england – Much That Is Fair

A Cup of Kindness Yet

I spent my last weekend in the UK in London with a friend who had flown over from the States, mostly so that she could see the revival of Guys & Dolls playing on the West End before it closes next month. Upon meeting Kings Cross Station, she remarked to me that she always forgets until she arrives in the UK how different its culture is from America’s, a culture shock epitomized this time by a broken-down escalator on the Elizabeth Line. An attendant had been standing by it, explaining that it was broken, apologizing for the inconvenience, and directing passengers to the working escalator. My friend lives in New York City, where the very idea of doing this would probably get you laughed out onto the street. “There was even still a working escalator next to him,” she said, in tones of wonderment.

“A Most Noble Ruin”

After the 2016 election, exhausted from campaign work and horrified by the turn my country had taken, I took a week off before the next political races began to visit an old friend in France. Their family had moved to a town near the Swiss border some years before, and I had hoped to visit for quite some time. I had only once before been to Europe. We saw a whole range of things on a family road trip to visit some of their expat friends who lived on the other side of the country, but what I remembered most were the castles, and how France seemed to have more of them than they now knew what to do with. We saw castles that were overrun with commercialism, full of fake armour and jousting flags, and ones that were open and empty and that you could walk through entirely unsupervised. These ruins had been living spaces once, full of their own histories and purposes. Taken together in the twenty-first century, they posed a difficult question about the physical remnants of history. How do we decide what we do with what the past has left behind?

On (Anti) Heroes & Heroines

By far the most exciting thing I did in London this week, over and including seeing a very old friend for dinner, doing the actual research that will hopefully shore up my future career as a scholar, and visiting a number of excellent bookstores (recs below), was seeing David Tennant on the West End, where he is currently starring as Macbeth.

I have a perverse love for Macbeth. Probably it should not surprise anyone at this point that I prefer Shakespeare’s tragedies over the comedies (and the histories that end in tragedy, like Richard III, over the nominally happy ones, like Henry V). Maybe it’s the pessimist in me, which likes the reassurance on stage that in fact, sometimes things don’t work out. More likely, I think I’m drawn to the pronouncements on human nature and mortal life that Shakespeare’s tragedies produce, and the gift he had for making you pity even the most awful of people (Richard III is a good example) in the hands of the right actor. I like to think that this puts me in a long line of amateur Shakespeare fans, those of us too poorly-read to know any better but fond of Shakespeare all the same. The most famous of these (of course) is Abraham Lincoln, who once declared in a letter to a Shakespearean actor, “I think nothing equals Macbeth—It is wonderful.” Lincoln was famously obsessed with the idea of ambition, being himself an extraordinarily ambitious man, and he was drawn to Macbeth’s story as a kind of cautionary tale. But when his letter about his own ideas of Shakespeare went public, he was broadly ridiculed in the press. Amateurs are amateurs, even if they are the President.