Young Bradman

151 Chapter eleven: These Our Actors It is, you know, not the sorrows of this life but its wantonness and its untamed abundance that, when we think of them, bring us near to tears. Ernst Juenger, On The Marble Cliffs (1939) The statue to Shakespeare in Sydney was strange, because it was ten years late for a start. The city wanted to mark the 300 th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death; war got in the way. Most people who cared wanted something practical, a scholarship or a library; the man who wanted the statue most, Henry Gullett, who more to the point put up the colossal £10,000 for it, died in 1914. The sculptor was Australian, working in England; the marble was Italian; the bronze figures of Shakespearean characters at the base, cast in London. Above all it made no sense, when it went up in the gardens behind the Mitchell Library in the summer of 1926/27, because (as some did point out) Shakespeare never heard of such a place as Australia. As with so many statues, it said more about the place and the people choosing it. An anonymous reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald suggested the memorial was ‘to one of their own race’, ‘a citizen of Sydney in Elizabethan hose and doublet’. Sydney sought to belong to a wider, English-speaking world. On the anniversary of Shakespeare in April 1926, it gave an excuse for a costume ball (mainly Tudor) and brought a bumper and exclusive crowd to the annual conversazione at the University of Sydney. The Governor of New South Wales, Sir Dudley de Chair, told the gathering: ‘It seemed that the world gave its richest crown of immortality not to its men of commerce or of politics, but to its poets, whose art was universal, like that of Beethoven, Titian and Michelangelo.’ Even if some of those ‘leading figures in art, commerce and politics’ at the event had never read or heard a line of Shakespeare, at least they were showing, for one evening, they had a history and a culture. That did mean having to sit through the university vice-chancellor, ‘who spiritedly defended Shakespeare from his detractors and the sceptics’. A book reviewer did the same in the Herald later in the year: People have argued that it is impossible that a provincial tradesman’s son, who left school before his education was complete to be apprenticed to his father, and who afterwards joined a company of players in London in a humble capacity, should have written the greatest of all English plays. But this argument leads nowhere ... the thing happened. Men have been able to speculate that others wrote Shakespeare’s plays, because we know so little about him; it would be daft to suggest that someone made Bradman’s runs for him. Fashion in statues, as all things, has changed. After two world wars and as more people think for themselves, we no longer raise statues to admirals, generals and kings, but – if to anybody – sportsmen. In his 2016 book about Trumper, Gideon