H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: RENDA

 Magister: Today, boys, History of England becomes History of English Literature, which is what happens when Rome conquers the timetable. Shropshire: Better Rome than grammar. G.: You say that only because Rome dies more noisily. Magister: Quite. We are upon Shakespeare’s Roman plays, and since you both affect intelligence, you may begin by naming the principal figures. Shropshire: Julius Caesar, obviously. G.: Caesar, yes, and Brutus. Magister: Continue. Shropshire: Antony. G.: Cassius. Magister: Good. Finish Julius Caesar properly before you wander into empire. Shropshire: Casca. G.: Octavius, though only by anticipation. Magister: Also Portia and Calpurnia if you wish to remember that women exist in tragedy. Shropshire: They generally exist to make men more agitated. G.: That is already a psychology, though not a good one. Magister: Now, Coriolanus. Shropshire: Coriolanus. G.: Volumnia. Shropshire: Menenius. G.: Virgilia. Shropshire: Aufidius. G.: Cominius, if one wishes not to flatten the Roman military apparatus. Magister: Better than most undergraduates. And Titus Andronicus? Shropshire: Titus, naturally. G.: Tamora. Shropshire: Aaron. G.: Lavinia. Shropshire: Saturninus. G.: Bassianus, if one wishes to remember that emperors need rivals and corpses. Magister: Very good. And Antony and Cleopatra, though it straddles worlds. Shropshire: Antony again. G.: Cleopatra, though Egyptian and therefore geographically inconvenient. Magister: Geography is no defence against the syllabus. Shropshire: Octavius Caesar. G.: Enobarbus. Shropshire: Lepidus, poor man. G.: Charmian and Iras, if one wants the courtly weather. Magister: And now, Mr. Shropshire, since you enjoy reducing literature to ailments, give us your psychology of these Roman men. Shropshire: Caesar is vanity, Brutus is conscience, Cassius is envy, Antony is appetite, Coriolanus is pride, Titus is rage, and Cleopatra is the whole female sex turned tropical. G.: That last is less psychology than educational failure. Magister: Indeed. Renda, whose little piece on Shakespearean psychology I have had the misfortune to read, would at least insist on a finer dissociation of passions. Shropshire: Dissociation sounds expensive. G.: In Italy it often is. Magister: Renda believes that Shakespearean characters reveal what he calls, in effect, a structure of power within the soul. Shropshire: Like a cabinet? G.: A poor cabinet, overthrown nightly by appetite. Magister: Not entirely wrong. The passions are not a heap but an order, or rather a struggle for order. Shropshire: Then my list stands. Caesar vanity, Brutus conscience, Cassius envy. G.: Too quick. Caesar is not mere vanity. He is political theatricality joined to habit of command. One must distinguish public style from private weakness. Magister: Good. Continue. G.: Brutus is not merely conscience. He is a man fatally in love with the moral description under which he wishes to act. Shropshire: That sounds like conscience with Latin. G.: It sounds like someone educated above his station, which is different. Magister: And Cassius? G.: Cassius is not envy alone. He is intelligence made acid by rank-consciousness and republican alarm. Shropshire: I preferred envy. It is shorter. G.: Brevity is not always a virtue, especially in souls. Magister: Renda would say that over-simple naming of a passion hides its internal hierarchy. Shropshire: Hierarchy in a passion? G.: Why not. A passion often governs smaller passions beneath it, like a prefect with no moral theory. Magister: Excellent. Now take Coriolanus. Shropshire: Pride. I stand by it. G.: Again, too quick. Coriolanus is pride certainly, but a specifically civic and military incapacity for translation. Shropshire: Translation? G.: He cannot translate martial worth into popular speech. He has no vernacular for the multitude. Magister: Very good. History of England, Mr. Shropshire, teaches us that some men can govern only in one grammar. Shropshire: Then Volumnia is ambition in a dress. G.: Better. Though again she is ambition moralised by Roman motherhood. Magister: There speaks the future scholar, not the future winger. Shropshire: I have always distrusted the ball. G.: It returns the compliment. Magister: Titus Andronicus, then. Shropshire: Rage. G.: Rage, yes, but ritualised rage. He inhabits an older Roman code of revenge, sacrifice, family honour, and political disintegration. Magister: A good phrase, “ritualised rage.” Write it down before you forget it. Shropshire: Handwriting counts, sir? Magister: Always. Typewriting disallowed, if you ever live to see it. G.: That would have pleased Jones, who has beautiful handwriting and little else. Magister: Do not gossip in class, Grice. Shropshire: So Aaron? G.: More difficult. He is intelligence freed from every civic loyalty the play wishes to honour. Shropshire: That sounds approving. G.: Only analytically. One may analyse a villain without becoming one. Magister: Which is more than can be said for some critics. Shropshire: And Cleopatra is still tropical, I suppose. G.: Cleopatra is theatre conscious of itself, passion that knows its own scenic value, sovereignty through display. Shropshire: I still think “tropical” had the advantage of climate. Magister: Renda would probably call her an instance of psychic over-determination, though that sounds worse in English than in Italian. G.: Everything sounds worse in English once it has crossed Italy by train. Shropshire: Then Antony is appetite still? G.: Appetite, but not merely. He is divided greatness, military nobility undone by a rival economy of value. Shropshire: That is certainly more than appetite. G.: Thank you. He cannot decide whether Rome is still the measure of worth or only one stage among others. Magister: And that is why these plays belong to history as well as literature. They dramatise Rome not as a date but as a set of pressures. Shropshire: Pressures in the soul? G.: There you see. Renda has already infected you. Magister: Better infected than dull. But let us name the principal men once more, since names are the minimum civility history owes the dead. Shropshire: Julius Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Casca, Octavius. G.: Portia and Calpurnia also, if we are not barbarians. Magister: Coriolanus, Volumnia, Virgilia, Menenius, Aufidius, Cominius. Shropshire: Titus, Tamora, Aaron, Lavinia, Saturninus, Bassianus. G.: Antony, Cleopatra, Octavius Caesar, Enobarbus, Lepidus, Charmian, Iras. Magister: Good. Enough names to satisfy the examiner, if not humanity. Shropshire: And the psychology? Magister: The danger there is to turn persons into labels. Renda is useful only if he stops you from doing badly what you were already inclined to do lazily. G.: Which is to call every excess “passion” and be done with it. Magister: Exactly. Shropshire: Yet “the lady protests too much” seems very plain psychology. G.: It is plain enough, but the interesting question is whether the excess is a symptom in the soul or a cue to the hearer. Magister: Very good, Grice. Renda makes it a symptom of dissociation. Another sort of philosopher might make it a hint to the listener about what is really meant. Shropshire: I should simply call it overdoing things. G.: Which is why you need school. Magister: Let us apply the point. Brutus protests Roman liberty. What is Renda’s use there? G.: That Brutus’s explicit reason may conceal, even from himself, a divided structure of motive. Shropshire: Such as? G.: Honour, public virtue, fear of tyranny, susceptibility to Cassius, vanity of moral self-conception, perhaps all in one bowl. Magister: Good. Renda’s “Shakespearean” side lies in making the psyche more stratified than common morals allow. Shropshire: Then Caesar saying he is constant as the northern star is psychology too? G.: Yes, but not only. It is also a public self-performance. He is telling others what sort of thing he must count as in the Roman theatre of command. Magister: Excellent. The Roman plays are full of men who speak themselves into political roles. Shropshire: That sounds modern. G.: It is merely old with better tailoring. Magister: Then Coriolanus’s difficulty with the people is not only pride, but a failure to produce the correct public self. G.: Exactly. He cannot perform the civic verbal gestures required by the republic. Shropshire: So his psychology is constitutional. Magister: That is rather good. Shropshire: I may improve yet. G.: In patches. Magister: Now, why do we read Roman plays in History of England? Shropshire: Because Shakespeare was English. G.: And because England reads Rome to understand itself. Magister: Precisely. Roman history enters English education as moral mirror, political vocabulary, and rhetorical discipline. Shropshire: Also deaths. G.: You are incorrigible. Magister: But not wholly wrong. The deaths matter because they close forms of life. Yet if you begin with the deaths, you miss what makes them intelligible. G.: As with Thrasea. Magister: Quite so. Rome keeps recurring under different schoolmasters. Shropshire: Then who is most Roman psychologically? G.: A bad question. Magister: And therefore useful if treated properly. Not “most Roman” by costume, but most Roman in the specific pressure between self, office, public speech, and honour. Shropshire: Then Brutus? G.: In one sense, yes. Coriolanus in another. Caesar in another. Antony less so, because his tragedy lies in becoming not Roman enough for Rome and too Roman to escape it. Magister: Very good. Shropshire: And Titus? G.: He is almost pre-Roman or hyper-Roman, ritual before polity, vengeance before constitution. Magister: A nice distinction. The Roman plays are not one psychology but several Romanities under strain. Shropshire: There is your title, sir. Magister: I have no need of titles. I have boys. G.: A harsher burden. Magister: Now, Renda’s “power structure of the soul,” if one may allow the phrase into a decent classroom, suggests that passions do not merely occur; they govern or attempt to govern. Shropshire: So in Caesar ambition governs prudence? G.: Not quite. Public confidence governs prudential retreat, perhaps. One must be exact. Magister: And in Brutus principle governs affection badly. G.: Yes, and self-image governs self-knowledge more than he suspects. Shropshire: In Cassius resentment governs judgment. G.: Better. Though judgment is not absent; it is sharpened by resentment, not replaced by it. Magister: Coriolanus? Shropshire: Pride governs speech. G.: Not speech generally. Public accommodation. He can speak, but not downward. Magister: Very good. Antony? Shropshire: Pleasure governs policy. G.: Too simple. Competing worlds govern him unequally and at different times. Magister: Cleopatra? Shropshire: Performance governs feeling. G.: That is almost right, but one must add that feeling itself may take theatrical form without ceasing to be feeling. Magister: Excellent. You see, boys, the danger of Renda is not that he is wrong to seek structure, but that schoolboys will turn structure into slogans. Shropshire: We do what we can. G.: Too often. Magister: Let us test another case. Menenius. Shropshire: Appetite in old age? G.: No. He is civic rhetoric as psychological temperament. Mediation embodied. Magister: Precisely. The belly speech is not mere politics; it is his mode of making society intelligible. Shropshire: So one might have a psychology of public styles. G.: That would be a great improvement on your earlier tropicalism. Shropshire: I concede the point under pressure. Magister: And Volumnia? G.: Maternal ambition joined to Roman honour-culture, yes, but also a soul in which love speaks the language of command. Shropshire: That sounds oppressive. G.: Families often are, especially in literature. Magister: And in schools, if one extends the analogy too far. Shropshire: You are not Volumnia, sir. Magister: I am relieved. G.: He is closer to Menenius, with less digestion. Magister: Careful, Grice. Shropshire: Then why would Italians like Renda go to Shakespeare for psychology rather than to, say, Euripides? G.: Because Shakespeare gives motives in excess, and excess invites quasi-clinical description. Magister: Also because Shakespeare is modern enough for the positivist to feel he is diagnosing persons rather than merely expounding myths. Shropshire: Positivists diagnose more than they read. G.: Often. But when a positivist is good, he notices patterns others sentimentalise. Magister: That is fair. Renda’s interest is in dissociation, hierarchy of passions, internal conflict, and over-protest. Shropshire: “The lady protests too much.” G.: Yes, and that is useful because the utterance does more than say. It reveals or invites an inference beyond itself. Magister: A hearer may recover something the speaker would rather not avow. Shropshire: So psychology and implication meet. G.: Precisely. The excess may be symptom from within, cue from without. Magister: Nicely put. Shropshire: Thank you. G.: Do not get used to it. Magister: Then perhaps the Roman plays matter because they show public action as inseparable from inward arrangement. G.: Yes. They are Roman not only by subject but by the way civic form enters motive. Shropshire: Rome is in the soul. G.: Careful. That sounds publishable and therefore false. Magister: Better say that Roman institutions provide the grammar in which these souls appear. G.: Much better. Shropshire: Then our list of principal characters is really a list of different civic grammars under pressure. Magister: That is almost too intelligent for Clifton. G.: He will spoil it next minute. Shropshire: Very likely. But I still think Titus is rage. G.: Ritualised rage. Shropshire: Coriolanus is pride. G.: Publicly untranslated pride. Shropshire: Antony is appetite. G.: Divided greatness. Shropshire: Caesar is vanity. G.: Political theatricality under command. Shropshire: Cassius is envy. G.: Rank-conscious intelligence acidified by resentment. Shropshire: Brutus is conscience. G.: Moral self-construction under republican pressure. Magister: Excellent. You have both learnt the difference between a label and a reading. Shropshire: Temporarily, sir. G.: It is all one can hope for in school. Magister: Now write an essay on one of them. Shropshire: Typewriting disallowed? Magister: Handwriting counts. G.: Then Jones may yet pass in Roman history, though not in philosophy. Magister: That remark, Mr. Grice, is very nearly too good for school.