor could expect to meet a bewildering variety of supernatural obstacles on a sea voyage, from Sirens, sea monsters and Cyclopes to the enchantresses Circe, Calypso and Medea. Even writers who thought these phenomena fantastical invoked them as potent metaphors for the genuine perils of early modern travel. Circe in particular stood for temptations of the flesh and spirit that threatened to turn travellers aside from their educational, religious or political objectives. And for the celebrated teacher Roger Ascham, the highest concentration of such temptations was to be found in Catholic Italy, whose people and customs were capable of transforming English tourists into beasts or demons, with disastrous effects on the island nation that produced them.[1]

Even Italians, Ascham claims, fear an Englishman infected with the virus of Italianism. ‘Englese Italianato, e un diabolo incarnato’, he cites them as saying in his influential tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and he goes on to list the specific forms of devilry carried home to England by youths returning from Rome:

for Religion, Papistrie or worse: for learning, lesse commonly then they caried out with them: for pollicie, a factious hart, a discoursing head, a mynde to medle in all mens matters: for experience, plenty of new mischieves never knowne in England before: for maners, varietie of vanities, and chaunge of filthy lyving. These be the inchantementes of Circes, brought out of Italie, to marre mens maners in England.[2]

Catholicism, ignorance, treason, clever talk, an interfering nature, voracious lechery – such are the toxic side effects of spells cast on the unwary English student who strays too close to Venice or the Vatican, refashioning him into an ungainly monster with ‘the belie of a Swyne, the head of an Asse, the brayne of a Foxe, the wombe of a wolfe’ (p. 228) whose sole purpose is to spread the twin diseases of false religion and sexual promiscuity throughout his native country. And travel, Ascham adds, need not be physical to work its deadly mutations. Italian soil can be imported to England in the form of books, and Italian books translated into English can do twenty times more damage than any trip to Naples. Travel weaves its deadly enchantments in the head, which is why the young traveller, whether in foreign books or foreign countries, needs to cultivate the godliness and ingenuity of the greatest of travellers, Ulysses, if he is to keep a fragile hold on his identity during his wanderings.

John William Waterhouse, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses (1891)

At the same time, the seductiveness of travel is taken as read by the moralists who rail against it. Circe, the Sirens, Calypso, Medea – all are deeply alluring to the vagabonds who cross their path. And the notion of travel itself, with its dissolution of boundaries and obligations, its pleasures erotically tangled up with its perils, its encounters with wonderful novelties and antiquities of art and nature – there is a magic to it which, as Ascham acknowledges, incites young Englishmen to ‘go, and ryde, and flie’ after ‘the Siren songes of Italie’ (pp. 228, 226). What more natural for aspiring authors, then, than to harness this metaphorical magic in their own books by sending their protagonists on a literally magical journey? A voyage by a fiery chariot, perhaps, cutting the tedium of a long-haul sea voyage to a few short hours of flight; or an excursion to somewhere no one else has ever visited, like the moon, the stars, the underworld; or a succession of close encounters with figures from myth or history or legend. To narrate such a journey is to set your mind at liberty for a while and question everything your teachers told you about right and wrong, truth and falsehood, the orthodox and the heretical. It is to discover that thought is free (as Stephano and Trinculo did with Caliban’s help), and that mobility can make your actions as unencumbered as your thought is.[3] And if anybody challenges you about the ideological implications of your fantastic journey – well, you can always say with Lucian that you never claimed to be giving an account of anything real, just indulging in a little jeu d’esprit to relax the exhausted minds of busy readers.[4]

Besides the chivalric romance, two major traditions of prose fiction sought to exploit the imaginative possibilities of the magical journey in the Tudor period. The better known of these is the magical jest-book, most successfully represented by the Europe-wide bestseller Virgilius – first translated into English, and printed by Jan van Doesborch, in about 1518 – whose protagonist embarks on a career of conjuring, sexual adventure, and flamboyant trickery, which provided a template for the legends of Dr Faustus.[5] The other tradition was that of Lucianic satire: a witty, highly inventive literary exercise derived from the work of the Syrian satirist Lucian. The translation of some of Lucian’s dialogues by the celebrated humanists Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More set him for a while at the heart of the English school curriculum; he was used to teach both Greek and Latin, despite his reputation for irreverence and even blasphemy;[6] and his status in Protestant countries was enhanced by the fact that two of his works were placed on the papal Index of forbidden books in 1559, followed by the rest in 1590.[7] From a twenty-first century perspective, these two traditions – the magical jest-book and the Lucianic satire – look as though they might have been aimed at two different classes of reader. The barely educated man or woman has seemed to many critics to be the obvious target audience for the exploits of a trickster magician; and the scholar has seemed the obvious recipient of Lucian’s dialogues, with their high density of literary allusions and their risqué, sophisticated subject matter. I’d like to suggest, though, that the two traditions were more closely linked than we tend to think. Thanks to Faustus, the magical jest-book became as closely associated with the Protestant Reformation as the works of Lucian, and as engaged with the serio-comic scrutiny of the triumphs and disasters of contemporary scholarship. The magical jest-book found its way into Tudor imitations of Lucian in the guise of ‘merry tales’, those pithy celebrations of spontaneous wit, scatological pranks, and inventive adultery. And both traditions fused in explosive fashion in the 1580s and early 1590s as components of the great burst of creativity that gave rise to Marlowe’s theatrical masterpiece Doctor Faustus, along with some equally energetic works of experimental prose fiction.

Mephistopheles, played by Arthur Darvil, in the Globe’s first production of Dr. Faustus (2012)

This essay about magical journeys, in fact, traces a journey that participates in the transformative magic of the narratives it discusses. Supernatural travel begins in the early years of the sixteenth century as a pleasure trip, spiced up by the presence of devils and the somewhat blasphemous resemblance between its protagonist’s peregrinations and those of a wonder-working saint, a second Saint Brendan. It becomes a tool of Protestant propaganda in the middle years of the century, tracking down the illegitimate activities of Catholics in England and beyond with the persistence of a good-humoured spymaster. And in the 1580s and 90s it undergoes another metamorphosis, mocking the religious inflexibility of Protestant moralists as cheerfully as it continues to deride the adherents of other religions. From one point of view, this is a voyage from exuberance to wittily articulated paranoia and back again to exuberance; and it provides a fascinating miniature model of the trajectory of English literature as a whole in the course of the Tudor period. But throughout the period there is a moral ambiguity about the magical journey that protects even its most propagandistic manifestations from charges of crudeness or simplicity. Authors who flirt with magic are playing with fire, and such perilous playfulness has little to do with preaching.

To begin with a magical jest-book, then: the most influential work of this kind before the Faustbuch – Virgilius – is a wish fulfilment fantasy that invites its readers to throw themselves headlong into the heady joys of imaginative travel. Virgilius himself is a strange alternative version of Virgil the poet, possessing at once the phenomenal powers ascribed by some to Virgil’s Aeneid (which could predict the future by way of a ritual called the Sortes Virgilianae, whereby readers chose a passage of the poem at random and then applied it to the circumstances of their own lives) and the dubious moral status of Aeneas himself, betrayer of his hometown Troy and his lover Dido.[8] The son of a Roman knight, Virgilius begins life as an ordinary schoolboy in Spain before stealing some necromantic books from a devil and reinventing himself as a teacher of thaumaturgy renowned across Europe for his learning and good looks. When his mother falls ill he does to her in Rome, where he quickly rises to become chief counsellor to the Emperor himself. His geographical mobility is as remarkable as the speed of his social rise. He goes to school in Tolleten – presumably Toledo, famous for sorcery – then moves to Rome and builds the city of Naples with his necromantic arts. In between, he indulges in a spot of sexual tourism. Finding himself unhappily married, he constructs a bridge of air and visits a soldan’s daughter on the other side of the Mediterranean. On being caught together by her father the couple flees across the airy viaduct, and it is for the princess that he builds his Neapolitan city by the sea. Power, sex and unlimited travel, then, derive in this book from books of magic – the volumes Virgilius purloins from the fiend. So too does danger, as the poet-magician’s exploits anticipate all Ascham’s anxieties about the deleterious effects of travel and Italian culture half a century before the publication of The Schoolmaster. And this combined promise of power and danger lends the book itself – the fiction purveyed by the anonymous author to his readers – a curiously amoral atmosphere, which may help to explain its Europe-wide success.

Virgilius the Sorcerer, by Aubrey Beardsley

The most fascinating thing about Virgilius is his unstable position as protagonist, which his freewheeling lifestyle serves to emphasize. What are we to think of him? We are never allowed a settled view of this magician as a jest-book hero. An immigrant in Rome, Virgilius begins by showing solidarity with the Roman poor, rewarding them for looking after his mother and providing them with free public services such as an efficient lighting system for the city. Later he becomes the patron of scholars, who are the most favoured citizens in the city he founds by magic, Naples. He is a successful lover, bowling over his eastern princess at first sight, and the world’s most powerful magician, twice defeating the Roman army. At the same time, all his encounters with women apart from the Soldan’s daughter prove unsatisfactory. A woman he fancies arranges to hoist him up to her bedroom window, only to leave him dangling in a basket for the world to laugh at; his wife destroys the magic image he made that robbed women of the desire to ‘do bodely lust’;[9] and an unfaithful wife gets the better of his patent lie detector, made in the shape of a metal serpent, with a simple but cunning ruse. As these incidents suggest, there are times when Virgilius has no sympathy at all with underdogs, male or female. He dedicates much of his time and energy to installing security systems to protect the Emperor’s interests: a palace designed to let him eavesdrop on the private conversations of his subjects; a brass horseman who enforces a curfew by slaughtering anyone who emerges from their houses after nightfall; a device for keeping tabs on the Roman dominions, installed in statues mounted on the Capitol. Such devices indicate the traveller-magician’s willingness to insinuate himself where he is not wanted, to pry into the minds and bedrooms of men and women, violating other people’s private space in a more insidious manner than any nosy tourist or itinerant scholar. And his undermining of his own heroic status is compounded by the manner of his death.

In the last chapter of the book Virgilius attempts to rejuvenate himself, using the tried and trusted method by which the enchantress Medea promised to rejuvenate King Pelias. The magician instructs his servant to chop him to bits and stow them in a barrel, then carefully tend a lamp hanging over the barrel for nine full days, after which the dismembered mage will be reborn as a beardless youth. Unfortunately, the Roman Emperor suspects the servant of having murdered his master and executes him before the nine days are over, after which a miracle does indeed occur – but not the one Virgilius intended:

Than sawe the Emperoure and all his folke a naked chylde .iii. tymes rennynge a boute the barell saynge the words. Cursed be the tyme that ye cam ever here / and with those words vanysshed the chylde a waye and was never sene a geyne and thus abyd Virgilius in the barell deed [i.e. dead]. (sig. F3r)

Ironically, given his status as the Emperor’s surveillance expert, Virgilius dies as a result of the Emperor’s eagerness to keep him under surveillance, which leads the dictator to break into his castle and stab his research assistant. Virgilius the spy is killed by an aggressive act of espionage; and his lifelong struggle to get the better of the supreme imperial authority – which began with a campaign to get back his father’s lands in Rome, and later saw Virgilius challenge the Emperor’s supremacy by setting up a rival metropolis – ends with power being restored to the Emperor again, albeit with the minor compensation that the latter never gets hold of the magician’s fabulous wealth, which remains secreted in an undiscovered cellar.

Virgilius the Sorcerer carries away the Princess of Babylon, by Henry Justice Ford (1906)

This scholar’s fantasy ends, then, by reinstating the political status quo, thus setting a precedent for the ultimate submission of magicians to their political masters, and the eventual entrapment of itinerant sorcerers, which is a regular feature of magical jest-books from the Faustbuch to Fortunatus. The return of the status quo is reinforced by the effacement of the wonders created with the help of the black arts. A traveller-magician builds many monuments but leaves few behind. The palace Virgilius built for the Emperor exists no longer. Neither do the surveillance statues he set up on the Capitol, or the lighting system he devised for Rome, or the airy bridge with which he abducted the soldan’s daughter, or his lie-detecting serpent. At each stage of the narrative the reader is invited to gawp like a tourist at Virgilius’s achievements in Rome and Naples; but should we wish to retrace his footsteps like a secular pilgrim, we shall be disappointed. All that remains of the magic that founded Naples is an egg suspended in a steeple (actually the Castel dell’Ovo on the island of Megaride), and the myth that the city will fall if the egg should break. The black arts of Virgilius have proved as short-lived as the man himself, ensuring that any traveller who seeks material traces of his passage can only bear witness to the rapid dissolution of his achievements in necromancy, despite his reputation as ‘the conyngest that ever was a fore or after in that scyence’ (sig. E3r).

Virgilius takes place in a pre-Christian society, and this along with its meticulous erasure of its protagonist and all his works helped it avoid religious censure. The sorcerer-poet’s errant behaviour poses no threat to the early modern authorities by virtue of its antiquity and the obliteration of its traces. But with the advent of the Reformation, the suspect qualities of the traveller (magical or otherwise) were multiplied a thousandfold by the pressures of religious conflict. In mid-Tudor England the uncertain credentials of every vagrant (where does he come from, who is his master, what is his agenda?) easily identified travellers with Catholic missionaries who sought to reclaim England for the Church; and the wonders they spoke of could easily be equated with the miracles and transubstantiations legitimized by Rome. During this period it was the satirist Lucian, with his reputation as the scourge of religious hypocrisy, whose accounts of fantastic voyages made him a favourite with English Protestants. William Baldwin’s brilliant anti-Catholic satire Beware the Cat (c. 1553), which is full of lying Catholic travellers, witches and magicians as well as the devious feline informers of the title, bears a close resemblance to Lucian’s Philopseudes (‘The Doubter’), translated by Thomas More in the first decade of the century.[10] And in 1564 the physician William Bullein introduced a still closer imitation of Lucian into this celebrated Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence (1564), in the form of the magical journey of a traveller called Mendax [i.e. liar, perhaps with a pun on mendicant or beggar], modelled as much on the sublime nonsense of Lucian’s True History as on the travels of Sir John Mandeville.[11]

William Bullein, from his Bulwarke of Defence against all Sicknesse, Soarenesse, and Woundes (1562)

In exchange for food, Bullein’s Catholic wanderer mesmerizes a London citizen with his strange accounts of the dragons, unicorns, giants, chess-playing parrots, tennis-playing apes and tree-climbing mermaids he has encountered on his worldwide peregrinations. His narrative is filled with hints at the abundant riches he has gained and lost, and with promises of future riches to be obtained by seizing certain ‘little fleting [i.e. floating] Islandes’ full of ‘Suger, Spice, Silke, Linnen, &c., readie made, and that will make readie money, and money maketh a man’ (p. 102). The islands are clearly ships to be snapped up in acts of piracy, and the whole narrative reeks of the greed for gold that fuelled the first great wave of Tudor exploration. The fact that buccaneering is advocated here by a Catholic makes it seem a Catholic vice rather than an English one – ironically enough, given the Dialogue’s publication in the lifetime of the English buccaneers and slave traders John Hawkins and Francis Drake.

But the satire of Bullein’s Dialogue is not exclusively directed at Catholics. Mendax’s story also satirizes the credulity of those Protestants who fall so easily for the tall stories told by beggarly ex-mariners and vagrant con artists. As proof of his veracity, Mendax offers his listeners his own dog, who is in fact (he claims) the victim of a spell like the one used by Circe to turn Ulysses’ companions into pigs. This dog, he insists, was once a boy who had the bad luck to be changed into a dog in the magical land of Ethiopia. In that country children grow on trees, which encourages cannibalism – a human being or an apple for breakfast, it makes no difference to an Ethiopian enchanter. Unfortunately, a recent team of Catholic missionaries did not know about this taste for human flesh, and got themselves consumed by hostile locals who disliked the new brand of magic the missionaries brought with them. Mendax and his boy were saved from consumption by their canine transformation at the hands of a friendly local; and the boy remains trapped in the form of a domestic pet. ‘This same is he,’ the traveller asserts:

he was a gentleman of a good house; he understandeth us well, and sometime was a proper man, and shoulde have maried with one in London called Jone Trim: whiche nowe are, God wot, of sondrie kyndes, but differ not in conditions, chast, religious, and kind harted. (p. 104)

Here the Circean metamorphosis performs a quite different function from the one it would have in Ascham’s treatise The Schoolmaster. The cannibalistic magicians of a distant land use it to protect themselves from the rapacious acquisitiveness of English visitors as well as from the agents of the Inquisition. In fact, foreignness has become naturalised in England as a result of religious division. The Englishman is as much a menace to his own countrymen as to the Africans whose goods and persons he covets, and young people of the island kingdom find themselves estranged from one another – rendered ‘of sondrye kyndes’ – by the bad religious company they find at home (where presumably the boy signed up for his ill-fated voyage to Africa). That the boy’s metamorphosis – indeed, the boy himself – is clearly a fiction invented by Mendax merely reinforces the point: it is Mendax, not the Ethiopians, who is the deadly enchanter of Bullein’s tale, seeking to take advantage of a naïve Londoner by charming him with seductive falsehoods and using Othello-esque tales to spirit away his gold. The Siren songs of Italy have already come home to roost on English soil.

Thomas More’s Island of Utopia (1518)

In fact Mendax goes on to suggest that the Western Archipelago itself is somehow ‘foreign’ to the idea of what it should be. He describes his visit to an antipodean Great Britain, whose Swiftian name (Taerg Natrib) implies that it is the inverted mirror image of his homeland. The capital city Nodnol is the ‘best reformed Citie of this woorlde’ (p. 105); there is ‘not one Papiste in all that lande […] no, nor one wicked liver’ (p. 106); churches are well attended, and ‘[t]here is not one Usurer: not one’ (p. 107). Disturbingly, Mendax’s lying account of his adventures ends with the biggest lie of all: that a version of Great Britain exists that is the ideal Protestant nation. Bullein here pulls off a conjuring trick worthy of the greatest Lucianist of all, the Catholic apologist Thomas More, by having a speaker of nonsense – a second Hythloday (whose name means ‘speaker of nonsense’ and who tells the story of More’s Utopia) – suddenly confront his readers with their own reversed reflection, to their intense discomfort. Protestant readers who have so far revelled in the satirist’s attack on papistry suddenly find themselves the butt of his excoriating pen, forced to acknowledge that they are as diseased as the hostile religionists they despise. Bullein’s Dialogue concerns the plague, and its point is that no one in England can escape either the punishment of that infection or responsibility for the sins that caused it.

We have now encountered both the magical jest-book and the Lucianic satire in English, although one should add that both Baldwin and Bullein incorporate plenty of jest-book material or ‘merry tales’ into their masterpieces. But in the decade after Bullein wrote hs Dialogue, we suddenly get evidence that two learned Englishmen, at least, recognised a generic kinship between the jest-book and the works of Lucian. On 20 December 1578 Edmund Spenser gave his friend the academic Gabriel Harvey a German jest-book called Till Eulenspiegel, translated as A Merry Jest of a Man Called Howleglas, together with two English jest-books and the Spanish picaresque ‘novel’ Lazarillo de Tormes, on condition that he read them all by New Year’s Day; ‘otherwise to forfeit unto him my Lucian in fower volumes’, as Harvey explains in his copy of Howleglas.[12] Clearly, itinerant trickster-heroes like the English jester-poet Henry or John Scoggin and the poet-priest John Skelton, whose jest-books Spenser gave to Harvey along with Howleglas, were seen as inhabiting the same comic universe as Lucian’s philosopher-slave Menippus – the man on whom Lucian modelled himself as a poet and a social commentator. All these texts, it would appear, made suitable Christmas reading, at least from Spenser’s point of view. The link between them was perhaps strengthened by the fact that Scoggin and Skelton were scholars, like Menippus, as would be the heroes of the two most famous magical jest-books of the following decade. Scoggin and Skelton were not magicians, but there is a necromantic aspect to some of their escapades that suggest they would have felt quite at home in the company of Virgilius or Fortunatus.

Gabriel Harvey, c. 1590

In 1578 Gabriel Harvey was a lecturer at Cambridge; Spenser may have been one of his students. Over the next few years his job could have put him in touch with several equally gifted young Cambridge students: Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, the experimental poet Abraham Fraunce, the teacher of French John Eliot.[13] One thing that links all these men is an interest in Lucianic magical journeys, which Harvey may have helped to stimulate with his ‘Lucian in fower volumes’. Fraunce published an amusing pastiche of Lucian’s True History in 1592, in which a trio of Cambridge scholars travels to heaven to consult with the pagan gods on a problem of astronomy.[14] Eliot printed a series of amusing passages on travel in his French and English textbook Ortho-epia Gallica (1593), taking much of his material from Rabelais and acknowledging Lucian’s influence (STC 7574, sig. B1v). Marlowe worked with Nashe on a Lucianic play about the seductive charms of the traveller Aeneas, Dido Queen of Carthage (c. 1593);[15] while Nashe’s Pierce Penniless (1592) owes much to Lucian’s Menippus and his journeys to the underworld. One gets the sense that the loosely-knit group of playwrights, poets and pamphleteers working in the 1580s and early 1590s known as the ‘University Wits’ felt an affinity with the learned Syrian satirist, especially the Cambridge contingent of that fellowship; and that they shared his delight in drawing on magic and the supernatural as instruments of satire.

But some of these Cambridge men were also interested in magical jest-books. Marlowe used the English translation of the German Faustbuch, The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr John Faustus (c. 1588), as the source for his greatest play; and Greene drew on an English jest-book, The Famous History of Friar Bacon (c. 1590), when he penned his own Faustian tragicomedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1590).[16] Evidently, one of the features of the Faustbuch that most appealed to its English translator P.F. – and which gets picked up in Marlowe’s play – was the vivid account it gave of Faustus’s travels. Not content with rendering the Doctor’s journeys as they are given in the original, P.F. adds many new details about, among other things, the city of Kraków and the tomb of Virgilius near Naples. Details like these make the central section of his translation read like a supernatural Baedeker or Rough Guide – making it ‘perhaps the most lively brief travelogue of the sixteenth century’[17] – and it is in these central sections that the master magician is permitted most unequivocally to assume the status of a jest-book hero, punching the Pope and stealing his food without a peep of authorial indignation. When Faustus acts out the naughtiest dreams of good German or English Protestants he can be permitted to play his pranks unimpeded, although his famous deal with the devil – to say nothing of the portentous title page – makes it inevitable that his story will end in disaster.

Roger Bacon, from Symbola Aureae by Michael Maier (1617)

Friar Bacon, on the other hand, engineers a cheerful ending for his story, burning his books, renouncing his craft, and saving his soul on the brink of damnation. To justify this redemption, the anonymous author has him devote his entire career to the service of the English monarch; and his geographical stability as a resident of England helps to confirm the relative moral stability of his character, as compared with those shifty wanderers Virgilius and Faustus. Instead of travelling himself, Bacon makes other people travel to him. He conjures Russians, Poles, Indians and Armenians to meet the English king in Oxford, bearing ‘sundry kinds of furres’ as if in celebration of the productive sort of travel indulged in by the English Muscovy Company.[18] He sends his German rival Vandermast flying home through the air to his wife after beating him in a conjuring contest. And he seeks to procure England’s safety by all means necessary. The Friar constructs his famous brazen head not for personal gain but to protect his country from its enemies by surrounding it with a giant wall of brass. Had he succeeded, he would also have cut the English off from the possibility of foreign travel, penning up the Englishman’s identity once and for all by barring him from shopping for outlandish continental fashions. He fails to build the wall, of course; but Bacon’s failures serve not as judgments on his character but to affirm for him the weaknesses of necromancy when set against the will of God – a lesson which like any good proto-Protestant he proves ready and willing to learn.

Like Virgilius, Bacon is an expert in the art of surveillance; but unlike his Roman predecessor his surveillance devices end up by making him see how closely he himself is watched by the divinity. At one point he constructs a mirror capable of showing what is going on at a distance – thus once again obviating the need for travel. But a pair of young men use the mirror to watch their fathers kill each other, and they avenge these deaths by fighting each other to the death in imitation of their parents. This incident is what makes Bacon renounce magic, burn his books, and become a ‘true penitent Sinner, and an Anchorite’ or hermit.[19] So the English book, like Virgilius, ends in a decisive act of self-censorship, symbolically stamping out the trade in inflammatory texts that caused such anxiety to Roger Ascham, and committing its protagonist to solitude, bookishness, and meditative silence.

Robert Greene in his grave clothes, from John Dickenson’s Greene in Conceit (1598)

It is well known that Marlowe and Greene wrote plays based on these two magical jest-books. What is less well known, perhaps, is the extent to which they themselves became the topic of magical jest-books after their deaths.[20] Greene in particular had a hugely active afterlife following his death in September 1592. He and the comic actor or clown Dick Tarleton (who died in 1588) embarked on a series of Lucianic journeys through Heaven, Hell and Purgatory in a number of ebullient pamphlets, from the anonymous Tarleton’s News Out of Purgatory (1590) to Greene’s News Out of Heaven and Hell (1593) by Barnaby Rich. Indeed, so many of these posthumous pamphlets were published that the cover illustration for John Dickenson’s Greene in Conceit (1598) shows Greene scribbling away in his grave-clothes, as far from decay six years after his death as he had been six years before it. As they wander through the afterlife, Greene and Tarleton make a mockery of the religious wars of the Reformation by co-opting both the fictional region of Purgatory (speaking from a Protestant perspective) and the very real realm of Hell as a source of gossip and merry tales. And in Henry Chettle’s Kind-Heart’s Dream (1593) their ghosts take up verbal arms to defend the theatre, which had been graphically linked to Hell by the anti-theatrical lobbyist William Rankins in 1587.[21] It is Tarleton who makes the best case in this text for tolerating drama, insisting that:

Mirth in seasonable time taken is not forbidden by the austerest sapients [i.e. wise people]. But indeed there is a time of mirth, and a time of mourning. Which time having been by Magistrates wisely observed, as well for the suppressing of Playes, as other pleasures: so likewise a time may come, when honest recreation shall have his former libertie. (STC 5123, sig. C4r).

The magical journeys in these posthumous pamphlets not only purge their dead theatrical protagonists of their sins, but constitute a serial celebration of imaginative freedom. Clearly, the literary scene had changed quite drastically since the aggressive anti-Catholic satires of Baldwin and Bullein in the 1550s and 60s.

Greene’s ghostly travels had a happy ending: he finished as an inhabitant of a Lucianic underworld at the beginning of Dickenson’s Greene in Conceit, listening appreciatively as the Cynic philosophers Menippus and Diogenes torment the spirits of the rich for their desperate desire to get back to their self-indulgent lifestyles. Greene evidently feels at home with these classical satirists who earned a reputation, like himself, for excoriating secret vices. And Marlowe too, I would suggest, ended by being redeemed in a work of supernatural fiction: an extraordinary magical jest-book called The Second Report of Doctor John Faustus.

A seventeenth-century engraving of Doctor Faustus and a friend

Entered in the Stationer’s Register in November 1593 and published in 1594, the anonymous Second Report begins by demonstrating its intention to continue in the role played by the first English Faust book, the Damnable Life, as a Rough Guide to supernatural Europe. It opens with a detailed account of all the tourist sights associated with Faustus in Wittenberg, most of which had been visited by the traveller Fynes Morrison in 1590.[22] Even more than Virgilius, the Second Report encourages the sort of magic-themed tourism that Morrison indulged in; it also includes an elaborate description of Vienna, the backdrop for the spectacular thaumaturgic events of the book’s second half. But there is a big difference in tone between the Second Report’s willingness to indulge the reader’s curiosity as to the material evidence of Faustus’s adventures and the Damnable Life’s insistence on its own moral function as a deterrent to curiosity. And this genial indulgence of the reader’s taste for the supernatural extends to its indulgence of Faustus himself, who reappears in the Second Report as a devilish trickster, as well as to Fuastus’s young servant Wagner, who acquires the forename Kit as if to align him with the controversial playwright who was stabbed to death six months before the Second Report was registered.

In fact allusions to Marlowe are stamped all over this jest-book like the fingerprints of a ghost. The first half is a Faustian tract, narrating the adventures of Kit Wagner as he takes up the black arts his master practised. The second half is set in Vienna, which is under siege by the Turks and is clearly, among other things, a pastiche of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Both halves are packed with references to the theatre. Wagner first meets the ghost of Faustus in ‘the same Hall wherein his Maisters latest Tragedy was perfourmed’;[23] and when he later decides to summon Faustus formally, with a spell, the ghost arrives in a pageant like the masque of the Seven Daedly Sins in Doctor Faustus, preceded by a miniature devil ‘as it were the Prologue of a Comedy’ (sig. B2v), and culminating in the dead doctor’s coronation. Later still, when a messenger from the Duke of Austria seeks a demonstration of Wagner’s necromantic skills, the young man mounts a performance of Doctor Faustus with a cast of devils in the sky above Wittenberg. Wagner’s activities as a young theatrical impresario align him with Kit Marlowe as strongly as does his nickname; and they also gradually transform the jest-book into a cheeky defence of the stage – or rather of the imagination, whether in the theatre or in print – even livelier and more impertinent than the one mounted by Tarleton in Kind-Heart’s Dream.

Design by Orson Welles for the costume of Wagner (1937)

A gradual change of tone takes place between the first half and the second half of the Second Report. The first frequently pays lip-service to the moral severity of the Damnable Life; Wagner is racked with remorse of conscience as he drifts into necromancy, and the dire consequences of such magical dabblings are mentioned often. When Faustus is crowned by devils, for instance, the author warns: ‘his wretchednes made [him] a king, and his new-found king-ship nothing’ (sig. B3r); and such interjections invest the first few chapters with some of the menacing atmosphere of the Damnable Life. But as the book goes on, the moral interventions decline in number, to be replaced by an implied imaginative complicity with the events that are being narrated. When Mephistopheles notices that Wagner has got a little depressed by his account of the psychological effects of Hell, he offers him a young woman to restore his spirits, who is described in lascivious details from head to foot – although the author insists the description is ‘farre more copious’ in the non-existent German original (sig. D4v). at the end of the chapter Wagner goes to bed with her, passing the night ‘in such pleasure as I could find in my heart to enjoy or any man (unlesse an Euenuch beside)’ (sig. E1r). The author and the male reader are suddenly in bed with Wagner, both imaginatively and morally speaking, and the theological connotations of the scene are all but forgotten.

The reason for this transformation, it seems to me, lies in the ludic attitude to fiction that gradually comes to dominate the text. It is an attitude much like Lucian’s in his True History, which begins by insisting on its own fictional status and mocking those accounts of impossible journeys that masquerade as reportage. ‘Let this voluntary confession forestall any future criticism’, Lucian declares. ‘I am writing about things entirely outside my own experience or anyone else’s, things that have no reality whatever and never could have’. As we have seen, the True History was in vogue in the early 1590s, when Abraham Fraunce published an imitation of it less than a year before the Second Report was entered in the Stationer’s Register. And the jest-book tales a similar delight on toying with ideas of truth and falsehood.

The house in Wittenberg where Faustus was dismembered

The description of Faustian tourist sites in Wittenberg, for instance, seems designed to contrast the accuracy of the Second Report with the ‘many things in the first book’ that are ‘meere lies’ (sig. A4r) – for instance, its claim to be a translation, when in fact it expands considerably on the original, especially in the section where Faustus discusses philosophy with Mephistopheles. ‘Let a man mark [these discussions] duely,’ the narrator goes on, ‘they shall finde them I will not saie childish, but certainly superficiall, not like the talk of Divels, where with foldings of words they doe use to dilate at large, and more subtell by farre’ (sig. A4r). The implication is that the Second Report will be a more accurate as well as a more naturalistic narrative, and that the material remains of Faustus (the ruins of his house, a hollow tree where he taught magic to his scholars, the stone he engraved with his own epitaph) may be taken as proof of its authenticity. But the Second Report is even less of a translation than the first, although a German Wagner book did in fact exist by the time of its composition. The text has nothing to do with any German original. And when a philosophical discussion takes place between Wagner and Faustus’s ghost, it lays no stronger claim to authenticity than the Faustus-Mephistopheles dialogue in the Damnable Life. The only proof that this discussion took place are the bruises Wagner shows to his friends afterwards, which he claims to have received when Faustus battered him for doubting he could come back from the dead. ‘As for the disuptations betwixte those two in this place,’ the narrator goes on, ‘consider from whose braines they proceede, for you must give the Germane leave to shew his Art, for witte for the most part they have very little, but that which they toile for like Cart horses’ (sig. C3v). The narrator, in other words, insists that his supernatural dialogue is as crudely conceived as the dialogue he criticized in the first Faust book. Both books betray their fictionality by their style; and this should alert even the most timid of readers to the fact that they are not dabbling in forbidden knowledge when they turn their pages.

All the early episodes are framed by mildly anti-German quips like this one, suggesting that the legend of Faustus is ‘whetted over with the dropping of the Tappe exceedingly’ (sig. C3v) – that is, soaked in beer, which had been identified by the Tudor travel-writer and jest-book author Andrew Borde as a weakness of the Dutch and Germans. Chapter 2 is a case in point, with its title (‘How certaine drunken Dutchmen [i.e. Germans] were abused by theyr owne conceite and selfe imagination, of seing […] Doctor Faustus’, sig. B4v) being reinforced by the chapter’s final sentence: ‘Many odde pranks Faustus is made the father of, which are […] so merely smelling of the Caske, that a man may easily know the childe by the father’ (sig. B4v). This is not just random xenophobia. The effect of the thick, beery vapours that envelop these early episodes is to disarm them by rendering them wholly imaginative – the products not of Satanic influence but of excessive drinking. Thus gradually the moral implications of Wagner’s transactions with damnable spirits get dissipated by the author’s repeated assertions – disguised as reassurances of his text’s veracity – that what he is telling is no more than a silly fiction. Few Elizabethan writers more cleverly illustrate Sidney’s statement in the Apology for Poetry that the poet ‘nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’ – that he is, in fact, not dangerous.[24] It is even tempting to believe that the writer could have had access to Sidney’s Apology, despite the fact that it only saw print two years after the Second Report went to press.

The journey on which the reader is taken in this text is, in fact, a trip from realism to mock-romance, from fictional biography to Rabelaisian nonsense. One step of the process is marked by the moment when the reader is invited to become complicit with Wagner’s liaison with the young woman. The episode drifts into the realm of romance when Mephistopheles disguises Wagner as the girl’s husband:

O wonder, his habite was changed with his thought, and he was no longer Wagner but Armisuerio the Ladies Lorde. And to be short this new Armisuerio and old Wagner mette with the Lady, and saluting her in the best kind of Bon noche, used her as he would doe his Lady, and shee him as her Lord. (sig. D4v)

The register of the narrative here shifts from the half-sombre tone it has had till now to the cheeky register of Ariosto. An Italian name introduces the lascivious Italianate encounter, and the name Armisuerio, with its gesture towards the terms for ‘true’ and ‘weapons’ (vero, armi), transports readers to the fabulous world of Charlemagne, as mapped out by Sir John Harington in his recent translation of Orlando Furioso (1591). Later the author confirms this link with Orlando by translating a poem in ‘Aristos vaine’ (sig. F2r). And once the scene has shifted again to Vienna, the narrative opens out into a fully-fledged pastiche of a romantic epic.

Gustave Doré, scene from Orlando Furioso

The siege of Vienna is dominated by a whacky Rabelaisian duel between the Holy Roman Emperor – Charlemagne’s descendant – and the Great Turk, a combat as ornately chivalric as it is ridiculous. The duel is complicated by the fact that the Christian combatant is mounted on a giant horse – big enough to be ‘the son of Gargantuas’ (sig. H2v) – and the Turk on a monstrous elephant. There is a great deal of ineffectual slashing and stabbing with weapons that are much too short, together with improbably agile side-stepping of potentially lethal blows. By this stage the text has stopped insisting on its fictive nature, and relaxed instead into a narrative so flamboyant that it could never be mistaken for realism. By this stage, too, the cold didacticism of the first half has completely vanished. Like the English conjurer Friar Bacon before them, Wagner, Faustus and their devilish companions devote their skills to the defence of Christian territory against foreign invasion, and as a result the author’s disapproval of the black arts is cast aside – just as in the text the religious differences between Christians are temporarily set aside for the fight against the Turk, with Catholics and Protestants joining together to defend the elements of faith they hold in common.

Even the Turks are not presented here as out-and-out villains. The Great Turk accepts the Holy Roman Emperor’s challenge to single combat with all the aplomb of a Carolingean paladin. In the final battle he meets his end like a hero, ‘fighting manfully on his Elephant’ (sig. K2r). Meanwhile his nemesis Kit Wagner, unlike the Wagner of the German Wagner book, avoids death altogether; we never learn what happens to him after the central role he played in the Turk’s defeat. Friar Bacon retired to the life of a hermit; but the Second Report ends with very un-eremitic celebrations, as the Christian princes ‘caused generall feasts and triumphs to be performed in all theyr kingdoms, provinces, and territories whatsoever’ (sig. K2r). For all we know, Wagner took part in the German leg of these celebrations; and we never see him suffer for the infernal pact that put him at the centre of them.

Gustave Doré, scene from Orlando Furioso

The journey of the Second Report – from England, where the author originated, to a beer-befuddled Germany, to Vienna, to the land of romance – can be read, I think, as a voyage of liberation; a pilgrimage towards the moment predicted in Kind-Heart’s Dream ‘when honest recreation shall have his former libertie’. The book’s breaching of geographical boundaries corresponds to its breaching of moral conventions, a repudiation of the defensive religiosity that put literature in fetters during the early phases of the Reformation.[25] The point of this narrative’s exuberant trajectory may well be that the most flamboyant fictions of page and stage are not finally damnable but inspiring – like the works of the satirist Lucian, or his successors Rabelais and Ariosto, or the outrageous experimental theatre of Kit Marlowe. It is a celebration of the imagination and its ability to cross gulfs, to bring people together, to delight and terrify, to make people believe that unreal things are real, to elevate the poor (as Faustus and Wagner are elevated), to reconcile enemies, and to win heroic victories, where life itself produces only massacres or uneasy compromises. The freedom it invokes may be achievable only through the magic journey of a fictional narrative. But the capacity of that journey to dismantle national, religious and social barriers, using only the bloodless weapon of impish laughter, rendered it as valuable to early modern readers as any more elevated art form.

Kit Marlowe (possibly)

NOTES

This essay was first printed in the Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 41, no. 1 (2011), 35-50. My thanks to Nandini Das for inviting me to write it.

[1] For a fuller account of Ascham’s attitude to Italianate Englishmen see R. W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-espionage and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 41-51.

[2] Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, in The English Works of Roger Ascham, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), pp. 171-302 (p. 229). Subsequent page references will be given in the body of the text.

[3] The Tempest, III. 2. 119.

[4] See Lucian, Preface to The True History, in Satirical Sketches, trans. Paul Turner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 249-50.

[5] The two editions of this translation are STC 24828 (c. 1518) and 24829 (c. 1562). All references are to the former.

[6] More’s translations of Lucian are given in The Complete Works of Thomas More, III, Part I, ed. Craig R. Thompson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974). For the impact of Erasmus’s and More’s Lucian translations see Thompson’s introduction.

[7] See Brenda H. Hosington, ‘Translations of Lucian in Renaissance England’, Syntagmatia: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Honour of Monique Mund-Dopchie and Gilbert Tournoy, ed. Dirk Sacré and Jan Papy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), pp. 187-205 (p. 188). Thanks to Stuart Gillespie for this reference.

[8] The dubiousness of Aeneas stems from his depiction as a traitor in the works of Dares Phrygius and Dictis Cretensis. For the vatic powers of the Aeneid see the entry on Virgil in The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, ed. Paul Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

[9] Virgilius, STC 24828 (c. 1518), sig. D2v. Further references will be given in the text.

[10] For a detailed discussion of Beware the Cat see R. W. Maslen, ‘William Baldwin and the Tudor Imagination’, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485-1603, ed. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 291-306. Baldwin’s debt to Lucian needs further investigation.

[11] For a detailed account of Bullein’s Dialogue see R. W. Maslen, ‘The Healing Dialogues of Doctor Bullein’, Yearbook of English Studies, 38.1-2 (2008), 119-135. All references are to William Bullein, Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence, ed. Mark W. Bullen and A. H. Bullen (London: N. Trübner, 1888), and will be given in the text.

[12] Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: A Study of his Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

[13] For the notion that some of these writers may have formed a kind of literary fellowship see Stephen W. May, ‘Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney and – Abraham Fraunce?’, RES Advance Access (published 11 February 2010), http://res.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/hgp117.

[14] Abraham Fraunce, The Third Part of the Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch (London, 1592), fols. 55r – 59r.

[15] For the Lucianic tone of Dido Queen of Carthage see Roma Gill, ‘Marlowe’s Virgil: Dido Queen of Carthage’, RES, n.s., 28.110 (1977), 141-155.

[16] For the date of the Damnable Life see R. J. Fehrenbach, ‘A Pre-1592 English Faust Book and the Date of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus’, The Library, 2 (2001), pp. 327-335. For the date of the Famous History see The English Faust Book: A Critical Edition Based on the Text of 1592, ed. John Henry Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 54-72. All references to the Damnable Life are taken from Jones’s edition.

[17] The English Faust Book, ed. Jones, p. 25.

[18] 1629 edition, STC 1184, sig. B1r.

[19] 1629 edition, STC 1184, sig. G3v.

[20] For further discussion of the texts that follow, with the exception of the Second Report, see R. W. Maslen, ‘Dreams, Freedom of Speech and the Demonic Affiliations of Robin Goodfellow’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 1.1 (2009), pp. 129-44.

[21] For William Rankins see R. W. Maslen, Shakespeare and Comedy (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), p. 13.

[22] See John A. Walz, ‘An English Faustsplitter’, Modern Language Notes, 42.6 (1927), pp. 325-365.

[23] The Second Report of Doctor John Faustus, sig. B2v. All references are taken from the first edition (1594), STC 10715, and will henceforth be given in the text.

[24] ‘The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes’; that is, the poet never works magic to enchant your reason into credulity. Philip Sidney, Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, revised R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 103. Sir John Harington says something similar in the preface to his translation of Orlando Furioso, but does not invoke conjuring; see Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Harington, ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 5, l. 3.

[25] For this notion of writing in imaginative fetters in the Reformation see James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, II. 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Introduction and Chapter 1.

Peake and Dickens

Mervyn Peake was passionate about Dickens. You only need to read a few pages of his first completed novel, Titus Groan, to see this at once, even before it has been pointed out – as Peter Winnington points out in his fine biography of Peake – that the scholar-pirate Mr Slaughterboard in Peake’s unfinished early novel of that name owns a complete set of Dickens bound in red leather; or that the hero-villain Steerpike in the Gormenghast books takes his name from the hero-villain of David Copperfield, Steerforth; or that Peake drew a magnificent set of charcoal illustrations for Bleak House in the 1940s, which wasn’t published till after his death.[1] There are Dickensian touches all over his work, and I’d like to point out a few of them in this post.

Peake looked at people with a Dickensian eye. In 1941, after being drafted into the army, he found himself studying his fellow conscripts with a sense of frustration that they should have been doomed to live in time of war – when lives and talents were being wasted at a frightening rate – rather than at a time when they could have served as imaginative material to be worked into a masterpiece of Victorian fiction. He wrote a poem about his frustration, ‘To a Scarecrow Gunner’. It’s not one of his best poems, and he knew it, leaving it in manuscript along with the unfinished Mr Slaughterboard; but it’s worth considering all the same. Here it is, a fourteen-line sonnet:

To a Scarecrow Gunner

The Fates have willed it that you’re living now
And not when Dickens might have watched your face
Your pigeon body and the tousled crow
That on your scalp finds perilous nesting space
And they have willed that Dickens cannot hear
Your sad inconsequent ejaculations
In such a curlew voice, as none may share
The portent of, save in hallucinations.

But so much less do I respect the Fates.

The Fates have willed the always insecure
And muddy forage cap on your dark head
Should not be part of Dickens’ stock and store –
But now sits cocky while the man is dead

Who might have seen what’s lost upon your mates.[2]

Mervyn Peake, 1945

Written as it is in wartime, this lament for what the scarecrow gunner fails to become – a character in one of Dickens’s novels – is rendered more painful by his likely other fate, to serve as fodder for the enemy’s guns. The birds in the poem – crow, pigeon, curlew – all have unfortunate connotations; the crow is a bird of ill omen, as is the curlew (its mournful cry is often thought to presage death), while the pigeon is a game bird whose use to carry messages in wartime makes it doubly vulnerable, as a source of food and a possible enemy instrument. The gunner’s scalp serves as a ‘perilous nesting place’ for his crow-like hair both because he is permanently dishevelled and because he is himself in peril as a soldier. The sound of the gunner’s voice is ‘sad’ because of the danger he is in, his voice unheard in the general din of a global conflict, the ‘portent’ it carries thanks to its resemblance to a curlew’s cry unnoticed by anyone except in the fever dreams or ‘hallucinations’ of the sick or wounded. The reference towards the end of the poem to Dickens being dead could have a double meaning; the scarecrow gunner’s cap ‘sits cocky while the man is dead’, both in the sense that the man who wears it is effectively dead already before being transported to the battlefields of the continent, and in the sense that the author is dead who might have seen his potential as a model for a character in his latest novel. The abrupt ending of the sonnet, then, while on the one hand it can be read as a poetic failing, can also be said to augur the premature ending of this potential. The scarecrow gunner is one of those lost souls in Peake’s work whose condemnation to obscurity robs the world of something extraordinary; and Dickens’s books are full of similar laments for lost potential.

Mervyn Peake, Harold Skimpole, from Bleak House

David Copperfield was obviously one of Peake’s favourite works by Dickens, and it’s a work that’s full of the fear of wasted talent: from the talent of Mr Micawber, who finds it so hard to find an outlet for his natural skills, to that of Rosa Dartle, whose disfigurement by the spoiled boy Steerforth has condemned her to a state of perpetual bitterness and a permanent quest for revenge against all the world apart from the man who actually injured her; from Little Emily, who is engaged to be married to a kindly and devoted fisherman named Ham, but is seduced by Steerforth into running off with him to Europe, ‘ruining’ her good name in the process, to Mrs Micawber, who is thought by her family to have made a disastrous marriage to the always-indebted Mr Micawber, and Agnes Wickfield, who is let down both by her widower father and her young admirer, David, and finds herself facing financial and personal ‘ruin’ as a result. There are several writers in the novel whose writing never comes to anything: Dr Strong, who is compiling a dictionary that never gets beyond the letter D; Mr Dick, who is writing an obscure Memorial which keeps being invaded by the figure of Charles I, decapitating the writer’s ambitions with every appearance. Mr Micawber, too, is a writer, who turns every event in his life, no matter how trivial, into a letter, very few of which succeed in their primary purpose, which is to bring him financial gain. David Copperfield is a writer, but for much of the novel all the writing he has time for is to jot down Parliamentary proceedings in shorthand, while his ill-considered marriage to the childlike Dora Spenlow quickly makes his nascent career as a novelist into a formidable barrier between them that augments their intellectual and imaginative differences instead of cementing their happiness. Relationships in this book are always on the point of collapsing or being destroyed by hostile forces; writing is always in the process of proving empty and pointless; and growing up, which is supposed to bring the potential of a child to maturation, is always being arrested or cut short.

Miss Mowcher, for instance, has stopped growing upwards at an early age and finds her life defined by her diminutive height. Dora has stopped developing intellectually at an equally early age, and finds herself being cheated by every tradesman or servant she asks to help her. Mr Dick, too, is widely perceived as having a childish mind, although his formidable guardian Betsey Trotwood remains convinced of his untapped genius. Mr Micawber is childish in his inability to find gainful employment, his permanent reliance on the kindness of a few good friends; Agnes too is trapped in childish dependence on others by the machinations of the upwardly-mobile clerk, Uriah Heep; Uriah has been forever tainted by the philosophy of the charitable foundation school where he was educated, which taught him to keep proclaiming his own humbleness no matter how fiercely he might resent it (p. 464).[3] For a Bildungsroman, a novel of growth from youth to maturity, David Copperfield is packed with people for whom growth has proved impossible in the teeth of the various social, economic, emotional and educational barriers they have been faced with.

Phiz, Steerforth at school

Perhaps the most striking figure of lost potential in the book is James Steerforth, the seemingly heroic young man who effortlessly wins the affection of people from every social class with his charm and charisma. Steerforth delights the inhabitants of the fishing community of Great Yarmouth, where he chooses to spend much of his time; the sailors and shipbuilders there, whose trades he learns at a whim; the schoolboys at the school where he gains his education – including David, who adores him with a passion; the women who fall for him and whom he betrays. Handsome, clever, rich (like Jane Austen’s Emma), he misuses his abundant gifts to damage the people who love him most as if in a destructive game – a game that proves self-destructive in the end. Rosa Dartle, the woman whose face he scarred and whose life he blighted, considers him to have been in potential worth ‘millions’ of any other person in the novel (p. 644). In practice he does nothing at all except flirt with David, damage Rosa Dartle and his mother, abscond with Little Emily, abandon her, and finally die pointlessly in a shipwreck.

As one might expect from the poet who lamented the lost possibilities of the scarecrow gunner, Gormenghast Castle in Titus Groan positively teems with similar cases of arrested development – to such an extent that Alice Mills has written an entire monograph about ‘stuckness’ in the fiction of Mervyn Peake.[4] In the first of the novel series that bears his name, Titus Groan himself gets stuck in childhood, growing with difficulty until he is ‘not two years old’ in the final chapter of the book that bears his name.[5] He is surrounded by people who are variously imprisoned by habit and custom, from the eremitic castle poet, who walls himself up in his tower with a barricade of books, to the community of the Bright Carvers, obsessively dedicated to the pursuit of carving wood into fantastic shapes while also being doomed to grow suddenly old at the age of twenty. There is the manservant Flay, so devoted to the castle that he has begun to ossify into a moving sculpture himself, and his arch-enemy Swelter the chef, permanently swathed in self-indulgence in the form of the imprisoning folds of fat that engulf him. There is the Countess Gertrude, Titus’s mother, an intelligent and formidable woman who is so wholly absorbed by her birds and cats she has no time for her children. There is his father Sepulchrave, so committed to his library that when Steerpike burns it he goes mad, repeatedly recreating the books he has lost by arranging pinecones on the ground as if on shelves, speaking in blank verse like his favourite dramatists and poets, and transforming himself as if by an act of unhinged imaginative will-power into a Death Owl from one of his tragedies or lost novels. Titus’s sister the Lady Fuchsia is stuck in her position as an impotent family member, ignored by everyone except her doting nurse and the castle doctor; and his aunts, the Ladies Cora and Clarice, are identical twins who are stuck in a permanent loop of mindlessly echoing each other’s thoughts and dreaming of a political coup that will never happen. All these characters embody the capacity of human beings to cut themselves off from one another – and from the past and the future, as the scarecrow gunner is cut off both from Dickens and from the life he might have lived in the time to come, if the deadly rituals of military life had not taken possession of his ‘pigeon body’. Gormenghast Castle is itself the mournful dream of an infinitely fertile imagination left to decay, like the forgotten halls and roofscapes of the seat of the Groans.

If Gormenghast perfectly embodies the lost potential that haunts the characters in David Copperfield, the young antagonist Steerpike embodies the character in Dickens’s book who has the most potential, Steerforth. Peter Winnington has pointed out that Steerforth had already made an appearance around ten years before the publication of Titus Groan in Peake’s unfinished novel, Mr Slaughterboard:

the moment when the dwarf, Shrivel, stands on the table and brushes Smear’s hair to a gloss inevitably brings David Copperfield to mind: the dwarf Miss Moucher [sic] is described by Dickens and memorably illustrated by Phiz, standing on a table, brushing and combing Steerforth’s hair which she has treated with oil.[6]

Phiz, ‘I make the acquaintance of Miss Mowcher’, from David Copperfield

This, Winnington says, is ‘about the closest Mervyn came to borrowing from Dickens’; but the echoes of Steerforth in the kitchen-boy Steerpike have been recognised for years. Steerpike is both charismatic and strangely attractive to others, despite his strange appearance and unsettling personality. Dr Prunesquallor is as arrested by his energy and naked ambition as Fuchsia is entranced by his mimicry of an adventure hero and a circus clown. Skilled, like Steerforth, in every craft he turns his hand to, he is galvanised into action by the birth of Titus, just as Steerforth is galvanised into action when he is invited to share in his young friend David’s personal life: to visit David’s working-class friends in their boat at Yarmouth, to meet David’s childhood sweetheart, Little Emily, and to entrance her adoptive family, slipping easily into their confidence thanks to his friendship with David, and laying his plans to break up their seaside idyll as if challenging himself to provide the most tragic of endings to David’s life story. Steerpike similarly worms his way into the lives of Titus’s family and associates: his sister, mother, father and aunts, the doctor who presided over his birth, the official who oversees the rituals they are obliged to attend, his elderly, diminutive nurse. Steerpike shares Steerforth’s playful brand of wicked humour, his willingness to do harm on a whim, and is at his most strenuously active when laying the groundwork for seemingly pointless acts of villainy: burning Sepulchrave’s library; designing imperial thrones for the aunts which will never be occupied; scrambling up and down a ladder to rescue members of the Groan family from a fire he himself has started; mixing poisons in the Doctor’s laboratory which he never uses, unless for the singularly pointless purpose of killing Nannie Slagg; lurking in a hammock under the Earl’s dining table to listen in on conversations that tell him nothing. His penetration of Titus’s environment is as complete, and as ruthless, as Steerforth’s invasion of David’s.

Mervyn Peake, Steerpike

In the second Titus book, Gormenghast, the former kitchen boy is more maliciously playful than ever, accompanied always by a monkey as if to point up his tricksterish nature. In this book his role as a double for Titus Groan – a kind of malignant substitute for him – is finally confirmed by his purloining of Titus’s boat, a light canoe the boy has imaginatively invested with the personality of the feral girl who was his first crush. And death is Steerpike’s constant companion or shadow, just as it is Steerforth’s. After being seduced and abandoned by Steerforth, Little Emily is urged to commit suicide by the envious Rosa Dartle, while her friend Martha (also ‘ruined’ by illicit sex) almost succumbs to the same temptation as she lingers on the banks of the Thames, before being saved by David and Mr Peggotty. In Gormenghast the young woman seduced by the upstart Steerpike ends by really committing suicide, since there is no one nearby to save her – one more in the trail of victims he leaves in his wake. She dies by drowning, as Martha nearly did. Steerpike, meanwhile, ends his days in water, like Dickens’s Steerforth, as if to atone for driving Fuchsia to despair. As we might expect, Steerpike is at his most strenuously active in the moments that lead to his death, nimbly evading hordes of pursuers, picking them off one by one with his catapult, skimming about the surface of the rising flood waters in his stolen canoe, until he is symbolically trapped in the ivy of the castle walls – and even then he wields his knife in delighted defiance and crows in triumph like a second Peter Pan. His ingenuity and energy are at their peak when there is nowhere left to go, and as a result he is as charismatic in the termination of his story as ever he was in its slow unfolding.

Steerforth’s death, too, contains unnerving echoes of an adventure story for boys. His charisma shines through as David observes him from a distance, labouring away with his less industrious shipmates in a hopeless attempt to fashion an escape from a deadly storm. Watching helplessly as Steerforth’s ship comes to grief among the breakers, David tells us: ‘I plainly descried her people at work with axes, especially one active figure with long curling hair, conspicuous among the rest’ (p. 637); and a few minutes later, ‘four men arose with the wreck out of the deep, clinging to the rigging of the remaining mast; uppermost, the active figure with the curling hair’ (p. 638). Even from far away David notices the beauty as well as the energy of the ‘active figure’, from the curling of his hair – so carefully tended by Miss Mowcher – to the very attractive head-covering that does so little to confine it: ‘He had a singular red cap on, – not like a sailor’s cap, but of a finer colour; and as the few yielding planks between him and destruction rolled and bulged, and his anticipative death-knell rung, he was seen by all of us to wave it’ (p. 639). Steerforth remains distinctive, handsome, stylish and theatrical in his final seconds, just as Peake’s Steerpike when he knows he is about to die promises to savour every second of it in a performance of melodramatic self-indulgence: ‘He would indulge himself – would taste the peculiar quality of near-death on his tongue – would loll above the waters of Lethe’ (p. 741). Steerpike is childish in his death, letting out the ‘high-pitched, overweening cry of a fighting cock’ as Titus strikes at him. Steerforth’s childishness comes out only after his death, when David sees him lying on shore among the ruins of Mr Peggotty’s boat-house, ‘with his head upon his arm, as I had often seen him lie at school’ (p. 640). He does not die alone; in another echo of a boy’s adventure story, the boatbuilder Ham – whose fiancée, Little Emily, Steerforth stole from him – makes a final heroic attempt to rescue his enemy, and drowns in the attempt, adding one more name to the list of lives destroyed by the young man’s influence. In both books – David Copperfield and Gormenghast ­– water comes to represent the threat of obliteration and obscurity, against which the books’ protagonists and villains struggle with every ounce of strength they have. The protagonists keep their heads above the water, while the villains and their victims succumb to it – on the villains’ part, at least, with seeming enjoyment, as they flash their knives and wave their caps in a last farewell.

Frank Reynolds, Uriah Heep

The other David Copperfield connection in the Titus books can be found in Steerpike’s resemblance to the book’s other villain, Uriah Heep. The ambitious clerk who rises to a position of power over the family that previously gave him employment has much in common with Peake’s unscrupulous kitchen-boy, who shares his humble beginnings and vaulting ambition. The pair resemble each other physically in obvious ways: Uriah when we first meet him is a ‘cadaverous’ youth of about fifteen, ‘who had hardly any eyebrows, and no eyelashes, with eyes of a red-brown, so unsheltered and unshaded that I remember wondering how he went to sleep’ (p. 181). Steerpike is seventeen when we first meet him in Swelter’s kitchen. He does not lose his eyebrows and eyelashes until he is almost burnt to death in the process of murdering Barquentine in the second Titus book, Gormenghast, but his eyes are of a distinctive shade of red from the beginning: he has ‘dark-red concentrated eyes’ (p. 111) when he first opens them to look at Fuchsia in her attic, and by the day of his death they have intensified to ‘two red points of light’ or ‘beads of blood’ (p. 743). Uriah is ‘high-shouldered and bony’ (p. 181), and Steerpike when he strips to wash is ‘very thin, very bunched at the shoulders, and with an extraordinary perkiness in the poise of the body’ (p. 115). Uriah is given to spasms of self-deprecating ‘writhing’ – at one point early on he ‘writhe[s] himself quite off [his] stool in the excitement of his feelings’ (p. 194) – and Steerpike undergoes a similar spasm when he begins to realise he has Fuchsia under his spell: ‘A snake writhed suddenly under the ribs of Steerpike. He had succeeded’ (p. 116). Uriah has the daughter of his employer firmly in his sights from the beginning of his rise to power, in much the same way as Steerforth has Little Emily in his sights from their first meeting; and Steerpike’s desire to fascinate Fuchsia stems from a similar conviction, when he first meets her, that she will be useful to him later – and afterwards perhaps from a sheer delight in imposing his power on people weaker than himself.

Phiz, ‘Somebody Turns Up’, from David Copperfield

Uriah’s designs on Agnes Wickfield form part of a long-term plan whose slow working out involves putting the unfortunate girl through what is effectively slow torture, as she watches her father gradually lose his identity under the combined influence of alcohol and Uriah’s remorseless exposure of his calamitous financial dealings. ‘My Agnes is very young still,’ Uriah tells David at one point (p. 310), ‘so I shall have time gradually to make her familiar with my hopes, as opportunities offer’; his hopes being that he can marry her after taking control of her father’s affairs. Peake’s Fuchsia undergoes a similar torture at Steerpike’s hands, as she watches her father slowly lose his reason after Steerpike has burned his beloved library. Both men, as well as Steerforth, worm their way like parasites into other people’s lives, taking possession of their most intimate private spaces – their rooms, their papers, their families, their bodies, their thoughts. And both men, it seems to me, embody this process of parasitical possession and consumption in a metaphor that represents another clear echo of Dickens’s wording in the work of Peake.

Many months after informing David of his ambition to make Agnes his wife, Uriah comes up with a novel way of describing the lengthy process of bringing his plans for her to fruition. ‘I say! I suppose,’ he says to David at one point, as the young man waits for a coach to leave, ‘you have sometimes plucked a pear before it was ripe, Master Copperfield?’ (p. 469). David answers, ‘I suppose I have’; and Uriah tells him: ‘I did that last night’. He is referring to his first abortive attempt to ask Mr Wickfield for his daughter’s hand in marriage, an attempt that resulted in wild rejection. Uriah remains convinced, however, as he tells David, that his plan will succeed. ‘It’ll ripen yet!’ he gloats; ‘It only wants attending to. I can wait!’ Shortly afterwards, David notices him through the coach window, moving his mouth as if in the process of eating the pear. ‘For anything I know,’ David observes, ‘he was eating something to keep the raw morning air out; but he made motions with his mouth as if the pear was ripe already, and he were smacking his lips over it’. Uriah’s gesture is as cannibalistic as it is proprietorial.

Frederick Barnard, Uriah Heep

In this passage, Uriah’s unpleasant anticipation of Agnes’s ripening contrasts to his habit of referring to David by the honorific reserved for young boys. Uriah is always calling him Master Copperfield instead of Mister Copperfield – something he rarely fails to point out whenever he does it. David, in other words, has always been unripe as far as Uriah is concerned, and always will be. This habit of making people seem younger than they are is shared by Steerforth, who feminises and belittles David by calling him Daisy, and by Steerforth’s scheming manservant Littimer, whose every word and gesture makes David think himself terribly young. In the passage I’ve just quoted, Agnes too is infantilised, as Uriah assumes that the only reason for her to reject him is because she has not yet reached maturity – and conversely, that maturation will render their marriage inevitable. At the same time, her prospective maturation is described in terms that wholly subject her to his body as well as his will; ‘smacking his lips’ anticipates the moment when he will effectively ingest her, making her part of himself. For Uriah, Agnes’ qualities and talents are reserved for his use alone, since he has effectively bought her when he took control of her father’s money. David listens to him with all the horror of a man who recognises how far this assumption implies the wastage of Agnes’s qualities and talents.

Mervyn Peake, ‘Sensitive, Seldom and Sad’, from Rhymes Without Reason (1944)

Steerpike has a similar moment of acute acquisitiveness in relation to the woman he desires. Having escaped from a prison cell in which the servant Mr Flay has locked him and climbed across a vast expanse of the castle walls and roofscape, the kitchen boy tumbles in through an attic window and loses consciousness. When he wakes he finds himself in a hidden room that belongs to a young girl: fifteen-year-old Lady Fuchsia, who retreats to this attic to withdraw into her imagination and forget the humdrum life of ritual that enfolds her in the formal spaces of the castle. Little by little Steerpike pieces together the evidence he sees around him of the proclivities and age of the attic’s owner – above all the picture book he finds open on a table, in which he finds a poem about three eccentric old men in a ‘grey and purple world’ (p. 106) and notices on the page the signatory marks of the book’s last reader: ‘Steerpike noticed small thumb-marks on the margin of the page. They were as important to him as the poem or the picture’ (pp. 106-7). Beside the picture-book lie two wrinkled pears, and Steerpike is hungry; he picks one up and notices that a bite has already been taken from its side. Nevertheless he proceeds to bite into the pear himself, as if intentionally to continue his violation of Fuchsia’s personal space as embodied by the attic:

Making use of the miniature and fluted precipice of hard, white discoloured flesh, where Fuchsia’s teeth had left their parallel grooves, he bit greedily, his top teeth severing the wrinkled skin of the pear, and the teeth of his lower jaw entering the pale cliff about halfway up its face; they met in the secret and dark centre of the fruit – in that abactinal region where, since the petals of the pear flower had been scattered in some far June breeze, a stealthy and profound maturing had progressed by day and night. (p. 107)

At this point in the novel Steerpike has only once seen Fuchsia at a distance, through a ‘circular spyhole in the wall of Octagonal Room’ where the Groans were gathering after the birth of the castle’s heir (p. 108). He does not know that she is the proprietor of the attic, the reader of the book who left her thumbprints on the pages, the biter of the pear.  Steerpike’s ascent is as yet only physical – the ascent he has just made up the wall of the castle, which finally severed his connection with the castle kitchens where his own development was cabined, cribbed, confined, hemmed in, by his monstrous master, Swelter the Chef. Steerpike himself is young – only seventeen. But his deliberate biting into the pear that has already been bitten – and the implications of this violation of the ‘secret and dark centre of the fruit’ – prefigures his invasion of the secret and dark centre of the castle, as well as his exploitation of the fruit’s first consumer, Fuchsia, whose personal space he is occupying at the moment he bites – and the trajectory of whose life will be interrupted by his meeting of her within a few pages of the bite. Like Uriah, he will assume that he possesses her from that moment, and that her maturation will provide him with another sumptuous meal like the pear he ate in her attic. But unlike Uriah, Steerpike will succeed in the end in wasting her talents completely – her talent for love as well as for all the various arts her attic contains.

Mervyn Peake, Fuchsia

As he wrote Titus Groan, Peake was intensely aware that the time he lived in was inimical to the process of bringing the rich potential of youth to maturation, especially for young artists such as Fuchsia or himself. Dickens gave him the language and some of the other novelistic techniques he needed to articulate this threat of artistic waste and loss. His version of David Copperfield, however, goes further in fulfilling this threat than Dickens dared to, at least at this stage in his career (Bleak House goes much further). Gormenghast castle and its occupants have been cut off from the historical, familial and economic resources that gave Dickens’s protagonist, David, the outlets he needed to fulfil his potential as a novelist. Cut adrift from the past and the future, as England was cut adrift from the rest of the world by war, Peake’s castle finds itself tossing on a sea of oblivion as deadly as the ocean that drowned Steerforth and threatened to overwhelm his victims, as well as the victims of his red-eyed double, Uriah Heep. At the same time, writing in response to Dickens perhaps gave Peake a sense of control in the chaos of wartime; control, and a promise that the arrested development of his cast of lonely characters might find a way to maturation after all.

Mervyn Peake, Miss Flyte from Bleak House

Notes

[1] See G. Peter Winnington, Mervyn Peake’s Vast Alchemies: The Illustrated Biography (London: Peter Own, 2009), pp. 95, 100, 283. For the full set of Bleak House illustrations see Mervyn Peake, Sketches from Bleak House, selected and introduced by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen (London: Methuen, 1983).

[2] Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems, ed. R. W. Maslen, Fyfield Books (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), p. 85.

[3] The Personal History of David Copperfield (London:Hazell, Watson and Viney, n.d.).

[4] Alice Mills, Stuckness in the Fiction of Mervyn Peake (London: Rodopi, 2005).

[5] The Gormenghast Trilogy (London: Mandarin, 1989), p. 365.

[6] Winnington, Vast Alchemies, p. 95.

Alasdair Gray on Alfred Kubin

A few months back I wrote a post on Alasdair Gray. Among other things I mentioned a note he wrote me about the writer-artist Alfred Kubin, which at the time I didn’t have access to because it was locked away in my office at the University of Glasgow, being protected from Covid like the rest of us.

In recent weeks I’ve been able to get back into my office and have been ferrying things back and forward between there and my Glasgow flat. Among other things I ferried my copy of Alfred Kubin’s fantastic novel The Other Side (1908), and when I opened it I found the note I mentioned in the earlier blog post.

My edition of the novel is from 1967, and was published by those friends of the fantastic Victor Gollancz Limited. Here it is with its handsome dust jacket:

As I said in that earlier blog post, this book was first recommended to me by my tutor Christopher Butler, as a superior alternative to the work of Mervyn Peake. Needless to say I couldn’t agree with him on the matter of its superiority, though I found it fascinating, as Kafka did apparently.

And here’s the note, written in Alasdair’s inimitable hand. A transcript follows.

31 July 2002
Office
Glasgow Uni

Dear Rob,

I should have returned this long ago as I finished reading it the morning after the day you gave it to me. I found it fascinating yet repulsive. One of the richest men in the world creates, circa 1900, a small principality in central Asia that is modelled on just such a small German autocratic city state circa 1850. He peoples it with the kind of folk he knew from his schooldays, living in the same kind of buildings. Having completed this static, stagnant world, he dies. It rots away and disintegrates with him. This cannot be called a prophetic story since the 3rd Reich rotted away more violently, through attacking the outer world into overwhelming it back. The style of illustration completely fits the narrative. Both strike me as foosty – modelled from the stuff that collects in vacuum cleaner bags.

BUT thanks for lending it. My response is highly emotional, so despite the foost it did not strike me as dull!

Yours – with thanks – Alasdair

I loved that sentence about the stuff that collects in vacuum cleaner bags. Here’s an example of what he’s talking about:

As a contrast, here’s the Handbook Alasdair designed for the then MPhil in Creative Writing when he was Professor at the University of Glasgow. Look at those clean lines, and the arrogant power of that writer-artist-lion, with his back foot grasping a mouse, his tongue reaching out to lick the quill. No wonder Gray felt sick at the sight of foostiness:

Front
Back

GOODBYE

 

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Gold Coast (1988)

On Monday I’ll be going to listen to Kim Stanley Robinson when he speaks in the Glasgow University Chapel. In doing so I’ll be fulfilling one of my dreams as a graduate student. I was a passionate fan of Robinson’s books in the 1980s, especially his debut novel The Wild Shore (1984), set in a post-Apocalyptic America which has been effectively segregated from the world after an act of calamitous military aggression, and his haunting trilogy Icehenge (1984), made up of three novellas containing three distinct perspectives on a gigantic monument located at the North Pole of Pluto. I was excited by his story collection The Planet on the Table (1986), bowled over by its experimentalism and variousness; puzzled and delighted by The Memory of Whiteness (1985), in which a religious cult called the Grays tracks the movements of a celebrated blind musician as he tours the solar system with his hi-tech orchestra: a story that combines physics, music and space opera with a stylistic exuberance that still resonates in my memory.

In 1989 I wrote a review of one of Robinson’s books, in a short-lived magazine called StarRoots edited by my friend the musician and writer Warren Scott-Morrow (aka Martin O’Cuthbert). I re-read the review today, and was surprised to find that it was of The Gold Coast (1988), the sequel to The Wild Shore and the second book in his Orange County trilogy (now known as the Three Californias trilogy – perhaps that was always its name). In my head the review had been of Pacific Edge (1990), the third book in that trilogy, probably because I liked that book far more: it remains for me the seminal example of how to invent an ecotopia, and an image from it – a hyper-modern sailing ship cutting through the waves of the Pacific, symbolic of the slower, quieter means of travel that need to be cultivated if ecocatastrophe is to be averted or reversed – still flashes into my mind whenever I think about the possibilities of a better tomorrow. I bought a mountain bike soon after reading Pacific Edge, and was always pleased that it was a Marin Muirwoods, designed and built on the West Coast and so potentially related to the mountain bike on which the protagonist of Robinson’s novel spends much of his time.

But in fact my review was of The Gold Coast, the second and bleakest in the trilogy, which depicts a near-future California riddled with corporate corruption, chained and bound by its freeways, utterly complicit with escalating global militarism – a miniature working model of capitalism in action as championed by the Republicans under the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher. It’s a clumsy review, especially in its opening, which signals the fact that at the time (and ever since) I was obsessed with fantasy rather than science fiction, and hence with the past rather than the future – to the extent that my prose style was often contaminated with the Romantic flourishes of not very elevated high fantasy. My favourite SF writer was Ursula Le Guin, mainly because I thought of her SF as practically fantasy since I had come to her through the Earthsea books, and my enjoyment of Robinson can be measured by the fact that I thought him a potential successor to the woman who for me was the greatest living writer. His writing had an element of the magical in it, as embodied in the mysterious Grays in The Memory of Whiteness, and I was thrilled when he published a weird-ish fantasy novella called A Short Sharp Shock in 1990.

Another aspect of the clumsiness of my review is the absence from it of any mention of the indigenous people of the West Coast. This is ironic, given that Le Guin had recently published her own West Coast utopia, Always Coming Home (1985), modelled in part on the way of living of certain indigenous peoples such as the Yahi, about whose culture (now extinct) her mother had written a book, Ishi in Two Worlds (1961). My account of Robinson’s book is in fact largely unconscious of the questions of race and gender that have come to dominate my thinking in the decades since.

All the same, I’m going to place it on this blog as a kind of time capsule from the 1980s. It seems appropriate to do so because at the time of writing this was the kind of future the world was looking at, the kind of future it has in fact made for itself: something bleakly and appallingly different from the parallel futures represented in the first and last books of the Three Californias trilogy. In The Wild Shore America has ‘regressed’, thanks to its segregation, to a frontier world which is beautiful as well as mournfully conscious of lost possibilities in the past. In Pacific Edge those possibilities have been joyfully seized to create a world which coexists in conscious and careful harmony with the needs of the environment. In The Gold Coast the world is bent on self-destruction. We’re still faced with the question of which of these futures we wish to have; and it’s still clear that the course we’re bound on is the last. Let’s hope COP26, for which my home city Glasgow is preparing as I type, provides the impetus for changing that course at last, after all these decades.

*****

The triumphal progress of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels has produced a new wonder: the Gold Coast, set in Orange County a few years from now, the Autopia of suburban Los Angeles. Then, as now, the freeways rule, travelled by cars that follow tracks preprogrammed into their computers, as do most of their owners. For the novel’s protagonist Jim McPherson, Orange County represents ‘the end of history, its purest product’, the termination of man’s westward progress where the past has begun to pile up on itself as freeway is elevated above freeway, mall above mall. Robinson’s first novel, The Wild Shore, isolated California in political quarantine from the rest of the world; in The Gold Coast Los Angeles has become the world, and Jim finds Californian landscapes and burgers replicated in miniature throughout Europe. Somehow Robinson convinces us that to learn about Orange County is to discover ourselves.

Jim’s problems are an astonishingly accurate rendition of everyone’s problems, give immediacy by the present-tense narrative; he expresses them in clumsy phrases which contrast strongly with the stylistic exuberance of Robinson’s previous novel, The Memory of Whiteness. The Gold Coast traces Jim’s efforts to forge order from his emotional and ideological confusion. He writes poems which he then juggles into incoherence by randomly rearranging their lines with his computer; he engages in political activity which involves blowing up arms factories at night, an empty expression of his need to ‘do something’; and most satisfactorily for him, he writes a history of Orange County to explain how the web of freeways and malls came into being, a past-tense narrative that provides a lyrical counterpoint to his botched present-tense dealings with friends and family, an affirmation of the land’s enduring identity.

Other characters pursue their own quests for coherence. One of Jim’s friends is a paramedic who clears human debris from the freeways and so confronts the stripped bone beneath the tanned Californian flesh. Another is famous for parties where designer drugs impose a superficial stability on the riot of the emotions. Despite all the layers of concrete, of economic and political systems, at the core of the novel’s interwoven narratives lies the crude functioning of the human organism. Jim’s engineer father, who is engaged in advanced research for the Defence Industry (its red tape brilliantly evoked in a tangle of abbreviations), finds his most successful project hamstrung by a private squabble among the Air Force top brass. Jim’s idealistic sabotage turns out to be a cover for a stranger’s profitable drug-running. As always in Robinson’s work ideals are complicated by personal misunderstandings. In this The Gold Coast resembles The Wild Shore, and it proclaims this affinity. Underneath the concrete Orange County retains traces of the tiny community of the earlier work, as Jim shows his friends when they dig up the remains of an elementary school at the beginning of the book, in an act recalling the boys’ attempt to exhume twentieth-century affluence in The Wild Shore. The personification of the endlessly revitalised past in The Wild Shore, old Tom Barnard, reemerges in The Gold Coast as Jim’s indestructible Uncle Tom, still telling his stories despite being bedridden.

But a comparison with Robinson’s first work only underlines the new novel’s greatness. This is a mature and courageous celebration of a land’s influence on its people; of broken but enduring idealism and friendship; and on the crudest level of the body itself, as it surfs the night waves or hikes the mountains that have escaped the depredations of real estate. Robinson has emerged from his rewritings of future history to challenge us more forcefully by rewriting the present.

Puck, Dreams and the Devil

[This article first appeared as ‘Dreams, Freedom of Speech, and the Demonic Affiliations of Robin Goodfellow’ in the Journal of the Northern Renaissance, Issue 1.1 (March 2009), pp. 129-44, and was reprinted by Cengage Learning in Shakespearean Criticism, vol. 139 (2011). I put it here to sit alongside a number of other pieces on the early modern fantastic.]

Henry Fuseli, Robin Goodfellow

1.  Robin Goodfellow in Athens

In darkness, Nashe tells us in The Terrors of the Night (1594), mortals are more vulnerable to the machinations of the devil than they ever are by daylight.[1] Dreams and night visions weave Satan’s most cunning ‘nets of temptation’ (p. 210), and after sunset one’s eyes turn into magnifying glasses, so that ‘each mote… they make a monster, and every slight glimmering a giant’ (p. 239), multiplying the viewer’s proneness to delinquency and despair.  For the Elizabethan anti-theatrical lobby, on the other hand – as represented by pamphleteers like Stephen Gosson, Phillip Stubbes and William Rankins – it’s drama rather than dreams that constitutes the Devil’s weapon of choice in the unceasing siege he lays to the human mind and spirit.  Plays, they claim, constitute an elaborate imaginative trap whereby Satan lulls the citizens of London into a false sense of security, then ambushes their souls through the unguarded portals of the senses.[2]  So when in about 1595 Shakespeare wrote a comedy called A Midsummer Night’s Dream and crammed it full of spirits, damned or otherwise, he was playing a witty game with the fears of Gosson and his fellow thespiphobes.[3]  What I shall argue here is that the game he played in the Dream was already in full swing among the pamphlets and printers’ shops of 1590s London, and that the appearance of Robin Goodfellow in the woods of Athens would instantly have alerted his first audiences to Shakespeare’s participation in it.

Puck’s presence in the Dream has long been something of a puzzle – whether acknowledged as such or simply ignored.  Classical creatures had found their way into the English landscape often enough in Elizabethan culture before Shakespeare started writing: the transformed Philomene had warbled in English woods in Gascoigne’s verse satire The Steel Glass (1576), Neptune had terrorized Humberside in John Lyly’s play Gallathea (c. 1588), the sea-god Glaucus had moped by the banks of the Thames in Thomas Lodge’s poem Scilla’s Metamorphosis (1589).  But Shakespeare’s transplanting of Robin Goodfellow to some woods near Athens was the first time (to my knowledge) that a figure from English folk legend had been relocated to the Mediterranean, and the implications of that relocation have not yet, I think, been fully worked out.  For one thing, as a peculiarly northern forest-dweller Robin may have had some effect on the relationship between night and day in his new, more southerly setting.  Nashe reminds us in The Terrors of the Night that nights are longer in the north, and especially in Iceland, where witches and wizards are plentiful and possess an enviable power over local weather-conditions (p. 223).  The Dream transplants those northern nights to Greece, curtailing daylight hours and extending the shortest night in the year to giant proportions.  Four days and four nights are supposed to have passed between the first and last scenes of the comedy, whereas the audience experiences only two – and has no idea which of those two is the midsummer night of the title.  Robin Goodfellow seems the obvious person to blame for this hypertrophied period of darkness, since he is associated in folk tradition with night, dreams, trickery and Devilish magic.  Moreover, he had an unusually high profile in print during the early 1590s, featuring everywhere as a spirit who transcends the normal boundaries of space, time, life and death.  It’s only by recovering this profile that we can hope to understand his function in Shakespeare’s ancient Greek extravaganza.

2. Puck in Print

For the Elizabethans, Robin possessed a strange double nature, as the embodiment both of English Catholic superstition in the past and of an innocent native cheerfulness that had been lost with the advent of continental sophistication in the present.[4] Reginald Scot paints him in the former light in The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), where he features as a bugbear whose ability to terrorize night-wandering papists has been stripped from him by Protestant rationalism: ‘Robin goodfellowe ceaseth now to be much feared, and poperie is sufficientlie discovered’ (sig. B2v).  The poet William Warner concurs with Scot. His Robin is a spirit who appears like an incubus to sleeping mortals, and in the fourteenth book of Warner’s digressive epic Albion’s England (published in 1606) Robin sits naked on the face of a dormant shepherd and laments the good old days of Mary’s reign, when English Catholics everywhere believed in him: ‘Was then a merrie world with us when Mary wore the Crowne, / And holy-water-sprinkle was beleevd to put us downe’.[5]  But Warner’s Robin is also a blunt teller of unwelcome truths to Protestants.  He goes on to utter a satirical invective against the various forms of hypocrisy prevalent in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, thus revealing himself to have as much of the satyr as of the demon about him.

This is hardly surprising, since by the time Warner painted this picture of him in 1606 Robin had long been associated with satire as well as with drama, dreams and devils.  Robin’s conversion into a satirist is in fact inextricably bound up with his theatrical associations.  In a pamphlet of 1590 called Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory the ghost of the late great comic actor Richard Tarlton appears to the anonymous author in a dream, and sooths his terror at this visitation by reassuring him that he is no devil, but a homely spirit like the noted goblin: ‘thinke mee to bee one of those Familiares Lares that were rather pleasantly disposed then indued with any hurtfull influence, as Hob Thrust, Robin Goodfellowe and such like spirites (as they terme them of the buttry) famozed in everie olde wives Chronicle for their mad merry pranckes’ (p. 2).  As a substitute Robin, Tarlton links himself with Catholicism – but a Catholicism defused of the terrors of damnation with which it had been charged by Protestant dogma.  When the author asks the dead clown’s ghost how it has managed to visit the land of the living, given the Calvinist belief that ‘the soules of them which are departed… never returne into the world againe till the generall resurrection’ (pp. 2-3), Tarlton contemptuously dismisses Calvinist doctrine as unhealthily dualistic.  His spirit, like the spirit of Hamlet’s father, inhabits Purgatory, the third alternative to heaven and hell, vouched for by the great poet ‘Dant’ as well as by ‘our forefathers’ and ‘holy Bishops of Rome’ (p. 3) – hence its ability to return now and then to the earth’s surface. In this way the clown blithely sweeps aside decades of religious conflict; and he goes on to tell a string of stories under the aegis of a non-judgemental version of the afterlife which permits the free flow of merry tales between this world and the next, regardless of theology.  His stories may stink of sulphur but they are ‘rather pleasantly disposed then indued with any hurtfull influence’; and in telling them he dismisses out of hand the didactic goody-goodies who saw all such stories – on stage or on the page – as works of Satan.

Tarlton’s News was ‘published’, according to its title-page, by an ‘old Companion’ of Tarlton’s, Robin Goodfellow – the spirit with which the ghost of Tarlton links itself.  It seems fitting, then, that when an anonymous ‘Cobbler’ wrote a story-collection of his own (The Cobbler of Canterbury (1590)), and prefaced it with a light-hearted attack on the shortcomings of Tarlton’s News, Robin Goodfellow should have penned a response to the cobbler’s preface, which was printed immediately after it in the first edition.  Here the goblin takes the cobbler’s objections to his publication as a sign of the times, when respect for good manners has been utterly eroded since the happy days when he was ‘so merry a spirit of the Butterie’, helping maids to grind malt and getting a ‘messe of Creame’ for his labour (sig. A4r).  The inhospitable spirit of Elizabethan England has driven Robin to a self-imposed exile in Purgatory along with his old friend Tarlton.  It has also made him devilishly vindictive, though not frighteningly so: he promises to ‘haunt’ the cobbler ‘in his sleepe, and after his olde merrie humour, so to playe the knave with the Cobler, that hee shall repent hee medled so farre beyond his latchet’ (sig. A4r).  Damnation and hauntings have here been reduced to pretexts for comic squabbling and trickery, quite bereft of the fear with which the established churches sought to invest them.

Robert Greene in his shroud

At this point in our story the immensely popular writer of romances and comedies Robert Greene gets mixed up with Puck’s Elizabethan biography.  Evidently a rumour went round that Greene had written The Cobbler of Canterbury, and to deny this rumour Greene wrote a pamphlet called Greene’s Vision (1592) in which he is visited in his sleep by the ghosts of Chaucer and Gower, who debate the merits and demerits of Greene’s prolific scribblings.[6] At the end of the dispute the spirit of King Solomon appears and elicits a promise from Greene that he will from henceforth devote himself to theology; and perhaps for this reason Greene did not publish the pamphlet in his lifetime, reluctant to commit himself to such a career-changing volte-face until he had exhausted the profitable vein of fiction he was still working at the end of his life.  When it did appear, the pamphlet reintroduced the fear of hell into the dialogue between pamphleteers, since it opened with a section where Greene articulates his  ‘trouble of minde’ in distinctly Faustian terms: ‘can the hideous mountaines hide me, can wealth redeeme sinne, can beautie countervaile my faults, or the whole world counterpoyse the balance of mine offences?’[7]  Greene’s fellow pamphleteer Barnaby Rich pounced on this hint at Greene’s posthumous fate, and described him in Greene’s News both from Heaven and Hell (1593) as wandering between Heaven and Hell in search of the happy third location, Purgatory, where he can escape damnation while retaining all the venial faults that made him so attractive a writer in his lifetime.  (On his journey he meets Dick Tarlton, who has now become Lucifer’s resident satirist-entertainer.)  The devil finally expels Greene’s ghost from hell at the request of the cony-catchers he exposed in his final pamphlets; and at this point Greene is transformed into a particularly aggressive incarnation of our old friend Robin Goodfellow, a spirit who troubles the nocturnal wanderings of living sinners.  ‘I woulde therefore wish my friendes,’ he declares, ‘to beware howe they walke late a nights, for I will bee the maddest Gobline, that ever used to walke in the moonshine’ (sig. H3r), haunting the sleep of women and persuading them to cuckold their husbands, infecting men of all occupations with the spirit of avarice so that they will do anything to amass wealth for their heirs, and urging lawyers, courtiers and clergymen to persevere in the corrupt practices already rife in their professions.  Robin has resumed his mantle as a night-dwelling satirist; but by now he trails in his wake the ghosts of clowns and popular authors, whose activities had been denounced as devilish by the theatre- and fiction-haters along with Robin himself.  The implication here as elsewhere is that the target of the moralists has been badly misjudged, and that they have wasted their energies in denouncing fictions and the makers of fictions, when in fact these are far more effective and energetic in attacking social abuses than they are.

For all his residence in a fictitious Catholic Purgatory, then, Robin Goodfellow was seen as mostly harmless by Shakespeare’s predecessors in popular print.  Indeed, he was represented as the victim of a miscarriage of justice, sharing with the common people of England the burden of an inequitable social and legal system, and endowed with gifts that enable him to expose these inequities.  In the anonymous pamphlet Tell-Troth’s New Year’s Gift (1593) he joins forces with the honest narrator Tell-troth to denounce the operations of jealousy or envy at every level of the English commonwealth.  Here he is characterised as ‘Robin good-fellow… who never did worse harme, then correct manners, and made diligent maides’ (sig. A2r), a kind of incorruptible agent for the discovery of hidden vices, who ‘could go invisible from his infancy’, is ‘subject to no inferiour power whatsoever’, and has ‘a generall priviledge to search every corner, and enter every castell to a good purpose’ (sig. A2r-A2v).  Robin’s affiliation with hell is explained as a consequence of this privilege, which means he can visit even the infernal regions without becoming contaminated by them, and use what he sees and hears there ‘to a good purpose’.  The insistence on his independence of all authority apart from nature’s is intriguing: it is the most explicit statement so far that Robin has become a figure for the legendary liberty of imaginative writers, a liberty invoked by the ghost of the executed poet Collingbourne in William Baldwin’s hugely influential collection of political poems, The Mirror for Magistrates (1559, 1563, etc.).[8]

Behind all these vision-pamphlets, in fact, the Mirror looms as a monumental presence, containing as it does the richest collection of posthumous first-person narratives in the English language.  Its versified stories of the decline and fall of great men and women throughout English history are narrated by the spirits of the dead, and its representation of the past is repeatedly linked to political and social abuses still current in the present.  Interestingly, too, it features a representation by a protestant poet of a Hell that is based on classical accounts of Hades (as it is in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (c. 1589) and Tell-Troth’s New Year’s Gift) and which is also explicitly linked to the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory.  This representation of Hell occurs in the celebrated ‘Induction’ to Thomas Sackville’s tragedy of the Duke of Buckingham, and is followed by a discussion of Purgatory among the protestant writers who have gathered to hear the narrative.  The Induction’s Hell, complains one writer, ‘savoreth so much of Purgatory… that the ignorant maye thereby be deceyved’ (fol. 137r) – presumably into thinking that Purgatory really exists.  But the chief editor of the Mirror, the printer-poet William Baldwin, disagrees.  In his poem, says Baldwin, Sackville has depicted not Hell or Purgatory but the grave, ‘wherin the dead bodies of al sortes of people do rest till tyme of the resurrection.  And in this sence is Hel taken often in the scriptures, and in the writynges of learned christians’ (fol. 137r).  A second listener goes further.  What does it matter if Sackville’s Hell resembles Purgatory, he says, since ‘it is a Poesie and no divinitye, and it is lawfull for poetes to fayne what they lyst, so it be appertinent to the matter’?  True enough, Baldwin replies, but such liberty has not always been accorded to poets; and he proceeds to read out the tragedy of Collingbourne, who was executed for writing satirical verse in the reign of Richard III, and whose ghost warns all poets to beware of speaking the truth about tyrants in an age that has grown ‘so fell and fearce / That vicious actes may not be toucht in verse’, and when ‘The Muses freedome, graunted them of olde, / Is barde, aye reasons treasons hye are helde’ (fol. 138r).  The tragedy closes with the heartfelt wish from its listeners that the warning it contains ‘may take suche place with the Magistrates, that they maye ratifie our olde freedome’ to speak openly in verse (fol. 146v).  Restoring this liberty will work for the ruling classes as much as for the common people in whose name the poet speaks, since rulers need to know what their subjects think of them if they are to defend themselves from popular insurrection and eventual dethronement.

The audience of Collingbourne’s tragedy speak with the heartfelt hopefulness of Protestants who have lived through persecution under a Catholic monarch and who hope for something better under her successor.  The first print-run of The Mirror for Magistrates was suppressed in the reign of Mary Tudor, and the 1563 edition from which I have been quoting couches its plea for poetic liberty in terms that are wittily designed to shock both radical protestants and Catholics alike – invoking the concept of Purgatory while at the same time dismissing it as a poetic fabrication – as if to test the Elizabethan reader’s capacity for greater tolerance.[9]  The references to Purgatory in the pamphlets of the 1590s seem to take up this notion of Purgatory as emblematic of the poet’s exemption from political or religious persecution, as does their frequent invocation of that figment of the superstitious Catholic imagination Robin Goodfellow.  Robin is a spirit of the buttery – that is, the bar or pub – rather than of the infernal regions, and his location in Purgatory indicates his temporary immunity from knee-jerk moral judgments based on over-rigid notions of right and wrong.

In the spirit of the other pamphlets we have touched on, Henry Chettle’s Kind-Heart’s Dream (1593) deploys its revenants to argue against simplistic views of the theatre and popular print.  Robin does not figure in it (though it addresses itself to ‘Gentlemen and good-fellowes’, sig. B1r), but the ghosts of both Tarlton and Robert Greene are summoned up, the latter appealing to Pierce Penniless – a pseudonym of Thomas Nashe – to defend his memory against the posthumous slanders of Gabriel Harvey, and the former defending the stage against its detractors while acknowledging the shortcomings of the modern theatre.[10]  ‘Mirth in seasonable time taken,’ the ghost of Tarlton avers, ‘is not forbidden by the austerest Sapients.  But indeed there is a time of mirth, and a time of mourning.  Which time having been by the Magistrates wisely observed, as well for the suppressing of Playes, as other pleasures: so likewise a time may come, when honest recreation shall have his former libertie’ (sig. C4r).  The latter sentence so closely echoes the discussion of Collingbourne’s tragedy in the Mirror that it is hard not to read it as a reminder of William Baldwin’s hope that liberty of speech will be restored to poets at last – even if only at the latter end of Elizabeth’s reign.  Greene and Tarlton, poets and players are ‘good fellows’ in two Elizabethan senses: good drinking companions (Kind-heart sees their apparitions while dozing in a tavern) and morally upright citizens who tackle vice wherever they see it.  And both wish the same punishment on all moralistic ‘maligners of honest mirth’: that is, ‘continuall melancholy’ (sig. C2v).

In Nashe’s Terrors of the Night – a pamphlet where spirits and devils are reduced to the size of dust particles so that ‘not a room in any man’s house but is pestered and close-packed with them’ (p. 212) – Don Lucifer himself, ‘their grand Capitano’, is described as having taken on the form of a ‘puritan’ with an aversion to shows and ceremonies of all kinds (p. 230).  In doing so he has ceased to be the cheerful entertainer he was of yore, when he ‘was wont to jest and sport with country people, and play the Goodfellow amongst kitchen-wenches’ (p. 231).  As a result of this transformation ‘there is no goodness in him but miserableness and covetousness’; he has shifted his allegiance to the camp of the theatre-haters and laughter-loathers, and the world is a poorer place.  Here again Robin represents a form of night mischief that is finally harmless, despite its devilish associations, and those who set themselves against it condemn both themselves and others to an unalleviated depression, the condition for which laughter was prescribed by early modern physicians.[11]   

Shakespeare’s Robin Goodfellow is the heir to all these Robins, Greenes, Tarltons and merry Devils.  Like his precursors he frequents the sleeping places of mortals, shaping what are in effect their dreams (all the lovers concur in retrospectively perceiving the business in the wood as dreamlike).  Like the Robin of Tell-Troth’s New Year’s Gift he can make himself invisible at will and go with impunity wherever he wishes in the globe or, presumably, out of it.  Tell-Troth’s Robin has the licence accorded to fools (and sometimes poets) to meddle with the doings of all classes, and Shakespeare’s Puck takes the role of Oberon’s fool, making and discovering fools wherever he turns up.  The merry tricks he plays are mentioned often in the pamphlets, and became the subject of a jest-book in the seventeenth century, Robin Goodfellow his Mad Pranks and Merry Jests (1628), filled with stories like the ones he tells the fairy on his first appearance in Act Two.  And his connection with fairies is taken for granted by nearly all the pamphleteers, as it is by Shakespeare.  Nashe, for instance, associates Robin with ‘elves, fairies, hobgoblins of our latter age’ in The Terrors of the Night (p. 210); and it is striking that Puck’s fairy friends in Shakespeare’s play have the capacity to shrink themselves to the size of Nashe’s mote-like devils.  Even Puck’s fondness for hemp, for stamping and for bellowing ‘Ho ho ho!’ is shared with the Robin of The Cobler of Caunterburie, whose catchphrase when provoked is ‘What Hemp and Hampe, here will I never more grinde nor stampe’ (sig. A4v).[12]  Clearly Shakespeare was deeply immersed in the recent literary as well as folkloric history of his ‘merry wanderer of the night’ (2.1.43), and knew how well the ground had been prepared for the rapprochement between popular superstition and sophisticated comedy by his precursors among the Elizabethan pamphleteers.   

 Shakespeare’s artfully managed rapprochement between popular superstition and romance, too, was prepared for by the pamphleteers we’ve glanced at.  Robin’s interest in lovers is first established in Tell-Troth’s New Year’s Gift, where he condemns greedy fathers for seeking to wed their daughters to wealthy men against their will, and catalogues the many forms of jealousy and fallings-out between sweethearts which occupy the central scenes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Tell-Troth ends with a general blessing bestowed by Robin on young lovers, which foreshadows Oberon’s blessing of Theseus’s household at the end of the Dream:

Their dalliaunce shall bee rewarded with darlings, whose sweete favoured faces, shall be continuall pledges of their faithfull kindnesse… Their encrease shalbe multiplied, their substance doubled and trebled till it come to aboundance… They shall adde so great a blessing to their store as time shall not take away the memory of them, nor fame suffer their antiquitye ever to die… Thus shall loves followers be thrise happy, and thus Robin goodfellowes well-willers, in imitating his care bee manifolde blessed (sig. F4v-F5r).

Oberon too promises that the issue created in the ‘bride beds’ of Theseus, Hippolyta and the rest will be ‘fortunate’, free from the ‘blots of nature’s hand’, and that the ‘couples three’ who engendered them will ‘Ever true in loving be’ (5.1.394-411); and Puck follows up this promise with a heartfelt appeal to his well-willers among the audience.  Shakespeare’s Puck shares, too, with Tell-Troth’s Robin a particular concern for the well-being of amorous women, as he shows when he mistakenly dismisses Lysander as ‘this lack-love, this kill-courtesy’ for his apparent spurning of Hermia (2.2.83).  The goblin, then, was associated with the defence of romance as well as of the stage at the point when Shakespeare introduced him into his Athenian love story.  He was also already seen as a link between English and classical myth, one of the Lares Familiares or household spirits transformed into an impudent English imp who lives in a classical-Purgatorial Hades, well before Shakespeare gave him a new home in the woods of ancient Greece;[13] and a half-demonic champion of laughter with a heart of gold, well before Shakespeare gave him the capacity both to laugh at and pity the mortal fools he spies on. 

Stanley Tucci as Puck

The combination of mischief-making with benevolence is shared by Shakespeare’s goblin with his namesakes in Tarlton’s News, The Cobbler of Canterbury and Tell-Troth’s New Year’s Gift.  In Shakespeare’s play, it is Oberon who speaks most openly about this fusion of qualities, when he invokes the link between himself, his fellow spirits and the devil at the end of the third act, telling Robin to ‘overcast the night’ with ‘fog as black as Acheron’ (3.2.355-7) – one of the rivers in the classical underworld – and encouraging him to mimic the voices of Demetrius and Lysander as devils are said to mimic men’s voices in Nashe’s Terrors of the Night (3.2.360-3).[14] But when Robin tells him that this must be done swiftly before dawn sends ‘damned spirits’ back to their ‘wormy beds’ (no hint of Purgatory here), Oberon replies by dissociating himself and Robin utterly from souls who have ‘themselves exiled from light’.  ‘We are spirits of another sort’, he claims, and goes on to describe his delight in dallying with the morning sunshine like Apollo, the classical god of learning (3.2.378-93); and this assertion of benevolence is reinforced at the point when the fairies and Puck extend their benison to the sleeping lovers in the play’s last scene.  If plays resemble dreams, in this play they are evidently dreams that bring peace and health to those who experience them.

Having said this, the terror of damnation with which the theatre-haters had infected the playhouse is by no means absent from Shakespeare’s comedy.  When Robin Goodfellow turns ‘actor’, for instance, after witnessing the amateur theatrics of the craftsmen (3.1.75), he throws them into a superstitious panic by assuming a range of terrible forms: ‘Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn’ (3.1.106).  But the devilry he practises is finally harmless, like the merry pranks played by the demonic Vices of an earlier dramatic tradition, or the antics of the devilish satyr-spirits in the pamphlets of the 1590s.  And if it is both harmless and health-giving, the theatre-haters who saw it only as monstrous stand condemned for crude thinking, moral cowardice, and a lack of generosity.  After all, the craftsmen welcomed Bottom back into their midst when they saw he was no monster (4.2); whereas the theatre-haters at their most extreme could find no place in a civil commonwealth for comedy.[15] 

Mickey Rooney as Puck   

It is hardly surprising, then, if in the last lines of the play Robin himself should turn defender of the theatre, like Tarlton in Kind-Heart’s Dream.  Theseus lays the groundwork for this defence earlier in the scene when he teaches his contemptuous master of the revels Philostrate the proper way to respond to well-meant drama.  ‘Never anything can be amiss,’ he says, ‘When simpleness and duty tender it’ (5.1.82-3); and he goes on to explain how best to read incompetent performances where the actors stumble over their lines and fall silent, overawed by the grandeur of their audience.  ‘Trust me, sweet,’ he tells Titania,

Out of this silence yet I picked a welcome,
And in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most, to my capacity (5.1.99-105).

For Theseus, a courteous audience participates in a performance, reading into it the good will they would hope to find in all the works of the imagination.  A little later he characterizes this process of generous reading as a kind of amendment or emendation: ‘The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them’ (5.1.210-1).  It’s the word ‘amend’ that Puck takes up in his epilogue; a word that had long been associated with readerly generosity by Elizabethan readers.  Presenting their books to a potentially hostile public, some authors prefaced them with a gnomic challenge to their critics: ‘commend it, or amend it’; speak well of a work of art if you can’t improve on it.[16]  Robin Goodfellow presents his audience with a more genial offer from the playwright and actors who have entertained them.  ‘If we shadows have offended,’ he begins, ‘Think but this, and all is mended: / That you have but slumbered here, / While these visions did appear’ (5.1.414-7).  For Nashe, visions seen in sleep, like Robin, are mostly harmless; they seldom have prophetic significance, and in most cases signify little more than the quality or otherwise of the last meal you have eaten.[17]  Robin’s dream, too, is no more than a ‘weak and idle theme’, and its idleness is not threatening (5.1.418).  If it is pardoned, the players will ‘mend’ or improve their performance next time; if they escape the hissing of envious serpents among their spectators they ‘will make amends ere long’; and finally, generosity from their audience will strengthen the bond of imaginative friendship or amity among the citizens and their entertainers: ‘Give me your hands, if we be friends, / And Robin shall restore amends’ (5.1.421-9).  The theatre-haters insisted that the playwrights had failed to amend or reform their plays despite endless promises of amendment.[18]  Robin makes the process of amendment a general one, healing rifts and bridging gaps between friendly co-habitants of the linked spaces of playhouse and city, and exorcising the demons that had been introduced into those spaces by the serpentine hissing of ungenerous prudes.

Henry Fuseli, Titania and Bottom

3.  Robin Goodfellow and Bottom’s Dream

It’s perhaps worth mentioning one more way in which Shakespeare’s Robin both evokes and counters the anti-theatrical prejudice through interference with sleep.  His decision to replace Bottom’s head with the head of an ass, then obtrude him into the presence of the sleeping Titania, in whose arms he is afterwards lulled asleep to the strains of seductive music, is another knowing reference to the Tudor controversy over the beneficence or devilishness of drama.  As early as the 1540s, the schoolmaster-playwright John Redford introduced a scene into his moral interlude Wit and Science in which the schoolboy-hero Wit is danced into a state of exhaustion by a seductive female Vice, then lulled to drowsiness in her arms.  As he dozes, the Vice’s son Ignorance places his fool’s cap on Wit’s shoulders: a cap no doubt endowed with the usual pair of ass’s ears.  On waking, it is some time before Wit becomes aware of his transformation; and if ever Shakespeare saw a performance of Wit and Science or one of its variants, it seems unlikely he would have forgotten the peals of laughter that greeted Wit’s puzzlement at the reaction of those around him to his changed appearance.

The Vice who seduced Wit into this compromising somnolence was called Idleness, a term often used by the theatre-haters to designate the unproductive activities of players.  Her rival in the play is a Virtue called Honest Recreation – and again, this is the virtue defenders of the theatre liked to champion, insisting on the necessity for relaxing and instructive entertainment in the midst of one’s daily labour, and claiming that the theatre could provide such entertainment more fully than any other art-form.  Redford’s Honest Recreation has nothing but contempt for Idleness; but any attack of hers on the Vice is pre-empted by the Vice herself, who launches a devastating verbal assault on Honest Recreation that anticipates in its wording the polemic of the theatre-haters in the 1570s and 80s.  Honest Recreation, says Idleness, is nothing but a fake, a common player or mummer who uses the mask of virtue to cover her vices:

The dyvyll and hys dam can not devyse
More devlyshnes then by the doth ryse
Under the name of Honest Recreacion:
She, lo, bryngth in her abhominacion!
Mark her dawnsyng, her masking and mummyng.
Where more concupiscence then ther cummyng? [19]

Honest Recreation retaliates with an eloquent humanistic defence of leisure-time activities as a source of intellectual refreshment; but her thunder has been stolen, her name forever muddied, and she retires defeated as soon as she has said her piece, leaving Wit firmly entwined in the embrace of her demonic counterpart Idleness.  And here he was to be found, again and again, throughout the rest of the sixteenth century.  Two more versions of the story of Wit and Science were staged in the 1560s and 70s (The Marriage of Wit and Science and Francis Merbury’s The Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom), each of which replayed the scene where Wit gets saddled with a fool’s cap in his sleep.  In the early 1580s a version of the play was acted called The Play of Playes and Pastimes, which responded to Stephen Gosson’s attack on the theatre by depicting Life lulled asleep by Honest Recreation herself – not by her vicious substitute – then entertained with Comedy when she wakes.20  And Redford’s play was reworked at least three more times in the following decade: once in The Cobbler’s Prophecy (c. 1590), a comedy by the celebrated clown Robert Wilson, where the god Mars is lulled asleep by Venus until startled into action by a comic cobbler; once in Anthony Munday’s Sir Thomas More (c. 1593), where More takes part in a performance of The Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom; and once in the Inns of Court entertainment The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, whose entire plot is ultimately derived from Redford’s.  Shakespeare helped to revise Sir Thomas More for performance, perhaps in the early 1600s.  It seems beyond the bounds of possibility that he should not have known the plot, at least, of Wit and Science, and its affiliation with the theatrical controversy.  And read as another reworking of this plot, Bottom’s transformation tells us a good deal about his creator’s attitude to the theatre at this stage in his career.

Henry Fuseli, Titania and Bottom

Bottom the weaver is an actor – albeit a very bad one.  His designation as one of the ‘rude mechanicals’ – the phrase Robin applies to them (3.2.9) – associates him with the standard insult levelled at actors and non-university playwrights by two of the so-called University Wits of the 1580s, Greene and Nashe, both of whom saw acting as a ‘mechanical’ art, a non-intellectual exercise well suited to the offspring of craftsmen and tradesmen who practised it.[21]  So when Puck invests Bottom with the head of an ass it seems no more than he deserves, as an upstart crow who plans to raise his presumptuous voice in the presence of royalty against all the principles of classical decorum.

Yet the weaver responds to his predicament with astonishing dignity.   He refuses to be frightened by the insults levelled at him (he tells his fellow craftsmen that in accusing him of monstrosity they are merely exposing themselves as ‘ass-heads’ or fools, 3.1.111), and sings to keep up his courage.  His song acts like that of a mermaid or Siren on Titania’s senses; she becomes ‘enamoured of his note’ (3.1.131), much as audiences were said by the theatre-haters to be roused to lustful paroxysms by the melodic blandishments of the stage.  Yet when she declares her love for him he remains both rational and scrupulously courteous.  ‘Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that’, he tells her, and later denies her statement that he is ‘as wise as he is beautiful’ – he lays claim only to the pragmatic ‘wit’ he needs to ‘get out of this wood’ (3.1.135-42).  This practical or mechanical intelligence manifests itself, too, in his philosophy: ‘reason and love,’ he says, ‘keep little company together nowadays – the more the pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends’ (3.1.136-9).  For him, the love that matters is the love that binds communities, the love between neighbours which he has clearly provoked among his own neighbours, the fellow craftsmen and actors who mourn his absence at the end of Act Four, just before he is miraculously restored to them.  Bottom is a fool only in that he voices popular wisdom, fails to take advantage of Titania’s infatuation for selfish ends, and refuses to modify his behaviour in the presence of power, as a sycophantic courtier would have done.  His deportment to Titania’s fairy servants is impeccable; and when Titania tells them to ‘Tie up my love’s tongue; bring him silently’ (3.1.191), it is not an injunction to restrain the ribaldry of an unruly clown, as it would have been in a Redfordian moral interlude, nor yet an act of ritual humiliation, as it would have been in a play by Robert Wilson, but a means of subduing him to her desire – a desire that is ultimately harmless, to herself, to him, and to their Elizabethan audience.

Joseph Noel Paton, Oberon and the Mermaid (with Puck)

The harmlessness of the piece of supernatural theatre Bottom finds himself caught up in is strongly asserted by Puck in the following scene.  When he describes the weaver’s transformation to Oberon, Robin laughs at the unnecessary terror of Bottom’s companions when faced with his metamorphosis: ‘Their sense thus weak, lost with their fears thus strong, / Made senseless things begin to do them wrong’ (3.2.27-8).  Later, unreasoning terror is mentioned again by Theseus, whose analysis of the workings of ‘strong imagination’ includes the transformation of inanimate harmless objects by panic: ‘in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush supposed a bear!’ (5.1.18-22).  Even the craftsmen are aware of the ease with which terror can be aroused by harmless things: they seek to defuse any fear that might be generated by their own theatrical performance by drawing attention to its theatricality, so that the lion in their play gives an elaborate and wholly unnecessary explanation of the principle of dramatic illusion to its courtly spectators.  Both the craftsmen’s very reasonable fear of Bottom, and their less reasonable fear that the ladies in their audience will fear them, are profoundly funny; and the implication is that the fear of the theatre evinced by its critics is not much less so.

Malice is simply absent from Robin’s actions, as it is from those of the well-intentioned craftsmen.  When Oberon rebukes him for administering the love-juice to the wrong lover, for instance, the goblin repeatedly insists that he ‘mistook’, although he is delighted by the outcome of his errors.  Once his cruel but harmless ‘sport’ is over, it assumes the status of ‘a dream and fruitless vision’ (3.2.371) for the Athenian lovers who were its victims; and Titania’s fleeting affair with Bottom – something mistaken on her part, not maliciously intended – also ends by being dismissed as ‘the fierce vexation of a dream’ (4.1.68).  Like Titania and the lovers, audiences will leave the theatre without having been adversely affected by what they saw there; restored to what Robin calls ‘True delight’ (3.2.455) – responsible pleasure, something the theatre-haters don’t seem able to imagine – in the things and people that are dear to them, they will return to waking life with nothing but an enhanced sense of its fragile beauty and comic unreasonableness.  And having left the stage, they will be no more tempted to engage in any over-critical analysis of their ‘most rare’ theatrical ‘vision’ than they would to analyse a dream after a feast (4.1.202).  If they sought to do so, they would show themselves to be asses, transformed to fools by the spectacle they have witnessed, just as those who take exception to satire transform themselves into satire’s targets by their over-sensitive response to its gibes.  

Arthur Rackham, Bottom

This, at least, is what Bottom implies when he wakes from the dramatic role of Titania’s lover in Act 4 scene 1.  ‘I have had a most rare vision,’ he says, and ‘Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream’ (4.1.202-4).  But he couches this observation in the language of theology, adding a somewhat jumbled but instantly recognizable version of Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was’ (4.1.207-10).  As we’ve seen, Robin Goodfellow and Dick Tarlton were not afraid to get themselves mixed up with theology, despite the bloody history of religious controversy throughout sixteenth-century Europe.  At the bottom of Bottom’s theatrical dream there may be a serious point about the working of the imagination at all levels of society.  After all, real dreams could, Nashe tells us, be heaven-sent ‘visions’ containing genuine prophecies, even if the bulk of them were nothing but outlets for the superfluous matter engendered by the human digestive system.[22]  Prophecies could provoke social change, insurrection, maybe even revolution; visions could start religions or spark off heresies; that’s why there was such careful legislation in England against men’s claims to be visionaries or prophets throughout the Tudor period.  Bottom awakes these controversial matters even as he dismisses them, just as Robin Goodfellow and his fairy companions evoke the demonic associations of drama even as they dismiss them.  The magic of the theatre, and its status as the space where human dreams and nightmares can be realized as nowhere else, remain as potent at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as they were at the beginning.  And it’s partly thanks to Shakespeare’s clever predecessors, with all the goblins, ghosts, and visions they invoked on stage and printed page, that this is so.  The time has come to wake them from their long sleep, set them loose among us once again, and listen carefully to what they have to tell us.

Arthur Rackham, Puck

NOTES

  1. See Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night or a Discourse of Apparitions, in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 209-210.  All references to The Terrors of the Night are taken from this edition.  An early version of this paper was given at the World Shakespeare Congress, Brisbane 2006, in a panel on early modern sleep organized by Garrett Sullivan and Evelyn Tribble.  I am very grateful to all the participants in the panel, especially Jeffrey Marsten and Rebecca Totaro.
  2. I have discussed the anti-theatrical prejudice in my book, Shakespeare and Comedy (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2005), pp. 5-24 etc.  See also Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), and Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality, 1579-1642 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
  3. My reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in this paper develops my discussion of it in Shakespeare and Comedy, pp. 141-154.  I am also indebted to Peter Holland’s introduction to his edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), and his essay ‘“The Interpretation of Dreams” in the Renaissance’, Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).  See also Derek Alwes, ‘Elizabethan Dreaming: Fictional Dreams from Gascoigne to Lodge’, in Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose, ed. Constance C. Relihan (Kent, Ohio and London: Kent State University Press, 1996), 153-67.
  4. Accounts of Robin Goodfellow can be found in Katharine Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959) (see index); Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies (London: Lane, 1976), entries for Puck and Robin Goodfellow; Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories (London: Allen Lane, 2000), ch. 5; and Winfried Schleiner, ‘Imaginative Sources for Shakespeare’s Puck’, Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985), 65-8
  5. Albions England (1612), Anglistica and Americana (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971), p. 368.  The first four books of Warner’s epic were published in 1588; the 14th book, containing ‘A Tale of Robin-goodfellow’, first appeared in the 1606 edition.  See my ‘Myths Exploited: The Metamorphoses of Ovid in Early Elizabethan England’, Shakespeare’s Ovid, ed. A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 27-8.
  6. For a fuller discussion of this text see my ‘Robert Greene and the Uses of Time’, Writing Robert Greene, ed. Kirk Melnikoff and Edward Gieskes (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), ch. 8, pp.182-7.
  7. The Life and Complete Works… of Robert Greene, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 15 vols. (London and Aylesbury: privately printed, 1881-3), vol. 12, p. 207.
  8. For a detailed discussion of the place of the tragedy of Collingbourne in The Mirror for Magistrates see Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chapter 3.  All references are to the 1563 edition.
  9. For a print history of The Mirror for Magistrates see the introduction to Lily B. Campbell’s edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938).
  10. For a recent account of Gabriel Harvey’s posthumous attack on Robert Greene and Nashe’s response, see Ronald A. Tumelson II, ‘Robert Greene, “Author of Playes”’, Writing Robert Greene, ed. Melnikoff and Gieskes, ch. 5.
  11. For the health-giving properties of laughter see my ‘The Afterlife of Andrew Borde’, Studies in Philology vol. 100 no. 4 (Fall 2003), pp. 463-92.
  12. The Cobbler’s Robin opens his epistle with ‘Ho, Ho, Ho’, the phrase Shakespeare’s Robin uses at 3.2.421.  Shakespeare’s Robin alludes to hemp at 3.1.72, and describes himself stamping to terrify Peter Quince and his fellow craftsmen at 3.2.25. 
  13. Nashe associates him with the Lares or ‘household Gods’ in The Terrors of the Night (p. 210), and Warner calls Robin a ‘breechlesse Larr’ in Albions England, p. 367.  See also Tarlton’s News Out of Purgatory, p. 2, quoted above.
  14. Nashe mentions the devil’s power of mimicry several times in The Terrors of the Night, but cf. ‘Those that catch birds imitate their voices; so will he imitate the voices of God’s vengeance, to bring us like birds into the net of eternal damnation’ (p. 211).
  15. Stephen Gosson takes this stance in his Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582).  See Arthur F. Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1974), introduction.
  16. For the phrase ‘Commend it, or amend it’ see e.g. the title-page of John Lyly’s Euphues and his England (1580).
  17. ‘From the unequal and repugnant mixture of contrarious meats… many of our mystic cogitations proceed; and even as fire maketh iron like itself, so the fiery inflammations of our liver or stomach transform our imaginations to their analogy and likeness’.  Nashe, Terrors of the Night, p. 233.
  18. For the theatre-haters’ rejection of the playwrights’ claims to have reformed their work, see my Shakespeare and Comedy, pp. 11-12.
  19. John Redford, Wit and Science, in Tudor Interludes, ed. Peter Happé (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), pp.181-219, p. 196.
  20. For a summary of the plot of The Play of Plays, which demonstrates its indebtedness to the plot of Wit and Science, see Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Salzburg: Universitaet Salzburg, 1974), pp. 181-3.
  21. See Nashe’s statement that ‘everie mechanicall mate’ aspires to the status of a rhetorician because of the example set by ‘vainglorious tragoedians’; epistle ‘To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities’, printed with Greene’s romance Menaphon (1589), Works… of Robert Greene, ed. Grosart, vol. 6, p. 9.  See also Greene’s romance Francescos Fortunes (1590), Works… of Robert Greene, ed. Grosart, vol. 8, p. 132, where the players’ art is described as ‘a kind of mechanical labour’.
  22. The Terrors of the Night, p. 235.

Two Poems: A Penny for your Thoughts

1.

The little man who sweeps the roads
Once dropped a penny down a grille.
At that appalling tragedy
He sat and wept, and sits there still

And rocks his body back and forth
While tears like small abandoned loads
Well out between his fingertips
And wash the litter off the roads.

2.

King Sam spent all his money in a vain attempt to wheedle
A dehydrated camel through the eyepiece of a needle.
Eventually, dying at the age of eighty-seven
In a poor but pious hermitage, the monarch went to heaven.

The Mountain Orchestra

When the villagers began the long toil up the mountainside they carried their houses on their backs like hermit crabs. Hampers, boxes, handbags, cupboards, tables and chairs seemed to have developed spindly legs and a taste for exercise, reeling along from bend to bend of the well-worn path as their owners struggled to outpace the bandits of Bist and Flumm, with their well-known thirst for gold and blood and delicate china. Half-way up the first steep slope the bandits caught them – as Granny Small had said they would – and at once the villagers let fall their burdens to protect their bodies. Chairs, kettles and mattresses rolled away down the spongy slope to fetch up against rocks or tumble into the burn. Soon the burn’s irregular staircase of ice-rimmed pools began to sprout long wavering strings of pale pink weed wherever the villagers’ blood spilled into it in rivulets and gobbets.

They had driven off the first attack and were about to retrieve their bundles when the old man called out: ‘Let them lie. It’s not often you get the excuse to throw out old rubbish. There’ll be better things on the other side of the mountain!’ So they left their kettles and mattresses littering the hillside, to act as an informal open-air reception room for sheep and wrens, and resumed their climb. But the little girl had already guessed that the old man had not been talking about pots and pans. In the attack he had received an ugly gash in the side from a bandit’s curtle-axe, and his feeble attempt to ward it off had resulted only in the smashing of the last of the Rebus violins. For a little while after that the old man had sat on a pile of sheep-droppings with blood and water soaking his trousers and let a tear roll down each cheek in tribute to the instrument. The little girl thought they must be carefully regulated tears, since he had always said you should allow two tears for every sad occasion: one for sorrow at your loss, the other for joy at the gift of life that allowed you to weep despite your losses.

He left the violin on the slope along with his favourite whisky glass – now smashed – and the mortal remains of Granny Small. The oldest woman in the village had died as she said she would, not of a curtle-axe wound but of a heart attack brought on by trying to brain a bandit with a lump of granite. For a long time as they climbed her thin shrill voice kept chattering on at them to hurry up; they were quite relieved when it died away, drifting off like a cricket’s chorus on a mountain breeze.

At one point the little girl and the old man took a rest on a tumbledown wall and looked back the way they had come. A feather of smoke unfurled from the village by the lake and the little girl fancied she could smell the scent of wood-ash on the wind. ‘Well, at least the houses are getting fumigated,’ the old man said; but the little girl was already shedding a good many more than the two small tears he recommended. They just kept welling out of her head like a burn from the side of a rain-drenched mountain. She finally stopped crying from sheer surprise that her head could be so full of water.

A little higher up they reached a stretch of level ground where the mountain path lost all definition in the sheep-cropped turf. At once the fog dropped down on them with what might have been a silent shout of laughter. Within seconds droplets formed in the girl’s brown hair and gleamed like eyes in the old man’s bristling eyebrows. Hills and mountain-ranges of fog rushed past at enormous speed, driven on by a wind that cut their flesh to the bone. The villagers forgot their fear that the bandits would follow them; instead they trembled because the ground beneath their feet was getting narrower, and the crags dropped into nothingness on either side. The wind tried to pluck them from the mountainside like an oystercatcher pecking at the shell of a stubborn mussel.

The little girl trembled with the rest but for a different reason. She was afraid of the Beast that lived among the mountains and left stories like bloody limbs littering the slopes for miles around. The old man patted her cheek and assured her that the Beast was far too large to bother with prey as insignificant as little girls. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘it’s fast asleep. Can’t you hear it snoring like the waves on a far-off shore?’ The little girl nodded but kept looking behind her uneasily. She could hear the waves on the shore whenever the wind dropped, but they sounded nothing at all like a monster snoring.

All the same, she was glad of the old man’s aimless prattle as he leaned on her shoulder. Although his weight was sometimes painful, she felt as though he were pulling her up the mountain instead of the other way round. ‘All my life I’ve wanted to visit these mountains,’ he panted. ‘It took an attack of bandits to get me up, and it’ll take a band of angels to get me down.’ By the time they reached the bottom of a slope of scree that swept up before them like a frozen wave into a foggy void, the rest of the villagers had disappeared. ‘You’re my guardian angel,’ the old man said, but it was he who pointed out where the little girl should set her feet. He seemed so sure of the way that it came as no surprise when they found themselves at the mouth of a cave, peering into the darkness to make sure there were no Beasts inside. At last they crawled through the narrow entrance, and at once the shriek of the wind dropped down to a whisper, as suddenly as if a door had shut behind them. From then on they only heard it from time to time, wailing disconsolately outside as if bereft of prey.

The cave seemed to run deep into the mountainside. At every movement echoes scuttled off and vanished into the stone entrails of the earth. But the roof was so low that the old man had crawled only a few yards before his head struck rock and he collapsed. He lay on his back as he had fallen, his head propped against the wall, his hands palm upwards by his sides. Every so often a breath escaped him in a little feather of smoke. The little girl curled up in the crook of his arm and busied herself with trying to forget about the Beast. Together they waited for night to enter the cave.

After a while the old man noticed that there was another old man lying beside him, whose breath likewise came in little feathers of smoke. He wore a tail-coat with fraying cuffs and a dirty white tie, and his face was as pale as his shirt-front except for a hint of yellow in the cheeks. The old man saw at once that the stranger was as sick as himself. He gave a chuckle at their shared predicament, then winced at the pain in his injured side.

‘We make a fine pair, I must say,’ he observed.

‘Eh?’ said the stranger, contorting his body to see who had spoken. ‘What’s that? Who’s there?’

‘Can’t you see me?’ asked the old man.

‘Indeed not,’ said the stranger. ‘You’re too strong, too alive. You’ll have to be a good deal closer to death’s door than that before I can see you.’

‘Is this better?’ asked the old man, moving a little closer to death’s door.

‘Yes, much,’ said the stranger, and twisted round to look at him closely. He had very bright eyes in deep sockets, as though he hadn’t eaten for a hundred and fifty-seven years and would stop at nothing for a scrap to feed on.

‘What’s that at your elbow, all wrapped up?’ he asked, nodding at the bundle.

‘It’s the ghost of my violin,’ replied the old man. ‘A genuine Rebus. I was clumsy enough to break it in a recent scuffle.’

‘That’s not all you broke, is it?’ the stranger said with a glance at the old man’s wound and a nasty grin. To his own surprise the old man felt insulted that such a sorry specimen should criticize the state of his body. It had served him for many years and he suddenly had a nostalgic affection for its failing organs. But before he could retort the stranger gave a sudden groan and started to writhe like an angry snake. It seemed he was trying to raise himself on one elbow.

‘So you’re a musician?’ the stranger gasped when at last he succeeded. ‘What a stroke of luck! I’ve been waiting for one of those for many years. You see, I too am a musician. My name is Colossus Retch. I expect you’ve heard of me.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Retch,’ said the old man. ‘We don’t hear much about modern music in the village by the lake. It’ll be different, I expect, when we reach the other side of the mountain.’

‘That’s DOCTOR Retch,’ the stranger snapped, ‘and my music is NOT modern.’

The old man didn’t hear him, because the little girl had sat up at the sound of voices and asked him who he was talking to. He said no-one and gave her a smile, which she put away at once and kept in a secret place for the rest of her life. She gave him a dazzling smile of her own in return, then took out an old linen handkerchief and started to wipe the blood from his forehead with gentle strokes.

The gentle movement drove everything else out of the old man’s mind. He had just managed to doze off when something buzzed in his ear and woke him up. It sounded like ‘A temporary pause’.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he murmured.

‘Nothing,’ said the little girl, still wiping.

‘I said, O tempora, O mors,’ the stranger said. He too had sat up and was looking much more sprightly. From nowhere he produced a large earthenware jug and poured himself a cup of something that emitted huge gushes of steam. A spicy fragrance filled the cave. Even the little girl felt the warmth invade her nostrils, steal down the back of her throat and invade her lungs, whence it spread throughout her body. The old man’s mouth began to water, and went on watering till he feared he would begin to drool.

‘Sorry I can’t let you have any,’ said the stranger. ‘This is Spirituous Liquor, strictly forbidden to anyone under the age of death.’ He sat back with an exaggerated sigh of contentment which brought back all the old man’s initial loathing of him. For a while all that could be heard were his appreciative slurps and the rumbling of the old man’s belly.

After some time Colossus Retch began to speak again. ‘Let me tell you about myself,’ he suggested. ‘Or at least about my posthumous self. You wouldn’t care to hear the details of my earthly life. Decidedly sordid, I’m afraid!’

He took another sip of the liquor. As he did so the old man saw his teeth flash in one of those grins that seemed to signal some private amusement, forever barred to the uninitiated such as the old man and the little girl. All at once the old man felt certain that if he let the stranger continue he would find himself trapped, forced to repeat some mechanical motion over and over again in the eerie solitude of the mountains. He opened his mouth in an attempt to protest, but his tongue remained frozen to the roof of his mouth as if rendered useless by some numbing potion or poisonous gas.

‘For a hundred and fifty-seven years,’ the stranger said, ‘I have had the honour of being the conductor of the Mountain Orchestra. I see your eyes light up in recognition –’ (they had done nothing of the kind) ‘– as well they might. The Mountain Orchestra, you exclaim, that melodious muster of master musicians, that band of lonely virtuosi collectively conjoined in their determination to subdue the chaos of this savage world with the staves of harmony! Believe it or not, before my time they were no more harmonious than a roomful of angry gibbons. Some of them couldn’t read music, some of them held their instruments upside down, not one of them could tie a bow tie without assistance or fasten a cufflink. But with time and patience and liberal lashings of raw talent I managed to shape them against all odds into a passable resemblance of a real live orchestra. The Mountain Orchestra, my friend, was shaped from my posthumous blood and sweat and tears, I say this without exaggeration. You may congratulate me if you like.’ And the stranger blew his nose on the filthy sleeve of his tail-coat.

At this point a gust of wind blundered into the cave and buffeted its way from wall to wall. A burst of music seemed to be released each time it struck a surface. The old man shivered and turned towards the entrance, laying his hand on the head of the girl which had slowly drooped until it was resting on his knee. Outside, the fog still glowed with a greenish light as it always does for an hour or so after the sun has set. With a start the old man saw that the Mountain Orchestra had taken its seats in the void beyond: rank on rank of see-through musicians fading away into the foggy distance. Each musician had indistinct features, but they held their heads at a certain angle that conveyed a sense of implacable resolution in the teeth of adversity. Each musician was smartly attired in evening dress made of mist and cobwebs.

The old man found his voice again. ‘Do you have repertoire?’ he asked weakly.

The stranger gave a modest cough. ‘We do indeed,’ he answered. ‘A repertoire curated by myself in response to the special needs and challenges of our orchestral purpose. Most of what we play is music,’ he went on, nodding his head as he warmed to his subject, ‘although alas it has not always been recognised as such. Winds, fogs, planetary movements, ghost sonatas; anything insubstantial really. Water music is a speciality; our performances of burns, brooks, becks, and the ripples on highland lochans are justly celebrated. You may know the Incoming Tide by Moonlight? An old composition of my own, I’m happy to say. But my time with the Mountain Orchestra draws to a close. I am looking beyond, so to speak, to new horizons and fresh challenges: spiritual compositions for the most part, though I may try my hand at nullity, loss and irremediable absence. And here you are, a fiddler emerging out of the fog as if by Divine Decree, perfectly qualified to fill the vacancy. How would you like to be my successor? How would you like, my friend, to lead the Mountain Orchestra in my place? Does the prospect thrill you?’

While he discussed his music the stranger’s face had taken on a wistful air. The lines of suffering scored on his brow had disappeared and his large eyes swam like mountain pools in the wake of a storm. But now he leaned forward with disconcerting suddenness and resumed his expression of wolfish hunger. His teeth and eyes were almost too bright to look at. The old man would have recoiled if he had been able to move his body as well as his head.

‘Well now,’ he said in alarm. ‘I’ll need to know a good deal more about the job before I accept it. What’s the pay like? Who do we play for? What are the perks?’

‘The pay,’ the stranger repeated scornfully. ‘The perks. Let me see. A weekly wage in pain and frustration, a lamentable lack of understanding from the general public, all the Spirituous Liquor you can drink and a captive audience. Will that do?’

‘I’ve known worse deals,’ the old man observed. ‘A captive audience, you say. Who are they?’

‘I’d have thought you’d know all about that, since you’re such an expert on the Beast,’ the stranger said. ‘The audience is here. You’re in one of its ears.’

The old man gave a start which woke the girl from a dream about animated furniture. He soothed her by stroking her hair while every nerve in his body strained to detect some other sign of life inside the cave. The stranger’s voice droned on regardless.

‘Yours will be one of the highest and loneliest destinies in the profession. Night and day, year in and year out, the Mountain Orchestra delivers performances of genius to no other audience than the Beast of the Martoc Mountains. As you know, the Beast has lain dormant under these mountains for many centuries. Your job will be to make sure it goes on sleeping undisturbed.’

‘I haven’t accepted yet,’ the old man interposed. ‘It doesn’t sound like much of a challenge to me. You mean to say that the Mountain Orchestra acts as a kind of musical rattle to keep an oversized baby quiet?’

‘That’s not what I mean at all,’ snarled the impresario. ‘You clearly haven’t grasped the seriousness of the situation. Once not so long ago the Beast almost woke up; it opened one eye and breathed out through one of its nostrils. That was what brought about the Age of Ash. It happened because my predecessor’s fingers got so numb he dropped the baton in Loch Tothel. I trust you’re not prone to numbness in the fingers? He spent seven hours trying to fish it out with a piece of string tied round a stone. Eventually it was brought to him by the Tothel Carp, but by then the damage was done. Not a living thing was left on the surface of the earth within five hundred miles of the Martoc Mountains: nothing but ash and bone and a few charred twigs. When he saw what he’d done my predecessor went mad and impaled himself on Cardothen Crag. You can still hear his shrieks when the wind blows north-north-west.’

The old man listened, but he could no longer hear the wind. He could not even hear the little girl’s breathing or feel her warmth against his ribs. Unobtrusively the stranger’s voice had carried him onto another plane of existence. The painful squeaks and wails as the Mountain Orchestra tuned their instruments made the stone floor beneath his fingertips vibrate.

‘My own posthumous career has been more successful,’ observed the stranger, and his eyes took on the wistful expression they held when he talked about his art. ‘I began my reign as conductor with a simple funeral march for all the lost souls. You know the sort of thing, a lot of cold stars and blowing dust, nothing too complex for my newly-trained musicians. Little by little we progressed to something more complex: a green bud here or there pushing out of the ashes, a solitary bird sitting on a dead branch. Cellos and bassoons hinted at stirrings in the earth as it quickened towards new life. Piccolos monitored the movements of approaching rainclouds. I’ll never forget the moment when we launched into a fully-fledged allegro maestoso to celebrate the rebirth of Spring. Since then – well, to tell the truth I’ve never recaptured that moment of glory. The triumphal march of returning life was the overture, as I see it now, for my career’s decline and fall. We’ve had our ups and downs since then, wrong notes, fluffed passages, entire compositions played out of tune or back to front. And I’ve been getting very tired in recent years. I’m sorry for what happened to your lakeside village; I fell asleep at about the seventeen millionth bar of the Peace Pavane and the Beast must have twitched in its sleep. I woke up in the cave this morning, so stiff I couldn’t move a muscle. Fortunately the Mountain Orchestra has filled the gap with some courageous improvisation, despite their lack of experience in such matters. Nevertheless, I think the time has come when I must cede my baton to my successor. And here you are, ready and waiting to step onto the podium at the moment of need. The question is: will you take up the challenge?’

The stranger’s voice had got steadily fainter as he talked. When the old man looked at him again he saw to his horror that his legs had vanished from the knees downwards and his eyes had lost their light. He seemed to be gazing at some scene beyond the cave wall. The old man watched and listened intently, hoping for some clue as to what that scene might be. All he could see, however, was darkness, all he could hear the flutter of his heart, the steady breathing of the little girl, the murmur of the blood-tide in his eardrums. Or was it the clatter of cutlery on silver plates and the murmur of voices against a background of gentle music, somewhere deep in the heart of the mountain? For a moment he could not tell.

‘Wait, wait!’ he cried in panic. ‘I’m not qualified at all! I’m only a humble violinist! Shouldn’t the conductor of the Mountain Orchestra be a celebrated musician like yourself?’

The stranger gave a ghost of his nasty grin. ‘Don’t kid yourself,’ he said. ‘I was no celebrated musician in my lifetime. I hung around at street corners turning the handle of a barrel organ and leering horribly at passers by. They would pay to make me stop leering. Sordid, I tell you! No, the Beast can’t tell an orchestra from a one man band. There’s nothing to worry about. Conducting’s easy; it’s merely a question of bobbing up and down with a little white stick to keep the musicians awake. Anything more is just a matter of pride. Start with something nice and simple like the grass growing, daylight filtering into the cave, or fish asleep in a forgotten pool at the mountain’s roots. You’ll have moved on to thunderstorms and the dawn chorus before you know it. And how about throwing in a violin fantasia from time to time seeing you’re a fiddle player? Everyone loves the screech of the highest note on a G string.’ And he leered again, even as his body was disappearing right up to his lapels.

‘Wait, wait!’ the old man cried again. ‘How can I be sure the Beast will stay asleep? And who are you anyway? How do I know you’re telling the truth?’

‘You can’t; you don’t,’ said the former conductor of the Mountain Orchestra. ‘And now goodbye. I’m due a hundred and fifty-seven years’ back payment of Eternal Reward.’ With that he vanished completely. For a moment it was as if a curtain of rock had been twitched aside. A colourful ball of jazz music bounced through the cave and out into the night, followed by a rich smell of roast meat and a mechanical canary. For the last time the old man called out, ‘Wait!’, but the cry only emphasized its own futility. He did not doubt that Dr Colossus Retch had already taken his first mouthful of everlasting soup.

‘It’s all right, I’m not going anywhere,’ said the little girl, waking up at the sound of his voice and taking his right hand. ‘But it’s so cold in here I think we’ll die.’

In the feeble light of a mountain dawn, the old man tried to examine her cheeks and pale cracked lips for signs of hypothermia, but soon he found that his aching eyes would not focus on her face. In fact he could see the front row of the Mountain Orchestra through her chest. She was fading from his sight, and other things in the cave were becoming visible. A carpet of luminous weeds decorated the floor, a curious chair stood in one corner, and Granny Small, about the size of a shrimp, was peering at him from a nook in the ceiling. He noticed a slender white stick on the carpet by his violin and flexed his right hand, ready to pick it up. Even as he rejoiced in the flow of blood to the fingertips he was aware that for the little girl they remained as cold and still as granite.

‘You won’t die, my dear,’ he told her, making a determined effort to use his tongue instead of his mind. ‘But I must go. I’ve just been offered a job with the Mountain Orchestra; an important job which begins at once; I really can’t say no. You’ll be musician for the village now. You’ll be magnificent.’

‘Me?’ cried the little girl. ‘But I’m not good enough! I don’t play anything!’

‘You’ve got your voice,’ the old man pointed out, ‘and you know all the songs. Will you sing to me now?’

The little girl couldn’t hear what he said, but she decided to sing for him anyway, partly because she thought he would like it, partly to see if her voice would do instead of a violin, and partly to stop herself thinking about the Beast, which had started to prey on her thoughts again as soon as she woke. That was how she pictured the scene years later: herself kneeling by the old man’s side with his hand in hers, music trailing out of her mouth in a silver thread as long and strong as a piece of twine spun by Granny Small. As the thread got longer it grew in size, bouncing off the walls deep down inside the tunnel at the back of the cave, lengthening and thickening until it became a clashing chain of notes, both sweet and harsh, as though the mountain itself were singing. After a while she stopped because the sound had started to scare her, but it continued to ring in the caves of her ears for a long time after.

The old man stood up with a sigh and stretched till his backbone cracked. Then he strode to the mouth of the cave with determined strides. He found he was wearing the stranger’s tail-coat with the fraying cuffs and the musty smell. It was too small for him, but now he remembered it hadn’t fit the stranger either. Underneath he still wore his own shirt, stiff with sweat and blood. ‘They could at least have provided a clean white shirt-front,’ he told himself irritably.

Before going out he took one look behind him to make sure he had left some suitable remains to keep the little girl company. He was shocked at how ill the corpse looked. The little girl had dropped off back to sleep in the crook of its arm.

With some difficulty he clambered up on his rostrum; each leg seemed to sink through each step to the height of his knee. By the time he reached the top he was submerged in fog to hip level and still sinking; at this rate, he thought, he would vanish into the abyss before he’d had a chance to lift the baton for the very first time. But then a flurry of clapping broke out among the violins, taken up with ghostly enthusiasm by the rest of the players. He rose a little, then rose some more when the cellists cheered. The old man graced them with a small, stiff bow, and when he straightened found that his feet were firmly planted on the boards of the rostrum. He struck the top with his little white stick to test its solidity. It gave out a satisfying clack, and the musicians’ eyes opened wide in anticipation. He smiled encouragingly – for his own sake as much as for theirs – and raised the baton.

‘Now then, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’

The little girl didn’t notice that the old man had died until the villagers found her curled up beside him the following morning. They buried him under a pile of rocks near the mouth of the cave. Then they walked on over the mountain, carrying the little girl with them on a worn-out armchair and accompanied all the way by a wicked wind. They found many things on the other side: things Granny Small had led them to expect and things she hadn’t mentioned; wanderings in woods and rests by rivers; cities full of noise and pain and the bright clean city where they made their home. By that time the little girl had grown up into a tall strong woman and her voice had grown to the size and strength of the mountain voice she had heard in the cave when she sang to the old man. Old and young men vied for her hand, and a musician won it.

But years later the woman wandered out into the city gardens and up onto the ramparts. As the fog rose out of the woods her mind wandered away to the distant mountains. She had often told the story of the old man’s death, sometimes taking out the smile he had given her, polishing it on her skirt and passing it round among her listeners. With the passing time she embroidered the story as he would have done himself. She insisted that he was still making music in the mountains, conducting a ghostly assembly of musicians called the Mountain Orchestra, who played till their bones ached and their insubstantial heads rang to make sure that the Beast stayed fast asleep. She said that if you listened hard enough you could sometimes hear soaring above the strains of the mountain wind and the chattering burns the silver thread of melody spun by the last of the Rebus violins. She prayed that the old man was not prone to numbness in the fingers.

One thing she had recently added to the story. Was it not possible, she would ask, that with time and the Orchestra’s diligent playing the nature of the Beast would begin to change? That the baroque musical architecture which she knew the old man favoured would enter its skull and impose a gentler structure on its savagery? Was it foolish to hope that next time the Beast stirred in its sleep it wouldn’t reduce the forests and villages to ash, but would instead murmur one of the Mountain Orchestra’s melodies back at them, as the mountain had done on the night she sang the old man out of this life and into the next?

The night laid cold dark hands on the woman’s face, and she let a carefully regulated tear roll down each cheek. One for sorrow, one for joy.

 

Helen Marshall, The Migration (2019)

[This post was inspired by a series of workshops called the What If Consortium, organised by the writers Helen Marshall and Kim Wilkins of the University of Queensland and involving scholars and writers from all over the world. The aim of the project is to explore the concept of Story Thinking, which uses creative writing methods drawn from speculative fiction to help transdisciplinary teams imagine and find solutions for complex problems collaboratively and effectively. In preparation for the workshops I read some of Helen’s work, for which she has won (among other things) a World Fantasy Award. I quickly found that her novel The Migration might be read as offering a fine example of Story Thinking in action. The post is intended as a contribution to the cogitations of the What If Consortium; and it’s also intended to form part of a case for fantasy as a genre that can contribute as much to real-world problem solving as science fiction can, despite the tendency to forget about it when the affordances of speculative fiction are under discussion. Or is ‘solving’ the right word? I prefer ‘resolution’, I think, which pays attention to the dialogic processes which are an essential feature of collaborative enterprises, and gestures towards music as a model rather than mathematics. Any good conference, classroom discussion, workshop series or in-depth conversation should have a close affinity with a concert, though I have to admit there’s not much about music in what follows…

Please be warned that there are numerous spoilers in this post.]

Oxford is the birthplace of fantasy. Charles Dodgson wrote his Alice books there, surreal dream worlds that helped define the distinctive art of the twentieth century. Tolkien and Lewis met there and formed the Inklings, a reading and talking group which played midwife to the most influential fantasies of modern times: The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955) and The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956). These books were written by scholars and reflect their interests, from Dodgson’s fascination with sophistry and riddles to Tolkien’s delight in ancient Northern European cultures, whose material and literary remains survive only in serendipitous fragments – including riddles – and which he painstakingly embeds in a rich new context, making them whole in the ultimate fulfilment of a scholar’s dreams. Scholarship sits lightly on the pages of these seminal fantasies: in the Anglo-Saxon attitudes of the messengers Hatta and Haigha, in the prefatory matter to The Fellowship of the Ring, in the textbooks used by the tutor Doctor Cornelius to instruct the future monarch Prince Caspian of Narnia in behaviour fit for a king. Oxford, where Dodgson, Tolkien and Lewis lived, is a city redolent of magic as well as of scholarship, with bizarre grotesques sprouting from its towers and spires and turrets, hidden gardens revealing themselves through the keyholes of old locked doors, a thousand waterways teeming with wildlife forming a maze in and around its streets, which get regularly flooded in periods of bad weather. It has urban myths aplenty, from the Underground Cathedral of Saint Giles, which can be entered via the steps to a Victorian toilet near the Martyrs’ Memorial, to the rumoured discovery of well-dressed skeletons in an underground brook near Christ Church Meadows.[1] And the city spawns new myths weekly – at least, it was still doing so when I last visited in 2019.

No wonder, then, if Oxford has continued to generate beguiling fantasies since Carroll, Lewis and Tolkien set off on their final journeys to another world. Many of these fantasies touch on themes which Tolkien and Lewis chose to ignore: the past understood as a deadly curse relating to toxic masculinity, as in Joan Aiken’s The Shadow Guests (1980); colonialism in Oxford’s museums, as partly acknowledged by Penelope Lively in The House in Norham Gardens (1974); the exclusion of women from much of the university’s history, and the careful replication of the British class system in Oxford’s colleges, as mimicked in the alternative Oxford of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (1995). It was a stroke of genius, then, for Helen Marshall to set her weird novel The Migration in the city where modern fantasy had its birth, as she charts the progression of what could well be the death of fantasy. In The Migration all the elements I’ve listed combine to create a peculiarly modern narrative: from medieval scholarship (here a historian’s investigations into the science of the Black Death) to riddles (what is the mysterious ailment that is killing young people all over the world?) to myths, legends and fantastic stories, as the ailment sparks off wild rumours only marginally less bizarre than its possibly ancient causes and modern symptoms. Set all these elements against the backdrop of a world which is falling apart because of the climate catastrophe and you have a potent reinvention of Oxford fantasy, a love-letter to Carroll, Lewis and Tolkien which is also a rallying cry for a revolutionary new way of seeing the world, and an urgent warning to take collective action before it’s too late, if it isn’t already.

Marshall’s Oxford is seen through the eyes of a teenage stranger. For Sophie Perella from Toronto, the buildings, history and habits of Oxford are just as strange as the strange events breaking out all over the globe. She shares her foreignness with the boy Cosmo in Aiken’s The Shadow Guests, who is from Australia but whose name proclaims him a citizen of the planet; with the Ugandan scholar John Sempebwa in Lively’s The House in Norham Gardens, who mournfully teaches fourteen-year-old Oxford girl Clare Mayfield two or three things about British colonial history; with the young Greek refugee Anna in Paul Kearney’s The Wolf in the Attic (2016), whose first-hand knowledge of the horrors of war makes 1920s Oxford look like a different universe – until she learns it harbours horrors of its own. Oxford for them is already weird before weird things start happening to them. Apart from anything else, they are young and Oxford is old, an embodiment of the piled-up generations which helped to construct the dangerous world they now inhabit. Sophie’s youthfulness in Marshall’s book is constantly reaffirmed by the fact that it’s written in the present tense, a tense never used for fiction by Lewis, Tolkien or Carroll, a tense that stresses the unpredictable nature of the story we’re reading. Past tense tells us that someone at least comes out of the story alive, that what happened is safely over, done and dusted, gone but not forgotten. Present tense tells us that the narrative voice could be the voice of the dead, speaking perhaps out of the ruins not only of their own life but of the whole cultural system that produced them. It implies that what we’re reading about is going on right here and now, even as we read. It’s also the preferred tense of Young Adult fiction. For the young, almost anything they come across is a surprise, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes shocking. Present tense ensures that we, like the young, have no idea what will happen next or how it will end.

Death is present from the opening pages of Marshall’s novel, and with it a sense that the nature of death is one of the many things in the world we don’t have a grip on. In a brief prologue, Sophie recognises the domination of her life by death when she recalls her games of playing dead as a very young child. Sophie tells us she played these games ‘before I knew what dead meant – what it really meant’, she adds (p. 1); but the rest of the book is dedicated to erasing any certainties we might have had as to what really means. The word’s meaning remains elusive throughout the prologue. ‘By the time I was older,’ Sophie tells us, ‘I understood more of the way the world worked, but it still wasn’t real dead I was playing at. It was something else. Something mysterious and terrifying. Like kissing a boy for the first time’ (p. 2). When her younger sister Kira joins in the games of playing dead, Sophie finds it deeply uncomfortable to see her sprawled out lifeless beside her and tickles the child till she moves and giggles, breaking the spell. In this way the comfort of a faux recovery eases the terror of perceiving death as a final ending. But by the end of the prologue, death has got caught up with the idea of memory – traces in the mind of what came before – which itself threatens to lose its function, as Sophie’s recollections of her life in Toronto begin to fade in another enactment of the dying process. The prologue ends with a plaintive acknowledgement of open-endedness. As an older child, Sophie tells us, she thought of death as ‘the feeling of rest after a long journey’ (p. 8). But her journey from Toronto to Oxford did not bring her rest. As a result of what happened next, she goes on, she now thinks of death as a ‘doorway’ and doesn’t wish to know what’s on the other side (p. 8). Portals to Narnia can be read as doorways to death, as the many doorways in The Last Battle (1956) disturbingly drive home. The prologue informs us that Sophia’s doorway leads nowhere so comforting or stable as a land of instructive lions, articulate beavers and walking trees.

From the beginning, then, Marshall’s book announces its preoccupation with questions about which Lewis and Tolkien had strong convictions: with the destination, for example, of the individual human identity after the death of the body; or with the problem of how far the past impinges on the present, to what extent its traces retain some semblance of life, how far they remain entangled in and relevant to the struggles of the living. These questions acquire a personal urgency for Sophie when her sister Kira falls ill. The girl suffers from an unknown condition which is rapidly spreading, jumping from child to child, from youth to youth across the world with unnerving speed, like a coronavirus that singles out the young instead of the old (the novel was written, of course, before the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic). It’s this condition, called JI2, that sends Sophie’s family from Toronto to Oxford, where cutting-edge research is being carried out on treatments for it (the temptation to mention AstraZeneca is irresistible). Sophie, then, heads to Oxford in a quest for answers; but what she finds is only more questions, about the past as well as the present. The treatment, as it turns out, is not effective – at least, not effective in certain crucial respects. Sophie’s world has no more certainties in it, and none of its occupants has much in the way of faith: in religion, in their fellow humans, or indeed in science, which has claimed in the past to find sure means to avert disaster. All conventional terms and familiar concepts have been destabilized, and the city of Oxford itself is vulnerable, its network of waterways rendered treacherous by the increasing frequency of deadly storms and torrential rain.

The clash of past and present is everywhere in Sophie’s new life in Oxford. Cut off from the past – her father stayed behind in Toronto, as did her best friend Jaina – Sophie has to rebuild her network of relationships almost from scratch, beginning with Aunt Irene, an Oxford historian with whom she and her family are staying. Irene’s specialism in history is death: the Black Death, to be precise, which swept through the world in the Fourteenth Century, wiping out populations on a scale unequalled since. And Irene’s research has direct relevance to the new pandemic of youth. Traces of the same hormone have been found in the corpses of the Black Death’s victims and the victims of JI2. Could the fourteenth-century plague and JI2 have something in common? Certainly both have called into question previous certainties, faiths, and social structures; and as Sophie begins to assist her aunt with her research, she soon finds herself empathising with the terrified victims of the earlier infestation. Whether or not there is a scientific link between her time and that one, JI2 represents for Sophie a reawakening of the fourteenth-century plague, just as the calamitous weather of the twenty-first century represents a reawakening of nature in retributive fury at the accumulated centuries of human abuse. Even the weather of the fourteenth century, we learn, was correspondingly calamitous, and its extreme events may have triggered (so Sophie speculates) some momentous change in human DNA, as they have again.

St Bartlemas Chapel, Oxford

Aunt Irene’s college embodies (and in this book about changing bodies the word is apt) the collision of old and new to perfection. Anachronistically known as New College it is in fact very old, having been founded in the fourteenth century when the plague was at its height. Dedicated to the meeting of young and old – undergraduates seeking instruction from established scholars – it is also the explosive meeting point for the past pandemic and its modern equivalent. ‘Did you know,’ Aunt Irene asks Sophie, as if the teenager could somehow have acquired an older woman’s knowledge through her traumatic experiences of disease and migration, ‘Did you know that most of the quads in the College used to be burial pits for plague victims?’ (p. 47). There are, in fact, as Sophie realises, ‘bodies underneath us right now’, telling a story of an old calamity that might unlock the secrets of the new one. It’s from a base in New College that the young people of Oxford rise up in protest against the social restrictions that are being increasingly imposed on them as the pandemic spreads. At one point in the novel Sophie follows the New College students to a party in a graveyard, in defiance of the curfew. The graveyard belongs to a little chapel known as Saint Bartlemas, in East Oxford, where New College students often sought solace when the Black Death was raging, hoping for bodily regeneration through the intervention of the relics there, which included a piece of Saint Bartholomew’s skin (the saint was martyred by being flayed). At this chapel, where the students and scholars gathered annually in medieval times on May Day and Ascension Day, occurs a key moment in the conflict between the infected young and their censorious elders: a chaotic fight between police and undergraduates sparked off by an act of police violence. Several students die in the fight and one policeman. Later, it’s the records of one of the undergraduates who died that confirm for Sophie exactly what is happening to the diseased. A sympathetic doctor hands her the dead boy’s medical records, and Sophie’s reading of this archival document links up with her part-time researches for Aunt Irene to bring past and present fully alive with unprecedented clarity. Aunt Irene’s investigations into the Black Death and the deaths of modern university students place that ancient institution, New College, at the epicentre of the revolutions and evolutions of the twenty-first century.

But Marshall’s Oxford is a site of industrial as well as intellectual labour. There have been long-standing tensions between Town and Gown – between local inhabitants and the intellectuals who gravitate to the University from all over the world – and these tensions are invariably understood in terms of class. Sophie herself occupies a space between the two populations. She attends a private school for girls and lives in the house of an academic, but the boy she falls in love with is a local boy from a half-derelict working-class estate, whose previous girlfriend – also local, also working-class – was an Oxford student who died of JI2. Sophie’s ties to the Town have a geographical, emotional and architectural centre, just like her ties to the Gown or university. Her first trip with her academic Aunt is not to a medieval site – though there are plenty such visits at later points in the book – but to the neighbourhood of the former cement works at Shipton on Cherwell, where stands ‘a tower, at least a hundred feet tall, jutting into the sky’ (p. 13): the cement works chimney. Kira mistakes this at first for a castle, having been prepared by her mother back home in Toronto to expect an England full of castles. Aunt Irene promises to take her to see a proper castle – the one at nearby Warwick – but the cement works chimney has more in the way of history than any decaying military fortification. It’s an integral part, for instance, of Irene’s own past – the place where she met a man who was perhaps her lover, ‘a quarry engineer who sometimes did freelance work assessing dig sites for the School of Archaeology’ (p. 14). This half-forgotten love story invokes the many points of convergence between Town and Gown in Oxford’s history, their symbiotic relationship despite the tensions between them. And it invokes for Sophie the disruption of her personal history by the onset of the pandemic. In Toronto she had always assumed that her future would involve a university education. Uprooted from Canada at a time when the world is waking up to a new Black Death, accompanied by unprecedented storms and temperature changes, such comfortable expectations have quickly come to seem beyond the pale. As a result, the ruins of the cement works look more like the pictures she is painting in her mind of the world’s future, stripped of its human population, quickly reclaimed by vegetation, its soundscape dominated by the calls of birds – like the ‘fantastic noise’ made by a flock of starlings that suddenly materialises near the abandoned factory, twisting itself into ‘complicated patterns and ghostly shapes’ as if to sketch out an unreadable prediction of things to come (and the incident clearly invokes the Roman habit of reading omens in the flights of birds) (p. 16). But its resemblance to a ruined castle means that the chimney is also tied to the past, or to an imagined alternative past which is always invading the present in fantastic stories, as doors open into it from wardrobes or pictures, or figures from it come striding or stumbling into the modern landscape, as in the work of Susan Cooper. And it is a brave and impetuous act by Sophie herself that brings the chimney back to life, rendering it urgently relevant despite its derelict condition.

It’s to the chimney that Sophie decides to bring the corpse of her sister after she has died of JI2 – stealing her from the hospital mortuary and smuggling her out of the city in her Aunt’s requisitioned Renault. It’s in the chimney that the body undergoes a wonderfully unsettling metamorphosis, reminiscent at first of the pupa stage in an insect’s development. It’s at the chimney that Sophie gets to know the Town boy, Bryan, an amateur engineer who becomes her lover, just as an older engineer became Irene’s; and it’s there that she learns to let the transmuted Kira go, to stop trying to keep her as the child she once was, the child she is no longer. The chimney even becomes a kind of chute or birth canal leading from this life to the next, as the resurrected, changed and now airborne Kira batters her way like a giant moth towards the circle of light at its distant apex. Finally, the chimney is the place where Sophie and Bryan plot together to acquire for themselves the secret of flight, building a powered paraglider or paramotor with which they hope to make contact with the freshly-fledged dead, the youthful angels of the climate apocalypse, Kira among them. The chimney, then, like New College, is a brooding and birthing place where the future can be germinated from the seeds of now.

It’s the place, too, where the impossible happens, taking over from New College as the central site of Oxford fantasy. This new version of the impossible is forged from the kinds of technical ingredients largely ignored by the scholarly Inklings: a petrol engine, a foam seat fitted with recycled seatbelts, the ‘giant steel circle of welded pipes’ which forms the paramotor’s frame (p. 318) – a witty homage to Tolkien’s One Ring, with the chimney as its Barad-dûr. The paramotor becomes Sophie’s obsession, just as the Ring becomes Frodo’s, and a similar aura of destructiveness clings to it, reinforced by the fact that it’s powered by fossil fuels. But it’s also an emblem of something like hope out of despair. Aunt Irene considers this kind of hope – the hope of an afterlife, the hope of a new phase of evolution that might involve some kind of resurrection from the dead – as no more than ‘magical thinking’ (p. 304), an anachronistic state of mind which might have been suitable for the fourteenth-century victims of the Black Death, because of the different ‘conceptual schema’ by which they lived (p. 303), but has lost its validity since the Millennium. Sophie and Bryan, however, who grew up with an easy familiarity with the miracles of science and technology, see magical thinking as a blueprint for action. Bugs undergo astonishing changes every day, resurrecting themselves from the tomb of the chrysalis or pupa. The laws of physics keep being rewritten, as the impossible proves possible in each successive generation. Technology shows itself capable of replicating some of the bizarrest actions of the natural world – such as the flying technique of the bumble bee, as imitated by ‘Herr Cederberg’ in the short story by Karin Tidbeck.[2] And the cement works chimney might just be the channel or conduit which will take human thought and action, if not science and technology, to a whole new level.

Marshall’s book, then, has something interesting to say about the impulse to indulge ourselves in fantasy and the fantastic, the art of the impossible. What happens to Sophie in Oxford has been prepared for in her mind by her self-immersion in often old-fashioned fantasy texts. Her idea of England is shaped in Toronto by her reading of books posted to her by the Oxford-based scholar Aunt Irene: The Ladybird Book of British History, for instance (p. 3), or Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series (1965-77), which deals with modern children (modern, that is, in the 60s and 70s) who are precipitated into a sudden clash between old and new, the ordinary world and a magical otherworld, for enormous stakes (p. 3). Cooper wrote The Dark Is Rising in America, although she was born and raised in Britain, so the series represents the intersection between cultures that will feature throughout Marshall’s book. Sophie also reads The Chrysalids (1955) at school in Canada, a book about a post-apocalyptic America written by the British author John Wyndham, whose title hints at insectile metamorphoses of the kind that are happening again in Sophie’s England (p. 28). A few pages later we learn more about Sophie’s reading. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), which describes a woman’s breakdown in fantastic terms and anticipates the breakdown of Sophie’s mother at one point in the novel (which is in fact a breaking down and reconstruction of her assumptions, her ‘schemata’ as Aunt Irene might call them) (p. 30). Harry Potter, whose schooldays anticipate the bizarre educational experiences of the students of New College, including their cultural war against the older generation and its police. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), comforting in a way The Migration refuses to be, though Marshall’s book freely acknowledges the necessity of comfort reading and therapeutic storytelling (p. 39). Fairy tales about appalling family crises such as Hansel and Gretel (p. 40). Peter Pan (book version, 1911), about a boy who learns to fly exactly as Kira and Sophie do (p. 160). I’ve already hinted at the presence in the novel of the Narnia books (that reference to death as a portal in the prologue), and one element of those books features prominently in it: animals (in this case bugs or birds) who share their thoughts with human beings. The novel swarms, in fact, with fantasy references, and in each case the fantasy in question has direct application to Sophie’s situation, preparing her for the wonders and horrors of the world of now. Fantasy provides her with schemata for a time of radical, painful or appalling change, despite or perhaps precisely because of its roots in the past.

One of the great moments in Marshall’s novel occurs at the point when Sophie confronts her Aunt Irene with some searching questions about her attitude to history and its bearing on the present. Sophie is almost certain that the young people such as her sister who have died of JI2 live on after death as themselves in some discernible way. Aunt Irene has spent her life studying a Medieval civilisation that believed the same thing; but for her it is ‘dangerous… to think in that way’, since ‘magical thinking’ means ‘you might do something stupid’ (p. 303), such as throwing away your only chance at adult life in a suicidal leap of faith simply because you believe that something better might come after. Aunt Irene sustains her argument with scientific discourse, as she insists that Sophie’s hopes for her sister are ill-founded:

The structure of the human brain is delicate. It can’t survive the kind of trauma those bodies are going through. So whatever lives on, even if it’s biologically alive, it isn’t the same. Don’t you think I want to believe as well that something continues on? But that’s false hope, Sophie. It’s a trick. (p. 303)

Her case against a belief in resurrection is much the same as the case an atheist might make against the delusions of a passionate believer. Yet it also echoes the arguments of the Christian apologist C. S. Lewis when he expostulated against the visions of human evolution propounded by the visionary science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon. In Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) and The Star Maker (1937), Lewis contended – books which describe the future history of humanity, covering thousands and even millions of years – the human body, mind and social order undergo changes so extreme that the new life forms these books describe can no longer accurately be called human. They have lost (Lewis thought) their soul. The fact that the same reasoning can be applied both by a believer and an unbeliever suggests that the territory each occupies is not as alien as one might think. In both cases, resistance to radical ideas and the different schemata that inform them can be a screen for deeply-rooted conservatism born of timidity: fear of difference, fear of revolution, fear of extreme corporeal change.

But Sophie has scientific reasoning on her side too. ‘That’s not how history works, though, is it?’ she argues (p. 304). ‘We don’t get to put things back to how they should be because it makes life easier to understand’. In any case, she adds, the past was as full of traumatic incidents as the present: ‘There isn’t safety in the way things were’. The Black Death is proof enough of that, or the massacres and migrations that have featured throughout human history. ‘So what if there’s an answer here,’ she concludes, ‘something radical and new’ about the changes undergone by the new plague’s victims?  Aunt Irene’s response to this unsettling suggestion may itself be conditioned by biology rather than reason. ‘Her eyes slide away from mine,’ Sophie observes; ‘For a moment I felt she almost grasped my line of thought but now she’s shifting away, her mind rejecting what I told her, antibodies pushing out a foreign bacterium’ (p. 305). The older woman is protecting herself against the unfamiliar, as people often do, not yet ready to ‘let it break through [her] defences, […] find a way to use it’. At the same time, Irene is a reader of fantasy and the fantastic, with Susan Cooper and John Wyndham on her shelves at home. She has not yet learned to accommodate the new, but that does not mean she never will. Like Sophie herself, Aunt Irene has been prepared for radical change by the kind of fiction she enjoys in her spare time.

Sophie’s scientific reasoning is akin to faith. As she prepares for her first desperate flight in the paramotor, the young woman recognises her half-baked plan to make some sort of contact in the sky with the newly-evolved survivors of JI2 as the definitive act of a true believer: ‘It is the only chance I have to see Kira again, even if it is a long shot. A leap of faith. I don’t know what comes next but I have to try’ (p. 319). She is spurred by the fact that she herself has now contracted JI2, which means she is already affiliated or committed to the metamorphosis her sister underwent before her. As the plague began to spread, the older generation started to think of the young as in some sense a different species, threatening the precious cultural inheritance they had hoped to pass down to their children and grandchildren; threatening, in fact, the survival of the world they thought they knew. For Sophie, by contrast, the infected young may carry the seeds of knowledge of the time to come, a wisdom she yearns for, as her name suggests. And sure enough, her desperate flight into the eye of a storm helps her gain that knowledge. In a lyrical passage, she finds Kira’s memories in her head along with her own, as well as Kira’s premonitions of the drowned world of the future, the world that will inevitably follow the melting of the polar icecaps and the onset of extreme weather incidents. It is a world for which the metamorphosed young will be fully adapted. The resurrected, airborne Kira ‘has been made for the storm – not just to survive, but to flourish in it. […] And the earth is passing away from me, the earth has hatched me. It’s hatched both of us. I can feel her closer now’ (p. 361). Myth enthusiasts may detect a reference here to the egg that hatched the twins Castor and Pollux and their sister Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. Helen is a paradox, like the victims of JI2; she both brought about the fall of Troy and bequeathed to future generations the magnificent story of that fall, the ‘terrible beauty’ described by Yeats, somehow liberating as well as tragic.[3] Sophie’s leap of faith is both terrible and beautiful, committing her body, like that of her sister, to the next ‘gyre’ or cycle of the world’s existence.

The book ends as it began, with the act of playing dead; but in the final chapter Sophie’s childhood games are relayed to us through the memories of her mother, now newly recovered from the breakdown brought on by her younger daughter’s death. Like Sophie, Char has always been haunted by the potential link between playing dead and ‘actual’ death. Each time she found the child Sophie acting out her own mortality, a ‘terrible fear would come over me that this time, maybe it wasn’t just playing, maybe it was real’ (p. 379). But in this final chapter, Sophie’s death is no game. The paramotor (a trivial object designed for pleasure – a means of playing with death) has crashed to the ground on its maiden flight and broken her body, and Sophie herself is about to undergo the post-mortem metamorphosis of all JI2 victims. Fantasy has been revealed once again as mental preparation for traumas to come.

But for Marshall, fantasy is more than this; especially experimental fantasy, of the sort that refuses to tread the path of slavish imitation – like The Lord of the Rings, whose familiarity sometimes makes us lose sight of just how original Tolkien’s text was at the time of writing. Sophie herself embodies such experimental fantasy, having had an ‘aura of unpredictability’ since birth, in her mother’s eyes, arriving ten weeks before her due date with bluish skin, yet surviving against all odds in an incubator and emerging stronger for the ordeal. Unpredictable fantasy – the sort whose ending you cannot guess when you start reading – can help us understand and resist brutality of various kinds, as is hinted at in the name of the doctor who wishes to take Sophie’s corpse for experimental treatment in his lab (he is ‘Lane Ballard’, a clear allusion to the dark visions of the future hatched by the former trainee doctor, J. G. Ballard, in his so-called ‘space fiction’). But experimental fantasy also enables us to confront the impossible, inhabit it, make it our home. Magical thinking gave Char hope in her early days as a mother, as she waited to find out if her premature baby would emerge from the incubator dead or alive. ‘“Live,” I whispered as I looked at you behind the glass, “please, live”’ (p. 383). But, she adds in the present as she breathes the same words while waiting to see if her broken daughter will live or die, ‘it doesn’t always work like that, does it? Only in fairy tales does it work like that’. Baby Sophie obeyed the logic of fairy tales in her childhood – the ‘magical thinking’ they encourage; but the laws of chance, Char thinks, make it unlikely this will happen again.

Sure enough, teenage Sophie doesn’t live; or rather, she ‘really’ dies. But fairy tales can be as unpredictable as any other kind of fiction, especially if you turn to non-European storytelling traditions. An Egyptian fairy tale known to Char, which Sophie used to read to Kira, tells of a heron who rebuilt the world after the Deluge, the universal flood which is also described in the Old Testament and classical legend. This tale told by a child to her sister offers a model for seeing a way out of the climate crisis: a way that involves stepping sideways from one form of life – the dominant form of our time, the life of human beings under late capitalism – into another whose schemata are unfamiliar to us, as unfamiliar as the notion of a heron as the world’s creator. Sophie and Kira take that sideways step or leap, with trepidation and excitement. In tracing their transition to another schema, Marshall’s book refashions Oxford, the birthplace of the fantastic, as the birthplace of a new fantastic, better suited to our needs at a time of accelerated global change. Readers of all generations can learn from this refashioning.

NOTES

[1] Marshall alludes obliquely to both these myths in her novel. I leave it to you to spot the references!

[2] Karin Tidbeck, Jagannath (2012), pp. 41-44.

[3] See Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Leda and the Swan’, ‘The Second Coming’, etc.