Getting a bit heavy-handed, aren’t you, Inspector? - some British culture via An Inspector Calls

 

Several years ago I came across a survey of British teachers of English literature.  Over time, many groups have greatly revised, often in the name of relevance and diversity, the reading list for the GCSE, the exam British students took before graduating high school (a current or at least recent list).  But which books did teachers actually pick to teach?

The answer was, when possible, An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestly, to the extent that I was able to calculate that a large majority of British students were tested, and have always been tested, on An Inspector Calls, no matter what other options are available.  The second place book was, by the way, Animal Farm.

So the point of the survey was that more varied contemporary options to the exam did not matter much if teachers just kept riding the same old warhorses.  My point, somewhat different, is that I was not even sure what An Inspector Calls was.  I had better read it.  I just did.

It is a popular play from 1945.  It is short – is it the shortest text on the list? – is it the easiest? 

ERIC:  My God, it’s a bit thick, when you come to think of it –  (Act I, p. 25)

Is it ever!  A bourgeois family is having a pleasant dinner celebrating the engagement of the daughter to a perfectly respectable young man when a police inspector calls with the shocking news that a young woman has committed suicide, and that (this takes a little time) every member of the family is at least a bit responsible for her death.  In another sense, none of them are at all responsible, but I suppose that idea is one of the things that makes the play teachable.  We can have a good debate about agency.

GERALD: (Crossing D. to Inspector)  Getting a bit heavy-handed, aren’t you, Inspector?  (ERIC crosses D.  to chair R. of table.)

INSPECTOR:  Possibly.  But if you’re easy with me, I’m easy with you.

GERALD: After all, y’know, we’re respectable citizens and not dangerous criminals.

INSPECTOR:  Sometimes there isn’t as much difference as you think.  Often, if it was left to me, I wouldn’t know where to draw the line.  (I, 23)

The Inspector is, like Father Brown and Columbo, as much an avenging angel as a detective, an idea that I hoped would be implicit but is instead made explicit by the end of the play.  Everything is made explicit.  This is the Inspector’s exit speech:

INSPECTOR:  One Eva Smith has gone – but there are millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, with what we think and say and do.  We don’t live alone.  We are members of one body.  We are responsible for each other.  And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.  We don’t live alone.  Good night.  (III, 53-4)

When An Inspector Calls premiered, Germany had just surrendered, days earlier, to the Allies; the war with Japan would go on for several more months.  I am having trouble fitting this speech into that context.  But otherwise An Inspector Calls is careful to resolve all of its mysteries.

It is a well-made play; I would love to see it performed.  But it does not look like a great national treasure to me.  Knock it off that list!  Make teachers pick something else!  Not that I wish new class preps on teachers – sorry.  And perhaps there is some kind of Chesterton’s Fence argument against removing it.

There is no equivalent in the U.S., where our educational system is chaos, or in France, where the texts for the Bac change every year.

I am likely getting much about the GCSE wrong, and sadly I will never be able to find that survey again.

Page numbers refer to the 1972 Dramatists Play Service edition.

The Malcontent by John Marston - Come down, thou ragged cur, and snarl here

What do I want to say about John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603, maybe 1604)?  It is unusual.  Marston is unusual, with a distinct poetic and dramatic sensibility.  No one else could have written it.

The Duke of Genoa has been tossed out by an usurper, so he infiltrates the court disguised as Malevole, the Malcontent of the title, not exactly a courtier, not exactly a jester, but given license by the usurper.   It is as if Diogenes (the dog man) was somehow an attendant of Alexander.

PIETRO [current Duke]:  Come down, thou ragged cur, and snarl here.  I give thy dogged sullenness free liberty; trot about and bespurtle whom thou pleases.

MALEVOLE: I’ll come among you, you goatish-blooded toderers, as gum into taffeta, to fret, to fret.  I’ll fall like a sponge into water, to suck up, to suck up.  Howl again.  I’ll go to church, and come to you.  (I.2, 16)

A nice example of Marston’s original language, including his taste, that Jonson mocked in The Poetaster, for obscure words with a pleasing mouth-feel.  Bespurtle.  Toderers.  The latter is a bit of a mystery, but “tod” is “fox,” if that helps.

The Malcontent sometimes feels like it should be played by Groucho Marx:

BILIOSO:  Out, ye cur! [again, a dog]

MALEVOLE: Only let’s hold together a firm correspondence. [the Groucho line]

BILIOSO:   Out!

MALEVOLE:  A mutual, friendly-reciprocal, perpetual kind of steady-unanimous-heartily-leagued –

BILISOSO:  Hence, ye gross-jawed peasantly – out, go!

MALEVOLE:  Adieu, pigeon-house!  Thou burr that only stickest to nappy fortunes; the serpigo, the strangury, an eternal, uneffectual priapism seize thee!  (II.3, 41-2)

That ends a little too obscene for a Marx Brothers joke.  The Malcontent has a number of outstanding vocabulary-expanding insult passages.

Malevole is the star part, played by Richard Burbage, Hamlet his own self.  Around the same time Burbage was also playing the Duke in Measure for Measure, another duke in disguise.  What fun to be a theater-goer in London in 1603.  Malevole is out for revenge, in some sense, and the restoration of his office, but the play takes a turn at the end of Act III when rather than shoving Duke Pietro off a cliff, he instead converts Pietro to – to what – not his cause, exactly, but to his malcontent vision of life.

PIETRO:  Lord Malevole, if this be true –

MALEVOLE:  If? Come, shade thee with this disguise.  If?  Thou shalt handle it; he shall thank thee for killing thyself.  Come, follow my directions and thou shalt see strange sleights.

PIETRO:  World, whither wilt thou?

MALEVOLE:  Why, to the devil.  (III.v, 66-7)

Soon enough this duke is disguised as a friar (exactly like Measure for Measure) and the two dukes in disguise scheme to disgrace the play’s villain,  The Malcontent is a genuine revenge comedy.  No one is murdered, the adulterous wife is forgiven, and the worst characters are barely even punished.

The Malcontent has a number of strong comic parts with their own great bits, but I think what elevates this play is the psychology of the Malcontent.  He falls into his disguise, into his role, too easily.  It is who he really is.  Similarly this is why Pietro is so easy to convert from enemy to ally, and for that matter why revenge is pointless.  Marston has found language and characters that express his, or a, view of the world, a refreshed Cynicism.

I will try one more Marston play, The Dutch Courtesan,  later this spring; I hope it is at least half as interesting, and a quarter as good.

Next up, soon I hope, is Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), which I remember as a weepy melodrama, quite interesting as a genre example but not a great play.  We’ll see.

Text and page numbers are from the New Mermaids edition. 

What I Read & Where I Went in March 2026 - the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich

London and Cornwall, St. Ives and Penzance and so on, is where.  I got some good Shakespearing in – The Tempest at the Wanamaker, the little candle-lit theater at the Globe, and a good walk around Shoreditch and northern London, tracking down various Shakespearean sites and monuments.  The Shakespeare Museum, built atop the excavated Curtain Theatre, surrounded, like, increasingly, everything in north London, by dubious modern high-rises, looks like it will open any minute now.

 

 

TRAVEL

The Living Stones: Cornwall (1957), Ithell Colquhon – A painter who, like many, fell in love with Cornwall, Colquhon was also a genuine mystic, attracted to Cornwall’s almost unbelievable number of magical rocks, piled up or simply set on end.  Her book is a journey around Cornwall’s weirdness, extremely interesting while I was right there, presumably somewhat less interesting at a distance.  Some especially weird setences, Colquhon writes in the British house style of the time, light, witty, deft at quick sketches of people and places.  I saw some of her paintings at the St. Ives Tate, and would like to see more.

 

SHAKESPEARE-ADJACENT

The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602), Henry Chettle – Somehow I finally wrote about this one.

The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (1990) – Highly useful.

 

NOVELS

He Knew He Was Right (1868-9), Anthony Trollope – His longest novel, perfect for international travel.  The A-plot, or really the protagonists of the A-plot seemed a little thin from the beginning, but soon enough other plots and characters tangle their way around the central story that I did not care much.  I sometimes have to resist the modern impulse to dismiss a tragedy by thinking “This guy needs a psychotherapist,” but that this novel is actually a quite early example of that notion, pathetic rather than tragic.  And, as is usual with Trollope, mostly comic.  Look at this beauty:

We are often told in our newspapers that England is disgraced by this and by that; by the unreadiness of  our army, by the unfitness of our navy, by the irrationality of our laws, by the immobility of our prejudices, and what not; but the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich,-- that whited sepulchre, fair enough outside, but so meagre, poor, and spiritless within, such a thing of shreds and parings, such a dab of food, telling us that the poor bone whence it was scraped had been made utterly bare before it was sent into the kitchen for the soup pot.  (Ch. XXXVII)

Crome Yellow (1921), Aldous Huxley – Now this is what I meant by post-WWI “house style”; Huxley practically invents it with this talky, digressive little sad sack of a novel.  Virginia Woolf was not quite right when she wrote that everything changed in 1910 – 1920 is more like it.  I was surprised how much Huxley imitated Thomas Love Peacock’s talky, digressive novels, like Nightmare Abbey (1818).

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Vladimir Nabokov – In which the author, having written a Russian masterpiece, switches to English.  The narrator is writing the biography of his half-brother, a famous writer.  Many curious tricks are played.  I am reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), which given how different the books are is also weirdly similar.

The Singularity (1960), Dino Buzzati – The first third of this novella is a scientist’s journey to a mysterious research facility, devoted to shhh-it’s-a-secret.  Then the next two-thirds are – I guess skip this if you do not want to know the secret, but I now I cannot see why it matters – a good science fiction story about artificial intelligence.  Not a great one!  Minor compared to The Tartar Steppes or heaven knows The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily.

Not to Disturb (1971), Muriel Spark – What  a strange book.

 

POETRY

Selected Poems (1818-48), Thomas Lovell Beddoes – Chettle’s Gothic, skeleton-filled play sent me to Lovell Beddoes.  The Carcanet collection is one-third excerpts from his crazy play Death’s Jest Book, which I should read again in full.

Selected Poems (1946-71), Salvador Espriu – A grim, mystical Catalan poet.

Archive of Desire (2025), Robin Coste Lewis – A recent poetic response to the poems and life of Constantine Cavafy.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Les chants du crépuscule (1835), Victor Hugo – It was Romantic poetry month, apparently.  This particular Hugo collection is highly political for the first half, Hugo haranguing or praising a range of French figures I do not know for reasons I do not understand.  I began to worry, but thankfully the second half takes a lyrical turn, and is full of beautiful French poetry.

Folhas Caídas (1853), Almeida Garrett – Another Romantic, this little book is nothing but love lyrics, mostly pretty pathetic.  Nice to be able to read this.

The Tragedy of Hoffman by Henry Chettle - The first step to revenge

His father hanged by the neck until dead for the high crime of piracy, Hoffman vows Revenge! on the duke who executed his father.  By chance the duke’s son is shipwrecked exactly where Hoffman is keeping Hoffman, Sr.’s corpse hanging on the wall of a cave, so Hoffman tortures and murders his enemy, thus ending Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman or a Revenge for a Father (1602).  Thus ending Act I, Scene 1, I mean.

LORRISQUE [A turncoat, evil servant]: He’s gone.

HOFFMAN:  Go, let him.  Come, Lorrique:

This but the prologue to the ensuing play,

The first step to revenge.  This scene is done

Father, I offer thee thy murderer’s son.    Exeunt.  (I.1, 252)

Theatrical!  He ends the first act in the same literal way: “So shut our stage up; there is one act done” (I.3, 258).  The revenge tragedy’s conventional play-within-a-play appears to take place in Hoffman’s head.

Chettle, one of the great hack playwrights of this time, messes with the revenge tragedy in many interesting ways.  One key aspect of the genre since Kyd invented it is delay; the revenger for some reason cannot just challenge his enemy to a duel or whatnot.  Shakespeare, in Hamlet, finds high psychological interest in the genre cliché.  Chettle abandons it in the first scene, and afterward his villain methodically carves through his remaining enemies until he is finally undone  by being distracted by lust:  “but I deserve it [his death] that have slacked revenge” (V.3, 324).

The revenger is typically seeks genuine justice and is delayed by the political power of his target.  Chettle’s revenger is a psychotic villain whose father was executed within a legitimate justice system for well-understood crimes.  My understanding is that this purely villainous revenger, who will become a staple of later revenge tragedies, is a genuine innovation of Chettle’s.

Since The Tragedy of Hoffman is available in a New Mermaids edition I thought it would be easily available in the usual places, but no, it was a bit of a pain to get.  So sorry about that, to any cheapskates (like me) chasing after a readable copy.  I ended up with the highly interesting but consumer-unfriendly Penguin edition – Five Revenge Tragedies (2012).  The other four plays are The Spanish Tragedy, Antonio’s Revenge, Hamlet, and The Revenger’s Tragedy, all terrific but do you really need another copy of The Spanish Tragedy or Hamlet?

That edition tells the story of the rise of Hoffman, though.  The book is perfect for half of a university course on revenge tragedies, or these days, if I believe the grim news, an entire semester.  What a good class.  The Tragedy of Hoffman is the dumbest play of the bunch, but I can see how it is highly teachable, especially after Hamlet, which it shamelessly loots.  Students who have worked their way through Kyd and Marston and Hamlet will dismantle and rebuild Hoffman with facility.

Hoffman, I will note, is a marvelously Gothic play, sometimes reminding me of Thomas Lovell-Beddoes’s Death’s Jest Book in its Halloween qualities.  What a great stage direction:

[Hangs up Otho’s skeleton.]  (I.3, 257)

This is from the first scene, with Hoffman talking to the corpse of his dead father:

But thou dear soul, whose nerves and arteries

In dead resoundings summon up revenge,

And thou shalt ha’t; be but appeased, sweet hearse,

The dead remembrance of my living father.  (I.i, 245)

Hoffman shamelessly rips off Hamlet, including an Ophelia-like character who goes mad but who, in an amazing and ridiculous twist, reveals Hoffman’s schemes to the other characters by leading them to the cave where Hoffman keeps his collection of corpses.  Then her sanity returns!  Wonderfully silly stuff.

Next up is John Marston’s revenge comedy The Malcontent, available everywhere, and as I remember it a great play.  I hope I do not take so long to write it up.