Completely raving, of course, and
what on earth has it to do with wargaming? ‘Kiss Me Kate’? Has he gone mad?
Well, of course, the excesses of
Christmas and the New Year may well have driven me over the edge, but to quote
the Bard (my, how the girls will flock to the blog) ‘It may be madness, but
there is method in’t.’ Yes. Quite. It might take a bit of digging to find it
though.
Actually, the point I am trying
to make with this sudden excursus into Cole Porter is about interpretation,
again. In January 2017’s issue of History today magazine, there is a profile of
Natsume Soseki, Japan’s Charles Dickens. He came to London in the early 20th
century, sent by the modernising Japanese government to assess which bits of
modernity Japan should assimilate, and which bits it should not.
Soseki was a scholar and author,
and had studied English literature. However, he arrived in England full of
English studies of Shakespeare. In his opinion, only an Englishman could
interpret Shakespeare, so his interpretation of the Bard had to be dependent on
English interpretations.
As Soseki lived in England and
did English things (including trying to learn to ride a bicycle) he revised his
opinion of how to interpret Shakespeare. His interpretation, he concluded, was
as valid as anyone else’s. Meiji Japan’s assimilation of many things modern and
western could be considered to be highly unfortunate for both Japan and the
rest of the world, but that is hardly Soseki’s fault.
The point of all this is, of
course, to ask the question: how do we interpret Shakespeare? After all, he
lived 400 or so years ago and, as I tried to suggest last time, the past is
different to the present. What his plays meant to the original audience may not
be what they mean to us. Occasionally, of course, some bright spark of a theatre
director has a go at doing something different, making, for instance, Macbeth set
in 1920’s gangster led prohibition, or The Tempest on a Greek island receiving refugees
or something (I have made those up, by the way, although I think someone might
have tried the Macbeth thing). Immediately the critics are sharpening their
pens, crying ‘It is not authentic!’
Who really knows, or cares,
whether such an updated production is authentic? Or, in other words, why do
people get so upset when a Shakespeare play is “updated”. A classic, after all,
is a classic. Part of the definition of a classic is that it speaks afresh to
each generation, and that each, returning to it, can find something else in its
depths. If we can interpret A Winter’s Tale as a post-nuclear apocalypse dystopian
warning, then who, really, is there to object?
Nevertheless, people do object.
The authority to make these objections comes from an idea of what an authentic
production of a Shakespeare play should be. Similarly, I suppose, wargamers
have an idea of what an authentic wargame might look like. New interpretations,
new ideas, tend to be rejected initially. Max Planck once remarked that new
ideas in physics are only accepted when the current crop of professors either
retires or dies.
No-one, therefore, really has the
authority to interpret Shakespeare. His plays are a gift to the world, for the
world to make of them what it will. That does not mean, of course, that a scholarly
community cannot make some sort of general introduction or guide to his works. Nor
does it mean that any interpretation goes. New ideas, new concepts, new
interpretations have to be tested and accepted by a wider community. The claim
that ‘They laughed at Galileo’ does not mean that my new ‘theory’ of gravity
should be taken seriously. Galileo, after all, was steeped in the physics
community of his day. He knew what he was doing, and what he was rejecting. I
would need a thorough understanding of the present state of research in General
Relativity before I could claim a new theory of gravity of which the community
should take note. So it is with Shakespeare; new interpretations do not emerge
from a void.
In these communities, then, there
is some sort of authority, derived from the group think of relevant people. So
it is in wargaming, of course. Even for us solo wargamers out here on left
field of the community the authority of the rest of the wargaming world has an
impact. Only by recognising and understanding the thinking of the community,
and the reasons why the community thinks in that way can my ideas have any sort
of impact. The main vehicle of this impact is, of course, the wargame rule set.
Rules are accepted or not by the wider community. They can become, in some
sense, currency for discussing wargaming, as DB* did, for a while.
This is no bad thing, of course. We
need a language to discuss the hobby, and successful languages will tend to
come to the fore. Paradigms tend to change, of course, and what was acceptable
wargaming language in the (say) 1970’s may well not be (except in some quarters)
today. The evolution of wargaming can, probably, be traced through the popular
sets of wargame rules. But no-one makes anyone use this or that particular set.
There may be popular rule sets, but there is no authority, no verifiable claim
to authenticity that a particular set can make.
And so we return to Bill S and
interpretations. A Japanese interpretation of Shakespeare is quite likely to
look very different from a performance staged in Stratford-Upon-Avon. One
cannot claim more authenticity than the other. Similarly, a battle of Waterloo
wargame performed with one set of rules cannot claim greater authenticity then
the same battle under different rules (assuming that the rules pertain, of
course). In that sense there is no authority of interpreter or interpretation.
After all, someone pointed out here once that the accounts of Waterloo vary
over what time the battle started, to say nothing of the events.
The authority, such as it is, in
the world tends to arise, ultimately, from the nation state and the control of
violence. Where who controls violence is disputed, civil wars (which are among
the most uncivil sort of conflict, of course) tend to occur. But in areas
where the state is not interested, or which it has relinquished control over
(such as wargaming and theatre), there is no authority beyond the
interpretative community (or communities) involved. Exactly where that leaves
us, as wargamers, interpreting our texts, is a subject for another time.
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