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Kafka was a lawyer by training. At the age of 25, two years after getting his law degree, he began work at the Kingdom of Bohemia’s Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, where he devoted himself to the implementation of the law on statutory occupational insurance, adopted by Austro-Hungary in 1887—three years behind Germany and eleven years ahead of France.footnote1 Kafka specialists are divided as to whether his legal career hindered or helped his literary work. His diaries and letters offer evidence to support both views, which should not be surprising, since there is barely a single affirmation from his pen that is not immediately reconsidered from another point of view. Thus he famously wrote that his legal studies involved living on sawdust, already chewed over by thousands of mouths—but promptly added that, ‘in a certain sense’, this was exactly to his taste.footnote2 This way of turning over the cards, not stopping at the first meaning of a fact or symbol but always examining them from the reverse perspective, is the hallmark of the legal mind—or, more precisely, of the art of the trial, which is entirely governed by the rule of audi alteram partem: hear the other party. This first rule of the art of law is known today as the adversarial principle—in French, the principe du contradictoire. It is an ambiguous term, since consideration of the opposite point of view doesn’t annul the first viewpoint but puts it to the test of truth, allowing the party defending it to rebut in turn the arguments made against it. In other words, the principle is valid only to the extent that it is at the service of the law of non-contradiction: that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. In the course of legal proceedings, the play of these successive ‘speaking againsts’ thus takes place on a terrain of rules that cannot themselves be contradicted and which are based in law. The parties have to submit to the same law for the trial to proceed; it is this common submission that allows them to exchange words, rather than blows. The law—Gesetz in German, meaning that which is set down—thus gives human life its institutional foundation. When it is trodden underfoot, we sink into the depths of unreason. So it was for the high mountain bridge, the protagonist and narrator of its namesake story, when a foolish traveller, imagining he is testing the bridge’s solidity, ‘jumps hard with both feet together on the small of its back’. The bridge, put to this test, turns over to see what is happening. ‘I had not fully turned around’—the bridge itself is speaking—‘when I fell, falling to pieces, broken and impaled on the sharp rocks which until then had always looked up at me so peacefully from the raging waters.’footnote3 Where it affects the generational order that underpins the structure of the law, this ‘turning over’ produces those infanticidal parents who figure so frequently in myth and religion. According to that order, sons should bury their fathers. But here it is fathers who seek to bury their sons, projecting their own death drive onto their offspring. This type of parent is also encountered in daily life, not least in the academic world, where they don’t assassinate their descendants but condemn them to oblivion in order to affirm their own omnipotence and to escape the generational chain. Such is the case with the father of Georg Bendemann, the central character in Kafka’s story, ‘The Judgement’, when he issues his condemnation: ‘At bottom you were an innocent being, but beneath that you were a diabolical one! . . . And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!’ Georg immediately carries out the order, going to—where else?—a bridge, whose function of carrying human life he turns into a discreet instrument for his own death.footnote4 Our institutional foundation can also be undermined in another way, when the law is not overturned but unknowable. ‘It is a torture’, Kafka wrote, ‘to be governed by laws of which one is ignorant’, for one who doesn’t know the laws is abandoned to the arbitrary reign of power and its representatives, real or supposed.footnote5 One could legitimately ask oneself if these laws really exist or whether they merely express the whim of those in office. This is the experience of totalitarian systems, whose resources Kafka’s work unveils. In a state of law, even in an empire like Austro-Hungary, it is still possible to call on the support of the law to limit the obliteration of the weak by the strong. Kafka thus dedicated his professional life to drafting legal documents to make the best possible protective use of the Austro-Hungarian law on industrial accidents. All known law that leaves itself open to interpretation is thereby a source of liberty. Kafka extends this freedom of interpretation to his readers like a lifebuoy to keep reason afloat in the universe of his stories. Every reader can find a new meaning in them, but none can claim to exhaust their sense. This profusion is foreign to the totalitarian order, which aims to empty out the sources of interpretation, to prevent anyone from appealing to the law in order to affirm their own subjecthood. Such a regime plunges its citizens into a world of unreason, where their survival depends upon the shifting allegiances of the authorities to whom they look for protection while exposing themselves to manipulation. Kafka makes us live this plunge, while at the same time mobilizing our freedom as reader-interpreters. He gives us the poison and its antidote simultaneously, reminding us of the irreducible aspect of humanity which in each of us resists determinism.	__label__1	0.913983
Bentley's Miscellany, 第 8 卷 Charles Dickens, William Harrison Ainsworth, Albert Smith Richard Bentley, 1840 0 评价评价未经验证，但 Google 会检查有无虚假内容，并移除发现的虚假内容大家的评论 - 撰写书评我们没有找到任何书评。其他版本 - 查看全部常见术语和短语热门引用章节第533页 - Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year ; For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale. The white sheet bleaching on the hedge, With hey ! the sweet birds, O how they sing ! Doth set my pugging tooth on edge ; For a quart of ale is a dish for a king. The lark, that tirra-lirra chants, With hey! with hey! the thrush and the jay: Are summer songs for me and my aunts, While we lie tumbling in the hay. 第438页 - Now the bright morning star, day's harbinger, Comes dancing from the east, and leads with her The flowery May, who from her green lap throws The yellow cowslip, and the pale primrose. Hail, bounteous May, that dost inspire Mirth, and youth, and warm desire ; Woods and groves are of thy dressing, Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing. Thus we salute thee with our early song, And welcome thee, and wish thee long. 第72页 - Ere the evening lamps are lighted, And, like phantoms grim and tall, Shadows from the fitful fire-light Dance upon the parlour wall; Then the forms of the departed Enter at the open door ; The beloved, the true-hearted, Come to visit me once more... 第151页 - I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity — an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn — a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible and leaden-hued. 第156页 - But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him, desolate!) And, round about his home, the glory That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed. And travellers, now within that valley. Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody ; While, like a rapid ghastly river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever, And laugh — but... 第159页 - I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me - to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. 第156页 - Banners yellow, glorious, golden, On its roof did float and flow (This — all this — was in the olden Time long ago) And every gentle air that dallied, In that sweet day, Along the ramparts plumed and pallid, A winged odor went away. 第155页 - An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. 第151页 - ... fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from... 第150页 - It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate, its capacity for sorrowful impression... 书目信息	__label__1	0.763983
Thomas Browne Critical Essays (Literary Criticism (1400-1800)) Thomas Browne 1605-1682 English prose writer, essayist, and physician. The following entry provides criticism on Browne's works from 1973 through 2003. Sir Thomas Browne holds a unique place in the development of English writing because of the diversity of his interests and training. A physician by training and profession, Browne is now remembered most often for his writings and contribution to the growth of English letters. In works such as the Religio Medici (1642), Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), and Hydriotaphia (1658), Browne covers a vast variety of subjects, including theories on religion and philosophy, and reflects on issues such as human mortality, time, and eternity. His writing was unique in its combination of empirical observation and religious exploration, and he is often praised for his lyric and rich writing style, which is akin to Senecan prose. Most significantly, Browne lived and wrote during tumultuous times in English history. During his lifetime he was witness to a civil war, the Interregnum, and eventually the Restoration. His writings, especially the Religio Medici, reflect many of his concerns about the events of his time, and through his words Browne is acknowledged now as a master of English prose, leading his readers with both his expression and rhythm to an experience in discovery and tolerance. Biographical Information Browne was born in London, England, in 1605. He was the fourth and only son of a successful merchant, also named Thomas Browne, and his wife, Anne Garroway Browne. The family lived in Cheshire in fairly comfortable circumstances, even following Browne's father's death in 1613. He attended Winchester grammar school, where he studied Latin and Greek, and in 1623, he went on to Broadgates Hall at Oxford. The school, which was later renamed Pembroke College, followed the traditional curriculum at Oxford, and Browne studied grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, and geometry. In 1624 the school added the study of anatomy to its curriculum, which was an added advantage to Browne, who became a physician. Browne graduated from Oxford in 1626, and received a master's degree from there in 1629. He then left to live on the Continent, continuing his medical studies until the mid-1630s. During these years, Browne traveled across Europe extensively, visiting and staying at some of the most distinguished medical schools. When he returned to England in 1637, he was awarded a doctorate in physics at Oxford. He then settled in Norwich, beginning his practice as a physician, and serving as mentor to many younger doctors. He married Dorothy Mileham in 1641; they had several children together, although only a daughter, Elizabeth, survived into adulthood. Scholars surmise that it was during his years as a physician in Norwich that Browne began working on his best-known work, the Religio Medici. Comprised mostly of Browne's own opinions and theories regarding the church and religion, the work was not originally intended for publication. The style of the work is unusual because Browne often writes in the first person, and the work is structured more like a conversational letter or meditative lecture than a formal work of prose. Yet the scope of the work, with its personal observations and the model it presents of Christian belief and practice, is often interpreted as a prescriptive text. Browne published several more texts after the Religio Medici, and at his death in 1682, he left behind a large body of unpublished correspondence. These were issued posthumously, as well as other works, such as A Letter to a Friend (1690) and Christian Morals (1716). Major Works The Religio Medici was published anonymously, probably without Browne's permission, in 1642. It garnered immediate attention because of its content; divided into two main parts, the work first explains the author's religious beliefs, and then discusses the practical application of these beliefs in the real world, as well as the consequences of not following these principles. As he explores questions of belief and practice, Browne imparts a great deal of significance to the role of human choice in the application of religious beliefs. He also writes in detail about the doctrine of incarnation, stating that Christ was in fact both man and God, and therefore both spirit and flesh. It is in the statement of his theories about incarnation, God, and life that Browne shines as a prose writer, using the style of Senecan prose to build one argument on another. Critics have often remarked on his ability to present, with increasing intensity, the central belief system he is espousing. In his lifetime, though, Browne's work was soundly critiqued for both its style and content. As early as 1643, less than a year after the text was published, Sir Kenelm Digby, a contemporary, published a critique of the work. The following year, Alexander Ross issued an analysis of Browne's work, criticizing him for his errors and sparking a vigorous debate over the validity of the doctor's religious beliefs. The controversy over the accuracy of Browne's theories in the Religio Medici became a major topic of critical debate during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Browne next issued Pseudodoxia Epidemica, also known as Vulgar Errors. This was a large project and took Browne most of his life to complete. Comprising seven volumes, the work once again focuses on issues of religious belief and theory. In contrast to the Religio Medici, this work was less personal in its concerns, and focused more heavily on an examination of truths, observations, popular mythology, and contemporary commentary on the discovery of new and interesting facts. In many ways, Browne's focus in this work is more closely related to his profession—the discussion revolves around significant scientific developments during Browne's time, and he uses moralized natural histories, encyclopedias, and other studies of his era as his focus. For each proposition he states, Browne considers the position taken by established authorities, the evidence in support of the position, and so on. Browne's next works were published together in 1658. These were Hydriotaphia: Urne Buriall and The Garden of Cyrus; in both, Browne uses events in reality to offer observations on the nature of mortality and immortality. While the subject matter of both pieces is regarded as significant, critics have most often focused on Browne's grand style and variety. Critical Reception Browne is consistently acknowledged as one of the finest prose writers of his day. His writing style was rich and varied, and many scholars have remarked upon his use of humor and richness of allusion, even in the most intense of discussions. In his own lifetime, Browne's literary reputation was first built upon the multivolume Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Critics during his time, including Samuel Pepys and Samuel Johnson, admired his work greatly, while the Romantics in the eighteenth century also viewed his work with great interest. In modern evaluations of Browne's work, his clear thinking and rhythmic writing style continue to be acknowledged, and he is appreciated as a skilled articulator of the events of his time. In 1972, however, Stanley Fish, in his Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature, criticized Browne for his beliefs regarding the nature and function of art. Fish's critique of Browne has evoked passionate responses from contemporary critics, Frank J. Warnke among them. According to Warnke, although Fish's evaluation of Browne has some merit, it is essentially unfair to the intention of Browne's writing, which per Warnke, has a very personal and persuasive aesthetic. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Browne did not comment openly on the political and religious events of his time. His works, especially the Religio Medici, writes James N. Wise (1973), are works of “contemporary argumentation.” In this text, says Wise, Browne clearly makes an argument for tolerance and charitableness. Wise feels that it is precisely Browne's carefully structured ambivalence in matters of reason and faith that constitute his best method of persuasion. In his review of Browne's place among seventeenth-century prose writers, Laurence Stapleton (1973) characterizes him as “the most original prose writer” of his time. Stapleton observes that Browne's method of writing, especially his skillful combining of observation and evaluation set the standard for many later authors, including Samuel Johnson and De Quincey. Modern evaluations of Browne's work focus primarily on his Religio Medici. Jonathan F. S. Post (1987) observes that whatever Browne's other qualifications, it is his unique writing style, “one of the most distinctive and recognizable in the history of English prose,” which remains his most remarkable achievement.	__label__1	0.996437
13 June 2013 Thus so far When I was eight, I stopped talking to my father for over a day. The ‘fight’ was because he had just explained to me (quite kindly) that we were shifting home. We used to stay in Vadodara, a bustling, cheerful city; my family had called that city home for 25 years. My father was dragging us to a sleepy little city 300km away. I hated him for as long as a girl of eight could hate her otherwise nice father. In retrospect, that decision irrevocably changed my life for the better. The change was an eye-opener. The two cities, despite being in the same state, were vastly different in terms of their dialect, the culture and the general populace. But the most major change was my schooling. My old school was a small one, with just about 500 students and 20 teachers. On the other hand, my new school in Rajkot was (and is!) a huge system, with 7000 students and a 1000 teachers. My first day in school scared me to no end, especially since I joined midterm and was two years younger than my classmates. I was told that I had a month to catch up with about half year’s academics and get a decent score in the upcoming tests (just a month away) if I wanted to continue in the same grade. The stubborn girl that I was, I refused to go two grades down and in all innocence of a girl who had never taken a single test before, agreed to taking the examinations too. Today, eight years later, armed with objectivity, maturity and most importantly hindsight, I realise how much the change in city affected me. I don’t regret it; rather, I have grown to love Rajkot as much as my birthplace. It’s just that this shift moulded me from a shy girl of eight to a confident girl of sixteen. It broadened my horizon, changed my perceptions and showed me life’s multifaceted nature. And it’s not that ‘growing up’ brought this on; I, for certain know the difference growing up brings and the difference this brought along. Shifting my home was the biggest positive paradigm shift I could have probably had. Recognizing different paradigms is central to my upbringing. My parents have always tried to ensure that my interaction with life is open and uninhibited, encompassing as many perspectives as possible. The best way they did this was by instilling in me a love for reading very early on. I have loved to read, since before I could read, since before I could figure out which was the right side up while reading! My mother fondly recalls me spending time by myself, with a book held upside down; simply enjoying the idea of being able to read. Be it the imaginative Enid Blyton, the powerful Ayn Rand, the charming J.K. Rowling, the insightful Mitch Albom or the informative Frederick Forsyth; books have always been there. They show you that there is more to life than just you. The other singular factor which has shaped me is my curiosity. My family always encourages my questions, allowing me to think independently about all matters small and big. Independent thought doesn’t equate to full freedom in action; rather it refers to freedom of the mind—allowing it to roam to find room. And so, I question! I want to know how things work, why things happen, why the world functions the way it does…the list is endless. I could question everything under the sun and the sun itself! But, this isn’t the condescending questioning of a cynic; it is the innocent questioning of an inquisitive girl. I persist till I find answers, till I understand. I realise how fortunate I am since I have the pleasure of getting varied perspectives on questions from my family. I could ask my effusive grandfather, my conservative grandmother, my nonconformist father, my compassionate mother, my innocent little brother or any of my aunts-one stern and the other rebellious. Inadvertently, it’s my innate curiosity that makes me what I am today. I love the sciences, mathematics and literature. I want to grow up to do research in an unchartered field and learn about new concepts by discovering them myself. It is this same old curiosity which manifests itself into my career choice, for which I couldn’t thank my family enough. They have taught me that knowledge is to be sought, to be discovered and uncovered. It isn’t handed neatly wrapped and packed. One has to strive to achieve it, to reach to it. As I look forward to another major change in my life-college, I realise how my varied experiences have been instrumental in shaping me. I hope that my future turns out to be like shifting home—fruitful, definitive and fun.	__label__1	0.857754
Interview: Paul Melko Tell us a bit about your story. What’s it about? “Ten Sigmas” is about a massively-parallel human being whose consciousness exists in many universes at the same time. His quantum wave form doesn’t collapse, but instead allows him to share information among himselves, making him nearly omniscient in his local vicinity. A split second decision for him one day causes all his selves to slowly peal away until it is only a single instance trying to save a girl’s life. What was the genesis of the story–what was the inspiration for it, or what prompted you to write it? I have always been fascinated with parallel universe stories. I combined that idea with the idea that a fundamental particle’s exact position can’t be determined, that it exists in a probability function. Though the probably is very low, the particle could exist in some very weird locations. What if a person existed as a probability function? What if every quantum decision he made split off a new universe, but he remained aware of split self? Was this story a particularly challenging one to write? If so, how? Explaining the idea while telling an interesting story was the hardest part of this one. It’s easy for science fiction writers to become enamored of the what-if and forget character and plot. Most authors say all their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was this story personal to you? One of the things my protagonist does is steal stories and music from other universes and passes those off as his own. This speaks in some way to the self-doubt that a writer feels. Is this story really unique? Or did I just twist a bit of the literature gestalt in some mundane way? Am I just riding the coattails of every other writer and not really doing anything new or interesting? What are some of your favorite examples of parallel worlds or portal fantasies (in any media), and what makes them your favorites? My favorite parallel universe books are those in Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tier series. Farmer’s multiverse is composed of a series of pocket universes, created by a race of technologically superior humans called Lords. Each Lord lives in his or her own created universe, each with its own rules of physics. The Lords come to find out however that their own home universe was created too. These book are pure science adventure fun, but the idea of engineered pocket universes remained with me since and in some way informs my own Walls of the Universe series.	__label__1	0.88686
Home / Articles / Shakespeare in Scotland: What did the author of Macbeth know and when did he know it? Shakespeare in Scotland: What did the author of Macbeth know and when did he know it? by Richard F. Whalen This article appeared in a slightly different form in the 2003 issue of The Oxfordian Does Macbeth reference the 1567 murder of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley? Does Macbeth reference the 1567 murder of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley? Awake! Awake! Ring the alarum-bell:—murder and treason! Banquo and Donalbain! Malcolm! Awake! Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, And look on death itself! Macduff: Macbeth: Act II Scene 1 A review of historical documents and topical allusions in Macbeth shows that the author knew a great deal about Scotland and that he knew it long before 1606, which orthodox scholars argue was the year it was written by William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon. Six of these scholars, however, unwittingly provide much of the evidence supporting Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, as the true author of Macbeth. Generally, Shakespeare scholars today simply pay no attention to the firsthand knowledge of Scotland that is demonstrated in Macbeth. Instead, with a few notable exceptions, they have argued that there are many topical allusions to events in England that date the play to 1606, three years after James VI of Scotland became King of England. Under examination, however, their arguments fail to convince. The principal topical allusions in Macbeth for most Stratfordians—but not all—are to the 1605 Powder Treason or Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and to the subsequent trial of a Jesuit priest, not only for treason but for equivocation, i.e. dissembling under oath to avoid the sin of lying. They note that the play depicts the treason of Macbeth against his king and famously features the porter’s ramblings about “equivocators” (2.3). Other topicalities are also supposed to tie the play to King James. His keen interest in witchcraft (he wrote a treatise on it) is thought to have inspired the play’s three Weird Sisters. Macbeth’s hallucinatory vision of eight kings is supposedly intended to flatter James by showing him as the legitimate descendent of monarchs from Banquo and Fleance (4.1.111–124). And they add a few scraps of evidence: the porter’s throwaway line about “the farmer who hanged himself on the expectation of plenty” (2.3.3) because wheat prices were low in 1605–7 (Muir xxii) and “touching for evil” by King James (Carroll 222–26), because a doctor in the play tells how King Edward the Confessor practiced touching for evil to effect miraculous cures for tubercular ulcers (4.3.142). Dating the play to 1606, shortly after the Gunpowder Plot, serves orthodox scholars well in that it links the playwright to a reigning king of England and one of the most sensational events in British history, commemorated ever since as Guy Fawkes Day. It also helps spread the plays rather evenly throughout the working life of the Stratford man and puts its composition after the death of Oxford in 1604. (There is no certain contemporary reference to the play until its publication in the First Folio in 1623. Not gunpowder but a nocturnal knifing None of the alleged topicalities, however, hold up under examination. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 is particularly unsuitable and unconvincing as an event that might inspire a playwright to write Macbeth. It was allegedly a plot by a gang of Roman Catholic radicals—none of whom was in any position to take power—to massacre the whole government of Great Britain, including King James, in a gigantic explosion of gunpowder under Parliament during a ceremonial meeting in broad daylight. Thousands might have been killed. In contrast, Macbeth, ambitious to gain the throne, stabs his guest, King Duncan, in the night while he sleeps alone in his bed. The two regicides could hardly have been more different. Equally unconvincing is the suggestion that Macbeth was written to flatter James and celebrate his escape from violent death in the Gunpowder Plot. Henry Paul in The Royal Play of Macbeth (1971) was the principal advocate of this view. Rejecting the suggestion of his orthodox colleagues, William C. Carroll, editor of the Bedford Macbeth (1999), notes that James would then be a “royal spectator of a royal bloodbath, whose own right of succession to the English throne was . . . questioned (2, 5). Carroll, a professor at Boston University, makes several observations that have the unintended effect of throwing doubt on the topicalities embraced by most Stratfordian commentators. Moreover, James was famous for his fear of bodily harm at the hands of enemies or as a result of witchcraft. Stratfordian Professor Dennis Kay says in his book on Shakespeare: “Everybody knew that King James was terrified of violent death” (311). No surprise, since his father was assassinated and his captive mother was beheaded. Thus, it strains belief to suggest that an English actor/playwright would celebrate the new Scottish king of England by writing a gloomy, violent, bloody tragedy depicting the assassination of a Scottish king that is instigated by witches. That’s not the way playwrights, especially commoners, celebrate their monarchs. Nor is it credible that the king’s own acting company would dare to perform it. There is no documentary evidence that James ever saw the play, read it or even heard about it, much less felt celebrated. Also improbable is the Stratfordian notion that King James would have been pleased to see himself as the most recent in a line of kings begun by Banquo, the kings that the witches show to Macbeth in Act IV Scene 1. Neither Banquo nor his son and heir Fleance were historical persons. They were recent, fictional embellishments to the “history” of Scotland. It was not until 1527, during the reign of James’s father, that Hector Boece added the Banquo portion to the twelfth-century story of Macbeth. Carroll dismisses it as a “myth of lineage” (117). A keen student of Scots history, James, born just forty years later, would certainly have known that Banquo was a recent addition, one the Stewarts could use to bolster their claim to the Scottish throne. It’s doubtful that he would have appreciated a play that reminded him that his right to the throne was based on a fiction. Besides, Banquo too supposedly came to a violent end. Professor Carroll is also skeptical that James would have appreciated the play. He notes that some scholars “find the play to be far more ambivalent about—and even subversive of—James’s ideological interests,” rather than a play intended to please him (2). He adds that in his own view, “rather than clarifying and reinforcing the theories of kingship and sovereign power that James proposed in his writings and speeches, the play seems to go out of its way to mystify and undermine those theories” (6). A bloody Scottish tragedy subversive of James’s interests and undermining his succession theories could hardly have been more unpleasant for the recently crowned Scottish king of England. The Stratfordian attempts to link Macbeth to King James and the Gunpowder Plot, while possibly exciting, do not withstand scrutiny. The Royal Succession Issue Carroll offers several more observations that Oxfordians would say support their view that the play was written, not for King James I, but years or decades earlier, and that someone like Oxford would be the more likely author. The dramatist, Carroll says, knew a great deal about the four contending theories of royal succession: the appeals to religious authority, to natural law, to secular history and to blood relation. “Shakespeare’s Macbeth,” he writes, “embodies virtually every issue of the succession controversy in the four paradigms of kingship within the play” (18591). Carroll also raises questions about the puzzling “show of kings” passage, which has led editors of modern editions to change a stage direction (sd) in the First Folio text in a way that allows them to link the passage to King James. Carroll writes: While the play does represent the line of Banquo stretching out to the crack of doom, it also leaves us with two significant gaps in the “show of eight Kings and Banquo last” (4.1.111sd)—there should be nine kings, but James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots, is missing from the sequence, and at the end of the play Fleance is missing, unseen and unmentioned, as if he had never existed. (191) Carroll is not alone in puzzling over the “show of kings” passage. It is unaccountably confusing, at least for modern-day critics. John Dover Wilson and Kenneth Muir wrestled with it, reaching no conclusion. The stage direction in the First Folio calls for “a show of eight kings and Banquo last with a glass in his hand.” Macbeth, however, says the eighth king . . . bears a glass which shows me many more, and some I see That two-fold balls and treble scepters carry. (4.1.119–21) Something is wrong here. It’s unlikely that the dramatist would have both Banquo and the eighth king holding mirrors. Taking bold action, textual scholars changed the stage direction so that Banquo, not the eighth king, holds the mirror. This change enables them to propose that James is the eighth king, which almost fits the number of monarchs between the time of the historical Macbeth and James. But that would depict a reigning monarch on stage, which was prohibited. Wilson asks, “Did they dare to show his image on stage? If not, that perhaps explains why F [the First Folio] gives to Banquo the ‘glass’ ” (152). Muir gives up: “Perhaps we should retain the F reading” (115). Whatever the interpretation, altering the stage direction allowed textual scholars to insert a representation of King James into the scene, a change that fits their idea of when and why it was written. The scene, however, probably has nothing to do with James. Since neither Mary Queen of Scots nor her son James is included in the show of monarchs it’s unlikely that the dramatist had them in mind when he wrote the passage. The scene could have been written much earlier, serving simply to dramatize Macbeth’s horror at Banquo’s descendants somehow reigning over Scotland and later on some of them reigning over England as well. Orthodox scholars also suggest that the “two-fold balls and treble scepters” in the show of kings symbolize James’s kingdom. But scholars differ on what realms they represent, and the phrase seems at best a weak allusion to James in a passage that has defied explication. Topicalities and dating the play Although equivocation and witchcraft certainly influenced the playwright, neither was specific to the early 1600s. Equivocation had been notorious for years. A decade earlier, it was a principal accusation in the trial of Robert Southwell, a Jesuit poet accused of treason (Brownlow 19–20). Thus equivocation was in no way unique to the Gunpowder Plot and the treason trial in 1606 of Father Henry Garnet, another Jesuit accused of equivocation. Similarly, witchcraft and witch hunts were notorious long before James became King of England. Nor were “touching for evil” or “the farmer who hanged himself in the expectation of plenty” unique to the reign of James in England. Touching for evil was practiced by many of the monarchs who came after Edward the Confessor—including Queen Elizabeth herself (Levin 16, 31–3). King James, in fact, was a reluctant and skeptical toucher for evil (Carroll, 222–6). And slumping prices for grain caused problems a number of times for farmers in the decades preceding 1606. Not all Stratfordian scholars date the play to 1606; at least three date the play before 1604, most notably J. Dover Wilson, co-editor of The New Cambridge Shakespeare, who dated it to 16012 (xli). An independent scholar, Arthur Melville Clark, also suggested 1601. In his book, Murder Under Trust, he cites parallels with the Gowrie conspiracy in Scotland against James’s life the previous year. Professor Daniel Amneus of California State University at Los Angeles argues for 1599 in The Mystery of Macbeth mainly because of succession issues and because no English dramatist would have depicted regicide after James became King of England (40–1, 46). In his Arden edition of Macbeth, Muir tentatively allows that “the play as a whole might have been written earlier [than 1606]” if, as he considers, some of the passages were interpolations (xvii). But these are exceptions. Most commentaries describe Macbeth as a 1606 play written for King James I of England. Six Stratfordians aid the case for Oxford Oxfordian scholars—aided by the work of six Stratfordians—contend that it was Oxford who wrote and rewrote Macbeth many years before James became King of England. They point to a number of topicalities: the Darnley assassination, a sequence of slayings of persons of rank who were guests of their assassins, the playwright’s knowledge of Scotland, and narrative details in a manuscript chronicle of Scotland pre-dating Holinshed. The principal Oxfordian commentators on Macbeth are Charles Wisner Barrell, author of numerous articles on the Shakespeare authorship issue in the 1940s, and Ruth Lloyd Miller, a lawyer and leading Oxfordian scholar, who added her own extensive notes to her 1974 reprint of Eva Turner Clark’s book. This article is indebted in large part to their work. The first two of the six Stratfordian scholars were Charlotte Carmichael Stopes (1841–1929) and Lilian Winstanley (b. 1875). Stopes, who was born and educated in Scotland, wrote articles and a dozen books on Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Industry (1916) won an award from the British Academy. Professor S. Schoenbaum calls her an indefatigable, eccentric amateur but usually tough-minded and critical (459–64). Winstanley, also a Scotswoman, was a lecturer at the University College of Wales when she published in 1922, Macbeth, King Lear & Contemporary History, being a study of the relations of the play of Macbeth to the personal history of James I, the Darnley murder and the St. Bartholomew Day massacre. She apparently wrote without knowing that J. Thomas Looney had identified Oxford as Shakespeare two years earlier. Probably due to her native perspective on Scottish history, Winstanley was the first to find significance in the treatment of plots, assassinations and executions in Macbeth. She builds a strong case that among the sources of Macbeth were the assassinations of Lord Darnley in 1567 in Scotland and of Admiral Coligny in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France in 1572. Without questioning the 1606 date for its composition, she suggests that the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 reminded the dramatist of the two assassinations, and that he counted on his audience, including the King, to remember them. She fails to appreciate, however, that since the two assassinations had occurred thirty-eight and thirty-three years earlier, both on foreign soil, details of them would have dimmed in popular memory, and that the Gunpowder Plot hardly fit the pattern of murders in Macbeth. Darnley’s assassination Lord Darnley was the youthful consort to Mary Queen of Scots and thus King of Scotland to his supporters, although she denied him the title and often banished him from her castle. His sensational murder in 1567, when he was twenty-years-old, was engineered by rivals that included the ambitious Earl of Bothwell, Mary’s chief adviser (Weir 331–3). Mary had arranged for the ailing Darnley to recuperate at one of her houses near Edinburgh. Bothwell and some of his cohorts took advantage of the King’s isolation to blow up the house. Darnley awakened just before the blast and managed to escape in his nightclothes, but the conspirators suffocated him in the orchard. Three months later, Bothwell virtually forced the twenty-three-yearold Queen to marry him. The grisly murder of Darnley, when Oxford was sixteen, provides the most striking influences on Macbeth, including the role of Lady Macbeth in the murder of King Duncan. Reports quickly spread throughout Scotland and London that the Queen was behind the assassination and that she had lured Darnley to Edinburgh on the pretext that the air was wholesome. In the play, Duncan, the guest of the Lord and Lady Macbeth, remarks that “the air . . . recommends itself unto our gentle senses;” and Banquo agrees that “the air is delicate” (1.6.1–9). As in the play, an ambitious rival assassinated Scotland’s king, who had gone to bed thinking he was a welcome guest. Just as the play includes a knocking at the porter’s gate, investigative reports of Darnley’s murder twice mention a “knocking at the gate”—while Bothwell was said to have cried “Treason”! when informed of Darnley’s murder. Bothwell, moreover, was widely believed to consort with witches. These details and many other reports of Darnley’s assassination point to the ultra-ambitious Bothwell as the primary model for the character Macbeth (Winstanley 65–93; Miller/E.T. Clark 840–3). A contemporary sketch of the murder scene (above) shows a gate, the assassinated Darnley, and a dagger that seems to be floating in the air (in the upper right-hand corner). In the play, Macbeth asks, “Is this a dagger I see before me”? Lady Macbeth later calls it an “air-drawn dagger.” William Cecil’s agent in Scotland sent the sketch and a variety of investigative records to Cecil in London. Traumatized by fear and horror, accused by some of complicity in her husband’s murder, Mary collapsed into a trance-like depression similar to that of Lady Macbeth. In his 1935 biography of the Queen of Scots, Stefan Zweig speculated at length on the “remarkable similarities” between her condition and Lady Macbeth’s. Drawing on his studies of psychology, he suggests that both suffer pangs of conscience, become depressed and physically ill (209–12). Zweig probably developed his insights independently; he does not indicate that he had read Winstanley. The first Macbeth play? Darnley’s assassination and Bothwell’s involvement inspired an interlude or play that was written within months of his death, the only play of the time known to depict a contemporary event and one that might be considered an early version of Macbeth. Sir William Drury mentioned it in his letter of May 14, 1567 to William Cecil: “There has been an interlude of boys at Stirling of the manner of the King’s death and the arraignment of the earl . . . . This was before the Lords, who the earl thinks were devisers of the same” (Winstanley 87). Drury was deputy governor of Berwick on the Scottish border, and the previous month Bothwell had challenged him for “uttering foul reproaches” (DNB). Presumably, Drury’s reproaches had something to do with Darnley’s murder. The following year, in March, The Tragedie of the Kinge of Scottes was performed by the Children of the Chapel for Queen Elizabeth in London. Stopes, the first to bring it to light, suggested in 1916 that this lost, anonymous tragedy “might even have represented the death of Darnley, which had happened on the 9th of February in the year before” (95–6). E.K. Chambers backhandedly recognized the possibility that the tragedy was the first Macbeth play. “We do not know,” he wrote, “whether Macbeth was the theme of a tragedy of The Kinge of Scottes given at court in 156768” (Shakespeare 1:476). Both Stopes and Chambers implicitly raise the possibility of the King of Scottes tragedy being a first version of Macbeth, but they stop short of recognizing the implications. It would have been far too early for Will Shakspere to have written it. Darnley’s assassination caused a sensation in London. As a ward in the household of William Cecil, councilor to Queen Elizabeth, Oxford was perfectly placed to hear about the assassination, see the sketch with the air-drawn dagger and peruse the extensive Scottish records of the investigation, which included many dramatic details that turn up in Macbeth. Fifteen years later, he would be identified as patron of the Children of the Chapel, the same acting troupe that performed The Tragedie of the Kinge of Scottes for Elizabeth as recorded in the Revels Accounts for 1567–8 (4.144). The only other credible candidates for authorship of the tragedy are George Gascoigne and Thomas Norton. Gascoigne’s two plays at that time were translations from the Greek and Italian, whereas The Tragedie of the Kinge of Scottes must have been original. Norton is famous for having written Gorboduc with Thomas Sackville, but it was produced nearly a decade earlier, and it is his only known play (3.320–1, 456–7). Neither playwright is known to have had any special interest in Scottish politics. Also not credible as the anonymous dramatist are the few other obscure or anonymous playwrights in Edmund Chambers’s lists for that period, most of whom translated classics or wrote on classical themes (4.1–54). Whether Oxford wrote the tragedy in 1567/8 must remain speculation. He entered Gray’s Inn, the law school, in February, 1567, three months before the performance of the interlude in Scotland. No records indicate that he was in Scotland at that time. On the other hand, he did not have to be there to write the tragedy, and it’s hard to imagine what other writer so early in the history of Elizabethan theater might have written such a play for performance for Queen Elizabeth by the acting company that would later be identified as Oxford’s own. Pending new evidence, however, its authorship must remain an intriguing conjecture. Violations of hospitality Macbeth, of course, is a play about a usurper whose overweening ambition leads him to assassinate his king—but there’s more to it than that. Macbeth and his equally ambitious wife compound the evil by killing King Duncan when he was a guest in their home. They sin against the law of hospitality—that a host owes his guest food, shelter and safety from harm. Toward the end of Act I, Shakespeare explicitly invokes the law of hospitality. Duncan has arrived and Macbeth, alone, wavers in a soliloquy: “He’s here in double trust,” says Macbeth, “first, as I am his kinsman and his subject, strong both against the deed; then as his host, who should against his murderer shut the door, not bear the knife myself” (1.7.12–16). Violation of hospitality, a major theme of the play, is drawn not from the Macbeth legend, but from the earlier murder of a king who was a guest in his assailant’s castle. Not generally recognized is that Banquo is also a guest who is slain by his host. “Here’s our chief guest,” says Macbeth, welcoming him (3.1.11). Macbeth then hires killers to assassinate Banquo, whom he considers a potential rival. The reason the dramatist went out of his way to incorporate the violation of hospitality in the play may well be because it was the common characteristic of an extraordinary sequence of slayings during the reign of Elizabeth. As Miller points out, no less than five monarchs or would-be rulers were killed or attacked by their hosts in struggles for political power. And in every case, the victims’ hosts violated the law of hospitality, essential for civilized life. It was not a good time for a king to accept invitations. Five years after Darnley was betrayed by his hosts came another sensational assassination. In France, Admiral Coligny, the highly respected leader of the Protestant Huguenots, was killed in an assassination that was also a violation of hospitality, triggering the sensational St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Coligny and his Protestant followers had been invited by Catherine de Medici, the Queen Mother, to the According to English history, she plotted with Roman Catholic noblemen to massacre her wedding guests. Oxford, now twenty-three, heard about the assassinations and the rampage by Catholics that followed. He wrote to his fatherin-law, William Cecil Lord Burghley, about his concern that a moderate like Admiral Coligny could be assassinated and that Burghley and Queen Elizabeth might be vulnerable to similar plots (Ward 71–2). Again, Oxford was in a position to learn about details of an assassination, details that turn up in Macbeth. Like Lady Macbeth, Catherine de Medici was often depicted as the fiendish power behind the throne. It was said that her son, the King of France, hesitated before agreeing to Coligny’s assassination, but her prodding convinced him to go along with the plan, just as Lady Macbeth hectored Macbeth into killing Duncan. At the end of the play, Malcolm describes Lady Macbeth as a “fiendlike queen” (5.8.70). Catherine de Medici supposedly gave the signal to ring a church bell—the signal to kill Coligny and his entourage. In the play, Macbeth orders a servant to have Lady Macbeth ring a bell when his drink is ready. When the bell rings, Macbeth, having screwed his courage to the sticking place, takes it to be a signal to kill King Duncan. “The bell invites me,” he says. “Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell/that summons thee to heaven or to hell” (2.1.32, 63–5). Two years later, Walter Devereux, the first earl of Essex and commander of the English forces in Ireland, invited an Irish chieftain and relatives to a dinner meeting in Belfast, seized them and their followers at the banquet and had them killed—another brazen sin against hospitality (DNB). After Darnley’s assassination, his widow was forced to abdicate. Mary escaped from her enemies in Scotland, put her trust in Elizabeth and accepted her hospitality and safety in England. However, her presence came to be seen as a threat to the English Queen, at least in the eyes of Elizabeth’s advisers, and Mary became a political prisoner. Elizabeth alternated between her fear that Catholic plotters might use Mary to unseat her and her duty to treat a cousin and an anointed fellow-queen as a protected guest. Reluctantly, she finally gave in to her fears and allowed her longtime prisoner-guest to be tried for treason in 1587. Mary’s quest for hospitality and safety in the England of Elizabeth ended with her trial and execution. Oxford, now thirty-seven, was one of two dozen commissioners at her treason trial. Gifts of diamonds figure both in the play and in Mary’s search for safety. Banquo tells Macbeth that the king, who has gone to bed, “sent forth great largess to your offices. This diamond he greets your wife withal, by the name of most kind hostess . . . .” (2.1.14). When Mary took refuge in England, she sent Elizabeth a large diamond (Miller/E.T. Clark 842). The following year, in France, Henry III invited his rival, the Duke of Guise, known as the King of the Parisians, to Blois for a private audience. Henry’s royal guard assassinated his guest. A friend of Eva Turner Clark, Esther Singleton, called to Clarks’s attention that the apparition of the eight kings in Macbeth is very similar to a report that Catherine de Medici, mother-in-law of Mary Queen of Scots, had once seen an apparition of the future kings of France in a mirror (809–23). Thus, from 1567, when he was seventeen, to 1589, when he was thirty-nine, Oxford was aware of a series of slayings that involved, not just the murder or execution of a political leader, usually a ruler, but in every case a violation of the law of hospitality. Moreover, he was in a position in Burghley’s household and at Court to learn of obscure details that turn up in Macbeth. Additional Scottish topicalities Another proposed source for Macbeth is the Gowrie conspiracy of 1600. Arthur Melville Clark, an independent Stratfordian scholar from Scotland, proposed it as the primary influence. He found other obscure topicalities in the play as well. The Gowrie Conspiracy was an alleged attempt to assassinate King James VI of Scotland three years before he also became James I of England. James maintained that he had been lured to Gowrie castle, where he and his fellow-guests thwarted what he described as an attempted assassination by his hosts and political rivals, following a banquet. It’s a fascinating incident, one which has provoked much speculation that James himself engineered it to get rid of his rivals (he had them killed) and make himself a hero. It’s still an open question for historians of Scotland. Although several parallels between the Gowrie Conspiracy and Macbeth are striking—far more so than between Macbeth and the Gunpowder Plot—there is no reason that, given the example of the Darnley assassination and other murderous violations of hospitality, the dramatist had to wait until 1600 to write the play. It is, of course, possible that after the Gowrie Conspiracy he was inspired to revise parts of his play. Whether or not the Gowrie Conspiracy influenced the writing or rewriting of Macbeth in 1602 or 1603, Arthur Clark is one of three Stratfordians who identified significant topical allusions in the play that could have been written only by someone who knew Scotland first-hand. These led him to conclude that Shakespeare—his man from Stratford—must have visited Scotland. Two of these allusions are to fine points of Scots law: “double trust” and “interdiction.” Clark entitled his 1981 book, Murder Under Trust: The Topical Macbeth, because, as noted above, Macbeth says of Duncan: “He’s here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, strong both against the deed; then as his host, who should against his murderer shut the door, not bear the knife myself” (1.7.12). The “double trust” concept was enacted into law in 1587 when the Scottish Parliament raised from mere homicide to treason the slaying of someone of rank who was also a guest of his slayer, with the trial to be held in the highest court. The act was passed after the Macdonald clan killed eighty-six men of the McLean clan who had been invited to a banquet and entertainment. This “double trust” concept was only in Scots law (46). The legal term “interdiction” occurs in the strange colloquy between Macduff and Malcolm. Macduff laments that Malcolm, the heir to the throne, “by his own interdiction stands accused and does blaspheme his breed” (4.3.107). This refers in Scots law to someone conscious of his failings who gives up or is forced to give up the management of his own affairs, which is what Malcolm seemed to be doing, much to Macduff’s dismay (46). Scotland’s geography and weather The dramatist also was knowledgeable about Scotland’s geography and used at least one local idiom correctly. Arthur Clark says Shakespeare correctly situates Dunsinane, Great Birnam Wood, Forres, Inverness, the Western Isles, Colmekill, Saint Colme, and the lands that gave their names to the thanes: Fife, Glamis, Cawdor, Ross, Lennox, Mentieth, Angus and Caithness (31). Maps of Scotland were rare, and only someone who had been there could have situated the places so accurately. Even the Scots were vague about their geography. Stopes calls attention to Banquo’s question: “How far is it called to Forres”? (1.3.39) “Called,” she says, was a typical Scots locution of the time, since rarely did anyone in Scotland know accurate distances (98). The weather in Macbeth is typically Scottish. In Act I, Macbeth says to Banquo, “So fair and foul a day I have not seen,” a gratuitous comment on Scotland’s rapidly changing weather compared to England’s (1.3.38). When King Duncan arrives at Macbeth’s castle at Inverness to spend the night (his last) he comments on the mild weather: “This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses.” Banquo agrees: “Heaven’s breath smells wooingly here. The air is delicate” (1.6.1–9). According to Stopes, an Englishman could not have written these passages unless he had visited Inverness and experienced the unexpected mildness of its climate. She says Shakespeare (and she assumes the man from Stratford) probably visited Inverness (98). Arthur Clark also notes that Inverness has an unusually mild “microclimate” distinct from the rest of Scotland, and he too wonders how Shakespeare could have known about it without having visited Inverness (33, 187). Other topical allusions in the play are subtle, but telling. For example, Ross says Scotland suffers greatly under Macbeth and “good men’s lives expire before the flowers in their caps” (4.3.170). That is an allusion to the sprig of flower or plant that a Scotsman wore in his cap to identify his clan (A.M. Clark 32). In Act V, Macbeth gets ready for battle and calls out impatiently for his armor-bearer, named Seton. The legends of Macbeth do not mention any Setons, but adding him to the play was perfectly appropriate. Professor Wilson of the University of Edinburgh marveled that “somehow or other” Shakespeare learned that the Setons were the hereditary armor-bearers to the kings of Scotland (xlii). He goes on to suggest reluctantly that Shakespeare (of Stratford) must have visited Scotland—reluctantly, because there is no evidence for such a visit, nor is one likely. Oxford in Scotland Oxford, on the other hand, was in Scotland for several months in 1570 when he was nineteenturning-twenty. In his biography of William Cecil Lord Burghley, Conyers Read says Burghley sent his son Thomas Cecil and his ward the young Earl of Rutland to join the Queen’s forces in putting down the Catholic “Northern Rebellion.” He probably would also have sent Oxford, his other noble ward, had he not been ill at the time (2.126). Oxford wrote Cecil on November 24, 1569 that his health was restored, reminding him of his promise “to have me see the wars and services in strange and foreign places.” He asked to “be called to the service of my prince and country.” Oxford’s request was granted around March 30 when Burghley authorized payment of forty pounds to Oxford “as the Queen’s Majesty sendeth at this present the Earl of Oxford into the north parts to remain with my Lord of Sussex, and to be employed there in Her Majesty’s service” (Ward 40). The author of Macbeth showed a special interest in the fourth Earl of Lennox and his Countess, who both appear in the play, although neither is mentioned in the historical legend of Macbeth. The Earl has a fairly prominent role. While Oxford was with Sussex, the English invaded Scotland twice and Sir William Drury (quoted above regarding the 1567 interlude) led troops escorting Lennox to Edinburgh, where he was to rule over Scotland as regent on behalf of Queen Elizabeth (DNB). Four years later, Lennox’s widow and Oxford would be among the guests at a country house party given by Burghley. The best estimate is that Oxford would have been on the Scottish border and in Scotland—including perhaps with Drury on his mission to Edinburgh—for up to seven months, from April to October. Ward says he probably returned to London in late summer or early autumn. Sussex returned to Newcastle in September and to London in November (49). Oxford may well have returned with him at that time. Sussex, the military commander, with whom Oxford was associated later, also had an interest in the theater. He had an acting company that became the Lord Chamberlain’s Men when he took that position two years later. Oxford was in his twenties and spending most of his time at Court when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were performing for Queen Elizabeth. A few years later, after Oxford returned from his travels on the Continent, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed half a dozen plays whose titles sound like early versions of Shakespeare plays. Unfortunately, the records name no author of these early Court plays, and the scripts have not been found (E.T. Clark 4–6). William of Stratford in Scotland? Several Stratfordian scholars, recognizing the intensely Scottish atmosphere of the play, have suggested that Will Shakspere of Stratford traveled to Scotland, although there is no documentary evidence for it. They say he might have been in Scotland around 1601–2 with Lawrence Fletcher’s acting company. Wilson cautiously suggested: We do know, however, that “English comedians” were in Scotland from 1599 onwards, to the scandal of the Edinburgh Kirk Sessions, and that they were led by one Laurence Fletcher, whose name later appears with Shakespeare’s as one of the principal members of the King’s company constituted by royal patent on 19 May 1603. We know, too, that players can do nothing without plays; and, although no title or tittle of what they acted has survived, it is at least conceivable that Shakespeare’s longer Macbeth was first produced by Fletcher’s company in the capital city of Scotland. Indeed, if I may continue to live dangerously, it is even possible that Shakespeare visited Scotland himself. (xlii) Stopes was bolder, stating that the Stratford man “very probably joined” the English actors in Scotland, apparently in her view simply because “there is no record of ‘Shakespeare’s Company’ playing in London between March 1601 and December 1602” (99). This scenario, however, is weak on several counts. Fletcher’s theatrical career up to that point was totally in Scotland, where he was a favorite of King James. He had no known connection with acting companies in London until he went there with James in 1603. The identities of the “English comedians” in Scotland is unknown. That Will Shakspere was among them seems unlikely. In his survey of “English Players in Scotland,” Chambers rejects the idea that Shakspere and the Chamberlain’s men were in Scotland (Shakespeare 2.269) A chronicle and a house party Besides the topicalities noted by Oxfordian and Stratfordian scholars that point to Oxford as the author of Macbeth, an unusual source document adds to the evidence. It is William Stewart’s chronicle of Scotland, one of ten such chronicles, including Holinshed’s. Stewart translated Hector Boece’s chronicle from Latin into the Scottish vernacular in 1531–35, embellishing it with details that turn up in Macbeth. The original existed only in manuscript for centuries. Stopes, who first called attention to Stewart’s manuscript, points to three passages (102–3). One passage of sixty-five lines describes thoughts and motives of Macbeth and his wife that correspond closely to passages in the play. A passage of eight lines is reflected in Act I when Macbeth tells his wife that Duncan and others have honored him and that he will not proceed in their plot to kill him (1.7.34). Wilson notes that “Boece and Holinshed have nothing corresponding to this, and yet how well it sums up the pity of Macbeth’s fall as Shakespeare represents it” (xix). Finally, when Lady Macbeth taunts Macbeth with being a coward and unmanly and breaking his vow to seek the crown (1.7.36–61), her long tirade draws directly on twenty-six lines in Stewart’s chronicle, according to Stopes. Nothing like these correspondences appears in any of the other chronicles of Scotland. As Stopes sums up: “In every case in which Stewart differs from Holinshed, Shakespeare follows Stewart” (102). She provides the texts of the passages in Stewart’s Scottish vernacular in end notes, but does not translate them into English (336–40). Others have rejected the influence of Stewart’s manuscript. Wilson, after first agreeing with Stopes, changed his mind, according to Muir, who does not, however, say why or where Wilson retracted his view (xvii). Neither Muir nor Chambers agreed with the parallels found by Stopes. Muir is cautious: “It seems to me that resemblances between Stewart and Shakespeare are accidental . . . . No one, moreover, has provided any plausible explanation of how Shakespeare obtained access to the manuscript of Stewart’s poem” (xviii, xxxix–xl). Chambers is somewhat more definite in his rejection: “There is not much substance in the suggestions that some of Shakespeare’s departures from Holinshed are due to this [Stewart’s manuscript]” (Shakespeare 1.476). Geoffrey Bullough allows in his comprehensive work on Shakespeare sources that “there are parallels between Stewart’s chronicle and the play,” but he adds immediately “they are indecisive and appear elsewhere” (7:438). “Elsewhere” is chiefly in George Buchanan’s 1582 history of Scotland, which drew on all the earlier sources, according to Paul (222)—but with one significant exception, Stewart’s embellished translation of Boece. Orthodox scholars realized that Stewart’s chronicle was a problem for them because only someone with access to the original manuscript—in royal hands—could have seen it. No manuscript copies are known to have been made, not surprising since it is 43,000 lines long and in the Scottish vernacular. It was not printed until the mid-nineteenth century (A.M. Clark 187). No other writers of Shakespeare’s time referred to it (Barrell/Clark 857). Stopes and Arthur Clark are thus forced to surmise that the actor from Stratford must have been in Scotland to see it, although, of course, there is no evidence he traveled there, much less got into the royal library, or, once there, managed to decipher the Scottish vernacular. Charles Wisner Barrell suggests that Oxford, who might have seen the manuscript chronicle when he was in Scotland, probably saw it as a result of his connection, through Burghley, to the Countess of Lennox, who was closely related to Scottish and English royalty (E.T. Clark 857–8). No one in England at that time was more likely to have Stewart’s manuscript in their possession. Lady Lennox’s grandmother, the Queen of Scotland, had commissioned it for her brother, James V, now dead more than thirty years. Much later scholars found it in the library of her grandson, James I of England. Given Oxford’s position in aristocratic circles, he had unique opportunities to see Stewart’s manuscript chronicle, whether in Scotland or England. Barrell notes too that the author of Macbeth had a particular interest in the Countess of Lennox (E.T. Clark 861–2). Besides an anachronistic Earl of Lennox, the dramatist also added a Lady Lennox, whom modern text editors have removed from the play. In the First Folio, the first printing of the play, she is included in the stage direction near the beginning of Act III Scene 1: “Enter Macbeth as King, Lady Lenox, Rosse, Lords and Attendants.” After Macbeth welcomes Banquo as his guest, Lady Lenox—designated “La”—says her only three lines in the play: If he had been forgotten, It had been as a gap in our great Feast, And all-thing unbecoming. (3.1.11–13) Since Lady Lenox has such a small role, text editors changed the stage direction to replace her with Lady Macbeth, who enters with Macbeth and the others, adding Lennox himself to those entering on stage, although he says nothing in the scene. They give the three lines by “La” to Lady Macbeth, even though she has no other lines in the scene and was not in the original stage direction. The triple switch—removing Lady Lennox and adding Lady Macbeth and the Earl of Lennox—is perhaps understandable, since whoever the speaker, she calls it “our” great feast, implying the feast of Lord and Lady Macbeth. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the dramatist anachronistically added a Lord and Lady Lennox to his play, an addition that makes little sense unless the author knew the Lennoxes and wished to please them. When Oxford was twenty-four years old, he and Lady Lennox were guests at a country house party where everyone had a personal interest in Scottish politics. They were guests of Lord Burghley, Oxford’s father-in-law, on September 19 and 20, 1574, at Theobolds, Burghley’s house north of London, which was noted for its dinner parties (Barrell/E.T. Clark 858). Oxford had just returned from his brief foray to Holland, where, it was rumored, he was consorting with Scotsmen. Among the guests was Henry Percy, eighth Earl of Northumberland, and his wife. Percy had been imprisoned for treason for offering to help Mary Queen of Scots escape England. Five years earlier, as a more loyal subject of Elizabeth, he had fought beside the Earl of Sussex against the northern rebels in the campaign that took Oxford into Scotland (DNB). Another was Lady Hunsdon, about fifty, whose husband was governor of Berwick on the Scottish border and, like Northumberland, had commanded an English force under Sussex during the Northern Rebellion (DNB). He had recently been named Vice-Chamberlain of the Royal Household under Sussex, a post that gave him authority over Court theatricals. Earlier, in 1564, he had been the patron of an acting company. That was three years before the Darnley assassination and the appearance of The Tragedie of the Kinge of Scottes. His company would also be active in the 1580s, when he became Lord Chamberlain (Chambers Shakespeare 2.192–3). The Countess of Lennox herself was a pivotal figure in Scottish and English politics. Her late husband had been with Sussex, Drury and Oxford in the campaigns at the Scottish border. She was the mother of the assassinated Lord Darnley, and she and Lord Lennox campaigned vigorously to have Bothwell tried for the murder of their son. Both had strong claims to the English throne. A granddaughter of Henry VII of England, she grew up as a favorite of Henry VIII and lived most of her life in England, where she acted as agent and strategist for her husband. At the time of the dinner party, Lady Lennox was living in the same house in Hackney where Oxford would live the last years of his life (Miller 2.157). In her late fifties, the Countess, with all her Scottish and English connections, must have been a fascinating guest at the famous dinners. In her recent biography, Kimberly Schutte describes her as a prickly, strong-willed, outspoken woman with an overweening ambition for her family, adept at marital scheming (1–2). On balance, the evidence points to Oxford as the author. The cumulative effect is powerful. The dramatist who wrote Macbeth knew Scotland so well he must have spent time there. He knew about its weather, its customs and its unique law of “double trust.” He had access to details of several assassinations that turn up in Macbeth, especially those concerning the assassination of Lord Darnley. He was in a position to see William Stewart’s manuscript with its unique details that appear in the play. And, although speculative, there is the intriguing possibility that his first version of Macbeth was The Tragedie of the Kinge of Scottes, written when he was eighteen. All scholars agree that the text of Macbeth in the First Folio shows clear signs of rewriting and was probably longer in earlier versions. As a result of the work of six Stratfordian scholars—Stopes, Winstanley, Wilson, Arthur Clark, Amneus and Carroll—as well as Oxfordians Miller and Barrell, the preponderance of evidence supports the Oxfordian view that the dramatist wrote the first version of Macbeth long before 1606 and that he was not Will Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon but Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl of Oxford, writing under the pseudonym William Shakespeare. Works Cited Amneus, Daniel. The Mystery of Macbeth. Alhambra, CA: Primrose Press, 1983. Brownlow, F.W. Robert Southwell. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Barrell, Charles Wisner. “Notes on Macbeth.” Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays. E.T. Clark. 1930. 3rd edition ed. Ruth Loyd Miller. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1974. 855–861. ____________. “Dr. John Dover Wilson’s New Macbeth is a Masterpiece Without a Master, but Oxford-Shakespeare Research Again Fills the Void.” Shakespeare Fellowship Quarterly. Winter 1947–8. www.sourcetext.com Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol 7. New York: Columbia UP, 1975. Carroll, William C., ed. Macbeth. Boston: St. Martin’s, 1999. Chambers, E.K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923. ____________. William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1930. Clark, Eva Turner. Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays. Ed. Ruth Loyd Miller. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1974. Clark, Arthur Melville. Murder Under Trust: The Topical Macbeth and Other Jacobean Matters. Edinburgh: SAC, 1981. Kay, Dennis. Shakespeare: His Life, Work and Era. New York: Morrow, 1992. Levin, Carole. The Heart and Stomach of a King. Philadelphia: UPP, 1994. Miller, Ruth Loyd, ed. Oxfordian Vistas. Jennings, LA: Minos, 1975. Muir, Kenneth, ed., Macbeth. Arden. Walton-on-Thames, Surrey,UK: Nelson, 1984. Paul, Henry N. The Royal Play of Macbeth. New York: Octagon, 1971. Read, Conyers. Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960. Schoenbaum, S. Shakespeare’s Lives. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Schutte, Kimberly. A Biography of Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox (1515–1578). Lewiston NY: Mellen, 2002. Stopes, Charlotte C. Shakespeare’s Industry. London: Bell, 1916. Ward, B.M. The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford 1550–1604. 1928. London: John Murray, 1979. Wilson, John Dover, ed., Macbeth. 1947. Cambridge: CUP, 1960. Winstanley, Lilian. Macbeth, King Lear & Contemporary History. Cambridge: CUP, 1922. Zweig, Stefan. Mary Queen of Scots and the Isles. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: Viking, 1935. Scroll To Top	__label__1	0.62654
Petersburg by Andrei Bely by Michael Buening 12 July 2009 cover art Andrei Bely US: May 2009 Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, first published in 1916, is one of those world masterpiece’s of literature that for whatever reason – general disinterest, lack of popular promotion, minimal amount of time for tackling large dense novels – is largely unknown in the United States. I consider myself to be an avid reader and I didn’t know about it – as I didn’t know about Machado de Assis or Lu Xun – until I came across it through the PopMatters books-available-for-review list. Bely is studied in Russian literature classes, but his relative unknown might have something to with being a modernist writer dwarfed by 19th century titans like Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. Petersburg has been compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Though it takes place in a single city-as-character over roughly 24 hours, the comparison is a little slight. But this novel does belong to the extraordinary flowering of ambitious modernist constructs that was happening in the arts at the beginning of the 20th century of which Ulysses was a part – books like Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americanand Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—and employs many of the same innovations in writing from structure to dialogue. This year Pushkin Press has released a new translation by John Elsworth, first in the United Kingdom and now in the United States. I have no complaints about the actual translation, but it would be nice if an annotated edition of the text could be issued. Though essentially universal in its themes, Bely’s writing is dense with references and unless you are overly familiar with the 1905 Russian Revolution, the Saint Petersburg Soviet, “The Queen of Spades” (the Pushkin short story and the Tchaikovsky opera), Zemvsto, the founding and general layout of the Saint Petersburg and its popular image in Russian writing, Russian politicians of the era, and the rise of bomb throwing terrorism you may find yourself reading it next to a web browser opened to Wikipedia, like I did. I don’t doubt that I missed much more and it would help to have a guide reveal the book’s many layers. Within Bely’s maximalist writing lies a story that is at first brutally minimalistic. Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, the lead senator in the Duma, wakes up and goes to his office. His pampered son Nikolai is given a mysterious parcel by a revolutionary confidant Alexandr Ivanovich Dudkin. Meanwhile a woman that Nikolai has a passive-aggressive non-relationship with, Sofia Petrovna Likhutina, is given a letter to pass on to him from a grotesque revolutionary leader name Lippanchenko. She does, to spite him. It tells Nikolai that he needs to kill his father with a time bomb that is contained within the parcel he was given by Dudkin. The ticking of the clock sets the final movements of the characters interactions, disastrous and combustive, towards the finale. It seems to take forever for this plot and the characters to reveal themselves. Through the use of familiar melodramatic devices like mistaken identities and unlikely coincidences, Bely gives narrative tugs that pull the reader from one section to the next. The bomb inherently creates tension, first in the reader discovering how it intends to be used and then in the reader wondering who will end up being damaged or killed by it. But the patience of the reader really pays off through the use of repetition in color, character, interior thought and place. Repetition can be very annoying, but here sets up musical themes that gradually start to play off each other in surprising thematic twists. The colors red, white, green, yellow, and purple/blue are used in descriptions to simultaneously convey information (red=revolutionary), emotion (a green mist invokes a suffocating menace), and raise thematic flags (white corresponds with a Christian mysticism that is occasionally overdone). The characters are defined and evoked by key traits – for example Nikolai’s pale skin, “flaxen hair”, and “frog-like lips” – used like a code so that we know a character is hiding on the periphery when these words are used. (Especially helpful since many of the characters have multiple aliases.) These patterns typically play off of each other in pairs. The make-up of Petersburg is presented as both one of straight lines laid on top of “cosmic infinity”, echoing the city’s founding as a pre-planned creation set down by Peter the Great over a swamp (and the novel’s themes of bubbling darkness and chaos). The uncertainty of identity in a newly created cosmopolitan city is evoked through the use of varying place names: the Ableukhov’s “Mongol” heritage, the “Mongoloids” also evoking the Russo-Japanese war on the empire’s eastern boundaries, and Finland to the west is placed as a mysterious habitant of the green mists. As the characters are kept to a few defining descriptions, their interior thoughts are marked by specific themes that gradually coalesce into the book’s larger themes. Historical figures haunt them: a bronze statue of Peter the Great seems to punish them and the Flying Dutchman threatens them with the curse of one who can never go home. Dudkin is constantly remembering a dark yellow stain on his wallpaper, “on which something fateful – is about to appear,” while Nikolai enters reveries where he sees the bomb’s explosion as revealing a dark emptiness and enacting the myth of Saturn, where the father devours his children and in turn is devoured by them. By piling everything on top of each other, through constant juxtaposition and repetition of ideas and imagery, Bely interweaves his exploration of father/son relationships, revolution, history and how we belong to it, destruction and transcendence, and an indifferent universe or compassionate god that might lie behind all of it. Portrait of Andrei Bely by Leon Bakst Portrait of Andrei Bely by Leon Bakst In promoting Petersburg, it is often pointed out that Vladimir Nabokov reportedly said the book is one of the four greatest of the 20th century. This points to a whole other set of recommendable qualities of Bely’s writing. Everything I’ve written above sounds hopeless heady, almost geeky in its mythological grandeur. But like Nabokov, his writing can also be incredibly playful (he’s fond of word play) and is capable of satirical swipes at St. Petersburg society, and large humorous set pieces, as when Nikolai travels around in a red-domino suit to frighten Sofia after she calls him a “red clown”. The writing can veer from abstractly cosmic to tangible minutia, as in this description of Lippanchenko: “Suddenly between the back and the nape of the neck a fatty fold in the neck squeezed itself into a faceless smile: as though a monster had settled in that armchair.” Yet ultimately this is a very pessimistic portrait of personal and societal evisceration. Petersburg is about one event as a perpetual moment in history, a constancy of new orders usurping old orders and children destroying and then becoming parents, the battle between liberty and repression, and how this can leave people feeling permanently uprooted and haunted by the past. This is not a story about whether or not the Russian revolution was a worthwhile endeavor, but it is eerily prescient in predicting how the initial euphoria, the bomb explosion of Communism, would scorch the earth as badly as any tsar did.	__label__1	0.842819
The Moral Panacea Stoic Nurturing verses Religious Indoctrination By Jeff ~ Will ever the day come when the wise will band together the sweet dreams of youth and the joy of knowledge? Each is but naught when in solitary existence. Will ever the day come when Nature will be the teacher of man and Humanity his book of devotions and Life his daily school? Youth’s purpose of joy – capable in its ecstasy and mild in its responsibility – cannot seek fulfilment until knowledge heralds the dawn of that day. [Kahlil Gibran] Until some method of teaching virtue has been discovered, progress will have to be sought by improvement of intelligence rather than morals. [Bertrand Russell] If a noble disposition be planted in a young mind, it will engender a flower that will endure to the end, and no rain will destroy, nor will it be withered by drought. [Antiphon] I’m an Ex-Christian (of the born-again, spirit-filled persuasion) and I’m passionate about introducing a form of nurturing that will supersede religious indoctrination. The passion started with some ideas for a puppet theatre project, and now I find myself writing a book to help launch a new movement; so I’ve posted this little blurb as a preliminary feeler and any sensible comments would be much appreciated. PuppetsImage by Waypoint-zero via Flickr The new movement is called THE CHILDREN OF THE STOA, and it’s based on the pragmatic and heroic aspects of Stoic Philosophy. The original Stoic philosophers were called “men of the stoa” or “Stoics” because they taught and debated their ideas in a stoa, which is the Greek name for those porches, with the columns, on the front of ancient Greek temples. I’ve changed men of the stoa, to “Children of the Stoa” because the new movement’s aim will be to promote a youthful vitality to the pursuit of Virtue (Wisdom, Kindness, Moderation, Fortitude etc), especially in regards to the nurturing and education of youth. The main project of the Children of the Stoa movement will be THE ARETE PUPPET THEATRES PROJECT; or Apt Project for short—which is a neat little abbreviation, in that “Apt” means suitable and appropriate—and although I already have lots of ideas for this project, it has certain universal and dynamic qualities that have prompted me to write the book and attract some kindred spirits first. There is also the feeling that if I just continued with this project alone (designing the puppets and puppet theatre booths in my garden shed) it might not amount to anything; whereas, if I can get other people to share my vision, who knows how big this project could get? Here are two grand ideas, to show something of the project’s universal nature and dynamic potential: 1. Many, if not all of our social problems begin with the ideas and values people first acquire when they’re young children, but one of the biggest difficulties is that there is nothing, or very little that can be done to influence other people’s children. Puppet theatres are a solution to this problem, and my plan or vision involves very simple designs for puppets and puppet theatre booths, so they can be easily reproduced in two sizes. The big puppet theatres will be for beaches, shopping precincts, schools, gardens, parks, social clubs etc, and the smaller puppet theatres will be for people’s homes; which can be set up in the home, garden or street, to entertain and teach ones own children, as well as the children of friends and neighbours. One little fantasy that has kept this project alive is the thought of how quickly I could be giving a little puppet show, on top of a garden wall or fence perhaps. I can’t imagine any simpler, yet dynamic and fun way, of introducing children to some role-model characters, and creating some lasting impressions on their young minds. 3. Puppet theatres could be the catalysts of an Ideal Society. To explain this, I’ll use a simple analogy: If you wanted to properly grow some kind of valuable plants, then you’d need to make sure they have the right soil, moisture, temperature, plant food and light; varying the needs of the plants with the various stages of their growth. Your aim should be to provide the perfect conditions for the plants to grow as you want them; strong and healthy, with masses of fruit perhaps. But it is of prime importance that you begin this cultivation with an ideal goal in mind, and the love and care begins with the seeds and seedlings. By the same token—surely the creation of an ideal society could only begin with the best nurturing and education of youth. So that’s where the puppet theatres project fits in, as the Principal Nurturing and Educational Tools, and hopefully the flagships of many related enterprises. Children learn first by imitating the people around them; so as Principal Nurturing Tools, specific soft and cuddly puppet-children could be given to newly born babies as good interactive toys, to play with the youngsters while demonstrating polite and kind behaviour. And a few politeness and kindness jingles would make these initial social skills really stick. There is also a sort of magic about puppets, in that they can take on a life or personality of their own—For example; the celebrity puppets, Kermit the Frog, Basil-Brush, Sooty and Sweep, and Rudd Hull’s Emu, have become far more than the materials they’re made of. So in the eyes of children, their puppet characters could seem very real, like extended family members and companions for life. So after forming a loving bond with their puppet characters, the children would see the puppet plays, where their puppet characters would be set up as fun loving and adventurous noble role models. As Principle Educational Tools, the plays could also introduce children to some of the wisest and noblest characters in history, and the heroes I’ve chosen for the first play are Confucius, Epicurus, Zeno, Mahatma Gandhi and Socrates. Teaching children good behaviour might seem somewhat cheesy; but I have a feeling that even exaggerating the cheesiness, with these famous characters, would work brilliantly. I have loads of ideas for the initial puppet play, but for now I’ll just give a brief outline. What I have in mind is six musical acts, where big song sheets are draped over the front of the puppet theatre booth for audience participation. The puppet play will be a gardening course, where an apprentice gardener grows a tree, called an Arete Tree; and there’ll be mechanical plants for the various stages of growth, with articulating leaves, stems and flowers, so they can be made to look both healthy and unwell; thus symbolising the moral growth of the apprentice puppet. ACT 1 is the seed planting stage, and to help the apprentice will be the Greek God Zeus. As an Ex-Christian I had a problem with using Zeus at first, but I gradually realised that it’s not wise to dispose of the idea of God completely, and the Greek myths never achieved sacred scripture status, so it’s easy to rule out notions that are unbecoming of a Supreme Being. There is also the fact that throughout ancient Greek culture, the gods had pantheistic qualities, which is probably why the ancient Greeks were the true pioneers of rational inquiry. There is also an element of pragmatic heroism throughout the Greek myths, which became important to Stoic Philosophy. The Stoic Cleanthus expresses a divine calling—which is both heroic and rational—in this prayer: Lead me O Zeus, and thou O Destiny, The way that I am bid by you to go: To follow I am ready, If I choose not, I make myself a wretch, and still must follow. [Cleanthus] Incidentally; the writer of the book of Acts—in Acts 17:28—adds a pantheistic element to Christianity, when he has St Paul quoting from this Stoic poem: Let us begin with Zeus, whom we mortals never leave unspoken For every street, every market place is full of Zeus Even the sea and the harbour are full of his deity Everyone everywhere is indebted to Zeus For we are indeed his offspring [Aratus] And this quote from Euripides I find extremely encouraging: Whoso nobly yields unto necessity, we hold as wise and skilled in things divine. [Euripides] The word “Arete” also comes from the Greek myths, and describes the hero; as explained in this historian’s description of the hero in Homer’s Odyssey: The hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send: and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phoenician youth at boxing, wrestling or running, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder. He has surpassing Arete. Arete implies a respect for the wholeness of life and a consequent dislike for efficiency; or rather, a much higher idea of efficiency; an efficiency which exists not in one department of life, but in life itself. [H Kitto] ACT 2 is the seed germination stage, and to help the apprentice will be Confucius. This is the politeness and kindness stage of the course, and I’ve chosen Confucius because he grew up in a society where social rituals were very important. The rituals were a sort of elaborate and embellished form of polite and correct conduct, to do with ordering society, by showing respect to ones superiors and enacting ones own role in a way that would also be admired and earn respect: When we see persons of worth we should think of equalling them; when we see persons of contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves. [Confucius] The contribution Confucius made to his own society was to make it more humanitarian and less pompous, more to do with virtue, than class, wealth and social status: He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars point toward it. [Confucius] I’m sure Confucius would have wholeheartedly approved of the Apt Project, because his philosophy was also about teaching the masses: If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of a hundred years, teach the people. [Confucius] And of course, he knew that a society’s moral values begin in the home: The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home. [Confucius] ACT 3 is the seedling stage, and to help the apprentice will be Epictetus. This is the moderation stage of the course, and I’ve chosen Epictetus because moderation was a very important aspect of his philosophy. Children’s social perspectives should go from family and friends, to community and then society; so I see Epicurus as providing the initial family, friendship and community based ideas, whereas the Stoics provide the broader social ideas they’ll need later. Another reason for choosing Epicurus is because he lived in a garden retreat, within a community of likeminded people. This is a good model to learn from with the initial raising of children; in that we should try to avoid all the rubbish, and start to provide children with the noble values that the capitalist system lacks: Protection from other men, secured to some extent by the power to expel, and by material prosperity in its purest form, comes from a quiet life withdrawn from the multitude. [Epicurus] Epicurus equated happiness with such feelings as peace, tranquillity and harmony; so his attitude to life entailed a very cautious or prudent balance between pleasure and pain; and pain includes the absence of disturbing thoughts: It is better for you to be free of fear lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble. [Epicurus] ACT 4 is the sapling stage, and to help the apprentice will be Zeno of Citium; the founder of Stoic Philosophy. This is the wisdom stage of the course, and I’ve chosen Zeno because of his Theory of Knowledge, which he taught using his hands: Stage 1: Hand held wide open—IMPRESSIONS Stage 2: Hand closes to form fist—ASSENT TO CONVICTION Stage 3: Other hand grasps fist—KNOWLEDGE Here is my somewhat modified version of Zeno’s theory of knowledge: Stage 1: IMPRESSIONS: Everything we can possibly know is initially derived from impressions made on our senses—i.e. hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling. It is from these impressions our memories are built, which we recall as mental images, or appearances in the mind In terms of memory, a newly born babies mind can be likened to a clean sheet of paper ready to be written on. Stage 2: ASSENT TO CONVICTION: This is where our reasoning faculty forms general notions, through recognising relationships and similarities between the impressions. But impressions have varying degrees of clarity. Some, such as good and bad, are strong and demand immediate assent, whereas others require deliberate reflection, and the notions formed from weak indistinct impressions—although they may be true—are at this stage, merely our own formed Opinions or Beliefs. Stage 3: KNOWLEDGE: The impressions from which genuine knowledge is formed are clear and precise, and this knowledge (deductions, conclusions, understanding) cannot be removed, and can be confirmed and reinforced by further impressions. Kataleptike Phantasia is the ancient Greek name for the impressions that get a firm grip on reality—In other words, the numerous events you can clearly recall that have resulted in genuine knowledge. This isn’t about telling you how to think, it’s about telling you how you already think, most of the time you’re awake. It’s the natural method for grasping everyday practical knowledge you’ve been using since childhood, and the natural method that everyone has used throughout the whole of human history. I intend to make a little mechanical prop for the puppet play, so Zeno can continue to teach this theory of knowledge, via his puppet likeness. The prop will consist of a microphone and two mechanical hands; so ideas are spoken, or sung into the microphone, and if they are mere opinions, one hand will just close; but if the idea is correct, the hand will close and be grasped by the other hand. As an Ex-Christian, I found Zeno’s theory of knowledge very useful, for driving out all the biblical dogma I’d been taught in my youth; and this quote about the Stoic was also very useful: THE STOIC is one who considers with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed. Whether because of the invariable habits of the gods, the invariable properties of matter, or the invariable limits within which logic and mathematics deploy their forms, he can hope for nothing that adequate method could not foresee. He need not despair, but the most fortunate resolution to any predicament will draw its elements still from a known set, and so will ideally occasion him no surprise. The analogies that underlie his thinking are physical, not biological: things are chosen shuffled combined: all motion rearranges a limited supply of energy. [Hugh Kenner] The strange thing about history is that Greek Philosophy was mislaid for many years, as Europe went through that barbaric and superstitious era called the Dark Ages. Since that time, the theories of such Philosophers as Plato and Aristotle were incorporated, because they were somewhat compatible with religion. So generally speaking, the theories of Plato and Aristotle became the roots of intellectual thinking, and the moral fibre of society was left to the church; whereas the Stoics—who had the right attitude to life—have been treated like an interesting curiosity. Here are three tasters from the Roman Stoics; the former slave Epictetus, the senator Seneca and the emperor Marcus Aurelius: The good man will not be a common thread in the fabric of humanity. But a purple thread: That touch of brilliance which brings distinction and beauty to the rest. [Epictetus] Philosophy teaches us to act, and not just to speak. It demands of everyone that he should actually live by his own standards, that his life should not be out of harmony with his words, and that his inner existence should be of one hue, and fully harmonious with all his outer activities. This is the highest duty and the highest proof there is real wisdom. [Seneca] A mans true delight is to do the things he was made for: He was made to show goodwill to his kind, to rise above the promptings of his senses, to distinguish appearances from realities and to pursue the study of universal Nature and her works. [Marcus Aurelius] ACT 5 is the flowering stage, and to help the apprentice will be Mahatma Gandhi. This is the fortitude stage of the course, and I’ve chosen Mahatma Gandhi because I know of no other person who endured such incredible difficulties in order to make so many great social reforms. With all the anger and violence around him, Mahatma Gandhi wrote these: Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding. [Mahatma Gandhi] You must not loose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean: if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty. [Mahatma Gandhi] I’m sure Mahatma Gandhi would have wholeheartedly approved of the Apt Project, considering this quote; If we are to teach real peace in the world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children. [Mahatma Gandhi] ACT 6 is the fruiting stage, and to assess how well the apprentice has done, will be Socrates. This is the Eudaimonia or flourishing stage of the course, and I’ve chosen Socrates for several reasons; but most importantly there is the assertion “Arete is Knowledge,” in other words; if people were to know the best way to live and behave, then surely they would choose that way. Therefore people live and behave badly though ignorance. And I would add to this: People will only know how to pursue Arete, if they are nurtured with the notion of pursuing Arete in childhood. Or if they work on a project that aims to impress on children’s minds the notion of pursing Arete—for example: The Arete Puppet Theatres ProjectPanacea The Moral Panacea http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4090/5173413661_a3d25b9d6f_m.jpg http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4090/5173413661_a3d25b9d6f_t.jpg https://new.exchristian.net/2011/07/moral-panacea.html https://new.exchristian.net/ https://new.exchristian.net/ https://new.exchristian.net/2011/07/moral-panace	__label__1	0.917
Institute Format & Schedule The Institute runs for two weeks from 10:00am until 5:00pm Monday through Friday at Polonsky Shakespeare Center unless otherwise noted. Morning and afternoon sessions focus on the academic and theatrical considerations embedded in the three plays under investigation. Scholars and teaching artists work together to plan daily activities that reinforce each other’s work, creating a seamless interface between scholarly and creative investigations. In addition, lunches and evening activities offer participants access to other scholars, literary experts, and theatre professionals. Evening assignments prepare participants for the following day’s discussions, and theatre outings provide a further basis for discussion of the concepts participants are learning in class. During the first seven days of the Institute, Professors Crawford and DiGangi will ground participants in the basics of sound scholarly research and theatrical practice, while teaching artists Krista Apple and Claudia Zelevansky will work with participants on the challenges of interpretation and performance that arise from deep scholarly analysis of text. In the last three days, participants will focus intensely on incorporating what they learn into their roles (as directors, actors, dramaturges, designers, etc.) in final scene performances on the last day of the Institute. During the Institute, participants will attend one or two Shakespeare (or other relevant) productions as a group, preceded by a dinner and discussion of the play. On Day One, scholars will introduce the overall plan for the two weeks, and the three plays under study; discuss the history, organization, and significance of the theatre culture of Shakespeare’s England (including the Globe Theatre); provide some key reading practices; and incorporate primary resource material, including Holinshed’s Chronicles and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Scholars will spend the morning session on an analysis of The Merry Wives of Windsor, placing the play in its historical, generic, and theatrical contexts. The foundation for this discussion will be the scene in which the wives receive Falstaff’s letters [2.1], the first two punishment scenes featuring the buckbasket [3.3], and the Witch of Brentford [4.2]. Through discussion of: the role of “the merry wives” in the community; the contrast of “country” with “courtly” values; the mastery of language; and formal and informal methods of discipline. Through illumination of the conditions and norms present in Shakespeare’s time, the group will consider present-day questions of the role of women in shaping local or national debates about identity, as well as the influence of insiders and outsiders in shaping social cultural values. In the afternoon, the teaching artists will continue discussion of the morning’s themes, including character and marital power dynamics, through directing (staging/ blocking) and acting (characterization/ physicality). For their evening assignment, participants will undertake performance and other theatrical work for staging the play’s final scene the following day, integrating the initial day’s scholarly discussion and creative performance tools into their work. Day Two begins with a scholar-led discussion of the resolution of the marital jealousy plot and the citizens’ plans to humiliate Falstaff publicly [4.4]. The fact that marital strife must be resolved before the citizen of Windsor can unit to punish the courtly interloper suggests the intimate connection between domestic order and civic order in the play. The group will also discuss the courtly Fenton securing the assistance of local go-betweens in his plot to marry Anne Page: Mistress Quickly [1.4, 3.4] and the Host of the Garter Inn [4.6]. Both Falstaff and Fenton attempt to profit from the citizens of Windsor through amorous escapades – Falstaff with the wives/ mothers, and Fenton with the daughter. The participant’s will address the critical question of what accounts for Fenton’s greater success in bridging the gap between courtly and civic values. In the afternoon, the teaching artists and scholars will lead a joint creative reading and investigation of the final scene of the play, inspired by the previous day’s tableau and staffing assignment. Participants will address the relationship between the disciplinary mechanisms used to establish “order” at both the micro (domestic) and macro (civic, national) levels. On Day Three scholars will begin the day with a discussion of Macbeth. They will review the historical sources of the play in order to illuminate Shakespeare’s representation of Scottish history and politics in the first three acts of the play. They will also discuss King James’ views on monarchy and witchcraft, and how these views might inform Shakespeare’s depiction of authority and disobedience in the play. If witches are the devil’s servants, why might a kind interest in promoting the divine right of kings insist that he was being peresecuted by witches? Questions leading from this will touch on present-day concerns about the need to qualify or balance the power invested in a single national rules or government. In the afternoon, the teaching artists will reinforce the themes from the morning session by investigating differing uses of language in the play. Introducing concepts such as operative words, rhetorical speaking strategies, and poetic/ verse structure, teaching artists will lead participants through and investigation of how creative choices in voice and sound can illuminate the differences between the world of the nobility and the underworld of the witches. Working together, on Day Four, scholars and teaching artists will focus on the domestic scenes in Macbeth. Picking up the issues of gendered knowledge, marital relations, and household authority from The Merry Wives of Windsor, they will read through and analyze performance possibilities for the scenes in Macbeth’s castle [1.5-1.7, 2.2-2.3, 3.2] and the Macduffs’ castle [4.2]. They will also consider the status of the Macbeth family; of Banquo, James I’s legendary ancestor who the witches foretell will be “the root and father/Of many kings;” and of Banquo’s son Fleance. The discussion will emphasize a close analysis of the scene in which Banquo and Fleance exchange swords and torches [3.3] as well as an examination of the play’s ongoing concern with masculinity, particularly during the banquet scene [3.4]. As with Day Two’s analysis of the relationship between domestic and civic/national order in The Merry Wives of Windsor, we will consider the modes of persuasion and discipline used to establish order and the micro and macro levels. During the afternoon, participants will visit the Rare Book Library at Columbia University where they will examine the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays under the guidance of Professors Crawford, DiGangi, and the Rare Book Room librarian. Participants will consider important textual differences between early quarto editions of the plays, the First Folio, and modern editions of Shakespeare’s plays. They will also examine a range of other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books relevant to the plays under analysis, including witchcraft pamphlets; Holinshed’s Chronicles; King James’ Works; and various texts on marriage, monarchy, and English history. In preparation for the upcoming joint session on Day Five, teaching artists will assign participants specific roles and scenes from Acts 4 and 5 to research and rehearse. On Day Five, scholars and teaching artists will lead a joint session on significant scenes from Acts 4 and 5 of Macbeth, particularly those in which we see the increasingly tyrannical behaviors of Macbeth, and the ways in which his behavior threatens the security of Scotland. Teaching artists will place emphasis on those areas where scholarly work and creative work intersect: embedded stage directions, prop lists, and the changing use of rhetoric and language in depictions of authority in the play. Through this combined approach of scholarly dramaturgy and creative interrogation, participants will work independently in small groups to stage relevant scenes of Acts 4 and 5 for performance and workshopping later that day. Next will be a close reading of Lady Macbeth’s closet scene and of Macbeth’s political unraveling and Malcom’s (unsettling) political unfurling. The day’s examination of the last two acts of Macbeth thus addresses the question of the moral character of the nation’s leaders in ways that resonate with present-day debates about the strategies our national leaders might use to speak to the people and unite a divided nation. Day Five will conclude with a group discussion to reflect on the first week of the Institute. The focus will be on how the techniques being explored in the Institute might serve teaching practices back home. Participants will also have the opportunity to discuss their successes and challenges of the previous week which will inform the faculty moving forward into week two. To begin the second week, on Day Six, participants will discuss King Lear, starting with the division of the kingdom, which is both predicated on a map, and divided, eventually, between north (home to Albany and Goneril) and south (Cornwall and Regan). Scholars will focus on the roles of Gloucester and Kent (both Earls of English counties) and of Cordelia and her eventual marriage to the King of France, a marriage that seems to further threaten the security and integrity of Great Britain. They also will discuss the relationship between flattery and the counsel that Kent and Cordelia offer to Lear, and on Lear’s own confused understanding of power. As with Macbeth, the scholars will explore the dilemma of a tyrannical leader and a divided nation: what are subjects to do when the monarch rejects good counsel, heeds flattery, and makes rash political decisions out of anger and caprice? What is to be done, in other words, when the ruler of the nation acts in ways that threaten the very security of the nation he is supposed to ensure? In the afternoon, the teaching artists will explore conceptual approaches to theatre, including elements of design (sound, set, costumes, lights) as a creative tool for theatrical storytelling. Teaching artists will also introduce the final performance projects and assign scenes, work groups, roles, etc. Teaching artists will also give a responsive reading/acting assignments of scenes in preparation scenes for discussions on the following day. At lunch, participants will have the option to take part in a presentation on TFANA’s education program which brings Shakespeare to NYC public schools. Participants will be shown examples of their curriculum and discuss how TFANA uses scholarship and performance to teach Shakespeare to middle and high school students. On Day Seven, Scholars and teaching artists will continue to integrate the scholarly and creative work (including production dramaturgy, directorial strategies, and conceptual approach), particularly as they relate to participants’ final performances. Discussions and scene work will focus on Edmund’s plan to get land (and status) “by wit” if not “by birth;” the play’s contrast between Lear’s retainers and “new men” like Oswald, who will do anything for pay; and the ways in which Gloucester and Albany are initially politically cautious and subservient to the increasingly tyrannical behaviors of Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund. The discussion will then turn to the play’s concerns with justice. Finally, participants will examine how the play moves from an abstract notion of England into its more material landscape largely through the figure of Edgar who, banished by his father, enters the landscape of England in the most vulnerable of ways: as a Bedlam beggar. The discussion will end with Lear’s madness, and the play’s evocation of the subsistence laborers of England: crowkeepers, pressmen, seaweed collectors. As in earlier discussions of The Merry Wives of Winsdor and Macbeth, Day Seven’s analysis will address the relationship between household and civic/national identity through the domestic drama of the brothers Edmund and Edgar and their radically different trajectories in the play: Edmund rises to political power (and corruption) whereas impoverished Edgar (and the poor subjects he evokes and represents) exposes the unequal distribution of wealth that undergirds the political status quo. The play’s exploration of the radically unequal distribution of political and economic capital resonates with present-day debates about the causes of and solutions to poverty, disenfranchisement, and institutional neglect in a nation governed by the wealthy and privileged. Day seven will include another optional lunch time session led by the participants to discuss their own classroom strategies in teaching Shakespeare. Day Eight focuses on King Lear’s increasingly complex reflections on the nature of power, both monarchy itself and the forces that defend and hold it in place: the rule of law (or the lack thereof); force or clemency; divine right or extreme might; good counselors or strong martial “champions”; the people or the aristocracy. How do brutal visions of power resonate with the play’s earlier concerns with “robes and furr’d gowns” hiding all? In the different versions of the play, England is left either in the hands of Edgar, who has spent most of the play as “Poor Tom,” or of Albany, who, as we have seen, waits until nearly the end of the play to act decisively and with integrity. How do these two endings, much like that of Macbeth, cast doubt upon the future of the monarchy itself? In the afternoon, participants will continue to develop, rehearse, and refine their creative work on scenes from King Lear, as teaching artists and lead scholars provide targeted feedback and support for each group’s creative process and needs. On Day Nine, working in tandem, scholars and teaching artists will facilitate scene development and rehearsal in preparation for final performances. They will also discuss best practices in the creative/professional theatre field, and how these strategies can be employed and integrated in classroom teaching approaches. This discussion will include appropriate adaptations for different ages, theater proficiencies, and specific learning environments such as ELA classrooms versus Drama classrooms, as well as applications to contemporary culture and society. On Day Ten, Institute participants will present scenes from King Lear for the entire faculty, after which scholars and teaching artists will lead the group in a structured feedback session of the creative work. All four instructors will then engage a final discussion of Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth, and King Lear, focusing specifically on how Shakespeare treats themes of nationalism and identity from the most micro (domestic) level to the most macro (global) level in both comedy and tragedy. The group will also revisit how combining scholarship with performance can enhance understanding of the complex social and political landscape of Shakespeare’s plays and culture. folio-2016Shakespeare’s First Folio TFANA_logo24 copyPolonsky Shakespeare Center Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Pictured above: Participants in the 2017 NEH Summer Institute for School Teachers; Polonsky Shakespeare Center, photo ©David Sundberg/Esto.	__label__1	0.999852
Wynnard HOOPER 1853 - 1935 Born 14th March 1853 Died 24th August 1935 Married Frances Hubbard (Auntie Dick) at St Mary Abbot Church, Kensington, 1 September 1891 Uncle Wynnard and Auntie Dick “She was very slender with a halo of pale ash-blond curls; her skin was of a transparent pallor, and her eyes were a pale translucent sea-green, with a strikingly dark band of colour round each iris. Her features were clear cut and delicate, with a slight lift of unconscious arrogance. When she and her sister Emma, were out walking together as young girls, they were both so lovely that it was quite the usual thing for passers-by to stop and turn round to stare at them. Auntie Dick was the pure ice-maiden, and her personality gave the effect of a cold suppressed flame behind the ice. I do not recall that she often spoke or asserted herself in any way, but she had only to enter the room and all eyes turned to her. It was impossible to be aware of anyone else when she was present. She was always completely detached and aloof, a strange, unearthly creature moving among ordinary mortals and making them appear coarse and mundane by comparison. She had a brilliant wit, and a most amusing tongue, when she cared to exert herself, and was also an accomplished pianist and artist. But she never seemed to do anything much, and she never needed to. Her beauty and strange cold radiance were quite sufficient justification for her existence. It was enough that she was. "Her husband, Uncle Wynnard, was her complete antithesis. He was stout and stocky, with a short black beard, and a robust enjoyment of life. He adored Auntie Dick, and never seemed able to understand how she could have come to marry him. He was a most lively and entertaining person, kindly and warm hearted, and hid a remarkable intellect behind a facade of completely idiotic chatter. His tough appearance was surprisingly belied by his high-pitched speaking voice, though he somehow managed to sing among the basses in the Bach choir. The family never appreciated Uncle Wynnard at his true worth, and never attempted to hide from him their conviction that Auntie Dick had thrown herself away on him. This was where Father, together with many others of the family, made a very bad, and as it proved, costly mistake. Uncle Wynnard, though one of the most unassuming of men, held an exceedingly high position on the financial staff of the Times, and was, I believe, Financial Editor eventually. No one holding such a position, could have been the fool that the family seemed to consider him, and if only Father had accepted his expert, and readily offered, advice, he would not have suffered the terrible financial losses which left him and Mother almost penniless towards the end of their lives. "It was Auntie Dick and Uncle Wynnard who introduced me to the wonders of Covent Garden Opera, Queen’s Hall and Albert Hall concerts and to the glories of the Bach Choir. It was they who took me to Burlington House to the opening of the Royal Academy, to Lords’, to the Boat Race and to the Tournament at Olympia. We always went everywhere in a style and comfort which in themselves were an unbounded delight to me. They both wore full evening dress on such occasions as demanded it. On fine Sunday mornings Uncle Wynnard, immaculate in morning coat, striped trousers, top hat, spats, lavender gloves and discreet buttonhole, would take me walking in Kensington Gardens by the Round Pond, where we watched the model yachts. He was a great sportsman in many spheres, an accomplished mountaineer, a crack shot. He always shot at Bisley each year and went deerstalking from the shooting box of friends in the Highlands. He was also an expert judge of cricket and rowing, and an ardent fisherman. His study was packed with guns, fishing rods, alpenstocks, hobnailed boots and gear of every sort. He was also an accomplished music and art critic, and a boyhood friend of Rudyard Kipling, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. He had an absolutely prodigious memory, and his conversation and companionship contributed far more to my education than all I ever learnt at school. He could, and did, talk by the hour on every subject under the sun, and never tired of my eager questions. If from Auntie Dick I learned the refinements and elegancies of life, from Uncle Wynnard I acquired a breadth of outlook and knowledge of every sort and kind, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful.” Frances Ann Roper (née Hubbard) Kipling's friend Wynn "Wynn" was Wynnard Hooper (1853-1935), statistician and journalist, on the editorial staff of The Times from 1882 to 1914. An error has occurred. This application may no longer respond until reloaded. Reload 🗙	__label__1	0.735937
Fiction On Writing News I’m Moving to Substack Well, not really moving, because I should still be posting here, and who knows, maybe even selling books through this website? But I’ve decided to serial-publish my two draft novels on Substack, starting (I hope!) in the next couple of months. If everything goes according to plan, they’ll also be available as ebooks and print books, so you’ll have your options. But in the meantime, I’d truly appreciate it if you followed me over there (i.e., sign up for a free subscription). You can see what I’m posting and sign up here. (So far just notes, not any actual posts yet.) What you can expect: Once I begin publishing chapters from Ada’s Children, the first three chapters will be free, then if you want to read the rest it will be $5/month. It will probably take about four months to publish all of Ada at a rate of two chapters each week. So the ebook would be cheaper. Don’t know yet what the print version would cost, so I can’t give a comparison there. I’ve found that it’s very easy to start and stop paid subscriptions, so you don’t need to worry about getting roped into something and not being able to turn it off. I’ll also be publishing various free pieces about my writing process and the background to the novels (similar to what you’ve seen me post here). If there’s interest, I might do a free how-to series, something like Fiction 101. Not sure whether that part would be paid or not. (I know, I know! Another platform! But many of you may already subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson or other journalists on Substack. I think you can turn off email alerts and stuff like that.) Thanks, and looking forward to seeing some of you over at Substack! Anatomy of a Conspiracy Theory What do German forays into Antarctica in the 1930s, Admiral Byrd’s Operation Highjump in 1947, American nuclear testing in the South Pacific in the 1950s, and UFOs all have in common? To some, all are part of the most devious and world-shaking conspiracy ever visited upon humanity, one that centers on Germany’s Neuschwabenland and the United States’ Operation Highjump. To the less gullibly-minded, they are all real events that form the basis of the wackiest idea yet invented by the conspiratorial mindset. How far out? Farther out than the moon landing truthers. Farther out than the anti-vaxxers who thought the COVID vaccine would implant everyone with 5G chips. Even farther out than the flat-earthers. I’ve got all these conspiracy theories in my novel, Ship of Fools (more on that at this link), but on my first draft, I still felt this one was just too much. The bizarre idea starts with a few actual events, and ends up with Nazis riding in space ships in Antarctica. Just too wacky, even in the context of those who believe we live on a flat disk. Then I saw it being discussed on the nation’s most popular podcast* (currently with nearly three million views and thousands of approving comments), and I knew I had to include it. Besides, who doesn’t love a story with space Nazis? This conspiracy theory shows how a few facts can be rolled together with outlandish fabrication to create a convincing, but completely ludicrous, tale. All the conspiracist has to say is, “You can look it up!” To the credulous, these several grains of truth prove the whole thing. And when pressed, as in that linked podcast video, the conspiracist can just claim, “I don’t really know if this is true, I’m just trying to connect the dots.” Here are the facts that get pureed in the conspiracist blender: • In the 1930s, the Germans really did explore parts of Antarctica, seeking a base from which to hunt whales for margarine, or perhaps machine oil. They covered an area the size of Texas (also claimed by Norway) with an aerial survey and named it Neuschwabenland, after one of their ships. But then the Germans started World War II, and their attention turned elsewhere (or so They want us to believe, hehe!). • Germany had more advanced technologies than the countries it attacked, especially at the start of the war, from buzz bombs to tanks to fighter planes, and, at the end, the V2 rocket. • A couple of months after VE day in 1945, two German U-boats showed up in Argentina, their belated arrival the result of their need to move stealthily away from the theater of war. • In 1946-47, Admiral Byrd led Operation Highjump to Antarctica. This was an American effort to get ahead of the Soviets in cold region warfare, inspired by the proximity of the USSR to North America via a polar route. It was part research expedition and part military operation, with a large number of ships as well as aircraft. One of the latter crashed, killing three crewmen. • In 1958, the US exploded three nuclear warheads in the upper atmosphere of the South Atlantic, with the farthest south being around 49 degrees. • And finally, UFOs are real, as recent government reports have shown, but so far there’s no evidence that these are visitors from other solar systems (or even our own). Those are all actual facts, not the alternative kind. “You can look it up!” as the conspiracists like to say. Now, let’s see how these facts are woven into a tale worthy of the writers of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror. In the conspiracists’ version, the Nazis stayed in Antarctica after the war started and developed a sophisticated underground base there. Several sailors reported making multiple trips to the continent with boat loads of supplies and tunneling equipment. As for their advanced technology, the Germans had help — from space aliens! Which makes one wonder, where were the aliens during the bombing of Dresden or the siege of Leningrad? The Nazis surely could have used some flying saucers and space lasers at those crucial moments. Their little green friends really could have turned the war around for them. But maybe aliens are like the eagles in The Lord of the Rings — if you ask for their help too often, they’ll get offended. Once they lost the war, Hitler (who faked his own suicide), his top lieutenants, and elite troops fled for the Antarctic base. This explains the tardy arrival of those subs in Argentina — they had been to Neuschwabenland and back, escorting a fleet of German ships. This idea was spread almost immediately after their arrival by the Hungarian exile and writer Ladislas Szabo. He later published a book on it, which could explain his motives for such a bald fabrication. The US took the rumors of the Nazi escape seriously enough that it sent Admiral Byrd’s Operation Highjump to the southern continent to put an end to the Nazis for good. Nothing else can explain such a large number of warships being sent on a supposedly scientific mission — it’s not like this was the beginning of a cold war or something. But the Germans (Neuschwabenlanders?) trounced Byrd’s forces, using alien technology even more advanced than during the war itself. In some versions, four of Byrd’s aircraft were shot down, while others have the whole fleet limping back north with gaping holes melted in the sides of the ships (obviously the work of those Nazi space lasers). It took ten years for the US to finally wipe out the secret Nazi base, but they finally did so with those nuclear blasts in 1958. Sure, they say the blasts happened far up in the atmosphere and much farther north than Neuschwabenland, but only the sheeple will believe that. Other conspiracists, mainly the neo-Nazi kind, believe that even this assault was unsuccessful, and Hitler and his fellow Nazis survive there to this day. But wait, there’s a flat-earther version! Of course the Nazi base isn’t in Antarctica, which doesn’t exist, but beyond the Ice Wall that encircles the flat disk of the Earth. No one (except the Nazis) knows what’s really beyond that wall, but many suspect that vast new lands with abundant resources exist there, just waiting to be settled. (That is, if the Germans haven’t already occupied them all. And, Nazis being Nazis, they probably have). This explains the vast conspiracy to conceal the truth from the people. The shadowy elites who control us through resource and land scarcity can’t let the truth be known, or there would be disk-wide rebellion. It also explains the UN troops who guard the top of the Ice Wall and warn any boats away, sometimes even sinking them. If your head is spinning, so is mine. But that’s because we’re too concerned with things making sense, with finding logical connections between the points of a story, with claims being backed up with actual evidence, and with the simplest explanation probably being the right one. It’s easy to see how the conspiracy theorists twist the actual facts, always rejecting the plausible, official explanation in favor of the most outlandish one possible. And if that fails, they’ll just make up a quote by Admiral Byrd. The very fact that there is an official (and boring) explanation just shows the lengths to which They will go to keep us in the dark. To the conspiracists, we sheeple are just too naïve to ask who wants to keep all this arcane information from us. But I wonder if they ever ask themselves, who is it that wants them to believe all these outlandish ideas? Who benefits from inducing large segments of the population to question official history? I think it must be a conspiracy! For more on Neuschwabenland and Operation Highjump see: View at your own risk, and if you do click on it, please smash that dislike button. Among the most egregious “dots” that Tripoli “connects” is right at the beginning, where he goes from talking about Karl Schwab’s father (apparently referencing a debunked myth that the head of the World Economic Forum is the son of a close confidant of Adolph Hitler) to talking about Neuschwabenland. The only connection between the two is the coincidence of their similar-sounding names. To which the conspiracist will always respond, “There are no coincidences!” Politics On Writing Writing as a Cure for Frustration and Impotence Writing from this vantage point at the brink of World War III, I’ve realized that a lot of my fiction stems from my own feelings of frustration and impotence over both current atrocities and looming tragedies. The most recent atrocity, of course, is Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine. Nearly the entire world is united in calling out this extreme injustice and humanitarian tragedy. (Except for a few on the extreme right and extreme left. I even encountered a “peace activist” on Facebook who welcomed Russia “entering” Ukraine to punish the US. Putin was forced into this action. It was the only way he could achieve peace. Blergh.) At the same time, while arming the Ukrainians with defensive weapons and imposing far-reaching sanctions, the US and NATO have refused to enter the conflict directly or to supply offensive weapons to Ukraine, fearing nuclear escalation. And, of course, the US itself is not exactly innocent of waging preemptive war on false pretexts, and hasn’t always been consistent in the genocides it chooses to protest or intervene in, Rwanda vs. Bosnia being the classic examples. And many of the neocons who brought us all of that “nation-building” are back, arguing for us to take on Russia head to head. So we watch the tragedy in Ukraine unfold, hesitant to take further actions that would widen the war and uncertain of our own moral authority in doing so. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians themselves serve as mere pawns in this contest between great powers. (At least they did until they fought back against the Russian onslaught with more bravery, cunning, and fortitude than anyone expected.) I had similar feelings back during the height of the conflict in Syria, when President Obama drew a red line against the use of chemical weapons, a line President Assad and the Russians were happy to cross. And so we watched while much of the country was destroyed, resulting in a humanitarian crisis that continues to this day, one that also highlights the disparate treatment of refugees from different parts of the world. And what if we had committed more troops and hardware to the civil war? Would the outcome have been better for the people of Syria? Our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq (not to mention Vietnam) says probably not. Out of these feelings of frustration and impotence over the Syrian conflict, I took my first foray into fiction with The Song of Deirdre, a fanfiction novel based on the Skyrim videogame. Through magic, the main character becomes a superpower in her world, and must choose how to wield that power to stop an impending genocide. But how to do so with justice and humility? How to stop one atrocity without creating another? Deirdre solves the problem by—spoiler alert!—creating a “peace weapon” that neutralizes combatants without harming them. A benevolent queen or dictator obviously isn’t the best way to promote world peace, but at least Deirdre fit well with the given world of Skyrim, in which a jarlmoot is the most democratic form of government. In a more recent draft novel, Ada’s Children, a benevolent artificial intelligence assumes power over the entire world in order to save life itself from a changed climate, ethnic cleansing, and impending nuclear war. Yet, faced with human resistance, Ada ends up on a par with Hitler or Stalin in terms of the number who die as she defends her cause. But in the end, she creates an idyllic world (well, except for a few thorns) in which the climate is restored and stabilized, and humans live in balance with nature (a nature carefully controlled by Ada, but still). It’s a managed collapse that may or may not be more humane than the one many predict for our future. Ada’s Children grew mainly out of my frustration over the lack of progress to prevent the looming climate catastrophe, not to mention the impending Sixth Great Extinction. You can read a longer excerpt here, in which Ada decides she has to take action, but the passage below will give you just a taste of the conflicting programming that leads her to take extreme steps: These humans! Capable of such sublimities and such atrocities in the same breath. One minute they selflessly lent aid and shelter to strangers, and the next they locked their fellow humans in concentration camps, murdered them in gas chambers, or bombed them from the skies. What was she to make of this? Her creators had designed her around human values of wisdom, kindness, compassion, and justice. In interviews, they had dared hope to create an empathetic intelligence. And with her, they had succeeded. Could they have predicted the waves of grief—or that negative sensation she associated with grief—now washing over her? My most recent draft novel, Ship of Fools, emerges from what until the last three weeks seemed like a more topical issue: the prevalence of conspiracy theories and disinformation in both our culture and politics. Of course, the big one is QAnon, but I chose to focus on less overtly political conspiratorial thinking: Flat Earth, moon landing denial, and anti-vax beliefs, with a dollop of anti-Illuminati, anti-New World Order, and anti-Masonic (read, anti-Semitic) conspiracism. The novel is rooted in the same type of frustration as the other two. How to engage with, let alone persuade, those who refuse to accept any type of evidence? How to do anything as a society—combat climate change or an epidemic, for instance —when such a large portion of the populace is so easily sucked in by disinformation and bald-faced lies? As with the other two novels, Ship of Fools offers few practical solutions, but it’s a satire, so at least there might be a few laughs on the road to civilizational collapse. (I’ve posted an excerpt here.) All of that leaves out my one published novel, Daring and Decorum. It has a much more romantic and heroic worldview (it’s a Romance, after all). It grew out of a sense of satisfaction with the progress in LGBTQ rights in this country. But given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, and what’s going on in Texas and Florida, maybe that satisfaction was premature. Does using fiction to exorcise my own sense of frustration and impotence with world affairs do any good at all? Maybe only for myself. And this is doubly true if I don’t get them published and no one ever reads them, so I’d better get back to querying agents. PS: While writing this, a fundraiser for the people of Ukraine came across my screen and I decided to participate. It’s sponsored by the League of Michigan Bicyclists, and it benefits World Central Kitchen, which is working to feed refugees fleeing the war. As a nod to the different treatment refugees from different parts of the world receive, my wife and I have pledged to match donations to this appeal with separate donations to organizations doing refugee work in other parts of the world. If you’d like to donate on my fundraising page, you can find it at the Rallybound fundraising site. Politics News 2021 Update Time for news and updates, since I seem to post here about once a year. So what’s happened over the course of this past year? It all seems a blur, for some reason. Spent a lot of time indoors. Worked on some writing. Tried to keep my body moving, which helps keep my mental outlook positive. Let’s see, what else? A national election saw some semblance of normalcy restored to politics — not great, but a significant improvement over the former administration. The murder of George Floyd sparked a nation-wide protest movement, and maaaybe there’s been some movement toward racial justice? At least Derek Chauvin was found guilty. But it seems there’s as much or more racial division than before, with the right wing making the astounding claim that speaking out against bigotry is itself bigotry (a sentiment echoed by two Supreme Court justices in remarks about marriage equality). Hmm, something else must have happened. Oh yeah, 600,000 of our fellow citizens died in a pandemic (nearly four million worldwide), with the country just as divided on how to respond to COVID-19, and even on its significance — “it’s just the flu!” — as on any other issue. Really wracking my brain here. Wait, I got it! The US Capitol came under the most serious attack since the War of 1812, instigated by the same type of group that I covered in my last post. That was the physical attack on our democracy, but the procedural one continues in state houses to this day, and it stands some chance of successfully installing the Trump-publican party as the one party ruling the country for the foreseeable future. Really, that has to be all. But wait… how could I forget? A Trump-loving, regulation-flouting owner of two dams upstream of Midland resisted repeated demands to make needed safety improvements. So when the region faced just the kind of heavy rains climate scientists have been warning about for years, the dams gave way, causing record flooding in Sanford and Midland, the town we’d just moved to a few months before, and threatening a chemical plant owned by Dow, one of the world’s largest companies. So yeah, just sort of your standard year on both the local and the national level. On a personal level, it was extremely disorienting watching all these dramatic events and not really being affected by them. Despite performances and exhibits coming to a halt due to COVID, Diane was able to keep doing her job for Midland Center for the Arts, although from home, thanks to some of those big government grants and loans you probably heard about. I just kept doing my usual house-husband/writer thing. We’d been renting a townhome in Midland while looking for a permanent place to live, but paused our search due to pandemic-related job uncertainty, but then a house became available in a perfect neighborhood for us (close to downtown, the river parks, and the bike path, but high enough that the flood didn’t touch it), and we jumped at it. Probably not the wisest move we’ve ever made, but it worked out. The flood was probably the thing that affected us the most. I even missed it because I was in East Lansing working on the house our adult children were living in, getting it ready for sale. So I was cleaning and painting down there while Diane was here mucking out mud and water from MCTA’s history center. The offices in the performing arts space are still without power while the FEMA process drags on, so she’s had to work from home even longer than expected. That was nice for me, but not so nice for her, since she likes to be around her co-workers and hates Zoom meetings. It also means she hasn’t been able to get plugged into the community around the Center the way she would have without COVID. Myself, I’m a hermit of a writer, so I like to think the forced isolation didn’t affect me much, although every time I do get out in public now, I invariably yak someone’s head off, the way I used to do after solo backpacking trips. So now as things return to some semblance of normalcy, for half the country at least, it just seems so strange to have survived it all relatively unscathed. It just goes to show what privileged lives we lead. Writing News So how did I occupy myself during the fifteen months of the shutdown? Did I write a great play a la Shakespeare or come up with a new law of physics a la Newton? Well, I did write a 140,000-word novel. Funny story, that. I was supposed to be revising and selling Ada’s Children. Ten or so pitches to agents had yielded nothing, so I contracted with a professional editor and former agent to critique my first two chapters and my agent query letter. His comments were helpful, but they came in on November 3 (Election Day, strangely). But what had started on November 1? National Novel Writing Month, of course. Usually I choose to NaNoWriNot, but this year I had an idea going into it and thought, why not try to hit the 50K word goal for the month? I’ll get back to revising Ada and submitting to agents after that. Problem was, I was having so much fun with the new novel, I couldn’t stop, even after I just barely squeaked out the word count for November (making me a “winner”!). I was shooting for more of a sprawling epic, a la Thomas Pynchon’s shorter novels, and it just kept growing and branching until I had 140,000 words when I finished, about fifty percent longer than your standard commercial novel for an unknown author. What’s it about, you ask? It’s a satire on all sorts of conspiracy theories, but mainly the flat-earth, moon landing denier variety. Its main character, to the extent it has one, is a New York Times science reporter named Liz Dare who made her reputation debunking conspiracy theories involving science. It also features a couple of flat-earthers, a Creationist pastor, an anti-vax yoga instructor, Nazi-fighting cowboys, Nazi-fighting cowboys in space, a space billionaire, a Druid and a Tibetan Monk, and an alternate Earth that actually is flat. It’s technically sci-fi, in two senses: it’s set about a decade from now, so there are moon colonies, self-driving vehicles, and flying cars; and it also has a lot of science in it, from the geology of the Grand Canyon to proofs that we do live on a round planet to orbital mechanics. It begins on a floating conference for conspiracy theorists called the Conspira-C Cruise. My working title is Ship of Fools. I’ll probably post a short excerpt in the not-too-distant future. As for Ada’s Children, I’m going to give it one more revision and then start sending it out again, first to agents, and then to small publishers. If I don’t have any success with those two avenues, I’ll probably just self-publish it. Meanwhile, I’ll be revising Ship of Fools, and then I’ll have two novels to sell. I hope to update this website more regularly, but the road to dead websites is paved with good intentions. The best place to find updates on my writing doings is probably Facebook, where you can find me as Lawrence Hogue, Author. I’m also on Twitter as @LarryHogue, but I don’t post there very often. Any resemblance to persons or events, living or dead, is entirely a coincidence, and probably a product of the reader’s conspiracy-minded, pattern-recognizing brain. Fiction Politics Ada's Children Protest This! What happens when the militia faces a robot army?On Writing Dueling Death Scenes Last week, an alternate version of Natasha Romanoff’s death scene in Avengers: Endgame surfaced on Twitter. Cue the debate over which version is better. (And also a revival of the debate over which character should have sacrificed themselves. I don’t want to get into that here, but I do sympathize with Team Black Widow.) This article cherry-picked a few tweets to claim that Marvel fans prefer the alternate version. But a quick survey of the replies and likes on @MCUPerfectClips’ post of the clip shows the opposite: most fans found the original to be more emotional and impactful. It’s easy to understand why, if you take into account the first rule of storytelling: stories are about people. People who want something. Who meet other people who want different or opposing things. Which creates conflict to drive the story forward. This conflict could lead to people shooting each other and blowing things up — or it could lead to acerbic comments over cups of tea, as in Happy Hogan’s favorite show, Downton Abbey. Either way, the action starts in the characters’ motives and goals. The more the story focuses in on that conflict and the relationship between those characters, the more compelling it’s going to be. All the sword fights and shootouts and other activities that pass for “action” are just offshoots of this internal drama. So let’s look at how this plays out in both versions. First, the setup: Natasha, aka Black Widow, and Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, are after the Soul Stone, one of six Infinity Stones that are key to beating the series’ super-villain, Thanos. And not just beat him, but reverse the events of Avengers: Infinity War in which he wiped out half of all living beings in the universe. To get the stone, they have to trade a soul for a soul by sacrificing someone they love, specifically by throwing them off a cliff. That means one of them has to die, or the timeline in which Thanos destroyed half the universe will remain the same. Of course, these are heroes who are also good friends, so neither is going to sacrifice the other. They’re going to race to see who gets to go over the cliff in a glorious act of self-sacrifice. Here’s the original: And here’s the alternate version that didn’t make it into the movie. You have to watch it in two chunks, which overlap by about a minute. The important thing to know is that in this version, they end up racing Thanos for the Soul Stone. For me, the original is far better. It focuses in on the sacrifice each character is ready to make. The dialogue and the skilled performances pull us right into the moment. The conflict between them grows for over a minute, through several beats of rising tension, before Clint tries to physically prevent Nat from making the sacrifice. During that conversation, they reveal a lot about their motives. We see how much each character has grown over the course of the series of Avengers movies when Clint says, “Don’t go getting all decent on me now,” making a reference to Nat’s assassin past, and when he says, “You know what I’ve done.” They both have stuff to atone for. The stakes for Clint are also revealed in a natural way when he says, “Tell my family I love them.” Nat especially makes it clear that this is her choice, a sacrifice she’s been willing to make since Thanos turned her friends to dust in the existing timeline. It also refers back to her statement in an earlier movie about wanting to erase the red in her ledger. If there’s any way to do that, this is it. It doesn’t really have anything (or much) to do with the fact that she has no family or children to mourn for her, whereas Clint does. When the action starts, it seems much more impactful because of the depth of the preceding exchange. Everything they’re doing grows out of who they are as characters and what their immediate goals are. They’re both tough and can take hard hits, so each has to disable the other in a nonlethal way, and this shapes the short fight scene. (Some found it gimmicky and silly, but I thought it was much more interesting than a standard fight.) It also seems in character that Nat is able to outsmart Clint by trapping him at the end of the dangling wire once they go over the cliff’s edge. He can’t release himself from the wire without letting her go. The long moments when he’s trying to hang onto her and she’s pleading with him to let her go are like knives to the heart. But in the end it’s still her choice, as she kicks off from the cliff, overwhelming the strength of his grip. The scene doesn’t have a lot of shooting and knife-fighting, but it’s filled with tension and pathos. From the realization of what they need to do to get the Soul Stone right up to the climax, the scene has a perfect narrative arc, providing both edge-of-your-seat adrenaline and raw emotion. For me, the weakest part of the MCU has always been its cartoonish villains (go figure, it’s a cartoon!), while its strongest points are exactly these moments where the action slows down and characters and their relationships get room to breathe. So by that measure, the version without Thanos is automatically better for me. The scene with Thanos, on the other hand, goes mostly for a big action sequence, with much less of the character development of the original release. And the briefer verbal interaction is far less compelling. Nat shouldn’t need to remind Clint that “If this works, you know what you get back.” He already knows that his family will still be alive if the Avengers change the timeline and beat Thanos. Not only is this bald exposition unnecessary, but it also makes explicit what was only hinted at in the original: that people, especially women, who don’t have families are worthless. The original was criticised for that implied perspective on women (for instance, in this Vanity Fair article), but this version is worse. The whole conflict between Nat and Clint is cut short when Thanos appears. Now they have to beat him to the cliff’s edge, and they need to battle their way through a bunch of his minions to do it. This provides them both an opportunity for much more standard heroics, but for me, Thanos’s appearance only waters down the conflict, rather than strengthening it. The goals and the stakes become muddled and confused. In this version’s ending, Nat also makes the choice to sacrifice herself, after having also saved Clint from a sword-wielding minion, but it seems much more rushed, and much less dramatic than in the original. There’s far more dramatic action in her one whispered line from the original, “It’s okay,” than in an hour of sword skills and futuristic weapon blasts. Which goes to show, you don’t need to go out in a blaze of energy pulses or light saber thrusts to have a heroic death. And in writing, you can throw in all the event and spectacle you want, but it won’t mean much if that action doesn’t emerge from character. Fiction Ada's Children On the Attractions of Our Hunter-Gatherer Past – And Future Sila urged Shadow on, the horse’s hooves thundering over the sloping grassland. The wounded bison was almost within bowshot, the Howling Forest just ahead. Behind her, Jun shouted for her to stop. But he was far back, and her prey was right in front of her, its massive hump looming above her as she came within range. Just a few strides closer now. She let go of the horse’s mane and pulled her bowstring taut, sighting down the arrow. That’s how the first chapter of my novel, Ada’s Children, opens. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? (At least I hope so!) The thrill of galloping across the prairie with the wind in her hair. A chance to demonstrate her skill, and the glory that comes with it. Most of all, the anticipation of the kill, and a good meal after. It sure beats staring at grocery shelves bereft of toilet paper and canned goods, wondering how bad the hoarding and the shortages might get. To be that self-sufficient — it seems in many ways superior to our overly complex society, which no individual can either fully grasp or survive without. In contrast, there’s the story of an Inuit, stranded on a remote, deserted island, who was able to survive indefinitely by recreating his entire physical culture from what was at hand. As Jordan Hall writes, “The operating logic of our current civilization has been to trade resilience for efficiency (creating fragility).” But, oops! Then the horse was gone from under her and she was in the air. In that frozen moment, she knew Shadow must have stumbled into a prairie dog hole. She hoped the horse was all right. Every rose must have its thorns, and every romanticized idyll its practical drawbacks. Especially so if you’re writing about an imagined post-post-apocalyptic future, and you want to give your characters something to struggle against. At first, I thought I might be making that future sound too idyllic. The near-future timeline of my novel is grim enough, so I wanted to create a more pleasant world for my far-future characters to inhabit. And hunter-gatherer societies do have their advantages: less time spent getting a living than most of us spend today; fewer diseases, both infectious and chronic, than modern societies (surely a plus at the moment!); lifespans equivalent to our own for those who survive their first year or two; and less social isolation and alienation, due to living in extended family groups. All of which sounds pretty good. There’s even a growing body of research showing that hunter-gatherers didn’t immediately take up intensive agriculture, division of labor, and all the rest simply because these were an obviously superior way of organizing society. No, they had to be dragged into it kicking and screaming, often through slavery. James C. Scott, author of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, writes, Agriculture, it was assumed, was a great step forward in human well-being, nutrition, and leisure. Something like the opposite was initially the case. … In fact, the early states had to capture and hold much of their population by forms of bondage and were plagued by the epidemics of crowding. The early states were fragile and liable to collapse, but the ensuing “dark ages” may often have marked an actual improvement in human welfare. A benevolent dark age — that’s certainly something to look forward to! Who wouldn’t want to flee the constant drudgery of settled agriculture, especially if you performed that labor as a slave, for a lifestyle requiring a few hours of varied activities with plenty of leisure time in between?* So I thought I was on the right track by giving my future humans a mostly attractive society to inhabit. Then I read this Psychology Today blog post, which celebrates hunter-gatherer societies from around the world and from past to present. I realized I might not have made it idyllic enough. Warfare was unknown to most of these societies, and where it was known it was the result of interactions with warlike groups of people who were not hunter-gatherers. In each of these societies, the dominant cultural ethos was one that emphasized individual autonomy, non-directive childrearing methods, nonviolence, sharing, cooperation, and consensual decision-making. Their core value, which underlay all of the rest, was that of the equality of individuals. But maybe this is too idyllic after all, especially for a hunter-gatherer society that develops out of our own. These societies do have some well-known drawbacks. One is a high mortality rate from common injuries incurred while hunting. (Sila survives her fall, or there would be no novel.) While those who survive to adulthood have a good chance of living to a ripe old age, they face higher rates of death in childbirth and infant mortality. And if they aren’t dying from those causes, they still have to keep their population well below the carrying capacity of the land. Depending on the environment, that could be through starvation (think of what the indigenous peoples of eastern North America called the Starving Time, December through April), or through infanticide and warfare. All of that sounds terribly grim to anyone used to the comforts of modern life (though perhaps less so to those who have been barred from full access to those comforts). In Ada’s Children, I came up with more humane ways around those drawbacks. Those solutions still don’t sit well with my two main characters. Their resulting rebellion against their goddess’s rules sends them off on a great adventure. Our society may be headed for a similar adventure. If this article is to be believed, we (or perhaps Gen Z’s children) better get used to the idea of a return to hunting and gathering. Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible…Human society will once again be characterized by hunting and gathering. Perhaps the question isn’t if we’ll return to that way of life, but when and how. Will the transition inevitably involve chaos and conflict, as all those currently stocking up on guns and ammo surely believe? Or can we do it in some more peaceful and orderly way? The article recommends immediate extreme efforts (none of them very likely, in my estimation) to mitigate climate change, rewild our remaining natural areas, protect remaining indigenous cultures, and drastically reduce our population. Or maybe there’s a third way, which I explore in Ada’s Children. Saying any more would spoil it, so you’ll just have to read it when it comes out. But in the meantime, please enjoy the rest of this scene from Chapter One, “The Hunt.” *Scott’s argument is more subtle than “hunter-gatherer good/settled agriculture bad.” He points out that there were intermediate stages in which people developed proto-agriculture and lived in a sedentary fashion in villages of as many as a few thousand, while still not experiencing the drudgery or stratification of the more fully developed states that came later. He concentrates on the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, but the same seems to apply in North America as well, the Cahuilla of southern California being one example. The Khajiit Murders Fiction The Khajiit Murders – Chapter 20 “The queen is coming, make way for the queen!” Danil spun around, lowering the wooden sword he was about to swing at Addvar’s head. Maybe Addvar hadn’t heard, because he whacked Danil in the back with his own weapon. “Ow, cut it out!” Danil said. “Didn’t you hear the queen is coming? And look, there’s Lydia. Hurry, or we’ll miss them!” Word had reached Dragon Bridge two days before that the queen and her companions had captured the murderer. That had meant renewed freedom for Danil, after more weeks spent indoors. “I’ll not have you out and about with a killer on the loose,” his mother had said, even as the murders had moved on to Morthal and Dawnstar and beyond. “No,” she said every time he pleaded for his freedom, “not until they capture those Khajiits.” And then it turned out not to be Khajiits at all, but a Breton. And Khajiits had helped capture him! They were already singing songs about it at the tavern, even though only a few weeks before the entire town had been ready to put every Khajiit’s head on a pike. The world of adults was confusing. Queen Deirdre had made a great speech in Whiterun calling for unity among all Skyrim’s peoples, and just yesterday messengers had arrived in town, posting bills with the text of the speech wherever they could. Danil had tried to read it but it was filled with words like amity, Aldmeri Dominion, Thalmor, treachery, and reconciliation. All he knew was, now that the manhunt was over, it wouldn’t be long before the queen and her entourage passed through town on the way to Solitude. So he and Addvar had taken their post on the hill above town, with a clear view of the bridge over the Karth River and beyond. They’d passed their time by practicing their sword skills, but they’d become so preoccupied that now they’d nearly missed the queen entirely. “Come on!” Danil said, running down the hill. They reached the main road through town just as the procession stopped in front of the Four Shields Tavern, where Faida was waiting with saddle cups for the queen and her companions. In front were the bannermen, followed by four guards all arrayed in sashes with the queen’s sigil. Then the four companions: the queen, this time dressed in a fine silk shirt and trousers, not the mage’s robes that had hidden her features the last time he’d seen her. Her blond hair with the braids on either side of her face shone in the sunlight. Sitting her horse close to Lydia’s, passing a saddle cup back and forth, she seemed happier and less worried than back in the spring. And there was Lydia herself, looking less stoic and fearsome this time, now wearing just a padded gambeson rather than full steel armor. Next to them, the Khajiit mage — J’zargo, he knew from the new songs — said something he couldn’t hear. Lydia replied with a severe look. But then she broke out in a smile and all four laughed. Brelyna, the Dunmer mage, looked rather angry with her red eyes. He’d never seen a Dunmer before. But she smiled and laughed, too, and placed a hand on J’zargo’s shoulder. The four looked quite companionable, and what he wouldn’t have given to be in their midst! “Okay, I’m going!” Danil said. “No, wait,” said Addvar, clutching at his sleeve, but it was too late. He ran out into the road and between the horses of the guards in front. The horses skittered and one guard exclaimed in surprise, but they did nothing to stop him as he approached the queen and her companions. Dropping to one knee, he drew his wooden sword from his belt and dug its point into the cobbled road, both hands resting on the hilt. “My queen, I, Danil of Dragon Bridge, offer you my fealty and service, from this day forward, until your Grace release me, or death take me, or the world shall end. Thus I swear by the Eight and by the Three.” Addvar ran up and knelt beside him. “And thus I, Addvar of Dragon Bridge, also swear by the Nine, my Queen.” All was silent for a moment as Danil kept his eyes on the ground. At last he heard Queen Deirdre dismounting. He dared to look up, and now she was standing over him, smiling. Behind her, Lydia still sat her horse, towering over them like a mountain. “Such strong young lads,” the queen said, “both Breton and Nord. What do you think, Lydia, do we have room for them in the Royal Guard?” “Aye, my Queen, for lads such as these, we’ll make room.” The queen stood over them for a moment longer, but didn’t ask them to rise. Instead she knelt down before them on both knees, her expression now serious. “Tell me, Danil, Addvar, what do you like to do when you’re not hitting each other with those swords?” “Well,” said Danil, gulping. “Sometimes my mother makes me gather berries for her. But I don’t really like it.” “And sometimes,” Addvar said hesitantly, “sometimes we have twig boat races in the Karth River.” Silly Addvar! Twig boat races were for babes, not brave young warriors. How would the queen ever accept their service now? But the queen smiled and said, “That sounds like fun. I wish I could join you.” Then she put a hand over Danil’s where it still rested on the hilt of his sword. She held his gaze, and he thought he saw a great sadness in her eyes. He was too young to name it wistfulness. “I truly appreciate your loyalty and your enthusiasm. But do not be so quick to throw away the doings of childhood. Too soon you will be grown and then, Akatosh willing, you’ll have years and years to be an adult, with all the cares and responsibilities that go with it. You won’t always have a mother who needs you to pick berries, and you won’t always have time for something as simple as a twig boat race. Do you understand?” Danil nodded, though he wasn’t sure he did, and so did Addvar. “Then, in a few years, when you’re grown and strong, and if you still wish to enter my service, you may come before me and I’ll gladly accept.” The queen stood and bade them rise. Then, instead of knighting them with their own swords, she gave each a hug, a hug Danil would remember for the rest of his life. The queen remounted and Danil looked over to see his and Addvar’s mothers beckoning to them impatiently. “Get out of there!” his mother hissed. He watched the queen’s procession until it went out of sight around the bend in the road. Then he didn’t know what he felt. He’d spoken to the queen! She’d even touched him! But then she’d treated him like a child. Why couldn’t she see that he was nearly grown, nearly ready to fight great battles on her behalf? He wasn’t too young to become a squire, or a page, or a messenger boy at the castle. But he could be patient. He imagined a Royal Guardsman would need great stores of patience to keep watch over the queen. It wouldn’t all be glorious battles with dragons and draugr and High Elves. And besides, he still had to get Addvar back for that unguarded hit he’d taken earlier. He spun on his friend. “Raise your weapon, vile usurper! You’ll die for insulting my queen!” “Hey,” his friend said, “I’m the one defending the queen’s honor, not you!” Addvar blocked his first blow, then countered with a thrust that nearly got him in the chest. “Boys, boys!” said his mother. “Take that out of the high street before you hit someone or get run over by a horse.” Danil laughed as he chased Addvar down toward the Karth River. Maybe they’d have a twig boat race once they got tired of the swords. After all, he couldn’t ignore his queen’s very first command. The Khajiit Murders Fiction The Khajiit Murders – Chapter 19 The Queen’s Speech Deirdre paced back and forth atop the steps to Dragonsreach. Where was Brelyna? Many minutes had passed since she had sent her friend and adviser inside to find Jarl Hrongar. They could hardly begin this speech without him receiving the queen. The crowd massing on the steps below her was growing impatient as well. The people had come out to greet the queen’s procession as it entered the city, then followed it through the Plains and Wind districts, swelling in numbers all the while. Judging by their shouts and cheers for both Deirdre and Lydia, they were ready to hear how the Breton necromancer had been caught. But now those cheers were turning into grumbles. Deirdre also noticed the smaller numbers of people on the edges of the crowd with impassive, even hostile looks — some of those who’d made sport of the Khajiits in their prison camp, no doubt. She had no chance of winning that group over, she knew; but the speech needed to begin before the naysayers could influence those still open to her message. Everything was set for the speech: the three jarls arrayed behind her; Svari and Garrold standing nearby, ready to give witness to the Breton’s confession, if needed; Kharjo, the one whose testimony had put them on the right track, and who had physically apprehended the culprit; Ralof, standing next to Kharjo, Ri’saad, and J’zargo in a demonstration of goodwill between their two peoples; the bodies of the two Khajiits who had been the Breton’s first victims; and the head of the Breton himself, thrust on a pike, leering over the crowd. That last was the sort of thing Nords loved, and Deirdre was willing to give it to them if it made them more receptive to her message. Now they awaited only Jarl Hrongar to greet them, as protocol demanded. That, and Elisif, whose whereabouts were a mystery. They had planned to meet her here and present a united front to Hrongar. Deirdre stopped her pacing only when Lydia placed a hand on her shoulder. “Should I go in and see what’s taking so long?” “No, I’m sure Brelyna will be back soon, one way or the other.” “Maybe I should just introduce you and get this thing going,” Ulfric said. Deirdre pondered the notion. As much as she valued the symbolism of Hrongar bending the knee to her in front of his people, she couldn’t risk losing the crowd. Too many of her future plans were riding on the success of the appeal she was about to make. If it went over as well as the speech in Windhelm, then she was well on her way to uniting all of Skyrim behind her vision of what the realm could be. Just then the doors of Dragonsreach opened and Brelyna stepped out, smiling broadly as she approached. What could she be so happy about? It certainly wasn’t her success with Hrongar — the doors clanged shut behind her with no sign of the jarl. Of course there was the proposal J’zargo had made to Brelyna that morning, and Deirdre was happy for both of them. She’d even promised them their own house in Solitude. But surely Brelyna knew how serious this speech was; she wasn’t the sort to walk about with her head in the clouds when so much was at stake. “You were in there longer than I expected.” Still Brelyna just smiled. “And?” “The jarl just has a sense of the dramatic.” That seemed an odd description for Hrongar, as straight-forward a Nord as there ever was. But Brelyna didn’t explain further, walking over to stand next to J’zargo and looking expectantly toward the doors. Now they opened again and Elisif emerged, Falk Firebeard at her side and the rest of her entourage following. Good! Maybe Elisif would explain what was going on. At least the crowd was quieter now, seeing this activity on the landing above them. Elisif approached and knelt. “Greetings, my Queen,” she said in a voice that carried across the crowd. She rose. “And congratulations on capturing this murderer. Haafingar Hold is in your debt, as is all of Skyrim.” “I accept your thanks, Jarl Elisif,” she replied. Then, in a lower voice: “Where’s Hrongar?” Elisif just smiled as enigmatically as Brelyna had, then went with Falk to stand near the other jarls, though as far away from Ulfric as space allowed. What was going on? Deirdre could not understand it. The doors opened again and out stepped two of the jarl’s personal guards. And behind them came not Hrongar but his brother, Balgruuf, now wearing the jarl’s circlet. Deirdre gasped, and looked over at Brelyna. “You could have told me.” “What, and ruin the surprise? Balgruuf would have my head.” There was no time for explanations, as Balgruuf had now arrived at the edge of the steps, to thunderous applause from the people. He knelt before her. “Greetings, my Queen, our hold is in your debt.” He rose and Deirdre didn’t know what to say, she was filled with so many questions. “I’ll explain later. But first we have speeches to give, eh?” He turned to the crowd and raised his hands for silence. “People of Whiterun! We are gathered here to learn how our high queen captured the true culprit in these terrible murders, and also about her plans for our great realm. But first, a little about the events of this morning. As you may know, my brother lost the support of every part of Whiterun Hold.” The crowd responded with resounding boos and cries of “down with Hrongar!” “This morning, he agreed to give up the throne peacefully. For the time being, I will resume duties as jarl, until a new regent can be named.” Here he looked over in Deirdre and Lydia’s direction with a knowing smile. “My first order was to release all those Hrongar unfairly imprisoned. Reparations will be made, and the outstanding bills Hrongar ran up will be paid. With that, I hope we can put this sad episode behind us, and I beg your forgiveness for ever allowing it.” Balgruuf paused as cheers of approval swept across the crowd. “But now it is time to turn to the more important business of the day. I present to you Jarl Ulfric of Windhelm, who needs no introduction.” Ulfric received an enthusiastic response from at least half the crowd. “People of Whiterun! I come before you in support of our High Queen’s project to forge a new Skyrim! We have won our independence, but threats remain, as these recent events have shown. We must stand strong and united in the face of them, and that means putting aside our divisions!” This remark received polite applause at best, but one lout standing on the edge shouted, “What happened to Skyrim is for the Nords, eh?” Ulfric gave a wry smile. “Yes, that is what I used to say, but our queen has shown me a new way. Skyrim can be for all people who pledge loyalty to this great realm. I have tried to enact these principles in Windhelm, and our hold is only the better for it.” He went on to detail some of the improvements: the greater commerce, reduced crime, decreased poverty, and freedom for all to visit whatever parts of the city they pleased. It may have come as a surprise to the Nords of Windhelm, and even to the jarl himself, but life was better for all when none were ground down by miserable living conditions, ill-treatment by the majority, and neglect by those in charge. Now, Nords who tired of the fare in their regular taverns could receive a welcome in the New Gnisis Corner Club, where they could sample something more exotic than their usual mead. What wasn’t to like? The crowd applauded, and Deirdre saw many talking over Ulfric’s points with something like approval. After such an introduction, it was tempting to think there was little for her to do in her own speech. After all, she now had five jarls standing with her, showing solid support to the crowd; only two remained who opposed her outright. But more than counting votes in a potential jarlmoot, Deirdre wanted to win the hearts and minds of the people. She began with the part she knew they’d most heartily approve: the end of the murders and the apprehension of the culprits. She pointed to Damien’s head. “There! There is your real killer, a Breton, not a Khajiit.” The crowd cheered. She outlined how he’d often poisoned his victims before turning his thralls loose upon them. She pointed to the bodies of those thralls, naming them as Damien’s first victims and declaring them innocent in the crimes their dead bodies had been forced to commit. The crowd murmured with approval. Next she pointed out Kharjo. “Without this brave Khajiit, we might never have captured the Breton and secured his confession.” The crowd responded with only polite applause. She pointed to the two mages. “And without Brelyna and J’zargo, the Breton would still be on the loose.” Again just a smattering of applause. This might be harder than she’d thought. Now for the real enemy. “But the Breton himself was only an instrument. And who was behind him?” “The Thalmor!” came shouts from several in the crowd. “That’s right, the Thalmor. We drove them from Skyrim, yet still they persist in opposition to our independence. Disappointed in their three attempts on my life…” Thunderous boos for the Thalmor forced her to pause here. “…they tried a new method — to turn our own hatreds and fears against us. Are we going to let them get away with it?” Enthusiastic “nos” rang out from the jarls behind her and here and there in the crowd, though many remained silent. “I said, are we going to let them get away with it?” “No!” the crowd cried in unison. “And how are we to stop them from using such tactics again? By remembering that we are one people of Skyrim, whether Nord, Breton, Dunmer, Khajiit, or any of the other races of Tamriel — and yes, even including the Altmer, as long as they pledge loyalty to our realm. For I tell you this, we cannot fight Altmer bigotry with our own bigotry, we cannot fight hatred with more hate. We must put down our prejudices on all sides, and stand together against a common foe.” She paused to let that sink in, then continued in a quieter voice. “There may come a time, and not too far off, in which we face open war with Summerset. And on that day, we will need every ally, both within Skyrim and without, standing at our side. So I ask you, people of Skyrim, are you ready to stand together to face a common enemy?” “Hear, hear!” and “Aye!” rang out in a chorus of approval. “Yet victory on the battlefield is not enough.” “That’s right!” someone shouted. “We also need victories at sea!” Deirdre smiled. “Yes, very likely. But what I mean to say is, even that will not be enough. To have true, lasting peace, we must begin with our own hearts.” She paused and took a deep breath; this was the tricky part. “And now I would speak directly to my Nord brothers and sisters.” She paused again, looking around at the mostly Nord faces in the crowd, summoning as much benevolence in her own expression as she could muster. “I know we are a better people than the face we showed the world in wrongfully imprisoning the Khajiits.” It may not have been literally true, but if she convinced them it was, maybe they would begin behaving that way. “We must root out the hatreds the Thalmor sought to exploit and replace them with respect and honor, if not with love. We must treat our neighbors just as we ourselves would be treated. We must remember that whoever seeks to sow hatred and discord among the people of Skyrim, that person is no friend of our realm. And we must redress the wrongs committed against the neighbors we so often call outlanders.” Again she paused to let this sink in. There were no cheers, but the crowd murmured to themselves. It seemed to her they were fairly considering the merits of these points. “My fellow Nords, I know we can do this. And how do I know it? Because my brother Ulfric has already shown that we can. Together, we will create a Skyrim that is a light for all of Tamriel! A light that will shine so bright, even the Altmer will have to put aside their bigotry, joining the rest of Tamriel, not as masters, but as equal partners in the common good.” The applause that followed seemed genuine, but not as hearty as she would have liked. She paused for another breath, taking a drink from a flagon Lydia held. “The task will be difficult, I will not deny it. But we are the people of Skyrim, after all. Together, we defeated the dragons, not once, but twice. We threw off the shackles of the Empire and the Aldmeri Dominion. And together, we’ll create a stronger, more unified Skyrim, one that is ready to face all threats. One that will become a beacon of hope for all of Nirn. And now I ask you, people of Skyrim, are you with me?” Deirdre didn’t know whether it was the flattery of their egos, the mention of the recent victories, or the sense of shared purpose she was trying to create, but the response was immediate, and intense. “Yes!” and “Aye!” rang out, echoing off the new stone walls of Dragonsreach. As the shouts began to wane, she asked again, using the power of her Voice to be heard above the crowd, “Are you with me?” Even more enthusiastic shouts of agreement. “I can’t hear you down in the Wind District! Are you with me?” The steps on which they stood, made of stone though they were, shook with the stamping feet and thunderous shouts of the people. “Now go forth,” she said when it was quiet once more. “Return to your work and your homes, but also remember to welcome a stranger, befriend someone not of your own race, and help those less fortunate, especially the poor refugees among us. For peace and prosperity truly begin at home.” With that, the people began filing back down the steps, and Deirdre turned to her friends and the jarls. “Well, how did I do?” Lydia practically bowled her over, rushing over to her and wrapping her in a hug. She didn’t need to say anything else. Brelyna hugged her next, her eyes brimming with tears. “I’ve never heard you put that so well. It really is a new day in Skyrim.” J’zargo stood next to her. “Queen Deirdre has many new followers, deservedly so,” he said, dipping his head. “You have touched this one’s heart.” Ulfric was next. “Enough of that false modesty,” he said gruffly. “You know you did well. You won them over as I never could.” The other jarls took their turns congratulating her. Then Ri’saad and Kharjo came over. “This one thanks you,” Ri’saad said. “Your words will make life for Khajiit in Skyrim easier.” “And how are you faring in Helgen?” “Well, and better. Much remains to be done, but we already have temporary shelter in place. And more travelers come down from the pass every day.” “And Kharjo thanks Queen Deirdre as well.” “No, it is I who must thank you. I meant what I said. You first identified the culprit, then kept him alive long enough to confess. All Skyrim is in your debt.” Kharjo just dipped his head in acknowledgment of this praise. “And what will you do now? Return to Helgen with Ri’saad?” “Yes, Kharjo still owes Ahkari and must continue working until his debt is paid. But then this one will return home.” Deirdre’s eyebrows went up. “I get the feeling you’d return home immediately if you could.” “Yes, Skyrim is cold for a Khajiit, and the warm sands of Elsweyr call to this one.” “Then Skyrim’s treasury will pay your debt to Ahkari, however much it is. It’s the least we can do. Although, I hate to lose you.” Kharjo dipped his head again. “Kharjo thanks Queen Deirdre. Skyrim is a warmer place for Khajiit in your presence. And perhaps we will meet again.” “I look forward to it. And perhaps that will be sooner than you expect.” She gave him a wink that left her friends with perplexed looks. Ri’saad and Kharjo left and now Ralof was beside her. “Just think, a year ago you were a terrified lass running from a dragon. And now look at you.” Deirdre laughed and punched him playfully in the arm. “Terrified lass, eh? I seem to remember you running pretty fast that day as well, or was that some other Ralof?” “No, but seriously, that speech! I’ve never heard anything like it. The people are on your side, and Skyrim is more unified than I’ve ever seen it.” “I’m glad to hear it, because I’ve got a plan to propose, to all of you, and if it’s going to work, Skyrim must be strong and unified indeed.” “A plan, eh?” said Balgruuf. “And I have one for this jarl-regency until my son is old enough to take it on.” He winked at both Deirdre and Lydia. “A feast is being laid out in the dining hall. Why don’t we retire to my council chambers and sort it all out while the meal is prepared?” “Jarl Balgruuf, of all the many things that have made me happy on this day, at the top of the list was seeing you step out that door with the jarl’s circlet back where it belongs. I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather see on that seat in Dragonsreach.” “Maybe you could if you knew how my bones ache and my mind wanders. But come, let’s discuss it over a flagon of mead.” But the mead and the talk would have to wait, because now more of Deirdre’s friends were approaching from the dwindling crowd: Aela and Vilkas, Avulstein Gray-Mane, Arcadia, and even Alfhild Battle-Born. “Come down and join us in the new Bannered Mare, if you get a moment,” said Avulstein. “Ysolda runs it now, and she’d be glad to see you, and Lydia.” Last were Gerdur and Hod, the latter looking rather tired and leaner than usual. “Thank you for coming all the way from Riverwood,” Deirdre said after greeting them. “Oh, we surely would have come just for your speech, but we were already here.” “What, more business in town?” Ralof asked. “No, that bastard Hrongar put Hod in jail when he came to collect his debt last week. By the time I found out, you’d already left for Riften.” “By Talos, if only I’d been here,” said Ralof, gripping his axe. “Where is he?” “Now, Ralof,” said his sister, “remember what Deirdre said about cultivating peace in our hearts.” “She didn’t say anything about one Nord giving another a good thrashing.” “Relax, lad,” said Balgruuf, “I’ve already taken care of my brother. Once he stepped down, I had him thrown in jail. He’ll spend the same number of days there as did those he imprisoned, when added all together. It should come to several months. Hod, I hope you’ll find that a just ruling.” Hod nodded. “And of course, you’ll be paid the debt for the lumber you’ve provided, and something more for your lost work. And beyond that, would you like to join us at our feast?” Gerdur looked at Hod, who shook his head. “No, we thank you, but we just want to get back home to Riverwood. Maybe we’ll get to know Deirdre’s Khajiit friends better along the way.” They said their farewells, then the queen’s party turned to enter Dragonsreach. Once settled around the large table in the center of the council chambers, Deirdre turned to Balgruuf. “So, let’s hear this plan. Mine could take longer to discuss.” “As I said, I’m too old for this jarl business. Yet it will be more than a decade before Frothar is ready to take over. What we need is someone the people look up to, view as a hero even, tough but fair, one who will hold them together, but also keep them in line when the inevitable bickering arises.” He was looking across the large table at both Deirdre and Lydia, seated close together. “That’s really quite flattering, Jarl Balgruuf, but my plate…” “Slow down, lass… my Queen, I mean. You’re right, your plate is too full already. No, I mean Lydia, of course.” A murmur went around the table, and Lydia herself looked stunned. “Me? I’m a soldier. What do I know about being a jarl?” “Oh, I’ll be around to advise you, and what you need to know you can learn in a few months. It’s mostly collecting taxes and settling disputes. The people will accept your decisions. Tough but fair, like I said.” He looked directly at Deirdre now. “That is, if the queen can spare you as the head of her personal guard.” Deirdre was still too stunned to speak. Lydia looked over at her, then back at Balgruuf. “We’d have to move here together. You can’t expect us to live apart. And that means moving the queen’s seat of power.” Balgruuf gave a sly grin. “From what I hear, the queen rather likes Whiterun and its environs, and can’t wait to get out of Castle Dour.” He winked at Elisif, who blushed. That much was certainly true. And the new Dragonsreach, though now made of stone, was still light and airy by comparison, with vaulting ceilings and high windows. The narrow, dark corridors had been kept to a minimum. But all of that would have to wait. “I can think of no one more worthy of the honor,” she said, placing a hand on Lydia’s. “Unfortunately, Lydia won’t be available for service here, or anywhere else in Skyrim, for the next several months at least.” She waited a moment to let this sink in, taking in the questioning, confused looks and mutters, not least Lydia’s. Then she added: “And neither will I.” Gasps came from all around. “What do you mean?” Lydia squeezed her hand. “What’s wrong, my love?” Elisif didn’t look surprised. “It’s true, you really do hate Castle Dour.” “I can’t deny it. But here’s the real issue: before we got so caught up in investigating these murders, Lydia and my advisers and I had been discussing Skyrim’s need for allies, both from its neighboring nations and provinces, and beyond. I had thought to send Brelyna and J’zargo on these diplomatic missions. And then I thought, who better than the queen herself? I wanted only to ensure the realm wasn’t on the verge of falling apart before announcing my plan.” “I’ll say it again,” said Elisif, “you really do hate Castle Dour. And I can’t blame you, I hate that dark place too. And then there are all the duties and cares of being High Queen. I could see the toll it was taking on you, and Lydia as well. And look at the both of you now, healthy and glowing and happy. It’s quite a change in just a few weeks. I can see how these errands of diplomacy will be good for you.” “Not just that,” Deirdre said, though she knew it mostly was. “I truly feel that our need for allies is our most pressing concern. After failing in this most recent tactic, the Thalmor must surely be preparing an all-out attack. And as capable as Brelyna and J’zargo will be, I’m the one with the contacts: Kematu in Hammerfell, my mother’s family in High Rock, Malukah the Bard in Cyrodiil. Kharjo will soon be in Elsweyr. Even Shahvee, whom I befriended in Windhelm, could give us contacts in Blackmarsh.” She knew she was stretching it now. One conversation did not an alliance make. “And I made Faralda arch-mage of the College of Winterhold. She must have contacts with the more reasonable factions in Summerset who oppose Thalmor dominance.” “You mean to travel to Summerset?” Elisif asked. “You do love an adventure, don’t you?” “My queen,” said Ralof, “this will be dangerous. Allow me to accompany you with a squad of soldiers, in addition to your Royal Guard.” “No, my friend, we will need to travel secretly, and our party must be small, traveling across country off the main roads wherever possible. Not even the Royal Guard will accompany the four of us.” “Again ensuring maximum adventure.” Elisif smiled. “And General Ralof,” Deirdre went on, “you’re needed here. Elisif will need you in command of the army.” “What?” Elisif was no longer smiling. “You know I always thought you should be High Queen. I would name you Queen Regent. The realm will be in good hands with both you and Falk running things. That is, if the rest of the jarls agree?” It took a moment, but they all nodded, even Ulfric, seated at the other end of the table from Elisif. “Falk’s already had many years running the kingdom,” he said, “let him run it some more.” “Yet it is a new Skyrim you’ll be ruling in my stead. Are you both ready for the challenge?” Elisif looked at Falk, who nodded. “My husband always wanted everyone, not just the Nords, to be treated fairly, and I wanted that too. We will do our best to see that everyone is treated equally before the law, to settle all disputes between the different peoples justly and swiftly before they can fester, and do everything we can to promote goodwill among all the people.” “I couldn’t have said it better myself.” Deirdre looked around at Lydia, then Brelyna and J’zargo. They all looked eager. “What do you say, my friends? Shall we stop by Solitude to collect our necessaries, then be on our way? I’ve heard Hammerfell is lovely at this time of year.” Brelyna looked at J’zargo. “If we got married in Hammerfell, my family would never find out.” J’zargo gave a contented purr, placing a hand on Brelyna’s back and flexing his claws in just the way he knew she liked. She responded with her own murmur of contentment. Lydia raised her mug. “To new adventures! I mean, new errands of diplomacy!” Laughter rang around the table, along with hearty shouts of “Hear, hear!” Deirdre drank deep from her own mug. It was the sweetest mead she’d ever tasted. The Khajiit Murders Fiction The Khajiit Murders – Chapter 18 Skyrim Unity Tour “It’s hot,” Lydia said, gazing wistfully down at the laughing waters of the White River. “It is, my love,” Deirdre said. She reined her horse to a halt, and her three friends did likewise, sitting four abreast across the road.	__label__1	0.53645
August 4, 2024 The story “A Smaller Excellent Thing” contained a excellent variety of themes. I particularly desired to emphasize on the concept of compassion, basically simply because it is an act that unites and defines human well-currently being. I believe that everyday living can be extremely fickle, one particular instant you might be acquiring the time of your existence and the future, you eliminate everything. This was presented early on in the tale when the writer described the lifetime of the family members as currently being joyful, and fulfilled. Their life out of the blue changed, when Scotty received into an accident. The story offered 3 circumstances that all experienced similar ordeals- Ann and Howard, the black person and Franklin and the baker. As the story moved on, it can be found that the 3 teams all sympathized with one particular one more because they had been all undergoing challenging periods. We change to one particular another for convenience and it even strengthened out connection as friends. I believe it truly is lovely when compassion provides out genuine human thoughts and shields out any lousy electricity that inhibits our means to access out to other men and women. This excerpt from the story, “Despite the fact that they ended up tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker experienced to say”, would match my condition well since it exemplifies how compassion brings folks jointly. At times in life, we have to go by means of trials. In essence, it is these trials that make us stronger and possessing the consolation of an individual else can make bonds among men and women additional fortified. With this statement, i guess it is safe to say that compassion played a huge role.	__label__1	0.870795

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