September 23, 2022
The fact that Queen Elizabeth’s funeral is taking a month enables me to be at least somewhat topical and talk about monarchy’s relationship to the imagination. For
monarchy is not just a political but also a mythological construct, and that is the reason it persists in a democratic age despite the many voices, some of them angry, crying to abolish it. The British monarchy clearly would like to be an entirely symbolic institution, and thus above politics, but dissenters are presently denying such a possibility and holding it responsible for everything wrong with the UK, from income inequality to the British Empire. Does an American have any business holding forth on this issue? What do I know of monarchy, whose country came into existence by revolting against it? My only answer is that I have spent my life teaching British literature, and in doing so have been faced with the task of trying to equip students with the imaginative background necessary to understand authors whose work is inseparable from the theme of royalty, from the Beowulf poet to Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot, who became a British citizen and thereby the only self-declared royalist produced by the state of Missouri.
Anyone researching monarchy actually ends up researching “kingship,” which is interesting in itself, given that the history of England has seen the enormously long reigns of three queens, Elizabeth I (1558-1603), Victoria (1837-1901), and Elizabeth II (1952-2022), which happen to coincide roughly with the three of the greatest periods of modern British literature—Renaissance, Romantic-Victorian, and Modern. No one can say the coincidence is causal, but one wonders about the synchronistic association of creativity with feminine power. At any rate, in inquiring into the mythical underpinnings of monarchy, it seems logical to start with the more superficial aspects of the phenomenon and work down towards its depths, which in fact turn out to be deep indeed.
Most superficially, the royals are celebrities. Either the royal family members are the British equivalent of Hollywood stars, or Hollywood stars are the margarine-substitute of royalty-starved Americans. Take your pick: both views have their truth. The members of the current royal family have been the indispensable fodder for the British gossip machine since they have grown old enough to generate gossip. There was the Charles-Camilla business, the Diana business, the Prince Andrew business, the Meghan and Harry business, yadda yadda yadda. The British tabloids and their paparazzi are as toxic as Tucker Carlson at his worst, and American sleazemongers can only envy the good luck of the British tabloids, whereas they are reduced these days to desperate attempts to blow up Hunter Biden, Benghazi, and Hillary’s emails into something that might pass for a lurid scandal. How nostalgic they must be for the days of Bill Clinton and Monicagate! Yet the glitter of stardom is an imaginative glitter, a numinosity that renders celebrities larger than life. Oddly enough, the soap opera lives of celebrities are part of their imaginative appeal. The stars have the same dysfunctional problems that ordinary people do, but on a larger-than-life level that glamorizes them.
And part of the glitter is money: both Americans and the British idolize wealth and those who have acquired it. I can sympathize with ordinary English people who are furious to learn that the royal funeral is going to be paid for by their taxes. No doubt it would be fair, not to mention good public relations, for the royal family billionaires to chip in. Traditionally, rulers are supposed to be rich, because they supposed to be gift-givers, a mythological function about which whole books have been written, such as the wonderful book The Gift, by Lewis Hyde. The gifts are material, but also symbolic: they are blessings showered upon those who deserve them, and they form a very important bond of loyalty. The king who cannot bestow gifts upon his loyal followers is a poor king, and a miserly king who hoards—as a passage in Beowulf makes clear—is regarded with contempt. The monarchy has lost touch with this dynamic, as has the Papacy: there are many people who hate the Catholic Church because, in their view, it sits upon its hoarded wealth like a dragon, a situation the present Pope is trying to mitigate.
The timing of the message about who will pay for this month of ceremonies is, to put it mildly, unfortunate, since in the same week Britons have been told that it will be “heat or eat” for a lot of them this winter. But I have to say that it is unfair after a point to blame the royals for this situation. They did not create the dire economic situation that England presently finds itself in. Who did? A succession of Tory governments from Margaret Thatcher forward, ruthlessly pursuing their conservative let-them-eat-cake selfishness. It is not the royal family that has starved the NHS budget to the point of collapse and conned the people with all the lies of Brexit, which are now coming home to roost. But for a long time, English people have voted repeatedly against their own economic interests exactly like their American counterparts. It is heartbreaking.
In addition to wealth, the numinous aura surrounding kingship is that of power. The crown, with its gold and jewels, symbolizes both. Yet once again there has been an ideological kidnapping of a mythological truth. Royal power, which is sacred, has been perverted into secular or profane power, power as domination, coercion, and violence. Whereas true royal power is a kind of energy—the glitter of gold and jewels makes them seem charged with energy so that they seem almost alive—an energy that in traditional mythology binds the king, his land, and his people together into a single identity. This is the function that, in The Great Code, Northrop Frye refers to as the “royal metaphor,” residually present in such a convention as the “royal we,” as when Queen Victoria said “We are not amused” about an off-color joke. Unfortunately, the ideological parody of this unified identity is the British Empire. My sense of Elizabeth is that she genuinely believed in the traditional function of the monarchy as a psychological unification of a people into a single identity, a sense of which emerges most strongly in a time of crisis, when everyone has to unite because survival is at stake, as during wartime. The photos of her before she was queen, working for the war effort, are significant.
But tragically she was saddled with the dying British Empire with its sordid history of colonial domination and exploitation, a domination that did not stop short of genocide, or at least the tolerance of genocide, on some occasions. The modern monarchy is supposed to be entirely symbolic in function: a whole series of conflicts and upheavals were required to render it politically powerless where it had once been, or at least aspired to be, absolute. Yet, despite her lack of power, the Queen is being held responsible anyway for all the imperial abuses by those who suffered them, or whose ancestors did. The angry backlash is fierce. The equal-but-opposite backlash by latter-day imperialists like the insufferable Piers Morgan simply makes things worse. Elizabeth kept the old ideal dream of monarchy alive by the sheer fact of her remarkable personality. She struck many people as genuinely noble in all senses of the term, and, if it was an act, she was a method actor and totally into her role. Whether the monarchical dream can be kept alive for long after her death is a question—and yet the function of unification is necessary, not optional, and certainly not obsolete. If the monarchy is no longer its vehicle, another will have to be found, or it will be “the war of all against all,” to quote that absolute monarchist Thomas Hobbes.
To decide whether there is a genuine myth of royalty or merely an ideological mystification passed off as an archetypal truth, we may examine and try to establish a rough typology of the varieties of kingship in history. I am no historian, and my “facts” here are literary and mythological rather than empirical, but the patterns in literature often act as a key to the patterns of history. Sometimes, indeed, they are the only “history” we have. There is a kind of descending scale of kingship, at the apex of which the king is actually an incarnate god. Often, as with the Roman emperors, this is a mere ideological fiction useful for the purposes of state control, but in some pre-modern cultures it was a true myth, the pre-eminent example being ancient Egypt. In such cultures, when the king dies, the successor is a new incarnation of the same god. Such god-kings are, theologically at least, utterly transcendent: they are less lawgivers than embodiments of the law, and the kind of law they embody is a sacred order of the universe, as with Egyptian ma’at and Indian dharma.
The God of Jewish Scripture is also a divine king and a lawgiver, transcendent and invisible, but is fascinatingly different in his direct and highly personal relationship with his people, embodied in the Covenant. Eventually, of course, the Israelites clamored for a human king because they suffered from empire envy, and wanted a king to unite twelve contentiously independent tribes into an empire to rival those huge empires that surrounded and oppressed them. After trying to convince them to be careful what they wished for, God granted them kings, of which the first three—Saul, David, and Solomon—were flawed but extraordinary and the rest, with a few exceptions, a rogue’s gallery of weak and/or corrupt losers, the ultimate loss being of the nation of Israel itself. From the Israelite institution of kingship came the phrase “God’s anointed” designating the unique status of the monarch not merely as God’s executive director but as the embodiment of the entire divine order. Its application to later European monarchs in a form which came to be called the divine right of kings was an ideological power play. That is to say, it was a lie. God never anointed the European monarchs, only the original kings of Israel. There is nothing in the Bible that says that all kings whatsoever are divinely appointed by God, so that disobedience to the king was tantamount to a revolt against God. But it is of course very convenient when almost none of your subjects can read and are dependent upon educated clergy who are themselves part of the power structure.
Late in the game, conservatives who were shaken by the revolutions and religious wars that dominated the whole 17th century tried in the interests of social order to maintain the fiction of divine right, despite the fact—actually, because of the fact—that it was becoming obsolete. Hobbes argued that absolute monarchy was absolutely necessary, to prevent that fabled war of all against all; Alexander Pope notoriously declared that “Whatever is, is right” because whatever is, is established by God, so don’t ask, don’t tell. But by that time, it was clear that the emperor, or king, had no clothes. A famous book by the philosophical art historian Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (1948), dramatized the distinction between the divine kingship of Egypt, and the consequent social stability of Egyptian culture over thousands of years, with what he saw as the very different pattern of Mesopotamian kingship, in which the king was human, sometimes all too human, giving rise to the kind of potentially unstable, even revolutionary social pattern which became much more the norm. If the king is only human, even if God’s favorite, he is neither infallible nor invincible—he may be deposed. In the face of the insecurity arising from this vulnerability, such regimes are shored up with conservative ideological fictions intended to preserve the existing social hierarchy, such as the Great Chain of Being, which argued that God had established the natural order as a top-down hierarchy: God, the angels, humanity, animals, vegetables, minerals. But it went on to declare that the top-down existing social hierarchy was in fact part of that natural order. If you clicked, so to speak, on the human level of the Chain of Being it would expand into the descending hierarchy of (1) king, (2) aristocracy and clergy, (3) middle class, (4) lower class. Finally, the family was a hierarchy of husband, wife, and child. The whole system of interlocking top-down hierarchies of authority was established by God and thus could not be questioned, let alone resisted. If you defied the authority of those above you, you were not merely revolting against the social order but against God himself and the whole order of nature (“God and nature bid the same,” as one of the good angels puts it in Paradise Lost).
The weak link in the chain of human authority was that the king inconveniently died, so an elaborate ideological fiction developed about genealogy and “blood,” whose practical purpose was to ensure orderly succession according to the rule called primogeniture, in which the kingship passed to the oldest son, then to the oldest son of the oldest son. Shakespeare's history plays turn on the question of primogeniture. Eight of them form a double tetralogy running from Richard II, who died in 1399, to Henry VII a little before Shakespeare’s own time, and the question is whether primogeniture is truly the will of God or mere propaganda serving the purpose of keeping the elite in power. Richard II was an impossible king and was finally deposed and killed, resulting in seven plays’ worth of civil war and social chaos. Apologists for the monarchy interpreted the strife and violence as God’s punishment for the killing of the rightful king. But Shakespeare is notoriously hard to pin down ideologically—"“Others abide our question. Thou art free,” said Matthew Arnold in a sonnet about him—and scholars have argued for generations about his attitude towards the upheavals he portrays. Does the double tetralogy endorse the myth of “God’s anointed” or subvert it? The answer depends to a certain extent on whether the critic or critical school interpreting the texts is conservative or radical.
The subversive view starts from the demonstrable fact that Shakespeare knows that ideology is one thing, human reality another. His Richard II is a true believer in the ideology of the anointed king—but only because he is a hopeless narcissist totally disconnected from reality, a kind of Donald Trump with brains, and the idea that he is godlike and cannot be criticized or opposed feeds his narcissism: “Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king” (3.2.54-55), he thunders. He is so out of it that in that same scene he takes literally the mythological idea that the king is one with his land and commands the spiders and snakes to attack his enemies. When he realizes that his followers are looking at him strangely, he says, oh, just joking. But he wasn’t. Meanwhile, his antagonist Bolingbroke plays practical power politics and deposes him, becoming Henry IV. But all does not go well for Henry in the two-part play whose title bears his title, for if there is more to kingship than ideology and delusions about killer attack-spiders, there is also more to it than mere power politics. Before there were nations, kings ruled small populations on the basis of a bond of personal loyalty and were often as not called “lord” instead of “king.” The loyalty was based on personality and charisma, not on some abstract rule of office. In the 20th century, the sociologist Max Weber first called attention to the role of charisma in politics and other forms of leadership, but Shakespeare knew all about its crucial importance long before. Henry IV is a competent administrator but a cold fish who finds personal expression distasteful and who cannot inspire the kind of loyalty born of warm personal feeling that is in fact necessary for successful leadership. His son, Prince Hal, is a ne’er-do-well, or pretends to be, but he has the charisma his father lacks, which enables him, when he becomes Henry V, to inspire his men to win the Battle of Agincourt against all odds. Nor was Shakespeare the first to understand the role of charisma in politics: it is what made David the greatest king of Israel despite character faults that the author of the Books of Samuel and Kings is surprisingly candid about.
Charismatic leadership is as inevitable as it is dangerous. It is inevitable as a fact of human psychology. The charisma does not have to be showy and theatrical, although that may draw the shallower types of follower. The quiet army lieutenant who inspires respect for his integrity, humanity, and good judgment may inspire his men to follow him into the face of death for reasons that have nothing to do with military duty. George Bernard Shaw’s play St. Joan shows that capacity in a 19-year-old illiterate woman, who can inspire her men, out of loyalty and love, to accomplish feats that their blustering military commanders cannot. Unfortunately, there are charismatic evil leaders as well. Such leaders always demand absolute personal loyalty, whatever they may command their followers to do, including violate the law and commit atrocities. Such leaders, who are always megalomaniacs, expect their followers to remain loyal even when their leader betrays them, as he invariably does, and are outraged when loyalty is withdrawn. Anyone who has not thought of Donald Trump by this point is slow on the draw.
Shakespeare’s King Lear begins as a kind of super-sized Trump, and for a large part of King Lear we are frankly appalled by what seems the perversely irrational loyalty of the play’s best characters, Cordelia and Kent, to this fool—to use one of the play’s key thematic words—with his casual cruelty and irrational temper tantrums. When he calls himself “a man more sinned against than sinning (3.3.60), we snort with derision, although that description will eventually become prophetic. We are absolutely dumbfounded when Kent, a blunt, fearless, honest man says to Lear, “you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master” (1.4.27-28). When Lear asks, “What’s that?”, Kent replies, "Authority” (1.4.30). But the fact of having authority proves nothing—as Lear himself rightly says, “a dog’s obeyed in office” (4.6.158-59). Lear banishes his daughter Cordelia because she is “disloyal”—which means that she contradicts him, and rewards his two evil daughters, Goneril and Regan, for their fawning pretense of loyalty—until they have what they want, whereupon they betray him. The entire play is about loyalty and betrayal, and the mark of the evil characters is that they betray everyone, including each other.
Charisma is a kind of psychic energy, and displays a cyclical pattern of rise and fall, both for individuals and entire societies. The pattern is exemplified in the most commonplace ways. We all know that celebrities rise, often in an exciting, meteoric way, have their fifteen minutes of fame, and then are judged to have fallen—and are turned against by their once loyal followers in a cruel and vindictive way, a way that suggests the followers regard the celebrity’s decline as a betrayal. Just let a musical star release a couple of albums deemed inferior, or be judged as merely repeating what they have done before rather than exceeding it; just let an actor appear in a couple of films that tank; just let a high-culture writer publish a book that suggests they are no longer cutting edge—we all know that the public and the critics will attack and judge with a self-righteousness that is as appalling as it is predictable. It is as if the artist had committed a personal offense. Even Christ could not escape the pattern. One week you are led into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey (or two donkeys—the media couldn’t get it straight then either) and proclaimed the Messiah, the next week you are reviled as less than the thief Barabbas. Your crime is that you are perceived as having lost the energy that formerly drew people to you almost hypnotically, an energy on which they are dependent as on a drug—which is why its withdrawal triggers a backlash. Charged with charisma, you are a winner; once the energy is expended, you are a loser, and the public despises losers. Some artists will go to almost any length, engage in any sort of publicity stunt, to avoid the impression that they are over the hill. Or they will attempt a comeback, a thrilling and triumphant late return from oblivion.
The sad and disturbing thing is that, while the public’s reaction is often irrational and cruel, its judgment often is not. A good number of artists really do crest and then topple like waves. They cruise at a high altitude for maybe ten years, and then their creative energy slowly subsides. Moreover, a certain artistic style or intellectual movement will follow the same pattern. A fresh and innovative style or perspective will burst on the scene, attract to it much of the best talent of its age, and then somehow wear out. The historian Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), one of the seminal books of modern times and a powerful influence on Northrop Frye despite the fact that, personally and ideologically, Spengler was a neo-Nazi idiot, postulated the same pattern for historical civilizations. They rise, fueled by an energy that Spengler identified with creative time, reach a zenith, and then decline. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) describes the same pattern psychologically. Civilizations are built by the redirecting of libido, psychic energy, from the service of the pleasure principle to the service of building a culture. When the energy fails, the entire culture suffers the “return of the repressed,” all the repressed desires whose gratification has been indefinitely delayed returning in the form of fantasies and acting-out behavior revolving around sex and violence. It is inevitable that this cycle of imaginative and intellectual creativity should be represented symbolically in terms of the cycles of nature—in Spengler with the seasons; in almost everyone with the idea of the decline of youth into old age, and the displacement of old age by a younger generation bursting with vitality.
It is at this point that the discussion dovetails with the subject of kingship, the point of intersection being a third great book of cultural mythmaking that appeared almost simultaneously with Spengler’s and Freud’s, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1913), another great influence on Northrop Frye, though also on countless Modernist writers of the early 20th century. Anthropologists dismiss Frazer with contempt, and in fact Frazer was almost as big an idiot as Spengler, though a much less toxic one, but Frazer was a visionary whose vision survives the quaint Victorian rationalism in which he tried to contain it. Frazer was fascinated by the recurrent mythical pattern of a king who is killed at the point beyond which his energy begins to fail and his vitality begins to decline. In less displaced versions, his followers rend his body (sparagmos) and eat it, assimilate his essence in a form of “communion” that binds together the group into one body—Frye’s “royal metaphor.” In more displaced versions, the king may recycled, so to speak, by undergoing a death-and-rebirth ritual, often involving a ritualized humiliation, exile, or imprisonment. The king was often regarded as divine, although in pre-modern societies the distinction between divine and human is at times ambiguous, so that myth criticism speaks of “dying god figures,” gods who are immortal cyclically by undergoing a sacrificial death and rebirth. The anthropologists say that the myth is not a fact but a construct: Frazer read the evidence from very diverse cultures in such a way that he got what he wanted.
A literary critic shrugs. The Golden Bough may not be science, but it is literary criticism of a rare order. Frazer did not invent the dying god: he was a Classicist in an era when anthropology did not yet exist, and he found the dying god in Classical and Classically-influenced texts such as the pastoral elegies of Virgil and Milton, in which a dead shepherd is mourned according to the ritual and symbols of the dying god. Whether the parallels he found in the myths of Australia or Africa are real or arbitrary does not affect the reality of what he did see, and saw accurately. He could also have found the same pattern in the myth of the Grail Quest, which features a Fisher King with a wound that will not heal, a wound that renders him infertile, and, because he is identified with his land, renders his land a sterile Waste Land, curable only by the Grail. In a section of The Golden Bough that some abridgements timidly omit, Frazer noted the obvious resemblance to Christ’s Passion, which in turn echoes the imagery of the Messianic king of kings and lord of lords as also somehow the humiliated and lonely Suffering Servant figure of the Book of Isaiah, “despised and rejected of men.” A group of scholars called the Cambridge ritualists noted the obvious resemblance of the dying god pattern to Greek tragedy, which indeed emerged somehow out of the festival of the dying god Dionysus.
Has the modern age outgrown monarchy? After all, democracy was born precisely by the revolutionary overthrow of monarchies, in the French and American revolutions. There are only a few surviving monarchies in the West, and all of them are symbolic rather than political. Are they merely a form of useless and perhaps delusional nostalgia? The answer seems complex. As I said earlier, symbolic monarchs dramatize the “royal metaphor,” the intuition that on the deepest level, we are members of one body. Monarchy is not necessarily the only way to dramatize that intuition of unity—a unity that in its most cosmic form includes humanity, God, and nature—but the intuition itself cannot be abolished even by the most cynical advocates of realpolitik. Experience of that unity is an experience of loyalty, of allegiance to something beyond the ordinary and ephemeral self. That allegiance can be projected on a human leader, and I think leadership will always have a personal factor. Gene Roddenberry’s Federation in Star Trek was an attempt to imagine what real civilization would be like should we survive long enough to achieve it. But what makes even the most rational federation of human beings work is exactly what makes the Enterprise work: the vital and humane personalities of Captains James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard.
As for the ironic cycle, the rise and fall of kings and everybody else, what Spengler’s and Freud’s tragic versions of the myth leave out is the rebirth. Some artists do not burn out but go on, occasionally into a late phase that is the culmination of their career, a summing up on a deeper level than the work of their youth. I would say that this was true of both Frye and Jung. Some artists, from Picasso to Bob Dylan, have a phoenix rhythm: they repeatedly die to their older style and are reborn into a new one. We begin to realize that the cycle of celebrity is not necessarily identical with the cycle of creativity. The same is true of artistic styles: folk and the blues have constantly re-invented themselves, and are not done yet. And as Frye pointed out in critiquing Spengler, Spengler was not just blind but resistant to the fact that cultures may also recreate themselves. Medieval culture was born out of dying Classical culture, and the role of Arthur as king was to try to preserve what was best in the old culture while fostering something new, something that, like Roddenberry’s Federation, went beyond the vain dreams of imperialism, and included the preservation and cultivation of learning. Arthur was largely mythical, but Alfred the Great, perhaps the greatest of all British monarchs, made a noble attempt to live out kingship as such an ideal. The Renaissance recreated Classical culture, and the Romantic movement recreated the Middle Ages: in both cases, the recreation was of what was real and best about the historical era, leaving the miseries and power struggles to the oblivion of history.
Despite the popularity of cultural pessimism, there is nothing inevitable about the decline and fall of our own culture, just as there is nothing inevitable about our personal decline and fall. Age is inevitable, with death at the end of it. Those who die disappear underground, as Arthur disappeared into Avalon. The ancestors descend into the landscape. But that does not mean that they are gone. There is a myth that Arthur may rise again in the hour of England’s greatest need. Call it a projection, but a projection points to a symbolic truth. There is something “down there”—whatever “down” means, wherever “there” is—that could rise and recreate the declined and fallen world in its darkest hour. No guarantees, but always hope.
Reference
The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Edited by David Bevington. 4th edition, 1992.