Performing Scottishness: Enactment and National Identities 3030394069, 9783030394066

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Performing Scottishness Enactment and National Identities Ian Brown

Performing Scottishness

Ian Brown

Performing Scottishness Enactment and National Identities

Ian Brown Kingston University London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-39406-6 ISBN 978-3-030-39407-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39407-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Tommy Lorne and his comedy feed W S Percy © Herald and Times Group This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Ella, John, Mia and Shona

Acknowledgements

This volume draws together many strands of my research both over the years and in recent times. Feeding into it are thoughts and insights derived from conversations with outstanding colleagues now no longer with us: David Bradby, Bill Findlay, Ronnie Jack, Ronnie Mulryne and Ernest Schier. It has been enriched by debate and analysis over years of discussion of relevant topics with friends and colleagues including Barbara Bell, Richard Butt, Aileen Christianson, Ted Cowan, Cairns Craig, Steve Cramer, Larry DeVine, Ksenija Horvat, Susanne Kries, Alison Lumsden, John McGavin, Paul Maloney, Margaret Munro, Murray Pittock, Alan Riach, Roger Savage, Jeremy Smith, James Turnbull and Frank Whately. As ever, deep thanks are due to the Scottish Literature staff at Glasgow University, where I am an Honorary Senior Research Fellow, my colleagues at Kingston University Drama Department where I am now Professor Emeritus in Drama and the efficient and helpful staff of Glasgow University Library and the National Library of Scotland, both of whose collections remain indispensable to my research. I am especially grateful to Thomas Owen Clancy, Sìm Innes and Trish Reid who each in their own inimitable way has supported and enlightened my work, providing moral support and intellectual rigour. I am grateful for the understandings provided by my Scottish-American friends based at Riverton, Scotland County, North Carolina. I owe special thanks to Ethni and Lloyd Dee for the lively inspiration they continue to offer me.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Given the range of this book, I found myself imposing on a wide range of expert critical friends, seeking comments on various drafts: Gioia Angeletti, Danièle Berton, Jean Berton, Alexander Broadie, Simon Brown, Gerry Carruthers, John Corbett, Gavin Falconer, John Kirk, Stephen Lacey, Craig Lamont, Katja Lenz, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Nicola Royan, Carla Sassi, Rory Watson and Richard Wilson. Their generosity, patience and helpful advice were unstinting. As ever, my brother Gavin read my drafts first, saving me from many infelicities before sending out copies for further comment. His intellectual rigour and acuity in matters of style always leave me refreshed and admiring, and allowed me to appropriate many useful inputs. Any remaining errors are entirely my own. Above all, I am, as ever, grateful to my wife, Nikki Axford. As this book was being written, her support was a constant encouragement.

Contents

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Introduction: Representational and Representative Performances of the Nation

1

Nationhood, the Declaration of Arbroath and an Exploding Pillar Box

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The Treaty of Union, Scoto-Britishness and Anglo-Britain

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4

Bards, Britishness, Buildings and Cultural Memory

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5

Cultural Communication, Language Performance and National Literatures

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2

3

6

Imagined Borders, Subverted Centres and Hybridity

123

7

Tartan Enactments and Performing Hybridity

141

8

Language and Resistance in Theatre, Music Hall and Variety

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Comedy, Television, Hybridity and Scottish Camp

185

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CONTENTS

10

Film from Oligopoly to The Angel’s Share

205

11

Internalising Exile at Home and Away

235

Bibliography

251

Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Representational and Representative Performances of the Nation

In the summer of 2012, television offered a wall-to-wall presentation of performances like the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee including its procession of boats down the Thames, and the London summer Olympics and Paralympics Opening Ceremony. These asserted again and again the conception of Team GB. In a programme note, the Olympic event director, Danny Boyle, described that performance as ‘A ceremony that celebrates the creativity, eccentricity, daring and openness of the British genius by harnessing the genius, creativity, eccentricity, daring and openness of modern London’. This study will from time to time touch on what might or might not be meant by ‘the British genius’. No doubt, the host city should be foregrounded, but the easy slide from ‘British genius’ to ‘London’ hints, at the very least, at a certain metro-centricity. Within this, his Opening Ceremony represented a Britain united, what, on becoming Prime Minister in 2016, Theresa May referred to as the ‘precious union’, a phrase picked up and repeatedly used by Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt in their campaigns to succeed May in 2019. A two-minute film represented aspects of the United Kingdom, as the stadium depicted a somewhat unlikely, if good-humoured, idyll, ‘remembering’ a frolicsome version of English pastoral life of village-green cricket and dancing around the Maypole. This included a version of Glastonbury Tor, as the stadium performances were accompanied in turn by national songs of the four nations of the United Kingdom. England was represented in the stadium

© The Author(s) 2020 I. Brown, Performing Scottishness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39407-3_1

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by ‘Jerusalem’; the other performances were relayed from iconic locations, Northern Ireland’s ‘Danny Boy’ from the Giant’s Causeway, Scotland’s ‘Flower of Scotland’ from Edinburgh Castle, and Wales’s ‘Bread of Heaven’ from Rhossili Beach on the Gower Peninsula. The three smaller nations were, therefore, represented as tourist destinations, two of them rural/coastal, so cheerfully objectivising their separate identities for consumer appropriation. ‘Bread of Heaven’ was sung not in William Williams’s original Welsh, but English. It would presumably have been unthinkable—or at least not for performance here—that a demonstration of British genius could be anything but monolingually Anglophone. After the songs, Kenneth Branagh in the character of Isambard Kingdom Brunel led a party of ‘businessmen and industrialists’ in Victorian garb to intrude into the idyll. From the peak of the stadium’s Tor, Branagh delivered Caliban’s speech to a drunken rabble from Act 3 scene ii of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This begins, ‘Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not’. Then, the Industrial Revolution began, with an untoward impact on Jerusalem’s ‘green and pleasant land’. The introduction of Shakespeare so early in the performance raises issues of representations of ‘Britishness’ which will be briefly addressed later in this introduction and in more detail in Chapter 4. In passing, however, one may note that the reference to one of Shakespeare’s isles carries an unmistakable echo of John of Gaunt’s eulogy from Richard II to ‘this scepter’d isle’, ‘other Eden, demi-paradise’, ‘precious stone set in the silver sea’, ‘blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’. The performance went on to include a variety of episodes, some played for humour and even a certain kitsch jolliness. These included an array of dancing nurses and hospital beds to celebrate the establishment of the National Health Service. The current ‘James Bond’ as performed by Daniel Craig apparently delivered the current Queen to the stadium via helicopter and parachute. Her ‘flight’ was accompanied by the playing of Eric Coates’s ‘Dam Busters March’, celebrating, perhaps untactfully, British versions of the Second World War. All these episodes and others performed a unitary vision of ‘Britain’ imagined as sharing a common history and traditions, all English language and, not least, underlying Brunel’s Shakespeare quotation, a kingdom united and imagined as a larger version of a version of ‘England’. This performance of ‘Britishness’ followed an earlier Olympic ceremonial performance during the closing event of the 2008 Beijing Games. There, London set out its stall as the next host city. In doing this, in one

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of the more remarkable oddities of performative iconography, the Scottish gold-medal cyclist Chris Hoy rode a bicycle on the athletics track, accompanied by a red London bus. He wore a city suit and a bowler hat, rarely, if ever, now seen in the City of London. The sight of the Scottish champion on a bicycle not quite big enough for him alongside a doubledecker bus was beyond parody. It certainly marked a version of London, or perhaps Britain-as-London, signified by stereotype and imagery designed for tourists, or at least non-residents. All of these Olympic performances highlight the fact that representations of Great Britain as the United Kingdom often depend on the elision, if not suppression, of differences in the sense of communities or national identities within the state, not to mention of constitutional realities. Yet, if Queen’s Diamond Jubilee street parties in London’s triumphant Olympic year for Team GB are an indication of the British nation’s unity, what is one to make of the fact that, despite the thousands held in England, only thirteen were held in Scotland? Tom Devine offers one possible, and striking, explanation of this difference: When asked by British Future ‘Are you very proud of the Queen?’, 50 per cent of English respondents said ‘Yes’, compared with 15 per cent in Scotland. A total of 55 per cent of Scots compared with only 17 per cent of English answered that they were ‘not proud’.1

The 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony was directed by David Zolkwer, a highly experienced director of public ceremonial, from the 1997 Hong Kong Handover Ceremony to the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games Opening and beyond. The Glasgow ceremony performed versions of ‘Scottishness’ rather than of Anglicised Britishness. The celebratory focus again drew on varieties of kitsch, pushed arguably much further and, yet, more self-mockingly than in London, drawing on forms of Scottish Camp discussed in Chapter 9. The sense of joyous self-satire included dancing Tunnock’s Tea Cakes and the late Andy Stewart. This comedian-singer, much-loved and simultaneously much-despised because of his couthy tartanised image, rose on film from the grave. Rather than quoting Shakespeare or using standard English, he sang a welcome in Scots, with which he often began a BBC television programme he hosted, The White Heather Club (1958–1968)—itself excoriated by many and beloved by many:

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Come in, come in, it’s nice tae see ye. How’s yersel? Ye’re lookin grand. Tak a seat and hae a drammie. Man, ye’re welcome. Here’s my hand.2

This formed part of a contemporary mash-up with Dumfries-born Calvin Harris’s 2012 song ‘Feel So Close’ with its chorus ‘And there’s no stopping us right now’. It is hard to think of either of these images of a constituent part of the United Kingdom having been incorporated by Danny Boyle into the earlier ‘British’ opening ceremony. That expressed a quite different vision, a unitary nation, rather than, pace the opening choirs, nations combining to constitute the United Kingdom. Not all these often-self-mocking and even deliberately clichéd Scottish images, of course, might carry much meaning beyond the Scottish border. Nonetheless, their performance in Glasgow was treated with jovial, even postmodern, irony rather than with the London event’s overall solemnity—despite the overwrought appearance of James Bond—while the performance of a progressive modern Scotland highlighted, inter alia, a gay kiss. That such performances matter, not least to politicians in power, may be deduced from the fact the then-Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, over-ruled a plan that the Red Arrows flypast smoke-trail during the Glasgow ceremony would feature the Scottish Saltire’s blue and white. He insisted on its trailing instead the Union Flag’s red, white and blue. Such a gesture might seem petty—and arguably was. The same Red Arrows had, after all, emitted Saltire-coloured flares fifteen years before, on the opening of the Scottish Parliament. Then, there was no inkling of the way the post-devolution politics of Scotland would develop. The Scottish Parliament whose opening was being celebrated was, whatever else, an outcome of the policies of the Labour government then in power in the UK. Perhaps, then, blue and white trails seemed ‘safe’ enough. Underlying such Conservative ‘pettiness’ in 2014, however, is surely a fear that, if the UK national air force celebrated the Saltire when a Scottish National Party government was in power in Scotland (and an independence referendum imminent), the performance of Scottishness might now have a deeper meaning. Given the change in the political context, the underlying significance of the colour of the flares was different. Or so, at least, it might seem in the conservative mind of a government minister.

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Here, as in the rest of this book, we are engaged with the interaction of performance and performativity, both terms we will return to. One remembers that a performative act is one where a statement is in itself the very act: the speech-act itself effects change. The usual common example given is of the statement ‘I do’ in assenting to marriage. Nothing actually appears to happen when those words are spoken, but the speaking of the words changes everything about the status of the speaker in a wide variety of legal, economic, social and other ways. Even in the present day, when in Britain over 40% of marriages end in divorce, the performative act of the exchange of marriage vows, while not irrevocable (as it is still in some other cultures), has an impact. This is such that, even if it is indeed revoked, the fact it took place will mark permanent changes of status and have implications which remain even after divorce. The first clause of the 1998 Scotland Act is succinct: ‘There shall be a Scottish Parliament’. One might debate the extent to which an Act of Parliament on the point of its enactment is a performative act. By and large, such acts look forward to action which they permit, forbid or define rather than in themselves being performative. The first clause of this act, however, has at least the ring of a performative act. It is inscribed on the mace of Scottish Parliament. At times, this study will range between performative acts and acts of performance which carry substantial, often implicit, meaning. In doing so, it will suggest that some performances—the signing and sealing of the Declaration of Arbroath is one—are indeed performative; we will come to that case in the next chapter and its importance in the longrunning narrative of Scotland as a nation. Neil Blain and Kathryn Burnett offer a warning to be borne in mind: It is not difficult to misrepresent Scotland, and its representation has often been analysed selectively, too. When this is added to ethnocentric or otherwise ideological accounts of Scottish culture and history (in which anglocentric versions are often to the fore), the resulting discursive knots can be hard to disentangle.3

Accepting Blain and Burnett’s cautionary observation, in this book I address a variety of performances of ‘Scottishness’. The approach adopted will include engagement with the building, definition and narration of a nation as it is expressed in historical manifestos, public events (the opening ceremonies already mentioned, the 1822 ‘King’s Jaunt’ discussed in

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Chapter 7), social events, urban architecture, debates about dress, language and literature and, finally, in the arts of drama, television and film. Yet, while this study is wide-ranging historically, culturally, politically and ideologically, it cannot claim to be fully comprehensive in such a complex field. While it examines issues of literary criticism in Chapter 5, for example, it touches only on specific examples of prose and poetry, and only glancingly on music. Discussion must also at times consider how ‘Britishness’ is performed. In doing that, it considers the slipperiness of this term, and its related conceptions, ‘Scotland’ and ‘Britain’. With regard to the slipperiness of the latter term, the former Prime Minister, John Major, offers an illuminating example. In a speech to the Conservative Group for Europe on 22 April 1993, Major opened with two sentences which now seem of another time: ‘Two years ago I said I wanted to put Britain at the heart of Europe. And the heart of Europe is where I still want us to be’. His peroration famously included a vision of his ‘Britain’. This, as if seeking the chimera of ‘timelessness’ for a ‘British nation’, aspired to draw on an imagined past with a continuing shelf-life of at least a half-century which we are now only half-way through: Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – ‘old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’ and if we get our way – Shakespeare still read even in school. Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials.4

The precious union (one cannot help wondering if there was somehow an echo in Theresa May’s mind, in employing this phrase later, of John of Gaunt’s Anglocentric ‘precious stone set in the silver sea’) is here imagined in terms which, as has often been observed, are distinctly English: ‘county (cricket) grounds’, ‘warm beer’, ‘green suburbs’, Shakespeare as the archetypal national writer for study in school. Major’s speech, in a way this study will come to in more detail, conflates Britishness and essentialised Englishness. In the same text from which Major quotes, Orwell asserts ‘England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and […] Albion’ are synonymous.5 Notwithstanding such Anglocentric musings, the question with which this discussion might proceed is just what is ‘Great Britain’? What is the ‘United Kingdom’? Above all, for our purposes, what is ‘Scotland’ and, therefore, ‘Scottishness’? Where do

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these formulations arise? As we address these questions, we will find ourselves exploring force-fields between two poles. One is national identity as a historian might understand it via such disciplines as archaeology, geography, economics, politics and linguistics. The other is the succession of individual and communal (re)imaginings of Scottishness for socio-cultural and socio-political reasons of the kind Benedict Anderson discusses in his fascinating and influential 1983 study, Imagined Communities.6 In these explorations, we recognise that ‘history’ is yet another ‘text’ closely tied to the context and the circumstances of its writing. In one sense the questions can apparently be easily answered. The term, ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’, appears in the wording of the first article of the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland agreed in 1706 and ratified by two 1707 parliamentary Acts of Union, one of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh and one of the English Parliament at Westminster. The first article states: That the two Kingdoms of Scotland and England, shall, upon the first Day of May next ensuing the Date hereof, and forever after, be united into One Kingdom by the Name of Great-Britain.7

The United Kingdom, therefore, is an alliance of Scotland and England. Given this book’s scope, it cannot focus on the position of Ireland and Wales, but it is worth noting Murray Pittock’s observation: People don’t talk of Wales, rather than Ireland, as ‘England’s oldest colony’ because to do so would be to acknowledge its current territorial potential as an un-British nation, and to pose an implicit challenge to the cultural and national integrity of ‘Britain’. England can have no ‘British’ colonies, because Britain is [original emphasis] England is very much the unspoken assumption.8

Further, the contest between Scotland and England often elides other regional/national identities. As Tom Nairn has suggested, the British national minorities are too big to be simply ignored, yet far too small to count naturally as equals or partners. […] they were subordinated through a system of informal hegemony, buttressed externally by empire. That multiple-identity order was made [original emphasis] to

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cohere through close political union: ‘Britain’ was the label for the subsequent over-centralism of a ruling and administrative class, compensating for the persistence of national diversities.9

Indeed, Linda Colley has argued that, following the Act of Union, ‘a sense of British national identity was forged, and that the manner in which it was forged has shaped the quality of this particular sense of nationhood and belonging ever since, both in terms of its remarkable strengths and resilience, and in terms of its considerable and increasingly evident weaknesses’.10 We shall return in more detail to the discussion of the nature of the Treaty which created the ‘United Kingdom’, these strengths and weaknesses, in Chapter 3. Meantime, the term ‘Great Britain’, embedded in the Treaty, was used about a century before by James VI and I when he came south to become not only King of Scots, but King of England. Then, he talked of ‘two kingdoms, surrounded by one sea’, writing to the Scottish Privy Council in January 1604: ‘Our princely care mon [must] be extended to see them [Scotland and England] join and coalesce together in a sincere and perfect union, as two twins bred in one belly, to love one another as no more two but one estate’.11 He imagined himself as uniting those kingdoms, though an attempt to do so in reality failed in 1606 in both parliaments because each considered that union would deprive it of historic rights. Though James did not achieve legislative union, he imagined it, beginning a commissioning process his son, Charles I, completed. Rubens painted James uniting the crowns of the two countries symbolically under his sway, blessed by Minerva, goddess of wisdom. When this was installed in 1636 in the ceiling of Inigo Jones’s great 1622 Whitehall Banqueting Hall, this was as far as unification would reach for many years. Although, after the battles of Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651), Cromwell’s Commonwealth imposed union on Scotland and England, that was dissolved on Charles II’s 1660 Restoration. Further attempts at union in 1667 and 1689 also failed. Even given the Treaty ratified in 1707, the idea of one British nation, a genuine Team GB, as opposed to two kingdoms, surrounded by one sea, may be problematic, at least historically. Britain may indeed be a state, but it is an open question, which this study examines from a variety of perspectives, whether it is quite a nation-state rather than an alliance. As Tom Nairn has put it, with regard to Scotland,

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The awkward problem they [the Scots] pose to Great Britain does not – contrary to a widely-held and quite natural opinion – lie in their status as a persecuted or unjustly assimilated national minority. Rather it is located in Scotland’s status as an imperfectly absorbed state [original emphasis].12

The nature of that imperfect absorption we will come to. For now, we can note that the picture has been further complicated since devolution. Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright suggest that devolution since the 1990s has meant that the shape of the union ‘has radically changed, a union state but not a uniform state’.13 As we shall see later, the question arises as to whether it has ever been a uniform state in any real sense, however much James and Charles may have wished to imagine it in this guise. The issue of uniformity or not will, nonetheless, come more to the fore as the Brexit settlement, still in development at the time of writing, appears to be allowing—even encouraging—Westminster politicians to try to row back on the powers of the Scottish Parliament over matters devolved in 1999. Examples include food standards which may be centralised in order to seek trade terms that would be potentially unacceptable to Holyrood. Commentators like Iain Macwhirter have argued that the desire of Westminster post-Brexit to reclaim powers devolved to Holyrood represents a reduction, even a power-grab, of the Scottish Parliament’s authority and rights.14 The issue is complicated, as we shall see in later chapters, by different understandings between English and Scottish authorities of where sovereignty lies, however much the former’s position, expressed as the view of the UK parliament, is that power lies at Westminster and, in Enoch Powell’s formulation, power devolved is power retained. Meantime, Anderson’s view that any national identity is a matter of imagination—and, I would argue, performance—is sometimes summarised as being constructivist or modernist as opposed to primordialist theories of nation-formation, as if this divide were unbridgeable. This study is based on the view that these theories are in fact complementary. Elements of both contribute to the long-standing sense and the contemporary re-imagination of any given nation’s sense of identity. As Homi K. Bhabha puts it, In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through the process of

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splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation [original emphasis].15

Both pedagogical-primordialist and performative-constructivist have a significant role in establishing ‘Scottishness’. Bhabha suggests how these processes shape the conception of a ‘nation’. Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation – or narration – might seem impossibly romantic or excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west.16

As Andrew Blaikie observes, myths of community are not just useful in ‘branding’ Scotland for instrumental purposes; they are also about belonging and self-identity. Against them people test their sense of self, and sometimes they are found badly wanting.17

The nature of performativity means not only that such identities may sometimes be found ‘badly wanting’, but that they change and develop over time. Further, their central expression may mean different things to different communities within the constructed ‘nation’. Here, as an example, let us consider in a preliminary way the question of Britishness and British nationhood, as opposed to Scottish nationhood. David Edgerton, writing about twentieth-century British history, makes the following observation: The British nation, as I define it, was not a natural state of affairs. The British nation was created: it emerged out of the British empire, and out of a cosmopolitan economy, after [original emphasis] the Second World War. Leaving behind empire went hand in hand with the development of a peculiar kind of nationalism which entailed the rejection of imperial citizenship and imperialism. Leaving behind economic liberalism meant creating not just an economic border but increasingly a culture of national self-supply.18

This ‘British nation’, following Edgerton’s argument, was created chiefly by the processes of nationalisation of major industries. These took on

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names like the National Coal Board (1947), British Railways (1947) and the Iron and Steel Corporation of Great Britain (1949). Related processes created the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB; 1946) and the National Health Service (1948), and even the passing of a National Theatre Act (1949). The introduction of military National Service for all fit young men in 1948 reinforced this process socially. These developments were complemented and reinforced by the passage of revising National Insurance, National Assistance and associated acts. These created a post-war nationwide welfare state where the population shared universal benefits, liabilities and contingencies. Meantime, during World War Two Scotland had been identified within the UK as a civil defence region. This representation of Scotland as a ‘region’ developed as many Scottish-owned firms were actually nationalised and, so, apparently absorbed by the UK state,19 while Scottish ownership was further weakened as a phenomenon by US buyouts reinforcing such earlier initiatives as the developments that led to Singer building its largest factory in the world in Clydebank as early as the mid-1880s. This Edgertonian nation was largely dismantled by the privatisation policies of Margaret Thatcher, and later policies undermining the common welfare state. Meanwhile, the Scottish Arts Council became fully independent in 1994, this having already been foreshadowed by an, in effect, autonomous Scottish Arts Council being established in 1968 out of the Scottish Committee of ACGB set up in 1948. Further, when the Scottish Parliament took over responsibility for the NHS in Scotland in 1999, it followed a divergent policy path from that in England. This Parliament went on to create a National Theatre of Scotland, launched in 2006. In other words, the conception of a unitary British nation, as opposed to a British state, fluctuates and, as we shall see, always has. Since the 1980s in several ways in terms of its major institutions it has been dismantled, a consequence—presumably unintended—of Thatcherite policies. Actually, to talk of a British nation-state is not entirely awkwardly problematic, depending on one’s historical perspective. An internationally recognised British nation existed in what we now call Scotland in the latter part of the first millennium. Its capital was at Al Clud, which, of course, is on the Clyde. Its language was a Celtic Cymric one, a P-Celtic language akin to modern Welsh. We now call this capital Dumbarton, whose Gaelic form Dùn Breatann or Dùn Breatainn signifies the ‘Fort of the Britons’. This, however, is not generally what is being referred to when we talk now of ‘Britain’ or the ‘British nation’. The existence of this

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British kingdom, however, has significance, as we will see in later chapters, in discussions of the nature of Scotland. Understanding the ways in which this older British kingdom, often called Strathclyde, now forms part of Scotland is helpful to the themes of this study. To make clear why this is so, it is worth recalling that the title of the sovereign in Scotland is not exclusively ‘King of Scotland’, but, as in the Great Seal of Robert I (the Bruce), ‘Rex Scotorum’, or ‘King of Scots’. This continuing usage is found regularly, as in Mary’s famously being ‘Queen of Scots’ and, indeed, the title of a BBC Scotland documentary about the current Queen’s sixty years on the throne: Elizabeth, Queen of Scots (2012). The basis of this formulation rather than ‘Queen (or King) of Scotland’—although early in the last millennium one might find a ‘King of Alba (Scotland)’—lies, according to historians like Michael Lynch20 and Dauvit Broun,21 in the way the Scots developed their national identity. This was not simply through a process of external conquest as happened most famously to England after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. (Although it had already happened to that country by conquest, when England, for some decades earlier in the eleventh century, had been part of the Danish Empire.) Christopher Smout describes the different position with regard to Scottish state-building during the eleventh and twelfth centuries: Scotland, in fact, was much less an identifiable state than a confederacy of peoples with distinct characteristics and traditions, each prone to rebellion and to internecine war, held together only by allegiance to the person of the king.22

(Though one might wonder about the extent to which what he says can also be applied in practice to an equally, but differently, rebellious and internecine England throughout the same period, especially during the reigns of Stephen, 1135–1154, and John, 1199–1216.) The Scottish political state was created, Smout, Lynch and Broun argue, by alliance as much as conflict between, centrally, Scots and Picts. There are, broadly, five older national identities that make up the Scottish nation in the centuries between its first clear formation under Kenneth MacAlpin or his sons during the mid-ninth century and 1707. These include the Picts—whose region, from north of the Forth round to Inverness, was confusingly historically called ‘Scotia’—and the Scots, who were Scoto-Irish inhabitants of the kingdom of Dalriata, more or less modern Argyll and Ulster. Alongside them were the Britons of Strathclyde and the

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Anglians of Lothian, which constituted medieval northern Northumbria. The language of the latter developed to form Middle and Modern Scots, returned to in Chapter 5. It still highly inflects contemporary Northern dialects of modern English, which evolved from Saxon in parallel with the Scots language’s evolution from Anglian. Finally, of course, the fifth element in the identity pool of Scottishness is the Norse. This strand, the Vikings who ruled in the Western Isles until the so-called battle of Largs in 1263 and in the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland until Norway ceded them to Scotland in the 1460s, joined the ‘confederacy’ later than the other four peoples. A consequence of this is that, as is true of some other nations, there is no single version of ‘Scotland’. The term ‘nation-state’ is of doubtful, if any, legitimacy in the Middle Ages, but its medieval equivalent as found in Scotland was formed by alliance and inter-marriage, as well as battle. It is possible, of course, although this is uncertain, that the formation of modern Scotland could have come about because earlier Viking raids had decimated warrior elites in Pictland and Anglian Lothian around the time Kenneth MacAlpin was seeking to unite by marriage the communities of Scotland in the 840s. Certainly, the Scottish political entity with its southern boundary more or less where it is now (though often in the early part of the last millennium compromised and varied for periods of time) began to be geographically defined in its modern scope by the Battle of Carham in 1018 (or perhaps 1016). Whatever the truth of this date, the point is that, despite Blaikie’s contention that ‘national identity has an important relational component in the sense that it is partly defined in opposition to that what [sic] it is not’,23 Scottish identity was, and is, not a centrally imposed conception shaped by foreign appropriation of the kingdom. This is so, however much invasion may from time to time have encouraged a protective coming together as a national community. Certainly, within contemporary Scotland, it is possible still to see intranational identities which are derived from those older elements in Smout’s confederacy, the alliances described by Lynch and Broun. These can be seen ultimately to underlie the situation as Blaikie expresses it: contemporary Scotland works because the country has a long history of internal devolution, with political decision-making and social mediation reflecting pride in the continuing strength of a collective civil realm (religion, education, trades unions, health and welfare) that has long been sustained by local, often neighbourhood traditions.24

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Hence, there is now no single Scottish identity, but only Scottish identities. This is reflected, for example, in the performances of Scottish literature, which has a fifteen-hundred-year tradition stretching back to when its first masterpiece, the Gododdin, now only found in a medieval Welsh translation, was written in Cymric in Dun Eitein, now called ‘Edinburgh’. Contemporary Scottish writers in all imaginative forms may, and do, choose to write in one of three longstanding and living Scottish languages, Gaelic, Scots or English, or a mixture of two or three of those. We are beginning to see Urdu and Polish elements developing within Scottish literary discourse: the former, for example, in Suhayl Saadi’s novel Psychoraag (2004) and the latter in Matthew Zajac’s play The Tailor of Inverness (2008). Historically, indeed, four languages, Gaelic, Scots, English and Latin, have each substantial Scottish literatures. There are, in literary terms, only Scotland’s identities overlaid through history and linguistically multiplied and interacting in inter-related communities. Implications of this linguistic diversity are discussed in later chapters. As John Caughie suggests, ‘A national culture would be one which confronted and opened out the specific contradictions of the historical development of the nation, using contradiction to continually transform a national identity which was never given and will never be completed’.25 This is very much the position in Scottish culture now, a counter-force to the contrasting danger Caughie identifies as that ‘kind of identity, national or supranational, which no longer recognises its own differences and instabilities, an identity which is no longer becoming but has arrived [original emphasis], fully achieved, [which] is a dangerous and almost invariably malign thing’.26 As Jonathan Hearn remarks, ‘cultures involve a certain density of institutions and interactions, but they are never discrete, bounded systems’.27 In Blaikie’s words, there is agreement that a national frame of reference must exist for there to be a competent nationhood. What is of interest here is how representations of the nation are re-appropriated to create competing accounts, counterinventions of tradition, alternative readings that contest the official story.28

This is a stance this study will develop as its chapters explore aspects of performances of Scottishness which use, in Caughie’s words just cited, ‘contradiction to continually transform a national identity which was never given and will never be completed’.

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Discussion of the imagined communities making up ‘nations’ and underpinning nationalisms is, of course, a central concern of Benedict Anderson. The current volume, as its title suggests, will focus on the performance of Scottishness, of Scotland as a performed community—or, rather, within its own national context, imagined and performed communities. In doing so, though, it will recognise and at times address examples of performances, like Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, of other imagined communities: largely in Boyle’s case, ‘Anglo-Britain-as-the-UnitedKingdom’. As this study considers the conception of ‘Scotland’ as a performed and performing community—and, so, ‘performance’ of nationhood—it will do so in a wide-ranging sense. It will go well beyond, but return to, performance in theatrical, televisual and filmic drama. In this, it will respect, but also complement and, to an extent, qualify, aspects of Anderson’s conception. Indeed, though Anderson argues that the conception of nationalism and, indeed, national identity emerged about two to three hundred years ago, counter-evidence of a developed sense of Scottishness can be found in the Declaration of Arbroath. Though it would be contentious, even tendentious, to suggest that this embodied nationalism in the modern sense, it certainly asserted, in ways examined in the next chapter, Scottish national identity as long before Anderson’s dating as 1320. Indeed, within the island of Britain such perceptions of a national identity were apparent very early not merely among Scots. Broun outlines claims to overkingship of Britain as a powerful mythology ‘bequeathed to kings of England by Athelstan [r. 924-39] and his successors in the tenth century’.29 Such claims were, he suggests, diminished somewhat by ‘increasing self-awareness in the twelfth century of being English in contrast to what were then seen as barbaric Celtic neighbours [leading to] a legacy of confusion and embarrassment to this day as people south of the border struggle (and often fail) to maintain a distinction between England and Britain’.30 This topic we will touch on at several points, but what is clear from the timelines of the enactments and performances we explore is that there has been, at least since the thirteenth century, a continuous, continuing, self-conscious and self-aware public discourse for Scots in which Scottishness is performed as a matter of political and cultural fact. Some of this has taken place at the level of governing classes. It has also been reflected by the public at large, whether through the popular cult of Robert Burns, which we will come to in Chapter 4, or events like the funding, building and opening in 1869 of the tendentiously titled

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National Wallace Monument, near Stirling, overlooking the site of the Battle of Stirling Bridge where an invading English army was destroyed in 1297. This contains a ‘Hall of Heroes’ which enshrines busts of such Scottish figures of historical and cultural importance as Robert the Bruce, Sir Walter Scott, Allan Ramsay, Adam Smith and Thomas Carlyle. Significantly with regard to the discussion in Chapter 4, the first bust included was of Robert Burns, in September 1888.31 Equally significantly, it took until 2019 for this male-dominated version of Scottish national fame to include women. Then Mary Slessor and Maggie Keswick Jencks were admitted. Scottishness is not a fixed identity, but a conjunction of many strands, even—however sometimes belatedly—crossing once-rigid gender boundaries.

Notes 1. T. M. Devine, Independence or Union: Scotland’s Past and Scotland’s Present (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 186. 2. Transcribed from excerpt of ceremony at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=DBa8NKDLH6I (accessed 9 December 2019). 3. Neil Blain and Kathryn Burnett, ‘A Cause Still Unwon: The Struggle to Represent Scotland’, in Neil Blain and David Hutchison (eds), The Media in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 16. 4. http://www.johnmajor.co.uk/page1086.html (accessed 7 September 2018). The citation is from George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 [1941]), p. 36. 5. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 47. 6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 7. UK Parliament, https://www.parliament.uk/documents/heritage/ articlesofunion.pdf. 8. Murray Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 99. 9. Tom Nairn, After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland (London: Granta, 2000), p. 181. 10. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 –1837, new ed. (London: Pimlico, 2003), p. 1. 11. Quoted in Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003), p. 209, n. 10 12. Nairn, After Britain, pp. 11–12.

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13. Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright, ‘Introduction: The Britishness Question’, in Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright (eds), Britishness: Perspectives on the Britishness Question (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 6. 14. See, for example, Iain Macwhirter, ‘The New Tory Regime Is Going to Tighten Scotland’s Shackles’, The Herald, 19 June 2019, p. 13. 15. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 297. 16. Ibid., p. 1. 17. Andrew Blaikie, The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 127. 18. David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A TwentiethCentury History (London: Allen Lane, 2018), pp. xx–xxi. 19. Murray Pittock, The Road to Independence? Scotland Since the Sixties (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), p. 7. 20. Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London: Pimlico, 1992), pp. 39–50. 21. Dauvit Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain from the Picts to Alexander III (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013 [2007]), p. 263 and passim. 22. T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830 (London: Collins, 1969), p. 22. 23. Blaikie, The Scots Imagination, p. 185. 24. Ibid., pp. 97–98. 25. John Caughie, ‘Scottish Television: What Would It Look Like?’, in Colin McArthur (ed.), Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (London: BFI, 1982), p. 117. 26. John Caughie, ‘Becoming European: Art, Cinema, Irony and Identity’, in Duncan Petrie (ed.) Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema (London: BFI, 1992), p. 35. 27. Jonathan Hearn, Claiming Scotland: National Identity and Liberal Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2000), p. 10. 28. Blaikie, The Scots Imagination, p. 13. 29. Broun, Scottish Independence, p. 22. 30. Ibid., p. 23. 31. James Coleman, ‘Unionist-Nationalism in Stone? The National Wallace Monument and the Hazards of Commemoration in Victorian Scotland’, in Edward J. Cowan (ed.), The Wallace Book (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007), p. 153.

CHAPTER 2

Nationhood, the Declaration of Arbroath and an Exploding Pillar Box

We noted in the introduction that discussion of how imagined communities make up ‘nations’ and underpin nationalisms is a central concern of Benedict Anderson.1 It is possible, however, to respect, but also to complement and, to an extent, qualify, aspects of Anderson’s conception. Indeed, as we saw, the historical record on conceiving Scottishness or Scotland as a ‘nation’ prompts one to qualify Anderson’s thesis. This is not concerning the idea of a nation being an ‘imagined’ community, but concerning the timing of such imagining. Anderson argues the conception of nationalism and, indeed, national identity emerged only within the last three centuries. Yet, earlier documents that embody an explicit sense of Scottish national identity offer clear counter-evidence. The Declaration of Arbroath is a letter, whose signatories comprise over fifty of Scotland’s territorial magnates, sent in 1320 to the Pope in support of the case for Scottish independence under Robert I (the Bruce) in the face of English claims of suzerainty and recurring threats of invasion. While it would be anachronistic and ahistorical to describe it as a nationalist document, it clearly asserts the existence and significance of a Scottish nation and identity. Arguably, it does so in at least two ways, one implicit, the other explicit, the latter echoed in a speech attributed to Bruce himself quoted in Walter Bower’s fifteenth-century Scotichronicon. The implicit can be seen in the list of signatories. The names of those cover a range of possible cultural and linguistic identities within, to use the term current at the time, the ‘Community of the Realm’. This is so even if that ‘community’ in terms of the Declaration’s signatories is one © The Author(s) 2020 I. Brown, Performing Scottishness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39407-3_2

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of the nobility rather than the people at large. The names of Duncan, Earl of Fife, Fergus of Ardrossan and Donald Campbell suggest Gaelic/Celtic origin, as may that of Patrick Graham; that of Magnus, Earl of Caithness and Orkney clearly suggests Norse origins; those of Malise, Earl of Strathearn and Ingram Umfraville suggest Norman-French derivation; other names, meanwhile, found more than once in the list like ‘William’, ‘John’ and ‘Alexander’ cannot easily be assigned to any one linguistic community. In fact, the sense the list embodies of a community which had assimilated members from a variety of linguistic communities and different national sources can be seen in the inclusion in the list of Eustace Maxwell, whose names combines a French-originating first and Scots second name. Further, this list of signatories implies a change in understanding of the role of medieval magnates in relation to possible loyalties and developing national identities. Anglo-Scottish wars at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century created the need for the Declaration. Until then, it was commonplace for magnates to hold land north and south of the Scottish/English border. The wars, however, made such an economic and, in modern terms, transnational arrangement very much more difficult, if not in many cases impossible. That cross-border ownership of land, of course, arose in large part from the spread by invasion south and invitation north of the border of a class of Norman and Flemish gentry with up-to-date military expertise and technologies. This has led in Scotland, but not interestingly so much in England, to what Geoffrey Barrow has called the ‘Norman Myth’.2 This argues that figures like Robert Bruce and his contemporary land-magnates whose ancestors had migrated to Scotland five or six generations earlier were still by 1320 ‘really’ Norman and not Scottish, even after two centuries of assimilation. The evidence of Bruce’s links to Ulster, the fact at least one of his brothers, Neil, had a Gaelic first name and his final settlement in a Gaelic-speaking area of the West of Scotland at Cardross, all tend to suggest that Bruce was entirely comfortable with a partly Celtic Scottish identity. No doubt several of his colleagues also were. Well before 1320 there was indeed the potential for what the declaration depends on, a community of the Scottish realm. In fact, outside the ambits of both national myth and Scottish/English rivalry, there had already been international recognition of the identity of the Regnum Scotie (sic), realm of Scotland, not least in the 1266 Treaty of Perth. By this, king Magnus IV of Norway, after his father’s losses at Largs in 1263, ceded to the king of Scots the Isle of Man and the

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Hebrides.3 The trigger for the explicit formation of the community in the Declaration’s terms, however, was, at least in large part, the attempts by Edward I in the 1290s to subdue Scotland within the realm of England. These led even many whose economic interests might have been served by maintaining transborder ownership of land to resist his claims. Nicola Royan and Dauvit Broun point to transactions and transitions between forms of feudal loyalty and national identity when they observe that for ‘true Scottishness to exist, there needs to be a king to defend it, just as in the Declaration of Arbroath, but where the king is unable – as Balliol – or unwilling – as Bruce at [the Battle of] Falkirk – then the subject is obliged to act’.4 In other words, there is a positive tension between the Declaration, national identity and a feudal relationship with Bruce as king, and the interaction between the elite with their signet seals (and the possibility that some who provided their seals were already plotting against Bruce, or had been) and everybody else.5 This tension is shaped around and in turn shapes the community’s sense of its identity as a nation whose leading magnates would occupy a distinct economic sphere in terms of landholding from that of England.. Whatever his position at Falkirk in 1298, Bruce at Bannockburn in 1314, as quoted by Walter Bower, addressed his army as follows: My lords, my people, accustomed to enjoy that full freedom for which in times gone by the kings of Scotland have fought many a battle! [.. those] barons you can see before you, clad in mail, are bent upon destroying me and obliterating my kingdom, nay, our whole nation. […] With Our Lord Jesus as commander, Saint Andrew and the martyr Saint Thomas shall fight today with the saints of Scotland for the honour of their country and their nation.6

Bower was writing the Scotichronicon from which this quotation comes, between, it is thought, 1440 and 1447. In this section, he draws on the earlier chronicle conventionally ascribed to John of Fordun (d. c. 1380). The text as we have it is more than likely to represent a literary ornamentation of what Bruce may have said, influenced by contemporary politics of the time Bower was writing. Nonetheless, the very latest date at which the term ‘nation’ for Scotland appears here is 1447, while the term’s use in the Declaration undoubtedly dates to 1320. Both dates substantially predate Anderson’s hypothesis about the initial conceptions of the nation as an imagined community.

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The Declaration’s explicit expression of incipient Scottish nationhood, whatever that may have meant at the time, is quite clear. The text alludes to a national foundation myth more ancient than that of Romulus and Remus and the mothering wolf for the foundation of Rome, and as likely to be historically accurate, which is not at all. Accuracy, of course, was not the point. What mattered was the assertion of identity embodied in the inaccuracy. In this, the Declaration draws on an earlier document, the 1301 Processus of Baldred Bisset. There, on behalf of Bruce’s predecessor as king of Scots, John Balliol, Bisset asserted, during arbitration proceedings between Scotland and England at the papal curia, that Scotland was founded by descendants of Princess Scota. She was allegedly a pharaoh’s daughter who in one version of the myth married a Greek king, Gaythelos, originally from Scythia. After journeying through the Mediterranean, Spain and Ireland, they came to Scotland, supposedly naming it after her, while Gaythelos’ name gave rise to that of the Gaels. The English representatives, drawing on their different foundation myth, counter-argued Scotland’s subjection to England, because a Trojan, Brutus, descended from Aeneas, conquered an island, subsequently named Britain after him. His youngest son, Albanectus, was allocated a third of Britain, Scotland, named after him Albania and, in Gaelic, Alba. Other European nations had their own equally far-fetched foundation myths. The key point is that the development of such myths clearly demonstrates perceptions existed that there was a nation for which the myths were necessary. In that international context, the Scottish version conveniently identified Scotland’s foundation as apparently even earlier than Johnny-come-lately England/Britain. However such diplomatic arguments were perceived at the time, the author of the Declaration still felt it necessary, in opening the case to the Pope, to refer to foundational mythology at some length: Most Holy Father and Lord, we know and from the chronicles and books of the ancients we find that among other famous nations our own, the Scots, has been graced with widespread renown. It journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage peoples, but nowhere could they be subdued by any people, however barbarous. Thence it came, twelve hundred years after the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea, to its home in the west where it still lives today. The Britons it first drove out, the Picts it utterly destroyed, and, even though very often

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assailed by the Norwegians, the Danes and the English, it took possession of that home with many victories and untold efforts; and, as the historians of old time bear witness, they have held it free of all servitude ever since. In their kingdom there have reigned one hundred and thirteen kings of their own royal stock, the line unbroken by a single foreigner.7

For whatever reason, the Scots are here portrayed as crushing the Picts, when within the king list are contained Pictish kings, while Kenneth MacAlpin’s claim arose, it is still thought, in part from having a royal Pictish mother. Dauvit Broun offers one theory: The fact that the Picts were now seen as an historical nuisance is striking testimony to how the idea of kingdom, country and people had crystallised in the heat of war into a seamless unity without any consideration of geographical reality.8

In terms of its historical importance, in any case, while the document has a loose way with facts, it is entirely firm about the sovereignty it claims for Scotland, its kings and their ‘nation’. The Latin words, Scottorum nacio, used in the document explicitly assert some form of national identity while in a later paragraph it is said that gens nostra (‘our people’) were specifically under papal protection (sub ipsorum proteccione). One should, of course, avoid reading the Declaration through the lens of modern conceptions of ‘nation’, or indeed nationalism. Broun makes this point clearly, while pointing out that in the thirteenth century there was a movement towards seeing Scotland as one country, not a collection of several countries.9 This is even although in that century the Scots were identified largely as inhabitants living north of the Forth. That was then a major geographical division and natural border in the British mainland, the ‘Sea of Scotland’, with its firth’s width and often impassable marshes and mosses around its riverine length.10 Broun makes the point that, as this singular conception of Scotland was developing, so was a ‘vision of Scots as an ancient and free people’.11 He goes on The focus had now begun to move decisively to the people, and to a definition of the kingdom. […] It was only in this context that an idea of the Scots as a sovereign entity took shape in a way we can begin to recognise today. The core idea, however, is also fundamentally different from that of a modern nation. It was of the Scots as a people obedient to the inherited authority of their king, free from the control of another king. The

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doctrine was that sovereign kingdoms constituted peoples, not that ethnic communities should be politically independent; nations were communities of submission, not people bound together by a common culture […].12

This earlier conception of a nation differs from what Broun calls the constructivist theory of nation-building Anderson expounds. Yet, even if the details of ‘nationhood’ and what the term means change and evolve over the centuries, an identifiable ‘Scotland’, autonomous, distinct and consciously integrating formerly separate groups like the Picts and Scots, existed in the years leading up to the drafting of the Declaration, not to mention the earlier Processus of Bisset. While, then, what a fourteenth-century conception of the Scottish nation meant is debateable, the Declaration undoubtedly asserts a Scottish national identity. This implicitly included Norse elements as well as Celtic, Lowland Scots and Norman and predated Anderson’s timescale for his imagined communities. Meanwhile, the Declaration was in itself a performative act expressing Scottishness in terms of national identity. It also highlighted a particular aspect of the relationship of the Scottish sovereign to his communities. That is the assertion that, should the Community of the Realm so will, the sovereign could be set aside and a new sovereign chosen. The Declaration, whose drafting was, after all, under the eye of the king himself, is quite explicit on this point. The document refers to ‘our most tireless Prince, King and Lord, the Lord Robert [… to whom], as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand’. Nonetheless, it goes on: Yet if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King […].13

Alexander Broadie has pointed out that the document ‘focuses repeatedly on the doctrine that legitimate rulership depends on the consent of the people’.14 This may be the first time in European history where the concept of the conditionality of kingship appears, but, of course, it describes

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what Bruce had himself enacted with regard to his predecessor, John Balliol. It also served as a warning to Balliol’s son, Edward, who after his father’s death in c.1314 was still hoping in 1320 to reinstate his dynasty with English help, something he attempted after Bruce’s death in 1329. Further, it may not be too fanciful to consider that the roots of the assertion of conditionality of kingship may lie in the Celtic High King system. There, the High King is primus inter pares of regional kings, not an absolute ruler. Certainly, we are not talking of a democratic structure where everyone of a certain age can vote out a president. We are, however, talking of a political system where the great territorial magnates were not simply vassals to the king, owing service. At least in principle, and on occasion in fact, they chose their sovereign and might depose them if they failed to rule well or, more particularly, proved tyrannical. This was the justification used for James I’s assassination in 1437, though that coup was not supported widely, and for James III’s widely supported deposition. While in England during the period of these acts the turmoil of the Wars of the Roses saw kings deposed, each deposition leading to a change of dynasty, in Scotland, even after James III’s fall, the ruling house remained in power. This is a key distinction between English medieval brigandage and the more orderly, if sometimes equally violent, conception of the Community of the Realm in Scotland. The Scottish constitutional principle of the right to depose a tyrannical ruler is stated later with great clarity by the early modern scholar George Buchanan, James VI’s tutor, in his 1579 De Jure Regni apud Scotos (Concerning the Law of Kingship Among the Scots ), written in part to justify the deposition of Mary, Queen of Scots. Although it may be debated how far sovereigns readily accepted the principle in practice, the examples Buchanan gives, including the contrasting reactions by the Community of the Realm to the assassinations of James I and James III, carry some force.15 The Stuart doctrine promulgated by James VI and I of the Divine Right of Kings can be seen as a reaction against this constitutional principle. A ‘Divine Right’ doctrine was closer to English constitutional views, especially as developed by Tudor propagandists. Pushed too far by James’s son Charles, that doctrine had disastrous results for him. Later in this chapter we shall see that the longstanding constitutional principle of conditionality of kingship has modern implications for where sovereignty lies, at least in principle, in Scots constitutional law.

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Some historians have rather dismissively described the Declaration as an exercise in rhetoric. It undoubtedly is this, and a fine one at that. It is also an important performative act in that it explicitly asserts the relationship of sovereign and people and, at least from a Scottish and ultimately papal perspective, the relationship of Scotland and England. Its meaning, implications and impacts cannot be erased, however much they may be modified in the perceptions of some later commentators. It surely marks the seriousness and solemnity with which its drafters engaged their themes that one of its most famous passages is an adaptation/conflation, brilliantly analysed by Barrow,16 of a passage from Sallust’s War of Cataline: Yet if he should give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own right and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.17

Imbricating Sallust thus in the text—no doubt advisedly—embeds the classical text’s gravitas in the document. Thus, its author seeks to buttress its claims by the classical precedent’s prestige. It is likely that many signatories did not appear in Arbroath in person on the date of the document, 6 April 1320, sending their clerks and seals instead. Probably illiterate, they were perhaps incapable of appreciating the classical references. Nonetheless, their sealing the document constitutes a virtual performance of unity of the Community of the Realm, given the authority of the classics, in order to address the Pope and his court. And they would surely recognise the classical references. As Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney point out, in the Declaration ‘we see Scotland writing to the centre of civilization (in this case Roman Christianity) […asserting] that the Scots are a cultured and civilized people […] who will resist colonization even against overwhelming odds’.18 The very act of the Declaration’s composition carries significance beyond its content. Thus, it asserts the distinct national identity of a Scotland imagined as a community half a millennium before Anderson imagined that happening. The point is that there is a clear link between the thought behind and the expressions of the Declaration. This means it can still resound

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as strongly as it does in contemporary discussions of Scottishness. In this regard, its impact extends beyond any consideration of political nationalism. A key passage, for example, is incorporated into the railings of the Royal Scots War Memorial inaugurated in 1952 in Edinburgh’s Princess Street Gardens. There, it is rendered as ‘It is not for glory, nor riches, neither is it for honours that we fight, but it is for the sake of liberty alone, which no true man loseth but at the cost of his life’. After this quotation we find ‘given at Arbroath by the barons, free tenants & the whole community of the kingdom of Scotland in the year 1320’. In a memorial including portraits of heads of state from Charles I and Cromwell through the Stuarts and Hanoverians to George VI, the adoption of these words and the 1952 description of the Declaration as being ‘given’ by the ‘whole community of Scotland’ marks its contemporary weight, whatever individual views might be about unionism or nationalism. The status assigned to the Declaration is even reinforced by the small, but significant, detail of its translation’s employing the word ‘loseth’. This archaic verbal form is southern English, never used in vernacular Scots, but most commonly now found in the context of James VI’s Authorised Version of the Bible. It may be that in terms of this version’s providing a ‘biblical’ status to the Declaration, it is also inserting the notion of Britain as a Protestant project. Further, the passing, but strong, association with Shakespearean syntax gives the Declaration of Arbroath a subtle Anglo-British makeover.19 Yet, even as one avoids reading the Declaration through the lens of modern conceptions of ‘nation’ or nationalism, one recognises that it still acts as an assertion of Scottishness for both unionist and nationalist. Each generation presumably reads it, assigning it meaning in that generation’s terms. Ultimately, the document retains its significance as an assertion of Scottishness because, like other versions of Scottish ‘history’ and mythopoeia, it remains a key part of twentiethand twenty-first century iterations of performed Scottishness. Its ‘rhetoric’ may be up-dated—or even re-antiquated—for modern times. In the year of the memorial’s inauguration, Queen Elizabeth succeeded to the throne and another example of performed Scottishness exploded into sight. This highlighted differences between Scottish and English perceptions of ‘Britain’ and its ‘shared’ history, examined in more detail in the next chapter. After the Queen’s accession in February 1952, she took the regnal name Elizabeth II. This gave rise to protest in Scotland: there had been no Elizabeth I, Queen of Scots. It was, however, asserted that regnal numbers were a matter for royal prerogative. On 28 November

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1952, the first pillar box with the cypher EIIR was erected in Edinburgh. Thirty-six hours later the cypher was defaced by tar; a week later a parcel was found in the pillar box containing gelignite; on 2 January 1953 another explosive charge was found; the box was defaced again this time with paint; on 7 February it was attacked with a sledgehammer, causing such damage the door had to be taken away for repair. Finally, at 10 p.m. on 12 February the box was blown apart. The next day, a Lion Rampant, the Scottish royal standard, was laid on its remains. This dynamic performance of Scottishness took place, with a certain ironic piquancy, on the junction of Gilmerton Road with Walter Scott Avenue. Given Scott’s role in imagining versions of Scotland, England and Britain discussed later, there is a symmetry in his nominal link to this event that the novelist himself might have appreciated. The General Post Office developed a specific Scottish cypher for its red pillar boxes north of the border. When the pillar box was replaced there was no EIIR, only the Crown of Scotland. No further pillar boxes with the cypher EIIR are thought to have been set up permanently in Scotland.20 The issue remains live, however: through apparent inadvertence an EIIR pillar box was erected in Dunoon in August 2018 only to be removed in short order in face of local protests.21 The opposition in some Scottish quarters, not just nationalist, to the idea that the Queen be entitled ‘Elizabeth II’ led to the matter being taken by John McCormick to the Court of Session for adjudication in McCormick vs the Lord Advocate. McCormick, a nationalist, was Glasgow University’s Rector. He had advised the students who temporarily repatriated the Stone of Destiny in 1951. The judgement confirmed that there was no statutory provision governing the numbering of a sovereign, it indeed being a matter of royal prerogative. In making the ruling, however, the Lord President, Lord Cooper, the most senior judge in Scotland, made the following observation: The principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law. It derives its origin from Coke and Blackstone, and was widely popularised during the nineteenth century by Bagehot and Dicey, the latter having stated the doctrine in its classic form in his Law of the Constitution. Considering that the Union legislation extinguished the Parliaments of Scotland and England and replaced them by a new Parliament, I have difficulty in seeing why it should have been supposed that the new Parliament of

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Great Britain must inherit all the peculiar characteristics of the English Parliament but none of the Scottish Parliament, as if all that happened in 1707 was that Scottish representatives were admitted to the Parliament of England. That is not what was done.22

What Cooper was saying in a constitutional doctrine that can be traced back to, inter alia, the Declaration of Arbroath is that, notwithstanding any English interpretations of the Treaty of Union, which will be discussed in the next chapter, Westminster or ‘the queen-in-parliament’ is not sovereign in Scots law. Indeed, his argument is based clearly on the provision in that treaty that preserved the force and integrity of Scots law. The Government of the day might have appealed this ruling by the Lord President through the House of Lords. It chose not to do so, perhaps for fear of rocking the boat further. Cooper’s statement of law remains in force in Scotland to this day, unchallenged. It is often simply not referred to, but time and again in the run-up to and since the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, the principle has been enunciated, not just by the Scottish National Party, of the sovereignty in Scotland of the Scottish people, not the queen-in-parliament. Nonetheless, the 1998 Scotland Act setting up the Scottish Parliament states quite clearly ‘Sovereignty remains with Westminster in all cases’. Such legislation overrules, but does not extinguish, Scottish perceptions of the long-standing constitutional position in Scotland. The next chapter addresses some conflicting—and conflicted—consequences of that with regard to conceptions of ‘Scottishness’ and ‘Britain’. A key example of this conflictedness and an important assertion—and, indeed, performance—of Scottishness was the signing in 1989 of the ‘Claim of Right’. This document’s year of adoption and title echoes the 1689 Claim of Right. This was an act of the old Scottish Parliament. That, in parallel to the English Bill of Rights, voted to remove James VII from office as king. This drew on George Buchanan’s arguments for the contractual nature of monarchy, which had drawn on the Declaration.23 Westminster and European parliamentarians from all parties—except the Scottish National Party (which did not feel it went far enough) and the Conservatives, plus Labour MP Tam Dalyell (who were unenthusiastic about its constitutional stance)—local authority councillors, and representatives of smaller parties and civic Scotland signed. This marked the document as a deliberate performance by a modern Community of the Realm. It begins by asserting:

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We, gathered as the Scottish Constitutional Convention, do hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of Government best suited to their needs, and do hereby declare and pledge that in all our actions and deliberations their interests shall be paramount.24

The performative nature of this event was further reflected by the significance of the place in which it was signed. This was the Assembly Hall in the centre of Edinburgh of the national church, the Church of Scotland. There, for many years the annual General Assembly of that church had met, as it still does, to debate issues of importance to the country and pass Acts on matters of church law. In the years when the Scottish Parliament did not operate following the 1706 Treaty and 1707 Acts of Union, in many ways that meeting served as a shadow Scottish parliament. Signing the Claim of Right in its modern venue was itself yet another way of enacting and performing Scottishness. This performance was reinforced on 4 July 2018. Then, the House of Commons, which conceives of sovereignty being embodied by the queenin-parliament, and asserts its own supremacy in matters of sovereignty, including over the decisions of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, passed without opposition an SNP motion with the following wording: That this House endorses the principles of the Claim of Right for Scotland, agreed by the Scottish Constitutional Convention in 1989 and by the Scottish Parliament in 2012, and therefore acknowledges the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of government best suited to their needs.25

It was entirely within the power of the Speaker to decline this motion if he considered it was constitutionally inappropriate. Yet, he accepted it, at the same time as refusing to accept a motion by other parties to add an amendment referring to the result of the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. It was within the power of the government—or indeed Labour—whips to defeat this motion because each on their own, if they so wished, could outnumber the votes of the SNP MPs. What in fact happened was that the motion was passed without the need for a vote. Yet, this motion asserts the sovereignty of the Scottish people as opposed to that of the House of Commons which otherwise claims UK-wide sovereignty. No doubt, it might be argued that such a motion carries in itself no practical implication. Nonetheless, as we shall see in the

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next chapter, from the beginning it was on the basis of such fudges that the Union of Scotland and England under the Treaty was achieved, and continues. A theme of this study is that differences arising from the different histories and constitutions of Scotland and England are often wilfully ignored. Alternatively, they are dealt with by a sometimes carefully calculated, sometimes wilful, or, as we will see, in some cases fundamentally ignorant, blindness to logical inconsistencies, both historically and in the present day. When (often seemingly calculated) wilfulness is involved, this appears to stem from a desire to overlook or play down these facts of difference. When arising from ignorance, it largely seems to stem from a lack of recognition that there are two nations. Their differences are embedded—not least in their Treaty of Union.

Notes 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 2. G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005 [1965]), p. 29. 3. William Ferguson, The Identity of the Scottish Nation: An Historic Quest (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 27. 4. Nicola Royan with Dauvit Broun, ‘Versions of Scottish Nationhood, c. 850–1707’, in Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock (eds), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 176. 5. I am grateful to Nicola Royan for making this point to me in a private exchange. 6. Walter Bower, Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, ed. D. E. R. Watt et al., 9 vols. (Edinburgh, 1987–1998), ii, pp. 249–250, quoted in Barrow, Robert Bruce, p. 294. 7. Transcription provided by the National Records of Scotland at https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files/research/declaration-of-arbroath/ declaration-of-arbroath-transcription-and-translation.pdf (accessed 7 September 2018). 8. Dauvit Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain from the Picts to Alexander III (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013 [2007]), p. 276 9. Broun, Scottish Independence, p. 263 and passim. 10. Ibid., p. 275. 11. Ibid., p. 263. 12. Ibid.

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13. Translation, National Records of Scotland, revised version complied by Alan Borthwick (2005), https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files/ research/declaration-of-arbroath/declaration-of-arbroath-transcriptionand-translation.pdf (accessed 3 December 2019). 14. Alexander Broadie, ‘John Duns Scotus and the Idea of Independence’, in Edward J. Cowan (ed.), The Wallace Book (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007), p. 83 15. George Buchanan, A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship Among the Scots, trans. and ed. Martin S. Smith and Roger A. Mason (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 2006), p. 101. Key sections of Buchanan’s argument are to be found on pp. 98ff. 16. G. W. S. Barrow, Scotland and Its Neighbours in the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon, 1992), pp. 15–16. 17. Translation, National Records of Scotland, op. cit. 18. Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney, ‘Introduction’, in Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 3. 19. I am grateful to Gavin Falconer for drawing my attention to the possible implications of this syntactic adjustment. 20. https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/lost-edinburgh-the-queen-and-theexploding-post-box-1-3529276 (accessed 14 September 2018). 21. The National, 17 August 2018, https://www.thenational.scot/news/ 16449389.new-eiir-postbox-sparks-fury-among-residents-of-scottishseaside-town/ (accessed 21 June 2019). 22. Loveland: Constitutional Law, Administrative Law and Human Rights 8e: Online Casebook, https://oup-arc.com/static/ 5c0e79ef50eddf00160f35ad/casebook_17.htm (accessed 3 December 2019). 23. Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London: Pimlico, 1992), p. 302. 24. House of Commons Library, https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ ResearchBriefing/Summary/CDP-2018-0171 (accessed 11 September 2018). 25. Ibid.

CHAPTER 3

The Treaty of Union, Scoto-Britishness and Anglo-Britain

The conception of Scotland’s national identity even—or especially— within the Union with England remains important, indeed critical, in a number of ways to the performance and nature of Scottishness. Although the meanings of terms like ‘nation’ may have changed since 1320, the performative act of the Declaration of Arbroath, as we have seen in the case of the Royal Scots Memorial, retains a significant place in broader Scottish culture. Indeed, it remains a point of reference, at least for Scots, in the unresolved differences between English and Scottish views of a British constitution. The unwritten nature of this means that such issues can remain unresolved in an apparently United Kingdom. Indeed, though the fundamental foundation document that led to the creation of the United Kingdom, the Treaty of Union, offers union, it quite explicitly does not offer unity. As Nicola Royan and Dauvit Broun put it, Certainly, the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 did not successfully unite Scotland either with itself or with England […] By 1707, rival views clashed head-on, and it was not possible to present a whole narrative of the commonweal. Scottish identity rested as much on its present laws and Church as it did on its king and its past.1

In this Scottish perspective, the Treaty and the subsequent Scottish and English Acts of Union are widely seen as enshrining a number of guarantees of the continuing independence of key aspects of Scottish culture and civic life. David McCrone has suggested, indeed, that the Union was less © The Author(s) 2020 I. Brown, Performing Scottishness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39407-3_3

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a marriage of convenience and more a mariage de raison.2 After all, fifteen of the treaty’s twenty-five articles are economic in their nature. This striking proportion underlines the treaty as in many ways a business document. (The French term applies, in fact, to a loveless marriage, in which commercial interest overrides compatibility. The failure to meet the conditions of such an arrangement lie at the heart of many of Georges Feydeau’s plays among other nineteenth-century, not to mention earlier and later, satiric, and often bitter, comedies. There, the mariage de raison also seems to imply that the ‘woman’ is ‘sold’ by her parents and that women are generally inferior to men.3 ) Other articles in this arranged marriage guarantee the continuation of Scottish institutions, including its own system of education, the establishment of the national church as Presbyterian and the autonomous Scottish legal system. Royan and Broun identify such factors as important to Scottish identity. Given this, since 1707 for Scots, whether unionist or nationalist, this document has held a crucial place in constitutional understanding. Presumably, in a mariage de raison harmony depends on meeting its reasoned conditions. On the other hand, in England, the Treaty and Acts of Union and their reasoned conditions are sometimes not even noticed as important constitutional documents. This may be because, often in English unionist discourse, the English version of the Act of Union is seen as simply an incorporating act, with England at the centre, doing the incorporating. As Colin Kidd argues, the ‘obvious de facto continuity of the historical English parliament after 1707 validated the ethnocentric notion that Britain’s political heritage resided in the history of English institutions’.4 However valid such ethnocentric validation may or may not be, certainly, if one searches online at the time of writing for ‘British constitutional documents’, while the standard Wikipedia entry mentions the Union documents, the British Library entry, dated 13 March 2015, does not. Under the general heading, ‘Britain’s unwritten constitution’ and below that in the section headed ‘The written documents of our unwritten constitution’, we find reference to the Magna Carta, which has little relevance to Scotland’s law now—although its provisions were a slogan adopted by participants in the libertarian 1820 Scottish Rising—and none at all before 1707. ‘Britain’s unwritten constitution’ is described by the British Library as follows: ‘First and foremost [of constitutional charters and documentation] is Magna Carta (1215), the “Great Charter of the Liberties of England”. […] “the first great public act of the nation”’.5 Other examples of written British constitutional documents offered are

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the 1258 Provisions of Oxford, the 1628 Petition of Right, the 1689 Bill of Rights and the 1701 Act of Settlement. None of these documents applies to Scotland. One scarcely has to ask what ‘nation’ is being referred to in this version of constitutional history, drafted for the British Library by Robert Blackburn, Professor of Constitutional Law at King’s College London. Here ‘British’ means ‘English’. Such aporia regarding the Union documents which actually established Britain as the UK—or any others significant in Scots law—is reflected in the March 2015 Summary Report on the UK Constitution of the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. This draws on a consultation document entitled A New Magna Carta and makes no mention of parallel Scottish documents.6 As McCrone, calling Scotland an ‘understated’ nation, observes, describing the UK as a nation-state seems to elide too many of the interesting questions about the alignment of cultural and political realms at both specific and theoretical levels.7

It also leads to occasional howlers, even from distinguished historians. James (now Jan) Morris, for example, in discussing Britain and empire once asserted ‘In general the British respected indigenous laws, where they made sense, and seemed just: within their own islands, after all they allowed a quaint degree of legal latitude to the Scots’.8 Indeed, the official Home Office primer for those aspiring to British citizenship, A Life in the United Kingdom, is thoroughly confused about the legal processes that led to the Union: it says ‘The Act of Union, known as the Treaty of Union in Scotland, was therefore agreed in 1707, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain’.9 The Treaty, of course, was signed by both countries as equals, while each passed in its own parliament its own Act of Union. A major Westminster department seems now, in a supposedly authoritative document, to have no grasp at all of the process involved. It reads as if it is making it up as it goes along. This is risible in its own way, but such ignorance is symptomatic of a wider problem to which Murray Pittock points: It has been both the strength and the weakness of British state formation that its contractualist element has been largely both unwritten and non-negotiable, based on the absolute sovereignty of Parliament and the

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centralization of State functions. Complacency regarding these has led to an inability to respond contractually to subordinate national demands.10

Even, one might remark, when such ‘demands’ regarding the nature of the constitution itself are apparently enshrined in the foundational contract for the ‘United Kingdom’. Morris’s Anglocentric depiction of Scots law shows its distinguished continental pedigree clearly to be beyond the author’s quaint ken. Indeed, Morris’s assertion manages to imply that Scotland is not part of Britain: ‘the British […] allowed a quaint degree of legal latitude to the Scots’. The roots of this lie in the conflation of Britain and England, a frequent phenomenon, as we have seen, in English-based discourse. This creates an illusion that Scotland and England, let alone the other nations of the United Kingdom, are united in the same country after the image of England. In this, they form a modern Anglo-British nation, with Scotland, not to mention Wales or Northern Ireland, apparently thought of as assimilated. As Tom Nairn observes, the ‘“occluded” bit of this bargain [the Treaty of Union] is [that] the resultant multinational character would remain of great importance to the ‘satellite’ (or weaker partner), and yet—in the longer term—be largely hidden from the dominant one’.11 Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smith offer an insight into such conflation of ‘English’ and ‘British’ and a developing pushback against it: Until recently, the elision of English into British (and vice versa) seemed to occupy an unproblematic position at the core of this construction [of a putative English ‘core’ with a grouping of ‘nations’ organised around it], although the ideological implications of this process are now questioned on a number of fronts. The concept of ‘margins’ also indicates that in Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Wales, countries of small and sparse populations have been seen as struggling to preserve political and cultural identities in the face of increasing demographic and economic concentration in England and, more recently, in the south of England. Historically these areas have been positioned, through linguistic markers of difference, as the ‘Celtic margins’.12

The different national discourses within the United Kingdom have allowed, even encouraged, a certain fudging in which the so-called Celtic ‘marginal’ nations can assert their identities. Meanwhile, those identifying as ‘English’ often appear to perceive their identity as synonymous

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with ‘Britishness’, while tolerating a ‘Celtic fringe’. To complicate matters, as David Goldie comments, it is difficult ‘to see the work of union as the operation of distinct and unaltering cultural identities’.13 He points to the unstable notion of British identity and its constant renegotiation, not least given the instabilities that ‘might exist in the negotiators themselves’.14 To be fair, it has often seemed to suit both signatories to the Treaty of Union since the 1706–1707 settlements not to resolve such thorny issues too clearly. Moreover, Goldie points to a later nineteenth-century phenomenon which certainly has its roots before the Union and continues to prevail: ‘The presence of influential Scottish people in England, and powerful English people in Scotland, created not only a hybrid or synthetic Britishness, but also an alteration in the nature of both England and Scotland themselves’.15 Attempts in the seventeenth century—like that in 1606 by James VI and I—to bring about parliamentary union had failed because of fundamental differences between the two national communities’ sense of their identity and rights. The treaty was only deliverable in 1707 because it was accepted that it was still not possible to resolve those differences. Let us remember that a key trigger for the Union was not a powerful sense of common identity, but, arguably, the sectarian wish to protect the protestant succession after the Scottish Parliament had passed an act making it clear it retained the right to nominate a different sovereign to England. Queen Anne and the protestant establishment forced through the Union against popular resistance in both countries, while preserving the economic interests of the negotiating classes. An element in these interests was a desire to obviate the impact of the failure of the 1698–1699 Darien scheme where a Scottish attempt to set up a colony had been thwarted by poor Scottish planning, Spanish hostility and English blockade. The Treaty’s overarching aim was to produce a political settlement that would sustain commercial and, post-Darien, colonial development as well as, so far as possible, a peaceful settlement between the two signatory nations. Since 1707, as we have noted, the tendency has been to talk of the process of union as the result of an ‘Act of Union’, as if there were only one. This has created the sense of a unifying single act, usually seen as that passed at Westminster. Hence, perhaps the confused Home Office farrago just cited. Relegated into the background is the fact that, rather than being simply a unified nation-state as might have existed after an act of conquest or, indeed, outright colonialism, the United Kingdom is based on an alliance treaty between two sovereign

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states. Further, the nature of that alliance was changed in 1800/1801 by Ireland’s formal inclusion and, over a century later, by the withdrawal of the bulk of Ireland in 1922. Perhaps part of the point of this procedure is that an Act of the parliament sited where the joint parliament now sits can easily be misrepresented as an Act of the new 1707 parliament. To foreground the performative act which generated the ‘United Kingdom’ as a treaty would highlight its international nature. It also would admit the potential impact of Charles de Gaulle’s cynical and somewhat sexist view of the evanescent nature of such agreements: ‘Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last’.16 As seen by Scots, as part of the Treaty’s conditions, reinforced by its confirming Acts, it maintains a separate Scottish identity in key areas of public life equal to that of England. This is despite a view expressed at the time of signing by senior English figures that appeared to assume subservience of Scotland to England: John Smith, Speaker of the House of Commons, for example, remarked, ‘We have catch’d Scotland and we will bind her fast’. By contrast, from a Scottish perspective, the Treaty’s articles 19–21 preserved the autonomy of Scots law, which would ‘remain in the same force as before’: its senior court, the Court of Session would ‘remain in all time coming within Scotland’. As Tom Devine summarises these articles, they buttressed and safeguarded the vested interests of those who mattered in Scottish society. Issues of integration within the Union were to be confined to parliament, fiscal issues and public law. As well as the rights of the Kirk, already protected through the Act of Security […], Scottish private law was maintained as were heritable offices, superiorities and heritable jurisdictions [existing privileges of the landed classes].17

Also guaranteed were the existing privileges of the royal burghs, while universities and schools and the poor law were left undisturbed, no matter their importance to civil society. It also preserved other Scottish institutions, civic and religious. The guarantee that the Church of Scotland would remain the established church in Scotland allows the piquant fact that the Episcopalian head of the Church of England, the Queen, becomes Presbyterian when crossing the Border into Scotland (and, presumably, instantaneously, reverts to Episcopalianism on crossing back). Her family join in this version of transubstantiation: Princess Anne’s daughter Zara Phillips was married in Edinburgh in 2011 under

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the rites of the Church of Scotland, though it is questionable whether she and her husband, the former England rugby international Mike Tindall, go frequently to Scottish Kirk services. Her mother, Princess Anne, married Tim Laurence at Crathie Kirk in 1992, not least because at that time the Church of England, unlike the then more progressive Church of Scotland, did not yet permit marriage by a divorcee when the former spouse was still living. In England the Queen is head of the church, run by a clerical hierarchy, with an archbishop as Primus at the top; in Scotland, she is simply another member of an egalitarian kirk, run by a series of governing courts from individual churches’ kirk sessions to, at national level, the annual General Assembly in which ministers and laypeople have equal voting rights. Even in these less religious times, the Treaty protects substantially different practices in the two national churches to the extent that in common parlance the Episcopalian Church in Scotland is often called simply the ‘English Church’. As Cairns Craig observes, It is not the dramatic upsurge of the Scottish economy in the eighteenth century that makes Scotland internationally important but that Scotland, through those institutions which the Union left intact – the law, the universities, the church – as well as its very productive publishing industry, retained a context in which it was possible to interpret its economic transformation in radically new ways. Equally, it was the reproduction of elements of Scotland’s distinctive cultural infrastructure that made its contributions to the British Empire more than just a repetition of English cultural forms.18

These may seem arcane issues. In a way, however, not always understood furth of Scotland, Scottish identity, whether unionist or nationalist, as Craig so eloquently points out, is bound up with institutions guaranteed by the Treaty of Union: Scots law, education and even the established church and, by symbiosis, other faith groups and their agnostic opponents in Scotland. The civic institutions of Scotland have remained different from those of the rest of the UK since 1707 even in minor detail: the chief citizen of a burgh—not ‘borough’—is, for example, ‘provost’, not ‘mayor’. Taken as a whole, the preservation of the integrity of these institutions, however minor individual details may be, is no slight matter. As McCrone observed in 2005, people think of themselves as Scots – and they do, in increasing numbers, over being British – because they have been educated, governed and

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embedded in a Scottish way. It is a matter of governance, not of sentiment; and, if anything, the latter derives from the former. In other words, people think of themselves as Scottish because of the microcontexts of their lives reinforced by the school system.19

These microcontexts contributed in the nineteenth century to the development of a phenomenon described by Graeme Morton as Unionist Nationalism.20 Unionist Nationalism considered that the whole success of the United Kingdom was founded in the fact it was not quite a United Kingdom. It was governed by a treaty that guaranteed important differences between Scotland and England on a basis of equality of esteem and constitutionality. Occasionally Scots law was overruled: as early as 1711 the Kirk objected that the votes of English, or at least Anglican, members passed the Patronage Act which suppressed parishioners’ right to appoint their ministers in favour of local landowners. Nevertheless, equality of esteem and constitutionality was, broadly speaking, the generally accepted discourse in Scottish society throughout the centuries of Empire. Certainly, it was one to which Walter Scott adhered. It is still a widely held view among Scots, whether or not unionist. This is reinforced, as Craig has pointed out, by ‘organised institutional structures for the support of its culture’.21 He cites a long list of these, including the Scottish National Library, Scottish National Galleries, Creative Scotland, the National Museum of Scotland, the Scottish Poetry Library and the Scottish Football Association. This list is far from comprehensive and might be extended beyond cultural institutions to include, inter alia, such bodies as the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator, the Scottish Trades Union Congress and the Scottish Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Specific Scottish differences in national development and identityformation as outlined in the last chapter underlie Scottish legal thought and perceptions of the Treaty of Union’s nature and meaning. English discourse, however, as we noted earlier in this chapter, often sees the Act of Union as simply an incorporating act, with England as the incorporating core, in a sense a conquest rather than union, as suggested by Speaker Smith’s remark. The most obvious symptom of that, one commented on ad nauseam, but nonetheless a recurring practice, is how often, not just in English discourse, but, in overseas practice, the words ‘England’ and ‘English’ are used for ‘Britain’ and ‘British’: the Turkish translation of ‘The British Council’ is ‘Ingiliz Kültür Heyeti’, just one example of

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a widely occurring phenomenon. Given the imperialism in which Scots played a full part we will examine later in this volume, this is an understandable, but nevertheless inaccurate use of language. Such a conception of a straightforward assimilation of Scotland into ‘England’ or ‘Englishness’ is also problematic. This is because what actually brought about the union was, as just outlined, neither the Acts in Edinburgh or Westminster parliaments in themselves, but an international treaty between the sovereign states of Scotland and England ratified by those two Acts. At the same time, however, as Anglocentric resistance to the forms of a union of equals actually agreed in the Treaty was to be found, a number of Scottish intellectuals were concentrating on promoting the idea of Britain as an entity. As Royan and Broun point out, ‘Historiography had always been and remains a site of political argument and the quest for identity; arguably by the end of the seventeenth century, being a Scot came second to the kind of Scot you wanted to be’.22 Given this, it is not entirely remarkable how many of the enduring icons and artistic expressions of ‘Britain’ were promoted by Scots. There were so many examples that I have described their activities as a whole as the ‘(Rule) Britannia’ project. Following the Union, many educated Scots believed in—and others decided to make the best of—the mariage de raison. While Englishmen like Speaker Smith often seemed to see the Union as the taking over by England of Scotland, many Scottish cultural leaders developed the conception of the newly created United Kingdom of Great Britain and of ‘Britishness’. A Scot, John Arbuthnot, physician to Queen Anne and friend of Jonathan Pope, was a proselytiser for the Union his Queen wished to see.23 He created the iconic figure of John Bull, an embodiment of England with his sister Peg embodying Scotland, as soon as in 1712. David Hume was later to protest, as Colin Kidd puts it, that ‘the myths which had accreted to English historiography had created an obnoxious chauvinism’,24 quoting Hume: ‘John Bull’s prejudices are ridiculous; as his insolence is intolerable’.25 Indeed, as Kidd outlines, ‘English history became the basis of British identity, but subject to a “quality control” check from Scotland’s sophisticated literati’.26 Another Scot, James Thomson, meantime, wrote the words of ‘Rule Britannia’ in 1740, as a concluding number for the Englishman Thomas Arne to set to music, when he and his compatriot David Mallet wrote The Masque of Alfred, a Brittanicising version of early English history. Meanwhile, Union-minded parents, after the Jacobite’s rebuff at Sheriffmuir in 1715, gave their children Hanoverian names: the middle name

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of the novelist Tobias Smollett (born 1721) is ‘George’. Smollett’s own work may be seen to embody swaying sympathies: ‘Tears of Scotland’ written in the wake of Culloden with lines like ‘Mourn, hapless Caledonia! Mourn/ Thy banish’d peace, thy laurels torn!’ offers a contrast to the tone of Humphry Clinker (1771), arguably a precursor to sentimental nineteenth-century Unionist Nationalism.27 As Kidd argues, ‘North Britishness was an aspiration towards full British participation in English liberties; a set of intellectual approaches to the history of English liberty and a celebration of the growing contribution made by post-Union Scots to the domestic security and imperial expansion of the new British state’.28 Yet, however the (Rule) Britannia project led by Scots proceeded, the sense of difference within the Union remained. As Devine puts it, ‘Westminster was sovereign in theory but in practice the real business of running Scotland remained the responsibility of Scots and institutions inherited from the period before 1707’.29 Devine goes on to observe, ‘The enduring stability of the Union was based historically in large part on Westminster’s traditional recognition of Scottish nationhood and identity, and a balanced partnership between Scotland and England within the Union state’.30 In this context, Walter Scott who shaped so many of our modern perceptions is a key figure in establishing still-prevailing views not only of modern ‘Scotland’ and ‘Britain’, but even ‘England’. The ways in which Scott imagines a British union in which Scottish identity is at least as important as English in its maintenance are embedded in his novels. This is especially so perhaps in Rob Roy (1817) with its antithetical counterpointing of the cousins, Highland cattle-trader and reputed brigand Rob Roy and pragmatic Glasgow unionist businessman Bailie Nicol Jarvie. Scott’s public actions offer parallels to his literary performance— in, for example, having George IV visit Edinburgh in 1822 and wear a kilt (a performance we will return to in Chapter 7) or in his 1826 campaign to maintain the independence of the Scottish system of banknotes which still pertains. Then, his pamphlets saw off another attempt, as it was seen at the time, by Westminster to flout the Treaty of Union. As Caroline McCracken-Flesher outlines the situation, Scott considered that Westminster’s presumption that Scottish banking practices could be legislated in England’s behalf showed Scottish protections embedded in the Treaty of Union were falling into abeyance. There was no separate space in which to perform things Scottish. From a British perspective, national

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desires, driven by England, restricted the different performances of Scottishness. Both Scott and the nation suddenly were revealed as plotted elsewhere, and loss.31

Yet, under Scott’s campaigning pressure this plotting ‘elsewhere’ was confounded. Such assertions, even—in a sense—creations, of Scottishness by Scott are widely recognised, affecting to this day perceptions of ‘Scottishness’. Scott also shaped modern perceptions of an English past and ‘Englishness’ in such novels as Ivanhoe (1819) and Kenilworth (1821). In these, he can be seen to be forming the very ways in which we now see medieval and Elizabethan England. The interaction of such performances, their organising spirit and their expression of imaginings and celebrations of national communities, not only Scottish, is a key theme of this volume. Anglo-British attitudes, such as arose in 1826, can be seen to arise from deep-rooted English chauvinism. This was not obviated by the achievement of a parliamentary union. Further, it was often expressed in hostility to Scots, not to mention other nations within the United Kingdom. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the slighting term for a Scot was ‘Sawney’, a version of the Scots pronunciation of Sandy, the shortened form of Alexander. This was the dismissive term for a Scot until the 1880s when ‘Jock’, an anglicised version of the older Scots pronunciation of ‘Jack’, seems to have taken over. Often this hostility had a political basis, for example in John Wilkes’s resistance to the administration of Lord Bute as Prime Minister in 1762–1763. It also presented itself in caricature: a James Gillray cartoon of 1779, ‘Sawney in the Bog-House’, now held in the London National Portrait Gallery, shows a kilted Scot in a convenience with two seats, one leg through one seat and the other through the other, clearly unused to the use of such a facility. The doggerel on the print itself reads: Tis a bra’ bonny Seat o my soul Sawney cries I never beheld sic before with my Eyes Such a place in aw Scotland I never could meet For the High & the Low ease themselves in the Street.32

Robust caricature is an important political freedom, of course, and it does not do to be over-sensitive. This cartoon, however, can be seen to embed Anglo-British prejudice, portraying Scots—at the time in the midst of the highly civilised Scottish Enlightenment—as typically backward and

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uncouth, so uncivilised they had no idea how to use a privy. Further, the musculature of the thighs on Gillray’s Sawney is highly exaggerated and his hand holds up the apron of his kilt so that the way it hangs suggests male genitals of considerable dimensions. Within this caricature, alongside the explicit anti-Scottishness there is something of the exoticising of the Other, the wild and possibly sexually dangerous Scot. One does not wish to overstate the case. The kilted Scot has attracted such curiosity in other cultures too. There are cartoons from France after Waterloo of French ladies finding all kinds of excuses to bend over to peep up the kilts of Scottish soldiers of the occupying army in order to enjoy a view of what they might fail to conceal. Of course, one would not suggest Scots are innocent in such matters of prejudice: in earlier centuries it was common knowledge among Scots that you could tell Englishmen because they all had tails. In the broad scheme of things, these are petty issues, but what they do not reflect is shared and welcoming perceptions of unity leading to or consequent on equal membership of a United Kingdom. As Kidd has suggested, Anglo-Britishness and a residual Scottish national consciousness were, and are still, symbiotically linked and predicated on the failure of British ideological integration. The ideological consequences […] are therefore the triumph of Anglo-Britishness; the dismal failure to construct a wholehearted ‘national’ British identity different in form from loyalty to crown or to Empire; and a continuing Scottish national identity weakened by a loss of ideological coherence.33

Iain Chambers offers us a view that illuminates why it might be that English nationalism might express itself as a chauvinist Anglo-Britishness: Here we face the possibility of two perspectives and two versions of ‘Britishness’. One is Anglo-centric, frequently conservative, backward-looking, and increasingly located in a frozen and largely stereotyped idea of national culture. The other is ex-centric, open-ended, and multi-ethnic. The first is based on a homogeneous ‘unity’ in which history, tradition, and individual biographies and roles, including ethnic and sexual ones, are fundamentally fixed and embalmed in the national epic, in the mere fact of being ‘British’. The other perspective suggests an overlapping network of histories and traditions, a heterogeneous complexity in which positions and identities, including that of the ‘national’, cannot be taken for granted, are not interminably fixed but are in flux.34

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Such an ‘Anglo-centric, frequently conservative, backward-looking’ perspective can be seen in such books as Jeremy Paxman’s The English (1998). There, time and again, we see Paxman’s conflation of ‘English’ and ‘British’. At one point, for example, he says, quite explicitly, ‘By the end of the nineteenth century the British (for which read English) way of doing things was a model for the rest of the world’.35 Here is not only quite explicit synonymising of ‘British’ and ‘English’, but Paxman’s English nationalism goes to his post-imperialist head: one doubts the contemporary French, say, or Americans would have concurred with his comment that the English-meaning-British way was ‘a model for the rest of the world’. Certainly, Paxman’s famously aggressive interrogative manner was in evidence when interviewing figures who stand outside an Anglo-British vision, like former SNP leader and First Minister, Alex Salmond. A notorious example may be found in an interview, available on YouTube, of Salmond on 19 April 2011, just before the election that led to Salmond’s forming a majority government. Paxman introduced the interview by asking Salmond what his ‘country might be like if he gets his way and manages to bust up the United Kingdom’. Later, Paxman puts words in Salmond’s mouth, accusing his stance of being premised on being ‘oppressed by the dreadful English’, a position Salmond does not hold. In this interview Paxman suggested Salmond was like Robert Mugabe seeking a one-party state, a remark that caused Salmond to laugh out loud and Mark Hennessy of The Irish Times to observe I’m sure Alex Salmond will be very, very glad if he was to get more interviews like that by English presenters. It’s certainly the picture of the patronising Englishman, and that’s going to feed into the debate both in Scotland and indeed the attitudes that perhaps will be taken abroad when people are looking at this from an outside audience.36

Underlying Paxman’s attitude and that of the reporting of other conservative Anglocentric journalists (some of whom, are, of course, Scottish) on current debates about the future of Britain is a surviving English nationalist hostility. This is perhaps more subtle, but nonetheless as substantial, as that in the cartoon of Sawney in the bog-house. Michael White of The Guardian, for example, reporting on a 2012 party conference, having quoted then-Home Office minister Jeremy Browne as saying ‘There were large numbers of people in the previous government who were coming here on visas related to activities they were not undertaking’, added

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‘He probably meant all those cabinet Scots’.37 Perhaps, White thought of Tony Blair himself in this category, although many Scots perceived Blair as English. Hugo Young, also in The Guardian, could write in 1998, just before the (re-)establishment of the Scottish Parliament that English resentment at devolution would ensure that Gordon Brown was the ‘last Scotch Chancellor’, the form of the national adjective presumably chosen deliberately.38 As Pittock has remarked, The knee-jerk hostility often visible to what some see as Scotland’s special pleading for a difference greater than Yorkshire’s is often, on close examination, seen to be an anger at perceived theft. Scotland has made claims for its own territoriality: and as Britons, many English believe that Scotland belongs to them.39

Given Paxman’s hostility to Salmond it may be relevant to note that Paxman was born in Leeds, a city in Yorkshire. What Paxman and White demonstrate in their underlying and often explicit conflation of Britain and England—and their compulsive desire, or even need, to disparage Scots and Scottishness—is what Michael Billig calls ‘Banal Nationalism’. This he discusses as follows: The banal episodes, in which nationhood is mindlessly and countlessly flagged, tend to be ignored by sociologists. [… This] sociological forgetting is not fortuitous; nor is it to be blamed on the absent-mindedness of particular scholars. Instead, it fits an ideological pattern in which ‘our’ nationalism (that of established nations, including the United States of America) is forgotten: it ceases to appear as nationalism, disappearing into the ‘natural’ environment of ‘societies’. At the same time, nationalism is defined as something dangerously emotional and irrational: it is conceived as a problem, or a condition, which is surplus to the world of nations. The irrationality of nationalism is projected on to ‘others’.40

As Billig implies, such banal nationalism may proliferate when a nation is perceived as ‘natural’ and ‘neutral’. The irony here, however, is that in their banal English nationalism—which some may seek to justify as a reaction against the Scots apparently having their cake (through devolution) and eating it (through retaining parliamentary and Cabinet representation at Westminster)—such observers and politicians appear to believe they are attacking Scottish nationalism from a position of British ‘neutrality‘. Such

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enactments, in these cases of unionist ‘Britishness-as-Englishness’, represented as non-nationalist, embody cultural capital, as defined by Pierre Bourdieu: Cultural capital in its objectified state presents itself with all the appearances of an autonomous, coherent universe which, although the product of historical action, has its own laws, transcending individual wills.41

What we are observing here is Anglo-British cultural capital embodied in the unionist state whose premises and groupthink these commentators take for granted. This is not to deny that there is a parallel form of cultural capital invested in versions of ‘Scottishness’. In that case, however, it may be included within both unionist and nationalist standpoints, as we shall see in later chapters. On the other hand, the English nationalism embedded in the implicit conceptions of ‘Anglo-Britishness’ we have noted here (or one might add without much danger of controversy in the United Kingdom Independence Party or the Brexit Party) is very much about asserting unionism within an Anglo-British United Kingdom. This is conceived of as adequately named ‘England’. Many of the adherents taking this line can be seen to follow in the lead of English writers who, as Dauvit Broun describes it, ‘had since (at least) the late tenth century seen England and Britain as synonymous’.42 They can also be seen to have supported the more xenophobic aspects of the Brexit campaign and since, not least in the form of the Tory European ‘Research’ Group. One of the contexts of performance, then, that this study considers is the universes of discourse in which Scottish (and English) commentators have operated when discussing national identities as applied to ‘Scotland’, ‘Britain’ and ‘England’. In this perspective, whatever one’s view of Alex Salmond’s politics, it is clear in the interview cited that it is not he who is making trouble, nor, to be fair, Paxman—at least it seems at a conscious level. What emerges are differences in perceptions, apparently widening, on the nature of Scottishness and Britishness, their relationship and their potential impact on the political settlement now in place in the United Kingdom. Even unionist Scots’ versions of Scotland’s cultural capital differ in significant ways from Anglo-British versions of cultural capital. Scottish cultural capital is perceived by many Scottish commentators as being embodied—not least under the Treaty of Union—in various Scottish identities. These include in particular, as we have noted, the Scottish legal system, with all that the system implies for Scottish cultures and

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senses of identity. Post-devolution, it is clearer than ever that the United Kingdom’s unity depends on the turning of a blind eye to unresolved differences in discourse, which nonetheless increasingly demands attention, not least given the existence of a Scottish parliament. In this process the intrusion of a strong Scottish nationalist movement which insists on not turning a blind eye to such differences is perceived as, at the very least, disruptive in a way apparently incomprehensible to those whose values lie in Anglo-Britain. They threaten, in Paxman’s elegant phrase, ‘to bust up the United Kingdom’, as if the issue were comparable to a marital breakdown. More seriously in the context of Brexit, they have led to Tory politicians apparently seeking to row back or undermine the powers of the Scottish parliament. Personalising the matter—as we have seen Paxman do or when politicians seek to ignore the widespread support in Scotland for the SNP by simply focusing their opposition to that support on the person of Nicola Sturgeon—is to hide from the fundamental questions the United Kingdom now faces. Indeed, when one remembers Jeremy Corbyn’s widely reported response during a 2018 visit to Scotland that he did not think Scotland could have its own legal system, the possibility arises that Anglo-Britishness is based on casual ignorance. A key area where differing perspectives are unresolved and constitutional legality and everyday perceptions support differing perspectives lies in the role and standing of the Scottish Parliament. Perhaps, a fundamental tension was always bound to arise between any such devolved institution and the sovereign Westminster Parliament. In fact, senior Westminster parliamentarians like Enoch Powell and Tam Dalyell foresaw such problems when they raised objections to plans for a Scottish Assembly being developed in the 1970s. In a Commons debate on devolution on 4 February 1975, Powell said, ‘the experience of our forefathers in Ireland is as drastic an object lesson as we could require’, arguing that anything the Scots wanted would have to be instead of, not as well as, the Westminster Parliament and that the ‘House of Commons brooks no competition and no concurrent authority in any part of the realm’. He went on, in January 1976, to argue in the debate on the Devolution Bill that it was ‘not possible for the same electorate to be represented in two legislative assemblies unless the British unitary state became federal, or its constituent parts separated and had their separate sovereignties recognized’.43 Perhaps in confirmation of Powell’s doubts, one widely held Scottish view of what had happened with the devolution of powers following the 1997 referendum may be illustrated most vividly by the opening moments of the first

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meeting of the Scottish Parliament, on 12 May 1999, to swear in members. Then, before a Presiding Officer could be appointed, the most senior MSP present took the chair. This was Winnie Ewing, an SNP veteran of both Westminster and Brussels parliaments. Her opening words were ‘The Scottish Parliament adjourned on the 25th day of March 1707, is hereby re-convened’. No one demurred. Devolution seen from Scotland was a partial restoration of ancient powers, and that seemed a view held on that occasion by both Scottish unionists and nationalists present. Here, regarding the current constitutional position and the nature of devolution, Westminster and Holyrood can be seen yet again to diverge. Michael Gardiner has observed As far as the British government is concerned, devolution constitutes little more than a reshuffling of local power with no active change in the relation of self to society, whereas, understood from a personalist perspective, devolution is far more political, saving the representation of relationships from becoming a mere managerial activity.44

He goes on: ‘The British understanding of devolution might be described in terms of “transport” or “metaphor”, that is, ultimately purely vehicular […]’.45 What is more, when the Supreme Court has been asked to adjudicate on such matters as the principles behind, for example, Sewel motions, the convention that the Westminster Parliament will not ‘normally’ legislate on a devolved matter without the consent of the relevant devolved legislature, it has asserted the sovereignty of Westminster and its right to override decisions of the Scottish parliament and that Britain is a unitary state. Such a stance reflects a position Arthur Aughey identifies as ‘a view of British politics which not so much denied but discounted the multinationality of the Union [whose] assumptions conditioned much of the academic thinking about Britishness and the constitution in what may be called the social democratic years of the post-war United Kingdom’.46 Yet the matter can be more complex, as one famous case makes clear. In mid-2007, eight years after the Scottish Parliament had been set up, Tony Blair, then UK Prime Minister, struck a ‘deal in the desert’ with Colonel Gaddafi, then leader of Libya, part of which was effectively an agreement to release the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi. In fact, Blair, a Scot, born and educated in Edinburgh and a lawyer, should have known he had no such power, even before devolution. Scots law and

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its independence were, after all, guaranteed not principally by the Scotland Act 1998, setting up the Parliament, but by the Acts of Union of 1707. Megrahi was convicted under Scots law and a prisoner under Scottish jurisdiction. He could only be released through the Scottish justice system under the aegis of the Scottish Parliament. Following Gardiner’s hypothesis that ‘As far as the British government is concerned, devolution constitutes little more than a reshuffling of local power’, it seems entirely explicable that Blair and, presumably, the Foreign Office officials around him appeared not to be aware that his powers did not extend as far as he thought. Famously, before the referendum on a Scottish parliament, Tony Blair told journalists that the parliament would be the equivalent of a parish council. If the transfer of powers through devolution was seen simply as an administrative adjustment, then what Blair said may be dismissive, but is understandable. In fact, Blair could not and did not deliver on that part of the ‘deal in the desert’. Instead, Megrahi was released on compassionate grounds two years later in a separate process under provisions in Scots law. Gardiner’s insights go a long way to explain how a Westminster government delegation in Libya might consider itself sovereign over the administration of Scots law, when it plainly was not. Such differences in perception bedevilled relations between Holyrood and Westminster in the negotiations surrounding Brexit. When Scottish representatives sought to be present at key talks, the then-Home Office Minister Caroline Nokes, likened the Scottish Government to ‘any county council’, which would not have rights of attendance.47 Such a lack of knowledge of constitutional and historical realities is surprising enough in an MP, let alone in a government minister. It also reflects an attitude that minimises the role of the Scottish Parliament, diminishes a historic nation to the level of a county, and takes a default position of Westminster supremacy. This, as we have seen, is constitutionally right in Anglo-British legal terms, but runs counter to Scottish constitutional thinking. It is presumably such confusion about the complex relationship between Scotland and England and their separate legal systems that could lead a leading Conservative politician like Sajid Javid to describe Scottish devolution as ‘nothing short of constitutional vandalism’.48 Such attitudes can appear to some observers to embody Little England nationalism as much as anything else. Indeed, such comments may not be so surprising when one notes their quondam Prime Minister’s response in the House of Commons on 29 March 2017 to Angus Robertson, then SNP Commons leader.

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Challenged by him that Scotland had voted Remain, May replied, ‘My constituency voted Remain in the European Union. The point is that we are one United Kingdom and it was the vote of the whole United Kingdom’. While the final sentence is certainly true, the proposition of equivalence of a sovereign-nation signatory of the Treaty of Union with a single English constituency betrays a remarkable absence of contextual awareness. Further, it represents apparent ignorance, or perhaps rejection, of the nature of at least one inclusive definition of Britishness. Bernard Crick has observed that ‘British history, like Britishness as a concept or belief, is an overall, umbrella category, mainly political and legal, within which national cultures not merely exist, but influence each other’.49 The reduction of national entities to the level of county councils or individual English constituencies embodies a rejection of the very Britishness that Crick outlines by those who would, presumably seek to defend the Union. Or, perhaps, they would seek to defend only their limited version of it. One might have some sympathy with what, from a Scottish perspective, seems like historical and constitutional ignorance and confusion on the part of someone like Nokes, or indeed Theresa May. Yet, to compare Scotland to a county or constituency is to commit something of a faux pas, even a schoolchild’s howler. In 1991 in National Identity,50 Anthony D. Smith cited the fundamental features of national identity as follows: 1. an historic territory, or homeland 2. common myths and historical memories 3. a common, mass public culture 4. common legal rights and duties for all members 5. a common economy with territorial mobility for members.51 Many of these we will return to in discussion in later chapters, but clearly, Smith’s 1991 terms all apply historically and currently to Scotland, while 2 and 4 do not apply, and never have applied, to Britain as a whole. With regard to feature 2, despite the existence of British myths such as the post-war ones regarding Dunkirk or the Blitz spirit, there are also very different myths and historical memories, which have little meaning outside Scotland, whether about Robert the Bruce and William Wallace or the Declaration of Arbroath or the seventeenth-century covenanting wars.

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Meantime, even though they are often represented as British myths, such English mythic figures as King Alfred (despite the attentions of James Thomson and David Mallet), the Magna Carta and Henry VIII mean little in Scotland, except in the latter case, perhaps, as a wilfully destructive initiator of the invasive ‘Rough Wooing’ (1543–1551) of Mary Queen of Scots as a wife for his son. Meanwhile, many Brexiteer Tories have talked of the importance of the success of battles with mythic importance for the English like Agincourt and Crecy without seeming to recognise that they were among the few successes of a long war. This lost England all its territory in France but the Channel Islands and, for a time, Calais, and in it the Scots were France’s allies. With regard to Smith’s feature 4, of course, while there is a body of ‘common legal rights and duties for all members’ shared between Scotland and England, each operates in many cases under different legislation and certainly, even with regard to ‘common legal rights and duties’, always under different legal traditions and conventions. In 2001, in Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History,52 Smith developed his criteria as follows: 1. a process of formation, or growth, of nations; 2. a sentiment or consciousness of belonging to the nation; 3. a language and symbolism of the nation; 4. a social and political movement on behalf of the nation; 5. a doctrine and/or ideology of the nation, both general and particular.53 All of these newer criteria apply to Scotland as an individual nation, although with regard to 3 three languages are generally, if sometimes controversially, identified as of national standing, Scots and Gaelic being exclusive to Scotland, alongside English. It may be illuminating to conclude with a specific example of difference of meaning. The semiotics of the Official State Opening of the Scottish Parliament by the Queen on 1 July 1999 were substantially distinct from those of a Westminster State Opening. The Queen sat in the body of the kirk, amidst the people, not on a throne, wearing day clothes, not a state robe. This echoes her dress when, after her coronation in Westminster Abbey in 1953, the Queen came to Edinburgh to receive in St Giles Cathedral the Honours of Scotland, including the crown. Then, she arrived not in ceremonial robes, but again in day dress, something which

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some Scottish observers saw as an insult to Scotland, while it has been suggested that this decision was encouraged by Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister. It may be that he did not want Scotland to be seen in a position to claim equality in terms of the ceremonial involved in enthroning the Queen and wanted to avoid any issues around the symbols of Scottish sovereignty. Yet, her appearance on opening the Scottish Parliament in 1999 in day dress, however intended, created a different performance of the relationship of the Queen to a parliament in Britain to that at Westminster. As we have seen, since at least the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, sovereignty in Scots constitutional law has been argued to lie not with, as in England, the sovereign in parliament, but with the community, often now defined as ‘the people’. By performing her role in day dress in the midst, not set apart from, parliamentary members, the Queen consciously or not, performed in a costume that presented her as acceding to that principle, rather as she is in Scotland merely another church member and not head of the church. In general terms, such constitutional quibbles are of academic, rather than practical, interest. In Westminster’s terms and according to an Anglo-British reading of the Acts of Union, the pre-Union Scottish parliament was incorporated into the English parliament to make the British one, so that English conceptions of sovereignty prevail. The fudge that allows this view of sovereignty is, however, disturbed by the establishment of a Scottish parliament, one ‘re-established’ in Winnie Ewing’s formulation in a city and nation where Lord Cooper’s judgement remains formally unchallenged. Thus, it may be seen to expose underlying fault lines in Britishness and certainly reinforces, even demands, performances of Scottishness. Given the way the present Scottish parliament was set up, for many years diplomatic use of the Sewel convention left unspoken the power of Westminster to override Holyrood. There was tactful silence, each being allowed in effect to believe what suited them. One of the many unintended consequences of Brexit is that, as negotiations unfolded, that silence was no longer really possible. The desire of the Scottish Government, determined to protect the Remain-voting majority of Scots from the consequences of Brexit and arguing for a place at the negotiating table, led to legal action. This brought the Sewel convention to the attention of forensic analysis in open court, exposing it as a fudge with no legal force. The Supreme Court judges were critical in their determination of legislation containing such weasel words as ‘normally have recourse to’. In that context performance of Scottishness takes

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on further meanings. It is clear that in relations between conceptions of ‘Scotland’, ‘England’ and ‘Britain’, and indeed within those conceptions, commentators’ cultural capital differs according to whether their perspectives draw on coherent Scottish or English or Anglo-British universes. Variations of viewpoint must exist between those apparent coherences. These are such that many seemingly common terms like ‘British’ are in fact problematic, not least because they are often taken for granted. Part of this book’s thesis will be that in some cases the survival so far of the Treaty of Union has depended on both sides refraining from analysing too explicitly or defining too precisely what is meant by such common terms.

Notes 1. Nicola Royan with Dauvit Broun, ‘Versions of Scottish Nationhood, c. 850–1707’, in Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock (eds), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 183. 2. David McCrone, ‘Cultural Capital in an Understated Nation: The Case of Scotland’, The British Journal of Sociology, 56:1 (March 2005), p. 68. 3. I am grateful to Danièle and Jean Berton for emphasising this point to me. 4. Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity 1689–c. 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 205. 5. British Library, https://www.bl.uk/magna-carta/articles/britainsunwritten-constitution (accessed 13 September 2018). 6. House of Commons, https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commonscommittees/political-and-constitutional-reform/The-UK-Constitution. pdf (accessed 13 September 2018). 7. David McCrone, ‘Cultural Capital’, p. 67 8. James Morris, Pax Britannica (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 191. 9. The Home Office, Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents, third ed. (London: Home Office, 2017 [2013]), p. 38. 10. Murray Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 23. 11. Tom Nairn, After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland (London: Granta, 2000), p. 132. 12. Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smith, ‘Introduction: Crossing the Margins’, in Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smith (eds), Across the Margins: Cultural Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 2–3

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13. David Goldie, ‘Unspeakable Scots: Dialogues and Dialectics in the Scottish-British Literary Culture Before the First World War’, in Gerard Carruthers and Colin Kidd (eds), Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 260. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 276. 16. Attributed to President Charles de Gaulle, ‘On Franco-German Treaty Talks’, Time, 12 July 1963, in James Beasley Simpson, Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 8. 17. T. M. Devine, Independence or Union: Scotland’s Past and Scotland’s Present (London: Penguin, 2017), pp. 26–27. 18. Cairns Craig, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture Since the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 7–8. 19. David McCrone, ‘Cultural Capital’, p. 74 20. Graeme Morton, Unionist Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland, 1830– 1860 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1999). 21. Cairns Craig, Intending Scotland, p. 72. 22. Royan with Broun, ‘Versions’, p. 177. 23. Kidd, Subverting, p. 38. 24. Ibid., p. 211. 25. Hume to John Home of Ninewells, 26 March 1748 NS, Letters, 1.121: D. W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (1984: pbk edn., Chicago, 1985), pp. 247–271. 26. Kidd, Subverting, p. 212. 27. I am grateful to Craig Lamont for this illuminating insight. 28. Kidd, Subverting, p. 214. 29. T. M. Devine, Independence or Union: Scotland’s Past and Scotland’s Present (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 39. 30. Ibid., p. 170. 31. Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 142. 32. This may be viewed online at http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/ search/portrait/mw63175/Sawney-in-the-bog-house. 33. Kidd, Subverting, p. 272. 34. Iain Chambers, ‘Narratives of Nationalism: Being “British”’, in Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires (eds), Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993), pp. 153– 154, cited in Berthold Schoene, ‘The Union and Jack: British Masculinities, Pomophobia, and the Post-nation’, in Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smith (eds), Across the Margins: Cultural Identity and Change in the Atlantic Archipelago (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 87.

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35. Jeremy Paxman, The English (London: Penguin, 1999; first published, London: Michael Joseph, 1998), p. 65. 36. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akfN7bO_2Bc (accessed 15 September 2018). 37. The Guardian, 25 September 2012, p. 8. 38. I am grateful to Gavin Falconer for drawing my attention to this egregious example of Hugo Young’s practice, found by him at https:// archive.org/stream/TheGuardian1998UKEnglish/Jun%2004%201998% 2C%20The%20Guardian%2C%20%23125%2C%20UK%20%28en%29_djvu. txt. 39. Murray Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 142. 40. Michael Billig, ‘Banal Nationalism’, in Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman (eds), Nations and Nationalism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 185–186. 41. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in A. H. Halsey et al. (eds), Education: Culture, Economy and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 50. 42. Dauvit Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain from the Picts to Alexander III (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013 [2007]), p. 42. 43. I am grateful to Gavin Brown for drawing my attention to these statements (email: Monday 23 March 2019). 44. Michael Gardiner, ‘Literature, Theory, Politics: Devolution as Iteration’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 46. 45. Ibid., p. 47. 46. Arthur Aughey, ‘The Wager of Devolution and the Challenge to Britishness’, in Andrew Gamble and Tony Wright (eds), Britishness: Perspectives on the Britishness Question (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 137. 47. Quoted in The Sunday Herald, 1 April 2018, p. 2. 48. Reported in The Sunday National, 2 June 2019, p. 3. 49. Bernard Crick, ‘The Four Nations: Interrelations’, The Political Quarterly, 79:1 (2008), p. 72. 50. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991). 51. Anthony D. Smith, ‘Civic and Ethnic Nationalism’, cited in Spencer and Wollman (2005), p. 181. 52. Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (Cambridge: Polity 2001). 53. Cited in Nadine Holdsworth, Theatre and Nation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 5.

CHAPTER 4

Bards, Britishness, Buildings and Cultural Memory

Michael Dobson, discussing what he calls with regard to Shakespeare ‘The Making of the National Poet’, identifies elements in the process of achieving and reinforcing such national canonisation. These include preparation of scholarly editions of the poet’s work; publication of critical monographs analysing his text; promulgation of his plays in secondary and higher education; the creation of monuments in nationally significant public places; and promotion of Stratford-upon-Avon as a site of secular pilgrimage. If one substitutes other sites and literary genres, one can see how this process applies to other writers across the world, from Cervantes to Pushkin and including, of relevance to the current discussion, Robert Burns and Walter Scott. Dobson continues, ‘The fact that these ways of presenting and representing Shakespeare [and we might add such other writers as just listed] have endured for so long has tended to make their specifically Enlightenment origins and interests virtually invisible’.1 They have also obscured at least one underlying motivation for such designation. This is cultural nationalism. This certainly applies in terms of these writers’ being entered into and remembered in a national literary canon. As Jen Harvie reminds us, The act of remembering constitutes and produces identity, providing narratives or performances of events and times that are understood to define an individual or a community […] Different versions of the ‘same’ memory serve different social functions and produce different effects of power. […] Theatre and other forms of performance contribute importantly to the © The Author(s) 2020 I. Brown, Performing Scottishness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39407-3_4

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memory work of specific communities – especially […] national communities. […] Such performance engages audiences in negotiating, formulating, and changing their relationships to their pasts – and so also their presents and futures.2

The act of remembering, producing and performing—one might add embodying—identity is also promoted when such canonised writers have been placed on a quasi-sanctified, and even god-like, pedestal, literally in the case of their statues and monuments. As J. E. Young observes, Traditionally state-sponsored memory of a national poet aims to affirm the righteousness of a nation’s birth, even its divine election. The matrix of a nation’s monuments traditionally emplots the story of ennobling events, of triumphs over barbarism, and recalls the martyrdom of those who gave their lives in the struggle for national existence.3

Rather than state sponsorship in the cases we shall discuss, we find—what is at least as powerful—community sponsorship, often galvanised, led and endorsed by leading figures in relevant social hierarchies. Of course, while Young’s second sentence here would clearly fit neatly with the function of the Wallace Monument mentioned in the introduction, the literary figures we are now addressing can hardly be said to be in Young’s terms ‘martyrs’ in a national struggle. As we shall see, however, they are often presented as politico-cultural participants in such a ‘struggle for national existence’. In this, they are certainly seen as expressing cultural nobility, triumphing over barbarism and embodying versions of national righteousness. In short, as they enter the literary canon, they become canonised as national secular saints. Katie Trumpener has suggested that ‘nationalist antiquaries take up the bard as a figure of cultural situatedness and argue for a reading of aesthetic works as the expression of cultural practices and historical conditions’.4 She adds the rider, however, ‘English men of letters adopt the bard as a figure of cultural fragmentation and aesthetic autonomy’. In discussing Shakespeare’s canonisation, this chapter will tend to dispute this rider, at least with regard to the view of ‘English men of letters’ of their own English ‘bard’. In doing so, it recognises that Trumpener’s understanding of ‘bard’ is much more complex and oral-culturally grounded than is meant in its use by idolators of Shakespeare. A key moment in the process of Shakespeare’s canonisation was the 1769 Jubilee organised by David Garrick at Stratford-upon-Avon. This

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is often represented in retrospect as being inspired by the second centenary of Shakespeare’s birth in 1564, even if delayed. Christian Deelman, however, offers a corrective, noting that this event was not, like most later celebrations, to honour an anniversary of the bard. The start of it all, and the major purpose throughout, was the opening of the new Town Hall [in Stratford-upon-Avon], and the dedication of it and the statue [of Shakespeare] given by Garrick.5

Yet, whatever the roots of Garrick’s Jubilee, as Deelman goes on to observe The fact remains that, whether Garrick intended it or not, the Jubilee was commonly taken to be a celebration in honour of the genius of Shakespeare. It was this belief which led to much of the criticism [of the event]. It was also in this guise the Jubilee has its major effect. For it brought out into the open, and impressed upon the public at large, the idea of Shakespeare as a god above the rules of petty critics.6

The context out of which the Jubilee could be said to have this longerterm impact is revealing. The 1730s saw often-fierce debate, following the Hanoverian succession, about the future focus of British policy. On one side stood the Patriot view that ‘Britannia’ should, in James Thomson’s words, aspire to ‘rule the waves’ with a global and imperialist foreign and trade policy, as proposed by the anti-Court factions under the patronage of Frederick, Prince of Wales. On the other was policy focused on mainland Europe, favoured by George II and his prime minister, Robert Walpole. Artists were recruited on either side of this argument, as we saw in the case of the Scots Thomson and Mallet when they produced The Masque of Alfred, concluding with ‘Rule, Britannia’, set to music by Thomas Arne, their English composer. An artist did not need to be alive, of course, to be recruited into one or other side of this debate. Shakespeare was recruited as a figure who might represent sometimes ‘England’, sometimes ‘Britain’, but also, from very early on in the canonisation process, the globe, the imperial world which was the fundamental focus of Patriots’ interest. Dobson observes that, in 1739, Thomas Cooke identified Shakespeare ‘as one of the faiths of the ruling class, dividing Britain between […] staunch believers in Shakespeare and the Church of England [and …] schismatic followers of Harlequin [representing the fashion for Italian comedy] and

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John Wesley’.7 (Again we see the conflation of ‘Britain’ and ‘England’.) Dobson comments on the long-term impact of this phenomenon: [From the mid-eighteenth century onwards] Shakespeare has been as normatively constitutive of British national identity as the drinking of afternoon tea, and it is now probably as hard for any educated Briton to imagine not enjoying the former as it would be to imagine forgoing the latter.8

One has to note of Dobson’s elegant comment here that afternoon tea is possible because of the development of imperial trade. It is also, as an institution, a class-based phenomenon, available only to those who have leisure to partake. The ways Shakespeare embodies any version of national identity are, indeed, complex and multi-layered. Such complexity was there early. Dobson cites Edward Capell’s dedication to the Duke of Grafton of the 1768 Complete Plays of Shakespeare. This appeared just after the colonial victories of the Seven Years War. Capell’s dedication suggests worldwide presentation of Shakespeare’s plays represents ‘Britain’ worldwide. He describes the plays as ‘talk’d of wherever the name of Britain is talk’d of, that is […] wherever there are men’. Dobson argues that this suggests that Shakespeare’s developing ‘national, indeed, global, pre-eminence […] constitutes one of the central cultural expressions of England’s own transition from the aristocratic regime of the Stuarts to the commercial empire presided over by the Hanoverians’.9 Leaving aside the moot point as to how far the Stewarts—whether before or after they became ‘Stuarts’ with Mary—did or did not support commercial empire, a question which historians like, to name only three, Tom Devine in Scotland’s Empire,10 Michael Fry in The Scottish Empire 11 and even Linda Colley in her chapter in Britons entitled ‘A Scottish Empire?’,12 imply differing and telling perspectives or the extent to which the Hanoverians presided over non-aristocratic regimes, one again notes the ease with which even as eminent and careful a scholar as Dobson slides and slips here between ‘Britain’ and ‘England’ as identical entities. There are other indicators of the ways in which Shakespeare was developing in the 1730s as an embodiment of ‘Britain’, however defined. These stand alongside Cooke’s 1739 identification of the playwright ‘as one of the faiths of the ruling class’, placing staunch belief in him and the Church of England in one category. That identification positions him as an embodiment of England and its established church, but certainly not

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of Scotland. In 1734, meantime, Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham, a Patriot opponent of Walpole’s corruption, had his gardener William Kent design and build the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe. In this were placed busts of Alfred the Great, Bacon, Drake, Edward the Black Prince [commonly seen as a surrogate for Frederick, Prince of Wales, the Patriot prince whose explicit inclusion might have been too controversial at the time], Elizabeth I, Thomas Gresham, Hampden, Inigo Jones, Locke, Milton, Newton, Raleigh, Shakespeare and William of Orange. Later, John Barnard MP and Alexander Pope were added. In this pantheon of British greatness, not one Scot appears. While it is doubtful that all, or even many, of those included could be described as Patriots in Cobham’s terms, it is clear that here the playwright is being conscripted as one of Frederick’s sympathisers as well as a ‘British’ Worthy. After campaigns by a number of bodies including the Shakespeare Ladies Club, which in the 1730s pressed for more of his plays to be produced in London, a statue of Shakespeare was erected in 1741 in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. Dobson argues that the nature of this statue suggests that Shakespeare ‘is being claimed as an honorary epic poet, the British Worthy who immortalized his nation’s heroic age’13 and that by the 1760s ‘nationalist appropriation of Shakespeare’ could be seen in other media.14 Meantime, Stratford was becoming the more and more visited centre of a cult of the playwright, focused on buildings related to the writer, including his birthplace, and his last residence, New Place. Famously, Francis Gastrell, then-owner of New Place, reached the point in 1756 where he considered that being pestered by visitors was such a nuisance that he had the mulberry tree in its garden, supposedly planted by Shakespeare, chopped down. Thus, he hoped to reduce the nuisance he felt. Locals, however, were enraged and stoned his windows, although, seeing a business opportunity, a local entrepreneur bought the logs from the felled tree. For many years afterwards, visitors were sold items which may or may not have been carved from those Shakespearean mulberry logs. Such fetishisation of the mulberry tree marks yet another dimension of the canonisation of Shakespeare as a national icon. Meantime, after more trouble between Gastrell and the local community, he took the draconian step in 1759 of having the house itself demolished. The force of Gastrell’s actions may seem—no doubt was—excessive, but they also mark the intensity with which feelings were by that date being aroused around the developing cult of the ‘national poet’. It is in this broader context that Garrick’s Jubilee should

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be seen. The sense Deelman seeks to debunk—that it began directly as celebration of the bard—can be seen to grow not only from post hoc rationalisation of the event itself and its content. The celebration also grew from the interaction of the event with the earlier process in the previous three or so decades of developing canonisation of Shakespeare as the national poet. Resistance to this process explains why many intellectuals despised the Jubilee and Garrick’s part in it: Horace Walpole, for example, wrote, ‘I have blushed at Paris when the papers came over crammed with ribaldry, or with Garrick’s insufferable nonsense about Shakespeare’.15 Insufferable or not, the swell of support for Shakespeare as a British worthy implies that there was already, well before the Stratford events, a very strong impetus in the direction Robert Crawford identifies when he argues that What gave by far the greatest impetus to the acceptance of Shakespeare as ‘national bard’ was his being presented as such by David Garrick [at the Stratford Jubilee]. Garrick uses the word in several poems composed for the occasion. In the Stratford ‘Morning Address’, Shakespeare is ‘our matchless bard’.16

Crawford here argues also that Ossian, first published in 1760, had given the term prestige that might derive from Celtic traditions. Certainly, the adoption of the term by Garrick in this period is striking. Katie Trumpener observes Responding in particular to Enlightenment dismissals of Gaelic oral traditions, Irish and Scottish antiquaries reconceive national history and literary history under the sign of the bard. According to their theories, bardic performance binds the nation together across time and across social divides; it reanimates a national landscape made desolate first by conquest and then by modernization, infusing it with historical memory. A figure both of the traditional aristocratic culture that preceded English occupation and of continued national resistance to that occupation, the bard symbolizes the central role of literature in defining national identity.17

For Garrick, even an English ‘bard’ might come to symbolise ‘the central role of literature in defining national identity’. In this, Shakespeare could begin, and continues, to unite the political expression of ‘England’ (and, in parallel, the diffusion of its language through Union and Empire) with

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the birth of Early Modern English—about as far back as the ordinary person can now go without comprehension problems. This is a very powerful mix. It is now easier to understand Shakespeare than contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe because Shakespeare’s influence on the English language has been much more profound.18 The Jubilee’s central location was a wooden Rotunda built more or less where the current Shakespeare Memorial Theatre stands. Rain blighted the whole event, scheduled from Wednesday 6 to Friday 8 September. A prime feature was to be a procession of Garrick’s actors through Stratford dressed as the chief characters from the plays. This proved impossible because of the weather, as did planned firework displays. Other major events were, however, able to take place in the Rotunda. One of these was the delivery of ‘Garrick’s Ode upon dedicating a Building, and erecting a Statue to Shakespeare, at Stratford-upon-Avon’. Its being set to music by Arne, the composer for the Patriot’s ‘Rule Britannia’, establishes a link between that highly politicised 1740 performance and this further version of ‘British’ national identity. The Ode took the form of a recitative, which Garrick spoke rather than sang, interspersed with choruses and airs. It enlarged in a general sense upon the ways in which Shakespeare was a poet of nature and genius, of unique qualities: the chorus sang ‘Our Shakespeare compar’d is to no man,/ Nor Frenchman, nor Grecian, nor Roman,/ Their swans are all geese, to the Avon’s sweet swan,/ And the man of all men was a Warwickshire man […]’.19 Clearly, the Bard is preeminent according to this song above all authors, whether classical or of the modern enemy France, whose leading intellectual, Voltaire, sneered at Shakespeare. Not only is the poet universally ‘the man of all men’, he is proudly and locally English. Meantime, Garrick’s recitative extended Shakespeare’s scope, including such lines as ‘Can British gratitude delay/ To him, the glory of this isle,/ To give the festive day,/ The song, the statue, and devoted pile?/ To him, the first of poets, best of men?/ “We never shall look upon his like again”!’ [original emphases].20 Again, Shakespeare is represented as artistically pre-eminent, but also now supremely virtuous (‘best of men’) and by slight paraphrase implicitly compared to his great hero Hamlet, or at least Hamlet’s idolised father. Further, he is now not only an embodiment of Englishness, but deserving of ‘British’ gratitude, ‘the glory of the isle’. The text here is unclear in detailed meaning, but clear in spirit: either his virtue is such as to deserve its being glorified by the isle of Britain or he is himself that very glory. His canonisation goes beyond his poetry, or the partisan appropriation of him for

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specific local political purposes. He is now presented as an embodiment of a Britishness which is at core fundamentally English. This section of the Ode preceded a four-line duet followed by a final chorus, which emphasised his universal canonical stature: ‘We will his brows with laurel bind/ Who charms to virtue human kind;/ Raise the pile, the statue raise,/ Sing immortal Shakespeare’s praise!/ The song will cease, the stone decay,/ But HIS name,/ And undimish’d fame/ Shall never, never pass away!’21 The last line here contains within it, an unmissable echo of those Britons whose Britannia should, to earlier music by Arne, ‘rule the waves! [and] never, never, never shall be slaves’. By this point of the proceedings, it is clear that, however much the event was about inaugurating the new Town Hall and the statue of Shakespeare, it had also become about installing him as a national poet, predominantly embodying Englishness, but also a version of Britishness. As if to make this quite clear, in an intervention not universally thought successful, Thomas King, one of Garrick’s leading comic actors entered. He was dressed as a Frenchified fop, and attacked Shakespeare in an effete manner, repeating Voltaire’s accusation of ‘barbarity’. The St James Chronicle reported that some of the audience were seriously amazed ‘at so unexpected an Attack upon the first dramatic Poet of their Country’.22 Whatever the dramatic value of King’s entrance, the response of The St James Chronicle marks the extent to which by now Shakespeare had become canonised. These ceremonies were to have a wider, countrywide and long-term impact than simply on Stratford and Warwickshire. Some of this is implied by the range of those who attended the other key Jubilee events, the masquerades which took place in the Rotunda each evening. These included leading society figures like the Duke of Manchester, Lord Northampton, Lord Hertford, Lord Carlisle and Lord Shrewsbury,23 whose very titles offer something of a mapping of the extent of England. From Scotland attended James Boswell, wearing for the masquerade the costume of a Sardinian freedom fighter, a cause he then supported as part of his general support for ‘Liberty’, and David Ross, actor and manager of Edinburgh Theatre Royal, formerly one of Garrick’s London company.24 Subsequently and slowly, other events, now explicitly celebrating Shakespeare from the start, developed. In 1820, in the Town Hall inaugurated by Garrick with its Shakespeare statue, Charles Mathews proposed a monument and theatre be built on the site of the New Place, to be used exclusively for Shakespeare’s plays, whose absence from the Jubilee had

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been marked. (Sometimes this absence is commented on as a lacuna. If it is one, it is more like an aporia, drawing attention to itself, but also to the importance of ‘Shakespeare’ rather than—or perhaps more than— his plays as embodying the nation.) In 1824, locals formed a Shakespeare Club, which still exists. Out of this, a revival of the Jubilee came about on 23–25 April 1827, following Garrick’s original schedule of fireworks, masquerade, concert and public processional pageant. In 1830, a followup event included some of the plays. The seeds of what would become the current manifestation of Shakespeare in Stratford were sown. In 1847, after a public appeal, the birthplace was bought by a Shakespeare Birthplace Committee whose members assumed government support would be forthcoming. When this was not, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust was set up in 1866, to be incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1891. The birthplace was much remodelled as a shrine to the ‘Bard’ and in time the Trust acquired other shrines including Anne Hathaway’s Cottage and his mother Mary Arden’s House, so extending the Shakespearean footprint from the town into the surrounding countryside. In 1864, the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth, a two-week festival of his plays was held in Stratford. Led by an energetic local brewer, Charles Edward Flower, the campaign to build the Memorial Theatre was begun. Marking the initiative’s local roots, members of the Flower family remained as governors of the Theatre and its company into this century: even now a later Charles Flower remains an Honorary Emeritus Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). The theatre opened in 1879. By now, it was argued not only was Shakespeare an embodiment of a nation—whether England or Britain—but he must have been born on England’s patron saint St George’s Day 23 April. While there is no evidence for this, it is possible wishfully to deduce this birthdate from the fact his name appears in the Stratford baptismal record on 26 April 1564. Certainly, he died, one might say by patriotic chance, on that date in 1616. As a further mark of his enshrinement in a national role, the company that eventually grew out of Flower’s initiative, now entitled the Royal Shakespeare Company, is the only company designated by British funding bodies as having ‘national’ status whose title includes an artist’s name. Meanwhile, every year on the Saturday closest to 23 April the RSC organises an internationally attended procession through the streets of Stratford, re-imagining the procession Garrick would have presented had the weather for him been more clement. In 2016, on the quatercentenary of the playwright’s death, the procession included over 10,000 people at

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ceremonies led by the Prince of Wales. While his impact is by now international, at core he is celebrated through such public street performance as a son of Stratford, based in central England. As Julia Thomas points out, in this, a London-based playwright, whose fame was established as a metropolitan theatre man, has become an embodiment of a broader, more romanticised and rurally based version of middle England.25 There is more security in assigning a date—25 January 1759—to the birth of that other poet whose birthday attracts annual celebration: Robert Burns. Robert Crawford, however, distinguishes between the nature of the status of Shakespeare and Burns as national bards. Indeed, he suggests that ‘England may have a national poet, but, strictly speaking, it has no national bard [original emphasis]’.26 Crawford sees the designation of Shakespeare as a ‘national bard’ as a response to Scottish ‘bards’: When fully recast in England as ‘the bard’ [Shakespeare] became not so much the opposite of Ossian as the antidote to Robert Burns. The more Burns’s standing as national bard was accepted, the more Shakespeare was promoted as a cross-border counterweight.27

His underlying point is that ‘the substantial ideological differences between the national bards of Scotland and England both articulate and were formed by markedly different cultural traditions that are too easily ignored’.28 Those ideological differences are reflected in the nature of their memorialisation, not least their annual birthday celebrations. On or about 25 January every year Burns Suppers are celebrated not only in the town of his birth, but worldwide. Given the tradition of celebrating his birthday, it is striking that the first such memorial supper was actually held on the fifth anniversary of his death, 21 July 1801. On that day, nine of his close friends gathered in his birthplace, by then a tavern. Another striking fact about this celebration is the speed with which it was established after his death. The movement to memorialise Burns and the development of his status as a national poet was far more rapid than that of Shakespeare, whose canonisation began well over a century after his death and in the third decade after the Treaty of Union that created a new ‘Britain’. Cobham’s ‘British Worthies’ mark its roots in the context of the developing politics of the post-Union (Rule) Britannia movement. In fact, this memorialisation marks a development of worship of literary, imperial, naval, and royal heroes in Britain (and beyond) that by the beginning of the nineteenth century was accelerating greatly and, during

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it, exploded. In Burns’s case, the steps towards canonisation could take place not only very quickly, but in the context of a Union already nearly a century-old. This difference in time and context meant that Shakespeare could hardly be said to have an attitude to the Treaty of Union—even although his Scottish Captain Jamy serves in his Henry V’s army (improbably, of course, since in the Hundred Years War Scotland was consistently an ally of France and many Scottish soldiers served the French cause) alongside the English Gower, Welsh Fluellen and Irish Macmorris. This theatrical service was no doubt in anticipation of the likely arrival, within a few years of the play’s being written, of a Scottish king of England with his potential as a theatre-loving patron. (Although as James Shapiro notes, in the published quarto version, Jamy’s voice was expunged: ‘In the [1600] Quarto of Henry V Shakespeare thus goes to considerable lengths to play down Anglo-Scottish tensions that were previously presented in a much harsher light’.29 ) With regard to eighteenth-century appropriation by those seeking to perform a version of Britishness, however, Shakespeare was a blank available to be canonised in the ways discussed above. Burns’s case was different. Burns’s own attitudes to the Union are still a matter of debate. He certainly offers material for a variety of readings of those attitudes and, so, for his appropriation for a variety of causes. While he may or may not have written of Scotland being ‘bought and sold for English gold’, or collected the song containing the words, ‘Such a parcel of rogues in a nation’, he did write on 10 April 1790 to Mrs Dunlop Alas! have I often said to myself, what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from the Union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her independence, and even her very name? I often repeat that couplet of my favourite poet, Goldsmith –

States of native liberty possest, Tho’ very poor, may yet be very blest. Nothing can reconcile me to the common terms, ‘English ambassador,’ ‘English court,’ etc., and I am out of all patience to see that equivocal character, Hastings, impeached by ‘the Commons of England.’ Tell me, my friend, is this weak prejudice?30

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However one reads this passage, with its emphasis on ‘native liberty’, it is a clear statement of his perception of a distinctive Scottishness. His poetic use of Scots alongside his use of English, and of different registers in both languages, demonstrates, whatever else, a commitment to Scottish cultural identity. So, arguably, does his adoption in a self-mocking manner of the term ‘Bard’. Crawford links his first use of the term to the success of the Kilmarnock edition of his poems when he refers to himself in letters as ‘my Bardship’, and suggests the impulse may have arisen from ‘Gray’s The Bard and Macpherson’s Ossian (much admired by Burns) [which] had furthered an enthusiasm for ancient, dignified, vatic bards’.31 He goes on to argue that As he negotiates with the term ‘bard’, Burns’s invention of the mockingly inflated ‘bardship’, his deployment of the self-deprecating diminutive ‘bardie’, and his adoption and celebration of the term ‘a Scotch bard’ show him well able to cope with the values of the metropolitan world of literature, and able to avoid being trapped in the potentially patronizing or embalming Bardolatry of being simply a ‘bard’.32

One of the issues with the early use of the term, which might give rise to Burns’s self-mockery, as Crawford points out, was that ‘Scotch bard’ implied a provincial talent, like such modern slights as ‘a Zummerzet poet’. A leading Scottish Enlightenment figure was, however, significant in developing the understanding of what ‘bard’ might signify by this time. Hugh Blair was appointed in 1762 at Edinburgh University to the newly created Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, the first professorship in English Literature in the United Kingdom. The background to this appointment with regard to the process of post-Union creation of the academic discipline of English Literature, and of teaching his students the ‘polite’ use of English within the context of (Rule) Britannia, has been examined incisively by Crawford in his influential study Devolving English Literature. Blair had written of Amerindian bards and enthused about Ossian. Crawford observes that Blair indicated that The bard stood outside the restrictions imposed by the new methods of composition as taught in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. The bard was an inspired singer, drawing on ‘primitive’ tradition, rather than a modern, cultured, and correct poet. Bards were thus rude, ‘natural’ geniuses in a

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way that modern poets were not. Bards were to be admired, but they were remote from the modern world of literature and literary teaching.33

Hence the ironic tone Burns adopts regarding his own bardship. After all, his poetry is very far from ‘primitive’, full of classical and Shakespearean reference and exploring register shift both between and within Scots and English language discourses with great sophistication and skill. Nonetheless and despite Blair’s reductive use of the term, Burns has become installed as Scotland’s ‘National Bard’. His adoption in this role was not, from very early in the process, confined to the borders of Scotland. Nigel Leask notes: We are familiar with the manifold ways in which Burns’s poetry buttressed Scottish identity in the British Empire (one of the earliest Burns Suppers was held in Calcutta in 1812) but it is refreshing to think that his sturdy democratic sentiments and vernacular challenge to standard English played a part in resisting, as well as reinforcing, colonial ideologies.34

Clark McGinn identifies the first such supper outside Scotland as taking place in 1806 at Magdalen College, Oxford. John Wilson (Christopher North) chaired this.35 Others followed across the USA and Canada from the 1820s on.36 The first Australian Supper was in 1841 (following an initial Burns Festival there in 1823).37 It may, indeed, be that the Empire’s disproportionate number of Scottish soldiers and administrators, and perhaps Masons, was an important vector through which the notion of Burns as the Scottish bard was developed—at least among those Scots spread worldwide who sought connection with their homeland. The Masonic connection also accentuated the masculinist ethos often associated with Burns memorialisation until well into the twentieth century. Meantime, the process of Burns memorialisation in Scotland moved ahead. Johnny Rodger observes that it ‘was felt by some of the townspeople that the plain stone slab on the poet’s grave in St Michael’s church [in Dumfries] was an inadequate memorial, and in 1813 an appeal was launched to build a mausoleum’.38 A committee to take forward this proposal included the Marquess of Queensberry and the Earl of Selkirk, while subscribers included the Prince Regent and the Duke of Buccleuch. However much Burns might be seen as a poet of the people and ‘native liberty’, and the initiative has arisen from local townspeople, support for

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the memorialising process in this early stage also came from the aristocracy and land-owning classes. The mausoleum was completed and inaugurated by the performance of public ceremonies, including Masonic rites, in 1818. As Rodger comments, the mausoleum ‘bears a striking resemblance to Dante’s tomb in Ravenna, designed some thirty odd years earlier by Camillo Morigia’.39 The architectural cross-reference to another national poet, and one of international and long-lasting renown, cannot, one might reasonably think, have been accidental. Burns was being associated with a fellow European national poet of the highest reputation. Further, within two years, the first fully public monument to him was completed in Alloway in 1820, on the edge of the village where he was born and overlooking the Brig o Doon which occupies so important a part in the narrative of Tam o Shanter. As Rodger observes, this ‘had no specific purpose apart from memorialising’.40 It also, however, inscribes him in the landscape to the extent that it marks the southernmost end of an axis whose northern end is his birthplace and centre is close to the ruined kirk which features so importantly in Tam o Shanter. Here topography is made to contribute to a monumental performance of memory. Further, the memorial is based on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates near the Acropolis in Athens, creating an associative link—in an age in which people were well-versed in the classics—between the memory of Burns and classical Greece: a choragus was a citizen who paid for productions at the city Dionysia, the annual Athenian poetry-theatre-music festival for which the great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were written. Both Dumfries mausoleum and Alloway monument enshrined statues of the ‘Bard’ in architectural contexts which related him to some of the greatest poets ever. While Andrew Blaikie argues that such sites ‘stand in for lost authenticity’,41 these specific sites at least can be argued to embed and embody versions of ‘authenticity’, not least implicit claims to authentic artistic achievement of the highest order, and, so, to maintain its reputation rather than replace its loss. As Jen Harvie expands on this conception: ‘memory is invested in and stimulated by sites. […] site-specific performance can be especially effective at remembering and constituting identities that are significantly determined by their materiality and spatiality’.42 One might add that the performance of memorial and site design, including the ceremonies surrounding their inauguration, also form part of such processes of ‘remembering and constituting identities’. Enthusiasm for such memorials meant that other monuments were built to Burns. These included some classical, like Alloway’s, as seen in the

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Edinburgh Burns Monument (1831, though proposed as early as 1812) in its prominent position facing Arthur’s Seat from the south side of Calton Hill. As the century progressed, others were designed in the vernacular style often called Scots Baronial. One example is the tower built at Kilmarnock (1879), where in 1886 a crowd of 30,000 was present to mark an event as seemingly abstrusely literary as the centenary of the Kilmarnock edition of his poems.43 Another example is found, close to one of Burns’s farms, Mossgiel, at Mauchline (1898), whose foundation stone was laid on 23 July 1896. Present at the ceremony were Lady Alexander of Ballochmyle marking continuity with his poetry, recalling ‘The Bonnie Lass o Ballochmyle’, and two descendants, Miss Annie B. Burns and Miss Constance Burns Hutchison, daughter and grand-daughter of Colonel James Glencairn Burns, the poet’s son. The nature of the ceremony surrounding the laying of the stone, a one-off occasion which foreshadows in its extent the annually repeated Shakespeare’s Birthday processions in Stratford, reflects the performative and public nature of such occasions: The memorial stone was laid with all the honours and according to the ancient rights of Freemasonry by H R Wallace of Busbie and Cloncaird, Provincial Grand Master of Ayrshire. This was perhaps the greatest event that ever occurred in Mauchline. The town was on holiday from early morn, and was literally a mass of bunting, streamers, flags, mottoes, portraits of Burns etc, the householders in competition with each other in decorating their buildings. A procession was formed in the football field on the outskirts of town, at the foot of Loudoun Street. All sorts of mottoes and devices were carried by the various trades, and flags, bunting, emblems etc were almost as numerous as in the town. The procession was monitored by Sergeant Giles of the Ayrshire Yeomanry. Besides the various trades and professions, there were representations from 32 Masonic Lodges, 14 Ancient Free Gardeners Lodges, Volunteers, Boys Brigade, Good Templars etc. It was a mile in length, and took nearly half an hour to pass a given point. Accompanied by various bands, the procession marched up the town, round by the Cowgate, up Kilmarnock Road, down past Mossgiel, and back to the memorial. It was estimated that nearly 10,000 were present.44

Memorialising monuments should not, then, be seen to be simply passive additions to the landscape. The stages in their inauguration demanded complex performative acts, often—indeed at this time usually—attended by very large crowds: Christopher Whatley notes that ‘Burns-related

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events attracted crowds that in many towns were among the largest ever seen in their respective bounds’.45 The continuing presence of such memorialised sites was, and is, intended to inspire a lasting memory of what the monuments represent, embody and inscribe on the ground. Indeed, looking back at the example of the Royal Scots Monument in Princes Street Gardens, one can argue that that site can be seen not only to memorialise that regiment and its past, but also in its prominent literal inscription of a key passage from the Declaration of Arbroath, the very Declaration and Scottishness themselves. Location matters. Edinburgh’s Burns Monument was less than half a mile east of the Edinburgh Theatre Royal, first opened in 1769, with its prominent statue of Shakespeare at the apex of its facade, discussed later in this chapter. This inscribed the poet in the landscape of Scotland’s national capital in a way analogous to his insertion into Alloway’s topography. The memorial is again based on the Choragic Monument, like that on the other side of the Calton Hill, overlooking the city of Edinburgh, of the philosopher Dugald Stewart. That was inaugurated in 1831, the year the Edinburgh Burns Monument’s foundation stone was laid. Burns stands in proximity to the Royal High School, whose design by Thomas Hamilton (designer of both Alloway and Edinburgh Burns Monuments) is based on the Temple of Hephaistos, and close to the New Town buildings of Regent and Royal Terrace. Burns is embodied in a neo-classical architectural composition, overlooking the royalty of Holyrood Palace and the commonality of the Canongate graveyard containing the headstone he arranged for his admired and poverty-stricken predecessor, Robert Fergusson. High above the valley and on the axis between the geological features of the Calton Hill and Arthur’s Seat, he is not only Scotland’s national poet configured within classical models and above all classes, but situated in the midst of the scenic effects of millennia of geological time as revealed by the Enlightenment pioneer of geology James Hutton. Nowhere is truly ‘ageless’, but such positioning is as close to marking Burns as physically and metaphorically ageless as may be. Yet, within such classical-ageless framing, Burns still remained rooted and appropriated. As Whatley puts it, Burns was identified both with Scotland and with a wider set of causes (each, of course, with its Scots inflections) within the union and empire. Scottishness and broader British allegiances did not cancel one another out: nineteenth-century Scottish identity – unlike, perhaps some of its later

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iterations – did not belong in a zero-sum game. Moreover, if anything, another lower layer of identity – that of localism and civic pride – was the prime focus of nineteenth-century Scottish commemorations of Burns’.46

Indeed, while earlier in the nineteenth century the leaders in fundraising were mainly Tory aristocrats or landowners, after 1859, the centenary of Burns’s birth, many of the initiatives were led by local people. The ways in which Burns monuments were imposed, and imposing, on landscapes is also reflected, if with less ‘age-long’ geological significance, in that of Kilmarnock, set high above the town. Many other towns sought statues. Glasgow’s, unveiled in January 1877, is set in George Square, one of a range of statues of soldiers, artists and monarchs which surround Walter Scott’s column and serve in the centre of Glasgow, opposite the City Chambers, as an open-air pantheon of Victorian Scottish heroes. As if, however, to mark the Glasgow statue’s difference from the monuments sponsored earlier in the century by the aristocracy—the fundraising committee for Edinburgh’s statue, for example, established in 1819 and chaired by the Duke of Atholl comprised establishment figures47 —this was funded by ‘over 40,000 individual subscriptions of one shilling each’.48 Aristocratic interest, nevertheless, continued: the Mauchline Burns Memorial was patronised by the Duke of Hamilton, the Marquess of Bute and Lord Rosebery. The variety of such monuments, then, undoubtedly architecturally and socially marks a wide variety of visions and versions of embodied Burns as a national bard, from the classical, by way, for example, of Kilmarnock’s eclectic gothic forms to the Scots Baronial and ecclesiastically inclined of Mauchline. Whatley’s claim that ‘Burns, it seems, had in the century following his death acted as a prompt to intensify the expression of a series of shared values and convictions within Scottish society, even if at times that consensus had been exposed as illusory’49 is surely irrefutable. Whatley identifies such ‘values and convictions’ as including solidarity among workers and egalitarian politics. They clearly also include the assertion, not least derived, as Whatley notes, through Burns’s collection and promotion of older Scots songs and writing of new songs and poems in Scots, of Scotland’s surviving post-Union cultural identity—and its performance. As Steve Newman observes, ‘[A] concept of an improving, nationalist assemblage appears to be at work in Burns’s conception of song collection’.50

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During the entire nineteenth century, both statues and monuments to Burns spread widely throughout Scotland, and in overseas territories with substantial Scottish diasporas like Australia and New Zealand, usually accompanied on their inauguration, as in the case of Mauchline, by the performance of large-scale public processions and ceremonies. In New York’s Central Park his statue stands in the wider context of other lionised, not to say canonised, figures: Americans like Daniel Webster and Alexander Hamilton and internationally recognised artists like Beethoven, Schiller, Wagner, Scott and Shakespeare. Indeed, the sense in New York of the enshrinement of these figures as international icons, embraced by the immigrant New World in a self-consciously considered way, may be reinforced by the fact that the statues of Scott and Shakespeare were inaugurated in the same year, 1872, while that of Burns followed closely in 1880. Such an apparently structured process of late nineteenth-century symbolic assimilation of cultural superstars into the new world of New York seems appropriate in a period when the Robber Barons were, in competition with one another, acquiring as many Old Masters as they could. The rightful place of Burns and Shakespeare in such a grouping of artworks was taken as read. Such international appropriation of Burns and his work has been explored by, inter alia, Murray Pittock in his collection Robert Burns in Global Culture.51 As John and Margaret Gold calculate, ‘There are upwards of 180 monuments to Burns worldwide. This far outstrips Shakespeare or any other poet’.52 At the same time, the widespread use of performance of his songs and poetry for all kinds of purposes, including, for example, the singing of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as part of modern Japanese university graduation ceremonies, is well known. What is more interesting is why this usage should be so widespread. One impetus for this phenomenon is certainly the ways, like Shakespeare, Burns is framed beyond being simply a national poet or bard. Whatley has observed that in the Scoto-British context Burns’s image as a ‘Poet of Humanity’ became ‘stronger and more influential with the rise of civic Scotland, and indeed welfare Britain in the twentieth century’.53 This is no doubt true in a specifically British context, but the presence of Burns in nineteenth-century New York’s development of Central Park’s artistic pantheon suggests this image was of longer and wider standing than Whatley’s contextualisation, valuable as it undoubtedly is. What is more, by the middle of the nineteenth century in Scotland alone, there had developed a cult of Burns. This, while it did not abstract him from the patronage and patronising of the establishment, developed

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his reputation as a poet of the people. Whatley computes the crowd attending the 1844 Ayr Burns Festival at 50–80,000. He warns against exceptionalism in assessing the significance of this startlingly large figure for a public ceremony, pointing out that in nineteenth-century public entertainment conditions and given the impact of the rise of accessible railway transport, there are many other examples of such large crowds at similar events. Nonetheless, the crowd at the Ayr Festival was undoubtedly, by whatever measure, a sign of powerful public interest. Of this event, Clark McGinn also notes the way in which Burns was beginning to be presented as not only a poet of the people, but an icon incorporating other versions of Scottishness: ‘Here overt Highland and tartan images were used to buttress Burns’s image for the first time in Britain both in the parade and at the marquee dinner and speeches afterwards’.54 They also mark a form of commodification of Burns as a cultural icon, open to appropriation for a wide variety of differing purposes by a wide range of classes. These were most commonly expressed through the performance elements of Burns Suppers, which developed from the beginnings already outlined into a worldwide phenomenon, involving set rituals. These came to include the piping in of the haggis, the ‘Address to the Haggis’, a recitation of the ‘Selkirk Grace’, the ‘Address to the Immortal Memory’ [of Burns, note the implied sanctification, if not deification, in the title], the ‘Address to the Lassies’, the ‘Response’ by a representative of the ‘lassies’ and often a recitation of Tam o Shanter. Often the drink at table was whisky. Often, though not exclusively, those attending wore formal dress, black tie or kilt, although Burns Suppers in homes also occurred, usually following the established rituals as far as domestically possible. By 1926 Hugh MacDiarmid was protesting in his A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle: No’ wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote But misapplied is a’body’s property, […] Croose London Scotties wi’ their braw shirt fronts And a’ their fancy freen’s, rejoicin’ That similah gatherings in Timbuctoo, Bagdad – and Hell, nae doot – are voicin’

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Burns’ sentiments o’ universal love, In pidgin English or in wild-fowl Scots, And toastin’ ane wha’s nocht to them but an Excuse for faitherin’ Genius wi’ their thochts.55

McGinn cites such a reaction as part of MacDiarmid’s accusation ‘that the Burns “cult” maintained the custom of celebrating Burns but had lost the true appreciation of his poetry, replacing that with mere tartan banter and more booze [… propagating] a sentimental and trivialized image of Burns’.56 One could counter-argue that MacDiarmid was missing the point. The Burns cult, by now, was not centred on a critical or aesthetic reaction to Burns’s poetry, any more than the development of what Bernard Shaw called Bardolatry around the image of Shakespeare related to a clear perception of Shakespeare the man and poet, however that might be defined. Indeed, in the latter case such Bardolatry, as we have seen, preceded even Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee, although it did arise after the Union. In both cases, what was the object of canonisation was not the literary canon, although that retained its separate importance, but was built upon factors identified by Michael Dobson cited at the beginning of this chapter. To recap and summarise, these include 1. preparation of scholarly editions 2. publication of critical monographs 3. promulgation of the poet’s work in secondary and higher education 4. the creation of monuments in nationally significant public places 5. promotion of a site of secular pilgrimage. In the case of Burns, there is a sixth phenomenon to add to this list: the ritual of the Burns Supper has developed in performance into a form of secular sacrament where the celebrant is not a single priest with acolytes, but a community of speakers. Such a phenomenon does not exist in Shakespeare’s case, unless one counts the Birthday Procession at Stratford. This, however, is by definition local and limited in attendance, even if there are international participants, as opposed to the worldwide phenomenon of the Burns Supper, with its innumerable celebrants and participants. It might be argued that the place the Burns Supper occupies in the Burns cult is taken in the playwright’s cult by the widespread, almost ritualised, regular inclusion of his plays in theatre programmes. These take

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place sometimes in specific festivals as in the Canadian Stratford Festival and its parallels in other countries, and often, especially in Britain, provide regional theatres with a useful income stream through school visits arising from the third of Dobson’s factors. These, incidentally, relate to John Major’s paean of praise, discussed in the introduction, for an imagined Britain-as-England. With regard to Burns, of course, the third of Dobson’s factors is currently a much more limited phenomenon than it was half a century ago. Neilson MacKay has noted how strange it is, to his mind at least, ‘that Burns — just as soon as Blake was accepted, open-armed, into the fold of Romanticism — should suffer such a long, long decline’. He continues, asserting that ‘the level of academic interest shown in Burns is said to have dropped 70 percent in sixty years’, Murray Pittock has noted that ‘While Burns could still justify a separate chapter in the 1957 Penguin Guide to English Literature, this situation had become unthinkable by the 1990s.’ Despite Burns’s continued appeal, the twentieth century, by and large, ignored him. Raymond Bentman, reflecting on ‘Burns’s Declining Fame’ in 1972, flags up [… that to] be sure, it has always been easier to regard Burns as a Scottish, not a British, poet.57

Yet, even if the teaching of Burns which might help keep him in the mind of students as they grow up has declined over the last half-century or so to the extent Pittock and Bentman identify, the existence of Burns Suppers has become for many, in effect, a substitute for curricular inclusion. These keep the poet in the public mind and memory, while each January, in many Scottish schools at least, Burns recitations and competitions occur. Bentman raises the question of the extent to which Burns’s canonisation marks him as a British or a Scottish icon, or both. Yet, there is no doubt that it is possible in other national contexts for Burns to become detached from such identifications, surprising as the thought may be to many. During a visit to the Caucasus in November 2002, on behalf of the Council of Europe, assessing post-Soviet cultural education requirements, the present author visited the English department in the Philological Faculty of the State University in Yerevan, Armenia. The meeting with the departmental staff was sticky at first, not least because a busy schedule had led to substantial late running. My hosts had been kept unduly

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waiting. After about twenty minutes of a difficult conversation, on being asked if there were any famous Scottish poets, I mentioned Burns. The entire room came enthusiastically to life. The first element of that enthusiasm was surprise, even among these senior literary academics, to hear that Burns was Scottish. As we continued our discussion, it became clear that under the former regime, it had not been the practice to remark on Burns’s Scottishness, perhaps for fear such mention might encourage nationalism within the Soviet Union. No one in the room was clear on this, but what was clear was that they profoundly admired his poetry and that Burns had been represented to them, no doubt assisted by approved translations of his work, as a proletarian poet, a ploughman who wrote about liberty. In fact, such elision of his national background as suited the purposes of his exploitation in the Soviet empire echoes the occlusion of his social standing as a tenant farmer and then tax inspector, encouraged by Henry Mackenzie’s description of him as a ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ and, so, his promotion as a Romantic hero. Further, such presentation of Burns as a humble working man makes it possible to neutralise class issues in memorialising him in the same way as foregrounding Shakespeare as the national poet or ‘Swan’ or ‘Bard’ of Avon pushes into the background the fact he was a very sharp and successful London theatre entrepreneur. His income not only as a playwright and actor, but as a sharer in the Globe Theatre, meant that it was possible for him, like a modern major West End producer, to buy an expensive country residence. In his case that was the grandest house in his home town. Such elisions and aporia with regard to national bards can lead to complicated outcomes as in the Armenian case. Steve Newman stirs the pot further when he observes One way to put this is that what has led to the neglect of Burns as a global poet is that his work is too local – too rooted in Scottish dialect, Scottish place, and the simple affective occasions caught in the songs. [… This] simplifies Burns’s understanding of the local and its relationship to what lies beyond it.58

Yet, as we have seen, the global impact of Burns as an icon remains, whether in a surviving nineteenth-century pantheon in New York’s Central Park or in twenty-first-century Yerevan University. Nonetheless, however much that global role may exist—and given the way Pittock has identified the extent to which his place as an important figure in ‘English’

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literature has fallen away—it may be safe, pace the special case of quondam de-nationalised Soviet class-identification of Burns, to see him as currently perceived primarily as a national bard for Scottishness, or at least Scottishness-within-Britishness, and not for Britain as a whole. Meanwhile, as we have seen, Shakespeare’s status as a national poet was from very early represented as embodying ‘Britain’, but ‘Britain-as-England’. Indeed, Nicola J. Watson has suggested that both ‘Shakespeare’s and Burns’s birthplaces insist above all on the connections between national poet and national soil’.59 She further contends that Both Shakespeare and Burns are made into National Bards by being naturalised to a landscape and locality at once actual and representative. This is achieved through a series of texts which coalesce the allegorical and the realist within a specified place.60

Out of this specificity, however, has developed the complementary globalised versions of both. Telling evidence for the distinction between Scottishness and ‘Britainas-England’, especially with regard to Burns, can be found in the distribution of statuary featuring either poet. Inevitably, of course, given earlier discussion, most of these statues were set up in the nineteenth century and so the evidence is to an extent historically determined. There are over twenty statues of Burns in public places in Scotland, from Alloway to Aberdeen. There are only three in England, including that in Poet’s Corner, the others being in London’s Victoria Embankment Gardens and in Newcastle (which he had visited and is close to Scotland, geographically and linguistically). By contrast, there are fifteen in the United States, nine in Canada and seven in Australia. One might hypothesise that in at least several of these overseas cases, the influence of Scottish participants in the imperial project was a motivating factor in their erection. There are no statues of Shakespeare in public spaces in Scotland, though Lord Cockburn commissioned one for the grounds of Bonaly Castle in Edinburgh and one graced the façade of the Palace Theatre next door to Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre, alongside four of the muses and Robert Burns. Sculpted by John Mossman, these were moved, when the Palace was demolished in 1977, into the foyer of the Citizens. In England there are statues of Shakespeare in ecclesiastical contexts—near his grave in Stratford-uponAvon, in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey and in Southwark Cathedral—while in public spaces they are found in only two sites, apart from

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that on the front of Stratford’s Town Hall unveiled in 1769. One is in London’s Leicester Square, unveiled in 1874; the other in the gardens in front of the Stratford Memorial Theatre, unveiled in 1888. There are two more recent examples of memorialisation of Shakespeare, with differing emphases, one as an internationalised figure of genius akin to his inclusion in the Central Park pantheon, but with a Stratford location, the other in a site of historical significance for his plays. The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald reported that on his reputed birthday in 2017 a half-size statue commemorating two of the world’s most famous dramatists, William Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu, was unveiled at Shakespeare’s Birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon […] The two playwrights were contemporaries of their age, though writing thousands of miles apart, and died on the same day, 23rd April 1616. The statue was a gift to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust by the people of Fuzhou, [contrasting] the cultural giants of East and West, one with calligraphy brushes, the other with a quill [alongside a bust of another great poet, the Bengali Nobel prize winner, Rabindranath Tagore].61

Plans are under way at the time of writing to set up another Shakespeare statue. This will be newly sculpted by Raphael Maklouf and Hayley Gibbs, erected outside and close to the site of The Theatre in Shoreditch. There, his earliest plays were performed.62 Clearly the potential for memorialisation and versionising of Shakespeare as of Burns, whether as international writing star alongside his ‘peers’ or as a famous figure of local interest, remains live. Nevertheless, despite such recent initiatives, the relative dearth of public statues of Shakespeare, the ‘national poet’, as against the many of Burns, highlights even further the extent to which Burns is inscribed into public places in Scotland, and Scottish diasporic sites, as a ‘national bard’, while leaving open the question as to why it has not been felt necessary to erect such statues of Shakespeare in other parts of England. Whatley, however, offers a possible explanation for the surge of memorialisation and the enthusiasm with which public performances at inaugurations and Burns Suppers spread, at least within the bounds of Scotland itself, arguing that As one of the world’s ‘fragile’ nations, its relationship with England a source of internal tensions and, periodically, of national angst, perhaps in [nineteenth-century] Scotland the commemorative acts were more than

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ordinarily required to mark divisions and create a coherent national memory.63

Whatley goes on, referring to a debate about Burns’s use of Scots, to comment: ‘The erection of enduring memorials to a figure such as this was an extension of the struggle over speech: in effect nation-building’.64 (The relationship of language and Scottishness is one we will return to in the next chapter.) As we have seen, ‘Shakespeare’ was recruited by the Patriots to the (Rule) Britannia movement, arguably, under post-Union pressure to (re-)memorialise in order to create, in Whatley’s words, ‘a coherent national memory’ for ‘Britain’. This pressure can be seen to derive from the hegemonic (and imperialist) impulse in the politics of the United Kingdom in the two centuries following 1707, embedded in the parliamentary and military systems, to name only two prevailing dominant social constructs. The assumption that arose from this process that the United Kingdom and the post-Union British settlement was the ‘natural’ status quo would give rise to the ‘banal nationalism’ Michael Billig describes as discussed in the last chapter. Given British/English banal nationalism, there was no driving compulsion to develop an explicit rather than an implicit (or banal) cultural nationalism through memorialisation by Shakespeare statuary of the kind the Burns memorialisation movement undertook for Scottishness. Shakespeare as a ‘British Worthy’ and ‘national poet’ could be taken for granted. Indeed, it was only a sense of embarrassment at New York’s appropriation of the national poet by its 1872 statue that prompted the statue in Leicester Square, in the middle of London’s theatre district, two years later. Further evidence of how ‘Shakespeare’ works in sustaining banal Anglo-British nationalism is seen in the taken-for-granted way in which John Major, in the speech cited in the introduction, saw continuing teaching of Shakespeare as evidence of Britishness: ‘if we get our way – Shakespeare still read even in school. Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials’.65 Such terms as ‘coherent national memory’ and ‘nation building’ applied to current political conditions might seem to relate directly to nationalist and independence movements. In nineteenth-century Scotland, however, such a direct relationship need not and largely did not exist. In this respect, an illuminating parallel to the erection of Burns monuments and, indeed, the Wallace Monument is found in the planning and erection of the Scott Monument in Princes Street Gardens.

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Rodger reports that ‘only weeks after [Scott’s] death [on 21 September 1832] a meeting was held under the chairmanship [of the then Edinburgh Lord Provost] John Learmonth, to discuss what could be done’ to build a memorial in Edinburgh worthy of Scott’s name.66 It may be that the efflorescence of Burns monuments already under way by the time of Scott’s death was an incentive to memorialise Scott even more quickly than the liberty-loving Ayrshire man had been. After all, Scott was another candidate, even rival, to be seen as Scotland’s national poet, perhaps more respectable and Unionist and certainly one whose poems and novels had already helped establish the highly popular National Drama.67 As with earlier Burns initiatives, the committee supporting the first monument was led by members of the Scottish political and social elite. It included the Dukes of Hamilton and of Buccleuch, the Marquesses of Lothian and of Abercorn, the Earls of Home, of Haddington, of Elgin, of Wemyss and March, of Dalhousie, of Rosebery and of Glasgow, Viscount Melville, and Lords Gray, Napier, Douglas and Abercrombie, plus a range of judges, knights and professors.68 The geographic range of Scottish noble membership reminds one of that of the English aristocrats attending the 1769 Stratford Jubilee. The Scott monument, with its Gothic-style drawing on motifs from Melrose Abbey, contrasts with Edinburgh’s classical Burns Monument, while its location, rather than placing the poet overlooking an effectively timeless geological prospect, sets the poet in the centre of the city itself. The significance of that location requires a slight digression. In one proposed plan for the first New Town of Edinburgh, it was suggested that the street layout should comprise the cross and saltire layout of the Union flag. This proposal was not followed through, not least, one might suspect, because there would be considerable difficulties in achieving successful architectural solutions to the corners needed when the lines of the saltire met the lines of the cross. Even if construction solutions might be found, the internal corners of rooms at those junctions would certainly be somewhat odd. Yet the current layout makes clear that the New Town, whose building commenced in 1767, was intended in its configuration to mark the mid-eighteenth-century post-Union and, indeed, post-Culloden constitutional settlement. Along the spine of the ridge of the upper slopes on which the New Town is built would run George Street, named for George III. On either side minor streets would run, one named after the rose of England, two blocks of the other after the thistle of Scotland. Beyond those would be other main thoroughfares, Queen Street

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and Princes Street, named for other members of the royal family, which, while Hanoverian, was descended from the Stuart James VI and I. At each end of the axis, George Street, would be garden squares named for the patron saints of Scotland and England, Andrew and George. Very soon, however, what was to be St George’s Square, perhaps to avoid confusion with the already existing George Square to the south of the city, was named after the queen: Charlotte. In 1769, only two years after the first New Town buildings were erected, immediately east of the North Bridge, at the only point where the Old Town met the New Town before the Mound was constructed, the Edinburgh Theatre Royal opened in a new building—appropriately in this iconic streetscape, in Shakespeare Square. It is hard to think of a more clearly politico-culturally determined set of street names. For our purposes, what is, above all, striking is the importance of naming Shakespeare Square as the home of theatre in this politically and constitutionally inscribed urban environment. There, it would be faced with the opening of the national Register House in 1788. This in itself was an assertion of the post-Union integrity of Scottish records, which had over the centuries been looted, deported and lost by earlier invaders like Edward I and Oliver Cromwell. The theatre’s location in this streetscape of Hanoverian settlement certainly commemorates and celebrates Shakespeare. It does so, however, in a New Town embodying a ‘Britain’ in which both Scotland and England are represented as equals in a union, rather than representing him as an Anglo-British ‘Worthy’ for an Anglicised Britain. Further, although the original plans did not include these ornaments, the theatre came to be topped by a statue of Shakespeare, based on that unveiled by Garrick in Stratford, flanked by the muses of tragedy and comedy.69 The significance of this replication on a building opened in the year of the Stratford Jubilee, but without the Jubilee’s performances of canonisation and apparently some years after its opening, embedded the symbolism of the square’s name in the theatre’s façade. Meantime, the awarding of the patent for the Theatre Royal in 1767 had allowed the refurbishing and renaming of the Canongate Theatre with that title until the opening of the new building in 1769, reopening with a celebratory prologue by James Boswell: This night lov’d GEORGE’s free enlighten’d age, Bids Royal Favour shield the SCOTTISH STAGE; His Royal Favour ev’ry bosom cheers; The Drama now with dignity appears.70

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The royal patent removed the need for the subterfuge of audiences’ paying for a musical event in order to see a play gratis which had arisen as theatre producers evaded the impact of Walpole’s 1737 Theatres Licensing Act. This had banned all but patent houses from presenting plays and offered those in Edinburgh hostile to Allan Ramsay’s Carrubber’s Close Theatre the occasion to close it in 1737, a year after it had opened. The Theatre Royal, then, as its patent house title proclaims, formed part, at least in Boswell’s prologue’s view, of a Hanoverian accommodation in Scotland. It also, and as importantly, let ‘The Drama now with dignity’ appear. Given this, it seems that the prominent location of a famed playwright high on the face of a theatre in the Georgian New Town marked a triumph for the Drama, appropriating Shakespeare in Garrick-approved pose with his muses for Edinburgh. The remodelled theatre lost its prominent statues high on its facade in the 1830 remodelling. By then, whatever the semiotics of the statue of Shakespeare, Scotland had its own national bard. In fact, the name of Shakespeare in this locality disappeared in 1815 when Waterloo Place was developed as an extension of Princes Street in the year of the battle, and extended over the Regent Bridge, inaugurated in 1819. The renaming of the street marks a joint triumph of Britain and its allies, while the consolidated nature of the Union in the streetscape of this area was further highlighted by the inauguration of the still-existing statue of the Irishman, the Duke of Wellington, in 1842, in front of Register House, facing the theatre. This was demolished to make way for the still-existing General Post Office building in 1859. The Scott Monument, inaugurated in 1846 and situated two blocks west of the Theatre Royal and, still, of Register House, stands on a cultural and historical fault line, a Gothic edifice, designed after a medieval Borders abbey, in a New Town of classical facades, facing across a valley, the ancient buildings of the Old Town of Edinburgh, but securely sited on a street named for Hanoverian princes. It embodies a version of Scottishness-within-Britain set in stone, but one full of contradictions and inherent oppositions of kinds addressed at various points throughout this book. The Scott Monument, alongside the Wallace and Burns monuments, forms part of the phenomenon Graeme Morton has called ‘Unionist Nationalism’, something akin to what we have just called ‘Scottishnesswithin-Britishness’.71 James Coleman draws specific attention to this when he discusses the conflicts between Unionist Nationalists and those asserting more autonomous Scottish rights, like supporters of the

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National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, in the committee travails that led to the building of the Wallace Monument: consideration of commemorative monuments involves the idea of cultural nationalism as an expression of a nation’s sense of self, its national identity or, to use a term that occurs often in the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century Wallace cult, its ‘nationality’. Historiographical examinations of nineteenthcentury Scotland have tended to view Scottish cultural nationalist discourse and practices as being poor substitutes for the kind of nationalism that Scotland conspicuously did not have: political nationalism. Alternatively, the commemoration of the Scottish past through the construction of such monuments as the National Wallace Monument and the worship of the national hero that these symbols represent, has been presented as signifying a lack of proper national historiography. These reductionist views have been countered somewhat by Graeme Morton’s term, ‘unionist-nationalism’.72

Coleman goes on to draw succinctly on Morton’s argument and relate it to the kind of performance of Scottishness by memorialisation, public ceremony and statue and monument building we have been examining, setting it in the wider context of joint Scoto-English empire-building and cultural activity: In cultural terms, unionist-nationalism was articulated through the contribution of Scots to the greatness of Britain and the successes of the imperial project, whether these Scots were scientists, economists, historical novelists or, looking to national memory, thundering reformers or patriot heroes. […] The construction of cultural nationalist symbols, such as the Wallace Monument, was not a surrogate for something more potent – i.e. something political – but a form of nationalist expression seen as being every bit as legitimate as calls for constitutional change.73

In this perspective, as Morton observes, From an analysis of the major expressions of national identity in midcentury, it is stressed that Scottish nationalism demanded equality with England within the Union of 1707. Strange as it may be to 20th-century eyes, Scotland wanted more Union, not less. Nor was it weak for its lack of rhetoric of parliamentary independence. Unionist-nationalism flowed from its axis of a British state and a Scottish civil society in the 1830-1860 period.74

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Within this framework, Wallace could be recruited for patriotic Scots to the unionist cause as one of the heroes who maintained the independence of Scotland so that, when the time might come for a British Union, it would be not by the subservience of one nation to another. It would instead be the conjunction of two independent and equal sovereign nations: Scotland and England. As we have seen, this perspective is not shared by everyone in England, to say the least. Out of this disparity in perspective arises much frustration on both sides for present-day politicians negotiating relationships of Scotland and England. Yet, if one reads back the Unionist Nationalist phenomenon to several, if not all, of the Scottish Enlightenment leaders, they can be read as Unionist Nationalists avant la lettre. This chapter has explored a canonisation process, complementary to that of Michael Dobson with which we began this chapter. Further, it has explored the complementary treatment as national poets of William Shakespeare and Robert Burns. Focusing on Britain and certain distinctions between England and Scotland, we have considered the development and enshrinement of ‘national poets’ or ‘bards’ and their memorialisation by monuments and statues inaugurated by large-scale public ceremonies and performance events. In the English context we have noted a blurring of the distinction between Englishness and Britishness, even an identification of the two through the figure of Shakespeare. In the Scottish case we have seen that, even within a British unionist perspective, a distinctive ‘Scottishness’ has been developed by a form of cultural nationalism. This often, mostly in the nineteenth-century but also in the twentieth, was accommodated within Morton’s term, ‘Unionist Nationalism’. Nonetheless, by performing the memorialisation and monumentalisation of cultural heroes, a form of Scottish cultural nationalism, whether it was Unionist Nationalist at its core or focused on the conception of a Scottish identity separate from that of England, was sustained after the Union. Often this was achieved through performative acts associated with the establishment of monuments and statues, but also by repeated performance acts, like the enactments at Burns Suppers. These asserted Scottishness and its integrity, whether or not within the Union, whether home or abroad. In these ways, bards and buildings contributed to conceptions, on the one hand, of Britishness, often in a highly Anglicised form, and, on the other, Scottishness. This might itself be drawn into a discourse of Britishness which depended on recognising that Scotland and England were distinct politico-cultural entities in such a ‘British’ vision. In

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other words, Dobson’s process of canonisation with which we began this chapter, might be very much the same whether applied to a Shakespeare or a Burns—or, indeed, Scott—but the national canons created in each case might substantially differ. A complementary process arose out of the same period as that which led to the memorialisations and creation of national bards we have discussed in this chapter. This, as we will discuss in the next chapter, foregrounded issues of language and nationhood. As we have seen, Katie Trumpener addresses such canonisation with regard to performance of national identities and bardship in Celtic languages as follows: ‘bardic performance binds the nation together across time and across social divides […]; the bard symbolizes the central role of literature in defining national identity’.75 Caroline McCracken-Flesher extends Trumpener’s discussion of the linkages of literature, language and nationhood, highlighting the problematics of such linkages when she observes The nation exists only in its narration, and stands constantly in play through the unpredictabilities of language. At the same time, narrative deploys power. […] But how is power negotiated within the linguistic shifts that unmake and make a nation? How to make that visible within Scottish and other nation theories? [… The] sign can shape and be shifted through the play of equivalence because of its instability. Within the discourses of the nation, this poses a problem, for value never will be fixed.76

In discussing Burns’s use of Scots, we have seen that Whatley observes that the ‘erection of enduring memorials to a figure such as this was an extension of the struggle over speech: in effect nation building’.77 The next chapter considers the role of speech, language and literary-critical ideologies in the process of Scottish ‘nation building’ and the development of Scottish ‘Britishness’.

Notes 1. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 3. 2. Jen Harvie, Staging the UK (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 41–42. 3. J. E. Young, ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today’, Critical Inquiry 18:2 (1992), p. 270, quoted in Johnny

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Rodger, The Hero Building: An Architecture of Scottish Identity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 128. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. xv. Christian Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (London: Michael Joseph, 1964), p. 260. Deelman, p. 261. Dobson, p. 7. Ibid. Ibid., p. 8. T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2003). Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (East Linton: Tuckwell Press; Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001). Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 –1837, new ed. (London: Pimlico, 2003), pp. 117–132. Dobson, p. 143. Ibid., p. 185. Cited in Johanne M. Stochholm, Garrick’s Folly: The Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 at Stratford and Drury Lane (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 40. Robert Crawford, ‘Ossian, Burns, and the Shaping of Shakespeare’, in Willy Maley (ed.), Shakespeare and Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 129. Trumpener, p. xii. I am indebted to Gavin Falconer for this insight. Quoted in Deelman, p. 185. Quoted in Stochholm, p. 76. Ibid., p. 77. The St James Chronicle (9–12 September 1769), p. 4, col. 2, quoted, in Stochholm, p. 89. Stochholm, p. 64. Ibid., p. 63. Julia Thomas, Shakespeare’s Shrine: The Bard’s Birthplace and the Invention of Stratford-upon-Avon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), p. 3. Crawford, ‘Ossian’, p. 133. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 137. James Shapiro, ‘The Scot’s Tragedy and the Politics of Popular Drama’, English Literary Renaissance 23:3 (Autumn 1993), p. 431. The Letters of Robert Burns, CLI—to Mrs Dunlop, on-line tredition (accessed 9 June 2019). Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, second ed. 2000 [1992]), p. 92.

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32. Ibid., p. 95. 33. Ibid., p. 97. 34. Nigel Leask, ‘“Their Groves o’ Sweet Myrtle”: Robert Burns and the Scottish Colonial Experience’, in Murray Pittock (ed.), Robert Burns in Global Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011), pp. 181– 182. 35. Clark McGinn, ‘Vehement Celebrations: The Global Celebration of the Burns Supper Since 1801’, in Pittock, Robert Burns in Global Culture, p. 193. 36. Ibid., p. 194. 37. Ibid., p. 195. 38. Johnny Rodger. ‘The Burnsian Constructs’, in Johnny Rodger and Gerard Carruthers (eds), Fickle Man: Robert Burns in the 21st Century (Dingwall: Sandstone, 2009), p. 60. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., p. 61. 41. Andrew Blaikie, The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory: Representations of Belonging (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 238. 42. Harvie, Staging, p. 42. 43. Christopher Whatley, The Immortal Memory: Burns and the Scottish People (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2016), p. 2. 44. Ayrshire History, http://www.ayrshirehistory.com/mauchline_national_ burns_memorial_opening.html (accessed 14 October 2018). 45. Christopher Whatley, ‘Contested Commemoration: Robert Burns, Urban Scotland and Scottish Nationality in the Nineteenth Century’, in Gerard Carruthers and Colin Kidd (eds), Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 226. 46. Whatley, ‘Contested Commemoration’, pp. 240–241. 47. Christopher Whatley, ‘Memorialising Burns: Dundee and Montrose’, p. 2 at http://www.glasgowheart.org/media/media_183298_en.pdf (accessed 4 March 2019). 48. Johnny Rodger, The Hero Building, p. 212. 49. Whatley, ‘Memorialising’, pp. 3–4. 50. Steve Newman, ‘Localizing and Globalizing Burns’s Songs from Ayrshire to Calcutta: The Limits of Romanticism and Analogies of Improvement’, in Evan Gottlieb (ed.), Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760–1820 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015), p. 64. 51. Murray Pittock (ed.), Robert Burns in Global Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011). 52. John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold, Imagining Scotland: Tradition, Representation and Promotion in Scottish Tourism Since 1750 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), p. 84.

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53. Whatley, The Immortal Memory, p. 1. 54. Clarke McGinn, ‘Vehement Celebrations: The Global Celebration of the Burns Supper Since 1801’, in Pittock (ed.), op. cit., p. 197. 55. Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’, in Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken (eds.), The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1978]), p. 84. 56. McGinn, p. 199. 57. Neilson MacKay, ‘The Heaven-Taught Ploughman’, The New Criterion, 37:2 (October 2018), https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2015/6/ the-heaven-taught-ploughman (accessed 11 October 2018). 58. Newman, ‘Localizing’, p. 57. 59. Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 59. 60. Ibid., p. 88. 61. Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 27 April 2017, http://www.stratfordherald.com/69714-tang-xianzu-statue-unveiled-shakespeares-birthplace. html (accessed 1 July 2019). I am grateful to Ella Hawkins for kindly drawing my attention to this and the next example. 62. Maeve Kennedy, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/aug/29/ wherefore-art-thou-exhibition-celebrates-shakespeares-shoreditch-origins (accessed 1 July 2019). 63. Whatley, The Immortal Memory, p. 16. 64. Ibid., p. 17. 65. John Major, http://www.johnmajor.co.uk/page1086.html (accessed 7 September 2018). 66. Rodger, The Hero Building, p. 96. 67. For detailed discussion of this phenomenon, see Barbara Bell, ‘The Nineteenth Century’, in Bill Findlay (ed.), A History of Scottish Theatre (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998), pp. 143–174 and passim, and Ian Brown, History as Theatrical Metaphor: History, Myth and National Identities in Modern Scottish Drama (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 1–11 and passim. 68. Rodger, The Hero Building, p. 96. 69. Illustrations of both these images may be found in Bill Findlay, A History, pp. 116–117. 70. John Jackson, The History of the Scottish Stage (Edinburgh: Peter Hill, 1793), p. 77. 71. Graeme Morton, Unionist-Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland, 1830–1860 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999). 72. James Coleman, ‘Unionist-Nationalism in Stone? The National Wallace Monument and the Hazards of Commemoration in Victorian Scotland’, in Edward J. Cowan (ed.), The Wallace Book (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007), p. 151.

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Ibid., p. 152. Graeme Morton, Unionist Nationalism, back cover. Trumpener, p. xii. Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 14. 77. Ibid., p. 17.

CHAPTER 5

Cultural Communication, Language Performance and National Literatures

On 22 March 2017, the north of Scotland newspaper The Press and Journal carried a front-page headline, ‘Councillor blasts “Gaelic Gestapo” as region is forced to promote the language’.1 Ben Hendry opened this report: ‘Cash-strapped Moray Council yesterday decided to set aside at least £40,000 for the project – despite only 1% of the population speaking the former national tongue’. Later in the report, he wrote that a ‘2005 law passed by the Scottish Government requires public organisations to draw up a Gaelic-language plan when requested to do so by Bòrd na Gàidhlig – the board which polices the policy’. The source of the sensationalist headline is identified as ‘independent councillor George Alexander [who] fought the proposals and urged his fellow members to vote against progressing the scheme – despite being warned that would bring the authority into “direct conflict” with SNP ministers [claiming] that the council could not afford to spend the estimated £40,000 required’. Alexander’s role was further highlighted: Mr Alexander remained defiant even after the council’s legal advisor told him it would be ‘against the law’ to defy an act of parliament, [saying]. ‘I dread the idea of spending money because Bord Na Gaidhlig [sic] says we have to. They are behaving like a Gaelic Gestapo. The thought of road signs with Gaelic first and English second sends a shiver down my spine, people can find that confusing.’

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The Council leader Stewart Cree is quoted as saying ‘Doric was also a cherished traditional dialect in many parts of Moray but did not receive the same promotion’ and adding ‘Our hands are tied, we have been given a directive to “do what we are told”’. Quite apart from the councillor’s remarkable linking of Gaelic-language promotion in modern Scotland to the activities of an oppressive Nazi police force, the report itself uses language that suggests authoritarian pressure is being applied in requiring that Gaelic-language policy be followed: ‘the board which polices the policy’. Meantime, councillors are cast, not least by themselves, as victims of unreasonable compulsion. This brings them into direct conflict with the SNP government, which they are resisting on several grounds. If nothing else, this report emphasises how much language issues are bound up with issues of Scottish identities, and how arguments about those are often set out in terms of other discourses than the linguistic or even the explicitly identitarian—and sometimes characterised by violent language. To put it another way, attitudes to Scotland’s languages and their expression are not simply controversial. Linguistic disputes like this one reveal the highly political nature of language recognition and usage in modern Scotland. Not all those who worry about Gaelic-language support employ such extreme language. Ian Jack in a Guardian article has talked of being ‘saddened’ by such tokens as Gaelic being included in station signs: What I remember of Cardonald is the old Flamingo ballroom and council estates that were well thought of. To me, Cair Dhòmhnaill is a kind of instruction to focus on a far more distant history, like one slice of a many-banded core sample pulled from the earth, which has an arguable usefulness, and may very well be false.2

Despite the more moderate tone, again, language is, despite the passing reference to multi-banding, talked of as if a zero-sum game. This chapter will explore the roots of this controversy and its place in the performance of ‘Scottishness’. It will consider politico-cultural-economic forces that have fuelled and still fuel language policies in Scotland and resistance to them. In doing so, it considers ways in which attitudes to Scotland’s languages and its literatures have been, and are, conditioned and, so, ‘Scottishness’ has been defined, expressed (or suppressed) and performed. In this, it will examine, to use Homi K. Bhabha’s resonant phrase, ‘performativity of language in the narratives of the nation’.3

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Before doing this, it will help to consider the background to the Press and Journal report and the wider underlying issues embedded in the use of Gaelic in Scottish public signs. In 2000, the UK government signed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, a European convention ‘for the protection and promotion of languages used by traditional minorities’. The Council of Europe describes the Convention as part of its ‘commitment to the protection of national minorities’, considering such ‘languages are part of Europe’s cultural heritage and their protection and promotion contribute to the building of a Europe based on democracy and cultural diversity’.4 Having signed this convention in 2000, the UK ratified and implemented it in 2001. The languages recognised by the UK under this convention include Scots, defined by Wilson McLeod and Jeremy Smith as ‘the term used for the traditional urban and rural dialects of Lowland Scotland and such regions as Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, with distinctive characteristics in all levels of language: accent, grammar and vocabulary’5 and Scottish Gaelic. Alongside these, the UK recognises Cornish, Irish, Manx, Ulster Scots and Welsh. (Gaelic has a higher status than Scots in this process, being recognised under Part III of the Charter. This specifies practical educational, legal, administrative, media and cultural commitments, whereas Scots is recognised only under the more generalised Part II.6 The councillor’s sense of grievance on behalf of Doric is not entirely unfounded, though that is a distinct question from the status of Gaelic.) Within this broader Europewide and UK context, the Scottish Parliament in 2005, then led not by the SNP, but by a Labour-Liberal coalition, unanimously passed the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act. The purpose of the Act is to establish a body having functions exercisable with a view to securing the status of the Gaelic language as an official language of Scotland commanding equal respect to the English language, including the functions of preparing a national Gaelic language plan, of requiring certain public authorities to prepare and publish Gaelic language plans in connection with the exercise of their functions and to maintain and implement such plans, and of issuing guidance in relation to Gaelic education.7

In its broader context, therefore, the Act can be seen not as part of an oppressive language fascism at work in Scotland of the sort seen when Breton-language activists collaborated with German invaders in World War Two. It is, rather, part of a peaceful Europe-wide concern for the

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rights of traditional minorities, minority languages and Europe’s cultural heritage and diversity. Nothing, arguably, could be further from Nazi intentions. Yet, such an apparently neutral and well meant, internationally derived and democratically intended attempt to support one of Scotland’s older languages can spark, as here, very strong reactions. Clearly, none of the Council of Europe’s considerations impinged on the thinking of the councillors as reported, especially not the one who talked of a ‘Gaelic Gestapo’ or, indeed, the journalist whose report took on the pejorative slant it did. What is striking about the use of the word ‘Gestapo’, quite apart from its sensationalism, is that it suggests that advocates of Gaelic have the power, like secret police authorised to use torture, to oppress English speakers. Yet, leaving aside the unreasonably hyperbolic implication of use of torture—after all, learning a language is often hard, but scarcely falls into any definition of ‘torture’—such an assertion reverses the actual power relationship of the two languages and their speakers, at least as defined in terms of speaker numbers. Gaelic, with around 57,000 speakers according to the 2011 census, is hardly in a dominant position. The Moray bourach is, however, useful in helping raise questions about the role, perceptions and management of not just Gaelic, but all three of Scotland’s older indigenous languages—Gaelic, Scots and English—in the creation and performance of national identities. In addressing some of these questions, the suggestion is that the historic reasons for the attitudes betrayed in Moray by this episode are deep rooted and relate in profound ways to what is seen as constituting ‘Scottishness’. The roots of this in modern times may include the fact that the Scots and Scots speakers are only a ‘social’ ethnic group, not one easily defined by the usual shared markers of ethnicity. Raising the status of Gaelic above that of Scots, at least to some minds, challenges that construct.8 The language conflict exposed in Moray in 2017 has deeper origins in geopolitical and cultural conflicts in medieval Scotland. The processes of nation-formation and -definition discussed earlier, represented, for example, by the consequences of the ‘battle’ of Largs, highlight the fact that the Scotland whose political unity was being forged then was a multilingual community. This is something already drawn attention to in discussing the linguistic backgrounds suggested by the signatories of the Declaration of Arbroath. Under Norwegian rule and subsequently under the MacDonald Lords of the Isles, the Hebrides had a high degree of

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autonomy. This was reinforced in everyday terms by the fact of its inhabitants’ linguistic differences in a Gaelic-, then Norse-, then Gaelic-speaking area. The islands’ linguistic complexity was not, of course, unique: large parts of Scotland from Galloway through Fife to the far north of the mainland were in the later medieval period Gaelic-speaking. The dominance of Scots by the middle of the last millennium as the prevailing language, at least in the Lowlands, was largely a gradually developing outcome—from the twelfth century on—of the establishment of the royal burgh system, from Dumfries to Inverness and many points between, for economic and governmental reasons. The prevalent language in use in those burghs, with their crucial commercial, legal and administrative roles, was that of southeast Scotland, what we now call Older, later Middle, Scots. This was in Scotland called ‘Inglis’ until Gavin Douglas joined his contemporaries in asserting it was ‘Scottis’ in his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, completed in 1513. This language is derived from the Old Anglian spoken in the Lothian and Borders regions, which had been the northern part of the early medieval kingdom of Northumbria, although previously that region had been a Brythonic-speaking area like British Strathclyde. It steadily evolved differently from its sister language which we now call ‘English’, under the impact of differences in trading patterns, continental partners and distinct political, cultural, educational and diplomatic ties, not to mention long-standing war-like relations. As the institutions of government were developed in Edinburgh as capital, so, in parallel, the dominance of the Scots language developed. Nonetheless, at least as late as the court of James IV (b.1473, r.1488– 1513) court poets wrote—and presumably were understood—in Gaelic and Scots. Hence, the possibility of The Flyting of William Dunbar, who came from Lothian, and Walter Kennedy, from the Gaelic-speaking area of Ayrshire. While James IV is considered the last Scottish king who is commonly understood to have spoken Gaelic, his great-grandson, James VI, while in his Basilikon Doron (c.1598) considering his Highland subjects ‘for the most part barbarous’, paid the sum of 100 Scottish pounds to an ‘Irish’ poet in 1581, ‘perhaps’, as Christine Robinson and Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh suggest, ‘in payment for a poem’.9 James IV, however, is also the king who in 1493 suppressed the Lordship of the Isles after the incumbent MacDonald had sought to treat directly with Henry VII. In short, relationships between Gaelic-speaking and Scots-speaking magnates throughout the earlier and middle centuries of the last millennium were highly politicised. There was a general acceptance of both languages in

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cultural discourse, often in unexpected interactions: the Book of the Dean of Lismore, for example, a key repository of medieval Gaelic poetry compiled in the early sixteenth century in east Perthshire, uses Scots orthography and includes poems in both Gaelic and Scots. There was at the same time a developing rivalry between them in terms of the power politics of those whose first language was one or the other. This rivalry was reflected also in approaches to history based on a fundamental paradox about the very historiography of Scotland and its inhabitants. As Ulrike Hogg and Martin MacGregor put it The Gaels had become a stereotype inhabiting the margins of the history of the kingdom to which, so that history still asserted, they had given birth and autonomous existence; the very history which they themselves had once authored and nurtured.10

By the sixteenth century, Hogg and MacGregor suggest Ownership of the Scottish past, however, was claimed for the Lowlands, while the original preservers of its records were sidelined and rarely brought into the narrative unless as troublemakers.11

By the time James VI was also James I—on England’s throne as well as Scotland’s—the rivalry was, if anything, fiercer. George Buchanan, James’s tutor, raised in a Gaelic-speaking area just north of Glasgow, wrote in Scots and Latin, but was hostile to Gaelic. The balance of power, which had been steadily moving in favour of Scots (and, under James after the Union of the Crowns, English) was decisively gaining the political upper hand. This process was reinforced by the fact that after the 1560 Reformation in Scotland the language of the available vernacular Bible was the English of, first, the Geneva Bible and, then, the King James Authorised Version. Further, as working practices developed in English and European printing houses, printers would default to English orthography while writers were encouraged to adopt English-language conventions. In this complex and fluid linguistic situation, it has been argued for many years that a key moment in the relationship of Scots and Gaelic is to be found in the 1609 Statutes of Iona. The significance and effectiveness of the Statutes has now been debated, but in the context that, while possibly they may not in themselves be so important as hitherto thought, they are still part of a wider campaign by James and his Scottish Privy

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Council.12 This culminated in 1616 in a major Council meeting and the regulations produced there. This campaign aimed overall at ensuring the subservience of the Gàidhealtachd, its governance and culture to central government. The Statutes themselves set out quite explicitly to reduce the status and use of Gaelic, at least among those more powerful in the Gàidhealtachd’s social hierarchy and to assimilate its culture into that of centralised authority. Besides some public order and trade considerations, the Statutes’ objectives included the provision and support of Protestant ministers in Highland parishes, limitations on the bearing and use of arms and the outlawing of bards and other bearers of traditional culture. Most famously, however, chiefs’ heirs were to be educated in Lowland schools where they ‘may be found able sufficiently to speik, reid and wryte Englische’.13 This process of linguistic acculturation, not to say oppression, continued following the 1616 Privy Council’s regulations. An Act of that year was concerned with ‘Settling of Parochial Schools’. This specified ‘that the vulgar Inglishe tongue be universallie plantit, and the Irish language, whilk is one of the cheif and principall causis of the continewance of barbaritie and incivilitie amongis the inhabitants of the Ilis and the Helandis, be abolisheit and removit’.14 Here, the ‘Irish’, for which read ‘Gaelic’, language is not just associated with barbarity and incivility, but claimed as one of its chief causes. Such attitudes to Gaelic were very little softened when one considers the dismissive attitude of Hugh Blair in the next century, even while in the 1760s advocating James Macpherson’s promotion of his ‘translation’ of the poetry of Ossian. This Blair took to be the work of an authentic Gaelic bard, although we now know it has a more complex provenance.15 As Robert Crawford puts it, for Blair ‘these versions of Highland artworks seemed “a fertile and cultivated country”; but his Lectures presented Gaelic as clearly both ancient and obsolete’.16 While Blair was taking such an attitude to Gaelic as effectively defunct, the language was certainly heard daily on the streets of Edinburgh, if only in the speech of the Gaelic-speaking Highlanders in the city guard. Beyond the city, even after the suppression of the 1745 Rising in which Gaelic-speaking Highland clans fought on both sides, there was still, as yet, little change in the linguistic geography Robinson and Ó Maolalaigh outline at the time of the Union of the Parliaments, half a century before Blair was delivering his lectures:

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Gaelic was spoken in a more or less unbroken continuum from the north west to Banffshire, Aberdeenshire and Angus in the east, and Perthshire and Dunbartonshire to the south. Gaelic was still spoken in parts of Galloway until the eighteenth century.17

Charles Jones and Wilson McLeod make the point that at this time, ‘English-Gaelic diglossia had not yet developed: for most Gaels English was an unknown tongue, although there were of course many individuals in the Gàidhealtachd who knew English to some degree, including cattle drovers and those living in areas adjoining the Lowlands where economic interactions involved language contact’.18 Given this, the extent to which Gaelic was in Blair’s day ‘obsolete’ in real terms is debateable. What is not debateable is that Enlightenment literati like him, and even his colleague Adam Ferguson, a native Gaelic speaker, were hostile to the language. As Kenneth Simpson puts it, Confronted through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by an increasing and apparently inevitable process of Anglicisation, [educated Lowland Scots] tended to identify that process with progress and the Gaelic culture with decline.19

In this, they were following the founding politico-cultural ideology of an organisation like the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, ‘founded in 1709, which had set up over 300 schools by 1795’.20 Although this organisation in time softened its line in face of the realities of seeking to educate in what was for many of its pupils a monolingual Gaelic-speaking culture, it initially worked—as a royal commission in 1716 put it—towards ‘reducing these Counties to order […] and rooting out their Irish language’.21 Again, Gaelic was stigmatised by association with the idea of disorder, while its exoticism was still being emphasised in naming it as ‘Irish’, though as the eighteenth century progressed the term ‘Gaelic’ become more and more common. After all, until the seventeenth century Gaelic had the same written form as Irish. Moreover, the Gaelic of the Lowlands was much closer to Irish than the Gaelic of the Highlands. The change in terminology is, therefore, also related to the rise of a distinctively Scottish Gaelic written standard and the extinction of Gaelic in the Lowlands (and perhaps to the Highlands being converted to Protestantism).22

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No doubt Blair’s experience of the Jacobite occupation of Edinburgh during the 1745 Rising may have influenced his hostility to Gaelic, even though the majority language of the Jacobite army was Scots and Gaelic speakers served in the Hanoverian armies. But, of course, Blair, in promoting proper ‘Rhetoric’, was also dismissive of the Scots language. As Crawford puts it, In his literary orientation Blair was a defender of what he saw as Scottish excellence, but that excellence had to be of the ‘proper English’ variety. He was a conscious Briton, writing of ‘Our Island’, at the same time lacking no alacrity in championing such respectable Scottish eminences as the Latinist George Buchanan.23

In his attitude to writing in Scots, Blair reflected a development that may have begun when many Scots followed James to London and English became a language of court influence. It certainly accelerated after the Union, when the Westminster parliament became the centre of political discourse and power in the new United Kingdom as a whole. As the middle classes saw this process develop, so a market was well established in Scottish cities by the 1720s for lessons in English and its articulation. This was often served by English actors like Allan Ramsay’s friend Anthony Aston, who enjoyed an Edinburgh stay of around four, sometimes controversial, years before in 1728 leaving the city and a trail of ‘unpaid bills’.24 The linguistic Kulturkampf was not, however, one-sided. Ramsay produced collections of poetry in Scots, The Ever Green (1724) and The Tea-Table Miscellany (1724–1737). His Scots-language ballad opera The Gentle Shepherd, premièred in the version we are familiar with in 1729, was performed successfully over the next century throughout Britain and North America. Nonetheless, Adam Smith who preceded his friend Blair in lecturing on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in Edinburgh, having studied at Balliol College, Oxford from 1740 to 1746, offered, as Robert Crawford reminds us, ‘his audience not only an education in Rhetoric as it was conventionally understood, but also the opportunity as Scots to confront a pure English style’.25 Crawford continues, ‘no Scottish poetry is mentioned in Smith’s lecture on poetry, though [Ramsay’s collections] had fought to stress that poetry in the Scots tongue was not only a hardy perennial but also fit to be admitted to polite society’.26 The flight of leading Enlightenment figures from Scots as not ‘polite’, that is to say

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‘civilised’, or as being old hat, betrays inner contradictions about languages and identity. This is often seen in individuals’ conflicting practices. David Hume, for example, who spoke Scots, as did many of his Enlightenment colleagues, sent his manuscripts off to have the ‘Scotticisms’ edited out. As James G. Basker remarks, Hume’s primary motivation was […] a personal anxiety to avoid ‘impurities’ and ‘incorrectness’ in his published works. […] He constantly asked friends to send him lists of Scotticisms and to proofread his works for any signs of them, and he did the same for his friends in turn.27

Hume certainly appeared to see his speech as an issue to be addressed by the next generation. He wrote in 1771 to an army officer nephew, advocating he ‘naturalize’ his language to English: I believe all the officers of your Regiment consist of Englishmen or Scotchmen thouroughly (sic) naturalized; so that you have a good opportunity of learning the pronunciation exactly; and I beseech you not to neglect it. It is an agreeable Quality and easily carry’d about with you: I was too negligent in this particular when I was of your age.28

Others joined in. James Beattie, for one, sought to help the cause by producing his guide, Scoticisms, Arranged in Alphabetical Order, Designed to Correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing in 1779. Such attitudes to language can be seen to constitute part of the (Rule) Britannia Project whose literati in Tom Devine’s words, ‘saw 1707 and its effects as crucial to curing the old Scotland of the seventeenth century and before of the maladies of obscurantism, faction, poverty and religious fanaticism’.29 However, leave alone the nature of Scots’ spoken ‘English’ under the impact of Edinburgh-based elocutionists or professors of Rhetoric, or attempts to ‘naturalise’ their language and correct it of ‘improprieties’, the forms of written English they produced were often not recognised as being quite ‘naturalised’ enough. John Butt describes Alexander Carlyle’s trying to explain to Lord Mansfield how it was that, in reading William Robertson and Hume, Mansfield felt he was not reading English: to every man bred in Scotland the English language was in some respects a foreign tongue, the precise value and force of whose words and phrases he did not understand.30

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Mansfield’s puzzlement, as Lord Chief Justice of England, offers another layer of irony and conflict in a complex linguistic situation. He himself is a product of post-Union cultural exchange and, arguably, competing values. A son of the Scots nobility, born at Scone Palace in 1705 and initially educated in Perth Grammar School, he joined Westminster School aged 13, entered Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1723, was called to the bar in Lincoln’s Inn in 1730, became an MP for an English constituency in 1742, and rose through the posts of Solicitor General and Attorney General to become in 1756 Lord Chief Justice. It was regarding him that Samuel Johnson remarked that ‘Much may be made of a [Scotsman], if he be caught young’. Presumably, Mansfield’s language had become so naturalised that for him English written by Scots literati, historians and philosophers of the standing of Robertson and Hume, even minus Scotticisms, did not read as ‘English’. It may be that here we have in Mansfield’s reaction to Robertson’s and Hume’s writing and Carlyle’s observation early evidence of the development of what is now called Scottish Standard English, a form of Standard English influenced by Scots, including Scots syntactic structures and both overt and covert Scotticisms in lexis. Jones and McLeod set the terms of the trend towards standardisation in a wider context: ‘the written Scottish Enlightenment, especially in the latter half of the eighteenth century, supported what were contemporary pressures not merely across Britain, but across Europe, for language standardisation […].’31 In short, the impulse of standardisation felt by such figures as Smith and Blair was not simply a local matter. Meanwhile, as they sought to set English as the polite standard and stigmatise or neglect Scots, the question remained open as to what form of English they were actually propagating, however much they believed themselves to be promulgating an ‘English’ standard of the language. The fact Hume considered it necessary to send his work off to have the Scotticisms removed carries the clear implication that he had been able to draft his philosophic and historical works in a form of Scots or Scots-influenced language capable of sustaining highly complex discourse and ideas. What seems apparent, from Mansfield’s reaction at least, is that by the late eighteenth century a situation existed which in many respects reflects that of the present day as described by McLeod and Smith, though the proportions would be very different. They identify three varieties of language derived from Old Anglian and Saxon and spoken in Scotland: ‘Scots, Scottish Standard English (SSE), and English of the kind spoken in England (sometimes, rather oddly, referred to as ‘Anglo-English’) [the last being] spoken by

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English immigrants and some members of the Scottish aristocracy […] encountered through UK-wide radio and television’.32 The eighteenth-century linguistic Kulturkampf being discussed here was no more one-sided than is the present-day complex linguistic position outlined by McLeod and Smith. Robert Crawford comments that poets like Ramsay were ‘more interested in asserting a symbolic continuity with Scottish poetic ancestors than in continuing accurately the language of those ancestors, [and] were reconstructing Scottish literary identity’.33 He goes on to argue that though ‘Ramsay usually presented his original poems and anthologies in terms of simple Scottish patriotism, he indicated that his language could be seen as “British”. In the Preface to his 1721 Poems he writes of “the Scots and English tongue” – not “tongues” – as if describing one language. [..] for Ramsay, “British” seems to describe the mixed speech which is the language of Scotland’.34 Crawford sees a similar approach to language in the practice of Burns, while he observes Burns lamenting the dominating effect of purely English taste in literature. […] Yet if we say that Burns is a British poet, in the sense that he fully utilized the spectrum of British language, then it is clear that he did this precisely because he was a Scottish writer. His deployment of a mixture of Scots and English is fully consonant with characteristic delight of his imagination in combining high and low, little and large. It represents a mingling of the low, dominated Scots language with the high, dominant language of ‘proper English’. […] Taken as a whole, his language is an ‘intermingledom’ of the language considered pure and that considered impure.’35

As Fiona M. Douglas puts it with regard to oral language, Language can act as a strong cultural identifier and can function as a rallying point, an emblem of in-group solidarity, or a linguistic totem. By using Scottish words, a speaker signals that they are part of the wider discourse community that is Scotland.36

Given this complex literary-linguistic situation in which the ‘British’ language was being employed by Scottish writers like Ramsay and Burns, and, of course, many others, including Walter Scott and John Galt, the question arises how far their literary performance of Scottishness reflected actual performance in speaking Scots in everyday life.

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Certainly, it is reasonable to hypothesise that a substantial number of speakers, will have remained monolingual Scots. After all, it is still the case by common experience that a substantial number of modern Scots speakers are monolingual in everyday practice, although urban working-class speech is closer to English than it is to traditional rural Scots, which may not have very many more speakers than Gaelic. As McLeod and Smith note: These varieties [of language available to Scots] form not a set of discrete categories, but rather a continuum of usages. Many Scottish speakers – especially those whose social ties to their particular communities are weaker – will switch from Scots to Scottish English depending on the social situation in which they find themselves. Many, of course, cannot; a recent notable court case saw a Scots-speaker being ruled in contempt [of court] because of a failure to shift to a form of SSE deemed appropriate for the occasion (he said Aye instead of Yes ).37

(Yet, no doubt the sheriff would celebrate and fiercely defend the ways in which Scots lexis is found throughout Scottish legal terminology and practice.) McLeod and Smith go on to make the case that middleclass speakers especially, a socially mobile group, ‘feel the centripetal pull of overtly prestigious “polite” SSE and covertly prestigious “broad” Scots, and often “code-switch” between the two, becoming more or less “broad” in the use of Scots’.38 They argue that such usage ‘chimes well with current views on linguistic categorisation, where forms and varieties are seen in “more-or-less” rather than “either-or” terms’. While one has, of course, to be cautious about reading back from such modern practice to earlier periods, the evidence, not least the fluency with which Ramsay and Burns talk of and exploit their ‘British’ language, points to the exploitation of this ability to switch freely, as now, from point to point along the ‘continuum of usages’ by linguistically enabled Scots in the eighteenth century. Further, again as now, there were clearly Scots, often settled south of the Border, who employed Anglo-English apparently exclusively. These would include Mansfield, who had acquired, it appears, Anglo-English fluency through education and lifestyle and David Mallet/Malloch who had done so as part of a conscious process of Anglicisation: one reason Samuel Johnson despised Mallet was because he passed as an Anglo-English speaker. Yet, it is also clear that James Boswell, as one

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example, for all his time spent south of the Border, retained the capacity to speak not just with a Scots accent, but, as occasion demanded, Scots. Given this, it is hardly surprising that language should become an important means of performing Scottishness. As Whatley expresses it. For many Scots in the nineteenth century, language was the essence of Scottishness; Burns’s use of it in much of his best work gave legitimacy to the way most ordinary Scots thought and spoke, and added another bulwark against the tide of Anglicising North British-ness that had flowed north since the union of 1707.39

Nonetheless, Scottish professionals who might seek to make their way in the developing British Empire would need to develop adequate linguistic fluency at least in Standard Scottish English to rise in their careers. In this process they and their diaspora colleagues could maintain their Scotslanguage skills, not least at a popular level through the worldwide spread of Burns Suppers discussed in the previous chapter but also through the Scots and Caledonian societies set up in the cities of the Empire. The Empire also required workers and soldiers with levels of literacy and fluency in versions of English in order simply to operate. In this context, the 1872 Education (Scotland) Act completed a certain trajectory of imperialist linguistic management. It insisted on English, the lingua franca of British imperial rule, as the language of education, not Gaelic or Scots, presumably still the languages of the large majority of Scotland’s indigenous population. While not explicitly forbidding these languages, it had the effect, by privileging English, of further reducing what prestige those languages had and side-lining their importance. Such a development may be considered to have given rise long term to perceptions by some Scots even now that the Scots language is ‘slang’ or ‘bad English’. With regard to Gaelic, meantime, it was not until the 1918 Education Act that education authorities in Gaelic-speaking areas were required to make ‘reasonable provision’ for teaching Gaelic. This was limited until the 1960s, although it is now more common, if still not widespread.40 Given this complexity over many years of battles over linguistic prestige and attempted language planning, it is not hard to see why the conflict on Moray council could find such emphatic, and confused, expression. This privileging of English—whether in the form of Scottish Standard English or, occasionally in private educational contexts, Anglo-English— in Scottish schools took place in a situation where, while Scots could be

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accommodated as a version of English, rather than the sister language with a high degree of inter-comprehensibility it is, Gaelic was left as an outlier in a country where it was the oldest surviving language of 90% of its territory. When in the summer of 1881 Robert Louis Stevenson went to Moulin, near Pitlochry, and later Braemar, he wrote the uncanny tales of ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘The Body Snatcher’ and ‘The Merry Men’. He had entered communities in which one language in general daily use was neither English nor Scots, but Gaelic. In fact, it was only as late as 1895, fourteen years after Stevenson’s visit, that regular Gaelic-language communion services in Moulin Kirk were abandoned, there by that time being only sixteen communicants. Indeed, when in 1946 the incumbent minister in the next parish, Blair Atholl, a distinguished Gaelic scholar, retired, even at that late stage a live consideration was whether his successor should be, for pastoral purposes, a fluent Gaelic speaker, though no such candidate was found.41 In other words, when Stevenson wrote his uncanny tales he was living in an uncanny environment in which the language he was used to hearing spoken around him by natives of his country in his home city was not necessarily being spoken on a daily basis around him as he wrote: an uncanny situation indeed, even if not by any means unusual in mainland European countries or multi-ethnic imperial states. Scots of the generation of Stevenson, and one might add contemporaries like Arthur Conan Doyle, J. M. Barrie and John Buchan grew to maturity in a society in which their identity was constantly split between being (potentially or actually) trilingually Scottish and monolingually imperial English. Whatever their own language competence (and all four were more than competent in Scots and English and three of them wrote fluently in both languages), in their home culture there were three languages currently—and in specific regions fairly widely—spoken. Linguistic splits and divisions were, therefore, highlighted. Stephen Arata has observed of Stevenson’s Pitlochry tales that Scottish Gothic constitutes a response to the specific trajectories of the nation’s history after 1707, in which the structures and practices of Enlightenment modernity are striated by various anti-Enlightenment political and religious discourses.42

That is certainly true. It is surely also more than likely, to emphasise the point, that the uncanniness discerned in ‘Thrawn Janet’ was at least reinforced by the fact that, when Stevenson wrote it, he was living in a

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community in his homeland one of whose active languages he could not understand and the imperialist state was stigmatising. After all, in 1872, less than ten years before his Moulin visit, one outcome of the Education (Scotland) Act, whether fully intended or not, had been to repress as a medium for education in schools not only Gaelic but also Scots, a language in which he was a fine poet. Reference to the impact of a basically monolingual education system in Scotland, against the background of a still actively trilingual linguistic geography, brings back our discussion to the nature of literary study in Britain under Hugh Blair’s long-term influence. His emphasis as he developed the foundation of the discipline we now call English Literature was on the primacy of writing in English. Such an emphasis and his attitudes to other Scottish languages were part of the (Rule) Britannia movement which led to issues of national identity being embedded in the structures of academic disciplines, not just literature, but, for example, history. Hence, English Literature as embedded in the Anglo-English-language literary tradition, influenced by Matthew Arnold, became largely, though not entirely exclusively (as we have seen, Burns could be considered as a writer of ‘English’ literature until the 1950s at least), a mark of Britishness. What is more, when Walter Raleigh was appointed in 1904 to the newly established chair of English Literature at Oxford University, he could write: We have spread ourselves over the surface of the habitable globe, and have established our methods of government in new countries. But the poets are still ahead of us, pointing the way. It was they, and no others, who first conceived the greatness of England’s destinies, and delivered the doctrine that was to inspire her.43

Clearly, the wonderfully aptly named Raleigh saw the development of English Literature as a study as part of the imperial ‘destinies’ of ‘England’, offering embedded values to be shared empire-wide and the promotion of English as the imperial lingua franca. This literature is seen as monolingual, a perception most clearly articulated later in the twentieth century in F. R. Leavis’s conception of the ‘Great Tradition’ of the novel. This excluded such an internationally important figure as Walter Scott, despite the fact his work contributed to the development of British (and in Ivanhoe and Kenilworth English) identity, as not forming part of a true British literary ‘tradition’. That depended on expression in a single

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pre-eminent language: English. In effect, as the need for a single lingua franca to sustain imperial expansion and administration had grown, so had a Herderian nationalist conception of English literature, in which study of William Shakespeare became a central unifying element. In this conception, to quote T. S. Eliot from a famous review, ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’, ‘The basis for one literature is one language’.44 Gerard Carruthers locates such a formulation in a critical tradition whose assumptions ‘rest on the idea of a national (literary) language, essentially licensed by the state, whether that be crown, parliament or people (or preferably all of these things at the same time with Eliot’s much sought-after organic culture)’.45 Carruthers goes on, in discussing the views of Edwin Muir in Scott and Scotland (1936)46 that Scots was becoming a defunct literary language, to argue that the ‘notion of a centralizing literary language in either England or Scotland is flawed both in the conception of such an unchallenged entity and in the reach that any language had throughout the “state” or “nation” (however defined)’.47 One can only agree with Carruthers, but, nonetheless, in his review Eliot sets a tone for much literary study which neglects key texts in Scottish literature when he says ‘We may even conclude it to be an evidence of strength, rather than of weakness, that the Scots language and the Scottish literature did not maintain a separate existence’.48 However startling this last claim may now appear, it can be seen to be reflected even now in the attitudes of certain linguistic scientists: David Crystal, for example, not only appears to consider Scots as simply a dialect on a level with English country dialects, but, judging by his subheadings in his 2015 collection The Disappearing Dictionary, considers Scotland to be on a par with an English county.49 The impact of such attitudes is summarised by Carruthers: The ‘English’/British nation is elided and is regarded as a largely unproblematic arena of literary development (except in class, gender, or sexual terms). Notwithstanding decades of intense self-analysis by literary theorists, these remain the underlying assumptions of mainstream English literary study. It is in good part this purblindness – an ingrained cluster of Anglo-Saxon attitudes, if you will – in the field of English Literature that, alongside a growing cultural nationalism, accounts for the rise of courses in Scottish Literature since the 1960s.50

And a key element in that rise has been the recognition that that literature is multilingual.

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Eliot’s review takes for granted that what matters in literary achievement is ‘the continuous supply of important men’—a somewhat sexist conception—and the centrality of ‘the metropolis’. Nonetheless, in 1931 he published in The Criterion what is in a sense a response to his views, Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’ which takes English literature to task for avoiding diversity on its own doorstep: It is absurd that intelligent readers of English, who would be ashamed not to know something (if only the leading names and, roughly, what they stand for) of most Continental literatures, are content to ignore Scottish, Irish, and Welsh Gaelic literatures, and Scots Vernacular literature.51

More recently, Vassiliki Kolocotroni has taken firm issue with Eliot’s attitude, describing it as a ‘stridently ideological view’52 and ‘a paradigmatic example of the centripetal tendency which we associate with Eurocentric, metropolitan modernism’.53 One might add that his unitary and centripetal conception of English literature can encompass not only his Anglicised American self, but assimilate, say, W. B. Yeats or Joseph Conrad. In this, it exemplifies a form of banal Anglo-British nationalism. To be fair to Eliot and his Herderian monolingual conception, Gregory Smith, whose book Eliot was reviewing, focuses on the literatures of Lowland Scotland in Scots or English, so himself evading the issue of the full linguistic range of Scottish literature. Yet, major elements of a literature like that of Scotland exists not only in Scots, but also even more distinctively in Gaelic, not to mention in its significant Scoto-Latin component, which includes, for instance, the internationally highly influential drama of George Buchanan. Any version of literary study based on Eliot’s and others’ monolinguist dictum and seeking continuity of literary tradition in terms of a single language must exclude the possibility of the interlingual influence which is so central to Scottish literature and its distinct traditions. The exclusion of these important linguistic strands of literature within Britain, major elements of Scottish literature, from holistic study of the various British forms of literature by identifying the key literary discipline as ‘English Literature’ can be seen to counterpoint the methods of colonisation in which both English and Scots people were active during the period of high Empire. This is still marked by a separation continuing today of the study of the Gaelic literature of Scotland into separate departments of ‘Celtic’ from those of the study of Scotland’s literatures in English and

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Scots. Indeed, within living memory, the very existence of Scottish literature as a subject of study was challenged. When Glasgow University established a Scottish literature department in session 1971–1972, according to an interview with A. A. M. Duncan (9 January 2003), David Robb reports there was a strong strand of feeling that the new department was just a lot of nationalistic nonsense. There was apparently, for example, one notorious occasion after senate had approved the Honours degree in the subject when two professors of the physical sciences were heard denouncing the innovation in the college club bar, claiming that there was ‘no such subject’ as Scottish literature.54

Meanwhile, lest the debate be seen to be led only by Scottish scholars, Norman Davies has commented with regard to what is included or not in ‘English’ literature: Another incident illustrates a different aspect of the prevailing lack of awareness. In 1982 Penguin Books published an anthology of Contemporary British Poetry. It excluded all poets writing in Celtic languages, even in translation, whilst including several non-British poets writing in English. In a poem entitled ‘Open Letter’, an Irish poet, and future Nobel Prize winner, was moved to protest at some length at the improper use of the word ‘British.’ You’ll understand I draw the line At being robbed of what is mine My patria… Seamus Heaney was right. All too often, the English casually subsume the insular Celts, or callously ignore them, as the mood dictates.55

‘Callously’ may be too emotive a word, as may ‘casually’. Nevertheless, the case can be made that the treatment of British Celtic literature (as with that in Scots) within the discourse of ‘English Literature’ is ideologically—even, pace our professors of the physical sciences, Englishnationalistically—driven.

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The conception of a literature being necessarily monolingual in itself— ironic in view of Eliot’s poetic practice of quotation from other languages—is complemented by what Kolocotroni calls the ‘centripetal tendency’ with its focus on the ‘metropolis’ and in turn on hierarchies of esteem. A key conception following Eliot’s critical concerns was set out in the middle of the twentieth century by F. R. Leavis, that of a ‘Great Tradition’, a conception very much based on the creation of centralised critical hierarchies and still with influence on underlying contemporary thinking about literature: It is necessary to insist, then, that there are important distinctions to be made, and that far from all the names in the literary histories really belong to the realm of significant creative achievement. And as a recall to a due sense of differences it is well to start by distinguishing the few really great – the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote: awareness of the possibilities of life.56

Leavis’s methodology of hegemonising assertion is clear. One particular footnote, referring to a key figure in Scottish literature with a worldwide literary impact ‘in terms of the human awareness’ of the kind he promotes, demonstrates one result of this methodology: Scott was primarily a kind of inspired folk-lorist, qualified to have done in fiction something analogous to the ballad-opera: the only live part of Redgauntlet now is ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ and ‘The Two Drovers’ remains in esteem while the heroics of the historical novels can no longer command respect. He was a great and very intelligent man; but, not having the creative writer’s interest in literature, he made no serious attempt to work out his own form and break away from the bad tradition of the eighteenth-century romance. […] Out of Scott a bad tradition came. […] And with Stevenson it took on ‘literary’ sophistication and fine writing.57

Leavis and those who follow him employ the concept of greatness to set up hierarchies of literary authority, status and power, from which Scott is excluded into a dismissive footnote. They also create hierarchies of genre: Leavis, in talking of Scott clearly thinks ballad opera is somehow a substandard form. Yet, one of the great Scottish masterpieces of the eighteenth century, Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd, is by any standards,

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except apparently Leavis’s, a major work of literature as well as of dramatic art. In a very real sense, Leavis and his ‘Great Tradition’ are setting out a narrow centralising vision of a literature. This is defined by the hierarchies (think of the Raj’s extraordinarily detailed tables of order of precedence) that were surely necessary in sustaining a colonial empire and certainly colonially desirable in establishing the value system of a monolingual imperial literary centre. In contrast, the editors of 2007 The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature argue: The grand narrative sweeps and authoritative interpretations of the nineteenth-century Whig historians and their twentieth-century successors have come to seem anachronistic and naively optimistic; more than that, it is now possible to see them as in thrall to political interests that dismissed or neglected large sectors of Scotland’s population and great swathes of its literature – often those that have subsequently been recovered and appreciated as amongst Scottish Literature’s greatest treasures. So for ‘History’ so constituted, the present volumes substitute a series of perspectives: multiple authors, many stories, many forms, themes, approaches and angles of understanding. […] a Scottish politico-national identity founded in alliances and conjunctions – enduring, fragile, frequently contested and always evolving.58

On the other hand, it might be said that the canon of ‘English Literature’ has been developed, as Cairns Craig has so clearly shown in Out of History,59 by centralising, suppressing difference, claiming and appropriating writers who belong to more than one tradition, whether, inter alia, American, Caribbean, Irish or Scottish. Such hierarchical and hegemonic attitudes are reflected in the question raised as a heading for Eliot’s 1919 review. They also can be seen from time to time, as in that review and since, to engage some scholars in a version of ‘Scots is bad English’ applied to literary studies. The most common form of this is the suggestion that a specific discipline of Scots literature is ‘parochial’ or, as we have seen, called ‘nationalistic’. Given the linguistic range of Scottish literature as opposed to that of the texts studied under the title ‘English literature’, the adjectives might be applied in the other direction, of course. Yet, to use such adjectives in a bout of academic name-calling is, and has been, both futile and puerile. Nonetheless, it was used in just this way as recently as when the Scottish Qualifications Authority in 2014–2015, after long debate, required a Scottish text to

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be included in the Scottish Higher English curricula. This name-calling was despite the fact that most cultures include in their secondary curricula texts from their national literature. The accusation of parochialism levelled at the SQA decision is not about literature, or about genuine parochialism, but is derived from colonialist and hegemonic attitudes embedded in historic attitudes to the study of English literature. In this framework, the very act of including Scottish texts as necessary elements in the Scottish secondary curriculum is in itself a performative act of Scottishness, and resistance to a centripetal hegemonic ideology of the study of literatures in Britain. When monolingual Great Traditionalists argue there is no organic core tradition in Scottish literature even—as T. S. Eliot famously did in 1919— question its very existence because it finds expression in more than one language, they are in fact banally nationalist in Billig’s sense of the term. Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman examine Billig’s usage as follows: The contrast between a ‘hot’ nationalism, overtly invoking difference, mobilising passionate concerns about identity, and a ‘cold’ nationalism of secure and established nation states where such emotional engagement may be seen as destructive if not primitive, does not in Billig’s view hold up to close scrutiny. Rather there is a constant ‘flagging’ of the nation, a persistent reminder of who ‘we’ are and how ‘we’ differ from ‘them’, a flagging whose function is to secure some in their identity and render others insecure, to confirm some in their beliefs and sense of entitlement and to undermine others.60

In Billig’s terms it is clear why the development of a distinct discipline of Scottish literature can be seen as ‘invoking difference’, while the ‘secure and established’ academic discipline of monolingually focused ‘English Literature’ embodies a ‘cold’ sense of entitlement and even covert nationalism. In this, there is constant flagging of a perception of identities which the study of Scottish literature tends to undermine. Such a sense of being undermined may even be one explanation for the famously over-heated and antagonistic reaction of one judge to the award of the 1994 Booker Prize to James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late. Indeed, one element in the judge’s anger seems to have been the nature of the language used by Kelman, a dialect of Scots. But, pace Eliot, Leavis and others, there is a core tradition in Scottish literature and that is that it is multivocal, multilingual, organic in the sense that it lives and interacts within

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itself, though not all parts of the whole always know how they relate to the other parts, or even sometimes that they contemporaneously exist. Scottish literature may be seen at times as having a discontinuous history. Modern scholars would argue there is no discontinuity, just a continuity that needs to be understood more subtly and tenaciously. As Kenneth Simpson has expressed it, Like the literature of alienation of the twentieth century, that of Scotland has been characterised by multiple voices, voices juxtaposed and often contradictory but originating from the one source, Burns epitomises this mingling of contraries or, in his terms, ‘intermingledoms’.61

Roderick Watson expands on this point when he comments that ‘the Bakhtinian analysis of the Scots tradition goes far beyond matters of “carnival”, to touch on how the authority of any discourse is destabilised in the face of multiple and competing languages and registers of speech’.62 There are still, however, major critics for whom language difference provides room for failure to come to terms with what Scottish literature is. Even Alastair Fowler, generally an astute critic, in his Times Literary Supplement review of Christopher Whyte’s 2004 Modern Scottish Poetry seemed to suggest that the Gaelic poets there under discussion were being taken on trust, that probably they were not as ‘good’ as the poets in English and Scots to whom Fowler had direct linguistic access: [A serious error of judgement] is the apparently disproportionate place given to Gaelic, which only a few thousand Scots have any knowledge of. Its influence on Scottish and English literature is virtually non-existent, as Whyte admits. The aptness of a cultural-political approach is therefore unclear. Initial demonstration of high aesthetic or other quality is called for, to justify the place given to Gaelic poetry.63

Yet Carla Sassi in the 2015 International Companion to Scottish Poetry 64 makes clear that rather than being ‘virtually non-existent’ there are substantial cross-influences in Scottish literature between Gaelic, Scots and English. Meanwhile, Fowler talks of Scottish literature as a category to which Gaelic writing is external, something of a nonsense which the idea of a necessarily monolingual literature may have given rise to. We see in Fowler’s review an imperialist or even colonialist exclusion of Gaelic, marked by his dismissive and inaccurate reduction of the tens of thousands of Gaelic-speaking Scots to ‘a few thousand’, as if, anyway, the size of the

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pool of native speakers marked a literature’s importance. The reductio ad absurdum of that argument would be to deny any need for anyone to study Latin literature. In fact, there is a clear consensus about the high quality, even when only translation is taken account of, of the work of the leading Gaelic-language poets of the last hundred years. Rather than come to terms with this, however, Fowler seems to imply that the only importance of Gaelic literature is that it might influence literatures in English or Scots. Even if a ‘great tradition’ approach, as represented by Fowler, is designed to bring Scottish literature within its aegis, a problem remains. That is that it seeks to dismiss aspects of that literature in order to create a unified monolingual canon rather than seek to understand the necessary diversity that constitutes any canon in a multilingual literature like Scotland’s.65 In contrast, as with Christopher Whyte’s study, the integrity of Scottish literature in different languages has been more recently recognised. Roderick Watson’s 1984 The Literature of Scotland 66 was the first history per se of Scottish literature to include Gaelic-language texts. Though in the 1987–1988 Aberdeen History of Scottish Literature, out of 84 chapters, only four dealt directly with Gaelic literature, twenty years later, in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (2007), out of 104 chapters, twenty deal with Scottish literature in Gaelic, while at least another ten deal with issues looking across all Scottish literature’s languages. Behind the editorial decisions that led to this change was a recognition by the editors of the Edinburgh History of the hybridity of Scotland’s culture, that in that culture and its literature the term ‘Scottish’ is ‘multicultural and multivalent – indeed, intercultural – and that Scotland has always been multi-ethnic and multilingual’.67 Further, as they observe, ‘Oral and performance modalities have been a notable feature in the development of Scottish Literature’.68 They argue that there is a crucial distinction between Scottish literature and the English literary models that have defined the canon and which find linguistic hybridity atypical to their paradigm. But ‘atypicality’ implies a prior norm, and it is precisely this kind of reactive or oppositional view that requires to be carefully handled if Scottish literature’s separate, but also integral, status is to emerge.69

Scottish literature—as, indeed, Scottishness—is no longer to be seen in terms of discontinuity or a literature in any one language. It is certainly

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to be seen as a series of interlinked cognate literatures in Scotland’s various languages. It refuses to respect the generic categories and hierarchies found in the ‘Great Tradition’ approach to literary study, especially in English literature. And it certainly jouks the danger of being parochially expressed in a single ‘great’ language. It has several of those from and among which to choose. Language choice within Scotland remains a crucible of politico-cultural performativity as we have seen when we discussed the ‘Gaelic Gestapo’ episode and its historic background. While what is being presented is a picture of a language community in some confusion, it is suggested that this confusion can be fruitful, even although the confusion presents a number of problems. First, historic pressures have tended to subordinate Gaelic and Scots; secondly, there is an absence of general understanding of Scotland’s languages’ history; thirdly, there is a tendency among some members of the community simply to see Gaelic as ‘dying’ and Scots as a ‘bad English’; fourthly, a geographically dominant standard Scots dialect is absent such as exists in both Scottish Standard English and Anglo-English, so that the communities speaking regional dialects of Scots often come into negative conflict, having no perspective of their dialect as part of a range of dialects of the Scots language. (At the time of the 2011 census when a question on the use of Scots was included for the first time, Donna Heddle has reported in conversation with me, for example, that she had to explain to many in Orkney who did not think they spoke Scots, but knew they spoke Orcadian, that the latter was a dialect of the former.) As we have seen, the debate about the languages of Scotland is closely related to the way in which their literatures are perceived and even whether they are recognised. Yet, within the linguistic discontinuity of language communities lies the possibility of enacting and performing different varieties of Scottishness in both linguistic and literary forms. Versions of Scottishness are linguistically performed in regularly adopting at different times, and from context to context, the freedom to code-switch back and forth between ‘overtly prestigious “polite” SSE and covertly prestigious “broad” Scots’, as McLeod and Smith put it, as well as within Gaelic dialects and between Gaelic and Scotland’s Germanic languages. ‘Code-switching’ is a term used alongside ‘style-drifting’ by A. J. Aitken as follows: ‘Some speakers can switch cleanly from one to the other — these people have been called dialect-switchers. Others again cannot or do not choose to control their styles in this way, but they do shift styles in a less predictable and more fluctuating way — these people we may

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call style-drifters.’70 Gavin Falconer has reported ‘Pure code-switching is much rarer now than it was, and possibly limited to speakers of traditional rural dialects of Scots, who are no longer numerous. For the most part, it has given way to style drifting, where the demarcation between Scots and English is no longer clear’.71 Nonetheless, there is a long history of code-switching by Scots between languages and by their writers between literary genres, as Lyndsay Lunan comments regarding James Hogg’s practice. She sees Hogg effecting ‘“code switches” between genres as a means of destabilising the authority of particular idioms in a manner that recalls Burns’s movement between English and Scots’.72 This is a subversive practice we will return to in later chapters. And, as we have seen from the Moray case with which this chapter opened, such switching, let alone drifting, is profoundly bound up with issues of identity and what ‘Scottishness’ means, as are the borders to be discussed in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Press and Journal at https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/ moray/1201080/councillor-blasts-gaelic-gestapo-as-region-is-forced-topromote-the-language/ (accessed 18 October 2018). 2. Ian Jack, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/11/ ian-jack-saddened-by-scotland-going-gaelic (accessed 31 March 2019). 3. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’, in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 3. 4. Council of Europe, https://www.coe.int/en/web/european-charterregional-or-minority-languages (accessed 18 October 2018). 5. Wilson McLeod and Jeremy Smith, ‘Resistance to Monolinguality: The Languages of Scotland Since 1918’, in Ian Brown (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 21. 6. Ibid., p. 28. 7. Stationery Office, London, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2005/7 (accessed 18 October 2018). 8. I am grateful to Gavin Falconer for this insight. 9. Christine Robinson and Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh, ‘The Several Tongues: The Languages of Scotland, 1314–1707’, in Thomas Owen Clancy and Murray Pittock (eds), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 154. 10. Ulrike Hogg and Martin MacGregor, ‘Historiography in Highlands and Lowlands’, in Nicola Royan (ed.), The International Companion to Scottish

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13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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Literature 1400–1650 (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2018), p. 101. Ibid., p. 109. See, for example, Julian Goodare, ‘The Statutes of Iona in Context’, Scottish Historical Review, 77:203 (1998), pp. 31–57, and the response by Martin MacGregor, ‘The Statutes of Iona: Text and Context’, Innes Review, 57:2 (2006), pp. 111–181. Kenneth MacKinnon, Gaelic: Past and Future Prospect (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 1991), p. 46 cited in Konstanze Glaser, Minority Languages and Cultural Diversity in Europe: Gaelic and Sorbian Perspectives (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007), p. 65. Quoted in Victor Edwards Durkacz, The Decline of the Celtic Languages: A Study of Linguistic and Cultural Conflict in Scotland, Wales and Ireland from the Reformation to the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Donald, 1983), p. 5. See, for example, Dafydd Moore (ed.), The International Companion to James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2017). Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, second ed. 2000 [1992]), p. 35. Robinson and Ó Maolalaigh, p. 154. Charles Jones and Wilson McLeod, ‘Standards and Differences: Languages in Scotland, 1707–1918’, in Susan Manning (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 21. Kenneth Simpson, The Protean Scot: The Crisis of Identity in Eighteenth Century Scottish Literature (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), p. 44. Ibid., p. 23. Quoted in ibid. I am grateful to Gavin Falconer for this further insight. Crawford, Devolving, p. 34. Adrienne Scullion, ‘The Eighteenth Century’, in Bill Findlay (ed.), A History of Scottish Theatre (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998), p. 91. Crawford, Devolving, p. 30. Ibid., p. 31. James G. Basker, ‘Scotticisms and the Problem of Cultural Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in John Dwyer and Richard B. Sher (eds.), Sociability and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1993), p. 84. Geoffrey Hunter, David Hume: Some Unpublished Letters 1771–1776 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1960), p. 131.

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29. T. M. Devine, Independence or Union: Scotland’s Past and Scotland’s Present (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 77. 30. John Butt, English Literature in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 143. 31. Jones and McLeod, p. 28. 32. McLeod and Smith, p. 21. 33. Crawford, p. 105. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., p. 106. 36. Fiona M. Douglas, ‘The Role of Scots Lexis in Scottish Newspapers’, Scottish Language 21 (2002), p. 2. 37. McLeod and Smith, p. 22. 38. Ibid. 39. Christopher Whatley, The Immortal Memory: Burns and the Scottish People (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2016), p. 16. 40. For more, though still brief, details of this process, see McLeod and Smith, p. 27. 41. I am grateful to Gordon Dilworth of the Moulin Kirk Trust for providing me with information from the Moulin Kirk Session records through the good offices of the Rev Bill Shannon, formerly minister at Pitlochry, and for information about the considerations for the appointment of a new minister in Blair Atholl in 1946 from his personal knowledge (Telephone interview, 25 June 2011). 42. Stephen Arata, ‘Stevenson and Fin-de-Siècle Gothic’, in Penny Fielding (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 43. Quoted by Charles Boyle ‘Empire of the Sun’, Guardian Review, no. 66, 20 April 2019, p. 33. 44. T. S. Eliot, ‘Was There a Scottish Literature?’, The Athenaeum, 1 August 1919, p. 681. 45. Gerard Carruthers, ‘Postscript: The Strange Death of Literary Unionism’, in Gerard Carruthers and Colin Kidd (eds), Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 353. 46. Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (London, 1936). 47. Gerard Carruthers, ‘Postscript’, p. 354. 48. Eliot, ‘Was There […]’. 49. David Crystal, The Disappearing Dictionary: A Treasury of Lost English Dialect Words (London: Macmillan, 2015). 50. Gerard Carruthers, ‘Postscript’, p. 360. 51. Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’, in Alan Riach (ed.), Selected Prose (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), p. 67 (originally published in The Criterion, 1931).

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52. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, ‘Literature in Europe’, in Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren (eds), The Modernist World (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 339. 53. Ibid., p. 340. 54. David Robb, Auld Campaigner: A Life of Alexander Scott (Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, 2007), p. 76. 55. Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (London: Macmillan, 2000 [1999]), p. 81. 56. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, new ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962 [1948]), p. 2. 57. Ibid., pp. 5–6 fn. 58. Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning, and Murray Pittock, ‘Scottish Literature: Criticism and the Canon’, in Ian Brown et al. (eds), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 7. 59. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996. 60. Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman (eds), ‘Introduction’, in Nations and Nationalism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 13. 61. Simpson, Protean Scot, p. 250. 62. Roderick Watson, ‘Alien Voices from the Street: Demotic Modernism in Modern Scots Writing’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 25 (1995), p. 142. 63. Alastair Fowler, ‘Eco-friendly’, TLS, 20 August 2004, p. 5. 64. Carla Sassi (ed.), The International Companion to Scottish Poetry (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2015). 65. This section of the paragraph draws on argument made at greater length in my Scottish Theatre: Diversity, Language, Continuity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), especially pp. 28–29. 66. Roderick Watson, The Literature of Scotland (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984). 67. Brown et al., p. 14. 68. Ibid., p. 10. 69. Ibid., p. 12. 70. A. J. Aitken, ‘Scottish Speech’, in A. J. Aitken and T. McArthur (eds), Languages of Scotland (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1979), p. 86. 71. Gavin Falconer, email 30 April 2019. 72. Lyndsay Lunan, ‘National Myths and Literary Icons: The Uses of Scott and Burns in Scottish Literature’, in Lyndsay Lunan, Kirsty A. Macdonald, and Carla Sassi (eds), Re-Visioning Scotland: New Readings of the Cultural Canon (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), p. 21.

CHAPTER 6

Imagined Borders, Subverted Centres and Hybridity

Often, Scotland is called a ‘small’ country. To put such an assertion in context, one might observe that it has a land area of approximately 31 million square miles, three-fifths of its immediate neighbour England’s approximately 50 million and a third of the entire United Kingdom’s approximately 93 million. Its population is approximately 5.2 million out of the UK’s 66.5 million, against England’s, 54 million. In a European perspective, one notes that the whole of Belgium (population: 11.5 million) is smaller than the area of the Highlands and inner isles of Scotland alone; the Netherlands (17 million), Denmark (5.7 million) and Switzerland (8.5 million) are each around half the size of Scotland. Mainland European countries of the comparable area to Scotland include Portugal (10.3 million), Czechia (10.6 million) and Hungary (9.8 million). In short, Scotland is less densely populated than other European nations of its size (and neighbours a country with ten times its population living in an area only two-thirds larger). Nonetheless, objectively speaking, it is

In places this chapter draws on, updates and substantially develops material first published as ‘The Centripetal Centrifuge: Decentralisation, Crossing Genre Boundaries and Theatre in Scottish Culture’, in Jean-Pierre Simard and Danièle Berton (eds.), Expression contemporaine et représentations(s) dans le theatre anglophone – Coups de Théâtre no. 20 (St Etienne: RADAC, 2005), pp. 131–140. © The Author(s) 2020 I. Brown, Performing Scottishness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39407-3_6

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substantial in European terms. This is even if it is, like many European nation-states, small on a global scale. Yet, it is not by international standards of population so small. Matte Hjort and Duncan Petrie quote work by Mark Bray and Steve Packer concerning population as a measure of size: ‘Over half the sovereign states have populations below five million and 54 below 1.5 million’.1 It is possible for larger quasi-empires identified as nation-states, like China or the USA, to celebrate, or at least assert, a manufactured unity sustained by a variety of state apparatuses which define the borders between citizens or subjects of these nation-states and those outside. Similarly, it is a given that, in Scotland, regional difference exists and local pride is manifested in a variety of ways. These, nonetheless, support in their variety a sense, even if from time to time conflicted, of Scottishness. In most countries, these ways include folkways, festivals or treasured traditions, often now entitled ‘cultural heritage’. Some of these may actually be traditional and ‘heritage’ in the sense of having existed for more than a few years, sometimes even more than a century. By and large, in most countries the manifestations of local identity are subsumed within a version of the imagined national community with imaginary and imaginative internal and external borders, major regional centres and, in countries the size of Scotland, one overall metropolitan centre. That centre in Scotland is the Central Belt taken as a whole. In Scotland’s imagined community, there is only one ‘Border’, singular and spelled with a capital letter. That is with England—and the region adjoining it is the plural and capitalised ‘Scottish Borders’. Yet, like any other substantial country, within Scotland, beside the ‘Border’ and ‘Borders’, there are many political and cultural borders and, so, many ‘centres’. As Thomas Eriksen puts it, ‘we know that identities are negotiable and situational […] we also know that the selection of boundary markers is arbitrary in the sense that only some features of culture are singled out and defined as crucial in boundary processes’.2 All of these in one way or another contribute to a complex sense of what, for any one region or individual, ‘Scottishness’ might constitute. Not least contributing to that complexity is the permeable border of the Gaelic-speaking regions. Their extent has shrunk over the years, by the deliberate policy, discussed in the previous chapter, of Scots- and English-speaking centralisers since the 1493 crushing of the Lordship of the Isles and the 1609 Statutes of Iona. This has been exacerbated after reverses like the policies pursued in the Gàidhealtachd after the 1745 Jacobite Rising and the 1746 Battle of Culloden. Yet, later internal migration has meant that Glasgow has the

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largest urban community of Gaelic speakers in Scotland. Further, there and in other Scottish communities Gaelic-medium schools exist, though in small numbers, at primary and secondary level, extending the network of potential centres for speaking Gaelic well beyond the current Gaelicspeaking heartlands. As Homi Bhabha has argued, The borders of the nation are, Kristeva claims, constantly faced with a double temporality: the process of identity constituted by historical sedimentation (the pedagogical); and the loss of identity in the signifying process of cultural identification (the performative).3

In this unremitting process, borders and the self-definition they demand are engaged in constant interplay with what has been and what is now being enacted or performed. As Bhabha puts it, ‘The boundary that marks the nation’s selfhood interrupts the self-generating time of national production with a space of representation that threatens binary division with its difference’.4 Further, as in similar situations in other national communities, imaginative borders and boundaries are important for Scots not just between the nation and other countries and cultures, but within the nation. So are such networks, often dispersed, as that of Gaelic speakers. These internal networks, borders and boundaries may be physical or cultural or both. While politico-linguistic ones are significant, any Scottish political, economic or cultural settlement necessitates crossing borders. Carla Sassi has offered a tentative summary of ‘three basic and interconnected properties’ of (b)orders as ‘debateable land’: ‘that of a site of resistance/containment (border-making), that of a site of passage or point of escape (border-crossing) and that of a site of encounter and hybridisation (border as liminal space)’.5 Each property outlined leads, in effect, to the need to transgress boundaries, internal and, sometimes, external. Such external transgression happens in terms of both the rest of the United Kingdom and overseas among, for example, the Scottish diaspora. In that respect, a border is also a horizon, a terminus to sight and insight and simultaneously a potential crossing into new perspectives. Yet, as we have seen from the ‘Gaelic Gestapo’ incident, such border-crossing, even, or perhaps especially, internally, is not always welcome or amicable. This is so even more, perhaps, when the linguistic ‘border’ crossed, as in Moray, reflects a relatively recent process—within the last two centuries or so—of linguistic suppression of one language community by another.

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In Scottish, as in other national, contexts, a range of internal boundaries, some historical, some contemporary, underlie current community identities. They run back and forth and across one another. Scottish examples, to name only some from many, include boundaries of historic lordships, like Fife or Moray—which retain provincial pride, however much arising from ‘manufactured’ history, as we have seen in the recent Moray case where the idea Gaelic was an alien introduction appears to have been believed by some councillors—the crofting counties, the Highland Line, the East/West divide, the ‘Highlands and Islands’, the northern isles and their relationship with mainland Scotland and the ‘Central Belt’ with its centralising designation, where so much of Scotland’s population is concentrated. Within all of those, the politics of language and linguistic differences involve interplay between varieties of Gaelic, Scots and English speakers, some monolingual, some bilingual, some trilingual. Further, this complexity is increased by the languages and cultures, some assimilated, some not, of newer communities whether Asian-Scots or from other world communities. Further boundaries include those arising, sometimes geographically, more often these days ideologically, from religious belief, often emerging in sectarianism. This is most often expressed, when hostile, as between Protestant and Catholic traditions (and sometimes considered in such cases to reflect or react against anti-Irish racism). It also presents itself in clashes between sects within Protestantism and in boundaries between other religious traditions, some of longstanding in Scotland and others found in the faiths of new Scots. As Andrew Blaikie expresses it, ‘there is no one tradition, or unified morality, or singular conception of nationhood. If the binaries on which modernisation is predicated are flawed, so too are its unities’.6 Such internal borders have been imagined, written about and discussed for centuries. To take the Highland/Lowland divide alone, we find in John of Fordun’s chronicle, written no later than the 1380s: The people of the coast are of domestic and civilised habits, trusty, patient, and urbane, decent in their attire, affable and peaceful […] The Highlanders and people of the Islands, on the other hand, are a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, ease-loving, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in person, but unsightly in dress, hostile to the English people and language and, owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel.7

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In 1611, John Speed continues this trope: The whole Kingdome is divided into two parts […] the South whereof is the more populous and more beautified in manners, riches and civilitie: the North more rude, retaining the customes of the Wild Irish, the antient Scot.8

Ingrained, or at least historically grounded, cultural complexity and what Homi Bhabha has called ‘hybridity’ in Scotland seems, therefore, inescapable. Bhabha defines cultural hybridity as the ‘interstitial passage between fixed identifications [entertaining] difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy’.9 He extends his discussion of this phenomenon when he suggests that Hybridity is the perplexity of the living […]. In the restless drive for cultural translation, hybrid sites of meaning open up a cleavage in the language of culture [so that] each specific social practice [is] both different and differential.10

In contemporary Scottish discourse, where any concept of colonisation is highly problematic, hybridisation works to and fro among its languages and cultures. Often in Bhabha’s thesis, which largely focuses on interactions of coloniser and colonised, there is a sense of recurrent stress. There are undoubtedly, as we have seen, culturally and politically stressful areas in the processes of hybridisation that have developed to constitute Scottishness. In some cases, elements of the hierarchy are unquestionably involved. Nonetheless, in others something more creative, even playful, is involved. To take a modern example, discussing the work of the contemporary theatre company Communicado and its director Gerry Mulgrew, Mark Brown observes that Mulgrew’s ‘theatrical hybrids are rooted in the pleasure of playing with a variety of influences and ideas’.11 In this regard, he explores Mulgrew’s work in some detail, though oddly failing to refer to his having worked in the early 1980s with the influential community-focused music-theatre-visual-arts company, Welfare State International. When Brown calls Mulgrew’s practice ‘Popular Experimentalism’,12 his discussion highlights the ways Mulgrew offers a model of theatricality and celebratory border-crossing often found in hybridisation processes within Scottishness. Such playful border-crossing extends over

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many areas covered in this study from George IV’s 1822 visit to the opening ceremony of the Glasgow Commonwealth games and from the theatrical zest and genre-transgression found in Scottish theatrical expressions, more often than not beyond the boundaries of the playhouse, and in the phenomenon of Scottish Camp we shall come to in chapter 9. Kenneth McNeil offers an important example of hybridisation in the performance of Scottishness. He comments that ‘Writing on the Highlands […] is a key Scottish component of the consolidation of nation and empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’.13 Here, he addresses the process by which the Other of the Highlands became a key part of a set of hybrid Scottish identities. In place of escape or deciding which side they belong to, Scots tend, consciously or not—and certainly not all in the same way—to embrace some of their borders as lying in the middle, not on the edge, of their self-perceptions. In this, language performance still remains overall a major cause of division, even hostility, as well as of networking. If this is true of Scots’ sense of Scottishness in general, it is particularly expressed by their writers, as we have seen in earlier chapters addressing, for example, the attitudes of Enlightenment writers to Scots, English and Gaelic. In the twentieth century, in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), Hugh MacDiarmid wrote: I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur Extremes meet - it’s the only way I ken To dodge the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt That damns the vast majority o’ men.14

The fact of his writing in Scots, as well as elsewhere in English, is its own statement of the cultural value of the language as a worthy literary medium, not ‘slang’, while the run-on line-break, ‘whaur/Extremes meet’, embraces both fission and fusion. The lines quoted seek—indeed express—a sense of blessed, or at least not ‘curst’, avoidance of arrogant self-assurance, but do so, it must be said, suggesting their own kind of ‘conceit’. This asserts sceptical ambivalence to be a virtue, as opposed to a ‘hauf-way hoose’ of compromise, neither one thing nor another. Such enthusiastic embracing of extremes in a newly central meeting place might point to the divided personality found so often in critical discourse in Scottish literature as to be (arguably exceptionalist) cliché. Classic examples include James Hogg’s Justified Sinner, or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde or his fraternal conflict of Henry and James

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in the Master of Ballantrae. It also, however, offers the creative and productive tensions of the partnership of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson or even J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy. While fractures and borders may offer possible barriers and boundaries, they also offer the potential for new associations and hybrids and, as just noted, hostilities. Chapter 1 explored the suggestion that the basic political formula in Scotland in the Middle Ages was of semi-autonomous regions coming together across barriers and boundaries through shared political and economic interests and across various language communities. Thomas Owen Clancy and Barbara E Crawford describe this process: In [language or landscape, politics, peoples or territory], Scotland during its earliest history is not a fixed and labelled destination, but a constantly shifting theatre of change. Even as late as the fourteenth century, Scotland as we know it was still evolving, first into a kingdom and then a nation, defining its borders and amalgamating its startling range of peoples and languages.15

Clancy and Crawford’s term—‘startling’—is itself startling in this context. In forming a national grouping by the early modern period, comprising sub- or quasi-national groupings and defined by the boundaries of ‘Scotland’, what developed was not a single unified ‘nation’ with a single consciousness of being ‘Scottish’. Otherwise, there would have been little need of, for example, the Statutes of Iona. The nature of such a national grouping of groupings then and now lies in the potential for and of the hybridity it embodies. As Jen Harvie observes, To recognise the fundamental hybridity of any identity works towards a development of early intercultural performance analyses which often identified a binary opposition between an oppressed ‘other’ and an oppressive, powerful ‘self’. While critically constructive in their original contexts, these analyses need development for the purposes of assessing intercultural encounter where it is more difficult to specify a primary, let alone solitary, location of power, or where the ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘self’ and ‘other’ exist within the same community and/or within the same person.16

The national Scottish community that evolved was, then, constantly imagined and reimagined in an interplay of self and other. It did so in particular, and often individually different, ways, internalised in Scotland and self-defined as the community ‘of the realm’. This—led by magnates and,

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of course, in no sense like a modern democratic community—was of a diversity capable even now of startling observers. Within this, for centuries monolingualism in Gaelic or Scots was for many the norm, their Scottishness defined through their membership of local or regional economic and language communities, often set against other Scottish communities. Yet, through the interaction of these disparate linguistic and geographic communities, hybridity became a central part of Scottish identities. Such hybridity arose, and arises, in part from the boundary-crossing bilingualism or trilingualism with which many Scots still live, even if they are not always explicitly conscious of it. This recurrent absence of conscious awareness of their own linguistic diversity and facility leads to the failure of many to recognise the distinctions between the Scots and English languages with both of which they feel familiar and, largely, at ease. Often such language hybrids comfortably shift code and register even within a single sentence. This is so even if some speakers consider one language (not always Scots) a ‘bad’ version of the other. Consequently, as Wilson McLeod and Jeremy Smith have observed, in Scotland ‘Scots and Scottish Standard English are, nonetheless, more socially significant than AngloEnglish’.17 Linguistic border-crossing, code-switching and style-drifting are symptomatic of the poetics of the ‘national bard’. In celebrating Burns, many Scots assert Scottishness. Others reactively express a contrasting sense of Scottishness, often defined as being ‘contemporary’ or ‘modern’, by resisting his ‘cult’. Burns’s plethora of linguistic identities and hybridity, whichever extreme of these views is adopted, nonetheless reflects the complex and hybrid linguistic and cultural identities of both sides of the debate. It also offers locations where they meet. Carol McGuirk reminds us of such larger cultural complexity of Burns’s linguistic and generic hybridity when she observes: The fact is that, though the ratio shifts from text to text, Burns always blends English with Scots, sentiment with satire, literary with local references. His ‘magnificent mixedness’, as Robert Crawford calls it in Devolving English Literature (1992), suggests not capitulation to English cultural pressure, but what Homi K. Bhabha, in The Location of Culture (1994), has termed ‘hybridity’, a form of resistance to cultural authority that works by infusing the colonisers’ language and speech with local or ‘native’ references. […] Bhabha’s idea of hybridity offers a way past the simplistic dyad

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– ‘good’ dialect versus ‘bad’ English – which has characterised so much Burns criticism in modern times.18

McGuirk follows this passage, in which she identifies the hybridity embedded in Burns’s work, by arguing for a boundary-transgressive ideological underpinning to his poetics: With his mixed range of allusions and languages, Burns in fact seeks to elude capture by any cultural authority, whether Scottish or English. In the kirk satires and ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, tyrannies of the local, provincial smallnesses are satirised just as energetically as the notion that English is the only language proper for British poetry. Even Burns’s famous title Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect is more elliptical than may at first appear, standing at once as a provocative statement of local allegiance and (in its hedge of ‘chiefly’) a hint of other interests, too. In Burns’s addresses to and for Scotland, in Bhabha’s words, ‘no political ideologies […] claim transcendent or metaphysical authority for themselves’. Burns himself, in short, saw no poetic use for cultural purity.19

In Scottish life in general, cultural and linguistic diversity and regional difference continue to embody underlying forces. These might in other circumstances drive apart the unity and integrity of Scottish culture, let alone Scottish literature. Given this, the aspiration to be ‘whaur/Extremes meet’ is from time to time counterbalanced by outbreaks of assertions of ‘cultural purity’. These, however spurious, resist celebration of hybridity in Scottishness. Such resistance may be seen as acts of denial (‘Gaelic Gestapo’; rejection of the great Scottish novelist Muriel Spark as not writing enough on ‘Scottish’ topics—whatever that might mean) that there are, and have been for more than a millennium, complex interrelationships in Scottishness of great diversity involving hybridity and intercultural interaction. These in the past have brought Norse, as well as early Irish, modern Gaelic, English, Scoto-Latin, Scots and even Welsh/Brythonic strands together in Scottish communities. They may also be expressed as celebrations of specific strands within that interaction. The Norse strand, which might be seen by some as somewhat ancient or passé, remains for Scots, certainly those living in northern areas, a lively part of their sense of their community identity. This is difficult to separate from the fact that, although Norn, their Norse dialect, died out in the eighteenth century, it survives as a substrate in Insular Scots. The Up Helly Aa festival held now

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on the last Tuesday of every January in Lerwick in Shetland represents a modern development, but one designed to reflect the Norse strand in the history of the islands and of Scotland at large. The ceremonies were developed out of earlier mid-winter tar-barrel-burning celebrations of a kind found elsewhere in the north of Scotland such as the annual Burning of the Clavie, also in January, at Burghead in Moray. Up Helly Aa in its more recognisable and gendered modern form developed from the 1870s on, by which time the burning of the barrels in confined spaces had come to be seen as too dangerous. Brian Smith notes that the local organisers then inaugurated a torchlight procession. At the same time they were toying with the idea of introducing Viking themes to their new festival. The first signs of this new development appeared in 1877, but it was not until the late 1880s that a Viking long ship – the ‘galley’ – appeared, and as late as 1906 that a ‘Guizer Jarl’, the chief guizer, arrived on the scene. It was not until after the First World War that there was a squad of Vikings, the ‘Guizer Jarl’s Squad’, in the procession every year.20

Public performance in and of the Shetland community in the Up Helly Aa celebrations is a relatively modern creation. Yet, it developed out of a perception of a shared past. Meanwhile, such a development, which might be labelled an ‘evolution’, is complemented by a lively tradition of writing in Shetlandic. This includes such contemporary work as the poetry and prose of Christine De Luca and drama of Grace Barnes, although both write also in English. Caithness is another part of Scotland for a substantial time Norse-speaking and largely settled by Vikings. While Gaelic was spoken in the more westerly areas of the county, as demonstrated by such village names as Braemore, Achavanich and Dunbeath, most of the east of the country, again as reflected in settlement names like Thurso, Lybster and Wick, has a Norse history. Of this, locals remain conscious and proud. Since Scots and Picts were united in the ninth century, Scotland has always been, and remains, a multinational nation, though often with bouts of internal dispute and conflict. As imagined in its multinational form, it may not be any more or less multinational than some other European nations, but, unlike most of them, it has constructed itself explicitly as multinational. The development of Scottish—in the modern sense—identity, then, embodied multiculturalism from the beginning of the process,

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even if that development was not by any means always harmonious. As Shetland and Orkney became part of the modern Scottish kingdom as late as 1472, they added to developing conceptions of Scottishness. Despite, therefore, sometimes being described as part of Britain’s Celtic ‘fringe’, Scotland is not in truth simply a Celtic nation. John McGrath on at least one occasion referred to Scotland as a ‘nordic’ nation.21 This he saw as caught up in a British state which did not understand its nature. Yet, any such definition of Scotland and, so, Scottishness in terms of any single national identity is deeply suspect. As we have already noted, Scottish consciousness of the ‘Border’ with England and regional boundaries within Scotland remains high, for whatever reasons. Boundaries are a matter of regular debate and cultural action, whether in the study of history and Scottish history’s place in university and school curricula, the invention of English Literature or the exploration, invention and reinvention of Scottish literature. In all of this, crossing of literary and linguistic borders and boundaries exemplifies the meeting of extremes to produce fresh syntheses and horizons. They meet in sometimes creative, sometimes destructive, disputations. A key and highly important eighteenth-century example of such crossing of borders and boundaries, which illustrates the disputes that such a process can generate, is the phenomenon of Ossian and ‘his’ poetry. There are, of course, many readings of this phenomenon.22 One reading, however, must be that, in his work, James Macpherson creates a new crossing of the boundaries between Gaelic and Scots–English cultures. He sought, in so doing, to create a model of epic recognisable across Europe, however much it might transgress the appropriate boundaries of actual Gaeliclanguage practice. And that model was itself a cultural construction of an ancient past in the service of nation-building and deep Romanticism.23 In short, he creates new dimensions to match European models of the classic and so appears to modify, if not even to subvert, original generic forms. As Kenneth Simpson eloquently expresses it, Macpherson’s achievement consists of his ability ‘to graft on to the heroism of the traditional epic the compulsive pathos of the age of sensibility’.24 In modern times, similar issues of borders and linguistic and generic boundaries have arisen in discussion of the very nature of ‘Scottish Literature’. There has been a tendency, which even now sometimes can be found, among critics, as the last chapter demonstrated, to use this term in a way that excludes writing in Gaelic or is focused only on literature in Scots, rejecting such important figures as the great twentieth-century Gaelic-language poets or

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Norman MacCaig. Nonetheless, for the last thirty or so years or so, it has been far more common to refer to ‘Scotlands’ and the ‘literatures’ of Scotland as a way of recognising their plurality and hybridity as nothing less than a strength. It must be clear that Scottish literature is multilingual, existing in Gaelic, Scots and English, and arguably in earlier days in Norse and Brythonic, as in the original of The Gododdin. It also has a very important and often forgotten Scoto-Latin tradition. In this, George Buchanan sits as a major, but often neglected, influence on the development of modern theatre throughout Europe, and by extension on world theatre. There were many editions and productions throughout Europe from the mid-sixteenth until the late eighteenth centuries of his seminal tragedies in the Senecan tragic mode—written for his students when he was in Bordeaux—Jephthes and Baptistes (both c.1540). Their influence on the development of French neoclassical drama in particular and, so, on much modern drama was central. What is striking about both Buchanan’s plays and Macpherson/Ossian’s poems is their intercultural nature and international influence, which was at least Europe-wide. Buchanan—as we have noted, himself from a Gaelic-speaking area north of Glasgow— shows that crossing of literary and linguistic borders and boundaries does not apply only to Scots/English and Gaelic (and even Latin) liminalities within Scotland, but can have international dimensions. Hybridity, as opposed to the monolinguality of the Great Tradition approach to English literature, appears extensively throughout the history of Scottish literature. In more recent years, highly regarded examples of writing by new Scots perform a contemporary version of Scottishness engaging languages other than Scotland’s older ones. Examples already mentioned include works like Suhayl Saadi’s novel Psychoraag (2004)25 with, in the words of its publicity blurb, its ‘urban Scots peppered with Urdu’ and Matthew Zajac’s award-winning The Tailor of Inverness (2008) which he himself performed and in which Scots, English, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and other languages intermingle in another version of, to use a term Crawford uses of Burns, magnificent mixedness. As boundaries are transgressed and borders crossed, so new syntheses emerge to shape and play out and with Scottish identities—literally in Zajac’s case both in his performance and in his own identity as son of an immigrant father. Somehow, elements of internal difference that might seem at first sight likely to fracture Scottish culture by their centrifugally inclined diversity and otherness can act as a force of centripetal cultural gravity. Alastair

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Niven argues the case powerfully that hybridity, difference and interaction are fundamental to Scottishness: Scottish identity has always been constructed through processes of intercultural exchange arising from the interchange of diverse cultures, through both diaspora and immigration, and the integration of immigrant communities into an essentially civic and cultural – and by no means ethnic – conception of Scottishness. Thus, hybridisation of ‘native’ and immigrant cultures constantly redefines and renews the nature of ‘Scottishness’.26

He suggests that, from at least the middle ages, new strands introduced to Scottish culture include ‘Irish, Norse, Flemish, Galwegian, Norman, Jewish, Italian, Polish, South Asian, African, Caribbean and Chinese, without by any means exhausting the list’.27 In this perspective, he makes the case for Scotland now—and in earlier times—being ‘a composite nation’. What this discussion underlines, of course, is that borders and boundaries within Scotland and Scottishness are not simply geographic. They relate to boundaries of language use, political hegemony, cultural acceptability, aesthetic taste, religious faith, gender and sexuality and manifold other dimensions of culture, expression and identity, including immigrant experience, influence and acculturation. Of course, this is not an argument for Scottish exceptionalism: as a generalisation, in Eriksen’s words quoted earlier, ‘identities are negotiable and situational’. Borders differentiate and define cultures and identities. Physical topography has cultural meaning throughout the world. Nonetheless, the significance of the geographic ‘Border’ that sets apart Scotland as a community of the realm has existed for a millennium and more. It has varied somewhat in its exact delineation at different historical periods, but with a significance inevitably related to versions of the idea of ‘Scotland’ and, so, Scottishness. This ‘Border’ then reflects, and helps shape the context of, other, internal, borders between Scotland’s long-established regions, often with their own Scots or Gaelic dialects alongside Scottish varieties of English. It also relates to borders of class, gender, sexuality and religion, categories of economic power and exploitation and implicit and explicit hegemonies, sometimes based on supposed religious affiliation, politics or combinations of both.

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Twentieth-century developments have influenced the meaning of ‘Scotland’ in further ways. Specifically, after the First World War and the development of many ‘new’ small independent nation-states in Europe, attention was paid to the possibility of Scotland becoming one of those ‘new’ old states.28 Modern recognition of Scottish complicity in imperialism, colonisation and slavery has removed the comforting myth of the innocent victim nation, exploited by the English. Indeed, some historians, now use the terms ‘Anglo-Scottish’—even, as we have seen, ‘Scottish’—Empire. This enables a more mature understanding of the identities of Scotland as a world colonial power, working in association with English power brokers. This, in turn, engages the profound questioning of cultural and historical identity and the nature and expression of ‘Scottishness’ with which this study is centrally concerned. These are, of course, not simply abstract theoretical questions. Recent constitutional movements and changes demonstrate such questioning is not just a literary matter or a matter of performance. So far as it is a literary or performance matter, however, it provides an incentive for the remarkable quantity of bordercrossing in Scottish literature and dramatic performance since the middle of the twentieth century. Such border-crossing tests the cultural subtext, the idea of what is a boundary and, so, where the identity of genre, individual and culture lies. As the ‘United’ Kingdom’s nature is questioned, so writers who cross genre, language and art-form boundaries embody that inquiry. Interrogating artistic borders, they interrogate the national idea. Reflecting this, it is striking that a prominent aspect of late twentiethcentury and twenty-first Scottish literature and drama is the relatively large number of writers who work across boundaries, in different genres, different languages and even different art forms as Alasdair Gray did between prose, drama and painting, achieving a high level in each. A list, which does not by any means include all, would feature Peter Arnott (drama and prose) in Scots and English, George Mackay Brown (poetry, prose and drama) in Scots and English, John Byrne (drama and painting) in Scots and English, Donald Campbell (poetry and drama) in Scots and English, Stewart Conn (poetry and drama) in Scots and English, Ian Hamilton Finlay (poetry, prose, drama, site-specific art, horticulture) in Scots and English, George Gunn (poetry and drama) in Scots and English, Jackie Kay (poetry, drama and prose) in Scots and English, Liz

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Lochhead (poetry, drama and painting) in Scots and English, James Kelman (prose and drama) in Scots and English, Robert Kemp (prose and drama) in Scots and English, Jessie Kesson (prose and film) in Scots and English, Tom McGrath (poetry, drama and jazz) in Scots and English, Robert McLellan (poetry, prose and drama) in Scots and English, Hector MacMillan (drama, prose and luthierism) in Scots and English, Kevin McNeil (drama, poetry and prose) in Gaelic, Scots and English, Edwin Morgan (poetry and drama) in Scots and English, Don Paterson (poetry and music) in Scots and English, Janet Paisley (poetry, drama and prose) in Scots and English, James Robertson (poetry and prose) in Scots and English, Iain Crichton Smith (poetry, drama and prose, including science fiction) in Gaelic and English, Sydney Goodsir Smith (poetry, prose and drama) in Scots and English, Joan Ure (poetry and drama) in Scots and English, and Christopher Whyte (poetry and prose) in Gaelic and English. And this is before one turns to poet-translators like George Campbell Hay (Gaelic, Scots and English). Moreover, one can easily extend this list by including the boundary-transgressive work of such directors as Gerry Mulgrew and his Popular Experimentalism, already referred to, not to mention Giles Havergal, working with his colleagues during his term as director of Glasgow Citizens (1969–2003), when his European perspectives call to mind Buchanan’s experimentation in his internationallyinfluential neo-classical plays and David Lindsay’s creatively transgressive borrowing from both European and Scottish traditions in The Three Estaitis, or Stuart Laing, working with Pamela Carter, in his experimental exploration of the boundaries of Modernism and the post-modern in such pieces as The Salon Project (2011) and Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (2013). This border-crossing marks deeply felt cultural and political interactions (and reactions) in Scottish life and art. It reinforces the suggestion that Scottishness, at least as expressed in Scottish culture, is best seen as hybridised, yet diversifying. It is a constantly changing, constantly reshaped expression of common identity without an imposed centre. It comprises a creative core of constantly separating and integrating otherness offering a gravitational hold on—and expressing the varieties of— performance of Scottishness. As Colin Nicolson and I have suggested, The spirit and practice of transgressing closed categories of genre and identity are, then, both clearly fundamental to contemporary Scottish literary practice. They not only mark the issues and fissures in Scottish cultural life,

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but also reorganise, re-imagine and refresh insight into how Scotland and its literature may be understood and enjoyed.29

As we argued in making this suggestion, the exploratory crossing of boundaries is a way of knowing, at least with less uncertainty, one’s identity—or identities. Working in more than one literary genre, not to mention art form, is, beyond any possible economic advantage from extending a potential audience, to assert the existence of another identity, or at least that one’s identity is complex and multiple. It represents resistance to simple categorisations. It interrogates established expressive modes and identity, both as artists operating within established models and as individuals within a settled culture. Such acts of creation not only demonstrate variety of skills and complexity of identity. They push boundaries within genres or art forms. They also fulfil the need to find outlet in different modes or languages. So, they express the right and capacity to break conventions, however imaginatively extended, of given modes. They create new interlinks and understandings. One of the results of boundary transgression is to allow, even require, reconfiguring of the possible.30 And the variety of performances of these artists is a performance of versions of Scottishness in which their audiences share. As Berthold Schoene has commented, Discontinuity and adaptability have become Scotland’s cultural trademarks […] From this powerful critical paradigm shift, which champions the cultural authenticity of the fragmented, marginalised, shadowy and wounded over that of the allegedly intact, wholesome and self-contained, Scottish culture has emerged as from a distorting mirror. No longer regarded, or led to regard itself, as exclusively Scottish and thus found or finding itself lacking, it becomes free to reconceive of itself in broader terms […] as situated within a vibrant network of interdependent cultural contexts.31

We have often concentrated on literary examples in this chapter. Schoene’s broader cultural framework prepares us for the next chapter as it explores varieties of ways in which hybridised Scottishness is performed in other spheres.

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Notes 1. This statistic is set in context in Matte Hjort and Duncan Petrie, ‘Introduction’, in Hjort and Petrie (eds), The Cinema of Small Nations (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 1–19. 2. Thomas Eriksen, ‘Ethnicity and Nationalism’, in Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman (eds), Nations and Nationalism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 145. 3. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 304. 4. Ibid., p. 299. 5. Carla Sassi, ‘The (B)order in Modern Scottish Literature’, in Ian Brown and Alan Riach (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to TwentiethCentury Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 151. 6. Andrew Blaikie, The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 232. 7. Quoted by John MacInnes, ‘The Scottish Gaelic Language’, in Glanville Price (ed.), The Celtic Connection (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992), p. 109. 8. John Speed, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (London, 1611), p. 131. 9. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 4. 10. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p. 314. 11. Mark Brown, Modernism and Scottish Theatre Since 1969: A Revolution on Stage (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 107. 12. ‘Communicado and “Popular Experimentalism”’, ibid., pp. 91–112. 13. Kenneth McNeil, Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760– 1860 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), p. 2. 14. Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’, in Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken (eds), The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1978]), p. 87. 15. Thomas Owen Clancy and Barbara E. Crawford, ‘The Formation of the Scottish Kingdom’ in R. A. Houston and W. W. J. Knox (eds), The New Penguin History of Scotland (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2001), p. 28 16. Jen Harvie, Staging the UK (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 12. 17. Wilson McLeod and Jeremy Smith, ‘Resistance to Monolinguality: The Languages of Scotland Since 1918’, in Ian Brown (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 21.

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18. Carol McGuirk, ‘Writing Scotland: Robert Burns’, in Susan Manning (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 169. 19. Ibid., pp. 169–170. 20. Brian Smith, ‘The History of Up Helly Aa’, http://www.uphellyaa.org/ about-up-helly-aa/history (accessed 7 November 2018). 21. John McGrath, ‘Introduction’, in Six Pack (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), p. vii. 22. See, for example, Dafydd Moore (ed.), The International Companion to James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2017). 23. I am grateful to Rory Watson for emphasising this point to me. 24. Kenneth Simpson, The Protean Scot (Aberdeen, 1988), p. 55. 25. Suhayl Saadi, Psychoraag (Edinburgh: Black and White Publishing, 2004). 26. Alastair Niven, ‘New Diversity, Hybridity and Scottishness’, in Brown (ed.), The Edinburgh History, vol. 3, p. 320. 27. Ibid. 28. This paragraph and the next one incorporates revision of material originally published in Ian Brown and Colin Nicholson, ‘The Border Crossers and Reconfiguration of the Possible: Poet-Playwright-Novelists from the Mid Twentieth Century on’, in ibid., pp. 262–263. 29. Brown and Nicholson, p. 271. 30. Ibid., p. 263. 31. Berthold Schoene, ‘Going Cosmopolitan: Reconstituting “Scottishness” in Post-devolution Criticism’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 9.

CHAPTER 7

Tartan Enactments and Performing Hybridity

To define any version of any national identity simply as ‘false’ or, indeed, ‘authentic’, would require standards, even a single standard, of ‘truth’ against which that definition might be assessed. Yet, few versions of national identities, if any, have such clear standards. All are in different ways complex and often confused. In the week of 12 November 2018, Boris Johnson talked of a deal with the European Union betraying ‘a thousand years in this place’. This is a term conventionally used at Westminster for Parliament and, enwrapped in that, British sovereign identity. Thus, he elided much, including the fact that there was no Westminster parliament or British nation-state with any form of sovereignty or independence a thousand years before he spoke. If ‘England’ is what he meant in his millennial perspective, a thousand years before he spoke England was subsumed within the Danish Empire and soon to be conquered by the Norman-French. He is not the only leading British politician to use this ahistorical and inaccurate timescale to justify opposition to European involvement. Hugh Gaitskell, addressing the 1962 Labour Party Conference in Brighton, opposed entry to the then-EEC saying it would mean ‘the end of a thousand years of history’.1 Gaitskell and Johnson were not talking about Britain, Britishness, or even, at least explicitly, Englishness, but some mythical version of English nationalist identity, seeking to justify it by spurious ‘history’. While such statements embody historical falsehood, that element of falsehood is essential to the version of ‘Englishness’ which they and others like them wish to promote.

© The Author(s) 2020 I. Brown, Performing Scottishness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39407-3_7

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Nonetheless, however demonstrably false what is said is—and the conception of English nationalism Johnson, in particular, promotes flawed for that reason—such formulations are a long-standing strand in assertions of Englishness and English versions of Britishness. What matters in such cases is not what is false, but what is accepted in public perceptions, and how—and indeed whether—such conceptions can be addressed and challenged by alternative conceptions. In those debates, historical truths can and should reasonably be brought to bear about which evidence can be adduced, and which underpin historical events—like Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon—with mythic power. These, with their mythic power I have called, in inverted commas, ‘facts of history’.2 But they are only part of the debate about national identity or its enactment, sometimes not even—apparently—the dominant element when they are not challenged, but banally taken for granted. In the performance of Scottishness, the wearing of tartan is often taken for granted, and also often denigrated. Its authenticity—whatever that word may mean in this context—and that of the kilt as costume is a question that, with distinguished colleagues, I addressed in depth in From Tartan to Tartanry (2010).3 There, we shed some much-needed factual light on the development and reception of tartan and Highland dress. This chapter will draw on material explored there as it considers the significance of enactment involving tartan in performing Scottishness. In doing so, it recognises, as the previous study did, that an essential quality of the design of tartan lies in its absence of singularity, in that the ‘very design of tartan embodies constant dynamic tension between the clarity, even rigidity, of its grid and the literally endless potential for colour and variety contained within, and visually threatening to break, the lock of that grid’.4 Its semiotics are complex. In that apparently rigid grid, the differences in colour choice are reinforced as colours cross the grid’s borders and engage with, modify and hybridise one another. The impact in visual terms as long ago as 1723 was compared to that of a flower garden: the author of A Journey Through Scotland then described Lowland women’s wearing it ‘in the Middle of a Church, on a Sunday, look[ing] like a Parterre de Fleurs’.5 The power of the analogy is that flowers in such beds are not aimed at creating a random impression, nor are they fully determined: they seem contained by, but are also growing out of and across, formal plots. Tartans to this observer in this analogy are seen as embodying carefully carefree design, a celebration and boundary-crossing

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interaction of dynamic natural growth and human intellect’s shaping aesthetics. Each tartan is like a floral hybrid. Sometimes, the wearing of tartan is seen as a simplistic act, even a largely mythical invention. When looked at more closely its performative history is much more complex—just like the semiotics of its woven construction. Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney ask the questions ‘Need a literary culture have a solid “centre”, whatever that might be? Might it not be the case that cultures operate with a warp and woof, through debate and dialogue, and across contested rather than settled identities?’6 They offer a metaphor for Scottish culture and its literature that echoes the structure of tartan. The semiotic warp and performative woof with regard to tartan are complementary modes of interpretation. This chapter considers the complex (and even contradictory) significations of these modes in social and political history. Part of those significations lies in the performative counter-act of rejection which comes into play when aspects of performance of Scottishness, like kilt-wearing, are described as ‘false’, ‘bogus’ or ‘manufactured’ and in turn those characterisations are resisted. The use of such terms in a derogatory sense represents its own form of what Cairns Craig has called ‘nostophobia’, a form of self-denial, self-resistant burying one’s head in the sand. After all, all enactments of identity with any mythic power, as the most effective have, are manufactured—in a sense false and bogus—usually with more than one purpose embodied in their creation. In that creative manufacture lies their richness and complexity. If there is one element that can be said to mark Scottishness, as the previous chapter has argued, it is such hybridity and contestation of identities, the crossing and interpenetration of boundaries, the importance of borders embraced or rejected. It is a commonplace, nonetheless, to mock many instances of enactment of versions of Scottishness. The stage performances of Harry Lauder, which we will come to in the next chapter, are stigmatised. So are such institutional examples as George IV’s August 1822 visit to Edinburgh, stage managed by Walter Scott and his theatrical friends, Daniel Terry and William Murray of Edinburgh’s Theatre Royal. This visit is, to say the least, under respected in such treatments as the radicalism of Hector MacMillan’s play The Royal Visit (1974) or the popular, if sometimes snide, history of John Prebble’s The King’s Jaunt (1988). Prebble summarises the visit’s effect as follows:

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Scotland could not be the same again once it was over. A bogus tartan caricature of itself had been drawn and accepted, even by those who mocked it, and it would develop in perspective and colour. […] Walter Scott’s Celtification continued to seduce his countrymen, and thereby prepared them for political and industrial exploitation.7

This chapter will consider the issue of the degree of ‘bogusness’ of Scott’s seductive ‘Celtification’. It will also beg leave to doubt whether even a man of Scott’s skills could single-handedly achieve such an impact, let alone whether it was this impact that prepared Scots ‘for political and industrial exploitation’. Arguably, the first had been under way since at least 1707, if not long before, and the second since the mid-eighteenth century (Carron Ironworks was established, for example, in 1759), if not much earlier in such works as Sir George Bruce’s (c.1550–1625) at Culross. More serious cultural historians avoid the solecism of tartan as bogus in analysing the significance of the visit and its imagery. Murray Pittock, for example, has recognised the importance in supporting a Hanoverian political settlement of the ‘transference of Jacobite symbols from the Stuart to the Hanoverian cause [… which] helped dull the radical edge of the Jacobite critique […] and buried the Stuart myth of regenerative power’.8 The Royal Visit was an important element in that process. Christopher Harvie has also discussed the wider meaning of the royal visit: It was the political apotheosis of Scott’s combination of unionism and cultural nationalism, the symbolic confirmation of the Hanoverian line, the transference of remaining Jacobite and nationalist sentiments to wider British imperial loyalties… reminding the political metropolis and élite that Scots loyalty, though full-hearted, was not wholly unconditional.9

Cairns Craig further addresses this process in terms of the politics of state formation: The iconography of the Highlander, adopted as a badge of national identification by the Lowland Scot in the nineteenth century, is not the iconography of a separate Scottish identity: it is, in fact, the iconography of the unity of the British state. George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822 […] was not […] a token of embryonic Scottish nationalism but a symbolic re-admittance into the British Geist of that part of the nation which had

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alienated itself by the 1715 and 1745 uprisings, but had paid its debts by dying profusely on the Heights of Abraham and at Waterloo.10

Caroline McCracken-Flesher, meanwhile, offers a corrective viewpoint to the position of those she sees as hypercritical of Scott’s management of the visit. She says, ‘Given recent arguments for the power of the very terms Scott deploys, to insist that through him they have operated only on England’s behalf is to reveal that we ourselves are limited by a primary assumption of Scotland’s subjection’.11 Colin Milton further reflects on the syntheses among Scottish cultures, including Highland and Lowland (a distinction here accepted for now, but one masking a whole catalogue of different differences), Scott appears to seek, observing that In Scott’s view, this dual inheritance equipped the Scots to make a unique contribution to an evolving British identity, one in which the creative tension between ‘Highland’ and ‘Lowland’ values would act as a dynamic principle. The idea of such an inheritance, at once dynamic and difficult, was one of Scott’s abiding legacies to his literary successors […].12

And, one might add, not only literary successors. Unquestionably, there is much to mock in the royal visit: Scott’s sonin-law John Gibson Lockhart called it a ‘hallucination’. It is not, however, an isolated episode of tartan fantasy, nor is it simply to be regretted as in some sense a creation of ‘false’ versions of Scottishness. Indeed, it is an interesting debate as to what versions of Scottishness are to be found ‘false’, as opposed to merely different. The 1822 crossing of boundaries of ‘Lowland’ and ‘Highland’ performances of Scottishness and rewriting of what constituted the imagery and enactment of ‘Scotland’ is not ipso facto false or to be interpreted in a single hegemonic way. Indeed, there were at once at least two versions of what Highland ‘truth’ the events might embody. One was promoted by Scott’s supporters, led by Sir David Stewart of Garth’s Celtic Society of Edinburgh; the other by his opponents, led by the quixotic Alasdair Ranaldson Macdonell of Glengarry and his True Highlanders. What mattered in the event’s complex hybridisations was the conscious synthesis of yet other forms of Scottishness. Here, these followed the constitutional inclinations of Scottish Tories like Scott. In a nineteenth-century extension of the (Rule) Britannia project, they primarily created and embedded a form not just, as Craig rightly

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suggests, of ‘the British Geist ’, but a form of specifically Scottish Britishness. (‘Scottish’ because, after all, in this hybrid no Englishmen beyond, for the occasion, the king and the Lord Mayor of London adopted the kilt. The former in so doing was seeking to assert his Scottish ancestry, however tenuous that might be.) This Scottish Britishness can readily be seen not, as Craig comments, as ‘nationalism’ in itself, but as a prototype of Morton’s Unionist Nationalism. One might almost say in this case as ‘Nationalist Unionism’. This sought to elide boundaries between different aspects of Scottish culture and history in a new hybrid performative enactment of Scottishness, however much objected to as ‘Celtification’ by many at the time and since. In this perspective, one can apply Kenneth McNeil’s aperçu very firmly to the Royal Visit: ‘Situated at the very nexus of nation and empire then, representation of the Highlands shifts constantly between Self and Other, making visible the ambiguities, tensions, and ruptures in the formation of national and imperial subjectivities.’13 As McNeil goes on to argue, in this context, wearing tartan is ‘neither a bogus parody nor a faithful expression of some pristine, authentic Highland tradition’.14 Rather, as Cairns Craig observes, If nations are founded not in unity but in exchange, both exchange within a national territory whose boundaries are largely arbitrary, and exchange with cultures that are other to them in time and space, then those bugbears of Scottish cultural history – Lowland Scotland’s adoption of the iconography of a Highland Celtic identity and the country’s increasing ‘Anglicisation’ – can be read not as the signs of failed nationhood but as the evidence of a nation which has grasped that its real resources are generated by its capacity for cultural export, translation and assimilation.15

Much fun is made of George IV’s visit and his corpulently wearing a kilt. To see the performance purely in terms of the visit to Scotland, however, and of a process of tartanisation of Scottish culture—represented as a falsification—is to miss not just such incisive later insights, but a number of contemporary contextual points. These points include, not least, the place of tartan in eighteenthcentury Jacobite performances of Scottishness. During the 1715 and 1745 Risings, for example, the Jacobite army was uniformed in tartan, as representing an older pre-Union Scotland. (Of course, some Hanoverian regiments also wore tartan, alongside the uniforms of non-Scottish

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regiments.) Pittock has long explored such performances and their underlying ‘script’: Jacobites compared Bruce and Wallace to the exiled Stuarts. As the Union cast the reasons for that struggle into oblivion, an appeal was made against the betrayal of the past on behalf of the past. Tradition became, as the Stuarts had tried to make it, a primary vehicle for identity; and the tradition that served as that vehicle was not the complex one of Scotland’s internal divisions and cultural clashes (though that was exploited by the opposition), but the simple model of Scotland v. England. Scottish history was thus the history of the fight for liberty […].16

Through such narratives, Pittock argues, the ‘Jacobites themselves broadcast their movement in such a way as to suggest that the Highlander was the type of the true patriot. Wild and free, he was the kind of hero all Scots used to be (so the story went) before the sapping betrayal of the Union’.17 When, therefore, Parliament in 1746 passed the Disarming Act or ‘Disclothing Act’ which came into force from August 1747, this, as Hugh Cheape has observed, was one of a series of legislative measures designed to force the assimilation of Scotland into the greater Britain following the Battle of Culloden. […] According to its title, ‘An Act for the more effectual Disarming of the Highlands in Scotland, and for more effectual securing the Peace of the said Highlands, and for restraining the use of the Highland dress, &c’, the purpose is self-evident. Tartan and Highland dress, bracketed with weapons, had come to be regarded as an outward and visible manifestation of Jacobitism and continuing loyalty to the Stewart dynasty in exile and, so, political treachery and lawlessness.18

Yet, the situation was more complex. Tartan could still be employed to represent a lawful, non-treacherous version of Scottishness within ‘Britain’. It was permitted both to regiments serving in Hanoverian armies, like the Black Watch, and to loyal members of the Scottish establishment. John Campbell, for example, cashier of the Royal [Hanoverian] Bank of Scotland from 1745, joined it on its foundation in 1727. He was portrayed by William Mosman in 1749 wearing a tartan costume, including a kilt. That such a performance was permitted implies the authorities trusted Campbell, apparently accepting that a figure in his position might wish to enact his Scottishness in a way that would be subversive if worn

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by a Jacobite soldier or ordinary Highlander. It is even conceivable that his ‘costume’ in the portrait’s enactment may hint at covert subversion on his part, as it certainly carried an assertion of his Scottishness within the Hanoverian settlement. Tartan could even imply anti-government stances without directly implying Scottishness at all. Murray Pittock observes ‘[in the aftermath of 1745-6] Tory gentlemen in England, who had done little to assist the Rising, wore tartan waistcoats in the House of Commons, and tartan became a fashionable statement of opposition to the government’.19 Meanwhile, tartan was, despite legislation to the contrary, openly on sale in Edinburgh very soon after Culloden, probably targeted at remaining Jacobite sympathisers. As Pittock reminds us, The continuing sale of tartan after 1746 (the ‘Edinburgh pattern’ Jacobite tartan seems to have been introduced in 1713) was a form of mute political protest in the city: for example, a ‘great Variety of the newest patterns of TARTANS’ was advertised as being available from James Baillie’s shop opposite the Tolbooth (an impertinent location for tartan sales) in the Mercury for 24 November 1748, just in time to make a purchase for St Andrew’s Day.20

Further, as Rosie Waine reminds us, ‘women in particular [were] free to wear the controversial cloth in public without fear of retaliation from the state’.21 Clearly the suppression of tartan by the Act, however targeted its implementation in Highland areas, had exceptions. Given such exceptions, pressure grew in time to suppress the Act. After the Highland Society of London had been established in 1778, the Act was repealed in 1782. The Highland Society of Scotland was then set up in 1784. In this context, as tartan became again fully legal attire, George and two of his brothers, William Henry and Frederick, were presented with full Highland dress in 1788.22 They wore this in 1789 at a London ball.23 The fact of this attire being worn—and so appropriated—at a fashionable London event by members of the Hanoverian royal family represented in its own way an enactment of Scottishness—as masquerade, no doubt kitsch, but with strong politico-constitutional undertones. George and his brothers were attending a London ball dressed in tartan in the decade tartan had been ‘legalised’. They were participating in an act of post-conflict hybridity. In this, they were adopting a costume associated with their distant relatives the Stuarts, but as part of a newly defined ‘Britain’. As Pittock explains the developing situation,

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The ideological reinscription of tartan on a discourse of British loyalty also incorporated the Hanoverian Royal Family in a traditional Scottish identity, and even better, the Jacobite one of the Stuarts, from whom they were – though by no means by the branch nearest to the throne in blood – descended. The fact that the Royal Family had not been Scottish for centuries was rendered less important, because by focusing on family entitlement to tartan and hence Scottishness, blood descent became a more important measure of nationality than it had been before.24

Certainly, Pittock slightly overstates his case here. The Royal Family had been Scottish in every sense under James VI and I until 1625 and Charles I had a noticeable Scottish accent. His second son, James (later VII and II), made much of his Scottish ancestry during his residence in 1679– 1682 in Edinburgh, his daughter Anne, later queen, joining him there in 1681. Nonetheless, Pittock’s general point surely holds. It is against this background, and after the efforts of Scottish soldiers, many dressed in the kilt, throughout the Napoleonic wars, that George IV could come to Edinburgh. He was the first crowned British monarch to do so since 1651. He was participating in an assertion of a newly reshaped Britishness. Further, this visit can be seen as part, as Linda Colley suggests, of a pattern of Hanoverian ingratiation with regional Britain begun in the previous reign. Prince William of Gloucester, George III’s nephew, visited Edinburgh on his way to receive the freedom of Glasgow in 1795, later receiving freedoms from Cambridge (1799), Liverpool (1804), Birmingham (1805), Bristol (1809) and London (1816). Augustus, Duke of Sussex, George III’s son, received freedoms from Bath, Bristol and Chester, also visiting Wales, Sunderland, Doncaster and Newcastle.25 The new king’s performance, however, incorporated—while still identifying as other to an extent—Scottishness in a form earlier appropriated by the Jacobites. This explains at least in part the apparent paradox to which Tom Nairn draws attention: Most Scots had no actual connection with earlier clannic or Gaelic society, and hence no ‘folk’ or other recollection or tradition upon which Highlandism could easily be grafted. On the contrary, Gaelic culture had often been despised by Lowlanders, and perceived as a badge of backwardness. None the less, the required recollection and ‘traditions’ were soon synthesized. This was possible because, with all its absurdities and unrealities, the process rested upon something real.26

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Out of that reality, to return to Pittock’s analysis, tartan, tartanry and Highlandism came to have a key role in sustaining an autonomous and assured identity for Scotland within the Union settlement: Scotland began to think of itself a Celtic country again, as Jacobite propaganda had affirmed; but it was to be largely a Celticism composed of echoes, the ‘Tartan Curtain’ that divided the new Scottish identity from the realities of both the national struggle of the eighteenth century, and the current tragedy of the Highlands.27

Meanwhile, the Hanoverian government had for years provided pensions to the exiled Stuart royals. George IV, presumably as part of the process Pittock describes as ideological reinscription, was a subscriber to the monument to Charles Edward Stuart, his brother Henry Benedict and their father, James, son of James VII and II, designed by Canova in 1817 and set up in St Peter’s in Rome in 1829. Aspects of the ‘King’s Jaunt’ may have been risible or regrettable. Nonetheless, it had serious undertones with regard to performance and meanings of more than one version of Scottishness. Its hybridity sought, however glibly, to embody harmony and peaceful accommodation and resolution of the earlier conflict. Many Scots regarded, and still regard, enactments like King George’s as managed by Sir Walter with, to say the least, scepticism. As recently as 20 November 2018 a letter from Ian W. Thomson was published in The Herald protesting at the visit as inventing ‘kilted flummery’. Yet, this letter is an example of how responses to mythopoeia about Scottishness can create additional myths. It asserts that, as a result of the 1822 visit, the Royal Company of Archers was set up in Scotland when, actually, Queen Anne awarded its charter in 1704 to a pre-existing body. This was founded in 1676 and received letters patent in 1713. That was when it adopted its tartan-clad ‘flummery’.28 Further, while Pittock suggests this was ‘a sartorial choice which would have been pretty well unthinkable in the Edinburgh of 1600’,29 tartan was certainly worn in Edinburgh by Lowlanders, judging by ministers’ complaints about women’s colourful tartan in church, at least as early as the 1500s.30 Tartan was, in fact, already by the early modern period part of performance of versions of Scottishness. After all, to quote Pittock himself, James V in 1538 ‘ordered a hunting suit of Highland tartan; tartan of a sort was one of the distinguishing characteristics of the “old Scots”

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and their traditional pursuits (such as the hunt), as it already was in the depiction of Scots soldiers of fortune abroad’.31 In fact, those like Thomson who excoriate the ‘flummery’ of the 1822 Royal Visit misunderstand the process of mythopoeia and communal identity development then under way, and still continuing. Over recent decades, for example, at more formal occasions like weddings or graduations, Scots have, after earlier twentieth-century resistance, increasingly adopted kilt-wearing. In more informal contexts, like international sporting events, over the same period tartan has been increasingly adopted as a marker of support for Scotland teams. A large group of followers of the national football team identify themselves with apparent pride as the ‘Tartan Army’. Their wearing of kilts with non-formal accoutrements like Doc Martin boots and casual tops marks a relatively recent democratic appropriation, shared by rugby supporters, of tartan and versions of Highland dress as signifiers of Scottishness in sports stadia. According to Hugh O’Donnell, the Tartan Army developed as a self-policing organisation, rejecting 1970s Scottish football supporters’ behaviour. This had bordered on, and sometimes constituted, hooliganism. Since 1977, when Scottish supporters vandalised the Wembley pitch, this form of tartanisation has marked a considerable and positive change in behaviour and in contemporary attitudes to tartan and its meaning. According to O’Donnell, on visits to foreign cities, though they are still at times noisy and boisterous, Tartan Army members make donations to local charities and play scratch games against local fans.32 It should be noted, however, that there is an alternative view, as Graeme McGarry has pointed out, which sees its members as ‘kilt-wearing drunken buffoons’.33 Certainly its selfpolicing ethos has not prevented some unsavoury behaviour. Nonetheless, the reappropriation of the kilt by both football and rugby supporters, not to mention graduands and grooms, has been a prominent phenomenon of the last thirty years. Observers have generally reacted favourably. An earlier post-Jaunt development has been entitled ‘Balmorality’. This began to develop when George IV’s niece Victoria toured Scotland with her husband Albert for the first time in 1842. She visited Taymouth Castle where her host, the second Marquess of Breadalbane, provided her with a lively performance of staged Scottishness. This included a welcome by a large party of kilted tenants and reveille to the piping of ‘Hey Johnnie Cope’, yet another imbrication of Jacobite iconography, here musical, into a hybrid Hanoverian version of Scottish Britishness. Out of such

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experiences, Victoria’s interest in having her own Highland retreat developed. She and Albert, after leasing Balmoral estate in 1848, bought it in 1852. Between 1853 and 1856 in another example of performative reshaping they built the present version of the castle with its romanticised Scots Baronial architecture, before demolishing the older building. In these Hanoverian developments, we can observe a strong trend, carried out, it would seem, with serious purpose, of absorption of Scottish tokens into the expression of the power, hegemony and icons of the British state. This extended from Victoria’s private dream world of Balmorality to the promotion of kilted soldiers as the heroes of empire. The creation and wearing of a Balmoral tartan and the regular appearance of senior royals at modern Braemar Highland Gatherings are only two examples of the continuing operation of the (Rule) Britannia Project of assertion of a hybridised Scoto-Britishness. Such Gatherings as that at Braemar are not, however, always to be read in one way as establishment institutions. Now spread throughout Scotland and the Scottish international diaspora, with their specific sports like tossing the caber, their Highland dancing and their piping competitions, they comprise yet other performances of Scottishness. Away from Braemar, they no longer necessarily do so in the context of Scotland-in-Britain—if they ever all did and as the American versions discussed in Chapter 11 certainly do not. The appropriation of tartan by the British Army’s Scottish regiments and, for Highland regiments, the kilt, the Highlandism generated in Lockhart’s 1822 ‘hallucination’ and the development of Balmorality led to reactions which see such enactments as fake performance of Scottishness. There have even been arguments, like those propounded by Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1983, that the tartan and the short kilt were somehow invented traditions. The short kilt in particular he claimed as an ‘English’ invention.34 Yet, Trevor-Roper’s claims have been thoroughly discredited, not least by the contributors to From Tartan to Tartanry. Indeed, we have just observed that tartan itself was widespread in both Highlands and, to an extent, Lowlands in the sixteenth century. Meanwhile John Telfer Dunbar had already offered in 1962, well before Trevor-Roper was writing, evidence of tartans at least from 144035 and bare-legged dress from 1093.36 Detailed refutations of Trevor-Roper’s arguments have, of course, been made.37 His assertions need not detain us here. What is striking, however, about such claims as Trevor-Roper’s is that they can clearly be read as English or Anglo-British nationalist attempts to denigrate those Trevor-Roper liked to call ‘Scotch’. This is especially so when he echoes

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the Statutes of Iona’s disparagement of those from Gaelic-speaking parts of Scotland: the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention. Before the later years of the seventeenth century, the Highlanders of Scotland did not form a distinct people. They were simply the overflow of Ireland. […] Their literature, such as it was, was a crude echo of Irish literature.38

The crypto-racist use here of terms like ‘overflow’ and ‘crude echo’ speak for themselves. The historical inaccuracies involved in this brief passage alone reflect Scotophobic ignorance of a Johnsonian level. Some, however, took this sort of attack seriously. Tom Nairn had already in 1977 talked of the ‘vast tartan monster’.39 A group of critics contributed to the now-dated 1982 Scotch Reels collection mentioned in Chapter 10.40 Of these, John Caughie would later argue in 1990: ‘Tartanry’ takes Culloden as its privileged moment: a moment recast as an epic of tragic loss and triumphal defeat, which is able to forget, with mythic amnesia, the actual historical tensions involved in the replacement of an absolutist, historically anachronistic and economically unproductive feudal system with a relatively productive free range agrarian system. If, economically, the epic transformation is tied to the industrial revolution, culturally, it is tied to the Romanticism which sought wildness in the now empty landscapes of one of the last ‘wildernesses’ of Europe, emptied by Cumberland and the Clearances, and filled, by Scott and MacPherson, with wild, charismatic men and fey elusive women.41

One may pass over Caughie’s somewhat glib characterisation of clearances, both highland and lowland, as a presumed good because they did away with an ‘anachronistic’ system, replacing it with ‘a relatively productive free range agrarian system [and] the industrial revolution’. What is worth noting is the way he simply dismisses without analysing the historical and cultural significance of the Romantic movement in, and as a reaction to, an industrial age as if it had no context beyond its own Romanticism. In fact, the fundamental problem with attacks like TrevorRoper’s and the Scotch Reels authors’ on ‘the invention of tradition’ is that all traditions are by definition at one time or another invented, just as, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, all nations are at one time or another imagined as communities. The point is that elements of iconography, such as

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in Scotland tartan or the kilt, are always available for adoption and subversion in the light of developing politico-cultural circumstances. They have been at different times by Queen Victoria and the Tartan Army. It is not enough simply to condemn these artefacts. The point is to understand them, their changing meanings and uses, contextualise them and recognise that however one may personally dislike aspects of their performance of identity, parts of that performance they remain. Indeed, a contemporary protester like our Herald correspondent cites in his letter an older opponent of ‘kilted flummery’ in Lord Macaulay. The contextualisation of his views makes clear why one must always be cautious in choosing one’s authorities. Macaulay is, of course, associated now with ‘Macaulayism’. This is the use of imperialist and colonialist education systems to disparage and suppress indigenous cultures, as he sought in India. In 1855, Macaulay included in his History of England his famous attack on the 1822 royal visit. He, claimed George ‘could not give a more striking proof of his respect for the usages which had prevailed in Scotland before the Union, than by disguising himself in what, before the Union, was considered by nine Scotchmen out of 10 as the dress of a thief [… while the] original has long disappeared: no authentic effigy exists; and all that is possible is to produce an imperfect likeness’.42 Such dismissive, one might say Macaulayist and inaccurate, writing is preceded by several pages of hypermanic anti-Highlander diatribe of a kind which might not seem alien to those who still feel able to talk of a Gaelic Gestapo. The conflict as to how to enact Scottishness is live, and lively, and attracts some violent, not to say sometimes hysterical, language. Simply to mock or to condemn phenomena like the 1822 royal visit or subsequent Balmorality as marking a superficial and ahistorical tartanisation of Scottishness does not quite accord, as we have seen, with the record. Walter Scott was drawing on something deeper. He may have reinforced it, but he could only employ it because it was already part of a conception of Scottishness, of an older Scotland, not least as the Jacobites (and, so, their opponents) saw it. The fact a presumed Hanoverian, Campbell of the Bank, chose within three years of Culloden and two of the Disarming Act to be portrayed in tartan, despite his role in a banking establishment loyal to the Hanoverian British settlement, suggests something more profoundly engaging in performative iconography than Romantic ‘hallucination’ avant la lettre. Such tokens were a means of asserting a distinctive identity within Britain. A figure like George IV

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could buy into this. It preceded his, or Scott’s, public performances. Further, these tokens were capable of a variety of interpretations, malleable to contemporary need both at home and in the empire. Steve Newman draws attention to one striking instance three years before George’s IV’s visit—piquantly involving Scott’s writing. In this, ‘tartanised’ historical artefacts marking Scottishness were adopted in relation to both Burns and Scott: [In 1819 the performance of an] adaptation of one of Scott’s Tales of My Landlord at a Calcutta theatre, [… was] followed by ‘Scots Wha Hae’ [whose] singer donned ‘a kilt and bonnet that had been worn at Culloden, and the feathers of the bonnet partly burnt in the battle of that memorable day, a circumstance which called up the most lively associations in the minds of all those to whom this fact was known’.43

Here public and theatrical performance and ‘lively associations’ intertwine, not least since it is not clear on which side the Culloden uniform was worn. Newman ponders whether this event is an example of conservative nostalgia, or an enactment in which formerly rebellious bravery is now integrated into the imperium, or a condemnatory sidelong glance at ongoing imperial oppression in India as echoing post-Culloden atrocities. Perhaps it is all three of these things. Centrally, however, it is a performance of Scottishness within the wider empire. Further, Burns’s patriotic song could, in another example to which Newman draws attention, be accommodated not only in an imperial, but also a unionist narrative. When ‘Scots Wha Hae’ was sung at an 1819 Edinburgh celebration of Burns, Captain Charles Adam of the Royal Navy exclaimed ‘Happily for us […] the feuds between Scotland and England to which the song refers, have long ceased, but […] I give you [the lofty and generous sentiment] “the cause of Freedom all over the world”’.44 Here, the wars that produced the Declaration of Arbroath are within a Unionist Nationalist narrative reduced to mere ‘feuds’. Meanwhile, tartan enactment quickly became attached to the phenomenon of Burns Suppers discussed earlier. From the 1820s on in America, for example, Clark McGinn points to ‘the increasing “tartan-isation” of the Burns Supper as the American Scottish societies added Burns as a defining attribute [of] Scottishness [alongside “hamely fare”, thrift, whisky and tartan]’.45 Such enactments were complemented, as in our Calcutta example, by performances in the theatre itself. The fluidity of their iconography found,

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for example, expression in nineteenth-century Scotland in theatrical adaptations of Scott’s novels and other plays on similar themes. Interestingly, however, with regard to Hanoverian appropriations in a metropolitan context, according to Barbara Bell, the ‘first Scott adaptation to enjoy major success was the version of Guy Mannering written for Covent Garden by Scott’s friend the actor Daniel Terry [who would later collaborate with Scott in the organisation of the George IV’s visit] in 1816’.46 From the next year on, the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, drawing initially on playtexts that had already appeared in regional theatres, launched its dramatisations of Scott’s novels under W. H. Murray’s management. These energised and provided focus for the developing phenomenon of the ‘National Drama’. This genre embodied many examples of boundary-crossing and hybridities in its exploration of English, British and Scottish relations and identities. It did so through tartanisation of Scottish themes, but also in its practical, dramaturgical functioning. It made use of song and comedy, influenced by and influencing popular theatre and, in time, music hall.47 This theatre seemed, in McGuirk’s words on Burns’s poetry cited in the last chapter, to see no need for ‘cultural purity’. In this, of course, it represented an example of long-standing Scottish literary and dramatic border-crossing. The canard that Scotland suffered a centuries-long post-Reformation abolition of theatre is now thoroughly rebutted (despite recurrent somewhat nostophobic and miserabilist rearguard attempts to deny the clear evidence by the newspaper critic Mark Brown).48 This rebuttal has recognised that the Scottish dramatic tradition is not confined to playhouse theatre.49 The recognition that Scottish theatrical activity ranged beyond the playhouse in a typically boundarytransgressive way does not imply, however, a denial of a Scottish dramatic canon. This certainly exists, though not always extensive and at times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries interrupted. That part of the canon that survives can be seen to begin around 1540 with the remarkable level of achievement represented by George Buchanan’s highly influential plays, Jephthes and Baptistes. Their impact was Europe-wide, as we have noted, not least on the development of French neoclassical theatre. The ways in which other Scottish drama has worked across genre boundaries, however, exemplifies more clearly how performed Scottishness operates in terms of hybridity. This is so even if, as we saw in a previous chapter,

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such hybridity would have caused Leavis difficulty. Despite its centurylong popularity throughout Britain, because it was that bastard boundarycrossing form, a ‘ballad-opera’, he would not have accepted the worth of an achievement like Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd. Indeed, bastard forms are regularly found in the history of Scottish drama and literature, when, say, the French theatre has tended to abjure them. They range from the mid-sixteenth-century dramaturgical variousness of David Lindsay’s Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis to the modern experimental transgression of genres that characterise and identify Edwin Morgan’s poetry and drama and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s syntheses of poetry, drama, sculpture, visual arts and gardening. Femi Folorunso dates interaction of popular and text-based theatre to a very early period: We now know, for instance, that a pattern of utilitarian drama was established in Scotland before the Reformation. This pattern achieved its highest standards in Sir David Lindsay’s Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis. A close scrutiny of the language and techniques of this play suggests […] imposition […] of literary order on popular elements in order to make some urgent, serious political statements.50

Complementing Folorunso’s work, Adrienne Scullion suggests the modern vehicles of music hall and pantomime that form key strands in modern Scottish theatre also have other deep Scottish roots in Gaelic-language performance modes. She suggests that, whatever the different and somewhat later, though related, experience of the development of music hall in England, in Scotland in the early to middle nineteenth century, a particular and significant influence in the evolution towards music halls per se came from this ceilidh tradition, which [immigrant Highland and Irish] communities brought with them to industrialising Glasgow.51

Murray Pittock comments that in the nineteenth century, the ‘kilt, the pipes, haggis, and the music-hall Scot became increasingly popular, but with little consciousness of the nationalist overtones the tartan had possessed in the eighteenth century’.52 There can be no doubt, however, that, whatever Pittock means here by ‘nationalist’, the factors he identifies performed Scottishness. It may have done so in a Unionist Nationalist framework, but, of course, would be none the less nationalist for being ‘Unionist Nationalist’. Further, in terms of the long-term influence

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of such developments, it is also the case that, with the subsequent export of Scottish music and cultural idioms through the Scottish diaspora, such popular forms acquired a whole new international range of cultural connotations and meanings.53 I will return to these in the final chapter, but one example of what such performed Scottishness could involve can be seen in the case of the Scots-Australian Theodore Napier (1845–1924). He took to wearing his version of a Highland chieftain’s dress in the streets of Melbourne, spent some time in Scotland in the 1890s, was vice-president of the Legitimitist Jacobite League of Great Britain and Ireland, founded in 1891, and paid homage annually at Culloden and Fotheringay Castle. Earlier, Charles Waddie, later a leader of the Scottish Home Rule Association, founded in 1886, had written the patriotic Wallace, or the Field of Stirling Bridge (1859)54 to proclaim his cause. Touring Scottish stars performing versions of Scottishness to expatriate communities formed part of this same process. Boundary transgression, then, is part of the very nature of Scottish theatre. Its performance of Scottishness from the earliest times combines popular and ‘high’, music and song, comedy and tragedy, in a set of hybrid native dramatic forms. Such genre-crossing was, of course, common in Medieval and Renaissance theatre generally. The Scottish theatre, however, appears to have been able to sustain such flexibility when other European traditions have tended to generic specialisation. (It is a fascinating hypothesis that such generic specialisation may have resulted from the colonisation of theatre by royal courts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on. If so, the removal of the Scottish court to London in 1603, often seen as to the disadvantage of theatre in Scotland, may have had a long-term unexpected, and arguably positive, effect in staving off such specialisation into more rigidly separated genres.) Processes of decentring and hybridity may, then, be seen as key elements in Scottishness and Scottish culture generally and its literature and theatre especially, with renewed importance in contemporary drama. Such hybridity and related generic boundary-crossing have deep roots. A wide variety of practices and genres worked together and hybridised from the medieval period on to form a Scottish theatre tradition. This, it has been argued, has been particularly congenial to theatrical genre-crossing in radical theatre over the last half-century. This applies not least in such work as that of John McGrath and 7:84 (Scotland) and companies they have directly influenced like Wildcat and others they have

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not (at least directly) like Suspect Culture. With regard to the former, Maria DiCenzo has claimed that in theatrical terms, what Scotland could claim to be its own was a tradition of popular forms such as music hall and panto — live forms of entertainment in which music and comedy figure prominently. What 7:84 did was to take advantage of the familiarity with and entertainment values of these forms (and others such as the ‘ceilidh’) and to use them as vehicles for political analysis and commentary.55

DiCenzo is not the only overseas critic to comment on such a central role for hybridity in Scottish theatre. Jean-Pierre Simard has observed: Based on popular and political traditions, the rich diversity of contemporary dramatic writing in Scotland shapes today the specific poetic of rooted orality and vernacular. This supports a re-reading of the popular traditions of Scottish society in all its diversity. When recognisable parts of the popular music heritage are not directly included, music and songs within the play text with recognisable tonalities, accents and discourse pay frequent intertextual homage to this pre-existing corpus.56

Alasdair Cameron and Adrienne Scullion made a further key point about these popular traditions and their ‘intertextual homage to this pre-existing corpus’ with regard to the performance of Scottishness and its theatrical expression: We have continually argued that trying to create a great tradition for Scottish theatre is a lost cause but suggested that popular theatre [original emphasis] is the key to seeing how Scottish theatre evolved and how notions of Scottishness were kept alive on the stage.57

Meantime, Scullion’s insight, quoted above, into the role of ceilidh in the development of Scottish music hall offers an elegant circularity for the way that John McGrath returns via popular theatre forms to ceilidh performance techniques. This is particularly so in what is often seen as the finest example of his work, exploring historical and contemporary Scottishness and issues surrounding its exploitation, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil (1973). It would certainly be somewhat bold to claim a continuously ‘great’ tradition for Scottish theatre, whatever that would mean. What recent

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scholarship has emphasised, despite occasional nostalgia for a self-abasing narrative of theatrical suppression, is that over the centuries there has been a more or less continuous Scottish theatre tradition. Within that there have been substantial achievements, whether in the early modern period by Buchanan and Lindsay, or in the eighteenth century by Ramsay and even, in terms of the time, John Home. His Douglas (1756) was a success on British stages, not least in London, for around a century. Meanwhile, the popular tradition reflected in the National Drama and the post-1963 renaissance in Scottish theatre both have deep historic roots. Cameron and Scullion go on with regard to the National Drama, based around Scott adaptations, to make a case for that popular tradition’s continuity in alternative theatrical venues, forming, as it were, a late nineteenth-century Scottish Fringe. They argue that, when the London-West-End-centred, railway-based, touring theatre circuit emerged in the mid-nineteenth century the audience for the National Drama did not disappear, but (re)turned to the ‘popular stage’ and that parallel tradition of Scottish theatre, the fairs and geggies. The actors associated with the National Drama still performed with notable success on Glasgow Green, and later at Vinegar Hill, on the geggie stages. These performers were still singing the same songs, appealing to the same audience, albeit in rather different surroundings. The geggies kept alive the nineteenth century ‘national repertoire’ and performed plays about Wallace, Mary, Queen of Scots, Tam O’Shanter, Jeannie Deans, James V, Highland chiefs, the Falls of Clyde, Wandering Steenie and the Warlocks of the Glen. They played them to Scottish audiences and played them with Scottish actors. The geggies, in a relaxed and informal atmosphere, provided the populous [sic] with plays about their own country, spoken in a familiar accent for audiences who could not afford the London touring shows or lived in the country and could not travel to the large city theatres. In so doing they preserved a distinctively Scottish dramatic tradition.58

The role of ‘these performers’ in such a tradition is not simply, of course, to act in plays. They embody accent, language and, so, a sense of community identity and participation. Charles Mackay (1787–1857), who achieved stardom playing Baillie Nicol Jarvie in adaptations of Scott’s Rob Roy, became ‘The Real Mackay’, his soubriquet being adopted in the 1840s for whisky advertisements—a very particular way of his performing Scottishness—and also a highly popular comedian. This capacity of the

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performer to be both actor and popular entertainer continued throughout the nineteenth century and into the present time. Bill Findlay has offered a study of a mid-nineteenth-century exemplar, James Houston, who had ‘parallel careers on the concert and theatre platforms as, respectively Scotch comic and Scotch comic actor’.59 Findlay observes that a factor which allowed the linkage of these two careers ‘and which helped these careers overlap — was Houston’s command of Scots. A number of reviews of his comic acting talent drew attention to this.’60 The performativity of language is an issue returned to again in the next chapter. The tradition of the performer who is both skilled in popular and classic theatrical forms and in comedy as in the Real Mackay’s case was clearly maintained by Houston, and later Scottish performers like Duncan Macrae, John Grieve, Walter Carr, Rikki Fulton and Russell Hunter. It still is by such actors as Una McLean, Andy Gray, Jimmy Chisholm and Maureen Beattie. Such performers operate within what we have seen is a complex linguistic situation. Bilinguality, and even multilinguality, allows all kinds of opportunities of expression in a Scottish context. Meanwhile, register shift, whatever the primary language employed, is a widely employed phenomenon in Scottish usage both socially and artistically.61 Many scholars—Randall Stevenson, Lindsay Paterson, John Corbett and Katja Lenz, for example62 —have discussed varieties of language, not just Scots or English or, now, Gaelic, but varieties within Scots or English, as a key dimension of Scottish theatre. The performance of Scottishness exists in the midst of a veritable heteroglossia. Tom McGrath, a poet and playwright who lived and worked in London during his twenties in the 1960s, returned in the early 1970s to Glasgow. He talked of writing in this heteroglossic context on his return: And then it was going into a whole new phase that was to do with understanding your identity as a Glaswegian first of all. […] And then later trying to understand your relationship to the Scots identity which is a more complex thing. But it was first of all understanding yourself in relationship to the language – and then there’s the dialect – and the gradual realisation that what had been there originally in my writing when I was about sixteen or seventeen was the most valued thing in me. [This was] the voices of the people in this place, and this is what I had come out of and this is what I had grown up in among and there was this enormous power in it [… and] tremendous richness just in the speech.63

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McGrath enlarged more fully on the interconnectedness for him of Scots language and theatre when he talked of beginning to write plays: I find that all the time when I’m writing the life in the thing coincides with it moving into phonetic ways of spelling the words. The life in it comes in through dialect and then funny processes go on in relationship to that because you can accept them. You can be broader, or not as broad, and what I find is that there is actually a folk element.64

McGrath suggests that, for him and others of his generation, this process involved differing underlying ideological choices from those of his predecessors, like Robert Kemp, Hugh MacDiarmid or Robert McLellan, who largely wrote in non-demotic registers of Scots with less dramaturgically experimental intentions. In this, McGrath stands as representative of generations of playwrights from the 1960s on, and not only in Scots language usage. Though folk drama was a historically important part of Gaelic-speaking culture, theatrical drama was not. In the twentieth century, however, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, some important Gaelic-language writing for the stage has emerged. This includes such plays as Òrdugh na Saorsa (Order of Release) by Tormod Calum Dòmhnallach, Ceann Cropic by Fionnlagh MacLeòid (Finlay Macleod), Sequamur by D. S. Murray, Scotties by Muireann Kelly and others by Donaidh MacIlleathain (Donnie Maclean) and Iain Moireach.65 Iain Crichton Smith’s plays include An Coileach (The Cockerel, 1966) on Christ’s betrayal and A’ Chùirt (The Court, 1966) exploring the Clearances and human conscience. Ike Isakson’s An Gaisgeach—The Hero (1995) revises an Anglocentric view of the conflict of Macbeth and Malcolm. Muriel Anne Macleod’s Theatre Hebrides company explored devised work in Gaelic in its Roghainn nan Daoine—The People’s Choice (2010), exploring a young woman’s life as she develops self-belief and resilience at a time of landlord oppression, potato famine and clearance.66 In this period too, although, as the next chapter will explore, Scots had long become considered suitable on stage only for comedy, its stage use, as Tom McGrath intimated, was revisited. Bill Bryden used it for tragic themes in both Willie Rough (1972) and Benny Lynch (1975), while it was used for versions of Greek tragedies by Bill Dunlop, Liz Lochhead, Edwin Morgan and even the present author. The avenues through which Scottishness might be performed dramatically were being re-assessed and the next two chapters discuss how.

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Notes 1. Hugh Gaitskell, Labour and the Common Market, https://www. cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/05f2996b-000b-4576-8b428069033a16f9/publishable_en.pdf (accessed 3 July 2019), p. 7. 2. See Ian Brown, History as Theatrical Metaphor: History, Myth and National Identities in Modern Scottish Drama (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 44–52. 3. Ian Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and Myth (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 4. Ian Brown, ‘Tartan, Tartanry and Hybridity’, in ibid., p. 1. 5. Quoted in John Telfer Dunbar, History of Highland Dress (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), p. 97. 6. Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney, ‘Introduction’, in Carruthers and McIlvanney (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 2. 7. John Prebble, The King’s Jaunt: George IV in Scotland, August 1822 (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000 [1988]), p. 364. 8. Murray Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 90. 9. Christopher Harvie, ‘Scott and the Image of Scotland’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, Volume II: Minorities and Outsiders (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 173–192 (184). 10. Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), p. 110. 11. Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 74. 12. Colin Milton, ‘Past and Present: Modern Scottish Historical Fiction’, in Ian Brown (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 117. 13. Kenneth McNeil, Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760– 1860 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), p. 3. 14. Ibid., p. 80. 15. Cairns Craig, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture Since the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 51– 52. 16. Pittock, Invention, p. 40. 17. Ibid., p. 43. 18. Hugh Cheape, ‘Gheibhte breacain charnaid (‘Scarlet Tartans Would Be Got …’): The Re-invention of Tradition’, in Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry, p. 17. 19. Pittock, Invention, p. 64.

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20. Murray Pittock, Enlightenment in a Smart City: Edinburgh’s Civic Development, 1660–1750 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), p. 75. 21. Rosie Waine, ‘From Rebellion to Romantic Appreciation: The Wearing of Tartan Following the Act of Proscription’, History Scotland, 19:6 (November/December 2019), p. 9. Examples of such dress are illustrated in Patrick Watt and Rosie Waine, Wild and Majestic: Romantic Visions of Scotland (Edinburgh: National Museum Scotland, 2019). 22. T. M. Devine, Independence or Union: Scotland’s Past and Scotland’s Present (London: Penguin, 2017 [2016]), pp. 82–83. 23. Murray Pittock, ‘To See Ourselves as Other See Us’, European Journal of English Studies, 13:3 (2009), p. 298. 24. Murray Pittock, ‘Plaiding the Invention of Scotland’, in Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry, p. 44. 25. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707 –1837, new ed. (London: Pimlico, 2003), pp. 233–235. 26. Tom Nairn, After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland (London: Granta Books, 2000), pp. 250–251. 27. Pittock, Invention, p. 80. 28. Cheape, p. 28. 29. Pittock, ‘Plaiding’, p. 36. 30. See, for example, Ian Brown, ‘Myth, Political Caricature and Monstering the Tartan’, in Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry, p. 94. 31. Pittock, ‘Plaiding’, p. 35. 32. Hugh O’Donnell, ‘Class Warriors or Generous Men in Skirts?: The Tartan Army in the Scottish and Foreign Press’, in Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry, pp. 212–231. 33. The Herald, 15 March at https://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/ 17502538.graeme-mcgarry-reaction-to-allan-mcgregor-retirementhighlights-growing-disconnect-between-rangers-and-scotland/ (accessed 19 March 2019). 34. Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 15–42. 35. Dunbar, History of Highland Dress, p. 14. 36. Ibid., p. 23. 37. For concise discussion of the flaws of Trevor-Roper’s arguments on this point see, for example, Pittock, ‘Plaiding the Invention’, especially pp. 32– 34, and Brown, ‘Myth, Political Caricature’, especially pp. 98–99. 38. Trevor-Roper, pp. 15–16. 39. Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism (London: NLB, 2003 [1977]), pp. 156ff.

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40. Colin McArthur (ed.), Scotch Reels : Scotland in Cinema and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1982). 41. John Caughie, ‘Representing Scotland: New Questions for Scottish Cinema’, in Eddie Dick (ed.), From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book (Glasgow: SFC & Polygon, 1990), p. 15. 42. Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, vol. 3 (London: Longman, 1855), pp. 312–313. 43. Steve Newman, ‘Localizing and Globalizing Burns’s Songs from Ayrshire to Calcutta: The Limits of Romanticism and Analogies of Improvement’, in Evan Gottlieb (ed.), Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760–1820 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015), p. 74. 44. Ibid., p. 75. 45. Clark McGinn, ‘Vehement Celebrations: The Global Celebration of the Burns Supper Since 1801’, in Murray Pittock (ed.), Robert Burns in Global Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011), pp. 189– 203 (195). 46. Barbara Bell, ‘The Nineteenth Century’, in Bill Findlay (ed.), A History of Scottish Theatre (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998), p. 142. 47. On the National Drama, see particularly the section under that subtitle (pp. 143–149), in Bell, ibid., pp. 137–206. 48. See, for example, Mark Brown, ‘An Historical Note’, in Modernism and Scottish Theatre Since 1969: A Revolution on Stage (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 30–38. 49. See, for example, Findlay (ed.), A History; Ian Brown, Scottish Theatre: Diversity, Language, Continuity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013) and History as Theatrical Metaphor. 50. Femi Folorunso, ‘Scottish Drama and the Popular Tradition’, in Randall Stevenson and Gavin Wallace (eds), Scottish Theatre Since the Seventies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 182. 51. Alasdair Cameron and Adrienne Scullion, ‘W. F. Frame and the Scottish Popular Theatre Tradition’, in Cameron and Scullion (eds), Scottish Popular Theatre and Entertainment (Glasgow: Glasgow University Library, 1996), p. 40, fn. 3. 52. Pittock, The Invention, p. 99. 53. I am indebted to Paul Maloney for this insight. 54. Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo; London: W. Kent & Co., 1859. 55. Maria DiCenzo, The Politics of Alternative Theatre in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 87. 56. Jean-Pierre Simard, ‘Populaire, politique at poétique: Réévaluer la réputa¯ ¯ tion du théâtre écossais’, Etudes Ecossais, no. 10 (2005), p. 193. (Fondée sur les traditions populaires et politiques, la riche diversité des écritures

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60. 61.

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63.

64. 65. 66.

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¯ dramatiques contemporaine en Ecosse dessine aujourd’hui la poétique spécifique d’une oralité enracinée et vernaculaire. Elle épaule une relecture des traditions populaire de la société écossaise dans sa diversité. Quand des pièces reconnaissables du patrimoine musical populaire ne sont pas directement insérées, musique et chanson diégétiques, aux tonalités, aux accents et au discours reconaissables adressent un fréquent hommage intertextuel à ce corpus préexistant – my translation into English.) Cameron and Scullion, ‘W.F. Frame’, p. 45. Ibid., p. 46. Bill Findlay, ‘Scots Language and Popular Entertainment in Victorian Scotland: The Case of James Houston’, in Cameron and Scullion (eds), Scottish Popular Theatre, p. 17. Ibid. See, for example, Ian Brown and Katja Lenz, ‘“Oh Dearie Me!”: Dramatic Rhetoric and Linguistic Subversion in the Scottish Situation Comedy, The High Life’, in Edgar W. Schneider (ed.), Englishes Around the World, Vol. 1 (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997), pp. 109–123. See, for example, Randall Stevenson, ‘Snakes and Ladders, Snakes and Owls: Charting Scottish Theatre’, in Stevenson and Wallace (eds), Scottish Theatre, pp. 1–20; Lindsay Paterson, ‘Language and Identity on the Stage’, in Stevenson and Wallace, pp. 75–83; John Corbett, Language and Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); and Katja Lenz, Die schottische Sprache im modernen Drama (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999). Ian Brown, ‘Cultural Centrality and Dominance: The Creative Writer’s View-Conversations Between Scottish Poet/Playwrights and Ian Brown’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen 4:1 (2011), p. 14. Originally published in Interface 1984. Ibid., p. 16. For a selection of these plays, see Michelle Macleod (ed.), A Century of Gaelic Drama 1911–2018 (Glasgow: ASLS, forthcoming). This play is discussed in detail in Emma Dymock, ‘Pulling Down the Pulpit to Make Way for the Stage: An Exploration of Anna Chaimbeul and Roghainn Nan Daoine’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, 9 (2016), pp. 113–134.

CHAPTER 8

Language and Resistance in Theatre, Music Hall and Variety

This chapter explores varieties of performance of Scottishness, particularly in the use of Scots as a ‘performed’ language in drama on stage and television. In developing themes introduced so far, it recognises the strength of Nadine Holdsworth’s conclusion in Theatre & Nation that theatre ‘has the potential not just to reflect what is happening in a nation at any given time but, via its discursive, imaginative and communal realm, to contribute to the creation of the nation through the cultural discourses it ignites, the representations it offers and the stories it chooses to tell’.1 As Holdsworth also suggests in her study, setting out the basis for her conclusion, Theatre, as a material, social and cultural practice, offers the chance to explore national histories, behaviours, events and preoccupations in a creative, communal realm that opens up potential for reflection and debate. But it is more than this. Arguably, theatre is deeply implicated in constructing the nation through the imaginative realm and provides a site where the nation can be put under the microscope [… opening] up a creative space for exploring the paradoxes, ambiguities and complexities around issues of tradition, identity, authenticity and belonging associated with the nation.2

Before, however, addressing more recent Scottish theatrical examples which support Holdsworth’s contention, a little historical context will be useful. As the last chapter mentioned, there have been commonly heard claims that drama and theatre were suppressed for centuries after the 1560 Scottish Reformation. These have been substantially refuted in © The Author(s) 2020 I. Brown, Performing Scottishness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39407-3_8

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recent histories.3 As Anna Jean Mill noted as long ago as her landmark 1927 study of medieval plays in Scotland, ‘the drama was employed by the early reformers as a valuable means of propaganda’.4 Despite intermittent censorship, dramatic performances have consistently and often controversially been at the foreground of issues of Scottish identities and Scottishness in ways Holdsworth would recognise. Certainly, evangelical elements in the post-Reformation church opposed theatre performances. During some decades in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries some aspects of dramatic practice were actually suppressed. Such opposition is evidence both of performed drama’s controversial nature and perceived potential impact. In later attacks by evangelicals, especially by the mid-eighteenth century, the degree of vituperation against theatre often correlated with the increasing ineffectiveness of those attacks against the inherent power they perceived in performance. By contrast, the most violent and, for a time, successful attempts at suppression of early modern Scottish theatre actually took place in the decades leading up to the Reformation. Then, the Catholic church, which with its widespread clerks’ plays had used drama to spread its Christian theology, regularly sought to suppress those who used theatre to oppose its organisation and corruption. The playwright and friar John Kyllour’s Historye of Christis Passioun, performed on Good Friday 1535 on the Stirling playfield in front of king, court and townspeople, attacked what Kyllour saw as the contemporary clergy’s pharisaic blinding of the people to the real Christ. The Catholic hierarchy hunted him down. He was burned at the stake in Edinburgh in 1539. While such purgatorial public performances of a version of hellfire were commonly practised across Europe in this period, this enactment, emblazoning one vision of the soul of Scottishness on the body of a playwright with an alternative vision, is a specifically theatrical enactment of the developing conflict over the future of religious belief in Scotland. In that same year, another protesting dramatist, James Wedderburn, whose plays had been performed in Dundee’s playfield, was charged. He fled into exile in France no later than 1540. There, the Scottish church still tried to apprehend him through the bishop of Rouen, where he died in 1553.5 When in 1540 the first version of what was to become David Lindsay’s’ Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis, an attack on clerical and political corruption, was performed at court in Linlithgow, Lindsay was protected by his high position as childhood mentor of James V and Lord Lyon King of Arms. However, after his play, substantially expanded for public performance, was presented in

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Cupar (1552) and Edinburgh (1554), and he had died of natural causes in 1555, the script was publicly burned at the cross in Edinburgh. The Catholic church also promoted a 1555 parliamentary Act banning theatre, in effect until the Reformation five years later. As Margo Todd argues, Protestantism may have succeeded in part because [original emphasis] the sessions [local church courts] enforced their legislation against festivity lightly, flexibly and sporadically. Where a heavy hand might have strengthened the opposition to Reformed doctrine as well as discipline, the elders’ [church leaders’] sense of the inutility of quashing the useful and harmless allowed for a more gradual but secure cultural reconstruction.6

In this perspective, the Kirk’s focus was chiefly on control rather than outright suppression and, as I have shown,7 part of that focus was developed through the use of drama in education. Schools across Scotland were required, not least in order to develop their pupils’ public speaking skills, to produce plays, classical or contemporary, at least once a year— and sometimes more often—for Kirk Sessions and local dignitaries. These, given the nature of the pupils involved, would be performed largely by those who would go on later in life to public roles in law, politics, civic administration, education or the church. In short, if one recognises that ‘drama’ is not simply and exclusively ‘playhouse theatre’, one can see that, while playhouse theatre developed in Scotland mostly in the eighteenth century and by that century’s end was strong, drama had been involving young people in performing versions of Scottishness since the Reformation. As part of this, it had been important in shaping attitudes to orality as an expression of varieties of Scottishness, in both the theatre and, through extension, public discourse. Many plays presented in the theatre in Scotland by the eighteenth century were written in English. Others, like Allan Ramsay’s Jacobitesupporting The Gentle Shepherd (1729), were in Scots. This, of course, integrated varieties of theatre when Haddington Grammar School pupils premièred its ballad-opera version in Skinner’s Hall, Edinburgh’s regular professional playhouse at the time. Part of the impact in performance of Ramsay’s play, the most popular pastoral on the British stage for a century, and Lindsay’s Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis, with its powerfully repeated politico-religious pre-Reformation message, lay in their vibrant Scots dialogue, shared with the folk drama that surrounded them. This reminds

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one that, however much Scots on stage was becoming ghettoised in comic contexts by the nineteenth century, the language had not always been thus corralled. There have certainly been periods in the last two centuries when Scots was considered appropriate only for limited dramatic use, usually for quaint or comic effect. The tradition of Scots-language comedy derived from the music hall and pantomime reinforced this practice. Earlier, however, it had been perfectly acceptable as a stage language capable of dealing with a wide range of intellectual and emotional material in a variety of registers. Further, however much there was the post-Union bourgeois tendency already discussed, to categorise English language as ‘polite’ and Scots, contrastingly, as uncouth, Barbara Bell identifies the development of the National Drama, discussed in the last chapter, as including a reaction against this cultural categorisation. She suggests this reaction arose from a real sense of frustration among many Scots at the perceived cultural and institutional drift towards reducing the status of their nation to ‘North Britain’, which was only partly halted by the work of Burns and [Joanna] Baillie. Dramatisations of the Waverley Novels began to effect a real change. […] Their comparative respectability, despite their setting in Scotland’s recent [partially Jacobite-supporting] past, allowed their transfer on to the stage, where they made Scotland’s history an acceptable subject for representation. […] the Scots, hungry to reassert their shared cultural identity in a public arena, returned again and again to see their national heroes and heroines portrayed in authentic Scottish settings by Scottish actors with Scottish accents.8

The long unbroken line of Scottish drama and theatre from Ramsay on did not produce the sort of masterpieces the Irishmen George Farquhar, Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Macklin and Richard Sheridan did for English playhouses. One should, nonetheless, never understate the range and depth of the Scottish theatrical tradition and its performance of Scottishness. Nor should one underestimate the importance of Scots-language drama within that tradition. In the first half of the nineteenth century, alongside other Scottish actors, the Real Mackay, performing in Scots, was, as we have seen, linguistically ‘the real Mackay’. By the end of the nineteenth century, Scotland-produced theatre was diminished—outside of variety and pantomime—by the professional theatre’s increased ‘industrialisation’. The mid-nineteenth-century railway revolution facilitated the development of a touring system focused on

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London’s West End. This is even though one of the major managements, Howard and Wyndham’s, had its headquarters in Edinburgh. This system was designed to develop and exploit scripts in versions of Standard English, with ‘regional’ accents reserved for minor or comic parts. This applied even, to an extent, in Irishman Dion Boucicault’s melodramas. It was not that Scottish playwrights were excluded by this system: one of its mainstays at the beginning of the twentieth century was J. M. Barrie, whose reputation was worldwide. To succeed, however, dramatists had, like Barrie, to adjust their language and creative ideas to a British and overseas market. In this, Scots-language dialogue was non-standard and, outside of ‘character’ parts, generally avoided. A major exception to this was Graham Moffat’s Bunty pulls the strings (1911), his first major full-length hit. This West End success ran for over 600 performances. It opened in parallel in the same year on Broadway and at once toured the United States. The play’s original intended title, The Causey Saints, more clearly pointed to its satirical attack on Presbyterian hypocrisy. Although that was changed for its West End production, presumably on grounds of intelligibility for a London audience, it was performed there in Scots. In dialogue, this appeared to present no difficulty in non-Scottish audience reception, even in America. In his autobiography, Moffat describes his approach to writing the play as follows: ‘One braid Scots word purposely placed in each act, as we put a touch of mustard on a steak to help the flavour!’9 Yet, analysis of the published text makes it clear that Moffat’s later claim of one ‘braid Scots word’ per act is a substantial under-accounting. It is clear, as I have shown in detail elsewhere, the original was actually written in Scots, as was remarked on in American reviews.10 Yet, when Moffat published the script, he translated it into English, leaving only a few Scots words. One can only speculate about his motivation. The play continued to play on tour in Scots. It may be that there were some commercial doubts that a Scots-language publication, as opposed to performance, would be well-received. Moffat’s English translation of his text for publication and later misrepresentation of his process highlights the sensitivity he, at least, felt about printed Scots. Meanwhile, it is an intriguing link with an older tradition that Moffat identifies parts he himself had performed in the National Drama as Bailie Nicol Jarvie, David Deans and Dominie Sampson.11 These parts were played by ‘the real’ Mackay and place Moffat in a line of descent of Scots-language performance and, so, promotion of Scottish identity.

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Moffat’s sensitivity marks a perceived—and perhaps conflicted and continuing—sense of linguistic propriety with regard to the relative status and intercomprehensibility of printed Scots and English. In Moffat’s case, the conflict seems to have been internalised in later life. His earliest published work was freely in Scots, comprising comedy sketches included in lateVictorian music-hall programmes. Such programmes were another context in which versions of Scottishness were performed. As Paul Maloney observes, the music hall that evolved in Scotland has a special place in the nation’s theatrical life: highly influenced by the fairground tradition, it was not, as in England, necessarily seen as a cruder appendage to an aesthetically rich legitimate theatre, but rather as something much closer to the mainstream, and to the Scots vernacular stage which constituted many people’s experience of theatre-going.12

With regard to Scottish popular theatre—and particularly Harry Lauder’s predecessor W. F. Frame—Alasdair Cameron and Adrienne Scullion suggest ‘that the totemic images of the Scotch comic […] were approved and even celebrated as symbols of a nationality which, under normal circumstances, audiences were never allowed to express’.13 Maloney goes on to make the case that music hall in Scotland—alongside pantomime— enshrined such ‘Scottish popular theatre’ in the wake of the National Drama’s decline in the mid-to late nineteenth century. He argues that its influence did not stop in the nineteenth century: In this context the Scottish music hall can be seen to have been directly in the line of a mainstream Scottish popular theatre tradition that continued through the socialist plays of Joe Corrie and the Fife Miners’ Players, who performed their one-act plays to working-class audiences in music halls and variety theatres, to the radical popular theatre of companies such as Wildcat and John McGrath’s 7:84 Theatre Company in the 1970s and 1980s, who claimed its legacy as their own.14

In a later study, Maloney discusses the historical, social and economic contexts in which music-hall stars like Harry Lauder and Tommy Morgan worked between the world wars. He emphasises the way that Scottish music hall continued in some sort to portray, in Bell’s words on the National Drama, ‘Scottish settings by Scottish actors with Scottish accents’. He notes that

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the common denominator for audiences was shared appreciation of Scottish language and culture, vested partly in language, dialect words and phrases, and partly in a familiar body of popular songs, poetry, readings and recitations, constantly renewed and extended by topical material: local news, events and personalities. While music hall performers elsewhere in Britain spoke in vernacular accents and incorporated topical material, in Scotland use of Scots words and speech, together with familiar performing material with Burns and Scott at its heart, expressed a popular performing culture not only local or regional, but genuinely national.15

Bill Findlay complements such analysis when, following work by Alasdair Cameron, he talks of the use of Scots language in the nineteenth century as addressing ‘a nationalist assertiveness in Scottish audiences’ preference for Scottish material on the Victorian stage’.16 This was bound up with the creation of a new national identity: the demand for Scots language material can, at least partly, be seen as reflecting an assertion of community. Although it is, of course, important not to forget the sheer enjoyment aspect, in terms both of the shared pleasure of linguistic and cultural recognition, and the escapism afforded by comedy, in a complementary way I think the demand for Scots language material can also be seen as contributing to the creation of a national identity through Scottish types.17

The positive contextualisation of the work of Scots-language comedians by Cameron, Scullion, Maloney and Findlay ties in with Holdsworth’s conclusions cited earlier. It runs counter to the criticism the performances of ‘Scottish types’ by figures like Lauder and Morgan have attracted. These performers offered their own contestation of what is ‘Scottishness’, in their time as controversial as the 1822 king’s visit. Hugh MacDiarmid, for one, famously attacked Harry Lauder in poetry and prose. In ‘To Circumjack Cencrastus’ (1930) we find It’s no’ sae easy as it’s payin’ To be a fule like Lauder […] The problems o’ the Scottish soul Are nocht to Harry Lauder.18

A subsequent line equates ‘Lauder’s kilt and Chaplin’s feet’.19 Later in his 1943 autobiography, Lucky Poet, MacDiarmid refers to ‘my furious

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attacks on Sir Harry Lauder, Will Fyffe, Tommy Morgan, and the other Scotch comedians—and the “chortling wut”, like the offscourings of the patter of these clowns which is so large a constituent of Scottish life on every social level’.20 MacDiarmid asserts his antipathy to Lauder and his colleagues arises from a sense of their not addressing the ‘Scottish soul’— as if such a thing could ever be singular. A less mystical critique, but following the broad lines of MacDiarmid’s, can be found when Cairns Craig argues: Tartanry and Kailyard, seemingly so opposite in their [noble Celtic and mundane, parodic lowland] ethos, are the joint creations of an imagination which, in recoil from the apparently featureless integration of Scottish life into an industrial culture whose power and whose identity lies outside Scottish control, acknowledges its own inability to lay hold of contemporary reality by projecting itself upon images of a society equally impotent before the forces of history.21

A reservation must be entered here. Scottish industry was largely in Scottish hands until after the post-Second World War nationalisation process. The facts do not quite support Craig’s hypothesis here, therefore. Whatever powerlessness was felt it was not simply grounded in pre-war industrial control. Craig goes on: This turning of the back on the actuality of modern Scottish life is emblematically conveyed in the figure of Harry Lauder – Kailyard consciousness in tartan exterior – who evacuates from his stage persona, indeed from his whole identity, the world of the Lanarkshire miners from which he began.22

The counter-argument to be made here is that there is no essentialist Scottish soul, but instead a range of performances that represent and enact aspects of Scottishness. Indeed, David Goldie has discerned deeper complexity in Lauder as a performer. This was recognised by a range of critics in the first half of the last century: H. V. Morton […] insisted that ‘Lauder’s genius is a thing apart’ and talked of finding ‘something essentially honest, good, pure, and simple’ in his performance.23 The great Times theatre critic James Agate discerned in Lauder ‘an exceedingly fine feeling for character’, and described him as

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a ‘great actor’, ‘an evangelist whose tidings are of pure joy’.24 Even one of Lauder’s harsher Scottish critics, George Blake, had to admit that Lauder in his heyday was ‘inspired by at least near-genius’.25 So while MacDiarmid was content to see Lauder’s performance as caricature and treat it as caricature, what he missed, and what audiences and many reputable theatre critics presumably did not, was the operation within this tartanry of a more complex aesthetic quality and humanity.26

Whatever Lauder is, he is unquestionably a Scottish figure, but one commercialised and synthesising, even hybridising, aspects of Scottish culture and society in his costume and performance. In this, he can be seen to be incorporating and integrating rather than evacuating aspects of Scottish culture as he offered release and relief to those in his audience who knew well enough the rigours of ‘the world of Lanarkshire miners’ and their industrial peers. In establishing himself as a star in a competitive profession as a client of the William Morris agency, he reached beyond the borders of Scotland. In that context, he adopted a persona and the kind of visually striking costume needed to have an impact in the brief allocation of time even a top star had in a music-hall bill. In this, he undoubtedly represented aspects of Scottishness, not claiming to embody all of it, were such a thing possible. In judging his performances, we have to take account of his theatrical context. Doing this with regard to his work and that of his contemporaries, we should understand, even if we do not wish to approve, that late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century music hall was replete with comics, like Lauder, who adopted national stereotypes in costume, accent and patter. Indeed, Lauder began his career as an ‘Irish Comic’. To isolate and concentrate on Lauder in this debate is to set up a straw man. Other examples of popular music-hall ‘Scottishnesses’ exist. Ike Freedman, for example, drew on his Scottish-Jewish background, working through various hybrid comedic characterisations until resolving them in his final incarnation as ‘The Scottish Hebrew Gentleman’. There, according to Paul Maloney, Freedman confounded the conventions of the ‘Hebrew’ performance by appearing in immaculate evening dress with top hat, white spats and cigarette holder. A sophisticated, cosmopolitan figure, as remote from the shabby barrow trader associations of the dialect performance as possible, he nevertheless retained his distinctive Glasgow accent, called his audience ‘customers’, and retained Jewish words and idioms. […] What emerged

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clearly from his performance however was an uncompromising determination to be both Jewish and [original emphasis] Scottish, in a way that allowed both equal validity. Freedman, who performed in touring revues with other leading Glasgow comedians of his generation like Tommy Morgan and Jack Anthony, regularly wore the kilt in the latter stages of his career.27

Versions of Scottishness found on the music hall and variety stage in the first half of the twentieth century were clearly complex, hybrid and potentially self-reflexively subversive of stereotypes. Lauder’s and Freedman’s contemporary Tommy Lorne, whose real name, Hugh Corcoran, highlights his Irish ancestry, also produced a synthesised, hybridised version of the kilted comic. In his case, he marked his performance with his native Glaswegian accent, wearing white-face makeup, over-large boots, a short jacket and a tiny kilt. Maloney analyses this persona: In reframing Highland dress in jauntily absurdist vein, Lorne was not dismissing tartan or what it represented: he was rather ironically reclaiming it for urban working-class audiences for whom its romanticised rural associations meant little. Lorne’s gentle satirising of the kilt provides a corrective, by resituating tartan and the kilt as one part – but not the defining feature– of a modern Scottish identity in which vernacular speech and references to working-class life and culture form the mainstay. […] By the time of his death [1935] Lorne had reached a professional parity with Lauder, and the two were subjects of a cartoon strip in the Daily Record – slogan ‘wake each morn to Lauder and Lorne’. While Lauder was respected rather than loved, Lorne was referred to in folkloric terms.28

The performances of Lorne and his contemporaries and successors like Billy Connolly and Craig Hill illustrate a more general point made by Nadine Holdsworth: Cultural practices can bring forth the instabilities of national iconographies to question their potency, significance and signification. Indeed, the use and abuse of national iconography is a common strategy of cultural workers who want to challenge national iconography’s institutional status, power and potential to exclude. This questioning inevitably entails a consideration of what falls outside as well as what falls inside national iconography. The exploration of absence as well as presence, unmasks the

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sociopolitical divisions and power relations of gender, colonialism, class, race and sexuality inherent in national iconography.29

Clearly, the range of Scottish comedy types ‘contributing to the creation of a national identity’ that Findlay refers to, let alone any other categories, is wide. The ideological underpinnings of each are complex, not to be dismissed by glibly, even if poetically, comparing a comedian’s kilt to Charlie Chaplin’s legs. In any case, Lauder on occasion, besides his solo performances, acted in film and on stage in a manner distinct from the persona of his variety turns. He appeared in films discussed in Chapter 10 and at least once in a Moffat play. He guested as Geordie Pow in a charity matinee revival of A Scrape o’ the Pen (1909) in, possibly, 1926.30 While that production presented a sentimental piece enacting conservative gender roles (although Moffat and his wife, Maggie, were highly active campaigners for women’s rights), Joe Corrie, a Fife miner, who began his playwriting career in the 1920s in a semi-professional context with his local Bowhill Players, wrote dynamic, politically committed plays in Scots about the people he lived among. The lively dialogue of In Time o Strife (1927), for example, explores industrial and domestic tensions surrounding the 1926 General Strike. In the same decade, two other initiatives encouraged writing in Scots. One was the semi-professional Scottish National Players (1921–1947). This toured plays on Scottish themes. The other was the amateur Scottish Community Drama Association (SCDA) founded in 1926 and still going strong. What marked all three developments was their ignoring, or even rejection as irrelevant to their concerns, of the commercial touring system. Their concerns were with matters of direct interest to their audiences in Scotland. Corrie himself by the 1930s was writing for SCDA companies, having developed a line in lighter comic plots. The political drive associated with playwriting in Scots seemed to be fading until in 1941 Glasgow Unity theatre company was formed. It amalgamated five radical amateur theatre companies. From the first, the company’s work included Scots versions of theatre classics. When it formed a professional company after the war, that produced more original work in Scots. Some was of the highest calibre. One example of this is Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep (1947). This has been recognised, after a revival by 7:84 Theatre Company in 1982 and revivals by London’s National Theatre in 2010 and the National Theatre of Scotland in 2011, as a masterpiece. Unity also premièred Robert McLellan’s The

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Flouers of Edinburgh in 1948, a period play exploring tensions as English began to be seen in Enlightenment Edinburgh as a more ‘polite’ language than Scots. This play reflected, and reflected on, the issues related to language and Scottishness in Enlightenment Edinburgh discussed in an earlier chapter. It brought the debate forward to the twentieth century. McLellan had begun in 1933 writing Scots-language one-act plays in a somewhat sentimentalised and misogynistic version of rural Scottish conflicts, especially in the sixteenth-century Borders. After his dramatically more thoughtful Jamie The Saxt (1937), he returned to this less demanding series of plays. The Flouers of Edinburgh marked, however, a new stage in his writing. This explored in vibrant Scots dialogue profound issues of national identity, including language. The première of The Flouers of Edinburgh was complemented by the 1948 Edinburgh Festival revival of a version of Lindsay’s masterpiece, The Thrie Estaitis, in Robert Kemp’s bowdlerised version. The pioneers of the 1920s, the Glasgow Unity writers, McLellan and Lindsay (via Kemp) stimulated a renewed recognition that Scots was a lively language for the stage, sophisticated and available for political activism. Further, audiences seemed to be attracted to hearing it spoken. Alexander Reid, McLellan’s contemporary, wrote in 1958 in a preface to his Two Scots Plays: If we are to fulfil our hope that Scotland may some day make a contribution to World Drama […] we can only do so by cherishing, not repressing our national peculiarities (including our language), though whether a Scottish national drama, if it comes to birth, will be written in Braid Scots [NB: very much McLellan’s approach, based in his native Lanarkshire-Scots dialect] or the speech, redeemed for literary purposes, of Argyle Street, Glasgow, or the Kirkgate, Leith, is anyone’s guess.31

The irony here is that, like Moffat before him, Reid published his Scotslanguage plays in an English-language version. During the 1960s, it seemed as if the energy of Scots-language drama was under threat. Unity had closed in 1951. McLellan seemed isolated, and focused on historical themes. Other attempts at Scots-language drama like Sydney Goodsir Smith’s The Wallace (1960) were—with the exception of John Arden’s Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (1964)—stilted, static and backward-looking. One of the great issues for the Scots language at the time, given the reality of generations of cumulative interaction with English, is whether the language of a contemporary play could be both

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dramatically authentic and taxonomically Scots.32 In the 1970s, however, a new generation emerged. This grew out of the work of earlier playwrights and their experiments. It used the demotic Scots of ‘Argyle Street, Glasgow, or the Kirkgate, Leith’, usually in a way Reid would not have thought ‘redeemed’. This generation revitalised the use of Scots on stage in a way that continues to this day. Highlights of that generation’s earlier work include Bill Bryden’s Willie Rough (1972), Tom McGrath’s The Hard Man (1977) and John Byrne’s Slab Boys trilogy (1978–1982). Since then, Scots-language drama has shown itself capable of dealing with a wide range of important topics. These include issues of national and gender stereotypes in Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987) and Anne Marie di Mambro’s Tally’s Blood (1990), class and gender oppression in Sue Glover’s Bondagers (1991), and issues of military life and the Iraq War in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2006). Dramatists like George Gunn, Henry Adam and, to an extent, Donald Campbell and Grace Barnes added an avowedly regional dimension in their plays. More recent work and language choices by playwrights like David Greig (Glasgow Girls, 2014), Kieran Hurley (Rantin, 2014, and Mouthpiece, 2018) and Rona Munro (The James Plays, 2014) continue to extend the linguistic range available to contemporary Scottish playwrights. Greig’s plays usually employ Scottish English, but Glasgow Girls exploits the vibrant potential of Glaswegian Scots. Hurley embeds a range of languages, Scots, English and some Gaelic, in Rantin and, to sometimes hilarious and sometimes moving effect, explores distinct Edinburgh Scots class-dialects in Mouthpiece. Munro, however one might question the historical accuracy and ideological acuity in her trilogy,33 undoubtedly handles Scots with theatrical vitality. Meantime, an important repertoire of translation into Scots has been developed including Molière translations like Robert Kemp’s Let Wives Tak Tent (1948) and Liz Lochhead’s Tartuffe (1985), Edwin Morgan’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1992) and the several translations by Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman of plays by the Quebecois Michel Tremblay like The Guid Sisters (1989) and The House among the Stars (1992). Alongside this, as mentioned in the last chapter, Gaelic playwriting since the 1960s includes work by Tormod Calum Dòmhnallach, Fionnlagh MacLeòid (Finlay Macleod), Donaidh MacIlleathain (Donnie Maclean), Iain Crichton Smith and Ike Isakson, as well as productions of new plays by companies like the late Simon MacKenzie’s Tosg and Muriel Anne Macleod’s Theatre Hebrides.

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Tom McGrath has spoken of the anti-hegemonic potential of multivocal language use in Scottish drama, and literature in general. He observed that Hugh MacDiarmid—once he had achieved his linguistic revolution—found, as do many revolutionaries, that he had become the old guard, resentful of the less dogmatic use of Scots by younger, particularly Glaswegian-Scots writers. Reflecting on MacDiarmid’s attack on emergent writers such as Edwin Morgan, Tom Leonard and himself, McGrath has explained: I suppose at that time we were coming up with a different ideology. We were coming up with a different approach after all that work, work that had been done in Scots language. We were coming up with this street level sound of existentialist man in the street, ‘black man in the ghetto’ type of writing. It just upset the applecart.34

In McGrath’s view, then, the use of Scots for literary purposes can carry a liberationist force, demonstrating that the linguistic usages explored in this chapter have fundamental ideological, cultural and political implications. These not least redefine, expand and incorporate new perceptions of what Scottishness may be. In a play like Matthew Zajac’s award-winning and internationally acclaimed The Tailor of Inverness (2008), already mentioned in the last chapter, we see Scottishness embracing not just Zajac’s immigrant father after the last World War, but a dramatic language that incorporates Scots, English, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and other languages in new syntheses. As I have noted before,35 the interest of contemporary Scottish writers in Scots and Gaelic, as well as English, must not be mistaken for cultural chauvinism. It is motivated by recognition of language’s power. It explores Scotland’s languages’ various possible applications in expressing, reflecting and developing political and cultural identities. It reflects the richly variegated culture in which these writers work. It is contemporary Scottish languages’ rich plurality that inspires interest in writing in their manifold varieties in the first place. As Iain Crichton Smith has expressed it, ‘We are born inside a language and see everything from within its parameters; it is not we who make language, it is the language that makes us’.36 In this, as Joe Moran points out, ‘words, as Shariatmadari reveals, aren’t a condiment you sprinkle on top of reality; they are the marinade that alters the taste of everything’.37 This is particularly why the trilingual (at least) nature of language in Scotland matters so

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much. Even when speaking one of its languages, whether Scots, English, or Gaelic, the use of that language is irresistibly ‘marinaded’ by its use in the historical and contemporary context of the others. Thus, in language, as in other dimensions of performance, manifestations of culturally and creatively self-confident versions of Scottishness proliferate. In Nadine Holdsworth’s words, each one constructs ‘the nation through the imaginative realm and provides a site where the nation can be put under the microscope’.

Notes 1. Nadine Holdsworth, Theatre and Nation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 79–80. 2. Ibid., pp. 6–7. 3. See for example, Bill Findlay (ed.), A History of Scottish Theatre (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998); Gioia Angeletti, Emancipation, Liberation, and Freedom: Romantic Drama and Theatre in Britain 1760–1830 (Parma: Monte Universit`a Parma Editore, 2010), passim, and Ian Brown, Scottish Theatre: Diversity, Language, Continuity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013). 4. Anna Jean Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1927), p. 88. 5. Bill Findlay ‘Beginnings to 1700’, in Findlay (ed.), A History, pp. 18–19. 6. Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 221–222. 7. See, for example, Brown, Scottish Theatre, pp. 91–94, and ‘Drama in Education in Post-Reformation Scotland’, in Lesley Graham (ed.), The Production and Dissemination of Knowledge in Scotland (Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2017), pp. 49–57. 8. Barbara Bell, ‘The Nineteenth Century’, in Bill Findlay (ed.), A History, p. 141. 9. Graham Moffat, Join Me in Remembering: The Life and Reminiscences of the Author of ‘Bunty Pulls the Strings’ (Camps Bay: Winifred L. Moffat, 1955), p. 26. 10. Ian Brown, ‘Scots Language in Theory and Practice in Graham Moffat’s Playwriting’, Scottish Language 33 (2014), pp. 65–81. 11. Graham Moffat, Join Me, p. 126. 12. Paul Maloney, Scotland and the Music Hall, 1850–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 8. 13. Alasdair Cameron and Adrienne Scullion, ‘W. F. Frame and the Scottish Popular Theatre Tradition’, in Cameron and Scullion (eds), Scottish Popular Theatre and Entertainment (Glasgow: Glasgow University Library, 1996), p. 39.

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14. Maloney, Scotland, pp. 8–9. 15. Paul Maloney, ‘“Wha’s like us?”: Ethnic Representation in Music Hall and Popular Theatre and the Remaking of Urban Scottish Society’, in Ian Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 133. 16. Bill Findlay, ‘Scots Language and Popular Entertainment in Victorian Scotland: The Case of James Houston’, in Cameron and Scullion (eds), p. 36. 17. Ibid. 18. ‘To Circumjack Cencrastus’, in Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken (eds), The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1978]), p. 248. 19. Ibid. 20. Hugh MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet: A Self-Study in Literature and Political Ideas (London: Methuen, 1943), p. 80. 21. Cairns Craig, ‘Myths Against History: Tartanry and Kailyard in 19th Century Scottish Literature’, in Colin McArthur (ed.), Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (London: BFI, 1982), p. 13. 22. Ibid. 23. Henry Vollam Morton, In Search of Scotland (London: Methuen & Co., 1929), pp. 155–156. 24. James Agate, Immoment Toys: A Survey of Light Entertainment on the London Stage, 1920–1943 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945), pp. 201–202. 25. George Blake, Barrie and the Kailyard School (London: Arthur Barker, 1951), p. 81. 26. David Goldie, ‘Don’t Take the High Road: Tartanry and its Critics’, in Ian Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry, p. 242. 27. Maloney, ‘“Wha’s like us?”’, p. 146. 28. Ibid., p. 141. 29. Holdsworth, Theatre and Nation, p. 61. 30. Graham Moffat (?), Programme in ‘Miscellaneous Items’ 1926 (?), p. 24, in the Graham Moffat Collection, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, SR 225. 31. Alexander Reid, ‘Foreword’, Two Scots Plays (London: Collins, 1958), pp. xii–xiii. 32. Gavin Falconer, email 1 May 2019. 33. See, for example, my discussion in Ian Brown, History as Theatrical Metaphor (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 206–211. 34. Ian Brown, ‘Cultural Centrality and Dominance: The Creative Writer’s View—Conversations Between Scottish Poet/Playwrights and Ian Brown’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, 4:1 (2011), p. 26. 35. See for example, Ian Brown, ‘Alternative Sensibilities: Devolutionary Comedy and Scottish Camp’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 319–327, especially p. 321.

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36. Iain Crichton Smith, Towards the Human: Selected Essays (Loanhead: Macdonald, 1986), cited in Madeleine Bunting, Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey (London: Granta, 2016), p. 220. 37. Joe Moran, reviewing David Shariatmadari, Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language, Guardian Review, 10 August 2019, p. 22.

CHAPTER 9

Comedy, Television, Hybridity and Scottish Camp

As the previous chapter has touched on, language choice has been and, arguably, remains an important issue in Scottish drama. Earlier chapters have addressed the role of linguistic choice in everyday life in the performance of Scottishness. This has contributed to its rich and varied culture, especially through the expressiveness of regional Scots dialects like Doric or Glaswegian. Acceptance—whether explicit or not—of Scotland’s linguistic variety and its potential in developing and reflecting the political and cultural implications that shape Scottish identities underlies any process of language choice in writing for Scottish performance. As I have argued before, there is no neutral option, no standard or default position, in such choices. Indeed, in everyday conversation, register shift, interaction between varieties of Scots, English and Gaelic and interplay within the usages of those languages, especially in particular regional and societal groups within Scotland, mark habitual aspects of communication and expression of social, cultural and political identities. All these devices and more are central to performing Scottishness in daily life. In particular, Scottish speakers speaking ‘English’ regularly use the phenomena explored by A. J. Aitken of overt and covert scotticisms.1 Through these, Scottish speakers, even in speaking what is commonly called by linguistic scientists Anglo-English, mark their speech and signal their linguistic identity to others. This is so even if only in such a simple way as properly pronouncing the fricative in ‘loch’. As in daily life, so on the stage. Besides language choice, and often linked with it, a key means of testing and expressing performed identities is through varieties of humour © The Author(s) 2020 I. Brown, Performing Scottishness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39407-3_9

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and the choice of objects and subjects for that humour in comedy. Humour and comedy explore and often subvert social boundaries and the apparently conventional borders of what is accepted or acceptable. In doing this, they also express shared values and common identities. This is one of the factors, for example, underlying the Scottish music-hall performers and performances discussed by Paul Maloney when he remarked, as cited in the last chapter, that the common denominator for audiences was shared appreciation of Scottish language and culture, vested partly in language, dialect words and phrases, and partly in a familiar body of popular songs, poetry, readings and recitations […], in Scotland use of Scots words and speech, together with familiar performing material with Burns and Scott at its heart, expressed a popular performing culture not only local or regional, but genuinely national.2

This chapter explores ways in which the multilingualism, whether conventionally bilingual or trilingual, embedded in Scottish cultures—though often unacknowledged even as it is being exploited and played with— operates in asserting ‘Scottishness’. In this, given the fluidity of authority and status that exists in such a multilingual context, a particular emphasis in Scottish comedy is on the subversive use of switches, often sudden, of linguistic registers and between the languages of Scotland. These play with the hybridity that arises from such linguistic interplay. Such switches produce a form of jouissance, a release that goes beyond the kind of pleasure—‘plaisir’ —which Roland Barthes, following the work of Jacques Lacan, discusses. His translator Stephen Heath offers this explanation of the relationship of the two terms: jouissance is specifically contrasted to plaisir by Barthes in his Le Plaisir du texte: on the one hand a pleasure (plaisir) linked to cultural enjoyment and identity, to the cultural enjoyment of identity, to a homogenising movement of the ego; on the other a radically violent pleasure (jouissance) which shatters – dissipates, loses – that cultural identity, that ego.3

Richard Middleton further suggests that plaisir results ‘from the operation of the structures of signification through which the subject knows himself or herself [while] jouissance fractures these structures’.4 In short, the switching of linguistic registers and universes of discourse fractures the borders of those registers and discourses which support self-identification

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or established versions of self-identification. This eruption goes beyond normative boundaries. It breaks and subverts them. In so doing, it interrogates and reshapes implicit value systems. This causes a release of pleasure beyond pleasure. Hidden or redefined identities are exposed. Attitudes are restated or reformed, or revised ones newly asserted. In many respects, this is an explanation for the general impact of satirical humour. In performing Scottishness through language interplay, satire—or at least subversive impact—is indeed often the achieved effect. So is the establishment or re-establishment of identities. In order to clarify discussion at this point, this chapter will focus, though certainly not exclusively, on the use of Scots language in comedy, often in a subversive or satirical way. It will particularly emphasise television broadcasting, but look across at parallels in poetic and theatrical practice. Through this focus, it will be clear that often the use of Scots language in this context approaches functionally what Ian Lucas defines as Camp. In his terms, that is engagement and politicisation by providing alternative, even oblique sensibilities which broaden and more often than not challenge traditional ways of perceiving situations and objects. It creates new ways of seeing and relating to authority […] Camp is always undermining authority, whether this be aesthetic, literary or artistic ‘rules’ or political or social power.5

As Susan Sontag comments, ‘The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. […] One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious’.6 Taking account of Lucas and Sontag’s definitions, though analysis of Harry Lauder’s performances through the alternative perspective of queer theory would be rewarding, it may be going too far to suggest that a camp critique of aspects of ‘Scottishness’ underlies his performance. There can be no doubt, however, that Tommy Lorne was certainly engaged in Camp performance aimed at undermining, while paradoxically celebrating, the authority of the figure of the tartan-clad Scot. He did this through key aspects of his white-face performance from his abbreviated kilt to his high-pitched vocal delivery. More recently, a number of Scottish comedians like Billy Connolly, Craig Hill, Frankie Boyle or Susan Calman have in complementary ways followed through with subversive comedy. They deploy often-surreal humour to deflate conventional assumptions and question received values, including gender and sexual stereotypes. They do this not least through use of demotic language and Scottish

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Camp humour. Their subversive humour within the politicised context of contemporary Scottish culture rather challenges Sontag’s claim that Camp ‘is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. […] It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical’.7 Of Connolly, Mary Irwin and Gabrielle Smith have commented: [Connolly’s] richly creative stream of consciousness and impressive command of ideas, images and idioms is underpinned by the implicit hard man forged in the shipyards and the streets of impoverished early post-war Glasgow. The concept of the ‘hard man’ encapsulates an entrenched stereotype of the working class Scottish masculinity built on physical strength and fearlessness frequently accompanied by a ferociously sarcastic sense of the absurd.8

Yet, Connolly, as his work developed, was prepared to subvert such masculine stereotypes and enact a more sensitive, less macho, approach. Meantime, Hill’s sense of the absurd and employment of the kilt and tartan is certainly far from ‘disengaged, depoliticized [… and] apolitical’. This is so not least in its openness to analysis through queer theory. In part, the impact of Scottish Camp has been to appropriate and then undermine a specific tendency, arising, one might argue, from Enlightenment emphases, towards a hankering for anglicised ‘politeness’. This resulted in a self-induced cultural cringe and its extraordinary complexities and contradictions. Partly driven by Scots themselves, an essentially imperialist and culturally colonialist groupthink recruited Scots and encouraged stereotyped versions of Scottish identities. A key part of the jouissance of Scottish Camp is self-mockery and, often, startling impoliteness, a particular strength (and occasional weakness) of Boyle’s performances. Submission to a partly colonised, partly self-colonised stereotype is thus transcended.9 In this process, one should not underestimate the liberating power of seeing and hearing oneself reflected in the media, in however, sometimes, bowdlerised a version. The more the version is unbowdlerised, the greater the jouissance. Far from every example to be discussed in this chapter involves a comedy in which tartan is engaged as it is with Lauder, Lorne and Hill. Yet, it is worth bearing in mind the extent to which, as I have pointed out before,10 that the comedic and subversive, not to say threatening and

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potentially anarchic, impact of tartan involves an impact going beyond Scottish artists, As Jonathan Faiers remarks: The great ‘turns’ of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century music halls, entertainers noted for their tartan costumes – for example Harry Lauder, Dan Leno, Marie Lloyd, or clowns such as Coco – donned their tartans as a masquerade that would allow them to become the transgressive characters beloved by their audiences. Their swaggering tartan costumes invested their performances with the spirit of rebellious and subversive clowning that can be traced back to the figure of Harlequin, British nineteenthcentury pantomime’s translation of Arlecchino from the original commedia dell’arte.11

In such a performance context, I have suggested that staging ‘tartan in kilt, trews, bunnet, frock-coat and other items, seen often by some critics as demeaning, can equally—or perhaps even more—be seen as celebratory, joyously conspiratorial with the audience and full of ebullient life’.12 In this, it is part of a performance repertoire that itself is part of the phenomenon I have labelled Scottish Camp.13 This comprises a range of literary and dramatic performance strategies. Like the camp devices employed to subversive ends in politico-sexual contexts Lucas discusses, these are designed to undermine assumptions about authoritative representational modes and hegemonic power. In Scottish comedy, it is often used to assert the integrity of aspects of Scottish national identities. Writers employ such strategies to express—ever more clearly—Scotland’s polyvalent and multilayered nature. The very use of Scots on stage has, as the last chapter showed, often been a matter of politico-cultural contestation. When broadcasting started in Britain in October 1922, the place there of Scots as a non-standard, non-hegemonic language within the context of the United Kingdom was even clearer than in the theatre. There was no contest. Then and for decades after, broadcasting was very much Londoncentric. Its language and accents clearly those of middle-and upper-class England, repressing regional, let alone nationally non-English, versions of Britain’s languages. It would be a long time before this situation changed. As Colin Milton reminds us, when the ‘single “BBC voice” of the forties and fifties [had] given place to a variety of social and regional accents’, the change ‘caused unease, complaint, and even outrage—with the BBC being accused of

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abandoning standards and promoting “incorrect” or “uneducated” or “slangy”—or just “incomprehensible”—speech’.14 In March 1939, nonetheless, on the BBC Scottish Home Service, Helen W Pryde’s series based on a working-class Glasgow family, The McFlannels , broke through. This ran intermittently until 1953. Episodes available on YouTube reveal character-based Scots dialogue ranging from strong Glaswegian-Scots dialect through to Scottish Standard English. The programme was popular in Scotland, although towards the end it was seen as becoming stale. A 1958 attempt to transfer it to television proved fruitless: characters so much in the mind’s eye did not seem ‘real’ on the screen. Yet, the programme’s powerful Scots-language dialogue’s initial success breached pre-war BBC emphasis on Received Pronunciation and English Standard English. Tellingly, its generic mode was comedy. When television arrived in Scotland in 1952 there was still no strong impetus for it to present Scots-language drama. Key programmes were still London-based. These included soaps like The Grove Family (1954– 1957) or Dixon of Dock Green (1955–1976). Possibly the first major television series using Scots-language dialogue (though not very emphatically) was Para Handy—Master Mariner (1959–1960). Based on Neil Munro’s characters, this was again very much within a comedic mode. Though the series was revived, slightly recast, from 1965 to 1974 (and, less successfully, in 1994–1995), the major locus of Scottish language on television at the time, both north and south of the Border, was in forms of comedy borrowed from music hall and, in Scotland, variety. A leading example of such borrowing was the work of Stanley Baxter, who starred in his own BBC series from 1963 to 1971. Baxter had become, following three seasons acting at the Citizens Theatre after World War Two, a star in variety and pantomime, with a particular skill as an impressionist. It was out of this background he introduced to television his series of sketches Parliamo Glasgow. These were written by Alex Mitchell, satirising another BBC product, Parliamo Italiano (1963), a thirty-episode Italian-language teaching programme. Mimicking the format of the original, Baxter presented himself in a formal suit, interpreting scenes in which people were seen speaking fluent Glaswegian Scots. He would face the camera, adopting the role of a presumed academic, and speak in a precise version of Received Pronunciation and Standard English. In the manner of Parliamo Italiano he would interpret what had been said as a phonemic transcription of the word or phrase being interpreted was shown on screen. Here, he revealed that ‘Sanoffy’ as in ‘Sanoffy caul day’ meant

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‘It’s an awfully [cold day]’, that ‘Izzatamarraonyerbarra, Clara?’ meant ‘Is that a marrow on your barrow, Clara?’, that ‘Izziaffiz’ meant in the phrase ‘Izziaffiz meat’ that he had lost his appetite, while the more complex ‘Takyurhonaffmabum’ was a demand to cease over-familiarity. This format, which with different Glaswegian phrases appeared several times in the series, clearly satirises stiff 1960s BBC televised language lessons. It draws on an element of class division and exoticises, even to an extent apparently denigrates, Glaswegian-Scots dialect as picturesque, odd and strangely funny. It offers, however, several more layers of satire and an unsettling uncertainty as to the standing of any potential underlying centre of gravity. The viewer may be encouraged to see the authoritative professorial figure as simply laughing at Glaswegian dialect. On the other hand, the scene can be read as mocking the pompousness of the interpreter. The scene can also be read as subverting the neocolonial perspective often found in such language-learning programmes as that being parodied. The centre of gravity certainly can be understood as the language of the Glaswegians which others are so foolish as to fail to understand. Further, the question arises as to whether Scots speakers who see the joke of the phonemic transliteration and its absurd formulations—as both lexical items and speech rhythms are fused in a new orthography— are superior in some way to those who do not grasp the Glaswegian terms in the first place. There is certainly a level of meta-satire in which the very exercise of anthropological approaches to language is under attack. There are certainly other levels of satire and subversion at play in Parliamo Glasgow. The central point is that the humour can only work when there are two languages, each in different registers, interplaying in Baxter’s jeu d’esprit. And it is unclear which language is privileged in these sketches, the self-satisfied language of the interpreter or the dynamic and fluent language of the Glaswegians. Certainly, it is arguable that the one community that can feel superior because fully in command of the layers of linguistic meaning involved is that of bilingual speakers of Scots and English. What is more, their fluency in Scots is here at a premium. It is only through this that the viewer can unpick the meanings in the transcriptions before the translation is provided. Indeed, part of the pleasure of the sketch lies in the reward of unravelling and understanding what appears nonsense, and is revealed to have hidden meaning, ideally before the interpreter interprets the transcribed Scots. This provides access to a jouissance, based not least on the disruption of any hegemony of those fluent only in Anglo-English. Thus, the perceived authority and status of

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the English dialect which uses Received Pronunciation is subverted. Baxter’s televised performance allowed a celebration of spoken Scots much appreciated in Scotland, if not necessarily entirely understood south of the Border. As these sketches were being developed, Ian Hamilton Finlay was experimenting to serious effect with the poetic use of the kind of linguistic transcription they explored. Again, the vivid potential of Glaswegian Scots was celebrated. In Finlay’s Glasgow beasts, an a burd, haw, an insecks, an aw, a fush (1961),15 one finds an wance ah wis a zebra heh heh crossin

or syne ah wis a midgie neist a stank foon that kin o thankless didje ever spen a hail simmer stotting up an doon

The vitality of the joyous transcription of Scots-Glasgow dialect performance, the conceit which drives these poems and Mitchell and Baxter’s sketches, has to be seen against a then-prevalent tendency in Scottish social, cultural and educational attitudes. This would stigmatise and marginalise such speech. Tom Leonard quotes D. S. Robb, a schoolmaster and editor on Glaswegian dialect: It is not Scots at all, but a thing debased beyond tears. It is a mongrel patois due to lower class immigration from Ireland, from the Lancashire

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mills, and the meaner streets of Glasgow […] For God’s sake – to speak it with reverence – let such horrors cease to be printed as Doric.16

The class and ethnic prejudice in Robb’s outburst needs no underlining. Leonard himself, of course, has written many admired poems in the kind of phonemic transcription of speech Mitchell/Baxter and Finlay used (and indeed E. E. Cummings had earlier used in poems transcribing Bronx dialect in the 1950s). He, however, develops Mitchell and Baxter’s innovation of a revised fusion of lexis and speech rhythm in a way Finlay does not. Curiously, Leonard resisted the comparison of his art to that of Mitchell and Baxter and, behind them, Finlay. Yet, while they used purely Scots lexis (e.g. ‘awfy’, ‘stot’ and ‘stank’), in his poems he tends not to, focusing rather on speech rhythms and phonemic versions of dialectal accent. Leonard’s poems include, for example, in his Six Glasgow Poems (1969),17 ‘The Good Thief’, speaking to Christ on the cross, heh jimmy yawright ih stull wayz urryi ih

and the opening of ‘A Scream’, when a schoolgirl brings her pal up to date with an episode of bus-fare dodging, yi mist yirsell so yi did we aw skiptwirr ferz njumptaffit thi lights

As Colin Milton observes of such poetry Leonard’s employment of a dialect as widely and strongly stigmatised as that of the urban working classes of the west of Scotland therefore represents the strongest possible challenge to assumptions like those of Robb. His Glasgow poems make an implicit but powerful claim that, far from being decaying and corrupt, Glasgow speech has the vigour and expressive range to be a suitable medium for the ‘high’ purpose of poetic creation. In this connection, he is able to draw on an alternative view of urban working class speech.18

Leonard’s practice is clearly subversive. He asserts the value of the Scots spoken by those whose dialect he adopts and treats with respect in his

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‘transcriptions’. Like Mitchell/Baxter, he refuses to accept word boundaries as he develops a poetics of spoken urban Scots. He thus resists the hegemony of standard English spellings. He even transgresses normal verbal boundaries, not to mention those of Scottish writer colleagues who would seek to demand a standardised spelling of Scots. As Milton proceeds to argue, Devising a spelling which represents dialect forms […] acts as a reminder that language is shaped in fundamental ways by region and class – and thus challenges ideas that language and tradition are stable, and that there is a common national culture and a shared social experience.19

Leonard asserts—and enacts in his writing—Scottishness, but, within that, difference within Scottishness. Whatever linguistic difficulties might have previously existed, drama was one of the drivers for representation and explorations of televisual versions of Scottishness from the 1960s on. This was even if the actual use of Scots language was at times restricted. Popular forms like classic adaptations, soap operas and detective series were the most regularly employed genres. Many of the first category—The Master of Ballantrae (BBC 1962), Weir of Hermiston (BBC 1973), Rob Roy (BBC 1977) and Huntingtower (1978)—were produced by Pharic Maclaren, who was also responsible for the first Para Handy series. The extent to which Dr Finlay’s Casebook (1962–1971), based on A. J. Cronin’s novels, can fairly be described as a soap, not least given its seasonal appearance, is open to question. Its small-town setting and characters also remind one of J. M. Barrie’s early writings. It certainly has soap-like features, including familiar characters with running relationships and storylines. It proved a highly popular, if also highly sentimentalised, version of life in rural Scotland earlier in the twentieth century. After the brief run on BBC of This Man Craig (1966–1967), set in a Central Belt urban school, STV’s High Living (1968–1971) was the first out-and-out soap to be produced in Scotland. STV followed this with Garnock Way (1976–1979), produced for the ITV network and its part spin-off, Take the High Road (1980–2003). This changed its title in 1994 to High Road. Meantime, the BBC, after a somewhat stilted historical soap, The Borderers (1968–1970), produced short-running crime or law-related series including The View from Daniel Pike (1971–1973) and Sutherland’s Law (1973–1976). The major

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performance of versions of Scottishness in a crime series surely, however, emerged in STV’s Taggart (1983–2010). Despite its oftenmocked catchphrase, ‘There’s been a murrrrder’, this from time to time explored wider social issues and made a star of the architecture and topography of Glasgow. It certainly moved definitively away from any vision of Scottishness being bound up with simple rurality or nostalgia.20 Other varieties of Scottishness were explored in later soaps, whether STV’s Gaelic-language Machair (1992–1998), BBC’s Monarch of the Glen (2000–2005) or its city-based River City (2002—present). BBC versions of crime series included the fey Hamish Macbeth (1995–1997), based on characters created by M C Beaton (for which, intriguingly, Danny Boyle wrote two episodes), and Shetland (2013–present). Meantime, as John R. Cook comments, Television drama may be about ‘Scotland’ but that does not necessarily mean, always, that it has been produced ‘by’ Scotland, or that Scottish interests and influence have been paramount in shaping the resulting images and representations.21

Sony, inter alia, produced Outlander (2014–present), adapting Diana Gabaldon’s novels, for worldwide distribution.22 While, like Dr Finlay’s Casebook, not quite a soap, this highly popular series exploits visions of Scottishness drenched in time-travelling, romanticised Jacobitism and a Highlandist scenography of Scotland returned to in the next chapter on film. Home-produced or not, these popular dramatic forms over the decades opened up widely varying versions of Scottishness. One striking development in these decades is the developing treatment of language. Gaelic had, at least for a time, its own soap, Machair. The language features in Outlander, which also employs Carol Ann Crawford, a distinguished consultant on speaking Scots language and its dialects. Beyond these genres, attempts were made to present grittier versions of Scotland. A relatively early example was Peter Watkins’s Culloden (1964). This sought to present the story of the battle by means of cinéma verité techniques. During the 1970s gradually confidence grew to develop a wider variety of televised applications of Scots language, both shortform comic and long-form dramatic. Pharic Maclaren’s nostalgic, rural-set 1971 BBC adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song was highly regarded. Yet, while its Scots was somewhat diluted, it was still seen furth

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of Scotland (at least in the case of a number of my informants) as difficult to understand. In the next year, Peter McDougall, employed uncompromising regional Scots-dialect dialogue in Just Your Luck. This initiated his series over the next three decades of celebrated Scots-language television dramas for the BBC. These often deal with contemporary sectarian and class issues and are set in or near his native Greenock. They include Just Another Saturday (1975), The Elephant’s Graveyard (1976), Just a Boy’s Game (1979), Down Where the Buffalo Go (1988) and Down Among the Big Boys (1993). Each explores brutal and alienating aspects of sectarianism and/or deprivation in urban west Scotland. Meanwhile, the BBC completed The Scots Quair series with Cloud Howe (1982) and Grey Granite (1983). In differences between the language of country and city, the potential of Scots as a televised dramatic language was established. This was even if, as we shall see later, it was still seen by some critics as offering difficulty in comprehension for monolingual English speakers. The extension of the range of language foregrounded in presenting Scottishness on television represented by the launch of Machair in 1992 was reinforced. In 1993, BBC Two Scotland launched Eòrpa. This current affairs programme, with its internationalist perspectives and nonmetropolitan take on current affairs worldwide, is award-winning; it migrated to BBC Alba, the Gaelic-language television channel launched in 2008.23 A more adventurous, though still nervous, promotion of Scots was to be found when the BBC ran Trawlermen (2006–2010). This comprised twenty episodes in four series and a special on the work of a number of trawler crews based in Peterhead and Fraserburgh. Several episodes in the first series were controversially broadcast with subtitles, because of the broad Doric dialects of some of the fishing crew. An interesting controversy arose. Behind it lay issues of the independence of Scots as a language distinct from English. This is often seen as a political rather than a linguistic matter (though in another sense all linguistic matters are political). The use of subtitles might appear entirely sensible since Doric is a specific non-standard regional dialect of a language different from the English normally used in British broadcasting. Nonetheless, some protesters saw it as demeaning. In this, it would seem that they, rather optimistically, viewed Doric as a version of English, which all English speakers should understand. Nonetheless, John Byrne, whose linguistically inventive stage plays constituting the Slab Boys trilogy (1979–1982) remain influential, wrote the successful BBC television series Tutti Frutti (1987) and Your Cheatin

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Heart (1990) primarily in Scots dialects. Both were broadcast throughout the UK. They took not only his dramatic language, but a range of versions of Scots to a wider audience. As Paul Elliot expresses it, the twin elements of John Byrne’s Scotland [are] language and comic characterisation. These two elements are inextricably linked to each other in Byrne’s vision of Scottish identity as the modes of communication, the accent and the cadences of Scottish vernacular, are twinned with the showy glossiness of America [sic] popular culture.24

Byrne achieves part of his comic take on Scottishness by observing and representing intercultural hybridisation of Scottish and American usages. Cairns Craig analyses this technique: It has long been argued that Scotland is a culture particularly conducive to schizophrenia and to doubles, but in Byrne’s plays the traditional dissociations between Highland and Lowland, Gaelic and Scots, calvinist and pagan are replaced by a double culture which is at once international and local, American and Scottish. The dynamics of his plays are driven by the misunderstandings, disjunctions and displacements that are generated by the translations between these very different cultural environments.25

In a meaningful pun Craig defines this creative process as ‘displacemeant’. Thus, Byrne hybridises Scots and American usages,26 a process we will return to in a moment with reference to other writers’ work. Another television playwright whose methods at this time also explored a version of the displacemeant Craig discusses is Donna Franceschild in Takin’ Over the Asylum (1994), although her A Mug’s Game (1996) employs more traditional televisual dramaturgy in its narration of the events surrounding the running down of a West Coast fish factory.27 In the former, rather than hybridising linguistic universes in new conjunctions, she explores the ways in which the universes of those considered ‘loonies’ may be more soundly grounded than those who so define them. Despite Byrne’s success in displacemeant, it often remains the case that Scottish television comedy series, however much they travel, still assert Scottish cultural identity and community by using language that may be difficult for others to understand. The distinguished television critic Nancy Banks-Smith, for example, asserted in a 1996 Guardian review, ‘I have discovered that no-one south of the border understands a word that Rab C. Nesbitt (BBC 2) says’.28 Yet, it seems often that Scots-language

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comedy writers employ this difficulty in creative and, I would argue, politico-culturally resistant and anti-authoritarian ways. Katja Lenz and I drew attention to just such use of Scots in the BBC’s The High Life (1994–1995). The actors Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson wrote this for broadcast UK-wide. We mentioned the writer/performers’ linguistic awareness and their concern to exploit the creative potential of the interaction of English and Scots in dialogue, and their use of Scots words and forms, particularly those incomprehensible to English-only speakers, to achieve a subversive comic effect.29

Indeed, Cumming and Masson were able to cock a snook by apparently smuggling Scots-language obscenity past monolingual English-language producers and into mainstream television. Several times pre-watershed the word ‘fud’, the most obscene Scots word for female genitalia, was used. This can be seen as a specific form of Scottish Camp, designed like mainstream Camp, to undermine assumptions about and subvert authoritative representational modes and hegemonic power. Such use of Scottish Camp in performance writing since the 1970s is often used to assert the integrity of aspects of Scottish national identities, usually, as in this case, to comic effect. The following analysis of some of Cumming and Masson’s techniques of linguistic interplay and camp subversion may serve as a specific example of wider practice. Cumming and Masson’s use of languages thrives on constant shifts in linguistic register and style. They exploit the comic potential of hybridising English and Scots cultural and linguistic references in their own version of the technique Craig calls ‘displacemeant’. The High Life is set in a spoof small Scottish airline, Air Scotia. The lead characters are two cabin stewards, played by the authors. Cumming’s character, named Sebastian Flight, clearly cross-refers to Evelyn Waugh’s Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. They speak fluently in varieties of Scots, the privileged language in this series. Their cabin supervisor, Shona Spurtle (Scots for a porridge spatula or to stir), often assumes Scottish Standard English register when she is asserting her superior status. The monolingually English-speaking pilot is written as a clown. The casting of the controlling management collaborator as a woman does raise the question, centuries after Knox, whether there may still be here a residual anxiety about emasculation if a woman has power.30 Even if this is the case, however, language variety is still part of the authors’ exploration of the potential of intertextual and,

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indeed, interlingual joking as undermining as well as asserting power relations. For example, an ageing rock star in the episode entitled ‘Dug’ is called Guy Wersch. ‘Gey wersh’ is Scots for ‘very bitter/sour’. The playing with language, however, goes beyond mere ironic naming and pervades the dialogue. ‘Dug’ includes an exchange where specific references to a Scottish locality in unlikely conjunction with a Scottish entertainment star goes as follows: Steve: I was in Mario’s in Motherwell having a macaroni, when who should walk in but Lena Zavaroni, Sebastian: Did you mean that to rhyme? Steve: Aye.31

Not only does Steve’s line contain rhyme, it contains alliteration. Here, we are in the universe of wordplay found in, besides poetry, pantomime. Meanwhile, the commonplace Central Belt urban location with its hybrid Scots-Italian restaurant, is background to the apparent glamour of stardom. Multiple rapid switches between different registers and universes of discourse in the complexity of language use in such comedy can at times become almost in itself surreal. In another episode, ‘Birl’, we find ‘That man is so surreal, he’s no real’.32 This time pantomimic rhythm and repetition underlie a sudden style switch between the discourse of aesthetic theory and everyday Scots slang. In ‘Dug’, Sebastian says to Masson’s character, Steve McCracken: Sorry to disabuse you, Stevie, but I’m in a state of total flummoxednesss. Since you picked me up this morning, the verbal hyperbole ejaculating from your gub has been shooting straight over my heid. What the fud is bugging ye?33

The shifts in register in the first two sentences of this speech from formal English (‘disabuse’), camp neologism (‘flummoxedness’), technical literary language (‘hyperbole’), Latinate vocabulary with a more or less hidden sexual double entendre (‘ejaculating’) to Scots demotic (‘gub’) and normative Scots (‘heid’) is all the more remarkable in its fluidity when one recognises that these six different registers appear within the first 34 syntactic items of the speech. The comic subversion continues in the next sentence, which employs, in one of the examples noted already, the word ‘fud’ as well as the vaguely hipster ‘bugging’ with the Scots second person

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singular. In terms of subversive language use, one has to observe that it is inconceivable that use of fud’s English equivalent (‘cunt’) would have received permission in a programme going out before the nine o’clock watershed, or possibly at all, on the BBC. The word retains its physiological/sexual meaning in Scots. It is generally eschewed, especially in mixed-sex company. Yet, it was used on more than one occasion in The High Life on UK-wide television. Presumably, none of the monolingual English editors realised that this strange word was more than some polite Scottish euphemism for ‘fuck’. Thus, the Scottish authors were able to smuggle in a word even ruder than the ‘f-word’. This kind of linguistic subversion in the series is discussed in greater detail by Katja Lenz and me elsewhere.34 Similar strategies can be found at work in other examples of popular television both before and after The High Life. Thus, the enormous success of Ian Pattison’s television series Rab C Nesbitt (1989–2014) as well as Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill’s Chewin’ The Fat (1999–2002) and Still Game (2002–2019), Greg McHugh and Chris Grady’s Gary: Tank Commander (2009–2012), Iain Connell and Robert Florence’s Burnistoun (2009–2012) and Simon Carlyle and Gregor Sharp’s Two Doors Down (2016–present). Not all of these always had UK-wide transmission. Nonetheless, they all reflect popular approval of a new comedic mode for the representation of subversive, even anarchic, visions and versions of Scots, Scots language and Scottishness. Kiernan and Hemphill, for example, interrogate attitudes to and realties of the ageing process, while Irwin and Smith have examined in detail the ways in which McHugh and Grady explore alternative visions of masculinity and the military.35 This strategy of playful, yet subversive linguistic border-crossing can also be found in a number of major translations of foreign-language drama into Scots in the last four decades. These include Bill Findlay and Martin Bowman’s translations of Canadian Michel Tremblay’s plays, starting with The Guid Sisters in 1989, Liz Lochhead’s translations of Molière and also her Medea (2000), and Edwin Morgan’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1992). Indeed, the latter uses the stigmatised Glasgow-Scots dialect referred to by Milton—and excoriated and anathematised by Robb. Morgan even goes beyond the comic mode in using that dialect for his version of Racinian tragedy, Phaedra (2000). All these notably creative translations employ strategies of linguistic, generic and performative hybridisation. Lochhead, for example, uses Scottish Standard English interspersed

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with Scots to varied subversive effect in Miseryguts (2002), her version of Molière’s The Misanthrope (1666): ALEX. I’m too upset! I’m all churned up inside you know! I can’t just socialise! Go on, away you go And leave me with my black despair in this dark corner. PHIL. Sit and feed your huffy wee black dog then, Mister Horner! It’ll keep you all the company you need—I’m no jealous! Bye! I’ll not ask you again to come on, with me—to Ellie’s?36

In this scene, Alex, Lochhead’s misanthrope, is telling his friend Phil about his despair at his beloved Celia’s behaviour and his desire for her to ‘up sticks and come up North with me’. Lochhead develops Alex’s selfdramatisation from Molière’s original. By employing the Scots colloquial ‘away you go’, she effectively deflates the pompous tone of the misanthrope’s despair. She completes her ironic rendition by juxtaposing it with the ornate clichéd phrase ‘black despair’. Further deflating Alex’s stylised self-dramatisation, Phil responds using the demotic ‘huffy wee black dog’. This engages an established metaphor for depression, but introduces it in conjunction with the subversively comic and patronising terms ‘wee’ and ‘huffy’. This subversion of Alex’s self-regard is then reinforced by calling him the nursery-rhyme name ‘Mister Horner’ (who self-importantly ‘sat in his corner […] and said, “What a good boy am I”’). The repeated shifts in tone and code reach their climax in Lochhead’s trademark use of unexpectedly comic rhyme choice (‘jealous’—‘Ellie’s’). This technique is also expertly used by Morgan in Cyrano de Bergerac. Such theatrically effective devices combine in the play with casual drifts between Scottish Standard English and Scots forms, multiple shifts of register, linguistic code games, and sudden switches between high-literary metaphor and nursery rhyme to mark a subversive crossing of linguistic, generic and performative borders. It is possible here to note only in passing that such disruptive techniques in language performance do not just appear in poems, plays and comedy. They appear in other literary genres, not least the novels of Irvine Welsh and James Kelman. Many Scottish writers in all contemporary genres employ such strategies to express Scotland’s identities as a post-imperial, devolved and multicultural nation. They do so not merely in terms of incoming or newly emergent cultures, but also with regard

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to performance of varieties of indigenous Scottishness, varieties of language and resistance to dominant cultural hegemonies. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha, as we have already noted, uses the term ‘hybridity’ to describe a form of resistance to cultural authority that works by infusing language and speech with local or native references. Certainly, it can be argued, with regard to popular television, that Masson and Cumming, and to some extent also Pattison, Kiernan, Hemphill, McHugh, Grady, Connell, Florence, Carlyle and Sharp, at once absorb and modify the modes and registers of Standard English to resist an Anglo-English hegemony in televisual language and representation. Arguably, too, these writers reassert the identity-bearing dynamic of Scots by playing with and across its relationship to its sister language, English, and within its own dialect varieties. Linguistic hybridity of the kind discussed in this chapter constitutes one of many ways of enacting varieties of Scottishness. It challenges, subverts and resists actual as well as would-be centralising hegemonic structures. Such subversion and resistance are at the heart of Scottish Camp. There, linguistic and generic play is central, as in the work of the playwright/performer Johnny McKnight. As Roderick Watson observes, the modern Renaissance of literary Scots and its contemporary manifestations are no less than a replaying of that ‘victory over linguistic dogmatism’ ascribed to the 15th -century Renaissance by Bakhtin […] This victory can only be properly achieved […] in a multilingual world and most especially in the linguistic borders between languages.37

Watson emphasises that it is the Bakhtinian ‘interorientation’ of Scots and English together that creatively generates subversive energies rather than such energy being the sole and unique property of the Scots language alone. This highlights the importance of multilayered hybridity in Scottishness. Yet, as we have seen, it is also true that Scots itself, like any other living language, contains a multiplicity of dialects, registers, jargons and hybrid expressions. The linguistic interorientation in performing Scottishness may, therefore, be between not only the Scots and English languages or, indeed, Scots and Gaelic, but within Scots itself. Out of such interactions much of the liveliness of the performance of Scottishness emerges.

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Notes 1. See, for example, A. J. Aitken, ‘Scottish Accents and Dialects’, in Peter Trudgill (ed.), Language in the British Isles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 94–114. 2. Paul Maloney, ‘“Wha’s Like Us?”: Ethnic Representation in Music Hall and Popular Theatre and the Remaking of Urban Scottish Society’, in Ian Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 133. 3. Stephen Heath, ‘Translator’s Note’, in Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. and ed. Stephen Heath (London: Flamingo, 1984 [1977]), p. 9. 4. Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990), p. 261. 5. Ian Lucas, Impertinent Decorum: Gay Theatrical Manoeuvres (London: Cassell, 1994), p. 115. 6. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 288. 7. Ibid., p. 277. 8. Mary Irwin and Gabrielle Smith, ‘“Ah hink it’s time for suttin blue n a BAILEYS!” Subverting Scottish Male Identities in Gary: Tank Commander’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, 11:1 (2018), p. 53. 9. I am grateful to Rory Watson for offering this insight. 10. Ian Brown, ‘Tartan, Tartanry and Hybridity’, in Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry, p. 4. 11. Jonathan Faiers, Tartan (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008), p. 166. 12. Brown, ‘Tartan, Tartanry and Hybridity’, p. 4. 13. See, for example, Ian Brown, ‘Alternative Sensibilities: Devolutionary Comedy and Scottish Camp’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 319–327. Subsequent discussion here draws on and extends material explored in this earlier chapter. 14. Colin Milton, ‘Ma Language is Disgraceful: Tom Leonard’s Glasgow Dialect Poems’, in Edgar W. Schneider (ed.), Englishes Around the World, vol 1 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997), p. 207. 15. Edinburgh: Wild Flounder Press, 1961, n.p. 16. Quoted in Tom Leonard (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Radical Renfrew: Poetry from the French Revolution to the First World War (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990), pp. xxiii–xxiv. 17. Citing second edition by Glasgow: Midnight Publications, 1970, n.p. 18. Milton, ‘Ma Language is Disgraceful ’, p. 191. 19. Ibid., p. 204.

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20. For further discussion of such developments, see: Alistair Scott, ‘STV— at 60’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, 11:1 (2018), pp. 29–50. 21. John R. Cook, ‘Three Ring Circus: Television Drama about, by and for Scotland’, in Neil Blain and David Hutchison, The Media in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 108. 22. For more discussion of this phenomenon, see, for example, James Cateridge, ‘“What If Your Future Was the Past?” Time Travel, Genealogy and Scottish Television Tourism in Outlander (2014–)’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, 11:1 (2018), pp. 67–83. 23. For more discussion of Gaelic-language television, see Diane MacLean, ‘Gaelic Television: Building Bricks Without Straw’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, 11:1 (2018), pp. 6–28. 24. Paul Elliott, ‘Its Only Rock and Roll: John Byrne’s Scotland’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, 11:1 (2018), pp. 113–114. 25. Cairns Craig, ‘Displacemeants—The Theatrical Art of John Byrne’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre, 3:1 (January 2002), n.p. 26. Ibid. 27. Jonathan Murray, ‘Raking Over the Asylum: the Television Drama of Donna Franceschild’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, 11:1 (2018), pp. 119–144. 28. The Guardian, 27 January 1996, p. 26. 29. Ian Brown and Katja Lenz, ‘“Oh Dearie Me!”: Dramatic Rhetoric and Linguistic Subversion in the Scottish Situation Comedy, The High Life’, in Schneider (ed.), Englishes, p. 112. 30. I am grateful to Nicola Royan for drawing my attention to this point. 31. ‘Dug’, Camera Script, BBC Entertainment Group (Comedy), 1994, p. 52. 32. ‘Birl’, Camera Script, BBC Entertainment Group (Comedy), 1994, p. 14. 33. ‘Dug’, op. cit. p. 8. 34. See Brown and Lenz. 35. Irwin and Smith, ‘“Ah Hink [….]”’, pp. 51–66. 36. Liz Lochhead, Miseryguts & Tartuffe (London: Nick Hern, 2002), p. 72. 37. Roderick Watson, ‘Living with the Double Tongue: Modern Poetry in Scots’, in Ian Brown (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol 3 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 166.

CHAPTER 10

Film from Oligopoly to The Angel’s Share

Televisual performance of Scottishness has developed in the terms discussed in the last chapter, largely—though far from exclusively—through home-based producers. Versions of Scotland and Scottishness through the medium of film have been more generally produced internationally. Films set in Scottish settings offer a framework in which versions and ideologies of Scottishness have been played out by writers and directors, many not themselves Scots. This chapter considers filmic representations of ‘Scotland’ as forming trajectories. In these, particularly from the middle of the twentieth century, earlier filmic versions of Scottishness have been interrogated and undermined. Those versions had often been developed in perspectives where approaches to Scottish identity were determined by wider considerations These included perceived international market demand and generic expectation. To contextualise this analysis, it will be helpful to recall those earlier films presenting performances of Scottishness. Although many of the films frequently discussed in critical studies over the years, like Whisky Galore (1949) or Brigadoon (1954), appeared after the end of World War Two, that war’s conclusion did not trigger a sudden blossoming of representations of Scotland or Scottishness on the screen. Such films, and those that followed, emerged in response to, and sometimes in reaction to, earlier cinematic performances of Scottishness.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, as Richard Butt has argued, both in America and elsewhere the developing film industry was concerned primarily with storytelling. It, therefore, sought ready-made narratives. That, then as now, meant that filmmakers often looked to literature for material. The first example of filmic versionising of a Scottish novel is not American, let alone Scottish, but Italian. In 1908, Itala Film presented a short scene from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor based on Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor. In 1909, in the USA Vitagraph adapted both The Bride of Lammermoor and Kenilworth, and Edison Lochinvar (from Scott’s Marmion) and The Imp of the Bottle (based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp). Butt observes that over ‘a quarter of the films produced in or about Scotland before 1920 are literary adaptations, and, with the exception of Macbeth, these are based on the work of just three Scottish authors’.1 These authors are Scott, Stevenson and J. M. Barrie. Butt identifies this trio as accounting ‘for all the [film] adaptations of Scottish literature until 1922, with most of their work adapted at least once during this period, and for the majority of adaptations of Scottish literature thereafter, totalling in excess of one hundred and fifty film releases’. He continues, ‘Almost all their prodigious output has been adapted for film or television, and many novels, plays or poems have been adapted numerous times’.2 While one notes that there may be intervening steps in the adaptation process—the Itala Film’s adaptation, for example, is already mediated by Donizetti’s operatic version—Butt’s general observation surely holds true that such adaptations’ representation of Scotland’s rural and urban landscapes, their introduction of particular Scottish character types, and their narrative explorations of psychological dualism, religious repression and the role of socialisation in the construction of class, have had a reproductive power within and beyond Scotland’s borders. […] [Further] cinematic association of Scottish political and cultural history with violent feuding and Celtic practices [has contributed to] the predominantly Highland face that Scotland has turned to the international audience, a face which is congruent with the adaptations of Scott, Stevenson and Barrie, despite the ambivalence of those authors themselves to the political and social systems they represent.3

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Clearly, Butt offers a wider and more nuanced version of the ways in which versions of Scottishness are determined in filmic practice than Colin MacArthur’s often-cited ‘Scottish Discursive Unconscious’. The core of this, MacArthur suggests, ‘is an ensemble of images and stories about Scotland as a highland landscape of lochs, mists and castles inhabited by fey maidens and kilted men who may be both warlike and sensitive— which serves internationally to signify “Scottishness”’.4 This is not to dismiss MacArthur’s interesting thesis, but to suggest, as we shall see, that, while its uses can be helpful, they are limited. Butt proposes that in the first half of the twentieth-century Scott, Stevenson and Barrie effectively constituted an oligopoly. The adaptations of their work determined the ways in which ‘Scottishness’ was performed in early film.5 These ways included an early adoption of not just Highlandism, but tartanry, as in the United Films (a British company) version, shot and produced in Scotland, of Rob Roy (1911). By the time another version of Rob Roy appeared in 1922 with, in the same year, a Mary Queen of Scots and, in the next, a Bonnie Prince Charlie, cinematic tartanry was established as a subgenre of Scottishness in film.6 One key element related to this is narrative imbuing rurality and spirituality with positive potential for transformation. This is seen, for example, in the sentimental 1934 US version of Barrie’s The Little Minister. There, as the minister comes to terms with values different from his own, Katherine Hepburn’s Babbie explores Barrie’s recurrent trope of personality changed through transformative encounter. In Scottishness in film, another key aspect being developed was Scotland as a site for adventure. This might be period—often eighteenth-century Jacobite—or contemporary. It was frequently romantic and sometimes involving open-air chases, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 version of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps . There, elements of ‘Scottishness’ included the embodiment of Scotland in the Highland scenery of Rannoch Moor. That film also included Butt’s category of ‘religious repression’ in the severe personality enacted in John Laurie’s crofter. Earlier, another Buchan adaptation Huntingtower (1927) was an adventure film involving a Russian princess under Bolshevik threat in the Scottish countryside saved by boys from the Gorbals. This starred Harry Lauder in a straight role, allying Buchan, Lauder and Scotland as a site of modern political adventure in a gallimaufry of versions of Scottishness. By contrast, however, between the wars some films offered a more domestic and comic version of ‘Scottishness’. These included the four

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film adaptions of J. J. Bell’s sentimentally amusing stories about workingclass Glaswegians that appeared in the 1920s (though his Thread o’ Scarlet (1938) has more of an air of mystery and even menace) and Graham Moffat’s version of his own Hogmanay comedy Till the Bells Ring (1933). This he not only directed, but performed in. After the first four decades of cinema, however, Scottishness as performed in pre-war feature films, whether produced domestically or internationally, drew in large part on versions of the works of Scott, Stevenson and Barrie, and to some extent Buchan. They included elements—though rarely, perhaps thankfully, all in one film—of Highlandism and (largely idealised) rurality, a sense of other worlds or spirituality, sometimes presented as religiously repressive, psychological dualism, adventure, often historical, and domestic comedy. One outstanding exception to this was Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1937). This was shot on Foula in the difficult circumstances of pre-war travel and life. It engaged the cast and crew in months of selfreliance on the island. Inspired by the abandonment of St Kilda by its few remaining inhabitants in 1930, the island at the edge of the world was not called in the film Foula, but Hirta, the name of St Kilda’s main island. The plot engaged with questions of the viability of remaining or not on the island and various rites of passage, apparently based on living conditions on St Kilda. In these, two leading male characters die in falls from cliffs. Bleakly and beautifully shot, the film foreshadows later work both by Powell and Bill Bryden. Neither it nor the other pre-war films mentioned with idealised-cum-rural settings represented contemporary Scotland, a highly industrialised society riven by economic, class and gender inequality. The versions of Scottishness performed avoided or occluded such issues. David Bruce comments that by the end of cinema’s first thirty years, a familiar pattern had been established in Scotland. Cinema-going was popular; the product was almost entirely imported; the indigenous output, such as it is, was at cottage industry level; there were no big players based in the country. There was certainly a significant Scottish contribution to world cinema but already that was being made by Scots abroad, most conspicuously in Hollywood.7

By the end of the thirties the situation with regard to feature films was little changed.

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To focus only on the performance of Scottishness in feature films is, however, to fail to address another important, if less prolific, strand in the representation of Scotland in film in this period. That strand is most prominently found in John Grierson’s work. Grierson famously introduced the term ‘documentary’ in 1926 for film as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’. There are, of course, large questions embedded within such a definition, not least what is meant by ‘creative’, ‘treatment’, or indeed, in a filmic context, ‘actuality’. Indeed, even when Paul Rotha glossed Grierson’s definition as ‘the use of the film medium to interpret creatively and in social terms the life of the people as it exists in reality’,8 all he did was add other layers of problematic terminology. What is striking for our purposes here is that any form of creative treatment, or indeed ‘actuality’, must involve processes of selection, adaptation and re-presentation, and so, in the context of Scottish material, performance of versions of Scottishness. Arguably, in his development and shaping of the documentary genre, not simply as director, a role he fulfilled surprisingly rarely, but as, above all, a producer and mentor of directors, Grierson established further strands of ‘Scottishness’ in film. Above all, these concerned social engagements, following his own radical political values, with everyday versions of common humanity, usually in work contexts, rather than in the more ethnographically focused travelogues of other pioneers of documentary cinema. One of his more famous assertions is ‘Beware the ends of the earth and the exotic: the drama is on your doorstep wherever the slums are; wherever there is malnutrition, wherever there is exploitation and cruelty’.9 From his first film Drifters (1929), for which he was writer, producer and director to the last in which he was creatively involved, as writer, the 1962 Oscar-winning Seawards the Great Ships (1961), concern for working people and their environments recurred in his filmmaking. Yet, despite his search for ‘actuality’ (and he was not above staging relevant scenes as he did for the 1936 classic Night Mail for which he was production supervisor), given his career-long dependence on different kinds of sponsorship and public funding, his work from time to time returns to more clichéd images of Scotland and its countryside. His belief in a statist democracy also led in some films to what reads as proestablishment propaganda centred on Scottishness as performed in communitarianism and orthodox versions of masculinity. Even where he is showing industrial Scotland as in Seawards the Great Ships , he does not interrogate industrial relations issues. Rather, he presents an image of collaborative interaction between worker and employer. In such films, in a

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term he himself used, he creates a new trope: that of Scotland ‘on the move’. Grierson was, of course, not only a producer. His range included being writer, producer, cinematographer and director of Granton Trawler (1934). He was cinematographer for The Private Life of Gannets (1934), produced by Alexander Korda, directed by Julian Huxley and winner after its release in America in 1937 of the 1938 short-film Oscar. Further, after working in various aspects of documentary-making in Canada during World War Two he occupied from 1951 to 1955 a somewhat ill-suited role as executive producer of Group 3 feature films. He worked with the director John Baxter as production controller and Michael Balcon of Ealing Studios as chair. There, he produced screen versions of work by Scottish writers, like James Bridie’s You’re Only Young Twice (1952) and Eric Linklater’s Laxdale Hall (1953). The latter reiterates the Scottishnessas-rurality motif. He produced, alongside, more run-of-the-mill feature films with no Scottish connections. Few of these attracted enthusiastic responses from critics or distributors. Some of his work even in this phase, however, demonstrated the social concern of his earlier documentaries. The Brave Don’t Cry (1952), based on the1950 Knockshinnoch Castle Colliery disaster, explored the context and consequences of such mining accidents. This, despite a sticky launch period, opened the 1952 Edinburgh Film Festival and was well-received. Man of Africa (1953), however, exploring issues of colonialism, while close to his heart, was less highly regarded. Grierson’s focus on aspects of work and working-class life was echoed in other films of the 1940s. These began to react against such genres of pre-war film as romantic, often Jacobite, adventure and the promotion of idealised ruralism or Highlandism. They included adaptations of George Blake’s Clydeside novels: The Shipbuilders (1943) and Floodtide (1949). The former, directed by John Baxter who would later join Grierson in Group 3, focused on the importance of the British war effort. Such industry-based films, however, often sentimentalised class distinctions and avoided controversial issues like sectarian shipyard employment practices. They were complemented by the 1950 version of Robert McLeish’s slice of urban working-class life, The Gorbals Story. This adapted, and to an extent softened, the original 1948 Glasgow Unity Theatre play. Grierson’s influence extended into the next generation. When, for example, Bill Bryden was beginning his career in the 1960s he particularly wanted to work with Grierson on his STV series, This Wonderful World. Launched

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in 1957 and running over the next decade, this broadcast a wide variety of documentaries into Scottish—and after 1959 UK—living rooms. While Bryden has confided to the author that he saw little of Grierson personally, his engagement with Grierson’s work can be seen to lie behind his own dramatic focus in such working-class, often industrially focused, plays as Willie Rough (1972), Benny Lynch (1975), The Big Ship (1990) and The Big Picnic (1994). That Griersonian engagement can also be seen in his film Ill Fares the Land (1983), based on the abandonment of St Kilda in 1930, and the productions he encouraged as Head of Drama for BBC Scotland (1985–1993), including his own Holy City (1986), setting Christ’s Passion in the midst of contemporary Glasgow. On the whole, however, in the immediate post-war period, filmic representation of Scotland, rather than following a more realist or city-focused trend, was still strongly determined by the values portrayed in pre-war performance of Scottishness. Highlandism drove a fey version of this, often represented by comedy and the mystique of a ‘Scotland’ embedded in the Highlands or Western Isles. In those locales resided emotional and spiritual truthfulness. In such films their locations nurtured a renewed or revised sense of self and discovery of new attitudes to life. This was somewhat as islands do in J. M. Barrie’s plays, whether the Lost Boys’ island in Peter Pan, the island which hosts the shipwrecked characters in a temporarily reshaped social structure in the second act of The Admirable Crichton, or that where loss is in some way encountered and recuperated in Mary Rose. Overall, it is as if Ossianic heroism and nostalgia and Barrie’s sense of lost worlds and transformative potential were reincarnated— alongside the other aspects of the Scottishness shaped by the oligopoly of authors—in films of the immediate post-war period set in Scotland. Frequently, any added comic tone was embodied in quaintly eccentric, often cunning, natives. Two films exemplify several of these latter features, though in different ways: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) and Alexander Mackendrick’s Whisky Galore! (1949), scripted by Compton Mackenzie from his 1947 novel of the same name and produced by Balcon. In the former, the plot is in outline a romantic cliché. Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) is on her way to be with her fiancé in the islands. A weather-bound version of Scotland sees her prevented from completing her journey to her distant, in both senses of the word, fiancé. She meets Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey). They are attracted to one

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another. Torquil, however, because of an ancient curse, cannot allow himself to respond to their mutual attraction. Eventually, in a ruined castle, redolent of Gothic Romanticism, he realises that the curse he was afraid of has been misunderstood. He and Joan can indeed be happily united. In the process of finding one another, Joan and Torquil—with his emphatically Gaelic name—meet a concatenation of eccentric and/or amusing characters. It is only in the misty and mysterious islands of the west of Scotland that they can find their true love. (Ironically, as Wendy Xin explains, Livesey could never, because of other commitments, actually make it to filming in Scotland. His performance was filmed at Denham Studios and edited in).10 Whisky Galore! enacts other tropes of Scottishness in film. These include ‘natives’ outfoxing the forces of central authority as they obtain unrationed whisky from a shipwreck, in an episode based on actual wartime events. It too, however, has subplots in which emotional truthfulness is a key theme. Not least of these is the successful eventual pairing of two young couples, Peggy Macroon (Joan Greenwood) with Sergeant Odd (Bruce Seton) and Catriona Macroon (Gabrielle Blunt) with George Campbell (Gordon Jackson). In the latter case, the drinking of whisky is the key that liberates the diffident George from his mother’s domination and Calvinistic disapproval of his engagement to Catriona. While the comic treatment permits sidelong glances at differences between Catholic and Presbyterian attitudes to sabbatarianism, the key conflict in the film is between the locals and the forces of central authority. These are mainly embodied in the English Home Guard captain, Waggett (Basil Radford) and the Customs and Excise who are determined that the cargo shall not be ‘liberated’ by the whisky-starved islanders. Their cunning is shown in a series of cameos as, in their different ways, they subversively achieve their own forms of Highlandist island liberation, just as George does domestically and romantically under whisky’s influence. In the end, Waggett is trapped in his officiousness. One of the hiding places for the purloined whisky is in ammunition cases for which he is responsible. When they are found, he is recalled to explain himself. He, as one representative of metropolitan authority, is subject to the attention of the Excise, another embodiment of that hegemony. This by the end of the film is thus seen turning on itself. The wishful thinking behind this outcome no doubt reflects a post-war exhaustion with central control and rationing, still largely in force when the film appeared. It is also an example of a

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Highlandist discourse, borrowed in this case from a more modern novelist than the oligopoly. In that, a version of liberty can be won through performance of a misty-eyed version of Scottishness. Both of these films mark ways in which motifs that, by the 1940s, were being seen to embody and express Scottishness could become assimilated into a wider cinematic grammar. Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! forms part of sequence of their films which includes The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948). These deal in their individual ways with issues of control and freedom, in the latter cases in other-worldly contexts. Similarly, the series of Ealing comedies produced by Michael Balcon, like Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), deals with small communities finding ways of resisting the forces of central authority and metropolitan or commercial hegemony. In other words, the themes of I Know Where I’m Going! and Whisky Galore!, while engaging with versions of Scottishness, form part of a wider production context. The wider framework of non-Scottish-based production and employment this involved is highlighted by the fact that all the actors in leading romantic parts named in the last two paragraphs, except Bruce Seton and Gordon Jackson, were non-Scots. Among senior production and direction figures, the only Scot was Alexander Mackendrick, who was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Mackendrick went on to direct The ‘ Maggie’ (1954) for Ealing. In this, the captain and crew of a West Coast puffer outwit an American businessman Calvin B. Marshall. A ‘puffer’ was a small coaster, a reality of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Hebridean small-island life. Its shallow draught permitted shore landing by grounding at high tides and travel through mainland canals and, so, linkages between the islands and the Central Belt. It is, however, more relevantly here, a metaphor for self-reliant, anti-metropolitan rural values such as Neil Munro developed in his Para Handy stories about the crew of a puffer, televised later and referred to in the last chapter. Marshall’s agent is tricked into allowing a valuable cargo of furniture to be loaded onto the Maggie. He himself pursues the boat and its crew in an attempt to have the cargo transhipped to a more modern vessel. A series of encounters highlight the value of emotional integrity over material reward and the anti-metropolitan native cunning of the skipper and crew. When the Maggie is in danger of sinking, Marshall agrees to the jettisoning of his cargo to save the boat. In

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gratitude the boat is renamed after him. Nominally at least, he is converted into and embodied by a puffer, itself an icon of Hebridean life and values. This film forms part of the Ealing series, already mentioned, in which routinely the ‘small’ person, as here, triumphs over the powerful and worldly in a way that, at a time of increasingly American economic power, was wishful. The ‘ Maggie’ engages in the sentimental aspects of this trope, while reinforcing representations of Scottishness developed in the films of the first half of the century. These include the identification of ‘Scottishness’, especially as embodied in Highland and rural life, as the source of integrity facing down metropolitan corruption and false values. Represented in this mode, ‘Scotland’ is a place with almost mystical powers. There, the benighted can be enlightened, just as the lovers in the films discussed earlier find their true and sincere partners through a series of tests in the Western Isles. Sometimes, as with George in Whisky Galore! , this involves throwing off religiose oppression in the process. In a less romantic context, the wily natives can similarly convert the moneyfocused materialism of an industrialist like Marshall to a more humane set of values. (Such a plot-line is developed by Bill Forsyth in his Local Hero (1983). There, though, the locals exploit the capitalist venturer for their own capitalist ends.) Even when working within what were in effect versions of film franchises in the post-war productions of Powell and Pressburger and at Ealing by Balcon, performances of Scottishness as transformative Highlandism were further developed. These performances arose from pre-war films and would be transmuted and transferred into later films. Such fantasised developments follow the impact of the designs for pre-war studio-set Hollywood visions of Jacobite Scotland and feed into a mythic version of ‘Scotland’. This can be seen to lie behind the famous reported complaint after site visits by Arthur Freed, the Hollywood producer of Brigadoon (1954), that, as a setting for his film, ‘Scotland did not look Scottish enough’. Such a reservation needs a little more consideration than simply that it marks absurd ideas about what ‘Scotland’ looks like. Of course, Brigadoon as a film is often pilloried for its ‘false’ view of Scotland, its Highlandism and tartanry. In this, it accompanies the cinematic tartanry of the 1950s found in such films as Walt Disney’s Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue (1953). The publicity strapline for that alerts us that the ‘villainous Duke of Montrose wants to suppress the rowdy MacGregor clan, but he underestimates the fiery Highlander, Rob Roy’.11 The words ‘rogue’ in the title and ‘villainous’, ‘rowdy […] clan’ and ‘fiery Highlander’ in the

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publicity express in a nutshell expectations—not only in Hollywood—of the genre. This developed its tropes after the war in such examples as London Films production of Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948), directed by Anthony Kimmins and Alexander Korda, who in the 1930s had famously produced overblown films on historic figures like Henry VIII and Catherine the Great. The genre ran in its more florid romantic form at least as far as Kidnapped (1971) as directed by Delbert Mann with a screenplay by Jack Pulman whose large-scale television adaptations include War and Peace (1972–1973) and I, Claudius (1976). The context of other work by such key contributors to these productions as Korda and Pulman mark the way in which this genre is linked to epic derived from unreliable history or historical fiction. In these, historical accuracy is a relevant critical criterion only incidentally, if at all. This has to be taken account of in any Brigadoon critique, as does the implication of earlier films, including Scottish ones, in creating the image of Scotland Freed sought. Brigadoon started as a musical play by the team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, premièred in New York in 1947. Their romantic version of Highlandism presents love found in a village which appears once a century for only one day. There, two visiting Americans can find romance and quite a lot of quasi-Highland dancing—as rechoreographed on Broadway by Agnes De Mille and in the film by Gene Kelly—served up alongside several songs, some of which, like ‘There But For You Go I’, are now standards, and a cameo of bagpipe music. Just as films involving cinematic tartanry can be seen in the context of history adaptations by directors like Korda and writers like Pulman, so Brigadoon ought to be seen not simply, or even primarily, in terms of its representations of Scotland. Its key context is the treatment of rurality in 1940s American musicals like Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) and Carousel (1945). There, plots, set in non-metropolitan contexts, explored with differing degrees of gravity issues of emotional relationship, community commitment and social responsibility. They achieved a generic shift. This shift in some way replayed that in a previous generation when Jerome Kern and Hammerstein’s Showboat (1927) had rejected the prevailing formats—slight, numbers-based, urban-set musicals with flimsy stories drawn from the genre of light opera—to explore issues of racial discrimination. Where, however, the impact of Showboat was generically one-off, that of the 1940s innovations in musical plays has lasted. This is a point Colin McArthur makes, inter alia, in his detailed 2003 exploration of

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the input Broadway and Hollywood production teams made to realising Brigadoon.12 It must be clear from the context outlined in the previous paragraphs that Brigadoon, and indeed the whole genre of cinematic tartanry, must be seen in a wider perspective than simply performances of Scottishness. It is not that they do not present versions of Scottishness, but that they do so within a wider framework that needs to be considered. Yet, there was for a time a tendency to excoriate such representations simply as misrepresentations without fully, if at all, considering their wider generic context. A key expression of such attitudes is to be found in the now somewhat-dated, and in places arguably nostophobic, arguments found in McArthur’s 1982 edited collection, Scotch Reels .13 As Richard Butt summarises it,14 for McArthur and other contributors like John Caughie, the problem lay with a ‘“tartan monster” [in Tom Nairn’s phrase, discussed in Chapter 6] stalking Hollywood films [that they saw as] “almost entirely regressive”, its appeal launched from a “vanished” past’.15 It might not seem worth continuing to engage in detail with such arguments, except that, as Butt further identifies, this collection became ‘a critical intervention in discussions of Scottish cinema, setting the agenda for subsequent discussions which either appropriated that agenda or dismissed the films it critiqued as irrelevant to a serious national film culture’. He also notes that ‘McArthur argues that tartanry was hegemonic in cinematic representation of Scotland’. Butt, however, then points out that ‘of all the feature films with identifiably Scottish narratives produced before his collection was published, relatively few concern the Jacobite rebellion and, while Scott and Stevenson are the most frequently adapted Scottish authors across cinema’s history, the majority of those adaptations are not of their Scottish narratives, but of novels like Ivanhoe, Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’.16 David Goldie has also criticised the Scotch Reels arguments in severe terms: This sense of superiorism, of a politicised intelligentsia primed on Gramsci and Althusser, confidently separating out the Scottish workerist sheep from the tartan goats is arguably what characterises many of the essays in Scotch Reels . There can be little doubt that the collection advances some thoughtful analysis of the limiting effects of both tartanry and Kailyard, and that it convinces in its major argument that these two discourses alone cannot fulfil the representational needs of a modern nation. But what is much

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less convincing is the argument, carried on from MacDiarmid and Nairn, concerning what McArthur describes as ‘the seriously stunting effects Tartanry and Kailyard have had on the emergence of alternative discourses more adequate to the task of dealing with the reality of Scottish life’.17

The point is that such arguments, by having failed to take account of the broader perspectives proposed here, which McArthur does address in his 2003 study, represent a particular set of versions of myth-representation of Scottishness. Lerner in writing the book for Brigadoon was surely aware that his precedents were, rather than Scotland or even Scottish folk-tales, other innovative Broadway musicals with, inter alia, rural settings. George Jean Nathan identified the source of the story of the village that intermittently appeared as the German folktale of the curse on Germelshausen. Faced with this challenge, Lerner asserted that the story was found in several folkloric contexts. In fact, the point about locating Brigadoon in the Scottish Highlands was that by so doing, he could draw on the associations of cinematic Scottishness (not just cinematic tartanry) discussed above. However much later critics may wish to deplore them, the versions of Scottishness he drew on were not in themselves simply ‘regressive’ or about a ‘vanished past’. They were, and no doubt still are, a rich resource of mythic material to be drawn on creatively as appropriate to the needs of, in this case, the playwright’s artistic purpose, ideological inclination and generic experimentation. After all, Brigadoon is not about a historic, let alone a vanished, past in any sense. A prevalent film genre about the recent past that featured strongly in 1950s Scottish cinemas was the World War Two film. Anyone attending such films as The Dam Busters (1955) about a successful air raid on Ruhr dams, costly in both British and (as noted almost in passing) German— mainly civilian—and slave-labourers’ lives (the introductory music for which accompanied the Queen’s ‘flight’ to open the 2012 Olympics), The Colditz Story (1955) about prisoners-of-war and their comradeship and escape plans, Reach for the Sky (1956) about the Battle of Britain hero, Douglas Bader, and his triumph over physical disability, The Man Who Never Was (1956) about a successful scheme to divert German resources before the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily, David Lean’s The Bridge over the River Kwai (1957) about conditions in and resistance to a Japanese prisoner-of-war work camp or Powell and Pressburger’s last film together, Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), about the capture of a German general in

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occupied Crete, was being engaged in a discourse of British unity and, even in apparent defeat, united spirit and successful cunning. By and large, these films promote an implicitly unionist Anglo-British ideology18 within the wider context, already discussed by David Edgerton, of post-war aspirations to create a unified British nation. Such ideological underpinning recurs in such contemporary films as Dunkirk (2017) or The Darkest Hour (2017). Yet, the question arises as to how Scots attending such films read them. One might ask the extent to which they read the stiff upper lip so often displayed by the predominantly English characters as positively as, presumably, audiences south of the Border might. One anecdote is trivial evidence, but I vividly remember on its first release attending The Man Who Never Was in the Alhambra, Dunfermline. The misdirection plot involved obtaining a male dead body and having it found at sea as if the victim of a wartime accident. German spies were to be persuaded he had been carrying secret plans for an invasion of Greece rather than Sicily to open up a European front against the Axis powers. The British authorities speak in the film to the deceased’s father, saying he will be serving England. The father, to laughter and cheers in that Fife cinema, asserts his son’s Scottishness, responding he is not serving England. It should not be assumed that post-war 1950s Scottish versions of Britishness—even given the impact of a shared war effort and the related propaganda about ‘national unity’—were any less differentiated from versions of Anglo-Britishness than they were in the nineteenth century. Two films adapting the work of leading contemporary Scottish novelists, James Kennaway and Muriel Spark, bracket the decade of the 1960s: respectively, Tunes of Glory (1960) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). The former, set in a regimental headquarters, concerns conflict between senior officers over issues of ‘tradition’, founded in class-based differences. It explores Scottish military mythopoeia and the social tensions this can give rise to. Scottishness as military identity is usually bound up with its masculinist, patriarchal versions.19 While one might want to argue that David McCrone is being somewhat narrowly overdetermined in his archetypical categories, one recognises the force of his thesis when he observes of such aspects of Scottishness-as-maleness, [it is] no coincidence that those identities diagnosed as archetypically Scottish by friend and foe alike – the Kailyard, Tartanry and Clydesideism – have little place for women. […] there is no analogous ‘lass o’ pairts’; the

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image of Tartanry is a male-military image (and kilts were not a female form of dress); and the Clydeside icon was a skilled, male worker who was man enough to ‘care’ for his womenfolk.20

(Clydesideism, of course, has been defined by Fiona Douglas, among others, as concern with topics related to the ‘working class, male, a skilled worker, a hero, coupled with associations of oppression, violence, alcoholism and socialism’.21 ) Regarding McCrone’s observation that kilts were ‘not a female form of dress’, however, one has to demur that for many years kilts have been female wear in competitive Highland dancing. The dress code of the Scottish Official Board of Highland Dancing specifies that the ‘dress for female Highland dancers may consist only of skirt and white blouse, but a jacket or a waistcoat may be worn over the blouse’. The skirt is defined as a kilt ‘reaching to the top of the knee […]. A plain kilt-pin should be used to fasten the kilt’.22 Further, when McCrone wrote this passage in 1992, pipe bands were already admitting women players who marched alongside men, both wearing kilts. None of this, however, detracts substantially from the broad thrust of his case. His strictures apply to many of the films we have addressed already and others we will come to. The film of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, though, appearing at the end of the 1960s, performed a quite different form of Scottishness. However wrongheaded many of its characters may appear, however much teachers conflict with one another and the relations between teachers and pupils are conflicted in the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, and however much the film itself tends to caricature socalled Morningside attitudes, it undoubtedly represents, as does Spark’s novella, female strength of mind. There is no-one in this film caring for ‘his womenfolk’. Indeed, the leading men are morally weak, either cowardly or exploitative. It is women who are decisive. Such a film is not in itself a turning of a tide, but it certainly performs versions of Scottishness which have an important and central place for women. By the 1970s, filmic performance of Scottishness, then, had moved on in many ways from the interwar period. Certainly, the 1971 Universal Pictures/Hall Wallis Mary Queen of Scots , starring Vanessa Redgrave as Mary with Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth I and a number of stalwarts like Patrick McGoohan, Timothy Dalton and Nigel Davenport somewhat improbably cast as Scottish lords, continued a line of Highlandist versions of Scottishness. In this, its creative team maintained the stereotypes of the Disney strapline for Rob Roy quoted earlier: ‘villainous’ nobles,

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‘rowdy’ clans and ‘fiery’ Scots. This strand of Scottishness as rough and uncivilised continues, from time to time, to be perpetuated. The 2018 film version of Mary’s life, in terms of its presentation of ‘Scottishness’, has, if anything, regressed risibly from its 1971 predecessor’s oddness. In this version, grand Scottish renaissance palaces like Stirling, Falkland or Linlithgow are represented as coarsely decorated and unwelcoming as opposed to Elizabeth’s palaces. Such misrepresentation echoes that of the 1995 Braveheart . There, major late thirteenth-century Scottish castles and cities are represented as wooden shanty towns. This is an architectural version of the wilding of Scotland as primitive. In the 2018 Mary, this version of ‘Scottishness’ as ‘backwardness’ produces wonderful howlers. A busy and ancient port like Leith is represented, when Mary lands, by a bare beach and rocks as if she were Bonnie Prince Charlie arriving on the northwest coast in 1745. All the romantic scenes appear to take place at the top of Highland mountains, private rooms in Renaissance Scotland being available, presumably, only for dark plotting. By contrast, the more realist, if not always realistic, strand found in the documentaries of Grierson and the Clydeside (as opposed to Clydesideist) films of the 1940s cited above can be seen to feed into 1970s work by Scots who represented Scottishness in more complex, often stark ways. A key example of this is the Bill Douglas Trilogy—My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978)—in which the director used black and white images to convey the bleak harshness of a deprived upbringing, based on his own, in Newcraighall, a mining village near Edinburgh. The difficulties faced in escaping poverty and neglect emerge as the narrative unfolds over the three films. In the first we see Jamie, abandoned by his father, his mother hospitalised, unable to look after him, under his grandmother’s care. He finds a substitute father in a German prisoner of war, but when the prisoner is released, Jamie is left behind. The final image of the first film is of his being carried out of shot on a coal wagon. The trilogy’s other two films bring him no respite in his ‘home’ village. It is only through his leaving and surviving military service in the Egyptian desert that he finds companionship offering some form of release. Cairns Craig highlights the importance that critics saw in these films on their release: Whatever its roots in Bill Douglas’s personal experience, My Childhood and its sequels have been read not simply as the account of the life of one

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extremely unfortunate family, but as an iconic overturning of the nostalgic representation of the nation.23

Craig sets the trilogy’s impact alongside that of Michael Radford’s later (1983) Another Time, Another Place. This adapted Jessie Kesson’s novel’s exploration of the release of a Scottish woman’s repressed sexuality. Here, the central character, Janie, is trapped in a loveless marriage with a dour older man in a stark rural landscape. Her brief escape through her fascinated involvement with an Italian prisoner-of-war ends disastrously. The representation of rural Scotland as a place of mystery and potential fulfillment is subverted. The prospect of fulfilment is not through mistyeyed visions of Scotland. In these films it is Germans or Italians, even if themselves for the time captive, who offer a form of—sometimes illusory—escape. Craig outlines the importance of such films when he argues: The power of Douglas’s work lies in its ability to unravel the myths by which Scotland conceals itself from itself [through cultural traditions drawing on the Kailyard. …]. The debates from which Scottish film criticism emerged in the 1970s were ones in which criticism saw its function as resistance to the falsehoods apparently endemic to whatever might constitute the tradition of Scottish film [… and] to identify and encourage films which, like Douglas’s and Radford’s, could be read as negations of these traditions. This, however, was not simply an argument about ‘Scottish film culture’ but about the influence of Scottish culture on film: the source of the problem for Scottish films was in the national culture itself rather than the specific conditions under which films were made in Scotland.24

One might go further here and say that the problem is not so much the influence of Scottish culture on film or a problematic national culture (which national culture is in any case not problematic?). The issue is that the ‘national culture’ cannot be defined as a single category. If one thing has emerged so far in this study it is that there are many versions of a national culture in Scotland. These are underpinned not least, as we have seen, by its historically various linguistic nature usually seen as fundamentally trilingual (though a fourth language, Norn, close to Icelandic and Faroese was spoken in in the Northern Isles until the eighteenth century and underlies those islands’ Scots dialects, while, of course, there is an important strand of Scottish literature in Latin). Filmmakers were certainly initially drawn by the somewhat more congruent influence of Butt’s

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literary oligopoly of Scott, Stevenson and Barrie. Duncan Petrie reinforces this point when he observes Fundamentally inspired by the mythic vision propagated by the novels of Scott and Stevenson, the cinematic projection of Scotland’s history is dominated by the romance, the images, tropes and symbols of eighteenthcentury Jacobitism. Consequently, such images have played a vital role in the subsequent construction of the idea of Scottish heritage in the 1980s and 1990s […].25

Nonetheless, throughout the twentieth century other versions of a ‘national culture’ as exploited in film complicated the picture—and the ‘pictures’. This situation is further complicated by questions not just of ‘Scottish’ film, but the sources of material and the cultural background and generic interests of individual filmmakers, not to mention the corporate identity of production companies. When the producers of Brigadoon could not find anywhere in Scotland enough like ‘Scotland’ for their purposes, one can talk of this as their creating a ‘falsehood’. In fact, any work of art is in several senses a ‘falsehood’ as well as containing, again in several senses, ‘truth’. The Brigadoon team was being true to a version of Scottishness which, from their American perspective, based on the conventions of progressive Broadway musicals and less-than-progressive romantic Hollywood movies, was entirely truthful. They were certainly not in a Griersonian sense seeking a version of ‘documentary’ truth, let alone ‘actuality’. The latter has, in any case, as we have mentioned, its own problematic issues with regard to ‘truth’ or ‘falsehood’. In this context, to accuse Whisky Galore! or Brigadoon or other films working within specific genres of ‘falsehood’ is as appropriate as accusing Oklahoma! of failing as an example of a Federal Theatre Project Living Newspaper production about agricultural life and crop-raising. Oklahoma! is simply not Triple-A Plowed Under (1936). Brigadoon is not Griersonian film, even in terms of his work at Group 3. Craig himself largely recognises this when he goes on to argue: That the narrative of Scottish films is driven by modes of escapism – whether the escapism of the fantasy narratives of Whisky Galore! or Local Hero or the escapism of the ‘realistic’ films which show someone, like Jamie [in the Trilogy], escaping his destructive environment – is not a commentary upon Scotland but a commentary on the nature of film itself in the

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first fifty years of its development. Film is an inherently nostalgic medium [… making its audiences] homeless at home, nostalgic for that other time, that other place of film itself.26

Indeed, the power of different versions of Scottishness, and in particular of the filmic trope that sees Highland and rural areas as places of escape from capitalist exploitation and of self-reshaping, can be seen in the progression—if one were being tendentious, one might say ‘regression’—from Bill Forsyth’s That Sinking Feeling (1979) and Gregory’s Girl (1981) to his Local Hero (1983). The first two achieved a certain wry offbeat humour based on character observation set in the heartlands of the Scottish Central Belt, whether in the city of Glasgow or the nearby new town of Cumbernauld. In the third, the wry humour associated with the first two films crossed a line always under threat in earlier Forsyth films where wryness becomes feyness. Comfort and Joy (1984) returned to his less sentimental form, but missed the opportunity in its amused take on competition between two sets of ice-cream-van operators to explore the fact that the ‘Ice Cream Wars’ that inspired the film were actually violent disputes between criminal gangs using their vans, in some accounts to mask trading in drugs, in others to sell stolen goods. Forsyth may actually have been unaware of the background to the conflict he presented, but that only reinforces that an opportunity was missed. Yet, to be severe on Forsyth for this would be again to fail to understand the conventions within which his film operates. Forsyth’s contribution to the developing variety of performances of Scottishness in film was his semidetached humour and a capacity to explore the aspirations and emotions of younger people in modern urban Scotland without feeling the need to create mystery or excessive eccentricity. This, at its best, did not sentimentalise Scots and Scottish life. In this, he was assisted by his ability to draw on a number of actors who had theatrical experience, whether that of Chic Murray in variety comedy as the droll headmaster in Gregory’s Girl or of 7:84 (Scotland) veterans like Bill Paterson and Alex Norton in Comfort and Joy. A cross-fertilisation between theatrical and filmic modes, not unlike that discussed in Chapter 6 between classic and variety stage, was both possible and creative. What is surely true, then, is that from the 1970s on, there was a more varied approach to drawing on and shaping performances of Scottishness in film. We have seen that on television one might in this period find developing dichotomies in versions of performed Scottishness. These

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were reflected, to take only one exemplary contrast in such BBC productions as Pharic Maclaren’s nostalgic, if sometimes harsh, rural-set Sunset Song (1971) and Peter McDougall’s series exploring brutal aspects of sectarianism and deprivation in contemporary urban west Scotland from Just Another Saturday (1975) on. Similar contrasts developed in film. Further, both of these highly regarded strands of television production can be seen to participate in their own ways in Scottish mythopoeia, in a way analogous to films of their period. Sunset Song embodied a vision of a rural past which is seen as somehow an embodiment of an older, truer Scotland. The novel itself is often nominated in public votes, however unscientific those may be, as ‘Scotland’s Favourite Novel’. Meantime Duncan Petrie has commented on McDougall’s creation of an ‘alternative, dark, urban, world blighted by poverty, machismo and violence’.27 This he sees as no less ‘mythic’ than Brigadoon and lacking the kind of analysis found in John McGrath’s work. Nevertheless, as with the Douglas trilogy, or the work of Forsyth or Jessie Kesson through Radford’s adaptation of her novel, often these films were made by Scots seeking, if not always to break entirely away from earlier conventions of representations, at least to revise and reshape screen performances of Scottishness. In this, Forsyth’s approach in his earlier films was to employ a wry, sceptical, generally urban-based, humour. This, with the exception of Local Hero, turned its back on romantic views of Scotland or Scotland-as-Highland. In this process, as Petrie suggests, Moving beyond the limitations associated with the veneration of the urban, proletarian hard man, [Forsyth, alongside Scottish artists in literary/dramatic genres like James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and John Byrne] not only focused in more honest ways on masculine vulnerability, but they also offered a range of different kinds of cultural analysis in the process: from […] Byrne’s celebration of the restorative properties of popular culture and sharp verbal wit to Forsyth’s wry and ironic contemplation of the shortcomings of the male psyche.28

Meanwhile, a new generation of independent films and filmmakers, focused on the Central Belt, used film to explore other, often harsher, versions of Scotland and its people. One of the initiatives that made such films financially more feasible was the intervention of new funding sources. Developing in the last two decades of the century, these opened up opportunities for films to

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be made outside previously conventional financial structures and earlier viewpoints on the nature of Scotland and Scottishness. They included Channel Four Films/Film 4, BBC Films and Scottish Screen, while a number of institutions like Glasgow Film Office were set up to facilitate and support filming in specific locations. Further, the arrival of the National Lottery and the funds it could make available for filmmaking from 1995 on also fundamentally modified and diversified the scene. Such developments opened a whole new range of opportunities, both national and international, for co-production within Scotland, the UK and across Europe.29 One of the long-term effects of such non-largestudio-based co-production is the development in new Scottish cinema of what has been described as ‘transnational’. This, in Simon Brown’s definition, drawing on work by Sarah Neeley30 and Sarah Street,31 ‘firstly offers a broader, more inclusive approach to New Scottish Cinema and second […] encompasses, rather than eclipses, the national’.32 Brown describes such cinema, following Street, as ‘simultaneously local, national and transnational’.33 In a telling phrase he also defines it as about ‘anywhere and [original emphasis] Scotland’.34 A key example of such fresh filmmaking was Shallow Grave (1994), supported by Film 4. This, as Channel Four Films, had already been a coproducer of Radford’s Another Time, Another Place and would go on to lead on the financing of Trainspotting (1996). Both Shallow Grave and Trainspotting were directed by Danny Boyle from screenplays by John Hodge. Set in Edinburgh, though the former was also filmed in Glasgow, they presented a very different vision of life in the Scottish capital from earlier versions, like Disney’s 1961 Greyfriars Bobby, which highlighted its history or photogenic potential. The plot of Shallow Grave is based on the long-standing motif, seen in, inter alia, Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale and the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (1955), of death triumphing over thieves as they squabble over their spoils. In this version, the thieves are three middle-class flatmates who find a fortune hidden in the suitcase of a new, fourth flatmate who has died from an overdose. Only one dies, but all are disappointed. The film goes through a series of bleakly comic adventures. These include the cutting up and disposal of the dead flatmate’s body, and the subsequently burying of the bodies of two criminals to whom the money belongs. They are killed as they seek its return. Critically well-received, the film won Boyle the 1995 Evening Standard Most Promising Newcomer Award. Its sardonic take on baser human motivation and behaviour in New Town Edinburgh’s elegant context presented

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a far seedier Scotland than is found in earlier films, even those like The Gorbals Story or the Douglas trilogy, which had explored the harshness of poverty, deprivation and social exclusion. At least in such films there was a sense of a potential moral centre, however deprived the film’s characters were. Shallow Grave, within the convention of middle-class capergone-wrong black comedy, offers no vision of Scotland as having a moral centre. In one sense or another all its characters, whether Scots or not, are corrupt. Scottishness is no guarantee of the kind of redemption earlier films has performed. As Petrie comments, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting show ‘little direct connections [sic] with established cinematic or televisual traditions, rejecting both Celtic romanticism and naturalistic grit [in favour of] a new sophisticated urban aesthetic’.35 Boyle and Hodge’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel, revisited Edinburgh, this time not through its privileged middle-class inhabitants, but through its working-class drug-addicts. The drug-taking counter-culture of Trainspotting offered radically differing versions of what ‘Scottishness’ means. It did so with a zest at times almost surreal and certainly demonstrating black humour akin to the Scottish Camp discussed in the last chapter. Petrie has talked of its ‘neo-expressionist aesthetic’.36 He identifies its filmic influences as ‘the playful reflexivity of the French nouvelle vague and its refraction through the British films of Dick Lester […] and the “New Hollywood” of Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino’.37 It makes lively, ironic and, in Petrie’s word, ‘playful’ use of accompanying music by artists like Blur, Pulp and Primal Scream in a way far removed from any sense of a Scottishness engaged with traditional music. It rather places it sonically as participating in a wider world in which drug-taking alters consciousness and creates its own (a)moralities. A key element in the soundtrack is the inclusion of Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Lou Reed, who themselves had been addicts. Lust for Life, for example, is about Iggy Pop kicking the habit, while Perfect Day has often (wrongly, according to Lou Reed) been thought to be about addiction.38 In 1995, the year between the appearance of these two films, two others appeared which in their different ways reflected a late-twentiethcentury continuation of filmic performance of Scotland as a place of Highlandism, romantic adventure and the wild in both terrain and personality. Rob Roy and Braveheart each had Hollywood producers. McArthur argues in a generally illuminating analysis of the latter that it succumbs to his ‘Scottish Discursive Unconscious’. This, as noted earlier, he sees

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as serving to signify ‘Scottishness’ internationally.39 In view of the complexity we have seen in previous chapters in terms of the range of performances of Scottishness, this concept is somewhat limited. It is, nonetheless, valuable as identifying related aspects of performance of Scottishness in a variety of performance (and literary) genres. Certainly, MacArthur’s conception can be reasonably applied to these films. He goes further with regard to Braveheart to draw attention to a debt to the template of the Western in some scenes, not least the ‘canyon ambush’ of the English. There, after they are drawn into a narrow valley, it is revealed they are surrounded by Scots. They appear, like native Americans surrounding US cavalry in a classic Western trope, on the skyline.40 Roderick Watson has suggested that, seen in the light of Gibson’s follow-up The Patriot (2000), Braveheart can be seen to embody a prototype of that film’s American nationalism via the American war of independence, along with folkloric Robin Hood symbolism and the—Catholic—tropes of the passion and Christ-like sacrifice that sets us free.41 McArthur also makes a convincing case that, whatever the intentions of those who made the film, its use of Scottish motifs built around the concept of freedom and of Scotland’s society as under pressure from an imperialist neighbour, and its presentation of Scotland as, despite the historical facts, primitive, could be—and has been—read as supporting neofascist politics. (Yet, it is also true that the anti-imperialist theme embodied in Scottish resistance to English invasion is not anyway often seen in British films where funding has to be sought south of the Scottish Border.) While Rob Roy certainly draws, like Braveheart , on Highlandist motifs, it is, though sexist, not neofascist in tendency. It is, however, very clear that it owes a great deal to the Western genre. Petrie, for example, sees it as a revenge Western.42 This is hardly surprising. Alan Sharp, the Scot who wrote the screenplay, having begun by writing television drama and novels, moved to Hollywood. There, of his first four films, three were Westerns: The Hired Hand (1971), Ulzana’s Raid (1972) and Billy Two Hats ( 1974). Sharp was far from confined to this genre, but could draw on its conventions and plot rhythms in writing Rob Roy. Nonetheless, Jonathan Murray argues that in ‘blatant contradiction of its own hybrid nature, Rob Roy constructs and valorises a Scottish national identity which maintains an unyielding sense of purity and authenticity by seeming to reject all forms of extended intercourse with alien cultural traditions and influences’.43 Both these films, in their different ways, can be argued to assert regressive forms of exclusivism in their versions of performed Scottishness. In

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this, these large-studio films run counter to the trend in lower-budget films made outside the major studio system over the previous twenty or so years. There was no question by the mid-1990s, then, but that representations of Scotland and performances of Scottishness had been fundamentally extended, deepened and diversified. As David Martin-Jones puts it, the question of whether films made in Scotland engage with the locations in which the narratives take place or simply use Scotland as scenic backdrop does not necessarily have to have a ‘negative’ (in the sense of ‘colonising’ or otherwise ideologically regressive) answer. […] It is no longer sufficient, then, to condemn the stereotypical mythical constructions of Scotland isolated in Scotch Reels . Rather, they need to be examined in relation to the specific films [one might add genres] in which they appear, and the ends to which they function.44

Martin-Jones goes on to suggest that even if there is ‘a knowing construction of Scotland as a fantasy space to which the viewer is temporarily transported for the duration of the film. […] the ends to which this fantasy space are used are not necessarily ideologically regressive, even if they do not always directly address Scottish concerns’.45 Indeed, Martin-Jones continues ‘a cinematic fantasy space is the perfect place to explore different and new types of identities, be they national (Scottish, British, English or otherwise), transnational, global/local, diasporic, gendered, and so on’. Given such developments, films like Peter Mullan’s Orphans (1998) and Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher (1999), both internationally award-winning, were able to use Glasgow as a backdrop as they created either black comedy in the former case or a dreich naturalism approaching a form of dark magic realism in the latter in ways which entirely avoided the stereotypes of earlier decades. As Petrie assessed the overall situation in 2004, While Scottish proletarianism can justifiably be posited as a progressive cultural response to the dominant values and class power of the British establishment, the elision of class and nation also tends to generate a rather crude and reductive opposition between a Scottish identity that is essentially proletarian, communitarian, demotic, gregarious and virile and an Englishness characterised as bourgeois, self-interested, stuffy, repressed and effete. Consequently, this kind of discourse necessarily privileges an overtly masculine and heterosexual concept of native virtue […]46

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Yet, in the year this somewhat pessimistic stance could be taken, another film asserting a range of differences in Scottish identities appeared. Ae Fond Kiss (2004) explored hybrid identities, not least in its central relationship of a Muslim, Scottish-Pakistani man and Irish Catholic woman schoolteacher. Further, in 2006, Nina’s Heavenly Delights with, in Martin-Jones’s words, its Bollywood lendings and Scottish-Indian relationships constructs ‘a fantasy Glasgow in which all cross- or intercultural desires are not only permitted, but also provide the recipe for financial success’ while in the final dance ‘NRI characters “cross dress” (as it were) in Tartanry, just as Scots do in saris’.47 Nina’s Heavenly Delights can be argued to offer a sentimental view of gay interracial relationships. Its theme nevertheless scarcely ‘privileges an overtly masculine and heterosexual concept of native virtue’. Yet, it would be wrong to over-emphasise the diversity explored in such films. Petrie’s 2004 stricture on gendering remains largely valid: The marginalisation of women in Scottish culture has created a situation where female creativity is inevitably linked to gender in ways that never pertain in the case of their male counterparts. In this way, female cultural expression becomes […] forever restricted to a narrow and obsessive focus on gender identities and issues.48

Despite this, the scope of Scottish film moved a great distance over the more than half a century from Whisky Galore!. The versions of Scottishness performed had become more morally complex and dark. One can exemplify this evolution if one considers the example of just two films which involve ships in a rather more sinister way than Mackendrick does. Both True North (2006) and Cargo (2006) concern the involvement of Scottish fishermen and sailors in people-trafficking. Further, the latter, instead of being produced by a well-known single studio, has twenty-five co-producers from a wide range of different countries. Scottish cinema should not be self-congratulatory, but such developments mark substantial changes in content and relationships with other nations. Similarly, the performance of Scottishness in these films is vastly different from pre-war Jacobite adventures or fey representation of Scotland as a place for escape to spiritual transformation. And such creative evolution continues. Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006) and Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen (2002) and The Angel’s Share (2012) continue a strand of filming, sometimes with a sardonic humour, which seeks to address deprivation in

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Scotland and spirited attempts to face its consequences. Of the former, Murray has observed: Red Road is an exceptionally private localised film, focusing on one character’s intense grief and alienation from the wider socio-cultural milieus she inhabits. […] it does not offer a totalising representation of those milieus themselves [but…] seems representative of early twenty-first century Scottish feature work in that it deliberately shies away from the sort of grand, totalising statement about present-day urban Scotland [of some representative late 1990s films].49

Such films highlight ‘the increasing difficulty of analysing contemporary Scottish cinema within established, comfortingly familiar frameworks of nation and national identity involving predominantly the classification of individual films into sets of progressive or regressive, complex or reductive allegories of nation’.50 Such difficulty, reflecting complex potentialities for Scottish identities, is surely to be welcomed. Although it may also be somewhat facile, it is tempting to note how, as Scottish politics moved towards devolution and the re-establishment of a Scottish Parliament, even without the sovereign powers of that one prorogued in 1707 under the Treaty of Union, the variety of mythic performances in film, as in other performance modes, has extended. So has the reach into international co-production and transnational approaches and a readiness to explore grimmer aspects of Scottish society and life. These explorations have accompanied, and sometimes seemed to foreshadow, initiatives in relation to Scottish autonomy and a developing political context. In this, the possibility of devolution and, even, independence raised issues about what societal forms such political developments might nurture. It is such developments that make even more obvious how oldfashioned the representational bourach of the 2018 Mary Queen of Scots is. Such a film can now more and more be seen, quite apart from its historical howlers, to have as much relationship to ‘Scotland’ and ‘Scottishness’ as the twenty-first-century fashion of using Scottish settings for avowedly fantasised Bollywood productions. This chapter began with a reflection on the development of filmic performances of Scottishness derived from the work of a trio of authors. In the last decade another author, Irvine Welsh, has seen the success of Trainspotting as a film (which tightened up the action of his more loosely constructed novel) followed through in other films based on his

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novels. His writing, which I have discussed in a previous publication as often exemplifying Scottish Camp,51 has continued to supply material for savagely and blackly funny film versions of corrupt Scottishness. Both Filth (2013), adapted for screen and directed by Jon S. Baird, and T2 Trainspotting (2017), by the team of Boyle and Hodge, also had screenplays written by Scots. Such depictions of Scottishness are a rather long way from the versions at the beginning of last century. What is clear is that through that century a wide range of more complex and less romantic, though nonetheless still in their way mythic, versions of Scotland have been performed on film. In that process from time to time there have been critical assaults on specific versions of Scottishness. Some were accused of ‘falsehood’, not always appropriately when one is examining works of imagination and when even the ‘actuality’ explored by Grierson received ‘creative treatment’. We have argued here that any version, let alone a filmic one, is in its way a myth, a versionising of performed Scottishness. Films discussed in the later part of this chapter have often been harsh, but also often satirically comic. They have also justified a comment Murray made in 2015. Having recognised ‘just how diverse Scottish cinema has become, aesthetically, thematically, and industrially speaking, since the first stirrings of meaningful local change in the early 1990s’,52 he said ‘More and more over the last 20 years, to watch, think and write about Scottish filmmaking is to find oneself transported beyond a single set of national borders’.53 If it is not too tendentious to say so, one might be tempted to say that that such continuing development marks a new, and sometimes determinedly unsolemn, maturity in performing Scottishness in film, at least in work produced by Scots themselves.

Notes 1. Richard Butt, ‘Literature and the Screen Media Since 1908’, in Ian Brown (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 53. See also Steve Joyce, ‘The Obscure Cinematic Lore of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: An Updated Silent Era Filmography’, Journal of Stevenson Studies, 13 (2016), pp. 57–109. 2. Butt, ‘Literature and the Screen Media’, p. 55. 3. Ibid. 4. Colin McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), p. 6. 5. Ibid., p. 60.

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6. For a more detailed discussion of this topic on which I have drawn for specific examples, see Richard Butt, ‘Looking at Tartan in Film: History, Identity and Spectacle’, in Ian Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry: Scottish Culture, History and Myth (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 166–179. 7. David Bruce, ‘The History of Film and Cinema’, in Neil Blain and David Hutchison (eds), The Media in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 75. 8. Paul Rotha, Documentary Film (London: Faber, 1936), p. 5, quoted in Laura Marcus, ‘“The Creative Treatment of Actuality”: John Grierson, Documentary Cinema and “Fact” in the 1930s’, in Kristin Bluemel (ed.), Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 190. 9. Quoted in Andrew Blaikie, The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 65. 10. Wendy Xin, ‘Scotland as Screen: Vexed Projections in I Know Where I’m Going!’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, 8:2 (December 2015), pp. 2–25. 11. Disney Movies at https://nortonsafe.search.ask.com/web?q=disney% 20rob%20roy%20highland%20rogue%20dvd&o=APN11912&prt=NGC& chn=retail&geo=GB&ver=22.16.3.21&locale=en_GB&tpr=111&guid= 100D8C3A-3562-4BB4-8A80-9C8476BA6DCB&doi=2016-10-17 (accessed 15 January 2019). 12. See McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots. 13. Colin McArthur (ed.), Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (London: BFI, 1982). 14. Richard Butt, ‘Looking at Tartan in Film’, p. 168. 15. Butt is quoting from John Caughie, ‘Representing Scotland: New Questions for Scottish Cinema’, in Eddie Dick (ed.), From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book, (Glasgow: SFC & Polygon, 1990), p. 15. 16. Richard Butt, ‘Looking at Tartan in Film’, pp. 168–169. 17. David Goldie, ‘Don’t Take the High Road: Tartanry and its Critics’, in Brown (ed.), From Tartan to Tartanry, pp. 238–239, quoting McArthur, Scotch Reels, p. 3. 18. I am grateful to Professor Gerard Carruthers for reminding me of the ideological thrust of these films for Scottish audiences in the post-war period. 19. For a discussion of this issue with regard to two major stage plays of the last fifty years, see Ian Brown, ‘Performance, Theatrical Engagement and Ambivalence in Two Stage Representations of Scottish Soldiering’, Scottish Literary Review, 11:1 (Spring/Summer 2019), pp. 125–143. 20. David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 190.

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21. Fiona Douglas, Scottish Newspapers, Language and Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 25. 22. I am grateful to Joan Henderson for bringing this regulation to my attention. 23. Cairns Craig, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 192. 24. Craig, The Wealth, pp. 193–194. 25. Duncan Petrie, Screening Scotland (London: BFI, 2000), p. 69. 26. Craig, The Wealth, p. 197. 27. Petrie, Screening, p. 139. 28. Ibid., p. 61. 29. For more detailed discussion of these changes, see Jonathan Murray, The New Scottish Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), especially Chapters 3 and 4, passim. 30. Sarah Neely, ‘New Scottish Cinema’, in Blain and Hutchison (eds.), pp. 151–165. 31. Sarah Street, ‘New Scottish Cinema as Trans-national Cinema’, in Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman (eds), Scottish Cinema Now (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 139– 152. 32. Simon Brown, ‘“Anywhere But Scotland?” Transnationalism and New Scottish Cinema’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen, 4:1 (2011), pp. 1–17. 33. Ibid., p. 5. 34. Ibid, p. 15. 35. Petrie, Screening, p. 196. 36. Ibid., p. 195. 37. Duncan Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 102. 38. I am grateful to Gavin Falconer for reminding me of this underlying factor in the choice of music for the film. 39. McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots, p. 6. 40. McArthur illustrates this scene: See ibid., p. 150. 41. Email, 30 May 2019. 42. Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions, p. 201. 43. Jonathan Murray, New Scottish Cinema, p. 34. 44. David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Culture: Genres, Modes and Identities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 15. 45. Ibid., p. 15. 46. Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions, p. 19. 47. Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Culture, p. 80. 48. Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions, p. 82.

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49. Jonathan Murray, ‘Scotland’, in Matte Hjort and Duncan Petrie (eds), The Cinema of Small Nations (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 89. 50. Ibid., p. 88 51. Ian Brown, ‘Alternative Sensibilities: Devolutionary Comedy and Scottish Camp’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 319–327. 52. Murray, New Scottish Cinema, p. 174. 53. Ibid.

CHAPTER 11

Internalising Exile at Home and Away

This study has considered a wide variety of versions of Scottishness. These over the centuries have been and continue to be performed in an equally wide range of contexts, modes and genres. If one thing emerges from this consideration, not least from the last chapter, it is that performing Scottishness is not simply a matter for Scots. It seems clear that many of the versions of Scottishness cinematically developed, especially in the first half of the last century, were largely derived from the impact of adapting the work of such Scottish authors as the three comprising Richard Butt’s oligopoly. Despite this, the development of what is performed as Scottishness is not simply a matter for those who were born or live now in Scotland. John and Margaret Gold’s remarks, though specifically concerning tourist material, open up a wider perspective: First, popular media, such as tourist brochures, guidebooks and posters, are as legitimate an expression of culture as literature, classical music and the theatre. Secondly, representations of Scotland are widely diffused and embedded in many different cultures. It is as justifiable to relate interpretation of such representations to the needs and beliefs of those cultures as it is to relate them to Scottish culture, even if the two diverge considerably.1

Passages in this chapter draw on and update passages from Ian Brown, ‘In Exile from Ourselves?: Tartanry, Scottish Popular Theatre, Harry Lauder and Tartan Day’, Études Écossaises, Numéro 10 (2005), pp. 123–141. © The Author(s) 2020 I. Brown, Performing Scottishness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39407-3_11

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Further, each performance interacts with and affects performances in other modes. It is not, however, as this study has made clear, as if all forms of performance are welcome to all observers. That would be too much to hope for whether from those in terror of a Gaelic Gestapo or those black-affrontit by Kailyard and all its (sometimes) tartan trappings. Yet, the thesis developed throughout this monograph is that, whether from time to time considered fashionable, or acceptable or, indeed, cringeworthy, all these performances have a role not only in performing but determining ‘Scottishness’. When Caroline McCracken-Flesher addresses the very particular performance of Scottishness embodied in the Holyrood parliament, she makes a striking claim about its very existence: Insofar as Scotland is an idea negotiated through signs, as well as a praxis enacted through laws, however much Scots may resent their depiction as homely or highland, however much they may cringe at the naming of Sir Walter or the swing of the kilt, they owe their Parliament in some small part to Scott’s signs […].2

McCracken-Flesher’s point can be taken more generally, but she is here making a key point with regard to Scott. No matter that from time to time he may fade from fashion—there is no doubt his novels have rather fallen from public favour in Britain in recent decades—or even be stigmatised, as we reminded ourselves earlier, by Leavis. Scott’s influence underlies many performances of Scottishness. This is certainly true in the permanence of his monumental memorialisation and embodiment in statue not only in the heart of Edinburgh, but at the heart of Glasgow. There, his statue is set atop a monumentally tall pillar in George Square. One may beg leave to doubt how many Glaswegians daily passing by are aware who bestrides the centre of their city. The fact is that Scott does. Whatever consciousness citizens have of his eminence, he remains eminent, even if for many implicitly rather than explicitly. And Scott cannot be seen in isolation. McCracken-Flesher’s point about the civic and political implications of enacted Scottishness ‘negotiated through signs, as well as a praxis enacted through laws’ extends to relate to any of the performative actions discussed in previous chapters. When Jonathan Hearn says that it ‘is not simply a matter of Scotland making political claims, but of political claims making Scotland, over hundreds of years’,3 he might be referring to the Declaration of Arbroath. He is, in fact, describing a plethora of performative acts, some in the legal sense, which have not only made Scotland.

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They insist that it continue as that national unit, stateless or not, which now survives. In short, what this study has made clear is the multitude of ways in which signs and praxis impinge on the performance of Scottishness. Even when specific signs may be disrespected for a time or actually disappear, for now, out of conscious mind, each in itself and in combination with others influences the performances and, so, the identities Scots perceive as being ‘Scottish’. Thus, they affect the sense others have of what it may be to be a Scot. As Neil Blain and Kathryn Burnett express it, The Simpsons ’ Groundskeeper Willie, Mel Gibson’s Wallace, Mrs Doubtfire, Shrek, [are] figures egregiously bearing Scottish identity abroad without (as it were) permission. But whether there is anything more ‘authorised’ about My Ain Folk, Cracker, One Foot in the Grave, Taggart, Morven Callar, Red Road or any other examples containing more apparently material Scottish dimensions is purely a matter of belief.4

Performing Scottishness takes place in diverse theatres and international discourses. As we have seen in previous chapters, two key discourses in which Scottishness is performed are those of literature and language. Central to this, of course, is the figure of Robert Burns. As Nigel Leask observes, ‘Reading or performing Burns overseas—a practice rapidly institutionalized from Penang to Calcutta to Alberta—conserved a distinctly Scottish gemeinschaft in the monolithic melting pot of the British Empire’.5 If, however, we remain for a moment with the reputation and performances of Walter Scott, which in Chapter 7 we spent some time examining, we can recognise the extent to which alongside Burns his influence has been significant. Its impact remains on a world stage. Katie Trumpener summarises his novels’ influence with regard to the interaction of ‘Scotland’ and ‘Britain’ during the period of empire, The empirewide influence of the Waverley novels lies in their ability to harmonize Scottish materials with British perspectives, as they reconstruct the historical formation of the Scottish nation, the simultaneous formation of the Britain that subsumes it, and a cultural nationalism that survives because it learns to separate cultural distinctiveness from the memory of political autonomy and can therefore be accommodated within the new imperial framework.6

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Yet, because of the long-standing effect of the ‘cultural distinctiveness’ contributed to through the many acts of performance we have discussed in the chapters of this study, questions of Scottish ‘political autonomy’ are not a matter of ‘memory’. The degree of that autonomy remains a matter of live and lively political debate. This has been especially so during the time Brexit from the European Union was being sought and outstanding unresolved questions remain about Scottish independence. These the 2014 referendum and the Brexit debate simply did not put to rest. (It is arguable, for example, that a country whose national identity is mainly institutional rather than based on language or ethnicity is quite likely, sooner or later, to gain independence—or, if it happens to Scotland, regain independence.) We have touched on a wide range of phenomena. These include the Opening Ceremony of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, dress praxis at international sporting events and weddings, and even Michael Dobson’s criteria for ‘The Making of the National Poet’. Following these, so specialist an academic process as the production of revised high-quality editions of Scott’s work by Edinburgh University Press (and Burns’s by Oxford University Press) has a performative function with regard to Scottishness. Taking account of all of this, it is striking that it appears that the cringing ‘at the naming of Sir Walter or the swing of the kilt’ is lessening. It is even, if cringe it still is, being embraced in both ironic and non-ironic ways. Not least among those who currently shape international versions of Scotland and Scottishness are members of the centuries-old Scottish diaspora. Many of these in the past were instrumental in shaping a version of empire that can reasonably be called Scoto-British. Cairns Craig suggests, indeed, that, given the active role of many of those who took part in migration from Scotland, ‘diaspora’ is an inadequate and misleading term: a term other than ‘diaspora’ is needed if we are not to be misled into equating Scottish experience with that of the Jews or Armenians. One suggestion is the adoption of another word of Greek origin, to characterise Scottish migration: xeniteia. Xeniteian migrants do not arrive in their new territories as victims of forced expulsion dreaming of a return to the homeland but as masons or architects who carry with them the plan by which they will rebuild the familiar structures of their homeland in a foreign place.7

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Rodrigo Alvarez defines the term as applying to voluntary exile as ‘one of the first steps in monastic life [where the] monk is invited to leave his past life, not only in a material point of view but spiritually. […] The disorderly attachment to relatives, friends or situations are remedied by xeniteia. […] It is a going out of oneself and of day to day experience’.8 This chapter will continue as a matter of convention to use the term ‘diaspora’ with regard to Scottishness in ‘exile’. It does so as a matter of past convention and convenience for readers. It is sympathetic to Craig’s powerful proposal that the ‘Scottish diaspora’, which includes some, but far from a majority, who have experienced forced expulsion, is renamed the ‘Scottish xeniteia’ and will also use that term in specific ways. As we have seen, a number of leading historians, including three cited earlier, Tom Devine, Michael Fry and Linda Colley, have explored from their differing perspectives the conception of the ‘Scottish Empire’. This phenomenon preceded, infiltrated, appropriated and to an extent subverted the British Empire to which it contributed and of which it formed a part. As Leask could observe in 2011, Recent work has tended to abandon an older view of the Scot as imperial victim, replacing it with a more empowered model in which Scottishness (as opposed to Britishness) not only survived but prospered in the imperial ecumene, although this has also sometimes led to a downplaying of Scots culpability in some of the more nefarious episodes of empire. 9

He goes onto cite others working in this field: John Mackenzie, for example, argues that instead of creating an overall national identity, [the empire] enabled the sub-nationalisms of the United Kingdom to survive and flourish.10 Each was able to create a loop beyond the English, a loop whereby ethnic myths could be reciprocally nurtured and developed. Detecting a more critical note in the imperialism of subordinate nations, Murray Pittock11 isolates the phenomenon of ‘fratriotism’ as ‘a means of expressing reservations concerning the nature and development of empire among the Scots and Irish [in particular with regard to James Boswell’s advocacy of Corsican ‘liberty’ and Thomas Cochrane’s naval service fighting for Chilean, Brazilian and Greek independence]’.12

One might, while agreeing with Pittock’s insight, enter a reservation about Mackenzie’s use here of the word ‘ethnic’. With regard to Scottishness, we have seen that from the earliest times Scottishness has arisen

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from alliances of different subnational groups. It would be very hard, indeed impossible, to single out an ethnic or essentialist identity for a Scot. But if one substitutes the word ‘national’ for ‘ethnic’ in Mackenzie’s formulation, then it seems clear that Scots have indeed been able to maintain ‘a loop beyond the English’. In this loop national myths could be reciprocally nurtured and developed. To such a reciprocation both Scots and English have contributed, alongside other national communities—and not only in the context of empire. It is when such reciprocation breaks down, as in the example cited in the introduction of Orwell’s offering ‘England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and […] Albion’ as synonymous,13 or that in Chapter 3 of Caroline Nokes’s likening the Scottish Government to ‘any county council’,14 that friction can arise. In the passage cited Orwell also observes that a Scotsman ‘does not thank you if you call him an Englishman’. This observation leads one to question whether an English person would thank one for calling them a Scot. Yet, one suspects the Nokeses of this world would consider Scots prickly or ‘whinging’ if they object to the reciprocal nature of the relationship of Scotland and England being disrespected in the way she disrespects it. Something of this breakdown of understanding can be seen in the attitudes of many English to the desire of many, though far from all, Scots for independence. For many English people ‘England’ and ‘United Kingdom’ are synonymous. While this may show they do not understand the nature of the United Kingdom, it also explains why they also might see those Scots as disruptive to the identity of ‘England/Britain’. Alan Little has noted the reactions during the period of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum of a sophisticated group of media journalists in London. He has reported that, when he asked them why they thought the demands for independence were being made, the only reasons they offered were that Scots were ‘chippy’ and the leader of the SNP, Alex Salmond, was ‘wily’.15 One reason Little identifies for so many Scots’ belief in belonging to ‘Britain’ collapsing is the collapse of the British nation created by the post-war British settlement, as David Edgerton defines it and as was discussed in the introduction. Indeed, the present state of Scottish-English relations is arguably ample demonstration of Edgerton’s thesis that the British nation ‘was not a natural state of affairs’. The idea of a ‘British nation’ is as imagined a community as any other in Benedict Anderson’s cosmos.

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The dismay expressed by those who see their ‘precious union’ under threat from ‘chippy’ Scots is based on a misunderstanding if they believe that the threat arises simply from a group of political parties like the SNP or the Greens. In fact, the current success of those parties is a symptom of the potential collapse of that union, not its cause. Yet, time and time again when they might preserve their ‘union’ better by recognising the need to have a genuine reciprocal union of the kind that has worked in quite different ways in quite different periods since 1707, in recent years they have tended to revert to Anglo-British versions of Britain. In these, as with Orwell, false synonyms are forcefully applied. Indeed, a case might be made that the differences between England and Scotland over remaining in or leaving the European Union arise from differences in perceptions of what the United Kingdom is. On the one hand, generally, Remainer Scots, whether nationalist or unionist, see their nation as distinct within Britain and in parallel with European nations of much the same size as theirs, alongside the Northern Irish with their distinctive political environment. English Leavers, however, have a post-imperial, but still imperialist, vision of Anglo-Britain, shared by many in Wales for historical reasons, possibly related to the fact of its early annexation. The irony is that those Scots whose performance of Scottishness includes, inter alia, a desire for the reinstatement of independence, which a Tory like Thatcher would abhor, do so in this argument not least because of Thatcherite policies. As Scotland continued to return Labour majorities among its MPs in the 1980s and early 1990s, there arose what came to be seen as a democratic deficit for Scotland. The perception was that Tory policies were being imposed from England. Tom Devine reported during his 2012 Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun lecture that, at the 2001 Dublin launch of the AHRC Centre in Irish and Scottish Studies, he had teased the late Donald Dewar, Scotland’s First Minister, as the ‘Father of the [Scottish] Nation’. Dewar responded, ‘I don’t know about that, but Margaret Thatcher is the Mother of the [Scottish] Nation’. It is important, however, that one does not confuse the desire among many to reassert an independent Scotland with Scottishness. As has been clear in several chapters of this volume, at different times, including now, it has been entirely possible and appropriate to be Unionist Nationalist. After all, the disputes about political settlements between Westminster and Holyrood, let alone between Scotland and England, derive much of their energy from conflicts between conceptions of Scottishness, Britishness and Englishness. There is no simple correlation of Scottishness and

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the desire for Scottish independence. Similarly, in terms of the diaspora/xeniteia, the complex conception of a Scottish identity expressed through another nationality is now common. This was historically in North America not as prominent as, for instance, Italian-American or Irish-American identities. Perhaps this was because Scots were very early to settle in what is now the United States and Canada. They were very much part of their foundation. There is no doubt, however, that Scottish-Americans and especially Scottish-Canadians, without for a long time necessarily formally using those labels, respected their own historic diasporic/xeniteian Scottish identities. Over many years they retained a sense of their origins through what they perceive as traditions that sustain their dual identities, even in sporting contexts, thus explaining their prominence in the worlds of curling and golf. Such retention of traditions has sometimes created positive feedback loops. Gaelic-speaking Canadians in Nova Scotia, for example, have preserved aspects of Gaelic language and Celtic music and dance that has benefited communities in Scotland by maintaining art-form traditions, some of which had been lost on the ‘home’ country. Strong overseas links, then, sustained a continued perception and enactment of Scottishness among diaspora/xeniteian communities. As Tanja Bueltmann, Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton explain, Associationalism also involved the Scots transplanting their culture to new settlements. Not just adapting the institutions they found upon arrival, giving them a tartan tinge, as it were, but bringing over their own institutions, unadulterated, and helping to build new societies from that basis. Scots philanthropic and cultural societies were formed to help migrants to integrate, find jobs and social networks, and meet a need to be among one’s own kind.16

Yet, such organisations, while sometimes open to accusations of clannishness, were according to Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton also more often engaged with local civic life: While catering primarily for fellow Scots, through charity and the maintenance of Scottish traditions, the majority of Scottish associations […] were not cut off from wider civic life, but connected to it in fundamental ways.17

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They also might develop through contacts in Scotland fresh ways of performing Scottishness. One striking example of this is to be found in the development of Fèis Seattle. In the 1970s and 1980s Gaelic-speaking communities, especially in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, felt the absence of formal tuition in traditional arts. In 1981 a group of volunteers on Barra set up Fèis [‘festival’ or ‘feast’] Bharraigh to support young people’s learning of traditional music in the context of other local traditional arts and the Gaelic language. Over the years, this example was followed in other communities as the Fèis movement came to establish a professional organisation, Fèisean nan Gàidheal, currently with 47 members. Each offers arts tuition in an annual festival up to a week long, often supplemented by a year-round programme of related tuition.18 On South Uist such events are organised by Ceòlas, the inspiration for Fèis (sometimes Féis) Seattle. John Dally, a Seattle-area piper attended Ceòlas in 1996, followed the next year by Sandra Gilliam and Richard Hill. On return to Seattle, they pitched the idea of a fèis to the Gaelic Society. The first Fèis Seattle was held in May 1998.19 This is described as bringing ‘together leading tradition bearers from Scotland and Cape Breton’ to create ‘a thriving community [highlighting] the music, language and culture of Scotland and Cape Breton’.20 The interactions of ‘home’ and diaspora/xeniteian communities offer here a remarkable interplay between the arts of the original emigrants, the remaining versions of those in Scotland, and the interaction between descendants at ‘home’ and of emigrants on the East Coast and the West Coast of America. There, a modern fèis (the ScottishAmericans retaining in some instances the older system of Gaelic accents with ‘féis’, an example of the potential of the diaspora/xeniteia for more small-c conservative practices) in Seattle draws on and, no doubt, now feeds through shared participants into forms of festival in both Scotland and Cape Breton. Other xeniteian communities have sustained other versions of Scottishness. These sometimes include the Kailyard. Andrew Blaikie differentiates between the role of such a trope for home and for diasporic/xeniteian Scots, if the Kailyard evidenced a deliberate forgetting, denial or elegy for the pain of internal migration to the cities, emigration, by contrast, produced a new hero: […] the emigrant, able to transport – lock, stock and whisky-barrel – the opportunities of realising the Scots Myth in the New World, New

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Zealand, Nova Scotia, a phoenix reborn. While in MacDiarmid’s vision the margins stand for the centre, here is another displacement, between the material realities of Scottish society and the idealisation of those arrangements from elsewhere.21

Further, over the last half century or so, the sense of ScottishAmericanness has become promoted more through specific performativities. Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton note that Caledonian Games ‘overseas emerged soon after their inaugural appearance in Scotland’.22 Though there is some dispute about the nature of the reputed first of these at Glengarry, Ontario, in 1819, the first in the United States took place at Boston in 1853. After the Civil War, they flourished in North America, as they did throughout the rest of the diasporic/xeniteian world, attracting crowds in their thousands. 25,000 attended the New York Games in 1872, ‘probably the largest attendance of any Game throughout the nineteenth century’.23 There may have been a falling away of enthusiasm for such Games in the first part of the twentieth century, but, in the United States alone since the mid-twentieth century, renewed enthusiasm has seen instances like North Carolina’s Grandfather Mountain Highland Games in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Agnes McRae Morton and Donald MacDonald founded them in 1956. The model was the Braemar Gathering and their desire was to ‘celebrate the large Scottish influence on the early colonisation of the Carolinas’.24 Tom Devine points out this area was settled historically by Ulster Scots rather than Highlanders. Drawing on work by Celeste Ray, he observes that the ‘Cape Fear area, where Highland immigrants had actually settled, was thought too flat and not sufficiently authentic to represent the romantic mountain country of bonnie Scotland’.25 One would not wish to contradict the unquestionably highland aspect of the Games’ location. There is no doubt that the site of the Games accords with the kind of ‘authenticity’ Devine comments on. It is important, however, to note that a key factor in the choice of site by Macrae Morton, who lived in Linville, the nearest town, was that her family owned it. Given such local contingency, it may be pushing things to argue that the choice of location was a conscious decision to misrepresent the Scottish-American nature of the area. While Devine’s perception is worthy of note, the actual choice of site appears based on local motivations and convenience of ownership and not simply, if at all, on the basis that the Cape Fear area was too flat. One has

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to be cautious as a Scottish commentator of overinterpreting the choices of diaspora/xeniteia members. What is certain, however, is such events can attract many more people than any in Scotland. Grandfather Mountain Games, for example, regularly attract over 30,000 people over four July days. Such events throughout the world also develop their own traditions, unknown in Scotland. The US ceremony of ‘Kirkin the Tartan’, for example, adds a layer of religiosity not found in Scottish versions of Highland Games. Scotland-based Scots, however, arguably have limited rights, if any, to pass judgement on such developments in performing Scottishness. Yet, such developments give rise within the performance interactions of any culture to discussion concerning what is ‘authentic’ or ‘true’. As time passes, and traditions emerge, or are manufactured, coteries of interest form. These claim the right to define what is acceptable, correct or right. Some are authorised, as with Louis XIV’s foundation of the Académie Française. Some are self-appointed, as with the members of the Scottish Renaissance Movement who sought to standardise spelling of Scots. Such coteries arrogate to themselves the right to define and promulgate what is ‘authentic’ or ‘true’. Clearly the degree of authority any such coterie is formally assigned or achieves through custom and practice will vary from case to case and time to time. The working of such coteries—and they include critical and scholarly coteries—nevertheless affects the ways in which a culture perceives and values itself. Internally, coteries often establish powerful and even autocratic rules of taste. These may mean that the very reading of history is profoundly affected by prevailing perceptions or permitted readings. In turn, these ‘rules’ may affect relations with diasporic/xeniteian members and perceptions of the diaspora/xeniteia’s own view of what is ‘authentic’. Such rules are also subject to intellectual fashion, social snobbery and political manufacture. These complex and conflicted cultural expressions are often, of course, evolved and presented, as we have seen, in theatrical and quasi-theatrical modes. These include popular film and television performance. The versions of Scotland represented in a series like Outlander, for example, are a complex case in point. Where a ‘home’ culture has a significant diaspora, these discussions may be fraught. Questions arise about the nature of ‘authenticity’, the ‘true’ repository of correctness and who has the right to judge what is ‘true’. Often the ‘home’ or metropolitan culture will see itself, rightly or wrongly, as having the ‘authentic’ tradition, or at any rate the right to adjudicate what is ‘authentic’ within what it sees as its ‘own’

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cultural expressions. These in turn are promoted as the lodestone for any assessment of ‘authenticity’ within the ‘diaspora’ culture. Colin McArthur condemns what we have seen he calls ‘the Scottish Discursive Unconscious, that deep-seated, historical bricolage of images, sounds and stories that immediately comes into the heads of people throughout the world at the word “Scotland”’.26 He argues ‘the discourses of Tartanry and Kailyard are dominant within the Scottish Discursive Unconscious, the latter in particular suffused with sentimentality’.27 But in making such sweeping statements, which we have seen are in any case open to question, one might respond that he is making a case within Scottish discourse. This, in a discourse covering, say, North American situations, needs to be more sensitive to the conditions that gave rise to and sustain an emigrant’s experience. Home Scots may think what they like of the relatively recent development in 1998 of such an event as Tartan Day and its New York parade on 6 April. The date marks the anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath. Yet, it is beholden on them to recognise that Scottishness is not just for Scotland. Diasporic/xeniteian Scots will wish, and have the right, to develop their own performances of their Scottishness. Further, while some home Scots still mutter against the Tartan Day Parade, it is hard to find antipathy in Ireland to New York’s St Patrick’s Day celebrations. The different perspective of the two nations is interesting and the reasons for it unclear. And it is striking that in the choice of 6 April the significance of the Declaration is still being recognised seven centuries after its signature. Such performances of diasporic/xeniteian Scottishness may move a long way from performances in the home nation. Catriona Macdonald has referred to the ‘fluid conception of diasporic movement’.28 In this, ‘nationality is as much ascribed from outwith as from within’.29 Scottish culture is mother culture for the diaspora/xeniteia. This, however, develops and preserves its own versions of that Scottish culture. These it regards highly, however they are perceived at ‘home’. I have previously written about one striking example of a highly hybridised version of Scottishness in a ceremonial event witnessed on Saturday morning, 7 September 2002, in Wagram. This is, aptly enough, in Scotland County, North Carolina, a centre of long-term Scottish settlement. The sound of bagpipes was heard as police stopped traffic on the small-town main street. A kilted pipe band played Scotland the Brave. On the town’s main crossroads, the procession halted. A group of young people in Highland dress then Highland danced on the crossing. The procession then continued. Fire engines and other civic vehicles representing the whole

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local community followed. Band members and dancers clearly included a majority of Hispanic Americans and Lumbee Native Americans. Their version of Scottishness had become appropriated as part of a hybridised diasporic/xeniteian Scottishness. This was so even to the extent that it included those native to the locality. They were adopting a ‘Scottish’ identity in this Scots-dominated area of North Carolina. It is possible for home Scots to regard such activity—and the many Highland Games of the rest of the world—as sentimental and old-fashioned. Yet, they clearly celebrate something Scottish-Americans own—and another strand of Scottishness. As Macdonald expresses it, unlike ‘truly transnational identities (gender, sexuality, ethnicity, etc.), Scottishness logically puts the nation centre-stage, asserting the longevity and tenaciousness of nation-hood over modern manifestations of global citizenship’.30 Further, it is hard to argue that what was seen at Wagram is actually in fact simply oldfashioned. However much based on historic forms, it is a re-fashioning for public performance of another aspect of Scottish identities. It is as much a part of the world culture that is Scottish as the work of the most cutting-edge home-based modern artists and critics. In a positive reiteration and recirculation of performances of Scottishness, it is possible to see enactments from outside Scotland reshape those inside Scotland. The interaction of internal and external versions of Scottishness impinges on ways Scottishness is performed in Scotland. The annual (since 1950) Edinburgh Military Tattoo draws on a historic identification of Scottishness with the military. From its earliest days, it also performed examples of Scottishness embedded in ‘exiled’ forms. These might include Indian Army pipers or representatives of Canadian army units with names, now lost through amalgamations, like The Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada. This title still survives, though only in the army reserve. Meantime, the Second Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment pipe band wears Maple Leaf (Canadian Government) tartan, which was adopted by the Canadian government in 2011 as an official national symbol.31 The Tattoo’s conception of performing Scottishness has become interactively internationalised. One is as likely now to see Fijian dancers, American marching bands and Canadian Mounties as any performance directly representing Scotland. Nevertheless, the event always concludes with massed piped bands parading. What is more, versions of the ‘Edinburgh’ Tattoo are now exported to xeniteian homelands.

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Roderick Watson has suggested that such events, like the Grandfather Mountain Games, raise wider questions about the human longing for some kind of ‘authentic’ common identity. This is no matter how constructed it must—indeed, inevitably can only—be. Such tropes revolve around long-felt issues of belonging, alongside death and loss, redemption, renewal and return. Over and above matters of history, language and politics, there is something mythical at work here—or if one prefers— philosophical or deeply psychoanalytical. Burns, Scott, tartan and other signifiers of Scottishness are only raw material used to fill personal voids and to seek to understand ourselves. It could just as easily, for other national groupings, be an entirely different performed iconography. All are equally paradoxical, plural and, often, hybrid. In the end ‘national identity’ can be seen to come down to an act of collectively constructed and performed existential choice. This is not always consciously or explicitly realised. It must, however, be formed out of the ever-changing historically determined cultural soup in which we all swim. In Watson’s resonant phrase, ‘always exiled, yet we long for home’.32 One thing this study has argued and sought to demonstrate is that Scottish culture is a large, dynamic and international performance. It has many theatres. Many varieties of ‘authenticity’ and ‘truth’ fill it. Such is the extent of this that these terms may serve little valuable function. As Italo Svevo has observed, ‘inventing is a creation, not a lie’.33 The issues we have been concerned to explore are the nature and underlying ideologies of the creative inventions that lead to performances of Scottishness. The interactivity and international cross-referencing such performing can involve often finds complex expressions leading to seeming-simple performances. The 1992 Hollywood film The Last of the Mohicans used, to great effect, an orchestrated version of Dougie Maclean’s The Gael in its penultimate scene. There, Hawkeye and Chingachgook chase their enemies through mountainous precipices for a final man-to-man fight. In Princes Street soon after, a busker was to be seen in native American dress playing that self-same tune—on Andean panpipes.34

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Notes 1. John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold, Imagining Scotland: Tradition, Representation and Promotion in Scottish Tourism Since 1750 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995). 2. Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 112. 3. Jonathan Hearn, Claiming Scotland: National Identity and Liberal Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2000), p. 1970. 4. Neil Blain and Kathryn Burnett, ‘A Cause Still Unwon: The Struggle to Represent Scotland’, in Neil Blain and David Hutchison (eds), The Media in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 9. 5. Nigel Leask, ‘“Their Groves o’ Sweet Myrtle”: Robert Burns and the Scottish Colonial Experience’, in Murray Pittock (ed.), Robert Burns in Global Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011), p. 183. 6. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 246–247. 7. Cairns Craig, The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 63–64. 8. Rodrigo Alvarez, http://oxfordpatristics.blogspot.com/2015/03/ rodrigo-alvarez-concept-of-xeniteia-in.html. 9. Leask, ‘“Their Groves”’, p. 173. 10. John Mackenzie, ‘Empire and National Identities: The Case of Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, vol. 8 (1998), p. 230. 11. Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 238. 12. Leask, ‘“Their Groves”’, pp. 173–174. 13. George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 [1941]), p. 47. 14. Quoted in The Sunday Herald, 1 April 2018, p. 2. 15. Alan Little, Yes/No: Inside the Indyref, BBC Scotland, episode 3 (first broadcast 19 March 2019). 16. Tanja Bueltmann, Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton, The Scottish Diaspora (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 11–12. 17. Ibid., p. 128 18. Fèisean nan Gàidheal, https://www.feisean.org/en/feisean-en/what-is-afeis/ (accessed 23 July 2019). 19. Richard Hill, email 19 July 2019. 20. Slighe nan Gàidheal, https://www.slighe.org/feis-seattle-2019 (accessed 19 July 2019). 21. Andrew Blaikie, The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 114–115.

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22. Bueltmann, Hinson and Morton, p. 125. 23. Ibid. 24. North Carolina History Project, https://northcarolinahistory.org/ encyclopedia/highland-games/ (accessed 26 March 2019). 25. Tom Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750– 2010 (London: Penguin, 2012 [2011]), citing Celeste Ray, Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 60, 112. 26. Colin McArthur, Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 103–104. 27. Ibid., p. 104. 28. Catriona M. M. Macdonald, ‘Imagining the Scottish Diaspora: Emigration and Transnational Literature in the Late Modern Period’, Britain and the World 5:1 (2012), p. 18. 29. Ibid., p. 19. 30. Ibid., p. 20. 31. Government of Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/ 2011/03/government-canada-makes-maple-leaf-tartan-official-symbolcanada.html (accessed 3 December 2019). 32. Rory Watson, email 30 May 2019. 33. Cited in Paolo Bartoloni, Interstitial Writing: Calvino, Caproni, Sereni and Svevo (Market Harborough: Troubador, 2003), p. 12. 34. Reported in an email by Gavin Brown, 17 May 2019.

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Index

0-9 1872 Education (Scotland) Act, 106, 108 1918 Education Act, 106 7:84 Scotland, 158, 172, 223 A Académie Française, 245 Act(s) of Union, 7, 8, 30, 33–35, 37, 40, 50, 53 Adam, Captain Charles, 155 Adam, Henry, 179 Ae Fond Kiss , 229 Agate, James, 174, 182 Aitken, A.J., 117, 121, 185, 203 Albert, Prince, 151, 152 Al Clud, 11 Alexander, George, 93 Alhambra, Dunfermline, 218 al-Megrahi, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed, 49, 50 Alvarez, Rodrigo, 239, 249 Anderson, Benedict, 7, 9, 15, 16, 19, 21, 24, 26, 31, 153, 240 The Angel’s Share, 229

Another Time, Another Place, 221, 225 Anthony, Jack, 176 Arata, Stephen, 107, 120 Arbuthnot, John, 41 Archers, Royal Company of, 150 Arden, John, 178 Arne, Thomas, 41, 59, 63, 64 Arnold, Andrea, 229 Arnold, Matthew, 108 Arnott, Peter, 136 Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB), 11 Assembly Hall, 30 Aston, Anthony, 101 Athelstan, 15 Aughey, Arthur, 49, 56 Augustus, Duke of Sussex, 149 B Baillie, James, 148 Baillie, Joanna, 170 Baird, Jon S., 231 Balcon, Michael, 210, 211, 213, 214 Balliol, Edward, 25

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 I. Brown, Performing Scottishness, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39407-3

267

268

INDEX

Balliol, John, 22, 25 Balmoral, 152 Banks-Smith, Nancy, 197 Bannockburn, 21 Barnes, Grace, 132, 179 Barrie, J.M., 107, 129, 171, 194, 206–208, 211, 222 Barrow, Geoffrey, 20 Barthes, Roland, 186, 203 Basker, James G., 102, 119 Baxter, John, 210 Baxter, Stanley, 190–194 BBC Films, 225 Beaton, M.C., 195 Beattie, James, 102 Beattie, Maureen, 161 Bell, Barbara, 90, 156, 165, 170, 181 Bell, J.J., 208 Bentman, Raymond, 77 Bhabha, Homi, 9, 10, 17, 94, 118, 125, 127, 130, 139, 202 Billig, Michael, 46, 56, 81, 114 Bisset, Baldred, 22 Blackburn, Robert, 35 Black Watch, 147, 247 Blaikie, Andrew, 10, 13, 14, 17, 70, 89, 126, 139, 232, 243, 249 Blain, Neil, 5, 16, 204, 232, 237, 249 Blair, Hugh, 68, 99, 108 Blair, Tony, 46, 49, 50 Blake, George, 175, 182 Blue Ridge Mountains, 244 Bonnie Prince Charlie, 207, 215, 220 The Borderers , 194 Borders, 4, 10, 15, 20, 23, 28, 38, 69, 84, 97, 105, 106, 118, 124–126, 128, 129, 133–136, 142, 143, 175, 178, 186, 190, 192, 197, 201, 202, 206, 218, 227, 231 Bòrd na Gàidhlig, 93 Boswell, James, 64, 83, 84, 105, 239 Boucicault, Dion, 171

Bourdieu, Pierre, 47, 56 Bower, Walter, 19, 21, 31 Bowhill Players, 177 Bowman, Martin, 179, 200 Boyle, Danny, 1, 4, 15, 195, 225 Boyle, Frankie, 187 Braemar Highland Gathering, 152 Branagh, Kenneth, 2 Braveheart , 220, 226, 227 Bray, Mark, 124 Breadalbane, second Marquess of, 151 Brexit, 9, 47, 48, 50, 53, 238 The Bridge over the River Kwai, 217 Bridie, James, 210 Brigadoon, 205, 214–217, 222, 224 British Railways, 11 Broadie, Alexander, 24, 32 Broadway, 171, 215–217, 222 Broun, Dauvit, 12, 13, 15, 17, 21, 23, 24, 31, 33, 41, 47, 54–56 Browne, Jeremy, 45 Brown, George Mackay, 136 Brown, Gordon, 46 Brown, Simon, 225, 233 Bruce, David, 208, 232 Bruce, Sir George, 144 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, 2 Bryden, Bill, 162, 179, 208, 210 Buchanan, George, 25, 29, 32, 98, 101, 110, 134, 137, 156, 160 Buchan, John, 107, 207 Bueltmann, Tanja, 242, 244, 249, 250 Burke, Gregory, 179 Burnett, Kathryn, 5, 16, 237, 249 Burnistoun, 200 Burns Monument, 71–73, 81, 82, 84 Burns, Robert, 15, 16, 57, 66, 79, 86, 237 Burns Supper, 66, 69, 75–77, 80, 86, 106, 155 Butt, John, 102, 120

INDEX

Butt, Richard, 206, 207, 216, 221, 231, 232, 235 Byrne, John, 136, 179, 196, 197, 224

C Caesar, Julius, 142 Caithness, 20, 95, 132 Calman, Susan, 187 Cameron, Alasdair, 159, 160, 165, 166, 172, 173, 181 Campbell, Donald, 20, 136, 179 Campbell of the Bank, John, 154 Canova, 150 Cape Breton, 243 Cape Fear, 244 Capell, Edward, 60 Cargo, 229 Carham, Battle of, 13 Carlyle, Alexander, 102 Carlyle, Simon, 200, 202 Carlyle, Thomas, 16 Carrubbers Close Theatre, 84 Carruthers, Gerard, 26, 32, 55, 89, 109, 120, 143, 163 Carr, Walter, 161 Caughie, John, 14, 17, 153, 165, 216, 232 Central Park, 74, 78, 80 Ceòlas, 243 Chambers, Iain, 44, 55 Channel Four Films/Film 4, 225 Chaplin, Charlie, 177 Charles I, 8, 27, 149 Cheape, Hugh, 147, 163, 164 Chewin’ The Fat , 200 Chisholm, Jimmy, 161 Church of Scotland, 30, 38, 39 Citizens Theatre, 190 Claim of Right, 29, 30 Clancy, Thomas Owen, 31, 54, 118, 121, 129, 139

269

Cloud Howe, 196 Clydesideism, 218, 219 Coates, Eric, 2 Cochrane, Thomas, 239 Coco (the Clown), 189 The Colditz Story, 217 Coleman, James, 17, 84, 85, 90 Colley, Linda, 8, 16, 60, 88, 149, 164, 239 Comfort and Joy, 223 Community of the Realm, 19, 24–26, 29, 135 Connell, Iain, 200, 202 Connolly, Billy, 176, 187, 188 Conn, Stewart, 136 Conrad, Joseph, 110 Conservative, 4, 29, 44, 45, 50, 155, 243 Cook, John R., 195, 204 Cooke, Thomas, 59, 60 Cooper, Lord, 28, 29, 53 Corbett, John, 161 Corbyn, Jeremy, 48 Corcoran, Hugh, 176 Corrie, Joe, 172, 177 Council of Europe, 77, 95, 96, 118 Cracker, 237 Craig, Cairns, 39, 40, 55, 113, 143–146, 163, 174, 182, 197, 198, 204, 220–222, 233, 238, 239, 249 Craig, Daniel, 2 Crawford, Barbara E., 129 Crawford, Carol Ann, 195 Crawford, Robert, 62, 66, 68, 88, 99, 101, 104, 119, 130 Cree, Stewart, 94 Cromwell, Oliver, 83 Cronin, A.J., 194 Crystal, David, 109, 120 Culloden, 148, 153–155, 158 Cumming, Alan, 198, 202

270

INDEX

Cummings, E.E., 193

D Dally, John, 243 Dalyell, Tam, 29, 48 The Dam Busters , 217 Dante, 70 The Darkest Hour, 218 Davies, Norman, 111, 121 Declaration of Arbroath, 5, 15, 19, 21, 27, 29, 33, 51, 53, 72, 96, 155, 236, 246 Deelman, Christian, 59, 62, 88 de Gaulle, Charles, 38, 55 De Mille, Agnes, 215 Devine, Tom, 3, 16, 38, 42, 55, 60, 88, 102, 120, 164, 239, 241, 244, 250 Dewar, Donald, 241 DiCenzo, Maria, 159, 165 di Mambro, Anne Marie, 179 Disarming Act (1746), 147, 154 Disney, Walt, 214, 219, 225 Dixon of Dock Green, 190 Dobson, Michael, 57, 59–61, 76, 77, 86, 87, 238 Dòmhnallach, Tormod Calum, 162, 179 Doric, 94, 95, 185, 193, 196 Douglas, Bill, 220 Douglas, Fiona M., 104, 120, 219, 233 Douglas, Gavin, 97 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 107, 129 Dr Finlay’s Casebook, 194, 195 Drifters , 209 Dumbarton, 11 Dunbar, William, 97 Duncan, A.A.M., 111 Dunkirk, 218 Dunlop, Bill, 162

E Ealing Studios, 210 The Edge of the World, 208 Edgerton, David, 10, 17, 218, 240 Edinburgh, 7, 14, 28, 30, 38, 41, 42, 49, 52, 71, 72, 79, 82, 84, 97, 99, 101, 143, 144, 148–150, 155, 168, 169, 171, 178, 179, 220, 225, 226, 236, 247 Edinburgh Film Festival, 210 Edinburgh Military Tattoo, 247 Edinburgh Theatre Royal, 64, 72, 83, 143, 156 Edward I, 21, 83 Eliot, T.S., 109, 110, 112–114, 120 Elizabeth II, 27, 28 Elliott, Paul, 197, 204 Eòrpa, 196 Eriksen, Thomas, 124, 135, 139 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, 95 European Union, 51, 141, 238, 241 Ewing, Winnie, 49, 53

F Faiers, Jonathan, 189, 203 Falconer, Gavin, 88, 118, 121, 182 Fallon, Michael, 4 Farquhar, George, 170 Fèis Bharraigh, 243 Fèisean nan Gàidheal, 243, 249 Fèis Seattle, 243 Ferguson, Adam, 100 Fergusson, Robert, 72 Film 4, 225 Filth, 231 Findlay, Bill, 90, 119, 161, 165, 166, 173, 177, 179, 181, 182, 200 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 136, 157, 192 Fletcher of Saltoun, Andrew, 241 Floodtide, 210

INDEX

Florence, Robert, 200, 202 Flower, Charles, 65 Folorunso, Femi, 157, 165 Fordun, John of, 21, 126 Forsyth, Bill, 214, 223, 224 Fowler, Alastair, 115, 116, 121 Franceschild, Donna, 197 Frederick, Prince of Wales, 59, 61 Freed, Arthur, 214 Freedman, Ike, 175, 176 From Tartan to Tartanry, 142, 152, 163, 164, 182, 203, 232 Fry, Michael, 60, 88, 239 Fulton, Rikki, 161 Fyffe, Will, 174

G Gabaldon, Diana, 195 Gaddafi, Colonel, 49 ‘Gaelic Gestapo’, 93, 96, 117, 125, 131, 154, 236 Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act, 95 Gaelic-language policy, 94 Gaitskell, Hugh, 141, 163 Galt, John, 104 Gamble, Andrew, 9, 17 Gardiner, Michael, 49, 50, 56 Garnock Way, 194 Garrick, David, 58, 59, 61–65, 76, 83 Gary: Tank Commander, 200 Gastrell, Francis, 61 General Assembly, 30, 39 The Gentle Shepherd, 101, 112, 157, 169 George II, 59 George IV, 42, 128, 143, 144, 146, 149–151, 154, 156 Gibbs, Hayley, 80 Gibson, Mel, 237 Gilliam, Sandra, 243 Gillray, James, 43, 44

271

Glasgow Film Office, 225 Glasgow Unity, 177, 178 Glover, Sue, 179 Gododdin, 14, 134 Goldie, David, 37, 55, 174, 182, 216, 232 Gold, John R., 74, 89, 235, 249 Gold, Margaret N., 74, 235 Goldsmith, Oliver, 170 The Gorbals Story, 210, 226 Grady, Chris, 200, 202 Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, 244 Granton Trawler, 210 Gray, Alasdair, 136, 224 Gray, Andy, 161 Gregory’s Girl , 223 Greig, David, 179 Grey Granite, 196 Grierson, John, 209–211, 220, 231 Grieve, John, 161 Groundskeeper Willie, 237 Group 3 feature films, 210 The Grove Family, 190 Gunn, George, 136, 179

H Hamilton, Thomas, 72 Hamish Macbeth, 195 Hammerstein, Oscar, 215 Harlequin, 59, 189 Harvie, Christopher, 144, 163 Harvie, Jen, 57, 70, 87, 129, 139 Hay, George Campbell, 137 Heaney, Seamus, 111 Hearn, Jonathan, 14, 17, 236, 249 Heath, Stephen, 186, 203 Heddle, Donna, 117 Hemphill, Greg, 200, 202 Hendry, Ben, 93 Hennessy, Mark, 45

272

INDEX

Henry VII, 97 Henry VIII, 52, 215 Henson, Andrew, 242, 249 Highland Society of London, 148 Highland Society of Scotland, 148 The High Life, 166, 198, 200, 204 High Living , 194 High Road, 194 Hill, Craig, 176, 187 Hill, Richard, 243, 249 Hjort, Matte, 124, 139 Hodge, John, 225, 226, 231 Hogg, James, 118, 128 Hollywood, 208, 214–216, 222, 226, 227 Holyrood, 9, 30, 49, 50, 53, 236, 241 Home Office, 35, 37, 54 House of Commons, 30, 48, 50, 54, 148 House of Lords, 29 Howard and Wyndham, 171 Hoy, Chris, 3 Hume, David, 41, 102, 103 Hunter, Russell, 161 Huntingtower, 194, 207 Hurley, Kieran, 179 Hutton, James, 72 Huxley, Julian, 210 I I Know Where I’m Going!, 211, 213 Ill Met by Moonlight , 217 Independence referendum, 4, 240 Iron and Steel Corporation of Great Britain, 11 Irwin, Mary, 188, 200, 203, 204 Isakson, Ike, 162, 179 J Jack, Ian, 94, 118

James III, 25 James IV, 97 James VI & I, 8, 25, 37, 83, 149 James VII & II, 150 Javid, Sajid, 50 Jencks, Maggie Keswick, 16 ‘John Bull’, 41 Johnson, Boris, 1, 141 Johnson, Samuel, 103, 105 Jones, Charles, 100, 119, 120 Jones, Inigo, 8, 61 Journey through Scotland, A, 142 K Kailyard, 174, 216–218, 236, 243, 246 Kay, Jackie, 136 Kelly, Gene, 215 Kelly, Muireann, 162 Kelman, James, 114, 137, 201, 224 Kemp, Robert, 137, 162, 178, 179 Kennaway, James, 218 Kennedy, Walter, 97 Kern, Jerome, 215 Kesson, Jessie, 137, 221, 224 Kidd, Colin, 34, 41, 42, 44, 54, 55, 89, 120 Kiernan, Ford, 200, 202 King Alfred, 52 ‘King’s Jaunt’, 5, 150 King, Thomas, 64 Knockshinnoch Castle Colliery disaster, 210 Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, 110, 112, 121 Korda, Alexander, 210, 215 Kyllour, John, 168 L Labour, 30, 241 Lacan, Jacques, 186 Largs, Battle of, 13, 96

INDEX

Lauder, Harry, 143, 172–177, 187–189, 207 Leask, Nigel, 69, 89, 237, 249 Leavis, F.R., 108, 112–114, 121, 157, 236 Leno, Dan, 189 Lenz, Katja, 161, 166, 198, 200, 204 Leonard, Tom, 180, 192–194 Lerner, Alan Jay, 215, 217 Linklater, Eric, 210 Little, Alan, 240, 249 Lloyd, Marie, 189 Loach, Ken, 229 Local Hero, 214, 222–224 Lochhead, Liz, 137, 162, 179, 200, 201, 204 Lockhart, John Gibson, 145, 152 Loewe, Frederick, 215 London Olympics and Paralympics, 1 Lorne, Tommy, 176, 187, 188 Lothian, 13, 82, 97 Louis XIV, 245 Lucas, Ian, 187, 203 Lynch, Michael, 12, 13, 17, 32

M MacAlpin, Kenneth, 12, 13, 23 Macaulay, Lord, 154, 165 MacCaig, Norman, 134 McCormick, John, 28 McCracken-Flesher, Caroline, 42, 55, 87, 91, 145, 163, 236, 249 McCrone, David, 33, 35, 39, 54, 55, 218, 232 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 75, 76, 90, 110, 120, 128, 139, 162, 173–175, 180, 182, 217, 244 Macdonald, Catriona, 246, 250 MacDonald, Donald, 244 Macdonell of Glengarry, Alasdair Ranaldson, 145

273

McDougall, Peter, 196, 224 McGarry, Graeme, 151 McGinn, Clark, 69, 75, 76, 89, 90, 155, 165 McGrath, John, 133, 140, 158, 159, 172, 224 McGrath, Tom, 137, 161, 162, 179, 180 McGuirk, Carol, 130, 131, 139, 156 Machair, 195, 196 McHugh, Greg, 200, 202 MacIlleathain, Donaidh (Donnie Maclean), 162, 179 McIlvanney, Liam, 26, 32, 143, 163 Mackay, Charles, 160 MacKay, Neilson, 77, 90 Mackendrick, Alexander, 211, 213, 229 Mackenzie, Compton, 211 Mackenzie, Henry, 78 Mackenzie, John, 239, 249 MacKenzie, Simon, 179 Macklin, Charles, 170 McKnight, Johnny, 202 Maclaren, Pharic, 194, 195, 224 Maclean, Dougie, 248 McLean, Una, 161 McLeish, Robert, 210 McLellan, Robert, 137, 162, 177 Macleod, Muriel Anne, 162, 179 McLeod, Wilson, 95, 100, 103–105, 117–120, 130, 139 MacLeòid, Fionnlagh (Finlay Macleod), 162, 179 MacMillan, Hector, 137, 143 McNeil, Kenneth, 128, 139, 146, 163 McNeil, Kevin, 137 Macpherson, James, 99, 133 Macrae, Duncan, 161 Macwhirter, Iain, 9, 17 The ‘Maggie’ , 213, 214 Magna Carta, 34, 52

274

INDEX

Magnus IV, 20 Major, John, 6, 77, 81 Maklouf, Raphael, 80 Mallet, David, 41, 52, 59, 105 Maloney, Paul, 165, 172, 173, 175, 176, 181, 182, 186, 203 Mansfield, Lord, 102, 103, 105 The Man Who Never Was , 217, 218 Marlowe, Christopher, 63 Martin-Jones, David, 228, 229, 233 Mary, Queen of Scots, 12, 25, 52, 160, 207, 219, 230 The Masque of Alfred, 41, 59 Masson, Forbes, 198, 199, 202 Mathews, Charles, 64 May, Theresa, 1, 6, 51 The McFlannels , 190 Middleton, Richard, 186, 203 Mill, Anna Jean, 168, 181 Milton, Colin, 61, 145, 163, 189, 193, 203 Mitchell, Alex, 190, 192–194 Moffat, Graham, 171, 172, 177, 178, 181, 182, 208 Moffat, Maggie, 177 Moireach, Iain, 162 Molière, 179, 200, 201 Monarch of the Glen, 195 Moran, Joe, 180, 183 Moray, 94, 96, 118, 125, 126, 132 Morgan, Edwin, 137, 157, 162, 179, 180, 200 Morgan, Tommy, 172, 174, 176 Morris, James (Jan), 35, 54 Morton, Agnes McRae, 244 Morton, Graeme, 40, 84, 85, 90, 91, 242 Morton, H.V., 174, 182 Morven Callar, 237 Mosman, William, 147 Mossman, John, 79 Mrs Doubtfire, 237

Mugabe, Robert, 45 Muir, Edwin, 109, 120 Mullan, Peter, 228 Munro, Neil, 190, 213 Munro, Rona, 179 Murray, Chic, 223 Murray, D.S., 162 Murray, Jonathan, 227 Murray, William (W.H.), 143, 156 My Ain Folk, 220, 237 My Childhood, 220 My Way Home, 220 N Nairn, Tom, 7, 8, 16, 36, 54, 149, 153, 164, 216 Napier, Theodore, 158 Nathan, George Jean, 217 National Assistance, 11 National Coal Board, 11 National Drama, 82, 156, 160, 165, 170–172, 178 National Health Service (NHS), 2, 11 National Insurance, 11 National Lottery, 225 National Theatre (London), 177 National Theatre of Scotland, 11, 177 Neeley, Sarah, 225 Newman, Steve, 73, 78, 89, 90, 155, 165 Nicolson, Colin, 137 Nina’s Heavenly Delights , 229 Niven, Alastair, 135, 140 Nokes, Caroline, 50, 51, 240 Norquay, Glenda, 36, 54, 55 North Carolina, 244, 246, 247 Northumbria, 13, 97 Norton, Alex, 223 O O’Donnell, Hugh, 151, 164

INDEX

Ó Maolalaigh, Roibeard, 97, 99, 118, 119 One Foot in the Grave, 237 Orkney, 20, 95, 117, 133 Orphans , 228 Orwell, George, 6, 16, 240, 241, 249 Ossian, 62, 66, 68, 99, 133, 134 Outlander, 195, 245

P Packer, Steve, 124 Paisley, Janet, 137 Para Handy, 190, 194, 213 Parliamo Glasgow, 190, 191 Paterson, Bill, 223 Paterson, Don, 137 Paterson, Lindsay, 161, 166 Pattison, Ian, 200, 202 Paxman, Jeremy, 45–48, 56 Petrie, Duncan, 17, 124, 139, 222, 224, 226–229, 233 Phillips, Zara, 38 Pittock, Murray, 7, 16, 17, 35, 46, 54, 56, 74, 77, 78, 89, 121, 144, 147–150, 157, 163–165, 239, 249 Poets Corner, 61 Pope, The, 19, 22, 26 Powell, Enoch, 9, 48 Powell, Michael, 208, 211 Prebble, John, 143, 163 Press & Journal, The, 93, 95 Pressburger, Emeric, 211, 213, 214, 217 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 218, 219 Princess Anne, 38, 39 Princes Street, 72, 81, 83, 84, 248 The Private Life of Gannets , 210 Pryde, Helen W., 190

275

Q Queen Anne, 37, 41, 150 Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, 1, 3 Queen, The (Elizabeth II), 28

R Rab C Nesbitt , 200 Radford, Michael, 221, 224, 225 Raleigh, Walter, 108 Ramsay, Allan, 16, 84, 101, 112, 169 Ramsay, Lynne, 228 Ratcatcher, 228 Ray, Celeste, 244, 250 Reach for the Sky, 217 Received Pronunciation, 190, 192 Red Road, 229, 230, 237 Reformation, The, 157, 168, 169 Reid, Alexander, 178, 179, 182 Risings, 1715 and 1745, 146 River City, 195 Robb, David, 111, 121 Robb, D.S., 192 Robert I (The Bruce), 12, 19 Robertson, Angus, 50 Robertson, James, 137 Robertson, William, 102, 103 Robinson, Christine, 97, 99, 118, 119 Rob Roy, 42, 160, 194, 207, 214, 219, 226, 227 Rodger, Johnny, 69, 70, 82, 89, 90 Rogers, Richard, 215 Ross, David, 64 Royal Scots War Memorial, 27 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), 65 Royan, Nicola, 21, 31, 33, 34, 41, 54, 55, 118 Rubens, 8 Rubicon, 142 (Rule) Britannia, 41, 42, 59, 63, 66, 68, 81, 102, 108, 145, 152

276

INDEX

S Saadi, Suhayl, 14, 134, 140 Sallust, 26 Salmond, Alex, 45–47, 240 Sassi, Carla, 115, 125 Schoene, Berthold, 55, 56, 138, 140, 182, 203, 234 Scotch Reels , 153, 165, 216, 228 Scotland Act (1998), 5, 29, 50 Scotland County, 246 Scots Quair, The, 196 Scottish Camp, 3, 128, 188, 189, 198, 202, 226, 231 Scottish Community Drama Association (SCDA), 177 Scottish Government, 50, 53, 93, 240 Scottish National Players, 177 Scottish Parliament, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 29, 30, 37, 46, 48–50, 52, 53, 95, 230 Scottish Qualifications Authority, 113 Scottish Reformation, 167 Scottish Renaissance Movement, 245 Scottish Screen, 225 Scott Monument, 81, 82, 84 Scott, Walter, 16, 28, 40, 42, 43, 57, 73, 74, 82, 104, 108, 143, 144, 154, 206, 237 Scullion, Adrienne, 119, 157, 159, 160, 165, 166, 172, 173, 181 Seawards the Great Ships , 209 Sewel convention, 53 Shakespeare, William, 80, 86, 109 Shallow Grave, 225, 226 Shapiro, James, 67, 88 Shariatmadari, David, 180, 183 Sharp, Alan, 227 Sharp, Gregor, 200 Sheridan, Richard, 170 Shetland, 13, 95, 132, 133, 195 The Shipbuilders , 210 Shrek, 237

Simard, Jean-Pierre, 123, 159, 165 Simpson, Kenneth, 100, 115, 119, 121, 133, 140 The Simpsons , 237 Skinner’s Hall, Edinburgh, 169 Slessor, Mary, 16 Smith, Adam, 16, 101 Smith, Anthony D., 51, 56 Smith, Gabrielle, 188, 200, 203, 204 Smith, Gerry, 36, 54, 55 Smith, Gregory, 110 Smith, Iain Crichton, 137, 162, 179, 180, 183 Smith, Jeremy, 95, 104, 105, 117, 118, 120, 130, 139 Smith, John, Speaker of the House of Commons, 38 Smith, Sydney Goodsir, 137, 178 Smollett, Tobias, 42 Smout, Christopher, 12, 13, 17 SNP, 30, 45, 48–50, 93–95, 240, 241 Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, 100 Sontag, Susan, 187, 188, 203 Spark, Muriel, 131, 218, 219 Speed, John, 127, 139 Spencer, Philip, 56, 114, 121, 139 Statutes of Iona, 98, 124, 129, 153 The 39 Steps , 207 Stevenson, Randall, 161, 165, 166 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 107, 112, 128, 206 Stewart, Andy, 3 Stewart, Dugald, 72 Stewart, Ena Lamont, 177 Stewart of Garth, Sir David, 145 Still Game, 200 Stirling Bridge, Battle of, 16 Stratford-upon-Avon, 57–59, 63, 80 Strathclyde, 12, 97 Street, Sarah, 225, 233 Stuart, Charles Edward, 150

INDEX

Stuart, Henry Benedict, 150 Supreme Court, 49, 53 Suspect Culture, 159 Sutherland’s Law, 194 Svevo, Italo, 248 Sweet Sixteen, 229

T T2 Trainspotting , 231 Taggart , 195 Take the High Road, 194 Tartan Army, 151, 154, 164 Tartan Day, 246 Tartanry, 150, 153, 174, 175, 207, 214–219, 229, 246 Temple, Richard (Viscount Cobham), 61 Terry, Daniel, 143, 156 Thatcher, Margaret, 11, 241 That Sinking Feeling , 223 Theatre Hebrides, 162, 179 This Man Craig , 194 This Wonderful World, 210 Thomas, Julia, 66, 88 Thomson, Ian W., 150 Thomson, James, 41, 52, 59 Tindall, Mike, 39 Todd, Margo, 169, 181 Tosg, 179 Trainspotting , 225, 226, 230 Treaty of Union, 7, 29, 31, 33, 35–37, 40, 42, 47, 51, 54, 66, 67, 230 Tremblay, Michel, 179, 200 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 152, 153, 164 True North, 229 Trumpener, Katie, 58, 62, 87, 88, 237, 249 Tunes of Glory, 218 Two Doors Down, 200

277

U Union of the Crowns, 98 Union of the Parliaments, 33, 99 Up Helly Aa, 131, 132 Ure, Joan, 137 V Victoria, Queen, 154 The View from Daniel Pike, 194 W Waddie, Charles, 158 Wagram, 246, 247 Waine, Rosie, 148, 164 Wallace Monument, 17, 58, 81, 85, 90 Wallace, William, 51 Walpole, Horace, 62 Walpole, Robert, 59 Watkins, Peter, 195 Watson, Nicola J., 79, 90 Watson, Roderick, 115, 116, 121, 202, 204, 227, 248 Waugh, Evelyn, 198 Waverley Novels, 170, 237 Wedderburn, James, 168 Wellington, Duke of, 84 Welsh, Irvine, 201, 226, 230 West End, 78, 171 Westminster, 7, 9, 29, 35, 37, 41, 42, 46, 49, 50, 53, 241 Whatley, Christopher, 71–75, 80, 81, 87, 89, 90, 106, 120 Whisky Galore!, 211–214, 222, 229 White, Michael, 45 Whyte, Christopher, 115, 116, 137 Wildcat, 158, 172 Wilkes, John, 43 William, Prince of Gloucester, 149 Wilson, John (Christopher North), 69 Wollman, Howard, 56, 114, 121, 139

278

INDEX

Wright, Tony, 9, 17, 56

Yerevan, Armenia, 77 Young, Hugo, 46, 56 Young, J.E., 58, 87

X Xin, Wendy, 212, 232

Y Yeats, W.B., 110

Z Zajac, Matthew, 14, 134, 180 Zavaroni, Lena, 199 Zolkwer, David, 3