Another day, another powerful man caught with his pants down. Political sex scandals—such an irresistible cocktail with so many possible variations on Quiller-Couch's seven basic narrative conflicts.
And yet as mesmerizing as I find Congressman Weiner’s slo-mo tumble into political purgatory, I must confess I prefer the sly elegance of a much earlier scandale that was likewise generated in the media currency of its time—the famous Woodrow Wilson Misprint.
In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson was a widower who took a shine to Edith Galt, and started sparkin' with her within a year of his wife's death--in these post-Victorian times with much more restrictive mourning customs, this might be considered inappropriate and so his advisors tried to keep the relationship under wraps. All was for naught when word got out that they were seen together and, as the Washington Post framed the story,
The President spent the evening entering Mrs. Galt.
For want of four little letters...T-A-I-N...a Presidency was nearly lost! But the Post, in marked contrast to Congressman Weiner, understand how replicable media could be and immediately recalled the edition. Undoubtedly Weiner wishes he could do the same...
Even though the semester has ended, I’m still pondering Laws of War—and not just in the Middle Ages. There’s a Matrix-like quality to this—once you become aware of these patterns, you see them everywhere! Not surprising, since man has been at war pretty much constantly throughout the course of recorded history. Heck, the very first work of literature is about a war!
Then Ares roared like a trumpet, as loud as nine thousand men could shout, aye, ten thousand men in the turmoil of battle! Trojans and Achaians alike trembled to hear the roar of the insatiate God of War!
And of course the Bible is chock-FULL of warfare—David and Goliath, Judah Maccabee the Rock Star...
…even the endgame, Armageddon, is a battle scenario. (Interestingly Armageddon is a placename—Megiddo is the name of an ancient city.) We tend to see war as this random, chaotic force of obliteration but there are recognizable, distinct patterns which emerge again and again, and not just in history.
These patterns are perhaps most apparent in our sports culture—most forms of organized sports tend to be team vs. team, facing each other on opposing fields, much like the classic pitched battle. You can see this in basketball, soccer, even tennis, but the classic sports metaphor for war is football, which shares the:
terminology (blitzes, bombs)
strategy (front lines, flanking maneuvers)
tactics(artillery vs. infantry)
as well as protective armor. What is a running game but an updated version of medieval jousting, with the players functioning as both destrier and knight? Football fans are even referred to as weekend warriors! And their latter-day woadwood would do any Celtic warrior proud.
William Wallace, Woad Warrior…
I’ve found that reading Froissart’s Chronicles has brought a whole new appreciation to the playoffs.
And—cheerleaders, that peculiarly American contribution to team sports. We love them, we fear them, we live vicariously through grrrlpower Kristen Dunst movies. (Full disclosure—I was never a cheerleader (3-sport varsity athlete here!) but I always thought it would be fun.)But,you ask, how do cheerleaders fit into the football-as-war scenario? Well, although women couldn’t actually fight in medieval battles* they did have a military function in chivalry—as an audience for the knight, to spur him to greater deeds, literally to see him off as he marched off to war. Interestingly the first cheerleaders were actually men, so this possible parallel with medieval women has actually developed over time. Of course nowadays cheerleaders are not content to merely watch and applaud--they take the field in their own right.
They even have a castle!
*Joan of Arc was clearly the ass-kicking and name-taking exception.
I’ve been buried in end-of-year activities (papers, proctoring, studying for finals), hence my sparse updates—but now that the semester is over I couldn’t let any more time pass without offering my congratulations to the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge! William was awarded his new title (along with Earl of Strathearn and Baron Carrickfergus—since his birth territorial designation is of Wales, the Queen is invoking the UK superfecta, apparently) by his grandmother the Queen.
As I watched the ceremony, it occurred to me that the funeral of the Princess of Wales had also taken place at Westminster Abbey--and perhaps the most vivid memories some of us have of Princes William and Harry are from that day.
Those silent crowds throwing flower after flower onto the limousine.
The princes' long, dreadful, brave march behind their mother’s cortege, accompanied by their father, grandfather and uncle Earl Spencer. Imagine being 12, 15 years old--and having the cameras of the world on you as you are walking behind your mother's coffin. Unbelievable.
The envelope in front of the lilies, with "Mummy" in shaky handwriting.
The spontaneous applause, like a fire crackling against the windows of the Abbey, from the crowds outside after Earl Spencer's philippic against the Royal family and the media.
That beautiful hymn, Diana's favorite, "I Vow to Thee My Country."
Strange days, that first week in September 1997. At the time, I felt that the Queen had had a verrrrry close call—I remember seeing those anguished British tabloid headlines begging for some kind of response. WHERE IS OUR QUEEN? WHERE IS HER FLAG? The Queen initially responded to Diana's death by not responding--by retreating into her estate up north, forgetting that, as C.S. Lewis said, the monarch is not "a private person" and that she owed her people...something more than protocol. They clearly wanted, needed something more. The Russian peasants used to call their Tsar and Tsaritsa батюшка and мамочка --Little Father and Little Mother, recognizing the mystical, familial, parental bond between ruler and subject.
SHOW US YOU CARE. Doesn't get much more direct than that.
The movie The Queen used the events of that week to explore the issues faced by a modern monarchy--in this era, the constitutional monarchy is a construct, an edifice of unspoken understanding between tradition and the people, and the modern ruler forgets that at her peril. Neither Henry VIII, the most absolute of British kings, nor his great-great-grandnephew Charles I, whose execution ushered in the Commonwealth for a time--Elizabeth II's reign is the latest incarnation of that balancing act that reinvents itself every generation. “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” indeed.
Of course Westminster Abbey is riddled with nuptial history—many, many royal weddings [including those of: the Duke of York (uncle to William and Harry); the Princess Royal (their aunt); Princess Margaret (their great-aunt); and the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh] have taken place there. The princes' parents Charles and Diana, however, were wed at St. Paul’s over on the other, older side of town, closer to the financial district and Roman Londinium. Other than The Wedding of the Century, St. Paul's is perhaps most famously known for its mention in the iconic Disney song "Feed the Birds." Early each day, on the steps of St. Paul's/The little old bird woman comes...
The current St. Paul's (A on the map) was designed by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666 that cleaned out most of the East End--but also finally eradicated the Plague that had reappeared every generation or so since the Black Death.
This semester, I wrote a paper for class on Prince William’s predecessor, William the Conqueror (or the Norman, or the Bastard—he had a plethora of sobriquets from which to choose). William I is a direct ancestor of our Wills and was actually crowned at the Abbey some two months after he led his Norman troops to victory over the Anglo-Saxons in the Battle of Hastings. And nearly a thousand years later his namesake stood in that historic sanctuary, pledging his troth to his bride, intoning the ancient Christian responses, surrounded by the ghosts of kings and queens, poets, soldiers, all hidden in the shadows watching as William Arthur Philip Louis became a man in front of his country and the world.
So—YEAH. Quite a week for history! I keep seeing parallels in Osama’s death to the end of World War II, specifically in the spontaneous mass street celebration that accompanied Victory in Europe Day.
[My favorite V-E story is how the two young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, actually slipped out to be part of the crowds anonymously, cheering on the King and Queen with the rest of the Londoners. And apparently they’re turning this incident into a movie! Kind of a real-life Roman Holiday, times 2!]
And it’s interesting that the fall of Berlin [and therefore the end of Third Reich] also happened at the end of April—but then, as I learned from Johnny Tremain,* “Armies always move in the spring.” [Mostly I think due to practicality—it’s easier to march and to forage, for you and your horse, once the snow and ice melt and things start growing again.] And it seems people also rise up against tyranny in the spring--as in Prague Spring and our current Arab Spring, whose narrative is spooling out even now, yet to be tied up. Interestingly, the Arab Spring may be a sign of Al-Quaeda's complete cultural irrelevance, a much worse fate to murderous ideologues than dying in battle.
And with the news reports coming out, I was wondering if they would release pictures of Bin Laden’s body, just in case. Fate took it two different ways with Mussolini and Hitler—Hitler’s body of course was completely destroyed and secretly buried after his suicide, whereas Mussolini was shot and strung up with his mistress** at a gas station in Milan, where Italian partisans vented their rage on their bodies. Mussolini's body eventually ended up in Predappio.
It seems the US took the former route—Bin Laden was buried at sea, undoubtedly to prevent any shrines from being set up over his grave.
My mother called me Sunday night and told me the news. While I was still on the phone with her, I checked Facebook, which was exploding—status updates, links to articles and videos. ABC News was streaming live with commentary, and of course YouTube was loading videos of the celebrations in Times Square, Ground Zero and in front of the White House.
All completely spontaneous—just like VE Day but with an electronic dimension that intensified and reinforced the public reaction. So now the Internet is the new Trafalgar Square!
*Fantastic novel, one of my favorites. Although it was one of the very first Newbery medalists, its underwritten tone and layered characterization suits it well for adults.
'This is the end. The end of one thing--the beginning of something else. They won't come back because there is going to be a war--civil war. And we'll win. First folk like them get routed out of Milton--then out of Boston. And the cards are going to be reshuffled. Dealt again...'
Each time a shutter groaned, protested, and then came to with a bang, it seemed to say, 'This is the end,' and the words echoed through the house: This is the end. This is the end.
...The house was still filled with midnight and ghosts, but as they closed and locked the heavy kitchen door behind them they saw it was close upon dawn.
'It is like a funeral,' Cilla whispered, 'only worse.'
**I’m always taken aback by the fact that I share a first name with both Hitler’s mother and Mussolini’s mistress—Klara, Claretta and Clara.
Loyal readers may recall my entry in January about the Scottish play and laws of war in the Middle Ages. Our production closed two weeks ago and turned out quite well, all things considered. This production was set in the '30s, with a more militaristic angle than is perhaps usually taken. For most of the final week of rehearsal I was either away from the theater or helping out backstage, so I saw it all the way through for the first time only on opening night--and was treated to a most interesting...anachronism? No, an egregious violation of the very laws of war I'm currently studying at Columbia!
Most people remember the last scene of Macbeth for the famous showdown between Mackers and his nemesis, Macduff:
Macd.
Turne Hell-hound, turne.
Macb.
Of all men else I haue auoyded thee: But get thee backe, my soule is too much charg'd With blood of thine already.
Macbeth doesn't want to fight because he's already wiped out most of Macduff's family--though he has damned himself through his murderous deeds, he yet retains some vestiges of humanity. This is important because Macbeth believes himself to be invulnerable: as he tells Macduff I beare a charmed Life, which must not yeeld/To one of woman borne. BUT. Macduff is about to reveal he himself was not in fact "borne"--his mother had an impromptu (and undoubtedly fatal, in the 11th century) Caesarean section (so-called because Julius Caesar was supposedly delivered that way--this is suspect, however) and hence Shit is About to Get Real.
In classic tragic style, Good defeats Evil: Macduff kills Macbeth and displays his head to the other nobles and the Scottish army...
This one's for the groundlings. For our production I suggested displaying Macbeth and Lady Macbeth hanging upside,
like Mussolini and Claretta Petacci at the end, but it's a little difficult logistically
...Malcolm is hailed as King and the State is made whole again.
But soft!--we have skipped over another death in Act V. Before encountering Macduff, Macbeth runs into Young Siward, the son of the English commander who is helping out Malcolm. Young Siward brandishes his weapon and challenges the Thane and is promptly killed by him, uttering the classic put down "Thou wast borne of woman." This death is referenced later in the scene just before Macduff enters--Ross* tells Siward of his son's death, Siward mourns but at least his son died like a soldier, and so forth. But our production added something--they dragged in a bound-and gagged Seyton, Macbeth's lieutenant, whom they'd captured near Young Siward's body (our production staged it so that Seyton carried off the body--the single most constant challenge of every Shakespearean tragedy is GETTING RID OF THE BODIES). And Siward hauls off and stabs Seyton to death. While Malcolm is standing right there! My jaw literally fell open. So the new regime executes bound prisoners of war? Since we've established that Malcolm is morally superior to Macbeth, isn't this sort of...awkward?**
Obviously killing a bound POW is a violation of the laws of war--certainly for our culture and time, and for the '30s when our production is set. And definitely for Shakespeare's time as well--Shakespeare's play Henry VI, Part III has a rather lurid incident in which Lord Clifford murders his prisoner the Earl of Rutland in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Wakefield as the boy is begging for his life.
This was seen as a Bad Thing by Shakespearean audiences.***
But the whole idea of laws of war, of regulating, through code and social expectation, how and when and whom to kill in warfare, is a dynamic construct. In the actual Macbeth's time, the 11th century, laws of war were very much in a time of transition--the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as well as Asser's Life of King Alfred are depressingly rife with descriptions of Anglo-Viking battles in which everyone on the losing side is killed.
Prisoners, fleeing soldiers, soldiers who surrendered--everyone. But customs of war were starting to emerge around this time--how and why this happened is still being debated but after the Norman Invasion in 1066, the bloodletting seemed to have subsided for a little while (if for no other reason than because everyone was DEAD who might've caused any trouble). The emergence of chivalry as a professional and caste code also had something to do with this.
*I feel kind of bad for Ross--all he seems to do is inform people of important plot updates! He tells Macbeth he's been made Thane of Cawdor, he tells Macduff his family is dunzo...he's like the Billy Kostecki of the Scottish Play!
Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes
Savagely slaughter'd.
Oh, and Penny's knocked up.
**I mentioned this to the actor who played Malcolm and he said he always looked away during that moment.
***Shakespeare's source was Hall's Chronicle, which changed Rutland's age from the verified 17 to a boy of 12.
The other night I caught the premiere of the latest gorgeously shot, historical guilty TV pleasure, The Borgias, about the notorious Spanish papal dynasty.
As I told my friend, "They had better not try to rewrite too much history--there is no possible way they could top what the Borgias actually did!" My specialty being English history, I knew little about this family until I read William Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire--a problematic book to be sure,* but worth a reading if only for his rundown of all the latest Borgia on-dits of the early 16th century. The head of the family was Roderigo--later Pope Alexander Sextus [commence adolescent giggling here], who had four acknowledged children by his mistress, Vannozza. Yes, you heard correctly--a Catholic prelate admitted having a mistress and children. So much for chastity! Of the children, the two best known are Cesare [who inspired Macchiavelli's Prince] and the lovely Lucrezia.
Detail from a mural in the Vatican--painted by Pinturicchio, the painter in Episode I for whom Guilia Farnese sits. Lucrezia was known as dolce ciera, "sweet face," in her youth. The Borgias must have had some Spanish Celtic blood way back-- that hair had to come from somewhere!
I must confess to being a bit of a Lucrezia fangirl. She seems like a Renaissance version of Elizabeth Taylor, impossibly gorgeous but you can just tell she must've gotten sick of all the fawning and papal politics and just wanted to kick back with margaritas with her girl-peeps. (She was close friends with her father's mistress, Giulia Farnese.) And she's gotten an unfair historical rap (although the scholarship on this has been changing)--as deliciously scandalous as the image of the icy blonde femme fatale mixing her poisons may be, she was a pawn of her family more than anything. 15th/16th century Italian noblewomen had very little agency.
BUT. Let's get to the juicy stuff--which alllll goes back to Il Papa. As Cracked.com puts it in their article "The Five Biggest Badass Popes,"
Any story you've ever heard about crooked popes started with this guy. He bought the papacy with four mule loads of silver. He nailed Rome's most eligible bachelorettes. He made his 17-year-old bastard son an archbishop. He started wars, poisoned cardinals and took their money, and probably ate live frogs while feeding people to the Rancor.
And--the Banquet of Chestnuts. This was a Borgia gala right out of the movie Bachelor Party, "with chicks and guns and fire trucks and hookers and drugs and booze!"** The guests included courtesans and high-ranking clerics--to get the action going, chestnuts were thrown onto the floor and the courtesans (whose clothing had conveniently been auctioned off) had to crawl on their hands and knees after them. I'll leave it to you to imagine what happened next. There were even observers standing off to the side, recording who and how and how long. The only thing missing was a mule!
A Borgian orgy!
Oh, and that hint of incest between Cesare and Lucrezia you caught in the first episode? Is based on fact. Yes, Cesare and Lucrezia were the 15th century Italian version of Christopher and Cathy (shut up, I loved those books). I'll leave the "Infans Romanus" affair to another post but suffice it to say, the Borgias kept it in the family.
*As fascinating as is his theory that the Pied Piper was actually a forest-dwelling murderer who preyed on children, there is no compelling documentary evidence to support it. And no CITATIONS! Bad Manchester!
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