History – Western Europe – Page 3 – education and deconstruction.com

Shakespeare’s England

The Book of the Week is “Shakespeare’s England,” a Cassell Caravel Book, by the editors of Horizon Magazine, published in 1964.

This book recounts English cultural, theatrical and royal-family history of the late 1500’s through 1616– the years of the height of Shakespeare’s fame.

In the late 1580’s, Shakespeare’s acting company performed for Queen Elizabeth. At that time, the status of acting company members was divided into three groups: veteran actors who were shareholders in the theater, weekly wage-earning minor-role actors who doubled as stagehands and writers, and young boys who played girls’ and boys’ roles (as females were banned from theater careers).

There were two kinds of playwrights: university-schooled, and non-; the plays of the former were more stiff and serious than that of the latter. All intellectual property rights to a work were transferred from the writer to an acting company upon purchase of a play. Nevertheless, works were pirated all the time, with no adverse consequences for the thief.

Read the book to learn about the events and issues that affected the fame and fortune of Shakespeare and his colleagues– the plague, censorship, a theater fire, playhouse construction, political intrigue and more.

My Paper Chase

The Book of the Week is “My Paper Chase, The Stories of Vanished Times” by Harold Evans, published in 2009. This is a recounting of Evans’ life and career in one volume.

Evans’ desire for obtaining a university degree was unusual for British journalists of his generation because it was not necessary. Fortunately, he was able to complete his degree in three years without having to study Latin.

Over the course of his decades-long rise through newspaper management, he covered wars, disasters, scandals, and also authorized the publishing of a number of controversial stories that defied British law. He believes that the job of a newspaper is to inform citizens of goings-on that affect them, even if the government does not want them to know.

Evans writes, “Violence is always sure of space on television and in the press. Political change, being more subtle and dull, is frequently neglected until it explodes into ‘inexplicable’ violence.”

Try to Tell the Story – Bonus Post

Some people scoff at the endurance of Great Britain’s aristocracy.

The following passage from the book “Try to Tell the Story” by David Thomson, published in 2009, explains why there is still a royal family:

“What is the royal family for? So that shaggy-dog stories may be told about their absurd status. What does that do? It makes them human and trivial. With what result? We knock along with them. Yet somehow the silliness of royalty excuses us from final realities– we can’t cut off their heads again because… well, they’d be offended, wouldn’t they. The way they are if you talk to them first. It’s a fatuous rigmarole, but it helps explain why an allegedly grown-up nation still drags along with these poor idiots.”

Another interesting concept raised by Thomson’s autobiography involves an education experiment. Post-WWII, the English government enacted an Education Act. The Act provided financial assistance to bright boys from lower socio-economic classes, affording them the opportunity to attend an English “public school” (actually what Americans would call a private school, reputed to have high standards). Thomson was one of the lucky few who participated. He attended Dulwich College (high school, in America), and did sufficiently well to gain acceptance to a college at Oxford University. However, his apprehension about his family’s ability to pay tuition there, prompted him to attend film school instead. Due to cases such as Thomson’s, the government’s education experiment was discontinued.

Testament of Youth

The Book of the Week is “Testament of Youth” by Vera Brittain, published in 1934. This is the depressing memoir of a young woman in England whose hardships were typical for her generation.

Ms. Brittain wrote, “…To me and my contemporaries, with our cheerful confidence in the benignity of fate, War was something remote, unimaginable, its monstrous destructions and distresses safely shut up… between the covers of history books.” She was in her late teens at the outbreak of WWI. She had just started college a couple of years after graduating high school, at one of the women’s schools of Oxford University. Ms. Brittain would not have been afforded such opportunity had a scholarly friend of her family not convinced her sexist father that educating females was worthwhile. Nevertheless, the entrance exams were rigorous. A glutton for punishment, she decided to major in history– about which she knew little– rather than English literature, which she knew well.

Then, to do her part for the war effort, Ms. Brittain took a leave of absence from school to nurse wounded soldiers for the Red Cross. She spent a total of three years in England and France performing unpleasant tasks, witnessing gruesome injuries and dying men, and chafing at orders of the bitchy matrons who were her bosses. Her younger brother had also just begun school, when he and three of his school chums were called up to fight in the war. One of the three became her boyfriend; she was friends with the other two as well. All parties exchanged numerous letters, detailing their activities, and expressing their fears, hopes and opinions about the war. In the next two years, all four young men died.

Ms. Brittain remarked, “No doubt the post-war generation was wise in its assumption that patriotism had ‘nothing to it,’ and we pre-war lot were just poor boobs for letting ourselves be kidded into thinking that it had. The smashing-up of one’s youth seemed rather a heavy price to pay for making the mistake, but fools always did come in for a worse punishment than knaves; we knew that now.”

The author described progress on women’s rights issues, as she considered herself a feminist. In the early 1920’s, England granted the vote to women over thirty years of age, because there was a disproportionate number of women in the voting population after the war. Oxford began granting degrees to women, rather than simply allowing them to take classes to further their education. Postwar, Ms. Brittain was no longer considered rude when she uttered the words “pregnancy” and “prostitution” in public (as opposed to “a certain condition” and “a certain profession.”) She and her friends freely discussed sodomy, lesbianism and venereal disease.

After Ms. Brittain finished her degree, she did some lecturing, teaching and publishing, and went to work for the League of Nations. She took her time deciding whether to marry a man who had pursued her. She was thinking, if she had a child, she would hope to a have a daughter, because a son might go to war and die.