tricky dicky

The only point having a character in a story make a prophecy is so that it can come true – unless the story is specifically about fake or failed prophecies. 

We talked (a lot) last time about Queen Margaret in the First Tetralogy.  Her main role in the last play of the cycle, Richard III, is to foretell the future.  She predicts, more or less accurately, the fates of all her tormentors.  When she tells Buckingham that he will one day rue his alliance with Richard, she tells him:

…remember this another day,

When he shall split thy very heart with sorrow,

And say poor Margaret was a prophetess!

…which is, of course, exactly what happens. 

In a recursive moment – which anticipates the way the witches in Macbeth turn cause-and-effect into a moebius strip – Buckingham fulfills Margaret’s prophecy by quoting it from his own memory, while waiting in one of Richard’s cells to be executed.  The comparison with Macbeth’s witches or weird sisters is apt as, in her role as a prophet of doom, Margaret takes on the role of a witch.  Richard calls her “foul wrinkled witch” in response to her accusations.  This is ironic, given Margaret’s own history of conspiring with her lover, Suffolk, to dispose of her enemy, Duke Humphrey’s wife Eleanor, by enticing her to indulge in witchcraft and then expose her (see Henry VI, Part 2).  Nor is this the only time that Richard – who has issues with the ladies, as we know – uses witchcraft as an accusation for his own political gains.  Later in the play that bears his name he disposes of Hastings, an obstacle in his path to the throne, by accusing his (Hastings’) mistress of being a witch and alleging that she and the queen have conspired to put a spell on him (Richard).  This is at least partly owing to Richard’s deeply ingrained misogyny as a character.  But the discourse and ideology of witchcraft is to hand before he picks it up. 

There are reasons why a patriarchal culture would develop and utilise the figure of an elderly woman as a vengeful seer.  Amongst other things, and purely in terms of the genealogy of tropes, there is the figure of the tragic and lamenting female that traces a lineage back ancient tragedy.  (Richard III is a play particularly influenced by the tragedies of Seneca, which made use of this trope.)  That begs the question somewhat, but we’ll leave it there.  There are the usual ways in which elderly women are used as liminal figures within texts created within patriarchy.  But there’s more.  We need to look at some of the political valences of prophecy in Early Modern England.  In that time and place, prophecy was linked to both witchcraft and revolution. 

It’s widely known that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth partly to appeal to his new king and patron, James I of England and VI of Scotland.  It’s a play with Scottish themes, obviously, and James was a Scot.…

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NOTE: This article has been amended to remove factual errors (please see the comments).

It used to be said that Englishmen got their understanding of history from Shakespeare and their understanding of theology from Milton.  These days, they get their understanding of history from Simon Schama and their understanding of theology from Richard Dawkins.  God help us.  In practice, this means middlebrow television and middlebrow publishing.  Which could, at the moment, with a little stretching, be boiled down satisfactorily to one quasi-word: BBC. 

Shakespeare, meanwhile, has gone largely from being a purveyor of an idea of history to being a bit of history that is itself purveyed.  It’s no secret that he’s an industry all to himself.  Of course, what that actually means is that he’s become an idea people sell – and part and parcel of this idea is a whole complex of other ideas, some of which are still about the history he supposedly tells or implies.  Like any industry, the packaging is as much ideological as it is plastic and cardboard.  And when it comes to the ideological packaging of isolated, decontextualised, atomised, rendered, pulped and puréed chunks of Heritage Themepark British History, the BBC is, once again, the main nozzle through which the resultant gloop is shat into the nation’s collective kingsize Styrofoam goblet.

This is certainly true right at the moment, during the second season of The Hollow Crown, the BBC’s glossy adaptation of Shakespeare’s main cycle of history plays, and in the immediate aftermath of the RSC’s and BBC’s Shakespeare Live! event.  Yes, they put an exclamation mark at the end.  They did.  This gala, star-studded barrowfull of bardballs was perpetrated supposedly to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.  I still don’t understand the idea of celebrating the death of someone you supposedly admire… except that I do understand it, of course: it’s a populist and sentimental way of conferring ostensible meaning on a random date, meaning which can then be parlayed into marketable goods, services, and/or ideological products. 

Speaking of marketable ideological products, I was going to talk more about Shakespeare Live! but… it had Prince Charles in it, which made talking about it pretty much superfluous.  He appeared in a playful little skit with some actors… and that’s all that really needs to be said.  This alone tells you literally everything you need to know. 

Prince Charles, you see, is like a black hole.  Not in the sense of being cosmically impressive, but rather in the sense that his mere proximity pulls in and crushes all other meanings into mush.  He is a meaning-pulper.  He is so empty, yet powerful (not because of anything he does but simply by having come into existence as a massive negation with intense cultural gravitational pull) that any context into which he is inserted instantly becomes about having him in it… which is functionally the same as being drained of all substance.  Because he has none.  Like all modern British royalty, he simply is what he is, and what he is is nothing more than the position he occupies by accident of existence.…

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Just a reminder: I recently guested (again) on the Oi! Spaceman podcast to talk about ‘Caves of Androzani’. Download here.

What makes an English king ‘bad’? It certainly isn’t starting wars, brutally oppressing peasants and vassals, invading places, or killing and exploiting lots of people. If it were, most of them would be seen as bad, and Edward III (who basically started the Hundred Years War) and Richard I (crusader) wouldn’t have the perennially good reputations they still enjoy. Generally we seem to decide a king is bad if he lost something. We – by which I of course mean ‘someone somewhere’ – seem to have decided that John, Edward II, Richard II and Richard III were the ‘bad’ kings.  Losers all.  John lost a lot of France, and a lot of his power to his barons, an event marked by Magna Carta. Edward II lost to Robert Bruce at Bannockburn, thus losing control of Scotland, and then lost control of his kingdom to his wife and Roger Mortimer, Earl of March. Richard II was challenged by the peasants’ revolt, and ousted from power twice by his barons, being finally deposed by Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Lancaster. Richard III, of course, lost at Bosworth Field to Henry Tudor, thus ending the Plantagenet dynasty and inaugurating the rule of the Tudors. It seems that what we don’t like from our kings, above all else, is failure.

Peter Ackroyd once wrote, beautifully, that when a man fails Shakespeare’s sympathy envelopes him… which you can see in almost all Shakespeare’s history plays. Even Shakespeare’s Richard III is allowed flawed introspection and guilt, and even some faint self-awareness, before his final battle, thus lending him tragic dimensions… and then gets his last moments of brazen, daring defiance (the horse remark having been, in my view, seriously misunderstood). But as for history, or rather for those ‘someones somewhere’ who have decided how history is told, generation upon generation, it seems that when a king fails, condemnation envelopes him. The reasons for his defeat, military or political, are then discovered by working backwards. John failed because he was ‘bad’. The flimsiness of his claim to the throne is played up, his apparent murder of a child pretender is paraded as proof of his perfidy, etc… all the way up to becoming a villainous cartoon lion advised by a snake. Edward II failed because he was too fond of his favourites, i.e. men of lesser nobility who exploited their access to him for personal gain, and who antagonised the baronage by cutting them out of the action and insulting them. It’s unclear whether people at the time though Edward was having sexual relationships with his favourites (historians disagree), though this has become the standard popular account since. The probably apocryphal story about the red-hot poker emerged years later, and seems to sadistically imply a fitting end for a sodomite. Marlowe’s play about Edward contains a charge of admiration for the frank love of two men, and Marlowe’s tragic overreacher version of Edward is now favoured in an era when many of us are inclined to sympathise with a man attacked for being gay.…

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William Shakespeare lived at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I and the start of the reign of James I (and VI of Scotland). This was a time when modernity was coming into being. Feudalism was crumbling and fading, and the capitalist epoch was in the process of being born. That’s why we call his time the Early Modern Period (another name for the Renaissance, basically). Modernity is essentially another way of saying capitalism, from its beginnings as a predominant social system onward. (We won’t here argue about whether we currently live in post-modernity.)

Shakespeare lived and died in an era of what Marx refers to as ‘primitive accumulation’. This was the process whereby feudal property was appropriated, broken up and turned into capital.

The basis of the feudal system was land, owned by lords, farmed by peasants who were tied to the land, generally not allowed to leave (which is why it’s such a clever joke when, in ‘The Androids of Tara’, the fourth Doctor responds to Zadek’s observation “You don’t look like a peasant” with “Well of course not, I’ve travelled”). The peasants farmed and produced their own subsistence directly. For the privilege of being allowed to do so (a privilege, incidentally, that people tend to grip hold of tightly when threatened with being forced off the land, out of direct contact with the means of subsistence, and into the wage system) they were obliged to produce surplus for the lord, to be paid upward to him in tribute. This manorial system was the basis of how feudal society was reproduced, i.e. fed and clothed day after day, generation upon generation.  Upon it was built a social system of ties, bonds and reciprocal (though not equal) obligations, arranged in strict hierarchy.

The lord might use part of the surplus he controlled to buy things, or to employ people to produce things for him. Swords, for instance, or clerical records, or domestic service, or minstrelsy, etc. As in our world, the basic economic form produced a wide variety of attendant para-forms and relations. Whatever anyone tells you, today the basis of capitalism as a system of social relations is still industrial production (i.e. people producing stuff for a wage), and yet not every worker is involved directly in industrial production of physical goods (they never were actually, as Marx knew full well). So it was that under feudalism not everybody was either a landowner or a servile farmer. It doesn’t alter the fact that manorial land was the basis of the system.

There was a market even at the highpoint of feudalism, and feudalism became increasingly marketised as time went on. The existence of a market is not an exclusive trait of capitalism, nor it it enough by itself to signify or create capitalism. Capitalism is the ascendancy of market relations. Much work has been done, and many arguments conducted, by Marxists on the question of exactly how and why feudalism transformed into capitalism. Marx himself, to quote David Harvey, thought that

The dissolution of the feudal order, the dissolution of the power of landed property and of feudal land control, was largely accomplished through the powers of merchant capital and usury [not to be considered equivalent to ‘the Jews’, by the way].

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Bit of an unplanned diversion for the Tricky Dicky series, this. Normal service to be resumed soon. (This series was always intended as a free-associating ramble.) We’re going to Shakespeare, albeit not in the way originally planned, so Spoiler Warning… um, for a play first performed about 423 years ago. Oh, and Trigger Warning, for discussion of recent violent acts, and some hardcore misogyny.

Apparently, the guy who recently murdered nine innocent people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon – let his name go unmentioned and unspoken, and be forgotten, for he is unimportant as an individual; and he made himself so – had the audacity to leave behind lots of written complaints at the site of his killing spree. They were mostly about not having a girlfriend, and about feeling that everybody else was crazy.

Oh, boo hoo. Join the fucking club, you fucking asshole. Most people have gone through the same or similar things at one time or another. A lot of people have gone through a lot worse.  What gives you the right to express your displeasure at a routine and banal human experience by violating other people’s right to live?

Thing is… this is basically the opening of Richard III by William Shakespeare. (And by that I in no way intend to glamourize or dignify the murders.)

1.

Richard opens the play by addressing the audience and telling them (us) his plans, much like one of these real-life murderers posting a manifesto (on paper, online, on YouTube, whatever) before embarking on his killing spree. (Because that’s basically what Richard does: go on a killing spree, albeit a rather more structured one.) Having whinged about how all the jocks are going around having fun and behaving like idiots now that peace has broken out, and about how ugly he thinks he is, and how he can’t dance and fuck and have girlfriends, Richard declares:

                    since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Almost immediately after this, Richard begins his campaign of sowing discord and blaming absolutely everything wrong with the world (which, to him and everyone he speaks to, means the court) on a woman, the Queen and her family – whom he asserts are all her tools.

Remember last time we talked about the ambitious, arriviste Woodville family who married into the Yorkist monarchy? The Queen in the play is the former Elizabeth Woodville, later Lady Grey (widowed), now Queen Consort Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV – Richard’s eldest brother. The play depicts her and her family as essentially innocent and good, which is historically doubtful but serves to underline Richard’s villainy, especially when he badmouths them and, at length, engineers the deaths of many of them. Lots of people will tell you that Shakespeare had to depict her positively as she was the great-grandmother of Elizabeth I (it’s complicated) but the play is actually very far from simply being Tudor ‘propaganda’, and Shakespeare depicts Edward IV (Elizabeth I’s great-grandfather) in decidedly mixed terms in the three plays in which he appears as a character.…

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This year, the English have been making fools over themselves over a posh dead guy. Wow, there’s something you don’t see every day. Sorry, did I say that’s something you don’t see every day? Silly me, what was I thinking? I meant, of course, that that’s something you do see every day. Literally, every fucking day. It’s practically our national pastime; worshipping posh dead guys. When we’re not worshipping posh live guys, that is. Everywhere in England, this is our thing. And Britain generally, if we’re honest… though the rest of the United Kingdom has the excuse that the dead guys (generally posh within their own context) they fawn over tend to at least be people who in some way stood up to English imperialism.

What a strange relationship we have in my country! (As an Englishman, I have the luxury of being able to blithely think of other people’s adjacent countries as being bits of mine… though there is some progress to be seen in the fact that, these days, that generally only works with adjacent countries.) In my country you can travel, in a relatively brief time, from a place where there are statues of English guys who became statue-material because they killed lots of Scottish people, to a place where there are statues of Scottish guys who became statue-material because they tried to stop the English guys killing those very same Scottish people. Okay, you can do something like that in America too. But at least in that case the people weren’t really different nationalities; the ones in the South were just pretending to be because a minority of them wanted to keep using black people as farm machinery, as Vonnegut put it. Also, in America, it has the decency to take longer. Even so, the pattern reoccurs across time with depressing regularity; the hyper-speed of modernity accelerates the process and telescopes it in space. And like so many political phenomena, it reoccurs dialectically at different distinct historical levels and loci. For instance, you can travel from bits of London alone where there are statues of guys who became statue-material for massacring lots of Indians to other bits of London where most of the inhabitants are descended from the survivors of the same massacres. But again, something similar is often possible Stateside too… though you have to redefine ‘Indians’ to make it work.

Speaking of America, and passing over the mounds of corpses of massacred indigenous peoples, we in Britain have had our civil wars too. Parenthetically, it often puzzles me that we talk as if we only ever had the one civil war… but I suspect the intensity with which we insist upon 1642-1651 being the ‘English Civil War’ is less to do with denying the others and more to do with effacing the fact that it was more fundamentally a revolution.

But this series of posts isn’t about that English Civil War. It’s about (albeit tangentially) one of the other ones. The one we charmingly call ‘the Wars of the Roses’.…

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