We haunted the gods of the Royal Alexandra Theatre; almost every Saturday afternoon we were in the topmost gallery, and when a company of Shakespearean actors from the Festival Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon visited Toronto for several weeks we gobbled eight Shakespeare plays, and digested them as well as our inexperience would allow. It was the discovery of a splendour of which we, as children of the New World, had little knowledge. The splendour of Shakespeare as he wished to be encountered—in performance. Here was a vast ocean of myth and poetry, in which Brocky had waded, though he never seemed to get in over his head; but Shakespeare acted brought total immersion, from which I, for one, never recovered. We had met with Shakespeare plays at Colborne—Julius Caesar and Henry IV, Part One, as works comparatively free from disquieting women, and As You Like It, with the supposedly dirty bits omitted, but I am of the firm opinion that Shakespeare in printed form should be kept from children; if they cannot meet him in the theatre, better not to meet him at all. One might just as well ask children to read the symphonies of Beethoven.
“I’ve got leave to go out this evening to have dinner with my father,” said Brocky, one day, “and I thought I’d take the opportunity to book for the four Saturdays that the D’Oyly Carte will be here. I suppose you want me to book for you, as well?”
“What’s the D’Oyly Carte?” I asked.
“My God! the voice of Sioux Lookout! Hasn’t heard of the D’Oyly Carte! Yet he quotes freely and intelligently from the works of the great W.S. Gilbert, and has been heard to troll a stave by Arthur Sullivan. Don’t you know, you poor boob, that the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company is the one undoubted and apostolic guardian of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas? Don’t you know that Richard D’Oyly Carte—known to the mockers as Oily Cart—was the manager who drew and held those two unlikely geniuses together, to produce the operettas you know so well? And that this company of unassailable authenticity, still conscious of the burning eye of Sir William Gilbert on every move it makes, is to be here in two weeks’ time, and will do just about everything one could wish to see, in the true Gilbertian style, and that we can drink it all in and be refreshed? Give me some money, and leave all the rest to me.”
Brocky was not mistaken. Shakespeare had been overwhelming; this was pure delight. Toronto had a snobbish fit over the D’Oyly Carte people; Sir Henry Lytton (imagine, a real knight, but as funny as a crutch, and able to dance like a teetotum, and actually wears a monocle off stage!) and the imperial Bertha Lewis, and the oleaginous Leo Sheffield, and the mock-ferocious Darrell Francourt; they begged them to come to lunch, and to appear at charity affairs, and read the lessons in fashionable churches, and do all the things famous English players were expected to do in the outposts of Empire. I sat entranced through eight of the operettas that I had known since early childhood from the phonograph records, as they, unfolded in their charming, whimsical splendour on the stage of the Royal Alex (which is what we theatre aficionados always called it, now that Alexandra was no longer Queen, and no lèse majesté could be imagined) and lost my heart agonizingly to Winifred Lawson, who was so comically pathetic as the Plaintiff in Trial by Jury. What has Nature produced more totally ravishing than a beautiful, witty soprano? And all of this musical indulgence was approved by Mr. Craigie, because it was English, and the D’Oyly Carte people were models of proper English speech, and Arthur Sullivan had been a Mendelssohn Scholar, at the Royal Academy of Music, just as Mr. Craigie himself had been, many years later.
“You said school was rough; it sounds to me as if you’d had a high old time,” says Esme.
I realize that in giving her some excerpts and impressions from the foregoing, I may have become lyrical, as old men do when speaking of the past.
“Those theatre and concert adventures were a few hours stolen from hard work and Spartan living. But you mustn’t suppose the school itself offered no recreations. We had all sorts of clubs.”
Oh, indeed we had clubs, ranging over a variety of the things—though not all the things—that could interest boys of alert, or less than alert, minds. There was the Stamp Club, with a large membership, because the school seemed to be hopping with people who, as Brocky said, could get into a fever about little pieces of paper that strangers had licked. There was the Travel Club, presided over by Lieutenant-Commander Daubigny, who taught French and German but had had a lively career in the Royal Navy and was rumoured to have eaten raw human flesh at a cannibal feast. There was the Chess Club, dominated by an English master, Mr. Crowe, who was no chess-master himself, but had in full measure the solemnity that goes with that game, and could reduce himself to a near-death stupor before making a significant move. There was the Art Club, but it did not flourish. There was the Music Club, of which Brocky and Charlie and I were keen supporters. And at the top of the tree was the Curfew Club, reserved for stewards, prefects, and the top boys of the Sixth Form. Brocky was a member because he was an obvious prefect, capable of keeping order and dealing out the high, the middle, and the lesser justice in anything that did not need to be brought to the attention of the housemaster, Mr. Norfolk. I was a member, though not as a prefect because I became, in my last year, editor of the school magazine, which carried literary recognition; I was what was called a Steward. We Curfew Club members enjoyed a dizzy eminence in the school, for we were the only boys who were permitted to smoke in the school building. We met on Sunday nights in a room in the tower, an architectural mishap, for it was fifteen feet tall, and its windows were at the ten-foot level; the tower clock was accessible through a trapdoor in the roof, and could be heard mumbling and cursing to itself at all hours.
Our meetings varied greatly in the degree of their intellectual strenuosity. There were members who wanted to talk about philosophy, because it was around that time that a cheap edition of Dr. Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy appeared and intelligent boys were drunk on the great popularizer’s “attempt to humanize knowledge by centering the story of speculative thought around certain dominant personalities”; you see how well I conned his pages and deluded myself for a while that I was thinking profoundly. There were members who were mad for science, and I suppose I ought to have been more supportive of them than I was, but I had had a whiff of real science—at least of geology—from my father, and I tended to dismiss the enthusiasts as amateurs. And they had small regard for me; geology was not rated very highly by the germ enthusiasts. Brocky liked nothing better than to stand the Curfew Club on its head.
“The collective colour of the Curfew Club mind,” he said, “is a sort of grey-green, greasy Limpopo River colour, and it needs clarifying; are they grey or are they green or what are they? Only determined stirring and boiling will tell.”
He certainly boiled them the February Sunday night he read his paper titled A Knotty Point of Shakespeare Criticism Untied: Where Did Hamlet Hide the Body of Polonius? This sounded so meaty, so solemnly literary, that Mr. Thomas Norfolk, the senior English master, decided to grace us with his presence, in addition to one of the junior English staff, roly-poly, witty Mr. Sharpe, who took an unschoolmasterish delight in Brocky’s mischief. There we sat, puffing away at our strictly legal cigarettes (Mr. Sharpe smoked a pipe with a bowl of extraordinary size) as Brocky unfolded his manuscript and began.
The problem of what Hamlet did with Polonius, said Brocky, had been neglected because so many other matters of greater immediate interest were raised by the famous scene (Act Three, scene four) where Hamlet has his great confrontation with his mother, and treats her to a most unfilial roughness of tongue. The scene moves swiftly, as the finest of Shakespeare always does, and indeed not twenty-five lines have passed until Hamlet detects the presence of Polonius behind the arras, and stabs him, without knowing who he is. What then passes between Hamlet and Gertrude is so laden with significance—Brocky said that he would not even attempt to deal with the suggestions of an incestuous passion in the Prince, and Mr. Norfolk nodded sagely in approval of this scholarly reticence—that we are apt to neglect Ham
let’s declaration—
I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room
—until after the next scene when Hamlet appears, declaring—
Safely stowed.
Clearly he has hidden the body of the good old counsellor, but where? When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern question him, he says that he has “compounded it with dust whereto it is kin,” which would have tipped off the two court toadies if they were not so stupid. We know better; we remember that “dust” means not only the flesh that remains when the spirit has flown, but any cast-off rubbish or human waste matter, and in the circumstances, what might be? It is made plain enough when Hamlet is questioned by the King, and at last says that they may find Polonius by his stench—if they take their time looking in the right place. “If you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.”
Now, what does this tell us? Is it not as plain as day? Hamlet has hidden Polonius in a room reserved for the King which the King rarely frequents, a room to be found off the stairs. In such a castle as Elsinore, and indeed in any castle of the sort that would be well known to Shakespeare, who had visited several such castles with his troupe of travelling players, that room off the stairs would be the privy, built on the outward walls to overhang the moat. Hamlet who has a nasty and decidedly dirty tongue—consider the way he talks to Ophelia before the play-within-the-play begins, with everyone listening!—is hinting that the King does not often go to the privy, and is indeed constipated.
Was this a deadly insult? Consider the reference the Prince makes to his uncle-father: he calls him “the bloat king” and describes his kisses as “reachy” which we know means rancid. Did the King then suffer from halitosis? Was not Hamlet being inexcusably personal in thus taunting a man who had the power of life and death over him?
Can we utterly deny ourselves some speculation as to what significance such a taunt may have had for Shakespeare himself? It is often said that it is dangerous folly to attempt to plumb the depths of an author’s mind by finding apparently significant hints of personal preoccupation in his work. But—we are only human; may we not seek to find out anything about the Prince of Poets that he has inadvertently let slip? It is surely worthy of notice that you may seek a Shakespeare Concordance from end to end without finding a single reference to constipation, although a plethora of other human ills are exploited to comic or tragic effect. Why this silence on a complaint so common, so vexatious, so sinister in its effect on the human spirit? Was Shakespeare attributing to King Claudius, through these taunts of Hamlet, an ailment that was his own secret, nagging, unremitting worry?
Brocky modestly left conclusions to others. He had not had time, he said, to sift the complete works for references which might throw light on this matter. But he threw it open for discussion by the Curfew Club. Was Shakespeare constipated? What do you think? Could it be made clearer that Hamlet heaped a final insult on Polonius—not a bad old soul, as Civil Servants go—by dumping him in the privy?
This was sailing dangerously close to the wind, and everybody knew it. I thought Brocky was going too far, but I marvelled at his impudent courage.
Mr. Sharpe was looking askew, and puffing his great pipe till it must have been red-hot. But to everyone’s astonishment Mr. Norfolk took the lead in the discussion and was a model of insensible calm. The point made by Gilmartin, he said, was of a certain interest, which a young critic might excusably exaggerate, for one dearly loved one’s own child, however feeble it might be. But when one contemplated the Mind of Shakespeare in one’s maturity, one realized that such distasteful trivialities as the location of privies and the personal characteristics of characters who deserved the closest psychological study were far beneath the notice of true criticism. Others abide our question, Mr. Norfolk continued (and everybody including Mr. Sharpe knew that he was approaching one of his flights into the intense inane), but the Swan of Avon soared free. Question as we might, he smiled and was still, out-topping knowledge. Criticism at its greatest and best was but the foiled searching of mortality.
With closed eyes Mr. Norfolk was silent, lost in wonder at his own kinship with the Immortal Bard.
(12)
Brocky’s daring assault on the gravity of the Curfew Club was not the high point of the Club’s history during our last year at Colborne. By an odd chance, that was brought about by Charlie.
Not that Charlie was a member. How could he be? He had never made it into the Sixth Form (we still had Forms in those days, and not Grades) but lingered in an academic Limbo called Five A Special, where boys were dumped who, for one reason or another, could not qualify for the final promotion. He had no distinctions; no, not even the Scripture Prize, because on his examination papers he knew too much, and wrote too much, and introduced doctrinal and historical matter which was outside the range of the college chaplain—a contentious young parson whom the Bishop did not want to appoint to a parish—and thus drowned in his own superfluities. Charlie was a failure, because he never seemed able to do anything to the satisfaction of authority. Yet everyone liked him because of his gentle but not mollycoddle way. Mr. Sharpe summed it up when be said that Charlie was not so much a lame duck as a lame dove.
There was to be a meeting of the Curfew Club of unusual interest, because one of the top masters—those who ranked just below the Head—was to speak on a subject on which he was an acknowledged authority. Acknowledged, that is to say, outside the walls of Colborne. Mr. Dunstan Ramsay, the head history master, was to speak about The World of Saints, and as he had written two or three very well thought of and often translated books about the most popular saints—the saints in whom tourists would have an interest—we expected something authoritative. And, as this was very much in Charlie’s line, Brocky and I asked permission to bring him as a guest; because he was well-liked by everybody—well, almost everybody—in the school, there was no difficulty in arranging that.
When we assembled in that curious tower chamber on a March Sunday night (the last Sunday before the Easter break) we expected that Mr. Ramsay would run us through a few popular saints, tell a few amusing stories about saints, and we would then move on to coffee and doughnuts. But Mr. Ramsay surprised us by bringing, and displaying, the most beautiful book that until that time I had ever seen. It was William Morris’s 1892 edition of Caxton’s The Golden Legend, and for a quarter of an hour or so we gaped in wonder at the superb pages as Mr. Ramsay turned them. (This was my first lesson in the etiquette of book-collecting; you do not allow anybody to touch your treasures unless you know them well enough to trust them.) I was already bitten by the book-collecting bug, as was Brocky, and we spent many Saturday afternoons grubbing through the dusty second-hand bookshops that then existed on Yonge Street, between College and Bloor. We were always in hopes of discovering something unsuspected by the bookseller in those dreary assemblages of outworn theology, outdated encyclopaedias, fiction that had not outlived its season and kindred rubbish, and now and then we picked up something of interest to one of us, though I don’t imagine many other people wanted such things. I bought old medical books, stuff discarded by students in the nineteenth century; not because I thought they could teach me anything of value about modern medicine, but because they contained interesting clues to the medical past. One book I treasured especially; it was a manual of bandaging, and from it one learned that the physicians of the mid-nineteenth century, however little they knew about antiseptis, could certainly truss up a patient after a wound or an amputation so that his own mother, would not have known him. Brocky looked for first editions of poets, and never, to my knowledge, found one of the slightest significance, though he acquired a lot of amusing junk, published in the nineteenth century by hopeful souls at their own expense.
Mr. Ramsay introduced us to the beauty of the printed book, which comparatively few people understand, and which has in my time become the concern of small private presses. Faced with that Morris Golden Legend I fell in love, in one of the few reall
y rewarding romances of my life: I fell in love with beautiful books, and now, as an old man, I have a harem which is by no means trivial.
Having shown us the book, Mr. Ramsay put a question: why, in 1892, did a great printer think it worthwhile to produce yet another edition, and that an immensely complex and expensive edition, of a book which had been one of the most popular in Europe for five hundred years? It was because The Golden Legend had been described as one of the ten books which, taken together, would give a coherent idea of medieval thought and medieval knowledge. Did all modern historians of the Middle Ages know it well, then? Some of them said they did, but a personal knowledge of the book might make their claim seem a little insecure. What was the book about? It recorded the legends of the saints, in the order, in which they were celebrated by the Church, beginning with the Legend of St. Andrew on November 30, at the beginning of Advent, and working through the Christian Year to the following November 29, when the Saints Saturninus, Perpetua, and Felicitas exerted their benign influence. It was a book to which the devout could turn at any time for edification and—this should not be underestimated—a thrilling story. Never, neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart, said Mr. Ramsay.