A mistake perpetuated: Thomas Elyot, J.P. Brockbank, mercy, vengeance, King Henry VI, FIVE! GOLD! RINGS!, four calling birds...

[Prefatory: This is a new blog—obvly. and obsly. Its subject is my life with William Shakespeare and his... crowd. I shall as time permits fill in such acts and scenes as may provide a retrospective context for a res that, for the nonce, must remain in medias.]

In my long, still-young trek through the Arden Shakespeare Third Series treatment of the canon [boom] I am currently finishing up 3 Henry 6, as edited by John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen.

Ooh, dead rose calyces and thorns! Foreshortening [sic]!

 

In a discussion of King Henry's character—specifically (to oversimplify) whether Shakespeare intended political realism or 'divine judgment' in his treatment of the studiously weaktea king—the editors throw up the expected citations of Machiavelli and Erasmus ('It is quite possible to find a good man who would not make a good prince'); and then, in a footnote on page 72:

J.P. Brockbank pointed to a similar sentiment in Thomas Elyot's The Governour: 'The King, says Elyot, must be merciful, but too much Clementia is a sickness of mind; as soon as any offend him the King should 'immediately strike him with his most terrible dart of vengeance.'

The quote in question is from an essay called 'The Frame of Disorder—"Henry VI"' included in Early Shakespeare (1961), which is Volume 3 of a series of Stratford-upon-Avon Studies monographs published by Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd. in London. The essay, Cox and Rasmussen explain, is a distillation of some ideas from Brockbanks's unpublished 1953 doctoral dissertation at Cambridge—which focussed on how Shakespeare used and transformed his historical sources for the first tetralogy. Indeed, the Arden editors, working almost half a century after Brockbank, are reverential re the soundness of his theory and his continued relevance and influence in the area of Shakespeare's histories.

 

Which is a shame. As it turns out, Brockbank's cited text is an unfortunate illustration of a hard academic lesson to be learnt: bad memes as well as good ones strive for survival. Mind you, Cox and Rasmussen cite Brockbank correctly. But whatever else [his?] credentials and scholarly aptitude, Brockbank just completely intercourses the penguin on his quotation of Thomas Elyot, Knight. I'ma tell ya.

 

 

Tim Roth, IGWS, will be playing Sir Thomas in the forthcoming biopic.

 

On the surface, The Boke named The Governour—a 1531 training manual for rulers dedicated to Henry VIII—seems very like The Prince; although it is pretty unlikely that Elyot would have read Machiavelli, whose own seminal work did not appear in print until 1532. The bit Brockbank cites is in Book 2, Chapter VII, entitled 'That a gouernour ought to be mercifull and the diuersitie of mercye and vayne pitie'. Elyot begins this pithy discourse with a resounding endorsement of mercy: 

MERCYE is and hath been ever of such estimation with mankynde, that not only reason persuadeth, but also experience proveth, that in whom mercye lacketh and is not founden, in hym all other vertues be drowned and lose their juste commendation.

Ok? Mercy is sine qua non: you either have it or you're a piece of shit. To be sure, later in the chapter Elyot seeks to govern his theoretical governor's mercy, to establish reasonable limits and so to distinguish mercy from what he calls vain pity:

[Mercy] is a temperaunce of the mynde of hym that hath power to be auenged and it is called in latine Clementia, and is alway joyned with reason. For he that for euery litle occasion is moued with compasion, and beholdynge a man punisshed condignely for his offence, lamenteth or wailethe, is called piteous, whiche is a sickenesse of the mynde, wherewith at this daye the more parte of men be disseased. And yet is the sikenesse moche wors by addying to one worde, callyng it vaine pitie. [emphases added]

So Brockbank is correct in reporting that Sir Thomas scorned the over-exercise of mercy as a 'sickness of mind'. But on the other side of Brockbank's semicolon lies this: 'as soon as any offend him the King should "immediately strike him with his most terrible dart of vengeance".' How—you may ask yourself as I asked myself at this point—how can this prescription comport with the high value Elyot places on mercy as a virtue? How can terrible vengeance be the first resort of 'him that hath power to be avenged' but that also is blessed with the combination of mercy and reason? Indeed, a king seeking vengeance on absolutely everybody who 'offends' him sounds positively Trumpian.

But Brockbank wildly misread Elyot. First of all, he linked two clauses and ideas in a single semicolon-ized sentence as if the latter proceeded from the former in his source; but Elyot's treatments of these two ideas appear in reverse order from Brockbank's citation and are nowhere near each other. Second, Brockbank mistakes both the identity of the vengeance-taker and the mood of the word 'should'. Here's Elyot's original context:

Let governours, whiche knowe that they have received their power from above, revolve in their myndes in what peril they themselves be in daily if in god were not abundaunce of mercy, but that as soon as they offende him grievously, he should immediately strike them with his moste terrible darte of vengeaunce.

Is that not quite clear? Presumably TBnTG predates the convention for capitalizing 'god' and the pronouns referring thereto—I'm not sure who started that shit and when. But the numbers of the pronouns are clear and consistent throughout: governours are plural, god singular. This passage is saying that governors/kings need to realize the deep shit they themselves would be in if God were merciless, because a merciless god would vengefully blah blah blah. And where Elyot is clearly using the subjunctive mood—'that upon offense God should do thus'—Brockbank construes it as obligatory conditional: 'kings should do thus'.

 

FWIW, 'Kings Should Do Thus' really is the whole point of The Boke named The Governour, but that is still clearly not what Elyot is saying here. I am really rather surprised that nor Brockbank nor anybody else (that I have found, anyway) has ever recognized or corrected this silly misreading.