Notes to stanzas 13 to 20

13.1 drift:* This is another ‘counter’: one that carries a typical ambiguity of direction. ‘Drift’ can mean, in the idiom in which it used here, progress along the proper course (and metaphorically therefore meaning, tenor, scope and even plot). In the marine sense, however, (as most commonly seen in the adjectival form ‘adrift’) it suggests precisely the opposite: i.e. deviation from the proper course or aimless movement. There might be an amphibolous multiple negative at play here: ‘I must not deviate from my proper deviation.’ It is impossible to ignore the moral implications of this ironic refusal to semantically identify a correct path (through the narrative, through politics, through life). In fact, it is vital that we do not ignore such implications. The anachronisms that follow in its wake are more than frivolous.

13.2 Forward:* A monosyllable; to rhyme with ‘bored’. This is the flip-side of the Birminghamized prosody that produces so many yawning diæreses. There is also a punning desire, I think, to remind us of Henry Ford and, more disturbingly, of a ford in a stream: disturbing because it suggests the idea not of travelling (as it were) ‘downstream’ in time, but of wading across the river (The Scamander/Meander?) to look at it from the other bank so that the direction of the flow of time appears to be reversed. which, being suffer’d, rivers cannot quench

13.5 rift:* As regards the previous note, the OED has a fourth homonym:

Rift, sb.⁴ U.S. [? Alteration of riff, obs. var. of REEF sb.¹] 1. A rapid, a cataract.

13.6 Sondheim:* Obviously an invented name. It means sound-home in German, I think.

13.6 pantomime:* This word originally referred not to the idiotic Christmas show—with its two-man horses, its old thespians in drag, and its ‘he’s behind you’ nonsense—but to a much more graceful and edifying type of non-verbal ‘mime’ as exemplified by the film Les Enfants du Paradis. The ‘sound’ of a pantomime might therefore be analogous to the proverbial song of the swan.
The traditional denouement of the pantomime (of the lovers Harlequin and Columbine) is the ennobling transformation scene. The ‘toilet’ passage in this poem can be read (amongst other things) as a debased and misplaced version of such a metamorphosis: one that insists upon the modern low-brow figure of the panto-dame, rather than the beautiful and pure Columbine, as its heroine. Instead of a transcendent romantic encounter with Harlequin, she will later have a much more threatening, dishonest and tawdry clash with a criminal: Jeff Sloggy.

13.7 okay:* The numerous occurrences of this word in BQ do as much to suggest American cultural colonisation as any other quality of the text. It is noticeable how regularly it introduces temporal paradoxes or explicit switches in the direction of, or position within, time. (See esp. 63.1* and 144.1). These moments are the most overt interjections of the TV announcer-persona and it is quite clear the poet intends ‘okay’ to be a totemic word of this disruptive voice’s insidious influence. Later in the piece it regularly finds its way into the mouths of the characters (see 175.8, 177.7, 206.8, 216.8).
The multiple possible etymologies of this definitively mindless Americanism are notoriously impossible to disentangle. Some contend it comes from Scots och aye; others that it is from French au quai, yet more that it is a patois word derived from an American Indian or West African (slave) word for ‘yes’, ‘it is’ or ‘I agree’. Most sensible commentators admit that it has come to be understood (at least) as a jocular abbreviation of some misspelled affirmation; though precisely what this might be is just as unclear: perhaps orl konfirmed or orl korrect. If the latter theory is the most likely, we can see how intrinsically paradoxical and dangerously ambiguous this seemingly innocent bit of American flippancy is. There is nothing in the least correct about abbreviating ‘all correct’ as O.K; not unless they are to suggest an even more heinous restructuring of English orthography than the one already carried out by Webster. The archetypal use for this word would seem to be the mimicking of a semi-literate worker in that immigrant society (perhaps a speaker of one of the languages from which the word is supposed to be derived) who is reporting on the completion of a (no doubt) botched job. Okay might therefore be called a brummagem abbreviation: a perfect word to be attached to this persona’s insecure treatment of narrative time; and yet another example of the connection between Birmingham—and all it stands for (and stands against)—and America, and all it stands for (and against).
It is important, I think, that the poet is blaming this OK time on the logic and stylistics of television. It strikes me that this medium is capable of dissembling and distorting time in a way that cinema is not. It must be difficult, perhaps impossible, to distinguish between live broadcasts and recorded pictures and therefore between fact and fiction. This is, of course, just as true where wireless is concerned, but the lack of visual content seems to make this infinitely less dangerous. What hysteria might have been created if Orson Welles’ infamous version of War of the Worlds had been ‘seen’ instead of simply ‘heard’ does not bear thinking about.

14.2 nicked:* ‘Tallied’, ‘resembled’, ‘stole’, ‘tricked’, ‘hazarded’, ‘guessed correctly’ etc.

14.6 Distinguished writer:* Perhaps Sterne is the most likely candidate. C18^th ‘romances’ with unusual narratives are often homages to Tristram Shandy, and the beginning of the coin’s narration in this poem (stanzas 27-29) is indisputably a parody of the first chapter of that novel.
    Unlike Thomas Bridges’ 1770 Adventures of a Bank Note however, the book cited here as the source of the narrative frame—The Birmingham Counterfeit, or The Invisible Spectator: a novel/romance anonymously published in 1772—makes no specific reference or allusion to Sterne’s infinitely superior work. The Birmingham Counterfeit is no doubt influenced by Adventures of a Bank Note, but Bridges hardly qualifies as a ‘distinguished writer.’
    The history of these fancifully covert first-person narrations seems to be as old as narrative itself. The earliest surviving text that might be loosely called a ‘novel’, for example, is the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius: a major source for both Boccaccio and Cervantes. Also known as The Golden Ass, this book (recently subject to a fine new translation by Robert Graves) is narrated almost entirely from the point of view of a man who has been transformed into an ass and can therefore observe human behaviour unseen. To all intents and purposes, Lucius (the ass) is an ‘Invisible Spectator.’ This narrative is a curious mix of the moral satire and prurient pornography: the two main uses of this technique. The former being exemplified by Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and the majority of ‘money talks’ narratives (of which more below), and the latter by the erotic cliché of the ‘Ovidian flea’ (‘Carmen de Pulice’: Dr Faustus v.285), which finds its most sophisticated embodiment in Donne’s ‘The Flea’ and its crassest in the anonymous salacious novel of 1887: Autobiography of a Flea.
    The Metamorphoses of Apuleius is an important antecedent of this text. Robert Graves, despite the clarity of his translation, is capable only of a dark introductory hint at the work’s most important feature where the current study is concerned. He explains the name, asinus aureus like this: ‘Professional storytellers, as Pliny mentions…, used to preface their street-corner entertainments with: "Give me a copper and I’ll tell you a golden story". So "golden" conveys an indulgent smile…’ (1950: p7) What Graves’s ‘indulgent smile’ occludes is the fact that aureus is also the name of the Augustan gold coin, which was undergoing a serious decline during the period. The name therefore implies asininus aureus ‘the assinine aureus’, a fact which ties in neatly with the pun in English The Golden Æs. (The æs ‘brass’ being the least valuable of Roman coins.) Lucius, whose only means of progressing from one episode to another is (like Black Beauty) to be the subject of continual barter transactions that never allow him to lose sight of the ongoing diminishment of his exchange value, is very similar to a circulating coin, clipped by each of its exploitative owners (and carrying the scars as proof). So, ‘give me an aes and I’ll give you an asin(in)us aureus’ is punningly and (heavily ironically) equivalent to ‘give me a penny and I’ll give you (back) a counterfeit sovereign… a fictional profit…’
    All ‘invisible spectators’ (not all as literal as Wells’ The Invisible Man) can trace their origins to the legend of Gyges—the mythical inventor of money, and the owner of the ‘ring of invisibility’—a discussion of which (along with some analysis of its ongoing use in the fiction of Professor Tolkien) will have to wait.
    The earliest narrative explicitly delivered by a coin that I can find is ‘Adventures of a Shilling’ by Joseph Addison (Tatler no. 249 November 11, 1710). Addison says the idea was suggested to him by an unnamed friend. A reference in the December 10^th entry of Journal to Stella reveals this friend (unsurprisingly) to have been Jonathan Swift. Addison certainly is a ‘distinguished writer’:

“I lay undiscovered and useless, during the usurpation of Oliver Cromwell.
    “About a Year after the King’s return, a poor Cavalier… fortunately cast his Eye upon me, and, to the great Joy of us both, carried me to a Cook’s-Shop, where he dined upon me, and drank the King’s Health… I found that I had been happier in my Retirement than I thought, having probably, by that Means, escaped wearing a monstrous Pair of Breeches.
    “Being now of great Credit and Antiquity, [this is a Queen Elizabeth shilling] I was rather looked upon as a Medal than an ordinary Moin; for which Reason a Gamester laid hold of me, and converted me to a Counter, having got together some Dozens of us for that Use. We led a melancholy Life in his Possession, being busy at those Hours wherein Current Coin is at Rest, and partaking the Fate of our Master, being in a few Moments valued at a Crown, a Pound, or a Sixpence, according to the Situation in which the Fortune of the Cards placed us. I had at length the good Luck to see my Master break, by which Means I was again sent abroad under my primitive Denomination of a Shilling.
    “… I fell into the Hands of an Artist, who conveyed me under Ground, and with an unmerciful Pair of Shears, cut off my Titles, clipped my Brims, retrenched my Shape, rubbed me to my inmost Ring, and, in short, so spoiled and pillaged me, that he did not leave me worth a Groat. You may think what a Confusion I was in, to see myself thus curtailed and disfigured. I should have been ashamed to have shown my head, had not all my old Acquaintance been reduced to the same shameful Figure, excepting some few that were punched through the Belly. In the midst of this general Calamity, when every Body thought our Misfortune irretrievable, and our Case desperate, we were thrown into the Furnace together, and (as it often happens with Cities rising out of a Fire) appeared with greater Beauty and Lustre than we could ever boast of before. What has happened to me since this Change of Sex which you now see, I shall take some other Opportunity to relate.

The ‘monstrous pair of breeches’ references John Philips’ ‘The Splendid Shilling: an Imitation of Milton’ which, at the end of the essay, the coin jocularly claims to have directly inspired, calling it ‘the finest burlesque poem in the British language.’ ‘The Splendid Shilling’ is itself burlesqued by James Bramton in 1743, the coin and the poem being rendered even more ironically grotesque and devalued as ‘The Crooked Sixpence’. It is along the same satirical lines that one supposes the author of The Birmingham Counterfeit to have copied Addison’s influential little piece: the ‘splendid’ shilling having become definitively ‘crooked’. It is rather formulaic and laborious, however, and has none of the verve of Addison’s short piece.
This sketch manages, in the space of just a page, to cast its eye over much of the territory of The Birmingham Quean: America, royalty, republicanism, Civil War, defacing of coinage, gambling, the phoenix, transsexualism, blindness, beggars and burlesque poetry.
Other examples of this oeuvre include: ‘The Adventures of a Halfpenny’ by John Hawkesworth in The Adventurer no. 43 (1753)—very much derivative of Addison’s; The Adventures of a halfpenny: commonly called a Birmingham halfpenny or Counterfeit: as related by itself (J.G. Rusher, Banbury 1820)—an illustrated children’s book; and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Sølvskillingen’ (1861).

15.2 Kickass:* Perhaps a term of derision like ‘Jackass’ but intensified by portmanteau to suggest that the he-ass in question is so stubborn and uncooperative as to require regular kicking. By what process of grammatical laxity it comes to be used as an adjective—let alone by what diabolical process of semantic revolution it, and the other words and phrases like it in this stanza, come to be synonymous with positive exclamations—I hate to think.
The overtones of asinus aureus are obvious.

15.2 dope:* Further to the equine connotations of the previous reference to an ass, ‘dope’ is most commonly used to refer to a preparation of opium employed in doctoring horses before racing in order to fix a result. According to one of the 1933 OED addenda, dope has also come in the U.S. to mean information regarding the condition of a racehorse, and thereby any form of more or less fraudulent ‘insider’ information (‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ as it were). The entire point of this narrative, however, is that we take great care to look this particular ‘gift horse’ (this ‘golden æs’) in the mouth.

15.3 hectic’s doper:* The effect of ‘dope’ is usually taken to be the opposite of the excited and disturbed condition of the ‘hectic’ (traditionally equivalent to a sufferer from consumptive fever). This difference is more than simply analogous to the ancient division of ecstasy (delirium) into melancholy and phrenesis. Traditionally, the diagnosis is made by observations of the complexion, temperature and pulse: the melancholic (or ‘doped’) patient having an unchanged pulse and temperature and a pallid complexion; and the frenetic (or ‘hectic’) having a raised pulse and temperature, and dark flushed skin. Melancholy and madness are in fact defined by Hippocrates (and all who followed him) specifically as delirium without the usual febrile symptoms. Robert Burton makes this quite explicit at the outset of his study: ‘Phrenitis… differs from melancholy and madness, because their dotage is without an ague’ (The Anatomy of Melancholy: Section I, subsection iv.) So, in expressing her fear of Hamlet’s madness when he sees the ghost in her bedchamber by saying ‘This is the very coynage of your Braine,/This bodilesse Creation extasie is very cunning in’ the Queen is diagnosing delirium as a result of melancholy not frenzy. Her son completely misunderstands her concern (which is excellent proof of just how right she is): ‘Extasie?/My Pulse as yours doth temperately keepe time,/And makes as healthfull Musicke.’ (Folio II.ii.1442-7)
Similarly, there is nothing ‘dope(d)’ about the ‘hectic’: just like the ‘bronzed’ complexion of the ‘brazen’ hussies who are the heroines of this piece (the coin and the West Indian drag-Queen), and the blushing reader on discovering he has been duped, the hectic is characteristically red-faced.

15.7 unexceptionably:* This is not the correct word. The intention of the phrase ‘unexceptionably fine’ is to denote ‘of unequalled value’ or, as a numismatist would say, ‘proof quality’. As a piece of generous conjecture, one might speculate that the correct word ‘unexceptionally’—which is currently a perfectly uncontroversial falling hexasyllable—might have deteriorated into a rising pentasyllable in the future of the poem; the poet could therefore deliberately be misemploying the subtly different concept of exceptionability in order, not to make any kind of nice distinction, but simply to maintain the prosody and thereby emphasize the couplet. Where the merit of artificial rhyme and scansion is concerned, however, one is sorely tempted to concur with the proposed resemblance of the phrase to the æsthetic qualities of canine gonads.

15.8 the flip-side of the coin:* Indeed this rhyme is, in the original King’s (or should I say Queen’s) English sense of the word, bad. The simplest gloss of the quasi-Americanism flip-side is ‘the reverse’. Such a reading could just as easily be obtained from ‘back-side’, however, and one has to assume that the decision to go with a neologism in place of such an obvious alternative (one whose sniggering prurience surely would recommend it to the context) is significant. There is a moment toward the end of the canto, (stanzas 215-216) when the coin expresses its deep desire to hang in the air, perpetually spinning. In this state, the coin would in fact look like a sphere, as described by the revolutions of its edge. One often forgets that the coin has not two, but three sides. Every time a coin is tossed there is a tiny, but genuine, theoretical chance that it will land on its edge. The flip-side might therefore be ‘that side of the coin visible when the coin is tossed or (in the American) flipped’: the edge—the liminus between heads and tails; the (revolutionary) surface of the coin that carries the threat of undermining the definitive game of binary probability.
We are talking about counters again: not simply words that stand both against and for themselves (as they spin perpetually in the air, as it were), but also words (and sexes, morals, politics, natures) which threaten to ‘stand on their edge’, refusing to come down on one side or the other so as to insist on the existence of this third (sublunar) dimension through which each of the ‘sides’ extends. It is this third edge which gives a coin its material substance, and its value, thus making it both more and less than the Platonic idea of a binary unit.

16.3 counteract:* era 2

16.5 single-minded:* Another of the terms undergoing semantic deterioration towards negative connotations which seem so popular in the construction of this decadent dystopia. The OED says this originally meant: ‘Sincere in mind or spirit; honest, straightforward; simple-minded, ingenuous.’ Clearly, the positive nature of single-mindedness is lost in an environment of such threatening ambiguity and equivocation.

16.6 stamping one-eyed logic out:* ‘To stamp out’, as well as to extinguish or eradicate, could also mean to emboss or (in the numismatic sense) to strike. Furthermore, the effigy of the monarch (‘single-rule’—the embodiment of the single-minded nation, in the original sense, and the defender of the monotheistic faith) on a coin is traditionally in profile and therefore—while cubism is kept out of the Royal Mint—only has one eye. This phrase therefore encapsulates the thematic and stylistic duplicities of the stanza by being simultaneously glossable as ‘eradicating single-mindedness’ and ‘counterfeiting the effigy of the monarch.’
It is worth noting the similarly ambiguous (and near antithetical) nature of the phrases with which this line rhymes. ‘On about’ is obviously a colloquial idiom meaning talking about (short for ‘going on about’), but in the clause ‘shady coins are what I’m on about’ there is an insistence upon the words ‘on’ and ‘about’ as prepositions rather than an abbreviation of a participle. If we literalize the clause, therefore, we might read it as: ‘counterfeit coins are what I am on [and] about’—i.e.: ‘I am the Queen [and] edge inscription’.
Similarly, ‘cast in doubt’ is a shoddily inverted version of the phrasal verb to cast doubt upon (itself a whimsical coinage that plays upon a reversal of the metaphorical idiom to cast light on [a mystery]) which manages to suggest that counterfeit coins are literally ‘cast’ in an alloy so dubious it is actually called ‘doubt’.

16.8 bin:* Despite what we hear from the proliferation of reproductions by lazy actors, there are a number of diphthongs which, rather than being protracted or interpolated by Industrial urban accents are often nullified: ‘seen’ can become ‘sin’, ‘been’—‘bin’, ‘take’—‘tek’ and so on. Other diphthongs are flattened; it is often an error to pronounce (as the poorly schooled at sounding poorly schooled habitually do) the word ‘go’ as ‘gow’ when it is far more often ‘goo’. The point is that these are flexible variations. At the end of a clause, these kinds of words will often broaden into the diphthong; within a clause however they are more likely to be monothongs. There are grammatical tendencies too: diphthongs being more often used for common nouns than common verbs, (which is an intriguing analogue to the grammatical stress-flip in certain noun and verb pairs in English: such as ‘conscript’ and ‘conscript’). When all is said and done, however, one would rather actors set an elocutionary example to the slack of vowels rather than attempt half-hearted emulations of their mumblings.

17.1 tales they could spin:* Another reference to the revolutionary liminality of the spinning coin. The pun on heady tales and heads & tails here is as close to a definitive exposition of its own technique of acute and unnerving narrative irony as the poem ever comes.

17.3 inkling:* Professor Tolkien runs a literary club here called The Inklings, the meetings of which I have once or twice had the honour of being invited to. Tolkien’s astute philological play on inkle-ings (insights) and ink-lings (the children of ink) is typical of the man. If I am right in saying of this poet’s politics and artistic vision that he is maintaining a strong position of traditional royalism, antidis-establishmentarianism, ennobling anti-capitalism (as opposed to the Marxian version), and a poetics of strong imagination coupled with plain speech—specifically by satirising the poetics and morals of the antithesis—then he could easily be a member of Professor Tolkien’s admirable group.
There are many thematic overtones shared by this poem and Tolkien’s own work in progress, The Lord of the Rings. Most obviously, I think, the resurrection of Plato’s myth of Gyges, and the recognition of its true allegorical import, is crucial to both texts. Both are aware of the golden ring of invisibility as the symbol of the invention of monetary tokenism to fuel the tyrannical ambitions, and both play on it in subtle ways. The entire motivational framework of Tolkien’s text is posited on the insidious influence of ‘The Ring’, and the quest is for the discovery of strength enough to overcome temptation and destroy it. If we replace ‘The Ring’ with ‘The Quean’ this drama might be understood as one very similar to Tolkien’s, but played out on the level of mimesis rather than of diegesis. Tolkien too, it should be remembered, comes from Birmingham.
To compare this poem to that of the Inklings might be to suggest, however, that Tolkien’s group are something like the Scriblerus Club. They most certainly are not. I hope they will not consider it reductive if I infer their outlook to be led, for the most part, by the writings of Owen Barfield, who suggests that the project of human literature should be to heal the linguistic fall by reconstructing a ‘mythopoetics’ which transcends rhetoric and speaks directly to the ancient wisdoms embedded in the collective unconscious. I find Mr Barfield’s arguments very cogent and refreshing in the main, but would not want to dismiss out of hand all ‘rhetorical’ devices, especially not in satires on the ‘fallen’ world. Like myself, the poet of this canto might be someone on the periphery of this group: admiring but in a position of fundamental disagreement; not a member, or even a regular attender, but someone who has glimpsed their work. If I were looking for him, this might be just the place to start.

17.3 the state we’re in:* A very commonplace pun.

18.4 rumour-mill:* Yet another hyphenated neologism suggestive of the linguistic environment of the future.

18.8 fingering a prince:* Aside from its bawdy connotations (played out in the following stanza), the verb to finger is used, one assumes, in the American slang sense ‘incriminate’ or ‘inform’, as in ‘to point the finger at’. This is heightened by the undertones of ‘steal’ and ‘handle covetously’, and the prestidigitative pun on fingerprints.

19.4 standpipe:* An all-too malleable and all-too ductile example of smutty tradesman’s cant.

19.4 tinkering:* ‘Mending or working metal in a clumsy, ineffective way.’ Many of the activities of the characters in this poem, not to mention the bungling octaves of the (shoddily worked) counterfeit narrator, might be described as ‘tinkering’. The double-entendres running through the plumbing of this stanza ring particularly hollow. If I dared risk such a tinny pun myself, I might say they plumbed the depths of taste.
There is also a potential allusion to the revolutionary republican ‘Tinker’ Fox here. (See 56.2 copper*)

19.5 riser:* See 19.4 standpipe*

19.6 sin:* This is a very carefully worded rhetorical question. Crucial to the proliferation of coining amongst C17^th political dissidents and non-conformists in the new Industrial areas of England was the notion of the sinless crime. That is to say, a crime which is arbitrarily identified by a tyrannical power and has no basis in scripture. There is nothing in the Decalogue which forbids anything like it; the injunction against the creation of ‘graven images’ being, in the popular imagination, a stronger argument for the sinfulness of the Crown in minting a quasi-divine image of the sovereign than of those who defy the monopoly it exercises. Coining, outside of London especially, seems to have been regarded by those who rejected the divine right of the monarch as a ‘social crime’ rather than a sin; like rioting or poaching, it was transgressive behaviour, subject to punishment by those in power, but justifiable as righteous action if the victims had themselves been identified as sinfully abusing power.
Complex attempts were made by educated people of the capital to justify the heavy punishments meted out on coiners; lawyers and clerics suggested that defacing or imitating the image of God’s chosen sovereign was a sinful form of High Treason. John Evelyn even went so far as to call coining ‘a wicked and devilish Fraud, for which no Punishment seems too great… one of the most wicked, injurious and diabolical Villanies Men can be guilty of.’ For Evelyn the coiner makes the King seem ‘as great a Cheat and Imposter as himself’ and pointed out (quite accurately) that adulteration of the coinage had been the first step in the decline of the Roman Empire. (Numismata, 1697, p.225)
It is quite obvious that such arguments, when received by the skewed ideology of capitalist non-conformism, were likely to exacerbate the situation. The last thing likely to convince the Birmingham coiners to halt their operations is a scholarly reference to the divinity of the Stuart monarchy as embodied in the commonwealth or the faded glory of Rome. Crucial to their thinking is the egalitarianism of all men—made in God’s image—subject only to Christ himself. The great moment of the Gospels in this regard—the crux for Lutheran fanatics of a rejection of all learned arguments over blind faith—is Matthew 22:15-22: the ‘quibbling’ Pharisees hand Christ the coin and he says:

Whose is this image and superscription?
They say unto him, Cæsar’s. Then saith he unto them,
Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsars;
and unto God the things that are God’s.

Taken far too literally and tendentiously, we can see how this might be seen to combine the following two glosses: firstly ‘we, being stamped with God’s image, all belong to God; Cæsar is no exception’; and secondly ‘if this coin were melted down and restruck with the image of the Jewish king you desire it would no longer belong to Cæsar; your acquiescence to the authority of Cæsar’s money is a defeat whereas my rejection of it is the ultimate victory.’ The fatal weakness of moving from these glosses to an argument condoning coining in C17^th England is patent: Christ pointedly avoids suggesting any criminal or revolutionary activity in preference for a transcendent vision which sees the coin as a symbol of man’s relationship to God, rather than the worldly token of exchange that the Pharisees, for all their political and philosophical finesse, completely fail to see beyond. It is crucial to my understanding of this passage that Christ does not make any reference to all of God’s ‘coins’ being of equal value. The fact that an analogy can be made between God’s and Cæsar’s coinages suggests that, just as in all currencies, the relative values of different pieces of differing intrinsic worth is not nullified by the sovereign stamp but asserted by it. A hierarchy of nobility amongst those who bear God’s image is therefore scripturally condoned.

20.1 docu-soap:* Perhaps a sort of amphibolous television programme (see 20.4 earwig*). There is also the possibility however of glossing this alloy as ‘didactic cash’ or ‘browbeating money’ (from Latin documentum ‘lesson’ and the American slang sense for soap ‘money’).

20.3 rig the joint:* ‘Rig’ here is used in the sense of ‘rigging a ship’: to ready the ropes and sails. ‘Joint’ is an American slang term meaning a place for illicit entertainment, drinking or drug-taking. Specifically, in this case, it might be intended to denote a fairground tent, the ‘fitting out’ of which would not be unlike rigging a ship. This would achieve two effects: firstly to perpetuate the tawdry environment of carnival slang, and secondly to reduce the substantial centrepiece of Britain’s constitutional monarchy to the status of a flimsy tarpaulin tent in which one hurls wooden balls at coconuts or peeks at gruesome biological oddities preserved in thick glass jars of yellowing formaldehyde.

20.3 cameras:* era 3

20.4 earwig:* The insect Forficula auricularia which is supposed to creep into the ear at night.
The phrase ‘fly on the wall’, referring to a privileged position from which to spy on somebody else’s activities, has become fashionable. The metaphor comes from the jargon of the American intelligence services who call hidden sound-recording devices ‘bugs’, presumably because the small microphones involved are sometimes disguised as domestic insects. At first sight ‘earwig’ seems to be used here as a verb meaning to take up this position of the ‘fly on the wall’, the bug, and to ‘eavesdrop’. (See notes to stanzas 14 and 15*on the ‘Invisible Spectator’, the Ovidian flea and asinus aureus.) The word ‘earwig’, however, does not mean to deliberately overhear—which would be inconsistent with the mythical ear-burrowing activities of the insect—but to insinuate or covertly influence. A docu-soap, in the purgatorial future envisioned in this poem, would therefore seem to be a ‘counterfeit documentary’, a television serial which presents itself as a ‘documentary film’ (an objective, observational form) but is actually a soap opera: a scripted ‘realistic’ quotidian drama designed (in the United States, of course) to influence housewives to buy certain brands of domestic products by interlacing advertisements with a recognisable portrayal of lives like their own. The idea is not only to debase the future status of our new Queen to one which is indistinguishable from a normal housewife, in furry slippers, but also to represent the monarch and her household as mere puppets of the scriptwriters of popular, commercial entertainment. The nightmare scenario is evoked of a Royal household whose sole function is to advertise the brands currently marked ‘by appointment…’, slavishly repeating words given to them by scriptwriters and therefore playing out artificial lives designed to be recognisable to the public in a seat of regal power which is nothing but a studio-set.

20.6-7 Big Brother:* A clear indication of the influence of Orwell’s novel on this poem; one that extends the reversal of televisual transitivity mentioned above by insinuating the haunting symbol of the ‘telescreen’, through which ‘Big Brother is watching you’.