What would Shakespeare have said of the foot-and-mouth mess?
PAUL JOHNSON
Hard to remember a time when so many of us have been so depressed. Is it the endless rain? Is it the foot-and-mouth outbreak, with images of heartbroken farmers and smoke drifting up to an angry heaven from the hecatombs of healthy animals? Or the emerging evidence of government incompetence on a scale I cannot remember in half a century of following politics? All of these things and more? I weep for Old England being hustled unceremoniously off the stage which it dominated so long by a succession of misfortunes, crass changes and an invasion across our White Walls on a scale unknown since the English themselves came in the 5th and 6th centuries. The farmers formed one of the last bastions of Englishness, with all its virtues (and faults), its stubbornness, constancy and pride, lit by lightning flashes of genius, its ability to combine love of the past with cunning craft to shape the future. Now they are stricken, not, I trust, unto death but in a way their forebears would not have thought possible. And no
sympathy from our ruling oligarchy 'a tightly knit group of politically motivated men', to quote their former leader Harold Wilson. Throughout the farmers' agony, New Labour's thoughts have been obsessed with managing the news, party advantage and winning the election, thus securing their places, perks, patronage and power to throw polluted payoffs to their porky pals. What a scene of physical and moral desolation! Never has Old Gaunt's speech in Richard II seemed more apt. Old England, as New Labour rides high in the polls, 'bath made a shameful conquest of itself.
The grandeur of these old history plays, written almost half a millennium ago, but still mightily relevant, has never seemed more poignant. I have been rereading them in these dark days, hugging to myself the fact that, while our enemies may take away everything else, Shakespeare remains, indestructible. I hear some hollow laughter there, do I not? There are nasty little theatre directors who are quite prepared to torture and twist these magical texts to make a squalid splash. Yes; but sometimes the splendid Shakespearean truth comes through pristine. One trumpet blast I shall remember with joy this silent spring is the RSC's production of Henry IV, Part Two which I saw at the Barbican last week. It is rarely performed, though it contains what I think is the best scene Shakespeare ever wrote (Act H, Scene iv). My memories of this diptych go back to the end of the war, when I saw the memorable Old Vic revival of Part One, with Ralph Richardson as Falstaff, Sybil Thorndike as Mistress Quickly and Olivier as Hotspur. He played it with a stammer to add pathos to his dying words, 'No, Percy, thou art dust, and food for . . . wwww... ' Prince: 'For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart!' I was a 16-year-old schoolboy with just enough for a seat in the gallery, and queued in a noisy, wisecracking scrum of Londoners, just as Charles Lamb had done 150 years before. I was third in the queue when the box-office man announced, 'Only one left — the last seat in the house.' The couple in front of me hesitated. fatally — should they split up and one of them go in? So the box-office man said, 'Right, lad, it's yours,' and I clambered joyfully up the narrow wooden stairs to Elysium. I had the pleasure, many years later, of reminding Ralph Richardson of his fine performance, when I sat next to him at a feast. His eyes lit up, he placed his hand on his heart and said, 'Sir, you honour me!'
As it happens, Desmond Barrit's Falstaff in this Henry IV is as good as Richardson's. It is exactly as it should be: big, boisterous, powerful, braggart, conman and bully, poet and fraud, full of zest punctuated by selfpity — but not too maudlin — a mountain of a man, halfway between volcano and slag heap, with monstrous appetites for life which inflate him until he is ripe to be pricked and shrunk into a wrinkled balloon. A man with a flash of evil, too, who said those mean words, 'Hook on, hook on!', with sinister relish. The play, produced by Michael Attenborough, lasts three hours and five minutes, but seemed to go like an eager greyhound, so strong and enthused are the cast, down to the smallest part. Silence, normally a bore, is turned into an explosion of aged tomfoolery in a miraculous performance by Peter Copley. I see from the programme notes that he trained with the Old Vic as long ago as 1932. Well, well: you can't beat an actor with the right patina. This great play, nobly done, cheered me. I came out of the theatre enriched, refuelled with mental and emotional pneuma — as Aristotle said was the aim of good drama — ready to face the appalling realities of life. For the play reminded me that England, weak, muddled, imperfect though Shakespeare shows her to be, is still worth
fighting for. What makes him so good as a national playwright is that he is never vainglorious or trying to pretend that all will be well in the end. It manifestly is not. These Henry plays are full of sadness. The old king dies conscience-stricken and in despair. Young Henry is mercilessly cut off. Falstaff drifts away, babbling o' green fields, the cold creeping up his shanky legs to his broken heart. The perky little Boy is murdered by the French as he guards the baggage at Agincourt. Bardolph and Nym are hanged. Mistress Quickly dies of the plague and lean Pistol, now alone, his fiery eloquence spent, humiliated and battered, decides to turn beggarman-thief. There is no escapism in Shakespeare. Yet his plays, when well done, are an escape all the same: from quotidian mediocrity into greatness.
Meanwhile, what of the tragedy being enacted in England today? The worst hit of all is Cumbria, where the smoke of endless pyres rises to the skies among those incomparable fells, which at this time of year ought to be at their enchanting best. I fear not only for the fell farmers, the hardestworking men and women I know of, but also for their Herdwick sheep, that small but princely breed, for which the high fells are home in the deepest sense of the word. The Herdwick sheep of the Lakes are called hefted: they have bred into them, over countless generations, an instinctive attachment to their heaf or hereditary patch on the fells, of which they feel they are freeholders. They know its invisible boundaries almost to a yard. It is their love of their heaf which enables them to survive the appalling winter conditions, high up the fellside. If you transport them elsewhere, they will escape and return, running hundreds of miles if need be. The Herdwick breed will survive, of course, but if the hefted flocks have to be incinerated, they can never be replaced. In any case, many of the small farmers face ruin, and government money, though promised, shows no sign of arriving. The Cumbria Community Recovery Fund has been set up, and cheques should be made out to it and sent to Derwent Mill, Wakefield Road, Cockermouth, Cumbria CA13 OHT. If you have a Charities Aid Foundation card, the number is 01900 325801. Or you can tell your bank to make payment to the fund at Lloyds TSB, Keswick branch, sort code 30-14-44, account no. 7006843.
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