157. The Admirable Crichton by JM Barrie

Rhetorician, scholar, wit, musician, fencer, lover and all-round good guy, James Crichton of Clunie (1560-82) was the origin of the ‘admirable’ Crichton of Barrie’s famous play. Crichton lived his short life at tornado pace: he gained his MA at fifteen, could speak ten languages (including Chaldean) by the age of 20, and became a military advisor to the Duke of Mantua aged 21, in which capacity he was assassinated by a rival aged only 22. He was soon dubbed the ‘admirable’ Crichton (and appears as such in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair). Barrie, a fellow Scot, chose the epithet for the title of his play about a butler stranded with his employers on a desert island, but the stolid figure of Crichton the butler (who despite being the obvious superior of his aristocratic employers finally insists on his own lowly place in the social order) is rather incongruously at odds with that of the dashing 16th-century prodigy.

Consulted:
Tytler, Patrick Fraser: The Life of James Crichton of Cluny, Commonly Called the Admirable Crichton (1819)

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156. A Man’s a Man by Bertolt Brecht

For English readers, the title of Brecht’s play A Man’s a Man (1926) has echoes of Rabbie Burns —‘A man’s a man for a’ that’. But the original German title has a twist it is impossible to render in English. It is Mann ist Mann, which can, in German, be heard either as ‘Man is Man’ or ‘Man Eats Man’, since ‘ist’ (‘is’) and ‘isst’ (’eats’) are homophones.

The play, set in British India, deals with a fish porter who is brainwashed into assuming the identity of a dead soldier, and, as the action progresses, witnesses and commits numerous atrocities. Brecht claimed the play presented a ‘new human type...mendacious, optimistic, flexible’: and in the light of current events of 1926 — thousands were joining the Nazis — this seems prescient. Man is predatory and cannibalistic, and Germany, under the guise of national renewal, was consuming itself.

Consulted:
Hayman, Ronald: Brecht: A Biography‎ (1983)

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Index

A clickable index of titles covered so far...

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke

A

The Admirable Crichton by JM Barrie
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara
Arden of Faversham, possibly by William Shakespeare
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
Astrophil and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney

B

The Bald Prima Donna by Eugene Ionesco
Blade Runner (a Movie) by William Burroughs

C

Cahoot’s Macbeth by Tom Stoppard
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Chamber Music by James Joyce
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Chrononhotonthologos by Henry Carey
Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper, by Charles Perrault
Clélie by Madeleine de Scudéry
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville
Crash by JG Ballard

D

La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima
Difficulties with Girls by Kingsley Amis
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

E

The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud
Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb
The Escaped Cock by DH Lawrence
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

F

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
Fam and Yam by Edward Albee
Fanny Hill by John Cleland
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
The Four Million by O Henry
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

G

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
Generation X by Douglas Coupland
The Ghost in the Machine by Arthur Koestler
The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius
Goldfinger by Ian Fleming
Goodbye Mr Chips by James Hilton
The Great American Novel by Philip Roth
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

H

Hamlet by William Shakespeare
High Windows by Philip Larkin
The Homecoming by Harold Pinter
The Hothouse by Harold Pinter

I

In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
The Inspector General by Nikolai Gogol
The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott

J

Jaws by Peter Benchley
John Thomas and Lady Jane by DH Lawrence

K

The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

L

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Life in London by Pierce Egan
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lord Emsworth and Others by PG Wodehouse
Love Among the Chickens by PG Wodehouse
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Marquez

M

Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
Married Love by Marie Stopes
A Man’s a Man by Bertolt Brecht
The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
The Mint by TE Lawrence
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham
My Man Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
The Mystery of Marie Roget by Edgar Allan Poe

N

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The Necronomicon, not by HP Lovecraft
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The New Testament by Various Hands
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
No Thanks by EE Cummings
Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith

O

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by TS Eliot
Oleanna by David Mamet
The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
Othello by William Shakespeare

P

Pamela by Samuel Richardson
A Passage to India by EM Forster
Perfume by Patrick Süskind
Persuasion by Jane Austen
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Playboy of the Western World by JM Synge
Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell by The Brontes
The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain
The Prelude by William Wordsworth

R

The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope
Rasselas by Samuel Johnson
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
The Republic by Plato
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
Rhymes to be Traded for Bread by Vachel Lindsay
The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning
The Room by Harold Pinter
The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams

S

Salt Seller by Marcel Duchamp
Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald
The Scum Manifesto by Valerie Solanas
The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence
Shamela by Henry Fielding
Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens
Something Happened by Joseph Heller
Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

T

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
Tales of the Unexpected by Roald Dahl
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America by Anne Bradstreet
The Threepenny Opera by Elisabeth Hauptmann and Bertolt Brecht
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

U

Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry
Ulysses by James Joyce
Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
Utopia by Thomas More

V

Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton by Dennis Potter

W

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Waste Land by TS Eliot
While England Slept by Winston Churchill
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
Winnie-the-Pooh by AA Milne
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
The Worm and the Ring by Anthony Burgess

XYZ

You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe

155. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Often cited as the most ingenious of Christie’s novels, And Then There Were None has had a chequered titular history. It was originally Ten Little Niggers, after a Victorian minstrel show song published by Frank Green in 1869, in which ten boys are bumped off in various unpleasant ways. Christie’s novel, following the song, involved ten deaths, and was set on the consummately un-PC ‘Nigger Island’ off the coast of Devon. As the twentieth century wore on, the title was tweaked variously as Ten Little Indians and And Then There Were None (the last line of the original song): but Ten Little Niggers persisted in Fontana reprints until (quite astonishingly) as late as 1981. When adapted as a play and film the work acquired several further titles, with one production trying to mend matters by calling itself Ten Little Redskins.

Consulted:
Sanders, Dennis; Lovallo, Len: The Agatha Christie Companion (1984)

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154. Chrononhotonthologos: The Most Tragical Tragedy that ever was Tragediz’d by any Company of Tragedians by Henry Carey

This play has the most ludicrous opening in the whole of English literature:

[Enter RIGDUM-FUNNIDOS and ALDIBORONTIPHOSCOPHORNIO]

RIG.-FUN.: Aldiborontiphoscophorniol
Where left you Chrononhotonthologos?
ALDI.: Fatigu’d with the tremendous Toils of War,
Within his Tent, on downy Couch succumbent,
Himself he unfatigues with gentle Slumbers.

Written around 1734 by Henry Carey, the Tory wit and Scriblerian, it mocks the doings of Robert Walpole and the monarchy, and revolves around such matters as the Queen’s diarrhoea and the King’s insomnia. As the historian of burlesque VC Clinton-Baddeley put it: ‘Carey is important because of his delight in pure extravagance.’ The play’s sesquipedalian title was inspired by antique models such as the Batrachomyomachia (a parody of the Iliad), and became so well-known that for decades afterward a ‘chrononhotonthologos’ (the King’s name in the play) was a synonym for a braggart or blusterer: it might be rendered ‘one who spends time over hot words’. It certainly got Carey into hot water. It was one of the plays that goaded the Whig establishment into passing the Licensing Act of 1737, which effectively muzzled the theatre.

Carey invented the word ‘namby-pamby’, by the way, to describe a fellow scribbler, Ambrose Philips.

Consulted:
Clinton-Baddeley, V. C.: The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660 (1952)

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