A To Z Challenge 2022: Shakespeare- I Is For Iago

Iago played by Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth. Public Domain

 Iago is the villain of the play Othello. Othello is a Moorish general, working for Venice. A black man. He marries the beautiful Desdemona, though he is a lot older than her. In fact, his experience is what attracts her to him, all those exciting - and sad - stories a young man would never have up his sleeve. They get married off stage at the very beginning of the play. Nobody can do anything about it, though they don’t like it.

And who do you see telling her father about it? In horribly vulgar and racist language? Iago! 

Here is the line: “An old black ram is tupping your white ewe.” 

So we know from the very first that he is no friend of Othello, whatever the Moorish general thinks.

I’m sorry, but I just can’t feel any sympathy for Iago. None! Mind you, he certainly gulls Othello pretty easily. 

But Iago is popular. He is the sort of guy you’d share a drink and a song with at the pub - in fact, he does sing a drinking song later in the play, “Let me the canikins clink”. Everyone likes and trusts him. Well, his wife, Emilia, doesn’t quite trust him, though she doesn’t think till too late that he would do that. 

They go to Cyprus, where Othello is to be in charge, and here all the nastiness begins. 

See, Iago is expecting a promotion. He doesn’t get it; it goes, instead, to Othello’s best friend Cassio. A stupid decision on merit, really, because Cassio is not very bright. But given that Iago has already been going behind his back, maybe the idiot was a better choice.

However, it’s made pretty clear that Othello has no idea of this. It’s nothing personal, it really isn’t. He just prefers Cassio. 

But Iago decides to get revenge and succeeds, persuading Othello that Desdemona is unfaithful, so that the stage in the last scene is covered with dead bodies - Desdemona, Othello, even Iago’s wife, whom he killed in a fit of rage for speaking out. 

And what is all this about? Missing out on a job! No, really, I just can’t find any sympathy for him! He does get some of the best lines in the play, mind you. He is the one who uses the term “green-eyed monster” for jealousy - I bet you have heard that one, even if you haven’t read or seen the play. 

And then there is his speech about the importance of a name: 

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.

Well, he should know about that!  

I have seen this on stage, in Tel Aviv, at the Cameri Theatre, in Hebrew. I was so familiar with the play in English that I was comfortable with it in Hebrew. 

But I mostly remember the actor who played Iago(the week before he had played Antonio in The Merchant Of Venice and the actor playing Othello was the Prince Of Morocco, very funny in the role). He was amazing. He played the good old Iago everyone likes, including Othello. He led the boys in that drinking song. 

And in the very last scene, being led away to execution, he was utterly chilling, as he turns back and - laughs. He is proud of what he has done and has no regrets. 

Here are a few actors who have played the role. One was Andy Serkis, on stage in 1992 - yes, that Andy Serkis, Gollum! 

Kenneth Branagh, who played Iago to Laurence Fishburne’s Othello in a 1995 film I haven’t seen yet.

The photo above is of Edwin Booth, back in the 19th century. He was the brother of the crazed assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and he played Iago. There is a film about him, Prince Of Players, with Richard Burton in the role.

Ian McKellen played the role in a filmed version of Trevor Nunn’s stage version in 1990. Well before Gandalf! 

I have good news for you, that one is on YouTube for free! Here is the link. https://youtu.be/oX0cbcrMAdo

It’s a plum role for a fine actor. Nice, too, that there is no more blackface for the role of Othello. 

A To Z Challenge 2022: Shakespeare- H Is For Henry

 Shakespeare wrote several Henry plays, about the Kings of that name between Henry IV and Henry VI - two Henry IV plays and three Henry VI plays. And one Henry V play, of course. And he co wrote Henry VIII with another author, John Fletcher. (I believe that was the play being performed when the Globe Theatre burned down, so I bet Shakespeare never forgot it!)

One of the Henry VI plays may have been his very first play, so they were not done in chronological order. 

I do remember the TV series The Life Of Shakespeare with Tim Curry, where the play is being performed to wild acclaim and Shakespeare, feeling very smug, is sitting in the pub with Christopher Marlowe, who lets him know he isn’t impressed with it. It needs characters you can care about, says Marlowe. He suggests that, as Shakespeare has a son he loves he could start from there. (A reference to the civil war in those plays and “a father who has killed his son” meeting “a son who has killed his father”).  

I won’t be going into detail about all of them here. You can watch them all on The Hollow Crown, currently on Prime. 

Prince Hal. Public Domain

My favourite of them was Henry IV Part I, which introduces the comical Falstaff and the cheeky Prince Hal, later to become the heroic Henry V and get his own play.

Henry IV was the son in Richard II. His father, John of Gaunt, did that amazing speech about “this England”. Henry usurps the throne at the end and vows a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to make up for it. Which he never does get around to. By Henry IV Part I, he is a father, worrying about his son Prince Hal, who is hanging around with the riffraff at a London inn, including the awful Falstaff, boozing and wenching, instead of preparing for his future role. Hell, there is a war going on with Scotland! And who is showing Hal up? A young man called Henry Percy, nicknamed Hotspur, son of the Duke of Northumberland. 

By the way, Hotspur in real life was a lot older than Prince Hal, but Shakespeare wanted to be able to compare them, so made him younger. 

But Hotspur rebels when Henry IV shows ingratitude, as he sees it. After all, the Percy family did help him get the throne.

If you see this in The Hollow Crown, Hotspur is played by Jonas Armstrong, who was a gorgeous Robin Hood in the BBC TV series, and Tom Hiddleston as a beautiful, mischievous Prince Hal. 

Thing about Prince Hal, he is only pretending to be a disgrace to his family, so that when he reforms everyone will like him better. Not sure I liked that much, which is why I have always preferred Hotspur. 

Anyway, Hal turns up to help his Dad when needed. 

Henry V shows Hal all grown up and King. He is planning to attack France because there is some argument over who it belongs to. He thinks it should belong to the English.

When the French send him a box of tennis balls and tell him to stick to this sort of stuff suited to his age, he has his excuse and off he goes to France, winning the battle of Agincourt and marrying the French princess, Katherine, who doesn’t speak English, but asks her English-speaking lady, Alice, for words. 

In the meantime, we find out what is happening to his old mates at the inn. Falstaff, who never comes on stage, is dying of a broken heart after Hal rejected him when coming to the throne. Mistress Quickly, the owner of the inn, describes his death in a long speech.  The bunch decide to join in the war. Unfortunately, one of them, Bardolph, is hanged for looting. In the Kenneth Branagh film, there is a flashback to the days of the inn, when someone holds his hands around Bardolph’s neck, suggestive of a noose.

Reading this play, I found out that Staines, a town mentioned in it, was much older than I realised when I stayed there on a visit to England! 

It is definitely a patriotic play, and was used as wartime propaganda when Laurence Olivier filmed it during WWII. The music was by William Walton, but also figured the Agincourt Carol. The film started in Shakespeare’s time, with a busy London street, then in the theatre. It moves on to the real world, including an amazing Battle of Agincourt and finally returns to the theatre, with a boy actor as Princess Katherine.

It’s up on YouTube if you want to see it. 

Remarkably, so is the Kenneth Branagh film, which I haven’t been able to find elsewhere, though I would be happy to buy it.

In The Hollow Crown, the role of Henry is played by Tom Hiddleston and begins with seeing him in his coffin while his family come to pay their respects. Of course, Henry V died young, leaving his baby son as king, and he inherited his mental illness from his mother’s family(his French grandfather thought he was made of glass). 

There is a recent film with Timothee Chalamet, The King, which has some Shakespeare elements, but not all. For one thing, Falstaff is not the silly old man shown in Shakespeare’s play. He is a strong character who goes to war with his King and actually has some brains. Well, he was a fictional character anyway, though he was thought to be inspired by a real person, whose family were annoyed by his presentation by Shakespeare. So why not? 

It’s worth taking a look on YouTube for different versions of the famous Crispian’s Day speech. It includes a scene from an American film in which an American soldier is challenged to say what he thinks of what they are doing, and smiles as he recites that speech.

Time for me to get back to bed and see if I can throw off this COVID thing! 

An Interview With Sarah Tolmie by Bryn Hammond

 Today I present for you an interview of author Sarah Tolmie, whose new book All The Horses Of Iceland has just been published by Tor. The actual interview was done by author Bryn Hammond, who kindly agreed to post it here. It looks amazing! I may have to get my own copy.

Take it away, Bryn! 

Author Sarah Tolmie

All the Horses of Iceland 

Sarah Tolmie 

A hypnotic historical fantasy with gorgeous and unusual literary prose, from the captivating author of The Fourth Island.

Everyone knows of the horses of Iceland, wild, and small, and free, but few have heard their story. Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland weaves their mystical origin into a saga for the modern age. Filled with the magic and darkened whispers of a people on the cusp of major cultural change, All the Horses of Iceland tells the tale of a Norse trader, his travels through Central Asia, and the ghostly magic that followed him home to the land of fire, stone, and ice. His search for riches will take him from Helmgard, through Khazaria, to the steppes of Mongolia, where he will barter for horses and return with much, much more.

All the Horses of Iceland is a delve into the secret, imagined history of Iceland's unusual horses, brought to life by an expert storyteller.

Bryn. I thought your style owed somewhat to the sagas, which can be terse, rather phlegmatic on emotions, with a liking for simplicity in telling. Did you set out to write in saga-style? Did the sagas guide you in how to write your story?

Sarah.

Yes, the book is explicitly in saga style. This means some telescoping of action, not the kind of detailed description of travel you get in travelogues or in today’s historical fiction. Travel in itself is not of interest in sagas: it’s a means to an end, and that end is making money. So it’s trade protocols, laws, ceremonies, personalities, all those things that facilitate strangers getting to know one another and working out their relations that they tend to concentrate on (those sagas about “wide-travellers” like Eyvind at least).

Bryn. You also drew upon the Secret History of the Mongols. Most obviously, you transpose names from the Secret History into your ninth-century story, while your note cautions us that these have no relation to the people of the same name from the life of Chinggis Khan. How else did the Secret History feed into your story? Did you think about sagas – any equivalences or contrasts – while you worked with their thirteenth-century contemporary, the Mongol biography of Chinggis with its features of history-writing, oral poetry, and tale? 

Sarah.

Well, the frame story of Jór, the 12-century monk who compiles Eyvind’s 9^th-century story from its various fragmentary sources and translates them into Icelandic, making it broadly into a family saga, introduces a similar distancing problem. While many of the events of the Settlement period (in Iceland, that is, so during the 9^th century) are recorded in surprising detail, the sources that record them all date from about 250 years later. While The Secret History of the Mongols seems to have been written admirably close to Temüjin’s own lifetime, there is the problem that the text as we have it had to be reconstructed back to its Mongolian original from the work of Chinese transcribers over several succeeding centuries. So very broadly speaking we’re looking at a similar gap. It’s one all medievalists are familiar with and have to strategize around: the gap between dateable history and the chronicles that record it, and the different ways in which oral history, genealogy, folklore and law function and appear before and after they occur in writing.

Bryn. You mention Grettirs Saga in your notes, which I confess is the saga of my heart: to me it is a great work of outsider fiction, and Grettir has unusual interactions with unusual women. As well, it has visitations from the dead, as you do. Your main character Eyvind believes only in ‘men, animals, ghosts, and luck’ – not in gods, as he travels through several religious zones; and asks, ‘What does a ghost have to do with religion?’ He kind of steps in and sorts out the supernatural situation in the qan’s tents, at risk of ritual offence. Ghosts are a universal language, then? 

Sarah. 

Ghosts occur in every culture I know of, at least. The dead have to be accommodated into every society, whether that be as ancestors to be worshipped, consulted and propitiated, souls to be prayed for or from whom to seek intercession, or whatever it may be. If you have a genealogy, you are likely to have ghosts. The weird space ghosts have come to occupy in supposedly post-secular culture – the horror space – always strikes me as a sad state of affairs, reflecting the loss of historical vision in our day. Ghosts now are just signs of trauma, undifferentiated.

Bryn. Eyvind despises gods, and he despises seithr – the magic of the Norse world. To him the practice of seithr, associated with women, is ‘unmanly nonsense’ and ‘effeminate’. In your steppe culture, too, it is women we see as practitioners of magic, but here Hoë’lün is the mother of the qan’s wife and comes from a line of ‘white magicians of high rank.’ She connects magical ability with disability of body, which is news to Eyvind. How did you want to present magic in each of these societies?

Sarah. 

When you look at who magicians or shamans are, case by case, in many societies, you see people who are variously disabled: blind, sterile, with impaired mobility or unusual speech. (You also see plenty of women and foreigners.) This is true right back into the Neolithic period from the limited fossil evidence we have from burials – these are the people we might expect subsistence level societies to destroy or expose, yet instead they are honoured and preserved. Any fear or revulsion they might generate works to make them sacred. People who present physically as being marginal are, logically, ones you might expect to be able to act at the margins of your society: to interact, always riskily, with spirits or gods. They are the police of that boundary. Perhaps it means that if they are harmed or killed in such endeavours it’s a smaller loss; perhaps their difference and potential monstrosity means that such others, spirits or gods, are more cautious with them, or feel kinship with them.

Bryn. A related question. In your notes you say ‘I avoid using the words Viking or shaman, both of which are often used irresponsibly, in my opinion.’ Instead you call Hoë’lün a magician,  although you also use the culture-specific word udugan. What did you want to shake off in not using ‘shaman’? (I needn’t ask what you want to shake off by not using ‘Viking’ – it’s probably like me and ‘horde’). 

Sarah. 

There’s a lot of flaky talk about shamans. It’s used a lot by people who want to claim authority for a religious role but don’t want to use priest, because that word implies institutional power. And because monotheists have invested so much in the word priest, perhaps, and poisoned it. Shaman is a term used to cover a lot of woolly thinking about religion and magic. Any kind of animism is apparently the province of a shaman (i.e., a priest of any of this broad range of religions, without using this term) and can be occupied therefore without institutional sanction (as with many self-proclaimed shamans today). This is bullshit. Somebody who performs the task of a shaman in any real, historical culture is a magician, and magic requires very real and usually institutional (familial, dynastic, ritual, etc.) buy-in from the people it affects. At bottom: religion and magic are the same thing. Extra-human, supernatural forces are called on, and respond; rituals are used to communicate; only people in certain statuses can achieve it. As far as I am concerned, a Christian priest is a magician; a shaman is a magician. A shaman is a priest is a magician. These terms are all interchangeable, and people use them irresponsibly, often to elide their own religious snobberies.

Bryn. Talk to us about travel and trade. For the peoples of the steppe, like the people of the Norse world, I think, trade and exchange were of the first priority. Aside from your horses, it’s nice to see felt as the object of marvel and discovery rather than silk, for once. 

Sarah.

Felt, isgeir. It is pretty incredible. The drama of wet felting as it was done in Mongolia – and still is, sometimes – is huge, galloping horses dragging a heavy rotating drum to crush the fibres together. Wow. And from the perspective of any culture that mostly made fabric by weaving – a huge undertaking, with many stages, that kept most of the women in early medieval cultures busy all the time – you can see how it might have a transgressive edge. Plus frankly, in northern countries, it’s far more useful than silk. Silk is very warm as a lining fabric, but otherwise? Purely for show – now show is very important, we realize, of course. Silk fashions were huge indicators of rank.

Bryn. Eyvind’s travelling companion is a Khazar, David. Among the religions Eyvind encounters, David’s Jewishness is to the fore, and sometimes snarky about Christians. Tell us about David.

Sarah.

There is a story that moves through about two centuries of Muslim and Jewish chroniclers that the rulers of Khazaria, a Turkic khaganate in central Asia, now modern Turkey, were Jews. This was a powerful idea for Jewish intellectuals mostly in southern (Muslim) Spain, as evidence of ongoing Jewish kingship and statehood after the diaspora; it was also used to interrupt narratives about Christian rulership and its growth across the world by Muslim chroniclers throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. For Christian readers in Europe much later it served as a wonder tale about a land unimaginably far away. It’s a niche story but it travelled around and lasted a long time. I personally do not think it was ever true. But as my story overall is a kind of wonder tale (elements of which are common in sagas), I proceed as if it were true. I never take Eyvind or his company to the fabled city of Itil, straddling the Volga, where the sacred king resided in a special compound in the middle of the river, but I do refer to it, and David, the leader of the Khazar traders, along with his kinsman David, is a Jew. His faith comes up from time to time as a theoretical thing – a way to discuss models of kingship, or monotheism, or dietary taboos (all of which, incidentally, Eyvind rejects utterly as a kingless, pagan Icelander who eats anything to avoid starvation). David’s religion marks him as different from the men that he leads: at once more elite (as only the king and the noble class were supposed to have been Jews) yet also as an outsider. This in itself makes him more flexible: he takes to Eyvind right away, just as he is also able to deal more meaningfully with Ibrahim, the Khwaresmian trader, a Persian Muslim, as well as with the qan. For one thing, he is a superior linguist. He is a bit testy about Christianity’s seemingless effortless overwriting of Jewish monotheism, about which Eyvind knows nothing. So he sets him straight a couple of times. David really grew on me as a character. I especially like his complex but taciturn reaction when Eyvind suggests an innovative form of burial ritual that might cover the deaths of unknown Jews massacred in Khazaria.

Bryn. Your story is set in the early ninth century. Historically, the Uighur khanlig existed at this time as a state, as at least an over-government on the steppe. In your steppe world of ‘many kings… greater and lesser, who govern tribes of their own people,’ Uighurs aren’t mentioned as a government, but they are named as cultural agents (see next question). 

Elsewhere I have complained about Guy Gavriel Kay’s historical fantasy version of the eighth century in Under Heaven. While Kay writes of Tang China he sticks pretty closely to history, but as soon as he steps onto the steppe, history is absent. In place of the Uighur khanlig he has primitives, and his character’s journey into the steppe is a Heart of Darkness journey into savagery and evil. 

You do NOT do that. Your steppe society is in no way portrayed as primitive. Still, you chose not to write about state-making on the steppe. Did you find it head-scratching at times to write historical fantasy, that does not have to be historical, while avoiding the trap of treating non-state or non-settled peoples as ‘people without history’? 

Sarah.

It’s a delicate thing. In some respect the whole business of the Khazaria story displaces the claims of Uyghurs as political agents or rulers – as they would more or less be ruling over the same space. So wonder tale wins out there. But on the other hand, for me at least, the main and lasting contribution of the Uyghurs to this region is the script. As you know, this book is as much the story of the creation of a book (Eyvind’s polyglot manuscript) as it is about anything. If the language in which the original Secret History was written was indeed shaped (into vertical columns, among other things) by a Uyghur scribe, and if we accept the Secret History, as reconstructed, as the earliest written sample of the language – well, the Uyghur writing system was central to it. In this book I have pushed this speculative moment back as far as c. 830, in which a nameless Uyghur scribe uses his script to record the brief story of Börte’s ghost in Mongolian. And this little manuscript is treated as the wonder it is. Best I could do by way of balance. As to the Guy Kay problem, it’s very real. If you are writing big good versus evil books, which he does (with greater sensitivity than most, however, I will say) – well, somebody has to be evil. His commitment to showing the civilization of the Tang, especially as against many notions of oriental tyranny that still float around in the heads of western readers, more or less embroils him into accepting the Tang’s hatreds, which were chiefly focussed on the steppe peoples menacing their empire. Han racism against Uyghurs is not exactly over, as we can all observe perfectly well today.

Bryn. Your story ‘takes place… before written literacy in Iceland or Mongolia’. But you are interested in origins. For example, to quote your notes: ‘Among other things that this story is meant to gesture towards speculatively is what the Persian-Arabic encounter that was the origin of the ghazal might have been.’ 

In history, Chinggis Khan’s government commissioned writers of Uighur to adapt the Uighur alphabet so as to write down spoken Mongolian for the first time. In your story you seem to have a prefiguration of this. A foreign scribe takes dictation from Hoë’lün, and puts her spoken language into Uighur letters. Eyvind comes into possession of the first document in the language of the steppe culture he visited, which some people tell him is a big deal, a historic piece of calfskin. 

The Secret History of the Mongols sits at an intersection, since it is the Mongols’ first book but also captures glimpses of the wealth that went beforehand in oral storytelling and oral history-telling. Why your interest in the invention of a script to write the language of your steppe culture? Did you have anything to say, in your story (or in this question session), about the advent of literacy and its consequences for an oral culture?

Sarah.

I went over some of this in the previous question. One thing that Eyvind notices about Iceland and Mongolia in his time is the importance of laws. Half of the Secret History, it seems, as you read it, consists of proclamation and application of laws. It is clear that many of these were already traditional before Genghis’s reign – clearly organized and memorized – not least because the numerous laws declared and enacted by Genghis himself (which the text portrays as perhaps his most significant achievement) require context. Likewise, the extensive collection of the earliest Icelandic laws, finally codified as Grágás in 1117, had been in constant use for some two centuries, and were memorized, parsed and analyzed by Lawspeakers, gothi and common Icelanders all the time in their constant litigation. It is a huge mistake to think that only materially rich cultures invest their time in laws: nope, poor people love laws just as much. Where there’s less to go around, and fewer people to marry, more regulation is required, not less. People often have wrongheaded ideas about what kinds of knowledge is preserved orally. The answer is: all knowledge. Huge bodies of complex laws, intricate genealogies, mathematics, rules about farming and building, all kinds of information was transmitted in the world before writing – not just myths and folktales. And when you look at myths and folktales when they are first written down, closest to their oral form, you find they are not vague and airy-fairy – there’s nothing New Age about them. On the contrary, they are exact and obey oral formulaic rules that chunk information into repeating patterns, link them by sounds, and so on: high-technique stuff that made words easier to carry in the mind. 

Bryn. I have seen you mention Independent People, the 1934 novel by Halldor Laxness, which I myself took up on the promise of a twentieth-century Iceland that owed to the sagas. Did I spot a citation of this title within your text? Are there other modern novels you went to for journey companions as you wrote this? 

Sarah.

Yes, somewhere Eyvind refers to Iceland as a land of “black rock and independent people” – which comes straight from Laxness’s title. I can’t think of anything else modern that was especially top of mind, though.

Bryn. There is an expectation that fiction about medieval Mongols, or steppe fiction in general, be military, which frustrates me. Even when you do write about periods of war, as I do, there is so much else going on to include in your view of their world. Besides, to judge from the Secret History, its composers and its audience of medieval Mongols weren’t half so keen on a bloody war story as are modern readers of fiction about them. Do you have any comment on medievalism about steppe peoples, on steppe peoples in popular culture? 

Sarah.

All I can say is it must be very frustrating for scholars of the period, and modern Mongolians today. Just speaking as a medievalist in general, I avoid watching all TV or films set in the period as they are ludicrously anachronistic. And the obsession with violence is the worst anachronism of all. This is us, not them.

Bryn. Lastly, any remarks on your publishing journey, or on the publishing scene as it pertains to a non-genre-standard book like your own? 

Sarah.

I wish I had some wise conclusion to come to for the non-genre-conforming writers among us. I don’t. It is an unending struggle. However, best case scenario: you can connect with the non-genre-conforming readers. They also exist. We find each other.

[author photo]

Sarah Tolmie is the author of the poetry collection The Art of Dying (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), the 120-sonnet sequence Trio (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), and the chapbook Sonnet in a Blue Dress and Other Poems (Baseline Press, 2014).

She has published two novels with Aqueduct Press, The Little Animals (2019) and The Stone Boatmen (2014), as well as three short fiction collections, Disease (2020), Two Travelers (2016) and NoFood (2014).

She is a medievalist trained at the University of Toronto and Cambridge and is a Professor of English at the University of Waterloo.

Read Sarah’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

Sarah’s website

http://sarahtolmie.ca/

All the Horses of Iceland at Tor
https://publishing.tor.com/allthehorsesoficeland-sarahtolmie/9781250807946/

Bryn Hammond writes the Amgalant series, a historical fiction version of the Secret History of the Mongols. Her website is https://amgalant.com/  Tweets @Jakujin

A To Z Challenge 2022 - Apology

 Hi everyone! So sorry there has been no post today. I have come down with COVID and spent most of the day sleeping and listening to a Kerry Greenwood audiobook. Tomorrow I will post about some of the Henry plays and add in a guest post I have lying on my files.

Cheers!

Sue

A To Z Challenge 2022: Shakespeare - G Is For Gaunt And Goneril

 

Goneril And Regan 1902. Public Domain

G is for John of Gaunt and Goneril.

John of Gaunt was a real person, the uncle of Richard II and father of Henry IV.  In the play, Richard II, he is not well liked by his nephew. Henry, his son, is banished and returns, then usurps the throne, but Gaunt dies. 

Before he dies, though, he makes a famous speech, “This England”. Here is a link to four famous versions on YouTube. https://youtu.be/hQQyyMyTHa0 . It shows the speech made by four different actors.

Some big names have played the role, most recently Sir Patrick Stewart doing it in The Hollow Crown series, and wasn’t he amazing! (Incidentally, the Duke of York in that version was played by David Suchet, who is best known as Hercule Poirot). He is in that YouTube video.

Another G is Goneril in King Lear. Goneril is Lear’s oldest daughter. When he decides to retire and split his kingdom among his three girls, he requires them to make speeches about their love for him. Goneril and her sister Regan tell him what he wants to hear, of course, while the youngest, Cordelia, rejects the entire “tell me how much you love me” thing. So, Lear makes the huge mistake of handing the whole kingdom to his older girls, who throw him out into the cold.

Goneril is married to the decent Duke of Albany, but she and her sister are fighting over the good looking but nasty Edmund, son of the Earl of Gloucester. Edmund has persuaded his father that his brother Edgar is disloyal. It is a sort of other version of the story of Lear. Edgar looks after his father, who has been blinded by Regan’s dreadful husband, Cornwall. 

Anyway, Lear’s two older daughters and Cornwall are dead by the end of the play.

So is Cordelia, the youngest, but at least she and her fsther have reconciled. 

Goneril has been played by some well known actresses. Irene Worth played the role in the 1971 film with Paul Scofield as Lear. (I saw that version when I was at secondary school). Dorothy Tutin played Goneril in the 1983 version with Laurence Olivier. Dorothy Tutin played Anne Boleyn in The Six Wives Of Henry VIII, and Cecily in the film of The Importance Of Being Earnest. You can see that one on YouTube for free. Here is the link. https://youtube.com/watch?v=S8MqqPPTXJk&feature=share. A wonderful production with Leo McKern as Gloucester and John Hurt as the Fool.

Most recent was Emma Thompson playing Goneril, would you believe, in 2018! I haven’t seen that. Cordelia is played by Florence Pugh(most recently seen in the Marvel Universe as Black Widow assassin Yelena Belova). Sir Anthony Hopkins is Lear. I can’t find it on my streaming services, but there are a couple of other versions on Prime, including one with Ian Holm as Lear.

Definitely a role worth pursuing if you don’t mind being a villain! 

A To Z Challenge 2022: Shakespeare - F Is For Fiction Inspired By Shakespeare

 Today I’ll talk about stories which are inspired by Shakespeare. There are plenty of those, books, films, short stories, probably more than I can handle in a single blog post, so what you see here will be what pops into my head.

Somebody once wrote that Shakespeare created the trope of the scientist and his beautiful daughter in his play The Tempest, and so he did! In fact, there is even a film which makes that clear. It’s Forbidden Planet, a 1956 film inspired by The Tempest, starring Walter Pidgeon as a kind of crazy version of Prospero, Anne Francis as his beautiful daughter Altaira and Leslie Nielson, later to be better known as a comedian, as a sort of Captain Kirk character, before Star Trek. 

On the remote chance you haven’t seen it, a spaceship visits the planet where scientist Dr Morbius(Pidgeon) lives with his daughter and Robbie the Robot. He has been able to do lots of good stuff with the help of a machine left by the now-extinct race who lived there. We do eventually learn why they died out, but I’ll leave that in case you haven’t seen it and want to. 

As long as we are talking about The Tempest, in which Shakespeare’s magician Prospero lives on an island with his beautiful daughter Miranda, an “airy sprite”, Ariel and an ugly creature called Caliban, there is a novel by Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest. 

It is set during the English Civil War, in a world where everything Shakespeare wrote was true, and he is called the Great Historian. As a result, there is not only magic, but the technology is different, as there were, for example, clocks in Ancient Rome. It’s seen from the viewpoint of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the nephew of Charles I, who must take a voyage to Prospero’s island to retrieve his staff and book of magic, to save England from the Roundheads. He also meets Oberon and Titania, who represent the land. A lovely novel, very easy reading!

Aussie children’s writer writer Jackie French has written a series of novels with Shakespearean themes. Here is a link to information about them. https://www.jackiefrench.com/shakespeare-series. My favourite is My Name Is Not Peaseblossom, in which Titania’s fairy Peaseblossom spends some time in our world. He is not what most of us would imagine a fairy to be like! 

The Fool’s Girl by Celia Rees is a YA sequel to Twelfth Night. In it, Viola and Orsino’s daughter, Violetta, heads for London with the clown Feste, in search of a precious relic stolen from her kingdom, Illyria. She meets Shakespeare and hopes he can help. Here is my review of it. https://suebursztynski.blogspot.com/2016/04/just-finished-reading-fools-girl-by.html

Speaking of Twelfth Night, comedy She’s The Man brings it into the present day. Instead of a shipwreck off the coast of Illyria, Viola, a passionate soccer player, disguises herself as a boy and heads for Illyria High School, a boarding school where her brother Sebastian was supposed to start, when her girls’ team is scrapped by her old school. Sebastian is overseas at the time, making it easier to get away with. She falls in love with teammate “Duke” Orsino. It was very funny and kept many aspects of the Shakespeare play. Not all,  but enough to make it recognisable. 

Ten Things I Hate About You was based on The Taming Of The Shrew, though more sympathetic to Kate. Again, it’s updated and has teen protagonists.

Aussie author John Marsden wrote a novel called Hamlet, a modernised version of the play with a much younger Hamlet. I confess I haven’t read much of it yet. He was best known for his series Tomorrow When The War Began.

And, of course, there is Terry Pratchett’s wonderful Discworld series about the three witches, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and the youngest witch, Magrat Garlick. The first of these is Wyrd Sisters(okay, the second if you count Equal Rites, which is where Granny first appears), more or less the Scottish Play as seen through the eyes of the witches. In the tiny mountain kingdom of Lancre, the king is murdered and the Duke and Duchess usurp the throne. A baby prince is carried away to safety, but the witches rescue him from pursuers and leave him to be raised by actors. The actors are eventually invited to perform a play as propaganda for the Duke. They perform what we know as the Scottish Play. The witches are not impressed…

This novel starts with a shriek of “When shall we three meet again?” answered by “Well, I can do Tuesday.” 

Let’s end it here! 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2022: Shakespeare E Is For Enobarbus And Emilia

Emilia and Desdemona. Dante Gabrielle Rossetti. Public Domain

 Today, we are going back to Antony And Cleopatra, the play with which we started this challenge, and continue with Othello. Both are likeable secondary characters who can be funny, and both end up dead. You really have to be careful when you see a Shakespeare play labelled “tragedy.” There has to be someone left alive at the end to carry off the dead hero for a magnificent funeral, but still…way too many bodies on the stage. 

Enobarbus is a secondary character, Antony’s friend, who eventually goes over  to Antony’s enemy, Octavius Caesar - and feels guilty. He is loosely based on a real person.

Enobarbus is best known for his speech which begins “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, burned on the water”, describing a memory of Cleopatra the first time she met Antony. It’s a stunning description of her, a wonderful speech, but it’s taken almost directly from a passage in Plutarch’s Lives, on which the play is based. 

When Enobarbus leaves Antony, he goes without taking his stuff. Antony, who is generous, sends his possessions after him. 

And Antony is a generous soul. In his very first scene, when Cleopatra demands to know how much he loves her, he protests, “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.” You can’t even think of calculating love! 

You’d think Enobarbus would have noticed this, but not enough. When he realises just how generous a friend he has deserted, he makes a speech and drops dead with grief and remorse, crying, “O Antony!” 

And here I have a confession to make. I once went to see a performance of this play by the Bell Shakespeare Company, with a friend I knew through Star Trek fandom. When Enobarbus dropped dead and the other characters in the scene bent down to look at the body, the words “He’s dead, Jim,” unintentionally burst from my lips. Fortunately, I said it quietly, not heard by the actors, but I rather think I spoiled it for my friend, who couldn’t stop himself from laughing.

There are a number of women called Emilia in Shakespeare’s works. They never seem to be the female leads, only lesser characters, some heroine’s gentlewoman.

Emilia from Othello is Desdemona’s gentlewoman, and is the wife of the villain, Iago. Despite that, she is a good friend to poor Desdemona, who is going to die at her husband’s hands after Iago persuades him that Desdmona is unfaithful. She has been described as “that old married bird” who lightens the scene when Desdemona wonders how any woman could be unfaithful for the whole world. Well, Emilia says drily, there are a lot of things she wouldn’t do it for, but the whole world? Who wouldn’t make her husband a cuckold to make him a king? She is a likeable character considering who she is married to. She knows her husband pretty well, but it never occurs to her that he’d instigate a murder. Not until the last scene, when she is shocked, especially when she finds out that the handkerchief he snatched off her was used as evidence against Desdemona. She tells Othello what really happened and is murdered for it by Iago.

I guess he figures that he’s likely to be executed anyway, so what the heck. But it’s a bit sad to see a likeable comic relief character die that way.

Tomorrow’s post will be F for Fiction Based On Shakespeare.