One of my favourite bites on YouTube shows a 78 rpm gramophone going round and
round as Vita Sackville-West – with the clipped vowels of her class and age
– reads extracts from The Land. Replete with trudging fieldsmen and sunlit
grasses green as jade, her long pastoral poem transposes classical Arcadia
to the clay soil of the Home Counties. Shortly after Vita’s poem won
England’s most prestigious literary award, the Hawthornden Prize, Virginia
Woolf had an idea for a new book: “And instantly the usual exciting devices
enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the
present day, called Orlando: Vita – only with a change about from one sex to
the other”. Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson described Orlando as “the longest and
most charming love-letter in literature”.
But a love-letter to whom? I would say: not just to Vita, but to a house
(Knole) and the landscape around it, to an English aristocratic temperament
and value-system, and to Shakespeare. One of the many tricks of Woolf’s most
light-footed novel is that Shakespeare not only puts in a brief cameo
appearance in his own person (the Sackville-Wests have long believed that he
once visited Knole), but also serves as a puckish spirit suffusing the whole
book. Orlando is in one sense Vita: his poem “The Oak Tree” is her The Land.
He is in another sense Shakespeare: born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, he
outlives his age, bends his gender (suggesting the transformation of his
female parts from boys to women with the advent of the actress in the late
seventeenth century), and presides over the shifting sensibilities of
English culture (from neoclassicism to Romanticism to Modernism).
Virginia’s primary source for Orlando’s disquisitions on his estate and his
cultural patronage was Vita’s historical study of Knole and the Sackvilles.
Adam Nicolson’s new book is at first glance his equivalent of his
grandmother’s work. “Wilton and the Pembrokes” would have been a better
title for it than Earls of Paradise: England and the dream of perfection.
This is a book about a single great family and a single great house in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is a microhistory of Wilton in its
prime, altogether neglectful of the wider Herbert/Pembroke clan and of their
influence far to the north and west of Wiltshire. But the over-egging of the
title page is revealing. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, written at Wilton,
plays the same part here that The Land plays in Orlando. Contrary to the
expectation supplied by his name, Adam’s lost paradise is not Eden but
rather that world of classical pastoral which his grandmamma sought to
English in her poem. And the book is ultimately more Orlando than Knole and
the Sackvilles.
The opening chapters are beautifully done, though Vita’s purple has rubbed off
on the prose. First a survey of the Arcadian ideal in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century England, then a topographic sketch of “the Wiltshire
downs as a theatre for pastoral”, then an idealization of the communal bonds
of the Middle Ages (think noblesse oblige and the benign paternalist vision
that remained alive in such poems as Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst”). After
this, an excellent chapter on the realities of the early modern rural
economy – good attention here to the effect on social structure of copyhold
land tenure. A recognition, too, that the creation of the great park at
Wilton had its costs: though Nicolson does not quote directly, he
half-remembers Raymond Williams getting hot under the collar in The Country
and the City because the lovely park in which the Arcadia was written had
been made “by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants”.
Earls of Paradise is a book for the general reader, not the scholar, so we
should not complain that it fails to make the key distinction between the
easeful Arcadianism that was mediated to the early modern period through
Virgil’s Eclogues and the poetry of agricultural labour that came via the
Georgics. Such is the engaging combination of Nicolson’s pastoral prose and
his eye for quirky archival detail that you find yourself admiring his
ability to find “the values of the counter-culture” in the aristocratic
Arcadian idyll of the sixteenth century: a commitment to the local and to
folk customs, an espousal of communal as opposed to commercial relations, a
love of nature that is spiritual rather than exploitative, a disdain for
central government. But then you stop and reflect: would the eighteenth Earl
of Pembroke and Montgomery and the Trustees of Wilton House, who are duly
thanked for permission to reproduce the magnificent family portrait of
Philip the fourth Earl, be hospitable to the arrival of a band of
eco-warriors intent on setting up an encampment of bendy tents in the park?
I somehow think the travellers would be more likely to suffer the fate of
the rebels in Sidney’s Arcadia.
The big problem with the book comes when it tries to do the Orlando thing:
when it brings in Shakespeare. Inevitably, Nicolson believes that William
Herbert was the addressee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and that he was the
mysterious “Master W. H.” to whom the 1609 collection of them was dedicated.
This is indeed the prevalent view in current scholarship, but there is still
no firm evidence for it and Nicolson adduces nothing new.
And then there is the purported As You Like It connection, the key to the
book’s pastoral idiom. In August 1865, the minor poet William Cory (author,
Nicolson characteristically reminds us, of the Eton Boating Song) had a
summer job at Wilton, tutoring some scion of the Pembroke stock. He was told
by the boy’s mother, Lady Elizabeth Herbert, that the family had a letter,
“never printed”, from Lady Pembroke to her son, telling him to bring King
James I from Salisbury to see As You Like It – and, what is more, that “We
have the man Shakespeare with us”. Undeterred by the fact that the letter
has never been found, Nicolson proceeds to an elaborate reconstruction of
this putative performance, linking it to the familial and political
circumstances of the moment. In a fantasy worthy of – and subliminally
allusive to – Woolf’s novel, he even casts William Herbert, third Earl of
Pembroke, in the role of . . . Orlando. But, unless I am missing something,
it is not written as a fantasy: Adam Nicolson really appears to believe his
own story.
Adam Nicolson
Earls of Paradise
England and the dream of perfection
299pp. Harper Press. £25.
978 0 00 724052 4
Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at
the University of Warwick. His books include The Genius of shakespeare,
1997, and John Clare: A biography, 2004. An intellectual biography of
Shakespeare, Soul of the Age, is due to appear later this year.
