THE PLAYWRIGHT MOST LIKELY TO ARTICULATE PRESSING CULTURAL ANXIETIES

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro - Simon & Schuster (2016)

I am always hesitant to read literary works as windows into the authorial psyche. I find arguments for the sexual and political inclinations of authors based on textual evidence to be dubious at best, and they are often manipulated to confirm a conclusion established by the critic long before the examination even began. If, for example, one wants to prove that a particular author was a closeted homosexual, one tends to discard all evidence to the contrary and to read artistic productions as reflections of the artist himself. This kind of reading turns even the most imaginative piece into a sort of thinly-veiled autobiography, and in my opinion, underestimates the power of the creative intellect. Having written countless short stories and character meditations myself, I know it is possible to write about people other than myself—about people who are not merely vessels for my own desires and neurosis. One of the enduring hallmarks of the creative intellect is its ability to inhabit psyches that differ greatly from one another, and from that of the gestating furnace. Therefore I think it can be damaging and reductive to impose an author’s life upon his body of work. 

When I first read the description on the back cover of James Shapiro’s fabulous book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, I had some concerns. The blurb suggests that,

James Shapiro shows us how attuned Shakespeare was to the cultural and political conflicts of the times, and how the tragedies of the day—and some that struck more perilously close to home—were transformed into the theatrical masterpieces we know today.

The kind of literary deduction proposed by this statement filled me with alarm. But the book came highly recommended, and I was intrigued by the concept of a biography that focuses on a single year in its subject’s life—a year during which a belated burst of energy gave birth to such layered productions as King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. So I decided to give it a read. 

Within the first few chapters I realized that my fears would be unconfirmed. Shapiro seems to be just as sensitive to autobiographical over-reading as I am. In fact, he is careful to underscore his own limitations in the introduction to his book. Writes Shapiro, 

Having spent much of the past quarter century researching and writing about Shakespeare’s life, I’m painfully aware that many of the things I’d like to know about him—what his political views and religious beliefs were; whom he loved; how good a father, husband, and friend he was; what he did with his time when he wasn’t writing or acting—cannot be recovered. The possibility of writing that sort of biography died by the late seventeenth century, when the last of those who knew Shakespeare personally took their stories and secrets with them to the grave. Modern biographers who nonetheless speculate on such matters, or in the absence of archival evidence read the plays and poems as transparently autobiographical, inevitably end up revealing more about themselves than they do about Shakespeare. 

James Shapiro spends very little time discussing Shakespeare’s family and relationships. There simply is not enough surviving evidence to prove how Shakespeare felt about his wife, his peers, or the newly crowned King James. Thus, Shapiro wisely chooses to focus instead on how the plays of 1606 provide a gateway through which to consider the wider cultural anxieties of the time. The strength of Shakespeare’s legacy has long been attributed to his talents for poking and prodding the human psyche—for locating the fear beneath the fear. This is why many critics describe his productions as ‘timeless’; because the true subject—the one that is never articulated—can be found in every era and location; it is part of our biological composition. Writes Shapiro, 

The year 1606 would turn out to be a good one for Shakespeare and an awful one for England. This was no coincidence. Shakespeare, so gifted at understanding what preoccupied and troubled his audiences, was lucky to have begun his career during the increasingly fractured years of Elizabeth’s decline. His early work had delved especially deeply into the political and religious cracks that were exposed as a century of Tudor rule neared its end. But it would take some time for him to speak with the same acuity about the cultural fault lines emerging under the new and unfamiliar reign of the King of Scots. In the [final months of 1605], their contours were already becoming more sharply defined for him, and his steadier grasp of the forces shaping this extraordinary time would result in one his most inspired years. 

Some years seem to contain an almost surreal degree of misfortune (is anyone else feeling like 2016 might be one of them?). In November of the previous year, a group of Catholic sympathizers planned a mass assassination of the king and all the members of parliament by planting kegs of gunpowder beneath the epicenter of government. In the Summer of 1606 a record number of Londoners died in what turned out to be one of the deadliest plague seasons in recorded history. The tensions between English and Scottish, Catholic and Protestant were exacerbated under the leadership of James, who sought to incorporate them all under the symbolic image of his crown. In light of these fears—both rational and irrational—we begin to see just how contextualized King Lear and Macbeth truly were. The first—mediating on the disastrous outcome of a decision to divide a united kingdom, and the second—the imagined assassination of a Scottish King. The combination of Early Modern English and allegorical characters can make it difficult for modern audiences to understand what it must have felt like for King James to watch a play like Macbeth. Thus, it is only in studying the contexts in which they were written that we can begin to detect the differences between Shakespeare’s plays published before and after the ascension of King James. Writes Shapiro, 

Even as the buried shards of religious division once again rose to the surface, so too did political ones when King James again pressed parliament to secure a Union of Scotland and England. To James, this outcome had seemed inevitable: as the Kind of Scots who had inherited the English throne, he embodied in his own person the union of the kingdoms. But for his subjects on both sides of the border the increasingly bitter debate over Union raised troubling questions about what it really meant to be English or Scottish, or for that matter British, creating identity crises where none had been before. This too was grist for Shakespeare’s mill. Under Elizabeth he had written English history plays; in 1606 under James he would shift his attention to British ones in both King Lear and Macbeth. 

One of the common threads that links King Lear and Macbeth is a complex and inconclusive discussion of evil and human accountability. We are drawn like moths to title characters who both excite and repulse us. Are Lear and Macbeth perpetrators or victims? What role does the demonic play in the degeneration of their lives? To what degree can an individual influence the progression of fate? After the Gunpowder Plot—an event which was spoken about at the time in the same baffled vocabulary as the commentaries on 9/11—the need to dissect and discover the source of evil became something of a national obsession. Writes Shapiro, 

The Fifth of November, that “confection of all villainy,” gave those issues fresh relevance, for it had prompted not only Shakespeare but also everyone else in the land to confront questions they had never been forced to grapple with so deeply or desperately: How can ordinary people attempt such horrible and unthinkable crimes? In doing so, what kind of lies or stories must they tell themselves and others? Does this evil come from satanic forces or from within us? What binds us together—be it a family or a marriage or a country—and what can destroy these bonds? Recognizing the hunger for a play that probed the very questions that now haunted his world, Shakespeare began to read and think about Macbeth. 

In his meticulous examination of a single year in Shakespeare’s productive life, James Shapiro shows what a narrow perspective can do for literary analysis. There is much to be learned when we resist the urge to draw a line connecting every play The Bard wrote and instead explore a particular moment and the circumstances surrounding the production of a single play. I have read countless ‘definitive accounts’ on Shakespeare’s life, but Shapiro’s book contributed more to my understanding of Macbeth and King Lear than any of the thousand-page tomes. And it isn’t as if he is lacking information. Shapiro has been a professor of English Literature at Columbia and a renowned Shakespeare scholar since the 1980s. If he wanted to write another birth-to-death biography, he would have. In fact, it is Shapiro’s decision to carve a piece out of the middle of Shakespeare’s life and examine it in semi-isolated detail that I find so impressive. It could not have been easy to insist on fencing such an endless and fertile field of primary and secondary material. Perhaps it is this kind of willpower that has led Shapiro to so many accomplishments. Besides his position at Columbia, he has also taught as a Fulbright lecturer in Israel, served as the Sam Wanamaker Fellow at the Globe Theater in London, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. Shapiro has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. In 2006, he won the Samuel Johnson Prize for 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare—a book that in many ways anticipated The Year of Lear. Shapiro has also written numerous periodicals for such publications as The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Book Review, and The Daily Telegraph. 

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 is by no means an introductory text. If you aren’t already familiar with Shakespeare, you will not be able to make the most of what James Shapiro has to offer. The Year of Lear is written for the Shakespeare fanatic who wants to go a little deeper, who wants to reinsert Shakespeare into the social and political contexts which he sought to articulate. It is a refreshing argument against seeing Shakespeare as some sort of timeless cultural anomaly, and it is an acknowledgment that he might have been influenced by the changes taking place around him. Shapiro probably says it best when he writes,

…to draw Shakespeare out of the shadows demands considerable effort and imaginative labor, for we need to travel back in time four centuries and immerse ourselves in the hopes and fears of that moment; but the rewards are no less great, for that richness, in turn, allows us to see afresh the tragedies he forged in this tumultuous year. 

NYT book review

Washington Post Review

James Shapiro author website

THE LIBERTINE MOST LIKELY TO FALL IN LOVE

Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius by Laurence Bergreen - Simon & Schuster (2016)

How many times does the average person fall in love? Idealists and adherents of fate would argue that each person is allotted a single ‘true’ romantic experience, characterized by some kind of quasi-mystical fusion of complementary souls. The vast majority—those who roam the earth with their feet on the ground and their heads beneath the stratosphere—might logically suggest that the Average Joe will experience two or three relationships of significance over the course of his lifetime. When a person claims to have fallen in love five, six, or even ten times, the general consensus is that the quality of their affections is somehow diluted, and their amorous intentions attain a sinister and self-serving gloss. 

So what do we make of a man like Giacomo Casanova? Why do we tolerate—and sometimes endorse—a self-professed womanizer who bedded over one hundred women and contracted syphilis no less than eight times? Can we feel anything but disgust for a man who routinely seduced young girls, allowed his own illegitimate daughter to observe his carnal acts, and resorted to rape whenever his targets refused to satisfy his unquenchable lust? The answer, of course, is no. And one of the reasons I enjoyed reading Laurence Bergreen’s substantial biography, Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius, is because Bergreen never tries to soften or romanticize Casanova’s dubious aims or methods. The resulting figure is not one with whom we sympathize or identify—he is a fleshy parasite, so preoccupied with delusions of grandeur that he fails to acknowledge his own reputation as a lecherous swindler who uses sex and aggression to distract himself from the paucity of his own intelligence. During the seething heyday of the Enlightenment, while philosophers and writers like Rousseau and Voltaire were busy ascending the peaks of international celebrity, Casanova struggled to attain his own literary ambitions. His essays and pamphlets failed to bring him the adoration he desired. He was forced to admit that he might not be capable of the kind of dense existential reasoning that elevated the likes of Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and John Locke. Casanova simply wasn’t smart enough—but he could certainly seduce.

Perhaps this is why Bergreen’s biography reads something like an extended psychoanalytical study of a disturbed and displaced personality. Casanova’s failed attempts to make a name for himself—as a writer, politician and ambassador—are laid alongside an unembellished account of his sexual exploits. In fact, they seem to leapfrog over one another in what turns out to be a predictable pattern of disappointment and indulgence. Bergreen’s biography is fascinating because it is largely prophetic. We know, as we read, that Casanova will continue to seek love and fame throughout his life, the episodes and embarrassments becoming increasingly grotesque as he ages. We know that we are watching a slow and excruciating downfall, one that spans the entire European continent (and Great Britain) as Casanova is unceremoniously booted from country after country. We read Bergreen’s book with twisted delight, our faces plastered with the hellish grins of those who are witness to the extended torture of a despicable creature. Casanova’s story has all the hallmarks of an epic, tactile decline: Venetian decadence and decay; masks and disguises; diseased flesh and secret pregnancies; lies and staged deceptions; massive fortunes won and lost; elaborate escapes from prison; Freemasons and astrological mysticism; the seduction of virgins, nuns, duchesses, and castrated males; cloaks and daggers and poisons and gondolas. Bergreen understands the anxieties at the heart of such urgent melodrama—the palpitating physicality of sex and escape and reinvention. 

Unlike most of the other authors I’ve profiled, Laurence Bergreen does not focus on a single historical period or geographical region. He is not an expert on English history, or Chinese philosophy, or the American Revolution. He is, rather, an expert on individuals. He is a true biographer who does not abide by the arbitrary restraints of time and space. Perusing his catalogue of published works, it seems to me like Bergreen lights upon a figure who interests him, and then does all the necessary research to orient his subject within social and political contexts. This approach has led to an impressively diverse range of subjects—from Al Capone, to Irving Berlin, to Louis Armstrong, to Ferdinand Magellan—and also allows him to get to know his subjects on a personal level before locating them within the larger tapestry of world events. Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius is chronological and rarely deviates from the life of Giacomo Casanova. Bergreen does not allow himself to follow intriguing tangents. The end result is that while readers might want to know more about 18th-century Venice, they could not possibly want to know more about Casanova. Nearly every day of his life can be accounted for and there are few, if any, gaps in the historical record. This painstaking attention to detail is indicative of an author whose priorities lie with the individual, not the historical moment to which he belongs. The victories, the defeats, the long stretches of boredom and routine—all are purposely included in order to depict a life in full. One can only assume that this same compulsion is reflected in Bergreen’s frequent contributions to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Esquire. One can further deduce that Bergreen’s determination to leave no detail behind is what lead him to become a sought-after university lecturer, a judge for the National Book Awards (1995) and a judge for the PEN Nonfiction Award (1991). I can’t say for certain whether Bergreen’s method of research inspired NASA to recruit him as the keynote speaker for the administration’s fiftieth-anniversary event, but it probably didn’t hurt. 

Bergreen sums up our cultural attraction to Casanova in the introduction to his book. The Venetian’s scandalous memoirs serve as both a confession of his various sins, and a searing indictment of the archaic social order dismantling Italy. Writes Bergreen, 

He slept with one hundred and twenty-two women, by his count, and perhaps with a few men…Seeking revenge for his lack of status at birth, he embarked on a lifelong quest to right this wrong by putting himself out to stud. He would use sex as a weapon of class destruction, siring eight children out of wedlock, each with a different woman whom he refused to marry. At times he behaved like a cad, at other times like a genius, He was the archetypal bad boyfriend: irresistible, dangerous, amoral. Casanova wasn’t the only dedicated hedonist of his day nor the most brilliant literary figure, and certainly not the only rogue, but he was unique in playing all three roles to the hilt. 

Bergreen also attempts to flesh out Casanova’s reputation as a calculating sex mercenary by suggesting that the libertine was actually overwhelmed by his own romantic inclinations. Casanova wasn’t just an imaginative guy with an extraordinary libido; he was actually catapulted into deep, blinding love with more than half of his conquests. It is rather perplexing for a modern reader with a cynical disposition to calculate how many times Casanova claimed to have found ‘the one’. He seems to have been gifted (or burdened) with an overactive imagination which caused him to turn a friendly smile or a waft of perfume into the beginning of an epic romance. Writes Bergreen, 

…as a libertine, Freemason, epicurean, and devotee of the Kabbalah, he was always trying to burst the bounds of Venetian institutions to exalt the self—and one’s sexuality. He believed in everything that came his way: religion, philosophy, magic, science, and especially love. He spiked the Age of Enlightenment with sex, and more sex. He exploited women shamelessly. At the same time, he gave himself to the women he possessed. “I don’t conquer, I submit,” he explained. He exalted women beyond reason. Each love affair was, for him, a meeting of the mind and spirit, a glimpse of eternity and ecstasy.

Without excusing Casanova’s revolting behavior, Bergreen implies that the Venetian’s aims were strikingly aligned with those of the broader Enlightenment movement. Casanova approached each new sexual experience without prejudice, and ignored the constraints imposed by irrational laws of religion and custom. He refused to draw conclusions until he could explore each possibility with his own five senses. He made himself as receptive and open-minded as possible, because that—according to Enlightenment philosophy—was the only method by which to obtain new knowledge. Bergreen even writes about Casanova’s experiments using the same vocabulary one might use to describe the great heroes of the Enlightenment in pursuit of their various disciplines, 

So began his education in love and women. They were his shadow self, his “ruling passion.” He would dedicate his life to trying to understand everything about women. He would become a libertine. He would give free rein to his senses, suspend moral judgement, and indulge his appetites. To be a libertine was to stand apart from society, to refuse to accept definitions and restrictions. The child of two actors, two outcasts, he would spend his life as a performer on the world’s stage, trying on an endlessly changing array of roles and costumes, playing all the parts, villain and hero. His imagination would attempt to vanquish them all. 

At the end of the day, Giacomo Casanova was as hungry for knowledge as his sometime-nemesis Voltaire. His interests and experiments have been ignored partly because to discuss them would require an uncomfortable journey to the land of the Taboo. It is easier to diminish Casanova than to admit to an understanding of his passions and desires. It is a natural impulse to censor his frank declarations and scorn his amorous pursuits. Casanova took advantage of people, he manipulated and injured many vulnerable women. He deserves our ridicule—but not our dismissal. As Laurence Bergreen proves in his extraordinary biography Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius, there is still much to extract from an imperfect life. There is the restless energy of a man whose belief in personal liberty was repeatedly thwarted by an oppressive, blood-based regime. There is the lashing out of a frustrated and unappreciated intellect. There is the incredible capacity of the human being to rise, and fall, and rise again transformed. And there is the possibility of falling in love over, and over, and over again. These insights, captured within the pages of a scandalous memoir, deserve our attention—even if the confessor’s exploits do not. 

Kirk's review

Laurence Bergreen's author website

THE OUTCAST MOST LIKELY TO FOUND AN EMPIRE

Genghis Khan and the Quest for God by Jack Weatherford - Viking (2016)

Not many of us can claim to have established an empire. The few recognizable founders—Alexander the Great, Cyrus the Great, Romulus of Rome—have come to occupy a rather ambiguous zone in the shared cultural memory. These myth-men, many of whom boasted of divine parentage and did nothing to disprove the wild speculations of their subjects, were paradoxically deified at the moment of their damnation. This is not a revolutionary concept. It is a recognized symptom of empire that these nebulous organisms glow brightest at the instant of collapse. From Shelley’s imagined encounter with the foot of Ozymandias, to the toppling of imperial statues in nineteenth-century Russia, the relationship between ostentatious external ornamentation and internal political decay has been well-established. In most cases, when the likeness of an emperor begins to proliferate in murals and statuary, his remaining years in power can be calculated on a single mutilated hand. 

This was not the case with Genghis Khan, a man who founded one of the most extensive, successful empires the world has ever seen, but who somehow manages to look awkward and oppressed beneath the heavy title of ‘emperor.’ In fact, the image of this robust, weathered warrior sitting immobile on a gilded throne and clutching a jewel-encrusted scepter is ridiculous to say the least. Genghis Khan was an entirely different kind of ruler. Ruthless as he undoubtedly was, he never succumbed to material gluttony and excess in the characteristic manner of emperors. Perhaps this is why he seems to roam the outskirts of the historical landscape, and why many historians choose to ignore his impressive conquests, rather than try to make sense of his unusual style of leadership. For if we acknowledge the relative success of a ruler who was neither extravagant nor particularly vain, it would become exceedingly difficult to excuse those behaviors in Western sovereigns whose various sins we overlook as inevitable byproducts of concentrated power. Genghis Khan’s mobile ‘palace’ of tents is an argument against the overwrought bedazzling of Versailles and the inherent evils it represents. In his remarkable book Genghis Khan and the Quest for God, Jack Weatherford presents the Mongol method of governance as a surprisingly grounded and rational alternative to despotic tyranny. By accepting diverse cultures and religions within his cosmopolitan empire, Genghis Khan and his descendants were able to conquer and control a vast portion of the globe stretching from China to Hungary, and from Russia to Afghanistan. 

Known for his 2004 New York Times bestseller Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford has long exhibited a profound interest in ‘peripheral’ empires and their methods of rule. In addition to three comprehensive accounts of the Mongol Empire, Weatherford has also explored the history of prominent Native American tribes and their contributions to global culture. His anthropological work has led to frequent appearances on The Today Show and All Things Considered. Weatherford is a regular contributor to such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and National Geographic. In 2006, he was awarded the Order of the Polar Star—the most prestigious Mongolian honour bestowed upon foreigners. A former professor of anthropology at Macalaster College in Minnesota, Weatherford now lives part-time in Mongolia. He is just one of the many Western intellectuals whose disenchantment with a Eurocentric vision of the world has evolved into a fascination with Eastern cultures—especially those which have been silenced and erased by overzealous religious crusaders. 

From the earliest days of his youth, Genghis Khan was an unusual candidate for leadership. Ignored by his father and banished by his clan, Genghis Khan spent his formative years foraging for food with his mother on the side of a mountain. In spite of the hardships the future Khan encountered, Weatherford suggests that,

…the intimacy between the young boy and the mountain substituted for what he was missing from his male kinsmen, who had rejected him and left him to die. The mountain became his confidant and guide. He rarely trusted or confided in people and seldom seemed as much at home or as happy as he was on his beloved Burkhan Khaldun. The important principles of his life, and the important relationships, originated there on its slopes, in its forests, and under its shadow. 

The difficult circumstances of his youth, as well as their subsequent impact on his values and priorities as an adult, helped to distinguish Genghis Khan from other imperial rulers. He was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and his humility enabled him to understand and appeal to the vast majority of his subjects on an unprecedented level. Thus it was that,

The Mongol Empire encompassed people from a greater diversity of faiths than that of any other empire in prior history. Never had one man ruled over followers of so many religions without belonging to one of them: Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Confucians, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Hindus, Jews, Christians, and animists of different types. Each of the major religions was divided into myriad competing, and often viciously warring, sects. Genghis Khan’s greatest struggle in life was not to conquer so many tribes, cities, and nations—that had come fairly easily to him—but to make them live together in a cohesive society under one government. 

Weatherford’s aim in Genghis Khan and the Quest for God is to establish that his subject was eager to understand and incorporate diverse philosophies and religious practices within his hybridized kingdom. He frequently invited religious leaders to his tent to teach him about their particular beliefs, and he organized conversations between them. He had no reservations about combining elements from different systems of belief and observing them side-by-side. Perhaps, as Weatherford suggests, Genghis Khan believed that all the religions he encountered were expressions of the same underlying power—a power he had first experienced in the natural sublimity of Burkhan Khaldun. Although the desire to engage and appease conflicting schools of religious thought might seem like an odd preoccupation to modern readers, Weatherford argues that,

Genghis Khan erupted into history in a century when gods flourished on Earth, when religion ruled the world. Sounds of the muezzin’s call to prayer, tolling church bells, chanting monks, and singing pilgrims filled the air across cities and villages from Japan in the Pacific to Ireland in the Atlantic. Ostentatious displays of religious piety dominated art, literature, architecture, and philosophy, whether at the Sung capital in China, the palace of the caliph in Baghdad, the papal throne in Rome, the court of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the fortress of the sultan in Delhi, of the mosques of Seville and Granada in Spain.

And from a political point of view,

Religion triumphed over secular life. Priests, lamas, monks, and mullahs controlled the calendar, set borders between rivals, and collected taxes. They operated judicial courts, staffed prisons, built universities, opened hospitals, and managed wineries, banks, brothels, and torture chambers. 

Genghis Khan spent a significant amount of his precious time mediating between warring religious factions. His efforts were not always successful, and the resulting conflicts must have been extremely frustrating. Nevertheless, his determination to bring about cooperation and meaningful deliberation between religious scholars led to the establishment of one of the most knowledgable and articulate imperial courts in history. Writes Weatherford, 

With each future victory on the battlefield, the number of scribes increased as men literate in other languages and cultural traditions were added to the administration. They grew from a simple corps of clerks into language schools that gathered clusters of intellectuals trained in philosophy and literature from rival religions and contrasting intellectual traditions. From this meager beginning would emerge a group of steppe scholars, a sort of new intelligentsia that would become increasingly important in the decades ahead. 

In contrast to the campy, rather dimwitted version of Genghis Khan popularized on the Western stage by nineteenth-century Orientalists, Weatherford portrays the founder of the Mongol empire as a compassionate, thoughtful ruler who nurtured a genuine desire to alleviate misunderstandings between religious groups. Weatherford’s examination of Genghis Khan—along with the lessons he distills from the progression of the Mongol’s life and empire—is particularly relevant at a time when religious persecution seems to be scaling new heights of violence and extremism. In fact, Genghis Khan’s informal tent meetings seem to preempt our own attempts at reconciliation. Weatherford’s elaboration of the challenges plaguing Genghis Khan will be painfully familiar to any modern reader. He writes, 

Rather than creating a spiritual utopia of art, compassion, and beauty, religion had saturated the world with resentment and hate. History’s earlier wars had been fought mostly for the simple human emotions of lust and greed, but the rise of the world religions had encouraged the hatred and killing of innocent people for no greater reason than that they worshipped God in another way. Religiously motivated or justified warfare posed the greatest threat to world peace and social stability. Wars in the name of competing gods now surpassed avarice, envy, and ethnicity as a source of violence, and these gods proved insatiable.

More than seven hundred years after Genghis Khan’s death, little progress has been made in pursuit of religious tolerance. Perhaps, as Jack Weatherford suggests in Genghis Khan and the Quest for God, it is time to shift our focus, and search for answers in the periphery. 

Jack Weatherford's Macalaster faculty page

NYT book review

THE WOMAN MOST LIKELY TO EMBODY THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COMMON STOCK

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh by Linda Colley - Pantheon (2007)

Who was Elizabeth Marsh? Did she extend the boundaries of human knowledge? Did she fight for the rights of a minority group, or otherwise subvert the hierarchy of power? Did she discover something? Paint something? Birth something? The simple answer is no. Unlike several other figures I’ve written about, who were celebrated during their lifetimes but have since retreated into the historical shadows, Elizabeth Marsh was never famous and never achieved anything of note. So why did I commit myself to reading Linda Colley’s delightful biography, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh? And—perhaps more to the point—why on earth would Colley spend years of her life digging through obscure archives in order to unearth paltry snatches of information on a woman who doesn’t really matter? 

The paradoxical answer is that Elizabeth Marsh matters precisely because she doesn’t. She was born in 1735 to a mediocre family of sailors and soldiers. She struggled financially her entire life. The one book she wrote, The Female Captive, is nowhere near the top of its genre, and was written as a final, desperate attempt to earn some extra income. And yet, the fact that a modern historian can learn anything about such an unimportant woman reveals the extent to which the British Empire of the 18th century was radically different from those that came before. Writes Colley, 

Elizabeth Marsh was socially obscure, sometimes impoverished, and elusively mobile. In the ancient, medieval and early modern world, such individuals, especially if they were female, rarely left any extensive mark on the archives unless they had the misfortune to be caught up in some particular catastrophic event: a trial for murder or heresy, say, or a major rebellion, or a massacre, or a conspiracy, or a slaver’s voyage. That Elizabeth Marsh and her connections, by contrast, can be tracked in libraries and archives, not just at interludes and in times of crisis, but for most of her life, is due in part to some of the transitions that accompanied it. During her lifetime, states and empires, with their proliferating arrays of consuls, administrators, clerks, diplomats, ships’ captains, interpreters, cartographers, missionaries and spies, together with transcontinental organizations such as the East India Company, became more eager, and more able, to monitor and record the lives of ‘small’ people—even, sometimes, female people—wherever they went. 

Because so many of our modern bureaucratic systems are rooted in this period of imperial expansion, it can be difficult to understand how profound the accompanying social and cultural changes really were. Whereas, under previous global empires, there existed a rigid separation between the ruling noble class and a faceless swarm of peasants, with the advent of the industrial revolution and Britain’s rising naval prominence, a powerful merchant class began to influence the shape and character of empire. These merchants were, for the most part, highly educated in commerce and international trade. They calculated and recorded everything that could be quantified. And when they found themselves in a position to enact laws and influence the priorities of government, they treated the British Empire and its many diverse subjects like a vast warehouse of goods, whose global movement must be meticulously tracked in order to guarantee a net profit. Thus, it became vital to collect information on every single body that could contribute to the preservation of the empire, not just the lords and ladies in England. With the demands of such a large and culturally diverse empire, the average sailor in Jamaica suddenly found himself worthy of attention and scrutiny. As Colley writes in her introduction, 

…this is not just an account of an individual and a family: it is also, thirdly, a global story. Elizabeth Marsh’s existence coincided with a distinctive and markedly violent phase of world history, in which connections between continents and oceans broadened and altered in multiple ways. These changes in the global landscape repeatedly shaped and distorted Elizabeth Marsh’s personal progress. So this book charts a world in a life and a life in the world. It is also an argument for re-casting and re-evaluating biography as a way of deepening our understanding of the global past. 

A professor of history at Princeton University, Linda Colley has spent a significant part of her life devising new perspectives on British imperial history. She frequently challenges the dominant narrative, as in her 1982 book, In Defense of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714-1760, which advocates for the vilified political party under Whig supremacy. Her 1992 book, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, similarly examines previously neglected populations, and won the Wolfson Prize for History. Described on her Princeton faculty page as ‘an exercise in meshing biography with trans-continental history,’ The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh was named one of the ten best books of 2007 by the New York Times. In addition to her nonfiction books, Colley is also a frequent contributor to the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Review of Books. She has curated museum exhibitions and given countless lectures throughout Europe and the United States. Through all of her diverse projects, Colley exhibits an underlying interest in the ‘small’ people of empire. She is fascinated with how the average British citizen came to see himself and his role in the volatile world of complex trade and warfare. Thus, Colley suggests that through her family and their naval connections, Elizabeth Marsh was,

…brought into contact with some of the main forces of global change of her time: enhanced maritime reach, transoceanic and transcontinental commerce, a more deliberate mobilization of knowledge and written information in the service of the state, the quickening tempo of imperial aggression and colonization, emigration, war, slavery and the slave trade. Many millions of people were caught up in one or more of these. Elizabeth Marsh was affected and swept into movement by all of them. 

And yet, despite the extent of these global forces, Colley is careful never to stray too far from her biographical subject. She gives Elizabeth Marsh the same intimate attention usually bestowed upon monarchs and intellectuals. She immortalizes every insignificant movement and event because she can, and because the alternative would be inhumane. This is one of the warm and cozy traps into which modern historians can easily fall. Writes Colley, 

Because of the tendencies of our own times, historians have become increasingly concerned to attempt seeing the world as a whole. this has encouraged an understandable curiosity about very large-scale phenomena: the influence of shifting weather systems on world history, ecological change over time, patterns of forced and voluntary migration, the movement of capital, or commodities, or disease over continents, the transmission of ideas and print, the workings of vast overland and oceanic networks of trade, the impact of conflicting imperial systems, and so on. These, and other such grand transcontinental forces, were and are massively important. Yet they have never just been simply and inhumanly there. They have impacted on people, who have understood them (or not), and adapted to them (or not), but who have invariably interpreted them in very many different ways. Writings on world and global history (to which I stand enormously indebted) sometimes seem as aggressively impersonal as globalization can itself. 

This is why Colley chooses to let the details of Elizabeth Marsh’s life illustrate the wider global changes, rather than overwhelm readers with her own extrapolations. Marsh’s written account of her capture in Morocco is not a work of literary merit, but it reminds readers of the existence of the individual amidst the chaos of globalization. During another, much later, period of immense global change, American sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that the 1950’s were convulsed by a series of violent, existential ‘earthquakes,’ caused by the collapse of colonial empires, the emergence of atomic warfare, and unchecked mechanization. Comparing Elizabeth Marsh to 20th century Americans, Colley writes that,

…like other members of her family, she tried to make sense of the changes transcending seas and continents that she and they were so markedly living through and acting out. The extent and quality of Elizabeth Marsh’s global earthquake in the mid-eighteenth century was substantially different from that perceived by Mills in the 1950s, though the flux of empire, enhanced state power, runaway military violence, modernization, and strains on family and marriage were part of her experience too. Elizabeth Marsh’s earthquake was also very different from out own at the start of the twenty-first century. But the nature of her ordeal, her precocious and concentrated exposure to so many forces of transcontinental change, and her sense in the face of these ‘impersonal and remote transformations’ both of shock and wonder, entrapment and new opportunities, remain eloquent and recognizable.

It is Linda Colley’s determination to locate the personal within ‘remote transformations’ that renders her biography so evocative. Strangely, her close attention to the particular details of Elizabeth Marsh’s life actually makes it easier for diverse readers to see themselves reflected in her chosen subject. Paradoxically, Colley’s dissection of a single isolated experience has the capacity to reach farther, and touch deeper, than the impersonal voice which would speak for an entire demographic. Thus, in The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, Colley succeeds in her aim to capture ‘a world in a life and a life in the world.’  

Linda Colley's website

Linda Colley's Princeton faculty profile

NYT book review

Hilary Mantel's review of 'The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh'

THE SCIENTIST MOST LIKELY TO HOLD A MICROSCOPE IN ONE HAND, AND HIS HEART IN THE OTHER

The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf - Vintage Books (2016)

The difficult thing about being a scientist is that once your theories have been debunked, once newer, more efficient methods of experimentation have been devised, or fancy new machinery renders your entire discipline obsolete, you tend to fade from the pages of history. You become a footnote in another scientist’s biography. The lucky ones are given the condescending designation of ‘inspiration,’ which is rather like the academic equivalent of the ‘participation awards’ handed out to talentless young athletes. The unlucky ones are mocked by their contemporaries and ignored by historians. Unlike artists, whose contributions may wax and wane according to changing aesthetic tastes, it is very difficult for a scientist to be resurrected once he’s been flattened beneath the unforgiving bulldozer of progress. After all, one can prefer Michelangelo even after Warhol comes along. It is much more problematic to say ‘I prefer to believe that the world is flat’ when centuries of data prove otherwise. 

Alexander von Humboldt is an unusual case of historical amnesia. Most of his theories, although rudimentary, have never been discredited. In fact, it is rather strange that most modern Americans have never heard of him, because his name can be found on nearly every page of your average atlas. In her fascinating (and beautifully illustrated) biography, The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf strives to articulate the extent of Humboldt’s influence to modern readers. It is not the first time Wulf has encouraged readers to take a closer look at the truths they ‘hold to be self-evident.’ In fact, she is a master at rediscovering the thrilling origins of some of the more mundane elements of twenty-first century life. Her 2009 book, The Brother Gardeners, examines the competitive relationships between gentlemen gardeners in the 18th century and was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Chasing Venus, published in 2012, recalls the imperial race to calculate the distance between planets in 1761-1769, when Venus passed between the earth and the sun. The Invention of Nature has already been nominated for numerous major awards and is a New York Times bestseller. Wulf has a knack for reminding readers of the incredible discoveries and occurrences which allow us to lead our boring everyday lives. She makes gardening, astronomy, and scientific calculation as suspenseful and exciting as trench warfare. She asks us to look at the circumstances of our lives with innocent eyes. In regards to Humboldt’s diminished legacy she writes, 

…while his books collect dust in libraries, his name lingers everywhere from the Humboldt Current running along the coast of Chile and Peru to dozens of monuments, parks and mountains in Latin America including Sierra Humboldt in Mexico and Pico Humboldt in Venezuela. A town in Argentina, a river in Brazil, a geyser in Ecuador and a bay in Colombia—all are named after Humboldt…Almost 300 plants and more than 100 animals are named after him…and on the moon there is an area called ‘Mare Humboldtianum’. More places are named after Humboldt than anyone else. 

So why does Humboldt’s name fall into the fuzzy, half-familiar region of my brain? Perhaps, as Wulf suggests, it’s because his theories have become common sense. They seem obvious to modern readers, even though at the time of their publication, Humboldt’s ideas were as radical and controversial as those of Charles Darwin—a man greatly influenced and indebted to Humboldt. The irony, writes Wulf,

…is that Humboldt’s views have become so self-evident that we have largely forgotten the man behind them. But there exists a direct line of connection through his ideas, and through the many people whom he inspired. Like a rope, Humboldt’s concept of nature connects us to him. 

Wulf uses this ‘concept of nature’ to frame her discussion and rejuvenate her forgotten hero. She digs deep to unearth his philosophical foundations, and then identifies his influence in later scientists who reflect similar underlying values. Rather than examining Humboldt’s specific experiments and discoveries, Wulf chooses to focus on his unique approach to the natural world—his singular vision. By doing so, she facilitates an easy introduction to modern readers. She locates, in Humboldt’s personal reflections, the roots of modern values and concerns. Thus, she emphasizes Humboldt’s prophetic ideas about relevant topics like environmental destruction, colonial exploitation, and the dangers of a cash crop economy. Writes Wulf, 

…Humboldt revolutionized the way we see the natural world. He found connections everywhere. Nothing, not even the tiniest organism, was looked at on its own…When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel. After he saw the devastating environmental effects of colonial plantations at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800, Humboldt became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change…He warned that humans were meddling with the climate and that this could have an unforeseeable impact on ‘future generations.’

That Humboldt was able to see so far into the future is incredible. Scientists in the late 1700s were never meant to extrapolate, to lift their eyes from the specimens pinned to their dissection tables. They were also never supposed to be present—as individuals—in their published findings. In order to fully appreciate Humboldt’s expansive perspective, one which spanned continents and millennia, it is necessary to remind ourselves of the volatile relationship between Romantic sentimentality and rational empiricism that fueled European debate during his life. 

Humboldt lived at a time when scientific discovery and geographic exploration were the intellectual battlegrounds upon which European empires could compete—much like the ‘Space Race’ of the 20th century. Within this arena, rigid lines were drawn between those who believed that the natural world could only be experienced through direct study and should be subject to strict taxonomic categorization, and those who saw room for an emotional, subjective approach to nature. One can imagine a Kill Bill style stare-down between John Locke and William Wordsworth. Humboldt was the brave scientist who dared to adorn his empirical observations with emotional reactions. Unlike the dry, impersonal reports published by staunch empiricists, Humboldt was never afraid to gush and swoon at the sight of a particularly splendid volcano. Without sacrificing scientific accuracy (his detailed descriptions and meticulous measurements are still cited in academic journals today) Humboldt made room for love, fear, and fascination. What might seem to us like the obvious way to write about nature, was unprecedented in Humboldt’s time. Thus it was that an extraordinary number of scientists, artists, and poets referred explicitly to Humboldt in their own works. His name pops up in so many dedications because he truly ruptured the established mold in a permanent and triumphant manner. Writes Wulf, 

Thomas Jefferson called him ‘one of the greatest ornaments of the age’. Charles Darwin wrote that ‘nothing ever stimulated my zeal so much as reading Humboldt’s Personal Narrative,’ saying that he would not have boarded the Beagle, nor conceived of the Origin of Species, without Humboldt. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge both incorporated Humboldt’s concept of nature into their poems. And America’s most revered nature writer, Henry David Thoreau, found in Humboldt’s books an answer to his dilemma on how to be a poet and a naturalist—Walden would have been a very different book without Humboldt. Simón Bolívar, the revolutionary who liberated South America from Spanish colonial rule, called Humboldt the ‘discoverer of the New World’ and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet, declared that spending a few days with Humboldt was like ‘having lived several years’. 

At a time when exploration made the distant regions of the world suddenly tangible, but the difficulties of travel prohibited many people from seeing them firsthand, Humboldt made sure to bring the whole experience to Europe, not just the objective facts. As Wulf suggests, 

One of Humboldt’s greatest achievements had been to make science accessible and popular. Everybody learned from him: farmers and craftsmen, schoolboys and teachers, artists and musicians, scientists and politicians. There was not a single textbook or atlas in the hands of children in the western world that hadn’t been shaped by Humboldt’s ideas, one orator had declared during the 1869 centennial celebrations in Boston. Unlike Christopher Columbus or Isaac Newton, Humboldt did not discover a continent or a new law of physics. Humboldt was not known for a single fact or a discovery but for his worldview. His vision of nature has passed into our consciousness as if by osmosis. It is almost as though his ideas have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared.

Andrea Wulf clearly admires Humboldt’s comprehensive ‘concept of nature’ because she injects its basic components into the structure of her biography. The Invention of Nature is full of facts, dates, and quotes, but it really about patterns. Wulf uses specific anecdotes and examples to illustrate a historical pattern of thought—a link between Humboldt, the famous men and women he inspired, and ordinary readers in the present. Wulf’s biography can be visualized as a chain of volcanoes, each representing a great thinker, the oldest and tallest being Alexander von Humboldt himself. Although at the surface these volcanoes might appear to be isolated geological phenomena, they all draw from a single subterranean source. Humboldt’s holistic, webbed vision of nature is that source from which we extract our modern understanding of the natural world, and its relation to mankind. 

Andrea Wulf's website

NYT book review

THE FOUNDING FATHER MOST LIKELY TO IDENTIFY WITH MODERN AMERICANS

Alexander Hamilton's Guide to Life by Jeff Wilser - Three Rivers Press (2016)

Nearly all of the biographies I’ve reviewed have been impressive feats of scholarly research. They have been meticulous, obsessive, and in several cases, a significant challenge to my upper body strength. They have been testaments to academic ambition and perseverance. They have also required a considerable input of intellectual energy. It is not always easy to process such immense volumes of information. This week, I decided to give my tired brain a break before it completes its degeneration into oatmeal. 

Jeff Wilser’s newest book, Alexander Hamilton’s Guide to Life, is by no means the definitive biography of Alexander Hamilton. In fact, Wilser happily admits that there are much longer—and more comprehensive—written accounts available. This book is not for the curious reader who is eager to learn everything there is to know about America’s trendiest Founding Father. But it does serve a purpose that other, more serious works of nonfiction, often disregard. Wilser’s book is funny. It is topical. Wilser writes with the sharp, sarcastic wit that is characteristic of blogs and ‘think pieces.’ His tempo is quick, the mental images he conjures are hilarious, and he makes use of inside jokes which speak directly to the modern reader. Wilser’s fast-paced journalistic style helps introduce the young millennial struggling to get by in Manhattan, to the distant heroes of American democracy. He identifies a persistent American spirit. He portrays Alexander Hamilton as a relatable, imperfect human and reminds readers of their own patriotic roots. This connection to the early days of American independence is crucial at a time when many people (younger generations especially) feel estranged from their country and its purported ideals of liberty and equality. With his comical voice and his deliberate decision to frame a biography in the format of a self-help book, Wilser drags the past into the present and reminds readers that there are still many reasons to be proud of American nationality.

Jeff Wilser has written four other books, with themes ranging from business, to self-improvement, to modern masculinity. His interest in the present is evidenced by his contributions to magazines such as GQ, Glamour, Cosmo, and Bon Appétit. His particular brand of humour consists of identifying the strange and ludicrous elements of modern behavior. Thus it is that when his online bio states that ‘he lives in Brooklyn with zero dogs,’ it can be read as a playful jab at all the modern writers who fill their back covers with odes to their canine companions. Wilser’s commitment to relevant humour is clear from the first page of his introduction:

…Hamilton fever is owed to the triumph of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical. It connects the old and young, the Left and the Right, the insiders and the outsiders. ‘It’s brilliant,’ gushed theater critic Barack Obama. ‘This is the only thing that Dick Cheney and I have agreed on in my entire political career.’ It will be sold out through 2047. Credit the genius of Miranda, credit the soundtrack, and credit the electric (and thrillingly diverse) cast. 

Yet it is not only Wilser’s punchy voice that distinguishes his book from more conventional texts. To a certain extent, Wilser knows his audience better than many respectable academicians. His choice to organize Hamilton’s life into groupings of related parables for the modern American reader is really rather effective. This categorical treatment of history is easier to digest than the traditional chronological approach. Writes Wilser, 

This book is not the exhaustive, comprehensive, list-every-fact book on Hamilton. Those books have been written and they are excellent. This is a different beast. It’s intended to inspire. Add perspective. Hopefully amuse. It’s organized by topic, from Self-Improvement to Honor, with a few stops in Money, Romance, and Leadership along the way…This is not a ‘How To’ book that will give you Hamilton’s shredded abs. And it won’t tell you how to get rich quick. Yet it cracks open his playbook, suggesting insight into how he went from abandoned son to Founding Father. Some lessons are literal and can be applied directly to your life. Others show us, through Hamilton’s actions, how to be more successful. And because Hamilton was a red-blooded man who made mistakes, still others guide us on what not to do.

In fact, it is Hamilton’s legacy as a ‘red-blooded man’ which sets him apart from the other Founding Fathers. Writes Wilser, 

…there’s a deeper reason we’re drawn to Hamilton—and that’s the man himself. He feels somehow different from the other Founders, who, with their wise words and their marble statues, can seem more like myths than men.

Alexander Hamilton’s Guide to Life is unlikely to survive close scholarly scrutiny. Wilser can be careless with interpretations and is quick to jump to conclusions (assuming, for example, that ‘sober’ in the historical context means ‘not drunk,’ as it does today). He is also unashamedly biased, admitting that his book is, 

…without a doubt, the second-most-pro-Hamilton book in history. (The first? The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, written by Alexander Hamilton. It comes in 27 volumes.)

In fact, it is difficult to predict whether Jeff Wilser will move on to a new subject, or whether his biography of Alexander Hamilton will fade into obscurity first. I don’t anticipate a lengthy shelf-life. But if you’re looking for a quick, jaunty ride through early American history, a casual, unpretentious conversation with one of our Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton’s Guide to Life may be the perfect fit. I read this book in a single morning and spent the rest of the day smiling. If that was Jeff Wilser’s intent, he deserves just as much credit as the ‘proper biographers.’ 

Jeff Wilser's website