Do You Think You're Clever? (18 page)

(Classics, Cambridge)

I’d say the interview just might have to be rescheduled … But is this an incitement to arson? It’s certainly a surprising question.

Clearly, if the department burns down, the fire must have been so severe that the fire brigade were unable to stop it. That would be quite a shock in a modern building, presumably incorporating an up-to-date fire alarm, sprinkler systems and fire doors to prevent a blaze spreading. So if the Classics department did burn down, questions would have to be asked. Why did the fire brigade fail to deal with the blaze? Were they slack in any way, either in arriving fast enough, or in dealing with the fire? Or was the fire not an ordinary fire, but started in several places simultaneously – or maybe involving accelerants, which would indicate arson?

Clearly an inquiry would need to be set up to answer these questions. If there were any casualties, there would need to be an inquest. Immediately the site was cool enough and declared by fire officers to be safe from risks like structural collapse and smouldering hotspots, fire investigators would move in and sift the site for forensic evidence. They’d also interview witnesses and retrieve video evidence. Officers of the Classics department would presumably begin checking with their insurers and begin the difficult decision of whether to rebuild or commission
a new building. While decisions were being made, the department would have to make arrangements to carry on in temporary accommodation. All in all, it would be something of a nightmare.

No doubt a few people would express a silent (or not so silent) cheer at the loss of the building. The 1989 structure is not universally popular. Although it is light and airy, it is undistinguished, and has little of the elegance, simplicity and ornament you would perhaps associate with one of the world’s leading centres for the study of classical antiquity – and certainly looks pedestrian in a city graced by such beautiful historic college buildings.

The biggest concern, however, is the contents, and this is perhaps what the question is after. The department’s great prize, of course, is its collection of classical plasters. In the Victorian era, plaster casts of classical pieces were very popular. But in the 1950s and 60s they fell out of fashion, and many collections were broken up. The Cambridge faculty is a rare and valuable survivor. As plaster copies, they are not irreplaceable, but their loss would be heavily felt by classical scholars at Cambridge. One hopes that the fire progressed slowly enough for at least the most precious casts to have been rescued from the burning building, but there are over 400 so the chances are that some were lost.

Of course, research work, computers and data, and the contents of the library might also have been destroyed if they could not be evacuated in time. That would mean a massive interruption to the functioning of the department,
and it’s possible that courses might be suspended for a year or so while resources were rebuilt. There are a number of priceless books in the library, and one hopes that these could have been saved.

Fire was always a hazard for libraries in classical times, and many important classical texts were probably lost forever when the great library at Alexandria was set fire to by Julius Caesar around 47 BC. This is why it’s an especially sensitive issue for classicists. Scholars cannot help wistfully speculating on what amazing works of literature and scholarship might have been bequeathed to us had the library survived – and naturally Julius Caesar is not universally popular. The starter of the faculty fire might become equally notorious …

(English, Oxford)

Shakespeare is so universally admired that the quality of his work often seems beyond question. Young students in particular – at least, those who have not written Shakespeare off as ‘boring’ – treat him with awe. So many layers of Shakespeare adoration have built up over the centuries that it’s hard to see the works of Shakespeare not as a literary bible but plays written by a real person, who was prone to good days and bad. It’s that hands-off approach
to Shakespeare that may perhaps stifle real understanding of the quality and thrilling immediacy of his work.

The interviewer is asking what at first sight seems a quite shockingly lowbrow question.
Hamlet
is widely regarded as one of the greatest works of literature ever written, the greatest masterpiece of the world’s greatest dramatist. To question it so offhandedly seems almost blasphemous. Yet the question is quite effective at stripping away the centuries of adoration and getting you to respond like an ordinary punter in the audience for the first performance in 1601 who had no sense of Shakespeare’s later towering reputation, or as a modern theatregoer seeing the work of a new, unknown playwright.

One can almost imagine a pompous and naïve Elizabethan critic writing the period equivalent of: ‘Mr Shakespeare has written a fascinating play about a disturbed young man who long agonises over whether to take revenge for his father’s murder. Stretching the play out for well over four hours may well capture perfectly the tedium of the young man’s dilatory behaviour but it really tries the audience’s patience. I found myself tempted to shout, “For God’s sake kill the bugger!” well before the halfway mark. Is there a possibility that Mr Shakespeare is more in love with his rambling verse than we are? (
Three stars
)’

There’s no doubt that
Hamlet
is long. It’s Shakespeare’s longest play by far. At nearly 4,000 lines, it’s twice as long as
The Tempest
and
Macbeth
. The role of Hamlet alone, at nearly 1,500 lines, is almost as long as Shakespeare’s
shortest play,
The Comedy of Errors
. Scholars dispute versions of the text – but with most full texts, played at average speed, the play runs for a backside-numbing four hours or more. It’s perhaps not surprising that many directors cut lines for performance, believing that modern television-trained audiences with their short attention spans could not last the marathon of an uncut text. They and critics talk about ‘streamlined’, ‘stripped down’ and ‘pacy’ performances. For his 1948 film version of
Hamlet
, Laurence Olivier cut and pasted to such an extent that the film ran less than two and a half hours, and Olivier actually got a writing credit alongside Shakespeare. Contemporary directors are often equally brutal.

Like other film directors such as Franco Zeffirelli, one of the ways that Olivier shortened the play was to cut out the characters Fortinbras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In doing so, they cut out the play’s political element and made it entirely an intense personal drama. And here perhaps lies the problem with considering
Hamlet
too long. If it is too long, then what are the parts that make it too long and need to be pruned? Cut out the political, and the context in which Hamlet’s drama is played out is lost – we forget that Hamlet is a prince and that the pressure on him and need for him to act (or not) is political as well as psychological. You might get a streamlined story that’s easier to perform and more obviously involving for a modern audience, but it’s somehow a shallower piece that tips towards the values of soap opera. Cut out the scenes with
the players, as directors similarly often do, and again you get a ‘distraction-free’, faster-moving story, but some of the psychological and symbolic richness of the play is lost.

Of course, these stripped-down versions are sometimes worth doing for the new light they shed on the play, and because of the practical attractions of staging a shorter version. But they should never be regarded as definitive. No one can be precisely certain what text Shakespeare intended. But let’s assume that the text we have in most published editions is at least close. If so, our interviewer and pruning directors are saying that Shakespeare got it pretty fundamentally wrong in this, his greatest drama.

While it’s good not to regard Shakespeare’s text as sacred, a dead body of work in which we cannot actively engage, it’s perhaps throwing the baby out with the bath water to assert that Shakespeare got
Hamlet
wrong. Surely Shakespeare, the most adroit and dramatic of all playwrights, knew what he was doing when he wrote
Hamlet
at over four hours? If it seems too long, maybe we have simply failed to read or stage it with sufficient understanding.

There’s a disturbing tendency for modern directors to regard themselves as kings of the theatre, dispensing their wisdom to barely competent playwrights such as Shakespeare, untutored infants of the theatre who are able to unlock their true potential only with the help of a decisive director. Perhaps it makes more sense to assume that Shakespeare knew what he was doing and work harder to unlock the power of the play using his own words and
structure rather than simply excising them and telling a different story.

There is some truth in the argument that Shakespeare wrote for very different audiences, who had never experienced the bite-size drama of TV and the quick click of the internet, but this does not necessarily mean that modern theatregoers just can’t take the full
Hamlet
. In recent years, audiences have been excited to sit through twelve-hour non-stop performances of the Greek classics. Surely it’s possible for them to be equally excited by a wonderful play a third as long, psychologically and politically modern, with a cast of intriguing, believable characters, driven along not by an academic’s inevitably pale translation, but by some of the most glorious verse in the English language?

(History, Cambridge)

Biologists have no problem being racist when it comes to classifying plants and animals. A race, a biologist will tell you, is a geographically distinct group within a species that shows its own hereditary traits, such as the maneless lions of Kenya’s Tsavo national park. It’s with humans that the issue becomes fraught with controversy.

In recent years, many scientists, perhaps all too deeply aware of how damaging science’s exploration of race issues has been in the past, have insisted that there is biologically
no such thing as race with the human species, and genetic research is backing this up. Human genome researcher Craig Venter and evolutionary biologists such as the late Stephen Jay Gould are among many scientists who have argued that there is no identifiable genetic basis to race. Genetic differences within what are ordinarily regarded as racial groups turn out to be far, far greater than those between them. Gould believed that the time human beings have been around (a mere 170,000 years at most) is far too short for genetically different racial groups to have evolved.

In fact, nearly every genetic marker studied for signs of significant racial differences fails to reveal any. Even the small things that one might expect to show differences between the races, such as blood type and susceptibility to particular diseases, do not bear closer inspection. Blood types are pretty much evenly spread within different ethnic groups and particular susceptibilities to disease turn out to be mostly geographic rather than genetic.

A race, biologists insist, must be genetically distinct. Yet the human ‘races’ are indistinct, with physical types blending so indistinguishably that one would have to say that everyone, ultimately, is ‘mixed race’ – especially since mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA), the tiny genetic time capsule inherited through the female line unchanged through countless generations, shows female ancestry can come from any racial group. Race, then, according to many scientists, is not a physical reality but a cultural and social construct, no more scientific than nationality. A very few
scientists disagree, however, arguing that there are genetic differences, even if small, and those small differences are enough to mark out different races – even if they are only ‘fuzzy sets’ that blend imperceptibly into each other. This all matters a great deal, of course, and is not simply an arcane scientific question, because bigots make the most of any scientific evidence that there are genetic differences between ethnic groups to justify their racial attitudes.

Yet whatever science says, most of us, on a day-to-day basis, assume that race is a reality. It’s a concept recognised both by the law and by the government in trying to ensure equal opportunities, and it’s information requested in numerous official applications and documents. And most us of have no problem specifying our own racial type (white Caucasian, black African, Asian, Aboriginal, mixed and so on). From a young age, most of us also can quickly identify the race of others instantly by sight alone – even if mistakes are common. Regardless of what genetics shows, the physical signs of race are generally so marked that they remain instantly identifiable whatever the context. A black African or a white Caucasian is still identifiable as such even if brought up in a completely different racial context, which is why it’s not enough to say that race is a ‘social and cultural construct’. However defined, it is a reality.

If your race is in the majority in the place where you live, you might easily forget issues of race, or even that race exists (in whatever form), but if you are in a minority you are constantly reminded of the differences. Sometimes,
these are something to celebrate. But sometimes they can bring great suffering.

What matters more, perhaps, than the reality of such ethnic differences is our attitude towards them. No one likes being labelled, and race is one of the most powerful and dangerous of all labels.

(Geography, Oxford)

Three simple words in this question – yet what a web they create. Today, the word ‘nature’ is used readily as a blanket term for the ‘natural’ world around us without necessarily defining exactly what is meant. Or it might describe something’s essential qualities, their inner or true nature. That’s the sense the Ancient Greeks would have understood, and the Roman origins of the word
natura
meant ‘birth’ – and described qualities that things were born with. Some things, the Greeks believed, are inborn – formed by nature – and some are added by man. Aristotle summed it up neatly: ‘Art completes what nature cannot finish.’

Art and nature were seen as complementary opposites, and until a few hundred years ago that’s how most people saw it. The seventeenth-century author Thomas Browne thus would have had a simple answer to the question ‘Is nature natural?’ Browne wrote in
Religio Medici
(1643): ‘Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth
day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.’ Most of his contemporaries would have concurred.

Over the next two centuries ideas shifted, however. When the Victorian poet Philip James Bailey wrote, ‘Art is man’s nature; Nature is God’s art’, it might seem to be saying the same thing as Browne, but Browne would not have understood what he meant, nor its punning style. To Browne and his time, nature was simply all the physical world – created by God, not by man – and those who tried to understand how it works were described as ‘natural philosophers’. But to the Victorians there was nature, which meant little more than ‘characteristics’, and there was Nature, with a capital ‘N’ – the big outdoors which keen Victorian naturalists went out and studied in the countryside, and romantic poets waxed lyrical about.

Nature had become separated from the sphere of man’s activities and interests, and was no longer the complementary opposite of art. Natural philosophers became ‘scientists’ and those professionals who studied plants and animals were botanists and zoologists. Naturalists were merely amateurs who made a hobby of observing birds and butterflies, wildflowers and mosses and so on. More and more, Nature became what it is today – something we enjoy in lavish TV documentaries and on trips to the countryside, or in school activities, but are never really part of. In fact, Nature is something that doesn’t come naturally,
any more than an interest in computers or cooking. In this sense, Nature has become unnatural.

But there is a whole other side to this question – just how much the natural environment is actually natural. Nearly every inch of the landscape of the English countryside, for instance, is the product of thousands of years of human toil, and the wild plants and creatures of the fields are those that have adapted to this man-made landscape – birds such as the skylark and corn bunting, linnet and grey partridge; rodents such as field mice; and meadow flowers such as cowslips and trefoil, scabious and daisy. And as modern intensive farming practices further alter the landscape, many of these ancient farmland species have in turn come under threat, like their natural forebears in the past. Wild cowslips have almost had their day; now it’s the age of nettles.

And what is true in England is true globally. Human activity has significantly altered the natural environment all over the world, not just by creating farmland from what was once virgin forest or plain, but by polluting the atmosphere and water and much more besides. Countless species of wildlife have been endangered in what seems like a massive cull as their habitat has been altered or destroyed altogether.

Yet though many species will die out, others will thrive. Nature will not die out but just alter its course. On the whole, human activity tends to reduce diversity but allows a few successful species to flourish, often to pest proportions.
And of course even the crops and livestock that humans fill the landscape with are actually the descendants of native plants and animals. So however much it’s altered by human activity, nature, or rather the natural environment, can always be described as natural.

Of course, we humans are actually a product of nature ourselves. So even the most extreme man-made environments, from a Shanghai shopping mall to a nuclear bunker, could be described as natural. If, however, your definition of natural is ‘unaltered by humans’, then there is virtually no corner of the planet which could be described as natural …

In recent years, the word ‘natural’ has acquired the aura of angels. Everything from GM foods to women pregnant at 65 has been labelled ‘unnatural’ by their opponents, as if that is enough to damn them forever, while advertisers can put a positive spin on just about anything by describing it as ‘natural’ (presumably untainted by the ‘dangerous’ input of scientists and manufacturers). In one of those jawclenching ironies, an orange tart labelled as full of ‘natural orange flavour’ has almost certainly never been near an orange, natural or unnatural. Food retailers can legally label food as ‘naturally flavoured’ if the cocktail of chemicals it contains creates a taste that just vaguely resembles the real thing.

Yet just why is natural so easily seen as good and unnatural bad? After all, diseases such as malaria and cholera are natural. In fact, death is quite natural, too. I’d guess it’s in
part a hangover from the ancient belief that things in their proper, natural form were, in their way, perfect, and, in Christian times, reflections of God’s creation. Unnatural things were distortions of these perfect forms created by the devil. When people talked about ‘unnatural acts’ they were talking about something a lot nastier than making ‘natural strawberry flavour’ drinks from chemicals.

Yet that ancient prejudice has been revived and reinforced beyond measure in the modern world by the distrust provoked by big manufacturing companies and agribusinesses, scientists and food technologists. This distrust is founded on genuine real disasters, from eugenics to thalidomide and from Hiroshima to Chernobyl. ‘Natural’ by contrast seems to be safe, tried-and-tested over millions of years. It’s free from dangerous artifice, human hubris and the taint of big money. In this sense, nature is always natural.