Category Archives: Literature

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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Arts, Books, History, Literature

Book Review: Reckonings

HOLOCAUST

Intro: Up to a million people were involved in the extermination of Jews in Hitler’s death camps, yet only a paltry 6,600 were convicted

THE recent publication of Reckonings, Mary Fulbrook’s monumental account of the attempt to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice, is propitious in its timing. It coincides with the rise in anti-Semitism.

The British historian has already won acclaim for her earlier work, A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis And The Holocaust. This latest volume deserves awards, too.

As with all detailed work related to the Nazis’ programme of exterminating the entire European Jewish population, a prospective reader should be warned: the depravity described is almost impossible to read. It is disturbing.

But it is a sense of deep injustice, as well as horror, that will eventually overcome readers of Reckonings. Its main theme is how the overwhelming majority of those involved in the murder of an estimated six million men, women and children were either never brought to justice or were dealt with so leniently that it amounted to the victims being gravely insulted.

Fulbrook estimates that “perhaps 200,000 people, and possibly closer to a million, were at one point or another actively involved in killing Jewish civilians. And the ranks of those who made this possible were far wider”.

The solitary name of Auschwitz has become almost synonymous with the Holocaust and the mass murder of Jews, but there were around another 1,200 “sub-camps” spread across the Reich.

Yet, out of a total of 172,294 participants prosecuted, only 6,656 were convicted. And the overwhelming majority of those actually found guilty received sentences of less than two years’ imprisonment.

One reason for that was the astonishing efficiency of the Nazis’ methods. As Fullbrook duly observes, the West German courts, originally charged with bringing the perpetrators to justice, needed witnesses but “the more perfect the extermination machinery, the less likely the murderers were to be found guilty”.

For example, there were only two known survivors of the Belzec extermination camp, where an estimated half a million people had been gassed – and one of those survivors was killed in suspicious circumstances before he could give evidence.

Only one person, Josef Oberhauser, was convicted, in Munich in 1965, in connection with this mass slaughter.

 

THIRTEEN of the 14 witnesses called to testify in court were former SS personnel. But as Fulbrook writes, were “hardly likely to want to incriminate their former colleagues and in the process risk incriminating themselves”.

In general, the West German courts would acquit those who could make a case that they had little choice but to perform their role in the mass murder (though there are no records of anyone who was punished for refusing to participate).

Claims by many of the perpetrators that they had done their best to make the victims’ final moments more bearable were also treated as a mitigating factor.

The 1966 trial of Walter Thormeyer, a former SS Hauptscharfuhrer, provides a vivid and grotesque example. His deputy, Rudi Zimmermann, one of the miniscule number to display remorse and who actually turned himself in, told the court that, on the occasion of mass killings: “Thormeyer appeared to prefer shooting the female Jews personally… with a certain relish.”

In fact, Thormeyer had a Jewish mistress, but when he feared that this (a crime under Nazi law) would be discovered, he took her for a walk in some woods… and shot her in the back of the neck.

The judge declared that this was a token of Thormeyer’s “consideration”, and the act “humane” – because his mistress had been spared the knowledge that he was going to kill her.

Thormeyer was, at the time of his trial, an official in the West German court system and, as Fulbrook observes, one reason for the general lenience of the sentencing (Thormeyer himself got 12 years) was that the entire German legal bureaucracy was riddled with ex-Nazis.

The idea that the extermination camps were killing Jews “humanely”, by using gas, rather than bullets, was invariably suggested by those put-on trial afterwards, most notably Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz.

In his memoir, he wrote how “humane” this was: “I was relieved that we would be spared all these bloodbaths, and that the victims too would be spared suffering until their last moment came.” Such concern for the victims. Pah.

It was solely out of concern for the killers that mass shootings were supplanted by gassing. The splattering of the brains of women and children was said to have had a deleterious effect on the morale of all but the most depraved German (and, indeed, Austrian) executioners. And it was anything but a humane killing: the very use of the word in connection with mass extermination is itself utterly repulsive.

 

DURING one of her – thankfully rare – accounts of what actually happened, Fulbrook provides citation from one involved in the gassings at Treblinka, Chil Rajchman (whose main job was extracting gold fillings from the dead): “During their death agonies from asphyxiation the bodies also became swollen, so the corpses form literally a single mass.”

He observed that there were differences between the bodies recovered from the smaller and larger gas chambers: in the smaller chamber, death took 20 minutes, whereas in the larger chambers, it took three-quarters of an hour.

Corpses from the larger chambers “were horribly deformed, their faces all black as if burned, the bodies swollen and blue, the teeth so tightly clenched that it was impossible to open them”.

Which, as Rajchman observed, made his job of pulling out all those gold crowns even more difficult.

This is the process whose vast majority of active participants the post-war German courts exonerated on the basis that they were “only obeying orders”.

Yet, as Fulbrook summarises it, “obeying orders” was only one element.

There were also “varying combinations of careerism, cowardice, conformity, fear, lust, brutalisation, hopelessness”.

She adds to that list “desire for reward”. For yes, there were takings to be had from the desperate Jews, before exterminating them.

Obviously, modern-day Germany is not that of the immediate post-war period, when self-preservation and shame combined to hide and conceal the truth.

Yet, during 2018, the head of the increasingly popular Alternative for Deutschland party (AfD), Alexander Gauland, declared the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis to be just “a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of glorious German history”.

Mary Fulbrook, or any reader who is repulsed at such comments, should send him a copy of her book.

. Reckonings by Mary Fulbrook is published by OUP for £25, 672pp

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Arts, Books, Literature

Recommended Biographies…

SUMMARIES

. Robert Graves by Jean Moorcroft Wilson (published by Bloomsbury for £25, 480pp)

ALONG with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves was one of the great poets of the First World War. Graves was born in 1895 and when war broke out a week after he left school, he enlisted aged 19.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson describes his troubled schooldays at Charterhouse and the horror of the war, during which he was wounded and reported dead. He survived, and, whilst he was haunted by his experiences, married 18-year-old feminist artist Nancy Nicolson.

The first volume of Moorcroft Wilson’s finely researched biography concludes with the scandalous end of Graves’s marriage, when he and American poet Laura Riding – who had been conducting a turbulent, four-sided relationship with Nancy and Riding’s married lover – threw themselves out of the upstairs windows of their Hammersmith house.

. Becoming by Michelle Obama (published by Viking for £25, 448pp)

FOR most of us, making a toasted cheese sandwich would be almost the least exotic thing we could do. But for Michelle Obama, after eight years in the White House, sitting in the garden of her own house and eating toasted cheese felt like “my new life just beginning to announce itself . . . Here I am, in this new place”, she writes in the preface to her autobiography, “with a lot I want to say”.

Born into a working-class family in Chicago, she studied at Princeton and became a lawyer at a prestigious Chicago law firm, where she mentored a geeky summer associate named Barack Obama. When they bought ice-cream cones one summer evening and kissed for the first time, Michelle had no idea of the destiny that would one day find her bonding with the Queen over their uncomfortable shoes.

Warm-hearted, funny, passionate about social justice and movingly candid about the problems of being a politician’s wife, Becoming is as compulsive to read as a great novel.

. On Leopard Rock by Wilbur Smith (published by Zaffre for £20, 368pp)

FROM his early childhood years and onwards, Wilbur Smith’s twin passions have been hunting and writing. The secret of both, he observes, is tenacity. Smith was born in 1933, in what is now Zambia, to parents who would inspire his future career in different ways. His father, Herbert, was obsessed with hunting (when Wilbur was a child, Herbert shot three man-eating lions), while his mother, Elfreda, was a passionate reader. Shelves of books lined the walls of their ranch house, and every night she would read to Wilbur in bed.

Soon he was determined to become a writer himself, an idea that his father vigorously opposed: “You’ll starve to death,” he predicted.

Uninhibited by the political correctness he detests, Smith’s memoir is a rollicking yarn of slaughtered wildlife, literary superstardom and late-blooming love. “I won’t stop writing until I stop breathing,” he promises.

. Not The Whole Truth by Angela Huth (published by Constable for £20, 320pp)

“SUDDENLY I am old”, writes the journalist and novelist Angela Huth, author of Land Girls. She was born in 1938, the daughter of the director and producer Harold Huth and his wife, Bridget. While Angela adored her father, her mother was “bored stiff by small children”, leaving Angela and her sister to be looked after by a devoted Nanny, who did her best to conceal their mother’s penchant for gin: “Oh dear, poor mummy fell down the stairs last night.”

Haphazardly educated at a girls’ boarding school, Angela studied art in Paris and Italy before returning “to face the dotty business of becoming a debutante”. A longing to write led her to Queen Magazine, where she met the brilliant journalist Quentin Crewe, who would become her first husband. There ensued an intensely glamorous Bohemian social life, with friends including David Frost and Princess Margaret, who shared Huth’s unusual phobia about dolls.

Deliciously gossipy and trenchant, Not The Whole Story is an entertaining collection of stories from times past.

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