Biting insights flow through these pieces by the chief literary critic of The Sunday Times who died last month
Shakespeare’s Wife Germaine Greer, 2007
It is impossible to think of two minds more different than Germaine Greer’s and Shakespeare’s. The leading quality of Greer’s mind is opinionatedness, whereas Shakespeare, so far as we can tell, had no opinions. He vanished into his plays, and trying to retrieve what he thought on any subject is like harvesting shadows.
This is frustrating for Greer, since her aim in her new book is to pin down Shakespeare’s opinion about marriage, specifically his own. Only the barest facts are known for certain. When he married Ann Hathaway, a local farmer’s daughter, in 1582, he was 18, she was 26 and three months pregnant.
Susanna, their first child, was born in May 1583, and twins, Judith and Hamnet, in February 1585.
Before or soon after that Shakespeare probably left Stratford, and by 1592 he was already well known as an actor and dramatist in London, where he spent most of his married life. When he made his will in March 1616, a month before his death, his wife was not mentioned at all in the first draft, and a redraft left her his secondbest bed.
Some scholars (most of them, Greer notes accusingly, male) have taken these facts to mean that Shakespeare was trapped into marriage by a designing older woman; that he was frogmarched to the altar by her family; that, like many women of her class, she was probably illiterate, and certainly unable to appreciate her husband’s greatness.
Greer is convinced that, on the contrary, Shakespeare wooed Ann, not vice versa; that she proved a good, true wife, enjoying her husband’s love and respect; and that she took a keen interest in his writing, and was quite possibly instrumental in getting the First Folio of his works printed after his death.
Since there is little or no evidence to support these claims, their furtherance calls for considerable ingenuity on Greer’s part. She suggests that The Comedy of Errors, with its moving depiction of wifely loyalty, reveals Shakespeare’s “attitude to marriage”, so he would be unlikely to have treated Ann in the way her denigrators allege. The weakness of such arguments is obvious — you might, with just as little cogency, select The Taming of the Shrew as showing Shakespeare’s attitude to marriage — so most of Greer’s book takes a different tack, and contends that Ann was a highly successful woman in her own right, so Shakespeare should have been proud of her, even if he was not, though he probably was.
Exactly what she was successful at is difficult to decide. Greer thinks she might have been a successful moneylender. The one surviving document that may give a clue to her business activities, if she had any, is the will of the Hathaway family’s shepherd, which says she owes him 40 shillings.
This does not sound like successful moneylending, but perhaps, Greer thinks, the shepherd entrusted the money to Ann’s safekeeping, which could mean she was a successful banker.
Alternatively, she might have been a farmer or a cheesemaker, a mercer or a haberdasher, a basket weaver or a lace maker or a stocking knitter.
Wherever Ann’s success lay, she made enough money, Greer thinks, to bring up her family without her husband’s help (though why he should not have helped her if she enjoyed his love and respect is not quite clear) and probably accumulated a lot more besides.
Quite possibly, in Greer’s view, Ann, not Shakespeare, bought New Place. It is true that no papers relating to Ann’s remarkable career have come down to us. But then, Greer reminds us, paper was scarce, and old documents were used for all sorts of menial purposes, and there were a lot of mice about.
Maschler’s comments are uniformly banal
The uncertainty of the whole situation allows Greer to fill her book with vast amounts of extraneous material. There are lengthy digressions on Elizabethan farming, cheesemaking, haberdashery and Ann’s other supposed occupations, packed with archival detail about the pigs, hens, household effects and genealogies of a great many people who, as Greer is perfectly willing to accept, may have nothing to do with Ann or Shakespeare at all.
In the same spirit there are sections on Elizabethan cottages, in case the Shakespeares ever lived in one, though they probably did not, and a stomachchurning excursion on venereal disease and its treatment, on the off-chance that Shakespeare suffered from it, although there is no evidence he did.
Threading this maze of blind alleys is the sort of reading experience that brings vividly to mind the many more useful and enjoyable things you might be doing.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari, 2014
Sapiens is the sort of book that sweeps the cobwebs out of your brain. Its author, Yuval Noah Harari, is a young Israeli academic and an intellectual acrobat whose logical leaps have you gasping with admiration. That said, the joy of reading him is not matched by any uplift in his message, which is relentlessly accusatory and dismaying.
His book presents a brief history of life on earth, starting with the big bang and ending 1,000 years in the future, by which time, he predicts, Homo sapiens will be extinct, because science will have replaced us with genetically engineered immortals and “supercyborgs”, part human, part machine, with faculties we can’t even imagine.
The disappearance of oldstyle humans is not, it is clear, a prospect he much regrets, for on his reckoning we have proved the most destructive species ever to plague the planet. Almost all the facts in the human story are contested, but, as Harari tells it, our remote ancestors lived peacefully among the other animals for many millenniums until about 70,000 years ago when Homo sapiens developed superior cognitive powers and, crucially, invented language.
No one knows how we alone managed this. But it was language that enabled us to co-operate, organise and become the dominant animal. From their African homeland prehistoric humans spread across the globe, colonising Australia 45,000 years ago, where they became the Indigenous Australians, then North and South America, where they became the Paleo-Indians.
Wherever they went they spread destruction, hunting the larger mammals to extinction. As Harari vividly puts it, we obliterated half the planet’s large-mammal species before we got round to inventing the wheel.
A second wave of devastation came with the invention of agriculture around 10,000 years ago.
Clearing land for the cultivation of cereals meant destroying the habitats of countless animal, bird and plant species, and reinforced humanity’s claim to be the deadliest organism ever. In Harari’s view, agriculture was also a tragedy for humans.
With agriculture came private property, social and sexual inequality, greed and exploitation. What had been close-knit, self- helping hunter-gatherer groups were replaced by a social system in which the majority were serfs or slaves, ruled by despots who owned the land.
Harari does not claim to be original in identifying the invention of agriculture as a world-changing disaster, and, in fact, the credit for this idea seems to belong to Jean- Jacques Rousseau, whose Discourse on the Origin of Inequality put forward almost exactly the same argument in 1754. Since then, research has tended to confirm the disaster scenario. Quite apart from introducing social inequalities, agriculture, it seems, led to a steep decline in the standard of living, because it required full-time labour whereas huntergatherers, it is estimated, spent less than 20 hours a week getting food.
Harari would like to believe that, in addition to their other advantages, hunter-gatherers were happier than we are. You can see why the thought attracts him. It would be a fitting payoff for our ecological mayhem. However, for once his argument stalls, and peters out in metaphysical niceties. Quantifying happiness seems a patently daft idea, which is no doubt why historians have steered clear of it, as Harari complains they have.
Mostly, though, Harari’s writing radiates power and clarity, making the world strange and new. His central argument is that language has not just made us top animal, it has also enmeshed us in fictions. Myths, gods and religions appeared with the advent of language, and are enormously strong. Fictions such as Christianity and nationalism can bind millions together in a common cause, and people die for them.
Humans, Harari observes, are the only animals that believe in vastly powerful entities that they have never seen, touched or smelt, and that is language’s fault.
Publisher
Tom Maschler, 2005
Tom Maschler is not prone to false modesty. He states frankly that when he was chairman of Jonathan Cape it was the best literary publishing house in Britain.
“We had the best authors, the best promotions and our production was the best.” In one of the many photographs of himself that grace this memoir he wears a T-shirt identifying him as “the world’s greatest publisher”.
Others show him posing with the rich and famous, but in one, taken on the eve of the 1995 Booker prize, he is holding up a 65kg tuna, caught in the Indonesian ocean. You cannot help feeling sorry for the fish. It probably had little interest in books, and it was sheer bad luck that it swam into the great publisher’s orbit.
All the same, it provides an apt emblem for Maschler’s career, since landing big fish has mattered to him more than anything else, and his book is laid out as a series of sections, each devoted to a single author from the Cape list. There is no denying that it is an impressive haul. Cape introduced Gabriel García Márquez, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Tom Wolfe and Kurt Vonnegut to British readers. Doris Lessing, John Fowles, Arnold Wesker, Roald Dahl, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Martin Amis also became Cape authors under Maschler. So did Salman Rushdie, though he defected when Penguin outbid Cape for The Satanic Verses — a lucky break for Cape, given the whirlwind it stirred up.
With a cast of this distinction, Maschler’s book should have been the literary event of the decade, providing intimate insight into the shaping spirits of contemporary literature.
Instead, it is an embarrassment. He keeps telling us what scintillating talkers his authors were, yet he records virtually nothing of what they said. Arthur Miller’s “conversation flowed”, he remembers, but the only detail that sticks in his mind is that he had big feet. David Hockney, he assures us, was “always ready to talk seriously about art”, but not a single remark comes our way. Was Maschler, you start to wonder, deaf? He admits, late in the book, to being hard of hearing. Maybe the handicap was long term.
Another problem is his style, which, for someone who has honed his wits on the foremost penmen of the era, is strangely ponderous.
The Frankfurt Book Fair, he tells us, “takes place in Frankfurt, so that if I wish to attend, I am obliged to go to Germany”. Quite so. It is as well to get these things straight before you start out.
His comments about books are uniformly banal. Of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children he reveals: “The novel belongs firmly to the literature that has been called ‘magic realism’.” Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot “is both highly original and extremely entertaining”. Apparently, when Barnes gave a dinner party for Maschler it was noticed, halfway through, that the host had disappeared, and he was found fast asleep in bed. It is a reaction to Maschler’s company that readers of this book will readily understand.
