D
DAMASK SILK
The book you are reading now is a work of fact and opinion. Better than that, it is a collection of facts and opinions about books about facts and opinions. But now I want you to use your imagination. You need to imagine an encyclopaedia in an unfamiliar language from a distant land more than 600 years ago. It is the biggest and most exacting encyclopaedia ever made, too big to be printed. It is created, in fairy-tale fashion, for one megalomaniacal man, and it is named after him, the whole running to 22,937 sections within 11,095 manuscript volumes, each between 1 and 2 inches thick, all bound in the finest yellow damask silk.
Now open your eyes, for such a thing did exist. It exists still, in a recklessly truncated and scattered form, a mere speck of the original. It is mentioned in hushed tones by scholars of Chinese history and literature, as if its power is still a virulent force. And it has a wonderful name, the Yongle Dadian.
It is also known as Yongle Dadian Vast Documents of the Yongle Era and Grand Canon of Yongle, and, in an earlier form, Wenxian Dacheng. When an analysis of the work was published in the Journal of Library and Information Science in 2010, its name was proving impossible to spell, as if it was jinxing readers from beyond the grave: occasionally it was the Yonle Dadian, once the Yonele Dadian and once even the Yung Lo Da Dian. Either way, it was the culmination of all Chinese knowledge – which, by immodest extension, meant all the knowledge in the world.
It was commissioned by the Yongle Emperor Zhu Di, the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, known also as Ming Chengzu, known also as the progenitor of the Age of Perpetual Happiness, additionally known as the fiercest of warlords. According to Pi-ching Hsu of San Francisco State University, the Ming Emperor Yongle was a man of contradictions. He has been portrayed as both a sage-king concerned primarily with the everlasting well-being of his subjects and empire, but also as someone associated with quite a few ‘less happy’ events, ‘including political scheming and mass murder’.
The emperor was clearly an educated man, which explains his encyclopaedia, but also an insatiable self-aggrandiser, which explains the size of it, and also his creation of the Forbidden City of Beijing. As an empire builder he was unsurpassed, extending Chinese influence during his rule (1402–24) to Vietnam, Korea and Japan, expending much energy fighting the Mongols, while also reinvigorating domestic agricultural prosperity. And then there were the other things: killing his enemies, establishing a large spying network staffed by eunuchs, purging anyone who might question his legitimacy or expose his sexual appetites and scandals. But as Professor Hsu attests, the tyranny was punctuated with outward displays of being very kind to animals, not least wild horses and cats, and he showed particular affection towards an imported giraffe, believing it to be some sort of unicorn.*
And so it is with some relief that we return to his reference work. The Yongle Dadian was composed with an extraordinary sense of urgency between 1403 and 1408. Written by thousands of travelling scholars scooping up everything in their path, the contents were quantified in 1901 by the historian Luther Carrington Goodrich as
thought, morals, poetry, frontier people (the Xiongnu and Hu for example), geography, surnames, government, law, the spirits, biography, divination, architecture (gates, bridges, halls, store-houses, walls, offices), villages, capital cities, history, burial customs, astronomy, botany, grain, military matters, Buddhism, Taoism, travels, bronzes, food and drink, caves, dreams, scholars, drama, sacrifices, clothing, mathematics, carpentry, post stations, shamans, literary collections.
*
The compilers submitted their first draft to the emperor after seventeen months, but he disapproved, deeming it insufficient for his needs. No doubt happy to escape with their lives, the anxious scholars went back to plunder a further 8000 ancient texts, emerging with a much bigger encyclopaedia of 3.7 million characters on 917,000 pages. This time the tyrant appeared content.
But one may reasonably ask the question: what was he so worried about? Why did his megalomania, his harvesting of everything, become so important to him? Powerful men and women are inevitably concerned with their legacies. It would be unusual if they amassed their immense power and wealth without simultaneously amassing cavernous amounts of guilt. It would be understandable, therefore, if they wished to leave something good behind, a reputation not wholly damning, something that may prompt future generations (their hand-washing descendants, say, or historians) to think better of them. A foundation, a grant or prize, the naming of a library; a benefactor ‘putting something back’. Emperor Yongle had more to put back than most. But in this case I think he may just have been being an emperor; he wanted the best, the most, the ultimate. It wasn’t knowledge for dissemination, or even knowledge for knowledge’s sake – it was knowledge that no one else could have, a gift to himself wrapped in yellow damask silk. And of course the emperor’s own entry in the encyclopaedia would be a glorious textual shrine. But even if he had been persuaded to spread the knowledge around, the almost impossible size of the enterprise ensured that no one could afford to reproduce it and that no one got to read it.
The problem with having 3.7 million characters was that one needed an awful lot of wood carvers and a very large forest to turn it into something that could be printed and distributed. Scribes made a few copies of some of it, but the master copy was the only complete proof that such a thing ever existed. By logical extension, all that knowledge in the hands of one individual – wasn’t that the perfect definition of intellectual tyranny? Wasn’t that the exact opposite of what an encyclopaedia was supposed to be?
The Chinese had been making encyclopaedias – leishu – since the ‘Warring States’ era between 474 and 221 BCE; even then, the historian Harriet Zurndorfer notes, there was ‘a dream of writing the world into a single text’. In the dynasties that followed, the shape and intention of these manuscripts fell into several categories – the compendiums of everything known, the natural and philosophical histories, the factual texts designed for civil service examinations, and all manner of specialist volumes. Then there were the riyong leishu, or collections of everyday practical information for those with limited literacy.
Unlike the Yongle Dadian, almost all of them were printed. For a snapshot of the vast range on offer one may consult the unique Siku quanshu (Complete Collection of the Four Treasuries), an imperial library catalogue compiled in the eighteenth century. The catalogue gave way to a physical library, combining 3461 separate works into a new masterwork of 2.3 million pages in 36,000 large folio volumes. Seven duplicates were made and distributed throughout the empire. It incorporated sixty-five leishu from a total of 217 consulted by the editors. These included volumes dating as far back as the Liang Dynasty (502–57), with ten from Tang (618–907) and twelve from Ming (1368–1644).
Wang Chutong, one of the Siku quanshu editors, then went on to compile the Lianshi in the 1790s, the first modern encyclopaedia devoted entirely to the work and activities of women. Subjects covered marriage, physical appearance, weaving, poetry and the role of women across the social spectrum, from imperial princess to streetwalker. The work was edited by men, but as Dr Zurndorfer observes, of the hundred contributors to the Lianshi, a large proportion were married to women with prestigious literary reputations. ‘One may infer that their appreciation of these women’s talents spurred their involvement … and that the topics they pursued therein reflect that admiration.’*
Given the circumstances surrounding its inception, perhaps it was inevitable that the Yongle Dadian would meet a tumultuous end. Initially stored in the Ming Dynasty capital Nanjing, it moved with the emperor to the new capital Beijing in 1421, and for almost a century and a half it remained in the summer palace in the Forbidden City. When a fire almost destroyed the palace, two copies were finally made, one of them destined for the Beijing Hanlin Academy, China’s largest repository library established in the 1720s. The fate of the other copies and fragments of copies is uncertain, but many were burnt when British and French troops sacked the Imperial Archive in 1860.
The last remaining copy, the one at the Hanlin Library, met a lonely and unceremonious fate. That manuscript, writes Lauren Christos, the Librarian at Florida International University, ‘over time fell prey to poor preservation whether through theft, rodents or insects, warfare or fire.’ The rodents didn’t chew everything: of the original 11,095 volumes, about 800 were still readable in 1900. After the Siege of Peking in that year, and the fire that swept through the library, the number dropped to only 370, or 809 sections, the equivalent of having only entries for the letter A.*
The loss of the text heralded the loss of an entire culture, for what is a society without an archive of its history and the memory of its people? In some quarters, the destruction of physical evidence of a group’s culture is legally defined as genocide.*
And in time even the name disintegrated. Maybe it really was the Yongle Dadian or the Yung Lo Da Dian. Perhaps Wenxian Dacheng should still hold. We only have what we call it today, for tomorrow it is still not there.
DEVISE, WIT
Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio.
When the lovelorn Armado calls upon divine inspiration near the beginning of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the audience knows his quest is doomed. Here is the pompous Spanish braggart sure that he was the first man to fall in love, dropping his military pursuits to woo his intended with poetry. Alas he has neither the talent nor the learning to write the persuasive sonnet; he has only the pale prospect of parody.
For centuries, scholars have debated the learning of Shakespeare himself. We have little if any documentation of what he was taught at school, nor the historical volumes by his side as he wrote Henry VI in 1591 and Henry VIII in 1612, nor what informed his philosophical worldview as he framed the minds of Hamlet and Lear.
It’s unnerving to learn that for much of the eighteenth century Shakespeare was regarded as an ignoramus. His plays were castigated for their lack of chronological, historical and geographical accuracy, and his lack of bookishness was used by the academic elite as an assault on creativity. The modern view has changed. Though lacking a donnish background, we know that Shakespeare had access to several almanacs and encyclopaedias, and there are numerous direct correlations between passages in his plays and the widely available volumes he may have had at his elbow.
He wrote on the cusp of Copernican comprehension; that is, the gradual acceptance that if the earth revolved around the sun, we should adapt our philosophical and dramatic approaches accordingly. The first English translation of Copernicus, A Perfit Description of the Celestiall Orbes appeared as part of the Digges Almanac of 1576, a popular digest that was almost certainly within Shakespeare’s grasp.*
Another publication, a more general encyclopaedia commonly known as Batman upon Bartholomew, is widely regarded as his most likely companion. It was published in 1582, when Shakespeare was eighteen, and immediately entered university libraries and educated homes. Re-published is more accurate, for it was a reprinting and modest update of a thirteenth-century work by the Franciscan monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus, popularised when printed by Wynkyn de Worde in London in 1495, and finally updated by Stephen Bateman (or Batman) in Shakespeare’s time.* The whole was the traditional mixture of fact and fiction, and, as English professor Neil Rhodes points out, scholars have detected some possible direct borrowings: the encyclopaedia mentions the effects of the moon’s light as a cause of madness (alluded to in both Measure for Measure and Othello); the geometric properties of the soul and our energy patterns (King Lear); and the concept of beast-like men (The Tempest). Other entries would be reflected in his sonnets.*
One more publication stakes a claim: Pierre de la Primaudaye’s French Academie, first translated into English in 1586. This was primarily a modern work, its four volumes encompassing the creation, the cosmos, animals and plants, the human body and its diseases, and a Christian philosopher’s guide to life. How did this show itself in Shakespeare’s work? Convincingly. Professor John Hankins has traced elements of the French Academie in the ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech in As You Like It, and in Lear’s speech that ‘When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools’. The references to the unweeded garden and the sleep of death in Hamlet may also derive from Primaudaye, as well as the many references to the force and influence of ‘custom’ in Hamlet and Pericles. Finally, Othello’s speculations on Desdemona’s supposed infidelity, and particularly the notion of the heart as a fountain, finds several parallel sources in French Academie.
It’s an exercise worthy of the best detectives. ‘None of this is conclusive,’ Neil Rhodes concedes, ‘but if Shakespeare did own an encyclopaedia – and in view of the enormous diversity of his subject matter it would have been a very useful companion – then this would almost certainly have been it.’ And beyond these forensics, one recurring theme in his plays – man as a microcosm of the workings of the universe – reflects the grand ambitions of every compiler of the modern encyclopaedia: the world in a book.
DOGMATIC DELIVERY OF KNOWLEDGE
In his later years, Shakespeare would have known of the far-reaching educational proposals of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), and in his roles as attorney general and lord chancellor Bacon would have been known to those who saw Shakespeare’s plays. Bacon’s treatise The Advancement of Learning (1605) was a hugely influential work, an exuberant promotion of the idea that the health and wealth of human lives could be improved beyond measure by the application of intellectual pursuits. Bacon was a heavy-hatted cheerleader, leaving it to others to realise his ideology in practical form. But all future encyclopaedists would have reason to be grateful to him.*
Nothing if not precocious, Bacon attended Cambridge University at the age of thirteen, where his acquisitions included a bow and quiver of arrows, a pair of pantofles and a dozen new buttons for his doublet. He read Livy, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Xenophon and Hermogenes. For nine months his education was interrupted by the plague. On his return to Cambridge, he impressed Queen Elizabeth with his gravity and maturity. When she asked his age, he announced he was ‘two years younger than Her Majesty’s happy reign,’ the charm of which suggested to all present that he would go far in life.*
The publication of his great educational proposal was initially overshadowed by the discovery a few days later of the Gunpowder Plot, but its influence endures. The Advancement of Learning opened with a double-length pull-out strip entitled Analysis, a visual aid for the treatise to follow. This praised ‘the excellency of learning’ and criticised ‘the zeal and jealousy’ of divines (self-appointed representatives of God), ‘the severity and arrogance’ of politicians, and the slightly vaguer ‘errors and imperfections of learned men’. Other targets included those who displayed a ‘distrust of new discoveries’; the ‘conceit that the best opinions prevail’; an ‘impatience of doubt’; a ‘mistaking of the end of knowledge’; and the ‘dogmatic delivery of knowledge’.
A second pull-out section at the start of the second volume – the one concerned with how Bacon’s improved theories of learning may be practised – again presented a shorthand view of the text to come. Here the pluses – ‘the places of learning, the books of learning, the person of the learned’ – were again outnumbered by obstacles, some of which prevail today: the ‘smallness of rewards for lecturers’; the ‘want of apparatus for experiments’; a ‘want of mutual intercourse between the universities of Europe’; and the ‘want of public appointment of writers or inquirers into the less known branches of knowledge’.
And then, in the form of a family tree, came Bacon’s approximation of what such a compendium of knowledge should look like, with the branch devoted to Human Learning providing the most useful snapshot of the range and value of academic pursuits at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
The accumulation of learning, Bacon decreed, should be divided into History, Philosophy and Poesy. History is then subdivided into Natural History (‘of creatures, of marvels, of arts’), Civil History (‘memorials, antiquities, chronicles, lives and narrations’), Ecclesiastical (‘history of the Church, of prophecy, of providence’) and Literary (‘orations, letters, sayings etc.’). Poesy was concerned with poetry and the imagination (‘narrative, representative, allusive’). Philosophy was split into science (physical and metaphysical), prudence (experimental and magical), body (medicine, athletics and the ‘sensual arts’) and mind (human will and the ‘nature of good’), and reason (invention, judgement, memory and tradition).
Future encyclopaedists would perceive in Bacon’s summary a significant practical pointer for their own work, and certainly a confident mission statement – a reaffirmation that their occupation fulfilled a modern need.
The vastness of the realms of knowledge now made these categorisations, this streamlining, a necessity. Encyclopaedia Britannica was still 160 years away, but these considerations would still be valid when its publishers first met. Bacon lived at a time when our understanding of science and natural history was producing a revolution of the mind: the work of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler heralded a new type of precision thinking, and their number would soon be swelled by Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton. The encyclopaedia was about to turn from a mere storehouse of facts to a more contemplative whole, and it would provide the natural and facilitating companion to a complete transformation of how we viewed the world.
* Journal of the American Oriental Society, Oct–Dec 2002, vol. 122, no. 4.
* As quoted by Lauren Christos, ‘The Yongle Dadian: The Origin, Destruction, Dispersal and Reclamation of a Chinese Cultural Treasure’, Journal of Library and Information Science, April 2010, vol. 36, no. 1.
* For more detail on the Siku quanshu and other Chinese encyclopaedias see Harriet T. Zurndorfer in König and Woolf, above. The Lianshi had a medieval precedent of sorts: Horus Deliciarum was edited by Abbess Herrad of Landsberg c.1180, although it was as much a visual instruction as a textual one, the abbess painting or commissioning more than 300 miniature illuminations depicting philosophical, religious and scientific scenes. The original was destroyed in a fire in 1870, but copies remain.
* Other volumes are scattered around the world – Germany has five, Britain fifty-one, and the Library of Congress forty-one.
* The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 was the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations.
* A fortuitous link: After Thomas Digges died, his widow went on to marry Thomas Russell, one of the trustees of Shakespeare’s will.
* Another fortuitous link: Batman was dedicated to Henry Carey, patron of the theatre company Shakespeare wrote for in the 1590s.
* See Neil Rhodes’s Shakespeare’s Encyclopaedias in König and Woolf, above. Also J.E. Hankins, Shakespeare’s Derived Imagery (University of Kansas Press, 1953).
* Three decades later, René Descartes proposed a similar philosophy. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637) argued that there was little that couldn’t be improved or solved by the systematic breakdown and analysis of a complex problem. But Descartes had doubts about the possibility of containing such knowledge between hard covers. ‘Even if all knowledge could be found in books,’ he wrote in the 1640s, ‘where it is mixed in with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes, it would take longer to read those books than we have to live in this life, and more effort to select the useful things than to find them oneself.’
* And so it proved: a lord, a viscount, legal adviser to Elizabeth and James I, Bacon is best remembered by historians of science as the great promulgator of empirical (i.e. sceptical and methodical) research. His flamboyance of mind was reflected in his manner, and this was prominently displayed at his wedding to Alice Barnham. As Dudley Carleton, one of those in attendance, recorded in a letter in May 1606, ‘Sir Francis Bacon was married yesterday to his young wench in Maribone Chapel. He was clad from top to toe in purple, and hath made himself and his wife such store of fine raiments of cloth of silver and gold that it draws deep into her portion. The dinner was kept at his father-in-law Sir John Packington’s lodging over against [adjacent to] the Savoy’.