because he liked to be seen as the man who knew everything. He resolved the paradox by a quietly histrionic trick of looking puzzled at all times, as if those big questions were too much even for a man with such a fine taste in tailoring. In the movie Downfall he is chiefly present as a model for black leather overcoats, but we are asked yet again to believe that when Hitler ordered him to destroy the remains of Germany’s infrastructure, Speer disobeyed the order, in the interest of future generations. His account of how he defied Hitler’s order was probably at least partly true, but confidence is not increased by the fact that his account of how little he knew about the Final Solution was at least partly a lie. Still, his guilt remains a personal question for all of us who were alive in those years, even if we were not born until near the very end of them. What would we have done? Something to ponder while we, too, go walking to Beijing.
Shakespeare and Johnson
WHEN I STILL DID a lot of traveling to make TV shows or appear on stage, I always took my complete Shakespeare with me on a long flight. It was the old Selfridge’s one-volume edition, with no notes but with an excellent introduction by Sir Henry Irving himself. Thus, because I was always traveling, I was always reading Shakespeare, even when the book fell to pieces so seriously that it had to be held together with a rubber band. In particular I read the history plays and the tragedies. The comedies I have always been able to read less often, although A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a special case. I like to read it every couple of years. Recently, on a midsummer night, I went with the family to see an open-air production in King’s College gardens. For my granddaughter, aged eight, it was the second time she had seen the play, and during the interval she politely made it clear that she had seen it done better: a knowledgeabletheatergoer. She was right, alas. The production was uninspired. Though they were hired-in professionals and not the usual bunch of mistakenly confident undergraduates, only a few of the actors knew how to speak. But the lines survived the beating they took. The text is a crowd pleaser, however transmitted. Hence the obvious answer to Johnson’s momentary puzzlement in his note on the play, when he quotes the bit about “the fiery glowworm’s eyes” and says “I know not how Shakespeare, who commonly derived his knowledge of nature from his own observation, happened to place the glow-worm’s light in his eyes, which is only in his tail.” But Shakespeare wasn’t just interested in what he himself knew to be true: he was interested in what the audience thought to be true, as they sat there and watched. As always, however, I would rather have been reading than watching.
Time having gone by since I fell ill, I have become reconciled to never traveling very far again, so I need a new routine for reading Shakespeare. I have taken to keeping a single volume of the Arden Shakespeare on my writing desk in the kitchen. At the moment it is Antony and Cleopatra . The Roman plays are my favorite Shakespeare anyway, and Antony and Cleopatra is my second-favorite amongthose—after Julius Caesar —so this is a high-ranking event. I have just finished going through the volume line by line and footnote by footnote, with increasing admiration for M. R. Ridley, who brought R. H. Case’s 1906 edition up to date with modern scholarship: modern for 1954. I spent decades getting familiar with Shakespeare without resorting to footnotes, but it was a doomed forgoing. Eventually you must look at the footnotes or you won’t know where you are. It remains true, however, that the best moments hit you without benefit of clergy. In Antony and Cleopatra , T. S. Eliot thought that the line most worth talking about comes from Charmian when she dies: “Ah, soldier!” I have always thought that Eliot was right, and now I still do. Charmian has so little to say
Shakespeare and Johnson
WHEN I STILL DID a lot of traveling to make TV shows or appear on stage, I always took my complete Shakespeare with me on a long flight. It was the old Selfridge’s one-volume edition, with no notes but with an excellent introduction by Sir Henry Irving himself. Thus, because I was always traveling, I was always reading Shakespeare, even when the book fell to pieces so seriously that it had to be held together with a rubber band. In particular I read the history plays and the tragedies. The comedies I have always been able to read less often, although A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a special case. I like to read it every couple of years. Recently, on a midsummer night, I went with the family to see an open-air production in King’s College gardens. For my granddaughter, aged eight, it was the second time she had seen the play, and during the interval she politely made it clear that she had seen it done better: a knowledgeabletheatergoer. She was right, alas. The production was uninspired. Though they were hired-in professionals and not the usual bunch of mistakenly confident undergraduates, only a few of the actors knew how to speak. But the lines survived the beating they took. The text is a crowd pleaser, however transmitted. Hence the obvious answer to Johnson’s momentary puzzlement in his note on the play, when he quotes the bit about “the fiery glowworm’s eyes” and says “I know not how Shakespeare, who commonly derived his knowledge of nature from his own observation, happened to place the glow-worm’s light in his eyes, which is only in his tail.” But Shakespeare wasn’t just interested in what he himself knew to be true: he was interested in what the audience thought to be true, as they sat there and watched. As always, however, I would rather have been reading than watching.
Time having gone by since I fell ill, I have become reconciled to never traveling very far again, so I need a new routine for reading Shakespeare. I have taken to keeping a single volume of the Arden Shakespeare on my writing desk in the kitchen. At the moment it is Antony and Cleopatra . The Roman plays are my favorite Shakespeare anyway, and Antony and Cleopatra is my second-favorite amongthose—after Julius Caesar —so this is a high-ranking event. I have just finished going through the volume line by line and footnote by footnote, with increasing admiration for M. R. Ridley, who brought R. H. Case’s 1906 edition up to date with modern scholarship: modern for 1954. I spent decades getting familiar with Shakespeare without resorting to footnotes, but it was a doomed forgoing. Eventually you must look at the footnotes or you won’t know where you are. It remains true, however, that the best moments hit you without benefit of clergy. In Antony and Cleopatra , T. S. Eliot thought that the line most worth talking about comes from Charmian when she dies: “Ah, soldier!” I have always thought that Eliot was right, and now I still do. Charmian has so little to say
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