Plague Remedy Podcast

Who Taught Shakespeare to Write? — Dr Alex Davis on Old-School Persuasion

• Stephen Sacco

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Where can I find Dr Alex Davis? 


Alex's Two Books & Two Others
 


  • Going for walks (where the best thinking is done)
  • The rest of 16th and 17th century English literature that isn't Shakespeare


SPEAKER_00

I'm Steven Sacco, and from Bonnet Scotland, it's the Story Podcast for readers and writers.

SPEAKER_01

And then what he does is he says, he takes that initial phrase, Your letter mightily pleased me. Variation 2. To a wonderful degree did your letter please me. Me exceedingly did your letter please. By your letter I was mightily pleased. I was exceedingly pleased by your letter. Your epistle exhilarated me intensely. I was intensely exhilarated by your epistle. Your brief note refreshed my spirits in no small measure. I was in no small measure refreshed in spirit by your grace's hand. From your affectionate letter I received unbelievable pleasure.

SPEAKER_00

Hello, friends, it's Stephen. You just heard Dr. Alex Davis give an example of the type of rhetorical training that Shakespeare would have received at school in the form of saying something very simple. I was pleased to receive your letter in various and copious ways. And that was only round one. He uh during this interview, he goes into round two of how you could take that simple phrase and make it more ornate. I love this interview. I absolutely love this episode, and I'm hoping to do some more episodes like this that would give people access to perspectives on different authors. And I'm happy that this can be the first one. This is great. We're we couldn't get Shakespeare. He was busy, there was a time conflict of several hundred years. So we got the next best thing, and that is Dr. Alex Davis, who is a senior lecturer at the University of St. Andrews School of English in late medieval and renaissance periods. And I don't know, this is a fascinating interview. And there's so much to glean here, whether you're a reader or a writer, but especially if you're a writer. Because a lot of the writing advice that we get now it stems from Strunken White. And it stems from that kind of mid-century basically American period. But there are other ways of writing. Interesting thing I think about poetry is you can appreciate it by reading it on the page. And you can also appreciate it by by hearing it. And hearing a good reader of poetry or an actor. And I think the same goes with any plays that are written in poetry. You can appreciate it on the page or you can hear it. I think this is why audiobooks are becoming so popular. As always, thank you very much for listening. I'm really pleased that our numbers are going up. I'm really happy that people are going back and they're listening to some of our older episodes. Now, you know, though we have older episodes, and that makes me really happy. I know I've been promising it a long time, but it will come. We're gonna do a full transition from Plague Remedy podcast to story podcast for readers and writers. So please, if you'd like to support us, it takes a minute of your time and cost you nothing to follow. To give us a few stars, write a nice review, and send it to somebody, you know, who might be interested in this. Now here's Dr. Alex Davis. Dr. Alex Davis, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me, Stephen. We just start a little bit about you and what you've been doing and what your research is and how you got interested in the period that you study.

SPEAKER_01

I'm a lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews in Northeast Scotland. I lecture in early modern literature, so the literature of the 16th and 17th centuries in English. I got into that when I was an undergraduate. It was the period of literature I liked the most. I went on to study it, did a PhD on it. I'm the author of three books, one called Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance, one called Renaissance Historical Fiction, and one called Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare. And I've just finished off a new one, which is with publishers to see if they'll take it or not, which is about empty space in the 16th and 17th centuries. So from the whitewash walls of Protestant churches to the actual experimental proof of the vacuum in the 17th century to Terranullius, the allegedly empty land that Western Europeans set out to colonize and subjugate in this period. So that's what I've been working on.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, brilliant. What do you think led to you as an undergraduate liking that period?

SPEAKER_01

I think it is to do with the language. The language of early modern literature is extravagant, it's excessive, it ha has a kind of intricacy and an expressiveness that certainly is not missing in other periods, but I think is particularly strongly developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, the early modern period as we call it.

SPEAKER_00

That's interesting, because I think I don't know, my favorite reference. I think of Joyce as having that same type of excessiveness. Yeah. And I think of Beckett and Pinter and all that as having the opposite of they were trying to see how much you could subtract from a text. Whereas Joyce and Shakespeare and whatnot were trying to see how much they could put into.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. There are people in the early modern period who practice brevity, but they're few far between. It's more a case of isolated passages within a wider landscape or copiousness and overdeveloped figuration.

SPEAKER_00

So you made a wonderful promise at the beginning when we were talking and said you could teach people how to write like Shakespeare.

SPEAKER_01

I'm not completely certain I can explain what I meant by it. And it goes to that question of language. The language I noted, the excessiveness, the copiousness of language that I was just talking about is not just a property of Shakespeare's writing. It's something that's shared across other writers from the period. It seems to be in some ways a kind of period style, which Shakespeare is, of course, masterly and exceptional with, but there are features of his language that extend outwards amongst his contemporaries. And I think a lot of the research in the traditions that I have been trained in as a scholar is very interested in how these stylistic features take root in the education that the writers of this period experience. And specifically the school education, so that the grammar schools. That's an institution that almost all of the significant writers of this period have in common. So not all of them go to university. Shakespeare famously does not, but almost all of them have been to grammar school. Those of them who didn't go to grammar school will often have received a similar education at the hands of private tutors. So if you're talking about who doesn't go to grammar school, we're talking principally about women authors of the period, and then also authors who are too poor or too socially inconsequential to go to school. But the majority of the writers we know of from this period all go to grammar school. And when you go to school in Tudor, England, it is not like the schools that I'm guessing you or I or most of your listeners went to unless they were homeschooled in an extremely eccentric environment. Because it's not the case that, for example, you arrive at school in the morning, you do an hour of math, you do an hour of history, then there's a little break, then you do, let's say, half an hour of geography or so on. So the modern curricula of schools are typically partitioned up into subjects. And that's not really the case for early modern grammar schools. Principally what you're learning there is Latin. Latin is the medium or shared medium of expression amongst the Western European elites. And so mastery of it in a sense gives you access to a whole level of culture. So you are, in a sense, doing the kind of exercises that somebody studying Latin at school or university now might be doing. There's actually considerable continuity in some of the exercises. You're simultaneously learning quite a bit about classical culture and literature and history while you do this. So this is an education that bears the impress of something that scholars call humanism. Humanism, as used with reference to 16th and 17th century culture, doesn't really mean, doesn't mean atheism as it does now. It really means a cultural movement that is devoted to the exploration and recovery of classical Greek and Roman antiquity. And recent scholarship is very strongly focused on the pedagogic aspects of humanism, so the way in which it's spread through institutions like the grammar school. So you're learning Latin, you're learning about classical culture, but the other thing you're learning at school are techniques of argumentation and persuasion. So basically you start off in the early forms, and even there, language learning is often structured through dialogue. If you think of when you were at school, you were learning a foreign language, dialogues are often very important because they put language learning into recognizable situations. Learning through dialogues at an early level, and then as you advance up the forms, your mastery of Latin becomes more and more sophisticated. You might ultimately end up doing exercises where in which you have to compose an oration from the perspective of abandoned Penelope waiting for her husband to come home from the war of Troy, or abandoned Dido lamenting the fact that Aeneas has left her in Carthage and sailed off to Italy. You might have to do debating exercises pro et contra. So, for example, we have the school books of Edward VI, child king of England. He's received a very high class humanistic education. So we have examples of him preparing an oration on the theme of whether love is a greater source of obedience than fear. So that's a good Machiavellian theme, whether love or fear attach is uh a populace to its ruler more or less, and that's also a rather good theme to give to a child king. So you're learning techniques of persuasion, argumentation that involve a great deal of attention to the verbal detail of discourse. So all the figures of speech, which you may have heard of, metaphor, simile, metonymy, but also really complicated ones like anti-metaboly, things like that, you will learn to master in the service of a stylistic ideal, which is copia, copiousness.

SPEAKER_00

That's fascinating. What percentage of the population are we talking about that would have gone to grammar school?

SPEAKER_01

Aaron Ross Powell Not a huge amount. So we're talking about kind of the elites here, people who are gentlemen, gentlewomen. The people like Shakespeare and Marlowe are the sons of prosperous tradesmen. So there's a little bit of extension of that social class sort of downwards. And then if you're an aristocrat, you probably don't go to school, you might be tutored at home. But we're talking about a kind of pretty narrow band of the population. This is the privileged and the prosperous girls don't go to grammar school.

SPEAKER_00

Correct me if I'm wrong. Humanism in that period it had to do with classical civilization. But also they were infusing it with whatever version of Christianity that they espoused at that time. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, absolutely. That nowadays, when humanism is almost used as a posh word for atheism, that doesn't really apply to early modern culture. Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch scholar, who's maybe the greatest scholar of the early part of the 16th century, one of his great scholarly projects is a new translation of the Bible, which causes a huge scandal because he translates it differently from the accepted text. No, these are people who are very engaged with their own religious identities. They're frequently engaged in the wars of religion and the religious controversies that spread through early modern Europe in this period. Part of the interest of classical culture for them, I think, is that it is something that they admire, something they want to imitate, but also something that they therefore they feel very ambivalent about because it is a pagan culture. So there is a kind of worm or resistance within their desire to imitate, or there are problems to overcome as they imitate classical culture. And you can maybe see that in much of the literature of this period, which is very interested in pagan cultures. If you think of Shakespeare's Roman plays, or a very famous text, which is not generally very well known, Philip Sidney's Arcadia, which is a prose romance, and it is set in ancient Greece. It doesn't much resemble our idea of ancient Greece. People wear ruffs and farthing gales, it looks quite Elizabethan in some ways. But it is very important to Sydney that's a world that exists separate from revealed Christian religion. So there's a scene in which one of his heroines, Pamela, has to prove that God exists, and she does or attempts to do so from first principles. She has to do it as a matter of deductive reasoning rather than revelation.

SPEAKER_00

Interesting. David Van was on the podcast, and he unexpectedly, he because I don't know, I compare his writing to Steinbeck. Very straightforward. He said, I told him that a priest once told me that if you really want to write English, you have to learn Latin. And he was like all for that. He studies languages, he taught Latin, he has issues with Seamus Haney's translation of Bewel. And that was a fascinating window into somebody I didn't picture as being influenced by ornate writing. So what do you see as the benefits of that and how it shows up in today's world? The benefits of learning to use the language, learning to use the metaphors, to know what the form of a sonnet is, for instance.

SPEAKER_01

So the education that people like Shakespeare received was basically designed to mold civil servants. It was designed to create people who are good lawyers, good private secretaries, secretary being somebody who is attached to, let's say, a nobleman and keeps their secrets, helps them to formulate arguments. It's really designed to produce an educated bureaucracy that can staff the emergent Tudor state. Indirectly, it is quite a good creative writing course in some ways. You are learning these trobes, these figures of speech, and you're also fundamentally learning an orientation towards language. I can give you an example.

SPEAKER_00

Sure.

SPEAKER_01

So one of the great textbooks of this period is by that Dutch scholar I mentioned, Erasmus, and it's called Day Copia on Abundance. And if Shakespeare did not learn at school from this book, he would have learned from something similar to it. And much of the Day copia, your listeners will, I'm sure, be able to find copies of it online, translated into English, is lists of words, of metaphors, of expressions, and so forth. But what he's doing is to teach you, he's teaching you how to write abundantly. And at the end of the first section of the book, he gives you an example, which is he's going to show you what can be done with a very simple phrase. Your letters pleased me very much. In Latin, it's tui literi magma nopere delictoront. And he says, We'll take one or two sentences and see how far we can go in transforming the basic expression into a protean variety of shapes. And what he does is he goes through and explores, for example, synonyms. So for example, there's no synonym for the word your, he says, your letters, but you can use paraphrasis, you can say Faustus, or you could say Faustus' letter. Letter has synonyms, you can say epistle, we can say letter, we can say note, etc. Pleased, lots of synonyms. Delighted, refreshed, exhilarated, etc. etc. He goes on. My spirits, my heart, you can put personify yourself there. Mightily, greatly, intensely, extremely, wonderfully, etc. He goes on. That's just an initial survey. And then what he does is he says, he takes that initial phrase. Your letter mightily pleased me. Variation two. To a wonderful degree did your letter please me. Me exceedingly did your letter please. By your letter I was mightily pleased. I was exceedingly pleased by your letter. Your epistle exhilarated me intensely. I was intensely exhilarated by your epistle. Your brief note refreshed my spirits in no small measure. I was in no small measure refreshed in spirit by your grace's hand. From your affectionate letter I received unbelievable pleasure. You can see how in those early stages of this, which is a list, you're doing quite basic language exercises in a way, you know synonyms, you're moving between active and passive voices, so all those kind of basic grammar exercises that you do. On we go, I'm just going to go down the list. When your letter arrived, you could have seen me jumping for all the joy I felt. That you paid your respects by letter was assuredly a satisfaction to me. Nothing more wished for than that your letters could have been brought to me. Your letter has reached us and eagerly looked for it was, etc. I'm going to go down the letter the list again. I cannot find words to tell the joys that your letter loaded on me, your letter heaped joy on me. I rejoiced greatly at your letter. Further down the list, your charming epistle filled every corner of my heart with delight. Nothing more delightsome than your letter ever came my way. And then the final one, your letter to me was a positive choice morsel for a Persian, as to say, which is a very recondite bit of classical learning, combining Greek and Latin. And at the end of that list, he's given you 150 different ways of saying thank you for your letter. So that is what Shakespeare did at school. As I said, it's there to create a kind of bureaucratic governing class. So you asked about the use of this. Verbal expression and the technologies that develop it are absolutely key to any kind of intricate sort of state formation, I think. Lawyers, bureaucrats, administrators of various kinds, constantly making arguments, communicating with each other. And I think that goes right up into the present day. For example, I have a friend who's very high up in a bank, once did a version of this for a visiting day, and I accidentally put, I have a fiend who is very high up in a bank. So she's deeply implanted in the this Mephistophily and financial structures that govern our world. She's very high up in a bank. She does not want graduates who do economics. She does not want graduates who are versed in financial theory. Banks have those people to do their calculations, but they hire PhDs. There's that film Margin Call where famously one of the bank's analysts has a PhD in astrophysics. What my friend wants is somebody who can send an email that neither offends the recipient nor embarrasses the sender. She wants people who can organize information and put it into legible and persuasive forms. So those verbal technologies are not going away, I would say. They are very crucial to all kinds of interactions. You mentioned poetry. There is a kind of poetics there. It's not a poetics based necessarily on kind of meter. But you can see how Erasmus's list of thank you very much for your letter starts to get more and more imagistic, more and more developed. He's showing you how even a very basic phrase has. This kind of latent potential within it to unfurl outwards in every direction. And that is how you end up with people who write like Shakespeare and his contemporaries who are copious because they've actually been trained at school to manipulate language in way in ways that are designed to unlock its verbal potential and then to argue using that.

SPEAKER_00

I'm thinking the literacy rate was not great. That the spoken word and being able to express yourself in the spoken word was really important. And having been raised Catholic, you say the right words and the sacrament is confirmed, the magic happens. And I do get that idea from Shakespeare that language has magic in it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I think your mention of the Captain Catholic liturgies and maybe the Eucharist as well, the idea that announcing a formula could have a magic effect. There is a lot of scholarship about that. Of course, it's a theology that has been repudiated in Shakespeare's England, but it's often argued that there are residues or relocated versions of Eucharistic attitudes to language to be found throughout early modern culture. Certainly it's a very oral culture. We've been talking about rhetoric. The final two parts of rhetoric, the fourth and fifth parts of the five parts of rhetoric, are memory and delivery. It's a craft that's based around verbal expression. And although the written word is becoming more and more important in this period, yes, it is a highly oral culture. And if I have emphasized Shakespeare's roots in a glatinate elite environment, the other part of what he's doing is a relationship to a world of sort of popular speech and common speech that is also part of what shapes his language.

SPEAKER_00

But I always thought when you read Shakespeare, it's tremendous world building. And it's just because of how he uses the language. Sure. And you always have those classical references that even if they're not common today, you know he's hearkening back to something. And that creates a world, which is a great lesson for writers.

SPEAKER_01

The practices of classical rhetoric are in many ways focused on what you might call world building. So what's echrasis, which nowadays designates the inset description of a work of art, so the shield of Achilles within a poem, something like that. In rhetorical theory, it simply means the vivid description of a scene or event in a way that makes it come to life. And so you're taught how to map out a scene ecrastically through vivid and resonant detail. So there's an understanding that what makes world building, as you've called it, successful is not the exhaustive description of its object. Okay. I I will uh refer here to the science fiction and fantasy author M. John Harrison, who is notable for his utter contempt for world building as it is practiced in the genres he enjoys, and I entirely agree with him. What that kind of worldbuilding that you often get in fantasy novels, where you have a map, you have a glossary, that is an attempt to substitute a bureaucratic apparatus for the evocative potential of language. It's a kind of imaginative impoverishment. And True Egg phrases works through resonant details that evoke a world that extends beyond what they themselves specify. And that is one of the things you're taught in classical rhetoric. So, yeah, world building. So many critics who have written about Shakespeare's plays in a tradition that is now thoroughly despised, a bit in the 19th century, would fantasize what was the childhood of Cordelia like? What was Rosalind like when she was brought up? Othello's early career in the army, and then famously, how many children did Lady Macbeth have? But those are I think that those are questions that are not well regarded in literary criticism now because they seem to be substituting a kind of biographical fantasy for an actual account of the language of the play, but that they are responding to the kind of echrastic suggestiveness of these texts, that they create characters with depth and complexity where you could, even if slightly pottery, spec speculate about what child what the childhood of Cordelia was like. You can speculate about the world that exists beyond the margins of the text.

SPEAKER_00

And when we think of logic today, I think we think of something much more symbolic and mathematical. And we don't think of language. So what was the relationship with logic and language then?

SPEAKER_01

Aaron Ross Powell You're doing a lot of logic in the Renaissance, but maybe in a slightly different way from the Middle Ages. So there's a very good book published, I think, last year or the year before about this by Karen Ettenhuber, who teaches at Cambridge, called The Logical Renaissance. Now it used to be said that in the Middle Ages everyone is obsessed with logic. So if any of your listeners have read Umberto Echo's medieval detective story, The Name of the Rose, one of the things that gets absolutely right is the way in which medieval people are medieval monks, at any rate, are extremely familiar with different form logical formats, extremely engaged with logic. That doesn't go away in the Renaissance. If you look at rhetoric handbooks, they will often be talking about things like syllogisms, not logical formats like that. But there is maybe a reorientation in the sense that the interest in logic is as a part of argumentation more than it is as a tool of philosophical inquiry, if you can see the distinction. So if you are Thomas Aquinas, you may think, maybe a little bit like Philip Sidney's Pamela, that you can prove the existence of God and map out an entire system of theology simply using logic. Whereas if you're at the Renaissance grammar school, you're learning techniques of logic as a part of argumentation. That is, and this is the other thing I should have mentioned earlier when I was talking about the grammar school, that is ungrounded in a way. So the idea is that you're being taught all these verbal techniques. You're going to go out, you're going to become a lawyer, a mayor, a private sector, whatever. And you'll use your powers of persuasion to persuade people to do virtuous and effective things. And the great problem with this theory is that there is absolutely no guarantee that you will use your powers for good, really. And I think there's no s no coincidence that a lot of early modern literature revolves around this gap in early modern theories about argumentation persuasion. So if you think of the most characteristic villains of early modern literature, so unlike Richard III or Iago, or indeed Milton Satan, they're persuaders. Their villainousness doesn't lie in any kind of physical prowess. It lies in their ability to turn the world upside down using techniques of language and argumentation. Even somebody like Macbeth, let's say, who is a great soldier and a great warrior, he is a self-persuader. He's somebody who is persuading himself to do terrible deeds. So a huge amount of the literature of the early modern period can be understood as thinking through the question of what happens if you are really interested in logic and rhetoric and argumentation, but only as instruments that can be directed towards pursuing contingent aims rather than, let's say, the truth in the way that Thomas Aquinas might be pursuing using them to pursue it.

SPEAKER_00

Interesting. You think about modern forms of persuasion, which are completely divorced from what you're trying to persuade somebody for. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

You see it nowadays. People are in you go to debating societies, which are, in a sense, a late ancestor of some of the techniques taught in tutor grammar schools and universities. The whole idea is that you don't care about what on which side you are arguing. You simply must argue effectively.

SPEAKER_00

Was that the attitude in the grammar schools?

SPEAKER_01

That grammar school education, I guess every theory of education probably has a massive gaping hole in it somewhere. Which the people involved in that educational system are maybe only peripherally aware of. So I would say that if you went to school to grammar school, it would probably look to you extremely disciplinary, there'd be a lot of beatings, and also extremely moralistic in many ways. So you are being taught to be a good little boy. But at the same time, the kind of techniques that you're being taught are fundamentally untethered to and there is no essential reason why rhetoric or logic needs to be deployed in the service of this argument or that one. Many of the training techniques you're taught, like pro-contra disputation, are in a sense amoral. And then once you leave school, you are, if you are a successful student, maybe going to be sucked into the patronage structures of the Tudor State, where, let's say, Lord Burley will employ young Stephen as a secretary and say something one day like The Queen is thinking of going to war with France. I want a policy document telling me why I should do it, or a policy document telling me I should not do it. So there is something amoral. You're just being asked to provide opinions. And as I say, a lot of the literature of the period is circling around that essential gap.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it sounds pretty much like Catholic school, which got thrown out of. To being immoral or trippy and annoying, I think. And I didn't want to go to Catholic school.

SPEAKER_01

Congratulations though.

SPEAKER_00

So that's how I got out of it. But so how do we how can somebody the first thing first thing also I did some acting and the first play I was ever in was a Midsummer Night's Dream. And I was snug the joiners. I was a really small part, I was the mechanicals. I was I got into it. I was so lucky to be introduced to it that way that you heard people speak the language, you were speaking the language. That's my entry into Shakespeare. And I've loved it ever since. How does somebody get into it now where it seems almost more difficult to do so? I think I think we have first of all, you type something in nowadays, and if you don't shut it off, and when you shut it off, it turns back on, and something tells you you could say it like this. Okay. Which is usually a a not copious, let's say, it's usually uh an abbreviation of it. And the way we text with each other and use emojis and all that. It's a different I won't say it's a worse use of language, though I think it it's a different use of language. So that the wordiness of Shakespeare or even Joyce could seem overwhelming to some people.

SPEAKER_01

Sure. I think that the difference is the appeal, surely. I think you're right that copia is not the stylistic ideal of our modern world and has not been for a long time. But the way we teach people to write and we teach them what good writing is writing often, that is clear, direct, unambiguous, a sort of strunken white style. Yeah. Certainly when you're writing kind of technical or explanatory prose. But in terms of the imagin the imagination and what kind of is stimulated and what's fascinating, I think the the any all the past styles, not just those, those of the early modern period, but of romantic literature and Victorian literature, which are being operated by different stylistic ideals and agendas, they hold their appeal in their very difference. I think with Shakespeare, you're right to feel that the sound of the language is very important. This is both a kind of written and a written language that is in a lot of contact with other contemporary European vernaculars and the ancient languages, but it is also very much in contact with the ordinary speech of people or of Shakespeare's England, so it has a kind of popular quality to it, a common and popular quality to it, as I think I said, that gives it an appeal and that I think will retain it it its appeal in its very difference from the kinds of language that are promoted both with within academia and sort of canons of good writing, but also if you were referring to various electronic aids, the the language generators of our own age, they are extremely stylistically bland.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and and I'm wondering what that does to people's this is uh maybe a little bit tangent, but what that does to people's thoughts if you're typing something in and something else gives you the language for it. Something else gives you what you want to express. There's a real fine line between using a tool that's going to maybe help you express yourself better. But And using the tool actually shapes what you're thinking.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think probably we have not yet to take a full estimate of what large language model devices are doing to people. That will probably become gradually apparent over the next decade or so. I think on the whole the effects are probably not very good. That if you rely on an artificial assistant to generate words from you for you, your own ability to produce words is correspondingly going to be diminished rather than enhanced. So all those techniques that I was talking about, which are mechanical in some ways, but they are about developing your own verbal resources. There are technologies that support early modern humanism, like the commonplace book we write down notable sentences, techniques for marking up text. But there are the ideal is ultimately that you should be the person who can come out with discourse and who can argue any position at any moment. Erasmus talks about rhetoric as a kind of portable well. Better better than actual money in your pocket, money in your purse. The ability to address yourself effectively to any circumstances through effective speech. And yeah, I think you would have to worry that people who prop themselves on chatbot, their own abilities to develop language will atrophy correspondingly.

SPEAKER_00

Which can be real death to a writer. Yes. Whatever whatever kind of form you want, because i even if you're writing in a very minimalist sense, you need to know what to keep, and you need to know what you can throw away. And you need to know that there's possibilities between those two.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, I think cool things are worth doing, but is important.

SPEAKER_00

And that's why I think it's exciting what you were talking about. How Shakespeare you can get into the language and it will help you.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So we talked about the grammar school and kind of the elite education. But Shakespeare has just permeated. It permeates our language, it permeates the stories we tell. People are doing all kinds of adaptations with it. Why don't we talk about a little bit about the popular culture?

SPEAKER_01

Sure. Great. Yeah, so Shakespeare is not just the prob probab the product of an elite humanistic education. He is somebody who is writing a kind of popular drama. So the playhouses of early modern London, they're urban, they're vulgar. The city authorities are regularly trying to cut to close them down. They're in a zone of London called the liberties of the city. Those are zones that are beyond certain kinds of legal jurisdictions. They're not law-free zones. Neither are they exactly red light districts or anything like that. But if you look at where the theatres, the bear baiting pits were in early modern London, they're in places like the South Bank of the Thames or Shaw Ditch. That they're in these sort of slightly seamy zones of the city. Players are actually, technically speaking, vagabonds in early modern law. They have to be attached to a nobleman's household if they're not to be arrested as people who are out of place. Just writing literature in English is not very well regarded in this period. English is a minority language in early modern Europe. Nobody speaks English if it's not their mother tongue, basically. Nobody looking at this period would guess that English would be a dominant world language 500 years later. There are ambassadors to the court of Henry VIII who do not speak English. Why would you? So the situation of being an early modern English man or woman, I think it's probably a bit a little bit like being Dutch nowadays, if you've ever been to the Netherlands, everyone's impeccable English and has not a very high expectation that you're going to be speaking much Dutch to them. So they're much more in contact with other languages. But literature in English, therefore, does not have a very high reputation necessarily. Part of the project of early modern literature is, if you like, to prove that English can be as suitable a device for sorry, a medium for expression as Latin, Greek, French, Italian, etc. When Ben Johnson, Shakespeare's contemporary, published in 1616 a volume entitled Works, it was his collected plays, he was ruthlessly mocked. Because it's you get to have a volume called Works or Opera if you are Virgil or Homer or you're safely dead and have been for several hundred years for a living playwright, somebody working in the playhouses in English to publish a volume called Works, scandalous. So it is a kind of vulgar institution, the theatre. It's full of ordinary people who are the groundlings. Shakespeare's plays are, I think, very much in touch with the popular culture of the day. There are references to traditions about goats, there are references to traditions about fairies in a midsummer night's dream. There are references to May Day celebrations, wits and tide, twelfth night celebrations, various kinds of popular festivity. And in terms of the language of the play, plays, one of one kind of very important stratum of it is a kind of proverbial level. So we make proverbs out of Shakespeare phrases from Shakespeare. It's one of the ways in which Shakespeare's spread through Anglophone culture. So phrases like to the manorborn or etc. etc. methods to his madness and so on. Shakespeare has become a source of proverbs, but actually, in terms of his own language, it has a kind of proverbial dimension to it. Nothing can come of nothing, says King Lear to Cordelia. And that is a very old kind of semi proverbial saying. All's well that ends well, the title of another play. So that there is a level to the language of the plays that is engaged with the day to day vernacular. of his kind his kind of rep ordinary contemporaries in early modern London.

SPEAKER_00

How were plays created? Because plays are I mean plays are more of a collaborative effort in a lot of ways. How were plays created in this early modern atmosphere and how much of that were collaborations?

SPEAKER_01

As you say, any play is a collaboration. In fact many plays just at the level of authorship were collaborative. So there's a great deal of interesting research that has been done over the last two decades about shared authorship in the early modern theatre. Sometimes it's very explicit so if we look at you look at a play like The Two Noble Kinsman, that's jointly attributed to Shakespeare and John Fletcher, Pericles is jointly attributed to John Wilkins and Shakespeare. But it's actually thought that in a more kind of granular level there are bits of other authors in Shakespeare. So bits of Thomas Middleton in Macbeth, bits of authors like Thomas Nash in the Henry VI plays it does seem that collaborative authorship is a pretty regular practice in the early modern theatre even before you get to the point of having to adapt those scripts for performance and insert them in into the the sphere of performance. I think 20 years or so ago now there was a book by Lucas Ern called Shakespeare as a literary dramatist, which made the argument that a lot of the texts we have or Shakespeare's plays are not directly related to the performances of those plays. So if you look at contemporary references to how long a Shakespeare play lasts so for example the prologue of Romeo and Juliet refers to the two hour traffic of our stage that's a pretty standard timing. You would struggle I think even if you were an Elizabethan actor there's often an idea that Elizabethan performance styles are pretty rapid you would nonetheless struggle to get through a lot of early modern plays in two hours. So the assumption I think has to be that a lot of these plays are being cut and modified in and that therefore the route between the play text that we have and actually went on in the theatre was indirect.

SPEAKER_00

And that's to this day and yeah cut things and change things all the time.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah sure but if you read let's say a review of the play, a contemporary play, the review will say oh director Stephen decided to cut the important scene in Act 3 scene two and that's as if that was a very unusual intervention by you. So there's not quite the idea that these original texts themselves were there to be repurposed and shuffled around and modified. It's more as if the idea that the Shakespearean text that comes down to us is solid and indestructible like the monolith from 2001 and then the director comes along and performs his or her vainglorious mutilating changes and I think that's not quite the case.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah and what we the influence I think on the oral to actually to sit there as a writer and hear your words spoken by presumably good actors of course there's nothing more excruciating than it going to a Shakespeare of a bad Shakespeare play I think how do you think that influenced the actual writing and the manuscripts that we ended up with Shakespeare himself was an actor I think I would struggle to give a good answer to that.

SPEAKER_01

I'm not a theatre person myself I was very pleased when that Lucas book came out it validated everything about how I approach Shakespeare. It's interesting the the stylistic evolution of Shakespeare is not necessarily towards a kind of clarity. So if you think of a late play like The Winter's Tale people often talk about how the language of Leontes in particular the tormented jealous husband of the Winter's Tale how that language is almost indecipherable at points. It makes very little sense if you put it down on the page and try to read it and or at least to pass it out grammatically. So it is a language that is hugely expressive I think it's and it's expressive on the page but it may be that it's perhaps a language that has been evolved in relation to lessons from performance and the playhouse about how strict canons of grammatical regularity and sense making are not necessarily effective communicators and that what most effectively communicates a state of mind might be tangled, chaotic or illegible. I think that's a lesson that one could come to sit simply through the kind of internal evolution of a writing style but involvement with playhouse performance could very plausibly drive that perception.

SPEAKER_00

What would you say to somebody when somebody says I can't get into it or I don't understand it. In a lot of ways I think people are saying what makes me feel stupid. But it just makes you feel stupid that maybe it's something you haven't encountered before. What would you say to somebody who's intimidated to sit down and read Shakespeare or to see a play or even to read poetry itself.

SPEAKER_01

It's a tricky question. Mostly of course in my professional life I'm encountering people who have voluntarily declared a willingness to go off and read difficult things. But I think one thing to acknowledge is that a lot of that that sense of intimidation and repugnance is well grounded I think the insertion of Shakespeare into a kind of industry a pedagogic industry a cultural industry is repellent in some ways. I have very little time for Shakespeare adaptations, movies about Shakespeare, novels about Shakespeare, etc I don't care for them at all. The erection of the text into a kind of cultural monument that has to be venerated is yes, I I think gross, disgusting how often do you hear an author say that they have been influenced by Shakespeare? You sound like a maniac if you say that but of course that's absurd. If he is one of the best writers you should be influenced by him but you sound like a megalomaniac if you say that and very few people say it. So there is something unnatural and distorting about the placing of Shakespeare beyond all other authors and the other thing to say is that yes the language is difficult. But I think the difficulty is rewarding the complexities unfurl into patterns of great interest and eloquence and expressiveness. But also that there is a kind of comprehensibility that many people who appreciate and love Shakespeare are not understanding everything that happens in the Shakespearean text. So it goes up back to that point about Leonty's speeches which are uh indecipherable in some ways and yet very expressive so I guess letting go of some of the anxieties about fully understanding something and mastering it might be one first step in learning to appreciate something that I think does communicate even without the artificial assistance of kind of students additions and notes and so forth and teachers such as myself who are all there to help you get through it.

SPEAKER_00

But you know there seems to be for literary text for literature there seems to be more of a stigma of difficulty I think because it's difficult to learn the guitar it's difficult to learn any sport but yet it's a rewarding and great thing to do. Sure. So I gotta ask you about I I'm thinking of something now probably something you never heard of or maybe you have there's this college that was started in Savannah Georgia recently Ralston College and it's backed by it's not an accredited school it's backed by all these conservative forces. Okay and their idea there is this idea that they're going to you know teach Western culture. So they're gonna teach people Greek and they're going to teach people Latin and they're probably teach people Shakespeare or whatnot. It's I think it's 67000 US dollars a year. It's not cheap and then you get a degree that's not even even certifiable which amazes me. But the point why I'm bringing that up is there is a certain type of thing at least I think it's coming back that Shakespeare and this and that Trump talked about us Western people writing operas. I don't think Trump's ever even been to an opera and the use the political use of Shakespeare as as a as actually a racial thing. This is what great white people have written sure and and there is a book there is a book about the white man's bard I believe a book about that. And yeah and I think it has to do more about how Shakespeare's taught than Shakespeare himself.

SPEAKER_01

But what's your take on all that I guess the baseline I take is that people who talk at great length about Western civilization often show themselves not to be as fully acquainted with its products as they might be and certainly not with the complexities of its products. It's a longstanding thing Shakespeare is a famous he's an eloquent writer people of course want to attach themselves to him so when I was growing up barely a Tory party conference would go by without somebody citing some speech or other from Shakespeare most notoriously there was an occasion in which the possibly multiple occasions in which the speech on degree from Trolus and Cressida was used. So that's a speech by Ulysses about the necessity of order and gradation and hierarchy this is everything that people at the Tory party wanted to hear. But of course famously it's ripped from one of Shakespeare's most cynical and unpleasant plays which is all about how Ulysses is a deceiver, Agamemnon is an empty bag of wind, the war at Troy is futile and pointless. So when I was an undergraduate and then a PhD student there was a lot of work being done about sort of radical Shakespeare's firstly thinking about kind of adaptations of Shakespeare that work in very different ways. So for example let's say the films of Derek Jarman which are often direct dialogue with those conservative appropriations of Shakespeare. But then also thinking through the kind of political stances of Shakespeare himself which are often indecipherable and difficult but if you think of the early modern period is one of the great periods of political theory the 50 years on either side of Shakespeare's life the periods in which people are thinking the most extraordinary and original things about our forms of collective existence and trying to theorize them in different ways. They're a period in which the states of Western Europe are undergoing extraordinary internal transformations and then yes you have this mode of the external projection as power and force in into these allegedly empty lands, the Terra nullius that is quote unquote discovered in the in the New World and elsewhere. So I think that yes the attempts to claim Shakespeare for some kind of homogeneous block of quote unquote Western history I mean that they are themselves that they are cynical and empty and betray a lack of acquaintance with what they are discussing very often. And really what they're doing is they're endowing their students with a kind of cultural capital, probably a kind of ability to talk with some plausibility about Shakespeare on Monday and Michelangelo on Tuesday and Plato the day after that. But probably not truly to engage with the complexities of those thinkers and artists because as soon as you do that firstly the idea of the homogeneity of any kind of Western tradition unravels and secondly because the complexities of those writers and thinkers, writings and thoughts, even if they are very conservative people and very reactionary people as many of them are, nonetheless are comp are s they are complexities that are sufficiently intricate and odd to resist their easy mobilization for the forms of political argument that these people would like to recruit them into. You can't go too deeply into them in some ways, if you want to make that kind of choice. And so you end up with people like various people in the political structure of the current United States administration. I'm I doubt if the current president is that deeply red. But people around him are at least superficially red in various forms of political theory and the in theology I'm pretty sure that they have, let's say, a superficial acquaintance with the political thought of Carl Schmidt, the Nazi jurist who sh is or was of intense interest to certainly not to George W. Bush probably not even necessarily to people in his immediate circle but to the people who are talking to those people who are talking to him that that there are always attempts to mobilize these thinkers to provide arguments yet again for current political actions not this time shall we invade France but shall we start a war with Venezuela? Shall we start deporting American citizens? Shall we do this? Shall we do that?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah so always our second to last question what are two books and two other things that you'd recommend?

SPEAKER_01

Oh well thank you this is tricky for me Stephen I have a very negative personality and actually recommending things goes against the grain. But the novel I most recently finished and hugely enjoyed was Sylvia Townsend Warner's The True Heart as it's the last Sylvia Townsend Warner novel I hadn't read and it turned out to be one of my favorites I think it's an excellent story about a 19th century orphan. It's also a version of the myth of Cupid and Psyche. It's very extraordinarily written it read to me a little bit like a Hayomiyazaki movie in some ways. Enjoyed it greatly and then I think the second one I'll recommend a novel by M. John Harrison, the science fiction and fantasy author who I mentioned earlier recently re-released an earlier novel of his, The Course of the Heart to heart-based novels I do not know how quite how to describe the Course of the heart but it is one of the most extraordinarily written books I've encountered. It's a very disagreeable read in some ways but a very fascinating one too and two other things that can be almost anything. Of things that I enjoy I enjoy going for walks. I thoroughly recommend it for those of you listeners who are capable get out have a walk is where much of my thinking gets done and also not thinking simply clearing the mind and striding about and then the other thing I would like to recommend to your listeners is the rest of 16th and 17th century English literature that is not written by William Shakespeare because due to that cultural hegemony referred to earlier he squats on my life like a bald buzzing hypnotoad and takes up a huge amount of my time and although I love his plays and his writing I think that there are many other extraordinary writers from this period who also deserve a little bit of their time and could usefully be engaged with that's great.

SPEAKER_00

That's great. And yeah John Burnside was also a big I believer in walks to clear your head and to write he said most of his poems were composed when he was out walking. I can't claim to have composed anything is wrong but yeah but no but it's a great it's a great way to think article or two something like that. Dr. Alex Davis thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01

Hugh thank you Stephen