"Henry V," "Merchant of Venice," Caste and Class — and Respect and Black Lives Matter

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother. Be he n'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition […].

— King Henry to his troops before the Battle of Agincourt

Henry V 4.3.61-64

Now by my hood, a gentle and no Jew!
— Gratiano, more or less to Lorenzo, on the Jewess Jessica

The Merchant of Venice 2.6.50

            The lines of King Henry V that I quote above need to be glossed nowadays — have the terms defined — and really should be modernized in performance. Henry is offering (figurative) brotherhood to everyone who fights alongside him in what looks like a hopeless battle, and he's making that offer even to the most vile in his army. That is — Henry kind of promises — even the most low-born will become a figurative brother to a king — himself, Henry — and, Henry implies, will rise to, or at least toward, the status of gentleman ("This day shall gentle his condition"). It is significant, and not just for understanding Shakespeare, that a word for "low-born" was negative in Shakespeare's day and has become far worse since then: vile is not a compliment. Neither is "varlet," "churl," "boor," or even "peasant," the last two or three of which once just meant "farm laborer" or "farmer." There were those who were gentle in their birth, and above them, and by Shakespeare's time included in the term, there were and are those who are noble and (above them) royal. And then there were the rest.

            Got it?

            Now Gratiano is a wiseass young man in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice (1596/97), the side-kick to the second-banana hero in the subplot: Lorenzo, the lover of Jessica, a Jewess (sic) with whom he, Lorenzo, is eloping and who (Jessica) has just gone off to steal more money from her father: the villain of the piece, Shylock. In the line I quote as a headnote, "by my hood" really doesn't mean anything, and "a gentle and no Jew" is complicated. "Gentle" puns on "gentile" and means "gentle" in our sense, plus something similar to "genteel": being a gentlewoman or having the qualities associated with a lady or gentleman — as opposed to us non-gentle (lowborn, vile) others, and, clearly, as opposed to Jews.

            "Jewish gentlewoman" or "Jewish lady" would be a contradiction in terms.

            Insofar as The Merchant of Venice is a romantic comedy in a romantic-comic world, Jessica can convert to Christianity (precisely what variety of Christianity Shakespeare won't get into) — Jessica can convert, marry a gentleman like Lorenzo, and become a lady. And the followers of a victorious king or duke or other warlord really might accumulate enough in loot and/or ransoms to move up the social ladder, or at least start their families up the scale.

            Not so with any non-converted Jews, and, in the real world of Shakespeare's day and long after, not so with Jews generally. In many mouths, "Jewish gentleman" was a kind of sick joke or condescending slight. It was like the folk etymology of "wog" as an acronym for "Worthy Oriental Gentleman": a put-down.

            Shylock in Merchant and far more so the earlier Jewish villain Barabas in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1592) could buy and sell, fairly literally, almost all the Christians in the play, and for the most part were smarter and better educated. No matter. There had been a long-running argument De vera nobilitate, "concerning true nobility," and one could argue that "true nobility" came from cultural "breeding," virtue, and leading a virtuous life, not from biological breeding, one's birth.  By Shakespeare's time, the boundary for respectability had moved down enough that the argument was on gentility, not nobility, and one could argue, "Gentle is as gentle does." Still, there are limits!

            In the late 19^th and much of the 20^th centuries, those limits were expressed in racial or racialist or downright racist terms: modern anti-Semitism is part of racism — as an ideology, an Early Modern invention — as well as traditional anti-Jewish prejudice and doctrine. And that's how I encountered it at Cornell University in 1965 when I asked what people were talking about when they mentioned "the White houses" on the Ithaca, NY, campus. The African-American fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha was founded at Cornell (1906), and the fraternity chapter I advised had two or three Black pledges that year, but from my rather out-of-it, new-graduate-student view, the Cornell fraternity system looked pretty much incandescent, albino-lily White. So what would the meaning be for "White houses"?

            Well, as you've probably inferred, "the White houses" didn't admit Jews, and had been open about it (and may've been leery of Catholics): "White" pretty much meant WASP or at least the generalized "the white man" as used by an old Jew in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" (set ca. 1950, novel published: 1959, film: 1974).

            Which gets me to the time I write, moving into the latter part of November 2015, a time of the Black Lives Matter movement the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, and campus protests against insults and threats to Blacks and debates on "microaggressions."

*

            Ordinarily, I press the point that "Guilt isn't inherited, but the loot is" and say that discussions of race in America should start with the issue of reparations and move on from there. And I am grateful to Bernie Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren and the persistent old New Left) for reintroducing issues of class into upper-end American political debate. And, indeed, I used to say, and will say again, that the crucial color in American conflicts on race is green: acceptance into bourgeois society will come when many more Blacks have wealth enough to make them bourgeois or richer.

            But —

            But one of the things I know I want money for is for status and respect, and for good and for ill — and it's the "for ill" aspects I'm concerned about here — even in militantly capitalist America not even old money can inevitably or maybe even reliably outweigh issues of caste and a pretty inflexible de facto hierarchy.

            In an earlier blog (31 Oct. 2015), I passed along a 1960s racist/anti-racist joke about a prominent American with an earned doctorate and a résumé that included serving as a university department chair, service in the OSS (the precursor of the CIA — although that could only be rumor until 2008), and the winning of a Nobel prize for work done with the status in protocol of a senior ambassador. The punch line was on correct forms of address for someone with so much high status and how was referred to in a recent visit to Mississippi or other deep-South state. The answer is that in Mississippi (or whatever) he was called "Nigger," which to a devout racist is simply a statement of who the man — Ralph Bunch — essentially is or was (Bunch died in 1971), and to a non-racist bitterly funny as a reduction to the absurd of racist "essentialism."

            We have such racial and racialist, and often racist essentialism as part of the cultural DNA of the United States, intimately combined with highly persistent Old World ideas of hierarchy and castes other than race: gender as a higher or lower caste for one thing, plus more amorphous and interconnected quasi-castes involving religions, ethnicities, sexuality, and even geographical culture. (How much anti-Semitism remains with us [and what happens when American bigots remember that Arabs are Semites], how much tolerance Christian America has for secularism: such matter will become clearer the longer Bernie Sanders runs for President.)

*

            It was a cliché when I was in college that the two great systems for political analysis of the 19^th and much of the 20^th centuries were class and race, and the Left mostly went with race — which is why part of split on the American Left after the 1960s had much to do with race, and still more to do with gender and sex.  As a man of the Left, I'll again offer the unsolicited (and therefore necessarily arrogant) advice that Blacks and other marginalized groups should keep their eyes on the prize of economic equality and ensure that calls for reparations in some sense help start the conversation on race.

            "Justice, justice you shall pursue!" (Deuteronomy 16:20), and economic justice is a central issue. But there are the standard "But's" that made "Class, Race, and Gender" a kind of mantra of the last part of the 20^th century, and to which we need additions, including in the US age and generation.

            Like the Jews and Catholics before them, Black Americans on mostly-White college campuses are both privileged — Hey, you're in college! — and still subject to the snubs and disrespect that do not make life significantly unsafe but can make one's life-experience unpleasant and bit-by-bit can wear a person out. And there are real threats. A noose on a tree on campus isn't a lynching even as the march of neo-Nazis through a heavily Jewish suburb isn't a pogrom; but a swastika made of feces on a dorm wall adds injury to insult, and needs serious investigation and prosecution.

            I had my life threatened once by some laughable fascists while a graduate student peace activist and risked a couple times getting clubbed by cops; and I tried to respond by sucking it up and following the mock-Latin motto, "Illegitimi non carborundum": Don't let the bastards grind you down. Still, the threats to me stemmed from what I did, not who I was or what I am.

            That may change for me if substantial human groups move into another period of full-scale religious warfare, but probably not. For American Blacks — centrally Blacks still, although Latinos and American Muslims are catching up — for American Blacks the challenges will include dealing with a declining but still important caste system in the tradition that had "Colored lady" and "Colored gentleman" ironic denials of status, and where one was color-coded into a caste that was in varying degrees, but constantly, in danger.

*

            During the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the radical English Lollard priest John Ball incited a group more "vile" than Henry V's common soldiers with the subversive rhetorical question, "When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?" If we can't "get ourselves back to the garden" of Eden, we can at least get ourselves back — figuratively — to the "beginning" of human culture when Adam farmed and Eve worked at her spinning, and "all men by nature were created alike, and" only later "our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men," where "naughty" means evil. Ultimately, the goal for an enlightened and redeemed humanity would be the destruction of systems of caste and hierarchy root and branch, and on the way destruction of systems of inherited caste and hierarchy. Moving toward those goals we do indeed need to do more to equalize wealth and income and opportunity, and simultaneously we need to pursue justice and decency in more everyday things so that "Black Lives Matter," as well as Black deaths, as do the oppression, deaths, and quality of everyday life of all those dismissed as innately incapable of being a "gentle," all of us seen as innately "vile."

Forward! Into the (Pre-Modern) Past [24 April 2014)

"The US is an oligarchy, study concludes"

"Report by researchers from Princeton and Northwestern universities

suggests that US political system serves special interest

 organisations, instead of voters"

UK The Telegraph headlines, 24 April 2014

             Among a number of professors and pundits in the last quarter or so of the 20^th century, a major buzz-term and figurative lens for analysis was "post-modernism" or, in what became a surprisingly widespread jargon term, "po-mo."

            (More sophisticated sorts talked and wrote of "post-Structuralism," but "po-struc" never caught on.)

            I'll throw in two thoughts relevant to the 21^st century.

            The first one I'm putting out there because I'm writing the day after Earth Day, a celebration of "the Environment" and of Nature. My impression was and remains that most of the po-mo analysis came out of places and institutions like Paris, New York, and — although this one got complicated — Duke University; Chicago and Madison, WI, and Yale, and eventually even Cornell in Ithaca, New York. And I remember thinking at the time, "These folks should get out more" — i.e., out of the City, out of academic enclaves, out of (small-e) environments that are human-made and see that most of their fellow human beings lived in places and contexts more embedded in, and in touch with, non-human Nature. Most people live in worlds where the power of the human Word and thought and intellectual "social construction of reality" is confronted constantly with realities not of human making and to a great extent beyond human control. Whether some people were out there trying to fit the world to our will with post-modern "social construction" or modern earth-moving equipment, the world for most people remained stubbornly outside of the human mind and only tenuously under human control.

            Urbanization has increased greatly the last four thousand years or so, and even in urban areas we're far from the life of people in ancient cities like Sumer and Akkad — or medieval London; but most people still live in places where a blizzard, hurricane, or tornado, an earthquake or a drought remind us occasionally to dial back our arrogance. Human culture is an itty-bitty little part of capital-N Nature; we perceive Nature through our cultures, but in no significant sense do we construct it.

            (If you're into philosophical, cosmological riffs on Quantum Mechanics, where conscious perception is needed to collapse wave functions and the universe evolved by an "anthropic principle" to produce human beings to perceive the universe so those wave functions collapse so the universe can exist — nah; that wasn't how it happened. The initial perceiving and measurement of the relevant phenomena were actually done by the Konscious Kumquats of Zircon 6; human physicists had nothing to do with it.)

            The second thought is the first one that occurred to me, actually, and which moved me to get my butt and fingers in gear and type out this blog post; it has to do with a po-mo view of social issues. Respectable post-modern analysis of social issues — that "post-Structuralist" variation — sometimes missed or undervalued the fact that while much has changed, a whole hell of a lot of people still live in societies not far removed from feudalism and that recent trends may be back toward social and political relationships that are as much feudal as modern. What follows the modern world is by definition "post-modern," but what we see now in much of the world may be closer to vulgar po-mo of the literary and cinematic and graphic-novel sort: "cyberpunk" dystopias and such, and their more insightful precursors in terms of social analysis such as Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1952) and Gladiator-at-Law (1954).

            A step back here, for the context of that thought about the political/social order: I'm listening again to Dan Jones's The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England (rev. edn. 2013). I had gotten past the reign of King John, and The Great Charter of 1215 and was approaching the end of the reign of King Henry III and the reissuings of Magna Carta and The Provisions of Oxford and other notable but repetitive events in English constitutional struggles and their accompanying mini-civil wars. And I noted that the most significant repeated event, one that Jones stressed, was conflict between such generally poor monarchs as King John — who went on to become the "Bad King John" of the Robin Hood stories — and his son Henry III on the one side, and what Jones summarized in a phrase as "the political community."

            That "political community" was mostly the barons and prelates and other assorted noblefolk of Europe — mostly men, but not all — with a few rich commoners in the mix. From those medieval conflicts on — and such battles were old news when King John was a boy — much of English history has been expanding the circle of that "political community"; and that English history has applied elsewhere, emphatically including what became the American Republic.

            The "political community" at the time of Kings John and Henry III wanted their rights and liberties protected and forced Magna Carta upon King John. As some teacher may've tried to explain to you, the Great Charter had some very promising clauses but was definitely protection for the rights and liberties of the ruling elites. "Bad King John" had actually been pretty good trying to protect lower-rank people from their feudal lords; among the rights and liberties those local lords wanted to protect was the "right" to exploit and generally mess over their serfs, "villeins," peasants, servants, and other inferiors, including now and then their better-born vassals and families.

            With rare exceptions like The Peasants' Revolt — the Great Rising in England in 1381 — with rare exceptions, politics was a game for the Political Community, the elite, and everybody else was supposed to know their places and stay there: serve and obey and shut the hell up or risk torture and death and the ruin of one's family.

            Most of the world's people for most of recorded history have lived under either something like feudalism or something worse. "The glory that was Greece" included the slave-based military aristocracy of Sparta and a democratic Athens where the demos (the citizenry) — was incredibly large by most standards but still many fewer than half the population. And Greek and Roman history includes also oligarchies, tyrannies, and dictatorships.

            Since 1776 and all that, there has been around an evolving ideal of a republic based in liberal democracy: where The People rule but all rule is restrained to protect individuals and minority populations. This is good, but even in the United States such ideals are (a) often more praised than lived up to and (b) as a practical matter, very far from universal.

            Such a set of ideals is mostly a modern, Enlightenment sort of thing and not natural to human beings and not all that common. "When Adam dug and Eve spun, who was then a gentleman?" the radical priest John Ball rhetorically asked the protesting peasants in the Great Rising: in the natural state Adam dug and tilled the Earth, while his wife spun cloth. There were no gentlemen and ladies living off the labor of others. Nice, theory, and a great slogan; but John Ball was captured, quickly convicted, and then hanged, drawn, and quartered  Ditto for a lot of others who were executed, if without the "wholesome terror to posterity" of the spectacle of emasculating, drawing, and quartering. Serfdom was on its way out in England, but still had a way to go. "Villeins you were" — one step above a serf — "and villeins you are," young King Richard II is reported to have said to defeated peasants; "In bondage you shall abide, and that not your old bondage, but a worse."

            We are not moving back toward serfdom in the USA, but we are in a period of reaction where the "the political community" is again being redefined, moving back toward the feudal norm with reductions in percentage of our population with much clout, and perhaps also in absolute numbers of political actors.

            We are not moving back to feudalism, but we are experiencing a devolution of power from central government to localities — much of the US Federal government is stalemated or sabotaged — and our local lords often see as their right the exploitation and occasionally just messing over of their "inferiors."

            Democracy is pretty sturdy, and it will survive; and the wheel of political fashion will turn: the elites will over-reach once again, and "the political community" will be expanded again.

            For a while, though, we'll be closer to normal with politics as struggles among small elites played over the heads of the majority, who will increasingly know our place, acquiesce in what trickles down to us from the lords of the manors and lands, and, for the most part, keep silent.


            For a while.