Culture is often a bearer of such practical wisdom. Indeed, the reason we listen to the experienced and wise, despite their lack of formal education, is that their experience has imparted practical wisdom. Theoretical wisdom is implicit in this down to earth practicality. Although the village elder might not be able to say why a certain behaviour is virtuous, her account, being correct, could be elaborated to reveal a true and natural principle. Extending this to an entire culture, we have one basis for social conservatism. The accumulated experience of ages has a sort of implicit wisdom to it, which can be potentially made into a theory, even though nobody may have yet done so. However, this isn’t enough, lest we be agnostic pragmatists like David Hume. For the one clinging to classical ideas, all practical wisdom has a theory behind it whose objective springs we can discover through reason.
One such cultural heirloom that is greatly misunderstood these days is aristocracy. Most cultures in human history have had aristocracies of some type. A noble class existed in ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, Mesoamerica, the Andes, Egypt, China, Japan, Greece, Rome, among the Celts, as well as mediaeval and early modern Europe. Indeed, aristocracy of some type has been one of the most common institutions of humanity across history. Yet in the last three hundred years, aristocracies have shrunk, from the predominant ruling elites of the world to disempowered and mocked cliques, clinging to privileges regarded as archaic.
Britain is one of the few countries that still has an institutional aristocracy. But its influence is ever diminishing, its numbers ever depleting, and its ideals waned to nothing. I doubt many would contradict me if I said its public image is far from positive. I believe the cause of this decline is that it is a remnant of a previous ethical outlook, one rooted in ancient Greek and Roman thought, and Christianised in the Middle Ages. This outlook collapsed in Britain during the eighteenth century (before it did in most of Europe). Whig liberal philosophers like John Locke chipped at its foundations. The aristocracy as a result became an institution without a purpose, embedded in a new society totally hostile to it.
So, what are these foundations? I think three: human goodness as function, a communitarian spirit, and a family-centred life. Really, it’s only the first, functional goodness, the latter two being elaborations of it.
Goodness as a function is simple. To be good is to function properly according to a species’ ideal. In the same way a good hammer is good at banging nails, and a good oven at baking bread, so a good human being is good at “human-ing” to coin a verb. The question ‘what is goodness?’ for ancient and mediaeval thinkers is almost invariably ‘what’s the function of humans?’ Yet because humans have reason, unlike animals who merely follow their instincts, our function involves more than survival and reproduction. We make art and science, and can appreciate the value of things through understanding. We are the animal that is happy with a garden and a library, as Cicero says.
This is an excerpt from “Mayday! Mayday!”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
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It’s time to consign plaques to history | Robert Poll
When the government launched its ‘Retain and Explain’ policy in January 2021, those of us who value our heritage and see through the attacks on it greeted it with cautious optimism. Sadly, the unveiling of a new plaque in Shrewsbury about Clive of India has proved that caution well placed.
For the policy helped close one battleground over removal, only to open up another much bigger one over history itself. History has always been open to interpretation and reinterpretation, but never, until now, has one single version been declared the ‘correct’ one. We have entered a dangerous new era for the study of history, where debate is increasingly controlled, its terms of reference defined by one group with one particular agenda.
Plaques were touted as a compromise, but handing editorial control of history to those who want to rewrite it is not so much a compromise as an act of unconditional surrender. Turning a monument into an anti-monument is a much more powerful victory than simply removing it. The Chairman of the Edinburgh’s ‘Slavery and Colonialism’ review is upfront about not wanting to remove statues, preferring instead to project his own version of history onto them. And it very much is his version of history. The review has descended into chaos and threats of legal action from academics who have been excluded and dismissed as a ‘racist gang’. These include Professor Sir Tom Devine, Professor Jonathan Hearn and Professor Angela McCarthy. The cry of ‘racist’ – long used to shut down criticism and debate – has now permeated academia as those with the ‘right’ views sense the opportunity to control public discourse (and then to reap the financial rewards through appointments, book and media deals).
So far, we have seen plaques unveiled for three prominent historical figures – Henry Dundas in Edinburgh, Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, and now Clive – each one proving an exercise in unadulterated propaganda. I don’t intend to conduct a point-by-point rebuttal here, as defending reputations is not my primary objective. But it’s clear that the vital distinction between fact and opinion has been blurred. It is not a ‘fact’ that Clive “inflicted famine, poverty and other atrocities” on India, any more than it’s a fact that Rhodes’ activities “led to great loss of life” or that Dundas was responsible for the enslavement of half a million Africans.
It’s all too easy to paint a lazy caricature of Clive as a colonial bogeyman. Much harder to understand him in context as a man who overcame his own mental health issues to achieve astounding feats against a decadent and corrupt regime abroad and a hostile establishment at home resentful of his class and success. Instead, today’s agenda-driven historians have sided with that very same spiteful establishment. Not exactly progressive.
The plaque has proved a blunt tool for a delicate job. Aside from the problem of who writes them, there is the insurmountable one of space. Biographies of these figures run to hundreds of pages each and there is simply no way to boil these down to a hundred words with any semblance of nuance or credibility. The obnoxious ‘QR code’ may side-step the space issue, but still concedes the need to provide an official interpretation where no such need exists. With their limited resources, councils need to reprioritise running local services instead of assuming responsibility for history lessons.
And this is not even to broach the aesthetic argument against these blights on our public realm that deface our statues as surely as any graffiti. If the Edinburgh review gets its way, Scotland’s historic capital will become a forest of plaques, with a lecture and guilt-trip on every corner.
Plaques have had their chance to prove they can deliver balanced history and have conspicuously failed. These three fiascos should be more than enough to spell the end of the plaque as a serious tool of historical debate and of the ‘Explain’ part of Retain and Explain. Just as the government and Historic England has adopted a default position of objecting to any application to remove a statue, now is the time for them to do likewise and consign the plaque to history.
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Benedick and the Mask of Misogyny
Among the first plays I often assign to my teenage tutorial students is Much Ado About Nothing. Written somewhere in 1598-1599 and within a year of Henry V, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It, the play shows Shakespeare as by then a master of Comedy and features several tropes that exemplify the genre. The would-be disastrous elements that might threaten tragedy—the plot to deceive Claudio by soiling Hero’s name, the apparent death by grief of the heroine, the turning of brothers-in-arms against each other—are kept safely within the realm of Comedy via ironic backstops—the fact that the miscreants are already captured before the terrible wedding scene, the dramatic irony that the whole mess might have been cleared up if Leonato had stopped to listen to the constables’ report or if Dogberry knew the words he was using, &c.
Much Ado’s consistently exemplifying the upside-down nature of Comedy—a masquerade allowing characters to speak honestly, a pair of fake wooing scenes that leads to confessions of real love, a misunderstanding on the constables’ part that leads to correct apprehension of the villains—all make it my favorite of Shakespeare’s comedies. Just as I use it as my students’ inaugural Shakespeare, I usually recommend Much Ado to people who want a decent entry into Shakespeare outside of the classroom, especially if they can find a good production of it.
In addition to Shakespeare’s reworking of familiar tropes in new ways, readers and audiences will find in Much Ado another staple of Elizabethan Comedy: bawdy jokes. Within the first few lines, banter of a specific strain is introduced that underscores and arguably provokes the main conflict surrounding Claudio and Hero: that of cuckoldry. After some initial exposition of the recent battles by a messenger to the local governor Leonato (as well as a bit too much protesting on Beatrice’s part about a Signior Benedick), the soldiers show up, and the preeminent Don Pedro notes Leonato’s daughter, provoking the lewd joke and theme:
Don Pedro:
I think this is your daughter.
Leonato:
Her mother hath many times told me so.
Benedick:
Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her?
Leonato:
Signior Benedick, no; for then were you a child.
Don Pedro:
You have it full, Benedick; we may guess by this what you are, being a man.—Truly, the lady fathers herself.—Be happy, lady; for you are like an honorable father.
Along with the casual bombast that unites the men (in which Beatrice soon partakes with as much alacrity as they), there is a suggestion of Benedick’s reputation as a supposed worrier of husbands. Whether or not this actually is his reputation and character (doubtful, as we’ll see) or whether it is merely a ribald compliment by a man too old to have participated in the recent action, it establishes Benedick as synonymous with the play’s one-up-manship and humorous outrage, often at the expense of women—here, the joker’s dead wife.
And there’s the rub, at least for modern readers: can we enjoy a play that is built, from incidental banter to entire plot structure, on a suspicion of women? Furthermore, are we allowed to compass—and, God forfend, enjoy—a man like Signior Benedick?
No less than Shakespeare’s Globe has taken up the first question in an examination of the play by Dr. Miranda Fay Thomas, whose treatment is well done. Using Beatrice’s cry of “O God, that I were a man!” as a jumping-off point, Thomas explores the recourses available to men and not women through the play, from the initial male bonding to “the ability to take personal revenge on offenders like Claudio, openly defy father-figures like Leonato, or even simply to fall in love with a person of her choosing and for her affection not to be seen as weakness, nor her sexual desires be used as evidence of her inconstant character.” The article continues through an examination of possible reasons for the play’s focus on the men’s apparent insecurity; “the very fact that women can hurt them emotionally,” Thomas argues, “is a chink in their armour that they do not want to be exposed.” This theme, of course, can be found throughout the play, a fact of which Thomas argues Shakespeare, whom she demarcates from his characters, was conscious, using as he does the imbalance of female characters (notably played by men at the time) “to his advantage by allowing us to see how vulnerable women like Hero and Beatrice could be in Elizabethan society.”
Though I don’t share all her interpretations of either the play itself or of today’s society, I believe Dr. Thomas’s argument worth the read, and one that, unlike some takes, does constructively add to the discourse. The broader critique of Much Ado along these lines, if undertaken to add to rather than subtract from our enjoyment of the play and if one avoids substituting mere criticizing for literary criticism, is a legitimate and fruitful one—and, in fact, jejune to the text.
The play, itself, examines the “battle of the sexes” tropes of Comedy, though I think ultimately to edify and expand the genre. While I don’t believe for a second that Shakespeare’s primary goal as a writer was social critique, the entire structure and tension of several of his comedies rest on some kind of imbalance between men and women that must be resolved by play’s end, and he milks the dramatic potential of said imbalances for all they’re worth. Much Ado would be boring if Beatrice weren’t more than equal to Benedick—who, we should note, is usually the butt rather than head of the play’s jokes—and much of the play’s ado could have been spared had the men simply listened to the women (a common theme in comedy that venerates both sexes and their respective complement). So, if there is what we’d today call sexism in the play, it does not necessitate that we vilify the whole thing, itself, as sexist. Indeed, the way Much Ado works out undercuts the soldiers’ suspicion of women; such insecurity as is veiled in the above joke and the broader plot ends up doing more harm than good to the men, and is eventually chastised—a formula Shakespeare reused again more seriously in The Winter’s Tale, among others.
However, we are left with the question of what to do with Benedick. To first-time audiences, Benedick would be the obvious source of the play’s supposed misogyny. Besides the low-hanging fruit of his name (full pun intended—as Shakespeare meant such things to be!), his persona of being too good for most women and living proudly as a bachelor lends him to modern castigation.
In Act II, Scene 3, Benedick soliloquizes:
I do much wonder that one man, seeing how much another man is a fool when he dedicates his behaviors to love, will, after he hath laughed at such shallow follies in others, become the argument of his own scorn by falling in love…May I be so converted and see with these eyes? I cannot tell; I think not…One woman is fair, yet I am well; another is wise, yet I am well; another virtuous, yet I am well; but till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace. Rich she shall be, that’s certain; wise, or I’ll none; virtuous, or I’ll never cheapen her; fair, or I’ll never look on her; mild, or come not near me; noble, or not I for an angel; of good discourse, an excellent musician, and her hair shall be of what colour it please God.
One’s initial response, nowadays (to our absolute peril), might have to be an at least prudent, defensive cringe on Benedick’s behalf against his own words. With the speech’s objectification, impossible beauty standards, fat-shaming, slut-shaming, ableism, &c, one can imagine the modern response. Yet, to the student or prospective audience member who would question whether we should laud such a chauvinistic, misogynistic, ableist, probably racist character, I’d say yes—because I don’t think he’s any of those things.
One general piece of wisdom is that when Shakespeare hands us a foil, be it a sword or a character dichotomy, we should pick it up. Benedick’s words—indeed, his entire character throughout the play—must be measured against Claudio. Before the metaphysical battle in 19th-century art and literature between Romanticism and Realism, Shakespeare had already staged the fight in several of his plays and poems; in Much Ado, it can be seen in Benedick and Claudio’s contrasting approaches to love.
Like many other romantics in Shakespeare, the inexperienced Claudio is taken away by his passion for Hero. While he arguably has the flimsy excuse of being new to this sort of thing, several aspects of his behavior point to the shallowness of his passion. Besides the fact that much of his language regarding Hero is that of commodity and trade, Claudio is just as easily led out of love as he was into it—a function of his romance’s being, from start to finish, based on externals. If we didn’t already know it, the play, itself, shows us such things can mislead for both negative and positive effects; in lieu of a play-within-a-play we are even treated to a masquerade that serves as a microcosm of the play and concretizes several of its core themes. Although the blame for Claudio’s rejection at the wedding ceremony explicitly and legally belongs more to Don John and Boracchio’s deception than to Claudio, the young romantic who leaves himself most vulnerable to passionate love nonetheless causes much harm by it.
This is a far cry from the supposedly woman-hating Benedick. For all his defensiveness against romance—and I do believe it is a defensiveness, a control and limit around an existing vulnerability, as Dr. Thomas suggests above, though one I think constructed as much to protect women from his own actions as himself from theirs—Benedick causes very little anguish in the play. Not until his conflict, the quintessential questioning of that venerable dictum “Bros before hoes,” is concretized by Beatrice’s requirement that loving her means killing Claudio, is there any real possibility of Benedick’s causing pain to a woman. Even then, the bashful man who declares his love for Beatrice is very different from the one who previously enumerated the terms of his proud but stagnant bachelorhood (the embarrassing, quickening changes brought by love being another core trope of Comedy).
Examined again with his later humility in mind, the speech reveals that he is not as sure against love as he might wish to seem; leaving room for the scene’s humorous extemporizing, he has his list of traits ready. Furthermore, anyone who knows the blindness of love qua comic trope and has been paying attention can see that he is describing, for the most part, Beatrice, herself. “Fair…wise…virtuous…mild [(eh, can’t win ’em all)]…noble…of good discourse…” He has already admitted most of these about the woman before his notorious monologue. If he doesn’t have her consciously in mind, his subconscious is at least primed for the scene’s later ploy by the rest of the men to have him overhear words of Beatrice’s affection.
To the modern reader or student, I would submit that far from hating women Benedick actually respects both them and himself enough not to mislead them. Further, I don’t believe he is as uninterested in them as he makes out—for consider how quickly he is directed towards Beatrice. One cannot turn an engine empty of fuel. However, his shortsightedness aside, he apparently knows himself and what it will take to make him genuinely committed, not just in name like Claudio. I’d even read his high standards as a confession of a knowledge of his own passion, which he has wisely and philogynically kept controlled behind an off-putting mask of bravado and bachelorhood—a veritable Elizabethan St. Christopher! Perhaps that’s a bit far. Nonetheless, brash and arrogant he may be, but he’s not the one who ruins Leonato’s daughter’s wedding day (I write this as a new father of a daughter far prettier than I was prepared for).
It may seem contradictory to hide a respect and love for women behind a mask of brash misogyny; yet, it is not the only time Shakespeare uses the ploy. The oft-maligned Petruccio, with a more blatant misogyny than Benedick’s, mimics and turns the tables on Kate’s shrewish misandry and, in Dr. Peter Saccio’s words in his excellent lecture series on Shakespeare, thereby releases her from said misandry and “teaches her to play.” Or, consider Hamlet’s much more vicious and tragic rejection of Ophelia, which he, as prince, must arguably do for her own good (though, in my opinion and his mask of madness aside, Hamlet is more a Claudio than a Benedick, and, at the risk of channeling Polonius, I wouldn’t want him near my daughter). Finally, for a dramatized examination of Prince Hal’s mask, read the Prologue to my novel Sacred Shadows and Latent Light.
In a time where even the mention of certain words, concepts, or perspectives can lead to the extirpation of an artist or his or her work, the lesson of Benedick bears stating explicitly: yes, characters do not equal the author, but neither may our shallow interpretations of characters equal the actual character. Forgive my being anachronistic and offering yet more unasked-for wisdom for reading his writing, but if Shakespeare sets up a Chekov’s gun (or a Leonato’s joke, as it were), it will go off—or be undercut and nuanced—by play’s end. The outrage in Much Ado should not be read as misogyny for its own sake, nor should masks of things like misogyny, conscious or unconscious, be taken for the real thing; rather, the low view of women sets up for the comic treatment of masculine bravado—which, in the form of Benedick and the revealed depths of his character, bashfully wants to respect, protect, and be loved by the very femininity it warily eschews.
The remedy, to further take something from Nothing, is to trust that Shakespeare (and, dare I say, other authors of the canon) and his characters have more depth than we can initially see. Beatrice and Benedick cure each other of their respective shrewishness and bachelorhood; may it not be that learning to enjoy characters such as they and works such as Much Ado, would cure modern interpretations of their own mask of love and philanthropy, which, like that of Claudio or of Don John, may very well hide a much deeper misogyny?
This is not to say we should avoid legitimate criticism (though, again, literary criticism =/= merely criticizing the perceived faults of a work), but such examination, in addition to seeking to build our knowledge for present and future readers, should approach works directly yet humbly. As I have noted in previous pieces, authors like Shakespeare already contain in their works and answer many of the critiques we might make.
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The War on Pubs, Part I: Taylor’s Conquest
The war on British pubs is as old as the British pub itself, so much so it can barely be classed as an emerging tendency. The government’s dislike of the pub is a fact of life and measures to undermine its prosperity and role in society are widely disliked but are rarely contextualised in political commentary beyond the Covid pandemic, relatively recent demographic changes, and the last fourteen years of government.
After the end of WW2, Britain seemed to be largely self-sufficient when it came to producing ingredients for beer, something it hadn’t achieved for the best part of a century. Protectionist measures enabled near-autarkic levels of barley production whilst wartime reserves of hops were sold for cheap on the domestic market. Of course, post-war economic pressures made investments more necessary and demanding, whilst imports (especially from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Ireland) were set to become more frequent. Nevertheless, an end to rationing, combined with the implementation of tax cuts in the mid-to-late 50s, one of the few helping hands to pubs since the birth of Modern Britain, which contribute to an increase in beer production and consumption. All things being far from perfect, Britain’s pubs could’ve expected much worse coming out of the most destructive war in history.
Indeed, Britain’s flourishing post-war beer market hadn’t escaped the notice of Edward Plunket Taylor. Famously a breeder of racehorses, coming to be recognised as a major force behind the development of the Canadian horse-racing industry, the tycoon’s family also owned Brading, a brewery in Ottawa founded in 1867. Using the loosely coinciding repeals of prohibition throughout various parts of the US and Canada as a springboard, Taylor merged Brading with another Canadian brewery to form Canadian Breweries in 1930. In pursuit of sheer scale, Taylor consolidated several smaller plants into a handful of larger plants and standardised his line of products, whittling his number of brands down from roughly 100 to six. By 1950, Canadian Breweries controlled 50% of Ontario’s beer market. Having subdued most competition at home, Taylor was well-positioned to turn his focus to foreign conquest.
Being well over 200 years old at this point in history, criticisms of the tie system weren’t new, and they weren’t to vanish in the coming decades, but it did provide an initial barrier to Taylor’s imperial aspirations. As pubs could only sell beer produced by the brewery they were tied to, Taylor realised he’d have to infiltrate Britain’s breweries before he could infiltrate its beer market. Aiming to acquire a 25% stake in every publicly traded brewery in Britain, Taylor sought to gain a foothold in the same way he had come to dominate the Canadian market: through the purchase and merging of smaller and unprofitable breweries. In 1967, Taylor merged Bass Brewery and Charrington United to form Bass Charrington, then the largest brewery in Britain with 19% of the beer market.
Taylor’s aspirations and manifesting success sparked a merging frenzy not seen since the relaxation of beerhouse regulations in the late 19th century and the emergent ‘Beerage’, leading to the rise of ‘The Big Six’, Britain’s six largest brewing companies: Allied Breweries, Bass Charrington, Courage, Scottish and Newcastle, Watney Mann (also known as Grand Metropolitan), and Whitbread.
Whilst Taylor had managed to upend Britain’s brewing market, the tie system continued to incentivise against territorial trespassing between brewers. As such, the mergers occurred largely (albeit far from exclusively) along geographic lines. Allied Breweries and Bass Charrington were more concentrated in the Midlands and the North, both having central breweries in Burton-upon-Trent. Courage originated in Southwark with properties across the South, whilst Watney Mann originated in London with clusters in and around the capital. Fittingly, Scottish and Newcastle were based in Scotland and the Northeast, especially Edinburgh and Newcastle, whilst Whitbread originated in central London, maintaining a sizeable presence in the West End, stretching off into the southwest and much of Wales.
Counterbalancing the instinctual desire to compare The Big Six to feudal barons, their pubs were more clustered than rigidly delineated. Indeed, each brewer was a national entity and desired to expand their control of the overall market. Still, it was the emergence of these large-scale brewers which sparked concerns among small business of a cartelised industry, one in which independent brewers were fighting for an increasingly austere slice of the market.
Initial attempts to curtail the growth of these large brewers lacked momentum. Both with the government and most of the public considering the size of these brewers to be a non-issue. At the very least, it was ‘small beer’ compared to other matters which directly affected pubs and breweries in more gruesome ways. A survey carried out by the Consumers Association showed only 1% of consumers factored in beer prices when it came down to choosing a pub. Simply put, pubs were (and remain to be) more than economic hubs of rational decision-making, but markers of communal identity which provide a sense of place and evoke a sense of loyalty; something to support in a period of inept and lacklustre political leadership.
As for pub owners, many valued The Big Six (and the tie system more generally) as a way of ensuring a steady supply of beer, business, and a livelihood. Far from a barrier to entry, it was seen as the exact opposite, acting as an extension of the quasi-paternalist system which had existed prior to Taylor’s landing on English shores.
Nevertheless, the fears of independent brewers were far from unfounded. By the 1970s, roughly 80% of Britain’s beer supply was controlled by The Big Six, along with roughly 75% of brewer-owned retail, and 85% of ‘loan ties’ – arrangements in which pubs that aren’t directly owned by a Big Six brewer exclusively stock their products and other supplies for discounts and loans. By 1989, the top five best-selling beers had 20% of the total market whilst the top ten had a comfortable 30%.
Also, it became increasingly clear to many pubs that large, cut-throat corporations were not spiritual successors to small, local, historically rooted breweries. The sense of mutual dependency which existed between pubs and the latter was practically non-existent between pubs and the former. Needless to say, an individual pub had more to lose from being untied than any one of The Big Six.
Inflated beer prices were a direct consequence of this arrangement. Between 1979 and 1989, beer prices increased by 15% above the retails’ price index and the tax cuts of the immediate post-war period had long been offset by some of the highest beer duties in Europe. Even if the price of beer was comparatively less important to consumers than the social element of pubs, the financial pressure on customers to buy beer from their local’s tied brewer was far from ideal in a period of stagnating wages and rising inflation.
Pubs which weren’t tied to The Big Six were also routinely shafted by predatory pricing, in which the major brewers would temporarily lower their prices to undercut and destroy independent establishments before increasing their prices to consolidate their financial dominance in particular area. This practice was especially harmful to rural pubs, which were more likely to be independent and less economically secure than urban pubs, courtesy of a continuing trend of rural depopulation.
However, whilst the cost of beer wasn’t a pivotal concern, the wavering quality of beer was a growing source of frustration for pubgoers. Practically impervious to market forces, The Big Six were able to push less-than-appealing products onto the consumer through advertising backed by a steady and plentiful flow of cash. Courtesy of organisations like CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale), Watney’s Red Barrel became shorthand for the extortionately priced yet wholly unremarkable (if not always terrible) concoctions one could expect from companies perceived as too big to care about the quality of their products.
Overall, the relationship between breweries and pubs was less comparable to ‘aristocratic’ noblesse oblige and more akin to the terror of mobsters and strongmen, whose promise of security wore thin as they threatened pub owners with financial ruin should they defy their heavy-handed demands. In Hobbesian terms, they were demanding obedience from people they were increasingly disinterested in protecting. This state of affairs created a seismic reaction which would change the trajectory of Britain’s pub and brewing industry, albeit not necessarily for the better; a reaction not from the market, but from the state.
