SENECA, MACHIEVELLI AND THE REFORMATION

Undeniably, the situation in Britain is fast approaching the tipping point of the cataclysm. Samuel Huntington's notion of the bloody border clash of civilization looks to probably first play out in terminal fashion in England. The weekend murder of a BNP activist by drug dealing muslim thugs, who happened to be his next door neighbours, is just the latest in the endless series of provocations. See the blog UP POMPEII for coverage of this atrocity.

To the average Englishman, things seem pretty grim. But England has faced times of desperation before, and as a nation state it has never been defeated in an all out war. My bet is that the pathologized soldiers of Mo will overplay their hand, wake the English beast, and seal their own demise.

A bit over four hundred years ago, England was in a similar state of turmoil. The established world had been overturned, in large part because of Henry VIII's repudiation of Catholicism, the rise of a mercantile class and the success of Drake, Ralegh and Frobisher in exploring the unknown world for the crown.

When Henry closed the Catholic monasteries, with the 1534 Supremacy act, he set in motion profound changes in the fabric of English life. Land the had been owned or controlled by the Catholic church was dispersed to the gentry classes, creating vast new wealth, as well as dispossessing many small land owners and tenants . High rates of immigration from the protestant populations of Holland and France followed, and England saw it's population double between 1520 and 1600. Land owning gentry, the nobility and the mercantile class came to influence and even control important aspects of society.

With the Catholic church no longer in control of the morals of English society, a period of relative liberalism ensued. This in a fundamental way gave rise to the Elizabethan theatre, and the exploration in drama of previously forbidden subject matter.

For all the good that the reformation brought, it also ushered in predictable social evils. Prostitution, bear and bull baiting pits, dog and cock fighting flourished, especially in the areas of greater London not under direct control of the authorities. Many theatrical performances took place in the same neighbourhoods, so that the works of Marlowe and Kyd were performed next to lawless criminal refuges, brothels and animal fighting arenas. The analogy to society today is too obvious to delineate.

In the realm of ideas, the same was happening. The amount of wealth at stake in the new world, predicted the acceptance of the realpolitik ideas of Machiavelli promulgated so perfectly in his best known work, THE PRINCE. Whereas under the feudal system, the gentry acted at least marginally responsibly towards the serfs, the new system allowed more rapacious landlord practices. This creeping amorality filtered down and through all levels of society.

The Roman playwright Seneca lived in what can be argued as the age of the tipping point of the Roman Empire, and his plays often dealt with the theme of redress of evil in a corrupt world. These themes, and the dramatic devices he employed resonated with and held great attraction to the newly emergent English theatre. The revenge tragedy, the play within a play, the dumb show, are all Senecan devices.

Elizabethan theatre owes almost everything to the ideas of Seneca. Everyone knows Shakespeare, but other lesser known, yet very important writers were at work. Marlowe gave us the first incarnation of Faust, and his Jew of Malta predates the Merchant of Venice. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy predates all of Shakespeare, and at least some renaissance scholars consider it the most important play of the whole period.

One of the best portraits of the lives of the new middle class of England is the anonymously attributed play, Arden of Faversham. It is called a 'naked tragedy' in that the characters are not from the nobility, not warriors and not kings.

Arden tells the true story of Thomas Arden, his wife Alice and her lover Mosby. The story opens with Arden disposessing his neighbour Reede, who previously held land at the grace of the Catholic church. His wife Alice is a faithless and promiscuous woman, who rightly it seems, holds her husband in contempt. Modern audiences would probably view her sympathetically, she being married to the insufferable bastard that Arden is. No longer able to stomach him, she and Mosby embark upon a series of plots to kill Arden. They fail and fail again, but finally succeed in a gruesome scene that Quentin Tarantino could take notes from. They are caught of course, and sentenced to die by alternately hanging, dismemberment and burning at the stake. English justice was spectacular in enforcing the power of the state if nothing else.

As a curiosity, their first plan to do away with Arden involved commissioning a poisoned painting. Contemporary medical theory held that eyesight and vision were a function of the eyes sending out beams to perceived objects. Alice and Mosby thought that they could have Alice's portrait done, and that Arden would drop dead when he saw the painting and the poison was beamed back to him.

Last week it was 'brilliant' doctors who tried to blow up and kill as many innocents as possible in London, and who knows what in Glasgow. Sheik al-Zawahri called upon Allah to tear out pretty much every one's eyes. The partially British trained opthamologist in Damascus, the butcher of Syria, fondly thought of Nancy Pelosi as he worked his plan to destroy Israel, and become the favorite goat of the manic mullahs in Tehran.