|
12-12-2009, 07:43 AM | #1 | |||
Avalon Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 35
|
The powerful british percy family
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
LINK Last edited by 14april2000; 12-12-2009 at 10:18 AM. |
|||
12-12-2009, 08:34 AM | #2 |
Avalon Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 35
|
Re: The powerful british percy family
Heretic’s Foundation XIV: Mr. Shakespeare’s Gunpowder Plot
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 Heretic’s Foundation http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=4523 By John Hudson darkladyplayers@aol.com Special to the Clyde Fitch Report On Nov. 5, Manhattan Theater Source will stage a very English celebration in Washington Square Park. As a fundraiser for the MacDougal Street space, the venue will present Remember, Remember the Fifth of November, a festival of cabaret and theater recalling the Gunpowder Plot Conspiracy of 1605 to blow up the houses of Parliament. Tickets for the fundraiser are $100, $50 and $25; festivities include laying a gunpowder trail through the park (presumably not using real gunpowder), music, visual art, film, food, wine — and a performance of Nat Cassidy’s play The Reckoning of Kit and Little Boots, which I look forward to even if it isn’t a gunpowder-plot play. Yet such things do exist. Perversely, the man who was to have set the explosives, Guy Fawkes, has become an icon of the American right-wing: a proponent of “blowing up” government. In 2007, supporters of Ron Paul, the GOP presidential candidate and libertarian, played on the tale of Fawkes to create a website, ThisNovember5th.com, that enabled Paul to raise more than $4 million in one day. Because popular memory has romanticized Guy Fawkes, some of the other folks associated with the plot have been forgotten. Although they appeared in literature of the period, they are rarely noticed today. Indeed, there are at least a half-dozen gunpowder plays. A play attributed to Shakespeare, The Fifth of November or The Gunpowder Plot, however, is unfortunately a forgery by George Ambrose Rhodes from the 1830s, as discussed in Mark Valentine’s article Shakespeare’s Last Purported Play. Genuine plays contemporary to Shakespeare that allude to the Gunpowder Plot include Macbeth, John Marston’s Sophonisba, Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon and Barnabe Barnes’s The Devil’s Charter. Only very recently has it been recognized that the category also includes Robert Burton’s Latin play Philosophaster, a comedy written in 1606 featuring a pseudo-scholar character that is one of the few stage Jesuits of the period. The character’s name is Polupragmaticus, meaning “being a busybody” who claims to be bilingual, ambidexterous, omniscient and, in fact, a Jesuit. It’s not much of a pretense since he also declares himself “a grammarian, a rhetorician, a geometrician, a painter, a wrestling coach, augur, rope walker, physician, magician. I know it all. Or if you prefer, I am a Jesuit. That sums it up.” To make Polupragmaticus’ identity indisputable, his servant is called Aequivocus, a clear allusion to the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation, which allowed one to lie under oath. The rationale for equivocation was spelled out in the manuscript Treatise of Equivocation, written by a Jesuit named Henry Garnet. Garnet was the confessor to two of the Gunpowder plotters. His manuscript was also found in their possession, which led to Garnet being tried for treason and hung, drawn and quartered. Appreciating that, in the early 1600s, it wasn’t Guy Fawkes but Garnet who attracted literary attention in connection with the Gunpowder plot, gives new focus to Macbeth. Why? Because the idea of “double meaning” — or equivocation — is central to the Scottish play. The standard definition of “Equivocale” in Florio’s Dictionary is “of diverse significance, of double meaning.” In Cotgrave’s Dictionary, Equivoque is defined as “a double or divers sense of one word.” Structurally, in Macbeth’s witches’ scenes for example, it’s clear the knocking and the references to “double double” are paralleled by the knocking and references to equivocation during the Porter’s scene. Thus, the witches’ chant “double, double toil and trouble” (IV.i.9) is paralleled by the Porter’s line “here’s an equivocator…come in equivocator” (II.iii.9-11). In the Porter’s scene, the footnotes in the standard Arden edition explain that the characters the Porter admits to hellmouth are the equivocator (Garnet himself), his alias (Mr. Farmer), and the Tailor — who was associated with the image of Garnet’s face that supposedly appeared miraculously on a bundle of straw following his execution. The three apparitions in the witches’ scene — namely the head, the bloody child and the child holding a tree — appear derived from the imagery of Garnet’s portrait on that miraculous straw. In other words, the apparitions summoned by the witches suggest the 11th century Macbeth is in league with Garnet’s 17th century Jesuits. This is remarkable enough, but the multiple time tracks in Macbeth are even more complex. The “Temple” Macbeth destroys (II.iii. 67), accompanied by the extraordinary appearance of a dagger hanging in the air (II.i.33), strange noises, the earth that did shake (II.iii.59) and threats of dire combustion all correspond to another time-track: the destruction of Jerusalem in the 1st century. In Josephus’ The Jewish War, we are told that a star resembling a sword hung over the city (6,5,289), that Jerusalem’s citizens “felt a quaking and heard a great noise” (6,5,299) before the temple was burnt. In other words, the destruction of the “Temple” (as Duncan) is an allegory for that other Temple destroyed by Titus Caesar. By presenting these parallel time tracks, Macbeth offers us two different paradigms for interpreting the title character; it invites us to consider how they may be reconciled. And there is a way to do it. In the same way Antony and Cleopatra anticipated many filmic conventions — like very short takes — Shakespeare’s multiple, interrelated time tracks in Macbeth bear similarities to modern TV-storytelling conventions. These serve to change our understanding of the play significantly. Ironically, the shift of audiences away from theater to TV shows like Lost may be the very thing that teaches audiences the narrative conventions that may allow them to appreciate the real meaning of Shakespeare. John Hudson is a strategic consultant who specializes in new industry models and has helped create several telecoms and Internet companies. He has recently been consulting to a leading think tank on the future of the theater industry and is pioneering an innovative Shakespeare theory, as dramaturge to the Dark Lady Players. This fall he will be Artist in Residence at Eastern Connecticut State University. He has degrees in Theater and Shakespeare, in Management, and in Social Science. This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Heretic’s Foundation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. |
12-12-2009, 09:28 AM | #3 | |
Avalon Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 35
|
Re: The powerful british percy family
Quote:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjeYS1h5Zyc The Gunpowder Plot, Pt. 2 - Roman Catholic Jesuit Conspiracy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4f1T7aBfn4 Last edited by 14april2000; 12-12-2009 at 09:42 AM. |
|
12-12-2009, 09:40 AM | #4 | |
Avalon Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 35
|
Re: The powerful british percy family
Quote:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjRz00jW158 The Jesuit Gunpowder Plot Pt 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCZkXFWZPoI The Jesuit Gunpowder Plot Pt 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcDkn_QMAMI The Jesuit Gunpowder Plot Pt 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tawDbsrL5os |
|
12-12-2009, 09:49 AM | #5 |
Avalon Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2009
Posts: 35
|
Re: The powerful british percy family
Percy power
Alexander Rose's Kings in the North allows Jonathan Sumption to trace the fluctuating fortunes of a titular dynasty The Guardian, Saturday 30 November 2002 Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History by Alexander Rose 578pp, Weidenfeld, Marcel Proust, we are told, was never more pleased than when he came upon the name of the Duke of Northumberland. Perennially fascinated by the boom of ancient titles, the novelist was delighted by its echo of high lineage and its sheer sonority. As the equally elegant and superior English writer who tells us this observed, the title had a "sort of thunderous quality". For most of its history, it has been borne by the Percy family, who became earls of Northumberland in the 14th century and dukes in the 18th. The Percys were companions of the Conqueror, prominent participants in English civil wars from the 12th century to the 16th, captains in the 100 years war, alternately heroes and villains in the history plays of Shakespeare, accessories to the gunpowder plot, political fixers under George III, generals in the American war of independence and admirals in the Napoleonic wars, ministers of Queen Victoria, and Tory wirepullers in the 1920s. Over the past eight centuries, two earls and one duke have been killed in battle, most recently in 1940; one has been lynched by a mob; one beheaded for treason, one shot by government assassins, five incarcerated in the Tower for more or less prolonged periods, and one beatified by the Church of Rome. It is a striking record of public service or disservice, depending on your point of view. The Percys are still the owners of Alnwick Castle and Syon House, and are among the largest landowners in Britain. Most great landed fortunes in English history have been acquired by a mixture of luck, patience, royal service and skilful marriage broking. The Percys had all of these, but the real foundation of their fortunes was the continual war on the borders of England and Scotland in the 14th and 15th centuries. The best-known incidents of these long and wearisome wars were the occasional set-piece campaigns fought by the armies of the kings, punctuated by great battles from Dunbar (1296) to Flodden (1513). But their real character was seen between these glamorous events, in the grubby ebb and flow of day-to-day violence across the border: hit-and-run raids against towns, castles and churches, mass cattle and horse-rustling expeditions, crop-burning campaigns and crude protection rackets. The main reason why this continued for so long was that for most of the period the English were also fighting a major war against France. They were therefore never able to devote enough resources to the conquest of Scotland for long enough to achieve their ends. Instead, their policy was to leave the northern counties of England to organise their own defence against the Scots with only minimal assistance from the exchequer at Westminster. This policy had two main consequences. One was to transform the regions within 100 miles on either side of the border into a world of their own, a bleak wasteland thinly populated by men whose lives were wholly devoted to subsistence farming and organised banditry. The other was to create vast, semi-independent lordships controlled by the royal wardens of the march, local potentates acting for all practical purposes as viceroys with exclusive power to raise revenue and recruit manpower for the defence of the border. Before the Scottish wars, the Percys were an ambitious but not particularly remarkable Yorkshire family with subsidiary estates in Sussex. Henry Percy III (d 1315) was "sober in peace and cruel in bataill" according to tradition. He was the first member of his line to play a leading role in the politics of the border. He acquired, and intermittently enjoyed, extensive estates in lowland Scotland confiscated from the Scots. Then, in 1309, in a rather shady deal with the guardian of its under-aged owner, Percy bought the barony of Alnwick in Northumberland for cash. He became the greatest landowner in the north after the king and the princes of the royal house, and the owner of one of its most powerful fortresses. His son, Henry Percy IV, added to the family holdings by acquiring Warkworth castle. However, the major source of the family's power was the ap-pointment of successive Percys as wardens of the east March of Scotland. This office, on which they retained their grip for most of the next two centuries, gave them command over the loyalties of the border tribes, practical control over the royal border fortresses in the valley of the Tweed, all the revenues of royal lands in north-eastern England, the right to recruit a private army generally standing at about 2,000-3,000 men, first claim on the booty and ransoms of war, and a stipend, which together with the revenues at their disposal must have exceeded their expenses in most years. It was a highly satisfactory deal. But it inevitably led to trouble when the traditionally robust structures of English government broke down in the reign of Richard II in the late 14th century, and again under Henry VI in the middle of the 15th. In the civil wars of the late middle ages, the great Percy power bloc in the north-east was among the most powerful pieces on the board. The foolish first earl and his impetuous son Hotspur played a decisive part in bringing down Richard II in 1399 and came close to destroying Henry IV in 1403. As soon as the Scottish menace faded in the 16th century, the Percys lost their power. The Tudors no longer needed a viceroy in the north. The sixth earl was ruined by Henry VIII, the seventh executed by Elizabeth, the eighth murdered in the Tower and the ninth abandoned politics for chemistry and astronomy. His successors abandoned the north altogether, and went to live on their Sussex and London estates. The modern fortunes of the family are due to Sir Hugh Smithson, who married the last Percy heiress in the 18th century, adopted her name, and re-established the family as a great northern dynasty. This is a well-researched, jauntily written, but rather odd book, which carries the Percy story up to the middle of the 16th century. Alexander Rose's problem is that, important as they were, the Percys were not doing interesting things all the time, and there are long periods when we cannot know what they were doing, interesting or not. Biographical materials are sparse, especially for the earlier generations, and Rose is too honest a historian to fill the gaps with myth, verse or speculation. He has therefore written a history not just of the Percy family but of England and Scotland as well. The technique is to interrupt the narrative from time to time to point out the role that the Percys did or did not play in the events being described. Thus an interesting account of this or that war, embassy or political crisis is quite often followed by a statement that the Percys had nothing to do with it; or that they were present but that nothing is known of their personal contribution. The result is a clutter of facts only marginally relevant to the subject. Does it matter? Probably not. This is admittedly a fat book, with a thin book inside struggling to get out. But that may be inevitable in a work of family history written for a wider audience. It should certainly not deter people from reading it. What Rose has to say about the political and social history of England is interesting, well-informed, and perceptive. The north is often neglected in general histories. A Percy's eye view of the subject at least has the advantage of telling a familiar story from an unconventional angle. · Jonathan Sumption's three-volume history of the 100 years war is published by Faber. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002...ardianreview22 |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|