Have you missed me? Is anyone still there? I’m pondering something new.
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29 Friday Apr 2022
Posted Announcements
in29 Friday Apr 2022
Posted Announcements
in15 Monday Aug 2016
Posted Miscellaneous, music, Thoughts
inTags
community, entertainment, Gilbert and Sullivan, Lamplighters, memory, mikado, nostalgia, Stanford Savoyards, stanford university, thinking
There is something thrilling about the sound of an orchestra tuning. It’s a sound that announces the beginning of something magical. It draws me in, somehow simultaneously settling my mind and making my heart race.
I have yet to find anyone who agrees with me on this, but I stand by it. The ritual of dimmed lights, applause for the conductor, and then the sound of first the strings finding their A, then the other instruments joining in – it’s beautiful and intoxicating.
On Saturday, I went to the Lamplighters Musical Theatre’s performance of their reworked “Mikado,” titled “The NEW Mikado,” at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. This production makes a valiant and largely successful attempt at retaining the musical and narrative structure of the original operetta while addressing the racial and ethnic aspects of the original that are uncomfortable and distasteful to a modern audience. Their solution? Remove the entire story from the setting of the fictional and highly stylized setting of the Japanese town of Titipu, and place it instead in a fictional and highly stylized town called Tirmisu in the fifteenth-century duchy of Milan.
And you know what? It works. It really, really works. I loved it.
But as I sat in the darkened theater, listening to the orchestra tune and then play the familiar melodies of the late Victorian operetta, my mind couldn’t stop wandering to my own past.
“The Mikado” is incredibly important to me. Every time I have seen it or been involved with a production of it in any way, it leaves ripples of impact in my life.
In 1997 or 1998, my mother took me to see a production of “The Mikado” put on at Stanford University by their Gilbert and Sullivan Society, The Stanford Savoyards. I remember sitting enthralled through it, and still have snapshot memories of the two act finales. After that, we went to several of the Savoyards’ productions until in early 2002, I decided to audition to join the chorus myself. I was fifteen at the time, and the production staff made it clear that I was an exception to their usual rules about the age of participants. But that audition, and then being in the production, introduced me to a new part of myself. It was the most daring thing I had ever done, I felt, and took me to a world of magic and camaraderie that opened my eyes.
I won’t deny that I enjoyed being the petted youngest member of the company. It’s always nice to feel special. But more than that, I was treated as an equal member of the effort to bring the show to the stage. And really, I was only two or three years younger than some of the others, who were freshmen at Stanford.
It’s hard for me to explain the impact of those few months of rehearsal and performance. Desperate for approval and encouragement in my singing attempts, longing to feel like a valued member of a community engaged in a shared endeavor, I really think that joining the Savoyards in 2002 was a pivotal moment for me. The weeks I spent in rehearsal, performance, and social interaction with the Stanford students in the company proved to me that even without a 4.0 GPA, I could keep up with these students I viewed with some awe.
Being in “Mikado” in 2002 (and “The Sorcerer” that fall, and “The Gondoliers” in the spring of 2003) gave me the courage to apply to Stanford.
As I listened to the familiar music on Saturday, my mind kept going back to May of 2002, as I’d wait backstage for the entrance of the women’s chorus. We’d all bustle about, putting finishing touches to wigs, makeup, and costumes, and occasionally pausing to listen intently to the faint strains of music and dialogue coming through the backstage PA system, praying that the tenor and the trumpet were both having good nights as they approached the high notes.
I remember the movements backstage as a sort of dance, as we knew exactly when to step aside for Ed’s manic sprint offstage at one side and re-entrance on the other side for the next verse, or to make our way to the exact spots for our entrance. At times I remember some people quietly dancing in the wings, compelled to move by music and adrenaline.
In 1997, “Mikado” planted a spark of interest in trying the stage for myself. In 2002, it showed me that I could, in fact, belong at Stanford and find a community there. In 2005, it woke me up to the fact that I was no longer enjoying the theater experience.
And now, in 2016? I have only rarely gone near Gilbert & Sullivan in the past eleven years. The memory of the overwhelming and frightening rage and loss I felt as I saw my time with the Savoyards ending has to some extent tainted the memories of the magic and passionate love I had for the experience. I’ve even flinched away from the music itself.
Perhaps it’s been long enough now that I can start reclaiming that music. I feel no desire to get back onstage, and the only thing I regret about my decision to leave the Savoyards is how long it took me to accept the end of the era for me. It was a life lesson in “leave before you hate it.”
Except for those moments when I hear an orchestra tune. During those moments, as the lights dim and the familiar combination of instruments all seek harmony on their A, I find myself briefly in the velvet darkness of the wings, or the yellow light of the cramped, crowded dressing rooms in Dinkelspiel Auditorium. And for a moment, I miss it. But just for a moment. Then I let myself float away into the magic of theater.
23 Monday Mar 2015
Posted Geekery
inTags
books, Edith Nesbit, entertainment, Frances Hodgson Burnett, James Thurber, knowledge gaps, literature, movies, nerds, NPR, npr pchh, pop culture happy hour, popular culture, popular music, thinking, whimsy
My laptop died in December. For the past three months, I have been enjoying the benefits of having a laptop that isn’t ancient. For instance, I can now consistently open PDFs.
Even better, I can once again access the iTunes store, with its glorious array of free and bank-draining possibilities.
I can finally act on the repeated recommendation from a friend to check out a podcast from NPR called “Pop Culture Happy Hour.” And oh boy, do I love it.
Now, due to a quirk resulting from some kind of change to the technical aspects of NPR’s podcast distribution in the past few months, most of my NPR podcasts suddenly decided to download all or most of the past few years’ archives. That was a bit annoying when it came to Fresh Air (I enjoy it well enough, but not THAT much), but when it came to PCHH, it’s great fun.
One of the things I like about it is that they theme the episodes, which are usually divided into three acts. The final act is always the same – “What’s Making Us Happy This Week” – but the first two are sometimes both discussions, and sometimes one is a discussion and the second is a funny quiz.
Anyway, some of the archived episodes I’ve been listening to have me thinking about the subject of popular culture knowledge gaps.
There are things we take for granted, assuming that everyone knows them as well as we do. Often it’s heavily dependent on what popular culture we’re exposed to as children, and at some level, we are still those kids who think that this is what everyone sees, reads, and listens to, and then we’re startled when we encounter someone who doesn’t know those songs, stories, and characters.
In my way of thinking, these gaps fall into a few overlapping categories.
1. Lack of knowledge
If you simply aren’t aware of something, you will naturally have that as a gap. That happened (and still happens) to me a lot. I didn’t grow up in a tv-watching household, so when my friends talked about Nickelodeon, the Siimpsons, South Park, Friends, or Buffy (to name a few), I usually either stared blankly or went off into my happy place until they finished. There was a guy who sat near me in eighth grade history, though, who used to love to recount the entire plot of each week’s Simpsons episode to me in spite of my demonstrated lack of interest. Which leads me to…
2. Lack of interest
This manifests at a lot of levels. Sometimes it’s as simple as an individual production by an artist, or sometimes it’s the artist’s entire body of work. Sometimes it’s a genre or an entire category. For instance, keeping up with popular music has never been of particular interest to me. So I don’t. If I encounter a song that I like, I listen to it, but I don’t put any effort into finding new music. There’s so much entertainment and popular cultural works out there that it’s impossible to consume more than the tiniest fraction in our lifetimes – why spend your time and energy on something that just doesn’t capture your interest?
3. Lack of access
Sometimes there are things you would follow if you could, but maybe you don’t have the right channels on your TV, or the funds to expend on pursuing the cultural thread in question, or the rules of your family don’t allow it, like Lane Kim on Gilmore Girls being forbidden to listen to rock music. Then again, maybe that’s not a good example, because she finds a way to listen anyway.
4. Lack of time
Like I said earlier, there’s so much out there in the popular culture realm, created before, during, and likely to be produced after our lifetimes. Even if you spent all your time reading, you’d never read all the books in the world. Same goes for movies, or tv, or comics, or sporting events, or music, or live performances. We all have to pick and choose and accept the fact that we’re barely going to graze the surface of what’s out there.
The kinds of gaps I’m describing here are interlocking. For instance, my lack of interest in pursuing popular music means I have a distinct lack of knowledge in the area.
Here are some of my gaps, other than popular music, of which I am aware. At the moment, I’d say mostly my choices are determined by category 2 – most of my gaps are simply due to lack of interest. For the same reason, I am rarely able to categorize my interests by genre. I follow what interests me.
1. Superman franchise
2. Batman franchise
3. Basically anything from the DC Comics universe. I’ve got some on Marvel, thanks to the past decade’s films, but I never really got into comics.
4. Manga
5. Anime
6. Most sports. I get a kick out of watching the Olympics (winter and summer) and sometimes watching bits of the World Series, but the rest of it just doesn’t hold my attention.
7. Most in the paranormal/supernatural area of stories
Some gaps I’ve discovered in others that brought me up short, and that help me to understand my own quirks:
1. Dickens novels
2. 1930s/1940s Hollywood classics/memorable actors and their roles
3. James Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks (nobody EVER gets my references, and it makes me sad)
4. Tudor history
5. Classic English children’s literature from around 100 years ago (think Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edith Nesbit, etc.)
6. Original literature versions of things Disney has mangled into syrupy, sanitized animations
7. Lord of the Rings
24 Tuesday Feb 2015
Posted Archives and Libraries, Family
inTags
archives, family, family history, germany, history, imagination, label your photos, photos, spangenberg, thinking
Today my dad came home from a trip to his hometown. He brought something back – a few dozen photographs, some loose and some in an album. Going by the clothing of the subjects and the style of the prints, I feel comfortable saying that none of the photographs are less than a century old.
At first I felt nothing but excitement as I examined each image, admiring the details of clothing and landscape. In a lot of ways I think these older photographs in their shades of black and white and sepia were more consistently flattering to their subjects than our color, high-resolution images. I laughed over the image of two teenage girls sitting on a lawn, noticing how one had her hand splayed over her face so the photographer wouldn’t see it – some things don’t change! I chuckled and smiled at the one of a solid little fellow not more than three or four, wearing a big hat, tiny feet poking out from under baggy denim overalls, and carrying a book under his arm.
Then I started to lay the loose images out on the table one by one. I started to hunt for physical resemblances to the family members I know on my dad’s side. I found myself looking each image in the eyes and studying their faces one by one.
I will be the first to admit that I have an active imagination. I know I romanticize.
As I sat and looked at the photographs laid out on the table, I suddenly felt like some of them were looking at me. Not in a creepy the-eyes-of-the-portrait-follow-me kind of way. I felt a combined sense of anticipation and resigned patience coming from those faces of unknown, long-gone relatives.
You see, most of the photographs are unlabeled.
A few have first names and what might be a partial date, but that’s it, and figuring that out depends on deciphering generations-old handwriting in German.
There is a spirited-looking young woman with dark hair named Luisa. There is a slightly sullen-looking young man named Willy in an army uniform with close-cropped hair. There is a teenage boy named Franz with severely parted and combed-down hair giving the distinct impression of a youth in between boy and man, wearing a proper grown-up suit for the first time. There is a middle-aged man in a mid-19th-century military uniform that is definitely European, and on the back is written in clear, beautiful script, “Karl Spangenberg.”
But most are unlabeled. There are older couples, young families, children, infants, teenagers, and a picture of a young couple in which the wife looks so young that I want to ease the ring off her finger, put her hair back in plaits, and send her back to high school.
When I look at them there is a feeling like someone holding their breath. I desperately want to give them back their names and place them on the right branches of the family tree, but I don’t know if I can. I don’t know of anyone old enough and present enough to be able to identify them, and I was never good at tracing subtle family resemblances.
So they are there, waiting and watching, half-resigned to an eternity of silent anonymity. And I look back at them, wishing I could at least call them by name.
15 Sunday Feb 2015
Posted History, Miscellaneous, movies
inTags
English history, Hampton Court Palace, history, in the news, Louis Jourdan, movies, musical, National Portrait Gallery, nerds, RIP, thinking
In the process of pursuing the online dating thing, I keep finding myself confronted by the questions of why I’m interested in history and why I’m interested in English history in particular.
It’s hard to answer that. It’s even harder to answer it without going off onto massive, rambling tangents.
I suspect that most of us don’t have clear explanations of why we’re interested in what we’re interested in. Some lucky people may have good stories of a moment in which they discovered the interest, but is that the same thing as an explanation of WHY it interests you? Probably not.
When asked, I start by saying I’m not really sure why I’m interested in English history more than, say, Argentinian or Nigerian or Vietnamese history. It’s just what draws me.
Then I tell about my first trip to England, when I was ten. That was the first time I remember encountering museum audio guides, which proved invaluable in navigating (and maintaining a ten-year-old’s interest in) London’s National Portrait Gallery. I loved learning the tidbits of information and context surrounding each piece of artwork.
This trip isn’t when I discovered an interest in history. I really couldn’t say when that started. But I think it may be the moment when I started turning to English history more often than any other nation’s history.
It’s been nearly twenty years, but I still remember that first trip to Hampton Court Palace. I initially wanted to go there because they have a hedge maze. The maze proved anticlimactic, but I found the strange hodgepodge of three architectural and landscaping styles fascinating.
I can’t explain WHY English history draws me, just as I can’t explain why I’m interested in the time periods that draw me. Luckily I can distract people from their original question with my Hampton Court Palace anecdote. It’s a more appropriate response in a social situation than a twenty-minute philosophical ramble through the nature of intellectual interest, anyway.
As for a general interest in history… I find something reassuring about the past. I can joke that I find it comforting because I know how it turns out, which is partly true (quiet, you philosopher types). I think it’s also that having a familiarity with the past makes me feel like I’m more firmly rooted.
And now, on an unrelated but sad note, French actor Louis Jourdan has died at age 93. His role in GIGI as the wealthy, bored Gaston is still one of my favorites. He’s obviously not going to win any singing competitions, but I like his voice. It sounds like a normal person putting their thoughts into music. And boy, is he nice to look at. Classic mid-century Hollywood male beauty.
08 Saturday Nov 2014
Posted Bloggy Book Club, History, History
inTags
books, England, English history, gender, history, Isabella of France, Lisa Hilton, Middle Ages, nerds, queens, thinking, women in history
If the practical authority of English queens can be said to have declined since the twelfth century, then intercession had undergone a concomitant diminution in status. Where the Anglo-Norman queens had shared and participated in their husbands’ governments, the conciliar role of the consort since then had been reduced to one of supplication. The way intercession had lost its meaning through ritualisation, becoming a staged means of permitting a king to act in a ‘feminised’ manner – to change his mind or show mercy – without compromising his masculinity, has been traced here through Isabella of France’s intercession for the banishment of the Despensers in 1321 and Philippa of Hainault’s pleas for the citizens of Calais in 1347. The failure of Anne’s intercession for Simon Burley shows that as a device it now had no spontaneous power, but merely modified the perception of a decision that had already been taken.
Lisa Hilton concludes her survey of the English queens between the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the death of Elizabeth of York in the first years of the sixteenth century with an extended and rather meandering comparison of the portrayal of women in “Beowulf” with Thomas Malory’s version of Guinevere in “La Morte d’Arthur.” If you can wade through a discussion that is more exhausting than exhaustive, you reach a point that is rather more interesting and pertinent to the book as a whole.
One of the threads Hilton traces throughout the centuries she covers in the book is the political role and power of the queen. Early in her time frame, you find women like Matilda of Flanders, Matilda of Boulogne, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, not to mention Isabella of France, known to some in history as the “She-Wolf of France.”
These women had political clout. Some led armies. Some governed lands as regents for their husbands or their sons. Some were reviled for it, like the Empress Matilda who was a contemporary and rival of Matilda of Boulogne, or like Isabella of France, who openly lived with her lover and led an invading army into England to depose her husband and replace him with her son.
That said, they weren’t completely independent beings. They and the kings they married ideally complemented each other as public beings. Sometimes they functioned in conjunction. Sometimes they opposed each other.
The queen’s role involved traditionally female roles. They endowed religious institutions, were patrons of artists, authors, and musicians, and did their best, by the day’s standards, to ensure their children had the best of the best. One of their greatest powers was as intercessor with the king. They could plead with him to pardon wrongdoers and there was no shame in his commuting sentences.
Somewhere along the line, though, the role of the queen begins to diminish in actual, everyday political power. The true intercessory power began to diminish. Instead, it became a piece of political theater. The petition for pardon was staged to present a decision already made as not weakness in the king, but chivalric and magnanimous behavior to please a woman.
Unlike her predecessors, whose names show up on charters and other legal documents, Elizabeth of York seems like a very home-and-hearth kind of queen. That’s of course a vast oversimplification, but Lisa Hilton puts it better – the queen, when anointed, became an extension of the king, an extension of his royal body. As such, over the reigns, she became more and more subject to his will and his interpretation of what she was expected to be.
Hilton’s conclusion goes into this development at some length, but ends with an interesting observation. With all this diminution of queenly power, for all of Elizabeth of York’s seemingly passive existence as queen, it is important to remember that she was the grandmother of England’s first two queens regnant, including her forceful, astute, and very powerful namesake, Elizabeth I.
Next Up: She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, by Helen Castor
02 Sunday Nov 2014
Posted Bloggy Book Club, History
inTags
books, Empress Matilda, English history, gender, history, King Stephen, Lisa Hilton, Matilda of Boulogne, Medieval, Middle Ages, nerds, presentitis, thinking
Anglo-Saxon commentators generally accept that women could participate in war and government, betraying ‘not the slightest surprise… when a woman is learned, devout, an able administrator or a brave fighter.’ Matilda of Boulogne was all of these things. However, post-Conquest attitudes to gender shift to a point at which any sign of such capabilities was remarked upon with astonishment and viewed as exceptional. ‘Masculinity,’ in terms of categorising the characteristics of women, becomes amorphous. In one sense it can be positive, in that if a woman does anything so unusual as to suggest she might have a brain it must be because she possesses ‘manlike’ qualities, but in another it can be negative, disturbing, unqueenly. The Empress Matilda found herself damned in the chronicles on both counts.
One of the frequent complaints I’ve read of Lisa Hilton’s book Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Elizabeth of York (which actually starts with Matilda of Flanders, not Eleanor of Aquitaine) is that it’s simply a recitation of biographical information with little analysis. And if you already know a good deal about these women, then I can see why that might be frustrating.
But I don’t know much about them. A few I’ve never heard of before. A few I know by name with a detail or two about their origins or the circumstances of their time as Queen of England. Even for the ones I known a little more about, my knowledge is based in the popular, often semi-apocryphal, version of their stories. Eleanor of Aquitaine was feisty and sexy, and then cruelly imprisoned. Isabella of France was the “she-wolf” who lived openly with her lover and violently deposed her husband. Elizabeth Woodville seduced Edward IV into marriage and then clogged the government’s offices with her numerous, greedy relatives.
As my history professors would say, things were more complicated. Lisa Hilton often points out what is the popular conception now and in the queen’s own time, what is impossible to prove, and how the available evidence may be interpreted.
One of the stories that particularly caught my attention is that of Matilda of Boulogne, mentioned in the starting quote to this post. This Matilda was married to King Stephen, who claimed the crown on the death of his uncle, Henry I. Both of the main women in this story are named Matilda, so bear with me here.
In spite of having some 20 illegitimate children, Henry I died with only one surviving legitimate child, a daughter named Matilda. Her first husband was the Holy Roman Emperor, which is why she is known to history as the Empress Matilda. After that first husband died, she married Geoffrey of Anjou, and from this marriage comes the Plantagenet line to the throne of England.
At this point, England had no provision for a daughter inheriting the crown. Henry appears to have made some attempts to secure his daughter’s rights with the barons and nobles, but he also appears to have made some indications towards his nephew Stephen’s inheriting the crown. Unsurprisingly, when Henry died, both claimed the throne and this led to years of armed conflict.
The two Matildas are roughly contemporaries in age and position. Many of their activities and responsibilities in this civil war were similar – both served as administrators and military commanders. Both portrayed their activities as stemming from maternal concern for their sons’ rights. And yet Matilda of Boulogne was praised by her contemporaries, while Empress Matilda was condemned as unfeminine.
Why?
Hilton doesn’t go into extended analysis on this point, but it’s an interesting one to consider. Perhaps it’s got to do with who was on the more powerful side – Empress Matilda’s efforts never got very far, in spite of her persistence. Perhaps it’s as simple as Matilda of Boulogne was fighting for husband and son, while Empress Matilda was fighting for herself and her son.
Perhaps it’s a simple matter of personality. It could be that the contemporary and immediately-after-the-fact chroniclers found a formalized way of expressing a more personal dislike of Empress Matilda as a person.
It also could be hindsight, medieval-style. Again and again, relatively contemporary accounts of people and events in the Middle Ages find explanations for success or failure that the modern mind might find irrelevant. Empress Matilda was “unwomanly,” so her efforts to claim her inheritance failed.
It’s like the infamous trial by combat. If you lose the fight, then obviously you are in the wrong. Modern logic says the two are unconnected, but 900 years ago, people thought differently. And consequently, we still recount their interpretations of events as fact. Empress Matilda was unwomanly, therefore she failed.
It’s hard to avoid what one history teacher called “presentitis” but when you can set modern values and ideas aside as much as you can, the glimpses we can get of the medieval mindset are fascinating.
16 Thursday Oct 2014
Posted Bloggy Book Club, books
inIf he tried to say what drew him to her, he would only find a handful of gestures. Her first refusal to perform on the harpsichord; her focus beyond the window in a room crowded with friends and strangers; her glances, which were as direct and unblinking as a hawk’s. The feeling of her hand an inch from his arm. He does not consider himself a lonely man, and yet he needs something in her gaze. Honesty, perhaps, or conviction.
I actually finished this book a week ago and I’ve been trying to work out what to say about it. For a book in which three people die, it’s an oddly quiet story that’s a little bit out of focus, like a flashback in a movie or tv show. It’s not bad-fuzzy. It’s as though most of the colors are a little washed out and nothing’s sharply defined.
This is Katy Simpson Smith’s first novel, though in her capacity of adjunct professor at Tulane, she previously published a study of motherhood in the South between 1750 and 1835. The Story of Land and Sea is in three parts that are not in chronological order, and it’s hard to describe it without giving things away.
Perhaps the simplest way to describe it is it’s a book about how people deal with the death of loved ones. Set in the years around and directly after the American Revolution, the story looks at the impact of two maternal deaths in childbed and the death of a ten-year-old daughter on the fathers, husbands, and grandfather. It incorporates complex relationships with faith, the land, the community, and, of course, the sea. It looks at friendship, marriage, slavery, and the impact of choices even years after the initial action.
Since it’s a new publication I don’t want to say anything that will give away plot points, and for all that the book is dreamy and slow, there’s not much excess.
It’s not a story that invokes strong emotion – I neither laughed nor cried – but it was gripping, and I wanted to keep reading. And really, isn’t that the best thing you can say of a book?
Next Up: Our Great Big American God: A Short History of Our Ever-Growing Deity by Matthew Paul Turner
04 Saturday Oct 2014
Posted Bloggy Book Club, History, History, Thoughts
inTags
anne boleyn, books, context, England, game of thrones, henry viii, history, katherine of aragon, nerds, thinking, Wars of the Roses
Having seen Elizabeth Blount and her own sister discarded once the king’s interest faded, Anne wanted more. She wanted to become Henry’s wife and queen, not his mistress. Unfortunately, Katherine was in her way.
But this is where fortune’s wheel favored Anne, not the queen. For Henry now had scruples about the legality of his marriage, and it is far more likely that these scruples developed before he was bewitched by Anne than afterward. She merely crystallized them, focused them, and gave him an additional reason to exploit them.
A few years ago, while pursuing my MA in history, I had a professor who remarked that nearly every historical thesis can be boiled down to the same basic point: The situations under discussion were far more complicated than we previously thought.
Think about your own recent history. If you really consider each major occurrence or decision, how many of them can be explained easily and directed back to one single cause?
England’s split from papal jurisdiction in the early 16th century is undeniably inextricably linked to Henry’s doubts about the legality of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, but it is a vast understatement to say that it is all because of his lust for Anne Boleyn. To assert this is the only cause is to do a colossal disservice to all those involved, 500 years ago. So here are some of the other points that I think are important to consider. They are by no means all of the causes and influences, and I am of course giving very brief explanations, but hopefully it’ll get some of you thinking.
First, as Julia Fox points out in the passage quoted above, Henry’s doubts about his marriage begin before Anne Boleyn starts showing up in the court records in any significant way, if at all.
It is common practice but in my opinion unfair to dismiss Henry as a lazy, selfish hedonist who took credit for others’ writings and efforts. While certainly true to some extent – he was selfish, he hated the physical effort of writing himself, and he loved banquets and tournaments and pageants – consider today’s politicians. How many of them write their own speeches without any help from professional speechwriters? As far as I know, there’s not much evidence to say that Henry had no hand at all in documents like the pamphlet Defence of the Seven Sacraments, which won him the title of “Defender of the Faith” from a grateful pope.
David Starkey’s book about Henry before he came to the throne is an interesting read. The child exuded charisma from every pore, and he was apparently the epitome of the ideal Renaissance prince. He was well-educated, very intelligent, interested in matters of philosophy, theology, music, art, literature, history, and war. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who was the king’s right-hand man for years, is reported to have warned other counselors to be careful “what matter ye put into his head, for ye shall never put it out again.”
He was genuinely interested in matters of theology. This really can’t be stressed enough. His scruples about his marriage to his brother’s widow are legitimate. Biblical verses give conflicting instructions on the question of marrying a deceased brother’s wife. Other royal marriages involving similar relationship networks bore children – why didn’t his? If the pope’s dispensation was issued in error, if the pope had no right to issue such a dispensation to evade canon law, then that gets into frightening questions of papal authority and infallibility.
It is easy to view Henry through the lens of 500 years of 20/20 hindsight. We know he married six women, two of whom died at his command. But when he was struggling with the Katherine question, nobody had any way of seeing the bloodbath and upheaval that was to come. We are too prone to seeing him as the bloated, violent, vindictive monster he became.
The second point I think it important to discuss further is some of the reasoning for Henry’s obsession with getting an undeniably legitimate male heir.
Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509, 24 years after his father defeated the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, in battle at Bosworth Field. 1485 is given as the official end to the decades-long Wars of the Roses, the conflict between opposing royal claims from the houses of York and Lancaster (yes, the loose basis for Stark and Lannister in Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin didn’t exactly break a sweat on that one). It’s basically nearly a century of civil war, royal restorations/usurpations (depending on who you asked), fear, and turmoil. The reign of Henry VII, troubled though it was by the occasional pretender to the throne claiming to be one of the lost “Princes in the Tower,” was one of the longest periods of relative stability in generations.
Henry VIII was terrified of leaving his country without a solid, uncontestable heir to the Tudor dynasty because to do so would be to throw the country back into the Wars of the Roses.
To his mind, a solid, uncontestable heir meant a male heir, and this is an issue that also takes a little thought on our part. We know, because we know how the last 500 years went, that three of England’s longest-reigning, most-solidly-on-their-thrones monarchs were women. Elizabeth I reigned for 45 years. Victoria reigned for 64 years. Elizabeth II took the throne in 1952 and is still going. And yes, the monarchy today is a far cry from what it was in the 16th century, but still. We know a woman can inherit the crown and rule without letting the country dissolve into civil war.
Henry VIII didn’t. The last (and only) time that England had the prospect of a queen regnant was Matilda, in the middle of the 12th century. Her attempt to succeed her father, Henry I, resulted in some twenty years of civil war as her forces clashed with those of her cousin Stephen, who was crowned upon Henry’s death in 1135. In the sixteenth century, England believed that a woman inheriting the crown was equivalent to civil war.
And thus the quest for a legitimate male heir whose right to succeed could not possibly be challenged.
Next Up: The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel, by Katy Simpson Smith
25 Thursday Sep 2014
Posted Miscellaneous
inTags
Godwrestler, judaism, religion, rosh hashanah, struggles, thinking
And God said: No longer shall your name be Ya’akov, “Heel,”
But Yisrael, “Godwrestler,” for with Me and with humanity have you battled, and You have won!”
And thus, night after night, God, You come to me.
Not with favors do You come, but to try my strength.
And when, by morning, I prevail against You once again, again I find myself alone:
A poor and hapless traveler, limping on a twisted thigh.
“With God and with humanity have you battled, and You have won!”
Is this Your blessing for me, Great Mystery?
Then heaven help me! For though against all I may prevail,
Against one there is no victory. Against me!
Your blessings rest heavy, God. I cannot bear them.
I limp, and I’m alone on every road, wherever I go.
Defeat me, just this once, that I might find some rest by morning,
The rest that all the vanquished know.
Again it’s night. Again alone. And once again God comes seeking.
Yisrael! Where are you?
Here, God, over here — somehow I moan.
But why? Why, night after night, do You battle with me;
And, with the rising of the dawn, forsake me once again,
And leave me limping, limping and alone?