Reading at the tea-table

I finished John Wain’s book on Shakespeare yesterday, reading it often in the midst of the noise of arguments at the lunch table, or in the middle discussions about roads and drains and electricity. There’s nothing wrong with these discussions, mind, and a lot of them are very interesting to someone who’s world hasn’t really collided with roads and drains and electricity except in the way the world of most of us collides with them. There’s also a lot of discussion of people and places in Dunedin, from a different perspective. Dunedin is big enough to be interesting and still small enough for everyone to know pretty much everyone else of any consequence. So names get bandied about the morning and afternoon tea tables in a way that’s been unfamiliar to me for a long time. And these discussions are even more interesting when I actually do know something of the people involved.
And then there are the opinions on everything and anything that’s going. Some of these are surprisingly at odds with the media’s opinion, and sometimes they add extra facts that open up cans of worms. And then there are the stories, which the better storytellers seem to have an endless fund of. It’s certainly a different atmosphere to the one I’ve been used to for my last somewhat sheltered seventeen years.
Having finished Mr Wain’s book, I’m now reading my way through The Bravest Man, by Jenefer Haig. (Yes, she does spell her name that way.)
It’s a book which not only collates the four Gospels together in a way that gives them a real chronology, fitting the various stories and incidents into their appropriate places – as far as anyone can – but it also offers a kind of running commentary to give us some history and background to the stories. It’s well done, and apart from some typos and proof-reading errors, is a reasonable publication.
Apparently – and I only vaguely remember this – Mrs Haig, who lives in Oamaru, brought an earlier version of her book to my attention some time back, when I was in the shop, and I told it was too expensive for the kind of market she was aiming at. And, I think, it was too big.
Anyway, she’s now dealt with both those issues (such influence I have never ceases to surprise me!) and brought it down to about 80 pages. It’s very readable, and I think would be very good for anyone who was just starting into the Gospels. Certainly it makes the hard work of putting it together seem easy.

More from John Wain

I find John Wain’s understanding of the Christian background to Shakespeare’s plays very good – almost to the point where I wonder if Wain isn’t a Christian himself. I’ve just seen on Wikipedia this note: "Wain's tutor at Oxford had been C.S. Lewis. He encountered, but did not feel he belonged to, Lewis's literary circle, the Inklings. Wain took literature as seriously as the Inklings did, and believed as they did in the primacy of literature as communication, but as a modern realist writer he shared neither their conservative social beliefs nor their propensity for fantasy."
That may account for more than a little!


I found another interesting section in his book on Shakespeare that I’ve been quoting from. He’s talking about King Lear, at this point.

‘All this titanic expenditure of effort and suffering to teach two stupid old men how to love? Yes: and rightly; for the colossal extravagance of means, the cosmic excess of upheaval and waste, celebrates the range and importance of the nature of man. At such time, even the supreme powers of the universe (whatever and wherever they may be) humble themselves before man, and bow to him, for

Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense.

That line reminds me of another, in Love’s Labours Lost, where the character is talking about the effect of women on men:

And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.

There’s something in Shakespeare’s view of human beings that indicates he feels ‘the gods’ are often in awe of these two-pronged creations.

Drawing of Lear by Boardman Robinson

John Wain

John Wain's book, The Living World of Shakespeare: a Playgoer's Guide, is full of quotable moments, but like all such books, remembering where the moments are without making a note in the pressure of reading is a bit of a task.

Anyway, here from page 39 of Papermac edition:

...the dispossed king is a powerful symbol, for deep down every man thinks of himself as a dispossessed king.

and from page 75:

...the deep heart of courtship...is of course, self-knowledge. The reason why young people so frequently select the wrong partner is because they hold mistaken views about their own characters. The first essential for a lasting love of someone else is a sound assessment of one's own identity. Only when we see clearly what we have to give, and what we need from others, can be begin to be happy a deux.

I believe what Wain is saying here, but I suspect that for most of us this self-knowledge only comes after we've lived with someone for a long time, rather than during a period of courtship, where the passion of love tends to blur the edges of anything the other person actually is.