Vintage Wave-function Collapse: "What Mad Universe" by Fredric Brown

And then you say "putting ideas under the noses of the people who most hate them. That's what science fiction exists for." You sure about that? I suspect most readers who expressed a preference would say that they are generally rather keen on ideas. In fact, the literary-fiction crowd often use 'the idea is the protagonist' as a stick with which to beat SF. The problem is that the notion of travel comes from movement through space. When we're standing still, and on no conveyance, we are not traveling relative to the world around us (of course, the planet is traveling through space). But in the case of time, when we stand still, we are indeed moving forward at the pace of life in time. So, in that context, time travel must mean more than that standing still movement - it must mean traveling faster than that to the future, or at any speed at all to the past, which does not happen at all in natural life time. One view of time is that is does not actually "pass", as we experience it, and that there is nothing uniquely real about the present. There is a 21st century and there is a 16th Century, there are elephants and there are trilobites. The past or future are not less real because we do not coexist with them, any more than distant universes, separated from us by the speed of light, are less real because we cannot perceive them. As Einstein put it: "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion".

The events, say, in a person's life, can be viewed, not as a cradle to grave chronology, but as continuous whole that can be narrated in any order. Forwards, backwards, or hopping around like a knight on a chessboard. This view of time is explored in Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five", and a 'backwards' version in Dick's "Counter-Clock World". This kind of time-travel is, I'd argue, consistent with physics; time cannot 'move' because it doesn't occupy a physical location from which it can move.

The idea of time travel was first set out by H. G. Wells (Fredric Brown makes a clever use of him in this book) but since then, like the internal combustion engine, very little of the idea has changed. We still generally think in terms of a machine or cabinet that propels the passenger backwards or forwards in time. Think for one moment however of the written word used by Mr. Wells and Mr. Brown to convey this idea. Well’s book was written in 1895 following thoughts happening inside his head. Without the written word, those thoughts would have remained trapped in 1895 unless some form of aural tradition of storytelling had taken it forward. Hence thoughts inside Mr. Wells' head have travelled from 1895 to 2017 and beyond as did the character Keith Winton (aka Karl Winston, his doppelgänger).

But Brown is not interested in time travel. As someone who is here and not there (possibly), I have noticed that there are two, possibly more universes, or realities in Portugal today. I cannot comment about other countries because, as I said, I am here, not there, yet it seems that, for many years now, the clear majority of people have been viewing the world through a screen. They awake and turn on the screen, then travel to work looking at the world through a screen, spend eight hours or so staring at another screen, sometime obeying the instructions that are displayed again and again and again, like Pavlov's dogs they salivate at each ping. Then they return home, looking at the world through a screen and doze off with a plastic tray on their knees staring wide eyed at another screen again. In this reality, there are a host of people who do not exist. Some of them are reported to have died years ago. I always understood that Adolf Hitler died in 1945, but there he is, still driving round Europe with his arm stretched out, shouting at people. And what is Henry VIII doing there? Apart from the dead people, there are many who believe that we should celebrate the fact that they do not exist. What is worse, they have award ceremonies to congratulate each other on their nonexistence. Recently I observed a new and disturbing phenomenon. These machine people from planet Screen now walk along the pavement with their eyes focused intently upon a tiny screen in their hands while jabbering away to an invisible man. I admit that my brain didn’t start to fall apart while reading “What Mad Universe”, but the massive torrent of ideas that Brown puts forward, and the startling consequences of those ideas are so interesting that I was reading it as the washing up piled up in the sink, and the house plants were dying around me. Too bad Brown was not more of a stylist. The prose is as wooden as a dead tree. But alas, the ideas are all there. Too bad Brown didn’t travel forward in time to 1957 to take full advantage of the fact that the many-worlds interpretation was not being really about the universe splitting per se, i.e., to avoid the problem of wave-function collapse that is invoked in measurement. The principle of superposition means that we can create states that are, for example, half spin up and half spin down. When we make a measurement of the spin, the wave-function collapses into only one of these states. However, these measurement processes are qualitatively different from unobserved processes, which allow the wave-function to evolve smoothly with time. This has led to a lot of discussions about the role of observers in quantum mechanics (Schrödinger's cat, etc.) The basic idea of many worlds is that there is nothing special about measurement. The wave-function only appears to collapse to the (necessarily quantum) observer, but all possible universes coexist in the same way that the states spin up and down can coexist for the electron.

There's more than one way to skin Schrodinger's cat. Dexter Palmer, 67 years later, wrote what Brown couldn’t.

The Wars of Academia: "Shakespeare’s Modern Collaborators” by Lukas Erne

“An example of Taylor’s creative approach to emendation in his edition of ‘PericIes’ in the Oxford Complete Works, which contains a number of passages rewritten by the editor with the help of the novella ‘The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre”, by Shakespeare’s collaborator George Wilkins.”

In “Shakespeare’s Modern Collaborators” by Lukas Erne

Right! Gary Taylor is one hell of a creative editor of Shakespeare. As the Oxford Shakespeare editor, he is an iconoclastic who just loves to chip away at the national bard. The problem is that disintegration of the authorship of the Shakespearean texts is nothing new, and older theories have been explored or superseded by newer theories.

For instance, Shakespeare's contribution to “Henry VI Part 1” was once seen by almost all editors to have no more than apprentice work, retouching the work of older playwrights such as Nashe, Greene, and Peele. Tillyard in 1942 may have been the first modern editor to attribute the play entirely to Shakespeare, but John Dover Wilson in 1952 was equally adamant in assigning the work mostly to Nashe. Modern editors, not incidentally having discovered that the work is actually a lot better than traditionally thought, have tended to reassign the play to Shakespeare. Naturally, Taylor is an exception.

The first two acts of Pericles were long assigned to the known plagiarist George Wilkins, for reasons that have always baffled me. Difference of quality and style can easily be accounted for by accepting the inference from Ben Jonson that an early version of the play existed around 1589; the later acts would then have been revised by Shakespeare according to what a growing minority of scholars (resisted, of course, by the Oxford Orthodoxy of Taylor and Wells) increasingly accept as his common practice. Wilkins was around 13 years of age in 1589. (If this seems weak by itself, take it from me there are many other sound grounds for rejecting Wilkins' hand in Pericles.)

The point is that there is no compelling reason to rewrite the history of Shakespeare publishing just to satisfy the latest theories of scholars with an ax to grind, namely Taylor’s.

However, as for advertising and selling plays under joint authorship and thus dragging the public into the wars of academia, everything goes. I remember a production of Macbeth being advertised as being the work of Shakespeare and Middleton. There was a RNT's current production of “Timon of Athens” being also advertised as "by William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton." The Oxford Shakespeare stand-alone edition edited by Nicholas Brooke still allows Shakespeare, on its title page at least, sole authorship of Macbeth, but The Oxford Shakespeare complete works edited by Taylor and Wells assigns whole chunks of it to Middleton.

For decades Shakespearean scholarship was subverted by the wholly uncorroborated theory of memorial reconstruction, which for all I know is still being taught as fact in schools. Thankfully, that unhistorical and Occam's-razor-defying theory, or rather, pyramid of theories, has been increasingly debunked in recent years, which perhaps explains why the Shakespearean wars have moved back to questions of authorship. I say to theatre managers and some book authors, hold your horses: "stylometry" is not an exact science, and may well prove to be no science at all (my suspicion is that it's a word invented by a don with a computer program and no training whatsoever in statistical science who is using the term to add the scientific seal of approval to his own preconceived notions).

Taylor is the man, with Wells, who decided to publish the complete Oxford edition with the name Oldcastle instead of Falstaff in “Henry IV Part I”. And who gave “Henry VIII” the title “All is True”. And there are plenty - plenty - of other editorial controversies associated with that edition, which resonate 25 years after publication (such as printed two versions of Lear, including a poem which only they believe to be by Shakespeare, printing a curious version of Hamlet which relegates familiar text to an appendix etc., etc.). So, his inclusion of 'Shakespeare' plays in the Middleton volume is clearly partly for the splash, as well as to highlight the collaboration, but mainly to try to justify the claims for Middleton's greatness.

Macbeth has been known for a long time, hasn't it? The only text we have includes two songs by (or from) Middleton, and the play is particularly short, suggesting that Middleton revised it for performance and that text is the one we have. So not so much collaboration, as posthumous revision.

I think the theories of the new “disintegratonists” like Taylor are quite vulnerable. I do not object to the suggestion of collaborators working with Shakespeare in principle, but it maddens me to see this stated as fact and printed texts published with the names of co-authors (particularly that of a charlatan plagiarist and thief like Wilkins). Even more to see plays advertised with the two names as though it were a certain fact, rather than a bunch of academics quoting each other as authorities.

Gary Taylor having a creative approach. Indeed. “Creative” is not the right word for it.

This faux pas on Erne’s part aside, the monograph is quite interesting. The idea that there was an editor or even more than one is fair enough. Just because the first verifiable publication of a text is in the Folio doesn't mean there wasn't a definitive version - printed or playhouse copy - available to Condell/Heminges et al. Lear we know was an old play 'improved' by Shakespeare in the early 1600s and a few different printed versions (the History & the Tragedy) survive. Some plays we know were printed in quarto but would not have survived without the Folio.

On the 'which editor' part - just to pick one play: 'Twelfth Night' is an exercise in anti-realism - 'more matter for a May morning' says Fabian... so a play about the 12th day of Xmas festivities is set in May? Or, when Feste says to Toby - that the surgeon is drunk: 'an hour agone, his eyes were set at 10 i' the morning'... i.e. all the action of the 2nd half of the play has occurred before midday. Hmmm. Not very likely...None of this needs an editor to explain - Twelfth Night has a clear anti-Aristotelian unity bias. The internal contradiction is a part of what the play is about: theatre (playing) is 'what we believe is happening is true'. Therefore, Malvolio is the centre of the play - as a Puritan he should be immune to these lies or appearances, but he is as susceptible to the imagined world and his imagination as everyone else. What is being asserted is the right of the play to be free of reality. That the play isn't consistent to what an audience has witnessed is not evidence that it was an editor who messed it up. The playwright wrote it like that on purpose.

Erne’s take on “editing” Lear was the best part for me. At the end of the '80s I remember a Portuguese production that set out to follow the revisionists and use the Folio text, not a word more or less. In the course of rehearsal, they found, as I remember, only two Folio cuts that didn't seem to work for them: the loss of the music as Cordelia waits for Lear to wake in Act 4, and the mock trial in Act 3 scene 6, both of which they felt obliged to put back in. The result was a substantial, long but tight production that I went back to many times during its run. I'm not sure about the music - it's an anticipation of the 4 late Romances, of course, but I'm less convinced of their supreme and exemplary status in the canon than many Shakespeareans are. But the 'trial' seems to me a necessity - an opinion that I reached decades ago after seeing the cut and trial-less Folio text of 3.6 performed, back in pre-revision days when this version was thought merely badly under-dressed rather than valid. Admittedly this was in a dire production - open-air at Sintra I believe, with a British Council party that knew nothing of variant texts and expected to see exactly what they'd been studying; but it gave an idea of how the cut scene fits in its context. The structure of what we now call Act 3, which by any standard feels like a unit in its concentration on the heath, can be summed up roughly:

sc1 - Brief dialogue between 2 subsidiary characters.

sc2 - Enter Lear and Fool talking nonsense. Enter Kent. Lear and Fool talk nonsense to him. Kent speaks of shelter and leads them out again.

sc3 - Brief dialogue between 2 subsidiary characters.

sc4 - Kent leads in Lear and Fool talking nonsense. Enter Edgar, talking heightened nonsense, and Lear and Fool talk more nonsense to him. Enter Gloucester, speaks of better shelter, and leads them all out again.

sc5 - Brief dialogue between 2 subsidiary characters.

sc6 - Gloucester and Kent lead in Lear, Fool and Edgar talking nonsense. Exit Gloucester. Lear, Fool and Edgar talk more nonsense. Re-enter Gloucester, speaks of better shelter, and leads them all out again.

This is the impression unavoidably conveyed to audiences predominately unfamiliar with either version and, these days, wondering when the interval is going to be, and even someone who knows most of the text and its history by heart as I inevitably do by now can't help being exasperatedly aware of foot-shuffling to all sides. This play was and remains a revolutionary study of extreme states of existence and consciousness that most people are only too glad of knowing nothing about. Watching a gaggle of madmen stagger knock-kneed on and off again time after time, with barely a chink of enlightenment between entrances and exits as to what the hell is going on, isn't everyone's idea of a recommendable evening out. And the 3rd time is likely to feel like the last straw. Which is no moment to expect an audience to appreciate what some Shakespeare scholars arcanely call the elegance of the cut version of the scene: the undeniable brevity of its deliverance of, apparently, merely more of the same is no help to an audience desperate for clues that still aren't forthcoming - in fact it only makes this scene feel more bafflingly pointless than ever. Why come in again just for that?

But once let Lear decide to direct a play within the play - a recognizable and coherent (if whacky) scene of trial, following a familiar formula that introduces terms and exchanges whose structure can be recognized whoever performs them - and the most exhausted and bewildered Lear-novice has a focus of attention at last. 

I deduced a star for the faux pas. Unforgivable. 

Shakespeare and I: "Shakespeare's Fathers, Friars, Fiancées and Foundlings"

(A friend of mine sends me these beautiful pictures. I don't know their origin. If anyone claims ownership, drop me an email and I'll post her or his name here)

It is becoming ever clearer that the four of plays “Much Ado About Nothing”, “MSND”, “The Tempest” and “Romeo and Juliet” are somehow interconnected in many ways. They can all be said to comprise some combination of fathers, fiancées, friars or foundlings, if foundling is an appropriate word to describe both the changeling Indian baby in “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Caliban in “The Tempest”. It was the best I could do to keep the alliteration going!

We all know about Lord Capulet and Egeus. In “Much Ado About Nothing” we have been presented with another strict father, Leonato. His strictness is not highlighted by his insistence on a choice of husband for Hero, since she is an overly compliant and reticent daughter compared to Juliet and Hermia. She offers no resistance whatsoever. Rather his strictness is illustrated in his unwillingness to believe that Hero is innocent of the accusation against her honor. This clearly associates him with that band of cold, harsh, disciplinarian fathers. Once Leonato is led to believe that Hero’s honor is besmirched, he does not question the truth of this but says she is “foul-tainted flesh” and believes death is the best thing for her. Prospero, in The Tempest, is somewhat controlling, too, manipulating Miranda and arbitrarily demanding that Ferdinand should move logs just because he has the power to wield and make demands. Well, I do not want to get ahead of next week’s discussion. But you can see a pattern.

So when fathers make life difficult for their daughters we need a friar to come to the rescue. Like Friar Laurence in “Romeo and Juliet”, Friar Francis comes to the aid of the distressed Hero in “Much Ado About Nothing”. The appearance of friars in these plays makes one wonder how much Shakespeare was at risk of being censored since the Catholic monasteries had been dissolved in Henry VIII’s reign and Franciscan monks were not politically in favor. Both friars play a similar role summed up by Friar Laurence, when he says, “Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied/And vice sometime by action dignified.” They both try by irregular and unorthodox methods to make good come of evil. They see innocence where others do not. The relative success they each have is determined by the genre of the play they each appear in.

Fiancées? Well they abound in all the plays: Romeo and Juliet, Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius, Hero and Claudio, Beatrice and Benedick and Miranda and Ferdinand. Everything eventually ends well for all the couples except Romeo and Juliet. Hopefully those who will enjoy a wedding will have experienced some life lessons.

Finally, we come to the foundlings. In “Midsummer Night’s Dream” the Indian changeling boy represents a domestic power struggle between Oberon and Titania. Caliban in “The Tempest” is often thought to be representative of native people in a land colonized by others. So he could be considered symbolic of a power struggle between indigenous people and invading colonizing forces. In any case, the presence of both these characters leads to many questions and much discussion.

Here is another interesting connection that I’ve just “discovered” just by thinking about the 4 plays: Shakespeare gave his contemporary audience an inside joke when he has Dogberry say, "O that I had been writ down an ass." The actor Will Kempe, who played Dogberry in “Much Ado About Nothing” had actually already "been writ down an ass" since it was he who played the role of Bottom in “Midsummer Night's Dream”. He literally spoke lines written for an ass in that play…

These are a few of my thoughts regarding the interconnectedness of four of Shakespeare’s plays I read in 2015. Do you see other connections and parallels? Please join the conversation if you wish to do so..