I haven't actually stopped reading

The trouble is, a Kindle allows you to read so much at once. The Works of Lord Byron, vol. 1 -- here, the teenaged genius discusses his annoying mother:

... though timely Severity may sometimes be necessary & justifiable, surely a peevish harassing System of Torment is by no means commendable, & when that is interrupted by ridiculous Indulgence, the only purpose answered is to soften the feelings for a moment which are soon after to be doubly wounded by the recal of accustomed Harshness. I will now give this disagreeable Subject to the Winds.

And he writes a lot about his debts and his weight loss. It is interesting and encouraging, though, to see him grow up, to read him become sympathetic, self-deprecating even about his poetry, and humbly anxious to maintain old friendships. "I do not know how far our destinations in life may throw us together, but if opportunity and inclination allow you to waste a thought on such a hare-brained being as myself, you will find me at least sincere, and not so bigoted to my faults as to involve others in the consequences."  Old men kept his letters for fifty years.

Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Babington MacAulay. The Victorian schoolboy of legend read it or was assigned to read it, and out of it all, memorized it seems mostly this:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods...."

I liked the scholarly prose discussion of what happened to Rome's pre-imperial historical documents better than the poetry which MacAulay invented to try to recreate something of what they had said. It seems the Gauls burned Rome's archives in the 4th century B.C.E. when they sacked the city, and that Roman historians of later centuries knew perfectly well they had no documents upon which to base anything they wrote or thought they knew about that time. They had only, it seems, memories of popular legend and poetry; it would be as if American historians could only reconstruct the colonial period from childlike songs about Paul Revere's ride, or Washington crossing the Delaware. MacAulay's Lays are his imaginative reconstructions of what those word of mouth songs might have been; they concern the biggest topics of remote Roman history, like Rome's wars against more powerful Italian neighbors, or the class struggles between patrician and plebeian. It's astonishing, what MacAulay understood his readers would already know about what he was doing.

The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of the Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, the struggle of Mettus Curtius through the marsh, the women rushing with torn raiment and dishevelled hair between their fathers and their husbands, the nightly meetings of Numa and the Nymph by the well in the sacred grove, the fight of the three Romans and the three Albans, the purchase of the Sibylline books, the crime of Tullia, the simulated madness of Brutus, the ambiguous reply of the Delphian oracle to the Tarquins, the wrongs of Lucretia, the heroic actions of Horatius Cocles, of Scaevola, and of Cloelia, the battle of Regillus won by the aid of Castor and Pollux, the defense of Cremera, the touching story of Coriolanus, the still more touching story of Virginia, the wild legend about the draining of the Alban lake, the combat between Valerius Corvus and the gigantic Gaul, are among the many instances which will at once suggest themselves to every reader.

Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages. Not at all what you might think -- not at all gamy little exposes of Victorian marriages that were troubled, as written by the men and women involved. Rather, simply short stories by a variety of Victorian authors, Kipling, Conan Doyle, etc., about characters in troubled marriages. Kipling's "The Bronckhorst Divorce Case" was not very interesting, and I have yet to move on to Doyle's "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange."

Also on my Kindle home page are the Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de l'Enclos -- very strange; are the French really that different? When she warbles on about "love," does she mean sex, does she mean the love that makes a couple married sixty years nurse one another through the last illnesses, or does she mean a kind of freewheeling indulgence (including sex), of every new crush that comes along and excites you and flatters your vanity? -- on the grounds that indulging so is only human nature and therefore one must be humane and sophisticated and true to it? 

The White House Cookbook. The Rubaiyat of a Huffy Husband. The Spectator. Under Two Flags by Ouida, who I think was somehow scandalous and terribly popular in another era. The Chaplet of Pearls by Charlotte Yonge, ditto. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, certainly ditto. Aristotle. Twenty-four Little French Dinners ... not by Aristotle, that last.

Twelfth Night

Difficult, of course. It will require a second reading even to begin to get the plot straight, even though it is "only" a comedy.

The prime difficulty is that for the bulk of the story, we follow "the lighter people," the non-noble characters, as they play three successive tricks on one another: first a steward, Malvolio, finds a forged letter that deceives him into behaving pompously before the countess Olivia, whom he now thinks is in love with him; then the delightful idiot, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, is tricked into provoking a near-duel with Count Orsino's young manservant "Cesario" (who is really the disguised girl, Viola); finally Malvolio is hied off to a dungeon and succored and visited as a madman by the rest of the lighter folk, ostensibly because of the behavior encouraged in him by the forged letter.

All this takes up quite a bit of time, and it all taxes the modern reader's understanding because the non-nobles, not only Andrew and Malvolio but Sir Toby Belch, Maria (she forges the letter), and Feste the clown, speak in language much more obscure than that used by their betters. They speak, I venture to guess, like common people of 1600. Their banter is full of lost references to popular songs and jokes, they are forever joshing each other in that pun-infested, can-you-top-this style that Shakespeare loved (Samuel Johnson complained about his "quibbles"), and naturally they use the slang and idiom of the time, some of it bastardized French, some of it simply vocabulary long disused. A "catch" is a song, "Catay" is China. Decipher this, either on the page or in the theater, and by the way I know people who attended a performance of Twelfth Night just this past weekend.

TOBY: "My lady's a Cataian, we are politicians, Malvolio's a Peg-a-Ramsey, and [sings] 'Three merry men are we.' Am not I consanguineous? Am I not of her blood? Tilly-vally, lady. [sings] 'There dwelt a man in Babylon, lady, lady."  (II, iii, 69-72)

There's plenty more, and why does it always seem that the helpful notes at the bottom of a page of Shakespeare never elucidate what is truly bizarre? Your scholarly editor will assure us that "skill-less" means "without knowledge," but will not explain why Viola wants a beard, but "would not have it grow on my chin" (III, i, 45). Good luck to all.

So oddly enough it is the daunting-looking columns of poetry given to Viola, to the Countess Olivia, to Sebastian and to Duke Orsino which seem to swing aside like doors and, actually comprehensible, open up the movement of the play beyond. As an example of this sheer mental refreshment, here is Viola. She has been sent in her male disguise from her master, Orsino, to woo the mourning and cloistered Olivia by proxy.  "What would you?" Olivia asks, amused and attracted by the beardless "Cesario." Viola answers. She would

Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out 'Olivia'! ....

At least we understand this as English, or think we do. It sounds very feeling. But we may yet be deceived. This may not be as dreamy and deeply meaningful a speech as changed modern ears are apt to hear. Explanatory notes at the bottom of the page, useful at long last, tell us that the willow is a symbol of grief for unrequited love, so the image of a shack built of willows at someone's door might have been intended as simply enjoyably silly. The same for "calling upon my soul within the house" -- imagine some lovelorn person wandering around literally saying "Upon my soul," as characters did in plays and books until that oath fell out of use. Because we're not used to glowing language (and who ever gets used to Shakespeare in any case?) we may see profundity, and make extracts, where the great man intended pleasant absurdity. 

While the reader is deciphering the lighter people's three successive barroom tricks, the nobility carries on, behind its swinging doors of poetry, with the love story. Its focus is the entrancing disguised girl, Viola. She has been shipwrecked along with her brother, Sebastian, on the coast of Illyria. Separated by the storm, each thinks the other is drowned. Viola dresses as a man, and takes service with the Duke, Orsino; her chief duty is to pursue his romance with the Countess. Olivia rejects him, but falls in love with the new page, "Cesario." For her part, Cesario falls in love with the duke herself.

It remains only for Sebastian to enter the fray, exactly resembling his sister, to astonish everyone and prompt questions, accusations, and confessions of truth and love, and thus launch the action softly down to its denouement, all the while he eyes Olivia himself. Did Shakespeare mean for us to draw any profound lessons from it all? I doubt it; only the fine expression "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them," thrice repeated, suggests a peg upon which a grand theme might hang. And yet the fine expression comes from Maria's forged letter, so possibly it is all in fun, too.

The introduction to Twelfth Night in my 1960s-era volume of Shakespeare says that this is one of the three "Joyous Comedies," the other two being Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It. Very well, but four hundred years is a long time for one civilization's definition of a joyous comedy to endure. It's a long time specifically for an upper class, courtly definition of joyous comedy to endure -- the joy of the gentleman's belly laugh at the idea of a steward being persuaded a gentlewoman loves him. The joke on Malvolio is about far more than his yellow stockings. I wonder what went on at the theater this weekend; I wonder how any theater company can make a modern audience understand and relish this play. I'm not such a virtuous and democratic killjoy that I can't laugh at Malvolio, but the entire world that bred him and his mockers (and they included everyone, beginning with his fellow servants) has gone, and how are we to resurrect them, even in make believe? For us pale twenty-first century weaklings, it's far easier to understand Viola and Olivia, arguing like soft-voiced birds over personal identity. "I prithee tell me what thou think'st of me"/"That you do think you are not what you are," etc.

...
OLIVIA: Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
VIOLA: By innocence I swear, and by my youth,
I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth,
And that no woman has; nor never none
Shall mistress be of it, save I alone. ... (III,i,153-157)

Beautiful. The writer of my '60s era introduction also dwells much on the love story, but I think Shakespeare liked his servants and his Belches better here. And just how do we go about properly appreciating that?

The Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montague (1790); Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe (1676)

Two English ladies, living two generations apart, travel half the world in pursuance of their husbands' careers. Lady Mary made a circuit from London through the Low Countries to Austria to Hungary to the Ottoman capital, and from there via the Mediterranean to north Africa, Italy, and thence to Paris and then home; all this over the course of about two years, 1716-1718, while her husband was an ambassador. In the 1650s and 1660s, Lady Fanshawe covered less ground but also had a rougher time of it, for the English Civil War you might say crafted her itinerary. Her husband, later the baronet Sir Richard Fanshawe, sided with the monarchy against Oliver Cromwell, and so the couple spent a great deal of time during the Commonwealth beating about from England to the Netherlands to France to Spain -- anywhere royal heads were still safe -- raising money for the dispossessed prince who, on Cromwell's death, became King Charles II.

Both women wrote books which, if not timeless repositories of wisdom, are nevertheless remarkable time capsules of life and adventure in their respective eras. Lady Mary's Letters are the more interesting to read, since she was a better, indeed a delightful writer who not only performed at concert pitch for an audience of great friends like Alexander Pope himself, but also carefully chose and polished what she wanted posterity to see. Her book only came out decades after her death. She was probably a fun person to be around, too, if perhaps a little snooty. She loves being the clear-eyed, liberated and logical Protestant Englishwoman, asking tough questions of the friars showing her holy relics in Bavarian churches. If the church possesses, for instance, both the mantle of a saint and a silver-plated griffin's claw, does that mean the griffin was also a saint? Her host smiled abashedly.

Lady Fanshawe, however, probably led a more interesting life, at least to the reader sitting in comfort and clicking through her Memoirs on a Kindle. (What would the ladies have thought about that?) In old age, she wrote in firm but somewhat pedestrian style of all the things that had happened to her on her travels, almost week by week, for years. She wrote for her one surviving son, so there are many family details that he could have untangled better than we can do. She seems to have had no desire to please a fretful posterity with gay, polished summations: these memoirs were meant to honor her late husband, and so she fleshed out anything and everything that concerned him, right down to the apparently photographic memories of official state ceremonies (he was an ambassador, too), and to what guards wore which uniforms, and what the people lining the dusty roads, cheering, looked like.

Yet what with the travel and the narrow escapes and the forged passports, the shipwrecks and the perpetual hunt for money, one wonders how the former Ann Harrison herself stood it. Perhaps she found it wonderfully "interesting" too, and all for the service of a noble and godly prince. Perhaps seventeenth century Englishwomen were simply made of sterner stuff than we can imagine. I would think after a while, the adventures would simply turn ghastly, and the reward of reaching a career in the wasp's nest of Stuart diplomacy, only to find betrayal and disgrace there, would finally break anyone's spirit. The twenty pregnancies added in must have been small help in times of family turmoil. (For her part Lady Mary, in the course of her Letters, appears to have had two.) Six miscarriages, including a set of triplet boys, fourteen births, withal four survivals to adulthood: Lady Fanshawe recounts them all, and notes in every case when death happened and where "my son" or "my daughter" is buried. For one decade-long stretch, she lost a child, on average, every two years.

It's best to let these ladies speak for themselves, but before listening to them, it's also wise to note one way in which both their eras now overlap our own. It lies in their experience of Islam. For several centuries now, we Westerners, we Americans especially, have been able to develop an amnesia about Islam because we have not much encountered it. Until very recently, the U.S. Marines' hymn's lyrics about "the shores of Tripoli" might have been the only (and beyond oblique) reference to Islam remotely a part of American life. We are accustomed instead to religion as a sedate, gentle human construct -- each one a part of the civic fabric -- and to understanding that everyone simply agrees, one day a week, to let one another worship peacefully where all choose, all faiths being essentially the same: benign.

Islam is different, and our ancestors saw it. Lady Fanshawe, sailing from England to the safety of the Continent circa 1650, knew that the approach of a Turkish vessel meant the real threat of a combat, capture, and slavery. "When we had just passed the Straits, we saw coming towards us, with full sails, a Turkish galley well manned, and we believed we should all be carried away slaves ...." She was not a hyperventilating Islamophobe. The Muslim slave trade was vigorous to say the very least. Two generations later, Lady Mary traveled and lived in the Ottoman Empire as a distinguished guest, made great progress in learning Turkish and appears also to have made polite noises when her hosts encouraged her to study "alcoran." She wrote, for public consumption, glowing descriptions of splendidly rich, beautiful cool Turkish homes sumptuously appointed in rare woods and and glowing fabrics, all plashing with fountains, and of fields and gardens blooming in the warm Mediterranean January; she wrote of her cloistered friend, the enchanting Fatima, exquisite and serene.

But she also traveled through the wild Serbian countryside in company with "bassas," imperial Ottoman officials, and their guards, the "janizaries" (slave soldiers, originally kidnapped Christian boys forcibly converted to Islam), both of whom preyed grotesquely on the helpless Serbian peasants. They slaughtered their animals, ate their food, and then charged them "teeth-money," "a contribution for the use of their teeth, worn with doing them the honour of devouring their meat. ... the wretched owners durst not put in their claim, for fear of being beaten." She notes that all this oppression is owing the "natural corruption of a military government, their religion not allowing of this barbarity, any more than ours does." Here, she is wrong. The bassas and the janizaries could certainly have pointed to Islam's laws demanding the jeziya, the tax levied on infidels for being infidels.

And in a section of letters at the end of the book, which seem to have been intended to remain private (from Letter LIII forward -- "Footnote, this and the following letters are now first published"), she is even less sanguine about the wonders of Muslim civilization. Men go in terror of "the vile spirit of their government," which "stifles genius, damps curiosity, and suppresses an hundred passions." Women go in terror of men.

The luscious passion of the seraglio is the only one almost that is gratified here to the full; but it is blended so with the surly spirit of despotism in one of the parties, and with the dejection and anxiety which this spirit produces in the other, that ... it cannot appear otherwise than as a very mixed kind of enjoyment.

Even the lovely Fatima herself is of startling parentage. She is the daughter of a Polish Christian woman, kidnapped and enslaved in one of the many running battles the Ottoman Turks fought in eastern Europe, always lunging for more conquest -- more jihad. Mind you, this was long after the Crusades. They had only just been beaten back from Vienna in 1683, about halfway through our two ladies' flourishings. The date of that Muslim defeat was September 11.

It is all part of a pattern that we have had the luxury of forgetting, a historical truth that was delivered to our attention in short doses during the 1980s and 1990s, and then with ferocious confidence on another September 11. This historical truth is not that Muslims are awful people; it is that Islam is the only major world faith which demands the subjugation of all non-believers, period. When its most passionate adherents take the mandate seriously, war, conquest, enslavement, punitive taxes, and the raising of mosques on other people's sacred sites are the norm. Two vigorous, educated women, living in the most civilized cities in Europe three and four hundred years ago, saw normative Islam in action on their travels in Europe. They recorded it, matter-of-factly. Pay attention to these voices, for, not only can they help cure us of our pleasant and dangerous amnesia, but the more you read in old books, the more you'll find these ladies are just two of a surprisingly large company of witnesses.

But, we said we would let them speak for themselves. They did take notice of less deadly subjects. They enjoyed audiences with royal personages, cast a jaundiced eye over other women's dresses and hair, attended archery demonstrations among court ladies, went to the opera. The great disadvantage of reading on a Kindle is that you cannot ruffle back and forth through the pages. You have to click about, one little screen at a time, and you forget things. I had forgotten that Lady Mary, gadding regally about, saw the ruins -- or what she believed were the ruins -- of both Troy and Carthage. For a gentlewoman of the Augustan age and a friend of Pope, this must have been a supremely pleasing experience. And early on in her travels, she wrote with delight of Vienna as a garden spot for mature women:

A woman, till five and thirty, is only looked upon as a raw girl, and can possibly make no noise in the world, till about forty. I don't know what your ladyship may think of this matter; but 'tis a considerable comfort to me, to know there is upon earth such a paradise for old women; and I am content to be insignificant at present, in the design of returning when I am fit to appear no where else.

And as for the storm-tossed Lady Fanshawe, wife of a Stuart cavalier from the age of sixteen, this is her first meal after a shipwreck, and she's enraptured to get it:

... we sat up and made good cheer; for beds they had none, and we were so transported that we thought we had no need of any, but we had very good fires, and Nantz white wine, and butter,and milk, and walnuts and eggs, and some very bad cheese; and was not this enough, with the escape of shipwreck, to be thought better than a feast? I am sure until that hour I never knew such pleasure in eating, between which we a thousand times repeated what we had spoken when every word seemed to be our last.

These women lived lives, if I may mix a metaphor, at full throttle and without a safety net. Lady Fanshawe and her husband were glad to start married life with a fortune of £20 cash, which he used to buy pen and paper, the tools of his trade (diplomacy). For her part, Lady Mary wrote her friends, half-jokingly, that she hoped to survive the trip from Vienna through Hungary to Peterwaradin in Serbia, in the depths of winter, but that it would make her of necessity incommunicado for a while. Her steely, un-self-pitying address to a correspondent could sum up any one day or year that either of these two ladies ever lived through: "Adieu, dear sister: this is the last account you will have from me of Vienna. If I survive my journey, you shall hear from me again. I can say, with great truth, ... 'I have long learnt to hold myself as nothing'; but when I think of the fatigue my poor infant must suffer, I have all a mother's fondness in my eyes, and all her tender passions in my heart."

Sir Francis Drake Revived: the Third Voyage, the Voyage Round the World, Drake's Great Armada. By Philip Nichols, et al

Originally published in the Times of Northwest Indiana

Catholic, imperial Spain was the superpower of the Western world in the 1570s and 1580s, and that was reason enough for Sir Francis Drake, doughty English Protestant, to sail around the world robbing Spanish ships and attacking far-flung colonial Spanish towns at will. Religious niceties aside, it would be a little as if, in the middle of the twentieth century, some famed American sea captain had sailed the oceans stopping and searching Soviet boats, or raiding Russian outposts, more or less with the permission of the United States government. The three short books collected here, in volume 33 of the Harvard Classics' "Five Foot Shelf" of great books, tell the stories of three of Drake's greatest adventures.

His exploits are the stuff of fable, or indeed, of Hollywood epic. Anyone who remembers the Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Sea Hawk will recognize, in Drake's Third Voyage, a familiar plot: an ambush of a Panamanian mule train full of gold from the slave-run mines is ruined by an over-eager common English soldier launching the attack too soon. In the Voyage Round the World we are with Drake as his five ships are reduced, by storm and battle, to one, the famed Golden Hind. This is the ship which, midway through the journey, happens to put in for a while at a "fair and goodly bay" at 38 degrees north latitude on the west coast of North America -- in other words, at the site of San Francisco. The Great Armada tells the story of the largest fleet ever to cross the Atlantic up till that time. Twenty-five ships and 2300 Englishmen spent ten months trawling the West Indies, once again trying to pounce on Spain's gold fleet (they failed) and hold the principal colonial towns to ransom (they succeeded). Almost one-third of the men died.

Drake's ambitions were two-fold. He wanted to "make" (profit from) his voyages, and he wanted to show that a free Englishman serving his Prince -- Queen Elizabeth I -- could, with God's help, humble the mighty King of Spain. By the time of the Great Armada, in 1585, humbling Spain was more a matter of national survival than pride. There was another woman, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, waiting to be proclaimed Queen of England as soon as her cousin the Protestant Elizabeth could be removed, and Mary was perfectly willing to march on London with a Spanish Catholic army at her back and a Spanish navy in the Channel. The English knew that invasion was imminent -- it came in 1588 -- and a good part of Drake's efforts went to capturing Spanish cannon held safe in the Caribbean.

Drake was, no doubt, a pirate. He stole on the high seas. But he also made common cause with a quasi-nation of escaped slaves in Panama, the Cimaroons, he prevented the offering of human sacrifice among the Indians of California, he divvied up his profits with the common sailors, and he helped keep England English, when a foreign nation had other plans. These chroniclers robustly "call upon this dull or effeminate age to follow his noble steps for gold and silver" -- and adventure and a share of glory, surely.