Sunday Whatever – An essay by Geraint Jonathan – Shakespeare the Tease (Or, The Rest is Scilens)

It’s somehow apt that among Shakespeare’s most idiosyncratic spellings is his rendering the word ‘silence’ as ‘scilens’. No other writer of the period is known to have spelt the word in this way. It appears in the printed plays and it appears in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, a collaborative work written in six different hands, one of which, referred to by paleographers as ‘Hand D, is thought to be Shakespeare’s. There’s good evidence to back it up: quite apart from the distinctive spellings, the handwriting seems consistent with that of his various signatures.

As the most famous, most talked about, and least known of writers, this ‘scilens’ of his could – at a stretch – be said to come with something of a cosmic wink, another ‘tease’ from the great Beyond; it  could also very well be said to come with no such thing. There have been other supposed little teases. It took an intrepid mind (though quite whose is uncertain) to find one of Shakespeare’s teases in the  King James Bible, specifically Psalm 46: if you count the first forty six words of the Psalm, you’ll come to the word “shake”; if you count back forty six words from the end, omitting the formal ‘Selah,’ you’ll see the word “spear”. The King James was published in 1611, but the translation had, the year before, according to some, been circulated among a handful of the nation’s finest writers, Shakespeare among them, needless to say. In 1610 Shakespeare was forty-six winters old. Hence his little tease. What could be made of this ‘scilens’ of his one wonders, or of course, one does not; but there’s sure to be someone, somewhere, who’ll have read into it a heralding of the great silences to come, silences Beckettian, Wittgensteinian, Rimbaldien, Garboesque . . . I jest, but only just.

On a more serious note, it strikes me as curiously apt, too, that in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More the three pages reckoned to be in Shakespeare’s hand should contain a scene that explicitly addresses the ‘issue’ of immigration, an issue as relevant then as it is now; (in fact the play itself, from around 1594, was deemed too ‘hot’ to stage – London having been shaken by xenophobic riots the year before.) The scene in question depicts a crowd already fired up by the rhetoric of a man who warns them of price rises to come such as will see “butter at eleven pence a pound, meal at nine shillings a bushel and beef at four nobles a stone . . .” Other hardships are conjured. And the culprits behind this dire state of affairs: “strangers”, these foreigners and refugees with their unEnglish eating habits, customs, accents. It is then that Thomas More addresses the unruly mob, calls mightily for tolerance, and makes “the strangers case”. It is, essentially, a plea for imaginative empathy. More asks the assembled to:

‘imagine that you see the wretched strangers

their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage

plodding to th’ ports and coasts of transportation . . .

Why you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper

That breaking in hideous violence

Would not afford you an abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you . . .

What would you think

To be thus used? This is the strangers case,

And this your mountainish inhumanity . . .’

Truly, words to walk with in these benighted times. Selah.

 Geraint Jonathan

Image: By Morecambe based graffiti artist E.D Reapa – Image of shakespeare with a colourful background that looks like fireworks. Image supplied by the author