Mysteries of the City

• BuyBaudelaire: The Complete Verse edited and translated by Francis Scarfe
  Anvil, 470 pp, £10.95, January 2012, ISBN 978 0 85646 427 0
• BuyBaudelaire: Paris Blues/Le Spleen de Paris edited and translated by Francis Scarfe
  Anvil, 332 pp, £10.95, January 2012, ISBN 978 0 85646 429 4
• Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity by Françoise Meltzer
  Chicago, 264 pp, £29.00, May 2011, ISBN 978 0 02 265198 5

Figuring oneself as Hamlet in the middle of the 19th century was a perilous business. Think of Mr Wopsle, who performs the role in a hilariously bad production in Great Expectations. When he agonisedly wonders whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings etc he is assailed by contradictory cries from the audience: ‘Some roared yes, and some no, and some inclining to both opinions said “Toss up for it”; and quite a Debating Society arose.’ On seizing one of the Players’ recorders during his altercation with Guildenstern, Wopsle/Hamlet is raucously entreated to play ‘Rule Britannia’. And when, his moralising over, he dusts his fingers on a white napkin after handing back Yorick’s skull to the gravedigger, an inspired prankster yells out: ‘Wai-ter.’