![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
There's one more time around at the Rhubarb that I have to go through at this point before I decide on whether or not to add more iterations for it, so, this time, we have three suggestions fromoursin.
I probably enjoyed Shakespeare a little more uncritically then, but as this entire sweep of three shows, many of the things that I used to seek when I was younger and put things into my profile are things that I have come to a more nuanced, and hopefully mature, understanding of. Or at least, I'd like to believe that's true.
There's one more time around at the Rhubarb that I have to go through at this point before I decide on whether or not to add more iterations for it, so, this time, we have three suggestions from
oursin.- Chivalry
I am, of at least one degree, a person who studied the period of time between 400 and 1700 CE, although, really, it's much more "the final destruction of Rome" to approximately "the beginning of trans-Atlantic exploration and colonization," because the way that it's usually set up in talking about history is with significant Eurocentrism, and very specifically, Eurocentrism around what one of my professors referred to as "Latin Christendom", the place where Catholicism is the dominant Christianity, the pontiff is the Bishop of Rome, and the lines of where Latin Christendom starts and stops is fairly close to, but generally eastward, of the lines where "the West" and Former Soviet Republics are drawn (with the exception of the division of Germany, which is fully part of Latin Christendom) that there are the Greek city-states, then the Pax Romana, and then the "Dark Ages" where all the gains of civilization and the Pax Romana were lost to Latin Christendom (even as they survived in Byzantium, the caliphates, and the empires of China, Japan, and the Americas), before a "Middle Time" where Latin Christendom picked itself up from the ashes of Rome and spent some time slowly relearning everything that had been forgotten, before there is an Enlightenment where Protestantism surpasses Catholicism and there is a rediscovery of philosophy, art, and other such that had never left, as such, but was flourishing elsewhere in the world, and then onward into Colonialism, Industrialism, and Globalism, culminating in an ever-present Modernity who are the best at everything because everything else has been prologue to Us, the pinnacle of everything.
As you might expect, this framing of history as a progression from the darkness to light is problematic at best, and several leading scholars of the academy are already hard at work disrupting and providing more nuanced alternatives to this narrative wrapped in white supremacy, Christian superiority, and manifest destiny.
Most of my interest, and my scholarship, with regard to chivalry, the code of ethics and morals most commonly associated with the mounted class during the post-Rome, pre-accurate pistols era happened before these attempts at greater accuracy in history were widely known and discussed, even though I suspect they were going on and had been for years before that. So. With that in mind, much of my interest in chivalry is based on romantic interpretations of the mounted class, usually centering around King Arthur and his knights. As, I suspect are many people's, since chivalric romance forms a significant body of work that survives the period, and there was, at least to an undergraduate trying to find it, significantly less of the practicalities of being a member of the mounted class and less still about the rituals that a squire would undergo to join the ranks of the knights. Knowing that you're looking at a fictionalized account of something sometimes means wanting to find the sources that it is based upon, and that was actually somewhat difficult, past the space of "as a knight, you have a grant of land, in exchange, you are expected to provide military service when your liege lord goes out raiding and to raise funds for ransoms should your liege lord be captured and need to be returned to you." As with so many things, most of what being a knight is involves having and managing enough resources to be able to provide for yourself, your horse, and your equipment, whether by working your land yourself or getting others to do so and taxing them for the privilege of it. And a certain amount of social requirements about how to treat your peers, your superiors, and those who are attached to you or your land.
Almost always, when chivalry is under discussion in the 20th and 21st centuries CE, it is the chivalry of the roman, the idealized, magically-tinged world where knights are put to test and ordeal, where knights made entirely of green lose their heads, then pick them up and bid the one who cut it off find them in a year's time to receive the same. That chivalry often tends to push women to the margins, as maidens, wives, or witches, and correspondingly tends to remove agency from the maidens and wives, either by putting them in the background, having men fight over them, or putting them in situations where they are bound by strange oaths or situations where they cannot exercise their power directly. Witches are allowed to exercise agency, but women using magic is almost always a negative thing in romantic chivalry, or something that comes with significant consequences that must be paid, if not by the witch, than by someone who is important to the witch. When people of our era talk about "being a gentleman," it is almost certainly this romantic chivalry being referred to. And, you can find some remnants of the concept of courtly love that is tied into this magical world and romantic chivalry in this era, in spaces that believe in a courtship process, where permissions are sought and obtained, where people are exhorted to wait until marriage before engaging in carnal desire, where people exchange words and letters and poetry between themselves talking about their pure love, supposedly untainted by the temptations of the flesh.
Of course, courtly love was, at least in the way that I was reading, an exhortation to the mounted class to behave better than they were, to have a thought about the people they are harming in the constant warfare, in the taking of spoils and the despoiling of others. Chivalry, as well, has this idea of trying to make the mounted class into better people than they are, to fight evils instead of perpetuating them. The Gawain-poet, after all, sets up a situation where Gawain is repeatedly tempted to commit adultery and spared from the fate to befall him because he resisted it. (Lancelot, of course, eventually gives in to it and that begins the downfall of Camelot, although there's a whole lot of blaming Guinevere involved there...) Chretien's Ywain is a story of broken promises, grief, and reconciliation after apology and demonstrating sincerity of the apology. Malory's Beaumains warns people not to judge others by their outward appearances, lest you insult someone who is one of your peers and then have to eat that apology when they join you or surpass you in prestige. There's also Merlin's magic to aid Arthur and Morgana's magic to hinder him. But it's all a world just slightly adjacent than ours, one that runs a little more on narrativium and the belief that objective good and evil exist and can be determined and followed.
I am less interested in chivalry as a life goal these days that I was before, because I did the research, and I read the stories, and I realized that the chivalry of the world is likely more practical and less concerned with good and evil, and the chivalry of the roman is more and more the domain of the toxically masculine, the supposedly involuntarily celibate, the people who demand that women segregate themselves into the perfect woman who is adored, is so in love with a single man that she stays with him, no matter what, and abdicates anything that is in her life that's not what he believes is the domain of women, and the fallen women, the b—witches who commit such sins as agency, having their own opinion, or otherwise not simply waiting for a worthy man to take possession of them and to be content with him for the rest of their lives. Chivalry is a place for reclamation, for pushing out the fools who have set up fortresses and clad themselves in what they believe are the devices of this mythic world, but that violate all the rules of heraldry to anyone who looks closely enough at them. But it's going to have to be done with clear eyes and the right attitude:
Do What Works
Fix What's Broke
Discard The Rest - Enlightenment
Not, in this case, the period of time that is the ending of the Medium Aevum, but instead, the practice by which one comes to a fuller understanding of self and others, often because by understanding the self, one understands the fundamentals of everyone.
More often than not, enlightenment as a metaphysical concept is discussed in the context of non-Abrahamic practices, and is most commonly associated with the regions of the world where Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, Yoga, and similar practices originated and spread before becoming globalized (and often transformed to suit the audience of where they were arriving or to become nonthreatening to the places where they were arriving.) (There has to be a name for the geographic regions I've described that isn't Eurocentric or exoticising, but I don't know what it is.) The methods to achieve the state are varied, as are the descriptions of the state itself. The Confucian sage, for example, has refined and rectified himself to perfection, such that he is in perfect harmony with the philosophy and the universe. The Taoist sage, on the other hand, has forgotten all of his refinement and refuses any attempt to impose order on the world, and by attuning himself to the ebbs and flows of nature and the world around him, achieved perfect harmony with the world and the philosophy. Certain schools of Buddhism view enlightenment as the cessation of karma, stepping off the endless carnival ride of reincarnation and living one last life before becoming one with the universe itself. Some view enlightenment as arriving in a flash after running the equivalent of an exploit on the brain and getting it to recognize the illusory nature of reality, or to transcend limiting conceptions, or to completely stop trying to categorize anything at all.
The concept is not exclusive to those regions, though. Mystery cults of all sorts and some denominations of Abrahamic religions may pursue gnosis or enlightenment in their own specific ways and rituals, whether as forms of prayer or as magical practice aimed at achieving a greater amount of aspects of or a closer communion to a deity.
Enlightenment often requires the presence of the darkness or ignorance that someone sheds when they learn the truth, be it mundane or metaphysical. And while the individual pursuit of enlightenment is often seen as laudable, and the results generally good, there is the danger that having found enlightenment, someone will attempt to spread their findings to others, and, well, there's a lot of history that suggests trying to do that ends badly for a lot of people, whether being put to the sword, drinking the Kool-aid, or getting trapped in pyramid schemes like the Church of L. Ron Hubbard. Very few people actively trying to spread their enlightenment do so successfully and without negative consequences to either themselves or their followers.
I admit, there's an appeal of forms of enlightenment where the way is about letting go or where a sudden insight produces the result, because, for the most part, I attack problems as they arise with an intention to solve them, or at least understand them well enough to either route around them or mitigate them. (This would be easier if my brain and its functions weren't one of the things that has to be routed around on occasion.) Even though many of those "sudden" enlightenments come after very long and somewhat involved study sessions and trying to learn how to live in such a way that when the spark of spontaneity comes, it will be listened to and acted on appropriately. Or un-acted on appropriately, with enlightenment arriving as a natural process built on long amounts of practice to set the stage for it.
So I seek enlightenment, but at the same time, realize that seeking enlightenment is often the thing that causes someone to get farther away from it. Mu. - Shakespeare
The playwright, in this case, not the captain from Stardust, although Robert de Niro does a good job with the role in the movie adaptation. Shakespeare is one of those places, along with Chaucer, Dante, and so many other authors of the time, where I try very hard to point out that the boring and stuffy classics, the Great Literature that gets told to us that we have to study and appreciate as the pinnacle of culture, well, there's a lot of sex jokes in it. And fart jokes, dick jokes, political satire, drunkenness, subversion of gender roles, murder, jealousy, fairies fucking around with humans because they're in a lovers' spat and the humans are convenient surrogates, and a fair hefty chunk more. What we think of as high entertainment now was, for the most part, like going to see trashy flicks at the local theater. There's also a lot of anti-Semitism, and plenty of other things to content note for the 21st century in all of the plays being written.
When I think about what people remember from Shakespeare, it seems to be the plays that are selected for their required schooling classes, which are almost uniformly from the tragedies, and if they decide to study things a little more closely, then they get into the comedies. So Shakespeare, Great Art, is almost always focused on the plays where the main character bites it, whether by their own hand(s) or by someone else's. Or the more serious of the comedies, like the Tempest or A Midsummer Night's Dream, where the main character survives, but there's not a whole lot of funny stuff going on. (I suspect a lot of people remember the funny bits in the tragedies simply because it's a change of pace to take in an entire scene about drinking, drunkenness, and pissing after lots of murdering and with more murdering to come. Or having a conversation with a skeleton and some gravediggers about how funny the dead man was when he was alive, after we've had a whole lot of thinking about (and occasionally doing) killing, some more thinking about dying, and we're just about to discover that someone's girlfriend is dead because he did his job at playing insanity a little too well.) There's usually a character there that's supposed to be comedic relief (or a troupe of mechanicals,) and they are there to be laughed at, even if they're also pitiable in some way even as they're being made into the ass of the joke. Or they have a disability of some sort that is used as the sign of their villainy, whether that villainy is effective (Richard III) or comical (Caliban).
It's only if you dive in a bit more that you meet the story of a decently profitable merchant, his love-smitten friend who's never amounted to anything, and the dirty old man who tags along with him. That story basically runs on anti-Semitism, though, as it sets up a situation where the merchant puts himself in hock to a greedy moneylender so that his love-smitten friend can try to win the heart of a beautiful lady by solving a riddle that her father insists all of her suitors try, with the penalty of guessing wrong being that someone forswears any other woman for the rest of their lives. And after that puzzle is defeated and the betrothal sealed, there's another segment where the lady and her clerk bail the merchant out of any of his obligations to the moneylender by cruelly using the exact words of the agreement against him (after offering him off-ramps where his money would be restored to him, with interest, and, incidentally, this play is the origin of the idea of someone getting their pound of flesh) and then ask for the jewels that the lady and her BFF gave to the love-struck friend and the dirty old man as promises of their impending marriages as payment, to test the men and see if they'll hold true and not give away their promises to this Paduan judge and his clerk. The men give them away, because the service done for their friend is worth more than their promises, and the ladies lead the men on a merry situation of saying that "whomever this Paduan judge and his clerk are, they're the ones we're going to marry" before revealing it was them all along, and everything ends well for everybody, except the Jewish moneylender (who not only has his contract voided, but his daughter absconds with the fourth of the foursome, along with yet more of his money, because anti-Semitism, amirite?) You could scrap all of the racism and still have a good story about gender roles, promises, and not being obstinate for what you think you're owed when it would be more humane to do something else.
Plus, there's a couple of comedies that are all about mistaken identities, especially when characters go a-crossdressing and other characters fall in love with them while they're presenting as another gender. Or the sex comedy that is basically about two people who are meant for each other, if they can just get over themselves, and the entire plot that hatches around the two of them to get them together. And, of course, there's a villain who is basically unhappy that his brother is successful and happy and otherwise being good at what he does, and it annoys him greatly, so he and some of his friends run a deepfake scam to get the person who fell in love to publicly slander his soon-to-be-spouse at the altar, which actually kicks off the two people who are meant for each other getting together over their shared anger at what happened. The plot gets foiled by a Watch Captain who never met a malapropism they couldn't appropriate to try and make themselves sound smart and there's hey nonny nonny the whole way around.
If we can take Shakespeare and The Classics off the pedestal they've been put on by the mostly white men who believe themselves the sole arbiters of what's good, we open the space for so many other authors and experiences to appear in the curriculum and the academy and be taken seriously, rather than shunted off to live in ethnic studies spaces or be seen only as secondary literature. So, whenever I can, I try not to reach for The Classics when someone comes in looking for a good book, mostly because I suspect I'll have a better time with them with more contemporary works, but sometimes there's a requirement to read A Classic, and so I do what I wish more people in the academy and in teaching would do, and I try to describe the Classic in such a way that makes it sound interesting and that would give them something to look for or strive to understand through the slightly arcane prose. A lot of the stuff that survives from history needs people to help contextualize it, interpret it, and otherwise allow people to bring their own relevant experiences to bear on it. There's fruitful ground for discussion if the kid who's always been picked on and looked down upon because he's Black has the space to empathize with what's happening to Shylock, and talk about what it looks like when white people treat him the same way, as something less than human, less than deserving, rather than just stopping at the fact that all the not-Jews in the play are rabid anti-Semites, which was just an attitude of that time and not anything we need to worry about being part of our contemporary time, no, of course not, pay no attention to the Charlottesville Rally in the corner. Or not making comparisons between how Portia and Nerissa screw Shylock over completely and don't have any qualms about it and how the protests about the Movement for Black Lives were handled by police. Or Iago's anti-Blackness and resentment at Othello. Or whether the Capulets and Montagues will ever be able to put the violence behind them, when to be the first person to try and stop the killing means that you're weak.
But these are things that should happen after everyone has already been grounded in literature that reflects their own times and experiences, to be able to see people like them both writing and starring in media and literature, and to be able to look at Shakespeare and many other of these "universal" authors through the lenses that they have sharpened and used and that have valid critiques and that sometimes just can't relate because there's nothing in there to relate to. My interest in Shakespeare is mostly in trying to find as many ways of making it at least enjoyable if someone's not coming to the stories willingly, to play up as much of the salacious aspects as I can, and also to note that Shakespeare has some pretty serious content notes on him. To make him less of a god and more of a person. When I put that interest in my profile, I'm pretty sure it was still at least for the salacious aspects that I wanted him there, for people to talk about rude jokes and ass-heads and people trying to get waaaaay too philosophical while they're blitzed and trying to be a guard.
I probably enjoyed Shakespeare a little more uncritically then, but as this entire sweep of three shows, many of the things that I used to seek when I was younger and put things into my profile are things that I have come to a more nuanced, and hopefully mature, understanding of. Or at least, I'd like to believe that's true.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-17 10:00 am (UTC)you know, failing to solve that riddle would be a good way for someone to dodge all future insistence that he marry. you wouldn't want me to go back on my solemn word, now would you, mother?
no subject
Date: 2020-12-17 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-17 08:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-17 11:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-17 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-17 08:24 pm (UTC)