Toe-Lining

Letters

Vol. 20 No. 3 · 5 February 1998

From John Griffith

Reviewing Heather James’s book Shakespeare’s Troy, Frank Kermode (LRB, 22 January) refers to the author’s view of the purpose of The Tempest as aligning the ‘theatre with constitutional theory that derives royal authority from the people, who technically have the right to withdraw their consent and leave the prince stranded on a desert island’. No one, in the time of James I, would have known what in theory or in practice was meant by this right to withdraw their consent. No one believed then, or for more than a hundred years, that sovereignty was derived from the people. Charles I did not lose his head at the behest of ‘the people’.

John Griffith
Marlow, Buckinghamshire

Vol. 20 No. 4 · 19 February 1998

From Gabriel Egan

Evidently Frank Kermode (LRB, 22 January) found baffling the idea that in Titus Andronicus the entrance of Lavinia with her hands cut off and her tongue cut out is ‘Ovidian and Petrarchan in tone (the latter because the way her injuries are described is said to resemble the poetic blazon, or catalogue of female charms)’. Kermode’s ‘catalogue of charms’ is not an adequate description of the Petrarchan poetic blazon which creepily itemises female body parts in a way many critics have likened to an imaginative dissection. Fetishistic ideas about cutting women into pieces are often said to be relevant to the rape of Lavinia and to the description of Petrarch’s Laura, and if Kermode thinks they are not he might as well say so. It might reasonably be suggested that the appalling sight of the mutilated Lavinia in a performance of Titus Andronicus focuses attention on the relationship between rape and flattery (’the underside of male violence’, as Simon Shepherd put it). Before joining forces to gang-rape Lavinia, Chiron and Demetrius boastfully swear great love for her. If one thought that Shakespeare wished to cast doubt on certain kinds of proclamation of appreciation, then Marcus’ description of Lavinia’s disfigurement could be said ‘to scrutinise the art of Petrarchan representation’. For Kermode, ideas as simple as this have to be quoted ‘because paraphrase would lose the flavour of these extraordinary statements.’

Gabriel Egan
Welford on Avon, Warwickshire

From Michael Prior

In 1647, Thomas Rainsborough asserted that ‘every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government.’ Rainsborough was not a political theorist and, so far as we know, published nothing on the subject. But as the colonel of a crack infantry regiment, as well as the leading spokesman for the Levellers at the Putney Debates, he knew something about the practice of political change. John Griffith’s belief (Letters, 5 February) that no one until the 18th century knew about either the theory or the practice of consensual government or ‘believed … that sovereignty was derived from the people’ is plain wrong. Losing does not obliterate the sometimes prescient beliefs of the losers.

Michael Prior
Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire

Vol. 20 No. 5 · 5 March 1998

From Jeffrey Masten

Frank Kermode (LRB, 22 January) is entitled to his opinions about what constitutes a threat to his notion of common-sense literary history, his views of what he calls ‘reasonably disinterested scholarship’, his belief that questions of sexuality and gender are mere ‘curiosities’, and even his xenophobic generalisations about American scholars. But, in a sentence that appears one full column into his recent attack on the Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, after he has already denounced an entire series of 22 books, its general editor and its editorial board, Kermode writes: ‘The most recent addition to the series … is reasonably typical of the rest, so far as I have seen them.’ Could I ask, in fairness to myself and to the other unnamed scholars whose work Kermode derides, that his ‘reviews’ be restricted to opinions (preferably substantiated) of books he has actually read?

Jeffrey Masten
Harvard University