humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

(quote)

At Folger, England Emerges From the Myths of Time

By Philip Kennicott

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, February 20, 2008; Page C01

In 1588, the Spanish Armada that threatened Elizabethan England was
undone by a storm. Seventeen years later, the infamous Gunpowder Plot,
an effort by angry Catholics to blow up Parliament, failed when the
conspirators panicked and were captured. These close calls with fate
were rapidly put to good propaganda use by the rulers of England, and
there emerged a persistent new theme in early 17th-century politics:
Providence was looking out for Britain.

A new exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library called "History in
the Making" is an episodic survey of how history and current events
were managed, manipulated and mythologized in the years before and
after the career of William Shakespeare. It also surveys the
politicized and even tendentious historical works that Shakespeare
drew upon in his plays, works that were often convenient, dynastic
fictions in favor of the Tudor ruling family. And it continues well
past the death of Shakespeare, through the middle of the 17th century,
ending with the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666.

Organized by guest curators Alan Stewart and Garrett Sullivan, the new
show is presented as a series of vignettes. The curators, mercifully,
have not drawn superficial connections between the political
mythmaking of four centuries ago and the rapid-fire spin wars of the
current political campaign. But the contents of almost every one of
the display cases in this engaging show might easily be reduced to a
familiar, topical theme: origin myths, scapegoats, God's will,
internal enemies, favored sons.

You are left with the sense that while it's dangerous to draw too many
connections, the basic strategies of propaganda remain much the same.

Contemporary analogies to the case of Sir Philip Sidney, for example,
mostly fall short. Sidney was the ideal courtier, dashing and
literate, an ambitious soldier and a poet of considerable skill. After
he was killed fighting the Spanish in the Netherlands in 1586, the
state pulled out all the stops for a grand funeral and interment at
St. Paul's Cathedral. It's tempting to think he had what we would call
rock-star status, or that he was somehow Robert F. Kennedy and James
Dean and Martin Luther King Jr. all rolled into one.

But he wasn't. Rather, Sidney was a convenient establishment figure,
whose life could be held up as exemplary by a state that needed to
stuff its pantheon with admirable heroes. Sidney's death does,
however, feel familiar in the almost manic need for contemporary
figures to bask in his reflected glory. The extravagance of the 1587
funeral was documented in a series of 28 engraved plates designed by
Thomas Lant. These popular mementos of a famous bit of pomp were,
according to at least one contemporary account, pasted together end to
end, and placed on rollers. The result was a long scroll that showed a
seemingly endless parade of courtiers and religious figures and
politicians who turned out to mourn the young Sidney (he was just 31
when he died).

The Folger curators have created a facsimile of that scroll, alongside
the original drawings, and the effect of turning its connected pages
is a bit like watching the endless parade of scripted sympathy one
sees on the television after a major political figure dies. You can
smell the shallow sincerity of these forgotten political players all
these centuries later.

A cycle of sonnets by Sidney was published after his death, and it is
likely that those poems influenced Shakespeare's forays into the form.
But the exhibition doesn't make too many efforts to keep attention
focused on the Bard. Shakespeare is a presence mainly in the parts of
the show that focus on efforts to construct a convenient historical
narrative. The exhibition begins, for instance, with the Brutus myth,
the fantasy that Brutus, a descendant of the legendary Trojan hero
Aeneas, is the real founder of Britain. Famous Shakespearean kings
(Lear, Cymbeline) were said to be Brutus's descendants. The power of
the myth, which cleaned up the far less splendid and much messier
reality of early English history, connected an aspirant empire to a
glorious past one.

Shakespeare's direct role in mythmaking is presented in two separate
cases, one devoted to Richard III, the other to Falstaff. In the case
of Richard III, Shakespeare was dramatizing a villain who had already
been amply villainized by previous historians, Thomas More the most
prominent among them. Richard was the last of the great Plantagenet
line, which had ruled England for centuries before the Tudors
violently displaced it. By making Richard into a humpbacked, child-
killing psychopath, Shakespeare was merely underscoring the most
unpleasant elements of a historical narrative that had already dipped
deeply into slander and fantasy.

Yet even when Shakespeare is regurgitating the bad history of others,
he leaves us so mesmerized as to be almost indifferent to the real
Richard -- who scholars argue was a man of the late Middle Ages of not
more than average cruelty, and not the caricature one finds in
Shakespeare.

England, in the 17th century, was also looking to rewrite its
religious history to justify the breach with Catholicism initiated by
Henry VIII and to give its homegrown Protestantism a more historically
satisfying sheen. Thus, the line between civil and religious
mythmaking often grows fuzzy. After the foiled Gunpowder Plot, the
deliverance was marked as a red-letter day in the English Book of
Common Prayer, and to this day, on Nov. 5, the English celebrate
(though with considerably less religious rancor) the foiling of the
"papist" conspiracy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/19/AR2008021902483.html?hpid=sec-artsliving

Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other
inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site.
Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by
someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will
take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards,
terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this
site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and
discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.