26 October 2017
Cambridge – Once A Great University
A literary adjustment.
By Chin Chin
Thank the Good Lord for the University of Cambridge. Well, no, not the Lord in the sense of Christ or one or more thirds of the Holy Trinity. That would be too exclusive, offensive to other religions or even worse to those with no religion at all. No, by “The Good Lord” I mean any godhead or absence thereof. There we are. No one could be offended by that.
Anyway the best thing about Cambridge is its English Department which leads the charge in modern thinking. It has warned students that some plays by Euripides and Shakespeare contain upsetting material, presumably so that they do not have to read them if they do not want to. What a progressive attitude. The faculty is certainly to be congratulated on it but needs to develop its approach and take it forwards if it is to remain a world leader in this area.
The obvious next move is to publish a special edition of English literature with the upsetting bits removed. This isn’t a new idea. In the early nineteenth century Thomas Bowdler, distressed that parts of Shakespeare were not sufficiently delicate for him to read to his wife and children, published “The Family Shakespeare” which left out or replaced the offensive bits. For example the word “damn” had to go, leaving Lady Macbeth saying “Out crimson spot”, Ophelia’s end is made specifically accidental to avoid any possibility of suicide, and the prostitute, Doll Tearsheet, is left out of Henry IV. But Bowdler was not alone. Others went further and the poet laureate Nahum Tate produced a version of Lear with a happy ending.
Commendable though all this undoubtedly was, it doesn’t quite cut it nowadays. The fact that Lear ends happily could still leave students in shock at some of the incidents along the way. The gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes, for example, could easily put some of the more impressionable students into a state of catatonic shock from which no ending, even if it included the provision of replacement eyes by an eminent surgeon and a bit of song and dance, could rescue them. No, to avoid a serious risk of emotional damage the story has to be cheerful the whole way through.
Cheering up Shakespeare is no easy matter. Take Macbeth for example. The very first scene refers to his meeting with Macdonwald and to how he behaved;
Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops,
And fixed his head upon our battlements
Well there is nothing lib-dem about that. One can understand that Macbeth might have felt it necessary to unseam Macdonwald and put his head on the battlements. The decorative arts were rather different in the 16th century; but, really, to do it without shaking his hand or bidding him farewell hardly measures up to what we understand by “respect”. At the very least he should have made it clear that his own actions were not inspired by racism or because he thought that Macdonwald might be gay or trans.
Well, Macbeth is an unlucky play so perhaps there would be too much to clear up, but some of the others aren’t much easier. Was it right for Prince Hal to kill Hotspur, for example? That is a shocking example for students, to say the least. Surely the right thing would have been been to take him down to the pub and explain the matter over a pint? If Hotspur was really so set on the Crown then a therapist could be recommended. The trouble is that the more you look at Shakespeare’s plays, the more you realise how much they need to be changed to make them suitable for the modern student. Better, perhaps, to move on and to produce new literature which is more in accordance with the spirit of our times.
Yes, that sounds much easier, so why don’t we have a go? Let’s write a thriller which could not give offence to a Cambridge student.
The first step, of course, is to find an appropriate hero. Away with those alpha males, trained in the martial arts and attractive to women. They carry with them an unpleasant whiff of Bulldog Drummond and victorian imperialism. No, our hero has to be confused about his sexual status. Is he gay or trans or something more exotic? Of course he won’t really know himself, making room for at least thirty pages of self-questioning vapidity and long rambling sentences. Done right this could make the book attractive to the sociology faculty.
So much, so straightforward. More difficult, however, is the identity of those victims of violence without whom a thriller would surely be incomplete. Make them good people and Cambridge students, brought up on the theory that good people never die, will not be able to handle the text. Very well, they have to be bad people – the sort of people who make racist and sexist remarks. Suppose, then, we start with a description of one of them:
“Jasper, an overdressed banker, stepped out of his luxurious offices towards his highly polished limousine. His driver, Kate, winced. She knew that given the chance he would address her as “love”, using the word to assert his domination of womankind as a whole.”
There we are. No one could possibly like Jasper, especially if he tells Kate that these are dark times or uses some other expression tinged with racism. Clearly, then, he would be a suitable victim and can be safely eliminated by the villain.
It would be more difficult, however, if the book had to begin with a terrorist crime like the destruction of an aeroplane. Then to avoid a shocking elimination of the innocent, the author would have to demonstrate that all the deceased deserved their fate.
“The aeroplane had been hired by the bank to take its highly paid staff to a conference in the Third World. There was an atmosphere of anticipation. They could hardly wait to sneer at the starving locals from their position of privilege. The mission statement of the conference was: “Where there’s muck there’s brass” and every one of them hoped to learn something useful about how to get richer.”
Yes, that should protect the Cambridge students. Bringing down that aeroplane shouldn’t damage them, but for safety it would be better if the pilot and co-pilot were also wicked – perhaps they had flown in South Africa before the end of apartheid. The difficulty is, however, that there wouldn’t be much tension in the book because you could always tell, by their character, who would be eliminated. If you wanted to deliver a surprise, a bad character would have to kill a good one, but that would make the book unreadable by sensitive people.
Maybe then we should avoid thrillers. What about humour instead? This is much more promising. Once we had identified the good people from the bad, we could ensure that the bad ones kept getting into a mess, falling off ladders and dropping things on their toes. That after all is what happens in Christmas pantomimes.
I’m not sure what it is that makes me balk at the thought of a full year of pantomime humour. Could it be too much of a good thing? Is there something else we could offer to leaven the diet? Certainly there is. We could intersperse it with long documentaries explaining how the loyalty of the country’s workers has produced high productivity and a rosy economic future. That should keep them all happy for a bit. Unfortunately only for a bit, however. When they left their lecture rooms and saw the newspapers, the poor dears might die of shock.
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