The final two films in the Tempest module of Shakespeare and his World explore two kinds of art and their relationship - Prospero’s magic in relation to that of the real-life figure John Dee, and the decision by Shakespeare’s fellow-actors to place the play at the very beginning of the First Folio, suggesting that it was the ultimate showcase for the magic of his poetic and theatrical art.

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I admire the work of Stephen Greenblatt more than that of any of the other “new historicist” critics, principally because he writes so gracefully and accessibly. I was blown away by Renaissance Self-Fashioning when I read it as a graduate student, and I’ve lapped up all his subsequent books. I had some reservations about Will in the World (I might revert to that in a future post), but really liked the recent biography of Christopher Marlowe. But for sustained scholarship and really opening up a key dimension of Shakespeare that had not been fully thought through in previous criticism, the palm goes to Hamlet in Purgatory. His best book? Or does Renaissance Self-Fashioning still take the lead? So maybe second-best … Enough of rankings - my original review follows here. With one key adaptation: at the time, I retained a degree of faith in the authenticity of “John Shakespeare’s spiritual testament,” but more recent scholarship has convinced me that it was not his. Matthew Steggle’s utterly brilliant research has decisively shown that it cannot have been - for reasons of date. Intriguingly, though, it may have belonged to Joan Shakespeare Hart, Shakespeare’s sister. So the sense of family recusancy remains …

IN APRIL 1757 the owner of Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon had his roof retiled. A workman of “very honest, sober and industrious character” found an old document between the rafters and the tiling. It was a Roman Catholic “spiritual testament” signed by John Shakespeare, the dramatist’s father.

Scholars and Bardolaters fiercely debated the origin of the document, and it now seems certain that it was not his. We also know that John Shakespeare was fined for non-attendance at church, a fact that might support the inference that he died a Catholic recusant, though there is a strong alternative case that he stayed away from worship for fear of being arrested for debt at the church door. If he indeed was a faithful Catholic, he would have believed that upon dying he would do penance in Purgatory until such time God saw fit to admit him into Heaven. He could, however, gain remission from his purgatorial sentence through the prayers and charitable works of those left on earth.

Purgatory had long been big business, thanks to the sale of indulgences. You could literally buy your dead relatives remission from fire. The abolition of both the doctrine of Purgatory - for which there was no biblical warrant - and the practices associated with it was central to the 16th-century Reformation assault on the corruption of the Catholic church. According to the Protestant way of thinking, everyone who dies is destined straight for Heaven or for Hell. Purgatory is merely a fable, an imaginary place akin to the fictions dreamed up by poets.

William Shakespeare seems to have revised Hamlet in the months immediately after his father’s death. Theatrical tradition has it that he played the ghost of Hamlet’s father himself. There is a dramatic convention going back to classical times in which a murdered man returns from the dead and calls for revenge. But, uniquely among the ghosts of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, old Hamlet locates himself in Catholic Purgatory rather than classical Hades: “I am thy father’s spirit ... confined to fast in fires/ Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature/ Are burnt and purged away.”

This concatenation of circumstances makes the temptation to biographical speculation almost irresistible - especially as Shakespeare himself had a dead son called Hamnet, a name that was interchangeable with Hamlet. James Joyce played brilliantly with the ensuing possibilities in one of the most entertaining scenes in Ulysses. “Our Father who are in purgatory”, says one of the characters.

Old King Hamlet is a Catholic ghost. But young Prince Hamlet has been to university at Wittenberg, a name synonymous with Martin Luther and the Reformation. He is intent on spiritual self-examination, with a particular emphasis on “conscience”. This marks him out as a quintessential Protestant. Is the play at some level a dramatization of Shakespeare’s personal spiritual development? Or an allegory of the Reformation in general?

Stephen Greenblatt is too canny a literary critic to risk simple answers to these questions. Hamlet in Purgatory neither pretends to solve the mysteries of the play nor indulges in fruitless speculation about Shakespeare’s own sectarian allegiances. Instead, it offers masterly accounts first of the history of the idea of Purgatory and its decline, then of the importance of ghosts and related apparitions in the whole range of Shakespeare’s plays.

At the centre of the book is a simple but profoundly original proposition. Greenblatt’s work is strongly influenced by anthropology. He treats Purgatory as an anthropologist would, by asking what cultural functions it served. His answer is that it represented a “cult of the dead”. He then asks what replaced that cult when Protestantism announced the abolition of Purgatory.

Greenblatt is especially struck by the way that Reformation theologians and polemicists treated Purgatory as a distinctly poetic fable. This leads him to claim that poetic fables - the plays of Shakespeare above all others - have taken over its role. Both Shakespeare’s interest in ghosts and our interest in those ghostly beings we call “Shakespeare’s characters” are manifestations of the post-purgatorial “cult of the dead”.

Stated baldly in this way, the proposition sounds far-fetched. But Greenblatt argues it through with great elegance and ingenuity. Each time one begins to feel unpersuaded, he brings forward a new piece of evidence that gets the reader back on message. And he ends with a beautiful coup de theatre out of The Tempest, where Prospero is seen reclaiming the idea of an “indulgence” for secular, theatrical purposes.

Matthew Arnold suggested in the 19th century that, with the waning of the old doctrinal certainties, poetry would one day take over from religion. Greenblatt’s striking new spin on this idea suggests that the process began with Shakespeare himself and continues today in our own cult of Shakespeare.

Two more Tempest films: Shakespeare and Montaigne, Caliban and music …

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I’ve been rereading Tolstoy’s extraordinary book What Is Art? I think it’s hilarious and in many ways wrongheaded, but also full of wisdom. For those who don’t know it: early in the book there’s a wonderful account of how he goes to the theatre to watch the rehearsal of an opera. What strikes him is the extraordinary labour involved: exhausted workers, performers being shouted at and abused, enormous amounts of human effort going into the production of an elaborate luxury. And the audience who will come to see the final product is posh and wealthy. So his mind turns to the peasants whose labour ultimately pays for the creation of art. And that leads him to ask: What justification is there for all this high culture? What makes it worth the human cost?

He goes on to attack the whole tradition of aesthetics, which he traces through Baumgarten and then Kant, Schopenhauer and others: the idea, as the philosophers have it, that art is essentially concerned with beauty. So what is beauty? Beauty, says Tolstoy, turns out in the end to mean something that gives pleasure. But pleasure to whom? The answer, he says, is “us”. We who are educated, who are leisured, who can afford to go to the opera. So the aesthetic turns out to be an elaborate way of legitimating the tastes of the wealthy. “We” call the things that please us beautiful, and then construct a philosophy which explains why everyone else ought to regard them as great art.

Having denounced the traditional approach, what does Tolstoy do next? He says that art is essentially the communication of feeling. The artist experiences a feeling and, through words, sounds, images, movements, manages to make other people experience it too. This shift towards strong feeling, the affective power of art, belongs to the Romantic tradition. I’m reminded of Wordsworth speaking about poetry and the communication of powerful feeling, defining the true poet as “a man speaking to men,” creating in his audience the same strong emotions that he has experienced himself. Crediting Coleridge with the thought, Wordsworth wrote of how true artists will create a connection, a bond, a shared feeling with their audience: “every Author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.”

The Russian word Tolstoy uses is zarazhenie which means infection, contagion. It’s as if art is like catching something, catching a virus. A boy who tells his fellow villagers that he met a wolf in the forest and makes them feel the fear that he felt is in some sense an artist. The composer of a fashionable symphony who leaves us impressed at the technical skill, but communicates no feeling to us, is not.

Fair enough. Infectiousness tells us whether something is art, but it doesn’t tell us whether it is good art. A work could infect us extremely successfully with feelings that are cruel, vain or vicious. So for Tolstoy, what is good art? Here the answer is consonant with his own belief system: above all, the brotherhood of all people. You remember his conversion to a very specific Christian idea of renunciation and caritas. True art inspires universal human brotherhood - though he also grants that there is value in art that simply communicates strong feelings to a wide audience (though the feelings in question must not be in opposition to that religious consciousness). Good art doesn’t necessarily have to preach a sermon about brotherhood - the aforementioned village boy’s story, or maybe a folk song, can qualify. What matters is that art should be capable of bringing human beings into a shared world of feeling.

Bad art, by contrast, divides us. It is exclusive. Indeed, for Tolstoy the fact that you have to be educated for years before you can appreciate something is not an argument in its favour but a reason to be suspicious of it. He takes the example of Wagner and gives a hilarious description of what it was like to sit through a performance of Siegfried. And he’s equally harsh about many of the acknowledged masterpieces of Western art: Beethoven’s late string quartets and Ninth Symphony, the poetry of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, the plays of Ibsen, even Michelangelo’s Last Judgement. Even - this has its own comic aspect - War and Peace and Anna Karenina come under suspicion. He is perfectly prepared to apply the axe to himself.

What survives in his canon are works that either advance this sense of human brotherhood or have a kind of class-free accessibility: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book that did so much to advance the abolitionist cause; Dickens the social reformer, especially A Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol; Victor Hugo; the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers; a peasant painted by Millet; a folk song sung well. Quite some leveling: a peasant song may be greater art than an opera; a story told by a child may succeed where a technically dazzling symphony fails.

It seems a counter-intuitive argument, a bit like his belief that Shakespeare was no good (a prejudice beautifully speared by George Orwell). But once you’ve read the book, you have to think: yes, he is on to something. Who pays for the art? Who is admitted to the table? Who has been educated into understanding it, and who is told that their failure to understand it is their own fault? What’s it all for?

And perhaps the deepest idea in the book is that art isn’t primarily a special class of beautiful objects at all. It’s a form of human relationship. So “Is this beautiful?” and “Does this give me pleasure?” are the wrong questions. You have to ask instead what kind of relationship between human beings does it create?

He’s wrong, of course, about nearly every particular judgement (says I, says the critical tradition). Beethoven survives Tolstoy’s attack on Beethoven - the Ninth Symphony survives as one of the greatest proclamations of human brotherhood. But the principle - the idea that art is dangerously capable of becoming exclusive, that it rests on material and social conditions we prefer not to think about, and above all that it is affective, something human beings do to and with one another - remains very powerful.

Something Tolstoy fails to recognize is that its capacity to affect different people in different ways and to speak to different ages and different cultures is what really makes art different from, say, science.

Had Einstein not worked out the equation e=mc², someone else would have done so a few years later. If there had been no Darwin, Alfred Wallace would have been credited with the discovery that evolution functions through natural selection. But if Shakespeare had not written The Tempest, no one else would have done. And if there had been no Beethoven, the whole history of music would have been different.

Every great work of art has an autonomy, a life of its own, independent from that of its author and from the restrictive conditions of the historical moment at which it is produced. The capacity to continue to speak to new generations and unknown audiences is the only sure test of artistic greatness. As Dr Samuel Johnson put it, to endure for more than a century is the true mark of value. His contemporary David Hume made the same point more capaciously:

The same Homer, who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and at London. All the changes of climate, government, religion, and language, have not been able to obscure his glory. Authority or prejudice may give a temporary vogue to a bad poet or orator; but his reputation will never be durable or general. When his compositions are examined by posterity or by foreigners, the enchantment is dissipated, and his faults appear in their true colours. On the contrary, a real genius, the longer his works endure, and the more wide they are spread, the more sincere is the admiration which he meets with. Envy and jealousy have too much place in a narrow circle; and even familiar acquaintance with his person may diminish the applause due to his performances: But when these obstructions are removed, the beauties, which are naturally fitted to excite agreeable sentiments, immediately display their energy; and while the world endures, they maintain their authority over the minds of men.

“Of the Standard of Taste” (1757)

The modern equivalent of the first half of Tolstoy’s essay - the critique of art’s elitism on social and political grounds - might be found in the work of the “new historicist” literary and cultural critics of the 1980s and 1990s. Most of them were middle-aged Leftists from the class of ’68. Their gospel was a form of neo-Marxist determinism. They argued that, far from being autonomous, literary works cannot be separated from their cultural context. According to this model, literature is determined by, to quote one theorist, “the social, ideological, and material matrix in which all art is produced and consumed”. “New historicists” proposed that novels, poems and plays are shaped not so much by individual authors as by “the social energies of the age” or “the multiple agencies of literary production”. The twenty-first century twist on this idea is that not just novels, poems and plays, but also the entire canon of western art, has always been imprisoned by structures of race, gender and class. (Though it is striking that race and gender - “white supremacy” and “patriarchy” - have in recent years garnered much more attention than class, the category that preoccupied, indeed agonized, Count Tolstoy.)

Of course all art is influenced by social and historical context - what human activity is not? And of course artists of the past were infected, and contributed to the wider infection of their societies, with prejudice. The anti-semitism of Dickens’ representation of Fagin or of T. S. Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Nightingales”, the routine racial prejudice that stains generations. Equally, when Wordsworth wrote “a man speaking to men”, he didn’t mean that women can’t be writers or readers. He knew that his own sister was a wonderful writer and his own best reader. He was using “man” to “human” and that is a symptom of the patriarchy of his age.

But what makes great art special is precisely its capacity to resist context. It accordingly behoves the reader or spectator or listener to look beyond the prejudice. To find, as it were, the life-affirming infection or affect as opposed to the toxic contagion. Hume is again good on not allowing our values to prejudice our judgment of works from other ages and cultures, all of which have their own, often quite different, prejudices (crude example - it is an error to judge ancient Greek attitudes to pederasty by modern ethical standards). The good critic: “the more fully to execute this undertaking, he must preserve his mind free from all prejudice, and allow nothing to enter into his consideration, but the very object which is submitted to his examination.” The bad critic: “If the work be addressed to persons of a different age or nation, he makes no allowance for their peculiar views and prejudices; but, full of the manners of his own age and country, rashly condemns what seemed admirable in the eyes of those for whom alone the discourse was calculated” (both quotes, again, from “Of the Standard of Taste”).

Indeed, major creative works have an autonomy that resists not just their context, but even their creators. John Keats remarked in a letter, “Things which I do half at random are afterwards confirmed by my judgment in a dozen features of propriety.” That is to say, artists are not fully in control of the processes whereby their creations come into being.

But it is the artwork itself, not the ideological context, which does the controlling. A true artistic work is one that takes on a life of its own, like Pygmalion’s statue. In some mysterious sense, it creates its own shape (“That which is creative must create itself” - Keats again). It’s only after you’ve finished weaving a book or composing a sonata or daubing a painting that you see the figure in the carpet.

Sometimes artists don’t ever see it themselves - and that is where the critic comes in. For determinist critics, artworks are like mass-produced Belgian carpets: the same few (ideological) figures are reproduced over and over again. For intuitive critics, each artwork of substance, like a hand-crafted Persian or Afghan rug, has its own individual figure, which is worth patient elucidation.1

The penultimate module of Shakespeare and his World focused on The Tempest. Its first two films explored the “New World’ context, first in the text and then via an intriguing little object in the collections of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

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My daughter, who is currently a graduate student and a daily user of JSTOR, recently asked “How on earth did you do research before there was Google?” “Well,” I said, “to find a book you’d begin by going to the library’s catalogue room which was filled with elephant folio sized A-Z volumes containing tiny pasted-in slips of paper giving shelf marks, and for journals you’d have to go to an index volume and then make your way along shelf after shelf of bound periodicals …” She was, to say the least, wide-eyed: “But the time it must have taken!”

There was a certain pleasure in the serendipity of it all — finding an unexpected gem that just happened to sit beside the book you wanted or that you noticed in the same issue of the journal. But, yes, the time. My PhD thesis was partly about verbal echoes of Shakespeare in the poetry of the Romantics. I had to find them all by slow reading and memorial recollection. With the arrival of large internet databases such as LION, similar tasks could be performed almost instantaneously thanks to the “search” function. Equally, when I was glossing the language of Titus Andronicus for my 1995 Arden edition, all I could rely on was the Oxford English Dictionary and a few print resources such as Partridge’s delightful dictionary of Shakespeare’s Bawdy, whereas now the Lexicons of Early Modern English database “hold[s] over 1.1 million word-entries in over 30,000 pages of text from 1475 to 1755,” allowing one to digest in minutes the full spectrum and multiple nuances of every obscure word used by Shakespeare.

No one would say that it is cheating for a student or researcher to use such online resources. Indeed, not to do so would be tantamount to academic negligence. To insist on the old ways would be to advertise oneself as a Luddite.

At this point, my brain says: brief digression needed - the common understanding of Luddism is a little unfair to the original Luddites - need to explain that. If I had been writing this in 1990, I’d then have gone to the library to find a book on nineteenth-century history in order to remind myself of the facts. If I had been writing this in 2020, I’d have gone to Wikipedia for a quick round-up. Now, though, I can have this Q&A with a generative LLM:

Me: Give me a very brief summary of the original Luddite movement and some brief thoughts on whether the use of the term Luddite for, say, people who in their research refuse to engage with you, Claude, is a little unfair to the original Luddites? Or maybe not - perhaps you ARE a machine that puts traditional craft workers out of work?

Claude: The Luddites were English textile workers, mainly in the early 1810s, who smashed the mechanised knitting frames and looms that were being introduced into the trade. The popular caricature is that they hated technology, but that’s the part usually worth correcting: they weren’t opposed to machines as such. They were skilled artisans—croppers, stockingers, weavers—who objected to a specific way machinery was being deployed to cut wages, sidestep labour standards, and let unskilled workers churn out shoddier goods more cheaply. Their name came from the possibly mythical “Ned Ludd.” The movement was crushed hard: frame-breaking was made a capital offence, and men were hanged and transported.

[Interjection from me: Byron’s maiden speech in the House of Lords was in defence of the framebreakers. And, by the way, technology allows me instant access to the speech, which would have taken ages for me to track down pre-google.]

So yes, I think you’re onto something, and the modern usage is a bit unfair to them. When “Luddite” gets slapped on someone who won’t touch a smartphone or refuses to let an AI anywhere near their research, it means something like “irrationally technophobic,” which was more or less the opposite of the actual Luddites’ position. Their quarrel wasn’t with the loom; it was with what was being done to them through the loom, and by whom, and who captured the gains. That was an economic and political argument about power and distribution, not a squeamishness about gadgets. A researcher who declines to use me because they worry about outsourced judgment, hallucinated citations, or the de-skilling of their craft is arguably being more Luddite in the original sense than the technophobe stereotype implies—they’ve got a considered objection, not a phobia.

And on your last point—I’ll take the hit, because it’s a fair cop in part. I am a machine that can do things people used to be paid to do: draft, summarise, translate, research. Whether I put “traditional craft workers” out of work is the genuinely open question the Luddites would have recognised instantly. The honest answer is that it depends on exactly the things they cared about—whether the technology augments skilled people or is used to replace and cheapen their labour, and who ends up with the surplus. That’s not a question the technology settles on its own; it’s settled by employers, markets, and policy. So if someone refuses to engage with me as a small act of not cooperating with their own de-skilling, they’re not being a fool clinging to the past. They might just be reading the situation the way a cropper in 1812 would have.

The one thing I’d gently add: the Luddites lost, and not because they were wrong about their interests. So the interesting descendant question isn’t really “machine or not?” but “on what terms?”—which is a much better argument to be having than the one the insult usually shuts down.

Not a stupid response, I’d say …

Conclusion? if a student or researcher refuses to engage with AI because, say, they do not wish to put money in the pockets of tech bros, or they have an environmentalist’s commitment to reduce energy consumption, that could be described as “virtuous Luddism.” But the Luddites lost. History suggests that once a technology offers sufficiently large advantages, attempts simply to ban it rarely succeed; even if the West clamped down on AI, others - China? India? - would seize the advantage. So the reasonable course is to act with it, which in academe means for the researcher to use it as a glorified google or super-fast editor - but always to be aware of its limitations (hallucinations) and biases (Anthropic has recently been consulting theologians as part of its attempts to shape Claude’s ethical behaviour - whether such consultations eventually shape the model in ways that privilege some religious and ethical perspectives over others is an interesting question). Granted, that AI can be both a research assistant and an editor does make its potential use and abuse more of a challenge than the invention of the search engine and the online database. And, yes, in all honesty it will put editors out of work, just as it is already jeopardizing the careers of translators (fascinating TLS piece here by Tim Parks on LLMs as literary translators).

As to honesty itself: I tell students that since AI is here to stay they need to learn how to use it constructively, creatively and openly: hence the “AI usage rubric” that I wrote about in my New Statesman piece. Is it plagiarism to use it? To reiterate what I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, I’m not persuaded that, in most ordinary cases, using generative AI constitutes plagiarism in the traditional sense. The exception is those rare cases where an LLM reproduces a swathe of memorized text: an example here. But this only seems to occur where there is either heavily duplicated text (famous quotes, for example) or extremely limited and recent (or obscure) input. To plagiarize is to present another person’s expression as one’s own without acknowledgement. Save in outlying cases of the kind just mentioned, AI does not do this. What it does is algorithmically reconstitute from multiple sources. Generative AI engines do not have a database from which it is possible to plagiarize; they are merely tools that are led by human prompts to predict, token by token, a sequence of words; tokens are words, sub-words, characters or punctuation marks generated from massive amounts of minutely broken-down training data. They are not whole phrases and sentences, which are the elements by which we judge manifest plagiarism. I say manifest because of the possible scenario that an LLM, whilst trained not to breach copyright (see my earlier post on this issue and the “fair dealing” defence), might chance to put together from its memory a sequence of words from one source that amounts to plagiarism - this would be like a human being plagiarizing from memory as opposed to copying from the text in front of them.

Though LLMs are sometimes called “agentic,” when used by researchers and students they do not have agency as a human does, and they therefore should not be credited as “authors” or be offended (let alone litigious) - as humans have a right to be - when their “words” (which are really digital simulacra of human words) are reproduced. Here is a link to a good article on the ethics of AI usage in research. (I am confining this argument to academe - AI agency becomes more real when someone tells it to go and hack a security system or bring down the internet.)

Researcher or student overuse of AI might better be described as outsourcing. Obviously a student essay or academic article that is identified as “100% AI generated” is a sign of laziness (and, if not flagged as such, deceit), and there are signs that such outsourcing is beginning to atrophy the human brainwork and the writing craft that are at the core of humanities education. But “all or nothing” arguments are likely to fail: the way to avoid “100% AI generation” is not to ban AI from the campus. Rather, we need to teach the art of constructive engagement with it. For that, maybe we should return to the Renaissance view of the matter: imitation was thought to be a GOOD thing, unless it was merely slavish. Providing the human user is driving the generative imitation creatively, via effective prompting (soon there will be degrees in prompt engineering or human-AI interaction!), generative AI is, as yet, a very handy tool, not a brain-devouring monster. As one of my colleagues puts it, “if a piece of academic work begins and ends with a human intelligence, I don’t mind if there is an artificial one somewhere in-between.” I also think that there is some merit in the so-called 30% rule.

My daughter will never know the peculiar pleasures of spending a morning chasing references through hefty catalogue volumes or opening a library drawer and fingering through a thicket of index cards. But she will never have to spend weeks finding something that today takes seconds. Every generation inherits different scholarly tools. The real question is not whether to use them, but how.

The final two Antony and Cleopatra films - on Octavius, who becomes Augustus Caesar, and on King James I’s aspiration to bring about a modern “Augustan peace.”

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This post is a follow-up to last week’s reflections on Coleridge.

Academic plagiarism has been much in the news, because of a case in Cambridge England that has evoked comparisons with a case in Cambridge Massachusetts (aka Harvard). The Francesca Gino affair, which involved alleged data manipulation as well as alleged plagiarism, had a certain karma because her research specialism is honesty and unethical behaviour - and no doubt it stirred emotions because she was allegedly on a salary of more than a million dollars a year. The Cambridge affair raises a different set of questions which are bound up with the thorny question of diversity and inclusion, which is not my subject here.

To my mind, academic plagiarism in the traditional sense is usually a fairly cut-and-dried matter. When quoting existing work exactly, the student or researcher should deploy quotation marks and a citation. When paraphrasing existing scholarship, the student or researcher should include a citation or perhaps a footnote statement along the lines of “My argument here is indebted to X and Y.” Mistakes can genuinely be made, especially if drafting and note-taking involves cut and paste from web sources, but if made they can be rectified, as sometimes happens when an academic paper is modified or retracted and resubmitted. Student plagiarism is readily detected through such programs as TurnItIn. Most universities now have a facility to run a plagiarism checker automatically for all written student assignments.

But two other areas are much more interesting - and more challenging: alleged plagiarism in creative writing and the question of whether AI usage is or is not akin to plagiarism.

The matter of writers borrowing/stealing from other writers has a long and fascinating history. The word plagiarus was coined by the dyspeptic and sometimes filthy Roman poet Martial, whom I’ve long enjoyed reading (not least because Ben Jonson imitated his epigrams, giving him a role in inspiring the “poetomachia” on the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean stage, the battle of wits between Jonson, Dekker and Marston). Here is Claude.ai’s account of the early history:

Me: Was Martial the first to introduce the word and the idea of plagiarism?

Claude: Not quite — the answer splits along exactly the line your question draws between the word and the idea.

Martial does deserve credit for the word. In his Epigrams (most famously Book 1, epigram 52, addressed to Quintianus), he complains that a man named Fidentinus is reciting Martial’s poems as his own. Martial builds an elaborate legal metaphor: his poems are like slaves he has manumitted (freed), and Fidentinus is a plagiarius — the Roman legal term for a kidnapper, someone who abducted free people or stole another person’s slaves and claimed them as his own. This crime was covered under the Lex Fabia de plagiariis. By applying that word to literary theft, Martial coined the metaphor from which our “plagiarism” ultimately descends. As far as surviving evidence goes, he is the first to use plagiarius in this figurative, literary sense.

But the idea — resenting someone who passes off another’s work as their own — was already old by Martial’s time (he wrote in the late first century AD). The Greeks had a well-developed vocabulary for it, chiefly klopē (theft); comic poets like Aristophanes traded accusations of stealing jokes and ideas, and Hellenistic scholars catalogued authors they judged to be thieves. Vitruvius, writing a century before Martial, tells the story of the librarian Aristophanes of Byzantium exposing contestants in a poetry competition as literary thieves because he recognized the passages they’d lifted from books in the library. Romans also used their own everyday word for theft, furtum, to describe the practice. So the concept was in wide circulation; Martial gave it a memorable new metaphor, not its first expression.

One more wrinkle: the English word itself arrived much later. “Plagiary” entered English around 1600 (Joseph Hall and Ben Jonson helped popularize it), and “plagiarism” followed a couple of decades after. So there’s a long gap between Martial’s Latin coinage and the modern English term.

So the tidy summary would be: Martial introduced the word (the metaphor), but the idea was already centuries old when he did.

Scarily accurate and lucid, I said to myself on first reading this. But then I checked the original (that’s what I always tell students to do): it’s not in the poem addressed to Quinctianus but in the following epigram (1. 53) that Martial names Fidentinus and accuses him of theft and (of relevance to my next move) likens him to a crow among swans. The two epigrams actually play off against each other. The first says that once an author gives their work to the public, anyone is free to reproduce it; it is a bit like W. H. Auden’s great poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” - “the death of the poet was kept from his poems … he became his admirers … The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” The second poem then scolds the poet who stands up in the marketplace and recites words that are not his own.

It is noteworthy that the word plagiary enters the English literary tradition around 1590-1600, when there was a tough, competitive and potentially financially rewarding literary marketplace for the first time. This helps to explain Robert Greene’s famous jibe at Shakespeare in his Groatsworth of Wit (as posthumously edited by Henry Chettle) of 1592. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s excellent collection Shakespeare Documented summarizes how a passage in the pamphlet consists of

a letter to three playwrights who bear strong resemblances to Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlowe, and George Peele. “Greene” warns them to stay away from actors who also write for the stage, especially the one he calls

an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

A variety of clues makes it clear that this “Shake-scene” is a reference to William Shakespeare. In the early 1590s, Shakespeare had just begun to make a name for himself as a playwright, with works such as Henry VI and Comedy of Errors. Shakespeare’s mastery of blank verse, a style favored by university-educated playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe and George Peele, may have hit a nerve. “Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde,” picked out as a quote in Roman type, is clearly a play on a line from Henry VI, Part 3, where the Duke of York exclaims of Margaret of Anjou, “O Tyger’s hart wrapt in a woman’s hide!” The allusion to York’s speech makes it clear that Henry VI, Part 3 had been written before 1592 and that it was familiar to London audiences. “Iohannes fac totum” means “Johnny-do-all,” the base of the phrase “Jack of all trades,” referring to Shakespeare’s inflated sense of himself. The passage ends with a pun on Shakespeare’s name, “Shake-scene.”

There are two competing interpretations of the “upstart crow” metaphor. In Greene’s earlier work Francesco’s Fortunes (1590), he implicitly accuses the actor Edward Alleyn of making money and achieving fame by speaking the lines of impoverished script writers: “why, Roscius [famous Roman actor], art thou proud with Aesop’s crow, being pranked with the glory of others’ feathers?” This is to say: Bloody thesps, getting all the glory while we in the writers’ room are paid a pittance …

But the other interpretation, which I lean towards, is that the allusion is to Horace, Epistles 1.3:

Quid mihi Celsus agit? monitus multumque monendus
privatas ut quaerat opes et tangere vitet
scripta, Palatinus quaecumque recepit Apollo,
ne, si forte suas repetitum venerit olim
grex avium plumas, moveat cornicula risum
furtivis nudata coloribus.

And how is my friend Celsus getting on? He has been warned - and needs warning again and yet again - to draw on his own resources, and to keep his hands off the writings that Palatine Apollo has taken into his keeping; lest, should the flock of birds come one day to reclaim their feathers, the poor little crow, stripped of her stolen colours, be left a laughing-stock.

Stolen colours, furtive appropriation: this is clearly a warning against plagiarism, so the allusion would have the implication that Shakespeare the jobbing actor turned fixer-up-of-old-plays turned allegedly original playwright has ripped off the style and maybe even the words of his better-educated rivals, the so-called University Wits. Recent research has suggested that Tom Nashe may have had a hand in the Groatsworth, and since Nashe seems to have had a hand in at least one of the Henry VI plays the suggestion may be that Shakespeare is passing off the entire trilogy as his own when it was really a collaborative patchwork.

But of course there is a larger sense in which Shakespeare was not entirely original. Nearly all his plays are based on pre-existing sources. In the Renaissance, creative imitation of the classics was admired more than novelty. It was only with Romantic ideas of “original genius” that literary borrowing came under suspicion. This whole area is something that I’ve been writing about for over forty years, in books such as Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination and The Genius of Shakespeare. Though the former was my first book, and is somewhat poky and academic, I still remember with pleasure the moment when I came up with a title for chapter 2: “‘The Eighth Commandment was not made for Bards’: Coleridge and the Problem of Inherited Language.” That quotation is from STC’s poem “The Reproof and Reply.” I don’t need to remind readers as to which of the biblical Commandments was the 8th. My reflections there were in the spirit of T. S. Eliot’s much quoted (and sometimes misquoted) sentence in his essay on Philip Massinger: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

So: I imagine a new scene for the terrific BBC sitcom Upstart Crow in which Will says to Robert Greene (or Chettle or Nashe): “Sucks to you, I’ve built my whole career on stealing and making what I steal something better, just look at how I’ve embellished Plutarch’s description of Cleopatra on her barge at Cydnus.”

This post has gone on for far too long, so I’ll hold back the discussion of AI for next week.

Here are the next two Antony and Cleopatra videos, for those who are following this re-run of my course on “Shakespeare and his World.” They focus on the imagery - beginning with the Nile - of this most image-rich of the tragedies.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge had been dead only a few months when the first stone was cast. Writing in Tait’s Magazine in 1834, Thomas De Quincey - a passionate admirer, a fellow opium-eater, a man many of whose best ideas were themselves recyclings of Coleridge - revealed that whole swathes of the theoretical-autobiographical-magnum-opus Biographia Literaria had been lifted, word for word, from the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling. De Quincey softened the blow as well as he could, calling Coleridge in almost the same breath “as entirely original ... as any one man that ever existed.” It made little difference. Six years later the Scottish metaphysician James Ferrier set the borrowings out in cold detail in Blackwood’s Magazine, and in the twentieth century the scholar Norman Fruman published a savage, apoplectic book-length reckoning aptly titled Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (1971). The charge has never quite lifted, for the simple reason that the evidence is there for all to see. There is nothing like a list of parallel passages to prove a case.

The worst of it is in the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of the Biographia, where Coleridge develops his great theory of the Imagination. Develops? Or pillages? The ten “theses” of Chapter XII are stitched together from Schelling’s Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre and the System des transcendentalen Idealismus of 1800, now loosely paraphrased, now carried across sentence by sentence. This is no case of two philosophers happening upon the same thought. Coleridge follows his source through the very order of its argument, keeps its illustrations, and reaches for its words.

He knew the ground was treacherous. A few pages earlier, in Chapter IX, he had already tried to absolve himself, asking his readers to put any likeness down to “a genial coincidence” of minds working alike, and cautioning that “an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase, will not at all times be a certain proof that the passage has been borrowed from Schelling.” Truth, he added, was a kind of “divine ventriloquist”; it should not matter through whose lips it chose to speak. It is a graceful defence. It is also, awkwardly, laid down a few pages before the unacknowledged translating begins, and to an unfriendly eye it can look less like candour than a man preparing his alibi in advance.

And yet the theory he builds is unmistakably his own creation. When he writes of “the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition,” and conjures the reader who feels stirring within him “the same instinct which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennæ yet to come,” the shimmering prose is pure Coleridge even where the philosophy beneath is essentially Schelling. That is the peculiar cruelty of the case. The borrowings are metamorphosed into unique, distinctive eloquence.

The Shakespeare lectures tell the same story in a different German accent. Here the creditor is August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur reached English readers through John Black’s translation of 1815. Coleridge’s single most quoted stroke of Shakespeare criticism - the distinction between “mechanic” and “organic” form, which generations of students have been taught to file under his name - turns out to have a German twin. Hear Coleridge first, lecturing on Shakespeare’s judgement:

The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form.

Now Schlegel, from his twenty-second Vienna lecture, in Black’s English:

Organical form, again, is innate; it unfolds itself from within, and acquires its determination contemporaneously with the perfect development of its germ.

Innate; unfolding from within; whole in its own outward shape: the thought is the same, and so is much of the wording that carries it. What sharpens the offence is that Coleridge delivered these lectures as fresh criticism struck off from his own reading, and let it be understood, now and then, that he had come to the idea before Schlegel’s book ever reached his hands. The dates, and the near-identity of the sentences, make that a hard thing to believe.

Nor do the two Germans stand alone. The early chapters of the Biographia on the association of ideas draw silently on the psychologist J. G. E. Maass; Kant, Fichte and Tetens are smuggled in without acknowledgment elsewhere. When René Wellek came to weigh the borrowings in his History of Modern Criticism (1955), he found them pervasive enough to eject Coleridge from his chair as an original philosopher. The pattern Fruman elicited and trumpeted so loudly is the uncomfortable one: the passages in which Coleridge sounds most magisterially like a builder of systems are frequently the passages he has taken, unannounced, from someone else.

With Friedrich Schiller, whom readers sometimes gather into the same indictment, it was different. Coleridge’s largest debt to him, the translation of Wallenstein in 1800, was published for exactly what it was, and Schiller’s deeper mark on his thinking about art belongs to the honest commerce of influence, not to the ledger of theft. If plagiarism is to be proved, it is Schelling and Schlegel who supply the proof.

What are we to make of it? The most generous and the most searching answer remains Thomas McFarland’s, in his superb book Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969). Coleridge, he suggested, thought and wrote by “mosaic,” copying passages he loved into his notebooks and losing track, in the fog of laudanum and lifelong disorder, of where his reading stopped and his own mind began. He did, after all, name Schelling somewhere in the book; he belonged to an age that prized a shared truth above the private ownership of it. His daughter Sara spent a good part of her editorial life defending him, and when she brought out her own edition of the Biographia in 1847 she did her best to meet the charge squarely. Call it plagiarism, call it the helpless absorption of a mind too porous for its own good, call it a Romantic carelessness about who owns an idea: the sentences of Schelling and Schlegel are still there on the page, lightly Anglicized, standing under another man’s name.1

Next week, I’ll write about the fascinating, varying history of the very idea of plagiarism.

Here are the first two Antony & Cleopatra films of SHAKESPEARE & HIS WORLD: one on the primary source, Thomas North’s Life of Mark Antony, and the other on the figure of Cleopatra, including a close reading of the famous description of her in her barge at Cydnus. Enjoy! Such a great play …

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The late (egotistical and cantankerous) historian A. L. Rowse’s greatest claim to academic notoriety was his identification in January 1973 of a certain Aemilia Bassano as the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Having examined the diaries of the Elizabethan doctor, astrologer and philanderer Simon Forman, in which she features as a client, Rowse concluded that Aemilia had the right theatrical connections and a suitably hot-blooded character. Did not Forman describe her as “brown in her youth” (obviously a dark lady) and note that her husband’s name was William (hence the double play on the name Will in several of the sonnets)?

A few months later it was pointed out by the BBC staffer and Elizabethan scholar Mary Edmond that Forman had actually written “brave in her youth” and that the husband’s name was Alfonso. But Rowse persisted to his dying day in the belief that he alone had solved the great literary mystery. Nor did his inability to read Forman’s handwriting deter him from making the diaries the basis of a book on Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age.

It is unfortunate that the life and writings of Dr Forman were for a long time inextricably linked with the quirks and vanity of Dr Rowse, because he was a man who reveals an immense amount about both the vitality and the strangeness of the Elizabethans.

Forman was born in Wiltshire in 1552. He hoped to follow the time-honoured path from grammar school to Oxford to London, but struggled for financial reasons. As a result, when he set himself up as a doctor - first in the provinces, eventually in the metropolis - he lacked the imprimatur of the College of Physicians. This body sought to operate a closed shop in the practice of medicine, so Forman was frequently rebuked, sometimes fined and even imprisoned.

Yet he seems to have found a winning formula with his mode of treatment that combined the casting of horoscopes with such attractive remedies as civet taken in poached egg for impotence and, for a bad knee, “a hote cow tord to be clapt on”. He built up a most impressive clientele, being regularly visited by courtiers, merchants, theatre people and all sorts.

He gained a particular reputation in the area of “women’s problems”. Word went out that, whether you were having difficulty with a pregnancy or in getting pregnant, Dr Forman was the man to visit. He kept detailed case notes, and a fantastic project at Cambridge University has digitized them … all 10,000 consultations between the years 1596 and 1603.

There we find such mysterious entries as “halek E parker 1598. 24 Novemb Friday pm at 15 post 9 et seminavi per multum semen et Matrix hausit multum virgam ad hoc tempus.” The “multum semen” offers a clue …

His journals have been known since the nineteenth century, when they were transcribed by the scholar J. O. Halliwell-Phillips, who backed off from a plan to publish them on account of the amount of “haleking” they contained. No one has ever worked out with certainty why Forman chose “halek” as his code-word for sexual intercourse. My guess would be that he was playing on a Greek root, “halek” has lexical resemblances to the Greek for “to grind” (αλέθω) and “to fish”(ἁλιεύω) - both verbs were Elizabethan slang for having sex, as we know from those dirty-minded characters Pandarus in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (“He that will have a cake out of the wheat must needs tarry the grinding”) and Pompey in Measure for Measure (“groping for trout in a peculiar river”).

Wherever the word “halek” came from, Forman certainly indulged in a prodigious amount of it. Even in his mid-fifties, we find him haleking with one Hester Sharp at 8am and Anne Wiseman at 3pm, then going home to halek with his wife, who was affectionately known as Tronco. He was as unscrupulous in taking advantage of his female patients as he was scrupulous in recording his every halek: “on April 12th at 4.10am, on the 14th at 9pm, the 21st at 5.45pm and on the 23rd at 5.30pm”. The precise times were necessary for the calculation of the astrological chart of any child conceived as the result of a particular halek.

Since he was not a member of the College of Physicians, he could not be, so to speak, struck off the medical register.

Forman’s dreams - especially one about a sexual encounter between himself, a tall red-bearded weaver and Queen Elizabeth dressed in nothing but a white shift and petticoat - provide extraordinary insights into the psychopathology of the Elizabethan age. Make of this what you will (Dr Freud would have something to say about the dirt, I suspect). Spelling modernized:

I dreamt that I was with the Queen, and that she was a little elderly woman in a coarse white petticoat all unready; and she and I walked up and down through lanes and closes, talking and reasoning of many matters. At last we came over a great close where were many people, and there were two men at hard words. One of them was a weaver, a tall man with a reddish beard, distract of his wits. She talked to him and he spoke very merrily unto her, and at last did take her and kiss her.

So I took her by the arm and put her away; and told her the fellow was frantic. And so we went from him and I led her by the arm still, and then we went through a dirty lane. She had a long white smock, very clean and fair, and it trailed in the dirt and her coat behind. I took her coat and did carry it up a good way, and then it hung too low before. I told her she should do me a favour to let me wait on her, and she said I should. Then, said I: ‘I mean to wait upon you, and not under you, that I might make this belly a little bigger to carry up this smock and coats out of the dirt.’

And so we talked merrily and then she began to lean upon me, when we were past the dirt, and to be very familiar with me, and methought she began to love me. And when we were alone, out of sight, methought she would have kissed me.

The weaver and the queen … surely he had seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And indeed his eye-witness accounts of some of Shakespeare’s plays are unique. Here is his account of one of my favourite plays, The Winter’s Tale:

In the Winter’s Tale at the Globe

1611 the 15 of May, Wednesday

Observe there how Leontes the king of Sicilia was overcome with jealousy of his wife with the king of Bohemia, his friend that came to see him; and how he contrived his death and would have had his cupbearer to have poisoned, who gave the king of Bohemia warning thereof and fled with him to Bohemia.

Remember also how he sent to the Oracle of Apollo and the answer of Apollo, that she was guiltless and that the king was jealous, etc., and how except the child was found again that was lost, the king should die without issue. For the child was carried into Bohemia and there laid in a forest and brought up by a shepherd and the king of Bohemia his son married that wench. And how they fled into Sicilia to Leontes, and the shepherd having showed the letter of the nobleman by whom Leontes sent was that child, and [by] the jewels found about her, she was known to be Leontes’s daughter, and was then 16 years old.

Remember also the rogue that came in all tattered like colt pixie, and how he feigned him sick and to have been robbed of all that he had and how he cozened the poor man of all his money, and after came to the sheep-shearer with a pedlar’s pack and there cozened them again of all their money. And how he changed apparel with the king of Bohemia his son, and then how he turned courtier, etc. Beware of trusting feigned beggars or fawning felons.

Intriguing that he is keen to remember the trickery of Autolycus but has nothing to say about the magic of the magical final scene in which Hermione’s statue (or, it is hinted, her pretending to be a statue) is brought to life.

Here are the final two short videos of the Othello module of my lecture course on Shakespeare and his World: the first one explores the pre-history of the character, focusing on his account of how he was taken into slavery by the Ottomans; the second one asks about the meaning of the “sword of Spain” with which he takes his own life.

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I recently stumbled across a piece in The Australian newspaper, in which I interviewed Julie Taymor and wrote about her movie version of Titus Andronicus (this link looks like a full version without a paywall), the play I edited for the Arden Shakespeare. I still think, more than 25 years on, that it is one of the great Shakespearean films. Here’s the piece, with some added hyperlinks:

JULIE Taymor’s West End stage production of Disney’s The Lion King begins with a procession: as you sit waiting for curtain-up, the music starts and fantastical elephants and giraffes, lions and zebras begin lumbering down the aisles. The colours are dazzling, the tones vibrant. Music, dance, mask and design are unified as if by magic.

Taymor’s eagerly awaited first film, Titus, also opens with a procession, but it couldn’t be more different. Drums and trumpets hail the return of hundreds of Roman soldiers from their bloody campaign against the Goths. Armour and skin are caked with mud and black with soot. The exhaustion of years at war is seared into the face of General Titus.

The Lion King was all fire and air. Titus takes us into a world of blood, earth and stone. Twenty-one of Titus’s sons have been slain in battle. During the next two hours, the remainder of them will be murdered or exiled. Titus’s daughter will be raped and mutilated. He will exact the most gruesome revenge, courtesy of a rare meat pie. Anthony Hopkins, who plays the part, describes it as “King Lear meets Hannibal Lecter”.

What has led Taymor from Disney’s happy “circle of life” to Shakespeare’s bleakest vision of death? Partly “a desire not to be boxed in as a particular kind of director”, she says. But principally it was because of her passion for the play itself and her feeling that it “just reeks of wanting to be a movie - far more than most Shakespeare”.

Titus Andronicus has had a chequered history. It was hugely successful in Shakespeare’s lifetime and did more than any other play to establish his reputation. But its graphic violence and its incongruous mixture of comedy and grotesquerie made it unacceptable to 18th and 19th-century tastes. With the horrors of the 20th century, it took on new life. Peter Brook revived it in the 1950s when the “theatre of cruelty” was emerging.

Behind the Iron Curtain, the Polish intellectual Jan Kott made it central to his argument that Shakespeare is “our contemporary”. The Romanian director Silviu Purcarete found it spoke to the chaos of the years after the 1989 revolutions.

The play’s troubling representation of rape and female mutilation has made it particularly challenging to female directors. Deborah Warner established her reputation with a production in the 80s, starring Brian Cox. “Is it a coincidence,” I once asked him, “that you and Antony Hopkins have both played Titus and Hannibal?”

Taymor, who directed an off-Broadway version in 1994, was shattered by her first reading of the play. “It literally shocked me,” she remembers. “I don’t think there’s ever been anything better written about the nature of violence - and if there was ever a time that should understand the implications of what Shakespeare was writing about, it has to be now.”

For Taymor, the play does not indulge in gratuitous violence. It is a dissertation on how and why we make entertainment out of violence. Brook’s famous production with Laurence Olivier as Titus and Vivien Leigh as his raped daughter, Lavinia, stylised the violence, opting for red silk ribbons instead of stage blood. Taymor, by contrast, approaches the drama through a striking combination of realism and stylisation. Some scenes present brutality head-on, while the action is punctuated by surreal montage sequences that she calls “penny arcade nightmares”. Taymor has an amazing capacity to work the language of a text into visual effect. “Everything I do becomes visual imagery,” she says. Shakespeare’s own proto-cinematic imagination becomes a source of inspiration as she finds visual equivalents for the dramatist’s figurative verse. Two key locations, a swamp and a crossroads, are peculiarly haunting.

As her production of The Lion King testifies, Taymor is above all a choreographer of human bodies and stage spaces. Watching Titus, an audience may wonder whether she is another Leni Riefenstahl, without any of the dark political baggage.

Before The Lion King, Taymor was known as one of New York’s most exciting avant-garde directors, her productions shaped by the journey she had taken through many different theatrical traditions. She grew up in a well-to-do suburb of Boston. She and her sister played theatre games in the garage.

From the beginning, she was drawn to “mime, puppetry, masks, the whole business of making believe and the leap of faith that theatre requires”. At 16, she went to the Lecoq drama school in Paris, where she learned the very European idea that an actor must start from the physical body, not the process of conceptual identification with a role that is characteristic of the New York “method”.

Then at college at Oberlin in the Midwest, she studied under a director called Herbert Blau, who was interested in the “ideograph” - the stage image or tableau that symbolically visualises the distinctive world of a play.

In Amsterdam, she saw a one-minute puppet show that veered wildly and instantaneously from slapstick comedy to brutal violence. In Indonesia, she discovered the intimate relationship between theatre, ritual and priestly magic.

All the different theatrical traditions that have informed her work come together in the film. Blau’s ideographs sowed the seed of the iconographic “nightmares”, while that one-minute puppet show anticipated in miniature the mix of tragedy and comedy, lyric poetry and black farce, the tender and the grotesque.

The influence of the director’s experience of Eastern theatre cannot be pinned down so exactly, but the key to it is the sense of drama as spectacle. As in Japanese bunraku and Javanese ritual theatre, both eye and ear are perpetually feasted. Music always plays a key part.

Taymor works closely with her husband, the composer Elliot Goldenthal, whose score for Titus brings together a bravura array of musical styles and traditions that sounds like modern jazz or Shostakovich one minute, indie rock the next.

Like Sam Mendes, another theatre director who turned to film - with American Beauty - Taymor knows the value of the rehearsal process, something for which few movie-makers have time. For them both, it was essential there should be a three-week rehearsal period before shooting began. This was especially valuable for the members of the Titus cast who lacked experience with Shakespearean language. Jessica Lange, who plays Titus’s enemy Tamora, Queen of the Goths, had never done Shakespeare. She benefited from work with Cicely Berry, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s voice coach.

“We were coming from very far reaches of the universe as far as acting experience was concerned,” Lange says. “The rehearsal period gave us an equal ground to work on. It was the only time the actors could have Julie’s full attention and concentration. Her strength as a director is in the visual - there was so much going on the way she was shooting and designing the film that you had to have your foundation in place from the rehearsal time.”

The other thing the films have in common is that they gave the directors the opportunity to work with the person they regard as the best actor in the world - Kevin Spacey for Mendes, Hopkins for Taymor. Why did the great Welsh actor agree to play the proud Roman general, when he had vowed never to tackle Shakespeare again?

“He loves the darkness of the story, the grotesqueness of it,” explains Taymor. “I guess that deep down he identifies in some way with a man who has this veneer of ordinariness, who is a repressed gentleman, who then has his world torn out from under him and through madness comes to see reality.”

During the gruelling four-month shoot, there were reports that Hopkins was going to give up acting for good. It was a turbulent time. You cannot live with the extremity of Titus for that period without sharing some of his derangement.

“If you ask Tony,” Taymor confides, “he’ll tell you he tore his soul apart playing this role, he went to hell and back.”

The other extraordinary performance is that of Harry J. Lennix, the one actor in the movie who was also in Taymor’s original stage production. He plays the villainous Aaron the Moor, the first great black role in English drama.

Taymor’s eyes are bright with admiration as she talks of both the man and the part: “Harry’s from Chicago, which is one of the most racist cities in America. He was both a Jesuit priest - I mean he was studying to become one - and a black Muslim. That sort of tells you who Harry is. You know black Muslim means peace and strength, but he’s got a very particular view of race in America. He will tell you that Aaron is justified in saying “f... you” to all the other characters; he’s got no reason to be nice to anybody. What I love so much about what Harry brings to it is the total joy in the evil of violence, the total easiness, and then the incredible humanity he brings to the love of his child.”

The transformation of Aaron from devilish villain to protective father is one of the great surprises of the play. It gives a special power to the last half-hour of the movie.

After seeing Titus, one of Shakespeare’s biographers, Anthony Holden, said to me: “The best Shakespeare film ever made? Discuss.” Probably not quite, but I would say that it is the only one of the recent celluloid treatments of the Bard to be up in the premier league along with Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight.

Yet the reviews were decidedly mixed when the movie was released in the US at the beginning of the year. For Time magazine, it was a stunning foretaste of what serious film-making could become in the new century, while The Washington Post took the view that Taymor would have been better advised to stick to Disney.

Part of the problem was that many reviewers had no understanding of the original play. They went to Harold Bloom’s bloated book on Shakespeare, found a few pages of brisk dismissal along the lines of “a ghastly parody of Marlowe”, and felt justified in blinding themselves to the tragedy’s troubling artfulness.

Ellen Little, one of the film’s co-executive producers, says a print was sent to Francis Ford Coppola. After seeing it, he phoned Taymor to tell her she had made a truly great movie, but one so far ahead of its time that it would be several years before people realised just how important it was.

The fact that Titus only garnered a single Oscar nomination, for its costumes, shows Coppola may be right. The voters of the academy were afraid to look into the heart of darkness beneath the dazzling surface.

Maybe Coppola was right about the long weight for recognition: an article published in 2024 was rightly titled “Titus: The Masterpiece that the Cinematic Greatness of 1999 Obscured”.

Here are the next two films from the Othello module of my lectures on “Shakespeare and his World”: these one focus on the Turkish (Ottoman) context.

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Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794-1847) was brought up first by his grandfather, a well-known figure in the literary world who had made his fortune by publishing the very funny but equally pornographic novel Fanny Hill (with its frequent references to “the engine of love-assaults” and the “ecstatic gush”), and then by an uncle from whom he eventually inherited an elegant London house but not the means to live there in the style to which he aspired. He studied in the academy of Charles Burney, son of the music critic, where he developed his talents as an artist. After a brief period as a guardsman, he became art critic of the London Magazine.

This was the most exciting literary journal of the age. William Hazlitt was drama critic, Charles Lamb resident essayist. De Quincey published his opium confessions there and John Clare his first poems. The publishers held brilliant dinner parties. Wainewright attended, wearing pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, and established a reputation as both a dandy and a wit.

His writings on art were impressionistic in judgment and purple in prose (“a delicate Schiavone, various as a tulip-bed”). Such phrases were singled out by Oscar Wilde, who regarded Wainewright as the precursor of such aesthetes as Walter Pater - and of his own dandyism and bon mots. Indeed, one of the pen-names under which Wainewright wrote was Egomet Bonmot. He also signed his articles under the names Janus Weathercock and Cornelius Van Vinckbooms. The ancient god Janus had two faces. Wainewright outdid him by adopting three masks. “A mask tells us more than a face,” remarked Wilde in “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” his 1885 essay on Wainewright. “These disguises intensified his personality.”

Aesthetes may talk about art for art’s sake, but to enjoy their connoisseurship they need a substantial income. In the course of 1830, Wainewright persuaded his sister-in-law, an attractive young woman called Helen Abercrombie, to take out life insurance policies with five different companies (the Eagle, the Palladium, the Pelican, the Alliance and the Hope). Her life was then worth the very substantial sum of £16,000.

Within days of completing the paperwork and drawing up a new will in favour of Wainewright and his wife, Helen was discovered vomiting, blind, her pulse racing. She was soon dead. The autopsy report proposed a cerebral haemorrhage, but the balance of evidence suggests Wainewright and/or his wife had fed her jelly laced with strychnine.

After various further twists to the tale, Wainewright was found guilty of forging a legal document and transported to Van Dieman’s Land. In the penal colony he established himself as a successful studio artist. He was never brought to trial for murder, but was known in Victorian times as “Wainewright the Poisoner.” Rumour added his uncle and his mother-in-law to the roll of his victims.

“To be suggestive for fiction,” Wilde concludes his essay on Wainewright, “is to be of more importance than a fact.” And to have inspired fiction was indeed his legacy. His story influenced an 1846 novel called Lucretia by the once hugely popular but now unread novelist Bulwer Lytton and then in 1859 he shaped the character of Julius Slinkton, the protagonist of Charles Dickens’s short story “Hunted Down,” narrated from the point of view of an insurance clerk who becomes suspicious of a client. Dickens had gone to gawp at Wainewright in Newgate gaol in 1837, with his actor friend William Charles Macready and his future biographer John Forster in tow. He transplants the alleged poisoner’s dandyish self-regard — the rings, the pale gloves, the connoisseur’s drawl —almost wholesale into his fictional poisoner’s vanity about his own hands. But, like so many novelists, Dickens fused two sources together. He was also fascinated by the strange case of Dr. William Palmer, the “Rugeley Poisoner,” a respectable professional man who murdered his own family for the insurance money, and it is Palmer, not Wainewright, who supplies the story’s chilling procedural texture. Reporting on Palmer’s 1856 trial for the magazine Household Words, Dickens was transfixed by the murderer’s “complete self-possession,” his “constant coolness,” his “profound composure and perfect equanimity” — he gives to Slinkton, but which biographer Peter Ackroyd slyly noted were also how Dickens liked to describe himself.

The inventiveness and the self-possession of the poisoner; the sometimes poisonous but always inventive pen of Wilde the wit and Dickens the novelist. Do they perhaps come from the same part of the brain?

Last week I wrote about the critic Frank Kermode, beginning from his last book, which was on E. M. Forster. Rereading that, I was struck that Sir Frank was not at all interested in Forster’s sexuality. In one respect, I thought “good”: as a general rule, one should be wary of claims that the secret to the careers of writers and artists is their sex lives. Shakespeare was probably bisexual and Henry James a repressed homosexual, but to suggest that their sexuality is the hidden key that unlocks their writing lives is to oversimplify and sensationalise matters of great complexity and mystery.

But the case of Edward Morgan Forster is the exception that proves the rule. In 1924, to great acclaim, he published A Passage to India. He was 45, exactly half way through his long life. Before the Great War, he had published a sequence of novels of ever-increasing deftness, style and human understanding: Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, and the incomparable Howards End. He was widely regarded by his peers, including figures as diverse as Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, as the greatest living English novelist.

From this time forth, he never published another novel. He remained highly productive as a writer: there were essays and radio talks, travel books and biographies, short stories and the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd. But no more novels.

Why? That was the question that tormented serious novel readers from the thirties to the sixties. Was this the longest case of writer’s block in recorded history?

The answer came in 1971, within a year of Forster’s death. There was a sixth novel, after all: the explicitly homosexual love story Maurice. In the summer of 1914, Forster had confided to his friend Florence Barger, “I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England’s.” A visit to Edward Carpenter, the elderly writer and radical activist who lived in domestic bliss with his much younger working-class lover George Merrill, had persuaded him that it was possible to write a gay love story with a happy ending. But to publish it would have been to ruin his reputation and to risk the prosecution of any publisher who dared to print it. Not to mention a future in which the police would certainly take a close interest in his own private life.

This was Forster’s dilemma. There was a moral compass at the absolute centre of his novels: the search for honesty in love. Forster’s heroines—Lucy in A Room with a View, Helen Schlegel in Howards End—refuse to make the respectable marriages expected of middle-class girls. They wrestle with their conscience and follow their hearts. A Passage to India ends by imagining a close friendship between the Englishman Fielding and the Indian Aziz. It brought Forster’s art to a point after which the only honest next step would have been to write openly about the love that consumed his own heart. The love that dared not speak its name.

The irony is that Forster was forced into an awkward compromise of exactly the sort that characterizes the muddle and disconnect of the peculiar kind of Englishness that his books had anatomized. Was his silence a courageous rejection of the heterosexual orthodoxy that had defined the English novel since its birth in the eighteenth century? Or was his suppression of Maurice an act of moral cowardice? In 1928 he was prepared to speak up on behalf of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian The Well of Loneliness. But even after the Wolfenden Report three decades later, he still refused to go public as a gay novelist himself or indeed to publish Maurice.

He collected his essays on politics and public affairs under the title Two Cheers for Democracy. But do his own compromises deserve any hurrahs at all? Nearly all his friends, in the Bloomsbury set and beyond, knew that he was gay, but the reading public didn’t. He had a very active sex life, in terms of both casual affairs and great passions (the loves of his life were first a beautiful young Egyptian Muslim named Mohammed el Adl, then the married policeman Bob Buckingham). He could not contemplate coming out to his overbearing mother, who had brought him up alone after father’s premature death, and with whom he lived for much of his life. Was it just too late for him to change by the time she died in 1945? That freed him to return to Cambridge and the company of such gay men as Dadie Rylands. But perhaps by then it was simply too late to come out of the closet. Half a life wasted?

The pathos — or is it the bathos? — of that waste comes across in a piece that Forster wrote in 1958, exactly half a century after the publication of A Room with a View. Entitled, “A View without a Room,” it imagined the afterlives of the characters. It is, in essence, a synopsis of an unwritten sequel – a sequel he could not or would not write, because of that question of being honest to his own kind of love.

Here it is:

“A View without a Room”

A Room with a View was published in 1908. Here we are in 1958 and it occurs to me to wonder what the characters have been doing during the interval. They were created even earlier than 1908. The Italian half of the novel was almost the first piece of fiction I attempted. I laid it aside to write and publish two other novels, and the returned to it and added the English half. It is not my preferred novel – The Longest Journey is that – but it may fairly be called the nicest. It contains a hero and heroine who are supposed to be good, good-looking and in love – and who are promised happiness. Have they achieved it?

Let me think.

Lucy (Mrs George Emerson) must now be in her late sixties, George in his early seventies – a ripe age, though not as ripe as my own. They are still a personable couple, and fond of each other and of their children and grandchildren. But where do they live? Ah, that is the difficulty, and that is why I have entitled this article ‘A View without a Room’. I cannot think where George and Lucy live.

After their Florentine honeymoon they probably settled down in Hampstead. No – in Highgate. That is pretty clear, and the next six years were from the point of view of amenity the best they ever experienced. George cleared out of the railway and got a better-paid clerkship in a government office, Lucy brought a nice little dowry along with her, which they were too sensible not to enjoy, and Miss Bartlett left them what she termed her little all. (Who would have thought it of Cousin Charlotte? I should never have thought anything else.) They had a servant who slept in, and were becoming comfortable capitalists when World War I exploded – the war that was to end war – and spoiled everything.

George instantly became a conscientious objector. He accepted alternative service, so did not go to prison, but he lost his government job and was out of the running for Homes for Heroes when peace came. Mrs Honeychurch was terribly upset by her son-in-law’s conduct.

Lucy now got on her high horse and declared herself a conscientious objector too, and ran a more immediate risk by continuing to play Beethoven. Hun music! She was overheard and reported, and the police called. Old Mr Emerson, who lived with the young couple, addressed the police at length. They told him he had better look out. Shortly afterwards he died, still looking out and confident that Love and Truth would see humanity through in the end.

They saw the family through, which is something. No government authorized or ever will authorize either Love or Truth, but they worked privately in this case and helped the squalid move from Highgate to Carshalton. The George Emersons now had two girls and a boy and were beginning to want a real home – somewhere in the country where they would take root and unobtrusively found a dynasty. But civilization was not moving that way. The characters in my other novels were experiencing similar troubles. Howard’s End is a hunt for a home. India is a Passage for Indians as well as English. No resting-place.

For a time Windy Corner dangled illusively. After Mrs Honeychurch’s death there was a chance of moving into that much loved house. But Freddy, who had inherited it, was obliged to sell and realize the capital for the upbringing of his family. And unsuccessful yet prolific doctor, Freddy could not do other than sell. Windy Corner disappeared, its garden was built over, and the name of Honeychurch resounded in Surrey no more.

In due course World War II broke out – the one that was to end with a durable peace. George instantly enlisted. Being both intelligent and passionate, he could distinguish between a Germany that was not much worse than England and a Germany that was devilish. At the age of fifty he could recognize in Hitlerism an enemy of the heart as well as of the head and the arts. He discovered that he loved fighting and had been starved by its absence, and also discovered that away from his wife he did not remain chaste.

For Lucy the war was less varied. She gave some music lessons and broadcast some Beethoven, who was quite all right this time, but the little flat at Watford, where she was trying to keep things together against George’s return, was bombed, the loss of her possessions and mementos was complete, and the same thing happened to their married daughter, away at Nuneaton.

At the front George rose to the rank of corporal, was wounded and taken prisoner in Africa, and imprisoned in Mussolini’s Italy, where he found the Italians sometimes sympathetic as they had been in his tourist days, and sometimes less sympathetic.

When Italy collapsed he moved northward through the chaos towards Florence. The beloved city had changed, but not unrecognizably. The Trinita Bridge had been destroyed, both ends of the Ponte Vecchio were in a mess, but the Piazza Signoria, where once a trifling murder had occurred, still survived. So did the district where the Pension Bertolini had once flourished – nothing damaged at all.

And George set out – as I did myself a few years later – to locate the particular building. He failed. For though nothing is damaged all is changed. The houses on that stretch of the Lungarno have been renumbered and remodelled and, as it were, remelted, some of the facades have been extended, others have shrunk, so that it is impossible to decide which room was romantic half a century ago. George had therefore to report to Lucy that the View was still there and that the Room must be there, too, but could not be found. She was glad of the news, although at that moment she was homeless. It was something to have retained a View, and, secure in it and in their love as long as they have one another to love, George and Lucy await World War III – the one that would end war and everything else, too.

Cecil Vyse must not be omitted from this prophetic retrospect. He moved out of the Emersons’ circle but was not altogether out of mine. With his integrity and intelligence he was destined for confidential work, and in 1914 he was seconded to Information or whatever the withholding of information was then entitled. I had an example of his propaganda, and a very welcome one, at Alexandria. A quiet little party was held on the outskirts of that city, and someone wanted a little Beethoven. The hostess demurred. Hun music might compromise us. But a young officer spoke up. ‘No, it’s all right,’ he said, ‘a chap who know about those things from the inside told me Beethoven’s definitely Belgian.’

The chap in question must have been Cecil. The mixture of mischief and culture is unmistakable. Our hostess was reassured, the ban was lifted, and the Moonlight Sonata shimmered into the desert.

“No government authorized or ever will authorize either Love or Truth”: the Wolfenden Report had been published a year before Forster wrote this, so I guess that here he is anticipating that its recommendation to legalize homosexuality will never be realized - and of course it did take ten years before that happened.

But don’t you think he might have got away with some subtle gay hints if he had written this sequel: could he have made George’s wartime infidelities in Italy a little experimental? And surely the “mixture of mischief and culture” in Cecil, and the fact that he is “not altogether out of” Forster’s circle, are strong suggestions? Where better for Cecil to have come fully “out” than the very city in Egypt where in the first war Forster himself fell passionately in love with the Alexandrian tram driver Mohammed el-Adl and found sexual fulfilment for the first time?

Here are the first two short films in the Othello module of my course on Shakespeare and his World. What was Venice like in Shakespeare’s time and how did he know about it? And how did the reputation of Venetian women play into Iago’s hands?

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When print arrived in the fifteenth century, people began to wonder if manuscript circulation would disappear. But although the printing press was, as the great historian Elizabeth Eisenstein put it, a massive “agent of change,” many literary, historical and other texts continued to be written and circulated in manuscript for at least two centuries. And although many medieval and later manuscripts are lost, many survive.

When the internet and the e-book came along, people began to wonder if printed books would disappear. But they won’t, not least because books are proving far more durable than digitalia. My only “lost” work is an edited compilation of the second series of the Arden Shakespeare, with supporting material from numerous other sources (including original Quarto and Folio facsimiles), which was produced in the mid-1990s via the then innovative medium of the CD-ROM. I suspect that there are now no more than a handful of computers anywhere in the world that can read it.

Then consider the case of defunct magazines. Whereas complete runs of 18th and 19th century periodicals, and 20th century “little magazines”, are available on the shelves of major research libraries (and, to be fair, have in many cases been helpfully digitized), “digital only” journals are more likely to disappear altogether once their website ceases to exist. Unless, perhaps, they were scraped by an engine such as the by-no-means-comprehensive Internet Archive.

For historians and biographers, the migration from physical letters in the mail to email also means that the preservation of that most intimate form of human exchange, the correspondence, will in the future be much more difficult to recover.

One of the aims of this Substack is to preserve bits of my writing that are widely scattered or now inaccessible. Ironically, though, once it disappears, it will be the old print texts that survive …

Not that I have any intention of disappearing any time soon, so here is another recycling of something that is no longer available in print or, as far as I can see, anywhere else online. I sometimes wrote for the defunct Standpoint Magazine, and this (stripped of a topical top and tailing that is now dated) is something I wrote about Sir Frank Kermode - who was one of my literary inspirations, although, as the piece argues, also someone who arguably contributed unintentionally to the decline of the discipline of literary study that has been so powerfully discussed by Substackers such as James Marriott.

The occasion was the publication in 2009 of his last book. I’ve added some links, together with a couple of clarifications in boldface, but I’ve kept it to the present tense rather than an obituary-like past.

My title echoed his:

CONCERNING FRANK KERMODE

Sir Frank Kermode is regularly described as Britain’s most distinguished — indeed ‘greatest’ — literary critic. [The authoritative British Academy memoir of his career rightly begins by describing him as ‘the pre-eminent critic of his generation’.]

In his heyday, literary criticism was thought to matter. The opinion — always frank, if sometimes detachedly Olympian — of Professor Kermode, expressed in the Listener or the Observer, was eagerly awaited. His acceptance of, and still more his premature departure from, the King Edward VII Chair of English Literature were considered to be of national interest. O tempora, O mores: does anyone outside Cambridge know, still less care, who now sits in the pre-eminent EngLit chair in the land?

There are many reasons why literary criticism has become a backwater with little more contemporary cultural purchase than that of classical philology or biblical hermeneutics. But no history of the discipline’s decline would be complete without pointing out that one of the principal architects of its deconstruction was its own leading practitioner: Frank Kermode.

He has just [i.e. in 2009, the penultimate year of his life] published a genial book called Concerning E. M. Forster (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £14.99). It consists of three Clark Lectures, delivered in the Cambridge where, like Forster before him, Kermode eventually found a home, together with a ‘causerie’ (ie, some high-class chatter) ranging around the recesses of the novelist’s work. Kermode is, as one has come to expect, fascinating and informative on such subjects as musical structure in Forster’s novels. His judgment on the strengths and weaknesses of Forster’s own Clark Lectures, Aspects of the Novel, are unerring, as his judgment nearly always is. The ‘causerie’ is full of this sort of thing:

The words quoted by Forster come from one of a series of poems written, with great force and exaltation, in archaic Italian … by the 13th-century Spiritual Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi. The poems are addressed to divine Love; the nearest English equivalent, not all that close, might be the baroque religious verse of Richard Crashaw four centuries later. Matthew Arnold knew about Jacopone (see his sonnet ‘Austerity of Poetry’) and Forster knew his Matthew Arnold; but it happens that Evelyn Underhill, author of Mysticism, which became the standard English work on the subject, published a biography of Jacopone that made him more accessible and included translations. Underhill was a disciple of Baron von Hügel, who, as Yeats remarked, accepted the miracles of the saints and honoured sanctity.

‘Golly’ is one’s first thought. If I could hold all this stuff in my head at the age of 90, I’d be doing all right. The man is a walking encyclopaedia of the high culture of the West. If we were the Japanese we’d have officially designated him a Living National Treasure.

Kermode’s mind is never provincial. His most influential teacher, the brilliant alcoholic D. J. Gordon of Reading University, was reared in the cosmopolitan ‘Warburg’ school of cultural interpretation, which excelled in the excavation of complex trans-national and transhistorical influences of the kind that are sketched here.

But the second thought is this. The vast majority of young lecturers in EngLit are profoundly uninterested in Forster. So Edwardian, so male, so English. Fodder only for articles with titles such as ‘Imperialism, class and the English country house in Howards End’ or ‘Masculinity amalgamated: colonialism, homosexuality and Forster’s Kipling.’ The very idea of a cosy causerie bringing Forster into alignment with Richard Crashaw, Matthew Arnold and Evelyn Underhill would be anathema to most youthful members of Kermode’s profession (outside Oxford and Cambridge).

Why so? Because those junior colleagues entered the academic profession during the Age of Theory. And who did more than anyone else to domesticate French Literary Theory in the late 1960s and ’70s? Frank Kermode.

From the very beginning of his academic career, Kermode has been interested in how literary texts work as systems, how they create autonomous worlds that in important senses stand apart from the real world. His first book, published in 1952, was an anthology called English Pastoral Poetry from the Beginnings to Marvell (W. W. Norton). In a remarkable introduction, written under the influence of the maverick critic William Empson, Kermode argued that pastoral is in some sense the defining literary form because the enclosed second world that it creates — Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, Andrew Marvell’s imaginary gardens — is an analogue for the literary work itself. It is a line of argument that anticipated the words of Paul de Man, high priest of literary Deconstruction, by some 30 years: ‘There is no doubt that the pastoral theme is, in fact, the only poetic theme.’

Kermode followed up, and established his reputation, with the 1954 Arden Shakespeare edition of The Tempest, the work that perfectly illustrates this theme, via the analogy between the play itself and the magical island where it is set. Again, the introduction was magisterial, offering hugely influential treatments of black versus white magic and the debate between art and nature. A couple of years later came Romantic Image (Routledge), a book that Kermode later said he dashed off in six weeks one summer because he wanted to explain to himself the origin and context of W. B. Yeats’s great line, ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’

Having proved himself as adept a reader of modern literature as of the Renaissance, Kermode was now in a position to reach beyond the specialised world of the academy. He became a sought-after reviewer and publisher’s adviser. ‘This is the age of the guru,’ he told Fontana Press. ‘We should do a series of gurus.’ They did: the Modern Masters, for which he served as editor, was phenomenally successful in providing comprehensible introductions to many of the demanding thinkers who shaped the intellectual life of the 20th century. When I was 17, everything I knew about Wittgenstein, Freud, Nietzsche, Chomsky, Lévi-Strauss and a dozen other daunting names came from these dazzling little volumes with their cool geometric cover designs.

The poet who proves most congenial to Kermode’s sense of the literary work as an autonomous second world, sufficient unto itself, is the American actuary, Wallace Stevens. Kermode’s elegant and deeply intelligent study of his work was the first book on him to have been published in England. ‘Notes towards a Supreme Fiction,’ the title of Stevens’ manifesto poem, could serve as the epigraph for Kermode’s entire literary-critical career.

Over the years, he became increasingly interested in the most supreme fiction of all: the Bible. The narrative line from Genesis to Revelation might be considered the archetype for all literary works. Kermode’s 1967 study The Sense of an Ending (OUP) developed a theory of narrative out of such a thought, focusing on closure rather than opening: to imagine apocalypse is to impose order on the chaos of experience by suggesting that everything is leading to a particular ending. This, Kermode suggested, is what fiction means. We might call the proposition a postmodern twist on the Whig interpretation of history.

The Genesis of Secrecy (Harvard, 1979) also uses the Bible as its archetypal text. But here something has changed. The figure of the Interpreter has come into the foreground. The confident sense of structure that shaped the earlier books has disappeared and Kermode is now fascinated by gaps and absences, loose ends and contradictions. There is a strange little vignette in Mark’s Gospel when Jesus is arrested: ‘And they all forsook him, and fled. And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.’ This marginal figure of the naked young man — about whom we hear nothing more — becomes Kermode’s symbolic interpreter. In seeking to strip the veil of obscurity from the text, he exposes not its meaning but his own nakedness.

What happened between 1967 and 1979 was that Kermode fell for the seductive charm of French Theory. As Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, he hosted a famous seminar that brought all the new gurus from Paris and Yale. This was the age of ‘the death of the author’ and of Jacques Derrida’s claim ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (‘there is nothing outside the text’). Kermode welcomed the new. Deconstructive Theory seemed but the logical extension of the idea of textual autonomy that he had developed in his work on pastoral, on Stevens and on the temporal structure of narrative. And there was quiet satisfaction to be derived from shaking up the tweedy Oxbridge-dominated world of EngLitCrit.

But he unleashed a tide that he could not stem. His own interpretations were always grounded in scholarship, rationality and tradition — that Warburg inheritance. He wrestled with the question of the limits of what we may reasonably say about a literary work. Does anything go? Can interpreters do what they like with texts? Kermode knew when to draw the line himself but was unable or unwilling to tell others that they must do so. His very tone and temperament, in both seminar and print, made him unwilling to take a stand. He was hospitable to all interesting lines of thought. He might raise an eyebrow or introduce a sceptical qualification, but he did not have a taste for confrontation. This tendency was consistent with his practice as editor of the Fontana Modern Masters, where he saw it as his role to keep all the balls in the air, to accord equal respect to such ‘masters’ as Marcuse, Mailer, Marx and McLuhan.

They ordered these things differently in Cambridge. There was an English faculty where you were either in or out, one of us or one of them. F. R. Leavis had spent years as an insider representing himself as an outsider. George Steiner had failed to gain a position in the Faculty. Not long after ascending the King Edward VII Chair, Kermode found himself at the centre of the MacCabe Affair. A young don who was into Theory had lost out in the scramble for promotion from Assistant Lecturer to Lecturer. This should have been a purely domestic matter, but somehow it turned into a national news story about the Theory Wars, leading to the edifying spectacle of the Sun trying to explain a new kind of Deconstruction to readers more accustomed to ogling page three girls while wielding a wrecking ball on a building site.

Kermode became fed up with the whole thing, discovered that his wartime naval service counted towards his pension, and took early retirement. In the 30 years since, he has stood apart from the fray within the academy by pursuing the higher literary journalism in the pages of the New York Reviews of Books and its London counterpart. He has bequeathed his uncanny gift for unpicking the figure in the carpet of a book to a few followers, most notably James Wood of the New Yorker. But his considered, intricate mode of very literary criticism is a world away from the practice of English in most university departments in the 21st century.

The story of what has happened since Kermode’s formal retirement in 1982 is a complicated one. In essence, the deconstructive turn decisively shifted the balance of power from author to reader. This made it possible for interpretation to begin not from the patient elucidation of the fine-grained texture of literary works but from the ideological predispositions of professional and often politically-motivated readers. Theory came before practice and works of literature came to be studied primarily as manifestations of extra-literary phenomena, most notably gender, race, class, sexuality and various kinds of imperialism. Musical patterns and Renaissance allusions in Forster were out. Forster and racism, Forster and ‘Queer Theory’ were in.

One of the great merits of Sir Frank Kermode’s criticism has always been its inscrutability. You cannot legitimately infer from it how he casts his vote in the privacy of the polling station. The most uncomfortable moment in his career was his discovery that Encounter magazine was being secretly funded by the CIA. He resigned from the editorial board. For Kermode, good criticism, like great literature, has always begun in disinterestedness. It should never be propaganda. He has many achievements to be proud of, and I am sure that like Piaf he regrets nothing, but does he ever wake in the night and wonder about his own role in the process whereby the profession of LitCrit came to believe that literature is not a place of its own, an autonomous second world, but merely the ‘site’ for a series of familiar political struggles?

I had an interesting exchange with Claude.ai on this matter:

ME: do you store your training data, as in a database?

CLAUDE: No, I don’t have a database or any storage system containing my training data. Here’s how it actually works:

Training vs. runtime are completely separate. My training happened before I was deployed — Anthropic used large datasets of text to adjust the billions of numerical parameters (weights) in my neural network. Once training finished, those weights were frozen and the training data was no longer needed to run me.

What I “know” lives in my weights. When you talk to me, I’m not looking anything up in a database. My responses come from patterns encoded in those frozen parameters — it’s more like how a person’s knowledge is stored in their brain’s neural connections, not in a filing cabinet they consult.

What I do have access to in a conversation:

• The current conversation context (everything said so far)

• Tools like web search, which let me fetch current information

• Any files or documents you share with me

What I don’t have:

• Access to my training data

• Memory of past conversations (unless you use the memory feature)

• Any ability to look up “where I learned” a specific fact

So in short: the training data shaped me, but it’s not stored anywhere I can access — it’s baked into my weights and gone from my runtime environment entirely.

ME: would you then argue that you are not in breach of any copyright because you are not storing or reproducing copyright material? You are more like a human being who has READ material and kept it in their memory than a database or a book or article that might be accused of breach of copyright?

CLAUDE: That’s a genuinely interesting argument, and it has real merit — but it’s also contested. Here’s a fair breakdown:

The argument in your favour (the “human reader” analogy):

• Like a person who has read widely, I generate responses from internalized patterns, not by retrieving stored text

• I don’t (usually) reproduce verbatim passages — I synthesize and rephrase

• Humans aren’t sued for copyright infringement simply because they read and learned from copyrighted books

• The output of a well-read person isn’t considered a copy of everything they read

Why courts and copyright holders push back:

• The training process itself may involve making copies of copyrighted material — scraping, storing, and processing text to train on it. That copying during training is where much of the legal action is focused, not the outputs

• Outputs can sometimes reproduce substantial portions of training data, especially for memorized content like song lyrics, poems, or distinctive passages — which is different from how human memory works

• Scale matters legally — copyright law wasn’t written with the assumption that one “reader” could process hundreds of billions of words and then generate text for millions of people

• The human analogy has limits — a human who reads a novel can’t reliably reconstruct it; I potentially could reproduce more than a human would

Where the law actually stands (as of my knowledge): Several major lawsuits (NYT vs. OpenAI, authors vs. various AI companies) are still working through this. Courts haven’t settled whether training on copyrighted data constitutes fair use, and different jurisdictions are approaching it differently.

So your argument is philosophically compelling and is genuinely being made in legal circles — but it isn’t settled law yet. The human analogy is strong for outputs, weaker for the training process itself.

Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.

I like that little disclaimer at the end … and will be watching future legal cases with interest.

There is also a literary-theoretical dimension to the question, which takes us back to a famous essay by my favourite French literary theorist (to be honest, about the only French literary theorist I really like and find entirely readable):

In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: “It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling” Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story’s hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain “literary” ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes. · · · Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins …

So begins Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay “The Death of the Author.” All writing is rewriting, a tissue of quotations … Claude would agree with that, wouldn’t it? Barthes works towards the conclusion that we must abandon the idea of the individual author “owning” their text (and hence their copyright, one might add), since “a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the AuthorGod), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” Is not this a perfect description of AI-generated text?