Elizabethan and other topics

Elizabeth was an open-minded person who promoted the arts especially the theatre. She was the extreme opposite of her Catholic half-sister Mary who was a fundamentalist, and like any fundamantalist she was a rigid person to whom apply Dryden's words describing Zimri in ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL, "stiff in opinion, always in the wrong". Shakespeare was aware of what was going on in the Queen's heart, that is why in TWELFTH NIGHT he depicts the religious fanatic What-'s-his-name as a perfect hypocrite. You know, it is nice after all to recall Zimri, Absalom and Achitophel whom I studied in the University of Baghdad in 1967, forty years ago. Out poetry teacher was American Robert Beamis who taught us that year the first two books of PARADISE LOST and the entire ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL and the entire RAPE OF THE LOCK. Beamis made us read the BIBLE to enhance our understanding and appreciation of PL. One of my class-mates was Mona Rashid Al-Zayyani from Bahrain where she is currenly in her capacity as owner and president of Arab Gulf Private University. One day forty years ago, Mona celebrated her birthday by throwing a party in the students' cafeteria, and among invitees beside myself and other class-mates were teachers who included Abdul-Wahhab Al-Wakil, Dhia Al-Jubouri, Beamis and another teacher a Cantabridgian John Wilson to whom thanks and tribute are due for his teaching us English prose in its golden period, the Augustan Age which included Dryden, father of modern English prose which, according to Dr Johnson, Dryden found brick and left marble, oh, yea, you go ahead now, dear Ib, and recite audibly please the actual original Latin about Augustine finding then leaving Rome, Defoe whose JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR strikes me as present-day newspaper reportage, Swift whose GULLIVER'S TRAVELS arouses in me a fearful hunch of some imminent menace in a way as if I am sitting at the edge of the universe and feeling that the floor of the universe is about to give way under my feet, Steele in his THE TATLER essays, Addison in his depiction of Sir Roger de Coverley, Richardson in his epistolary novels which read as intimate as diaries, Fielding's superbly constructed picaresque novels what with their juxtapositions, digressions and what-not, Smollett's novels of excursions in the beautiful England of the late eighteenth century, Dr Johnson in his LETTER TO CHESTERFIELD which Samuel Beckett kept reciting until later age, Goldsmith in his essays on Beau What's-his name, Gray's Netley Abbey whose ruins in the bosom of the woods were hidden from profane eyes, Sterne's sweetly intimate conversational style heralding the twentieth-century stream-of-consciousness novel, Lord Chesterfield in his LETTERS to his son, and de Quincey in his from-heart-to-heart prose style in THE CONFESSIONS




In evening of 7th February 1601, somebody paid the Chamberlain's Men Troupe two sterling pounds to perform Shakespeare's not-often performed RICHARD II. Next morning 8th February (=Iraqi 14th Ramadhan Revolution which occurred also on 8th February [1963] and which deposed Kareem Qassim) there was the Essex plot to depose Queen Elizabeth. After police investigations it turned out that Essex and his fellow-conspirators made the Chamberlain's Men Troupe perform RICHARD II that evening to prepare people to the idea of deposing the monarch, and also expecting that the London street would back the conspirators. Such things didn't happen. Exposed, Essex and conspirators had no choice but run away , but caught and later beheaded. Six months later, Elizabeth in her firm voice said to Parliament, referring to the RICHARD II performacne associated with the Essex conspiracy, "I am Richard II, don't ye know that?"