{"id":73516,"date":"2018-01-06T16:07:05","date_gmt":"2018-01-06T23:07:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=73516"},"modified":"2018-01-06T16:07:05","modified_gmt":"2018-01-06T23:07:05","slug":"the-mask-of-anarchy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/01\/06\/the-mask-of-anarchy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mask of Anarchy"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala Courtesy The Island<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

THE MASK OF ANARCHY. WRITTEN ON THE OCCASION OF THE MASSACRE AT MANCHESTER\u201d was composed by Percy Bysshe Shelley during his sojourn in Florence in Italy on hearing about an unprovoked attack by a group of militia cavalrymen on a peaceful and orderly protest rally attended by some 60,000 workers at St Peter\u2019s Field in Manchester, England on August 16, 1819; the unnecessary militia action (which involved the mounted soldiers slashing indiscriminately at the protestors with their sabres) had left more than four hundred injured (including about a hundred women and girls) and eleven dead according to legally established claims. To reassure the authorities about their peaceful intentions, the workers had brought their children along with them. In spite of the gravity of the issues they were protesting against and the seriousness of their demands for reform of government policies that affected them as workers, they were in a festive mood as they marched to the venue of the meeting from various places such as Stockport, Oldham, and Ashton. They were holding their union banners and playing band music.\u00a0 This was meant to show that they were not an unruly mob. The scheduled highlight of the day was an address by Henry Hunt, the popular public speaker of the time who spoke on behalf of workers.<\/p>\n

The conservative rulers often accused the leaders of the reform movement of conspiring to introduce into England the \u2018Anarchy\u2019 that, they claimed, had resulted from the Revolution of 1789 in France. They usually assumed reformers to be anarchists. Therefore it was not surprising that the local magistrates were dismayed by the phenomenon of the growing peacefulness and orderliness of \u00a0labour demonstrations of the kind they saw at Peter\u2019s Field. The nervous magistrates decided to have Henry Hunt and a few of the organizers of the rally arrested. Hardly had Henry Hunt started delivering his speech from the chair before the troops ordered there \u00a0rode into the crowd who, naturally, panicked when this totally unexpected intrusion took place. The soldiers also panicked for, as it later transpired, they were from an untrained militia unit and so were unprepared to meet such a chaotic situation. The mayhem took place during this operation.<\/p>\n

The harrowing incident that occurred at St Peter\u2019s Field that day, came to be variously described. It was called the Manchester Massacre, the Battle of Peterloo, the Peterloo Massacre, and different variations of these.\u00a0 The coinage Peterloo was a taunting allusion to the much touted British victory over French forces commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte near Waterloo in the present-day Belgium on June 18, 1815, that is, four years before the government-led violence on its own citizens in Manchester that we are talking about here. The victorious side in the Battle of Waterloo was commanded by the Duke of Wellington.\u00a0 The militia atrocities committed at Peter\u2019s Field exposed the inherent indiscipline and hypocrisy of the British government that characteristically relied on militarism in perpetuating the English monarchy.<\/p>\n

The poem\u2019s title The Mask of Anarchy\u201d is interestingly appropriate. In the original title the word \u2018Mask\u2019 was spelt \u2018Masque\u2019. A court masque was a form of dramatic entertainment borrowed from Italy; \u00a0it was actually a play in verse with \u00a0music and dancing, and singing and acting performed in court circles in England. The court masque was particularly popular in the 16th<\/sup> and the early 17th<\/sup> century. \u00a0Shelley was writing a few years before the end of the first quarter of the 19th<\/sup> century. The word masque is the short form of \u2018masquerade\u2019. \u00a0A masque usually hired professional actors for the speaking and singing parts. Often courtiers, even the royals, took part in these performances as masquers\/masqueraders, who did not have to speak or sing. A masquerade involves hiding the identity of the actor or person wearing the mask. By invoking the literary-dramatic conventions of the court masque Shelley means to expose the masked anarchy that was the English throne of his time. So, there is a play on the word \u2018mask\u2019: it refers both to the historical court masque with associations of masked entertainment among the high and mighty, and to the more ordinary mask, which is a face covering used for protection (as by doctors wearing surgical masks), or for entertainment (as by children at a carnival), or for the concealment of the identity of the perpetrator during a criminal activity (as by bank robbers). The last mentioned use of a mask is relevant to Shelley\u2019s poem.<\/p>\n

Though written a few days after the Peterloo Massacre on August 16, 1819, The Mask of Anarchy\u201d was first published in 1832, edited with a preface by Leigh Hunt, Shelley\u2019s friend. This was ten years after the poet\u2019s death in 1822, nearly a month before his 30th<\/sup> birthday. There was a reason for this delay in publishing the poem. Shelley was passionately anti-establishmentarian. He detested all forms of oppression against the common people. He had deep sympathy for them and wanted to relieve their suffering by securing them justice.\u00a0 Though he became less impetuous as he passed his early youth, he always remained a republican and a democrat. Mrs Mary Shelley wrote about her late husband: He looked on all human beings as inheriting an equal right to possess the dearest privileges of our nature; the necessaries of life when fairly earned by labour, and intellectual instruction. His hatred of any despotism that looked upon the people as not to be consulted, or protected from want and ignorance, was intense \u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026 \u2026\u2026..the news of the Manchester Massacre \u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026.. \u00a0roused in him violent emotions of indignation and compassion. The great truth that the many, if accordant and resolute, could control the few, as was shown some years after, made him long to teach his injured countrymen how to resist. Inspired by these feelings, he wrote the Mask of Anarchy\u00a0 \u2026\u2026\u2026.\u201d.<\/p>\n

After composing the poem, Shelley sent it to his friend Leigh Hunt, to be published in the Examiner, which the latter edited. But, Mrs Shelley says that Leigh Hunt did not insert it in that publication, and that he explained why, in his preface to the poem that he printed, about ten years later, in 1832, where he wrote:<\/p>\n

I did not insert it \u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026 because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mrs Shelley\u2019s comments suggest why her husband\u2019s readership was more underground than aboveground during his lifetime.<\/p>\n

(The source for the text of the poem from which I have quoted in this essay and Mrs Shelley\u2019s comments printed above is: https:\/\/ebooks.adelaide.edu.au\/s\/shelley\/percy_bysshe\/s54cp\/volume9.html<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Wasn\u2019t it William Blake, Shelley\u2019s senior contemporary and fellow Romantic, who wrote Poetry Fetter\u2019d, Fetters the Human Race\u201d? Blake held that too strict observance of rules regarding rhythm, rhyme etc. prescribed in conventional verse forms imprisons the poets and circumscribes their power of thinking and creative expression. Shelley belonged to the second generation of Romantic poets, who in common reflected a strong absorption with liberty (the state of being free from imprisonment) and freedom (the right or power to think, believe, speak, and work in liberty). The Romantic poets\u2019 idea of the conscious and unconscious ranges of the human mind\u2019s creativity that they called imagination included this element of liberty and freedom. For them freedom in poetry was allied with freedom in politics. They were inspired by, among other things, the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 to protest against all forms of oppression and to seek freedom from them. In the Mask of Anarchy, Shelley adopts a mixture of stylistic elements from the popular ballad (folk art) and formal rhetorical devices of the court masque (court art) to give expression to his thematic concern with protest and hope of freedom.<\/p>\n

The poem consists of a dream narrative. Its opening lines, it seems to me, reflect a tinge of guilt or embarrassment on the part of the poet (that he had to be away from those innocent protestors in their hour of distress):<\/p>\n

As I lay asleep in Italy<\/p>\n

There came a voice from over the Sea,<\/p>\n

And with great power it forth led me<\/p>\n

To walk in the visions of Poesy.<\/p>\n

Apart from the physical distance between him and them at the moment (for Shelley was visiting in a foreign country then), there was a gulf of at least two kinds separating them: he was of a patrician or aristocratic family background as opposed to the common people of the plebeian classes; and with his education and culture and their lack of it, he and the workers moved in different intellectual spheres. The culturally refined, socially privileged, educationally superior Shelley on the one side and the unsophisticated, ill educated, and dispossessed workers on the other. But intellectually and temperamentally (i.e. considering his native rebelliousness, his compassionate, caring attitude towards the downtrodden masses, his keen sense of justice, his impatience with authoritarianism, etc) his mind was well attuned to pick up, as it were, the cries of pain and anger that rose from St Peter\u2019s Field that day. It was this \u2018voice\u2019 of the workers \u00a0that led him \u2018To walk in the visions of Poesy\u2019. But the poet has no voice of his own. He is asleep. He walks or somnambulizes \u2018in the visions of Poesy\u2019, in search of a strong enough voice to inspire the \u2018Men of England\u2019 to awaken themselves to the oppression, exploitation, and injustice that they are being subjected to by the monarchist government and to face up to it and eliminate those evils. He must achieve his political end as a poet (i.e., that of inspiring the common suffering people with his thoughts so they Rise like Lions after slumber\u201d and shake off their chains of bondage).<\/p>\n

Shelley faces a problem in achieving this. His audience is not uniform. He has readers of his own social and intellectual order; but he primarily wants to be accessible to the less highbrow, more numerous class of readers (workers) whose cause Shelley wants to champion. \u00a0This is why, as pointed out above, \u2018The Mask of Anarchy\u2019 adopts the traditional ballad style, and also draws upon elements of conventional Poesy associated with the court, which usually has nothing to do with the sordid realities of the real world, the very thing that Shelley is here concerned with. \u00a0Shelley\u2019s strategy is meant both to educate the common people about their own deplorable situation under the existing scheme of things, and to confront his social and intellectual peers with that bitter truth which should disturb their cultured minds.<\/p>\n

In spite of his passionate involvement with their cause, Shelley cannot identify with the demonstrators. He can never pose as one of them. He never once uses an inclusive \u2018We\u2019. It is always \u2018ye\u2019, though his advice to them has no element of patronizing at all.<\/p>\n

\u2018Rise like Lions after slumber<\/p>\n

In unvanquishable number,<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026..<\/p>\n

Ye are many, they are few.<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t say We are many, they are few.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his dream walk, the poet encounters a masquerade of the evils that characterized the government of the day. The first evil he meets is Murder, who wears a mask like Castlereagh. Now this was a very important person in the government. Robert Stewart, or Viscount Castlereagh, was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1812 to 1822. In that position, he managed the coalition of six countries that defeated Napoleon Bonaparte of France in 1815. This Shelleyan \u2018murderer\u2019 Castereagh was connected to our country also, because it was he who \u2018purchased\u2019 Ceylon from the Dutch (on behalf of the British empire) in 1796. Castlereagh was a deadly opponent of freedom and reform, though he was hailed as a hero by the English government. The seven blood-hounds that followed him were fat. Not surprising, considering that Castlereagh fed them with human hearts that he drew out from his wide cloak!<\/p>\n

Next came Fraud, who, like Eldon, was in an ermined gown. The Earl of Eldon (whose armorial motto was \u2018Let Honour be without Stain\u2019) shed copious tears, for he wept well; his tears fell like mill-stones; children played\u00a0 with them, thinking they were gems, round his feet, but \u2018Had their brains knocked out by them\u2019! (Shelley learned that even children got injured in the attack on the rally.)Fraud was followed by Hypocrisy, \u2018clothed with the Bible\u2019 and Hypocrisy came riding on a crocodile. He was like Sidmouth . Henry Addington or 1st<\/sup> Viscount Sidmouth was Home Secretary 1812-1822. More Destructions followed in this masquerade disguised as Bishops, lawyers, peers or spies.<\/p>\n

Last came Anarchy on a white horse splashed with blood. He wore a crown on his head, and grasped a scepter. On his brow was seen this mark: \u2018I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!\u2019 Anarchy passed over the English land<\/p>\n

\u2018Trampling to a mire of blood<\/p>\n

The adoring multitude.\u2019<\/p>\n

The \u2018adoring multitude\u2019 are the ignorant uneducated masses who don\u2019t understand who their enemies are! The hired murderers are the soldiers. They (the soldiers) pray to Anarchy:<\/p>\n

\u2018Thou art God, and Law, and King\u2019, and they demand \u2018glory, blood, and gold\u2019! Lawyers and Priests whisper the same\u00a0 formula: Thou art Law and God\u2019.<\/p>\n

They all cried with one accord<\/p>\n

\u2018Thou art King, and God, and Lord.\u2019<\/p>\n

They all worshiped Anarchy as if he were God. Anarchy the Skeleton bowed and grinned to everyone. He knew the Palaces of our (English) Kings and their emblems of sovereignty \u2013\u00a0 crown, scepter and globe were rightly his. So he sent his slaves to London town to seize upon its Bank and Tower, and he was proceeding to meet his pensioned Parliament, when one, \u2018a maniac maid\u2019 fled. Her name was Hope, and she looked more like Despair! She cries: \u2018Misery, oh, Misery\u2019! Hope was almost extinct. She lay down on the street before the horse\u2019s feet waiting for \u2018Murder, Fraud and Anarchy\u2019. (Anarchy was riding on a white horse.)<\/p>\n

To be continued<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala Courtesy The Island THE MASK OF ANARCHY. WRITTEN ON THE OCCASION OF THE MASSACRE AT MANCHESTER\u201d was composed by Percy Bysshe Shelley during his sojourn in Florence in Italy on hearing about an unprovoked attack by a group of militia cavalrymen on a peaceful and orderly protest rally attended by some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rohana-r-wasala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}