Coover

Two typical monologues from the over-written and unpleasant Pinocchio in Venice- each contains a single remarkable idea fatally smothered in hubristic verbiage:
In our family, if one can call a bastardly plague of debauched egg-suckers a family, it has not forgotten how you honored our great-grandsire Melampo with eloquent silence when the poor beast, too dead to speak for self, stood accused—and by a ruling class of lickerish unprinci-graspers born and spit—of the theft of his own meager sustenence. To wit, the odd chicken or two he'd been hired to guard. Some said that great-granddad was bent, others that he was an old prole ahead of his time, and a martyr to causes as yet unformulated, but your mute testimony shut all their pustulous faces and left the ole sonofabitch to lie in peace at the bottom of whatever stinking well they dumped him in. You earned thereby our eternal gratitude, though you'll probably get somewhat less than that, memory being the garbagey stewpot of doodoo that it is, and certainly your pres-ence, which, if I may say so in passing, seems a mite fragrant, honors my poor hovel. So come along now, good sir—and easy, Alidodo, you blundering beffardo! You must transport the gentleman with the same cunning tenderness with which God's chosen ass is said to have borne the gravid Virgin so as not to tear her gossamery maidenhead, the frangibility of which was likened by Thomas the Rhymer unto that of crisp silk, and whose rupture would have detheologized the Western World, catastrophically orphaning us all. Come, come! I'll put a fire on!" And thus it was that the exhausted pilgrim found shelter at last, swathed in the woolen blanket, the first thing he has stolen since those fateful grapes that landed him in the late Melampo's terrible brass-studded collar all those decades ago, and nested in sawdust and woodchips, his natural element—being, that is, the son of a carpenter.
and
 "Don't even listen to those bandits, Pinocchio!" warns a voice at his back. He twists around to seek out the source, but there is no one back there, just empty space, blue, vast, and inscrutable. "If you lend those scoundrels a hand, they'll steal it!" "Cross words," grumbles La Volpe sardonically, resolving the puzzle. "Words!" repeats Il Gatto, sniggering hysterically into his empty cuff. "Avoid evil companions, my boy, or you'll be sorry!" "How could I be sorrier than I already am?" he groans, his wounds stretching as, losing strength, he slumps lower. "You could be," replies the cross with a tremulous sigh, "like me." "Ah well. As to that, there was a time when—" "I know, I know, they send us dossiers, resumes, we get the publicity handouts. You're a famous case, a model for us all, you've—if you'll pardon the expression—crossed over. This is a big honor for me, I know that, I've got the star of the dance, top billing, I shouldn't complain. But do you remember what it was like before? Do you remember how it felt to be a piece of talking wood?" So long ago. A time of darkness. He was innocent then. And innocence, as his long life has taught him, is a form of naughtiness. Yet .. . "I had . .. no pain . . . no fear . . . I was free . ." "Free to get used for a chair leg or a clapboard! Free to soak, rot, and burn! Free to get chopped, hacked, whittled, split, and pulped! Hey, look at me! A tree made out of a tree! A joke! They gave me arms, I can't use them. Am I mad? Hell, I'm cross as two sticks, that's what the children say, but I don't know what 'mad' is, I don't know `cross.' Pain,' you say, `fear': it all sounds like magic to me—or it would, if I knew what magic was. I even envy that old Fox over there with her itches and scratches—I say, 'her,' but what do I know, right? I don't know `knowing'! While you, you've had a life! You've had everything!" "You don't know. Men's lives are short and stupid." "Stupid? You tell me stupid? What's two and two, you ask. I don't know. I don't know what's two! But you know, you're smart, you've got brains, whatever they are. You've got—I don't know, I can only imagine—which is difficult, I don't even have an imagination—but what? You've got charm, right? Dignity. Serenity. You've got—correct me if I'm wrong—hauteur, glamour, class, talent—how'm I doing?—dash and daring. And tenderness. Smoothness. Authority. Have I got the picture?" "Well, I guess so—but how did you—?" "I read it on a movie poster." "You did?" "You caught me. I'm lying. I can't read. I'm dumb as a stump, I'm thick as a plank, I'll never make my mark, or any other. Oh, I wasn't born yesterday, but that's just it. I wasn't born at all. Not like you, Mr. Star of the Dance! And I can't take steps to do anything about it, I can't keep my nose to the grindstone or listen to reason or kick the problem around, so what chance have I got? I'd be down in the mouth about it if I had a mouth. I can't even put my foot in it. I can't show my hand or beat around the bush or face the music. I don't even know where it is, the music, I mean, or the bush either, I'm too stupid. If I had a heart, I'd be wearing it on my sleeve, if I had a sleeve. So what have I got? A routine. A lumber number. A dumb show, a curtain dropper, an act with nails, halfway between a hanky twister and a creepie. But I'm a pro, a reliable standby, an understud, a support who never lets you down, I'm an old hand who hasn't even got one. People like to wear me on their chests.
and so on.

Diary of a Provincial Lady

By E.M. Delafield

Am also worried by extraordinary and tactless tendency of saleswoman to emphasize the fact that all the colors I like are very trying by daylight, but will be less so at night.

Put a cat in the same room as her grandmother- hidden under the sofa if you liked, and in two minutes the grandmother would say "I believe there's a cat in this room" and at once turn queer.
Cook has as usual carried out her favorite labor-saving device of three sponge cakes and one bun jostling one another on the same plate.

The Letter of Marque

I knew she was to be sold out of the service, but I had no notion of . . . I had supposed that privateers were little disreputable half-piratical affairs of ten or twelve guns at the most, luggers and brigs and the like.' `To be sure the most part of those that ply their trade in the Channel are of that description, but there are foreign-going private men-of-war of much greater consequence. In the nine-ties there was a Frenchman of fifty guns, that wrought terrible havoc on the eastern trade; and you can scarcely have forgotten the prodigious fast-sailing ship that we chased day after day and so very nearly caught when we were coming back from Barbados — she carried thirty-two guns.' `Of course, of course: the Spartan. But she was from America, was she not?' `What then?' `The country is so vast that one has an indistinct notion of everything being on a larger scale, even the privateers.' `Listen, Martin,' said Stephen, after a slight pause. Will I tell you something?' `If you please.' `The word privateer has unpleasant echoes for the seaman, and it might be thought injurious, applied to the dear Surprise. In any case she is no ordinary privateer, at all. In an ordinary privateer the hands go aboard on the understanding of no prey, no pay; they are fed but no more and any money must come from their prizes. This makes them unruly and contumelious; it is their custom to plunder without the least mercy and strip their unfortunate victims; and in the case of the most wicked and brutal it is said that those prisoners who cannot ransom themselves are thrown overboard, while rape and ill-usage are commonplace. In the Surprise on the other hand everything is to be run on naval lines; the people are to be paid; Captain Aubrey means to accept only able seamen of what he considers good character; and those who will not undertake to submit to naval discipline are turned away.

and

 Eventually Auden acknowledged having painted the name. He refused to remove it — said he was unable to do so in conscience — and in this he was backed up by the other six. He was not violent or abusive — no foul language — nor was he obviously drunk — but he and the others stated that if any hand attempted to remove the name, his first stroke would be his last. Davidge and West had had no support from the bosun, gunner or carpenter, still less from any of the hands, who, though in no way riotous, were clearly heard to say that they would do nothing to bring bad luck on the ship. For fear of making the position even worse, Davidge had therefore given no further direct, unmistakable orders: nor, having no Marines of course, had he put the seven men in irons. Since the Articles of War did not apply, and since the ship was not at sea, neither he nor West had been certain what to do. He had nevertheless suspended the men from duty pending the captain's arrival and had forbidden them to come on deck. Perhaps he should have sent them ashore directly; if he had done wrong he was heartily sorry for it; but he appealed to Captain Aubrey's candour. `Did you consult Mr Martin?' asked Jack. `No, sir. He only returned a few minutes before you.' `I see. Well, I think you did tolerably well in a difficult situation. Pray ask the doctors if they can spare me a moment.' In the short time he had to wait various possibilities flashed through his mind, but the arguments for and against each were still equally balanced when the cabin door opened. 'Mr Martin,' he said, 'you have no doubt heard about the present trouble. Please tell me all you can about these Sethians. I have never heard of them.' `Well, sir, they descend from the Valentinian Gnostics, but the descent is so long, remote and obscure that there would be little point in tracing it. In their present form they are small independent communities with I believe no governing body; but it is difficult to be sure of that, since they were in danger of persecution as heretics for so long that they are naturally reserved; and there is still something of the air of a secret society about them. They believe that Cain and Abel were brought into being by angels, whereas Seth, who, as you will recall, was born after Abel's murder, was the Almighty's direct pure creation, and not only the ancestor of Abraham and all men now living, but the prototype of our Lord. They have the utmost veneration for him, and believe he watches over Sethians with particular care. But they have little opinion of angels, holding that by their — how shall I express it? — that by their mutual impurities they brought about Noah's flood. This should have wiped out their descendants, but some crept into the ark; and they, not Seth, are the ancestors of the wicked.' `It is odd that I should never even have heard of them. Do they often go to sea?' `I imagine not. Most of the few I have come across or heard of live in small scattered groups in remote inland parts of the West Country. They sometimes carve the name Seth on their houses; and they fall into two schools, mutually hostile, the old school that writes the S backwards and the new that writes it as we do. Apart from that and an unwillingness to pay tithes, they have a reputation for holding together and for being honest, sober and reliable, not unlike the Quakers. Yet unlike the Quakers they have no dislike for warfare.' `But they are Christians, are they not?' 'As for that,' said Martin, looking at Stephen, 'there are some Gnostics who would puzzle St Peter.' `The Valentinians were good enough to say that Christians might be saved,' observed Stephen. 'We might perhaps return the compliment.' `In any event,' said Martin, 'these people have left the gnosis of Valentinus infinitely far behind: it is quite forgotten. Their holy books are ours. I believe we may certainly call them Christians, though somewhat heterodox on certain points of doctrine.
and
This is not unlike being on a stage and waiting for the curtain to go up. I wonder whether actors have the same sense of distorted time, a present that advances, to be sure, but only like the shadows on a dial, imperceptibly- and even then it may go back.
Perhaps they do- they tell me that stage feasts are all made of cardboard- cardboard sausages, cardboard leg of mutton, cardboard ham, cardboard goblets they make believe to drink in.
and
This fine-tooth comb that the worthy shipwrights will be using- we often hear of it and yet who has ever combed his teeth?
May it not be that fine qualifies the tooth rather than the comb? That what is intended is a comb with fine teeth that is to say with teeth set close together?

On the begetting

of the King James Bible:

 Ninety-nine per cent of the Church of England, in other words, thought conformity the better path. Among the one per cent who did not were those who would in time become the leaders of the Pilgrim Fathers. At the same time, Bancroft began to hire the men for the great translation and here it was breadth and inclusiveness which dictated the choice. The first Westminster company, charged with translating the first books of the Bible, had Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster Abbey, as its director. He was known as 'the Angell in the pulpitt', the man more versed in modern and ancient tongues than any other in England, who could serve, it was thought, as `INTERPRETER-GENERAL' at the Day of Judgement, but he had other skills, and another track record, which confirmed him as a member of the core establish-ment and recommended him to Bancroft and the king. He had been used before in important political work, some fifteen years earlier when Bancroft was working for Whitgift rooting out the Separatist congregations in London. Andrewes, then in his mid-thirties and already recognised as the coming man, and as the cleverest preacher in England, could be relied on to do Bancroft's work for him. Highly detailed accounts survive of what Andrewes did for the ecclesiastical establishment: a representation, in other words, of what Bancroft would have known of him, the grounds on which he chose him as one of the principal Translators. Once again, it is not a dignified picture: his governing qualities are those of a man who knows how to exercise power. Through the second half of the 158os, the more extreme Separatist puritans, who considered each congregation a self-sufficient church of Christ, became the target of a campaign led by Richard Bancroft. They were to be found in private houses all around London, holding private conventicles in which their inspirational preachers were, it was reported to Bancroft, `esteemed as godds'. Bancroft, who in another life would clearly have been an excellent detective, had his spies in place. As a central player in the Crown establishment, he would have had an array of inducements to hand: money, prospects, threats, the persuasive words of a man with access to power. Those tools gave him access to all kinds of secret meetings. 'After the Minister hath saluted everie one, both man and woman, at theire comynge into the Chamber with a kysse', one report of such a Separatist meeting described, shocked at its impropriety, a large Table beinge prepared for the purpose (which holdeth fortie or fiftie persons) he taking the chayre at the end thereof, the rest sitt down everie one in order: . . the Minis-ter hymself having receaved [communion] in both kyndes: the breade and the wyne which is left, passeth downe, and everye man without more a doe is his owne Carver. The state church could not tolerate the freedom or the priest-lessness of such behaviour. Many Separatists — and they were overwhelmingly young, idealistic people, a tiny minority, perhaps no more than a couple of hundred in England as a whole — fled to the Netherlands but others were arrested and, eventually, some fifty-two were held for long periods in the string of hideous London gaols: the Clink, the Gatehouse, the Fleet, Newgate, the Counter Woodstreet, the Counter Poultry, Bridewell and the White Lion, some of the prisoners shut in the 'most noisome and vile dungeons', without `bedds, or so much as strawe to lye upon . . . and all this, without once producing them, to anie Christian triall where they might have place given them, to defend themselves'. One of them, the eighteen-year-old Roger Waters, was kept in irons for more than a year. Their leaders, honest, fierce men, the spiritual forebears of the future Massachusetts colonists, were to be interrogated (or `conversed with' as Bancroft described it; the meetings were known among the Separatists themselves as 'Spanish conferences') by the more brilliant and trustworthy members of the Church of England. Andrewes was at their head. Bancroft instructed him to interrogate Henry Barrow, the leading Separatist who had been arrested in 1587 and kept in the Fleet.
Andrewes visited the gaol accompanied by another divine, Wil-liam Hutchinson. Their descent into the Separatists' hell is a moment of sudden, film-like intensity, when the passionate realities of early modern England come starkly to life. The entire context of the King James Bible is dramatised in these prison meetings: holiness meets power, or at least one version of holi-ness meets another; the relative claims of society and the indi-vidual, and the legitimacy of those claims, clash; the individual conscience grates against the authority structures of an age which senses incipient anarchy at every turn and so is obsessed with order; the candid plays against the cynical, worldliness against a kind of stripped Puritan idealism; and the godly comes face to face with the political. The purpose of the visiting churchmen, Barrow wrote later, was 'to fish from [him] som matter, wheruppon they might accuse them to their holy fathers the bishops'. This was true: a good interrogation would be a good career move. Other Translators were nosing around these ratty dungeons: Hadrian a Saravia, a major propagandist of the Divine Right of Kings, was interrogating a Separatist called Daniel Studley, also in the Fleet. The Thomas Sparkes who had so meekly and dumbly sat at the Hampton Court Conference was to be found at this time trying to convince the young Roger Waters of his sins, as he hung in chains in the worst of the stinking pits of Newgate gaol, known as the Limbo. With Barrow, in March 1590, Hutchinson and Andrewes began kindly. They were sitting in the parlour of the Fleet prison (one of the better of the London prisons, 'fit for gentlemen'). Hutchinson told the Separatist that he wanted 'to confer brotherly with you concerning certain positions that you are said to hold'. It was a gentle beginning and Barrow responded in the same vein. He was keen 'to obtain such conference where the Book of God might peaceably decide all our controversy'. That phrase, innocuous as it might sound, was salt in the eyes for Andrewes. It released a flood of hostile questions. All the issues of order and authority, the great political questions of the day, streamed out over his prisoner-conversant. `Whie,' Andrewes said, 'the booke of God cannot speake, which way should that decide owr controversies?' That was the central ques-tion of the Reformation: did Christians not need a church to interpret God for them? Or could they have access to the god-head without help, with all the immediacy of the inspired? Barrow replied in the spirit of Luther: each soul could converse with God direct, unmediated by any worldly church, his thoughts and actions to be interpreted by the words of scripture itself.
inherited wisdom, treating the word of God, the scriptures, not as a common inheritance, whose significance could be understood only within the tradition that had grown and flowered around it, but as a private guidebook to a personal and selfish salvation. The heart of the Puritan error was that social divisiveness, that failure to join in, its stepping outside the necessity of order, its assumption that the Puritan himself was a member of God's elect, and the rest could look to the hindmost. How could a society be based on that predestinarian arrogance? Increasingly, for churchmen such as Andrewes, it seemed that the true church could only be inclusive, one in which God's grace would descend on believers not through some brutal predestinarian edict but through the sacraments, through the ceremony of the church. Separateness was of course an unacceptable political position. It severed the links on which order relied and carried the seeds of anarchy within it. The fact that the words of Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians sanctioned such separatism was for Andrewes secondary. The Separatists quoted the passage at every turn: 'Come out from among them, and bee yee separate, saieth the Lord, and touch not the vncleane thing, and I will receiue you, And will bee a Father vnto you, and ye shall bee my sonnes and daughters, saith the Lord Almightie.' The response of Andrewes and Bancroft to the emphasis placed on those words, to its implication of God-sanctioned individual freedom, was brief: it was 'libertine', meaning the thought typical of a man `loose in religion, one that thinks he may doe what he listeth', as a 1604 dictionary defined it. Barrow responded sharply. It was not a private spirit but 'the spirit of Christ and his Apostles'. They had been happy to be judged by the word of God and so was Barrow. This, for Andrewes, so crushingly aware of his own sin, was too much. DR ANDREWES: What, are you an apostle? BARROW: No, but I have the spirit of the apostles. DR ANDREWES: What, the spirit of the apostles?
BARROW: Yea, the spirit of the apostles. DR ANDREWES: What, in that measure? BARROW: In that measure that God hath imparted unto me, though not in that measure that the apostles had, by anie comparison, yet the same spirit. There is but one spirit. That was not an unreasonable answer: God had blown his spirit into Adam, and it was acceptable to think that the life of men was a divine gift. But Andrewes, revealing himself here in a way he would rarely do later in life, curiously narrowed and harsh like Bancroft at the conference, clung to his hostility. They argued over the difference between a schism and a sect. Then, in an emblematic moment of the English Reformation, angry, impassioned, pedantic, scholarly, they called for a dictionary. The heretic and his interrogator pored together over the Greek—Latin Lexicon of Joannes Scapula (Basel, 1580) to try and sort out the etymologies of the two words, but they could come to no shared conclusion.

From God's Secretaries

Jointness was the acknowledged virtue of the age. Most of the plays performed in Jacobean England were written by more than one writer. A joint translation, by a large number of people, consulting the original manuscripts in both Greek and Hebrew, but relying carefully on much of the work which the sixteenth-century translators had done, was completely concordant with the ideology of the time. Lack of jointness, either through an overweening individuality or through simple dissolution, a falling apart, was considered an overriding error and a sin. The age was stiff with an insistent individuality, an over-whelming demand for 'authorship', for being master of one's fate, for claiming an individual significance beyond the world and society in which you had your being. 'Every one vaunts himself,' Philip Stubbes the Puritan pamphleteer had wailed in The anatomie of abuses, 'crying with open mouth, I am a gentle-man, I am worshipful, I am honorable, I am noble, and I cannot tell what; my father was this, my father was that; I am come of this house and I come of that.' The jointness on which so many of the moralists of the time lay such emphasis was an attempt to mend the cracks which the eruptive egotism of the time was opening. It is the great and
tragic theme of King Lear, that selfhood and disunity, a natural urge in man, nevertheless destroy the life they aim to elevate. Jointness, by contrast, was slow and careful. It required consul-tation, the gradual application of principles, not their violent banging in. Although the evidence is a little uncertain, these were probably the years in which woodscrews, made of brass, with the thread on them hand-cut, were first used in the making of furniture. The chairs and joint-stools made with screws — as well as with the more conventional oak pegs — became, in sermon after sermon, a symbol of coherence and propriety, of jointness. `In reformations of great importance,' the church historian Thomas Fuller told his congregation, 'the violent driving in of the nail will either break the head or bow the point thereof, or rive and split that which should be fastened therewith. That may insensibly be screwed which may not be knocked into people. Fair and softly goeth far.' Fair and softly goeth far: the irenicon of the new translation was to be a joint product.
and
Some Puritans maintained that the names of the great figures in the scriptures, all of which signify something — Adam meant `Red Earth', Timothy Tear-God' — should be translated. The Geneva Bible, which was an encyclopaedia of Calvinist thought, including maps and diagrams, had a list of those meanings at the back and, in imitation of those signifying names, Puritans, particularly in their heartlands of Northamptonshire and the Sussex Weald, had taken to naming their children after moral qualities. Ben Jonson included characters called Tribulation Wholesome, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy and Win-the-fight Littlewit in The Alchemist (16 io) and Bartholomew Fair (1614), and Ban-croft himself had written about the absurdity of calling your children 'The Lord-is-near, More-trial, Reformation, More-fruit, Dust and many other such-like'. These were not invented. Puritan children at Warbleton in Sussex, the heartland of the practice, laboured under the names of Eschew-evil, Lament, No-merit, Sorry-for-sin, Learn-wisdom, Faint-not, Give-thanks and, the most popular, Sin-deny, which was landed on ten children baptised in the parish between 1586 and 1596. One family, the children of the curate Thomas Hely, would have been introduced by their proud father as Much-mercy Hely, Increased Hely, Sin-deny Hely, Fear-not Hely and sweet little Constance Hely. Bancroft, and this royal translation of the Bible, could give no credit to that half-mad denial of tradition. It was one that trav-elled to America with the Pilgrim Fathers. Among William Brewster's own children, landing at Plymouth Rock, were Fear, Love, Patience and Wrestling Brewster. It is one of the ironies of America's relationship to the King James Bible that, at the very beginning of the Massachusetts colony, the thinking of the colonists and of the Bible, which would in time come to seem
like their national text too, could not have been further apart. The Pilgrim Fathers would undoubtedly have taken the Geneva Bible with them.
Bancroft, and almost certainly the king, was not prepared to give any ground in the language of the translation to the Presbyterians (who denied any scriptural authority to bishops) or Separatists (who would in time call themselves Independents and then Congregationalists). This was one of the oldest nubs of Bible translation. William Tyndale in his great 1526 ground-breaking translation of the New Testament had translated ecclesia not as 'church' but as 'congregation' and presbyteros not as 'priest' but as 'senior' (which he later changed, under pressure from Thomas More, to 'elder', as being the more English word). The entire meaning of the Reformation hinges on these differences. A presbyter, an elder, has no ancient priestly significance; he is not the conduit of God's grace, he does not interfere with the direct relationship of each soul to God, nor, in Luther's famous phrase, with the priesthood of all believers. If presbyter is what the scripture says, what need is there of bishops and archbishops? And if ecclesia means not church but congregation, what relevance to God can there be in the elaborate and expensive superstructure of an established church and the grotesque indulgences of its officers? Was the true meaning of the word ecclesia not a reproach to the habits of even such a godly bishop as Thomas Morton who when travelling by coach 'had always some choice or useful book, which he either read himself, or else caused a Chaplaine as his Amanuensis to reade unto him, who attended on his Journeying'? Did ecclesia really mean old men riding about the countryside as comfortably as if in a first-class railway compart-ment? And monopolising the funds of the true church to do so? It was to avoid questions of that kind, redolent of the profound political and social subversiveness which lies within the Reformation, that the old words had to be kept. 4. When a word bath divers Significatons, that to be kept wch bath ben most commonly used by the most of the ancient Fathers being agreeable to the proprietie of ye place and the analogie of fayth.
The Church of England, like the Church of Rome, but unlike the more fully reformed churches of Europe, relied for its under-standing of the often complex texts of scripture on the ancient inherited traditions of Christianity, the statements and resolutions of the councils of the early church and the great body of patristic scholarship, in particular those church fathers — above all Jerome, St John Chrysostom, Augustine and Origen — of whom sixteenth-century English scholars, including several of the Translators, had made a particular study. This instruction is part of that widespread Reformation phenomenon, the search for primitive authenticity, for avoiding all hint of dreaded 'inno-vation', looking for true meaning in the most ancient and hence the most reliable texts. This too is a mark of the modern: a historical consciousness and a sense that the world now has fallen away from the more perfect state in which it once existed. 5. The Division of the Chapters to be altered either not at all, or as little as may be if necessity soe requier. The king seals his first point: the new Bible is to look and feel as much as possible like the old.
Having established the grounds of continuity, the Rules then move on to deal with the question of commentary and expla-nation. The sixth instruction, repeating James's outburst at Hampton Court, was in many ways the richest:
Noe marginal notes att all to be affixed, but only for ye explanation of ye Hebrew or Greeke Words, which cannot with-out some circumlocution soe breifly and fitly be expressed in ye Text.
A full exploration of this fascinating rule must wait until later — so much flows from it — but its bones are clear. The kind of notes with which the Geneva Bible was littered, so violently disliked by James, were not to be admitted. But the crucial point is this: there were to be no marginal notes 'au all', not even those which might conform to the ideology of the established Jacobean church. The text, as all good Protestants might require, was to be presented clean and sufficient of itself, except where the actual words of the original were so opaque that a 'circum-locution' might not explain them within the text. 'Circum-locution' did not mean then quite what it means now. Thomas Wilson in The ante of rhetorique, published in 1553 and in use throughout the sixteenth century, had described circumlocution as 'a large description either to sett forth a thyng more gorgeous-lie, or else to hyde it'. The words of this translation, then, could embrace both gorgeousness and ambiguity, did not have to settle into a single doctrinal mode but could embrace different mean-ings, either within the text itself or in the margins. This is the heart of the new Bible as an irenicon, an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace. It is the central mechanism of the transla-tion, one of immense lexical subtlety, a deliberate carrying of multiple meanings beneath the surface of a single text. This single rule lies behind the feeling which the King James Bible has always given its readers that the words are somehow extra-ordinarily freighted, with a richness which few other texts have ever equalled.

and

Yet further `Ancient and Grave Divines, in either of the Universities', were to ensure that passages and references translated one way in the Old Testament were translated concordantly in the New. There had been ferocious controversies throughout the sixteenth century over precisely this problem. Distressingly, in the New Testament, Christ and the apostles, when quoting from the Hebrew scriptures, tended to use not the original Hebrew texts them-selves but the Greek words of the Septuagint, the translation of the Old Testament made at Alexandria in about 130 sc. Often, even in the best texts, the words of the Septuagint do not faith-fully reproduce the meanings of the Hebrew scriptures. Could Christ and the apostles have been wrong? Could the omniscient God, in the form of Jesus, be ignorant of his own word? It was clear that the standard of scholarship among Christ's disciples was despicable. The Greek of the New Testament was coarse and clumsy, a steep descent from the heights of fifth-century Athenian elegance, 'countrified and simple' according to Erasmus, or apparently 'concocted', as Charles Bradlaugh, the Victorian atheist described the Gospels, 'by illiterate, half-starved visionaries in some dark corner of a Graeco-Syrian slum'. Paul garbled quotations from Isaiah, Mark muddled Isaiah with Malachi, Luke included the name of Canain in a genealogy which was not there in the Hebrew Genesis, Matthew left out three kings in his genealogy of Jesus, then misquoted both the Hebrew and the Septuagint before attributing something said by Zechariah to Jeremiah. In a text which was said to have been dictated by God, this was an agonising and difficult problem.

The plague, the bible

Plague was a sign of God's wrath provoked by men's 'own inventions', the taste for novelty, for specious newness, which was so widespread in the world. The very word 'plague' — and there is something unsettling about this pedantic scholarship in the face of catastrophe — came from the Latin plaga meaning 'a stroke'. It was 'the very handy-worke of GOD'. He admitted that there was a natural cause involved in the disease but it was also the work of a destroying angel. `There is no evill but it is a sparke of God's wrath.' Religion, he said, was filled by Puritan preachers with 'new tricks, opinions and fashions, fresh and newly taken up, which their fathers never knew of'. The people of England now 'think it a goodly matter to be wittie, and to find out things our selves to make to our selves, to be Authors, and inventors of somewhat, that so we may seem to be as wise as GOD, if not wiser'. What could be more wicked than the idea of being an Author? Let alone wittie? New-ness was the sin and novelty was damnable. 'That Sinn may cease, we must be out of love with our own inventions and not goe awhoring after them . . . otherwise, his anger will not be turned away, but his hand stretched out still.' The educated, privileged and powerful churchman preaches his own virtue and ignores his pastoral duties, congratulating himself on his own salvation. The self-serving crudity of this stance did not escape the attentions of the Puritans. If Andrewes sincerely believed that the plague was a punishment for sin and `novelty', and if he was guiltless on that score, then why had he run away to Chiswick? Surely someone of his purity would have been immune in the city? And if his pastoral duties led him to the stinking death pits of Cripplegate, as they surely did, why was he not there? Did Andrewes, in other words, really believe what he was saying about the omnipotent wrath of the Almighty? In a way he didn't; and his hovering between a vision of overwhelming divine authority and a more practical understand-ing of worldly realities, in some ways fudging the boundaries between those two attitudes, reveals the man. Henoch Clapham, the angry pamphleteer, lambasted Andrewes in his Epistle Dis-coursing upon the Present Pestilence. All Londoners, Andrewes included, should behave as though plague was not contagious. Everybody should attend all the funerals. There was no need to run away. It was a moral disease. If you were innocent you were safe. And not to believe that was itself a sin. How innocent was Andrewes in running to save his own skin?
and
Throughout that exciting summer of 1603, as it felt for a moment that England was going to change, the Puritans were busy raising the stakes. Word was sent around the counties that the old complaints could be given new life. Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, as revised in 1552, embodying the English compromise between Protestant language and Catholic ceremonies, had always been for the Puritans 'an unperfect booke, culled and picked out of the popishe dunghill, the Masse boke full of all abhominations'. Now they could say so. Bishops, they claimed, were nowhere endorsed by the word of Christ. Trumped up, fat 'pomp-fed prelates' could not 'clayme any other authorities than is geeven them by the statute of the 25 of Kynge Henry the 8'. They were royal placeholders, para-sitical government officials, nothing to do with God or his church. A sudden electric current ran through the English shires. The Puritans arranged public debates on the question of the wearing of the surplice, and on the use of the cross, on the bishops' laying on of hands at confirmation, and on the all-important question of whether ministers should be learned or not. In a Catholic or sub-Catholic church, where the visual and the ceremonial dominated the verbal and intellectual, it scarcely mattered if the priest was well qualified; he was simply the con-duit for divine meaning. But in a proper, pure reformed church, the minister needed to be, more than anything else, an effective preacher of the word, not a mere `dumme dogge', as the phrase went at the time — it came from Isaiah — who would go through the motions and convey nothing of the intellectual spirit of reformed Christianity.
All these old issues which had riven the church in the 15 7os and 'Sos, and which had been effectively shut down since then by rigid suppression, were now to be given new life. James's all-too-Scottish and intellectual readiness to talk through difficult ques-tions was going to release a log-jam, Everything in the new Jacobean England suddenly felt more fluid than before and a conference with the Puritans on the future governance and doc-trines of the English Church was going too far. One needs reminding, perhaps, of just how passionate was the loathing among Puritans of that symbolic strain in the English Church. Few modern Christians, however severe, would be quite as brave as Richard Parker, the author of A Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing with AntiChrist in Ceremonies: especially in the Signe of the Crosse, published in London in 1607, who was keen to point out to the ignorant, at some length, 'the idolatrie of the Crosse, the Superstition of the Crosse, the Hipocrisie of the Crosse, the impietie of the Crosse, the injustice of the Crosse and the soule murther of the Crosse'. The cross was 'a part of deuill worship . . . The vsing of the Crosse is but an idle apishe toye, and lighter than the surplice, which is also too light.' Why did these things matter so much? Why did people care about the wearing of a surplice, or the emblem of the cross, or the use of a ring in the wedding service? Why was so much agony expended on the relative weight of symbol and word, of text and ceremony, on the precise bodily movements of English-men at prayer? There is a straightforward answer: two entirely different and opposing worldviews, and two views of the nature of human beings, are bound up in this debate. For the strict reformers, only the naked intellectual engagement with the com-plexities of a rational God would do. All else was confusion and obfuscation. The word was the route to understanding. Every-thing else was mud in the water. Men were essentially thinking and spiritual creatures. Bodily observance was an irrelevance. A Calvinist religion, as Milton later said, was `winnow'd, and sifted, from the chaffe of overdated Ceremonies'. It was free of irrelevance. The only desire of ceremonialists like Lancelot Andrewes and his disciple William Laud was to distort this precious purified religion of the word. 'They hallow'd it, they fum'd it, they sprincl'd it, they be deck't it,' Milton raged, 'not in robes of pure innocency, but of pure Linnen, with other deformed, and fantastik dresses in Palls, and Miters, gold, and guegaws fetcht from Arons old wardrobe.' For those like Andrewes who held on to the place of symbol in the life of religion (and they were a small if powerful minority even among the bishops of the Jacobean church), and who saw God not as an intellectual system but as a mystery, the stripping of the altars was an unpardonable arrogance. The church had always used ritual and ceremony to approach the divine. It was the conduit through which grace could reach the believer. Only big-headed modern 'novelists' could assume that, without any guidance from the wisdom of the church fathers, ordinary people could approach God direct, as no one had done since the Apostles. Mystery for Andrewes required ceremony and a respect for the inherited past. Bowing to the name of Jesus was the hinge and fulcrum of this debate. The later pamphleteer William Prynne (whose cheeks were to be branded on the orders of William Laud with the letters SL standing for 'Seditious Libeller' — Prynne called them 'Stigmata Laudiana') considered the habit of bowing 'a meere Popish Inuention of punie times'. And, anyway, bowing at the name of Jesus `disturbes and interupts men in their devotions, by auocating their bodies and minds from those serious duties about which they are imployed and to which they should be wholy intent'. Prayer was as serious and technical as a law lecture; and what did bobbing and dipping have to do with that?

James the First of Scotland

From God's Secretaries-
 Scotland was no place to be a king. The English throne, infinitely more powerful in relation to the nobility than his own; supported by the structures and doctrines of the church, rather than eroded and undermined by them; rich, potent and admired — all this awaited him like a harbour tantalisingly visible from far out to sea, but, until Eliza-beth's death, only to be longed for and lusted after. Elizabeth taunted him. James had often sent his spies to Whitehall or to Richmond to see how near to death the ageing queen was coming. But the English Council was aware of this too and whenever a curious Scotsman seemed to be watching and attending on the queen more carefully than usual, it was arranged for him to stand waiting in a lobby from where he could see, 'through the hangings, to the queen dancing to a little fiddle'. Over and over again, James would hear reports of her fitness and her vigour. Meanwhile, she dandled her kingdom and her money in front of his eyes. There were other claimants to the English throne, but none so strong. Both his mother and father carried Tudor genes but Elizabeth would make nothing sure. In 1586, all too vaguely, she had promised to do nothing that would take away from 'any greatness that might be due to him, unless provoked on his part by manifest ingratitude'. She began to send him money, and in the letters that accompanied the cash, Elizabeth allowed herself to speak to James from the enormous and magnificent height of an imperial throne. As she wrote to him in June 1586:
Considering that God hath endewed ws with a crown that yeildeth more yerly profeit to us, than we understand yours doth to youe, by reason of the dissipation and evill governement thereof of long tyme before your birth, we have latelie sent to youe a portion meete for your awin privat use. The English carefully varied the amount from year to year, sometimes ,3,000, sometimes .g5p00, so that James would never quite know where he stood. The Scots always called the grant an 'annuity' — a payment due every year — and the English 'a gratuity', made out of the kindness of their hearts. The English policy had its effect. Although James's mother was a Catholic, and although he had flirted with the Catholic states in Europe and had made vague, lying promises to English Roman Catholics that he would introduce something like toleration when he acceded to the English throne, he had never done anything to put his chances of succession in jeopardy. He had been bought. By the time of Elizabeth's death — she died, in the end, 'mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree', so quietly that no one was quite sure of the precise time of her death — James's mouth was dry with years of panting. It was a difficult role to play. Although there is no evidence of his affection for a mother he hadn't seen since he was an infant, James had been forced to acquiesce in her execution in 1587. The unstated but implicit assumption was that he had bargained that acceptance for a recognition of his title to the English throne. The conventional modern view of such an upbringing would be negative: such abuse would be bound to destroy the person. James, for all his strange, unaccommodated behaviour, went precisely the other way. The outcome of his violent, threatened youth was not someone filled with vitriol and vengeance, although James could be foul-mouthed, but what might be called exaggeratedly social behaviour, a longing for acceptance and a desire for a life and a society in which all conflicting demands were reconciled and where all factions felt at home.

From Ford Madox Ford

It was the Nightingale:
Henry James used to say that the best goods are not done up in the most fashionable looking parcels.

and (ahem)

Years ago—I should say in 1913—I was on the top of a bus in front of the Bon Marche. I saw Miss Gertrude Stein driving with a snail-like precision her Ford car. It was a vehicle of the original model of my name-sake and with its great height above the roadway gave to Miss Stein, driving, the air of awfulness of Pope or Pharaoh, borne aloft and swaying on their golden thrones. I sprang down from my bus in order to pursue that phenomenon, for I had been going to call on her. I wanted to speak to her. I was leaving Paris that after-noon and should have no opportunity for a long time. I do not remember what it was exactly that I wanted to talk to her about. I have had so many and such long arguments with that old friend—or enemy—that they seem to fuse, the one into the other in an unbroken chain of battle. It must however have been about the sculpture of either Mr. Joseph Epstein or poor Gaudier Brzeska. She had written—or more probably she was reported to me as having said—something caustic and contemptuous, probably about Gaudier. And at that date Miss Stein was both Pope and Pharaoh of the pic-ture-buying world. At any rate I was determined to have it out with her about something and I trotted on keeping that pro-cession in sight for quite a number of blocks. She out-distanced me in a stretch of roadway that was quite clear of traffic whereas the sidewalks were blocked. It occurred to me that she must be going to Picasso's: I took a taxi. But she was not at Picasso's. A number of people were and they were all disliking the new stage in which that cubist found himself, all having been en-thusiastic patrons of his earlier representational work. Upon one of them—I think it was that prominent dilet-tante, the Comte de Beaumont—the painter turned and said: "You used in the old days to say that I drew better than Raphael and painted better than Velasquez. You said it, not I. I never said it." How then was it that
they—being nobodies—dared to question him—the divine master, by their own accounts! —if in his wisdom he saw fit to take other directions? Did they imagine that he could no longer draw better than Raphael or was it to be imagined that they thought that they, the no-bodies of the audience, made the masterpieces of the divine draughtsman? That was probably what they did think. . . . Then let them go away and find other divine artists to paint, under their directions, works which were better than those of Raphael. I am not Picasso. My sympathies are altogether with revolutionary work and with no other. I would rather read work of Miss Stein or Mr. Joyce or look at the work of Picasso himself than consider the work of a gentleman who wrote like Thackeray or drew like Apelles. They may write or draw better than either master: I can do without them. But I cannot see that my own work is in the least revolutionary. I go on my way like a nice old gentleman at a tea-party. Occasionally it strikes me that if I change a little my method of sequence in presenting scenes, or shorten my sen-tences and occasionally put in instead of chasing out all assonances I may feel a little better. But all over the world there are, I am aware, gentlemen and ladies lamenting that I don't write as I wrote when I was eighteen or twenty-seven or thirty-six or forty-five. Or even fifty-four. There is a German Professor, in Hamburg, I think, who castigates me for no longer imitating the verse of the Minnesingers.

Bits from Bryson's Shakespeare

We know precious little about Shakespeare's wife and nothing at all about her temperament, intelligence, religious views or other personal qualities. We are not even sure than Anne was her usual name. In her father's will she was referred to as Agnes (which at the time was pronounced with a  silent g- thus ANN-uss).
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Plague, virtually always present somewhere in the city, flared murderously every ten years or so. Those who could afford to left the cities at every outbreak- this in large part is the reason for the number of royal palaces just outside London. Public performances of all types were banned within 7 mailes of London each time the death toll in the city reached forty, and that happened a great deal. Survival was ever a struggle- nowhere in the metropolis did life expectancy exceed thirty-five and in some poorer districts it was 25.
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The gates to the city locked at dusk, and no one was allowed in or out till dawn, though as dusk falls at midafternoon in a London winter there must have been some discretion in the law's application or there would have been, at the very least, crowds of stranded, and presumably aggrieved, playgoers on most days of the week. Movement was only fractionally less proscribed, at least in theory, inside the walls. A curfew took effect with darkness, at which time taverns were shut and citizens forbidden to be out, though the fact that the night constables and watchmen were nearly always portrayed in the theater as laughable dimwits (think of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing) suggests that they were not regarded with much fear. The principal geographical feature of the city was the Thames. Unconstrained by artificial embankments, the river sprawled where it could. It was up to a thousand feet wide in places—much wider than it is today—and was the main artery for the movement of both goods and people, though the one span across it, London Bridge, stood as an unnerving impediment to through traffic. Because water accelerates as it flows through narrow openings, "shooting the bridge" was an excit-ing and risky adventure. A popular saying had it that London Bridge was made for wise men to pass over and fools to pass under. Despite all that was tipped into it, the river was remark-ably full of life. Flounder, shrimp, bream, barbels, trout, dace, eels, and even occasionally swordfish, porpoises, and other exotica were among the catches hauled out by bemused or star-tled fishermen. On one memorable occasion, a whale nearly got caught between the arches of London Bridge.
The bridge was already venerable when Shakespeare first saw it. It had been built nearly four centuries earlier, in 1209, and would remain the only span across the river in London for nearly two centuries more. Standing a little east of today's London Bridge, it stretched more than nine hundred feet and was a little city in itself, with more than a hundred shops in scores of buildings of all shapes and sizes. The bridge was the noisiest place in the metropolis, but also the cleanest (or at least the best aired), and so became an outpost of wealthy merchants—a kind of sixteenth-century Bond Street. Because space was so valuable, some of the buildings were six stories high and projected as much as sixty-five feet over the river, sup-ported by mighty struts and groaning buttresses. It even had its own precarious palace, Nonesuch House, built in the late 1570s, teetering at its southern end. By long tradition at the Southwark end of the bridge the heads of serious criminals, especially traitors, were displayed on poles, each serving as a kind of odd and grisly bird feeder. (The headless bodies were hung above the entrance gates to the city, or distributed to other cities across the realm.) There were so many heads, indeed, that it was necessary to employ a Keeper of the Heads. Shakespeare, arriving in London, was possibly greeted by the heads of two of his own distant kins-men, John Somerville and Edward Arden, who were executed in 1583 for a fumbling plot to kill the queen.
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Saint Paul's stood in an immense open square, covering about twelve acres all together, which served, a bit unexpectedly, as both cemetery and market. It was filled on most days with the stalls of printers and stationers, a sight that must have been hypnotizing for a young man with an instinctive regard for words. Printed books had already existed, as luxuries, for a century, but this was the age in which they first became accessible to anyone with a little spare income. At last average people could acquire learning and sophistication on demand. More than seven thou-sand titles were published in London in Elizabeth's reign—a bounty of raw materials waiting to be absorbed, reworked, or otherwise exploited by a generation of playwrights experimenting with entirely new ways of entertaining the public. This was the world into which Shakespeare strode, primed and gifted. He must have thought he'd found very heaven. Inside, the cathedral was an infinitely noisier and more public place than we find today. Carpenters, bookbinders, scriveners, lawyers, haulers, and others all plied their trades within its echoing vastness, even during services. Drunks and vagrants used it is as a place of repose; some relieved themselves in corners. Little boys played ball games in the aisles until chased away. Other people made small fires to keep warm. John
Evelyn could have been writing of Saint Paul's when he noted, a generation later, "I have been in a spacious church where I could not discern the minister for the smoke; nor hear him for the people's barking." Many used the building as a shortcut, particularly when rained. The desire to retire indoors was motivated by fashion as much as any sudden interest in comfort. Starch, a stylish new item just making its way into England from France, notori-ously wilted in rain. Starch's possibilities for fashionable dis-comfort were already being translated into increasingly exotic ruffs, soon to be known as piccadills (or peckadills, pickadailles, picardillos, or any of about twenty other variants), from which ultimately would come the name "Piccadilly," and these grew "every day worser and worser" as one contemporary glumly noted.* Moreover, dyes were not yet colorfast, or even close to it, adding a further powerful incentive to stay dry.

and

Among other differences we would notice between then and now was much to do with dining and diet. The main meal was taken at midday and, among the better off, often featured foods that are uneaten now—crane, bustard, swan, and stork, for instance. Those who ate well ate at least as well as people today. A contemporary of Shakespeare's (and a friend of the family) named Elinor Fettiplace left to posterity a household management book from 1604—one of the first of its type to survive—that contains recipes for any number of dishes of delicacy and invention: mutton with claret and Seville orange juice, spinach tart, cheesecakes, custards, creamy meringues.* Other contemporary accounts—not least the plays of Shakespeare and his fellow writers—show an appreciation for dietary variety that many of us would be pressed to match today. For poorer people, not surprisingly, diet was much simpler and more monotonous, consisting mainly of dark bread and
cheese, with a little occasional meat. Vegetables were eaten mostly by those who could afford nothing better. The potato was an exotic newcomer, still treated skeptically by many be-cause its leaves looked similar to those of poisonous nightshade. Potatoes wouldn't become a popular food until the eighteenth century. Tea and coffee were yet unknown. People of all classes loved their foods sweet. Many dishes were coated with sticky sweet glazes, and even wine was some-times given a generous charge of sugar, as were fish, eggs, and meats of every type. Such was the popularity of sugar that people's teeth often turned black, and those who failed to attain the condition naturally sometimes blackened their teeth artificially to show that they had had their share of sugar, too. Rich women, including the queen, made themselves ad-ditionally beauteous by bleaching their skin with compounds of borax, sulfur, and lead—all at least mildly toxic, sometimes very much more so—for pale skin was a sign of supreme loveli-ness. (Which makes the "dark lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets an exotic being in the extreme.) Beer was drunk copiously, even at breakfast and even by the pleasure-wary Puritans. (The ship that took the Puritan leader John Winthrop to New England carried him, ten thou-sand gallons of beer, and not much else.) A gallon a day was the traditional ration for monks, and we may assume that most others drank no less. For foreigners English ale was an acquired taste even then. As one continental visitor noted uneasily, it was "cloudy like horse's urine." The better off drank wine, generally by the pint.
Tobacco, introduced to London the year after Shakespeare's birth, was a luxury at first but soon gained such widespread popularity that by the end of the century there were no fewer than seven thousand tobacconists in the City. It was employed not only for pleasure but as a treatment for a broad range of complaints, including venereal disease, migraine, and even bad breath, and was seen as such a reliable prophylactic against plague that even small children were encouraged to use it. For a time pupils at Eton faced a beating if caught neglecting their tobacco. Criminality was so widespread that its practitioners split into fields of specialization. Some became coney catchers, or swindlers (a coney was a rabbit reared for the table and thus unsuspectingly tame); others became foists (pickpockets), nips, or nippers (cutpurses), hookers (who snatched desirables through open windows with hooks), abtams (who feigned lunacy to pro-vide a distraction), whipjacks, fingerers, cross biters, cozeners, courtesy men, and many more. Brawls were shockingly common. Even poets carried arms. An actor named Gabriel Spencer killed a man named James Freake in a duel, then in turn was killed by Ben Jonson two years later. Christopher Marlowe was involved in at least two fatal fights, one in which he helped a colleague kill a young innkeeper and another in which he was killed in a drunken scuffle in Deptford. We don't know when Shakespeare first came to London. Ever a shadow even in his own biography, he disappears, all but utterly, from 1585 to 1592, the very years we would most like to know where he was and what he was up to, for it was in this
period that he left Stratford (and, presumably, wife and family) and established himself as an actor and playwright. There is not a more tempting void in literary history, nor more eager hands to fill it. Among the first to try was John Aubrey, who reported in 1681, long after Shakespeare was dead, that he was a school-master in the country, but no evidence has ever been presented to support the claim. Various other suggestions for the lost years have him traveling in Italy, passing his time as a soldier in Flanders, or going to sea—possibly, in the more romantic versions, sailing with Drake on the Golden Hinde. Generally none of this is based on anything other than a need to put him somewhere and a desire to explain some preoccupation or area of expertise that later became evident in his work.

Protestantism from Shakespeare

 Elizabeth was a fairly relaxed Protestant. She favored many customary Catholic rites (there 'would be no evensong in English churches now without her) and demanded little more than a token attachment to Anglicanism throughout much of her reign. The interest of the Crown was not so much to direct people's religious beliefs as simply to be assured of their fealty. It is telling that Catholic priests when caught illegally preach-ing were normally charged not with heresy but with treason. Elizabeth was happy enough to stay with Catholic families on her progresses around the country so long as their devotion to her as monarch was not in doubt. So being Catholic was not particularly an act of daring in Elizabethan England. Being publicly Catholic, propagandizing for Catholicism, was an-other matter, as we shall see.
Catholics who did not wish to attend Anglican services could pay a fine. These nonattenders were known as recusants (from a Latin word for "refusing") and there were a great many of them—an estimated fifty thousand in 1580. Fines for recusancy were only 12 pence until 1581, and in any case were only sporadically imposed, but then they were raised abruptly—and, for most people, crushingly—to n0 a month. Remarkably some two hundred citizens had both the wealth and the piety to sustain such penalties, which proved an unexpected source of revenue to the Crown, raising a very useful £45,000 just at the time of the Spanish Armada.
Most of the queen's subjects, however, were what were known as "church Papists" or "cold statute Protestants"—prepared to support Protestantism so long as required, but happy and perhaps even quietly eager to become Catholics again if circumstances altered.
Protestantism had its dangers, too. Puritans (a word coined with scornful intent in the year of Shakespeare's birth) and Separatists of various stripes also suffered persecution—not so much because of their beliefs or styles of worship as because of their habit of being willfully disobedient to authority and dangerously outspoken.
and
 In theory she enjoyed unlimited powers to detain, at her pleasure, any subject who failed to honor the fine and numer-ous distinctions that separated one level of society from an-other—and these were fine and numerous indeed. At the top of the social heap was the monarch, of course. Then came nobles, high clerics, and gentlemen, in that order. These were followed by citizens—which then signified wealthier merchants and the like: the bourgeoisie. Then came yeomen—that is, small farm-ers—and last came artisans and common laborers. Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what. A person with an income of £20 a year was permitted to don a satin doublet but not a satin gown, while someone worth £100 a year could wear all the satin he wished, but could have velvet only in his doublets, but not in any outerwear, and then only so long as the velvet was not crimson or blue, colors reserved for knights of the Garter and their superiors. Silk netherstockings, meanwhile, were restricted to knights and their eldest sons, and to certain—but not all—envoys and royal attendants. Restrictions existed, too, on the amount of fabric one could use for a particular article of apparel and whether it might be worn pleated or straight and so on through lists of variables almost beyond counting. The laws were enacted partly for the good of the national accounts, for the restrictions nearly always were directed at imported fabrics. For much the same reasons, there was for a time a Statute of Caps, aimed at helping domestic cap makers through a spell of depression, which required people to wear caps instead of hats. For obscure reasons Puritans resented the law and were often fined for flouting it. Most of the other sumptuary laws weren't actually much enforced, it would seem. The records show almost no prosecutions. Nonetheless they remained on the books until 1604. Food was similarly regulated, with restrictions placed on how many courses one- might eat, depending on status. A cardinal was permitted nine dishes at a meal while those earning less than £40 a year (which is to say most people) were allowed only two courses, plus soup. Happily, since Henry VIII's break with Rome, eating meat on Friday was no longer a hanging offense, though anyone caught eating meat during Lent could still be sent to prison for three months. Church authorities were permitted to sell exemptions to the Lenten rule and made a lot of money doing so. It's a surprise that there was much demand for in fact most varieties of light meat including veal, chicken and all other poultry were helpfully categorized as fish.
Travel for nearly everyone was on foot or horseback- or not at all. Coaches as a means of public transport were invented in the year of Shakespeare's birth but weren't generally used by the masses until the following century.

Stalin from the Dark Valley

He had exiled the inspiring Trotsky, who denounced him as "the grave-digger of the proletarian revolution." He had isolated the intellectual Bukharin, who regarded him as a "debased Genghis Khan." By 1929 Stalin had established what Trotsky called "the dictatorship of the secretariat." He was thus able to initiate a revolution more far-reaching than Lenin's. At the time its full horror was hidden by a fog of propaganda. But during the Second World War Stalin told Churchill that his "revolution from above" had surpassed, in the severity of its impact on the Russian people, the Ger-man invasion itself. It was no wonder that at night the floodlit Red Flag, which a concealed wind-machine kept flying above the crenellated walls, tented towers and gold domes of the Kremlin, reminded contemporaries of a "pool of blood suspended in the darkness."' Also gleaming from the Kremlin's battlements were the gilt double-headed eagles of the Romanovs, not replaced until 1937 by Stalin's huge illuminated red glass stars. Other royal relics littered the palaces, cathedrals and barbicans of this 65-acre museum, not just State treasures such as the crown jewels but priceless bric-a-brac: the red velvet, gold-embroidered saddle of Ivan the Terrible, the engraved armour of Boris Godunov, the huge boots which Peter the Great made for himself, Catherine the Great's silver wedding dress. But time had moved on in the Kremlin: the clock on the Saviour Tower no longer chimed the "Preobrazhensky March" but the "Internationale" (so tuneless that it was hardly recognis-able). In 1929 Stalin demolished various imperial and ecclesiastical edifices to clear the ground for Communist monuments such as the military academy. Moreover, the kite-shaped fortress overlooking the Moscow River became more impregnable than ever. It was Stalin's Castle, a night-marish labyrinth shrouded in "cloud[s] of secrecy" and enclosed by walls of terror. Elaborate measures were taken to preserve the safety of Russia's man of steel. There were sentries at every corner. Crack secret police pa-trolled the corridors and grounds. Guards checked the identity of all visitors against their photographs. Passwords were constantly changed. The air was tested for traces of poison gas. At the centre of this stronghold Stalin himself dwelt with becoming simplicity—in the imperial servants' quarters of the Poteshny Palace. His small study was plainly furnished with a bookshelf, a battered leather ottoman and a writing table. On it stood two photographs: one of his daughter Svetlana, the other of Lenin reading Pravda. No pictures hung on the walls. Instead there was a plaque inscribed with Dante's line, "Go your way and let people talk"; and an intaglio profile of the wife of Zeus above Pushkin's sonnet, "Hera, the far-famed goddess of power."' The adjoining bedroom was similarly modest: the windows were nar-row, a couple of rugs covered the worn floor and Stalin slept under an old army blanket. Nothing in his personal appearance suggested that he was the embodiment of power. He invariably wore a plain khaki tunic but-toned up to the chin and uniform trousers stuffed into long black boots. He was short and swarthy with thick, greying hair, deep, dark, slightly squinting eyes, a nicotine-stained moustache and bad teeth—having a penchant for medical murder himself, Stalin did not trust dentists. Some people, to be sure, perceived a monster. Boris Pasternak said that Stalin was "the most terrible creature he had ever seen, a crab-like dwarf with a yellow, pock-marked face and a bristling moustache."' Another poet, Osip Mandelstam, was repelled by "the huge laughing cockroaches on his top. lip "'° When Stalin laughed, the critic Kornelii Zelinsky noted, "His eye-brows and moustache move apart and something cunning appears. Tiger-ish, in fact."
Other outsiders discerned Stalin's "brutal lack of scruple" and even the sycophantic New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty found him "crude," "hard and cruel." Insiders were exposed to the auto-crat's feral rages, drunken buffoonery, paranoid suspicions, caustic cyni-cism and obscene invective. Women were by no means immune, not even the highest in the land. Stalin once told Nadezhda Krupskaya that she was a syphilitic whore and later said that if she misbehaved he would make someone else Lenin's widow. Yet for the most part visitors were overwhelmed by Stalin's simplic-ity and sincerity; by his unaffected friendliness and his unassuming de-meanour. H. G. Wells thought him kindly, "candid, fair and honest"— and tried to get him to join the P.E.N. Club. The American journalist Eugene Lyons emerged from a rare interview saying, "I like that man."'After his first meeting with Stalin the British Ambassador Lord Chilston told his staff, "Do you know, I think the chap's a gentleman."15 It was hard to reconcile the shy Kremlin recluse with the dictator around whom a personality cult was forming so extravagant as even, apparently, to surprise its subject. "If this goes on," Stalin remarked to one of his bodyguards, "some night I'll find my own statue in my bed." Stalin always claimed that he discouraged personal adulation. In fact he craved it, once growling over a portrait showing his pock marks that artists see too much. The semi-cripple with the withered left arm and two toes joined on his left foot was inordinately vain. The shoemaker's son from Georgia responded with whiplash ferocity to any slight. The sometime seminarian from Tiflis built power on the foundation of awe. The Red revolutionary established his legitimacy by becoming the heir of Lenin. But it was not enough to be the guardian of Leninist orthodoxy; even though, as Zinoviev complained, Stalin could thereby claim to be infalli-ble. Stalin must also be the high priest of Lenin's own cult. For Lenin had been genuinely revered, not because he inspired terror but because he embodied hope. On his death huge queues had formed outside the Hall of Columns in what had formerly been the Nobles' Club, where his body lay. Bonfires were lit in the streets to ward off the intense cold. Amid the crowd were Pasternak and Mandelstam, the latter joking that people had
come to complain to Lenin about the Bolsheviks but "it won't do any good." In fact Mandelstam marvelled at the spectacle of the "Moscow of ancient days burying one of her tsars," and his wife Nadezhda concluded that Lenin's funeral was "the last flicker of the Revolution as a genuine popular movement." Stalin wanted to be the keeper of that flame. He needed to preserve Lenin for his own purposes. Perhaps inspired by Howard Carter's discovery of the mummified Tutankhamun, Stalin advo-cated the embalming of Lenin's body. And in 1929 he approved the con-struction of a permanent shrine, beside the rose-coloured Kremlin Wall in Red Square, for the supreme effigy of Communism. It was a marvellous fulfilment of Lenin's own (frustrated) ambition to create "monumental propaganda" and an extraordinary realisation of his remark that great lib-erators are often fated after their deaths to serve as the icons for some new tyranny. Lenin's mausoleum was a stepped pyramid of russet and dark grey granite (grey being a "worker's colour" ), and it became the focus of intense devotion. Just what superstitions this pharaonic monument inspired in a godless theocracy it is impossible to say, though the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky did suggest that Lenin's preserved body symbolised the ever-lasting life of Communism. Anyway, a perpetual procession of votaries shuffled towards the immobile guard of honour, under the porphyry inscription of Lenin's name, through the bronze portals, down the dimly lit steps, into the labradorite-tiled Funeral Hall and past the immortal corpse. It lay in a scarlet-lined, glass-topped sarcophagus based on a sable plinth surrounded by magnificent blooms, which were changed daily. The head rested on a red silk cushion. A cloth of purple and black satin shrouded the loins and legs. The torso was dressed in a khaki gabardine tunic with the Order of the Red Banner pinned over the heart. The little hands, nails carefully manicured, were crossed. The auburn beard was trimmed. The eyes were closed as though in sleep. The lips were fixed in the ghost of a smile. The yellow-white skin was drawn smoothly over the high cheek-bones and domed forehead. The flesh was in the pink. It was kept so in a marinade of chemicals. Lenin's embalmers regularly swabbed his exposed surfaces with a secret "balsam," impregnating the tis-sue, which did not become waxy but remained firm and resilient. They paid particular attention to the face, its lips stitched together, its eyelids sewn over false eyes, its skull void of grey matter—the brain had been sent to the Lenin Institute, where it was sliced into 30,000 pieces for scientific study. Every 15 months the whole body experienced a little resurrection—it was given a "general overhaul."The inner cocoon of rubber bandages was unwrapped and the stick-like limbs and eviscerated trunk were bathed in a solution of glycerine and potassium acetate ( while the embalmers sometimes got drunk on the 96 percent proof spirit used in the preservation process). The survival of these cosmetic taxidermists depended on Lenin's own survival. To foreign journalists they nervously demonstrated the continuing elasticity of the flesh, pinching the cheeks and tweaking the nose. Plainly Lenin possessed enough elan vital to defy rigor mortis.

All Things Shining- whoosh

But the memory tells you nothing about how to act once the situation is gone. This makes our contemporary notion of the sacred and the real radically different from many others we are familiar with. This situational notion of what grounds our existence, for example, is nothing like the eternal, everlasting kind of certainty and security that philosophers from Plato to Descartes to Kant desired. And it is nothing like the monotheistic, unified kind of certainty that the Judeo-Christian religions offer either. Rather, this pre-Axial kind of certainty is transient and multiple and it requires care. As Homer knows it carries you along for a while but it cannot last forever. Second, this characteristic of the sacred as we experience it in our culture ties it very closely to the Homeric Greek conception of what is real. In Homer's age the name for nature, or what there is, was physis. This is the word from which our word physics derives. Physics today is likewise the study of what there is, but we now have a very different conception of what there is than Homer had. For us, the ultimate elements of nature are quarks and leptons and other subatomic particles that have mass and charge. Or perhaps the ultimate constituents are minuscule multidimensional strings that vibrate. Or maybe the final physics will tell us something different still. But whatever physics ends up saying about the universe, the story it gives will be a story about basic constituents and the laws that govern how they casually interact. For Homer this notion of reality isn't wrong on the facts, as if some other physical, causal story could get it right.'' Instead, for Homer, the causal account starts in the wrong place altogether. For the word physis in Homeric times wasn't the name of some ultimate constituent of the universe; it was the name for the way the most real things in the world present themselves to us. The most important things, the most real things in Homer's world, well up and take us over, hold us for a while, and then, finally, let us go. If we had to translate Homer's word physis, then whooshing is about as close as we can get. What there really is, for Homer, is whooshing
up: the whooshing up of shining Achilles in the midst of battle, or of an overwhelming eroticism in the presence of a radiant stranger like Paris; the whooshing up of a rock in the turbulent sea that calls forth Odysseus's hand to grab it. These were the shining moments of reality in Homer's world. And whooshing up is what happens in the context of the great moment in contemporary sport as well. When something whooshes up it focuses and organizes everything around it. The great athlete in the midst of the play rises up and shines—all attention is drawn to him. And everyone around him—the players on the field, the coaches on the sidelines, the fans in the stadium, the announcers in the booth—everyone understands who they are and what they are to do immediately in relation to the sacred event that is occurring. In Homer's world what whooshes up is what really shines and matters most. And we can still sense this in the moment of sport. It is worth emphasizing that this Homeric notion of reality is orthogonal to our contemporary scientific understanding—they are simply not explaining the same kinds of things. Indeed, one could embrace both notions—and we think one should embrace both notions—without any conflict. The scientific conception of what there is focuses on the causal basis of reality; Homer's account, by contrast, describes the way the most important or meaningful mo-ments of existence present themselves to us. Of course it is true that meaningful events—like great moments in sport—involve entities that have a causal basis. But the causal structure of the leg muscles in Lou Gehrig's left thigh is neither here nor there when it comes to the question what it is like to be caught up in the response to one of his extraordinary plays or his moving farewell. The third point to make is that the physis phenomenon is not unique to sport. It may be that in our culture sport provides the cen-tral locus for the phenomenon—that in general it is in the context of sport that contemporary Americans are most likely to feel this sense of community and focused meaning, this sense of understanding ex-actly what one is about, if only for a while. But that is not to say it can't happen in other contexts too. Many people, for instance, felt their sense of themselves and their world come into focus during the speech by Martin Luther King Jr. on the National Mall. For someone else it might happen occasionally in the context of an important fam-ily meal at Thanksgiving. Perhaps some other folks feel this kind of focused, communal meaning taking them over in the context of the classroom. There is nothing in our position that requires the story to focus on sports. It's just that this is the place in contemporary Ameri-can culture where the phenomenon seems most familiar. But the sports example is important for another reason too, and this brings us to the fourth point we want to make. Namely, there is something inherently dangerous in the phenomenon we are describ-ing. Inherently dangerous, and perhaps even repellent. We need now to address this final point about physis.
AT A DINNER PARTY recently one of us was describing the phenom-enon of whooshing up. A colleague at the table—himself a kind and clearheaded philosopher who thinks deeply about related issues—had an immediate response. "I know exactly what it's like to feel that kind of energy pulsing through a crowd," he said. "And every time I'm near it I want to get as far away as possible." The discussion was cut short at this point, as social conversations often are, and the source of this colleague's concern was never explicitly articulated. It is clear, how-ever, what someone might mean by a comment like this, and there is a very serious worry behind' it. Without attributing any of the fol-lowing views to our friend, therefore, we need to lay out the danger of whooshing up. First we need to notice that to be overtaken by some potent force is to have one's actions no longer completely under one's control. When I find myself rising as one with the crowd in the presence of some great athletic feat, there is an important sense in which I am not the source of my own activity. It is my muscles, of course, that generate the motor actions—straightening the legs, raising the arms, emitting the inarticulate utterance that means "Hooray!" But there is a strong sense in which I perform these movements without ever having decided to do so. The activity is out of my control in the sense that I do not perform it voluntarily. It's not as if I was forced to jump up and cheer either, of course. It was always an option for me to adopt a kind of ironic distance from the situation, or even, as our colleague recommends, to walk away. But so long as I find myself taken over by the situation, there is an important sense in which I am no longer the source of my own activity. From the point of view of the Enlightenment, this condition is appalling. In a famous essay, Kant argued that "enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity." To be imma-ture, in the Kantian sense, just is to allow oneself to act in ways that one has not chosen freely on one's own. Failing to resist the mad-ness of crowds is a prime example. Maturity, by contrast, is having the resolve and courage to use one's own understanding in choosing how to act, without guidance from anyone or anything external to oneself The mature thing to do at the baseball game therefore, in this Kantian sense of maturity, is to resist the power of the community response in order to decide as a rational individual what the appro-priate response to the situation should be. One might well decide that an athletic feat merits applause, and if so, one might express one's approval appropriately. But rising as one with the crowd is out of the question. This might sound like a boring way to act at a baseball game, but there is sense behind Kant's caution. There is, after all, a vanishingly small distance between rising as one with the crowd at a baseball game and rising as one with the crowd at a Hitler rally. Indeed, insofar as Lou Gehrig's farewell address is properly considered an act of rhetoric instead of an act of athletic greatness proper, perhaps the distance there is smaller still. So the power of the whooshing up phenomenon is revealed to be Janus-faced. If we cannot articulate a distinction between Gehrig and Hitler, then perhaps Kantian maturity, though relatively boring, really is the wisest course.

The Great War from FMF

You may say that everyone who had taken physical part in the war was then mad. In those days you saw objects that the earlier mind had labelled as houses. They had been used to seem cubic and solid permanences. But we had seen Ploegsteert where it had been revealed that men's dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. Man and even Beast . . . all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields. . .. Even omnibuses had picked their lumbering ways, crowded with obfusc humanity, dulled steel and bronze, between pits and hillocks of the tortured earth until they found the final pit into which they wearily subsided. It would be long before you regarded an omnibus as something which should carry you smoothly along the streets of an ordered life. Nay, it had been revealed to you that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos. One had come from the frail shelters of the Line to a world that was more frail than any canvas hut. And, more formidable than the frailness of the habitations was . .. the attitude of the natives. We who re-turned—and more particularly those of us who had gone voluntarily and with enthusiasms—were like wanderers coming back to our own shores to find our settlements occupied by a vindictive and savage tribe. We had no chance. We were like poor Regan after his four years in hospital. The world of men was changed and our places were taken by strangers. As to my own fate I was relatively unmoved. Very early in life I had arrived at the settled conviction: Homo homini lupus—man is a wolf to his fellow men.
And I have always believed that, given a digging fork and a few seeds and tubers, with a quarter's start, I could at any time wrest from the earth enough to keep body and soul together. I thought so when I was twenty; I thought the same when I stood on that Campden Hill kerb and I am again preparing to set out on that adventure at this moment of writing with the world seeming to crumble around us. I wrote then, in the columns of that lunatic journal, that England had suffered more, at least in her mentality, than any other of the nations that had shared in the war. . . . We fought in the beginning and for more than half of the duration of the fighting with volunteer soldiers. Thus in 1919 England found herself in the position of Bulgaria at the end of the Balkan War of 1913. . . . Bulgaria had formed a battalion of elite troops out of all the educated men in that relatively illiterate country. This battalion she hurled against the barbed wire of the impregnable Turkish entanglements round Tchatalja. It was entirely wiped out and Bul-garia found herself deprived of intelligentsia and almost of men who could read and write. In 1919 England was in an almost parallel position. It was not her intelligentsia that she had lost. They had embusqued themselves in government offices, in muni-tion works, in prisons or in the posts vacated by fight-ing men. . . . But the most vigorous and alert of the young men had been killed or mangled—physically and mentally. It had been impossible for a young man sound physically and of healthy imagination not to volunteer in the years between 1914 and 1917. Those who remained and filled all the posts in 1919 were the physicaly unfit and the mentally frigid. So those poor boys came back- maimed and bewildered to a world administered by those born to detest them.

Humphrey Bogart and Beat the Devil

 The tension mounted, and the anxieties went pub-lic, showing up in his performance—in the tightness of the mouth, the weariness of the eyes, and the brusque, often unconvincing delivery of the lines. Huston thought of the Robert Morley character as a latter-day Kasper Gutman, the Fat Man of Maltese Falcon. But Sydney Green-street had a twinkle and liked to mix with the other members of the cast. Morley detested practical jokes and found Lorre "an intensely tiresome little chap with quite the foulest vocabulary I have ever had the misfortune to listen to." Rather than hear a nightly cascade of scat-ological words and off-color material, Robert took his meals in his room. Both leading ladies fell short of expectations. Gina Lollobrigida, the top-heavy Italian sex symbol, was of no interest to Humphrey. He pro-fessed himself "not a bosom man" and referred to her as "the Refriger-ator." Gina's great rival, Sophia Loren, cannily if bitchily observed that Gina was "good playing a peasant, but incapable of playing a lady"—something she was required to do here. Although Jones had a finishing school beauty, hers had been an irregular career. After playing radiant heroines in films like Since You Went Away and Cluny Brown, she appeared in a series of unprofitable films. She was miscast as a fiery half-breed in Duel in the Sun, and seemed out of place in the title role of Madame Bovary. Ruby Gentry, the story of a swamp girl in the Deep South, might have been more of the same had it not been for King Vidor's strong direction. The feature pleased audiences and returned Jennifer to the elite group of bankable stars. Still, she had never been known for comic ability, and Capote's daily contributions threw her off balance for most of the shoot. "I always wanted to know where my character was going," Jones complained, "whether she was going to drop dead or jump in the ocean or be knocked over the head . . . so it sometimes threw me a little bit not to know from day to day what she was going to do or not to do." On top of that, many of the Italian performers knew no English and spoke phonetically, giving their lines a strange, arrhythmic tone. Retake after retake was required. And then there was the business of
the unions. When the shoot was over, Humphrey remembered that
"Italian labor was divided into two camps: reds and whites. We weren't permitted to use the Commies, though they represented the best technicians." Besides all this there was Truman, who made no attempt to hide his homosexuality, swishing around wearing a lilac scarf and an ankle-length camel's hair coat. Humphrey, who made a habit of railing about "fags," didn't know what to make of this short, flamboyant Puck. At first he gave Truman a wide berth, mocking his gestures and loudly referring to him as "Caposey." But as the filming went on, he found himself beguiled by the little man. There were two reasons for Humphrey's turnaround. Truman could be outrageous, but he was a true professional, generating dia-logue on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. He never seemed to need a break, save for eccentricities like phoning Rome to speak to his pet raven, Lola (who answered back), and going to a hospital to take care of an impacted wisdom tooth (where he turned out twelve pages despite the pain). Also, the little man was a lot more combative than he looked. One afternoon Humphrey was feeling particularly macho. Sit-ting in the lobby of the Hotel Palumbo, he kept challenging various crew members to arm-wrestle as they passed through. These contests were won handily and, spotting Caposey, the champ called out, "How would you like to take me on?" Truman accepted the invitation, pulled up a chair, and locked fingers with him. Seconds later, Humphrey's arm was down and it stayed there. "Would you mind doing that again?" Humphrey inquired. "Yes, for fifty dollars." Hum-phrey put money on the table—and lost again. "As we stood up," Truman remembered, "he caught me in a bear hug. He meant it affectionately, but there was also a certain kind of frustration-malice in the way he did it. 'Cut that out, Bogie!' I said. But he kept on squeez-ing me. 'Cut that out!' I said and hooked my foot behind his leg and pushed. Boom!" Humphrey tumbled back and suffered a hairline fracture of the elbow. As Huston observed, Truman was "a little bull." Unfortunately, his taurine prowess resulted in a delay of filming while the star-producer received medical attention. Yet the two men became fast friends. "I really liked Bogie," Truman insisted. "He was one of my all-time favorite people." Humphrey had similar feelings; he wrote to Lauren, "Wait till you meet our screenwriter. You have never seen anything like him. At first, I didn't think he was real—but he grows on you and now I'd like to carry him around in my pocket and take him out when I need a laugh.
 The Bogart reputation took off in the 193os when Broadway plays like The Petrified Forest crystallized the national angst. In the 194os, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca established Humphrey's reputation as the American male par excellence, operating in a compromised and often evil world, a man without illusions. "I don't mind a parasite," Rick tells Ugarte. "I object to a cut-rate one." Even so, this hard-bitten cynic has a heart—a vulnerable one, protected by a screen of acrimony and wisecracks: "Tell me," he asks Ilsa, "who was it you left me for? Was it Laszlo, or were there others in between? Or aren't you the kind that tells?" And now, in the 195os Humphrey was about to be plunged into an entirely new genre, a category that, at that point, had no name. A generation later, film critic Roger Ebert argued that Beat the Devil was the first "camp" movie, an accident waiting to happen. He praised Capote's elliptical dialogue, singling out Jones's line "They're desperate characters. Not one of them looked at my legs" and Lorre's description of time: "The Swiss manufacture it. The French hoard it. Italians want it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook." Ebert also took delight in the film's improvised style, "half-serious" attitude, and patent absurdities:
There's Nothing You Can Do About It. Nothing! 183 
the ex-Hungarian Lorre, his hair dyed blond, is named O'Hara; the heavily accented Lollobrigida declares, "Emotionally I am English"; Humphrey claims, "I was an orphan until I was twenty. Then a rich and beautiful lady adopted me." There is a scene, Ebert points out, on a veranda overlooking the sea, "where Bogart and Jones play out their first flirtation, and by the end of their dialogue you can see they're all but cracking up; Bogart grins during the dissolve. The whole movie feels that way." That style was off-putting in the 195os, the mark of the unprofessional, the bum. Over the years, though, Beat the Devil made money by becoming a cult favorite. That cult had many members, but Humphrey was never one of them. "Only phonies think it's funny," he insisted. "It's a mess." True enough; even so, camp followers delighted in that mess. In her celebrated essay "Notes on 'Camp,' " Susan Sontag offers some definitions. "Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. . . . The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful." In a triumph of irony, the flam-boyant, sibilant Capote had taken two unassailable symbols of ur-masculinity, John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, thrown them both to the ground, and then helped them to their feet.