Introduction

I

The ‘Letter about the soveraigne and supreme power’ has until now been seen as the most novel articulation of royalist political theory in Scotland. Robert Wodrow ascribed it to the Marquis of Montrose, an attribution followed by subsequent historians until David Stevenson demonstrated convincingly that it was more than likely the work of Archibald, 1st Lord Napier. Stevenson argued that the Letter was essentially a summary of Jean Bodin's The Six Books of the Commonwealth, and placed it within the context of French infuence on Scottish political thought. He argued that its absolutism and its failure to engage with the covenanters’ religious arguments for resistance made it unsuitable as a propaganda piece and that consequently it was rejected by the Plotters. However, a hitherto overlooked political treatise held in the Laing collection and catalogued under the title ‘Observations upon the divine right of kings’ bears a striking resemblance to the Letter in both subject matter and content.

It is dated from the seventeenth century and though the author is not named within the treatise itself, ‘Lord Napier’ has been handwritten next to the entry in the Laing hand list, and ‘? By Montrose or Napier’ on a slip of paper in the inside cover. The manuscript is a bound quarto volume, a little smaller than A6 in size, and there are 100 pages of text written in a fair hand. This may suggest it is a transcription or was intended for publication. The handwriting does not match that of a petition which is holograph of Montrose. The binding at times obscures the text in the guttering, and creases, variations in the density of the text and smudges render a few words illegible, and there are pagination errors.

At the time of the death of Edward, third earl of Derby, in October 1572, the position of the Stanleys in north-west England and the Irish Sea was one of considerable power and influence. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, the earls of Derby had increasingly dominated the government of Lancashire and Cheshire, even when the earl did not hold a commission as lord lieutenant, an office which made the holder the de facto head of county government. This authority was something which was carefully protected. Although the third earl's younger sons, Thomas and Edward, had been involved in a scheme to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots, from captivity and transport her to the Isle of Man in 1570, Earl Edward had taken steps to demonstrate his loyalty to Elizabeth I and protect his status by sending both of them to London at the queen's command. William Cecil, Elizabeth's chief minister and Lord Burghley from 1571, may have retained his suspicions about the loyalties and regional influence of the Stanleys, but the succession of Edward's eldest son, Henry, as fourth earl of Derby, may have gone a long way towards assuaging at least some of his fears.

Unlike his father, who, although he had skilfully adapted to the religious changes between the death of Henry VIII and the accession of Elizabeth, had remained a religious conservative, Henry had grown up in service at the Protestant court of Edward VI and continued as a promoter of the reformed religion in a county well known for its widespread and entrenched Catholicism.

When David Livingstone, famed Scottish missionary and devout abolitionist, travelled through northern Angola in 1854, he could not help but notice the many enslaved people in the country's inland towns, the way their Luso-African masters employed them, and how some were trafficked to the coast to fill the holds of Cuban slave ships. While this culture of slavery clearly worried him, something else impressed him positively. Livingstone found a land lush with wild coffee, which some colonial settlers had begun to cultivate. To him, this budding coffee economy seemed a model for the future development of a colony going through the final throes of the Atlantic slave trade. ‘Te fact of other avenues of wealth opening up so readily seems like a providential invitation to forsake the slave-trade and engage in lawful commerce’, he wrote in his travel memoir.

Commercial exploitation of natural forest coffees in Angola had started on a small scale in the 1820s near São José de Encoge, a Portuguese settlement more than 300km inland by caravan track from the colonial capital, Luanda. Contemporaries claimed the taste of this product was ‘as good as that of Mocha’, referring to the arabica cultivars introduced in the colonies of Brazil and São Tomé decades earlier. Banking on rising coffee prices, dozens of adventurous settlers had since bought captives to transform indigenous coffee forests into plantations, giving abolitionists hope that a new export economy based on agriculture could replace the unlawful slave trade.

Tropical Africa was, and still is, home to a wide variety of indigenous coffee species, but before the twentieth century, Africans generally did not cultivate much coffee and the continent exported very little. In fact, while populations in East Africa had long processed small amounts of forest coffees for domestic use, the only region in the continent that produced substantial amounts of wild and naturalized coffees for export before 1900 was Angola. During the colonial period, nonetheless, Africa emerged as a new frontier in the global coffee trade, as the continent's share in world production rose from a little over 1 per cent in 1900 to 15 per cent in 1950 and 23 per cent in 1965. Most growing regions in Africa, Angola included, produced robusta coffee, a species different from the arabica strains that had so far dominated global trade. Although not as desirable in taste, robusta had two advantages over arabica that determined its commercial success in the twentieth century. First, it was resistant to coffee leaf rust, a fungal disease that, since its initial outbreak in Ceylon in 1869, has severely restricted the worldwide expansion of arabica production. Furthermore, because of its poorer taste, robusta was relatively cheap, allowing manufacturers to keep blended and soluble coffee products affordable during the Great Depression (1929–39) and the post-war boom in commodity prices.

Angola was among the early beneficiaries of increased global demand for African coffees after 1900, exploiting its position as leading robusta producer in the continent.

Henry did not write again until 11 January, busy with his reading room report and other matters. Two hundred and fifty copies of the report were finally printed by 1 January and arranging the distribution to all the subscribers and members, and to different friends whom he knew would be interested, such as Bicheno, King and Wolff at Hamburg (who was thinking of doing something similar), took up a great deal of time. ‘On the whole I think it gives satisfaction; Evans, Highmore, Magrath (the committee men) have all come for more copies, the latter particularly is very busy puffing the Institution in Hampstead and in Town.’ He muses that all authors must, like him, be ‘very nervous and a little vain’, and imagine that everybody is thinking of their work. The only objection that reaches him is to the teaching of Latin, ‘which I stand up for stoutly, and believe to be the best thing in the place’. His main object was ‘to inform people clearly of what had been tried and succeeded, so that they might know what could be done in this way for the working classes if they have the zeal’.

Four months pass before his next entry on 27 April, at Sevenoaks Common where he has taken Eliza, who, though not exactly ill, is ‘in a weak state’, and needs a rest from the bustle of home and children. They are in the same lodging as eight years ago when Ellen was a baby, a very quiet and beautiful place. They stroll on the Common, read, and take an occasional drive in a donkey chaise visiting the pretty local villages.

My Country (Má vlast)

Shortly after the premiere of The Secret, an idea began to crystallize in Smetana's mind about completing his symphonic cycle. At that time, the cycle comprised only four symphonic poems: Vyšehrad, Vltava, Šárka, and From Bohemia's Meadows and Groves—the last of which he had composed three years earlier. According to a contemporary source, Smetana, having completed this symphonic “tetralogy,” shifted his focus primarily to opera, resisting popular demand for more works of the “tetralogy type” that had been so well received. Still, his tireless diligence and prolific nature eventually yielded, at least in part, to the public's desire for more of this music. The idea of extending the cycle had lingered with him for some time. On January 9, 1879, he wrote to Hostinský:

Although the chronological order of each part of this symphonic cycle is known, the genesis of this unique work remains obscure. Dalibor published an account of its origin, but it was based on conjecture, leaving the true nature of the creative process veiled. However, drawing from Zelený's allusions, insights from other friends of the composer, and Smetana's own correspondence, we can partially reconstruct its development. The first mention of Smetana's desire to compose Vyšehrad and Vltava appears in November 1872, following the completion of Libuše.

Virgil associates Troy with loss, exile, and mourning: with Aeneas's loss of his wife Creusa and his father Anchises, and with the communal lacrimae rerum. Yet Troy survives collapse in numerous ways. Its survivors go into exile and form new communities, like Deiphobus's civic simulacrum at Buthrotum. The tears of things also power Aeneas's honorable peitas, driving his war against Turnus and marriage to Lavinia, fulfilling the civic obligation to rebuild and found an empire. Depictions of Troy survive both textually and culturally, from the painted temple at Carthage (as depicted in the Aeneid) to the New Troys of London and other western cities. Exile in these instances becomes foundational.

Criseyde's exile from Troy, by contrast, is associated with irremediable wrongdoing and betrayal. She can neither return nor lay a foundation for some new Troy. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is not interested in Troy's potential for renewal but in her peculiarly intimate and feminine actions: her gradual loss of faith and abandonment of Troilus, and of Trojan community, in their darkest hour. Her “sliding” heart is evidence of a failure to fulfill her promise to Troilus and her broader obligation to Trojan community, so that she is inevitably marginal to any coherent narrative of Troy's triumphant rebirth. Indeed, her abandonment of Troilus has often been taken quasi-allegorically as the beginning of the end for the city itself.

The medieval Christian author-scribes, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of Old Norse mythology, framed their narrative materials using explanatory and interpretive models prevalent in their time. Euhemerism is a particularly powerful model that prompts us to question where the lines are drawn to distinguish divinity from humanity and what those lines consist of. It seems clear that the dualism that sharply distinguishes between the divine and the human and envisions a vast impassable gulf between the two – a dualism that is prominent in the Judeo-Christian religious worldview and saturates the Western mentality today – was less discernible in the pre-Christian period in Scandinavia. During that time, the divine was conceived as both an immanent quality and a transcendent one, capable of revealing itself in many forms. When one encounters this strict bipartition between godkind and humankind in the mythology that has been preserved in our main sources, chances are that one is faced with highly selective and mediated material that has undergone a complex process of modification and adaptation, refined to the extent that it represents a literary mythology rather than a lived religious system. This mythology unfolds in a separate story world with no real place for human beings. When comparing Norse mythology to other mythologies, it is striking that the mythological sections of the two Eddas show little or no interest in and no concern for the human world and human affairs. Instead, the gods are mainly preoccupied with interactions among themselves and with the jǫtnar and other beings in the mythological universe. Part of the challenge for anyone wishing to study these materials is to ground them, bringing them back to earth and tethering them more securely to human concerns. The dearth of explicit theological reflection in the materials from the pre-Christian era means that one is forced to tackle this question of divine immanence through earlier non-mythological sources, as has been done in the preceding chapter, or perhaps through later sources that are unsympathetic to the idea and find it incompatible with their notions of divinity.

Theater Life in Prague

It was the dream of Czech patriots to establish an independent Czech theater, as they believed its absence hindered the development of Czech drama and opera. Although Czech performances were permitted twice a week in the Estates Theater, these productions were often suspended during periods of political unrest. In the period before the 1848 revolution, the Bohemian Diet owned two building sites in Prague, and in 1845, Prague citizens petitioned to have one of these sites dedicated to the construction of a Czech theater. This request was granted to an organization formed on May 3, 1845, which was tasked with coordinating all necessary arrangements for the theater.

This pivotal date in Prague's theater history also marked the rise of František Ladislav Rieger, a key political figure who would later influence Smetana's career. Born into a wealthy miller's family, Rieger combined his legal studies at the Prague university with a keen interest in economics and politics. At the time, the Society of Industry in Bohemia was the only Czech organization in Prague allowed to engage in political activity. Initially limited to nobility, the Society began admitting ordinary citizens in 1843, and Rieger quickly became its leading figure for the next twenty-five years. Rieger, with his youthful energy, stirred public interest in the idea of an independent Czech National Theater as early as 1844. His influence extended beyond organizational efforts into the artistic realm. By 1848, he had become a central figure in Czech political life, advocating for a new constitutional charter and championing the revolutionary principle that legislative power should originate from the people.

Wagner had finished the poem of the Ring by the end of 1852. He first read Schopenhauer almost two years later, in October, 1854, when he was working on the composition of Die Walküre, and The World as Will and Representation was, he told Liszt, “like a gift from heaven.” He wrote to Röckel that Schopenhauer's philosophy “completely demolishes the nonsense and charlatanism of the Fichte-Schelling-Hegel view,” and that it repudiated what he now thought of as the “heartless unreasoning optimism” of Judaism. The philosopher had somehow known what he himself had intuited but not recognized, that the Ring was a demonstration of the nothingness of all existence, and Schopenhauer's ideas had led him to “the only adequate key-stone to my poem in keeping with the whole idea of the drama, which consists in a simple and sincere recognition of the true relations of things and complete abstinence from the attempt to preach any particular doctrine.” Yet he left the text of the dramas and their all-important stage directions unchanged. With respect to the Ring Schopenhauer offered little, it seems, but an after-the-fact interpretation, making Wagner the first of the many commentators on his work.

The suddenness of this conversion calls for an explanation. Wagner’s own thinking had looked back to the philosophy of the first quarter of the century, and he may well have felt an affinity for Schopenhauer because Schopenhauer was, in reality, firmly in the tradition of early German idealism. The philosopher's persistent polemics against “the Fichte-Schelling- Hegel view,” as Günter Zöller says, “appear more as deliberate attempts to distance himself from competing approaches and to more starkly highlight his own philosophical contributions than might have been warranted by the fact of the matter.”

To the extent that it is about anything at all, Heiner Goebbels's theater installation Stifters Dinge (Stifter's Things) is as much about the atmosphere in the theater as it is about the things on the stage. In a press release upon its 2007 premier, the Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne, Switzerland, described it as a “composition for five pianos with no pianists, a play with no actors, performance without actors—one might say a no-man show.” Music from mechanically played pianos is interspersed with sounds from archival recordings, while lights illuminate a pool of dry ice, from which smoky tendrils curl into the air. The Théâtre Vidy says of Stifters Dinge that the things (they list “light, pictures, murmurs, sounds, voices, wind and mist, water and ice”) do not function in a merely illustrative role, but rather become the protagonists. The installation is, in that sense, uncanny, but its uncanniness is an atmospheric effect because it arises out of the interplay between the solid objects, components of the atmosphere as a geophysical system, and both pictures and sounds. Goebbels himself says that his aim was to afford the audience “die Entdeckung des freien Raums” (the discovery of free space). “Free space” is not empty space because the theater is not a vacuum. Rather, what the “discovery of free space” means in practice is that the atmosphere in the theater is both a part of and a result of the composition.

7 February. Sunday morning. My Journal has been discontinued for more than two months, my mind having been for a great part of the time too much filled with dismal views of our business to like to set down my thoughts. At times it oppressed me so much that I could only sit brooding, or at best occupy myself with a novel … I have generally found sufficient interest in my Reading Room occupations and other active employments, but even then, I was afraid to collect my thoughts and sit down to write. Just at present things look a little brighter, as a little of Hinck's money has come, there is some prospect of more, and the Lisbon business seems inclined to revive from its six month's almost total stagnation. The state of things is still dismal enough, but there is no good dwelling on it. We have no reason to despair of being able to earn a moderate livelihood, and more we need not ask for. At Hampstead we continue to endeavour to make every possible retrenchment without actually altering our mode of living; whether we shall reduce the number of our servants from three to two, is a point not yet decided upon; we could then hardly keep up what are called decent appearances in our present house. At Broad St. Buildings we have made still greater changes having parted with all our full paid clerks except Fitton; Henry Eddis leaves us on Lady Day.