This Little Britain: How One Small Country Changed the Modern World. Harry Bingham

being heard. In the onrushing torrent of history, his is one of the few individual rocks to jut out above the waters: not simply the man of his moment, a product of time and place, but a genius for all time. As far as Britain is concerned, only Newton occupies a similar place. Perhaps, at a long stretch, Darwin too. To avoid Shakespeare just because he’s too hard to talk about would leave an absence in this book so loud as to be deafening.

      Shakespeare was, of course, one of the greatest writers of his or any other age. The infuriating thing about him is his perfection. Most writers, even great ones, have their strengths and weaknesses. Dickens is, for all his glories, also sentimental and vulgar. Jane Austen, for all hers, wrote confidently only within very narrow limits and almost never strayed beyond them. Wordsworth is often pedestrian, Tennyson often stupid. That’s not to diss those writers, it’s just to note their human foibles. Shakespeare, curse the man, appeared to have none. Whether you want lyrical, stirring, witty, clever, romantic, sad, spiritual, angry, psychologically perceptive, evocative—anything at all—Shakespeare is up there with the very best of English or any other literature. He wrote in verse so totally unstrained you’d swear he drank pentameters with his mother’s milk. With other poets, even great ones like Milton, there’s always a sense of effort. The result may be wonderful, but you can smell the sweat. Not so with Shakespeare.

      The Bard, however, did something more for art than simply illuminate it for one shortish lifetime. He altered it—not just English literature, but Western literature—for ever. In particular (and this is a point brilliantly made by John Carey in his What Use Are the Arts?) he was the first writer ever to understand fully the possibilities of indistinctness in language—a blurry allusiveness, a sideways leap into the non-rational, the sudden electric crackle of subconscious connection. To see what I mean, consider (as Carey does) the following two snippets, both talking about jewels, both written by English playwrights, both dating from the 1590s.

      Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,

      Jacinth, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds

      CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, The Jew of Malta

      Thou torturest me Tubal,—it was my turquoise, I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.

      WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Merchant of Venice

      The Marlowe passage is perfectly decent writing. The length of his list suggests the depth and richness of the treasure. His adjectives bring in hints of feel, colour, light, even temperature. If you studied a how-to book on good writing, a decent student would probably come up with something like the bit from Marlowe.

      Shakespeare, however, simply overleaps these more pedestrian qualities. First, there’s that ‘thou torturest me Tubal’. All of a sudden, that turquoise isn’t just a precious stone, it’s become an instrument of psychic torture. Just four words in, and Shakespeare’s already outclassed Marlowe by a country mile. But then comes the phrase that makes Shylock’s turquoise really flash into being. Shylock says he wouldn’t surrender that stone ‘for a wilderness of monkeys’. What on earth does he mean? What wilderness? What monkeys? Why would monkeys be likely to inhabit a wilderness? More to the point, why should a wilderness of monkeys be valuable currency in any case? Cold logic would rate a wilderness of monkeys rather low down on any list of financial assets, so Shylock’s expostulation hardly suggests that the turquoise has value. Except that it does. Cold logic has nothing to do with it. Shylock cares so much about that damn stone that his reason almost deserts him, and it’s the inexpressible genius of that phrase to make us feel the stone, and Shylock, and the intensity of the moment, as though we were right there in the man’s head.

      That’s what Shakespeare can make of a one-off phrase. When he brings that same extra-logical suggestiveness into a sustained passage of poetry, no writer has ever touched him. Here’s a piece from Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra is mourning and praising her now-dead lover:

      His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm

      Crested the world; his voice was propertied As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends; But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas That grew the more by reaping; his delights Were dolphin-like, they showed his back above The element they lived in; in his livery Walked crowns and coronets, realms and islands were As plates dropped from his pocket.

      There’s no question that this is writing of the very highest quality. But could anyone paint a picture of the Antony that Cleopatra is talking about? His legs straddle the ocean, but only his dolphin-like back appears to be above water. His bounty is autumnal, although (perhaps because of all that orb-shaking) he has a habit of dropping island-sized dinner plates from his back pocket, presumably biffing those crowns and coronets on the way. Taken at face value, the passage is nonsense. This is mixed metaphor taken to the max. In Shakespeare’s hands, however, it (inevitably) works.

      Such work, however strange it must first have sounded, was too self-evidently brilliant to leave literature unaltered. On the contrary, however hard it was for other writers to follow that first example, follow it they would strive to do. The consequence has been that Shakespeare brought the vast richness of the inexplicable and extra-logical not just to English but to world literature. Writers since him may not have touched those heights, but they have a new resource to make use of, a new mode of expression, a new way to communicate meaning. In twenty-first-century writing, be it in English or Japanese, those methods are now routinely deployed. Though it would be easy for us to forget that such things have to be discovered, perfected and disseminated, we shouldn’t do so. Shakespeare was literature’s benefactor; that ‘wilderness of monkeys’ his remarkable gift.

LAW

       THE RUSTICS OF ENGLAND

      In 1154, England acquired a new king: Henry II.

      Henry, grandson of William the Conqueror, was about as English as saucisson and baguettes. Not being English, he also had a very un-English drive for centralization and order. He put the barons in their place, knocking down any castles that hadn’t obtained regal planning permission; he streamlined the tax system; he overhauled record-keeping; and he turned his attention to the courts.

      From Anglo-Saxon times on, England had enjoyed the most developed state apparatus in Europe, including a set of shire and local ‘hundred’ courts. These courts did their job, up to a point. The laws they applied were mostly unwritten, customary hand-me-downs, passed from one generation to the next. The methods of trial were somewhat confused, being a mixture of the traditional trial-by-ordeal and the newfangled trial-by-jury, or indeed, sometimes by a hybrid of the two. If this was confusing, then so too was the law itself. The lack of clear central control meant that the law in Exeter represented something different from the law in Carlisle. No one had ever experienced or expected anything else, and the system worked at least as well as it did anywhere else, and quite likely a fair bit better.

      Yet Henry wasn’t a king willing to put up with anything so ramshackle. Legal disputes had a habit of ending up with the king himself. Although a court system existed, Henry could hardly delegate authority to it with a great degree of confidence that the system would actually deliver the effects expected of it. In place of those variable, regional, hard-to-control courts, he therefore instituted a new system of royal judges who roved the land, dispensing justice. The new judges combined local reach and royal power. Although justice came to the people just as it had always done, it now came with explicit royal authority and, particularly on the civil side, a common set of procedures and practices. No other European country had such an advanced or complete system. It was an English