Chimes At Midnight

I wanted to write a little about the Donmar Henry IV, since along with director Phyllida Llloyd's Julius Caesar and the as-yet unannounced third part of Shakespeare-in-women's-prison trilogy it forms a cheerfully independent-spirited stab in the side of the Shakespeare industry, not intellectualised or trendy enough to be tarred with the avant-garde brush while still quite capable of making white male critics smash their monocles in outrage that this sort of thing gets public funding.

Foucault would have a field day what with all the sexuality and prisons involved, but the production is so swift and light on its feet (everyone's favourite Shakesperean characters the Messengers refreshingly enter and exit so fast they practically shatter their kneecaps on the walls) that to get too bogged down in continental frippery would seem to miss the point. This is clear and breezy Shakespeare that gets the text across without dwelling too much on Interpretation, and that can only be a good thing. That said, certain elements of the text are highlighted by the prison setting not so much through brilliance of conceit as simple stripping away of pageantry and nonsense.

What had never occurred to me about the play, but what removing the trumpets and swords and expansive battlefields clearly reveals, is just how depressive almost everyone in it can appear. Falstaff as played by Ashley McGuirre is a lifer in this production, old age creeping up on her without anything to show for the years spent behind bars but what social standing she can muster amongst the other inmates. The jokes and the ribaldry, the childish need to have the last word and never be sincere conceal a deep pain and fear of advancing time. What is in that word honour? Substitute the word honour for just about anything that might be considered worth having for a prisoner and you start to see the hopelessness of Falstaff's situation. What's the point of taking life seriously when it has nothing to offer you?

what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead.

The overwhelming pointlessness of counting out each day and pretending to care are spat out painfully clearly by McGuirre's delivery, her "No"s combining the petulance of a child with the weariness of one old enough to know the child is right to be petulant.

Or take King Henry himself, as played by Harriet Walter. "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown" indeed, but never has this seemed less general and more particular than in Walter's telling. This isn't about the heaviness of rule when set in a prison; this is about trying to escape the past. Henry seeks to "steep his senses in forgetfulness" because his previous deeds won't let him go; as Henry he regrets his treatment of Richard; as a convict she cannot escape her sins. Depression means that being weighted down by your own being, being unable to escape except in sleep and lusting after a Jerusalem that means absolution and will never come.

Hotspur meanwhile is down on the Wikipedia page for PTSD as being the first recorded sufferer:


Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,
And start so often when thou sit'st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks;
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?


asks his wife, and indeed this version of Hotspur is never quite in the room with us: Jade Anouka is a whirlwind of energy, completely ignoring his poor wife's entreaties and focussing above all on action, action, action. At one point he starts an unnecessary series of situps while discussing an upcoming battle - we get the sense that Hotspur's method of dealing with depression and PTSD is just to do things and never reflect, which is why eventually, perhaps, he is not the equal of Harry Monmouth. His father is played as withdrawn in his sickness, apparently another casualty of nameless horrors.


Just about the only character not dealing with the kind of hopelessness that characterises severe institutionalised depression is Hal - and in this production, he is the only inmate we know is about to get out soon. His final rejection of Falstaff is accompanied by the return of the prison guards as the remaining inmates once again face another day of oblivion and the bright light Hal represented ascends to kingship. Strip away the historical trappings of the History Plays and you're faced with human drama of people facing their own mortality and pointlessness every bit as much as Macbeth sees "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow". For those who find the tavern scenes and low comedy of these plays tedious, this a bracingly bleak reminder of the tattered and bruised humanity that Shakespeare ometimes seemed incapable of leaving out of his plays.

How Appropriate, You Fight Like A Cow

The under 30s world can be divided into those who played point-and-click adventure games as children and those who have known nothing but shooting and football on some godforsaken TV-based console; it will surprise you neither that I believe the former group are our future statesmen, philosophers and pioneers nor that I belong very much to the former group. King amongst the point-and-click games, of course, was Monkey Island, the rakish, mad, three-headed monkey infested series that made you feel cleverer than you should for essentially doing nothing but rubbing every item in your inventory against every surface in the area until something worked.

Most famous of those games' mechanics was probably the insult sword-fighting system. This most cerebral of martial arts functioned on the ingenious insight that since in old swashbuckling movies the banter between duellists was far more fun, suspenseful and basically more the point of the film than the distinctly impractical clash of weapons, it should be the purpose of combat in the game to outdo your opponent in witty repartee. 

The way it worked was that you wandered around the forest or the ocean or whatever finding new pirates to fight. As you fight you swap insults, with each insult having an appropriate rejoinder which gives you the advantage again, so "You fight like a dairy farmer" is met with "How appropriate, you fight like a cow".  At first you don't know any insults or rejoinders at all, and are promptly beaten in every contest. As time passes however, you collect more insults and become a force to be reckoned with until you're good enough to beat the final boss. It remains the only game I can think of that forces you to lose most of your battles, which gives winning an extra sense of satisfaction.

I wonder whether we should approach arguing this way. Usually an argument is framed as a straight contest between two sides, often with each person in standing as a champion for some wider community or tribe: when arguing against the case for God with a Christian, for instance, I know that a lot of the pride involved derives from the fact that we both represent larger communities that we want to gain victory for. We also want to win because we so desperately want to be right that we've already basically decided that we are before the argument begins so as to avoid the pain of accepting that we're wrong, rendering 99% of arguments fundamentally pointless. Nobody is playing fair.

We are so used to this model of argument by now that no one even notices their premises going in: it is simply accepted that arguments are a matter of pride and since arguments never have the kind of definitive, knockout-punch victory that characterises most human contests it is quite possible to grind them down to a stalemate, usually involving long digressions about the exact semantics or the methodology of the Laffer curve or what have you. Everything else is mainly about the verbal Flynning - the equivalent of the moves movie swordfighters make to make things impressive, be it quips or comebacks or clever metaphors. But when pride is at stake, nobody wants to lose the argument and so, because no-one ever actually plays entirely fairly, no ever entirely does.

But remove pride from the equation and arguing becomes a totally different endeavour. Looked at in terms of who gains what, the "loser" of the argument is in fact normally the winner. The traditional "winner" has not actually learned anything new. She has presented the information she already knows, let us say about the effects of Keynesian stimulus spending, and it has proved to trump the opinion of her opponent about the ineffectiveness of such measures. She has gained nothing from the encounter other than the satisfaction of educating another human being. Her opponent however, now knows more than she did beforehand. Having been defeated in this idealised rational back-and-forth, she now moves on ready to face her next opponent much the wiser. 

Note that this rarely means that fundamental values are altered. A liberal can lose to conservative evidence-based arguments a dozen times in a row and still maintain the priority to redistribute power from the weak to the strong, and her conservative opponents will still want to maintain traditional power structures. It is simply that the arguments about methods will henceforth be better. As I grow older I find myself happier and happier to lose arguments because I am more secure in my progressivism, not less. The basic leftish impulse is to redistribute power from the top to the bottom, and everything else is commentary. Because I know that bedrock is not going anywhere, I don't feel that admitting an opponent is correct is a tacit admission I'm becoming a Tory. That, I think, is the very understandable fear of a lot of people who argue - that by losing they risk becoming their worst nightmare.

The thing is, basic principles aren't part of a rational argument. I couldn't tell you why I think the redistribution of power and the promotion of human equality, dignity and happiness is my priority. It just seems bloody obvious. It's not going to be displaced by argument. Therefore, really, I should go into every argument wanting to lose. I'll put forward my best case, but if I see that someone has better evidence and better logic, I'll admit it and come out wiser than I was before. The cleverest woman in the world would be the one who has lost every single argument she has been in but never had to fight the same one twice.

Treating arguing like insult sword fighting is not going to catch on any time soon. We all have far too much pride bound up in our identities of religion and politics and everything else to admit that we're wrong. But the least we can do is admit to ourselves before going into an argument that our paradigm for rational back-and-forth is hopelessly broken and that we are engaging in a farce. That way, we might stop focussing, even for a few moments, on just how we can beat our opponent, and ask what they can teach us instead. It is the most you are going to get out of it, since you're certainly not going to change their mind.

The Comfort Of Old Fears

"The object we hope to accomplish is to convert all Pagan nations... There is no secrecy in this... Our mission [is] to convert the world—including the inhabitants of the United States—the people of the cities, and the people of the country... the Legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all!"

Not an ISIS recruiting pamphlet, but the Catholic Archbishop of New York, John Hughes, in 1850. I'm taking to blogging bits and pieces from Battle Cry of Freedom when they strike me, and the fears of Catholic immigration in 19th Century America seem apposite right now considering similar fears regarding Muslims today. The basic trope is the same: condemned out their own mouth, they have admitted that theirs is a totalising ideology that will admit nothing less than utter domination of the earth's peoples, that their tendency to breed at a faster rate than the established population makes them an existential threat to that population's liberty (demographics being the mortal fear of all racists, since the only thing the primitive can definitely do better than us is breed), and that they can never be trusted as loyal citizens while their allegiance is given to a religious hierarchy far from our borders.

On more than one occasion while travelling America a local has helpfully told me that the UK is in danger of falling to the sway of sharia law by dint of demographics. Judging by the tone of the Mail and the Express, the sentiment is shared by many of my countrymen, although they are unlikely to tell you so with the breezy matter-of-factness common across the pond. I have already written about the fact that Islam is currently dominated by a profoundly anti-modern discourse (it is worth pointing out that Hughes' superior Pius IX believed it impossible "for the Roman pontiff to reconcile himself with and agree to progress, liberalism and modern civilisation") and I am under no illusions that this represents a problem in the short-term. But looking at the history of migration, it seems unlikely that future generations of Muslims will be any more of a threat to the modernity of Britain than Irish Catholics turned out to be to America.

We can be easily scared by anyone who claims they want to take over the world. It's a completely stupid claim to make, of course. History has shown that even the most successful conquerors and proselytisers have run into obstacles rather a long time before they hit the edge of the map; Genghis Khan's grandsons divided an empire between them, Napoleon found Russia a little too cold for his liking, and Muslims and Christians both found it surprisingly hard to make much headway converting each other en masse to the correct religion. For some reason, though, if you claim that world domination is your aim and you have funny clothes and an ancient religion to cite and a certain look in your eye and just enough followers to prove that you're not a raving hermit in the wilderness, people start to panic. The effect relies also on the suspicion that one's own civilisation is ripe for the pillage - Hughes, in his lecture entitled The Decline of Protestantism and its Causes, taunts Protestant culture as being weak, effete, stagnant - all the things conservatives fear is true about modern liberal Britain. Say what you like about Hughes, but he knew how to push his opponents' buttons as well as ISIS does.

The sly dog

I'm no historian of Catholic immigration to the US, but my assumption is that Catholicism did not have the feared effects on the US chiefly because Catholics themselves simply lacked the zeal required. Most people want to be left alone and make enough for themselves and their family, and attempting to convert large numbers of Protestants is just too much of a bother in the everyday run of things. Today Catholicism is the largest single denomination in the US, fulfilling the fears of the No-Nothings in the mid 19th Century, and has manifestly failed to do much to alter the character of the country. Unless we've all been taken for a ride and Pope Francis is about to command his 80 million servants to execute Order 66 whereupon all Protestants will be shot in the back with concealed laser rifles, we're laughing.

We easily forget that the modern British state is essentially founded on anti-Catholic prejudice. We imported a foreign monarchy (twice) rather than undergo even the threat of a Catholic on the throne, a fact which to me casts the House of Hanover-Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsor in a distinctly ugly light. We excluded Catholics from universities, positions of power and influence, from voting, we rioted in the streets when the newspapers told us they were up to no good. Today anti-Catholicism exists only in echoes, a folk memory we've never entirely come to terms with. You catch it in the occasional sniffy comment of the aristocracy about a cousin shamed by "fleeing to Rome", you get a whiff of it in the dark jokes about Catholic priests and child abuse, and certain old saws about large families and Catholic guilt that you feel really ought to be the preserve of people who actually from that community.

Once, eating lunch in hall as a student, jokes about the Catholic church were flying around when it became clear that we were greatly offending the sole Catholic amongst us. I immediately felt shamed by having joined in, but Catholics had seemed a legitimate target; wealthy and powerful as a church, a righteous target for liberals with their divorce and abortion restrictions, wearing stupid clothes and generally a symbol of the corrupt Old World. And yet, I couldn't help noticing that we were making these jokes in an institution that didn't let Catholics in for four centuries, that existed in one sense to bolster the power of the Anglican aristocracy and in which the jokes we were making were centuries-old echoes of those of our forebears. No one remembers what Fireworks Night is about, but like other Anti-Catholic feeling in this country, the embers of its meaning still glow somewhere in our consciousness.

Caricaturing Catholics as insufferably smug is a tired stereotype

That there existed Catholics who genuinely did want to convert us all should not be in doubt. Our existential fear of them needed at least some degree of foundation to make sense. But in the end they were so far from conquering and converting us that today it is difficult to see what so much of the fuss in our history is about. It seems a joke, which is why we joke about it. Our uneasy coexistence with 21st Century Islam is likely to be similar, and I have little doubt that a hundred years from now, children in an ever browner Britain will be slightly confused as to what the vaguely anti-Muslim jokes they are repeating actually mean, still less think anything malicious of them, or understand them as echoes of a more fearful time.