I was planning to spend the evening slaving over a hot computer, but really wasn’t feeling in the mood, when I got an email from a lovely Listserv community to which I have belonged for many years reminding me it was my birthday this week. (No, I’m not being deliberately forgetful, nor, I hope, is it a sign of early Alzheimer’s, just my family never made a fuss about things so I tend to forget about them.)

So instead I went to see Michael Grandage’s production of Don Carlos, and it was a good decision. For once the “stunning” blurb was entirely justified. It is an 18th-century play by Friedrich Schiller, of whom I must confess I had not previously heard. The play is stunning – the plots, the twists, the betrayals, the sheer drama is up there with Macbeth, and that to my mind is high praise indeed.

The language of the adaptation/translation by Mike Poulton is brilliant – serious, courtly, emotional, but never anachronistic, while avoiding the alternative trap of grating archaism (no “thees”, “thous” or “sayeths”). It was so perfect you hardly noticed it, which is high praise for a modern traditional dress production.

Derek Jacobi as the Philip II of Spain has huge stage presence, but the other main characters – his wife Elizabeth of Valois, his son, Don Carlos, and most of all the freethinking Marquis of Posa – hold their own against him, giving the play an excellent balance.

It is based on historical fact, in that Elizabeth was originally intended to marry the son, but Philip decided to take her for himself, although a quick internet search suggests the supposed love between the first two was a romantic myth. But the shadow of the Inquisition, which hangs over the whole play, and bursts forth at the end, certainly wasn’t, which reminds me I have a “Women of the Inquisition” book somewhere in my “to read” pile.

What struck me on the bus home was how much in intent at least Don Carlos resembled a play that I wrote for a school production at age 17, “The Framework of the Revolution”, which was Frederick Forsyth meets George Orwell meets adolescent sense of tragedy, written by someone with no sense of dialogue whatsoever. (All of the youthful rebels got machinegunned in the end.)

It was undoubtedly as bad as that sounds, and went down a treat (I’m sure not) with an audience of private school pupils and parents used to Gilbert and Sullivan done by lots of girls in tights. Oddly enough I have no recollection of the evening of the performance, only of the dress rehearsal, in which hardly any of the 40-odd characters knew their lines, or what was going on. I was up in the lighting room having a scream – remember that bit!)

Unhappily, or probably happily, I don’t think I any longer have a copy, and somehow I doubt the school kept one.

.. no, not like that – just boring business stuff. But if you want a quick laugh, check out this quiz …

I’m pretty damn hard core! Fear me!

The book sale is still on at the British Museum, and they’ve got lots of new stock …

* Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700, Adam Fox, OUP – which was on my Amazon “to buy” list anyway – surprising that it is being remaindered.

*Philip Sidney: a double life, Alan Stewart, bought mostly because I’m interested in his sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, the poet.

From it I learned that their grandmother “had been a learned woman, taught by the famed Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives. In 1553 she commissioned two tracts by the scientist John Dee: ‘The Philosophical and Poetical Original occasions of the Configurations & names of the heavenly Asterisms’ and ‘The true cause & account (not vulgar) of Floods & Ebbs.’ Evidently encouraged by her mother, the young Mary Dudley [the poets’ mother] was taught penmanship and learned Latin and French (as witnessed by her annotations on her copy of Hall’s Chronicles). She also spoke fluent Italian and, like her mother, corresponded with Dee.” P. 40

I also note that one of Philip’s tutors in 1572 and 1573 was “Mistress Maria, the Italian” – interesting a woman tutor (p. 41)

* Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams. He takes on what he describes as the “progressivist” view of philosophical development – “the Greeks had primitive ideas of action, responsibility, ethical motivation and justice, which in the course of history have been replaced by a more complex and refined set of conceptions that define a more mature form of ethical experience”. (p. 5)

He says in the introduction that Nietzsche has a lot to offer on the subject, in addition to the famous “The Greeks were superficial out of profundity”, noting that: “One thought that impressed Nietzsche was that in lacking some kinds of reflection and self-consciousness the Greeks – whom he was willing to compare to children – also lacked the capacity for some forms of self-deceit.” (p. 10)

But, “rejecting the progressivist view … had better not leave us with the idea that modernity is just a catastrophic mistake and that outlooks characteristic of the modern world, such as liberalism, for one are mere illusion. As more than one philosopher has remarked, illusion is itself part of reality, and if many of the values of the Enlightenment are not what their advocates have taken them to be, they are certainly something.” (p. 11)

Isn’t it wonderful – and oh so rare – to read a philosopher writing in comprehensible English!

My evening is now mapped out … with Bernard.

Night!

P.S. Should add, in case I sound excessively scholarly, my final purchase of the week was Colin Watson’s Coffin Scarcely Used, a pleasant rush through a Thirties English body-strewn town – plot definitely Christie-ish, but with wry, subversive humour all his own. He’s not nearly as good as Dorothy L. Sayers, on whom I have rhapsodised elsewhere, but miles above most of his contemporaries.

And that’s what I spent the first half of the evening reading, while recovering from a squash game.

[books] (a tag)

First and most importantly, defending abortion. Below is posted, as advised by Rad Geek, a small contribution to a “Google bomb” to get an appropriate Google response to the search “Roe v Wade”.

Anti-abortion ideologues beware: I’m promoting objective, factual information on:
Roe v. Wade
abortion

You can too. Join me in Bombing for Choice.

America is the obvious example of why women have to be vigilant in defending abortion rights, even when they have seemingly been secure for decades, but Australia provides a further warning.

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More cheerfully, some women who really made the news, often against all of the odds:

“… Despite the fact that women were restricted from applying for some jobs ( the ban on female General Trainees was only lifted in 1960) they were responsible for some of the BBC’s most famous news programmes.

In 1950, Grace Wyndham Goldie pushed the BBC into covering the General Election, she championed the first party political broadcasts and Budget programmes before re-launching Panorama in 1955 and developing Tonight in 1957.

In radio, two women (Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie) saw through the development of the Today programme which was launched in 1957. Isa Benzie was the first producer and inventor of the programme’s title.

It was in 1957 that the first woman read the news in the BBC Television Service: Armine Sandford, one of a team of four who presented the West Region’s daily television news bulletins from the Bristol studios.

But it was a long while before women were allowed to read the national news. Nan Winton was tried as a newsreader in June 1960 but soon axed. …”

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How did the “Victorian” change into the “modern”? This essay about Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening suggests one woman writer of the period might have some of the answers …

For feminist scholars, the text is especially rich because its female author explores and negotiates a fluid border of literary tradition — examining and playing with, alternately embracing and backing away from, the Victorian literary foremothers’ version of “domestic fiction” and the up-and-coming, largely male-dominated, Modernist movement. Chopin as an author, like Edna as a character, is a woman caught in the borderlands between the literary traditions assigned to her as a nineteenth century female writer and the mores of a new era.

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I’m not really a fan of the Impressionists, but if you are, as well as knowing about Monet, Renoir, et al, you should also know about Berthe Morisot. There’s a new exhibition about her at the (American) National Museum of Women in the Arts.

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If you are planning to read Simon Goldhill’s Love, Sex, and Tragedy. How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives, which I am one of these days, an essential accompaniment and corrective, it seems, is this excellent review. Also a useful response to the claim we “don’t need women’s history now, because it is included everywhere”.

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For anyone alarmed by the Telegraph story about women in Germany being “forced” to work as prostitutes or face a benefit cut, here’s a pretty reasonable debunking. The old story, if you think an account is unbelievable, it probably is.

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Whew, now I’m on top of my inbox again …

[women] (a tag)

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cat, originally uploaded by natalieben.

Yes, Friday cat blogging, but not as you know it. Be warned!

It was 1568. Agnes Bowker, 27, daughter of the late Henry Bowker of Harborough, Leicestershire,, a spinster and domestic servant in the same town, found herself with a difficult, but hardly unusual problem – she was pregnant.

Cast out by her employer when her predicament became evident, she seems to have wandered the countryside until on the 16th of January the following year she gave birth, after an apparent gestational period of 53 weeks, with in attendance a midwife and several “gossips” (female matrons).

This, however, is where the story gets very strange indeed. For she gave birth, it seemed, to a “monster”, as she called it, or what was clearly a cat, as forensic examiners saw it.

Based on her later testimony, the father might have been another servant, Randal Dowley, who suspiciously fled the area and was never heard from again, it might have been an apparently shape-shifting beast that assumed the form of a cat, a bear or a man, or a sinister schoolmaster, Hugh Brady.

It seems pretty clear, to me anyway, that she was covering up either a late abortion or infanticide. Panic-stricken, she doesn’t seem to have thought that this was not a way of quietly covering up what she had done.

That, tragically, in 2005, some girls or women should still find themselves in the same situation is evidenced by the recent discovery of a baby’s body on Teeside. I heard on a radio that a girl, 15, had come forward.

But anyway, back to the history – Agnes’s tactic eventually worked, in that she escaped punishment – which could have been the rope for infanticide – and disappeared back into history.

One of the remarkable things about this case, and there are many, is the way the local official charged with investigating the case, Anthony Anderson, went about his work.

His is the drawing of the “monster” above, done with meticulous forensic care. “This picture … containeth the full length, thickness and bigness of the same, measured by a pair of compasses.”

The townsfolk had already dissected it, and found a piece of bacon in its throat that obvious convinced most of the men that this was just a piece of trickery.

Now the official charged that another cat be killed and flayed, so that its shape could be compared to the “baby”. He found the only difference was in the colour of the eyes. “I cast my flayn cat into boiling water, and pulling the same out again, both in eye and else they were altogether one.” (p. 21)

Surprising is the matter of fact “scientific” way he attempted to establish the facts. Was this the perhaps surprisingly early spread of the scientific method out into the countryside, or simply an application of rural commonsense?

Less unexpected was the political use that the appearance of this “apparition” was put; with Elizabeth only uncertainly on the throne, and religious uncertainty still rife, Such births showed something was wrong in the nation, and God was sending a sign to say: “Fix it.”

This is the title story in the book by David Cressy from which I posted that nice collection of curses yesterday.

Sharon asked me a couple of weeks ago what I think of it. Well it has some wonderful stories and period detail, as this story suggests, but I do find it curiously lacking in theory or even a coherent approach.

There’s a nod to “postmodernism” at the start, but it seems to take this to mean just presenting competing narratives without attempting to draw any distinctions between them, a rather simplistic idea of the approach.

Associated is an expressed desire not to draw conclusions, although as the book progresses it is increasingly dotted with them, often it seem to me on very flimsy grounds.

On factual topics on which I have some knowledge I also have some doubts. e.g. on p. 66-67 “A variety of medicines was used ‘to bring down or provoke a woman’ flowers’, to stimulate menstruation, or ‘to hasten the bringing forth’ of a child from the womb and this knowledge was widely distributed through printed herbals and through women’s lore.”

The reference given for this is John M Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance; and possibly David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England 47-50).

But this seems to contradict everything I’ve read on this issue, which says while the midwife’s oath included a promise not to use such substances – suggesting they were known to exist – such dangerous, illegal knowledge was never written down.

Can anyone comment on that?

A tag: [history]

LATE ADDITION: I notice that “Ephelia” has just posted on another similar case, that of Mary Toft, who claimed to have given birth to rabbits (having apparently experienced a series of miscarriages).

Was woken this morning by a phone call about a problem at work, sleepwalked my way through a yoga class, and am now wondering what life would be like without living in a perpetual state of sleep-deprivation.

I can remember waking up about three weeks ago one day before the alarm went off, having had more than nine hours sleep and it really felt odd – good, but odd. I don’t get many opportunities to follow Isobel’s advice.

So that might be influencing this post, although hasty reassurance to any workmate reading, this is not directed at you.

Agnew Bowker’s Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England, by David Cressy, has a lovely little collection of the abuse vented by clergymen at their congregations in the 17th century:

* Directed at someone who put his hat on during a sermon (maybe his head was cold?): “lob, saucy goose, idiot, widgeon and cuckoo, scabbed sheep, none of my flock”

* The whole congregation: “sowded pigs, bursten rams and speckled frogs”; or, “black mouthed hell hounds, limbs of the devil, fire brands of hell, plow joggers, bawling dogs, weaverly jacks and church robbers. If I could call you worse I could.”

* When members protested about ceremonial changes: “black toads, spotted toads, and venomous toads, like Jack Straw and Wat Tyler”. (all p. 157)

Nice to know they were restrained by being “men of God”.

Translations: lob – a lazy, clumsy person, a lout; widgeon – a type of duck (although I don’t know why it is a term of abuse); “bursten ram” – perhaps a reference to diseased genitals?; plow joggers (a term of abuse that continued into the 19th century and I guess means roughly “peasant”; weaverly jacks????

This reminds me of an Australian play that I read for my HSC. I can’t of course remember the title or the author, but I do remember it was set in the early 20th-century federal parliament and involved lots of unparliamentary language of a colourful sort. It was where I learnt the world scrofulous, which does roll off the tongue beautifully as an insult. Anyone recognise the play?

A tag: [history]