More Trouble

There's a play called Sir Thomas More.  It is never performed, despite having bits in it written by Shakespeare.  Every Shakespeare play is performed.  Even the rubbish ones.  Except Sir Thomas More.  Sir Thomas More is never performed, ever.  Not any more.

Why?

Actually, in academia and the theatre world, it is well known how the play spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in its wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in Sir Thomas More, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterward with more awful effect.

Basically, anyone who has ever seen Sir Thomas More performed has gone insane.  (I'm not sure how the actors managed to stage it, but there you go.  Perhaps actors are immune for some reason.)

But it's worse than that.  Anyone who has even read the whole thing in its entirety has gone insane.

There are asylums stuffed with academics, Shakespeare scholars, students of Early Modern drama... all slavering and gibbering and banging their heads against their rubber-padded walls, chewing off their own fingers, sitting in their own faeces and happily eating it, because of this play.  There are multiple known cases of people slaughtered (usually with screwdrivers for some unfathomable reason) by people who have seen or read Sir Thomas More and immediately gone on wild-eyed killing sprees.

Most people, of course, have only read the Shakespeare bits.  Because no other dramatist of his time was any good at all.  But even reading a part of this play can drive one partially insane.  For instance, there are many who will attempt to claim that Shakespeare's scenes in the play constitute a message of humanistic tolerance for refugees.  In the scene, More attempts to reason with a xenophobic crowd who are hellbent on driving back some asylum seekers.  More asks the crowd to imagine themselves in the position of the refugees and... shit I nearly did it myself there.  This insanity in insidious.  The mere iteration of the intact Shakespearean contribution integrated into the play instantly insinuates itself into my interiority and instigates incipient irrationality which instantiates itself into the imagination and iii iiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.......



Sorry.  I'm back now.

Yeah, as I was saying.  Otherwise sensible people will i-i-imagine that Shakespeare is making a humanistic plea for tolerance of strangers, which can then be adopted sentimentally by modern liberals.  Actually, what he's doing is demonstrating the shit ignorance and fuck selfishness of ordinary people, the mob, who need to be lectured on basic Christian morals by Sir Thomas fucking More... who was, in the real world, a religious bigot and fanatic who persecuted and tortured people he disagreed with.  But no, to Shakespeare, mindless hate is the province of the poor.  The point More makes to the baying crowd of vicious, swinish, hateful and hate-filled Tudor Daily Mail readers is that they, by assembling and protesting and speaking their minds, are themselves doing evil by rebelling against the sacred law and rule of the king.  Imagine, he says to them, if the king banished you for your treacherous disobedience - as well he might justly do.  Then you'd be in the same position as the refugees.  Ah-ha!  Gotcha, you oiks! 

This isn't a modern liberal plea for tolerance.  This is sanctimonious propaganda for an absolute monarchy based on utter contempt for ordinary working people.

I say this as a fan: STFU Shakespeare.

Just thinking about it makes me mad.  But madder still do I get when I think about little snatches of it - which sound terribly humane when consciously and cynically ripped out of context - being embossed on tatty notebooks for sale as part of the Shakespeare industry, all part of the bullshit attempt to sell Shakespeare as sage and saint and precursor of everything that we today egotistically think of as our advanced widsom. Of course, the irony is that, when we flatter ourselves that Shakespeare was just like us because he foresaw so much of our liberal tolerance, we're actually getting something right for the wrong reasons.  We are very much like Shakespeare.  We're still producing drama that reflects the dominant ideology of our age, the ideology of the ruling class, just as he did.

I personally think that most dementias associated with Shakespeare - and there are so many specifically Shakespeare-related forms of mental illness that there really should be more serious psychiatric work done on the subject - stem, fundamentally, from the play Sir Thomas More.  It would be easy to blame Shakespeare - the fountainhead of so many psychotic delusions - for adding the insanity to Sir Thomas More via his contribution.  I think it's the other way round.  I think Shakespeare is infected with contagious insanity via his association with that play.  Even his early plays are retroactively infected with the virus.  (This, incidentally, is also the root cause of both anti-Stratfordianism and the Ricardian Society.)

This peculiar effect is key to understanding why and how Sir Thomas More came to be written in the way it was.  It is a collaboration between various dramatists.  This was extremely unusual for the time.  Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle appear to be the main authors but, in addition to Shakespeare, the play was also partially written by Thomas Heywood and Thomas Dekker.  Remember that Monty Python sketch about the world's funniest joke?  It killed anyone who heard it?  So in order to translate it into German and thus turn it into a weapon usable against the Third Reich, the British Army had to break it up into bits and get it translated in fragments?  Even seeing more than one word would land you, screaming and suffocating on your own guffaws, in the field hospital?  That's actually an encoded secret clue - given to us by Terry Jones, who is a direct descendant of Thomas Dekker, probably - about what happened with Sir Thomas More.  They tried to write a play about More and it gradually became apparent to them that doing so would drive them insane, so they split the play up into bits and asked different writers to tackle a bit each.  Even so, the overall effect was still enough to make them think they could get the play past the Tudor censors.  (I believe it came back to them with "Thou hast gotteth to beeth fucking kiddingeth, thou naughty knaves!" scrawled on it in the Master of the Revels' handwriting.)

Even today, anybody who tries to write anything about Thomas More goes mad.  Peter Ackroyd went mad after he wrote a biography of More.  (I mean, have you read Thames - Sacred River???  That could only have been written by a mad person.)  Even Hilary Mantel went mad simply as a result of including More as a character in the Wolf Hall novels.  (Then she went sane again, admittedly.)  Robert Bolt went mad too, I expect.  I can't be bothered to look it up and check.  But I know that the people who made the movie of A Man For All Seasons went mad.  They must've done because they later came to think it would be a worthwhile thing to do to remake it with Charlton Heston instead of Paul Scofield.

So, yeah.

Also, it's a shit play.

Reviewing Doctor Who Episodes Without Having Watched Them: 'Listen'

This is, of course, another episode that all the usual Moffatistas praise to the skies.  Well, that's fair enough.  All the Moffaty things they love are here.  Again.  And what on earth could possibly be wrong with wanting to watch exactly the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again?  I mean, Moffat makes lots of money writing the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, so obviously repetition is good, right?  Stands to reason. 

Also, such is the religious devotion that certain people have to this man that nothing thrills them more than yet another episode where Moffat sticks his hand up Doctor Who's arse and rearranges its guts to his liking... or (perhaps a better metaphor) meticulously works his way through a library of classics, scribbling 'Steven Moffat is cleverer than the person who wrote this' over every page.  And he is, obviously, because he gets big viewing figures and makes lots of money from being a Whovian capitalist.  The definition of artistic success, clearly. 

Reviewing Doctor Who Episodes Without Having Watched Them: 'Robots of Sherwood'

I saw 'Deep Breath' and 'Into the Dalek'.  Then I stopped watching Series 8.  Welcome to the first in a new series of posts in which I will be revewing the rest of Series 8 without having watched it.


Mark Gatiss, that arch-trickster of modern Doctor Who, has done it again.  In 'Robots of Sherwood' he has managed to dupe everyone into thinking he is doing nothing more than simply paying homage to the classic series, while actually flying something far more profound under the fan radar.  Yes, he has armies of robotic Merry Men stalking around Sherwood Forest, their eyes glowing red, holding out their hands and saying "Kill the humans" in calm voices, but that's where the similarities to 'Robots of Death' end.  For a start, these robotic outlaws are the good guys, cleansing the greenwood of the forces of law and order.

The triumvirate of villains in this episode - the Sheriff of Nottingham, Sir Guy de Gisbourne and King John - represent the power of the Norman state, and Robin Hood is a symbol of Saxon resistance.  It's fitting that they should use a CGI Patrick Troughton to play Robin, since the Second Doctor was always the most anarchic and rebellious, and there's always been something of Robin in the character of the Doctor.  The CGI is a bit wobbly here and there, but generally it more than adequately captures the nuances of Troughton's acting style.

The extended use of quotations from Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Labriola, Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, Victor Serge, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Christopher Caudwell, Bakunin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Maxim Gorky, Adorno, Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and Brecht liven up the episode no end.  It's quite remarkable that the BBC should choose to devote such a long stretch of an episode of their flagship family entertainment show to a scene in which various characters learnedly debate revolutionary theory.  But the brave decision pays dividends.  I particularly enjoyed Jenna Coleman's readings from Minima Moralia.

Jenna is the star of the show here, especially in the scene where she verbally disembowls the Sheriff when he quotes from various sociobiologists, most notably E. O. Wilson.

However, at the end of the day, Gatiss is playing yet another trick on us - albeit a fascinating one - when he launches his extended mediatations on the hermeneutics of revolutionary theory and the radical Enlightenment.  What he's really up to is a critique of the whole concept of metafiction.  By having his characters display a lumpenly obvious and clunky self-awareness of their own historico-mythic quasi-fictionality, he tackles head on the banality of the pop-postmodern obsession with texts which are reflexively self-referential.  (There's also, I believe, an encoded critique of Steven Moffat here... I know he and Gatiss don't get on.)  This ties in with the way in which the functional adequacy of the CGI Troughton implicitly lays bare the limitations of the original actor.

Gatiss' ultimate project for Doctor Who becomes clear in the powerful mix that he creates for 'Robots of Sherwood': a subversive political radicalism joined to a total rejection of the strategy of the self-involved and the self-referential. 

In this respect, the golden arrow thudding into the chest of the gigantic steampunk Friar Tuck (Colin Baker) is a stroke of brilliance.  We know what we're meant to take from this.  Cybermen, 'The Time Warrior' and the Sixth Doctor are invoked, only to be shot down.  Doctor Who's legacy is raided from the rich and given to the poor.  Bravo.