New Saturday morning quotes : The Narrative

We live in interesting times. The internet has effectively become a universal window on the world, which means that it has become more difficult for those in positions of power to practice chicanery, deception and to promote a false narrative. At least for the time being. One would think that the right and privilege for the public to peek behind the curtain to observe the movements of the levers of power would cause the powerful to modify their behavior and perhaps clean up their act. But no. Instead, they pour all of their energy and effort into squelching freedom of speech and curtailing channels of communication. And what is left of the “free internet” is heavily monitored in order to eliminate communications that are not in line with The Narrative.

Take the formula at the head of this page. In an essay published in 1943, George Orwell, decried Nazi propaganda as a clear counter to logic and science, suggesting that if Hitler announced that henceforward “two and two are five,” it would be accepted by the public as truth. Later, in his novel 1984, Orwell, expanded on the same theme.

There is so much intentionally dubious information circulating today that we are faced with the absurd plague of self-appointed arbiters of truth, telling us what is what and scraping what isn’t from the internet—for our own good, of course. But it is a mistake to believe that this is a new phenomenon. Western civilization has been the victim of false narratives since time immemorial, it’s just that the powers that be formerly had much better control over the sources and dissemination of information. We offer below a few examples of myths and lies that have been fed to us over the centuries.

The myth of genius
“Cymbeline is for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and judged in point of thought by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance. There are moments when one asks despairingly why our stage should ever have been cursed with this immortal “pilferer” of other men’s stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendently platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers. With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.”

– George Bernard Shaw, from a review of a Shakespearean play, September, 1896

Genius misplaced
“Isn’t it odd, when you think of it: that you may list all the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern times, clear back to the first Tudors—a list containing five hundred names, shall we say?—and you can go to the histories, biographies and cyclopedias and learn the particulars of the lives of every one of them.  Every one of them except one—the most famous, the most renowned—by far the most illustrious of them all—Shakespeare!…You may add to the list the thousand celebrated persons furnished by the rest of Christendom in the past four centuries, and you can find out the life-histories of all those people, too.  You will then have listed 1500 celebrities, and you can trace the authentic life-histories of the whole of them.  Save one—far and away the most colossal prodigy of the entire accumulation—Shakespeare!  About him you can find out nothing.  Nothing of even the slightest importance.  Nothing worth the trouble of stowing away in your memory.  Nothing that even remotely indicates that he was ever anything more than a distinctly common-place person—a manager, an actor of inferior grade, a small trader in a small village that did not regard him as a person of any consequence, and had forgotten all about him before he was fairly cold in his grave.  We can go to the records and find out the life-history of every renowned race-horse of modern times—but not Shakespeare’s!  There are many reasons why, and they have been furnished in cartloads (of guess and conjecture) by those troglodytes; but there is one that is worth all the rest of the reasons put together, and is abundantly sufficient all by itself—he hadn’t any history to record.”

– Mark Twain, “Is Shakespeare Dead?,” from My Autobiography, Chapter XIII, 1909.

History is malleable
“The extent to which sixteenth-century historians felt a need to shape and select their material varied greatly, and it has been argued that attitudes towards the writing of history changed markedly during the course of the century. The chronicles of Holinshed and Hall, the main sources for Shakespeare’s history plays, are organized ‘on the principle of including as much as possible’. Yet this inclusiveness of apparently ‘random information’ can be seen as a strength rather than a weakness, in allowing for differing voices to be heard. Holinshed’s Chronicles often juxtapose several accounts of the same events, refusing to select and edit, ‘to give everie author leave to tell his owne tale’…”

– Warren Chernaik, “Chapter 1, The Uses of History,” The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays, Cambridge University Press, 3874, p. 3.

The virgin queen
“Supposedly, the ‘virgin queen’ may not have been virtuous at all…In 1587, after rumors swirling around the country viciously, a man named Arthur Dudley arrived at Philip II’s court in Spain and claimed to be the illegitimate child of [Robert] Dudley and Elizabeth. His supposed conception in 1561 was eerily linked to the time Elizabeth had been bedridden with an illness which had resulted in her body “swelling.” Matters were made worse for the supposed couple when in 1560, Dudley’s wife Amy was found dead in her residency, at the bottom of a flight of stairs with a broken neck, the circumstances for which were regarded as suspicious—and Robert Dudley felt the brunt of it.”

– unnamed author (probably AI), History is Now Magazine.

Setting and controlling the narrative has been with us since the beginning, probably starting with creation myths that, if one did not accept the narrative, one was barbecued, or worse. The control of historical narrative indeed extends to the early music revival, and if one points out the fallacy of questionable but accepted scholarship, one is subject to slings and arrows. One chooses intellectual curiosity and independent thinking, and one responds with the rhetorical question, “Am I bovvered?”