Category Archives: Culture

Arts, Culture, History, Philosophy

Profile vignette: Voltaire

THE LIFE OF VOLTAIRE

FRANCOIS MARIE AROUET was born in Paris, the son of a civil servant, Francois Arouet. Voltaire was educated at the principal Jesuit college in France, which he left at the age of 17. He was intended to enter a career as a lawyer, but the idea repelled him. His father became concerned at the dissipated life he was leading and permitted him to enter the service of the French ambassador to Holland. Unfortunately, the young man misbehaved there too, conducting an undiplomatic affair with a French Protestant in The Hague, so he was sent back home again.

His return to the lawyer’s office was short-lived. He wrote a notorious satire on a rival who won the poetry competition for an Academy prize. In 1716 he was suspected of satirising the regent, the Duc d’Orleans, and he was banished from Paris for several months. The following year he wrote a savage attack on the regent accusing him of a range of crimes, and this resulted in his imprisonment in the Bastille for a year.

In the Bastille, he wrote his tragedy Oedipus and assumed the pen name “Voltaire”. The play was performed in 1718 and it was a triumph. Voltaire’s next dramas were less successful. He devoted himself to a poem about Henri IV. Because it championed Protestantism and religious toleration, the authorities refused to allow its publication. Voltaire was not that easily defeated though; he had the poem printed in Rouen and smuggled into Paris.

By now Voltaire was a well-known and popular figure at court. He was denounced by the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot as an upstart. Voltaire inevitably responded by circulating scathing epigrams about the Chevalier, who had Voltaire physically beaten up. Voltaire challenged the Chevalier and was again imprisoned. He was freed only if he agreed to leave France. He left for England in 1726.

In England, Voltaire encountered many interesting people including Alexander Pope, the Duchess of Marlborough and John Gay. He also immersed himself and soaked up English literature: Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and the Restoration dramatists. He became interested in the philosophy of Locke and the science of Newton.

Allowed back into France in 1729, Voltaire behaved with more circumspection, trying not to offend courtiers and wisely investing in the government lottery, which led to his increasing wealth. The patronage of Madame de Pompadour procured him the illustrious post of official royal historian. A piece of ill-placed flattery by Pompadour made the queen jealous and Voltaire was once again forced to leave France. This time he travelled to the court of Frederick the Great. By 1750, he was in Berlin as the king’s chamberlain on a huge salary. But, once again, and in customary style, Voltaire caused offence by writing satirical criticisms and was ejected. He was stopped at Frankfurt by a representative of Frederick the Great, who demanded the return of a book. Voltaire characteristically retaliated by writing a malicious character sketch of Frederick, which was not published until Voltaire’s death.

In 1756–59, his pessimistic poem about the Lisbon earthquake appeared, Customs and the Spirit of Nations. The Lisbon earthquake was a great natural disaster in which earthquake, fire and tsunami followed one another in remorseless succession. Was this a demonstration that there was no presiding God looking after human welfare? Was the human race alone in the universe? Whatever the views expressed it was, in a sense, the dawn of humanism – and certainly a landmark in the Enlightenment. He then wrote his masterpiece, Candide, a satirical short story ridiculing the philosophy of Leibniz.

Then, in an almost natural order, the first of Voltaire’s anti-religious writings appeared. In 1762 the Protestant Jean Calas was falsely accused of murdering his son to stop him converting to Catholicism. The judicial killing roused Voltaire to establish the man’s innocence, and he made great efforts to rescue the surviving members of the Calas family from further persecution. This and similar efforts made on behalf of victims of French religious fanaticism won widespread admiration. He even set up a refuge for persecuted Protestants.

Voltaire was a friend of Rousseau – until Rousseau decided to throw his support behind the Swiss government. In 1778, when he was 83, Voltaire was given a “royal” welcome in Paris when he arrived to mount a production of his last tragedy, Irene. The excitement of this reception was too much for him, and he fell ill and died. After the Revolution, Voltaire’s body was buried in the Pantheon, recognised as one of the great figures of European culture.

RECORD: SUMMARY

Born 1694, died 1778

French author

. Propagated the view that saw the Lisbon earthquake as evidence that there was no presiding God looking after human welfare.

. Embodied the 18th century Enlightenment.

. Satirised aristocrats, kings and philosophers.

. Rebelled against religious intolerance and injustice.

. Championed and gave refuge to persecuted Protestants.

1718 – Oedipus

1723 – The League or Henry the Great

1738 – Elements of the Philosophy of Newton

1751 – The Age of Louis XIV

1759 – Candide

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Arts, Culture, History, Literature

Short Essay: Shakespeare’s Plays

(1590–1612)

IT WAS VERY soon after the beginning of his acting career that William Shakespeare started writing plays of his own. Shakespeare was remarkable in many ways, but perhaps the most remarkable is that he was immediately successful. There is no surviving sign of any “apprentice work” that is substandard or unworthy of performance, which is really quite extraordinary. He wrote historical plays that were from the start finely written, immensely popular and commercially successful, the three parts of Henry VI (1592). The theatre impresario Philip Henslowe wrote in his diary that “Harey the vj” played to packed houses at the Rose Theatre between March and June 1592.

The young Shakespeare’s triumphant debut on the London stage was not universally applauded, and there must have been many who were envious of his ability. In September 1592, a frustrated writer called Robert Greene wrote a pamphlet called Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance. This included a ranting attack on an “upstart crow”, a “Shakescene”. It must have been audaciously galling for Greene to see Shakespeare make an immediate hit with his very first play – rather like the composers Igor Stravinsky and William Walton being extremely irritated by the success of Benjamin Britten.

His first seven years in the theatre included several other successes too. He completed two more history plays, King John and Richard III, a revenge tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and three comedies, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. So, by 1592, William Shakespeare had attempted to write in each of the three most popular forms of drama of his day – and succeeded. Not only that, he had extended their range, and made his own highly original contribution to each genre. The play-goers in London must have been very aware that a dazzling new talent was at work, eclipsing even Christopher Marlowe, then generally thought to be the best playwright of the era.

For two years in 1592, the London theatres were shut because of plaque. While the theatres were shut, Shakespeare turned his hand to narrative poetry, writing the long and extensive poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece (a dedicated letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he promised to compose a “graver labour”. The play has a serious tone throughout). These poems were highly praised for their eloquent treatment of classical subjects. He wrote many sonnets too at this time when plays were banned, and these were in private circulation by 1598.

When the theatres re-opened in 1594, Shakespeare joined the acting company The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and soon became its joint manager. The company had made quite a clever and shrewd choice by inviting Shakespeare in as a “sharer”. Up to this point he had been a freelance, and any theatre company could perform his plays; now, though, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had his exclusive services. Shakespeare had his financial security; the company had his plays.

There then followed a torrent of great plays: a tragedy (Romeo and Juliet), three more histories and five more comedies.

When James I came to the throne in 1603, Shakespeare’s company became The King’s Men, and this change in status brought great benefits to the company. His later plays included tragedies such as Hamlet and Macbeth, plays that rank among the darkest ever written. Shakespeare crafted his later plays so that they could be performed in open-air theatres like The Globe, but now also indoors in the great halls of great houses, where artificial lighting and more elaborate stage effects were possible. Shakespeare was always an intensely practical man, well able to adjust to changing technical conditions – and changing fashion. Tragi-comedy (or romantics) was a form of drama now much in trend, so Shakespeare supplied it. These “last plays”, as they are known, included Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

Shakespeare’s prolific play writing have seen 37 of his plays surviving (while several more have not). The Tempest shows a thinly disguised Shakespeare taking his leave of the stage. He formally handed over the role of The King’s Men dramatist to John Fletcher and retired in 1612 to Stratford, where he died four years later, on 23 April 1616. In 1623, two of his closet friends in the King’s Men – John Hemminge and Henry Condell – assembled all the plays and published them in what is referred to as the First Folio. It was not just a tribute to the greatest playwright of the age, but it saved the plays from extinction. Without that timely publication, many of the surviving plays would have been lost.

Shakespeare was the outstanding playwright of the Renaissance, outshining all his contemporaries and setting new standards for all subsequent dramatists. His plays range widely in subject and tone – challenging histories loaded with political agenda, atmospheric and romantic comedies and the darkest of tragedies. His work is astonishing for the richness and beauty of its language, showing the full potential of the English language for the expression of thought and feeling, building on the weight and majesty that William Tyndale had brought to it a few decades earlier. It also shows great insight into a wide range of human predicaments. Shakespeare’s plays exemplify the questioning humanism of the Renaissance.

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Britain, Culture, Government, Society, Technology

Whose job is it to keep us nice online?

SOCIETAL: SOCIAL MEDIA

Imagine and visualise a debate that you’ve just had on stage at the Cheltenham Literature Festival concerning a neat little modern conundrum: ‘Is social media the curse of our age?’ Imagine, too, that you and your fellow panellists have agreed that it probably is. In this scenario, should you, or should you not, tweet about it?

We would assume that people normally would. But maybe you would be unsure. What would be your motivation? Would you be publishing an event that you’d found fascinating? Quite likely. Or would you just be craving the sort of “like”-induced serotonin surge you and your fellow panellists had just been talking about, given your addiction to social media networking? What demons were ruling you? What damn tech tricks made you feel that you ought?

And so it goes viral after comments from the Festival audience stick with you. The young woman who saw social media as the vector of the eating disorder she suffered from as a teenager, but who now was using social media platforms to rebuild her sense of self-worth. The older man who, after tweeting in support of Boris Johnson’s comments on burkas, had been shocked to find himself subject to an onslaught of fury, including people trying to get him sacked. Or, another man, say, active on platforms but tired of competing with screens for attention and convinced that the world around him was narcissistic and utterly crazy.

There might be a sense of social media acting the heavy beast squatting upon all our shoulders, forever seen in the corner of an eye. It might also be an overdue reminder that your own thoughts about all this can get a little lofty. Yet, we could trot out the gotcha about the billionaire moguls who run these platforms banning their own children from using them, even while marketing them to yours. We could talk for hours about the damage being done to the fabric of our democracy.

For most people, however, concern about social media has nothing to do with any of that. Instead it is about obsession and compulsion. It is about self-worth and self-harm. It is about friends and relatives developing new violent politics that seem to have come from nowhere. It is about teenagers living their lives as a constant performance on apps that their parents barely comprehend, for audiences that they can scarcely imagine. It sits in the lives of many as an ever-grinding mill of misery, even when they cannot imagine life without it, and they feel that something must be done.

 

EARLIER this year the Government let it be known that it was working on a white paper of proposals to tackle the nebulous business of online harm. Matt Hancock, then culture secretary, declared that Britain was to become “the safest place in the world” to be online. You’ll maybe understand the urge of ministers and can probably see where this is going: “something must be done”. But does this rule out making anyone less fearful?

In some areas, certainly, legislation is desirable and overdue. Criminal hate speech, libel, grooming, copyright violation, fraud and violent radicalisation are all areas that technology companies should be taking far more seriously. We really should have no objection to them being forced to do so. Likewise, there is growing evidence that the chemical hits of serotonin, dopamine and adrenaline that drive online behaviour creates a dependency culture, in the manner of nicotine or cocaine. The notion of a cigarette packed-style warning on your Snapchat or WhatsApp might seem ludicrous today but it could become a necessary measure to help improve physical and mental wellbeing.

The pervasive public miseries of social media, though, are more low level. They involve not hate speech but vitriol and nastiness; not extremism but political polarisation; not libel but rudeness and disrespect. Not grooming, even, but sexualisation. They involve, in other words, forms of speech that today are free and uninhibited, and where the government almost certainly plans to make less free.

Who will complain? Feel the way the wind blows. The public sees a harm and worries about it. Paradoxically the users of social media are increasingly censorious, blocking undesirables and avoiding certain platforms. In parliament, the very bedrock of democracy, you have a cohort of MPs radicalised against popular free speech by some 100 tweets a day threatening rape or murder, or by calling them traitors or fascists.

Many will wish that social media giants should be policing themselves more effectively, yet simultaneously doubt they ever will. Tell those same people that the state ought to do it instead and they will balk, hard. You will remember the instinctive illiberalism of so many politicians in the Leveson battles over press regulation. You might be feeling it is coming back.

Next time, when it’s those hated tech behemoths who pilfer the revenues from traditional media organisations, will even the press be prepared to put up a fight? They must. Like it or not, what was true with the press is even more true for social media. Except in areas of outright criminality, liberal democracies do not curb your freedom of expression. They may fret about it, lambast it, implore others to close their ears. Yet the moment they shut it down they are liberal no more.

This fight is coming. It is likely to be ugly and all the nicest people will be on the wrong side. Trolls, those ugly creatures who once lived under bridges, now reside right behind the screen you’re looking at. Prowl they will. But you have a choice.

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