Wednesday, June 05, 2019


A Measure of Inspiration: Demos, Aristos, Poetic Ambiguity & Leadership
A paper for The Poetics of Leadership: Creativity, art and story in enabling meaningful change. Conference at University of Cumbria 7th-8th September 2018
This paper examines "traditional", or hierarchical, leadership, order & "degree", through the lens of Shakespeare's "problem” play, Measure for Measure, contrasting that narrative world with a "life-world" situation in which so-called "non-hierarchical" leadership is assumed as the philosophical & preferential organisation. Analysis of the latter is drawn from over thirty years' experience working in Steiner Waldorf schools. The paper views these apparently contrary narratives & their accompanying "myths" (using the word as Roland Barthes applied it to the popular culture of his day) as devices that try to raise barricades in the way of the very ambiguities that their presence creates. 
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Google says, "Poetry & leadership go together". Its algorithm discovers 21 million results for "Poetry for Leadership", while typing, "Leadership & Shakespeare workshops", resulted in a further one million finds. That should not come as a surprise, although, on the whole, given the vast amount of writing about leadership, little of it could be called "poetic". Anyone brought up with Shakespeare's dramas, must know leadership & the character of leaders as a recurring theme. In nearly half of the plays, it is the major theme, in the others its presence fills the background.

Shakespeare's leaders are often tragic figures & exert an influence that has meshed with the literature of the English-speaking world & literature globally. The robes of Shakespearean kings  hang on the shoulders of many modern leaders, in fiction & otherwise. The mythic aura that is now scarcely separable from the historic Winston Churchill has much to do with the way he projected a Shakespearian persona (Henry V perhaps), while in contemporary theatre, Shakespearian lineaments dress George Jones, the central figure in David Hare's 1993 play, The Absence of War, based on the Labour party's failed 1992 election attempt. In the play Jones observes that his quoting of Shakespeare is mocked in parliament because of his northern (& assumed) low-brow background. But the Hare's characterisation of him is also profoundly Shakespearian. Even more recently, the West End, & nationally, successful play, King Charles III, saw the author, Mike Bartlett, using blank verse for a tragicomedy about the long-awaited accession & rapid abdication of the eponymous king in a style closely mirroring Shakespeare's history plays (Diana appearing as a ghost). Projecting Shakespearean leadership even further into the future, the actor, Patrick Stewart, remarked in an interview that playing Shakespeare's monarchs was the perfect preparation for life as a Star Trek captain!

Whether Julius Caesar, Richard II, Coriolanus, king, duke, thane, general, or all-purpose "nobleman", Shakespeare's tragic heroes sit at the top seats of their Renaissance worlds, in a similar manner to that advised for Machiavelli's Prince[1] . Leaders, both in Shakespeare & Machiavelli's conception are individuals surrounded by two categories of persons, henchmen & hangers-on, or potential & actual enemies (although the first group must always be suspected of having morphed into the second). Characters in the plays are, without exception, flawed in some way in spite of the great qualities expected of them. But, as Machiavelli, knew only too well, those qualities prove contradictory in the face of reality. The leader must maintain order in disorderly times, defend the realm, protect his own back, but, at the same time, he should be a moral example to his people. But the Prince, if he is to maintain good order in the state, which is his raison d'etre, it turns out, will have little choice but to be cruel in vengeance, unyielding & manipulative[2], for it is, after all, "better to be feared than to be loved". In Shakespeare too, the leader's flaws appear in dramatic contrast to the well-established ideals of the Christian ruler, such as the "king-becoming graces" listed by Malcolm in the Scottish play: "justice, verity, temperance, stillness,/Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness,/Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude...": surely the virtues of a saint rather than a Renaissance ruler. Tragedy bursts through its own measure, for no leader could completely embody any but a few of these. Found wanting, character gravitates through pity & fear towards a catharsis that will, almost certainly, mean death.

The power of these depictions, & of the potential for narrative in general, lies in their ability to engage thought & feeling simultaneously, in so doing to encompass ambiguity. The best designed theories, especially if they are to be academically respectable struggle to know what to do with ambiguity. While art has the option to simply represent (character, situation, conflict &c) leaving resolution in the cathartic moment, paused dynamically between uncertainties, academic theory tends to desire a strait path with no blind corners, smooth surfacing & a clean, white curb-line. There are innumerable theories seeking to break out from linear constraints, of course, including the famous "Uncertainty Principle". The existential revolt, for example, directed Jean-Paul Sartre to fiction as a means to convey what his philosophical writings could not. As he put it, "Everything has been figured out, except how to live". Meanwhile, a very different thinker, Alfred North Whitehead, summarised, "In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory". Whitehead compared his mode of thought, Process Theory, to that of his contemporary & colleague, Bertrand Russell. He characterised Russell's view of the world as a sharply defined seeing, in full, midday sunlight. His own thought, by contrast represented a blurry & indistinct vision, like the world at early morning, when not yet fully awake. For him the creation of the world was not a complete act (as Isaac Newton had conceived it), but an ongoing development carried forward through human agency.
                
Collegial leadership, as proposed for Steiner Waldorf schools, has something in common with what Sartre & Whitehead theorised. In founding the first Waldorf School in 1919, Rudolf Steiner was concerned to put the direction of the school in the hands of the school's teachers[i]. He opposed the idea that State institutions & "experts", not actively involved in classroom practice, should direct the schools[ii]. This opposition was twofold: First, he shared a scepticism about political interference in education (indeed, cultural life in general) expressed by John Stuart Mill[3], who was writing eight years before Steiner's birth; secondly, Steiner believed that the practical responsibilities of school organisation would help to prevent the teachers from losing track of everyday realities, ensuring they could stand in their classes as competent people-of-the-world rather than abstruse, scholarly pedants representing a "high", quasi-Classical, culture, with little connection to the needs of practical life[iii]. Steiner, nonetheless, acknowledged the historical role of State intervention as a short-term imperative, a means to free schooling from the influence of religious bodies. But he conceived this as a mere staging-post on the way to establishing a fully "free spiritual life" with teachers taking full responsibility for curriculum & educational method[iv]. The exercise of such freedom, however, rested, importantly, on enlightened inner attitudes & qualities that teachers would themselves cultivate, collegially. Time & again he returned to the theme of self-education, shared practical research & study. The phrase "learning community" was not used by Steiner, but it is clear that this was what he intended, & leadership too was to be understood in those terms[v].  

We must note that there is a paradox here. Up to what was to be a fatal illness (Sept -March, 1924-25), Steiner was, in effect, a "visiting Director" for the school. At one stage teachers complained that he "came too seldom" & remarked that things worked better in his presence (a complaint met with the repost, "then we must contrive a way to give the year 975 days"!)[4]. In addition to Steiner's involvement, Emil Molt, MD of the Waldorf-Astoria Zigarettenfabrike & the businessman who created the conditions needed for the school to open, also took the role of business manager for the school & remained involved even after the school was made independent of the cigarette business. Records of the "Conferences", the staff meetings, that took place when Steiner came to the school are striking for what they reveal about the formation of the new school & some of its struggles.

Where the UK is concerned, the first completely new[5] Steiner Waldorf school, was founded in 1925, but growth in the number of schools was gradual until the mid-1970s. The legacy of Steiner's wish for Waldorf schools to be self-managed has been marked in the way they have traditionally been organised, although, more recently a range of leadership & management forms have been adopted, including the employment of Principals (required for Steiner Academies), education & business managers & augmented administrators. Broadly speaking, we suggest, that considerations of the freedom for teachers has exerted, & still exerts, a stronger influence than the attendant need for continuous professional development, & action research. As a result, the "College of Teachers", a term generally used in the English-speaking world for what Steiner had called "the Teachers' Conference" (or meeting), has generally been regarded as binding principle. Thus what was introduced as a collegiate process has melded into formal, organisational, imperatives & structure. Within these, debate & (sometimes) disagreement about the nature of leadership & governance can sometimes erupt. This, more political, aspect of an increasing number of Waldorf schools, was given a further lease during the 1970s & 80s, when new Steiner Waldorf schools were founded under a zeitgeist of "spiritual" counter-cultural & "New Age" movements.

Dr Ernst Lehrs, a teacher & medical practitioner who joined the first Waldorf School soon after its inception sought to address this situation in a pamphlet entitled, Republican Not Democratic[6], published by the Association of Waldorf Schools North America. In this he describes the intended "republican constitution" for Waldorf schools as a fusion of democratic & aristocratic principles, enabling clear remits of responsibility to arise democratically through the will of the collegiate. Once agreed however, leadership was to be conferred on trusted individuals, thus becoming "aristocratic". For example, a teacher given the responsibility for arranging a school festival would be empowered to arrange the programme according to her, or his, best intentions & inspiration without interference, though with the proviso that the festival would be reviewed & any extension of the remit would then be at the further discretion of the collective. In spite of Lehrs' intention, however, the key problem for school leadership (common in most education, something akin to the art of herding cats) is frequently an inbuilt reluctance to genuinely empower a colleague so that authority fully accompanies responsibility & its attendant accountability. The dynamic of demos & aristos, & the mobile nature of leadership conceived by Lehrs is easily frozen within the school as institutional fait accompli.       

Each type of social organisation, or institution, produces mythologies, often rival narratives that can be used to justify or secure certain interests. Any mythology reveals some truth, but not all truths are progressive or enlightening. For Steiner Waldorf schools we might list the following regressive myths & their concomitants:
·       the schools employ flat management & are completely non-hierarchical
o   thus decision-making must inevitably be slow & (possibly) painful & incomplete
o   but those involved can prove their virtue by being dysfunctional  
·       that collegiality means there is no leadership
o   & this avoids the "tyranny" of "top-down", "conventional organisations"
o   while facilitating the tyranny of the stubborn or anti-social
·       that individual freedom of the teacher is sacrosanct
o   while the school claims that its ethos is "collegial"
·       that each school is a "sovereign institution"
o   although the reputation of individual school is linked with that of other Steiner Waldorf schools
o   in spite of inspection & increasing regulation
·       deviation from arrangements set out be Rudolf Steiner during the first five years of the first Waldorf School amount to a corruption of the education
o   in spite of clear indications that Steiner was continually responding to new & changing circumstances throughout that period[7] & his emphasis on avoiding any sort of "ideological" approach that might prevent a clear-sighted but richly open-hearted meeting of emerging "reality".   

As will be evident from this brief list, we do not assert that Steiner Waldorf schools are replete with answers. Steiner's insistence upon the avoidance of a programmatic approach, proposing instead a realistic or practical idealism forms a piece with his setting out of the foundations of "ethical individualism"[8], which we cannot explore in detail here. However, the aim of this paper is to draw attention to his clear intention that staff in the Waldorf School would work together to develop a methodology of research immediate to their vocation. Rather than relying on theory or defined "principle" he expected that teachers would work in an evolutionary way, mutually supporting one another in the enterprise of a phenomenological thinking, seeking to develop the school "in spirit", reading contemporary needs, through meeting the "riddle" that each child & each generation of children set before them.

One possible methodology for this can be found in the way Steiner himself worked. That methodology is implicit in Steiner's way of proceeding in the design of the Waldorf curriculum & is hinted at throughout his Philosophy of Freedom. The author of this paper has attempted to articulate this method in the introduction to the 2015 edition of Rudolf Steiner's Curriculum for the First Waldorf School (Floris Books). In brief, the essence of the approach involves a rhythm that works from introspection to extrospective space, recognising that "subject" & "object" are each products of thinking. Thus "inner", contemplative, activity stands in relationship to the sensory & evidential as the living sea-snail to a triton shell. In our experience of the methodology, it is rewarding & effective, but difficult. While its difficulty makes it hard to sustain it is both thorough & engaging once people commit to it.              

Unfortunately, such procedures are still little understood. We may live in "Liquid Times"[9] but the characteristic mode of thought applied to the fluidity of modernity remains stolidly crystalline, intent on fixing problems. Ancient Greek thought may no longer seem relevant, but reactive habits of mind continue among political leaders & the bureaucracies that advise them. Steiner's endeavour continues to be marginalised if only because of his association with "esoteric" spirituality. His use of the word, "spirit" included western Christian, Indian & oriental spirituality & thought, but his endeavour can be characterised as an project to overcome, a still powerful, model that draws from Classical thought. Indirectly criticised by Kierkegaard, this model, stands behind many current processes & exercises of leadership & governance, relying on legalistic "policy thinking", is retrospective & procedural in nature: law fixes what has already gone wrong, but itself is a shell without a living creature. In Kierkegaard's view, Greek thought & philosophy (he made an exception for Socrates) was a project to "recover eternity" & hence wisdom as that which had already been revealed at a moment of primal origin. Thus, the present was good insofar as it could be made to recover the past: "Greek culture did not understand the 'moment' & "did not define it with a forward direction, but a backward direction[10]". In Kierkegaard's view this meant that the Greeks looked towards the moment passing away into an eternal afterglow drawing sight away from emergent futures, from which arise inspiration for both personal & social leadership. Kierkegaard again: "The moment is that ambiguity in which time & eternity touch each other, & with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity & eternity intersects time"[11]. While these may seem to be "grand themes" beyond the ordinary scope of a discussion of educational leadership, Steiner's endeavour to create an evolutionary "spiritual science" capable of informing practical action, including educational work, calls for a certain bravery in confronting the difficulty of "living thinking". Dare we say, that by contrast, in the case of general academic discourse too, as soon as life rears up, speculation wants to sneak away like a philosophy professor claiming he has forgotten his raincoat.

With that image, we will pursue the errant professor with a final narrative. Measure for Measure belongs to a group of Shakespeare's plays that have been characterised as "problem plays"[12] & is usually regarded as the most problematic of these. If we suspend our disbelief, we enter Vienna at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Dukedom over which one Vincentio holds sway. But, right from the start, change is afoot. The duke, either because he plans a religious retreat, or because he believes he has allowed too much licence among the populous, is handing the reins of power to Lord Angelo, who, it appears is something of a moral Pharisee, a puritan, who (so the duke says), will act as a scourge to restore propriety. The duke himself has ruled, so he tells us, over-leniently:
  ..............................Now, as fond fathers,
Having bound up the threatening twigs of birch,
Only to stick it in their children's sight
For terror, not to use, in time the rod
Becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees,
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead;
And liberty plucks justice by the nose;
The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart
Goes all decorum.  [Act 1, scene 3]
But there is also a hint that the hand-over to Angelo is a test:
................................Lord Angelo is precise;
Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses
That his blood flows, or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see,
If power change purpose, what our seemers be
[Act 1, scene 2]

The duke withdraws, apparently on a mission that will take him far from Vienna, but, in (dramatic) fact, only as far as a nearby Friary, where with the help of his spiritual mentor, disguises himself as a member of the Franciscan in order to return to the city to observe the results of his social experiment. Back in Vienna, we are witness to the licentiousness of some of the Viennese youth in the Falstaffian setting of the Mistress Overdone's[13] tap-house (a brothel), now under threat of demolition by order to Angelo. Angelo's further measure for moral improvement is to reintroduce an ancient law by which any man found guilty of fornication is to be executed. A young man, Claudio, against whom the play hints that Angelo has some hidden malice, is immediately arrested under the newly reinstated law, although we are told, he is "all but married" to the now-pregnant Julia[14]. Claudio's sister, Isabella, on the point of committing her life to the convent of the Poor Claires, is prevailed upon to plea for her brother's life[vi], which she does reluctantly at first[15]. However, Angelo then gives way to his own repressed lust (he complains that it is her virtue that is the cause!), offering to release Claudio if Isabella sleeps with him. The disguised duke hears of this & rescues the situation by bringing it about that Angelo is manipulated into spending the night with Mariana, a women he jilted when her dowry was lost as the result a ship-wreck, believing that Mariana is Isabella having consented to the blackmail. Although, like Scarpia in Tosca, Angelo had given orders for Claudio to be killed in spite of Isabella's apparent compliance, the duke stages his "return" & - remember, we have to suspend our disbelief - everything ends with justice reasserted & all reconciled (the only beheading being that of a pirate, who conveniently resembled Claudio & who had already died of fever in prison on the same day as the latter's ordered execution). In the concluding scenes there is an unanswered question, one that comes out of the blue. As the resolution proceeds, Duke Vincentio proposes marriage to Isabella; she gives him no answer (she was after all preparing for monastic life) & the play provides no hint as to whether she will, or will not, accept.                                     
       
While Measure for Measure appears to be a play about sexuality & the abuse of power, I believe it succeeds also in placing before the audience a situation that is relevant to ourselves, in the most obvious sense, questions about the ethics of leadership, conflicting drives "interests" & the nature of authority & law. The play is full of ambivalences: is the Duke a magus figure intent on drawing out a far deeper corruption than mere sexual misbehaviour, or a weak but manipulative ruler playing games rather than dealing justice directly to his people? - why, at the beginning of the play, does everyone seem convinced of Angelo's purity, when he plunges so readily into trying to impose himself on Isabella & the back-story of his promised troth to Mariana, which would have left her "ruined" according to the norms of the time, must have been known to his circle?

A clue can be found in the way Angelo invokes that previously disused law against fornication. Everything we learn about his character indicates a brittle quality: he is a man set apart from others, who, through his own self-estimation, sets himself above the norm. Law in such hands, we discover soon becomes dangerous & he is revealed as the very character Isabella draws for him (note the mixing of Christian & Classical - "heathen" -imagery here :
Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder;
Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
[Act II, scene 1]

Indeed the little taste of authority given by the duke goes to his head (& quickly!). But Duke Vincentio, in spite of his plotting is also brittle. And "plotting" is the word that fits here because he becomes proxy for the play's author, scheming, intervening but, finally, caught up in his own devising. There is also a streak of cruelty in his make-up (he lets Isabella believe that her bother has been executed even after he has revealed how Angelo has been tricked). But although Vincentio is the instigator of moral movement, the action ends in uncertainty, for the plot is still in the process of unfolding as the play comes to an end. The title of the play also carries an internal contradiction. The line in which the title appears is spoken by the Duke after he has engineered the unmasking of Angelo & condemns him to execution (although before he reveals that Claudio is still alive): "An Angelo for a Claudio, death for death/ Hate still pays hate, & leisure answers leisure;/Like doth quit like & Measure still for Measure". What Vincentio proposes here is retribution, an eye for an eye, but his Bible-educated audience would have known that this is drawn from the Gospel of St Matthew: "Judge not that ye be not judged, For with what measure ye judge, ye shall be judged & what measure ye mete shall be measured to you again"[16]. And earlier, Isabella had - ironically in view of what Angelo later demands - that he to look into his moral core before proceeding to enact the law against her brother's life:
Go to thy bosom,
Knock there & ask your heart what it doth know
That's like my brother's fault, if it confess
A natural guiltiness, such as his
Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue
Against my brother's life...
[Act II, scene 2]  

The great theatre director, Peter Brook, produced Measure for Measure for a famous & influential 1950 production with John Gielgud as the Duke, a production that helped to reappraise the play for modern audiences. Twenty years later Brook returned to the play in his book, The Empty Space[vii]. He argues that the ‘absolutely convincing roughness and dirt’ of the ‘disgusting, stinking, world of medieval Vienna’ gives Isabella’s plea for grace and mercy more meaning than it could have in ‘lyrical comedy’s never-never land’. For Brook, then, the problem of the play is also the solution: its dramatic and ethical essence lies precisely in the irreconcilable juxtaposition of what he calls ‘the Holy and the Rough’ that the nineteenth century scholar, Frederich Boas, found so uncomfortably perplexing. In Brook's summation moral ambiguity is very much the point:        
If we follow the movement in Measure for Measure between the Rough and the Holy we will discover a play about justice, mercy, honesty, forgiveness, virtue, virginity, sex and death: kaleidoscopically one section of the play mirrors the other, it is in accepting the prism as a whole that its meanings emerge[17].

Numerous studies of leadership feed a popular narrative. In that version of things, leadership is individual: extraordinarily skilled, powerful, charismatic, or psychopathic (possibly all four). Books such as Why Should Anyone Be Led by You[18] are studies of individuals in major public roles (Sir Martin Sorrell, Greg Dyke, Darwin E. Smith, CEO of Kimberley-Clark, Peter Brabeck, of Nestlé &c). Although the book emphasises the situational nature of their effectiveness & stresses that that has much to do with the way the individuals deal with their personal weaknesses, it is also a book of names with a focus that does not take in collegial relationships other than the warning that the leader should avoid becoming too close to the led. Measure for Measure demonstrates that, all but for the plotting Duke, an Angelo wields ultimate & unstoppable power to destroy. Waldorfian collegial leadership may have its problems, but the approach places blocks against tyranny because the collegial team retains the prerogative to award, or rescind authority. More to the point, when managed consistently, it integrates a task-orientated developmental path in which the whole is involved so that individuals act within the consciousness of being partial, inter-dependent agents of a collective without which leadership would be impossible. Leadership as process necessitates an inclusive learning gesture &, ethical sensibility to which structural position must be at most, secondary.               

A Coda:
Questions of leadership are irretrievably bound into the issue of power:  where that power originates & how power is distributed. The ambiguity here is that it is all too common & trite to say that "power corrupts..." & while that is also an evident truism the nature of the way in which power corrupts is far from straight-forward. Perhaps is would be better to note that - to adopt the usage with which Shakespeare would have been familiar (as an intransitive) - power must decay, but that fixation with power binds the moral character of the one wielding it to inescapable entropy. In Livy's semi-mythical account, the patrician hero of early Rome, Lucius Quintcius Cincinnatus, was especially distinguished, for taking complete control of the State in a time of danger &, once invasion had been defeated, setting aside all trappings of authority to return to his plough; the exceptionalism of the story being very much to the point. The Socrates of Plato's Republic would have had no truck with the idea that leadership & self-interest might reside in the same frame, but that part of the Dialogue, involving Thrasymachus[19], who springs to attack Socrates' argument, "like a wild beast" suffers from more than the usual debating trickery. Not only does Plato load the dice by drawing a repellent portrait of Thrasymachus's character (his contribution is like that of a "bath-man [having] deluged our ears with his words"), but Socrates counter arguments circumscribe questions of justice & power at great length without coming to a point. We should take note, perhaps of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in demonstrating how power can shape a society so that both the powerful & powerless internalise its norms so that we come to think of those norms as our own. North Korea, perhaps provides the ultimate paradigm.....          
Is this Shakespeare's own summation of Measure for Measure?
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
[Sonnet 94]
...finally, a Jewish story:
A young man urgently way-lays his rabbi with question: "Master what really is the Talmud[20]?"
The rabbi replies: "I'll give you a picture & a question. Two men enter a chimney, &, when they emerge, one is covered in soot & the other has remained clean. Which one of these goes home to clean himself?
"Why the one covered in soot".
"Not so", the rabbi replies, "for the one who is covered in soot looks at the one who is clean & thinks he too must be clean, while he, who is clean looks at the other &, thinking himself to be covered in soot, goes at once to clean himself.
"Now, I ask you again: Two men enter a chimney, &, when they emerge, one is covered in soot & the other has remained clean. Which one of these goes to clean himself?
"Well, the clean one then".
"Not so", replies the pursues, "For, you see they have a mirror, so the one who is clean knows he is so & the one covered in soot goes to clean himself".
"I think, I understand".
"No", says the rabbi, "that is not the Talmud yet. But where have you ever seen a chimney into which two men might climb & one emerge clean, while the other is covered in soot? That, is the Talmud".
       
                            



[1] The Prince, Machiavelli, Nicholo, first published 1553, but distributed in manuscript from approximately 1513 
[2] For example: "Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared". (ibid)
[3] On Liberty  Mill, J.S. p 239: “A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body”.

[4] Conferences, Vol 3, p 11, 15-10-1922
[5] "the first completely new....school". Steiner visited Britain & gave lectures at the request of Margaret MacMillan, a pioneer of early childhood education. During this tour, Steiner met & influenced, Margaret Cross, the owner of a small independent boarding school in Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, The Priory School, which incorporated many of Steiner's educational ideas. Much later this became the Rudolf Steiner School Kings Langley. There is a painful irony in that this school, which became the "New School" when a group of teachers broke with the imperious Miss Cross has now closed as a result of a combination of in-fighting & incompetence
[6] My personal view is that this title gives a false view of Lehrs' argument, & that this should read, "Republican & Democratic" since, without the habits & courtesies of democracy, a republican way of working could not be achieved. 
[7] See Rudolf Steiner's Curriculum for the First Waldorf School, Stockmeyer, E.A.K. (compiled) with introduction Avison, K, Floris Books, Edinburgh 2015
[8] In particular, The Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner, R.
[9] Liquid Times: living in an age of uncertainty, Bauman, Z. Polity Press, 2007
[10] Kierkegaard, quoted in Caputo, J.D. Radical Hermeneutics, Indiana University Press, 1987
[11] (ibid)
[12] A description first used by the nineteenth century scholar, Frederich Boa (1896) He described Measure for Measure as a comprehensive example of the type, a problem in its structure, mood & the demands made on the audience....! 
[13] In contrast to the way Falstaff & his milieu is presented, Shakespeare seems at pains to underscore the lewd nature of these "low" characters. When a question is put about Overdone's marital status, the answer follows that she has been married nine time, "Overdone by the last"     
[14] For Shakespeare's audience, the concept of marriage was unlike that of more recent history. Formal religious solemnisation was still relatively rare during the Elizabethan & Jacobean period, with "hand-fasting", the practice of joining the right hands of the couple who then declared aloud before witnesses that they accepted one another as man & wife was usual (Shakespeare's own marriage, in 1582, probably took this form & he is recorded as witnessing a hand-fasting is 1604 & was witness to a suite about the dowry in 1612). Such "ceremonies" could take place anywhere witnesses were able to assemble (outside, at the bride's home, in a tavern...) & the marriage was legally binding, only to be dissolved by the death of one party. Common Law marriage remained valid in law until 1753         
[15] In many ways, Isabella is a counterpart to Angelo, equally puritanical & not at all sure she should plead for her brother. Her first speech, an interrupted conversation with the Mother Superior indicates this with extraordinary brevity: ISABELLA:
And have you nuns no farther privileges? FRANCISCA: Are not these large enough? ISABELLA
Yes, truly; I speak not as desiring more;/But rather wishing a more strict restraint/Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare

[16] Gospel of St Matthew, Chapter 7, verses 1-2
[17] The Empty Space, Brook, Peter. Pelican Books 1972
[18] Why Should Anyone Be Led by You, Goffee, R & Jones, G, Harvard Business School Press, 2006
[19] The Republic of Plato, Book 1
[20] The Talmud is the source from which the code of Jewish Halakhah (law) is derived. It is made up of the Mishnah and the Gemara. The Mishnah is the original written version of the oral law and the Gemara is the record of the rabbinic discussions following this writing down. It includes their differences of view.



Endnotes:
[i] The State will tell us how to teach & what results to aim for, & what the State prescribes will be bad. Its targets are the worst ones imaginable, yet it expects to get the best results! Today's politics work in the direction of regimentation & will go even further than this is its attempts to make people conform. Human beings will be treated like puppets on strings 7 this will be regarded as progress. Institutions like schools will be organised in the most arrogant & unsuitable manner Steiner, R. Teachers' "Conferences" 20-08-1919 Vol. 1 p 34, 
[ii] The school, therefore, will have its own management run on a republican basis & will not be managed from above. We must not lean back on the orders of a Principal; we must have a republic of teachers & kindle in ourselves the strength that will enable us to do what we have to do in full responsibility. each one of you, as an individual, has to be full responsible. (ibid)
[iii] ....an unconscious, antisocial prejudice, that educators are impractical people, divorced from the realities of life. How could they possibly be able to organise things by themselves, & serve practical needs properly?.........Whoever thinks like this fails to see that it is when teachers are not allowed to decide for themselves, either their broadest aims or the smallest details....that they become impractical & remote from reality. However many guidelines are heaped upon them....they will not be able to educate..[so as to]...equip those in their care for the business of life. Steiner, R. in "The Spirit of the Waldorf School, lectures surrounding the founding of the first Waldorf School in 1919. Anthroposophic Press, NY, 1995, p.9
[iv] It was a necessary stage in the development of human & social relationships for the circles which, in medieval times oversaw education & culture, to be relieved of this function & for the state to take control. But to perpetuate this is a serious social error......
Within the framework of the state, cultural & spiritual life has grown towards freedom, but it cannot become fully free within these structures. It needs to be autonomous.....Education, from which all spiritual & cultural life emerges & develops must be administered by educators, without interference from political or economic quarters. (ibid)
[v]With us everything depends on the free individuality of each teacher. Actually there is no school director in the usual sense....Instead of a school director or head-teacher, we have the teachers' conferences, in which there is common study & common striving towards further progress....Today our teachers cannot know what will be good in the Waldorf in five years' time, for in these five years they will have learned a great deal & out of that knowledge they will have to judge anew...RS, "Human Values in Education" Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971 p 112. From lectures given in Arnheim, Holland, 17th July 1924
&
All the experience & knowledge acquired from teaching should be "put in a pool" at these meetings. In this way the teachers, in spirit & soul, becomes a whole where each member knows what the other is doing, what experience has taught & what progress has been made as a result of work in the classroom. The teachers' meeting becomes, in effect, a central organ whence the life-blood of the practical teaching flows, helping to maintain freshness & vitality. "A Modern Art of Education" RSP 1972  p 209. Lecture in Ilkley, UK, 17th August 1923
&
First & foremost there are the children. And then there are the teachers.....The school must be run in such a way that one does not set up an abstract ideal, but allows the school to develop out of the teachers & out of the pupils. "Human Values in Education", RSP 1971 p 22 
   
[vii] Brooks wider thought about theatre (in The Empty Space) views it as a hermeneutic device:
Truth in theatre is always on the move. As you read this book, it is already moving out of date. it is for me an exercise, now frozen on the page. but unlike a book, the theatre has one special characteristic. It is always possible to start again. In life this is myth, we ourselves can never go back on anything. New leaves never turn, clocks never go back, we can never have a second chance. In the theatre, the slate is wiped clean all the time.

In everyday life, "if" is a fiction, in the theatre "if" is an experiment. In everyday life, "if" is an evasion, in the theatre "if" is the truth. When we are persuaded to believe in this truth then the theatre and life are one. This is a high aim. It sounds like hard work. To play needs much work. But when we experiences the work as play, then it is not work anymore. A play is play.


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