MEDICINE AND LETTERS
THEODORE DALRYMPLE
‘That Shakespeare,’ a German friend of mine once said to me, ‘knew a thing or two.’ You can say that again. Sometimes, indeed, I think he knew everything, at least everything about human nature. When a religious fanatic tells me that this or that holy scripture is all I need as a guide to life, I reply with a single exclamatory word, ‘Shakespeare!’ He even knew about — or perhaps I should say, anticipated insurance and social security fraud. At any rate, they would not have surprised him, or an attentive reader of him.
I suppose that the three parts of Henry VI are by general consent not among his greatest works (if, indeed, they are his, which some deny, and not only Baconians and Oxfordians). Yet Part 2 has illumination in it for those who have what Pasteur called, with regard to the favours conferred by chance, the prepared mind.
For example, anyone who has frequented criminals as much as I have will recognise the truth of the Duke of York’s bitter words: Pirates may make cheap pennyworths of their pillage, And purchase friends, and give to courtezans, Still revelling like lords till all be gone ...
As for the man who is robbed, who according to the modern police is the true author of his own downfall, in that he failed to take enough precautions to secure his property, he merits not our tears: ... the silly owner of the goods Weeps over them, and wrings his hapless hands, And shakes his head, and trembling stands aloof, While all is shared and all is borne away...
Serves him jolly well right, then.
When the court has removed to St Albans, an impostor called Saunder Simpcox is brought before it. Allegedly blind, as well as paralysed in the legs, he claims to have had his sight restored at the shrine of St Alban, and the crowd (never much admired by our national poet) shouts ‘A miracle!’ The Duke of Gloucester soon traps Simpcox: Gloucester: ... What colour is this cloak of?
Simpcox: Red, master. Red as blood. Gloucester: Why, that’s well said. What colour is my gown of? Simpcox: Black, forsooth; coal-black as jet.
Gloucester then calls Simpcox the lyingest knave in Christendom, for ‘Sight may distinguish of colours, but suddenly to nominate them all, it is impossible.’ And then he says that ‘Saint Alban here hath done a miracle; and would ye not think his cunning to be great, that could restore this cripple to his legs again?’ Simpcox replies, ‘O master, that you could!’ And Gloucester turns to the burghers of St Albans and asks, ‘Have you not beadles in your town, and things called whips?’ The whip wielded by the beadle soon restores strength to Simpcox’s legs, for, as the stage direction puts it, ‘He leaps over the stool and runs away’, the crowd exclaiming, ‘A miracle!’ As everyone knows, Britain is no less a land of miracles than it was in Shakespeare’s day. Of course, the medical miracles now occur in the opposite direction. Millions of unemployed are turned, at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen, the modern equivalent of the beadle’s whip, into cripples. As the people of St Albans put it, all those years ago, ‘A miracle! A miracle!’
Previous page
