Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  11 March

  Following the defeat of the French in Egypt, the British army presents the Rosetta Stone to the Society of Antiquaries in London

  1802 The Rosetta Stone, so called because it was discovered in the Egyptian port of Rosetta or Rashid, is one of the most popular exhibits at the British Museum, where it has been kept for over two centuries. From a few feet away it’s not much to look at – a lump of dark grey granite measuring 3 feet 9 inches high and 2 feet 4½ inches wide. It’s what’s on it that makes it remarkable. The same message is given three times over: in Greek; in the Egyptian demotic, or vernacular; and in hieroglyphics, or the sacred writing used by the priestly caste.

  Before French army engineer Captain Pierre-François Bouchard discovered the stele in the summer of 1799, modern knowledge of hieroglyphics was limited to a few fragments. Now here was a sizeable chunk of a language known to everyone with a liberal education – between 1,600 and 1,700 words in the English translation of the Greek – enough to unlock a wide variety of the puzzling symbols.

  What was found – by the English physicist Thomas Young and the French scholar Jean-François Champollion, perhaps the greatest natural linguist of his generation – was that the hieroglyphics worked in two ways: phonetically and as pictograms. The picture writing was clear enough: the outline of an ibis stood for an ibis. But it could be read abstractly too, as when a crescent could stand for the moon and also a month, or the diagram of a reed and tablet, for writing or even a scribe. The phonetic hieroglyphs worked synthetically, each element contributing a sound based on the name of the thing pictured, which, added to the other ‘letters’ in the ‘word’, gave the sound (not the picture) of the thing or concept represented.

  How exciting was the message, once deciphered? Alas, not very. It dates from 196 BC, the first anniversary of the coronation of the thirteen-year-old Ptolemy V. It’s bulked out with flattery along the lines of ‘O King, live for ever’, in which is embedded a priestly decree thanking the king for his favours shown, in such a way as almost to imply he’d better keep up the good work:

  King Ptolemy, the ever-living, beloved by Ptah, the god Manifest and Gracious, the son of King Ptolemy and Queen Arsinoë, the Parent-loving gods, has done many benefactions to the temples and to those who dwell in them, and also to all those subject to his rule, being from the beginning a god born of a god and a goddess.

  The benediction in return for a benefaction gets down to particulars, with reference to the revenues both of silver and of grain bestowed on the temples, in return for which ‘the gods have rewarded him with health, victory, power, and all other good things, his sovereignty to continue to him and his children for ever’ – so long as he keeps the moolah coming.

  12 March

  The author of the nation’s anthems is born in Covent Garden, London

  1710 Anthems – whether national or not – often come of unexpected antecedents. ‘La Marseillaise’ was set to a tune from Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 25, by a royalist who narrowly escaped the guillotine. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, a poem about the American flag surviving a night’s bombardment by the British navy, was set to a popular English drinking song. The origins of ‘God Save the King/Queen’ are lost in history, with the words echoed in a Biblical salutation and an old Royal Navy oath inviting the response ‘Long to reign over us’, and the tune popping up in medieval plainsong, a 1619 keyboard piece by John Bull, and a Scottish carol, ‘Remember O Thou Man’.

  Where it all came together, oddly enough, was in the post-Restoration metropolitan theatre. In 1745, The Gentleman’s Magazine published ‘a new song set for two voices’, ‘God Save our Lord the King’, ‘as sung at both playhouses’, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden. The catalyst was the landing in Scotland of James Francis Edward Stewart in pursuit of the Jacobite claim to the British throne, and his defeat of George II at the Battle of Prestonpans on 21 September 1745. In London, players, managers and audiences alike thrilled to Thomas Arne’s setting of the anthem at Drury Lane (see 24 February).

  Arne, born on this day in 1710, had cut his teeth on the music for a masque first performed for Frederick of Hanover, Prince of Wales, son of George II, at his country house, Cliveden, in 1740. Entitled Arthur, the spectacle rested on a preposterous analogy between King Arthur and Frederick, both reposing in their rural retreats ready to sally forth and restore the nation to ‘liberty, virtue and honour’. The high point of the performance was the first outing given to ‘Rule Britannia’, with lyrics by David Mallet and James Thomson. Later, Arne expanded the music of the piece, turning the masque into a full-blown oratorio, to be performed first in Dublin and then again at Drury Lane.

  Why was it that ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’, drawing on obscure traditional sources, first emerged as patriotic songs during the 1740s? Was it because the experience of being ruled and threatened by foreign monarchs concentrated the country’s collective mind on its national identity? And why should those solemn anthems have first been voiced in the metropolitan theatre – and that of a distinctly ‘light’ variety? Perhaps at the Last Night of the Proms, when the groundlings dress up in funny costumes, blow hooters and shout ‘Rule Britannia’, they are not engaged in some postmodern parody, but behaving squarely within the tradition of the song’s performance.

  13 March

  A play is anathematised, a movement is born

  1891 Ibsen had written his play Ghosts in 1881. Although the ‘pox’ figures often enough in Renaissance and 18th-century literature, Ibsen’s work was the first time that syphilis had been realistically – horrifically – depicted on the British stage. The British stage was not ready in 1881. It was ten years before, to evade the heavy hand of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship, a ‘members only’ performance was mounted in London, on 13 March 1891.

  This was a period when venereal disease was a major public concern (particularly its debilitating effect on the armed services), and legislation – the notorious ‘Contagious Diseases Act’, introduced in 1864 – permitted the forcible incarceration of women diagnosed diseased (but not men). The Act had been repealed, amid controversy, in 1886.

  The attack on Ghosts was led by the Daily Telegraph drama critic, Clement Scott, who declared it (in a much echoed diatribe): ‘An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open … absolutely loathsome and fetid … Crapulous stuff.’ Not the kind of thing that theatres proclaim on their pavement placards. Scott went on to anathematise Hedda Gabler as a display of ‘appalling selfishness’ (a strange, but typically moralistic, objection).

  Scott (1841–1904) embodied the core of West End theatre conventionalism. He had been the leading drama critic in England for going on 30 years, and had been on the Telegraph since 1871. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he routinely took a stern moral line on what he reviewed. He was plausibly suspected of having too close a connection with actor-managers – notably Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree (Scott was married to the sister of George Du Maurier, the dramatic adaptation of whose Trilby made Tree’s fortune). Accusations of his being too close to what he was supposed to offer objective judgement on, and receiving what amounted to bribes, led to a libel trial in 1882 (which Scott won) and a cloud of suspicion that was never dispersed. Scott, it may be said, had no interest – intellectual or financial – in the old theatrical order being shaken.

  Shaken it was. ‘Ibsenism’ (under the manifesto of G.B. Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism), and the leadership of William Archer, became a movement that eventually brought the English theatre into the 20th century. Scott was not in post to see the turn of the millennium. In 1897 he was fired from the Daily Telegraph for having declared in an interview that the acting profession led, inevitably, to immorality among actresses. And, presumably, lots of VD.

  14 March

  Mrs Beeton, arbiter of household management, is born

  1836 For more than 140 years Isabella Beet
on laid down the law on how to manage servants and cook for minor royalty in her perennial, though much revised, Book of Household Management, still being given routinely as a wedding present right up to the end of the last century. The first edition covered the full hierarchy of household staff, from the housekeeper, who should ‘rise early, and see that all the domestics are duly performing their work’, through the butler, to ‘wait upon the family’ at meals, ‘assisted by the footman’, to the coachman, groom and stable boy.

  Then there was advice on how to throw a grand dinner party, on what ‘legal memoranda’ to keep about the house, on how to make up inexpensive prescriptions at home for common ailments, even how to bleed a patient struck with ‘the strong kind of apoplexy’ when a surgeon wasn’t available – and recipes, recipes, recipes: over 900 pages of them. Recipes for fish, fowl, game, calf, veal, pork and ‘common hog’, lamb and mutton, vegetables, breads and sweets of all kinds: desserts from puddings to pastries took up six chapters.

  For all that, you need to forget what you thought you knew about Isabella Mary Beeton. She was not a stuffy, middle-aged Victorian housewife; for that matter, the book itself is not the guide to social mores in the Victorian era that it’s often claimed to be, since almost no one – least of all its author – really lived like that.

  The real Mrs Beeton was an intelligent journalist with her eye on the main chance, married to a publisher. They lived in a semi-detached house in Pinner, attended by one maid (a virtually universal complement of labour even in lower-middle-class homes before the Second World War) and a part-time gardener. Together they would commute to work on the train, at a time when married, middle-class women didn’t do that – he to manage the publishing business, she to edit and write for the various women’s magazines financed by the fortune he had made on a pirated edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (see 20 March).

  She was prone to miscarriages. Of her three live births, the first died at three months, the second at three years, and the third killed her – of puerperal fever – at the age of 28. On this evidence, and having been granted access to her papers, her biographer Kathryn Hughes has worked out that she almost certainly suffered from syphilis, contracted by her husband from prostitutes and communicated to her on her wedding night.1

  Her death was kept a secret for as long as possible, says Hughes. The publishers of her immensely successful book didn’t want her readers to know that the woman they turned to for advice on everything from a chesty cough to a light sponge cake had failed to create a nurturing domestic environment for herself.

  1 Kathryn Hughes, ‘The sickly Mrs Beeton’, The Times, 8 October 2005.

  15 March

  The Ides of March: Julius Caesar is assassinated

  44 BC When he enters the Capitol on that fateful morning, Shakespeare’s Caesar meets the soothsayer who had warned him to ‘Beware the Ides of March’. ‘The Ides of March are come’, he quips. ‘Aye, Caesar; but not gone.’

  This encounter comes straight from Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, as do the portents the night before the murder: thunder and lightning, Calpurnia’s bad dreams, the augurers failing to find a heart in the sacrificed beast (Plutarch’s list runs on to include ‘multitudes of men all on fire’).

  So what does Shakespeare add to the historical account? He takes a series of events, already ‘dramatic’ in the newspaper sense, and shapes them into real drama. Caesar is killed in the Capitol, rather than the Theatre of Pompey. The assassination, the competing speeches in the Forum by Brutus and Mark Antony (missing in Plutarch), and the reading of Caesar’s will all take place on the Ides of March, whereas the murder, the funeral and the will are spread out between 15 and 20 March in Plutarch.

  It’s those great speeches that schoolchildren used to have to memorise, and for the good reason that – despite all the portents – they determine the characters’ fortunes thereafter. Brutus (a much more ‘honourable man’ in the play than in its source) painfully sets out his dilemma: ‘Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.’

  Antony cloaks his true intentions from the outset, saying that he ‘comes to bury Caesar, not to praise him’, then – harping on the phrase ‘honourable man’ with increasing sarcasm – proceeds to play the crowd, refusing to read Caesar’s will, moving them to pity and rage at the sight of the corpse, then calling them back to hear the will after all, when they start off on their tour of mayhem. In all, Antony gets 135 lines to Brutus’s 47 (in the last seven of which he is politely introducing Antony to the crowd). It isn’t fair, but it’s politics. ‘Now let it work’, says Antony. ‘Mischief, thou art afoot. / Take thou what course thou wilt!’

  A curious footnote on the date. When Caesar’s own reform of the Roman calendar came into force, the Ides of March fell on the 14th, not the 15th of the month.

  16 March

  Lytton Strachey declines to do battle

  1916 The Military Service Act of this year meant that even male Britons as unlikely as Lytton Strachey were eligible to serve in the forces. Strachey was duly summoned to an ‘Advisory Committee’ on 7 March, where he stated his conscientious objection. It was not, he insisted, a religious objection, but ‘moral’. He firmly believed this war to be ‘profoundly evil’. The committee made no judgement, but referred his case to a tribunal at Hampstead Town Hall on 16 March. The hearing took place at 5.00pm and was public. Attending were prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group, of which Strachey was a luminary, and his sisters.

  Strachey placed a ‘light blue air cushion’ on the bench before seating himself, and spread a rug across his knees. The examination then began (the following description is from Michael Holroyd, Strachey’s biographer). The military representative on the committee began by asking:

  ‘I understand, Mr Strachey, that you are a conscientious objector to all wars?’

  ‘Oh, no’, came the piercing high-pitched reply, ‘not at all. Only this one’.

  ‘Then tell me, Mr Strachey, what you would do if you saw a German soldier attempting to rape your sister?’

  Lytton turned and forlornly regarded each of his sisters in turn. Then he confronted the Board once more and answered with gravity:

  ‘I should try and interpose my own body’.

  Unsurprisingly, the Board were not amused, and the question of exemption was adjourned until Strachey had undergone medical examination. The doctors confirmed that he was wholly unfit.

  Strachey found the experience rather thrilling. As he said: ‘For a few moments I realised what it was like to be one of the lower classes.’ It was not, however, an experience that he took any care to repeat.

  17 March

  Marx waxes literary over the Crimean War

  1854 Of all the Marxists, the most literary – in taste and breadth of reading – was Karl Marx himself. Had he not made his name in economics he might well rank as a literary critic of some note. Not one to keep his learning in separate compartments, Marx mustered a barrage of literary allusion to vent, in the New York Daily Tribune, 17 March 1854, his disgust at the War Debate in the British Parliament of that week, committing the country to join with imperial France against Russia in the Crimea:

  A singularity of English tragedy, so repulsive to French feelings that Voltaire used to call Shakespeare a drunken savage, is its peculiar mixture of the sublime and the base, the terrible and the ridiculous, the heroic and the burlesque. But nowhere does Shakespeare devolve upon the clown the task of speaking the prologue of a heroic drama. This invention was reserved for the Coalition Ministry. My Lord Aberdeen has performed, if not the English Clown, at least the Italian Pantaloon. All great historical movements appear, to the superficial observer, finally to subside into farce, or at least the common-place. But to commence with this is a feature peculiar alone to the tragedy entitled, War with Russia, the prologue of which was recited on Friday evening in both Houses of Parliament, where the Ministry’s address in answer to the Minister’s message was simultaneously discussed and unanimously adopted,
to be handed over to the Queen yesterday afternoon, sitting upon her throne in Buckingham Palace.

  Marx (who had been in England for only five years, and whose reverence for Shakespeare had been acquired in his native Germany) had complex views on the Crimean War. He was impressed by the solidarity (particularly among the British working classes). He loathed tsarist Russia, and was – with reservations – in favour of anything that might do it damage. As the war progressed, he noted the cooling of the bourgeoisie’s enthusiasm ‘as it began to affect their purse’. In the end, it all came down to capital.

  18 March

  Philip Massinger joins the eminent literary company in Southwark Cathedral

  1640 Outside Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey the most glorious gathering of the literary dead is to be found in the louche South Bank premises of Southwark Cathedral. There are literary monuments (plaques and windows) to John Bunyan, Lancelot Andrewes, Samuel Johnson, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer. And, of course, Shakespeare, whose brother Edmund is buried there. Also buried there is Shakespeare’s collaborator, John Fletcher, and a rival dramatist of his later years, Philip Massinger (interred on this date). Had Shakespeare himself died in one of the regular plagues of the early 17th century he too would, it is certain, have found his resting place here – a few hundred yards as it was from the Globe.

  Massinger deserves to be better known than he is. He was born in 1583 in Salisbury, the son of a landed MP and fellow of Merton College, Oxford. Little is known of Philip Massinger’s life – it is uncertain, for example, whether he was married or widowed in his adult years.

  It is known that he was at St Alban Hall, Oxford in the early years of the 17th century, and at least one source records that he was distracted from his studies by a passion for poetry, romances and drama. He left without a degree, around the time of his father’s death in 1603. It is speculated that thereafter he was, for a while, an actor or ‘player’.