HAMLET CALLS playwrights and actors the abstract and brief chroniclers of the time. This is not strictly true, for Elizabethan drama usually dealt with the past not the present. The novel was waiting to take over the function of chronicler of the present, which all too soon becomes the past. Thus, we read Fielding and Smollett to find out about the eighteenth century, and Dickens and Trollope have fixed the nineteenth century for us in a manner no mere historian could achieve. Nevertheless, the novelist often thinks it his duty to revivify the remote past, and to that end will research deeply in the manner of the historian. He can be accurate about everything except one thing – and that is language. Bulwer Lytton, writing The Last Days of Pompeii, is a sedulous antiquarian, but he dare not give his readers dialogue in Latin or Greek. All he can do is contrive a kind of English which has been termed ‘Wardour Street’. Wardour street, in Soho, London, is at present concerned with the marketing of films: a century ago it specialised in shops which sold fake antiques – hence the application of it to language. Sir Walter Scott’s dialogue, full of odds bodkins and gadzooks, is today risible. Can contemporary novelists, writing about the past, do better?

I have myself written about various kinds of past in fictional form. I have written two novels dealing with the first century after Christ. Obviously, I cannot plunge the reader into Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. In using English the profoundest danger is represented by anachronism. I wrote, for example, of the assassination of Caligula. There is a Latin verb, assassinare, which seems to justify the use of an English derivative, but the notion of assassination only came in with Islam. The Old Man of the Mountains trained his Christian-killers with dreams of paradise induced by hashish. An assassinus was a hashish eater, hence the assassination of Caligula is an impossible concept. There are certain writers, especially the writers of film scripts, whom this would not worry. Some time ago the great director Franco Zeffirelli sent me a script about the Emperor Tiberius which contained the colloquialism ‘Okay’ several times. Reading Gore Vidal’s recent novel Live from Golgotha, one is tempted to believe that ancient Rome might be rendered in American slang, but Vidal is only joking here. When he tackles ancient Rome seriously no one can be more meticulous in handling a neutral kind of English which will serve for any period in time.

Americans have particular difficulty in coping with the language of the past, since they are so very much children of the present. I shuddered when I picked up Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, which deals with a very remote Egypt, fearing the intrusion of Americanisms. But, you may say, why cannot Americanisms be as legitimate as Anglicisms? Using a modern language to convey the past is false anyway, so why should not terms like ‘take a rain check’ or the greeting ‘Hi’ intrude? The answer is not easy, and there is a difference between modern and contemporary as far as language is concerned.

The problems are considerable when we are dealing with an English-speaking community remote, but not too remote, from our own day. Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover is about Nelson and the Hamiltons and it does not commit a single linguistic error. When Erica Jong decided to write about eighteenth-century London in her Fanny, she used the resources of scholarship to get her colloquial lower class English right. No American brought up on the Declaration of Independence is likely to get the higher eighteenth-century registers wrong. When we go back to the seventeenth century, however, we face great trouble.

I know this to be true, because in 1964 I published a novel on Shakespeare called Nothing Like the Sun, which displeased some readers because they found much of the language unintelligible. In 1993 I celebrate the quarter-centenary of Christopher Marlowe’s assassination (is this the wrong term?) with a novel entitled A Dead Man in Deptford. It has been suggested by some that the book increase its prospective readership by being translated into modern English. I do not see the point of this argument, since Elizabethan English is modern English. True, there are words that Shakespeare and Marlowe use which have died out – ‘nief’ for ‘first’, for example, and ‘kibes’ for ‘chilblains’ (and perhaps ‘chilblains’ itself is disappearing, along with the ailment) – and certain words have changed their meanings.

To Shakespeare a politician was a Jesuit and suburbs were not dormitory areas of some affluence but brothel districts. But the bulk of the language is common to the Elizabethans and to ourselves, especially those of us who are American. Americans say ‘sure’ as an affirmative and so did Shakespeare; they have also in common the past participle ‘gotten’. Elizabethan London and New York have rhythms in common, as well as phonemes. Hamlet pronounces ‘tropically’ to pun with ‘mouse trap’ which Americans can still do but Englishmen not. To modern Americans ‘customary’ has two stresses, as it does for Hamlet, who says: ‘Customary suits of solemn black’. No modern Englishman can, like an American, give that five-stressed line its full value. The Americans are a kind of Elizabethans, and their presidency is an Elizabethan monarchy. It seems to me, in writing both a novel about Shakespeare and a novel about Marlowe, that the thing to do was to avoid contemporary language rather than to work hard at installing Elizabethan peculiarities. We take for granted nowadays concepts derived from Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. We use terms like ‘proletariat’ and ‘complex’, as well as clichés like ‘the survival of the fittest’ without realising how modern they are. Shakespeare’s intuitive knowledge of psychology is vast, and the Oedipus complex may be at work in Hamlet, but Shakespeare was no more ready than D.H. Lawrence to formulate such a concept.

Novels about the past have to be a shameless kind of compromise. Nothing Like the Sun filtered Elizabethan usage through an imaginary narrator who lives in the contemporary Far East and is drunk on the Chinese rice spirit called samsu. He is not always accurate, but his inaccuracies are deliberate. For instance, he has the young Shakespeare note the ‘spurgeoning’ of the back eddy under the Clopton Bridge which spans the river Avon in Stratford. This is a reference to Caroline Spurgeon who wrote a substantial book on Shakespeare’s imagery and refers to the poet’s use of the image of the back eddy in The Rape of Lucrece. If anything seems anachronistic in Nothing Like the Sun, blame it on the narrator.

My novel on Marlowe has as narrator a young actor named John Wilson. This is my own baptismal name, and my family always believed that it could trace itself back to that actor. At the end of the novel I disclose that I myself, John Anthony Burgess Wilson, am making a self-identification with that putative ancestor. Whether this works or not, I do not know. I do know, however, that I could not have ended the novel like this:

Previously unpublished; dated 1992.