Books -The Last Chapter ?.

Books and literature  in the Western World have a long ,strange and wonderful history.The first great age of books,literacy and literature occurred during the Roman Empire.The books that existed then were papyrus scrolls called in Latin volumen hence our word volume.They were written in either Greek or Latin the two lingua francas of the empire.Latin being spoken in the West and  Greek in the East. The New Testament for example was written in Greek which Jesus of Nazareth would have spoken as a second language along with the rest of the inhabitants of Palestine at that time.These books were hand written but seem to have been produced in large quantities.The great library at Alexandria was said to contain 500,000 volumes and the library at Pergamum 200,000 volumes.Rome itself possessed 28 public libraries and many citizens are recorded as having private libraries.The Roman Empire was basically a primitive industrial civilization with large scale production of goods such as ceramics which included table ware ,amphorae for storage of goods ,roof tiles.metal objects such as nails and weapons and concrete for construction.In a modern touch many of these objects bear the brand name of the manufacturers on them.  It seems that book production by teams of scribes turning out volumes by dictation was also a feature of this economy.The levels of literacy among the urban populations seems to have been quite high.Pompeii and other excavated Roman sites  have been found to be full of graffiti commentating on daily life written by the working population.Any wet cement for example usually ended up with some message to posterity added to it by the workmen in charge.The literature of the ancient world eventually consisted of a vast archive of poetry, plays, novels,philosophy ,engineering,science and history.It is salutary to examine what eventually happened to this archive in the succeeding centuries.   

Books-The Last Chapter ?.

So with the imminent demise of the printed book and such features of civilized life as bookshops and libraries have our politicians anything to say on this subject?. In the neighborhood in North London where I worked for the last ten years the number of bookshops diminished from about seven to only one.This is something that everyone can see is happening around them .Our politicians have nothing to say on this particular subject despite the occasional noises they like to make about the importance of education and literacy.What is happening is a product of markets and technology which politicians have long ago given up any claim to control over.After all compared to the entire industries they have watched disappear the demise of the book shops and libraries must seem a fairly minor affair. There is also the dumb progressive fallacy that politicians are so fond of.That any changes that they impotently preside over are some form of progress which should be welcomed .I will explore later the possible long term consequences of the present technological revolution on literacy and civilization at a later time .First I will examine how we got to where we are now. 

Books -The Last Chapter ?

Last week the BBC broadcast a television program on their arts series Imagine. It was entitled Books -The Last Chapter and fronted by their chief arts man Alan Yentob.The program which was only an hour long was devoted to the topic of the demise of the printed book.Since the 15th century our civilization has been based upon the printed book so such a prospect is literally an enormous one.The rise of the e book is now revolutionizing the literary  world .Surely the demise of the printed book is a revolution on a par with any of the great revolutions in history.However the only debate I have seen so far is this little BBC program.There were some interesting points in it with various technophiles and bibliophiles arguing their points of view.The technophiles were the usual American Silicon Valley suspects with their zero knowledge of human history and their unlimited optimism.One could imagine them if they had been around in Russia in 1917 or Germany in 1933 jumping on the bandwagon  saying "We are going to totally revolutionize society ,create a whole new world and a new human being to live in it .Anyone who opposes us is just an old fashioned reactionary Luddite who wants to live in the past.".Well we know now how those particular revolutions turned out for the people who believed  in them. So perhaps we  should look more closely at the revolution we are currently engaged in.

My Life With The Sopranos Final Part.

Watching The Sopranos in its entirety is a great and unrepeatable experience .However once you have got to the end there are no further surprises and all you can do is admire the symmetry of the more outstanding episodes.The story is a tragic one with few of the original characters still standing at the last.Tony's tragedy is that he has everything he wants but it is not enough and he still suffers from depression for which he needs to see Dr Melfi.In the keynote episode Heidi and Kennedy after the death of Christopher his nephew he flies to Las Vegas in a private jet laid on for him courtesy of one of the mob hotels there.He is sufficiently intelligent to realize that actually owning his own Lear jet would not make him any happier.Later on he takes peyote with Christopher's girl friend and after winning in one of the casinos observes a desert sunrise with her.He exclaims to the sunrise ,"I get it ,I get it" in a moment of epiphany.However the next and final three episodes see his downfall. In the episodes earlier in series six when Tony is in in a coma he experiences a parallel existence in which he meets some Buddhist monks who accuse him of defrauding them.This introduces the idea of karma which is essentially that the bad actions you commit will eventually catch up with you and you will in the end reap just what you sow.This is a essential truth of human life which must be obvious to any thinking person.The Sopranos is about the workings of this law of karma.Tony Soprano and his associates have made a Faustian bargain in that their wealth and power come from a tainted source who in the end demands they keep their side of the bargain by handing over their body and soul.  

My Life With The Sopranos.

After visiting the Sopranos for so many months and experiencing the ups and downs of Tony.s life,the mob feuds , his relationships with Dr Melfi, his wife Carmela and his children Meadow and AJ I finally reached the sixth and last series.This is a long series of 21 episodes effectively a long goodbye.It begins with Tony in a coma after being shot by his uncle from which he recovers. However this in the end turns out to be only a reprieve and the series eventually proceeds to a doom laden finale .The final four episodes can in fact be watched in one sitting as a single movie.The keynote episode is Heidi And Kennedy named after the two schoolgirl drivers who only appear for a minute after causing a near fatal crash to Tony and his nephew Christopher.The resulting death of Christopher is a shocking as it is surprising.From then on Tony's world starts to unravel with the war between himself and his archenemy Phil Leotardo.This leaves Tony without his right hand man Silvio Dante and only Pauli Galtieri left from the original core of his gang from Series 1.The final episode Made In America is literally that. The death of Phil appears to have returned Tony to a secure future  only to have him find one of his key men is in the hands of the FBI giving evidence against him to a grand jury.The final scene in the diner with Tony ,Carmela.AJ and Meadow we can presume ends with the death of Tony. The screen suddenly turns black at the end of the episode and it is certain that Tony has just been shot by a gunman who entered the diner at the same time as his son AJ.

My Life With The Sopranos.

Not only do we get to sit in on the self revelatory psycho-analysis sessions with Dr Melfi but we actually enter Tony's  interior life by the means of the Fellini style dream sequences such as those in the episode Funhouse which rounds off series 2.In this episode while hallucinating as a result of food poisoning from an Indian meal Tony is informed  by his unconscious of the the certainty of his suspicions of an FBI informer within his crime family by means of a talking fish.There is also the extended sequence in the episodes at the start of season 6 when Tony is in a coma.Here Tony could almost be in a parallel universe where he is a normal  respectable American businessman attending a West Coast sales conference .We are in effect shown what he would be like if he were not a criminal.Other recurrent themes are his love of animals such as  the ducks in his swimming pool in the first episode ,his horse Pie O My foully murdered by Ralphie and the stray cat adopted from the safe house in the last episode.

My Life With The Sopranos.

Of course it is James Gandolfinis portrait of the protagonist Tony Soprano whose masterful performance keeps us returning for the entire six series.Tony Soprano is the archetypal l' homme moyen sensuel  , the average non intellectual man who just happens to be a mob boss.The focus is always on him from the first episode when he enters analysis with Dr Jennifer Melfi who will also be in all six series.Even when he is not on stage as it were everything that happens in the series is pertinent to him.The first two series focus a lot on his mother so it is quite a surprise when she dies unexpectedly at the start of the third series.I always think that in series 2,3 and 4 there is an essential repetitive element.A potential rival and threat Richie in series 2 and the odious Ralph in 3 and 4 creates problems for Tony .In each case the resolution to the problem by their violent dispatch comes totally out of the blue and is a total surprise.It is always these surprises and clever bits of plotting that make watching The Sopranos such a pleasure.As I said it took me nearly six months to get through the entire six series generally savoring a couple of episodes a week.I always think the character of Dr Melfi  is a bit of a red herring.Despite her attraction to Tony there is no affair with him, she is not affected or threatened in any way by his  associates or business dealings and finally drops him as basically incurable in the last series. Nonetheless the scenes with her are a key element in the series.Not only does Tony take Prozac for his depression but we see various other mobsters doing the same thing,truly Prozac nation.

My Life With The Sopranos

I started with the first series which first aired in 1999 for obvious reasons.The premise of a mobster in analysis is shared with The Robert De Niro film Analyze This a comedy which came out just after the first Sopranos episodes.This was complete coincidence both projects had arrived at the same idea completely independently being in ignorance of one another.David Chase the creator of The Sopranos was worried about this but managed to get his show out first. The Sopranos had originally been planned as a feature film using the themes of the first series and the plot involving Tony Sopranos mother.The first series can in fact be viewed as a wonderful extended movie over several sittings which moves to a resolution and denouement.The main characters who will accompany you through the next five series are all introduced in the first series Tony Soprano,his wife and children,his nephew Christopher his associates Silvio Dante and Paul Galtieri his nemesis Uncle Junior.The ongoing work is of the order of a Wagner s Ring Cycle of gangster movies actually being much longer.Unlike a soap it is a genuine work of art as everything in it has a purpose and like an opera there are recurrent themes in it .Also like all the most serious works of art it is a tragedy,a theme I will return to later.I spoke earlier of the classic gangster movies such as The Godfather films.Leones Once Upon A Time In America and Goodfellas being set in the time frames of the 1920s to 1970s respectively.Although first aired in 1999 The Sopranos is already a period piece.The period it is largely set in is that between 911  and the crash of 2008 although it actually finished by 2007.The age of George Bush although it ended less than three years ago already seems like another era.This was the age when America was obsessed with the War On Terror  and the war in Iraq.America was economically secure despite being embattled and fearful unlike Obamas America which often seems like a ghost of the nation that existed a few short years ago,sometimes the world outside can go a long time before remembering it is still there.  

My Life With The Sopranos.

Earlier this year from January to June I discovered  a world which I would drop into regularly every week and catch up on the life of its inhabitants.The world was that of a family of Italian American gangsters living in New Jersey - The Sopranos.I have always liked gangster films my favorites being Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Parts 1 and 2 and Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America. Both The Godfather Part 2 and Once Upon A Time In America share excellent performances by Robert De Niro . My favorite gangster films shared a setting in the New York of the earlier part of the 20th century the 20s ,30s and 40s.When Martin Scorsese updated the genre in Goodfellas in the early 90s by  a setting mainly in the 60s and 70s  I enjoyed watching it but did not include it with what I considered the original mythic films. When the Sopranos originally appeared I dismissed it as a Mafia soap derived from Goodfellas with which it shared  many of the actors.In January of this year having read some opinions to the contrary I decided to sit down and watch the whole of the first series. Which is where my life with The Sopranos began

Roland Emmerich,Shakespeare And The Baconian Theory Final Part.

The new Emmerich film with its plot of the Oxonian follow on to the Baconian theory is basically an example of getting the past all wrong.Because we think it is obvious that Shakespeare is the worlds greatest writer we assume that it was somehow obvious to his contemporaries.I expect many people would say he was the greatest person alive on the planet at that time.Yet in the society he lived in he was a very minor figure.His works which we think so important were merely entertainment.It is hard for modern people who accept their own culture as the height of wisdom to realize that people in the past did not value the things we value, human rights for example of which they had little conception.The most important thing to the people of his time was religion not literature .Shakespeare is so circumspect on that subject that Catholics,Protestants ,Humanists and Agnostics have all been able to claim him as one of their own.The conspiracy theories about him are a way of filling in and fantasizing about a figure who forever remains elusive.The man from Stratford is almost as big a mystery as the man from Nazareth.As nature abhors a vacuum so the conspiracy theories have filled it. We would like to think that we know pretty much everything but we are in fact limited by time and space.The last century with its great mass of filmed material is the exception to this but the further back we go go the harder it is to be certain of anything.What we would actually like is some sort of time viewing whereby we could look into the past and settle these mysteries .An excellent novel by Colin Wilson called The Philosophers Stone describes just that.The protagonist in the novel is able to see Elizabethan London by a sort of remote viewing.What he actually sees enables him to verify the Baconian Theory !.

Roland Emmerich,Shakespeare And The Baconian Theory

So Shakespeare's plays were basically a popular entertainment of their day designed primarily to make money for the theatrical companies ,managers,actors and writers of which Shakespeare was all three.At the time Shakespeare does not seem to have been thought of as an exceptional individual , a poet on a par say with Virgil or Homer.This honour was conferred on him during subsequent centuries.His collected works were first published in the first folio seven years after his death.At that time there was little in the way of fiction published in the English language.Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,Malory's Morte D'Arthur , Sheldon's translation of Don Quixote ,Chapman s Homer and that would be about it.So for the literate in the country houses and rectories of the nation who would probably never see a play the complete works were no doubt a godsend.We are lucky that  Shakespeare's complete works survived .In my Jacobethan conversation earlier I mentioned Kyds Hamlet which was the precursor to that of Shakespeare.There is no surviving copy of this in existence so we have no idea what it was like anymore than we can know what the Colossus of Rhodes looked like.If there had been no complete edition of the plays we would perhaps have only a handful selected purely by chance,Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar perhaps with only the names left of other plays such as King Lear or Othello.   

Roland Emmerich,Shakespeare And The Baconian Theory

A scene involving two early 17th century London men about town.We will call them Ben and Dan.
 Ben; You say you have no  business on Friday ,I am also free that day.What say you to a day out in Southwerk to partake of the entertainments there. Dan: What have you in mind ?. Wagering on the bull or bear baiting ? A visit to a bawdy house mayhap ?. Ben: I would fain attend a play. Dan: I have not attended a playhouse for some time but I would be happy to do so .Is there a play you wish to see?. Ben: Yes Hamlet ,it is on at the Globe.Dan; What is it about?. Ben: It is a revenge tragedy .Dan; Are not revenge tragedies ten a penny these days?.The last play I saw was a revenge tragedy of  Websters.The title Hamlet seems familiar ,is it not by Tom Kydd?.Ben:There was a play of that name by Kydd but this play is one of Bill Shagspers.Dan: So it is a remake then.

Roland Emmerich.Shakespeare And The Baconian Theory.

The Baconian later Oxonian theory goes something like this.Bacon or Oxford wrote the plays but because the theater was not a respectable profession for a gentlemen of their standing they let Shakespeare who was supposedly too ill educated and lower class to have written the plays himself take the credit.Their supposed reward for this was to see their works performed. I say performed because the plays were seldom printed to avoid other theater companys  from putting on their own versions.So Bacon would not even  have seen his work in print. This seems to be a new concept of vanity publishing.The question to be asked is why did people in the 16th century write plays? What was their motivation?.The simple answer is for money. Creative artists such as writers,painters and composers create their masterpieces to earn their living.A writer in the 16th and early 17th century could earn the most money by writing for the stage.There was no real system of copyright  and no great reading public.However to fill a theater day in day out ,week after week by writing  successful plays would entitle you to your cut of the takings and this would in time lead to real wealth by 16th century standards. It would appear that this is in fact what the actual historical William Shakespeare did as by the time he retired to his home town of Stratford on Avon he owned the second biggest house there plus a large amount of land.This seems to be one problem that the advocates of Baconian theory have with Shakespeare. He was keen on money and knew how to make it.How could the greatest literary genius of all time be so vulgar as to be interested in money!.

Roland Emmerich ,Shakespeare And Baconian Theory

The subject of his latest film is pretty much in line with the rest of his oeuvre in that it takes the world of esoteric knowledge which has been outlawed by the academy and packages it for a mass audience.Theories such as that the Pyramids are twelve thousand years old depicted in his film 10,000BC or that the Mayans have prophesied the end of the world for next year featured in his film 2012, have been  around under the radar in obscure books and magazines. Emmerich has taken these ideas and re-packaged them in a big budget movies. The difference between his Shakespeare film and the others is that it is such an old conspiracy theory in effect dating from the 19th century then updated in the 20th by someone changing the name of the suspect from Bacon to Oxford.Strangely one link between the Baconian theory and beliefs such as that of Atlantis is the figure of Ignatius Donnelly.Ignatius Donnelly was an American author who  created the modern craze for Atlantis in the late 19th century with his book Atlantis The Antediluvian World. This became a best seller and Gladstone who was British prime minister at the time even considered sending a Royal Navy expedition to look for remains of the lost continent. Donelly went on to become a champion of the Baconian theory and wrote a book The Great Cryptogram which set out to prove that there was a cipher hidden in Shakespeare's plays  that would prove they had been written by Bacon.

Roland Emmerich,Shakespeare And The Baconian Theory.

Emmerich's latest movie Anonymous finally brings the conspiracy theories about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays to a mass audience.The particular theory explored in this film is that the plays were written by the Earl of Oxford .This theory dates from 1920 and is sometimes known as the Looney theory after its author Richard Looney.I have titled this piece and the Baconian theory because the first theory attributing the authorship of Shakespeare's plays to another person  did so to Francis Bacon Lord Chancellor and herald of the scientific revolution of the 17th century.Bacon was a much greater and more significant figure in the history of western thought so the attribution of Shakespeare's plays to him has always seemed to me to be more plausible than the Oxonian theory.The Baconian theory first appeared in the mid 19th century and soon found many adherents in England and America including the Prime Minister Gladstone.So what in fact connects the subject matter with that of Emmerich's earlier films?The current film has attracted some controversy and condemnation from academics who fear their poorly read students will after seeing the film start telling them in class that the Earl of Oxford was really Shakespeare.