Technical update

Blogging is on hold for a little while as I need a new adapter for my laptop. Should be back to normal by next week. In the mean time, enjoy this picture of a Spanish don from 1688 from a collection of drawings known as The Cryes of the City of London - note his swagger, his fashionable clothes, his long hair, and particularly his enormous sword(!).

(Source.) 

 

Farces

I've read quite a few farces over the past few days - a fantastic dramatic genre for my research as they frequently emphasise the extravagance and bombasticity of heroic drama.

Picking plays to use is a dicey subject, though: I spent ages on Sunday looking for William D'Avenant's The Playhouse to be Let (1663), the fifth act of which, I had read, is one of the earliest examples of English burlesque. It features several characters typical of heroic dramas, tragedies, and romances - Cleopatra, Marc Anthony, and Caesar - presented in a decidedly unromantic way. Once I had finally found a copy online, through EEBO, it was a little disappointing. It was very short (not even five pages long) and about the best joke was the consistent naming of Anthony as "Tony" - as farcical jokes go, rather weak.

Reading Thomas Duffett's The Empress of Morocco (1674) now, which is slightly more interesting - especially as the cast-list reveals that the female characters were all played by men in its original run. It's a direct spoof of Elkanah Settle's own The Empress of Morocco and turns the London underclasses into a sort of alternative Moroccan nobility: Morena, the titular empress, is also an "apple woman", for example.

Speaking objectively, I do feel that a lot of farces of this period have fallen out of popularity deservedly. There's a lot of pantomime humour in them, which makes them extremely useful to use as sources to tell us what was popular in the late seventeenth century - the humour in The Playhouse to be Let, for example, derrives from the baseness of Cleopatra et al's behaviour, and indicates that the official take on them was far more serious. By burlesquing their characters in suggesting an everyday humanity to their behaviour, pretension of taste and ideology is being lampooned. As I say, this is interesting for what it tells us about seventeenth-century cultural. beliefs. Yet at the same time, no one can expect a modern audience to go to a play fully briefed on all the intricacies of Restoration culture and society. And as much as anything else, a lot of the humour is very cheap, frequently with a rushed feel about it.

All the same, I'll defend The Dragon of Wantley to the death. Cheap or not, any hero who wins the day by kicking his adversary in the bum is pretty funny.

REVIEW: Tough Without a Gun: The Extraordinary Life of Humphrey Bogart by Stefan Kanfer

I've read several popcorn books in the past month - by which I mean, books that are brainless reads which you might be embarrassed to read on the train. At work I was sent a proof of the new Sex and the City prequel: Summer and the City, a teen novel featuring a pre-college Carrie Bradshaw which proved surprisingly readable.

Then, following on from a childhood reading the entire Sweet Valley High series and a previous incarnation as a Sweet Valley blogger, I read Sweet Valley Confidential, the sequel set ten years later, which came out in the UK this month. I'm interested in SVH, and in '80s and '90s juvenile series more generally, as subjects for academic discussion and would love to read and write essays about them. In particular, I've long fantasised about "doing something" on SVH as a spiritual descendant of eighteenth century conduct novels.

I don't want to talk about SVC too much here but I will say that as a sequel to the original books, I think that it failed in capturing their essence. As a novel in its own right, I also think it was poorly-written and thought-out; I would never recommend it to someone unfamiliar with the series. Still, as a slice of what-happened-next, it's of interest - I wouldn't say that it scratches an itch but it acknowledges that there's an itch to be scratched.

I also read Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South, an alternative history which postulated what would happen if South African white supremacists from the present day travelled back in time to nineteenth-century America to provide the Confederate army with AK-47s, thus changing the course of the civil war. A ridiculous premise that actually works surprisingly well; I was quite impressed with Turtledove's depiction of Robert E. Lee in particular. Other than the too-lengthy battle scenes, it was extremely well-done.

As my discussion of any of these three books would probably become nerdy rather than scholarly, I'm forced by default to review Stefan Kanfer's recent biography of Humphrey Bogart, Tough Without a Gun.

I'll be frank: I don't think that it's a very good biography. Too be sure, it's readable - the introduction extremely so - but Kanfer shows all the typical biases of a biographer who's far too pleased with his subject. Bogart is introduced as a man whose life spans three centuries, which, though literally true (he was born in 1890s, found fame in the 1940s, enjoys a legacy stretching into the 2000s), is stretching the facts a bit. Really, we can hardly allow this to be an impressive claim, given that he was born in the nineteenth century's final year. In fact, had he been born just a week later, he'd have been born on the first day of the twentieth century.

Kanfer's characterisation of Bogart is also suspect. In his biographer's eyes, Bogart is the plain-talking man's man who's tough but fair; a complicated mesh of all the best characters he plays. The people he comes up against are unfair, or cruel, or misguided, or stupid. As represented by Kanfer, Bogart is rarely in the wrong in a given situation - a terrible attitude for a biographer to take. To brush over Bogart's more unpleasant qualities entirely; to see manliness represented in his alcoholism; to characterise him as a perpetual underdog, the prey of the deliberate vindictiveness of both Hollywood and his first three wives - is both distasteful and dishonest.

As a consequence, Bogart's humanity is veiled. For example, Bogart's first wife divorced him on the grounds of "neglect and cruelty" - Kanfer does not dismiss this but he doesn't go into further detail, either. And at times the desire to paint Bogart's nemeses in a bad light leads to pettiness. The woman responsible for him being summoned to court in 1949 is referred to as "a self-described 'model'" (143) - why not just call her a model, or an aspiring model?

Kanfer is also too obviously invested in the Bogart-Bacall relationship. I can sympathise - they were an iconic couple - but this results in Bogart's post-marital affairs being glossed over. Particularly puzzling is the case of his relationship with his hairdresser, Verita Thompson. Kanfer establishes them as having had a "lengthy affair" (95) between 1942-55 but she then receives only four, austere mentions throughout the book before her allegations of their relationship are dismissed as "unverified" (241). Why introduce her in such a way if she is only to be subsequently set aside?

Beyond Kanfer's cloying apotheosis of Bogart, the biography also concerned me in that it added little to my knowledge of the man that I couldn't have discovered for myself online. There were some amusing anecdotes that I hadn't heard before but there was otherwise little evidence of original research or analysis into either Bogart's character or Bogart as a standard of manhood during the 1940s.

This latter failure is particularly disappointing as the book does attempt some small scrutiny of this kind. A discussion of manliness is perhaps inevitable in any book or article on Bogart. After all, both the AFI and Entertainment Weekly voted him the greatest male screen legend of all time. There's a "Bogie Cult"; his image is synonymous with that of the private dick; his name is even slang for the monopolisation of a cigarette or joint. Bogart is associated with a certain kind of masculinity, yet all that Kanfer can do is wonder why "there never will, never can be another Humphrey Bogart". (252)

To my mind, this is a shallow question. A better one would be to query why Bogart's masculinity is still regarded by many as the epitome; after all, Sam Spade, Rick Blaine, and Dix Steele are from films now over sixty years old. It is true that the particular type of masculinity that they represent is no longer entirely fashionable, but it remains respectable. We remember his dry one-liners, his consumption of cigarettes and alcohol, his attitude to women as things to be admired as an ideal masculinity, even in this post-feminist world. Why is Bogart still cool, still highly regarded as a figure of masculinity, when his contemporaries Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, James Cagney and even Clark Gable (when was the last time you saw a Gable film that wasn't Gone With the Wind?) are forgotten or ridiculed?

In fact, we might ask why the version of masculinity exhibited by Bogart was ever fashionable to begin with. Kanfer writes: "In the early 1940s masculinity was defined by the appearances of men in uniform. Those who couldn't make the grade were defined as lacking in virility..." (88) This "definition" dovetails exactly with Bogart's breakthrough - when Bogart was forty-two. Why did this older actor, who had been relegated to bit-parts for the previous ten years, and was now being cast in noirs, find fame during a time when the other fashionable male stars were presented as young and belligerent? And why was he still successful in the early 1950s when the wave of Marlon Brandos and James Deans came along?

Kanfer does not attempt to answer these questions. Instead, he limits himself to occasional commentary on those habits of Bogart which do exude masculinity. At one stage, he concludes a passage on cigarettes with a commentary on the manliness of smoking in the 1940s, finishing with the wry aside: "After all, Adolf Hitler was the one who didn't use tobacco or eat meat." (116) In a book that has hitherto been distinctly lacking in jokes, I find this flippant remark bewildering. Is it a joke, the sole one in the book, about Hitler and in the context of cancer? If so, bad taste. Or is it a legitimate point? If so, it goes unexplained. Hitler's notorious conception of an ideal manliness is a fascinating subject; a discussion, however brief, of a western reaction to Hitler's manliness couldn't fail to capture my attention. Yet Kanfer leaves this avenue unexplored.

Without a sense of irony, he quotes from Jeffrey Meyers' biography of Bogart, that the star "survived twenty-five years in Hollywood without a drug problem, a nervous breakdown, or a psychiatrist." (244) He does not seem to consider that Bogart was hardly emotionally healthy, with frequent violent outbursts and an excessive alcohol habit - both of which Kanfer mentions earlier on in the book.

It's understandable that Kanfer adores Bogart, but I've long believed that the best biographies are those written with an academic neutrality. Mary Lovell's biography of the Mitford sisters is a good example of this, as are Lindy Woodhead's biographies of Harry Selfridge, and Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein. Bogart is one of my favourite actors; I like his voice, I like his one-liners, I like his left-wing attitudes, I like the idea of his relationship with Bacall. I appreciate that Kanfer loves him, too - and sympathy and admiration for the subject are both acceptable in a biography, provided that they are deserved and not overdone.

Kanfer, unfortunately, overdoes them, and consequently I think his book suffers for it. What I found strange was the fact that the first few chapters are interesting - even well-written. The story of Bogart's life up until the mid-1930s is presented with a comparative neutrality but Kanfer's love of his subject comes through in his writing. We anticipate the coming clash between Bogart the man and Bogart the celebrity.

Yet it is once Bogart begins to achieve some fame that the bias comes through. Suddenly the Bogart we are reading about is near-indistinguishable from the characters he plays. In the penultimate chapter - on the media inspired by Bogart since his death, which comes off as a simplistic literary review rather than an analysis of those works - he writes: "As American life coarsened...the curt, stiff-lipped men that Humphrey Bogart represented on-screen, and the sharp-witted individual that he was off-screen, took on a meaning far beyond sentiment. They stood for values that certain men and women - most of them far too young to remember him in his heyday - remembered and romanticized." (247)

What Kanfer doesn't understand is that this desire to cling to the romanticized version of Bogart is the very trap that he himself has fallen into. But can we entirely blame him for this? Bogart's success and legacy were founded on his celebrity image; Kanfer tells us that one of the reasons he continued smoking was because he was aware that it was part of his public persona (203). Kanfer's reluctance to relinquish the idealised, celebrity conception of Bogart is natural, given how much effort was gone into the creation of that celebrity. The veil drawn over its actors to present them with a new face fashioned by Hollywood is still active - and, I'd say, still effective.

REVIEW: Sweet Land Stories / Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow

This past month I have been fortunate enough to read a number of very good books. There was True Grit by Charles Portis, whose narrator is one of the most engaging I've ever encountered. I read a collection of stories by Richard Yates, one of my favourite American authors, called Liars in Love, which I didn't find quite as good as some of his other writing but still head and shoulders above the current American male literati. I also reread several favourite books: The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, which I have already praised in an earlier entry, and in immediate response to that, Susanna Clarke's books; these are like old friends, however, and I'm going to keep to my maxim of reviewing books that are new to me.

Most engaging of all the new books I read were two by E.L. Doctorow: Sweet Land Stories and Homer and Langley and, as they seemed to act as a question and answer to one another, I'm going to treat them as such. The former is a collection of short stories with no explicit common theme, although three of them have an explicitly criminal element, one dealing with a serial killer, another with the kidnapping of a baby, and the third with the murder of a child. The other two, one chronicling the life of an unfortunate young woman, the other regarding life on a religious commune, both introduce characters who do some morally questionable things but aren't quite as clear-cut. The latter book, Homer and Langley, is based on the lives of a pair of reclusive brothers who lived in New York in the first half of the twentieth century. Doctorow makes some minor artistic changes and extends their lives by about thirty years, but his story follows a similar narrative to reality.

Of note, none of the narrators or principal characters of the Sweet Land Stories are the true "villains"; their actions are the product of circumstance and the inducement of others. In "A House on the Plains", Earle helps his mother dispose of the bodies but she is the brains and muscle of the operation. Jolene commits adultery - but it's her husband's uncle who first acts on his feelings. Lester in "Baby Wilson" goes along with the kidnapping because his girlfriend brings the baby home. (As a side-note, Lester repeatedly states that it's in his character to just do whatever is easiest for him, and that going to the police would involve too much effort. But surely it's more effort to go on the run with the girlfriend and the child when there's an ongoing nationwide manhunt for them?)

Perhaps the clearest unifier stems from the title: Sweet Land Stories, a reference to a line in the song My Country 'Tis Of Thee. The irony of considering any of the stories representative of life in a "sweet land" is obvious - perhaps particularly in the final story, "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden", where an F.B.I. agent uncovers a government conspiracy. However, in the song, the words "sweet land" are followed by "of liberty"; it is the question of liberty that I think is at the heart of the book. Liberty is a common theme in American literature, perhaps stemming from the promise in the Declaration of Independence of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", and Sweet Land Stories seems to merge all three ambitions together in its discussion of what it means to live in America, placing liberty at the forefront.


Liberty - but from what? And at what point does liberty become a matter of keeping out of reach of would-be captors? The book is concerned with these two questions. In the first two stories liberty does seem to mean the freedom to live on the run from the police without being caught; it's the liberty of a creature aware that its freedom is neither permanent nor assured. (One is reminded, reluctantly, of the caged animals of Kate Chopin.) In "Jolene: A Life", liberty refers more to transience that an American lifestyle can bring: Jolene can leap from prostitution to the life of a wealthy housewife with relative ease - until her past comes to catch up with her. It is only at the culmination of the story that she finds a different (and perhaps more genuine) form of personal liberty, which allows her to live without compromising her lifestyle to that of someone else.


"Walter John Harmon", the story of life on a cult, is rather different. Its narrator and his wife moved to live under the guidance of Walter John Harmon some years before the story begins, and he describes their lifestyle and the aftermath of his wife's eventual elopement with Harmon. In particular, how can the WJH cult continue now that Harmon has been proven a liar and charlatan? The WJH cult is conservatively Christian with the exception of Harmon himself (who practices free love) - but apparently not otherwise unethical (no child-rape horror stories, for example). Yet the cult receives wide condemnation from the outside world; it cannot exist untormented by critics and it is eventually reduced to a militaristic state. The final, ominous line - "We are assured of a clear and unimpeded field of fire" - indicates that in order to exercise their liberty, the cultists will meet the outsiders who seek to collapse them face on.


The final story, "Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden", is perhaps the least successful. A child's body is found in the garden of the White House and an F.B.I. agent takes it upon himself to investigate when everyone else wants it hushed up. The subsequent narrative draws on the unequal dichotomy between established white Americans and poor Mexican immigrants. Immigration is obviously an important theme in any work that wants to tackle the subject of American life, but I felt that Doctorow handled it with far more flair in his Ragtime. In this story the meaning of liberty shifts again, while Doctorow considers the cost of liberty for immigrants - will they keep quiet about the death of their son for the sake of life in America? - and the freedom of speech - what are the benefits and losses of keeping a national scandal quiet? Perhaps it would have been better as a full-length novel; as it was, I felt that there was too much stuffed in there.


Perhaps the lasting lesson from Sweet Land Stories is that unqualified liberty can be a dangerous thing. If you're lucky, you may end up with a peaceful life of isolation - married in Alaska, as in "Baby Wilson", or living alone, as in "Jolene: A Life". If you're unlucky, the future may bring rootlessness ("A House on the Plains"), conflict and uncertainty ("Walter John Harmon"), or disillusionment ("Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden"). For the most part the main characters in each story are left happy ("Child, Dead, in the Rose Garden" is the exception), but it's a happiness of compromise and lowered expectations.


If Sweet Land Stories considers the joys and terrors of liberty, then Homer and Langley does just the opposite. As I have said, the book is based on the lives of Homer and Langley Collyer, and sticks fairly close to reality. As the years pass, the pair become more and more bound to their house and the piles of newspapers and trash they amass, until eventually they couldn't get out even if they wanted to.

The story is narrated by Homer, who went blind early on in his life and is dependent on his brother to aid him, thus strengthening the barrier against the outside world. There is no hope of liberty, whether literal or spiritual. Even the papers they keep in the house are eventually filled with stories about their curious life. The final passage of the book is truly terrifying; as good as any serious horror story.

Together, the two books complemented each other well, with their diverse attitude towards liberty. Side-by-side, the difference is striking. Where the central concern of Sweet Land Stories is that of liberty, Homer and Langley refuses to engage with the subject. Liberty means the outside, a place of change and insecurity, two things which the brothers are opposed. Much of Langley's time is spent in the creation of a newspaper that is wholly representative of every newspaper ever and will therefore only need to be bought once: "Collyer's eternally current dateless newspaper." Homer is more cynical but even so his blindness and his reliance on Langley prevent change from forming a striking impact. Far better to inflict imprisonment on oneself within the safety and stability of one's own home than to risk the myriad of dangers that can come from venturing outside.


What I find both bizarre and frustrating about Doctorow is his determination to avoid admitting his sources. This is less problematic in the case of Homer and Langley, where the title explicitly refers to the real Collyer brothers, and yet in spite of this, there is no reference to them in the blurb, or in the reviews on the cover, or even as an epigraph (which would have worked quite well, I think). In fact, had I not looked the book up on the internet before reading it, I wouldn't even have realised that it was based on true events. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that I am not American and that Doctorow assumed that the Collyer brothers were notorious enough in his own country that there was no need to provide an explanation.


Similarly, "A House on the Plains" in Sweet Land Stories is a point-for-point retelling of the story of Belle Gunness, a serial killer who lived at the turn of the twentieth century. What baffles me about this is that Doctorow claims that the two stories have little in common - even though they are nearly identical, other than a few superficial biographical details. The most obvious addition is that of Earle, the narrator and Dora's son and co-conspirator, but really, what does he bring to the story? He acts as an instrument to reveal the horrors of Aunt Dora's farm without giving explanation to her actions. He is there to narrate rather than as an integral cog in the story's mechanics.


The silly thing is that my argument isn't with ficionalising real life; that is an age-old technique. No: the use of obscure, uncited sources is problematic because at some point the reader has to distinguish what part of the story is to be admired as the author's own creation. I recognised the Belle Gunness story only because I'm a true crime nut. If the other stories in Sweet Land Stories have real sources, I am not aware of them.



Complaints aside, I very much enjoyed both books and wouldn't hesitate to recommend either of them. Doctorow is, in my opinion, one of the greatest living American writers and is well worth your time.

Locke / The origins of duelling

My last entry had a very cross tone to it, which can attributed in equal parts to stress and Dryden himself. I wasn't making very good progress with anything he had written so I switched to reading John Locke. I am reading his Essay concerning Human Understanding and it is still challenging yet more enjoyable than Dryden. It's only partly a thesis-related text: it isn't directly related to my subject but his discussion of personal identity may yield some material that can be of use. At the very least, it will provide some perspective on the sort of things that people in the late seventeenth century were thinking about. I haven't read very far into the Essay yet; the abridged version is over four hundred pages long and I started right from the beginning by reading the OWC introduction by Pauline Phemister. I shall report anything of relevance to my research when I come to it.

I'm currently writing about the origins of duelling. Many critics seem to take it for granted that the duel was a direct descendant of the medieval joust, the idea being that young men of the late sixteenth century longed for the days of romance and chivalry, and that they incorporated the fashionable new rapier into semi-ludic displays of battles. I'm not so sure. It would be very odd indeed if a nostalgia for the joust persisted into the seventeenth century, simply because almost nothing else from the middle ages was remembered fondly during this period. It was only later, during the late eighteenth century, that we begin to see a renewed interest in medieval culture and romance - and, significantly, it is during this period that we can observe a decline in the popularity of the duel. While Tennyson was writing his Idylls of the King, while Macready was reviving King Lear, while the Camden and Early English Texts societies were being founded, duelling had fallen entirely out of fashion. One would think that if duelling were the relic, or at least a direct relative, of the middle ages, the Victorians would have embraced it and it would have a strong presence in the later nineteenth century. Instead, they turned to attempts at historical reenactment.


If anything, many seventeenth-century cultural fashions were deliberate steps away from the middle ages, back to the classical world. The heroes of plays and poems were classical, or came from the Old Testament; little is written of King Arthur or the Virgin Mary, both major characters in medieval writing.

We might also add that the joust was a formal, mercenary event, held in public and considered entirely acceptable during its time. It has more in common with the Roman gladiatorial combat, or even the modern football match. Duelling, however, was controversial from the outset. It was illegal, which meant that it had to be held in secret, and it was fought to settle a question of honour. If you found yourself being challenged to duel, it would mean that you had grievously offended someone (perhaps by calling them a liar or seducing their sister) and the only way to settle things was with a duel. There was also an extralegal element to duelling that is entirely absent in jousting; one fought a duel to provide retribution for a personal injury that the official law would not pursue.

My concern which follows this is why this method of settling things became so popular. To be continued!

Poetics

I took Aristotle's Poetics to work today, another relic from my time as an undergraduate that I didn't recall very well, and I ended up hitting upon several interesting passages. Poetics is of course a deconstruction of epic and tragedy in classical literature and has exerted a powerful influence over western dramatic criticism that cannot be overstated; I could hardly not read it.

What I found most interesting is Aristotle's assertion that tragedy reflects the lives of people better than those around us. To simplify his argument, the tragic model depends on disaster befalling good people. He goes on to write:

Since tragedy is an imitation of people better than we are, one should imitate good portrait-painters. In rendering the individual form, they paint people as they are, but make them better-looking. In the same way the poet who is imitating people who are irascible or lazy or who have other traits of character of that sort should portray them as having these characteristics, but also as decent people. (Poetics, 8.1, trans. Malcolm Heath, Penguin 1996, p.25)

It occurred to me that this description of the ideal tragedy was in fact what irked critics of both epic and tragedy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aristotle's proposal that the tragic subject should be innately better than real people in spite of any flaws they possess cannot be reconciled with the principals of Commonwealth and post-Restoration societies, which were partly acting in response to Christian idealism. For many critics, Milton and Dryden among them, a perfect (or even superior) hero could not be synonymous with a flawed hero; the flaws provided an insurmountable obstacle to achieving perfection or superiority. Why should an irascible, lazy character be superior to those surrounding him?

I think to most modern readers this sounds a reasonable complaint so perhaps it is surprising how relatively recently it arose. This objection had seen some light in earlier centuries - Odysseus appears in Dante's purgatory undergoing punishment for crimes of fraudulence during the Trojan war - but it was during the seventeenth century that it first appeared with frequency. Reaction then was variously Miltonian, as I began to discuss in my previous entry, or comic (Behn, Dryden, and later Fielding). Note also that it was here that the lines between epic and tragic began to blur.

I couldn't comment conclusively on how the dilemma was resolved in nineteenth-century literature but it seems to me that the later twentieth century saw a revival of the classical model of the hero who is flawed yet still superior to his fellow men. For example, the action-men heroes of the late 1970s through to the early 1990s (Rocky Balboa, Max Rockatansky, John McClane, Costner's Robin Hood, Martin Riggs) are don't respect authority, are anti-intellectual, lack conventional manners, and perhaps use a native slyness to win the day; nevertheless they are invariably innately better than the characters who surround them and it is they that the audience cheers for. There are of course variants (Indiana Jones is an obvious example of the intellectual action hero) but the formula is generally the same. Like Aristotle's description of the tragic subject, these epic heroes are painted as they are, as everymen, but made better-looking - given, in short, a kind of intrinsic nobility that real everymen don't possess.

But I'm getting side-tracked. I don't believe that Aristotle addresses the conflict between superior and flawed heroes later on in his Poetics - I'd be very surprised if he does, in fact - but I'm interested to see what else he has to say. So far it has been an enlightening read.

Katherine Briggs

I immediately broke the resolution in my last entry because no sooner had I mentioned Katherine Briggs, I was left wanting to read my favourite book of hers, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, a thorough, but not over-long, survey of fairy lore, poetry, and literature of the British Isles. It's a book that I'm very fond of, having come across it in a library sale at school when I was sixteen and I realised that it was the book that I'd always wanted to read but didn't realise existed. (My edition has the word "English" in the title before "Tradition", but it seems customary to eliminate it - perhaps because at least three-quarters of the book investigates Scottish, Welsh, and Irish fairies.)

Anyway, it's a wonderful, wonderful book which I usually end up reading about once every ten months (imagine Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell without everything except the footnotes; I realise that this is some readers' idea of hell). Although it was first published in 1967, there is still an academic freshness to it, and it makes a wonderful change from the prettified Edwardian fairies, the Disneyesque inventions, the new-age faeries, and the self-consciously grotesque fairies and goblins that have become so popular in recent fantasy literature. Reading it this time, I came across two interesting things in Briggs' chapter "Giants, Hags and Monsters". The first refers directly to the representation of heroes:

Giant-like qualities cling even to the Arthurian heroes. The early Lancelot poem dwells with particularity on the distortion of Lancelot's appearance when he was in a rage. Arthur and Guinevere are supposed to have sat on the two great rocks at Sewing Shields, and Guinevere said something that annoyed her husband so that he threw a stone at her, which she caught on her comb. The stone can still be seen and weighs several tons...In fact, in folk tradition the characters are like those in the Bayeux Tapestry - the important ones are large and the unimportant ones are little. Often monstrous traits are attached to heroes, who sometimes seem to have changed from gods to heroes and from heroes to giants. (Briggs 65-6)

I'm not sure if I will use this in my own thesis as Briggs' research focuses on the popular or folk whereas at this stage mine is primarily on the official literature. It's an interesting point to encounter in her discussion, however, and has made me think about the physical "largeness" of heroes; I will certainly be encountering that idea again in my study of Fielding's Tom Thumb and The Tragedy of Tragedies. The idea of attaching monstrous traits - one assumes physical traits only - to heroes is particularly intriguing.

Second, in her review of British dragons (or worms - it seems that the cryptozoological difference is slight) in folklore, she retells the story of the Lambton Worm, wherein the Heir of Lambton rides off to fight the dragon "wearing spiked armour, so that it wounded itself when it bit him" (68). Of course, this brings us back to The Dragon of Wantley and Moore's own spiked armour, which I discussed on Sunday. I was fond of my pet theory - that the spikes on Moore's armour, as in the Aphra Behn play, represented the horns of a cuckold - but the occurrence of spiked armour in both stories which otherwise only have the most superficial details in common suggests that it was a standard or recognised characteristic of dragon stories. However, perhaps there is room for both interpretations to exist in the play alongside each other. At times like this, one longs to be able to go back in time and see the play originally performed.