"Flagey in Winter" by Simon Mundy

 

An ensemble comedy of manners, this novel returns us to the characters established in its precursor, Flagey in Autumn, the staff and customers of the Cafe Franck in Place Flagey in Brussels. 

In early January, the weather is cold and icy, so when Elise, skiing with her brother Artur in Bolsano, Italy, ends up in hospital, her lover Fidel is summoned to her side. It being Sunday, and he being too old to be fluent with making travel arrangements online, the friends pitch in to help ... and some decide to accompany him. Funded by Russian Nikita, who has closed her gallery for the time being, Fidel is sent with Mercedes (Nikita's employee) and her new boyfriend (a new character) Rory, a Scottish journalist. Later they will be joined by Catrina and her boyfriend barista Patrice, by Nikita herself, by Esko the Finnish MEP and his new girlfriend French filmstar Amelie, and by Agnestina who is newly out of love with Flamand and whose laptop was used to make the bookings.

Back in Brussels, Bruno is bested by unaccredited lobbyist Tyron Wangstrutt. 

I found this sequel slightly disappointing. Like love, the first book had the excitement of discovering new characters, while this had the stale feeling you get when the joy of fresh love starts to become routine. The only pairing that still sparkled was that of Esko and Amelie and that was only because Amelie's filmstar antics made Esko (and me) permanently on edge as to whether he would be dumped or not.

However, it was fun. I am developing affections for each of them (except, perhaps, Saskia). I hope poor Mariana finds love soon! Flamand? 

I wondered whether the split setting quite worked: the joy of the first book had been that all the shenanigans had been focused tightly in one place.

The third person omniscient viewpoint enables the reader to eavesdrop on the thoughts of each of the characters and the constant flitting from one to another keeps the narrative from flagging. It was a very easy read (two days) and there were many moments of quiet humour. I enjoyed reading this book.

I look forward to reading the sequel, Flagey in Spring.

Selected quotes:

• "If in doubt, procrastinate." (Sunday: First thing)
• "Museums bored her even more than being bored." (Sunday carried on: Cold wine for a cold Sunday)
• "She growled in frustration, a scarring contralto growl like parts of an engine disintegrating" (Sunday carried on: Cold wine for a cold Sunday)
• "Old age was what happened to other people, like being born a man." (Friday: What might have been)

July 2026; 239 pages
Published by Hay Press in 2024

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Cold Comfort Farm" by Stella Gibbons

 This is a funny book with a big reputation. It was rated in a BBC poll as the 92nd best ever novel. I vaguely remember reading it many years ago and enjoying it but I had blotted out most of the details.

The style of writing is heavily satirical, designed to parody a hugely popular (at the rime) genre of novels with earthy rural settings. The most outrageous paragraphs are marked with stars "in the manner of Herr Baedeker" so the reader "can be sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle" (Foreword) such as these (2 stars and 3 stars respectively): 

• “Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.” (Ch 3)
• “The blank eyes burrowed through the foetid air between herself and her visitor. They were without content; hollow pools of meaninglessness. They were not eyes but voids sunk between two jutting pent-houses of bone and two bloodless hummocks of cheek. They suspended two raw rods of grief before their own immobility, like frozen fountains in a bright wintry air; and on these rods the fluttering rags of a futile grief were hung.” (Ch 19)

Fundamentally, it is a glorious send-up, over the top in every possible way, from the names of the cows (Feckless, Pointless, Graceless and Aimless, one of whom loses a leg but seems to manage without it) to the one-dimensionality of the characters (love god Seth, old Adam who is said to be 90 and yet sings a "smutty wedding song he had learnt for the marriage of George I" who died in 1727, the eternally depressed Judith, Aunt Ada Doom hiding in her bedroom for twenty years having seen "something narsty in the woodshed" when she was two, ethereal Elphine, hell-fire preacher Amos, and modern novelist Mr Mybug to mention but a few). The language is a delight, from words that are completely made up such as 'sukebind' (a plant) or 'mollocking' (having sex) to words that she has dragged bag from the 'obsolete'; section of the dictionary such as 'bartery', 'thought-whelmed', and 'beasten-housen'. I'm not sure about 'chuck-stubbard' (a young man).

The plot involves modern girl Flora travelling to deepest darkest Sussex (as someone who lives in East Sussex I was amused to find my bright metropolitan county depicted thus) to live with her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm. They are all trapped in the most depressing and muddy of rural lives. Flora is a practical and positive young lady and battles to improve their lives. Will she succeed or will she be dragged down with them into the endless mire?

So what's wrong with it? 

• As with so many novels of the time, it is disfigured by some casual racism, such as the mention of a "Jew-shop" in Chapter 2. 
• I was surprised to find that it was set in the future. In chapter two a bra designed in 1938 is mentioned. When she decides to travel down to Sussex she goes by train rather than fly because "there is no landing-stage nearer than Brighton". In chapter 12, telephones are fitted with television (yes, she uses the word in 1932) screens. "The Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of '46" are mentioned in chapter 15. This science fiction seemed totally unnecessary.
• I also thought that it took surprisingly long to get going. We don't get to the farm until the third chapter and we have already read a huge 7% of the book before the inciting incident, a classic letter from Judith Starkadder: “So you are after your rights at last. Well, I have expected to hear from Robert Poste's child these last twenty years. Child, my man once did your father a great wrong. If you will come to us I will do my best to atone, but you must never ask me what for. ... We are not like other folk, maybe, but there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort, and we will do our best to welcome Robert Poste’s child.” (Ch 2)

But once it gets going, the reader is repeatedly delighted by the endless inventiveness and the glory of the language. So what if the plot is silly and a tad predictable? This novel is meant to entertain and it does that in mattocks.

Selected quotes:

• “I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.” (Foreword)
• “A lowering, moist, steamy light, almost like that which gleams below the eyelids of a man in fever, filled the cowshed.” (Ch 3)
• “His voice had a low, throaty, animal quality, a sneering warmth that wound a velvet ribbon of sexuality over the outward coarseness of the man.” (Ch 3) Seth is wonderfully one-dimensional as the love-god who finds the pressure of his female admirers rather too much and really just wants to spend an enjoyable afternoon at the talkies.
• “The country for miles, under the blanket of the dark which brought no peace, was in its annual tortured ferment of spring growth; worm jarred with worm and seed with seed.” (Ch 4)
• “Then animation fell from him, a sucked straw. His body sunk into the immemorial posture of a man thought-whelmed. He was a tree-trunk; a toad on a stone; a pie-thatched owl on a bough.” (Ch 4) Wonderful description! Pie-thatched!
• “Mrs Starkadder was the Dominant Grandmother Theme, which was found in all typical novels on agricultural life.” (Ch 5)
• “Do you think I could have the curtains washed? I believe they are red; and I should so like to make sure.” (Ch 5)
• “She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while you were eating an apple.” (Ch 5)
• “She had a lively acquaintance with confinements through the work of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones. their descriptions of what was coming to their less fortunate married sisters usually ran to ... eight or nine pages of staccato lines containing seven words, and a great many dots arranged in threes.” (Ch 6)
• “His conversation ... was ... mainly a kind of jockeying for place, a shifting about of the pieces on the board before the real game began.” (Ch 6)
• “It was too true that life as she is lived had a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.” (Ch 8)
• “Elfine: a light, rangy shape which had the plastic contours of a choir-boy etched by Botticelli, drawn against the thin cold sky of spring.” (Ch 10)
• “Old tides lapped his loins.” (Ch 10)
• “She was the core, the matrix; the focusing point of the house ... and she was, like all cores, utterly alone. you never heard of two cores to a thing, did you? Well, then.” (Ch 10)
• “Those Bloomsbury-cum- Charlotte-Street lions which exchanged their husbands and wives every other weekend in the most broadminded fashion.” (Ch 10)
• “She felt like stout Cortez or Sir James Jeans on spotting yet another white dwarf.” (Ch 11)
• “It was impossible to sit down for five minutes in Hyde Park after seven o'clock in the evening without being either accosted or arrested.” (Ch 11)
• “Choir-boys are seldom sexless, as many a harassed vicaress knows to her cost.” (Ch 11)
• “Her hands, burnt and bone-modelled as a boys, were clenched.” (Ch 11) Bone-modeled!!!
• “The lights in the windows had a leering, waiting look, like that on the faces of old pimps who sit in the cafes of Holborn Viaduct, plying their casual bartery.” (Ch 16)
• “Flora ... felt as though she were at one of Eugene O’Neill’s plays; the kind that goes on for hours and hours and hours, until the RSPC Audiences batters the doors of the theatre in and insists on a tea interval.” (Ch 16)
• “The dawn widened into an exquisite spring day. Soft, wool-like puffs of sound came from the thrushes’ throats in the trees. The uneasy year, tortured by its spring of adolescence, broke into bud-spots in hedge, copse, spinney, and byre.” (Ch 17)
• “The sordid flies, intent on their own selfish pleasure, buzzed in idiotic circles above her head with as much noise and as little meaning as life itself.” (Ch 19)
• “They ... made their supper off beef, beer and pickled onions, pleasantly spiced by anxiety and speculation.” (Ch 20)

A joy to read. Vastly entertaining. Endlessly creative.

April 2025 and again November 2025 (that's the joy of belonging to three reading groups); 224 pages

First published in 1932

My Penguin paperback edition was issued in 2006

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Wikipedia quotes Faye Hammill's work exploring the influences on Cold Comfort Farm:

• The farm and Aunt Ada Doom are modelled on Dormer House and Mrs Velindre in The House in Dormer Forest by Mary Webb.
• The original for Reuben comes from Sussex Gorse by Sheila Kaye-Smith.
• The Quivering Brethren are modelled on the Colgate Brethren in Susan Spray by Sheila Kaye-Smith
• The rural mysticism is found in Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys is another target.

Odd notes:

• Twice, Gibbons describes the eyebrows as ‘penthouses’. The word, deriving from the AngloNorman word ‘pentiz’ meaning an ‘appendage’ and only later being modified to penthouse because it was applied to buildings, originally (from the fourteenth century) meant a structure with a sloping roof, joined onto a main building, like a shed. From the sixteenth century this was extended to mean a canopy. In the seventeenth century it was applied to the sloping roofs in a real tennis court. It only reached its present meaning, a posh apartment at the top of a block of flats, in the nineteenth century. The word ‘pent-house’ meaning eyebrow can also be found in Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott.
• It’s set in Sussex ... yet Flora washes with soft water (Ch 5) which might be difficult to come across in the chalk-based South Downs.
• The phrase that became famous was that Aunt Ada Doom “saw something nasty in the woodshed” when in fact she remembers it (and she has “never forgotten it”) in the woodshed, the bicycle shed, potting-sheds, cow-sheds ... (Ch 10)

"A Spot of Bother" by Mark Haddon

A dysfunctional family prepares for what looks like a catastrophic wedding in this work of comic brilliance which was shortlisted for the Costa Award in 2006.

George has discovered what looks like cancer on a patch of skin; he is terrified of dying. His wife, Jean, is having an affair with an ex-colleague of George's. His adult son Jamie has just been dumped by his boyfriend. George's daughter, Katie, wants to marry Ray (or does she?), but the rest of the family don't like him. Jacob, Katie's son, is a challenging infant.

The past tense third person narrative hops between the four principal adults. The plot is driven principally by George, whose response to retirement and mortality is a series of bizarre actions. It seems that hypochondria, paranoia and depression are fertile grounds for comedy and that's before he experiences the side effects of mixing medication. But the fearsomely belligerent Katie was another wonderful character, not to mention the extremes of parenting demanded by Jacob. 

I hardly ever laugh out loud but I did with this book, more than once.

It's a big book at 503 pages but it is divided into 144 chapters so I found it quick reading.

Selected quotes:

• “That was the weekend, of course, when Gareth burned the frog. How strange, looking back, that the course of an entire life should be spelled out so clearly in five minutes during one August afternoon.” (Ch 2)
• “George could do the bluff repartee about cars and sport if pressed. But it was like being a sheep in the nativity play. No amount of applause was going to make the job seem dignified.” (Ch 4)
• “Jamie wondered, sometimes, if Tony had been a dog in a previous life and not quite made the transition properly. The appetite. The energy. The lack of social graces. The obsession with smells.” (Ch 12)
• “His own preferred exits were rapid and decisive. Others might want time to bury the hatchet with estranged children and tell their wives where the stopcock was. Personally, he wanted the lights to go out with no warning and the minimum attendant mess. Dying was bad enough without having to make it easier for everyone else.” (Ch 24)
• “He was going to die. ... With blinding clarity he realized that everyone was frolicking in a summer meadow surrounded by a dark and impenetrable forest, waiting for that grim day on which they were dragged into the dark beyond the trees and individually butchered.” (Ch 24)
• “When his bus arrived he was packed into a confined space with thirty unwashed people and shaken vigorously for twenty-five minutes.” (Ch 46)
• “‘Mum said you weren't feeling very well.’ She couldn't work out where to put herself. Sitting on the bed was too intimate, standing was too medical and using the armchair would mean touching his discarded vest.” (Ch 49)
• “Which was how young people took over the world. All that fiddling with new technology. You woke up one day and realised your own skills were laughable. Woodwork. Mental arithmetic.” (Ch 51)
• “Maybe old people always fooled themselves, pretending that the world was going to hell in a handcart because it was easier than admitting they were being left behind, that the future was pulling away from the beach.”
• “The tape ended and the screen was filled with white noise.” (Ch 51)
• “It occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. the other part was not giving a toss about what other people thought.” (Ch 111)
• “As a gesture of goodwill, it being their wedding, she decided to admit that he was right. Not out loud, obviously, but by not answering back.” (Ch 142)

March 2025; 503 pages

First published in 2006 by Jonathan Cape

My paperback Vintage edition was issued in 2007.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Love's Labour's Lost" by William Shakespeare

 One of Shakespeare's comedies. 

The King of Navarre persuades three of his Lords to abjure women and study philosophy together for a period of three years; they all swear to do this although Berowne is reluctant. They then realise they must immediately break their oaths because the Princess of France and three ladies have arrived on a diplomatic mission. They meet the ladies and fall in love but, before they can  all go off happily into the sunset, or to bed, a messenger tells the Princess that her dad is dead so they must all endure a period of mourning for a year and a day. These courtly romances, enlivened by the usual mistaken identities and misdirecting of love letters, are repeatedly interrupted by the lower class.

Much of the humour relies on wordplay, making this play a challenge for the reader (I often needed to check the notes) and the audience. On the whole, it was heavy going and it is generally regarded as one of Shakespeare's lesser works. 

There's a lot of poetry in it (including a sonnet in Alexandrine hexameters). Well over one third of all the lines are rhymed , more than any other Shakespeare play (the next contenders are Richard II and The Midsummer Night's Dream). 

It also contains 189 proverbs, beaten only by Romeo & Juliet (223) and King Lear (197). 

Most of Shakespeare's plays are clearly sourced but LLL isn't and it shares the same number of scenes (9) as the other unsourced plays: The Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.

Some of the lower class characters seem to share characteristics with the Commedia dell'Arte. For example, Armado is a Braggart and Holofernes a Pedant.

Selected quotes:

• "O, I am stabbed with laughter." (5.2.80)
• "Light seeking light doth light of light beguile." (1.1.77) It was thought that eyes saw by shining a light out of themselves.
• "Small have continual plodders ever won,/ Save base authority from others' books." (1.1.86 - 87)
• "Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio." (1.2.175 - 177)
• "To jig off a tune at the tongue's end, canary it with your feet, humour it with turning up your eyelids, sigh a note and sing a note, sometime through the throat as if you swallowed love with singing love, sometime through the nose as if you snuffed up love by smelling love, with your hat penthouse-like o'er the shop of your eyes, with your arms crossed on your thin-belly doublet like a rabbit on a spit, or your hands in your pocket like a man after the old painting; and keep not too long in one tune, but a snip and away." (3.1.10 - 20)
• "A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind." (4.3.308)
• "Love's feeling is more soft and sensible/ Than are the tender horns of cockled snails." (4.3.311 - 312)
• "A time methinks too short/ To make a world-without-end bargain in." (5.2.782 - 783)

One of my mum's favourite poems comes from a song at the end of LLL:

When icicles hang by the wall

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail

And Tom bears logs into the hall

And milk comes frozen home in pail,

When blood is nipped and ways be foul, 

Then nightly sings the staring owl:

'Tu-whit, Tu-whoo!' A merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow

And coughing drowns the parson's saw

And birds sit brooding in the snow

And Marian's nose looks red and raw,

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, 

Then nightly sings the staring owl:

'Tu-whit, Tu-whoo!' A merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

I saw a production of LLL by the Eastbourne Operatic & Dramatic Society at the Eastbourne Royal Hippodrome on Friday 26th January 2024. My review is here.

I also saw a more or less straight-from-the-text LLL streamed on Digital Theatre from a 2015 Stratford Festival production. 

Other Shakespeare plays that I have reviewed can be found here.

January 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Two Gentlemen of Verona" by William Shakespeare

This shows the moment when Valentine rescues Silvia from Proteus with 'Sebastian' (Julia) looking on. It was painted by Angelica Kauffman in 1789 and is in the public domain.

One of Shakespeare's earliest plays, this comedy explores the betrayal of friendship.

The Plot

Valentine and Proteus, the two gentlemen of Verona, are best mates, having grown up together. Valentine is about to travel to Milan and wants Proteus to come, but Proteus is in love with Julia (who, despite her protestations to the contrary, reciprocates his love) and he wants to stay in Verona. So they part.

In Milan, Valentine falls in love with the Duke's daughter, Silvia, and she with him, but her dad the Duke wants her to marry Thurio, who is richer. Meanwhile, back in Verona, Proteus is told to go to Milan by his father. Proteus and Julia say their fond farewells, exchanging kisses and rings and promising eternal fidelity.

When Proteus arrives in Milan he meets Silvia and falls in love with her. (His namesake, Proteus, was the 'Old Man of the Sea', a figure from Greek myth famed for his shape-shifting. It is from this that we get the word 'protean' meaning changeable.) So when Valentine tells Proteus of his plan to elope with Silvia, using a rope ladder to rescue her from the tower her father shuts her in at night, Proteus sees his opportunity to pinch his mate's girl. He betrays Valentine to the Duke, and Valentine is banished from Milan. In the countryside he is captured by a band of outlaws but they are impressed by his gentlemanly looks and his ability to speak more than one language and they make him their captain.

Meanwhile, back in Verona, Julia decides to travel to Milan in search of Proteus. To “prevent/ The loose encounters of lascivious men” she decides to disguise herself as a male page. 

Proteus pretends to assist Thurio who serenades Silvia. Julia arrives and realises that Proteus is in love with Silvia. Silvia, who knows that Proteus has betrayed Valentine, berates Proteus: “Thou subtle, perjured, false, disloyal man”. 

Sebastian employs pageboy 'Sebastian' (Julia in disguise) to take a present to Silvia: it is the ring Julia gave Proteus. Silvia refuses the ring.

Silvia flees Milan searching for Valentine. The Duke enrols Proteus and Thurio in a posse to capture the absconders. 

Silvia has been captured by the bandits but Proteus frees her. He thinks she should be grateful but she still refuses him so he decides to rape her. At this point Valentine, who has been lurking in the undergrowth, steps forward. He's a bit cross with Proteus who begs forgiveness. Val grants this and says “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee”. Sebastian (Julia), who witnesses all this, swoons. Recovering she tells Proteus that she failed to deliver his ring to Julia and then gives him the ring that he gave to her. She reveals her identity. Proteus, still protean, realises he really loves her.

The outlaws come in with captives: the Duke and Thurio. Thurio claims Silvia but when Valentine threatens to kill him, renounces Silvia. The Duke, unimpressed by Thurio’s cowardice, gives Silvia to Valentine and unexiles all the outlaws.

Added to this are two (three?) other key roles. The servants of Valentine and Proteus are Speed and Launce (who has a dog, Crab) respectively. Speaking usually in prose (often reserved by Shakespeare for lover-class characters) this pair comment on the action and have solo and paired comedy routines. But it's classed as a comedy because of the happy ending.

Shakespeare at his most misogynistic?

Modern sensibilities have difficulty with the scene in which Valentine, having prevented Proteus from raping Silvia, then appears to offer her to him as a gesture of friendship with the words: “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee”. This sounds utterly patriarchal. On the one hand there is love at first sight and on the other hand marriage as a dynastic partnership between two patriarchies. Silvia is a very strong women, refusing to marry the man her father has chosen for her, contracting a secret relationship with another man, running away to be with him when he is sent into exile; will she acquiesce to become a mere body gifted by Valentine to his inconstant mate? This is either Shakespeare at his most misogynistic or Shakespeare the tyro dramatist who hasn't yet realised that plot must follow character.

The sources Shakespeare may have used

Aspects of the Julia-Proteus courtship (the business with the letter and Julia’s annoyance with her maid in 1.2, Proteus being sent away by his father in 1.3, Julia, disguised as a boy, becoming the page of her lover and being used to carry messages to his new sweetheart in 4.4) are drawn from the story of 'Felix and Felismena' in Los Siete Libros de la Diana by Jorge de Montemayor originally published in Spanish in Valencia in 1542 but translated into English by Bartholomew Yong in 1598. 1598 is later than the normally accepted date for 2GoV but Yong claims in his preface to have finished his translation in 1582, so it is possible that Shakespeare saw a manuscript copy; alternatively he saw the French translation which was published in 1578. A third (and I think the likeliest) possibility is that he saw a play (by anon) called The History of Felix and Philomena which was performed at Greenwich Palace by the Queen's Men on 3 January 1585. This is likely to have starred Richard Tarlton, the best-known clown of the time, a leading player in the Queen’s Men (and possibly the original of Yorick), who was known for working with a dog; there are suggestions that Shakespeare wrote the part of Launce for Tarlton but that Tarlton never performed it because he died in 1588.

Another likely source was The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, a narrative poem by Arthur Brooke, published in 1562, which contains a character called Friar Laurence and the device of a young man attempting to meet with his forbidden love using a rope ladder.

Another source is thought to be Arcadia by Philip Sidney published in 1590 which contains a woman dressed as a page who follows her betrothed and another character who becomes captain of an outlaw gang.

The friendship of Valentine and Proteus may have been inspired by the intimacy of Titus and Gisippus in The Boke Named the Governour by Thomas Elyot published in 1531 (which is based on a story in the Decameron but there are more verbal similarities between 2GoV and The Governour than the Decameron). In The Governour, Titus and Gisippus are inseparable until Gisippus falls in love with Sophronia. He introduces her to Titus, but Titus is overcome with jealousy and vows to seduce her. Upon hearing of Titus' plan, Gisippus arranges for them to change places on the wedding night, thus placing their friendship above his love.

Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, a novel by John Lyly, published in 1578 also mentions two friends, inseparable until divided by a woman. Lyly (whose younger brothers went to school with Christopher Marlowe) was private secretary to the Earl of Oxford - thought by some fools to be the author of Shakespeare’s work - and leaseholder of the Blackfriars Playhouse where his boy-company performed plays, some of which he wrote, including Midas, performed in 1589 - 1590, which contains a scene similar to that between Launce and Speed discussing the pros and cons of a woman.

Date when Shakespeare wrote 2GoV
2GoV was mentioned in Palladis Tamia by Francis Meres which was published in 1598, so it predates this.

If we accept the theory that one of the sources was The History of Felix and Philomena then 2GoV must date to 1585 or later. If Richard Tarlton was the original player for Launce, 2GoV was written before 1588 when Tarlton died. But If Shakespeare also used the material from Lyly’s Midas the earliest date for 2GoV is 1589. So it may be that Shakespeare wrote the part for Tarlton but hadn't completed the play before Tarlton's death and maybe went back to it at a later date.

Many experts argue that 2GoV is one of the earliest plays Shakespeare wrote, possibly the first. There are a variety of flaws:

• Whenever there are three participants in a dialogue, one tends to fall silent, making it a duologue. Shakespeare employs duologues, soliloquys and asides almost entirely. 
• The conversation between the outlaws is less a conversation and more an arrangement of speeches. 
• Proteus is not the only character to be inconstant: Valentine is the perfect romantic gentleman until he seems to hand Silvia to his rival; Silvia is a strong women until she fails to protest against being handed over; Sir Eglantine is reputed to be brave but is a coward at the first opportunities

Furthermore, much of the blank verse is end-stopped; in his later plays Shakespeare made much more use of enjambement and caesuras. He also is much stricter with his iambic pentameters in 2GoV than in his later verse. 

All these things argue for an early date of composition. Shakespeare is thought to have arrived in London in about 1590 so 2GoV probably dates to around 1591 or 1592.

Flaws and errors
Some snobs refuse to believe that a lower middle-class oik like the son of a glover from Stratford could possibly write the wonderful poetry contained in the plays; instead they postulate that they must have been penned by an aristocrat. They suggest that Shakespeare's knowledge of Europe could only have come from somebody who had been on the Grand Tour. 

In 2GoV (Act 1, Scene 1) Valentine says his father seeks to see him “shipped” (1.1.54) from Verona to Milan and Proteus, near the end of the scene, tells Speed, Valentine’s servant, to “be gone, to save your ship from wreck” (1.1.145). But to travel from Verona to Milan by ship would be crazy. You’d need to go to Venice first (that's heading in the opposite direction from Milan) and then sail all the way around Italy, land at Genoa, and then travel overland to Milan. The overland section of the journey alone would be longer than the direct land route from Verona to Milan. Perhaps Valentine knew about the bandits and was trying to avoid them, and when he went into exile (travelling overland) he didn't much care about being caught. On the other hand, Julia, when she goes off in search of Proteus, travels overland. Perhaps she didn't know about the bandits which might explain why she didn't get caught.

Other geographical errors include the Duke of Milan, in Milan, who says he fancies a “lady in Verona here” (3.1.81) and Speed who welcomes Launce to "Padua" (2.5.1) when they are in Milan.

I, personally, love it when Shakespeare makes mistakes and when his plays are flawed. I don't want to think of him as the "immortal" bard. He isn't born a genius. To me he is a lad from Stratford who has a talent for writing plays and poetry. He reads voraciously and watches lots of rival plays and is a reasonable actor who specialises in the second-string roles. He has to learn his craft and his plays get better and better. He's quick at taking the ideas of others and improving them; in particular he learns blank verse from Kit Marlowe. He writes for the actors he knows and for the playhouses in which they perform; he writes for the audience and he becomes expert in knowing what will work on stage which is why he is so good at adapting the work of others. This is a portrait of a real writer rather than the impossible 'icon on a pedestal' fantasy so beloved by so many.

Selected quotes

• “For he was more than over shoes in love” (1.1.25)
• “I think him so because I think him so.” (1.2.24)
• “They do not love that do not show their love." (1.2.31)
• “Thus have I shunn'd the fire for fear of burning,
  
• And drench'd me in the sea, where I am drown'd.” (1.3.78-79
• “O, how this spring of love resembleth
• The uncertain glory of an April day,
• Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
• And by and by a cloud takes all away! (1.3.84-87)
• “Ay, but hearken, sir; though the chameleon Love can feed on the air, I am one that am nourished by my victuals, and would fain have meat.” (2.1.164-7)
• “I'll be as patient as a gentle stream,
• And make a pastime of each weary step,
• Till the last step have brought me to my love,
• And there I'll rest, as after much turmoil,
• A blessed soul doth in Elysium." (2.7.34-38)
• “Wilt thou reach stars because they shine on thee?” (3.1.156)
• “For Orpheus' lute was strung with poets' sinews,
• Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,
• Make tigers tame and huge leviathans
• Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands. (3.2.78-81)
• I wonder whether the ‘huge leviathans’ were inspired when Shakespeare read John Stow’s Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles ... Abridged which had multiple edition, including one in 1590 and which mentions on page 314 a “monstrous fish of the sea did shoot himself on shore, where for want of water beating himself on the sands he died” in 1574 at the Isle of Thanet.

August 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Other Shakespeare plays reviewed in this blog can be found here.

"Let the Games Begin" by Niccolo Ammaniti

 It took me a little while to realise that this was a comic novel. It is dazzlingly original, Monty Pythonesque, with a large cast of bizarre characters and a plot that never stops being inventive. 

Told (mostly) from the alternating perspectives of a furniture salesman who has a secret life as leader of a very small Satanic cult and a best-selling writer, but with occasional forays into other PoVs, the plot involves the Satanic leader's attempt to impress rival cults by a spectacular media-worthy sacrifice. He decides to murder a pop musician at a bacchanalian party involving all of Italy's celebrities at a huge private park in Rome. Meanwhile the writer, who is just trying to keep famous and, wherever possible, have sex with beautiful women, has been invited to the party.

There are some incredible one-liners:

• "Somaini would have liked to pout, but the Botox wouldn't let her." (C 26)
• "She was as sexy as a lettuce leaf without any dressing." (C 34)

There are some very original and modern similes and metaphors:

• "Zombie's face had the same complexion as a boiled cauliflower." (C 25)
• "He felt vulnerable and confused, like a non-European Union citizen at the residents' permit office of the police department." (C 44)

I suppose the intent of the book is to poke fun at, satirise and attack our celebrity-obsessed modernity: 

• "'Tell me a VIP. Anyone at all. Come on. The first name that springs to mind.' ... 'The Pope'. 'Oh, come on. A VIP, I said. Singers, actors, football players ...'" (C 11)

My problem was that I found the ever-more-weird convolutions of the plot that were deemed necessary to keep the frivolity going exhausted me.

Selected quotes:

• "Any balanced relationship, where he was not the star, caused unpleasant side effects: dry mouth, headspins, nausea, diarrhoea." (C 4)
• "Ciba was overwhelmed with waves of pleasure, by endorphins trickling from his head downwards, swishing through his veins like petrol in a pipeline. ... the pleasure channelled its way into the urethra, in the epidydymides, into the femoral arteries and exploded inside his reproductive organ, which filled with blood, causing him a ferocious erection." (C 12)
• "It often happened that he would stop talking, as if someone had unplugged him." (C 14)
• "He had had so many ideas when he was young. Travel by train across Europe. Go to Transylvania to visit Count Vlad's castle. See the dolmen and the sculptures on Easter Island. Study Latin and Aramaic. He hadn't done eny of these things. He has gotten married too young to a woman who loved holiday villages and sifting through factory outlets." (C 15)
• "If ethical and aesthetic principles no longer exist, looking like an idiot disappears as a consequence." (C 38)
• "Do me the favour of leaving me alone, and if you see me on the street, change streets." (C 38)
• "the dark years of accountancy." (C 45)
• "He would have liked to scream, spit out all his wrath, but he just threw open his mouth, and squeezed his head between his hands." (C 59)
• "Appetite was the expression of a replete and satisfied world, on the verge of surrender. A people that tastes instead of eating, that nibbles instead of feeding themselves, that's already dead but doesn't know it. Hunger is a synonym for life." (C 64)

September 2020; 328 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Conrad Monk and the Great Heathen Army" by Edoardo Albert

Those missing the great liar, coward, braggart and politically incorrect cad Harry Flashman as chronicled in the novels of George MacDonald Fraser might like this book. Conrad is a coward whose fear of sharp steel is even greater than his love of bright gold who does his best to cheat and charm his way to stay alive and profit while the Vikings are invading the England that will soon by ruled by Alfred the Great.

Some great moments:

• “He’s a heathen,” I said. “A heathen from the Great Heathen Army, who has just been pillaging a monastery. How much more heathen can you get?” (C 1)
• "Hope is what gives people reason to rise from their sleep and face another day of toil." (C 1)
• "Hope is what keeps fools going." (C 1)
• "Curiosity has always been my besetting sin. Well, no it hasn’t; cupidity, concupiscence and cowardice have warmer places in my heart, but I preferred to have a quaternary of errors rather than a trinity of faults" (C 3)
• "I stopped thrashing around. I could have been lying there naked, humping a hog, and no one would have noticed." (C 4)
• "I would have to come up with a better plan than swipe and ride." (C 5)
• "Skill, strength, courage: none of them mattered a jot in battle compared to fortune’s favour. And the greatest favour fortune could bestow, and one with which I co-operated wholeheartedly, was to avoid battle altogether." (C 5)
• "His body slowly subsided to the ground, like a candle with an untrimmed wick burning down on one side." (C 6)
• "I would only fight the Danes if the odds were four to one in my favour and I could hide at the back." (C 9)
• "Which was when I realised what that emotion was: gratitude. The reason for my failure to recognise it became clear. I had not seen gratitude directed towards me very often." (C 15)
• "Really, the only joy of riding with a defeated army is the knowledge that you have not been left for the ravens." (C 18)

Fun

June 2020

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Lucky Jim" by Kingsley Amis

This is the classic story of Jim Dixon, a reluctant historian, in his probationary year as lecturer at a provincial university, who has to negotiate love affairs, mad professors and drunkenness in an attempt to cling on to his job.

I didn't find it very funny. On the whole I find comic novels hard going. There is the incomparable Wodehouse and there are the rest. Perhaps comedy dates quickly. Even Shakespeare's jokes are pretty poor and the only humour comes from the physical stuff and that's often down to the reinterpretation of the actors rather than the script.

This novel has some set pieces. There is the excruciating evening of madrigals at the house of Jim's professor, a classically bad driver. There is the dilemma of what to do when Jim wakes up as a guest in the professors house to find that an inattentive cigarette has burned his bedclothes, a bedside table, and a rug. There is the Summer Ball and the public lecture that Jim delivers, as usual, drunk. The best set piece was the slow bus ride to the station. There were some good bits in these set pieces.

There is, of course, the character of Jim. He gets so bored. And then he starts to pick fights. He imitates people and gets caught in the middle of the mockery. And he gets into hopelessly misunderstood tangles with girls, their boyfriends, and his professor.

But the best thing about this book is that Kingsley Amis actually writes very well indeed. There are some wonderfully original descriptions, especially of awkward social situations.

• "He paused, and his trunk grew rigid as he walked; it was as if some entirely different man, some imposter who couldn't copy his voice, had momentarily taken his place." (C 1)
• "Fury flared up in his mind like forgotten toast under a grill." (C 3)
• "His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum." (C 6)
• "It was clear he was about to blow his nose. This was usually horrible, if only because it drew unwilling attention to Welch's nose itself, a large, open-pored tetrahedron." (C 8)
• "The thin red second hand swung smoothly round the dial, giving the illusion of time rapidly passing. The other hands pointed to five past nine." (C 2)
• "He could only just handle her as a female friend; as her 'lover' he'd be a cowboy facing his first, and notoriously formidable, steer." (C 5)

Selected quotes:

• "I think I had some idea about wanting to have some sort of noise going on while I was ... going off." (C 2)
• "Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way." (C 6)
• "How wrong people always were when they said: 'It's better to know the worst than go on not knowing either way'. No; they had it exactly the wrong way round. Tell me the turth, doctor, I'd sooner know. But only if the truth is what I want to hear." (C 8)
• "Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up ... by a short study of the Middle Ages.  ... Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cocksure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous, or as wrong as they'd been in the ... Middle Ages?" (C 8)
• "Dixon reflected firstly how inefficient a bar to wasting one's time was the knowledge that one was wasting it." (C 10)
• "Christine's aim, he imagined, had been to show off the emphasis of her natural colouring and skin-texture. The result was painfully successful, making everybody else look like an assemblage of granulated half-tones." (C 10)
• "Your attitude measures up to the two requirements of love. You want to go to bed with her and can't, and you don't know her very well." (C 12)

March 2020; 251 pages

Selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923) and by Anthony Burgess as one of the 99 best novels since 1939.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Wise Children" - the play by Emma Rice

This is a play adapted from the book Wise Children by Angela Carter. The title is based on the saying:  “It is a Wise Child that knows its own father, but wiser yet, the father who knows his own child.” (Act 1 Scene 5)

Nora and Dora are twins living in Brixton, London UK. Dora is telling the story on their 75th birthday which also happens to be the 100th birthday of their father and uncle, twins Peregrine and Melchior Hazard. N & D are carrying on the theatrical tradition of their grandparents Ranulph and Estelle and theatrical knight Sir Melchior. Twinship, theatre and illegitimacy are themes that recur in this convoluted story.

Other quotes I enjoyed:

• “Nora was always free with it and threw her heart away as if it were a used bus ticket. She had a passion to know about life and all its dirty corners.” (Act 1 Scene 7)
• “It’s every woman’s tragedy that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator.” (Act 2 Scene 3)
• “Old father Thames lies between Brixton and glamour like a sword.” (Act 2 Scene 3)
• “Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.” (Act 2 Scene 3)
• “He was not the love of my life but all the loves of my life at once.” (Act 2 Scene 3)

September 2019