Lear, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Orwell

The Play’s the Thing: Orwell and Drama (Last of Three)

by Richard Lance Keeble of the ORWELL SOCIETY

19th September 2020

Drama at the BBC: The next act

Orwell’s work for the BBC is not to end in November 1943. For through his friendship with Rayner Heppenstall, a producer at the corporation, he goes on to write two fine dramatic adaptations – of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, for the Home Service on 29 March 1946 (CWGO XIII: 179-201). The second, too often neglected, is of Little Red Riding Hood (ibid: 345-354). Just like the earlier adaptation of Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ for the BBC’s Eastern Service, this reflects Orwell’s deep interest in the fairy story genre – which finds its most famous flowering in Animal Farm – A Fairy Story, in 1945. And Orwell is to adapt his famous satire on the Russian revolution for the BBC in 1947. Crick describes it as ‘very stilted’ (1980: 493) while Orwell told his friend, Mamaine Paget: ‘I had the feeling that they had spoilt it but one nearly always does with anything one writes for the air’ (Lynskey 2019: 157).

ORWELL’s fascination with the theatre and Shakespeare in particular culminates in two remarkable ways. This first is his essay, ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’, published in Polemic, in March 1947. It has been strangely missed, or its significance downplayed, by the biographers.

There is no mention of the essay at all in either Shelden (1991) or Meyers (2000) while D. J. Taylor (2003) and Bowker (2003) only comment on it en passant. Crick (op cit: 438, 520, 522) first focuses on Orwell’s critique of anarchism and pacifism; in the third reference he points out Orwell’s ‘tempered pessimism’; only in the second reference is there any mention of Shakespeare as he describes it as ‘a profound comparison of the didacticism of Tolstoy with the tolerant humanism of Shakespeare’.

From British Library’s blog on Tolstoy and Orwell

Orwell bases his critique of Tolstoy on an obscure pamphlet in which he has damned King Lear as ‘stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious’ etc. (1980 [1947]: 793). Tolstoy fails to consider Shakespeare as a poet. ‘Those who care most for Shakespeare value him in the first place for his use of language, the “verbal music” which even Bernard Shaw, another hostile critic, admits to be “irresistible”’ (ibid: 796). Tolstoy sees no justification for the presence of the Fool. But for Orwell it’s crucial. ‘He acts not only as a sort of chorus, making the central situation clearer by commenting on it more intelligently than the other characters, but as a foil to Lear’s frenzies. His jokes, riddles and scraps of rhyme, and his endless digs at Lear’s high-minded folly … are like a trickle of sanity running through the play….'

But Tolstoy’s essential ‘anti-human’ stance draws Orwell’s special venom. Indeed, what Tolstoy probably most dislikes about Shakespeare ‘is a sort of exuberance, a tendency to take – not so much a pleasure as simply an interest in the actual process of life’ (ibid). In other words, it’s a ‘quarrel between the religious and humanist attitudes towards life’.

An early English language edition of Tolstoy’s essay.

The plot of King Lear, Orwell argues, is essentially about renunciation. And this clearly resonates with Tolstoy’s own history. ‘In his old age he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights and made an attempt – a sincere attempt though it was not successful – to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant. … Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him happier. But there is one thing certain about his later years, it is that he was not happy’ (ibid: 799, italics in the original). Indeed, one of the morals of the play is that ‘to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack’. Moreover, all of Shakespeare’s later tragedies ‘start out with the humanist assumption that life, although full of sorrow, is worth living and that Man is a noble animal – a belief which Tolstoy in his old age did not share’. Against Tolstoy’s ‘other-worldliness’, Orwell celebrates Shakespeare’s worldly vitality, his love of life which he conveys, above all, in the ‘music of language’.

Orwell next moves on to Tolstoy’s pacifism – criticising it, along with anarchism, for being intolerant. ‘For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone should be bullied into thinking likewise’ (ibid: 802).

In many respects, Orwell is presenting a very slanted view of Tolstoy. For instance, Peter Marshall offers a totally different picture of him in his monumental history of anarchism: ‘Although Tolstoy condemned the passions of greed, anger and lust as vigorously as any tub-thumping Puritan, he was no other-worldly moralist. He recommended the happiness which is to be found in a life close to nature, voluntary work, family, friendship and a painless death.’ Moreover, Tolstoy’s promotion of anarchistic pacifism stresses its impact on people’s well-being here and now. ‘He rejects the charge that without government there will be chaos or a foreign invasion. His experience of Cossack communities in the Urals had shown him that order and well-being are possible without the organized violence of government’ (Marshall 2008 [1992]: 370, 374).

Yet Orwell is using his picture of Tolstoy for essential rhetorical purposes – and as a foil against which he can deliver his wonderfully profound celebration of life – and the music of words of his hero, William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare not forgotten in Nineteen Eighty-Four

In Orwell’s last novel, the dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four (2000 [1949]), women are represented as both highly sexualised or the complete opposite – desexualised madonnas. In her essay, ‘Desire is Thoughtcrime’, Jenny Taylor highlights the novel’s ‘dichotomy between lust and utopian desire, between woman as Madonna and whore’ (1983: 28). Julia, the ‘girl from the Fiction Department’ – though perhaps also a Party spy engaged in a honeytrap operation – conducts a passionate, secret affair with Winston Smith. Yet in another crucial scene, Winston dreams of his mother, the good breast, as part of an Arcadian Golden age of plenitude. A girl comes towards him across the field. ‘With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside’ (op cit: 36). But her naked body arouses no desire in him. Rather ‘What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to an ancient time.’ And he concludes the scene triumphantly: ‘Winston woke up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips’ (ibid).

This split in the representation of women, then, is highly problematic. Yet is it not significant that Orwell brings together the worlds of the unconscious, utopian desire and High Art with his final evocation of the name of Shakespeare?

Conclusions

Orwell’s love of the theatre begins in his childhood and remains constant throughout his life. It has been too often missed by biographers and Orwell scholars. Theatrical plot lines are dotted about – often wittily and imaginatively – A Clergyman’s Daughter. For instance, when Dorothy, while recovering from her breakdown, teaches at Mrs Creevy’s appalling school, Orwell has a great deal of fun describing the hoo-ha and parental protests that follow her class on Macbeth with its oh so controversial/shocking line ‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripp’d’ (1976 [1935]: 387). ‘I do so adore Macbeth,’ he writes to his friend Eleanor Jaques, on 18 November 1932 and is keen to take her to see a production at the Old Vic (Orwell and Angus 1970, 1: 130-131).

Orwell does not particularly distinguish himself during his stint as drama critic (1940-1941) but many of his reviews capture his sense of humour, his love of bawdy, Max Miller-ish jokes and show him playing with ideas later to be taken up in longer essays. Then while working at the BBC, his drama interests inevitably spill over into his output. Along with all his often inventive and highly original arts feature programmes and political commentaries, he designs thirteen courses based on Calcutta and Bombay University syllabuses in English and American literature, science, medicine, agriculture and psychology and runs a series introducing drama and the mechanics of production, backed up with shortened versions of Indian plays. According to Peter Davison: ‘This had a direct effect in that two participants, Balraj and Damyanti Sahni, set up a travelling drama company in India on their return’ (1996: 117).

Interestingly, his fascination with fairy stories is reflected in two dramatic adaptions he writes for the BBC – of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ while his own version of Animal Farm is broadcast in 1947.

Moreover, the work of dramatists such as Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and William Shakespeare is constantly reflected upon during his writing career (though D. H. Lawrence’s short stories and poems especially interest him rather than the plays). The Collected Works, edited by Peter Davison (1998), indicates more than 120 references to Shakespeare, 96 to Shaw, around 30 to Wilde and 11 to Chekhov. Even while fighting in the trenches alongside Republican militiamen during the Spanish civil war in 1937, Orwell is reported by his comrade, Douglas Moyle, to find time to read his favourite dramatist: ‘I was surprised to find him sitting quietly by himself, sheltering from the cold wind, reading a little volume of Shakespeare’s plays. He didn’t speak, and I realized he would rather be left alone’ (quoted in Wadhams 1984: 80).

From British Library’s blog on Olivier and Leigh’s Macbeth

Davison even suggests that the concept of ‘Doublethink’ (the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time) of Nineteen Eighty-Four could have been drawn from Macbeth. In this play, the Porter refers satirically to equivocation. Standing at the Door of Hell, the Porter asks who knocks: ‘Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven: O come in [to Hell] equivocator’ (Davison 1996: 132). An intriguing idea.

One thing is certain, however: for it’s the Bard’s sexiness and love of life that Orwell, the theatre man, celebrates so movingly and memorably in his essay ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’.

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