from The Age of Wonder: Vitalism

The natural tendency of most English doctors and surgeons was to avoid too much theory and speculation. This evidently did not apply to Lawrence, or to his intellectual masters on the Continent. The great French naturalist Georges Cuvier approached all animal life as part of a continuous 'successive' development. The celebrated Parisian doctor Professor Xavier Bichat developed a fully materialist theory of the human body and mind in his lectures Physiological Researches on Life and Death, translated into English in 1816. Bichat defined life bleakly as 'the sum of the functions by which death is resisted: Even more radical were the 'Machine-Man' theories of the French physiologist Julien de la Mettrie. He argued that the theologian, with his `obscure studies, could say nothing intelligible about the soul, and that only physicians and surgeons were in a position to study the evidence. `They alone, calmly contemplating our soul, have caught it a thousand times unawares, in its misery and its grandeur, without either despising it in one state or admiring it in the other.' 16 William Lawrence was only waiting the opportunity to bring such radical ideas to bear. As part of his new professorship he was required to give the series of public lectures at the Royal College, starting in spring 1816. These immediately followed on the series given by Abernethy. It was the custom that one Hunterian Lecturer would preface his remarks with an appropriate salute to the endeavours of the previous incumbent. But on entering the lecture hall, after a few elegant throwaway compli-ments, Lawrence began roundly to attack Abernethy's theories. He stated bluntly that there was absolutely no such thing as a mysterious Life Principle, and that the human body is merely a complex physical organisation. In a phrase that became notorious, he claimed that the development of this physiological organisation could be observed unbroken, `from an oyster to a man'. Lawrence's references to Abernethy became steadily more aggressive and sardonic. 'To make the matter more intelligible, this vital principle is corn-pared to magnetism, to electricity, and to galvanism; or it is roundly stated to be oxygen. 'Tis like a camel, or like a whale, or like what you please ... This last was a contemptuous, and deliberately literary, allusion to Shakespeare's Hamlet mocking the foolish old Polonius. Other smart literary quotations came from the poems of Alexander Pope and John Milton. Lawrence eventually went on to broaden his attack. Science, he argued, had an autonomus right to express its views fearlessly and objectively, without interference from Church or state. It must avoid 'clouds of fears and hopes, desires and aversions'. It must 'discern objects clearly' and shun 'intellectual mist. It must dispel myth and dissipate 'absurd fables'. The world of scientific research was wholly independent. 'The theological doctrine of the soul, and its separate existence, has nothing to do with this physiological question ... An immaterial and spiritual being could not have been discovered amid the blood and filth of the dissecting room:  Finally he attacked the very nature of the religious, mystifying or unscientific philosophy which Abernethy appeared to be promulgating: 'It seems to me that this hypothesis or fiction of a subtle invisible matter, animating the visible textures of animal bodies, and directing their motions, is only an example of that propensity in the human mind, which had led men at all times to account for those phenomena, of which the causes are not obvious, by the mysterious aid of higher and imaginary beings: 214 As the controversy became more public, Lawrence was accused of personal betrayal, ingratitude and atheism. Between 1817 and 1819 he and Abernethy continued to exchange increasingly vitriolic views in their Royal College lectures, and student groups of supporters formed round each. Abernethy was the senior figure, but Lawrence would not back down, and published his lectures in a book that became notorious, his Natural History of Man (1819). It became clear that this was no ordinary academic wrangle, but that the subject in contention was the fundamental nature of human life. The larger implications were clearly social, political and even theological. There was also a strong overtone of imperial controversy: foreign versus British science. Thus Vitalism was the first great scientific issue that widely seized the public imagination in Britain, a premonition of the debate over Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, exactly forty years later.

Brunelleschi's Dome

 Yet in the early 1400s the Eternal City must have been, in most respects, a wretchedly uninspiring sight, a parent that the Florentines may well have wished to disown. A million people had dwelled in Rome during the height of the Empire, but now the city's population was less than that of Florence. The Black Death of 1348 had reduced numbers to 20,000, from which, over the next fifty years, they rose only slightly. Rome had shrunk into a tiny area inside its ancient walls, retreating from the seven hills to huddle among a few streets on the bank of the Tiber across from St. Peter's, whose walls were in danger of collapse. Foxes and beggars roamed the filthy streets. Livestock grazed in the Forum, now known as i1 Campo Vaccino, "the Field of Cows." Other monuments had suffered even worse fates. The Temple of Jupiter was a dunghill, and both the Theater of Pompey and the Mausoleum of Augustus had become quarries from which the ancient masonry was scavenged, some of it for buildings as far away as Westminster Abbey. Many ancient statues lay in shards, half buried, while others had been burned in kilns to make quicklime or else fertilizer for the feeble crops. Still others were mangers for asses and oxen. The funerary monument ofAgrippina the Elder, the mother of Caligula, had been turned into a measure for grain and salt. Rome was a dangerous and unappealing place. There were earthquakes, fevers, and endless wars, the latest of which, the War of the Eight Saints, witnessed English mercenaries laying waste to the city. There was no trade or industry apart from the pilgrims who arrived from all over Europe, clutching copies of Mirabilia urbis romae (The wonders of Rome), which told them which relics to see during their stay. This guidebook directed them to such holy sights as the finger bone of St. Thomas in Santa Croce
in Gerusalemme, the arm of St. Anne and the head of the Samaritan woman converted by Christ in San Paolo fuori le Mura, or the crib of the infant Savior in Santa Maria Maggiore. There was a hucksterish atmosphere to the city: pardoners sold indulgences from stalls in the street, and churches advertised confessions that were supposedly good for a remission of infernal torture for a grand total of 8,000 years. The Mirabilia urbis romae did not direct the attention of the pilgrims to the Roman remains that surrounded them. To such pious Christians these ancient ruins were so much heathen idolatry. Worse, they were stained with the blood of Christian martyrs. The Baths of Diocletian, for example, were built with the forced labor of early Christians, many of whom had died during the construction. Antique images that had survived a millennium of earthquakes, erosion, and neglect were therefore deliberately trampled underfoot, spat on, or thrown to the ground and smashed to pieces. Nevertheless, some of the old pagan glory of Rome persisted despite this new breed of Vandal. The high road from the south, the Via Appia, expertly paved with basalt blocks fitted together without mortar, was an architectural marvel in itself, cutting straight as an arrow through mountains, marshes, and valleys. Of still more interest were the 300,000 sepulchers that still lined the road for miles, the products of an ancient law that had prevented anyone except the vestal virgins and the emperors from being buried within the walls of Rome. Or one could see the broken arches of aqueducts such as the Acqua Claudia. At 43 miles long, and with arches ioo feet in height, this structure was a testament not only to the fresh drinking water enjoyed by the ancient Romans (in comparison with their descendants, who took their water from the tainted, foul-smelling Tiber) but also to their remarkable engineering skills. Some modern-day Romans were even ignorant of its purpose, believing it to have been used to import olive oil from Naples. Filippo arrived in this squalid, crumbling city soon after the conclusion of the competition for the Baptistery doors.
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these forces are separated into push and pull energies, known respectively as compression and tension. All elements in a building are subject to one or other of these actions: their stone or timber beams are compressed from above (which causes them to shorten) or pulled from the side (which causes them to stretch). An architect must design a structure that will counteract these pressures by playing them off against each other—a game of action and reaction—and channeling them safely to the ground. The first type of pressure does not create insurmountable problems for an architect. Stone, brick, and concrete all possess such enormous compressive strengths that buildings can be raised to colossal heights without the blocks of stone crushing at the base. The tallest spire in England, that of Salisbury Cathedral, stands 404 feet high, and the two towers of the cathedral in Cologne each rise to Sir feet, or the equivalent of a fifty-story building. At this height they are almost a dozen feet taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza, another edifice whose tremendous size is made possible by the strength of the stone blocks from which it was built. Yet not even these soaring structures come close to exhausting the compressive strength of stone: a column of limestone could be built to a height of 12,000 feet, or over two miles high, before starting to crush under its own weight. The stones in a dome, however, are not only crushed from above but also thrust outward by the pull energy known as "hoop stress," in the same way as the rubber of an inflated balloon will bulge outward if one compresses it from above. The problem for architects is that stone and brick do not respond nearly so well to this lateral thrust as they do to compression. The Romans seem to have possessed some understanding of the structural problems created by tension and compression, and they attempted to solve them by making extensive use of the new pozzolana concrete. Where the horizontal stress is greatest, at the base of the dome, the concrete wall of the Pantheon was built to a massive thickness of 23 feet. It then tapers to only two feet at the top, at which point a round window or "oculus" is left open. Five thousand tons of concrete were poured in horizontal layers on to wooden formwork, but at the top of the dome lightweight aggregates such as pumice and, more inventive still, empty amphorae (clay bottles used for shipping olive oil) were added to the concrete in place of stone in order to reduce the load. The inside of the dome was also coffered which lightenened the load and added a feature that has been extensively imitated.

Humphrey Davy and Nitrous from the Age of Wonder

 Yet there was one major scientific discovery which hovered tantalisingly close to Davy's grasp. Had he fully seized it, he would have made himself, Beddoes and the Pneumatic Institute famous forever. Though nitrous oxide could not cure physical disease, it could do something just as valuable: it could temporarily suspend physical pain, or at least the sensation of pain. The gas profirided the key to an entirely new science, that of anaesthetics: literally, 'the negation or blocking of feelings'. Characteristically, Davy pounced upon the new concept, asserting in his laboratory notebook that the gas could certainly be used for suppressing even 'intense physical pain'. He speculated on the physiological mechanism: 'Sensible pain is not perceived after the powerful action of nitrous oxide because it produces for the time a momentary condition of other parts of the nerve connected with pleasure.'  He successfully tried treating his own toothache from impacted wisdom teeth with nitrous oxide. 'The pain diminished after the first four or five inspirations.' But the effect did not last, and he did not take the next logical step of having the offending teeth removed while under the influence of nitrous oxide. The gas was seen as blotting out the consciousness of pain with pleasure, rather than suspending consciousness itself. Yet in many of his extreme experiments Davy had deliberately pushed himself into unconsciousness, and he knew this could be done without harm. Later, writing up his experiments for Researches, he more explicitly stated the gas's surgical potential: 'As nitrous oxide in its extensive oper-ation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in which no great effu-sion of blood takes place:131 He added the caution about bleeding not to limit the gravity of operations in which anaesthesia might be applied, but because he believed nitrous oxide was only absorbed through venous blood. It might therefore become ineffective during a major operation when extensive haemorrhaging took place. Part of Davy's originality was simply to conceive of the radical idea of pain-free surgery. He later had long discussions with Coleridge about the nature and significance of human pain. Coleridge wondered, for exam-ple, why God might have created a world in which human childbirth, one of the great productive aims of nature, was so painful as well as so dangerous for women.  This was a prophetic speculation, as it turned out, for nitrous oxide mixed with oxygen eventually became one of the standard anaesthetic procedures used during labour, especially if difficult or prolonged. When he read Researches in December 1800, sent to him by Longman with the new edition of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge wrote to Davy wondering if he had had further communication with the leading London surgeon Sir Anthony Carlisle, 'concerning Pain, as they had all once discussed it during his London visit. 'It is a subject which exceedingly interests me — I want to read something by somebody expressly on Pain, if only to give arrangement to my own thoughts, though if it were well treated, I have little doubt it would revolutionise them.' He later urged Davy himself to write such a philosophical treatise on pain. Many standard operations in the early nineteenth century — being cut for kidney stone, having teeth removed, or a wounded limb amputated — were unimaginably painful. The pain also caused shock, which itself could kill. The only known form of painkiller — the soldier's use of alcohol — was largely a method of controlling terror and deadening shock, not true anaesthesia. But having made his momentous suggestion, Davy failed to pursue it. Characteristically, he rushed impetuously on to other discoveries. Although he published his conclusions, neither he nor Beddoes saw that the immense possibilities of anaesthesia were taken up. The loss to human well-being, in the alleviation of terror and suffering on the operating table for another two generations, was incalculable. Fanny Burney's account of her own mastectomy — having a breast removed, without anaesthetics, by a military surgeon in her Paris apartment in 1811 — is perhaps more shattering than any account of a limb amputated on the battlefield during the Napoleonic Wars. It would seem that Davy missed the greatest medical opportunity of his early career. As late as 1831, his polemical biographer J.A. Paris dis-missed the whole nitrous oxide experiment as absurd. 'It will be admit-ted that there must have been something singularly ludicrous in the whole exhibition. Imagine a party of grave philosophers, with bags of silk tied to their mouths, stamping, roaring and laughing about the apartment. ' Nitrous oxide only began to be tried again experimentally some forty years later. This was in America, when Dr Horace Wells had a tooth extracted under the gas during a demonstration lecture in Connecticut in December 1844. Wells awoke, announced that he had not felt `a pin-prick, and proclaimed 'a new era in tooth-pulling'. But it was quite another chemical, ether, that provided the first true anaesthesia for major operations. The American surgeon William Thomas Morton successfully amputated a man's leg under ether at the Massachusetts General Hospital on 16 October 1846. Two months later, on 31 December, a British surgeon, Mr Lansdowne, performed a similar amputation at the Bristol General Hospital. Thereafter anaesthesia by ether was used widely in both the Crimean and the American Civil War. But the final acceptance of anaesthesia in Britain did not really come until Queen Victoria admitted to having taken a whiff of chloroform during the birth of her son Prince Leopold in April 1853.

Mad Puppetstown

Brilliant title and brilliant prose from Molly Keane:
The days slipped past, bright ships, sailing out far beyond remembrance.  It was morning, a very faint young morning, cold and chaste past belief. The sky was as flat as wax and as green as a leaf. The day had only just forgotten its last pursuing star and the birds' July singing strained like tiny, creaking wheels in the stillness. Easter sat up in bed, waking immediately and unregretfully. The alarm clock on the chair by Nanny's bed could have told her that two hours must still go by before it was time to get up, but Easter could not quite read a clock and tell the time by it—an ignorance of which she felt ashamed and concealed with feverish duplicity. But it was light. Easter sat upon the edge of her bed swinging her bare shanks. Why at this enchant-ing hour was everything forbidden ? Books, pictures, toys, walks abroad, everything that failed to dis-tract or amuse in its proper hour would entrance at this live forbidden moment. Easter sighed. A waxy eye on the heap that was Nanny slumbering, and her foot reached down to the linoleum—colder than glass.
and some notable turns of phrase:
She might have known it would not come off. So few of the things she did with Evelyn were com-pletely successful, although she had known moments of vivid excitement with him. His mind never slurred back to discuss such times ; perhaps that was what lent them a sort of freak preciousness. He never tried, Evelyn, about anything. But when you were with him you were keyed up to an intense point of effort. In streaks you knew supreme enjoyment in his ,company. Yet, on the whole, for solid slumping comfort, Basil's companionship was difficult to better.
Aunt Dicksie did not see any reason to discuss unpleasant realities at meal-time. Polite conversation could quite well be sustained without touching on unnecessary topics.

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Colonel Tattingham liked to have them there—they came up to dinner on Sunday night (that was a permanent institution). He liked to see the children riding in the park. They were as incident to it as were the deer. He liked to pay for the twins' schooling ; he had put their names down for Eton when his nephew was killed, that gay young Harry who had made so little of a business about being his heir. He liked to go with Brenda and that funny little cousin to see the boys on the 4th of June, but not on St. Andrew's day now. (Shocking cold he caught last time he watched the game.) He was so fond of Easter too. Sometimes he gave her a throat lozenge and sometimes a sovereign. Alas, that vulgar paper money He would slip his forefinger and thumb into his waistcoat pocket before he remembered that sovereigns belonged to the older, more gentlemanly days, and dislike of the nasty fuss incident upon the extraction of a note from his case was responsible sometimes for the more easily produced cough lozenge. Easter could never quite tell which it was to be but was equally polite in her thanks for either.

John Adams and Extraterrestrial life

Sometime in the summer of 1786 the fifty-year-old John Adams, graduate of Harvard University, man of science and future second
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HERSCHEL AMONG THE STARS
President of the United States, turned up one morning uninvited at The Grove. He was shown round all Herschel's new telescopes, and they embarked on an impassioned discussion of the possibility of extrater-restrial life, and the moral implications of there being a 'plurality of worlds. This was the sort of metaphysical debate that Herschel had once had with his brother Jacob, touching on the speculations of European authors like Fontenelle and Huygens, but which he tended to avoid with his English contemporaries. Neither Herschel nor Caroline recorded exactly what was said, but it is clear from his own diaries that Adams would have put lively and unorthodox views: 'Astronomers tell us that not only all the Planets and Satellites in our Solar system, but all the unnumbered Worlds that revolve round the fixt Stars are inhabited ... If this is the case all Mankind are no more in comparison [with] the whole rational Creation of God, than a point in the orbit of Saturn.' Like the poet Shelley a generation later, Adams liked to press this argument one stage further. If astronomy discovered extraterrestrial civilisations, then surely the earth-based doctrines of Christian redemption became absurd, or at least mighty inconvenient for the Lord. 'I ask a Calvinist, whether he will subscribe to this alternative: EITHER God Almighty must assume the respective shapes of all these different Species, and suffer the penalties of their Crimes, in their stead; OR ELSE all these Beings must be consigned to everlasting Perdition?
Adams never forgot this spirited meeting with Herschel. Years later, in 1825, he wrote to Thomas Jefferson, his successor as President, complaining of the orthodox Christian beliefs of most British scientists, and advising Jefferson not to hire them to teach at the University of Virginia, where he was Chancellor. Adams contrasted these scientists' attitudes with Herschel's untrammelled vision: 'They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton's universe and Herschel's universe, came down to this little ball [planet earth], to be spit upon by the Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.' This argument would presumably have been satisfactorily concluded the following year, when both Adams and Jefferson died and went to meet the Great Principle. 
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Over the next decade Herschel's work began to be widely known by the younger generation of Romantic writers. Byron visited him at Slough in 1811, and viewed the stars through his telescope, which gave him an alarmingly religious experience: 'The Night is also a religious concern; and even more so, when I viewed the Moon and Stars through Herschel's telescope, and saw that they were worlds: Later Byron defended him-self against accusations of atheism. 'I did not expect that, because I doubted the immortality of Man, I could be charged with denying the existence of a God. It was the comparative insignificance of ourselves and our world, when placed in competition with the mighty whole, of which it is an atom, that first led me to imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be ... over-rated.
Coleridge seized on this idea in a late essay: 'Kepler and Newton, by substituting the idea of the Infinite — for the idea of a finite and determined world assumed in the Ptolemaic Astronomy — superseded and drove out the notion of one central point or body of the Universe. Finding a centre in every point of matter and an absolute circumference no-where, they explained at once the unity and the distinction that co-exist throughout the Creation by focal instead of central bodies. The attractive and restraining power of the sun or focal orb, in each particular system, supposing and resulting from an actual power, present in all and over all, throughout an indeterminable multitude of systems. And this, demonstrated as it has been by science, and verified by observation, we rightly name the true system of the heavens' — Church and State (1830). Hubble put this simply and beautifully: 'Our stellar system is a swarm of stars isolated in space. It drifts through the universe as a swarm of bees drifts through the summer air' — Edwin Hubble, The Realm of the Nebulae (1936).
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With such images in his head, Keats left Clerkenwell at 6 a.m., shortly before autumn sunrise. The stars were still out as he crossed London Bridge making for his student lodgings at 8 Dean Street, Southwark, near Guy's. He noticed the planet Jupiter, very bright, setting over the Thames. The moment he got to his lodgings, he sat down and began to write, starting with the inspired line, 'Much have I travelled in the Realms of Gold ... This perfectly introduced two linked ideas, of thrilling exploration and gleaming brightness, which orchestrate the whole poem. Keats wrote so quickly that he was able to send a clean copy of the poem straight round to Cowden Clarke that same morning. Clarke remembered opening it at his breakfast table in Clerkenwell by 10 a.m. (a credit also to the postal system). He noticed the historical error — it was Balboa, not Cortez, who reached the Pacific but was thrilled by the beauty and originality of the sonnet. Among other things, Keats had combined science and poetry in a new and intensely exciting way. 127 Keats likens his own discovery of Homer's poetry to the experience of the great astronomer and the great explorer finding new worlds.
... Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with wond'ring eyes He stared at the Pacific — and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise —Silent upon a peak in Darien.
Both comparisons turn on moments of physical vision — watching, staring, looking with 'wondering eyes. (This was the original manuscript reading, although Keats later changed it to the more conventional 'eagle eyes'.) Physical vision — one might say scientific vision — brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geog-raphy of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite. In the case of Herschel's sighting of Uranus, Keats's word 'swims' is brilliantly evocative, because of its sense of new life and movement.

From Nicholson's Making of the King James Bible

The place was a warren of concealment. Walls were false, every room had a trap door or access to secret stairs. Many of the chimneys had double flues, one for the smoke, the other in which a priest could hide. The place was betrayed, the house searched and then occupied by government agents, who waited for the priests they guessed were hidden within its walls. Only after eight days, on Monday 27 January i6o6, did Garnet and his companion Father Oldcorne emerge from their hiding place. They looked half-dead and their appearance terrified the men who were there to arrest them. The hole they had been crouching in was too small for either of them to stand up, and Garnet's legs in particular were horribly swollen. One of the women of the house had given them sweet hot liquids through a straw that perforated the walls of the hole and they had some marmalade they had taken in there with them. But there was no means of drainage in the tiny closet; it was the smell of their own accumulating faeces which had finally driven the men into the open air. Their only option now was to put themselves in the hands of the Jacobean state, which would humiliate, torture, try and then kill them. Mr Henry Garnet, as the officials of the English state insisted on calling him, was deemed guilty of knowing about the conspiracy beforehand without reporting the plotters to the authorities. Those authorities did not accept that the secrecy of the confessional could not be abused. The conflict between his du t\ as a Catholic priest and his duty as an English citizen they considered no conflict at all. His was a treacherous, unreliable, seditious and above all a lying heart. Among the papers and books of Francis Tresham, one of the plotters, had been a manuscript written by Garnet entitled A Treatise on Equivocation. In it Garnet had elaborated on the circumstances in which the Jesuits considered it lawful not to tell the whole truth. A priest, for example, could say, when asked, that he was not a priest because he was not a priest of Apollo; or that he had never been over the seas, because he had never been over the Indian seas. These desperate measures were the product of scruple: only because Roman Catholics considered it a sin to lie, and only because the intolerance of the English church and state made it necessary for them to lie were they forced to descend to this kind of Jesuitical equivocation.
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Christian IV King of Denmark and Norway was coming to visit his sister and her husband, newly elevated from the exigencies of Scotland- James himself was something of a drinker, but there was no keeping up with Christian and the Danes. They scandalized even the Jacobean court with the depth of unbuttoned drunkenness they unleashed on the capital.
Nothing was too much for the Danish revels. An artificial oak tree, full size, was bedecked with leaves made of taffeta on each of which was written the word 'WELCOME'. Drink flowed, men and women wallowed 'in beastly delights'. It was, according to Sir John Harington, a vision to match Wlahomets paradise'. But, for a measure of how far court life stood outside the sort of regulated strictness which Puritan and God-fearing Englishmen believed in, nothing can quite match the events of the evening at Theobalds on which the masque of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba was performed....
Faith, Hope and Charity then appeared one by one to make their speeches. Faith was so drunk she couldn't get a word out; Hope couldn't stand upright and had to withdraw; only Charity, clearly the greatest of these, could say what she had to say — that Christian IV already had all the gifts that heaven could bestow and so there was nothing more she could give him — before returning to the lower hall where she found both Hope and Faith 'sick and spewing.' It isn't difficult to share the reaction of Puritans to such a world, particularly when the costs are considered. The royal household in the last year of Elizabeth's reign had cost £47,000. By 1606, that had risen to over £100,000. Other costs were dropping: the end of the war in Ireland saved £300,000 a year, the Spanish peace still more on ships and men, but even those savings couldn't counteract the gush of Jacobean largesse. The royal debt had stood at £422,749 on the death of Queen Eliza-beth. By Michaelmas 1606, it had gone up by a third to £550,331. And still the fountain poured, £3,000 here, another £2,000 there. A handsome courtier called Sir Henry Rich, known as Harry, the younger son of the Earl of Warwick, was standing in White-hall and saw £3,000 in coins being carried past him to the office of the Keeper of the Privy Purse, the royal household's finance director. Harry Rich whistled at the sight and muttered half to himself that he wished he had that much money. The king over-heard him muttering, asked what he had said, and on hearing the reply, said 'Marry, shalt thou, Harry', and ordered the money to be taken to Rich's rooms. 'You think now you have a great Purchase,' the King said. 'But I am more delighted to think how much I have pleasured you in giving this money, than you can be in receiving it.' It was, as so often with James, a winning remark and betrays the instinct at the heart of all his extrava-gance: money was a love vehicle, a bond of patronage and grati-tude, part of the dream of one nation in which the glory of royal riches bound the people to the throne.
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 `Puritan': what did the word mean? It was of course an insult, a slur-word; no one would have claimed it for himself and its meaning was shifting, sometimes applied to extremists, some-times to what was clearly the moral majority of Jacobean Eng-land. Puritanism, in short, was in the eye of the beholder. `Concerning the name,' Giles Widdowes wrote in The schysnzati-call puritan, 'it is ambiguous and so it is fallacious.' The difficulty is made worse because 'Puritanism' spreads effortlessly into so many different areas of seventeenth-century life: it could be said to involve daily habits and styles of dress; attitudes to the place of ceremonial in worship, and the relation of word to ceremony; fiercely held beliefs about the constitution of the church, what it should be, what it must not be, and the relationship of church to state; the question of what were called 'things indifferent' —those parts of Christian practice, such, as the use of the surplice, which some might like and others abhor; and beliefs about the nature of God's universe, the place of man within it and, cru-cially, the role of pre-destination. Had God designated some people for heaven and some for hell from the beginning of time? Would their own behaviour on earth have any effect on that destiny? Surely not, it was suggested, if all was pre-ordained? Why then should anyone behave well? If our destiny was settled, and our destination neither a punishment nor a reward for hoW we had lived, then what should stop us behaving as wickedly as we liked? What purpose could there be in good works or a good life? The Bible itself was the answer to all those questions. It was the word of God, an enormous, direct, vastly complicated, infinitely interpretable account of what God meant by and for his creation. It was accessible to the people as a whole either through the lessons read to them every Sunday in church, or through ser-mons, or, to the literate minority, through reading the good book themselves. In the mid-sixteenth century, perhaps 3o per cent of the English gentry had been illiterate. By the 162os, that figure had dropped effectively to zero. Lower down in society, the figures were worse — 55 per cent were illiterate among small yeoman farmers in the 164os, and as much as 95 per cent among labourers at the same time — but at all social levels, the trend towards literacy was upwards, particularly among men and par-ticularly in London, soon stretching far ahead of the rest of Europe. This increasingly word-orientated section of the popu-lation was the seed-bed in which the highly intellectual, question-ing and quizzing form of religion we know as Puritanism had its beginnings. A puritan ate and drank the word of God. That word was his world. If the Bible authorised anything, by defi-nition that was in concordance with God's will and so by defi-nition should be followed. Anything explicitly denied or disapproved of by the Bible should not be indulged. So, for example, Samuel Hieron, the Puritan pamphleteer and one of the organisers of the Millenary Petition, maintained that the Bible provided for the head of each household, 'direction for his apparel, his speech, his diet, his company, his disports, his labour, his buying and selling, yea and for his very sleep'. Most people would have probably accepted that. The difficulty came in deciding on the lawfulness of religious behaviour and belief that were not mentioned in the Bible. If something wasn't mentioned, did that mean God had no view on it? Or if it wasn't mentioned, did that mean that God did not approve of it? That was certainly the understanding of the holy Separatist Henry Barrow, a view for which he died. Fasting in Lent, clergy appointed by the state, or by any grandee who held no place in the church, any ceremonies that were not explicitly authorised by scripture: all of these Barrow considered unlawful. Other Separatists and Presbyterians, or even reformists who wished to remain within an improved Church of England, considered fasting, holy days, kneeling at communion, most church officials (certainly bishops and archbishops), the baptising of infants who didn't know what was happening to them, the churching of women after childbirth, getting married with a ring, all unlawful. Bancroft had an answer for them. There were no Christian kings mentioned in the Bible. Did that mean that Christian kings were unlawful? Didn't religion have to change, at least in its relatively inessential practices, as the habits and practices of society changed? If the king, whose authority was essentially divine and who was God's agent on earth, required it, then was it not the duty of every good man to obey, whatever the Bible said? The surplice was not mentioned in the Bible but the king wanted surplices to be used. It was obvious to Bancroft and the king that every God-fearing minister should therefore wear them. This was the territory across which the insult 'Puritan' would fly. 'A puritan is such a one', the London lawyer John Man-ningham wrote in 1602, 'as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbour with all his heart.' Anyone who took a stricter line on the demands of scripture than the person speaking could be labelled a Puritan. The critical division between extreme and moderate was on the question of royal authority: moderate Puri-tans accepted the authority of the church, and of the king as its head, even if they cavilled over points of doctrine; radical Puritans denied the authority of that state and would in the end rather separate themselves from the royal church than accept doctrines which they loathed. It was not the conventional modern conflict of freedom against authority, nor even a struggle for freedom of conscience or belief. This was not the age of toleration: it was a conflict of different visions of authority. 'Let them chant what they will of prerogatives,' Milton would write much later, 'we shall tell them of Scripture; of custom, we of Scripture; of Acts and Statutes, still of Scripture, till . . . the mighty weakness of the Gospel throw down the weak mightiness of man's reasoning.' That was written in the heat of the Civil War, but if not so polarised, at least in embryo, that division between the rival claims of divine and worldly authority is appar-ent in the first decade of the century. It was a difference of emphasis that split the 'Puritans'. It was the very fissure which James and Bancroft quite deliberately and very adroitly managed to deepen in the first years of the reign, when they expelled those eighty or so Puritans from the church between 1604 and 1606. For James, it was effective and practical politics: a means of achieving unity and uniformity in the church by excluding a small proportion of extremists.
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This extraordinary and passionate atmosphere is one of the governing qualities of the time. The age was at ease with un-bridled but apparently quite unsexual love between men. Even Cecil, discussing the intimate relationship between the king and his principal adviser, wrote to a friend: `As long as any matter of what weight soever, is handled only between the prince and the secretary, those counsels are compared to the mutual affection of two lovers, undiscovered to their friends.' That sense of closeness, of the possibility and richness of an unmediated intimacy, plays a shaping role in the translation. Among the many wonderful books of the Old Testament which Chaderton's company translated was the Song of Songs, or the Song of Solomon, the great love lyric of the Bible. Some six-teenth-century reformers had been keen to exclude it, on the grounds of its immodesty and its fleshliness, but others, drawing
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0 lett me bosome thee, lett me preserve thee next to my heart
on a long Jewish tradition, read it as an account of God's love for his people and his church. That is how the luscious verses of the song are annotated in the King James Version: `A bundle of myrrhe is my welbeloued vnto me,' the girl sings; `he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.' And her lover replies, `Behold, thou art faire, my loue: behold, thou art faire, thou bast doues eyes.' Chaderton calmly annotates: 'The Church and Christ con-gratulate one another.' The lover continues: `Thy two breasts, are like two yong Roes, that are twinnes, which feed among the lillies.' (Chaderton: `Christ setteth forth the graces of the Church.') 'Thy lips, 0 my spouse! drop as the hony combe: hony and milke are vnder thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon. (Chaderton, inscrutable to the last: `Christ sheweth his loue to the Church.') That aching gap, between the ecstatic sexuality of the poem and of the rather helpful and interesting notes which the Trans-lators provide, might make us smile now, but it was clearly not a comic effect that the Jacobean Translators were after. The modern reaction to their binding of the religious and the erotic experience is a measure of what Eliot called the `dissociation of sensibility' that occurred to English consciousness at some time later in the seventeenth century. We can no longer imagine that erotic passion and religious intelligence can be bound together into one living fabric. All we see in the commentary of Chaderton's company is what looks like their prudishness, their refusal to see the erotic and the passionate for what it is. But in doing that, we patronise them, we assume they were trying to conceal what they were so clearly and so consciously mak-ing vital and present. The Sancroft—Bonnest correspondence, Andrewes's private prayers, Donne's sermons and sacred sonnets, the poetry of Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne, all show that a profoundly open `passionality' is completely and immediately available to these men. Their lives and works are largely moti-vated by a frame of mind in which emotion, intellect, spirituality and desire do not exist in isolated compartments but feed and nourish each other.

John O'Hara finally from Geoffrey Wolfe

Despite declining to buy rights to his first novel in 1934, Paramount recognized O'Hara's gift, and aspiring to make use of it offered him a ten-week contract as a writer of what was termed—by grocery clerk bookkeeping—"additional dialogue," at two hundred and fifty a week, with an option to renew for another ten weeks. It's one of the more affecting credulities of moviemakers that they continue—in a triumph of hope over experience—to confuse the art of dialogue on the page with the art of dialogue on the screen. In a story or novel, voice must enact the most explicit of actions; a prose character's speech and language of meditation is that character's performance, the principal display of motive, sense, and judgment. On the screen, a character's words serve best to punctuate acts, or lie at cross-purposes to those acts. The screen-plays of America's best literary writers make a dreary filmography: Fitzgerald bombed, as did Dorothy Parker; Faulkner was bombed during most of his serial visitations, though he managed to come up with a nice credit on To Have and Have Not. In the human comedy, Hollywood is top banana, whether the subject is boastful ignorance, mad vanity, vulgar gimme, automotive or architectural novelty, eccentricity of wardrobe, or unfelt sentiment. When I was a greenhorn novelist, beckoned from New York to that palmy colony by first-class air tickets for a first chance to be professionally lied to, a more experienced writer friend took me to an instructional lunch, as if to a briefing at the Explorers Club. My friend assured me that if I refrain6d from scribbling sums on the backs of hotel envelopes in the expectation that I'd soon be able to afford an imported roadster, and if I understood that any woman asking in a friendly way whether I hailed from out of town was a hooker, and if I NEVER returned ANY phone call from ANYONE in the movie business more than once, I'd limp home with my skin and some of my self-respect. He sagely explained that it was best not to debate whether it were a pardonable sin to sell one's soul, at least until someone offered to buy it (with a cashier's check), and that should I be so lucky as to sell mine, for God's sake get a hefty chunk on the front end. I got no hefty chunk but I enjoyed a limo trip from LAX to the Beverly Hills Hotel and heard swell reviews of my book by people who hadn't read it. What a visitor makes of such circumstances pretty much sets in stone whether he'll read the pretty blandishments of Hollywood as the talent-thieving seductions of the whore of Babylon or as the razz-ma-tazz of a pretty cheerleader. Here John O'Hara had his head on straight. For one thing he was cocky, which sold a whole lot better out west than hangdog. He arrived late to work his first day on the job, and Matthew J. Bruccoli reports that he explained in extenuation, "You should have seen her." For another thing, he desired a car, and Hollywood had an abundant inventory and was a capital place for a writer to carry away money enough to buy a fine ride. A feature writer for the Los Angeles Times recently remarked that "for almost a century, writers have been coming to Southern Cali-fornia for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks."' The more sardonic writers didn't announce themselves to be bank robbers, but thought of themselves as hookers. From the prominence of Stockholm, after bagging his Nobel, Faulkner explained to an interviewer who'd asked how he bore his two-year sentence at Warner Brothers: "I just kept telling myself, 'They're gonna pay me Saturday, they're gonna pay me Saturday.'
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O"Hara was protected from self-ruin by his wife Belle's "modest competence".
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If the violent striking back here has been commensurate with its provocation, this is not invariably the case in O'Hara's work. As Louis Auchincloss has written in Reflections of a Jacobite: la the strange, angry world that he describes, the characters behave with a uniform violence, speak with a uniform crudeness. . . . The most casual meeting between a major and minor character will result in an ugly flare-up or a sexual connection, or both. It is impossible for an O'Hara hero to order a meal in a restaurant or to take a taxi ride without having a brusque interchange with the waiter or driver."' Auchincloss is address-ing the novels rather than the styries, and he has somewhat over-sharpened his point, but motiveless truculence is often a feature of O'Hara's unsuccessful characterizations. Resentment is animating, but only when the acuity of the hurt—as opposed to a reader's personal judg-ment of the stakes—can be felt through the writer's sentences. "Surely," Auchincloss writes, "there is a difference between the feelings of the man who has not been asked to dinner and those of the man who has been thrown down the front stairs." O'Hara, who wrote both crudely and subtly about both, might not agree. Hurt—unlike the narrative that attempts to convey it—is not subject to an exegesis, but it is reasonable to argue that injury suffered from an abuse of power has a better chance of exciting pity and terror than the delayed petulance of an individual scorned.
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In a 1942 Newsweek column, O'Hara chose to memorialize what was to be one of the more inglorious anecdotes attached like a limpet to his history. As he reported the story, the war correspondents Vincent Sheean and James Lardner, together with Ernest Hemingway, were off together at the Spanish Civil War when they found themselves with some unexpected dividend of spare cash from a royalty or expense-account payment and wondered aloud how best to spend it, and Hemingway had said of this lagniappe, "Let's take the bloody money and start a bloody fund to send John O'Hara to Yale," about which remark O'Hara remarked, "It's a mean little story, but it shows what my friends think of me." In his biography of O'Hara, Matthew J. Bruccoli quotes a letter to him from Sheean that ameliorates the disdain a bit by subtracting "bloody," and goes on to explain that he excised Hemingway's snub from his own book to avoid one of O'Hara's "savage rages." And still later Don Schanche, the Esquire interviewer-of O'Hara, told Bruccoli that O'Hara said of the sally that "it was the first time I knew Heming-way had any real envy of me."' It remains a puzzle why O'Hara retailed the story to his Newsweek readers, unless being known to know Hemingway was more pleasurable than the great man's opinion of him was painful.
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Lionel Trilling's passion for the novel burned with an almost sacred heat: he believed it to be civilisation's most refined expression of intellectual elevation and moral complexity. But the novelist who had his considered esteem was not an American realist- Dreiser and Steinbeck aroused his disdain- but Henry James. And O'Hara would not have seemed his inevitable choice for an heir to the Master's lacework of inferences and contingencies.
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But of course he knew just what he was doing; he was sometimes given envelopes to pass along. "It was only a venial political sin to pocket some of that money on its way from the committee to the ward leader: but when Mike was given $400 to deliver to a ward captain, the ward captain received $400, not $375. There would have been no comment and no disillusion-ment if Mike had paid himself a $25 delivery fee, but he early showed that he was not a $z5 man. The $25 men are indispensable, but they invariably remain $25 men" (O'Hara, Ten North Frederick [New York: Random House, 19551, pp. 207, 208).
THE TOMES 285
that there was no shadow over his patriotism or manliness."' What seems remarkable here—as elsewhere in O'Hara's many linkings of col-legiate social disappointment and existential disgrace—is the want of irony. It is a mystery how loyally, with what blind faith, this shrewd skep-tic accepted the conventional mandarin wisdoms. How could O'Hara have failed to hold to the fire the feet of a character who confuses mem-bership in Skull and Bones with service at Verdun? In Chapin's Yale junior class, forty-five students were chosen for the brotherhoods of three tombs: Scroll and Key, Wolf's Head, and Skull and Bones.* While a socially aspirant fellow, feeling his shoulder go untouched on Tap Day, might say to himself that this was how it would feel to hear a doctor diag-nose a malign tumor, how could a grown man have allowed himself to believe that a character hearing a cancer diagnosis would imagine as an equivalent curse how it would feel to go untapped by Wolf's Head? Such an unreliable table of equivalence is fatal to a novel of manners, whose narrator must demonstrate reliable judgment in order to seem a wise judge of his characters' misjudgment of weights and measures. It's fathomable to be a snob or to be easily impressed by surfaces when one is young. Some lucky kids seem to be born "attractive" or "original" or both, with a strong chin or bushy eyebrows, with shrewd fashion sense or fearlessly open eyes or even with a coherent set of val-ues. Sometimes this apparent grace is merely an accident of physiog-nomy, and in rare instances—from genes or by training—a kid can have from childhood the whole package: brains and courage and kindness. But most of us have to learn a day at a time—many days, a long time—what matters, what's decent or mean, what's authentic or bogus. After a while—after, say, a couple hundred short stories, half a dozen novels, and a half century of living—it becomes a vice to refuse to learn.
*Yale's version of discrimination—O'Hara's favorite—differed from Princeton's and Harvard's. Princeton's better eating clubs of the time (Ivy, Cottage, and Colonial) selected members according to unscientific principles of "attractiveness," a function of boyish decorum and understated haber-might welcome a hdashery. Ivy ockey player from a Montana high school as well as one from St. Paul's, if the high-schooler had the right haircut, so that in the annual club photo a stranger couldn't tell the young gents apart. As Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. has elsewhere explained, Harvard's better final clubs (Porcellian, and A.D.) insisted on "belongingness," a function of family name and schooling (Groton, St. Mark's, even Milton). Yale's secret societies selected gifted strivers according to their titled distinctions, so Tap Day was a contest between curricula vitae: captains of major teams (inclu-sive of hockey, squash, and rowing) were surely in the running, as was the editor of the Yale Daily News (unless he was or appeared "unattractive"), or a straight-arrow fundraiser.
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When a novel breaks down in so many ways—fails in voice, pacing, proportion, energy of character, psychological credibility, and moral vision—it usually, as a literary work, fails utterly.* Yet, O'Hara consid-ered From the Terrace his masterpiece, and there are passages in it so grand that for pages at a time it is possible to share his delusion. On hier-archies and the manifestations of deference he is observant and subtle. As a boy of eleven Alfred "had already noticed that some of the fathers and mothers of his friends would contradict themselves if they expressed views that conflicted with those of his own parents. ("Such a lovely day!" "A little too warm for my taste." "Well, yes, it is rather close.")' In turn, Mary's mother, Mrs. St. John, regarded from Wilmington the Eatons of Fort Johnson, or Port Johnson, whatever that little mill town was named: "They're nothing and nobody. The mother is a drunkard and other things beside, the father is a nouveau-riche war profiteer."' The novel also offers several brief, almost impressionistically com-pressed descriptions of the consolations of long marriage, of adjustment and resignation. The sexual accommodations of Mrs. Budd to her hus-band have been quoted above; the settled affection between the daugh-ter of James D. MacHardie (senior partner of Alfred Eaton's investment bank) and her husband, Creighton Duffy, is described with swift and sure daring: "She laughed a lot and smiled more. She was a jovial woman, and the quality had been brought out by Duffy in their perfect marriage. The MacHardie money had got her nothing but duty dances as a debutante, but Creighton Duffy wooed her with second helpings of ice cream and cake, and she had won him by devouring them. She became a Catholic (as she would have become a Mohammedan) because he asked her to. . . . They had each other, and it became increasingly unimportant that no one else wanted either one of them."' This is a glimpse of the complex portraiture mostly missing from the tomes, the delicate willingness of O'Hara to seem surprised by his char-acters, a simulation of surprise credible only after a novelist's empathetic study of his inventions' quiddities. Creighton Duffy is Alfred Eaton's nemesis, a petulant and jealous man who brings Alfred low. He, too,
*These novels never failed commercially: From the Terrace sold out its first and only hardcover printing of one hundred thousand copies, and by 1966, Matthew J. Bruccoli reports, Bantam had sold two and a half million copies in paperback, together with thirteen million copies of O'Hara's other books.
exhibits sexual habits of potential interest to Havelock Ellis, but this time O'Hara pulls back from the perverse in refusal to reduce and judge, as he does so often elsewhere. He must, bless his soul, love Duffy's coarse character, despite himself: "The slaps and ticklings that stimulated them in their lovemaking had never gone past the danger point, and when lovemaking had exhausted them they slept like enormous, untroubled infants until time for their next feeding." Writing about the sexual impulses and excesses of the characters of Butterfield 8 and Ourselves to Know, Arthur Mizener rightly reproaches O'Hara for his inclination always toward the extreme: "a tabloid newspa-per's alternately sentimental and sensational view of life, a view that characteristically takes extreme forms of behavior—especially of sexual behavior—and unusual circumstances as typical."' A reader's confi-dence in O'Hara's judgment of individuals is frequently shaken; as Mizener notes, "everything conceivable happens occasionally," but to represent molestation and sexual violence and eccentricity of taste as being inevitable—as if, behind closed doors, all is abuse and seduction—is "the basic stuff of sexual fantasy, of pornography." Although Mizener might have meant his dismay to have a moral component, my interest is in the awful toll that O'Hara's indulgence of "unusual circumstance as typical" exacted on his novels. Aristotle makes sense, I believe, in his credo on this matter, that in make-believe a plausible impossibility is to be preferred over an implausible possibility. O'Hara owes no apology for his management of crowds, in contrast to individuals.
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Even recently—perhaps especially recently—McPhee was rueful as well as amused at his presumption in cadging from a celebrated pro-fessional a free piece, but that's what he got. The story, "The Favor," concerns an accident following a game at the Yale Bowl; encouraged by the writer's courtesy, McPhee said he'd like to change the venue to Prince-ton's Palmer Stadium, and telephoned O'Hara to ask whether this tri-fling change would be acceptable. "No," was the answer. O'Hara got for his generosity a Revere silver bowl, inscribed With thanks for The Favor. McPhee delivered this gift to 2o College Road West, and O'Hara, clearly touched, asked whether McPhee might like to join him in a drink. "I was only what? Twenty-one. I said sure I would." O'Hara led his guest out to a terrace—the terrace, the one from which the big novel came*—excused himself, then returned with "an old-fashioned glass big enough to hold a softball. This was a bucket of booze."
The O'Haras were invited during their first year or so in Princeton to more dinner parties than they welcomed, and these often went badly. At J. Robert Oppenheimer's house O'Hara quarreled, about educational theory, with the nephew of Thorstein Veblen "who wrote," as O'Hara remembered later, "an overestimated book called The Theory of the Leisure Class."At another Princeton dinner party, Matthew J. Bruccoli
(On the other hand, McPhee has conceded that other terraces have been hallowed or blamed for From the Terrace: "Wherever there's a terrace, he wrote his novel on it." )
reports that the wife of the New York Times bigwig Arthur Krock declared to O'Hara that A Rage to Live was a "fraud."' To such belliger-ence he would respond without forbearance, drinking till he was drunk, then glaring or snorting or turning his back—which often seemed to have a lurid target pinned to it. Soon he had a reputation for difficulty, though—as ever—not without exception. At a dinner at his house he had seated on his right a friend's new wife, a woman from the South who'd been warned to agree with whatever her host opined. Nervous, she drank too much, then opined her own self. "Mr. O'Hara, I have to tell you, your books are just trash. Whenever someone sends me one, I toss it right into the fireplace." A long silence commenced as guests stared at their salad. O'Hara made a noise, then a choking sound. He was laugh-ing. "He knew a pugnacious drunk when he met one," in the recollection of Kate Bramwell.

Bryson's Shakespeare

 all other London playhouses, with the single even-tual exception of the Globe, relied on other entertainments, particularly animal baiting, to fortify their earnings. The pas-time was not unique to England, but it was regarded as an Eng-lish specialty. Queen Elizabeth often had visitors from abroad entertained with bearbaiting at Whitehall. In its classic form, a bear was put in a ring, sometimes tethered to a stake, and set upon by mastiffs, but bears were expensive investments, so other animals (such as bulls and horses) were commonly sub-stituted. One variation was to put a chimpanzee on the back of a horse and let the dogs go for both together. The sight of a screeching ape clinging for dear life to a bucking horse while dogs leaped at it from below was considered about as rich an amusement as public life could offer. That an audience that could be moved to tears one day by a performance of Doctor Faustus could return the next to the same space and be just as entertained by the frantic deaths of helpless animals may say as much about the age as any single statement could. It was also an age that gave rise to the Puritans, a people so averse to sensual pleasure that they would rather live in a distant wilderness in the New World than embrace tolerance. Puritans detested the theater and tended to blame every natural calamity, including a rare but startling earthquake in 1580, on the playhouses. They considered theaters, with their lascivious puns and unnatural cross-dressing, a natural haunt for pros-titutes and shady characters, a breeding ground of infectious diseases, a distraction from worship, and a source of unhealthy sexual excitement. All the female parts were of course played by boys a convention that would last until the Restoration in the 1660s. In consequence the Puritans believed that the theaters were hotbeds of sodomy—still a capital offense in Shakespeare's lifetime—and wanton liaisons of all sorts. There may actually have been a little something to this, as popular tales of the day suggest. In one story a young wife pleads with her husband to be allowed to attend a popular play. Reluctantly the husband consents, but with the strict proviso that she be vigilant for thieves and keep her purse buried deep within her petticoats. Upon her return home, the wife bursts into tears and confesses that the purse has been stolen. The husband is naturally astounded. Did his wife not feel a hand probing beneath her dress? Oh, yes, she responds candidly, she had felt a neighbor's hand there—"but I did not think he had come for that." Fortunately for Shakespeare and for posterity, the queen brushed away all attempts to limit public amusements, in-cluding on Sundays. For one thing she liked them herself, but equally pertinent, her government enjoyed hearty rev-enues from licensing bowling alleys, theatrical productions, gaming houses (even though gambling was actually illegal in London), and the sale and manufacture of much that went on in them.
* Stephen Orgel makes the point that sodomy, though inveighed against in law, was tolerated in practice as long as it was discreet. Far more at risk of prosecution were incautious heterosexual females, because illicit births added inexcusably to the poor rolls.
But though plays were tolerated, they were strictly regu-lated. The Master of the Revels licensed all dramatic works (at a cost of 7 shillings per license) and made sure that companies performed in a manner that he (considered respectful and or-derly. Those who displeased him could in theory be jailed at his indefinite pleasure, and punishments were not unknown. In 1605, soon after the accession of James I, Ben Jonson and his collaborators on Eastward Ho! made some excellent but un-wisely intemperate jokes about the sudden influx of rough and underwashed Scots to the royal court and were arrested and threatened with having their ears and noses lopped off. It was because of these dangers (and the Vagrancy Act of 1572, which specifically authorized the whipping of unlicensed vagabonds) that acting troupes attached themselves to aristocratic patrons. The patron afforded the actors some measure of protection, and they in turn carried his name across the land, lending him publicity and prestige. For a time patrons collected troupes of actors rather in the way rich people of a later age collected race-horses or yachts. Plays were performed at about two o'clock in the afternoon. Handbills were distributed through the streets advertising what was on offer, and citizens were reminded that a play was soon to start by the appearance of a banner waving from the highest part of the structure in which a performance was to take place and a fanfare of trumpets that could be heard across much of the city. General admission for groundlings—those who stood in the open around the stage—was a penny. Those who wished to sit paid a penny more, and those who desired a cushion paid another penny on top of that—all this at a time when a day's wage was 1 shilling (12 pence) or less a day. The money was dropped into a box, which was taken to a special room for safe-keeping—the box office. For those who could afford an additional treat, apples and pears (both apt to be used as missiles during moments of dis-appointment) and nuts, gingerbread, and bottles of ale were on offer, as was the newly fashionable commodity tobacco. A small pipeful cost 3 pence—considerably more than the price of admission. There were no toilets—or at least no official ones. Despite their large capacity, theaters were reasonably intimate. No one in the audience was more than fifty feet or so from the edge of the stage. Theaters had little scenery and no curtains (even at the Curtain), no way to distinguish day from night, fog from sun-shine, battlefield from boudoir, other than through words. So scenes had to be set with a few verbal strokes and the help of a compliant audience's imagination. As Wells and Taylor note, "Oberon and Prospero have only to declare themselves invisible to become so." No one set scenes more brilliantly and economically than Shakespeare.
 In the rush to entertain masses of people repeatedly, the rules of presentation became exceedingly elastic. In classical drama plays were strictly either comedies or tragedies. Elizabethan playwrights refused to be bound by such rigidities and put comic scenes in the darkest tragedies—the porter answering a late knock in Macbeth, for instance. In so doing they invented comic relief. In classical drama only three performers were per-mitted to speak in a given scene, and no character was allowed to talk to himself or the audience—so there were no soliloquies and no asides. These are features without which Shakespeare could never have become Shakespeare. Above all, plays before Shakespeare's day were traditionally governed by what were known as "the unities"—the three principles of dramatic presentation derived from Aristotle's Poetics, which demanded that dramas should take place in one day, in one place, and have a single plot. Shakespeare was happy enough to observe this restriction when it suited him (as in The Comedy of Errors), but he could never have written Hamlet or Macbeth or any of his other greatest works if he had felt strictly bound by it. Other theatrical conventions were unformed or just emerging. The division of plays into acts and scenes—something else strictly regulated in classical drama—was yet unsettled in England. Ben Jonson inserted a new scene and scene number each time an additional character stepped onstage, however briefly or inconsequentially, but others did not use scene divisions at all. For the audience it mattered little, since action was continuous. The practice of pausing between acts didn't begin until plays moved indoors, late in Shakespeare's career, and it became necessary to break from time to time to trim the lights. Almost the only "rule" in London theater that was still faithfully followed was the one we now call, for convenience, the law of reentry, which stated that a character couldn't exit from one scene and reappear immediately in the next. He had rather to go away for a while. Thus, in Richard II,John of Gaunt makes an abrupt and awkward departure purely to be able to take part in a vital scene that follows. Why this rule out of all the many was faithfully observed has never, as far as I can make out, been satisfactorily explained. But even by the very relaxed standards of the day, Shake-speare was invigoratingly wayward. He could, as in Julius Caesar, kill off the title character with the play not half done (though Caesar does come back later, briefly, as a ghost). He could write a play like Hamlet, where the main character speaks 1,495 lines (nearly as many as the number spoken by all the characters combined in The Comedy of Errors) but disappears for unnervingly long stretches—for nearly half an hour at one point. He constantly teased reality, reminding the audience that they were not in the real world but in a theater, as when he asked in Henry V, "Can this cockpit hold the vastie fields of France?" or implored the audience in Henry VI, Part 3 to "eke out our performance with your mind."
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Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). Where would we be without them? He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un- prefixes to existing words to make new words that no one had thought of before—unmask, unhand, unlock, untie, unveil and no fewer than 309 others in a similar vein. Consider how helplessly prolix the alternatives to any of these terms are and you appreciate how much punch Shakespeare gave English. He produced such a torrent of new words and meanings that a good many, as Otto Jespersen once bemusedly observed, "perhaps were not even clearly understood by the author him-self." Certainly many of them failed to take hold. Undeaf, untent, and unhappy (as a verb), exsufflicate, bepray, and insultment were among those that were scarcely heard again. But a surprisingly large number did gain common currency and about eight hundred are still used today—a very high pro-portion. As Crystal says, "Most modern authors, I imagine, would be delighted if they contributed even one lexeme to the future of the language." His real gift was as a phrasemaker. "Shakespeare's language," says Stanley Wells, "has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language." Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father to the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, be cruel to be kind, blinking idiot, with bated breath, tower of strength, pomp and circumstance, foregone conclusion—and many others so repetitiously irresistible that we have debased them into cliches.
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The dark lady is no less doubtful. A.L. Rowse- who, it must be said, never allowed an absence of certainty to get in the way way of a conclusion—in 1973 identified the dark lady as Emilia Bassano, daughter of one of the queen's musicians, and, with a certain thrust of literary jaw, asserted that his conclusions "cannot be impugned, for they are the answer," even though they are unsupported by anything that might reasonably be termed proof. Another oft-mentioned candidate was Mary Fitton, mistress of the Earl of Pembroke. But again some im-agery in the text—"her breasts are dun; . . . / black wires grow on her head"—suggests someone darker still. We will almost certainly never know for sure, and in any case we perhaps don't need to. Auden for one believed that knowing would add nothing to the poems' satisfactions. "Though it seems to me rather silly to spend much time on con-jectures which cannot be proved true or false," he wrote, "what I really object to is their illusion that, if they were successful, if the identity of the Friend, the Dark Lady, the Rival Poet, etc., could be established beyond doubt, this would in any way illuminate our understanding of the sonnets themselves."
The matter of Shakespeare's sexuality both that he had some and that it might have been pointed in a wayward direction—has caused trouble for his admirers ever since. One early editor of the sonnets solved the problem simply by making all the masculine pronouns feminine, at a stroke banishing any hint of controversy. Predictably, the Victorians suffered the acutest anxieties. Many went into a kind of obstinate denial and per-suaded themselves that the sonnets were simply "poetical exer-cises" or "professional trials of skill," as the biographer Sidney Lee termed them, arguing that Shakespeare had written them in a number of assumed voices, "probably at the suggestion of the author's intimate associates." Thus, any reference to longing to caress a fellow was Shakespeare writing in a female voice, as a demonstration of his versatility and genius. Shakespeare's real friendships, Lee insisted, were of "the healthy manly type" and any alternative interpretation "casts a slur on the dignity of the poet's name which scarcely bears discussion." Discomfort lasted well into the twentieth century. Mar-chette Chute, in a popular biography of 1949, relegated all discussion of the sonnets to a brief appendix in which she ex-plained: "The Renaissance used the violent, sensuous terms for friendship between men that later generations reserved for sexual love. Shakespeare's use of terms like 'master-mistress' sounds abnormal to the ears of the twentieth century, but it did not sound so at the end of the sixteenth." And that was as close as she or most other biographers cared to get to the matter. The historian Will Durant as recently as 1961 noted that Sonnet 20 contained "an erotic play on words" but could not bring himself to share specifics. We needn't be so blushing. The lines he alludes to are: "But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure, / Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure." Most critics be-lieve that these lines indicate that Shakespeare's attachment to the fair youth was never consummated. But as Stanley Wells notes, "If Shakespeare himself did not, in the fullest sense of the word, love a man, he certainly understood the feelings of those who do."

The Spanish Armada from Shakespeare

Tensions between Protestants and Catholics came to a head in 1586 when Mary, Queen of Scots, was implicated in a plot to overthrow the queen and Elizabeth agreed, reluctantly, that she
must be executed. Killing a fellow monarch, however threaten-ing, was a grave act, and it provoked a response. In the spring of the following year, Spain dispatched a mighty navy to capture the English throne and replace Elizabeth. The greatest fleet that "ever swam upon the sea," the Spanish Armada looked invincible. In battle formation it spread over seven miles of sea and carried ferocious firepower: 123,000 cannonballs and nearly three thousand cannons, plus every manner of musket and small arms, divided between thirty thousand men. The Spanish confidently expected the swiftest of triumphs—one literally for the glory of God. Once England fell, and with the English fleet in Spanish hands, the very real prospect arose of the whole of Protestant Europe being toppled. Things didn't go to plan, to put it mildly. England's ships were nimbler and sat lower in the water, making them awkward targets. They could dart about doing damage here and there while the Spanish guns, standing on high decks, mostly fired above them. The English ships were better commanded, too (or so all English history books tell us). It is only fair to note that most vessels of the Spanish fleet were not battleships but over-loaded troop carriers, making plump and lumbering targets. The English also enjoyed a crucial territorial edge: They could exploit their intimate knowledge of local tides and currents, and could dart back to the warm comfort of home ports for refreshment and repairs. Above all they had a decisive techno-logical advantage: cast-iron cannons, an English invention that other nations had not yet perfected, which fired straighter and were vastly sturdier than the Spanish bronze guns, which were poorly bored and inaccurate and had to be allowed to cool after every two or three rounds. Crews that failed to heed this—and in the heat of battle it was easy to lose track—often blew themselves up. In any case the Spanish barely trained their gun crews. Their strategy was to come alongside and board enemy ships, capturing them in hand-to-hand combat. The rout was spectacular. It took the English just three weeks to pick the opponent's navy to pieces. In a single day the Spanish suffered eight thousand casualties. Dismayed and confused, the tattered fleet fled up the east coast of England and around Scotland into the Irish Sea, where fate dealt it further cruel blows in the form of lashing gales, which wrecked at least two dozen ships. A thousand Spanish bodies, it was recorded, washed up on Irish beaches. Those who struggled ashore were often slaughtered for their baubles. By the time the remnants of the Armada limped home, it had lost seventeen thousand men out of the thirty thousand who had set off. England lost no ships at all. The defeat of the Spanish Armada changed the course of history. It induced a rush of patriotism in England that Shakespeare exploited in his history plays (nearly all written in the following decade), and it gave England the confidence and power to command the seas and build a global empire, be-ginning almost immediately with North America. Above all it secured Protestantism for England. Had the Armada pre-vailed, it would have brought with it the Spanish Inquisition, with goodness knows what consequences for Elizabethan England—and the young man from Warwickshire who was just about to transform its theater.

Hollywood and Upton Sinclair from The Dark Valley

Beyond the fringe of Hollywood in gilded enclaves, architectural mimesis ran riot. Houses were not houses but Art Deco Palazzo, Mexican haciendas, Gothic castles, Tudor manors.... Greta Garbo lived in an Algerian monastery, Charlie Chaplin a colonial mansion... everything was sham and fancy.
From the vast studio hangars came a cascade of scenery as substantial as a Dadaist delirium. Here in painted canvas and plywood, mocked up lath and plaster was a cyclorama featuring the entire history and mythology of mankind. No one conjured up the chaos of conflicting images more vividly than Nathanael West. Stumbling past flapping marble porticoes and cellophane waterfalls, his hero (in The Day of the Locust) encounters the skeleton of a Zeppelin, a bamboo stockade, an adobe fort, the wooden horse of Troy, a flight of baroque palace stairs that started in a bed of weeds and ended against the branches of an oak, part of Four-teenth Street elevated station, a Dutch windmill, the bones of a dinosaur, the upper half of the Merrimack, a corner of a Mayan temple.36 Like these evanescent tableaux, the costume drama overflowed from the studio lots. Sunset Boulevard and its surroundings witnessed a perpetual masquerade, a strutting procession of mimic men and women dressed for their parts. Females wore mink coats over purple lounging pyjamas. Males sported green trousers, orange sneakers, pastel handkerchiefs. Stars con-cealed themselves behind dark glasses with large white rims, "a triumph of conspicuous anonymity."37 Extras competed in exhibitionism. Hollywood attracted a huge company of supporting players—small-town beauty queens and vaudeville midgets, cabaret dancers and circus strong men, burlesque comedians and opera soubrettes. Following like prospectors in a gold rush came barkers, mountebanks, swamis, "healers," beauticians, morticians. Of all the make-belief merchants none were more extraordi-nary than the so-called "cinemoguls" or "cellulords." Almost without exception these men—they were all men, many of them Jewish—had risen from humble beginnings. Sam Goldwyn had been a glove salesman, Louis B. Mayer a rag-picker, Harry Cohn a furrier, Eddie Mannix a bouncer in an amusement park. The Warner brothers were butcher's sons. The Schenks had owned a drugstore. Marcus Loew and Adolph Zukor had run penny arcades. Most had come to Hollywood via the slums of show business: flea circuses, theatrical agencies, nick-elodeons, vaudeville. Once established as the rulers of movie-land they became, as often as not, a prey to fantasy, vanity and megalomania. They confused cinema with verite: Walt Disney reckoned that the centaur sequence in his cartoon film Fantasia would be the making of Beethoven. Monarchs of the "marzipan kingdom" moved in "an aura of greatness," said Ben Hecht, "and reports of their genius would have embarrassed Michelangelo."38 Like royalty, Sam Goldwyn never carried money. The film producers became pocket dictators. Louis B. Mayer of MGM declared that directors should learn to crawl before they could walk. Harry Cohn of Columbia bugged and purged his employees, exploited his star-
THE DARK VALLEY
America in Isolation
505 
lets sexually and modelled his office on that of Mussolini. "I don't ulcers," he said, "I give them. "39 Cohn also vouchsafed an explanation of what the film industry was about: "It's cunt and horses."4° This was not so much a definition as a characteristically crude declaration of philistinism. And it would have amply confirmed the low esteem in which the movie tycoons were held. Writers, who ranked in the studio hierarchy above hairdressers but below heads of publicity, particularly despised them. They were always (in an expression attributed to Sam Goldwyn) "biting the hand that lays the golden egg." Thus Dorothy Parker complained that she was working for cretins. S. J. Perelman described them as hoodlums of great wealth. Ben Hecht called them trash-pedlars who had lamed the American mind. Josef Von Sternberg, who wielded pen as well as lens, said that his bosses knew what they wanted but didn't know how to spell it. Another writer, who wished to get out of his contract with Columbia, offered to act as Harry Cohn's interpreter on a trip to England. But it was Sam Goldwyn who attracted the most joyous ribaldry. Bald, jug-eared and hook-nosed, he was the prototype of the language-garbling, cigar-chewing Hollywood Napoleon. His verbal solecisms—"Include me out," "In two words, im possible"—were notorious and (mostly) apocryphal. His greed was leg-endary. Goldwyn "beat at your mind like a man in front of a slot machine," said Hecht, "shaking it for a jackpot."42 His taste was execrable. Like Walt Disney, he tended to equate art with obscenity. Yet writers, who invariably have the last word in the struggle between culture and commerce, gave a false impression of film producers. They inflated the already bizarre follies and foibles of the caliphs of California, caricaturing them as ignorant clowns, lunatic charlatans, sacred monsters. Part of the writers' animus stemmed from the fear that their literary talents were atrophying in Hollywood, which they variously compared to Devil's Island and the Sargasso Sea. More galling still, they were shackled to Goldwyn and his ilk with golden chains. As one memorably expostulated, "They ruin your stories. They massacre your ideas. They prostitute your art. They trample on your pride. And what do you get for it? A fortune." Fortunes were made because the film tsars were skilful salesmen. They had a shrewd grasp of public taste, which they did not intend to go bust by overestimating. There was a method in their seeming madness: they made money even more prodigiously than they wasted it. P. G. Wodehouse, who admitted that he had been paid huge sums for doing practically noth-ing in Hollywood, nevertheless recorded: "Studio life is all perfectly nor-mal, not a bit crazy." He claimed, regretfully but erroneously, that it would not afford him a single comic story. "Sam Goldwyn," said another author, "goes up the hill and teaches the foxes to be smart."Goldwyn and his kind were particularly smart when it came to defending their fiefdom against the only man of letters who ever seriously threatened it. This was Upton Sinclair, who sought election as Governor of California in 1934 on the Democratic ticket and a utopian socialist platform. "What does Sinclair know about anything?" growled Louis B. Mayer. "He's just a writer. "46 Sinclair knew a good deal and he was not impressed by the New Deal. An old-time muckraker, he had become famous by denouncing many American evils, from the meat-packing industry to the child labour laws. Now he began the EPIC crusade to "End Poverty in California." Nor-mally Sinclair could be dismissed as a crank. He preached more "isms" than Horace Greeley: feminism, spiritualism, food faddism, prohibition-ism, Fourierism. He attempted to uplift humanity, as H. L. Mencken gleefully noted, through sex hygiene, Esperanto, telepathy, twilight sleep, chiropractic, war gardens, vers libre and paper-bag cookery. Though not a Communist, Sinclair was an ascetic defender of Soviet Russia. Neverthe-less, at a time when one in seven inhabitants of California was on relief, Sinclair's radical nostrums seemed so attractive that people paid to attend his political meetings. What he proposed, in brief, was to tax according to means and to set up cooperatives producing for use rather than profit. He even had ideas about generating jobs in the film industry: "Why should not the State of California rent one of the idle studios and let the unemployed actors make a few pictures of their own?" Louis B. Mayer was appalled and he led his fellow magnates in a bitter assault on the muck-raker. It demonstrated that Hollywood was not simply in the business of conjuring up a candyfloss world. When provoked, it could create vicious as well as vapid distortions of reality. Sinclair asked for trouble, not least by likening movie bosses to Jewish traders of yore who had sold Christian girls into concubinage. But he was taken aback by the dirty tricks that followed. A slight, professorial figure with pince-nez, pursed lips and an expression of quizzical geniality, Sin-clair expected others to share his fundamental benevolence. Instead he found himself pilloried as "Utopian Sincliar," a "red devil," the fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse riding his hobby in an attempt to catch up with Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. MGM freely issued California cinemas with bogus newsreels in which respectable Americans pledged their support to the Republican candidate, Frank Merriam, while shabby aliens said they would vote for Sinclair because, "His system worked veil in Rus-sia, vy can't it work here?"

Hirohito and the 36 coup

From The Dark Valley:
HIRourr 0 found shades of the prison-house closing upon him as the decade progressed. At its beginning he was merely a captive of convention. He was occasionally paraded as a pageant, usually immured as a fetish. Before his people the Emperor manifested himself in all the trappings of divine kingship. He could not smile or wave lest it should impair his dig-nity, though he was obliged to appear in ill-cut clothes because tailors had to guess his measurements, not being permitted to touch him. When he was on tour spectators were not allowed within too metres of his maroon Rolls-Royce. His situation was epitomised by the weird communion he held with his subjects while on fleet manoeuvres in Kinko Bay during the autumn of 1931. After dusk, while his ship's company were having their evening meal, the Emperor was observed on the aft deck standing alone, stiffly at attention, saluting towards the land. It was five or six miles away and totally obscured by the murk. But a telescope revealed two rows of flickering lights, evidently lanterns waved by fishermen and bonfires blaz-ing on hill-tops. A chamberlain wrote: At such a distance the people on the coast could not possibly have seen the ship, so they must simply have timed this demonstration of their loy-alty and affection according to the predicted hour of the ship's passage. The emperor's response to this must have been intuitive, for unless he was aided by some temporary change or quirk in atmospheric conditions, it is unlikely that he could see the lights with the naked eye. It was quite a moving sight . . . the emperor saluting people he could not see, and the people hailing the emperor they could not see. At first the ship's Captain could not think how to acknowledge their greeting. Then he slapped his knee and exclaimed, "The searchlights! We'll turn on the searchlights, and they will know we are here. " As their beams burst through the gloom and played over the undulating shores of the Sat-suma and Osumi peninsulas, the vessel became a seaborne temple of light. The eyes of crew and courtiers blurred with tears as they witnessed the imperial aureole and thought of the joy it would inspire. Yet it is clear that, in their perceptions of each other, the living god and the anonymous masses remained in the dark.
For the most part Hirohito was quite invisible, shut up in the Imperial Palace. It was guarded by an azure moat, massive grey walls of unmortared stone, heavy iron-studded gates and the Towers of Tenshu, with their pro-tecting "arms from Heaven. "No sightseers were admitted and from the outside nothing could be discerned of the Palace, a maze of pavilions built on the site of the ancient Tokugawa castle, except porcelain tiled roofs shaped like Mongolian tents. Twice a year, at cherry blossom time in the spring and when the autumn chrysthanthemums were in bloom, the Emperor gave garden parties. Privileged visitors, the men in top hats and frock coats, the women in European dress or gorgeous silk kimonos, saw a 300-year-old horticultural masterpiece. It contained ancient plum trees and gnarled pines, lotus pools and bronze fountains, waterfowl and but-terflies, vines and water lilies, willow-pattern bridges and lacquered pergolas, purling brooks and rockeries banked with cryptomeria. It was another Eden, a place of sublime confinement. The first telephone was admitted to the Palace only in 1928, the first journalist in 1933. He was Ward Price, star reporter of the London Daily Mail and a celebrated lickspittle of totalitarian regimes. He owed his entree to having given Japan "very favourable publicity" in the past, and he would soon trumpet the army's "most categorical assurance" that it had no aggressive intentions towards China.
and
 Paradoxically, the more the soldiers exalted the Emperor as a god, the more they reduced him to the status of a puppet. This was because they could pull the strings in a theocracy, whereas if the Emperor were a constitutional monarch Japan would be a parliamentary democracy with the army remaining subject to civilian control. Hence the explosive debate, which rocked Japan to its volcanic founda-tions in 1935, over whether the Emperor was a mere "organ" of government. This view had been put forwards by a dull legal scholar named Minobe Tatsukichi, who now became the victim of a heresy hunt comparable to that involving Salman Rushdie in a later age. The irony is that Minobe, who supported the authoritarian Meiji constitution, would else-where have been deemed a conservative. However, he did defend civil rights such as freedom of speech and he attacked the army for making war "the basis of our national policy." The soldiers and their factious political supporters retaliated with an "epoch-making" assault on liberalism. Minobe, as Saionji said, became "the scapegoat." Few had read his works and fewer understood the intricacies of the academic argument. But the campaign ripped across the country like an earthquake. Minobe was invited to kill himself.
....
Like the pearly mist which so often veiled the morning face of Tokyo, aggression was in the air. The city was tense with anxiety and rife with rumours of further terrorism. Court officials were given police guards. Saionji believed that the country was taking the path of German or Russian dictatorship. When in mid-January 1936 Japan finally walked out of renewed London negotiations to limit naval rearmament, after once more being denied parity, Takahashi feared that political and military extremists would unite to bring about fascism.
Signs that its enrages would precipitate some new putsch were legion. Hirohito's brother, Prince Chichibu, was rumoured to be encouraging the young officers: he had given one of them a set of his underwear. It was clear, in fact, that some new libation of blood was about to be offered on the altar of the Showa Restoration. But the Japanese convention of tacit understanding operated to a bewildering degree. The coup was common knowledge in government circles and
even received a measure of official collusion. It was foreshadowed but unmentioned. Agitated by the Minobe debate and stimulated by the trial of Aizawa, which took place at the beginning of 1936, the plotters, a score of modern samurai none higher in rank than captain, had steeled themselves to act. They held the leadership in common, but they were not an entirely homogeneous group. Many streams, some flowing from Nazi and revolutionary sources, fed their murderous idealism. But its essential well-springs were nationalistic. The plotters were in revolt against the degenerate alien creeds of liberalism, capitalism, fascism, socialism and Communism. They mod-elled themselves on the 47 ronin in the classic morality tale, whose vengeful self-sacrifice for the sake of personal obligation answered the deepest yearnings of the Japanese soul. In fact the current which swept these young soldiers to destruction was that of native religious fundamentalism. No one has analysed this better than the writer Mishima Yukio, who shared their utopian ambition to purge Japan of foreign defilement and their "supreme resolution to die a fanatic's death."
At two o'clock the next morning, 26 February 1936, bugles sounded reveille within earshot of the Palace. Fourteen hundred troops of the 1st and Guards Divisions donned heavy greatcoats and packs, drew live ammunition and mustered in their barracks. Many of them expected another night exercise. But, obedient to a fault, they carried out their ferocious orders to the letter. Separate squads set out to assassinate seven prime targets.

The Dark Valley resumed- On the death of George V

By the beginning of 1936 the King was obviously failing. He can-not have been cheered by news of Rudyard Kipling's death—supposedly the trumpeter of empire went first to herald its Sovereign into eternity. On 20 January George, wearing a flowered dressing gown, held a final Privy Council meeting in his bedroom at Sandringham. He could barely sign his name and soon lapsed into a coma. His doctor, Lord Dawson of Penn, issued that celebrated announcement: "The King's life is moving peace-fully towards its close."" Dawson himself fulfilled this prophecy with a remarkable act of euthanasia, only recently revealed. He injected a lethal mixture of morphine and cocaine into the King's jugular vein. This was done, with the royal family's approval, to ease the King's suffering and to ensure that his death was reported with suitable dignity in the morning papers, notably The Times, rather than in "the less appropriate evening j ournals." In her diary Queen Mary wrote, "the sunset of his death tinged the whole world's sky." But the fading of royal glory, like the lowering of house lights, had to be stage-managed. Even in death—particularly in death—veneration for the monarchy had to be kept alive. The King's body was embalmed to guard against its exploding during the funeral pro-cession as the Duke of Teck's had done. George V's exit was a bizarre culmination of a long, intensive propaganda campaign which aimed, as Leonard Woolf wrote, "to establish in the people a superstitious 'loyalty' towards the royal family." According to an American resident in London, the "royal publicity machine," which outdid "that of any film star," was responsible for the central paradox of English life. This was the coexistence of an "advanced political democracy" with a "retrogressive social aristocracy." The British themselves had no difficulty in accepting the paradox, observed the American. They were shocked by the deification of Stalin and Hitler but they failed to see that their own adulation of royalty surpassed that "inspired by any Dictator in Europe." 85 Doubtless this was an exaggeration. But now a people which had rejoiced at the Jubilee was encouraged to indulge in a communal catharsis. The nation donned black. The air waves resounded to a perpetual threnody. The BBC devoted so much time to prayers, hymns, incantations, tolling bells and solemn music that some wondered whether king-worship had taken over from faith in God. (At his first State banquet the future Lord Longford absent-mindedly genuflected to the King.) Equally mourn-ful were the press and the cinema. They provoked a frenzy of grief, as if trying to convince their audiences that the King's death was "the greatest event in human history since the Crucifixion."86 The arrival of his body in London aroused something close to mass'hysteria—a foretaste of the emotions generated, six decades later, by the passing of Diana, Princess of Wales. Slowly and sadly, in cold pale sunshine, the funeral cortege made its way from King's Cross Station to Westminster Hall. The coffin, shrouded in the royal standard and surmounted by the Imperial State Crown, a gold circle encrusted with gems such as the fiery white Cullinan diamond and the massive blood-red ruby given to the Black Prince and worn by King Henry on St. Crispin's Day, travelled on a gun carriage. As it entered New Palace Yard, the apex of the diadem, a Maltese Cross con-taining St. Edward's huge sapphire, the oldest crown jewel of all, jolted loose and flashed to the ground. A Grenadier sergeant major retrieved it and King Edward VIII, following the bier, exclaimed: "Christ! What will happen next?"87 Some of his subjects regarded this mishap as a terrible omen. But most were overwhelmed by poignant emotions engendered during George V's lying-in-state. Conservative MP and diarist "Chips" Channon, who watched the coffin being placed on its purple catafalque, was "left with the feeling that nothing matters . . . almost an eve-of-war reaction."" Over the next four days almost a million people queued for hours in hushed awe to pay their last respects to the King. Late one evening his four sons came down to the dimly-lit hall and took over the duties of the long-booted, plume-helmeted Household troops keeping silent vigil at each corner of the catafalque. It was another "excellent piece of public relations," according to Edward VIII's official biographer, though in order not to cheapen the gesture news of it was not given out in advance. The new Sovereign had another reason for being discreet: "King Carol of Rumania might have come and insisted on standing on top of the coffin."Almost everything else in Edward VIII's short reign was a blaze of indiscretion. This chiefly arose from his dangerous liaison with Wallis Warfield Simpson. She seemed to have bewitched him. She had, declared Mrs. Baldwin, "stolen the fairy Prince." A Baltimore girl who was said to have spent her youth in "much seduced circumstances," Wallis had, according to malign gossip, learned the arts of love in Chinese brothels. But the secret of her success with Edward was probably not Eastern sexual techniques but Western ruthlessness. Certainly she looked more determined than beautiful, having obstinately straight hair, hard sapphire eyes and a firmly pointed chin. With her svelte figure and lustrous complexion, she seemed "chic rather than feminine, half artifice, half steel." Often she would spend a whole day on her make-up, burnishing an appearance which combined animal allure and soignée sophistication. Loving jewellery, bibelots and objets dartwith a passion worthy of Queen Mary (who rightly saw her as an adventuress), Wallis herself was a sparkling social ornament. She was brittle and witty, punctuating tart, staccato sentences with salvoes of silver laughter. She was vital, clever, modern, flirtatious .. . and voracious. Unlike her deferential English rivals, she had no hesitation in meeting Prince Charming's quasi-masochistic needs. Perhaps because he had been bullied and spoiled throughout his early years, Edward yearned for a regime of strictness tempered with tenderness. Soon after their affair began in 1934 Wallis was ordering him to fetch her cigarettes while forbidding him to smoke. She criticised his clothes and got him to paint her toenails. He loved her "madly tenderly adoringly" and, it is clear, sexually—despite giving George V his word of honour that she was not his mistress. Wallis responded firmly, coolly, even contemptuously. She told him that he had not grown up where love was concerned and she occasionally reduced him to tears. His billets-doux were often puerile, sometimes infantile and always full of self-abasement. Complaining that Mussolini seemed to have planned the Ethiopian crisis just to ruin his holiday, he wrote to her: "Your blue-eyed charmer is the most dis-appointed small boy you can imagine." Now King Edward flouted convention by insisting that Mrs. Simpson be invited to royal occasions, neglected his duties to visit her, smuggled Paris fashions into the country for her, showed her the confidential government papers (which he dis-missed as bunk) in his red boxes. His Private Secretary was aghast at such irresponsibility: "Before her the affairs of state sank into insignificance .. . every decision, big or small, was subordinated to her will." At first this was little more than a political inconvenience. The government suspected that Mrs. Simpson was an informer of the German Ambassador Ribbentrop, though it found evidence only that she was an agent of the American press magnate William Randolph Hearst—to whom Edward later wrote in "ardent admiration."Many in official circles believed that the King himself was "pro-Nazi." Ribbentrop himself thought that he was "a kind of English National Socialist." Certainly the King threw his weight against intervention when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in March 1936. But Britain's failure to resist was already a fore-gone conclusion. The opinion of Sovereign and subjects coincided.