"Thus he that overruled I overswayed..." (On "Venus and Adonis")

Oof.

Where do I start?

"Venus and Adonis" is a VERY pretty poem. So pretty, in fact, that it was the most popular of all of Shakespeare's works during his actual lifetime.

I mean, it's about the goddess of love and the most beautiful boy in the world. How could it not be?

Well, it's sort of about them.

Maybe I'll start there. A history lesson. Okay.

First up, the poem was written while the theatres were shut down due to plague, coincidentally. Shakespeare had to turn to another way of making money.

So you know all of those theories out there about Shakespeare being gay? This poem is a central piece to them. "Venus and Adonis" is dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, who would have been about 18 years old at the time. It is thought that Southampton is also the youth featured in Shakespeare's sonnets, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

See, Southampton was a young noble sort-of orphan (he had a mother, but was a ward of the state due to his father's death,) whose fortune was tied up in an interesting dilemma: in order to receive his fortune, he had to marry by age 21, or else be fined a HUGE sum of money, something like five thousand pounds, basically enough to significantly damage his prospects forever.

But he REFUSED. Said it wasn't the woman they put forward to him, it was the concept of marriage altogether. And the result could ruin some of his family, so they pressed the issue, and he refused even more sternly.

Enter Shakespeare.

Somewhere around Southampton's 18th year, it is thought that someone hired the playwright (who would have been 28 by this point,) to write a poem to Southampton in order to attempt to convince him to marry. And it might have worked, had not Shakespeare seemingly fallen in love with the object of his inspiration and possibly put forth his own suit instead.

Which brings us to the poem. Here's the dedication. Some say it's not out of character for works of this time in its flowery nature; others say that in its singular uncertainty about the reception of the poem, it stands out for its honesty.

Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.* 

To the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Baron of Titchfield. 

Right Honourable, 

I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden, only if your Honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather: and never after ear [plough] so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your Honourable survey, and your Honour to your heart’s content, which I wish may always answer your own wish, and the world’s hopeful expectation. 

Your Honour’s in all duty,
William Shakespeare.

And now to the poem. "Venus and Adonis" is worthy of a read on its own; it's not long (199 6-line stanzas,) so I'll spare you a detailed explication. What you need to know is that Venus, the goddess of love, plays the role of pursuer of Adonis, most beautiful boy in the world, who staunchly refuses her embrace, because he has better things to do, like...go hunt. The first half of the poem is highly erotically charged as Venus attempts everything in her power to seduce him, while Adonis remains pouty and uninterested:

"[He] blushed and pouted in a dull disdain,
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy—
She red and hot as coals of glowing fire,
He red for shame but frosty in desire." (33-36)

What's of particular interest here is the reversal of gender roles - Venus the hot-blooded pursuer who plucks Adonis off his horse and carries him under his arm, while Adonis blushes and wilts under her ardor. She begs him for kisses and he refuses, turning away, until night finally descends, and he grants her one kiss, which she then turns into a passionate riot of kisses, until he complains that she has taken advantage of him. 

So what does this have to do with Shakespeare and Southampton? In parts, the poem is a plea for Adonis, in his beauty, to couple with Venus in order to breed more like him, to duplicate his beauty so that it may not disappear with his death:

"Things growing to themselves are growth’s abuse;
Seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty;
Thou wast begot; to get, it is thy duty. 

'Upon the earth’s increase why shouldst thou feed,
Unless the earth with thy increase be fed?
By law of nature thou art bound to breed,
That thine may live when thou thyself art dead;
And so in spite of death thou dost survive,
In that thy likeness still is left alive.'" (166-174)

Here, then, is what Shakespeare's patrons paid him to do: beg Southampton to marry, to breed, to have children, and pass his estate along after his death.

For die Adonis does, and brutally (and erotically.) Venus fears the boar, and with good measure: the next morning, Adonis is gored to death in the groin (*AHEM*) and Venus admits that if she had been the boar, she would have done the same in her attempts to kiss him there (*DOUBLE AHEM*)

Do we know for sure that Shakespeare and Southampton were lovers, or even shared a special relationship beyond the norm? No, we can't know that. Beyond the mists of time, Shakespeare himself was an intently private man, and left no private correspondence behind for us to peruse, unlike many of his contemporaries. But his first round of sonnets, written around this same time, also feature his passionate love for a golden young man.**

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, age 21, 1594.
By the incomparable Nicholas Hilliard.

*“Let the common man admire trash or vile things; may golden Apollo serve me full cups of Castalian waters.

**History lesson and the beauty of the poem aside, it is yet another example of a toxic trope, where the message is "just wear a woman down long enough, and she'll eventually cave in to your sexual advances." Remember that Shakespeare's works are both descriptive of their time and prescriptive for the times that come after them. In their popularity, they offer a model for how love "should" be. But we live in a time where we can question this, and the poem, as glittering as it is, left me a bit queasy with Venus's persistence in the light of rejection. No means no.

"A woeful pageant have we here beheld." (On "Richard II")

I read "Richard II" in college, but to be honest, I didn't remember a thing about it, even once I re-read my notes in the margins. I'm glad that was the case, because it felt like coming into this play as a blank canvas for me, which was pretty perfect, because I darn well loved it.

There's a metaphor in the play that sums up the plot pretty succinctly: Richard describes how the kingship is like two buckets in a well; as one rises, the other falls, and the play mirrors that device. But it's not just Bolingbroke's kingship that rises: as he ascends, so does our respect for Richard.

"Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown;
Here cousin:
On this side my hand, and on that side yours.
Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen and full of water:
That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high." (IV.i.)

Reading the plays in as close to a chronological order as we can figure, it's possible to watch as Shakespeare's playwriting skills develop. In "Richard II," there is a vast leap forward in the portrayal of what feels like real humanity in the plays. The intro in my Riverside Shakespeare describes how the previous plays' characters are not really developed people in their own right, but still somewhat allegorical, and I was prepared to argue that point until after I'd read "Richard II."

At the start of the play, Richard is the typical ineffectual king bent on personal pleasure and obeisances from his court. Out of jealousy and pettiness, however, he makes a fatal mistake: upon the death of his uncle, John of Gaunt, Richard seizes John's assets and thereby the inheritance of his first cousin, Henry Bolingbroke.

But here is the great paradox of the piece: Richard's kingship is based on divine right, and the belief that God has placed him and the nobility in their positions, that "Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off from an anointed king" (III.ii.) But if the nobility and monarchy are granted their positions by God, then how can Richard remove the inheritance of Bolingbroke? How omnipotent is the king? Can he upend God's order? And if he can, then why can't another man?

In the end, much like Anne Boleyn seals her own fate by upending queenship and marriage laws just a little over 100 years later, Richard's downfall is caused by his own hand. In denying Bolingbroke's divine right, he denies his own sacred right to kingship, and Bolingbroke takes first his land and then his crown, and then his life.

Which brings me to Richard's humanity. As his kingship, and the royal rights and privileges afford to him by it, slip away from him, his human side comes more and more to the front. The scene in which he hands his crown - literally - to Bolingbroke brought me quite truthfully to tears, sitting at my dinner table, trying to keep the big, fat, wet drops from gumming up my precious Riverside.

The scene is, at its core, about the loss of identity. Richard was born to be king, and his kingship has taken up his entire self. Without it, who is he? When Northumberland addresses him as "My lord - ," Richard interrupts him:

"No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man,
Nor no man's lord; I have no name, no title,
No, not that name was given me at the font,
But 'tis usurp'd: alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out,
And know not now what name to call myself!" (IV.i.)

He has lost his very self, and next calls for a mirror to check to see if he is indeed still himself, and not completely altered on the outside, as he feels himself to be on the inside. When he sees his outward face to be the same as it ever was, he smashes the mirror. And when Bolingbroke disdains to minimize his grief, claiming it is only a shadow, Richard speaks with the kind of sarcasm and bite we all might wish for when someone gaslights us:

"The shadow of my sorrow! Ha! Let's see:
'Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul;
There lies the substance: and I thank thee, king,
For thy great bounty, that not only givest
Me cause to wail but teachest me the way
How to lament the cause." (IV.i.)

Richard's lament in IV.i. is the cry of a man whose entire identity has been wiped away - is he the shadow himself now? Who are we, when all of the structures that have held us up are stripped away? Without his kingship, is Richard no one? Without the identities we have built for ourselves, are we still... someone? What if all of the things we have believed in - the divine right of kings, the honesty or power of our leadership, faith in an institution - is stripped away? How do we find meaning without it?

I don't have answers. But Shakespeare's depiction of a man grieving his identity and previous life brought me to tears in a way none of his other plays had yet done, just with the power of the words on the page. I know what it's like to struggle to find your identity after much of it is swept away, so perhaps that explains my reaction. Regardless, if you haven't yet read "Richard II" or seen a production, do so, when you can. It's a gem.

Robert Sean Leonard in the title role, San Diego’s Old Globe, July 2017.

"Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!" (On "King John")

So, "King John!"

What an odd little play.

First up, we'll need to address how John was held in the imagination of the Elizabethan era, which is somewhat different from how we view him today. Thanks to Scott's Ivanhoe and Disney's thumb-sucking, scrawny lion whose stolen crown doesn't fit on his head, we picture John as a whiny and ineffectual regent for Richard the Lionheart, who was all things bold and courageous and who came home to support the hero Robin Hood.

Not so - there's no connection with John and Robin Hood until the literature of the 19th century, and Richard I was, frankly, a terrible king. He would have sold his own liver for a chance at a battle, any battle, and certainly would have auctioned off anyone else's. He butchered his own people in France (remember he was king of both England AND half of what we now know as France,) and he spent most of his reign leaving the administration of his affairs to others, among them his little brother John.

It's hard to say why Richard was viewed, even in Shakespeare's time, with such adoration. But John wasn't hated nearly as much, except by many of the nobility, who resented his taxation and his attempt at curtailing their powers (hence the Magna Carta, which is completely ignored in the play.) And yet John is certainly viewed with distaste, as a man who can't quite come out and say what he means. He can't bring himself to tell Hubert directly to murder young Arthur, his brother Geffrey's son and a threat to his crown, so he hints around it, later berating Hubert for taking his hints when Arthur's death is taken so ill by his nobles that they abandon him. And he promises much advancement to the Bastard Faulconbridge, though never in concrete terms, which prove illusory by the end of the play.

Corey Jones in the title role at the 2013 Utah Shakespeare Festival.

And yet the nobles love him, and grieve his wasting death at the end of the play. They acknowledge his nobility and right to kingship in view of the threat from France, but it turns out to be the church's intervention that saves John, not his own strength.

John was the youngest of four brothers to survive to adulthood, and was unlikely to ever become king, except he was born into the most warlike family known to man. His mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was married to two kings, and makes an appearance as a sly, manipulative, yet powerful granddam in Shakespeare's play. His father was known for his temper tantrums and refusal to bow to the power of the church, ending in the murder of Thomas a Becket at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral.

A 1597 portrait of King John by an unknown artist.
While the portrait was completed many years after John's
death, it shows how an artist in Shakespeare's era would
have pictured him.

The truth is, the more that you read about medieval monarchies, the more you realize that the myth of primogeniture is just that - a myth. It was rare for more than two or three generations to remain stable on the throne based on inheritance of the eldest son. So what do you do? You marry your daughter to another prince of a nearby territory and hope their oldest son, your grandchild, will inherit both.

And this is where we end up early on in "King John" - England's king makes a deal with France's to combine their forces against Arthur's, using marriage between their youth to strike a deal. But the deal itself is not just against Arthur - both kings are thwarted in their attempts to enter the city of Angiers, which is barred against all comers and refuses to open to any but the true king.

But who is the true king? Both King John and King Philip of France claim it for themselves. When asked "Speak, citizens, for England; who's your king?" the citizens reply with "The king of England; when we know the king." When both kings try to claim the crown, the reply from the citizenry is:

"A greater power then we denies all this;
And till it be undoubted, we do lock
Our former scruple in our strong-barr'd gates;
King'd of our fears, until our fears, resolved,
Be by some certain king purged and deposed." (II.i.)

The citizens await the decision to be made before they will open their gates. They have the ability to add their power to one claim or another, and thereby strengthen that claim, but abstain instead. They want certainty, to only open their gates to whoever God (and brute force) claims as king. But by abdicating responsibility, they leave themselves open to the whims of fate. Who is to say that the winning king will be a good one? Could they not have assured the victory of a better king by getting involved? And yet they seem stymied by the choice, unable to decide, and so refuse to engage at all. 

Tim Sailer plays the title character in Texas Shakespeare Festival’s “King John," 2018.

Eventually, the citizenry are the ones who make the suggestion for the two kings to join their forces by marriage of the next generation (Blanche and Lewis.) They solve the problem through negotiation rather than force. And this seems to be the new paradigm - war by commerce and parley rather than sword and cannon. The Bastard in particular seems disgusted by the realpolitik of it all, but he is the illegitimate son of the Lionheart, after all, so battle is in his blood. 

From the balcony, the play seems to be about indecision and uncertainty, and what happens when no strong, legitimate hand emerges to rule. In that case, do we sit back and wait to see who is victorious, as do the citizens of Angiers? Or are we right to try to find new answers when the old ways no longer serve us? 

Yes, You Are Allowed to Wear a Blanket Today.

(Vulnerable moment.)

What's been really interesting to me about all of these very valid posts I've been seeing, like this one, about how it's okay to hunker down and just get through this, just survive, just deal with all of your emotions during this time, is that I realized that this is what I have been doing for two years now.

I had a meltdown a couple of weeks ago when the uncertainty of it all hit me, but then I realized the familiarity of that uncertainty and the frustration I felt with it. It's the same thing I've been processing since my whole world blew up two years ago, and so many things kept happening, one thing after another, so that it felt like there was no control over anything. In truth, there WAS no control over anything.*

Here's the thing about trauma: PTSD is caused (as far as science and doctors can tell) when you cannot escape a traumatic situation. Our bodies are designed to run away or fight a threat. When they cannot do that - when they are forced to just endure it - it causes deep-seated neurological issues that often manifest in anxiety, depression, lack of energy, jitteriness, lack of concentration, etc. When this goes on for a long period of time, or is repeated many times over a period, it becomes complex PTSD, which is lesser-known because it doesn't usually feature the flashbacks or nightmares so well known in regular PTSD.

Complex PTSD, or C-PTSD, is often exacerbated when people dismiss one's traumatic experiences as being simply normal. But just because something is widespread doesn't make it normal for our human bodies to cope with. This pandemic is a fantastic example - we're all dealing with it in some form (even the idiot 24-year-old next-door-neighbor who chose to have an ACTUAL party in her backyard last night until 2 am on a Sunday.) So because everyone is dealing with it, many people have a tendency to describe what is "normal" to them as the right answer for everyone.

But this is traumatic - for many people, they are watching in horror as their livelihoods slip away. Will they be able to pay their mortgages? Eviction relief is one thing, but if you are paycheck-to-paycheck, and suddenly three months' worth of rent comes due when the emergency order is lifted, and you haven't HAD a paycheck for that whole time, what do you do? We always knew that a day would come that there wouldn't be enough jobs to go around, but suddenly that day is here; what do you do when you've worked in retail for 20 years, and now there is no retail work to be had? What do you do if you are a nurse who has to face the reality of the risk of not just getting infected yourself, but bringing it home to vulnerable family members? What about plans for career movement or weddings or long-awaited vacations? These are all things we are losing and collectively grieving.

I read a piece by Roxane Gay in Medium where she sums up how I've really been feeling: "Will any of what I have to say even matter when this is all over?"

But this feeling is not unfamiliar to me in a strange way. And I can see how, repeatedly over the past two years, I have tried (and failed, miserably,) to try and establish some control over the waves of change that have just washed over me and knocked me down and filled my mouth and soul with fear and uncertainty. And I tried it again a couple of weeks ago. But this, like so many other things that happened to me in the past two years, is uncontrollable, and our world will be different in so many ways when it is all over, and it won't be all over at once, but in jolts and shudders and long, drawn-out sighs, and it is OKAY to let your body feel afraid, and to sit with those feelings and acknowledge them and pull your warm cup of coffee to your chest and get out your fuzziest blanket and ignore the call of your to-do list.** Because I'm speaking from experience when I tell you that if you run from it, it will still be there whenever you turn around, so you'll have to keep running forever. You don't have control over your future right now. All you can control is the one thing right in front of you, and sometime's that's simply your breathing.

So if that's all you can do right now, in this moment, because everything else is too scary, I'm giving you permission to just breathe.

*For those just joining me, here's the rundown:

• Jan. 2018: grandfather died
• Feb. 2018: end of 6-year relationship
• Feb. 2018: (just a handful of days later) hospitalized with flu, peeing blood from dehydration
• Feb. 2018: traumatized me seeks comfort in new relationship (like an idiot)
• May 2018: gets engaged to new relationship (like an idiot)
• May 31 2018: buys house with fiance (like an idiot)
• June 1 2018: sprains ankle moving in to house, spends three hours in urgent care, fiance DOES NOT CARE and makes me keep moving, grocery shop, and make dinner that night
• June 7 2018: break it off with jerk fiance, spend next 3.5 months living downstairs of new house in increasingly hostile environment, scared every day that something bad would happen to my cats
• Summer 2018 (not sure what month): stepdad diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer
• Sept. 2018: finally close on both old house and new house, move in to fabulous new house
• Nov. 1 2018: stepfather succumbs to cancer
• Nov. 2018: (two weeks later) abnormal pap smear
• Nov. 2018: (two weeks later) attempted biopsy reveals growth in uterus, 6-18% chance it's cancer
• Dec. 21 2018: surgery, no cancer, random growth the size of a man's pinky finger removed
• There was peace for a while; spring of 2019 went well.
• But then in July of 2019 I had to end a long-standing and close friendship when I discovered the deep dishonesty that underlay it. It hurts to lose one of your support systems, even though you've discovered that support is rotten to the core.
• Fall, 2019: workplace culture becomes untenable. Not ready to discuss that yet, but I rage quit without regret right before Christmas.
• Jan. 2020: completely change careers after a decade in education
• Late Jan. 2020: biological father dies. Even though we haven't had a relationship in almost 15 years, still a shock to the system.
• Feb/Mar. 2020: COVID-19 crisis hits

** (Yes, I know some people find comfort in creation; you do you, boo.)