tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3693215684418749512024-02-07T22:20:49.030-08:00The Theology of Romeo and JulietMichael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-8899510760883520732012-05-08T19:54:00.000-07:002014-02-24T00:31:00.812-08:00IntroductionMany people will agree that there is something powerfully transcendent, beyond this world, about Shakespeare’s treatment of romantic love in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>. I shall use some texts from ancient Gnosticism, a variant of early Christianity, supplemented by Jungian psychology and the religious and mythological themes that were part of the Elizabethan consciousness, to bring out some of the manifold nuances of the sacred in this play. <br />
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In the Introduction I will try to explain my general point of view, and what the intersection of Gnosticism and Jungian psychology looks like in relation to Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet. I will also say a little about the Gnostic texts that I am using, most of which have only come to light since the Second World War. <br />
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At the beginning of Part I, I will take us back to a way of looking at erotic language that was second nature in Shakespeare’s day, but seems strange to us now. It is a kind of triple vision, looking beyond the overt meaning of the words to both sacred and sexual implications. My exemplar will be the Hebrew Bible’s Song of Songs, as the Elizabethans, inheriting a tradition from the Middle Ages, would have seen it. From this background I will start looking at <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, unpacking hidden religious references, both pagan and Judeo-Christian. We will start with temporal markers in the story. Shakespeare set the play at a time of great importance in the old Celtic religion of Britain; correspondingly, the Italian story that was the basis of his play has temporal correspondences to the Christian liturgical year. <br />
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Then we shall see how the play reflects the motif of the "bridal chamber" as developed in the Gospel of Philip and other writings in the <i>Nag Hammadi Library</i> (Robinson, 1988), a group of 4th century Gnostic texts discovered in 1945. The bridal chamber is a Gnostic variant of the Sacred Marriage, a theme that occurs in paganism, Judaism, and Christianity. The idea, in all traditions, is roughly this: Human beings are incomplete, missing half their nature. The other half is not simply another being, but an entry into a higher realm of being. The bridal chamber rectifies a prior separation and so raises both of the participants to divine status, experienced as a fullness replacing a lack.<br />
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The second theme of this work, undertaken in Part Two, is specifically Gnostic, that of the jealous demiurge, or creator god, personified in the play by Juliet's father. The demiurge claims the soul as its own, saying there are no other gods, and thereby unwittingly keeping the soul from knowing its true home, the Gnostic pleroma or fullness. If the soul, through the sacred marriage, should make contact with the pleroma, such a union is treated by the demiurge as illegitimate and to be thwarted at all costs. Thus we have what I would call the theme of the illicit sacred marriage, of which Romeo and Juliet is the most famous expression. <br />
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In Part Two I will develop this theme and relate it to a genre of medieval poetry known as the alba, from the Provencale word for dawn. The alba was perfected by the troubadours in what is now southern France. I will look at some songs that easily fit this concept of the illicit sacred marriage; they also share some of the imagery of <i>Romeo and Julie</i>t. The play in fact can be seen as an extended alba in the classic 12th century troubadour sense. In turn the alba can be interpreted in terms of the medieval bearers of Gnosticism, the Cathars. Then an unsuspected layer of meaning appears if we imagine the play in the context of religious strife in 13th century Verona, where Cathar supporters fought against the Roman Catholic hierarchy and lost. A similar surprise comes if we take this approach to the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible, which now appears as an expression of defiance against orthodoxy.<br />
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<b>INTRODUCTION: THE ORIENTATION OF THIS STUDY</b><br />
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When I read a book, or go to a film or a play, I ask myself how the work helps sensitize me to aspects of human existence that I wasn’t so aware of before, and how it affects me emotionally. Does it help me to feel more strongly an aspect of life I may have felt only vaguely before? I come to Shakespeare with such considerations in mind. What I wanted to know, is he saying and feeling about life?<br />
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I could appreciate Shakespeare to some extent simply watching the plays, without further study. But when I started reading the plays in books that discussed the historical background, what the various words and phrases meant in Elizabethan English, and various Biblical and mythological references, my appreciation increased. When I read what different critics said about the characters and their motivations, I could enjoy the plays even more.<br />
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I felt a big jump in my understanding when I started reading psychological analyses of the plays. I studied Freud, Jung, and their followers, and I read analyses of the plays which saw the characters as people whose words and actions could be understood by reference to Freudian or Jungian theory. I started to see the plays in terms of life’s universal problems, and to see the plays’ images in terms of the symbol interpretation schemes of these theorists. <br />
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Pursuing my study of Jung further, I looked at Gnosticism, where Jung (1963) said he found many of his own views anticipated. The term “gnostic” means “knower” in Greek, in particular someone who knows by direct experience (Layton 1987). The term "Gnosticism" in Jung is an invention of 19th and 20th century scholarship, describing a variety of religious groups during the 2nd through 4th centuries that called themselves Christian but were labeled heretical by Christian orthodoxy (King 2003). Irenaeus, for many centuries our earliest reference for Gnosticism, spoke of “the gnosis falsely so-called,” as distinguished from the “true gnosis” experienced by the Christian saints.. In around 180 c.e., Irenaeus wrote a lengthy attack on these “false gnostics,” some of whom apparently did call themselves Gnostics (Layton 1987). His polemic, together with lengthy paraphrases of the works he was attacking, was preserved by the Church in Latin along with shorter pieces in both Latin and Greek in the works of Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Epiphanius. Another lengthy polemic, by Hippolytus of Rome, was lost to the West until the mid-19th century, when one copy was found in the Greek Orthodox monastery on Mount Athos.<br />
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So I read these paraphrases, translations of which appear in various anthologies. I also read translations from new finds, books called codices made of papyrus and hidden under the sands of Egypt since the 4th century. A few of these codices were found in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the major discovery was in 1945 when a farmer digging near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, found a large jar containing 13 undisturbed codices, many of which corresponded in conception to the writings the polemicists had written about. These codices suffered various forms of neglect until the early 1950's when Jung himself exerted his prestige to make them accessible. The language was Coptic, Egyptian using Greek characters, translations from Greek originals. The Nag Hammadi Library, as it was called, finally appeared in English in 1977. Jung got to sample only a little of it, but that was enough for him to say, “I have worked all my life to know the psyche--and these people knew it already” (Churton 1987). <br />
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The Gnostic texts--by which I mean the paraphrases grouped together by modern scholars plus the original works that roughly correspond to them--often consisted of complex mythologies that performed subversive twists on basic Biblical narratives. The Greeks had done similar things with their tradition. For example, Euripides wrote a play about Helen of Troy in which she never goes to Troy. For the Gnostics a common theme was that the god of the Garden of Eden was only a lower-level deity in a hierarchy of gods. As Gnostics told the story, they lived in a world shaped by that lower-level god, while their spiritual home was in the realm of the highest god. To return, they sought gnosis, Greek for knowledge or insight, attained by reaching that same level within themselves. <br />
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Jung, in his interpretation of Gnosticism, identified the hierarchy of gods as layers in the human unconscious The ego, or center of consciousness, is unconsciously in the thrall of complexes, each in its own personal way. Complexes in turn reflect more universal patterns, across individuals and even cultures, what Jung called the archetypal. Beyond this is the inaccessible source of the various aspects, called the Self, which can be approached through a dialectical process of affirming and combining the opposite tendencies in the archetypal patterns. This process of discovery, in both its Gnostic and Jungian variants, owes much to Platonism, which saw "knowing oneself" as the main goal in philosophy. This philosophy was much in vogue in Shakespeare's England. <br />
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Soon I started seeing parallels between Gnostic myths and Shakespeare plays. I read a few books that made general statements relating Shakespeare to Gnosticism, but they were short on specifics. For example, Harold Bloom (1969) listed several of Shakespeare's plays which he considered "gnostic," but without elaboration. Later I read Bloom's book <i>Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human </i>(2000). There he gives the example of the character Marina in Pericles, whom he compared to the Gnostic demigoddess Sophia. Still later I discovered the English poet Ted Hughes' book <i>Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being</i> (1992), which developed the point further, but again only in relation to that one play.<br />
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So I started developing the parallels for myself. Writing about different plays in this light became a kind of spiritual practice for me. The Gnostics had given a new spiritual context for tales of the Biblical and Greek gods and heroes. It seemed to me that Shakespeare had reworked to similar effect legends from the European classical and folk traditions. In this way both the Gnostics and Shakespeare became part of my own spiritual quest. Seeing the plays in Gnostic/Jungian terms, I wondered whether perhaps they could serve as concrete models for approaching gnosis in our own lives, taking them as a kind of ritual activity from which we could learn how to achieve greater self-awareness and a sense of the transcendent. <br />
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One parallel that struck me between Gnosticism and Shakespeare is their common focus on the type of dynamic personality represented by the “Lord God” of Genesis, Yahweh or Jehovah, whom the Gnostics called the demiurge. This term is Greek for fashioner or artisan, used by Plato in the Timaeus for his creator god, who although wise and good was inferior to a higher god in knowledge and goodness. The Gnostics viewed the demiurge in Genesis as arrogant, ignorant, foolish, blind, and jealous (Robinson 1988). The parallel I saw was that Shakespeare's major characters often act in a similar way. Juliet’s father and King Lear come to mind; I think the ghost of Hamlet’s father also fits this pattern. <br />
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Other Shakespeare characters, usually the heroes’ persecutors, seemed to me to personify various Gnostic “archons,” or authorities--the demiurge’s helpers, corresponding in Jung (1964) to archetypal complexes that possess the ego, or center of consciousness . The archons, in Gnostic myths help the demiurge make the first humans by putting into them their own harmful characteristics. In Shakespeare, Romeo has the animosity of Juliet’s cousin Tybalt to contend with; but without noticing it, he becomes like Tybalt himself. The persecutor’s desire for battle becomes the hero’s own desire. Similarly, in a castle filled with intrigue, Hamlet suspects his father’s death was murder; and he responds with intrigue and murder himself.<br />
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The Gnostics implied that our propensity to act in such ways is not our fault; we were built that way, as part of our creation as a species. Genesis, read in the conventional Judeo-Christian way, says that God made humans in his own godly image, and that the first humans brought evil on themselves in choosing to follow the serpent. In the Gnostic variant, however, a group of lesser gods or angels, headed by the demiurge, fashion the first humans and put in them their own harmful characteristics (Robinson 1988). People then act in various evil ways, often covering over the evil with words like “love,” “honor,” and “justice,” unless they acquire insight.<br />
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But how to get such insight or knowledge? In the Bible, God sends his Law to oppose the corrupting serpent. Gnostic myth changes this story in a characteristic subversion of Judaic tradition. One text (<i>The Hypostasis of the Archons</i>, in Robinson 1988) calls the serpent “the instructor,” because in urging Eve to defy the god’s prohibition to eat of the tree of knowledge, it is encouraging the attainment of liberating knowledge, which passes to Eve as she eats. In this version of the story, the serpent embodies feminine Wisdom and the higher realm rather than the devil. Then when Adam and Eve are thrown out of the Garden into a world of suffering, that is the chief archon’s fit of temper, not humanity’s just punishment for wrongdoing. There is no original sin.<br />
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In Shakespeare as in Gnosticism, there is often little sense of the protagonists’ bringing suffering on themselves by their own misdeeds. Friar Lawrence does not lecture Romeo on how awful it was that he killed Tybalt, but on the inappropriateness of despair and the necessity of acting from reflection rather than impulse. The awfulness is in the situation, one of undeclared war between his family and Juliet’s, and his own youthful nature. Likewise Hamlet’s friend Horatio gives Hamlet no lectures about the people he has killed, but merely cautions him to take care.<br />
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Yet sometimes a Shakespeare play does seem to be showing the hero’s own responsibility for his situation--e.g. Lear’s responsibility for losing his temper at his youngest daughter. Here the character is more in the position of the god-figure in the Garden than that of Adam or Eve, the one setting up the situation rather than its victim. Even for Lear, the outcome is far out of proportion to the crime, due to other factors. And while more powerful than Lear, the Gnostic demiurge, too, is both blameworthy and only one character in a drama not entirely of his making.<br />
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In Gnostic myth the feminine figure Wisdom, Sophia in Greek, appears again and again in as an aid to suffering humanity in rising above the demiurge’s realm. Jung (1964) attributed this function to the anima, the feminine presence in men’s unconscious, at its highest level. Similarly in Shakespeare, psychic healing often comes by way of a gentle but powerful feminine presence, who seems as though from heaven and who has suffered herself. Both Juliet and Lear’s daughter Cordelia have some of this aura. <br />
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Besides the helpful feminine figure, something else serves to move the Shakespearean hero toward gnosis. Characters such as Romeo, Hamlet, and Lear all feel their powerlessness against forces within and without. <b>“O, I am Fortune’s fool!”</b> Romeo exclaims (III.i.138). <b>“Give me that man/ That is not passion’s slave”</b> (III.ii.71-72) cries Hamlet in despair. And Lear: <b>“We cry that we are born to this great stage of fools”</b> (Iv.vi.176-177). This condition, in Jungian terms, is that of the ego’s recognition of its own captivation by complexes. That is what Shakespeare also explored, the realm of the ego’s awareness that its effort is continually in the way of itself, that is, its goal of acting freely and in accord with its highest aspirations. Gnostic myth has the demiurge, or its son, or the soul, becoming aware of its ignorance and foolishness. The way forward is by a deactivation of the ego, that small center of consciousness and will, and a seeing of what lies beyond. <br />
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Shakespeare shows us ways this can happen. Dreams, mystical visions, and madness appear. Coincidences, happy and unhappy, also serve to defuse the ego. Death cancels the ego, at least as we know it; hence the will to suicide or to put oneself in harm’s way. In the plays there are apparent deaths and dramatic rebirths. Rebirth is the reconstituted ego, now with a conscious tie to a mysterious other within and without. Coming out of madness is a kind of rebirth. Even dropping the appearance of madness signifies rebirth, because it means a shift in identification, away from ego-suspension. Similarly, when the hero dies and the play ends, the spectators, who have been identifying with the hero, die imaginally yet continue to assimilate the hero’s experience, their egos perhaps made a little freer and wiser by what they have seen.<br />
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Shakespeare’s heroes suffer mightily, but at the end seem to have achieved a kind of transcendence of this life and its attachments. Yet none turns to a faith in God as represented by any church or priesthood; it is rather a state of inner knowing and feeling. First comes a stark portrayal of humanity’s passionate fallibility, then a period of suffering , then ego-suspension (in madness, etc.) and insight (gnosis). Finally a kind of peacefulness reigns. Romeo feels a sudden “lightening” (V.iii.19) or calmness as he is about to swallow his poison. When Hamlet’s friend Horatio fears Hamlet is putting himself in mortal danger, Hamlet only says; <b>“The readiness is all...Let be”</b> (V.ii.218-220). He means the readiness to die. Similarly warned of danger by his daughter Cordelia, Lear seeks to reassure her as they are taken to prison, saying, <b>“We'll...take upon's the mystery of things/As if we were God's spies”</b>(V.iii.14-17). Such calm comes from within, through self-knowledge, especially of one’s moral failings, leading to a blissful sense of being in the loving hands of a power greater in wisdom than the ego. <br />
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That sense is what Gnostic myths help us to see as well. Such a process is described repeatedly in Gnostic myths. In general, I want to show, a character in a play resonates, as it were, one or more figures in Gnostic myth. The character, we might say, embodies a Gnostic myth. Both Romeo and Juliet, we shall see, are the soul experiencing the Gnostic bridal chamber with their angelic counterparts. In this experience of transcending the demiurge's world, Juliet is the Gnostic Eve gradually embodying the Gnostic Sophia, and Romeo the Gnostic Adam becoming, to a lesser extent, the Gnostic Christ. Gnostic myth illuminates other plays as well, most memorably Hamlet and King Lear, where the Gnostic aspect is even more pronounced.<br />
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Someone might ask: How can it possibly be that Shakespeare wrote his plays in accordance with Gnostic narratives, when those narratives were all hidden away--either in buried jars or in the almost as inaccessible Latin and Greek polemical works of the early Church fathers?<br />
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But what has been done once can be done again. Shakespeare, in the Renaissance, had very much the same traditions to draw on as the Gnostics: first, the Judeo-Christian religion; second, Graeco-Roman mythology and literature; and third, the methods of interpretation provided by Greek philosophy. All that was necessary, in the 16th as in the 2nd century, was to take these traditions in the Gnostic direction.<br />
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Shakespeare's audience, too, had these traditions in hand. Some might have known only the basic Graeco-Roman myths, but known the folk traditions of their native Britain. Shakespeare has more than enough references to the sacred to go around. All would have known something of the method of interpretation, too, from the way they were taught to understand the Bible. The Old Testament was understood as prophesying the New. In this way they knew how to see one text in terms of another. Moreover, they were taught to see sensuous language, as in the Song of Songs, not simply for what it was but as having a sacred meaning as well; they knew how to see a text on different levels of meaning.<br />
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The more intellectual of Shakespeare's contemporaries would have understood other modes of interpretation as well. An eclectic Platonism had been the interpretative method of choice for the classical writers of the Roman world (Cicero, Plutarch, Apuleius, Macrobius, etc.--all much more known in Renaissance England than they are today) and was the basis for Judeo-Christian interpretation as well. The Renaissance philosopher Ficino had given new impetus to the Neoplatonic version of this method, and it was a fertile source of inspiration to such artists as Botticelli and Michelangelo. Less well known but as highly valued by some in England were the Renaissance alchemists, who used a similar eclectic mix of symbols and traditions in a Gnostic-like way--not so much, as I will be using them, to turn lead into gold but to turn a leaden consciousness into a golden one.<br />
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Here it is important not to assume that Shakespeare, as a Stratford provincial with only a grammar school education, could not have been aware of such methods of interpretation. In the first place, we do not really know who wrote the plays, so little is known about their author. Numerous highly educated candidates have been forward, each with some plausibility and a reason for anonymity. Members of the nobility, for example, were not supposed to write plays because it was beneath their dignity--and also, I think, because people might gossip that the characters in the plays were based on certain members of that nobility! Shakespeare himself could simply have been a producer and actor who, for a fee, agreed to pose as the playwright. Thus when rival playwright Robert Greene famously accused the early Shakespeare of <b>"crowing with our feathers,"</b> he might have meant not just borrowing lines and plots from other writers (as Wood, 2003, theorizes) but actually taking credit for another's work. And when he delivered his manuscripts without a "blot" on them, as Ben Jonson had observed (Wood 2003), perhaps that is because he or someone else copied another's drafts.<br />
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Even if Shakespeare did write Shakespeare, he likely had help. I am not talking about collaborations with others, which certainly happened with Pericles and a few other plays. I am referring to a highly educated circle in London sponsored by nobles (Leicester, Southampton, Oxford, Pembroke, etc.) and including such figures as the alchemist John Dee, translator John Florio (whose version of Montaigne turns up often in the plays), poet Edmund Spenser, playwright Ben Jonson, etc. Nobles back from their travels could have fed him details about other countries, and scholars could have brought to his attention writings not widely known by the general population.<br />
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In this connection the writings of the early16th century independent Catholic scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam offer a tantalizing connection to Gnosticism. He was widely admired in England, by Catholics and Protestants alike. His paraphrases of the gospels had been required reading in all English parishes under Henry VIII; Henry's Catholic daughter Mary, who succeeded him, even helped translate them from Latin. Erasmus's edition of the Greek New Testament was the one used by all Protestant translations into English. His comic work In Praise of Folly went through many English editions. <br />
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The connection to Gnosticism is this. Erasmus edited and published Irenaeus's polemic against Gnosticism, in its Latin version. In the 16th century it went through numerous editions. A 1576 edition even includes the Latin word "Gnosticorum" in the title--an innovation not present in Irenaeus's own title. It is just possible, but by no means necessary, that the playwright at some point read Erasmus's edition of Irenaeus. .Let me explain why.<br />
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First, there is much in common between the plays and Erasmus's works. Writers today (e.g. Wood 2003) comment on the similarity of <i>In Praise of Folly’s</i> tone and language to<i> King Lear</i>; but the same could be said of other of Erasmus’s works in relation to other plays, including <i>Romeo and Juliet.</i> Some writers have noticed what seem to be borrowings in Hamlet from Erasmus's early work <i>Adagia</i> ("Sayings"). Shakespeare may also have drawn on Erasmus’s Latin translations of Euripides. Erasmus translated two of Euripides plays, <i>Iphegenia in Auli</i>s and <i>Hecuba</i>. Scholars have noticed what seem to be borrowings from Euripides' <i>Iphegenia in Aulis</i> in Shakespeare's <i>Julius Caesar</i> (Wood 2003). More broadly, Euripides' self-sacrificing dutiful daughter resembles various Shakespearean heroines, such as Desdemona, Ophelia, and Cordelia. (Juliet, we shall see, is an example of one who rejects that role even as it is forced upon her.) Moreover, it has been shown that the references to the Trojan Queen Hecuba in Hamlet could have come only from Euripides' play <i>Hecuba</i>. <br />
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Second, there is the religious predicament of 16th century England and Shakespeare's place in it. Shakespeare himself is likely to have been secretly raised Catholic (Wood 2003); some of his patrons, such as the Earl of Southampton, also had Catholic backgrounds and probably still practiced the faith in their private chapels. Erasmus, too, considered himself Catholic, even attacked the Church mercilessly and had every one of his works on the Catholic Index of forbidden books. Given Shakespeare's commonality with Erasmus, it would not be surprising if he read his predecessor's work widely. <br />
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Third, there is the Gnostics’ reputation: They had been the first Christian heretics. In a country where being called a heretic by the Catholic Church was not necessarily a hindrance, Gnostics would have had a new respectability. At the same time the Protestants condemned them as much as the Catholics had. Individual Gnostics were mentioned by name and caricatured in the popular mythology handbooks of the day (e.g. Lynche), as well as in satirical adenture stories (Joseph Hall) To be on the safe side, it was good to know them simply to be sure not to sound like them. But one could still secretly mine them for ideas. It remains a rather large leap from the bizarre-sounding doctrines presented by Irenaeus to anything in Shakespeare, but the same may be said for the relationship between Irenaeus and the genuine articles found at Nag Hammadi.<br />
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This approach to Shakespeare flies in the face of most scholarship over the last half century, which was reacting against a previous trend that had seen the plays in Christian terms. To be sure, the later scholars said (e.g. R. Frye 1961, 1963), Shakespeare put Biblical allusions in the plays. But such allusions gave the point of the view of the characters, not the dramatist: religious ideas help to shape the characters for us and build dramatic tension and irony. <br />
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My point of view does not deny what such scholars are saying. The characters say things that make sense in the context of orthodox Christianity, and in that way shape our sense of them. Where I differ is in this: The characters’ Biblical allusions retain their sacred meaning in the context of the play as a whole, but in a less literal-minded framework than orthodox Christianity, one closer to ancient Gnosticism, and in some ways closer to pagan religion as well. Such meaning lies beneath the surface of the characters’ consciousness and that of the audience.<br />
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I also am not talking about all the plays. I have in mind most of all <i>Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet,</i> and <i>King Lear</i>. What I have to say would also generalize in part to other plays, and most fully to <i>Pericles,</i> about which Hughes (1992) and Bloom (2000) have already written. I hope to elaborate the perspective in detail for all four of these plays; in fact, it takes all four to present it, because each play shows a different aspect of the worldview. <br />
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In this process I want us to get more than an intellectual understanding of what Shakespeare did with the traditions he inherited. I want us to appreciate it on a sensory and feeling level as well. Toward this end art is particularly helpful. The classical and folk traditions Shakespeare inherited had visual as well as verbal expression. Renaissance alchemy also had a rich collection of pictures that apply to Shakespeare, as Nicholl has already demonstrated in relation to <i>King Lear</i> and Haley to <i>All’s Well That Ends Well</i>. So I scoured numerous sources to find suitable visual expressions. This endeavor expanded my appreciation of Shakespeare in ways I did not anticipate. <br />
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Finally, I want our appreciation of Shakespeare to be of use in our own lives. To this end, the concepts of Carl Jung and other psychological descendents of Freud continue be useful. To be sure, there are other valid interpretations of the images and situations in Shakespeare: but it is the Jungian-Gnostic undercurrent which in my view makes Shakespeare most relevant to our lives today.Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-23038052322434784162012-05-08T19:53:00.003-07:002014-02-24T00:29:47.253-08:00Images of the sacred marriage<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicrkeAEUt_zW6dH5ohWAPsI4xWk445TWQqcziMWyaWGRju3Ch5ghz4yDvfzBhgA8C-GOHL5LIqhNLTub1MUlDd5YXDvM3e48izufv4ZvvnPorrfKaSQCRiDOGT9KPvdruKKnGTjKacHLQ/s1600/01dChristwound.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><b>PART ONE: THE SACRED MARRIAGE IN ROMEO AND JULIET </b><br />
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<b>A. The sacred marriage in the Judeo-Christian tradition</b>.<br />
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On the Elizabethan stage it was forbidden to present any Christian doctrine explicitly (Dawkins 2000), presumably so as to avoid the sectarian controversies that had wreaked havoc in English politics. An arena that in living memory had been dominated by Catholic “mystery plays” was suddenly secularized by royal decree. English drama rose to the occasion with great success. Yet the transition may not have been as sharp as it seems. In the language of love, dramatists had a well-known predecessor, namely the Song of Songs, which also did not use the word “God” or speak in religious terms. Yet as the Elizabethans saw it, it was all about the relation of God to humanity, a “sacred marriage” between the two. <br />
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The term "sacred marriage," <i>hieros gamos</i> in Greek, originally applied to a fertility ritual, to honor the gods of the crops. A god and a goddess were imagined to celebrate their nuptials: Hera and in Greece, Isis and Osiris in Egypt, Inanna and Dumuzi in Sumer, etc. In its oldest form, men and women impersonating the gods might have had ritual sexual intercourse, or one man and one woman would perform this act; perhaps one or both would be ritually sacrificed (Frazier 1958). Songs and stories were composed to express in myth what was the ritual was about. <br />
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With the advent of priests and poets in the great civilizations of antiquity, there came imaginative literary variations on the myths, yet with an echo of the old rites. The marriage of two gods, or of god and humanity, continued to have its appeal, although neither partner might be claimed divine or even married. Thus we have the Hebrew Song of Songs, which from affinities to Egyptian and Mesopotamian love poetry scholars hypothesize may have been adapted from these cultures without any indigenous Hebrew fertility rite (Murphy 1990). Without any reference to the sacred specifically, it appears in a Bible replete, as we shall see, with apocalyptic utterances about the Lord God and his Bride Israel. The Song is then interpreted in terms of this divine marriage, by Christian and Jew alike. .<br />
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Let me give examples that will be of use later. The Hebrew Bible’s sense of the <i>hieros gamos</i>, which the rabbis applied to the Song of Songs, occurs in Hosea and Isaiah. Hosea speaks of a new covenant between the Lord and his people: <b>“I will betroth thee unto me in faithfulness, and thou shalt know the Lord,</b>” says God through Hosea (2:20). <b>“Know”</b> refers to the consummation of a marriage, as in “Adam knew Eve”; but it has a more spiritual sense as well, of communion. Isaiah, similarly, speaks of a time when Israel shall:<br />
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<b>forget the shame of thy youth, and shall not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more. For thy Maker is thine husband: the Lord of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel: The God of the whole earth shall he be called.</b> (Isaiah 54:4-5)</blockquote>
Besides these specific mentions of marriage, other Hebrew Bible passages speak reproachfully of Israel <b>“whoring”</b> with other gods (Ex. 34:15, Ps. 73:27). This image treats her as a woman whose sole partner should be the Lord.<br />
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The Song itself does not speak of Israel and the Lord at all, or even of a marriage. It poetically describes the love of a young woman and a young or at least very athletic man. In the view of the rabbis, the man was the Lord God of Israel and the woman his chosen people, the Israelites. The Song expressed their devotion to each other, the need for the people of Israel to have faith in their God, and the eventual fruitfulness of their spiritual union (Murphy 1990).<br />
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Then Christianity came along, whose basic texts, in the dominant tradition, are those that became the New Testament. These texts interpreted the marriage as between the Lord and the people of all nations. Indeed, Isaiah had paved the way in speaking of the husband as <b>“God of the whole earth” (</b>54:5).<br />
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Orthodox Christianity, of course, did something that Isaiah did not do: it concretized the Bridegroom in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus at Mark 2:19, Jesus speaks of the disciples as “children of the bridechamber”; he himself, the text implies, is the bridegroom. (I shall discuss the actual text in a later section.) Paul, more explicitly, says to his converts, <b>“I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ”</b> (2 Cor. 11:2). In the same vein, when discussing marriage, he compares Christ to the husband and the Church to the wife (Eph. 5:23-25). The Book of Revelation speaks in similar terms (19:7-9, 21:2, 22:17); this time the marriage is of the New Jerusalem and the Lamb. All of this redefines the rabbinic tradition expressed in Isaiah and Hosea..<br />
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In the New Testament itself, I have found only one reference to Bride and Bridegroom that reflects the wording of the Song specifically (cited in Lavin and Lavin 2000). In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist refers to Christ as the “bridegroom” in the famous text in which the Baptist is asked if he is the savior. He answers:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Ye yourselves bear witness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. He that hath the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice; this my joy therefore is fulfilled.</b> (John 3:28-29, King James Version)</blockquote>
The latter part, about the friend who hears the bridegroom, seems a reference to Song of Songs 8:13: <b>“Thou that dwellest in the gardens, the companions hearken to thy voice.”</b> (I will discuss the significance of this reference in understanding the Song towards the end of thisessay.)<br />
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In the 2nd century, Origin, basing himself on these references to “Bridegroom” and “Bride” and others in the established canon, wrote a long commentary on the Song, comparing the Woman to both the soul and the Church, and the man to Christ and the Word. Only about a third of this commentary survived, but it had immense influence despite the condemnation of his later works as heretical. <br />
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In the 4th century, Augustine referred to the sacred marriage between Christ and the Church in his analysis of Christ's crucifixion. In the background is the story of Adam and Eve, who originally lived in a garden similar to that in the Song of Songs, but were expelled into a land of suffering and death. Now God himself has come down to earth, to enter into a new marriage. God's marriage bed is the cross, where as Christ he takes on himself the suffering of the people--in Augustine's words, <b>"He lovingly gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride"</b> (quoted in Jung 1967, 269). God's bride, the Church, is a community of souls defined by its faith in Jesus as opposed to its identification with Judaism or any pagan faith. Augustine adds, <b>"..and he joined himself to the woman forever."</b> As in the traditional Jewish understanding, this is a union of the divine with the human, of the male as god with the female as human, rather than the union of god and goddess. And the new life being promoted is of a purely spiritual nature, the fruit of a spiritual marriage between God on the cross and humanity. This marriage is for God an act of extreme suffering, but the result, Augustine says, is joy for those who choose to become the bride of Christ.<br />
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All of this language was applied in Shakespeare’s day not only to the Song of Songs, but to the ordinary marriages of men and woman. Erasmus, an Augustinian by training and a devotee of Origen by later study, used the same language as Augustine and Origin to explain the sacred significance of marriage, as a surrendering of each of the pair to the other in a secular prefiguring of the soul’s surrender to Christ<br />
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In the Middle Ages, the Song was the easily the most quoted book in the entire Bible (Kendrick). Commentators followed Origin in seeing the woman of the Song as the soul, and the man as Christ, the Word of God. To illustrate, let us take the first lines of the Song:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>The Song of Songs which is Solomon’s: </b><br />
<b> Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. </b>(1:1-2, King James Version)</blockquote>
For the interpretation, first let us hear St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th century:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” Who says this? The bride. Who is she? The soul thirsting for God...The passion of love excels among the gifts of nature, especially when it returns to its origin which is God. And there are no names as sweet to express the affections of Word and soul as those of bridegroom and bride, seeing as these have all things in common, have nothing which either claims, nothing in which the other has no share.</b> (Harper 1907, xliv)</blockquote>
The Church, in Bernard’s view, is simply <b>“the unity-or rather unanimity-of many souls”</b> (Bernard 1952, 16). “Church” is a shorthand for the combined souls of the believers. Illuminated manuscripts of the time showed the sponsa (wife) and sponsus (husband), as Christ and his bride the Church, as in <b>Fig. 1 (</b>Camille 1998, 23), a 12th century illustration to Bede’s commentary on the Song.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzGieDR534qE9-APtPXMyOrBm5fFlYMOw6QfQUcToVQ5Zv8mTYgKfEMZE_3a8hFn9GNolQjBhP0Zh49wcvgRh0X1hDJuR4FN16KmLuo02xhqtyn_TX4ZCcr_7DidOEBsF6EKf9ZF9fgVE/s1600/01sponsa-o.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzGieDR534qE9-APtPXMyOrBm5fFlYMOw6QfQUcToVQ5Zv8mTYgKfEMZE_3a8hFn9GNolQjBhP0Zh49wcvgRh0X1hDJuR4FN16KmLuo02xhqtyn_TX4ZCcr_7DidOEBsF6EKf9ZF9fgVE/s320/01sponsa-o.tif" height="310" width="320" /></a><br />
In the 16th century St. Bernard’s tradition, in both interpretation and austerity, was renewed by reformers in the Roman Catholic Church such as Teresa of Avila and her friend John of the Cross. Teresa writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>My Lord, I ask nothing else in this life but "to kiss me with the kiss of Your Mouth," and to do this in such a manner that I should not be able to withdraw from this union, even if I wished it.</b> (Bloom 1988, 7)</blockquote>
John of the Cross, in a poem introducing T<i>he Dark Night of the Soul</i>, says similarly:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>O night that guided me, </b><br />
<b>O night more lovely than the dawn,</b><br />
<b>O night that joined Beloved with lover,</b><br />
<b>Lover transformed in the Beloved! </b><br />
<br />
<b>The breeze blew from the turret</b><br />
<b>As I parted his locks;<with all="" and="" be="" beloved.="" caused="" face="" gentle="" hand="" he="" his="" i="" in="" lost="" my="" neck="" oblivion="" on="" reclined="" remained="" senses="" suspended.="" the="" to="" wounded=""> </with></b><br />
<b><with all="" and="" be="" beloved.="" caused="" face="" gentle="" hand="" he="" his="" i="" in="" lost="" my="" neck="" oblivion="" on="" reclined="" remained="" senses="" suspended.="" the="" to="" wounded="">With his gentle hand<br />He wounded my neck <br />And caused all my senses to be suspended. <br /> </with></b><br />
<b><with all="" and="" be="" beloved.="" caused="" face="" gentle="" hand="" he="" his="" i="" in="" lost="" my="" neck="" oblivion="" on="" reclined="" remained="" senses="" suspended.="" the="" to="" wounded="">I remained, lost in oblivion, <br /> My face I reclined on the Beloved. </with></b><br />
<b><with all="" and="" be="" beloved.="" caused="" face="" gentle="" hand="" he="" his="" i="" in="" lost="" my="" neck="" oblivion="" on="" reclined="" remained="" senses="" suspended.="" the="" to="" wounded="">All ceased and I abandoned myself, </with></b><br />
<b><with all="" and="" be="" beloved.="" caused="" face="" gentle="" hand="" he="" his="" i="" in="" lost="" my="" neck="" oblivion="" on="" reclined="" remained="" senses="" suspended.="" the="" to="" wounded="">Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies. </with></b><br />
<with all="" and="" be="" beloved.="" caused="" face="" gentle="" hand="" he="" his="" i="" in="" lost="" my="" neck="" oblivion="" on="" reclined="" remained="" senses="" suspended.="" the="" to="" wounded="">(Bloom 1988, 7) </with></blockquote>
<with all="" and="" be="" beloved.="" caused="" face="" gentle="" hand="" he="" his="" i="" in="" lost="" my="" neck="" oblivion="" on="" reclined="" remained="" senses="" suspended.="" the="" to="" wounded="">These writers describe the relation of human individual to God as a surrendering of the will to the higher power, a loss of one's separate identity, even including assent to divine use of force. Since the Song itself nowhere speaks of the relationship of the two lovers in such terms, I wonder if perhaps the atmosphere of the times, in which the Spanish Inquisition was burning people with a vengeance, has found its way into their visions.<br />
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Before Protestantism, the general public was not able to read the Song for itself, because it remained in Latin. To translate it into the languages that people actually spoke was considered heresy. William Tynsdale, the first translator of the Bible into English, in fact fled England when a Catholic monarch, so-called “Bloody” Mary, ascended the throne. The Catholic Church eventually caught up with him and burned him at the stake for his pains (Geneva Bible 1969, editor’s introduction). <br />
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Under Elizabeth, however, the Bible was not only allowed but required of any household above a certain economic level. The most popular translation-and the one quoted by Shakespeare--was the Geneva Bible, put together by English Calvinists in the safe haven of Geneva, Switzerland. Now the laity could read the Song, although the approved Calvinist interpretation appeared in the margins. King James I took offense to some of these notes; the marginal comments stopped in the version he sponsored, leaving only brief comments at the top of the page. <br />
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When lay readers of the Geneva Bible turned to the Song, they found erotic imagery carefully interpreted in the traditional way. Consider the following, spoken by the woman (I quote from the King James Version, which in these lines is virtually identical to the Geneva Bible, with the advantage that its current edition modernizes the spelling):<br />
</with><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south;</b><br />
<b>Blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out</b><br />
<b>Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.</b><br />
<b>…</b><br />
<b>I sleep, but my heart waketh; it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh,</b><br />
<b>Saying, "Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled; </b><br />
<b>for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night."</b><br />
<b> … </b><br />
<b>I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dripped with myrrh,</b><br />
<b>and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.</b><br />
<b>I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself and was gone.</b>. <br />
(Song of Songs 4:16, 5:2, 5:5-6.)</blockquote>
According to the Geneva Bible the <b>“north wind”</b> and <b>“south wind”</b> are the Holy Spirit, which the faithful soul wishes to descend upon her (1969, 282). Then when the beloved complains that <b>“my head is filled with dew,”</b> apparently meaning he is wet, that expresses Christ’s patience with sinners. When the lover responds by putting myrrh on her fingers, she is attempting to <b>“anoint”</b> Christ with her <b>“good works”</b>; but what is required is her whole heart and devotion before he can accept her as his bride. Later in the Song the beloved speaks, describing the parts of his lover’s body in sensuous terms, starting with the feet, moving up to the navel and the breasts, and ending with the hair (7:1-3). Our commentator says that this expresses<b> “the beauty of the Church in all her members. She is assured of Christ’s love toward her”</b> (282). My point is not to ridicule such interpretations. It is take them seriously, in as much as they show a major way erotic imagery was taken at the time. Shakespeare’s audience was accustomed to seeing sacred interpretations of very sensuous language. <br />
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Modern commentator looking at the Song see other things: <b>“Open to me</b>” suggests a sexual invitation; in fact the word in Hebrew translated as “open to” is the same as the word translated as “knew” in the sentence “Adam knew Eve” (Bloch and Bloch 1995). Handles and locks also have sexual connotations, as does the act of “withdrawing.” These connotations were not lost on Elizabethans, as we know from the jokes in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare himself had used the language of the Song of Songs in a purely sexual way in his poem <i>Venus and Adonis</i>, when he has Venus say to the reluctant Adonis, who just wants to go boar-hunting (ll. 231-4):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer:</b><br />
<b>Feed where thou wilt, on mouutain or in dale;</b><br />
<b> Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,</b><br />
<b> Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.</b></blockquote>
Shakespeare no doubt offended many with this appropriation. In fact it is a little beneath him, as a poet who revels in ambiguity. Elizabethans were quite capable of listening on three levels at once: the literal meaning of the words--which I would call the ego-level--the spiritual, and the intimately sensual. <br />
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A problem with applying the Geneva Bible’s or any standard Christian interpretation of the Song to <i>Romeo and Juliet </i>is that the relationship is not even metaphorically between a female mortal and a male god. To be sure, Juliet calls Romeo <b>“the god of my idolatry” </b>(II.ii.113), but he speaks in terms almost as exalted: she is a <b>“bright angel”</b> (II.ii.26). They each speak of the other in sacred terms. <br />
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Medieval commentators seemed to realize this problem, and some advanced a solution. Not only was the Bride the soul, it is symbolically the Virgin Mary, who at death is bodily lifted up to heaven and put at the right hand of Christ his as Bride. A visual example is a mosaic done at the direction of Pope Innocent II, who was a friend of Bernard of Clairvaux, in about 1140-1142 (<b>Fig. 1a, below</b>; Lavin & Lavin 2001, 29).<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjad0slQMiUmO77NWUEbXWaFRyfeVUWPQB9nW4qGbSNXZtxnq0I5MZrFQx-XeEnsuZHypDyeaQYnQ-IeXdrvIpx0v25qbSGP0YKmxeanDN0ZKcdzAMapI5i7krQpSQ76aeZQaedCToQ5Go/s1600/01aMaryChrist.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjad0slQMiUmO77NWUEbXWaFRyfeVUWPQB9nW4qGbSNXZtxnq0I5MZrFQx-XeEnsuZHypDyeaQYnQ-IeXdrvIpx0v25qbSGP0YKmxeanDN0ZKcdzAMapI5i7krQpSQ76aeZQaedCToQ5Go/s320/01aMaryChrist.tif" height="311" width="320" /></a><br />
The writing held by Mary says <b>“His left hand is under my head and his right hand doth embrace me,”</b> a quote from Song of Songs 2.6, repeated at 8.3. The writing that Christ holds says, <b>“Come, my chosen one, I will put my throne in you</b>” (in Latin: Veni electa mea et ponam in te thronum meum) (Lavin & Lavin 2001, 27-28). This latter sentence <b>“has no other source than the Divine Office,” </b>the Lavins say; perhaps it is a litany by Innocent II himself. The sentence means that Christ is empowering Mary to rule with him in heaven. But as the Lavins notice, the wording also suggests <b>“their adult connubial union.”</b> The sexual imagery of the Song is carried over into words accompanying the image of Christ, as spoken to his mother Mary. <br />
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The Lavins show another way that illustrators implied a sexual relationship between Christ and Mary. They put Christ’s right leg between her legs (<b>Fig. 1b</b>, left below: Lavin & Lavin 39), a pose associated with secular marriage (<b>Fig. 1c, right below</b>; Lavin & Lavin 25).<br />
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Judaism had another way of interpreting the Song, that of the tradition later known as Kabbalah (Bloom 1988, 7). On this view, the Song metaphorically describes the androgynous body of God, seen by Moses on Mount Sinai. In this tradition, set down in the Middle Ages, the body of God had different aspects, called the Zeferot, and the poem was at least in part a dialogue among two or more of these aspects, metaphorically male and female. The metaphor of a young woman and a young man is one way of giving sensuous expression to the beauty of God. This interpretation makes the Song much closer to the traditional god/goddess marriage. <br />
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Along these lines, a Hebrew text from the 1st century describes some of the aspects of God as the sun, moon, and planets. This fits what the woman says of herself and her companion<b>: "I am black.. because the sun hath looked upon me" </b>(1:6); and also <b>"My beloved is white and ruddy...His head is as the most fine gold"</b> (5:10-11). These images suggest night and day, and their chief lights, the moon and the sun. Then the marriage is a <i>hieros gamos</i> between sun and moon, which esoteric Judaism preserves within a monotheistic framework. <br />
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From this perspective, human love at its most sensuously beautiful is a metaphorical approximation to divine love between God's own complementary aspects or emanations. Those who appreciated the Song from an esoteric perspective seemed to have this idea in mind: A 13th century Jewish text from Spain quotes a saying of the sages: <b>"When a man unites with his wife in holiness, the divine presence is between them."</b> (Matt 1997, 155).<br />
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With the invention of the printing press, Kabbalistic interpretations of the Song were given limited publication, and these were followed by more widely read commentaries by such esoteric Christian thinkers as Pico, Bruno, and Agrippa. Before them, the Catholic Church had itself made a few attempts to see God bisexually. For example, the standard Latin translation of the Bible used in the Middle Ages, the Vulgate, gave the male figure breasts.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Osculetur me osculo oris sui Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth<br />quia meliora sunt ubera tua vino. for your breasts are better than wine.</b><br />
(Matter 1990, xvi-xvii)</blockquote>
.The Greek translation used by the Vulgate identified the Hebrew word d<i>odeyka</i>, literally meaning “your love-making,” as meaning breasts, a word which in Hebrew has the same root (Murphy 1990). The King James Version, which went to the Hebrew, translates the word as “your love,” so that the line reads “for your love is better than wine.” This translation goes the other way and desexualizes the Hebrew.<br />
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The 12th century Bernard, using a variant of the Vulgate, dutifully analyzes the line in terms of breasts. He says that while it is unclear whose breasts these are, the bride’s or the bridegroom’s, one valid interpretation is that they are <b>“the breasts of the Bridegroom-that is, of Christ”</b> (1950, 32). What they offer is <b>“the milk of Thy loving-kindness”</b> (33). In a similar vein, illuminated manuscripts sometimes give Christ sexually ambiguous features. I have not found any with breasts, but the <i>Rothchild Canticle</i> of 1320 has an illustration of the wound in Christ’s side that suggests the female, while the woman on the opposite page carries a very masculine spear (<b>Fig. 1d;</b> Camille 1998, 38). <br />
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Liturgies and other sacred poetry probably also used feminine imagery occasionally to refer to Christ or God. In these various ways, seeing God in both feminine and masculine imagery would have worked its way into public consciousness. The soul could yearn for God using the words and images of longing for both sexes--and also imagine its own sexual longings in sacred terms.Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-20597795561587073082012-05-08T19:53:00.001-07:002012-05-09T15:38:20.224-07:00Temporal markers of the sacred<b>B. Temporal markers of the sacred in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i> and previous versions of the tal</b>e<br />
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In applying the concept of the sacred marriage to our play, I want to look first at the temporal markers in the story, both as Shakespeare presents it and in earlier versions: At what time of year does the action of the play take place? People today often miss the reference, for they attach no significance to it. It occurs fairly early, in the play’s third scene, when Lady Capulet is talking to the nurse about marrying Juliet off. It is “a fortnight and odd days” before Lammas, Lady Capulet says (I.iii.15). Juliet herself will be fourteen “on Lammas Eve at night”(I.iii.18). .<br />
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<b>i. The reference to Lammas: Christian and Celtic symbolism.</b><br />
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What is the symbolic importance of Lammas? Gibbons’ notes to the Arden edition of the play tell us that Lammas, August 1, is the time in the English church when the first harvest was celebrated. Loaves of bread were made and consecrated from that harvest. Gibbons calls attention to the association between Juliet and “early-ripening.” Juliet herself is ready for harvesting, so to speak. For the nurse, there may also be an association between Lammas and “lamb,” her pet name for Juliet. Gibbons tells us that there was a false belief that “Lammas” meant “Lamb-mass,” when in fact it meant “loaf-mass.” The association is meaningful even if false. Lambs in Britain were traditionally weaned on August 1-and so was Juliet, by the Nurse’s recollection, at the age of three (I.iii.24-26). Juliet now is about to be weaned in another sense. At the same time Juliet’s fate will be that of a sacrificial lamb. Gibbons points to one other association to Lammas: a commentator noticed the association between July, the month of Juliet’s birth, and her name. Since Shakespeare was given the name from earlier versions of the story, it is logical for her to have been born in July.<br />
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However I think Lammas has much additional significance, if we consider it from the perspective of Celtic myth. We know that Shakespeare frequently drew on the Celtic tradition. For example, later in the play Mercutio has a long speech about Queen Mab and her fairy doings (I.iv.33-94). And only two years before our play, he put on <i>Midsummer Night’s Dream</i>; the title refers to another special time for Celts, when fairies were said to appear to mortals. Apart from Shakespeare, Elizabethans had Ireland and its ways very much on their mind, if only because England was then actively subjugating that land.<br />
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Before the Roman conquest of western Europe, a holiday corresponding to Lammas was celebrated all over the Celtic world.. It is no coincidence that Emperor Augustus took August 1 as his cult-day, and that he initiated his cult in the Celtic city of Lugdunum, modern Lyon, named for Lugh, Celtic god of light (Curran 2000). The Romans called him “the Gaulish Mercury,” in keeping with their practice of identifying foreign deities with their own. <br />
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In Ireland, Lammas was the central day of Lunghnasadh, Lugh’s festival, which extended 15 days on both sides of August 1. It was said to have been started by Lugh in honor of the death of Tailtu, his foster-mother (Curran 2000). She was an earth goddess forced to clear her land by the conquering gods of civilization, an effort that killed her. People would go on hillsides and pick wild berries in honor of her, taking “flatcakes of oatmeal and milk” to eat, as an 85 year old woman in Donegal told an interviewer in 1942. The custom did not die out in her town until World War I (Smyth 1996, 105). <br />
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Lughnasadh was a time when people might begin “year and a day” marriages, a kind of trial marriage that might or might not be made permanent later. These were known as “Teltown marriages,” from the Anglicized name for the town which tradition held was the burial place of Tailtu (Crowley 1998), and where Lughhnasadh was celebrated grandly even in the 18th century. In pre-Christian times these marriages would have had Druidic blessing. <br />
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The time also honored one of Lugh’s marriages, to the goddess Naas. There is little information on her. The festivities suggest a goddess of the bountiful harvest. If we turn to images of Mercury in Roman Gaul and Britain, we find just such a consort, the goddess Rosmerta, meaning “the great provider,” often shown with a cornucopia or a purse (Green 1992, 180). A stone plaque found in Gloucester (<b>Fig. 2;</b> Green 1992, 181) shows her next to “Gaulish Mercury” (the cock is an animal sacred to Mercury) with a ladle in her hand above a big pot.<br />
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This pose suggests a feast (Green), perhaps including a ritual by which the goddess of the land, impersonated by a priestess or the Lady of the house, dishes out a ceremonial drink by which those present reaffirm their loyalty to their Lord (Enright 1996, 251-252). Scholars are confident that the image in the plaque is Celtic, despite the Roman setting, because of other unmistakably Celtic images next to similar scenes found in Bath, Trier, and Mannheim (Green). <br />
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Occurring at the time the grain was cut and the fields burned, the holiday was also associated with ritual sacrifice by cutting and burning. It is unclear how often human sacrifice was performed by the ancient Celts; Roman writers implied that it was frequent event. Lucan, Julius Caesar, and Strabo wrote about a giant “wicker man” that was burned at harvest-time with victims locked inside. In or around Shakespeare’s day, illustrated books popularized the wicker-man; e.g. the<i> Britannia Antiqua</i> of 1676 (<b>Fig. 2a;</b> Curran 2000, 237), and farmers still burned small straw figures at harvest. ). <br />
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In the Roman accounts, the human sacrifices and the wicker-men were not made to satisfy Lugh, but rather other sky gods, Taranis or Essa (Green 1992). Apparently more than one harvest god was honored on August 1. Scholars today do not mention any Roman accounts of myths connecting these gods to the day or to Lugh. However I think we can make some educated guesses, at least for Britain and Ireland.<br />
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In the 19th and early 20th centuries, folklorists wrote down pagan folk-tales remembered by Irish villagers; MacNeill (1962) has assembled many of them. A god or lord of the harvest, honored around August 1, was recalled by many, associated with the ritual sacrifice and burning of cattle. His name was Crom Dubh, the stooped black one, stooped from bringing the first sheaves of wheat to Ireland. Bad as he was, he was still the one who gave the people <b>“the light of day, darkness of night, and the change of the seasons”</b> (MacNeill 1962, 597). Moreover, <b>“It was he who taught them to sow and reap, and when the weather would be good or bad”</b> (595). <br />
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MacNeill (1962, 409ff) thinks that this god was not Lugh, but an older god who had to be appeased to prevent ruined crops and diseased animals, perhaps corresponding to Balor, Lugh’s grandfather, in the written legends. These devout Catholic informants recalled stories that anyone who saw the hilltop bonfires still lit by “witches” would be struck dead. This sounds like the “evil eye” that was Balor’s chief weapon. Likewise, any children wandering about at night were likely fall into the earth. Various sink-holes were said to be the lair of the god, now in the form of a giant snake, driven there by St. Patrick, whom MacNeill thinks in these stories is the Christian monks’ popular substitute for Lugh. <br />
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In the official legends, written down in Latin by medieval Christian for their own use, Lugh is portrayed as belonging on his father’s side to a race of warrior-gods more civilized than the harsh and unpredictable native ones. His mother was the daughter of the native chief god Balor, but the gods, like their Celtic worshipers, identified themselves with their father’s tribe. Lugh eventually killed Balor with a sling-shot aimed at his dreaded eye. (In the stories collected by MacNeill, he is sometimes not killed but either driven underground or converted to the new religion (Christianity, in the substitution of St. Patrick for Lugh).0 <br />
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The English had an example in their not too distant past that suggested a re-enactment of the slaying of Balor. The second Norman king of England, William, the Red, was supposedly an inept king with many enemies. History said that he died on August 2, 1100, a day conspicuous by its ritual significance. It would have been especially significant to kill a a king with red hair, corresponding to blood and to color the grain started to take when it was ready to harvest. Moreover, the death was said to have been the same way as Lugh’s grandfather’s, through the eye; William died by an arrow through the eye (Brittania 2000).<br />
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Although I have not found scholars making the comparison, Lugh and Balor are reminiscent David and Goliath, here become warrior-champions of the enlightened and more primitive indigenous tribes of deities. These Celtic gods, however, were not simply immortal, as were the Greek and Roman Olympian gods, or the Judeo-Christian father-god Jehovah. The Celtic harvest-gods die and are reborn each year, according to the rhythm of the farming year. Balor must be honored to protect the crops and the health of the crops; and although he is defeated at the harvest, when Lugh kills Balor and marries the land, Balor still operates in the sky and in the Land of the Dead, and he must be appeased to protect the grain and the animals from disease. Moreover, Lugh in turn is killed on November 1, not to be reborn until the light begins to grow longer again. <br />
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To me the cycle is reminiscent of the tale of Persephone, daughter of the Graeco/Roman grain-goddess Demeter or Ceres. The grain-maiden is taken underground by the Lord of the Underworld and made his wife at the time of the fall planting, mid-September when the Eleusinian Mysteries are conducted. She is not rescued and returned to her mother for a third of a year, 4 months, when the crops start appearing above ground. The rescuer is Hermes, the Roman Mercury, with whom the Romans identified Lugh. She returns underground again in September and the cycle repeats Lugh’s killing of Balor on August 1 becomes in the Mediterranean world the rescue of Persephone from Pluto in January. Or so it seems to me.<br />
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In any case-although I have yet to find a single work on Shakespeare to point this out--the mention of Lammas would have evoked for Shakespeare’s audience a time of both non-traditional, even sacred marriage and sacred death, and a day sacred to goddess as well as god. More specifically, Lord Capulet, if fused with his nephew Tybalt, is reminiscent of Pluto and Balor. Juliet, born at night on Lammas-eve, a day sacred to two Celtic goddesses of wealth and plenty, merges with these goddesses, one the wife of the god of light, the other dead as a result of being forced to do something against her heart. Romeo’s killing Tybalt and marrying Juliet is reminiscent of Lugh’s killing Balor and marrying the grain maiden, or Mercury rescuing Persephone. Later Lugh dies and the grain-maiden goes underground; so also Romeo and Juliet die in the crypt. But Romeo will meet and rescue Juliet in the next performance, and so will the gods repeat themselves in the next year.<br />
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We cannot expect that Shakespeare’s audience would have appreciated all these parallels. But they would have known enough for the story to resonate with their cultural unconscious. More importantly, the parallels suggest that a story is being told that reflects broader human experience and the human situation generally. Gnostics, too, went beyond the myths of particular places and times to describe the archetypal unconscious level.<br />
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<b>ii. References to the Christian calendar in Brooke and Bandello</b>.<br />
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Earlier versions of the Romeo and Juliet story also contain references to sacred marriage and death, but in terms of orthodox Christianity rather than Celtic belief. Shakespeare’s immediate source, a narrative poem by Brooke, starts the action at Christmas time (Brooke 1957, l. 155) Then the action drags out. Romeo spends months looking up at Juliet’s window before he risks talking to her. He kills Tybalt on the day after Easter (l.960); so the marriage must have been a short time before. Then toward the end, Juliet’s marriage with Paris is set by her father for September 10 (l. 2072). The symbolic significance of these times will be clearest if we go back two more versions of the tale.<br />
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Brooke’s source was a story in French, which was a translation, with moralizing comments added, of one in Italian, by Bandello. There were two other versions before that, but Bandello’s is the one that puts in the references to the Christian calendar. For Bandello, Romeo first sees Juliet "soon after Christmas" (Bandello 1992, 55). In other words, the love between Romeo and Juliet is born at the time of year of Christ's birth. Then they agree to marry during "the time of Lent" (63), which is traditionally the time for the lover of God to focus on Jesus. Our lovers, correspondingly, focus on each other. We are not told exactly when the marriage is, although we know it is on a Friday (63), and that it is before Romeo's killing of Juliet's cousin, which occurs "at Easter time" (65). The marriage-date, Friday during Lent, brings to mind, of course, Good Friday. The marriage is consummated in "a certain garden" (64), suggesting the Garden of Eden, the garden of the Song of Songs, and Gesthemene. Tybalt’s death at Romeo’s hand, followed by Romeo’s flight to Mantua, suggests Christ's conquest over Hell after the crucifixion, followed by the renunciation of the body implied by the Ascension. Finally, Juliet's arranged wedding with Paris is set by her father for mid-September (71). She visits the friar and gets the sleeping potion on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption (71). The association between Juliet and Mary as Queen of Heaven could hardly be clearer. When Romeo hears of Juliet’s apparent death and returns secretly to Verona, he arrives at the hour when “Ave Maria” is sung (83), another association to Mary. <br />
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This time scheme is not only significant from a Christian perspective, but also from Jewish and pagan ones. Easter in northern Europe was the time of spring fertility rites, a survival of which is our “Easter bunny,” the reproductively vigorous rabbit that lays eggs. The very word “Easter” is cognate with “Estrous,” the time of fertility. It was harvest time in the eastern Mediterranean, when the first grain was made into sacred bread and the lambs were sacrificed in Jerusalem (Leviticus 23:9-14). Mid-September, the time set for the marriage with Paris, is the start of the planting season in the eastern Mediterranean, also the time, as I have mentioned, of the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, which commemorated the abduction of the grain-goddess’s daughter to the underworld and her subsequent marriage to its god. Similarly Romeo and Juliet reunite in the underworld of the Capulet vault..Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-35413868558371468482012-05-08T19:52:00.001-07:002014-02-24T01:11:49.030-08:00Sacred images of the partner in Romeo & Juliet: luminosity in darknessShakespeare does not have the earlier versions’ extensive temporal correspondences between human and divine passions, there is only the reference to Lammas, a symbol which neatly combines both sacred death and sacred marriage. What he has in abundance is metaphorical imagery putting the couple’s relationship in sacred terms. Consider Romeo's speech when he first sees Juliet at the Capulets’ ball:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom. Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!<br />It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night<br />As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear;<br />Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!<br />So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,<br />As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows...<br />Did my heart love til now? Forswear it sight,<br />For I ne'er saw true beauty til this night</b>. (I.v.43-55)</blockquote>
Romeo does not even know who Juliet is, but already he sees her in a special way, as a spark of light on a field of darkness. In the Song of Songs there is a comparable image: the man calls the woman a<b> “lily among thorns”</b> (2:2). But the issue here is light more than beauty. "Light" in all Indo-European symbol systems means spirit; darkness means lack of spirit; or even stronger, it is the color of evil. The Book of John, for example, says, <b>"The light has come into the world, yet men have loved the darkness rather than the light, for their works were evil" </b>(John 3:19). <br />
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In the play, Montague has already indicated these conventional opposites in the course of worrying about his son’s habit of wandering at night and sleeping during the day. Romeo’s avoidance of the <b>“all-cheering sun</b>” (I.i.132) and <b>“fair daylight” </b>(I.1.137) in favor of an <b>“</b><b>artificial night”</b>(I.i.138) portends a <b>“humor” </b>that is <b>“black”</b> (I.i.139)-i.e. melancholia. At the Capulets’ night-time ball, the enmity between the two rival families is a similar metaphorical darkness, and Juliet is the light in that darkness. This imagery makes her an object of veneration, like Christ a divinity come into the world of sinners at the darkest time of year. <br />
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Despite the Montagues’ positive evaluation, however, light in Christianity does not always mean good.: Lucifer, the light bearer, is in traditional Christianity another name for the devil. And lights in the dark are most likely, in folk tales, evil spirits, not good ones, especially if they are female. Good spirits, it is said, do not need the cloak of darkness to hide them. From this perspective, Romeo's perception of Juliet should be of that which he had a foreboding before he went to the Capulets, something that would be his doom. <br />
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Yet it might be that the day-world, with its rivalries and ambitions, is evil, and what he finds at night is of the highest good, so fine that it approaches the sacred, as Romeo soon expresses in wanting to <b>"make blessed</b>" his hand by touching Juliet’s. What Romeo intuits corresponds to the Gnostic and Neoplatonic myth of the spark of the highest divinity that lies trapped in dark matter, the human spirit. Yet such a view, that the human spirit has a spark of the divine, would be heretical to orthodox Christianity, for whom the only divine human is Jesus himself.<br />
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Romeo now approaches Juliet and compares her first to a shrine and then to a saint, with himself a pilgrim. In respect to the imagery of light, a conventional Christian basis for the comparison might be that saints are metaphorically surrounded by light, depicted in paintings with halos. At the same time he sees her in romantic terms, using the imagery of the sacred to advance a romantic interest:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom. If I profane with my unworthiest hand<br />This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:<br />My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand<br />To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.<br />Jul. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,<br />Which mannerly devotion shows in this;<br />For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,<br />And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.<br />Rom. Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?...</b>(I.v.95-103)</blockquote>
And so on. A kiss from a young man is likely to be with lustful intent, Shakespeare’s audience knows (from Castiliogne’s Courtier, translated 1561, if nowhere else). Romeo’s imagery is designed to suggest a nobler impulse. Here Juliet first responds to his metaphor as though to parry his advances; Romeo finds another advance, and so on, still within the metaphor, until he finally gets his kiss. A religious setting is turned to serve relations between the sexes, thus elevating the sexual to a higher realm. <br />
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There is a conventional sequence here. A pictorial example is <b>Fig. 2b</b>, love as a tree to be climbed by means of the senses: first sight, then sound, then touch, and so on.<br />
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The ascent suggested spiritual as much as sexual love. Honorius of Autun described the Song of Songs as such, with five stages of sexual love paralleling five stages in the history of salvation. .A modern scholar has summarized Honorius’s list, with the stages of salvation in parenthesis after each stage of sexual love:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>1) Seeing the Beloved (God’s covenant with Abraham), 2) Speaking with her (God’s conversation with his people through Moses and the Prophets), 3) Touching her (Christ’s incarnation and historical life), 4) Kissing her (the gift of Peace given the disciples by the Risen Christ, and 5) having intercourse with her (perfect union enjoyed in heaven). </b>(Ansel 1990, 31-33)</blockquote>
Romeo’s quest for Juliet thus becomes elevated to a quest for union with the divine. Even Romeo’s name lends itself to the double entendre: “Romeo” is “pilgrim” in Italian. When our couple kiss, it is not mere lust, but a mingling of souls, as Castiliogne described the non-lustful but still passionate kiss of two lovers (1901, 356).<br />
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Later, as Romeo nears Juliet’s window, the metaphor returns to that of light in the darkness, but in a different image. Romeo says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom. But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?</b><br />
<b>It is the east, and Juliet is the sun....(II.ii.1-2)</b></blockquote>
The audience would recall that in early Christian hymns the rising sun is the second coming, Paradise, where the soul joins God. Juliet to him seems just such a paradise. Then he sees her looking up at the sky, and his fantasy leads him to contrast the brightness of her eyes with that of the stars. Supposing two of the "fairest"--i.e. brightest-- stars were put in place of Juliet's eyes, then:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b> Rom. The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,<br /> As daylight doth a lamp;..</b>.(II.ii.19-20)</blockquote>
Similarly, supposing her eyes took the place of those stars in the sky, then:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom. ...her eyes in heaven<br />Would through the airy region stream so bright<br />That birds would sing and think it were not night. </b>(II.ii.20-22)</blockquote>
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Imagine stars so bright birds would think it day: so bright are Juliet's eyes, shining from within. <br />
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This particular image, of a woman glowing with an intense inner light, occurs in traditional Christianity in the representation of angels and of saintly women, such as the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene. It occurs also in alchemy, as a representation of the spirit that is hidden in matter (<b>Fig. 3 below,</b> Jung 1968, 189, labeled the “soul of Mercury”).<br />
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Yet the image of the woman of light expressed by Romeo corresponds most closely to one encountered in Gnostic texts describing Adam's experience of Eve at the beginning of humankind. (Romeo similarly is at a beginning). The <i>Apocryphon of John</i> describes this experience in a retelling of Genesis. Adam, in the moment of Eve's separation from his body, sees her as illuminated from within by light.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>And he </b>[Adam]<b> saw the woman by him. And in that moment the luminous Epinoia appeared and she lifted the veil which lay over his mind. And he became sober from the drunkenness of darkness...And he recognized his counter-image, and he said, "This is indeed bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh."</b> (Robinson 1988, 118. Comments in brackets added by MH)</blockquote>
Epinoia, literally "after-thought" in Greek, is the feminine spiritual principle in the world, whose spirit the divine father/mother had breathed into Adam to help him escape the prison of matter into which the powers of evil, the archons or authorities, had thrown him. The luminosity is a spark of the divine mother/father. Originally a being above matter, Adam had his own luminosity, but it lost its shine. As the text relates:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>And when they </b>[the archons, rulers]<b> recognized that he </b>[Adam] <b>was luminous, and that he could think better than they, and that he was free from wickedness, they took him and threw him into the lowest region of all matter...And he </b>[the blessed One, the Mother-Father] <b>sent, through his beneficent Spirit and his great mercy, a helper to Adam, luminous Epinoia which comes out of him, who is called Life. And she assists the whole creature, by toiling with him and by restoring him to his fullness and by teaching him about the descent of his soul (and) by teaching him about the way of ascent, which is the way he came down. And the luminous Epinoia was hidden in Adam, in order that the archons might not know her.</b> (Robinson 1988, 116.)</blockquote>
But the archons saw the spirit inside Adam and wanted it; they took Eve, as they called her (Hebrew for Life), out of Adam's body for the express purpose of possessing that spiritual power through rape. To escape them, Epinoia left the body of Eve. Yet for a brief time Adam was united with this feminine figure of light. <br />
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In Romeo's eyes, Juliet is as Eve first appeared to Adam, without the "veil" of "drunkenness," i.e. his ignorance of the divine; she is a divine light. which yet is of the same being as himself, flesh of his flesh. The Capulets' orchard is from this perspective a version of the Garden of Eden. Moreover, the Adam and Eve story is no longer something from long ago; seen from this new perspective, we are each of us Adam when we suddenly see another person as though lit from within like a torch and "flesh from my flesh." Romeo evokes one further image looking at Juliet on her balcony:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom. ...She speaks!</b><br />
<b>O speak again, bright angel! for thou art </b><br />
<b>As glorious to this night, being o'er my head,</b><br />
<b>As is a winged messenger of heaven</b><br />
<b>Unto the white-upturned wond'ring eyes</b><br />
<b>Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him</b><br />
<b>When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds</b><br />
<b>And sails upon the bosom of the air. </b>(II.ii.25-32)</blockquote>
Shakespeare is putting the image in a familiar context: From orthodox Christianity we identify an angel as a being of light, and also as a <b>"winged messenger of heaven."</b> Just as the winged Hermes in Greek mythology communicates between Olympus or Hades and our world, so do angels in Christianity communicate from heaven to earth. In the Neoplatonic ladder of being described by the Renaissance philosopher Ficino, an image well known in Shakespeare's time, angels are on the second level from the top; between spirit, i.e. God, at the top and the human soul on the third level. Angels are filled with the light of God and can transmit that light to humanity. Clearly, there is much more light here than an evil spirit would want to muster up; moreover, it is a light permeated throughout with love, love from an infinite source as Juliet articulates later in the scene: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b> Jul. My bounty is as boundless as the sea,</b><br />
<b> My love as deep; the more I give to thee,</b><br />
<b> The more I have, for both are infinite. </b>(II.ii.116-118)</blockquote>
An infinity of love and bounty, however, is more appropriately attributed to God; she, then, is a conduit of love from God to man-if not like Christ, then at least like the Virgin Mary.<br />
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Romeo's image of Juliet as a luminous angel corresponds also to descriptions of Adam and Eve In the Apocalypse of Adam, another text found at Nag Hammadi. Adam is with his son Seth, imparting secret knowledge to him about the way Eve was when he first experienced her:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>When God had created me out of the earth along with Eve your mother, I went about with her in a glory which she had seen in the aeon from which we had come forth...And we resembled the great eternal angels. For we were higher than the god who had created us and the powers with him, whom we did not know.</b> (Robinson 1988, 279)<b><br /></b></blockquote>
The "God who had created us" in Gnosticism is Yahweh, the god of the Old Testament, the dictatorial lord of a garden who plants a tree expecting his creation toobey his order not to taste it. I will say more about this god, the Gnostic demiurge, in Part II. The<b> "glory"</b> is another reference to the light around them, which comes from a higher source than their creator.<br />
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Later on in the play, after Friar Lawrence has secretly married the pair, Juliet also speaks in images of light shining in darkness. Anticipating the wedding night, she says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Jul. Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,<br />...Lovers can see to do their amorous rites<br />By their own beauties...(III.ii.5,8-9)</b></blockquote>
This is the same image of the spirit shining from within, but it is one that she specifically associates with <b>"amorous rites,"</b> i.e. sexual activities. Then she has Romeo flying to her on a great black bird:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
J<b>ul. Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night.</b><br />
<b>For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night,</b><br />
<b>whiter than new snow on a raven's back.</b><br />
<b>Come gentle night, come loving black-browed night,</b><br />
<b>Give me my Romeo… (III.ii.17-21)</b></blockquote>
First Romeo is called <b>"day,"</b> similar to Romeo's calling Juliet the sun. But he is <b>"day in night,"</b> imaged as new snow on a raven's back-- rather like the jewel on a black African's ear, as Romeo had spoke of her on first sight. This image of Romeo on a raven's back also complements Romeo's earlier image of Juliet as an angel riding a cloud. <br />
<br />
For Juliet, Romeo is the snow lying on the back of night, and the bird is the raven on whose back Romeo flies. The raven had sacred significance in the Celtic tradition. Roman writers reported that ravens were considered sacred to “Gaulish Mercury,” and that the word “lougos” in Celtic even meant “raven” (Green 1992, 135). The text <i>De Fluviis</i>, attributed apocryphally to Plutarch, relates that at the founding of Lugdunum, named for Lugh, ravens with a few white feathers in their plumage flew down from the sky. This was considered a good omen, and a shrine was built on the site (Kondrataev, 1997). <br />
<br />
Juliet’s image of white snow on a black raven is especially appropriate if, as Kondrataev (1997) has argued Lugh was a god of storms rather than the sun, and his brightness that of lightning against a dark sky. MacNeill (1962) includes in his collection one reminiscence of what old Gaeilic-speakers used to say during a storm: <b>“Lugh Long-arm’s wind is flying in the air tonight!”</b> and “<b>Yes, and the sparks of his father!”</b> This last, the informant explains, referred to sparks made when a smith shoved a hot iron bar into Balor’s eye before he had a chance to kill anyone with it (598). If the “smith” is really Lugh throwing a thunder-bolt, the story fits Kondrataev’s hypothesis. The symbolic significance, Lugh as a bringer of enlightenment to a world in dark ignorance, is as related to the Gnostic vision as the concrete image is to our play. <br />
<br />
Juliet's lines here have some of the characteristic sounds and rhythms of Christian litanies, which often had series of invocations beginning with the word “come.” An example is the Roman Catholic “Veni Sancte Spiritus,” or “Come Holy Spirit”:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Veni Sancte Spiritus Come Holy Spirit</b><br />
<b>Et emitete caelitus. And from thy celestial home</b><br />
<b>Luces tuae radium. Shine your radiance.</b><br />
<b>Veni pater pauperum Come father of the poor,</b><br />
<b>Veni dator munerum Come mother of our souls,</b><br />
<b>Veni lumen cordium… Come light of our hearts…</b><br />
(I thank Ed Smith and Steven Marshall for this reference and translation).</blockquote>
There is also a famous Roman Catholic prayer that begins<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love. </b></blockquote>
I
do not know how this prayer was adapted to the Anglican rite, but in
1707, a century later, I find the hymn
(http://cyberhymnal.org/htm/c/o/comehshd.htm):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove,<br />
With all Thy quick’ning powers;<br />
Kindle a flame of sacred love<br />
In these cold hearts of ours. </b></blockquote>
So clearly the prayer had not simply died.<br />
Imaginally, these Catholic hymns contrast the white warmth of the divine with the impoverished coldness of humanity. But Juliet' evocation of “snow on a raven’s back” is of a divine spark of human love that shines in the darkness of the world--a typical Gnostic, world-negating image. That such a presence should be located in the person of her lover, and be brought only in the dark of night, would for the orthodox Christian, if he thought about it, be the height of Luciferian heresy. <br />
<br />
Juliet’s next image is even more extravagant:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Jul. …and, when I shall die,</b><br />
<b>Take him and cut him out in little stars,</b><br />
<b>And he will make the face of heaven so fine</b><br />
<b>That all the world will be in love with night</b><br />
<b>And pay no worship to the garish sun... </b>(III.ii.21-25)</blockquote>
Juliet is not saying that Romeo should be chopped into bits when she is dead. The Elizabethans used "die" as a euphemism for sexual climax; so she is imagining Romeo turning into little stars at the height of her love, like a kind of fireworks display. An additional meaning is that it will be like the second coming, the state of timeless bliss that both sex and life after death were imagined as having. The literal meaning is only a distant third, an ironic foreboding. <br />
<br />
Perhaps to forestall the audience from supposing that Juliet actually wishes Night to kill Romeo if she dies, the Folio edition of Shakespeare changed "I" to "he" in the first line above: from <b>“…and when I shall die</b>” to <b>“…and when he shall die.”</b> In that case, people unfamiliar with the euphemism would simply think, how nice, when he dies she wants him up in the sky like a constellation, immortalized. Other people would appreciate the sexual message: In this Folio version, she is asking Night to really light Romeo's fire, metaphorically speaking, when she gives him bliss. Perhaps to emphasize Juliet's own budding sexual feelings, the Arden edition adopts the "I" of the earlier Quarto edition of the play. <br />
<br />
The sun, which here Juliet repudiates, is in Christianity an image of the second coming, and darkness is the reign of evil. So her wish that <b>"all the world will be in love with night"</b> could be seen as a call to love evil. Gnostic imagery was given a similar treatment by its enemies. But such an interpretation takes the imagery out of context. The sun here is that which shines on the world that keeps Romeo away from her, the world of Romeo's and her fathers. In the Gnostic perspective, this day world is seen from a higher perspective as an evil darkness filled with bits of divine light trapped in the dark matter of circumstances not of their own making.Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-42029707900123639542012-05-08T19:51:00.003-07:002014-02-24T01:23:34.389-08:00Sacred images of separation and unionJuliet's vision of bliss is interrupted by her nurse, from whom she learns that Romeo has killed Tybalt and has been banished from Verona. (Tybalt had insulted Romeo, to provoke a fight. Romeo declined, but Mercutio jumped in to defend Romeo's honor; Romeo’s restraint of Mercutio only served to make him defenseless against Tybalt's sword. With Tybalt dead, Romeo killed Tybalt..) Juliet is plunged into anguish. At first she thought it was because of the death of her cousin Tybalt. But she recognizes her primary emotional bond is to her husband, and that if Tybalt died, it was in order that Romeo might live. <b>"Wherefore grieve I then?"</b> she asks. Then she remembers what the nurse had said: Romeo is banished. Looking at the ropes she was about to hide so that Romeo could sneak up to her room that night, she says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b> Jul. ...Poor ropes, you are beguil'd,<br />Both you and I, for Romeo is exil'd. <br />He made you for a highway to my bed,<br />But I a maid, die maiden-widowed.<br />Come, cords, come, nurse; I'll to my wedding-bed;<br />And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead! </b>(III.ii.132-137<b>) </b></blockquote>
If Romeo leaves, she might as well be dead, because all that means anything to her will be gone. <br />
<br />
Romeo expresses the same feeling when Friar Lawrence tells him of his banishment:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom. There is no world without Verona's walls, <br />But purgatory, torture, hell itself.<br /> ... Heaven is here,<br />Where Juliet lives; and every cat and dog<br />And little mouse, every unworthy thing,<br />Live here in heaven and may look on her;<br />But Romeo may not. </b>(III.iii.17-18, 29-33)</blockquote>
And when the Friar objects and says Romeo is overreacting, Romeo tells him he has no right to talk. If he were in Romeo's situation, he too would have the right to feel as he does:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>F</b><b>riar L. Then mightst thou speak, then mightst thou tear thy hair,</b><br />
<b>And fall upon the ground, as I do now, </b><br />
<b>Taking the measure of an unmade grave... </b>(III.iii.68-70)</blockquote>
After his experience of the pleroma-fullness--of light with Juliet, a world without her, which he used to take for granted, becomes a hell to escape from. To explicate the difference between these two states of heaven and hell, let us turn to another Gnostic text from Nag Hammadi, the <i>Gospel of Philip</i>. This text says of the separation between Eve and Adam:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>When Eve was still in Adam, death did not exist. When she was separated from him death came into being. If he enters again and attains his former self, death will be no more. </b>(Robinson 1988, 150)<b> </b></blockquote>
Here death <b>"came into being"</b> when Adam and Eve were separated, i.e. when Eve was taken out of Adam's body. Orthodox Christianity, in contrast, says that death became a reality when they disobeyed God by eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Romeo and Juliet's experience is the Gnostic one. To be sure, Romeo has disobeyed the Prince's edict against fighting and is banished as a result. But banishment is death only because it means separation from Juliet. To reunite with her-and thus regain his Eden-- Friar Lawrence explains, he has to wait until the Friar can safely reveal the marriage and get the banishment lifted.<br />
<br />
Our Gnostic text takes a similar position to that of Friar Lawrence. How is it that Adam, or any of us, can regain his former completeness? The Gospel of Philip answers:<br />
<blockquote>
<b>..the woman is united to her husband in the bridal chamber. Indeed those who have united in the bridal chamber will no longer be separated. Thus Eve separated from Adam because it was not in the bridal chamber that she united with him. (Robinson 1988, 151-152)</b></blockquote>
What is the bridal chamber? As we have seen, the canonical Bible makes a few obscure mentions of it, just enough to make it respectable. It is that which Paul, Augustine, Bernard and others said was the marriage of Christ with his Church, or of the Word with the soul. But the Gospel of Philip speaks of it in other terms: it is the place where <b>"the image and the angel are united with one another"</b> (Robinson 1988, 149). Here <b>"the image"</b> simply means any ordinary human being, typified by Adam, who was made in God's image; the <b>"image"</b> then is to receive the<b> "angel,"</b> described as <b>"a male power or a female power."</b> And where is one to receive these angels or powers? The text continues: <b>"One receives them from the mirrored bridal chamber."</b> Here the bridal chamber is described as <b>"mirrored"</b> so as to indicate that the event in this world is one that mirrors another event in the upper world. This mirrored bridal chamber is then that which unites the two, the image and the angel, as <b>"the bridegroom and the bride"</b> (all quotations from Robinson 1988, 149).<br />
<br />
I think we can now see more clearly the sacred aspect of the imagery in the play. When Romeo sees Juliet as an angel, he sees in her the being of light with whom, if he unites with her, he will be complete. It is not just completeness, but transcendence and hence being beyond the world and its demands, and moreover beyond death as well, in a timeless bliss. This is what both want, a kind of indestructible union. For that, apparently, they need the bridal chamber. Juliet understands this point in a this-worldly way when she asks that Romeo arrange the wedding and then impatiently awaits its consummation. That image of the wedding, and then the night together afterward, is the image of the two becoming one. <br />
<br />
This image of the angel as expressing the transcendence of marriage is one that D. H. Lawrence uses in his novel <i>The Rainbow</i>, when at the heroine's wedding he has her father Tom Brangwen exclaim, in a kind of momentary piercing of the veil that shrouds our world, that <b>"it seems to me as a married couple makes one Angel" </b>(1943, 130). Such angels are also the primal beings that Plato in his<i> Symposium</i> had Aristophanes imagine as the original humans, before Zeus, feeling threatened by their power, split them in two, creating the sexes. A similar image appears in Jewish Kabbalistic writings, which were extant in Shakespeare's time. The <i>Zohar</i>, from 13th century Spain, describes how the female and male aspects of the godhead relate to each other: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>The Female spread out from her place and adhered to the Male side, until he moved away from his side, and she came to unite with him face to face. And when they united, they appeared as veritably one body. From this we learn that the male alone appears as half a body...and the female likewise, but when they join in union they seem as veritably one. </b>(Zohar iii 296a; quoted in Pope 1977, 164)</blockquote>
The first two sentences describe God, as a unity with male and female aspects. The last sentence is about humans, when they imitate the Godhead in marriage; in sexuality, they elevate their own status and even contribute to the power of the Godhead itself. <br />
<br />
Shakespeare would very likely have known Plato's much-cited text. Knowledge of the <i>Zohar</i> passage was more difficult, but it could have come by way of Englishmen visiting Italy, where it had been published in Hebrew (Edel 1988), Spanish Jews in exile in London or the Netherlands, or scholars anywhere. Kabbalah was in vogue, beginning with Pico della Mirandola in Italy, followed by such figures as Giordano Bruno, who visited England in the 1580's, and John Dee, Elizabeth's court astrologer.<br />
<br />
Of course Romeo and Juliet will not, after the wedding night, literally be one. Yet they seem to themselves as one, and the union is more than physical. What is it about being with another person, an ordinary human being, that suggests completeness? After all, in this world they are two separate beings. And why is it that separation seems like death? It is all a matter of what we are in the presence of, of what we see and know through here and now experience. The <i>Gospel of Philip</i> has an explanation, one that is rather mysterious unless we see it in the context of either Gnosticism or our play:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>It is not possible for anyone to see anything of the things that actually exist unless he becomes like them. This is not the way with man in the world: he sees the sun without being a sun; and he sees the heaven and the earth and all other things, but he is not these things. This is quite in keeping with the truth. But you saw something of that place and you become those things. You saw the Spirit, you became spirit. You saw Christ, you became Christ. You saw [the father, you] shall become Father. So [in this place] you see everything and [do] not [see] yourself, but [in that place] you do see yourself--and what you see you shall [become].</b> (Robinson 1988, 146-147; bracketed words in published translation.)</blockquote>
So when Romeo sees Juliet as an angel, he becomes an angel himself--he is in the angelic place; and when Juliet sees Romeo as a white being on a raven, the same is true. You enter the other world briefly when you see something from it. <br />
<br />
The text I just quoted makes another point. When you see something of the other world, what you are seeing is an aspect of yourself. This is the point that Jung (1969) made when he spoke of the animus, an unconscious male image in women, and the anima, the unconscious feminine in men. Each is an aspect of our unconscious selves that we project onto others; and when we get to know these aspects and recognize them as of ourselves, we are both making ourselves whole and becoming truly ourselves, instead of the part-selves ignorant of their other parts.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, in this world we are not always in the presence of the one on whom we have projected the angel; we need continual renewal. It is similar to the worshiper's need for the repetition of the mass or other holy service to help him or her be in a sacred space at other times. Thus separation of the lovers, even after the marriage, feels like death to them.<br />
<br />
The <i>Gospel of Philip</i>, we have seen, speaks of men uniting with female powers and women uniting with male powers. But for Gnostics the physical sex of the angel was not that important. In the Hymn of the Pearl, for example, the angelic being is portrayed as brother to the male human being in this world. In the Pistis Sophia, similarly, Jesus's counterpart is at first identified as his brother. These texts, we must remember, were written after Plato, who in his <i>Symposium</i> had Aristophanes imagine three kinds of original human pairs, male and male, male and female, and female and female. Everything said applied to all three. For Gnosticism, in relation to the bridal chamber, the human being is actually in the position of the female, whatever his or her physical sex. It is the same as in the orthodox Christian interpretation of the Song of Songs, in which the woman is held to stand for the human soul. The Gnostic bridal chamber is that place where the soul receives its light-power from above, which is then embodied in us. The <i>Gospel of Philip</i> puts it this way:<b><br /></b><br />
<blockquote>
<b>Indeed, one must utter a mystery. The Father of everything united with the virgin who came down, and a fire shone for him on that day. He appeared in the great bridal chamber. Therefore, his body came into being on that very day...</b>(Robinson 1988, 152<b>)</b></blockquote>
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When that light hits us, we are all Marys giving birth to the Christ within. To the extent that the light from above for us, in the days after Christ, is imaged as coming by way of Christ, rather than from the Father directly, we could also say that the soul receiving this light is the bride of Christ. In that sense the Gnostic agrees with Augustine in saying that the sacred marriage is that of Christ with his church. <br />
<br />
Shakespeare could not, of course, have read the <i>Gospel of Philip</i>. Nor is it likely that Augustine did. But both Augustine and the Gospel of Philip were influenced by a common source, Platonism as interpreted in the Roman Empire. Such Platonism also shaped the perspective of the Renaissance, including the myths and allegories the Platonists had adapted to their purposes.<br />
<br />
One myth that was especially popular in the Renaissance was that of Cupid and Psyche, as related by the Middle Platonist Apuleius at around the same time as the Gnostics. In this story Cupid is not the little boy we typically think of, but rather a young man. This Cupid, with his romance with the young woman Psyche, was the subject of numerous Renaissance paintings, fresco cycles, and wedding chests (Cavicchioli 2002). Engravings or at least descriptions would have reached England-the frescoes decorated buildings designed and used for occasions of state in Rome and Mantua. In addition, Apuleius’s text was available in both Latin and English. His philosophical works were included in the Latin edition, and members of Shakespeare’s circle would have appreciated the allegorical significance of the tale. <br />
<br />
There are numerous allusions to Cupid in the play, sometimes by name and sometimes as “love,” the translation of his other name Amor; such references are often followed by a reference using the pronoun “he.” They mostly are of a generic nature and need not refer to Apuleius’s tale. Yet the scene their first night at Juliet’s window is more specific, as Shakespeare scholar Mark Skavig (2000) has pointed out. I want to put that observation into a broader Renaissance context.<br />
<br />
Juliet asks how Romeo managed to get to her window. Romeo replies:<b> “With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls”</b> (II.ii.66). Renaissance representations have Cupid falling in love with Psyche at first sight, just as Romeo does. An example is a Florentine wedding chest from the 1470’s, which shows Psyche being adored by young men, while Cupid does the same from above (<b>Fig. 4</b> below; Cavviocholi 2002, 74). The winged Cupid, dispatched by his mother Venus to get rid of Psyche, has been wounded by his own arrow. Romeo similarly speaks of his “wound” caused by love (II.ii.1). The word “psyche” is Greek for “soul,” and indeed that is just what Romeo calls Juliet, saying “<b>It is my soul that calls my name”</b>(II.ii.162). <br />
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Like Juliet, Psyche at first does not know her beloved’s identity, as he comes and makes her his wife under cover of night. In Psyche’s case, Cupid has forbidden her to know his identity, and when she finds out anyway, he flees. In Juliet’s case, her lover flees when he acts like a Montague and kills his enemy-that is, when he momentarily assumes the identity he had hidden from her. Like Juliet, Psyche undergoes several trials before being reunited with her beloved, in her case including a journey to the underworld which results in her death by poisoning. As for Juliet, death, or its appearance, is what brings Psyche’s lover back. Cupid flies from his sick bed at his mother’s house to Psyche’s side An illustration is <b>Fig. 4a</b> (Cavviocholi 2002, 131), from a fresco cycle in Mantua, in a room of the Palacio Te, a palace known also as the “Sacrarium of Venus.” If Venus’s house is in Mantua, Cupid and Romeo race in from the same place!<br />
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In Psyche’s case, the story has a happy ending. Cupid asks Jupiter to
bring her to Olympus so they can be officially husband and wife. She
duly ascends to heaven, and the fruit of their union is a daughter
named Voluptas, Latin for Joy--the Joy of unity with the divine, in
Platonic allegory.<br />
<br />
Apuleius’s essay <b>De Deo Socrates</b>, which was published in the same volume as the Latin text of the tale, gives the philosophical meaning, which Cavviocholi has summarized:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>The search for a mediation between men and the perfection of a sublime and distant divinity as one of the leitmotivs of his </b>[Apuleius’s] <b>time, the goal toward which the new religious and contemporary schools of thought were striving. Apuleius’s answer to the problem is that of a Platonist, heir to the long tradition of interpretation of Plato’s <i>Symposium</i>, in which Eros is presented as a daemon, a being whose nature falls halfway between men and gods and makes a relationship between them possible. Consistent with this vision, Cupid, besides being an Olympian, is presented as the means by which Psyche will rise to heaven. </b>(2002, 43. Word in brackets added by MH) <b><br /></b></blockquote>
The affinity with the Gnostics’ conception of the “bridal chamber” is evident. In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, writers such as Boccaccio and Ficino synthesized Apuleius with Christianity. Love is ignited by the apprehension of the divine within another individual, the sight of which which transports the lover to divine heights. This doctrine was given a popular presentation in Castiliogne’s <i>The Courtier</i>, a book which enjoyed great popularity among Elizabethans. Such an appreciation applied to Romeo and Juliet would not have been lost on the educated members of Shakespeare’s audience.<br />
<br />
Romeo and Juliet certainly feel joy from their union, although Juliet's does not last long, thanks to her father’s plan to marry her to Paris. Romeo's lasts a little longer. Waking up in Mantua, he feels a "joy" occasioned by a dream he had during the night, which he thinks is prophetic of "some joyful news at hand." He reflects that:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom. .. All this day an unaccustomed spirit</b><br />
<b>Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.</b><br />
<b>I dreamt my lady came and found me dead--</b><br />
<b>Strange dream that gives a man leave to think!--</b><br />
<b>And breathed such life with kisses in my lips</b><br />
<b>That I revived and was an emperor.</b><br />
<b>Ah me, how sweet is love itself possessed</b><br />
<b>When but love's shadows are so rich in joy! </b>(V.i.4-11)</blockquote>
The dream reminds us of what she said earlier about the fireworks at Romeo's death (on the Quarto's reading, where it is he who dies, not she). After Romeo's reflection on his dream, his servant enters and tells him of seeing Juliet's funeral. Immediately Romeo knows what he is to do--he says, <b>"I defy you, stars!" </b>meaning he knows how to escape the fate that governs men's lives in this world, and which means to doom Juliet and him to separation. A person's fate, even in Shakespeare’s day, was thought to be determined or at least influenced by the positions of the planets and the zodiac at birth and throughout the person's life. In Gnosticism the planets are the particular archons that possess one. It was only by an ascent beyond the stars that one could transcend one's fate, in Gnosticism as well as in pagan cults such as Mithraism. In the context of ancient and Renaissance Neoplatonism, even orthodox Christianity presupposed the rule of fate, unless one was saved by Christ. In Romeo's case, I think we must suppose that he sees himself dead in Juliet's tomb, and Juliet's spirit, which is still nearby, transforming him in a triumph over fate. Juliet for him takes the role of Christ as the liberating power from above. In Gnostic terms, he will be united with his angel by transforming to spirit, his majestic form, upon which the stars have no power, by a suicide which complements what he imagines has been her choice of suicide over separation. <br />
<br />
This philosophical context gives an extra meaning to Romeo’s phrase <b>"love's shadows"</b> in his reflection on his dream. In the context of the dream, the phrase refers to the image of union that was contained in the dream: An image is the shadow of the thing it is an image of, a thing without substance but suggesting a reality of which it is the shadow. If this thing without substance is sweet, he is saying, how much sweeter is the real thing. <br />
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In the context of Juliet's death, and Romeo's impending suicide, the phrase takes on another meaning; it becomes a reference to Plato's allegory of the cave in <i>The Republic</i>. Plato speaks of things in the material world as shadowy copies of a higher reality in the perfect world of Forms, like images projected onto a cave wall of wooden cutouts moving at the front of the cave, which themselves are copies of a Reality outside the cave. Juliet's and his earthly love is a shadowy image of their true love in the eternal realm. The language of the Gospel of Philip is similar. The <b>“image”</b> of the bridal chamber is a shadow and harbinger of divine union in the world beyond the archons. In this Platonic framework, shared equally by Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, Romeo's earthly love for Juliet is the love of his divine spark on earth for its counterpart in the heavenly realm, which will become complete only with his earthly death. (This Platonic play with <b>"shadow"</b> happens again in Shakespeare, to make different points, when Hamlet speaks with his school friends and the Fool with Lear.)<br />
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Given the dream, Romeo--like Juliet before the wedding night--is eager with expectation; he is already imaginatively in the world beyond the stars, in union with his angel. He refers to this cheerfulness again in the crypt as he looks at the lifeless Juliet:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom....How oft when men are at the point of death</b><br />
<b>Have they been merry! which their keepers call</b><br />
<b>A lightening before death. O, how may I </b><br />
<b>Call this a lightening? O my love! my wife! (V.iii.88-91)</b></blockquote>
The <b>"lightening"</b> that Romeo experiences (spelled with and without an "e," depending on the edition) suggests both brilliant light and lightness, lack of weight. In his enlightened state, he has detached from the world, in anticipation of his reuniting in death with Juliet, in a bridal chamber after death, of which the earthly bridal chamber was an anticipation. Compare the feeling here with the end of the <i>Gospel of Philip</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
E<b>very one who will enter the bridal chamber will kindle the light, just as in the marriages which are [.....] happen at night. That fire [....] </b>(burns?--MH) <b>only at night and is put out. But the mysteries of that marriage are perfected rather in the day and the light. Neither that day nor its light ever sets. If anyone becomes a son of the bridal chamber, he will receive the light....And none shall be able to torment a person like this even while he dwells in the world...The world has become the eternal realm (aeon), for the eternal realm is fullness for him. This is the way it is; it is revealed to him alone, not hidden in the darkness and the night, but hidden in a perfect day and a holy light. </b>(Robinson 1988, 160)</blockquote>
This, it seems to me is what Romeo experiences coming into the crypt, the<b> "lightening."</b> This text also suggests that the spiritual bridal chamber has something in common with the ordinary marriages, the ones that <b>"happen at night." </b>The latter are images of the former, which are in turn images of that perfect marriage <b>"of the day and the light."</b> Thus ordinary marriage, even though as fleeting as an individual life, still has something sacred about it, as a tertiary image of the divine--just as in the Allegory of the Cave. <br />
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<b>"Great is the mystery of marriage!" </b>exclaims the <i>Gospel of Philip</i>; later it offers an analysis of that mystery, as pertaining to the couple's desire to hide their concourse from the world:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>No [one can] know when [the husband] and the wife have intercourse with one another except the two of them. Indeed marriage in the world is a mystery for those who have taken a wife. If there is a hidden quality to the marriage of defilement, how much more is the undefiled marriage a true mystery! It is not fleshly but pure. It belongs not to desire but to the will. It belongs not to the darkness or the night but to the day and the light. (Robinson 1988, 158; interpolations by translator) </b></blockquote>
Romeo in the crypt is approaching this light, the <b>"lightening"</b> in both senses, an easing of the mind and a flash of light from beyond this world, as though thrown by some sky-god.. His new marriage, very much like that of Christ on the cross, is not of desire, that is, physical pleasure, but rather the very opposite, something which must be conceived by the mind and willed in accordance with that conception. As Romeo sees such a union, it is by a conscious decision to die, which he does by swallowing poison. In this same vein is Juliet's will-power later, withstanding pain and the resistance of her bone as she plunges Romeo's dagger (a phallic symbol on a higher level than sex) into her heart! The pain is that of Christ's marriage bed of the cross, in Augustine's analysis of the sacred marriage, in which Christ's place is now taken by Juliet's angelic counterpart, Romeo.<br />
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Let us go back to Romeo in the crypt. Once he is actually there, looking at Juliet's body, he begins to have doubts about whether he is having a lightening or not. The problem is that Juliet looks so lifelike: "Why art thou yet so fair?" he asks himself. Then it occurs to him: Death has claimed her as his own and so keeps her beautiful for his own pleasure:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom. ...Shall I believe</b><br />
<b>That unsubstantial Death is amorous,</b><br />
<b>And that the lean abhorred monster keeps</b><br />
<b>Thee here in dark to be his paramour? (V.iii.102-105)</b></blockquote>
It is the "death and the maiden" theme, death getting the maiden as his bride. Or in Gnostic terms, it is the separation, which gives Juliet and hence both of them to death. As Romeo says, in answer to his previous question:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom. For fear of that, I still will stay with thee,</b><br />
<b>And never from this place of dim night</b><br />
<b>Depart again. (V.iii.106-108)</b></blockquote>
To save her from the unwanted groom, he must be with her; he must die himself to give her life.<br />
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Despite the Christ-like gesture, this commitment to some bridal chamber after death seems an unchristian idea--it is not the marriage with Christ that is to save her from death, it is the marriage with Romeo. But on the spiritual level, perhaps it is the Christ in Romeo that has married her. It is the one who has pledged himself totally to the other, with not even a "til death do us part": The death of a spouse does not cancel the contract. And when Juliet dies to be with Romeo, we see that it does not cancel the contract for her, either. "He who gives his life, so shall he save it; but he who preserves his life shall lose it," says the Gospel of John. That much Gnostic and exoteric Christianity agree on. It is in anticipation of that sacrifice that Romeo feels the <b>"lightening"</b> that I spoke of earlier. <br />
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With his commitment to the final sacrifice, I submit, Romeo, and later Juliet as well, are also feeling that holy bridal chamber of which the Gnostics spoke. They each die for the sake of the other. And notice that Romeo is not saying that in this way they will be in heaven. It is so unselfish, he is fully prepared to be excluded from heaven, in fact he even expects it:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom. O, here</b><br />
<b>Will I set up my everlasting rest,</b><br />
<b>And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars</b><br />
<b>From this world-wearied flesh. </b>(V.iii.109-112)</blockquote>
Suicide, after all, is a forbidden act in the Judeo-Christian tradition; this was true in Gnosticism and orthodox Christianity alike. Yet it is the fantasy of a unity which makes immortal that still governs this scene. The myth of Psyche’s ascension to heaven to be Cupid’s lawful bride is there, enhancing the tragedy of its non-fulfillment. And the fruit of this union is not joy but grief. Yet the myth of the Sacred Marriage, in which the sacrifice of the couple brings fruitfulness to the land, still governs the play, as the families in Verona finally end their feud and put the wasteland of death behind them.Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-52392126015631871202012-05-08T19:50:00.004-07:002014-02-24T01:28:35.519-08:00Separation, union, and transcendence<b>E. Separation, union, and transcendence in the play and in the<i> Rosarium </i>alchemical series</b><br />
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There is another a way of seeing the mythic aspects of the play that would not have been foreign to Shakespeare’s audience, an extension of the Platonistic-Hermetic framework I have been discussing. This is by means of alchemical "emblems," pictures, together with a motto, illustrating a theme. Most relevant for our purposes is the <i>Rosarium Philosophorum,</i> published in 1558 at Frankfurt-am-Main. Its German origin does not belie influence on Shakespeare, because English noblemen often visited Protestant princes on diplomatic missions, and could easily have brought the book back with them, to be shared with others. In any case, I am only trying to communicate the spirit of the times. The first 10 of its 20 emblems were made famous by Jung in his <i>Psychology of the Transference</i> (1966, originally published 1946), where he used them to elucidate the romance-like relationship of analyst to patient. <br />
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The first emblem shows a fountain emptying into a basin or bath, symbolic of the work's container, the soul and the body. The second and third show a King and Queen facing each other, a scene reminiscent of the man and the woman in the Song of Songs (<b>Fig. 5</b>).<br />
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In the fourth, the pair are in the bath. In the fifth, the pair is lying in the bath entwined in each other; the emblem's label is <i>Coniunctio</i>, or <i>Coitus</i> (<b>Fig. 5a</b>).<br />
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A variant, number 11 in the series, shows the pair with wings but in the same position, only slightly apart in the groin; the Lady's hand seems to be holding him back (<b>Fig. 5b</b>). Although much later in the <i>Rosarium</i> series, Jung places it with the other. This emblem is labeled <i>fermentatio</i>--the couple’s love is fermenting, rather than expressing itself actively. The man is <i>verschlossen</i>, the verse says--blocked or shut in. Next the bath becomes a tomb, and the pair now one person with two heads (<b>Fig. 5c</b>); it is the <i>Conceptio</i>, or <i>Putrefactio</i>.<br />
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Next the soul ascends to heaven (the <i>extractio</i>), then rain comes down onto the unified body, and the soul returns (the <i>mundificatio</i>). The tenth (<b>Fig. 5d</b>) shows the two-headed person rising aloft, with a single pair of wings. <br />
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Much of this imagery relates well to the play. The goal is to overcome the separation of the male and the female, as separate individuals and as aspects of the complete personality. This is begun in the simple <i>coniunctio</i> of emblem 5, which depicts ordinary sexual intercourse, which occurs on Romeo and Juliet’s wedding night. It occurred verbally the previous night, twice in fact, at the ball and at her window. After each intercourse, verbal and sexual, they separate, and their love continues within the two of them, fermenting. The wings in the variant of number 5 (Jung calls it 5a; it is our 5b) suggest spiritualization. (A Tantric-like stopping or slowing down of intercourse once begun is also possible.) Similarly Romeo and Juliet each is for the other an angel, which the wings signify. The <i>putrefactio</i>, death or deathlike sleep in the tomb, is simplistically the state following climax. But it is also the meditation needed for soul to separate from body and create a new, spiritual being. It suggests Romeo’s view of death as what will free them from the tyranny of the stars in this world, and also Juliet’s sleep. The new life, their unity in the tomb, is also that of the hermaphroditic body, the rising of the king-queen angel, the immortal being that joins both sexes as in the visions of Plato, Gnosticism, the <i>Zohar</i>, and D. H. Lawrence quoted earlier. Even this achievement is not the end; the <i>Rosarium</i> has nine more emblems, which Jung interprets as the continuation of the individuation process.<br />
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The transformation of bath into tomb relates to the psychological process, and the play, in several ways. First, it suggests the "death" aspect of the "little death" of orgasm, and its confusion of boundaries between individuals, followed by lassitude afterwards, and, in favorable conditions, a continued suspension of separateness which slowly dissipates. This is the outcome of the "marriages at night": they are not eternal, as the <i>Gospel of Philip</i> reminded us. Second, the new image of the tomb suggests the life that Romeo and Juliet experience after their wedding night, in sorrow at separation, which both imagine in terms of death. Here the rain that falls in the later emblem is their tears. They are separate physically but not in their imaginations. <br />
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More generally, the tomb on this level displays part of the course of any project that reaches out to a meaningful object. First there is a sense of aliveness and meaning, and a feeling of close connection with the object. But then when the project, defined in a particular way, has gone as far as it, or outside circumstances, will allow, there is a loss of the former aliveness-a <i>putrefactio</i> follows the <i>coniunctio</i>. In this case the rain is not just sorrow but also a process of transcending the old project, an <i>extractio</i> from it, and then a returning to earth, <i>mundificatio</i>, followed by the appearance of a new project or system of meaningful reaching out which has internalized the old one, in a sense combined it within one’s own being. Both before and after this appearance, there is a <i>fermentatio</i>, in which the internalization incubates and the new project is born. At least, this is how the process should work--we, like our lovers, often get stuck at one stage or another. <br />
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On the stage we see Romeo and Juliet's bodily reunion, ironically in her tomb, which the <i>Rosarium’s</i> image of the hermaphrodite in the bath or tomb suggests. At the same time the opposite ending is implied, the one desired by the lovers in choosing death, that of their eternal spiritual union, suggested by the winged two-headed king-queen rising in triumph. For us, too, an essential goal is the death of old divisions in the soul and the establishment of a higher unity. With Jung, I analyze the completeness of which the Gnostics spoke, and the alchemists drew, as a unity between the conscious and the unconscious, to which the anima or animus, projected onto a loved other, is a bridge. This projection is also the ray of spiritual light which our receptive, feminine-imaged consciousness receives from an unconscious beyond vastly more comprehensive than the ego. Jung points out that the whole process of contemplating the emblems, together with the accompanying text, describes one individual's experience, not two. Other people nonetheless are indispensable, as the mirror in which we see our unconscious aspects. In an object of romantic love, we see an aspect of ourselves to be integrated. The result is not necessarily a cessation of love for the other, but a recognition of how each is in the other, a recognition that changes and develops. <br />
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Our lovers, unfortunately, have neither read Jung on the <i>Rosarium</i> nor are thinking of their love in terms of Gnostic spirituality; so they are not aware that in loving the other they are loving a projection of which the essential part is still alive in themselves; nor do they suppose that as a result of their marriage, as an image of the one in heaven, they have conceived the Christ. As a result, when the other dies it seems to them that the most important part of themselves has died, and there is nothing to do but follow that part to wherever it has gone. Their tragedy is their ignorance: not just Romeo's ignorance that Juliet was not dead, but the ignorance on both their parts that their spiritual life on earth, or their psychological individuation as free human beings, had just begun.Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-6553579255372047572012-05-08T19:50:00.002-07:002014-02-24T01:51:57.487-08:00The troubadour alba and the play<b>PART TWO--THE DEMIURGE AND ITS POSSESSIVENESS TOWARD THE SOUL, IN <i>ROMEO AND JULIET</i>, 13TH CENTURY VERONA, AND EARLIER POETRY</b><br />
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<b>A. The play in relation to the troubadour alba. </b><br />
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So far this analysis of the play, while being illuminated by Gnostic sources, is not specifically Gnostic, as opposed to Platonic or Neoplatonic, a philosophy which shares with Gnosticism the view that the liberation of one's earthly spirit is by following one's yearning for unity with one's angelic counterpart. But there is another aspect of the Gnostic picture, to which I have referred in passing, namely, the archons and their attempts to possess the spirit, symbolized by the "luminous Epinoia" who flees the body of the human Eve so as to escape being raped. This act also keeps her from being "known" by Adam--until somehow she manages to conceive Seth with him, in his old age. The archons are uniquely Gnostic; all that Platonism has in their place is featureless matter, distorting our image of the Good with shadows. <br />
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Now we might ask, what in the play corresponds to the demiurge and its archons, psychologically the autonomous complexes--greed, lust, envy, domination, laziness, and so on--that tempt and possess the soul and so cause the loss of connection to spirit? One is tempted to say that the lovers' passion is itself a temptation of the flesh, but I do not think so. Their devotion is to each other, not to any selfish lusts. Their total commitment to each other, even beyond the grave, is what makes them so noble. <br />
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The answer, of course, is the Capulets, Juliet's father and all her relatives, who hate the Montagues and do whatever they can to obstruct Juliet’s own yearnings, the father by decreeing who she shall marry and the others, typified by Tybalt, by seeking to kill Romeo for even daring to attend the Capulets’ ball. What is especially interesting is just how Shakespeare imagines the Capulets’ effect on the couple, from the first clandestine meeting at Juliet's window, where Juliet fears for Romeo's life, to their last meeting in the crypt.<br />
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There is one meeting between the lovers that we have not looked at, the last one in which they actually talk with each other. This is at the end of the wedding night, with the birds chirping in the orchard. First Romeo says that the sound of the lark means that dawn is near and he must leave. Juliet insists that it is the nightingale, not the lark. Romeo says in effect, have it your way--so what if I'm killed, I'd rather be here. Then Juliet has to admit the truth and urge Romeo to go, while cursing the lark. As he goes, the nurse knocks on her door to say that her mother is coming. I will discuss the individual lines in a moment; but first I need to lay some groundwork.<br />
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As many scholars (e.g. Bloom 2000) have pointed out, the interchange takes the form of a type of medieval song, called in French the abaude, in English the dawn song, which in its generic sense is about lovers either parting or meeting at dawn. In its classic form, the troubadour alba (Provencale for dawn), the lovers almost invariably are parting at dawn, to avoid being caught by the lady’s Lord, usually her husband but sometimes her father. In a sense the whole play, in that its theme is true love conducted at the risk of death at the hands of the girl’s family, conceptually revolves around the theme of the alba.<br />
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That Shakespeare may have meant to evoke the alba specifically is suggested not only by the theme but by numerous references to dawn in the play. In the first scene, Romeo’s relatives talk about Romeo’s return at dawn from melancholy nighttime wanderings. The next night, the lovers at. Juliet’s window part before dawn, with its light that could betray them. The next night, after Romeo and Juliet consummate their marriage, Romeo leaves at dawn. The next dawn is when the Capulets discover Juliet apparently dead. At the next one, Romeo awakes from his dream. The play ends at the fifth dawn, with the couple dead in the crypt. <br />
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Another signifier of dawn is the time all this takes place. <b>“A fortnight and odd days”</b> before August 1 is about July 14, which in the Julian calendar used then corresponds to July 25 in today’s Gregorian calendar. (In 1582, the year it went into effect in Catholic countries, it was 10 days ahead of the Julian Calendar still used in England.) This is roughly the time when the
sun moves from the sign of Cancer to that of Leo. As Stavig has observed
(2000), the six signs ending in Cancer are all night signs,.and the other six, starting with Leo, day signs. The significance for us is that if we consider the year as a single day, from sundown to sundown, then the main action of the play occurs at dawn, at the point of conjunction between sun (Leo, August) and moon (Cancer, July)..<br />
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Another point is that the two signs on either side, Leo and Cancer, are governed by the Sun and the Moon respectively, which in the Song of Songs, its imagery suggests, are the mythic personas of the couple, imagery which we have seen continued to be used in alchemy. The Song of Songs, a literary ancestor of both the medieval dawn song and Shakespeare’s plays, is itself a dawn song, as Hatto (1966) noticed, including it in his anthology of dawn songs. The question remains, however, whether it is a song of parting or one of coming together. I shall discuss this question and why it is important in a later section.<br />
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In view of all this, let us look at symbolic and philosophic parallels between the medieval dawn song and Shakespeare’s play. The line I wish to follow is one first taken in the late 1930’s by de Rougemont (1956). His remarks were quite brief, perhaps too brief, because most scholars since then have not been convinced. My treatment might seem over-long to some, but it is meant to counteractt a half-century of neglect.<br />
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The troubadours, who perfected the dawn song as a poetic form and called it the alba, flourished first in what is now southern France, then spread to northern Spain and northern Italy, in the 11th through 13th centuries. There is considerable overlap between these areas and the areas in which Catharism, the Gnosticism of the Middle Ages, was in the ascendancy at the same time. Both especially flourished in Languedoc, the area just north of the eastern and central Pyrenees Mountains. What caused the Cathars’ decline was the so-called "Albigensian Crusade" directed by the Pope and the King of France against the Cathars and the Provencale-speaking lords who protected them. Over 20 years and more, Languedoc was laid waste; perhaps a million people died. Annexed to France, this formerly rich and gracious land never recovered. Troubadours and Cathars alike fled to Spain and Italy or died holding their ground.<br />
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What is relevant about the alba for us is that interpreted in a certain way, with a certain double meaning, it duplicates the situation of the Cathars, who sought union with the divine outside the Roman Catholic Church. This meaning would have been clear to the troubadours' audiences, who would have been quite familiar with Catharism. We have already seen one half of this conception, the striving for unity with the divine. The other half is evading the snares of the false but tyrannical demiurge. This is where interpretation shifts from the relatively safe mysticism of St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila into heresy. (The Renaissance Neoplatonists like Ficino on the whole managed to evade the issue.) <br />
<br />
The classical Languedoc alba took the form of a dialogue between two out of three characters: a knight, his lady, and a watchman. Sometimes birds substitute for the watchman, especially the lark, or a woman of lower birth who is a confidant of the lady. In<i> Romeo and Juliet</i>, the nurse and the friar both take the watchman role. In the alba scene, the lark is explicitly mentioned, and the nurse is implicit, with her knock of warning at the end. Then when the nurse defends Juliet's marrying her father's choice Paris, she is no longer trusted by Juliet, and Friar Lawrence has the watchman role, enacted in the macabre setting of the crypt. <br />
<br />
In the classical alba, the lady is married to a rich and powerful lord, who will kill the lovers apart if he finds out. It is he that the watchman watches for. The alba celebrates the joy of the knight and the lady together and the vigilance of the watchman. This celebration of adulterous love, which is at the heart of the cult of courtly love, was condemned by the Inquisition in 1277. After that, either the lady had to be unmarried, the lover had to be clearly spelled out as Christ, or the poet had to be retelling a story that was already traditional, such as the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Arturian legend.<br />
<br />
All of this, however, is simply to look at these songs on a literal level. There are indicators that we are not always to stop on that level. In some songs the lord is called the <i>gilos</i>, Provencale for "jealous one." For example, take the last stanza of an anonymous Provencale alba:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b> Beloved Lord Steven, go, Amicx N Esteves, via, </b><br />
<b> for I shall remain yours, Qu’ieu remanh vostr’amia</b><br />
<b> and if the jealous one comes Que si’l gilos venia,</b><br />
<b> I have great fear Gran paor ai</b><br />
<b> and great terror E gran esmai</b><br />
<b> that he will do us villainy. Que’ns fezes vilania. </b>(Sigal 1996, 89)</blockquote>
<b>"Gilos,"</b> i.e. <b>"jealous one," </b>is the same word that the Vulgate Bible applied to Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament. This God is fearful indeed, as indicated by such punishments as the flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the slaughter by Moses of those who worshiped the Golden Calf. The double reference, to the husband and the God, would not have been lost on someone living in the Cathar milieu of that time and place. For Cathars there is an additional point, that to hold up the Old Testament God as an ideal is to defend a cruel tyranny that denies a person's right to choose how he or she shall worship--or who to love. And just as the god of Genesis punished Adam and Eve and all their descendants for following just once the advice of the serpent, whom some Gnostics considered a representative of the true God, so will the Catholic Church do <b>"villainy"</b> to people who have heeded the talk of heretics.<br />
<br />
Such a view of the Church and of its god would not have been lost on Shakespeare's audience. Fewer than ten years earlier, Protestant (and thus to Catholics heretical) England had had to fight for its survival against Catholic Spain's Armada. Before that, it had had to endure Catholic Queen "Bloody" Mary's burnings of Protestants. The play secularizes qualities of such a God without mentioning it or the Church by name. (In fact Queen Elizabeth's God was almost as Jehovah-like, against Catholics and other suspected plotters, as Mary’s, but it was not persecuting the play's audience.) The fearsomeness of the Lord comes through in Lord Capulet's tirade when his daughter will not marry the man of his choosing: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Cap. Hang thee, young baggage! disobedient wretch!</b><br />
<b>I tell thee what: Get thee to church o' Thursday,</b><br />
<b>Or never after look me in the face...</b><br />
<b>Graze where you will, you shall not house with me...</b><br />
<b>An you be mine, I'll give you to my friend;</b><br />
<b>An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,</b><br />
<b>For, by my soul, I'll ne'er acknowledge thee,</b><br />
<b>Nor what is mine shall never do thee good. (III.v.161-196)</b></blockquote>
Capulet here is of course an example of the hypocritical father who thinks he is acting for his child's own good, but whose actions reflect his own needs and values and rather than any knowledge of his daughter and her feelings. His angry tirade parallels the Lord God of Genesis banishing his creation to its own devices. Just as Jehovah banished Eve and her mate from the Garden of Eden for their disobedience, so will the one who takes the role of Jehovah in the family eject Juliet from her privileged life should she disobey her father and place her devotion elsewhere, even to follow her own heart. <br />
<br />
So the gilos in Romeo and Juliet's alba is on one level her father, and on another the God of Genesis, whom Gnostics called the demiurge. In one respect this alba differs from the troubadour alba: the gilos is father instead of husband. Does this difference matter?<br />
<br />
I think it was for good reason that the troubadours insisted that the lady actually be married to the jealous one rather than being his daughter or fiancee. People who considered Catharism as their faith had themselves been brought up as Catholics, or apparent Catholics, and would have continued to attend Catholic mass to avoid suspicion of heresy. As Catholics, they had recited the Apostle's Creed and given many other pledges of their loyalty to the Catholic God, starting with baptism as infants. It was not possible to renounce such pledges and still live in the community; the Church would have regarded renunciation as evidence of heresy. Cathar priests, or <i>perfecti,</i> were prepared to live in the woods or in disguise as itinerant workers in one town after another; thus their identity remained hidden from the Church. But that was not expected of believers, the <i>credentes</i>. Hence the Cathar faithful, <i>credentes</i>, lived two lives, one during the day and the other at night when behind closed doors they dared to worship according to their hearts. At night they broke the vows they made during the day.<br />
<br />
In a sense Juliet's marriage is indeed an illicit one, comparable to the Cathar <i>credente's</i> relationship to his religion. Like the Cathar's faith, Juliet's marriage is secret and must be so, if she is to not suffer a fate comparable to that of a Cathar <i>credente</i> convicted of honoring Cathar ways: that of being stripped of all property and protection and reduced to the status of pariah. The marriage transgresses the rules of the patriarchal family, in which the father chooses or at least approves the daughter's choice of a husband. It is this kind of marriage which the cult of courtly love undermined and which the troubadours sang against.<br />
<br />
The troubadours, naturally, did not advertise any particular secret meanings for their verses. There was no need to invite persecution. They simply encouraged people to make a variety of interpretations: <b>"The more interpretations the better, as long as they are good,"</b> one troubadour advised (Kendrick 1988, 19). One of the most famous troubadours, Giraut de Bornelh, refers in one poem, according to Burgwinkle (1990, 25) <b>"to the fact that he previously wrote songs that were hard to interpret (trobar clus),"</b> in other words songs with multiple meanings. This is in a song that is rather obscure itself! <br />
<br />
With that comment from de Bornelh in mind, let us turn to a famous alba of his, to bring out its <b>"trobar clus" </b>aspect, which I believe will prove highly relevant to the play. I will begin with the first and third stanzas. In both, the watchman is singing to the knight:<br />
<br />
<b>Reis glorios, verais lums e clartatz</b> <b> </b><br />
<b>Deus poderos, Senher, si a vos platz</b><br />
<b>Al meu copanh siatz fizels aiuda </b><br />
<b>Qu’en no lo vi, pos la nocha fo venguda</b><br />
<b> Et ades sera l’alba!</b><br />
<b> ...</b><br />
<b>Bel companho, en chantan vos apel;</b><b></b><br />
<b>no dormatz plus, qu’eu </b><b>auch chanter</b><b> l’auzel </b><br />
<b>Que vai queren lo jorn per lo boschatge </b><br />
<b>Et ai paor que’l gilos vos assatge,</b><br />
<b> </b><b> Et ades sera l’alba!</b><br />
<br />
<b>I. Glorious king, true light and brightness, </b><br />
<b>Powerful God, Lord, if you please, </b><br />
<b>to my companion be a faithful aid, </b><br />
<b>For I have not seen him since the night has come <br /> and soon it will be dawn! <br />...<br />III. Fair friend, in singing I call you:</b><br />
<b>sleep no longer, for I hear the bird</b><b> </b><b>sing </b><br />
<b>who goes seeking day through the wood,</b> <b> and I fear the the jealous one will attack you, <br /> and soon it will be dawn! </b><br />
<b> </b>(Sigal 1996, 148-149)<b><br /></b><br />
<br />
About the first stanza, one might ask a question (Saville, 1972): How can someone expect to pray to the God who has proscribed adultery, that He protect the adulterers from harm? De Rougemont (1956, 87) suggested an answer: The watchman is not praying to that god at all. Rather, the phrase "true light" in the first line suggests that there is a "false light"; this would be the god on the side of jealous husbands, the Gnostics’ demiurge. <br />
<br />
For the Cathars, the adjective "true," as in "true god" or "true light," designated their god, higher in power and knowledge than the Catholics' god. Although there are very few surviving Cathar texts from which to cite examples, one is a prayer which Nelli has reproduced: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Holy Father, Just God</b> [Provencale, Dieu dreyturier]<b> of the good spirits, thou who art never deceived, who never errs, nor lies, nor loses his way, nor doubts: for fear of dying in the world of the alien god </b>[Dieu estranh]<b>, as we are not of this world, and the world is not of us, give us to know what thou knowest, and to love what thou lovest. </b>(Nelli 1976, 38-39. My translation from Nelli's French version.)</blockquote>
The prayer is addressed to the <b><i>Dieu dreyturier</i></b>, in French <i>Dieu juste</i>, meaning either legitimate or just God, as opposed, Nelli says in a footnote, <b>"to the other God, unjust (or illegitimate) and bad."</b> The one praying asks not to <b>"die in the world of the alien god,"</b> the <i>Dieu estranh</i>, <i>Dieu etrange</i> in French, another term for the illegitimate God, the false light. This distinction clearly corresponds to the older contrast, reflected in the Nag Hammadi texts, between the God of All and the demiurge.<br />
<br />
In praying to the<b> "true light,"</b> the watchman is in effect invoking the god of "true love," as opposed to false love, of which the Lady's husband is the earthly model. Courtly love thus corresponds nicely to the Cathar creed. In Languedoc as elsewhere in the medieval world, marriage was a matter arranged by the fathers to promote their goals. The husband then had the right and even the obligation to use the wife for the purpose of creating and raising offspring to continue his line. The lover, however,was one who was chosen by the lady alone after passing many trials of his love. The situation parallels the pilgrim who surmounts many difficulties to arrive at the holy shrine, or the mystic who overcomes visions of demons so as to be in union with his god. Similarly, the knight attains the object of his desire, to be at one with his lady, with the result not the birthing of children but the rebirth of their own spirits on a higher plane.<br />
<br />
In stanza III of de Bornelh's song, besides mentioning the gilos the troubadour also refers to "the bird," which "goes seeking day through the wood." In the Catholic church, the bird of the day is the rooster, whose crowing at dawn is symbolic of Christ's ministry. Village churches often put a rooster at the top of their steeples instead of a cross for that reason, and hymns used the same symbol. The day here is a symbol for God or the Second Coming. For example, a well-known Latin hymn written by Prudentius in the fourth century had the following as its opening stanza:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>The bird, the messenger of dawn, Ales diei nuntius</b><br />
<b>Sings out the light is near, lucem propinquam praecinit;</b><br />
<b>And Christ, the rouser of our minds, nos excitator mentium</b><br />
<b>Now calls us back to life. iam Christus ad vitam vocat. </b><br />
(Saville 1972, 68)</blockquote>
Here is the same symbolism of light, dark and the bird, the song's "messenger of the dawn." <br />
<br />
For the troubadours, however, the "bird who goes seeking the day through the wood" is not the rooster but the lark. The rooster, which cannot fly and just struts around guarding his hens until he gets eaten, is hardly a fitting symbol of the troubadours' lofty ideal. They admired the lark, which not only flies toward heaven but also seems to sing for joy as it cavorts in the air. Bernat de Ventadorn used this image to great effect in the first stanza of one of his loveliest songs:<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b> When I see the lark moving Can vei la lauzeta mover</b><br />
<b> its wings joyfully against the light, de joi sas alas contra-l rai,</b><br />
<b> forgetting itself and letting itself fall because of que s'oblid'e-s laissa chazer</b><br />
<b> the sweetness which rushes to its heart, per la doussor c'al cor li vai,</b><br />
<b> alas! I feel such envy ai! tan grans enveya me'en ve</b><br />
<b> of those whom I see rejoicing decui qu'eu veya jauzion,</b><br />
<b> that I wonder my heart mera villhas ai, car desse</b><br />
<b> does not at once melt away with longing. lo cor de dezirer no-m fon.</b><br />
<b> </b>(From liner notes to "Proensa," compact disc by Paul Hillier et al, 1988)<br />
<br />
From this beginning, it is not yet clear of what kind of joy the poet is envious. Light, we know, is a symbol of the spiritual; the lark could thus be seen as moving in response to a ray of divine light, and the poet could be envying those who rejoice in the spirit, which he himself thirsts to feel. From this perspective, the second verse might seem something of a letdown, for we learn that his heaviness is due to unrequited love. But the earlier ambiguity only serves to ennoble and lift up the troubadour's love to the level of the divine.<br />
<br />
I have not seen a Provencale alba referring specifically to the lark; but the image does appear in an anonymous French dawn song a century or so later. The Lady recounts how she and her lover played together in the woods all night until the sky turned gray, continuing: .<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>And the lark, arising, sang: E ke l’alowe chantait </b><br />
<b>As if to say, "Lovers, away," Ke dit: “Amins, alons an,”</b><br />
<b>And he responded softly: Et il respont doucement:</b><br />
<b> "It isn't nearly day “Il n’est mie jours,</b><br />
<b> Sweet noble heart, Savourez au cors gent,</b><br />
<b> So help me love, Si m’ait amors, </b><br />
<b> The lark lies to us." L’alowette nos mant.” </b><br />
(Sigal 1996, 43)</blockquote>
Here the <b>“lark arising"</b> takes on the role of the watchman; the lark's song corresponds to the warning which the watchman sings. In the next stanza, the lady recalls her final embraces with the knight, and the knight repeats his refrain, the context making it increasingly clear that the knight does not believe what he is saying; he is simply expressing his regret at having to part. <br />
<br />
Both the image of the lark and the use of denial as an expression of regret occur in Romeo and Juliet's own alba, as their wedding night is ending. Juliet begins by saying to Romeo:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Jul. Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.</b><br />
<b>It was the nightingale and not the lark </b><br />
<b>That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear. </b>(III.v.1-3)</blockquote>
I have not said anything yet about the nightingale. I suspect this was a conventional troubadour symbol: Marie de France, at the court of Henry II of England in Aquitane, bordering Languedoc, composed a poem called "<b>The Nightingale,”</b> which suggests its meaning (Camille 1998, 9). A lady, when her lord is out, spends her evenings on her balcony, looking at a young man who lives opposite, who also looks at her. One night the lord comes in early, and he asks what she was doing out there. She says she likes to listen to the nightingale, which indeed does sing all night. The lord goes outside and soon brings back something and throws it at his lady’s feet. It is a nightingale, strangled by the lord. It is clear that the nightingale symbolizes the lover, who sings courtly songs to his lady at night. The lark, in contrast, begins his song just before dawn.<br />
<br />
Hence Juliet's reference to the nightingale: they are still in the time of love. Romeo responds, more realistically: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom. It was the lark, the herald of the morn, </b>
<br />
<b> no nightingale;... </b>(III.v.6-7)</blockquote>
and he points to other evidence:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>...Look, love, what envious streaks </b><br />
<b>Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east. </b><br />
<b>Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day </b><br />
<b>Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. </b><br />
<b>I must be gone and live, or stay and die. </b>(III.v.7-11)</blockquote>
He seems to be referring to the red streaks which often appear before sunrise, and the fading of the stars.<br />
<br />
This sequence of images reflects a long tradition of conventional signs for dawn, which I shall discuss in a moment. Right now I want to focus on the lovers' game about the lark. Juliet persists:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Jul. Yond light is not day-light, I know it, I;... </b><br />
<b>Therefore stay yet; thou need'st not to be gone. (III.v.12,16)</b></blockquote>
<br />
So Romeo plays the same game:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Rom. Let me be ta'en, let me be put to death; </b><br />
<b>I am content, so thou wilt have it so.</b><br />
<b>I'll say yon grey is not the morning's eye... </b><br />
<b>How is't, my soul? Let's talk; it is not day. (III.v.17-19,25)</b></blockquote>
But this game is no good unless someone takes the other side, the practical role. Juliet concedes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Jul. It is, it is! hie hence, be gone, away! </b>(III.v.26)</blockquote>
All this is but an elaboration on the simple refrain in the French abaude cited earlier, "<b>The lark lies to us." </b><br />
<br />
In his dialogue with Juliet, Romeo points to the <b>"envious streaks," "Night's candles" </b>and<b> "jocund day."</b> Here Shakespeare is again, knowingly or not, availing himself of a conventional image in the troubadour alba. The fourth stanza of De Bornelh's "Reis glorios" has a similar reference:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>IV. Bel Companho, en chantan vos apel; </b><br />
<b>E regardatz las estelas del cel! </b><br />
<b>Connoisseretz si’us sui fizels messatge; </b><br />
<b>Si non o faitz, vostres n’er lo domnatge, </b><br />
<b> Et ades sera l’alba! </b><br />
<br />
<b>(Fair friend, go to the window, </b><br />
<b>and look at the signs [lit.,stars] in the sky; </b><br />
<b>you will know if I am your faithful messenger:</b><br />
<b>if you do not, yours will be the harm, </b><br />
<b> and soon it will be dawn!) </b>(Sigal 1996, 148-149) </blockquote>
The parallel with Romeo's warning to Juliet is clear. The stars are fading, the watchman implies, and looking at them will reveal other signs of dawn as well. The adjective "envious" fits with the troubadour's gilos, "jealous." (On the other hand, the adjective "jocund," as applied to day, is out of place; that word more properly fits the other tradition of dawn as a time of happy expectation.)<br />
<br />
We have already seen the word "enviou" in Bertranh's song about the lark arising. It also appears in the following anonymous 12th century Provencale alba:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Gaitaz vos, gaiteta de la tor</b><br />
<b>del gilos, vos malvays seynor, </b><br />
<b>enious plus que l'alba </b><br />
<b> </b><b>que za jos parlam 'amor. </b><br />
<b> Mas paor </b><br />
<b> nos fai l'alba </b><br />
<b> </b><b> l'alba, oi l'alba!</b><b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>(Watch for us, dear watchman of the tower, </b><br />
<b>for the gilos, your evil lord, </b> <br />
<b>more envious even than the dawn </b><br />
<b>for yonder we speak of love. </b><br />
<b> But we know
</b><br />
<b> to fear the dawn</b> <br />
<b> the dawn, yes the dawn!) </b><br />
(Sigal 1996, 115)</blockquote>
Why is the lord envious? Just as the singer without love is envious of the lark in flight, so the <i>gilos</i> is envious of the knight, for possessing the lady's love; all the gilos has is the fulfillment of wifely duties. Similarly the demiurge is envious--of humanity. Recall what the<i> Apocalypse of Adam</i> has Adam say: '<b>"For we were higher than the god who had created us and the powers with him, whom we did not know" </b>(Robinson 1988, 279). That is why the demiurge, the creator-god, had to split them up. So must the <i>gilos</i> separate the lady from any knight she might love. The <i>Apocryphon of John</i> describes a similar envy. This time it is of Adam's luminosity, which is the spirit of the aeons above the demiurge, which the archons see:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>And when they recognized that he [Adam] was luminous, and that he could think better than they, and that he was free from wickedness, they took him and threw him into the lowest region of all matter. </b>(Robinson 1988, 116).</blockquote>
But this petty action only makes matters worse for them, for, as we have already seen, the great <b>"Mother-Father"</b> sends a helper, <b>"luminous Epinoia."</b> The demiurge, or chief archon, wants this luminosity for himself; hence he tries to catch it, first by <b>"bringing it out of his rib,"</b> (117) and then by making the form of a woman which has the Epinoia’s likeness. The Epinoia does come into this bodily form, and Adam sees in her the light that was in him, declaring she is<b> "flesh of my flesh"</b> (118). The chief archon then seduces this woman, but the Epinoia has already left her. Such is the demiurge’s envy for Adam--and for Eve as well, when the Epinoia is within her. <br />
<br />
Of what is Juliet's father envious? He is clearly envious of Juliet's spirit, her obedience to a higher law within her, which he therefore wishes to remove from her so that she will be subservient to him. It his envy of this spirit which the lovers fear. Perhaps also, he suspects that Juliet has a secret lover whom she wants to marry; he perhaps envies that spontaneous attraction, which is denied in the system of arranged marriage.<br />
<br />
Another conventional sign in the sky, which Shakespeare does not use here, is the appearance of the Morning Star (the planet Venus shining close to the sun). As far back as the classical Latin poet Ovid (first century c.e.), this star was called Lucifer, Latin for "light-bearer": Ovid says in his Amores: "Lucifer had arisen leading the way for Aurora" (Hatto 1965, 275). The image of the Morning Star occurs in the second stanza of de Bonelh's song:<br />
<br />
<b>II. Fair friend, are you asleep or awake? Bel companh, si dormetz o velhatz,<br />Sleep no longer, softly rise, No dormatz plus, suau vos ressidatz<br />for in the East I see the star grown bigger Qu’en orien vei l’estela creguda<br />which brings day. I have known it well, C’amena’l jorn, qu’eu l’ai bae conoguda,<br /> and soon it will be dawn! Et ades sera l’alba. </b><br />
(Sigal 1996, 148-149)<br />
<br />
Ironically, Lucifer is in Christianity a name for Satan. The name as applied to a star which heralds the day, the time of the demiurge, is thus quite appropriate for the Cathars and the troubadours, for whom the day-world was no joy. When the planet appeared as the evening star it was called Venus, the star of love. This. too, fit the Cathar and troubadour view, for whom the night was the time for communion with God or one's lover. For Catholics the names, taken over from pagan Rome, did not quite fit. Some Christian poets called the morning star Venus, who as mother of Cupid could be compared to Mary, mother of the Christian god of love. <br />
<br />
The Provencale alba typically ends with the lovers recognizing reality and making their separation. In de Bonelh's song, stanzas V and VI reiterate the faithfulness and sacrifices of the watchman. In some manuscripts, such as the one whose translation I have been using up to now, the song ends there. But a few manuscripts have a seventh stanza in which the knight replies to his friend. In Saville's translation: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>VII. "Bel dous companh </b><br />
<b>tan sui en ric sojorn</b><br />
<b>Qu'eu no volgra mais fos alba ni jorn, </b><br />
<b>Car la gensor que anc nasques de maire</b><br />
<b>Tenc et abras, per qu'eu non prezi gaire</b><br />
<b> Lo fol gilos ni l'alba."</b><br />
<br />
<b>("Handsome sweet friend, </b><br />
<b>I am in such a precious resting place </b><br />
<b>that I would not want there ever to be dawn nor day, </b><br />
<b>for the most noble lady that ever was born of mother </b><br />
<b>I hold and embrace; for which reason I do not care at all </b><br />
<b> about the foolish jealous one or the dawn.") </b><br />
<b>(Saville 1972, 201-203)</b></blockquote>
What is the knight saying here? On the one hand, his <b>"I do not care at all about the foolish jealous one"</b> could be saying, "I have no fear of the gilos--let him do his worst, even kill me if he wants." Or more weakly, he has no feeling of loyalty to the gilos; as one of the lord's knights, he would have taken an oath of fealty, which now is meaningless to him, although he still cares about his life. The Cathar convert similarly through baptism, christening, etc., has previously pledged himself to the Catholic Church; these pledges now are as nothing to him. Moreover, some could say they no longer fear the gilos, since they have already tasted the life to come in their lady's arms, that is, the spiritual embrace of the Cathar Church. <br />
<br />
The knight's <b>"precious resting place"</b> is comparable to the Gnostic<b> "place of rest,"</b> or the <b>"fullness"</b> that knows no lack, i.e. no yearning. He is in the place of spirit, brought about by their union. It is toward the recapturing of such a place that Romeo and Juliet each follow the other into death. Similarly, the Cathar <i>perfecti</i>, those who formally pledged themselves to the Cathar God and renounced the ways of the world, put their faithfulness to God as they saw him on the line, most famously at the Cathar center at Montsegur but also at many places where the Crusaders captured them, by choosing to be burned at the stake rather than pledge allegiance to a church they despised. The burning, <i>le bruler</i>, at Montsegur and elsewhere, took place at dawn. After a final night of prayer and blessings--came the dawn.<br />
<br />
The last line of de Bornelh's song adds the adjective <b>"foolish," "fol" </b>in Provencale, to <b>"jealous one."</b> This touch actually reinforces the suggestion that there is a hidden reference to the Catholic god. The <i>Apocryphon of John</i> uses this description of the demiurge:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Now the archon who is weak has three names. The first name is Yaltabaoth, the second is Saklas, and the third is Samael. And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, ”I am God and there is no other God beside me," for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come. </b>(Robinson 1988, 111-112)</blockquote>
"<b>Saklas"</b> simply means <b>"fool," a</b>ccording to Barnstone (1984, 75).<b> "Samael,"</b> we learn in another Nag Hammadi text , means <b>"the blind god" </b>(Robinson 1988, 175). In Judaism, it was one of Satan's names. Other epithets of Yaltabaoth are <b>"ignorant"</b> (111) and, of course, <b>"jealous"</b> (112). The demiurge is foolish because of his pretensions; he thinks he is all-powerful and all-knowing when in his vainglory he does not know that a higher power than he undermines his actions, and to whom, when the savior comes, he bows down in humble submission. Shakespeare implies as much about the fathers in Romeo and Juliet. With Capulet, Montague, and their wives standing over their children's bodies at the end of the play, the Prince says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Prince. ...Capulet! Montague! </b><br />
<b>See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate, </b><br />
<b>That Heaven finds means to kill your joys with love. </b><br />
(V.iii.291-3) </blockquote>
The fathers because of their hatred for each other have brought about the deaths of the very ones in whom they have their joy; thus their hatred is foolish, accomplishing the opposite of what they want.<br />
<br />
It is clear how various figures in the play relate to Gnosticism; we have simply to look at the similar situation in the Provencale alba. To Romeo, Juliet represents the world of spirit, in contrast to the hellish world around them. And to Juliet, Romeo represents the same. Against them, Juliet's father is the gilos, the jealous one, and the Capulets generally his forces. The day world is the evil world of death and separation. At night, from the higher perspective, they see the world for what it is, a place of darkness punctuated by a few bright lights. Similarly, night was the time the Cathar perfecti came into the villages, so as to avoid being seen by the Catholic authorities.<br />
<br />
In <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>, Juliet's equivalent of the watchman is at first her nurse, who dutifully warns her when her mother is approaching. Later when the nurse turns false, discrediting herself by recommending that Juliet marry Paris and forget about the existing marriage with Romeo (III.v.212ff), then Friar Lawrence takes on the watchman role. That role in the alba has parallels to the friar. The watchman hides the lovers from the gilos; he creates the appearance of the lady's faithfulness. This is just what Friar Lawrence does: he tells Juliet to agree to the marriage with Paris, her father's choice, and then has her appear to die, for unknown reasons. The friar does not lie, but like Cathar priests who took on disguises so as to go among their flock, he creates appearances.Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-52021315461064630642012-05-08T19:49:00.005-07:002014-02-24T01:57:11.861-08:00The play in relation to 13th century VeronaIn 16th century England, the necessity for hiding one's religion was
part of everyday life. First there was a king who abolished all the
monasteries and convents and set himself up as the head of a national
church with no ties to Rome. Then came his Catholic daughter Mary, who
tried to stamp out all the new shoots of Protestantism in the land.
Then Elizabeth started out being tolerant but then, after the Pope
authorized the Catholic princes to make war on her, made it a crime to
celebrate the Catholic mass. On the content it was often the same. It
was not safe to make one's beliefs known at any time, because of the
shifts in power that could happen overnight.<br />
<br />
Our play
is set in the Middle Ages, in Italy, the very heartland of Roman
Catholicism. Yet northern Italy was beset with numerous heresies. The
largest of these was that called Catharism. In neighboring Languedoc,
it took decades of warfare to stamp out, and then by forces external to
the region, owing to its support by leading nobles and the bulk of the
populace. In northern Italy, the situation was similar, except that
when the Cathars' supporters actually tookontrol of most of Northern
Italy, in the 1260s, their power was tenuous enough that it took the
external forces--again, the French--a much shorter time to do the job;
and then, once sufficiently renumerated, they left.<br />
<br />
At
the time Catharism was being exterminated in Languedoc, Cathar priests
were quite numerous in northern Italy: In 1250, One Cathar turned
Dominican gave his estimate of the numbers of Cathar perfecti, the
equivalent of monks, nuns, and priests: 1500 perfecti in Lombardy, 500
based in Verona, 200 in Mantua. Bergamo and Brescia, 100 in Vicenza and
100 in Tuscany (Lambert, 1998). In one study of the Cathars is a map,
part of which is reproduced as <b>Fig. 6,</b> with the areas of Cathar strength shaded.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMjlAbcmje_jKKarM_MSWaYue6pOD7UuLtcv8BCgFOQ9TfLdAQuyqWGcx06hWzEQseLQTfJOl8k3Lm7gGkYZ14CYVKaZ2CwkPcv0Yg0sAYmINVVUAa4HsrwRicDCqIDWHFVD_T_i9luHw/s1600/06map.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMjlAbcmje_jKKarM_MSWaYue6pOD7UuLtcv8BCgFOQ9TfLdAQuyqWGcx06hWzEQseLQTfJOl8k3Lm7gGkYZ14CYVKaZ2CwkPcv0Yg0sAYmINVVUAa4HsrwRicDCqIDWHFVD_T_i9luHw/s640/06map.tif" height="512" width="640" /></a><br />
By
this date, 1250, in southern France, Cathar numbers were down to 200
for the entire region, thanks to crusades there starting in 1212. In
1245, as the campaign in Languedoc was winding down, the Pope called
for similar action in Italy. Cathars there had avoided persecution for
the same reason as in Languedoc: Political power in its city-states was
in the hands of families and political parties that declined to
cooperate with the Pope's demands (Lambert 1998). Thus Cathar perfecti
remained free to win converts, which would have included disillusioned
Catholic priests and monks as well as ordinary lay people. <br />
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Let
us skip now to the beginning of the next century. 1302 is the date that
people in Verona traditionally gave for the events of <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>. This is one year before the great poet Dante stayed as the guest of the Lord of Verona, Bartolomeo della Scala. Dante in his<i> Purgatorio</i> does not mention the couple. but he does mention two great contending groups in Verona, the Montecchi and the Cappelletti (<i>Purgatorio</i>
VI, 106), putting their souls, as of Easter 1300, on the outskirts of
Purgatory, the circle of the "late repentant." One writer of the Romeo
and Juliet story, da Porto in 1530, gave these names to the warring
families of Verona (Gibbons 1980, 34), which Brooke, Shakespeare's
primary source, translated as "Montagew" and "Capelet" (241). <br />
<br />
Da
Porto, who also seems to have been the first to use the names "Romeo"
and "Juliet" ("Giuletta" in Italian), said that the story was true, and
of the time of Bartolomeo della Scala; a 1594 Italian history of Verona
also reported it as fact. But Dante was there and never mentioned them!
This is one good indicator that the couple never existed--Dante was not
one to pass up a good story. But now that we are reading the story on
different levels, we can ask whether perhaps other things did exist
corresponding to the story.<br />
<br />
The notes to many
translations of Dante say that only the Montecchi were of Verona, while
the Cappelletti were of Cremona--hence historically the two families
could not have been neighbors. But that is not the end of the matter.
Pietro Allegieri, Dante's son, author of one of the first commentaries
on <i>The Divine Comedy</i>, said that his father was referring to two
rival political parties, not families (Singleton, 1973). Such political
parties typically covered a whole region and not simply one city, as
factions in particular places looked for outside allies.<br />
<br />
The
Montecchi party did get its name from a Veronese family of that name,
actually the Monticola; "Montecchi" is Dante's Tuscanization of the
name (Singleton 1973). The Montecchi, most of the time, were one of a
group of parties known collectively as the Ghibellines, a Florentine
designation originally applied to parties allied with the
Hohenstaufens, the family of Holy Roman Emperors Frederick I and
Frederick II. After the rule of that family ended, the term continued
to apply to the Emperors' supporters. Italy was theoretically part of
the old Holy Roman Empire, a loose association of political entities
founded by Charlemagne four centuries earlier. Italians who opposed the
Pope's political domination of their cities looked to the Emperors for
support. Dante himself had started out against the Ghibellines but
switched sides when his own party condemned him to death. Canto VI of
the <i>Purgatorio</i>, after mentioning the rival families, ends with
an explicit appeal to the current Emperor, who was staying out of
Italy, to support his Italian followers as his predecessors had done. <br />
<br />
In
Verona, according to Dante's son, the Montecchi's opposition was called
the Cappelletti, the name taken from the family in Cremona. The
Cappelletti were Guelph, a Florentine designation for parties allied
with the Pope. At that time the Pope ruled the middle part of Italy
directly and used the Church's enormous power to oppose the Emperor's
influence elsewhere. Some areas feared both Emperor and Pope. Such
areas, such around Milan, typically chose to be Guelph but also opposed
letting the Inquisition into their territory, because they feared the
popes would dominate through such means. Cremona, most of the time, was
ruled by Ghibellines.<br />
<br />
The contention between warring
families in Verona was thus duplicated throughout northern Italy, some
families in each town preferring the emperor and others wishing to be
aligned with the Pope. There were also factions within each party, for
example the black and the white Guelph factions in Florence, which
resulted in Dante's condemnation in absentia for being of the faction
that lost power when he was away. As a result each family depended
mainly on itself and lived in fortress-like houses with huge towers.
After the Guelph victory had been consolidated, most of the towers were
ordered demolished; only a few remain, most famously in San Germaniano,
where they are a tourist attraction to this day (<b>Fig. 7</b>, at
left below). Even smaller ones look like fortresses--for example, the
house traditionally identified with Romeo's family in Verona (<b>Fig. 7a</b>, at right below), in the Ghibelline part of the old city. <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgimQil4crt6EDQgtu1EKjPgPpmt3YvgcWR_zhSMKE4tWIoebji1MmmTrTGtuI4JRdqnBd93dkPYjEs1d4aqRVbDokpz416HovJmEsc4hQJj6c378lrr2dwy7SyuJ8-Z2U99-oZPq5CgJE/s1600/08aCunnizaColor.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnyb_t83nTPmf1VyG88ctHUU6YH1ryfUvDBDT5yqrP7a9ty7a-uidc0qKH3XiuoJUjzV8RF35OMrgXXR9JTR810cg8ClM15UEOvtAGyt_dogACh1PeTGNmyxYBj1nrH2_SJSDypXioQ_Q/s400/07and7aSanGirRomeo.tif" height="297" width="400" /></a><br />
During
the middle third of the 13th century, when animosity between the two
sides was at its height, the leading Ghibelline family in northeastern
Italy was the da Romanas, originally of the minor rural nobility north
of Vicenza. (See map, Fig. 7b). In 1207 this family had joined the
Montecchi of Verona after losing out to Guelphs in Vicenza (Prescott,
1972). At that time Verona was ruled by the Sanbonifacios and the
Estensi, powerful noble families who were traditional vassals of the
emperor as well as supporters of the pope, for pope and emperor were
not then in opposition. <br />
<br />
In 1226 Ezzelino III da
Romana led the Montecchi to the seizure of power in Verona. He also
married a Sanbonifacio, the first of several Romeo-and-Juliet-like
marriages designed to secure the peace. He was not then able to sustain
his personal dominance, but in 1230 he became Lord of Verona in virtue
of successfully leading the Montecchi defense against a Sanbonifacio
attack (Prescott 1972, Abulafia 1988). Marriage apparently did not
affect his military judgment. At that time Ezzelino was a member, for
tactical reasons, of the Guelphs’ Lombard League. But because of what
Ezzelino saw as Guelph betrayal in negotiations after his victory over
the Sanbonifacios, he dedicated Verona to the Ghibelline cause from
1232 on.<br />
<br />
The connection between the Montecchi and
heresy is this: On two occasions Ezzelino had felt undermined by
Catholic monks. In 1229 he helped his brother Alberico, who ruled the
town of Bassano, put down a rebellion which they determined was
instigated by Dominicans and Franciscans. From then on, Ezzelino "hated
friars and refused to allow any of them into his dominions. This meant
that Ezzelino was a protector of heretics, because the Dominicans were
the chief inquisitors charged with rooting out heresy" (Prescott 1972,
225). <br />
<br />
Ezzelino had to make one exception to this
policy, in 1233, as a result of Guelph military attacks and pressure
from his own subjects. He reluctantly let in a Dominican preacher named
Fra Giovanni, who claimed to be on the side of peace between factions.
The multitudes declared the preacher Lord of Verona, and Ezzelino found
himself temporarily swearing allegiance to the friar. Fra Giovanni
immediately had 60 men and women from Verona's leading families burned
at the stake as heretics (Prescott 1972, Lambert 1998). Then he held a
grand peace festival to which many thousands came from all over
northern Italy, where he advocated that everyone forgive their enemies.
He also announced the engagement of Ezzelino's niece to the son of Azzo
d'Este, a match which would further unite the two factions in Verona--a
second example of the Romeo-and-Juliet solution, this time one secretly
aided by a monk. Later the preacher made the mistake of moving to
Vicenza, where the ruling Guelphs found him too dictatorial and threw
him in prison; he got out a month later and quietly disappeared. <br />
<br />
Six
months later, Ezzelino was Lord of Verona again. The marriage that the
preacher arranged actually did take place, during a truce in 1235. The
Emperor, now allied with both factions, spirited the couple away to his
lands in southern Italy, to keep them safe, he said. Azzo d'Este,
perhaps feeling betrayed by this act, switched over to the Guelphs and
in 1236 made an unsuccessful surprise attack. Thus the fighting
resumed. Ezzelino continued refusing to allow the prosecution of heresy
in areas under his control (Lea, Vol. 1, 1888; Lambert 1998). <br />
<br />
At
that time Emperor Frederick II was formally allied with the pope and
was on record as being in favor of persecuting heresy. But events such
as the alliance with Ezzelino must have convinced the pope that the
emperor was not sincere. In 1239 the pope excommunicated him and called
him the anti-Christ. He excommunicated Ezzelino soon after. For its
part, the Roman Inquisition ruled that Ezzelino not only protected
heretics, but that all his friends and relations were heretics, and
that in all likelihood he himself was one (Prescott 1972). By
"heretics" the Inquisition meant Cathars, because other sects were
mentioned by name (Lambert 1988). Besides his family, Ezzelino's
interest in astrology, magic, and the Arabs, and his disinterest in
fathering heirs (Lambert 1998), all made him suspect. It was thought
that Cathars believed that births took souls out of heaven and so
should be discouraged. As for the emperor, he now wished to build an
alliance of all those opposed to the Pope and no longer showed any
interest in persecuting heresy.<br />
<br />
For the Pope's
propagandists and chroniclers, no epithet was too strong against
Ezzelino--he was not just the anti-Christ, but the spawn of Satan--one
Paduan even wrote a play that enacted the tryst between his mother and
the devil. Ezzelino apparently did resort to rather drastic measures.
He reportedly had to build four new prisons to hold all the people he
imagined conspiring against him. And when he lost Padua due to
someone's opening the gates, he reportedly had every Paduan member of
his army killed as a potential traitor. Dante put him (with the Tuscan
spelling, "Azzolino") in one of the most vividly depicted circles of
Hell, that of political leaders who were cruel to their neighbors;
these souls are up to their eyebrows in a lake of boiling blood, with
centaurs shooting arrows at them. In one medieval illustration, a
hundred years after his death, Ezzelino is identified by name and given
a recognizable portrait (<b>Fig. 8,</b> from Brieger et al 1969, 156).
Since Dante had characterized Ezzelino as having hair “black as soot”
(Inferno XII.109), he was always portrayed with thick black hair. Next
to him Dante placed a member of the family he fought most against, the
d’Estes: “that fair-haired one Obizzo d’Este” (XII.110-111), Lord of
Ferrara, who had a similar reputation for cruelty. <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj90HIAcJgKUXRKyzuhgi41dXOmALDZ5CP-n29rPV2P7t8G_5PCN3R_IdVoh2ChTSxs4hEy9pCqUi9Dq3UfsAfzzPeh7gqLecsjV4s-_rsUAlV7Y6zyOSMFB3ng3hqeRgyQSjCxhOfozRA/s1600/08Azzolino.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj90HIAcJgKUXRKyzuhgi41dXOmALDZ5CP-n29rPV2P7t8G_5PCN3R_IdVoh2ChTSxs4hEy9pCqUi9Dq3UfsAfzzPeh7gqLecsjV4s-_rsUAlV7Y6zyOSMFB3ng3hqeRgyQSjCxhOfozRA/s640/08Azzolino.tif" height="347" width="640" /></a><br />
The
Inquisition also posthumously condemned Ezzelino's sister Imiglia for
heresy (Lambert 1998)--but not his other sister Cunizza, whose life
included four marriages and various liaisons. She had the good sense to
go back to her mother's Guelph family in Florence, where she became a
friend of the young Dante. Dante put her in his <i>Paradiso</i>, in the sphere of Venus. A medieval illustration has her floating above her husbands’ four castles (<b>Fig. 8a</b>).
Of their father, Ezzelino II, Prescott (1972) reports only that he had
retired and gone to a monastery. Lambert (1998) reports without comment
an Italian scholar's claim that the father quietly became a Cathar
perfectus. <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgimQil4crt6EDQgtu1EKjPgPpmt3YvgcWR_zhSMKE4tWIoebji1MmmTrTGtuI4JRdqnBd93dkPYjEs1d4aqRVbDokpz416HovJmEsc4hQJj6c378lrr2dwy7SyuJ8-Z2U99-oZPq5CgJE/s1600/08aCunnizaColor.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgimQil4crt6EDQgtu1EKjPgPpmt3YvgcWR_zhSMKE4tWIoebji1MmmTrTGtuI4JRdqnBd93dkPYjEs1d4aqRVbDokpz416HovJmEsc4hQJj6c378lrr2dwy7SyuJ8-Z2U99-oZPq5CgJE/s640/08aCunnizaColor.tif" height="283" width="640" /></a><br />
In
1245 the Pope, in Lyon, in what is now France, organized a Crusade
against Frederick and his allies, a war directed also at heresy,
meaning primarily the Cathars. Cities which continued their support of
the emperor were put under interdiction, meaning no sacraments could be
performed except extreme unction, and sometimes not even that. Faced
with this pressure, along with a mass of French and even German troops,
the Guelphs of Milan and many other towns, most notably Florence,
joined with the crusade in so-called confraternities. One Peter of
Verona had shown the Guelphs what to do. In Florence he had managed to
turn the Dominican convent into a base from which to launch armed
attacks. The result was "in effect, a Catholic gang, which beat up its
Cathar rivals in a series of street battles" (Hamilton 1981). <br />
<br />
The
convent, now part of the Church of Santa Maria Novella across from the
main train station in Florence, today has as part of its display of art
works a large fresco, done during the Renaissance, of St. Dominic
burning Cathar writings (<b>left side of Fig. 9</b>, below; Roettgen
1997, 181). Another presents the Dominicans as "hounds of the lord," as
they liked to be called; the painting shows hounds tearing up the flesh
of wolves, the latter representing heretics. Still another (<b>right side of Fig. 9</b>;
Roettgen 1997, 181) depicts Peter being viciously knifed by two
assassins on the way to Milan. According to Papal investigators, this
1252 murder was commissioned by Cathars, conveniently ones prominent in
the towns around Milan where Peter was intending to go next. This gave
the Inquisition not only an excuse to move in but considerable popular
support. But a recent travel guide to the region (Buckley et al, 2000)
gives another account of Peter's murder: "The assassins were in the pay
of a couple of Venetian businessman whose property he had confiscated"
(111). Peter was canonized as "St. Peter Martyr" within the year.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPuK8E2xPnjqAd2V7yXv4LVkj9lFBJQLWn0lUBhFWOpyWpHVPIqsNlUu_s4lSYPqLJgqDhitIj449nrW8f_S0Co7UNIE2Gq_iJ2S8ncOOTPYWH44RIcd3gWwUIEoGcg1YJKr_AANos2O8/s1600/09dom+peterColor.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPuK8E2xPnjqAd2V7yXv4LVkj9lFBJQLWn0lUBhFWOpyWpHVPIqsNlUu_s4lSYPqLJgqDhitIj449nrW8f_S0Co7UNIE2Gq_iJ2S8ncOOTPYWH44RIcd3gWwUIEoGcg1YJKr_AANos2O8/s400/09dom+peterColor.tif" height="400" width="400" /></a><br />
As
a result of the confraternities' street tactics, the Cathars could no
longer be protected by their supporters among the powerful families of
Florence, and the Inquisition had free rein (Lambert 1998). The
families which protected Cathars did fight back, however, as
Ghibellines allied with the emperor and after him his sons. In the
1260's they even ruled Florence again.<br />
<br />
How do we know the Ghibellines protected the Cathars in Florence? I will give an example. In the <i>Inferno</i>,
Dante puts the main Ghibelline leader, Farinata degli Uberti, in the
Circle of the Heretics. The souls in this circle, he says, are those
holding to the doctrine of Epicurus, by which, he carefully explains
(X.13), he means people who do not believe in the immortality of the
soul--not, despite a few commentators, people who eat too well. The
Inquisition, however, clearly declared Farinata and his whole family to
be heretics of the Cathar variety (Lambert 1998, judged by Lambert to
be accurate). And although the Pope did later restore confiscated
property to many Ghibelline families of Florence, he explicitly did not
do so to Farinata's family. <br />
<br />
Fortunately for
Farinata's daughter, she married the son of a leading Guelph,
Cavalcante dei Cavalcante, who despite his Epicureanism did not face
the wrath of the Inquisition. Thus the family was spared poverty. The
son, Guido Calvalcante, was a friend of Dante's; this marriage is thus
a third case of marriage between warring families in 13th century
northern Italy. Dante put the warring fathers together after death in
the same tomb--as is duly noted in many artists' illustrations to the
Inferno. <b>Fig. 10</b> is a typical example, from the 15th century (Brieger et al 1969, 141).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUVyCQ7HQsbFLU_qABOdke9O3r2gWc5BJgoFdXM4MtcfNG9Cbu4GC1zgG-WbDWH6GRW4soX2ZzlZlfcJSCswAbuXxDl2H46JEvsZ3ISyaykhIJpEvOTzLCin4CYSUDcaL5BIfc6X1c3Y4/s1600/10aFarinataDore.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div>
Dore’s late 19th century portrayal, <b>Fig. 10a</b>, is the most well-known, with Farinata suitably haughty-looking but without his tomb-mate.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHJNh7_XUYo9gximtZ46n6UAENeMlrfxBJDYylhS6Sm0Qoo7VBfFPI0J4R_j_BFZtkMdHYcWkZMBc_dCDoxyNB6gGkdag0T7R4hZXTi6ggJ5y6JySX2tIpc-grvYQLRCrBQdoGbZYUDpI/s1600/10bBlakeFarinataB&W.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUVyCQ7HQsbFLU_qABOdke9O3r2gWc5BJgoFdXM4MtcfNG9Cbu4GC1zgG-WbDWH6GRW4soX2ZzlZlfcJSCswAbuXxDl2H46JEvsZ3ISyaykhIJpEvOTzLCin4CYSUDcaL5BIfc6X1c3Y4/s400/10aFarinataDore.tif" height="400" width="320" /></a><br />
In contrast, Blake painted Farinata as something of a sage (<b>Fig. 10b</b>,
below); perhaps Blake knew of Farinata's Cathar leanings and applauded
them. (Blake developed an elaborate Gnostic mythology in his Urizen
poems and elsewhere, which I examine in another essay on <i>King Lear</i>.) The pair looking into the tomb in each case are Virgil and Dante.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHJNh7_XUYo9gximtZ46n6UAENeMlrfxBJDYylhS6Sm0Qoo7VBfFPI0J4R_j_BFZtkMdHYcWkZMBc_dCDoxyNB6gGkdag0T7R4hZXTi6ggJ5y6JySX2tIpc-grvYQLRCrBQdoGbZYUDpI/s1600/10bBlakeFarinataB&W.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHJNh7_XUYo9gximtZ46n6UAENeMlrfxBJDYylhS6Sm0Qoo7VBfFPI0J4R_j_BFZtkMdHYcWkZMBc_dCDoxyNB6gGkdag0T7R4hZXTi6ggJ5y6JySX2tIpc-grvYQLRCrBQdoGbZYUDpI/s640/10bBlakeFarinataB&W.tif" height="440" width="640" /></a><br />
Commentators
explain that what drew Dante to Farinata is that the latter, when the
Ghibellines successfully occupied Florence, succeeded in persuading his
allies--mostly from Florence’s nearby rival Sienna-- not to destroy the
city. (When the Guelphs got Florence back, they on the other hand
leveled everything Farinata’s family owned!) By 1450, interestingly
enough, Farinata seemed to have shaken off the Inquisition's bad press
long enough to be included in a wealthy Florentine's portrait gallery
of "famous men and women" (<b>Fig. 10c</b>; Roettgen 1997.)<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWTIJgwpAu9ckGcNL4bsLkADMrpzFr3-a-Wf2NGw7sW1TF-f70-C-7rrJ64QC5d8BrnJB-Rf8nYUK-aLo9v3IPsfvkeMjVOKvtM11_hVNaqMPAdXzhAgBBoc3gDAFoTSvJXi1yWhZywDk/s1600/10cFarinatcolor.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWTIJgwpAu9ckGcNL4bsLkADMrpzFr3-a-Wf2NGw7sW1TF-f70-C-7rrJ64QC5d8BrnJB-Rf8nYUK-aLo9v3IPsfvkeMjVOKvtM11_hVNaqMPAdXzhAgBBoc3gDAFoTSvJXi1yWhZywDk/s400/10cFarinatcolor.tif" height="400" width="256" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
The caption to this portrait hails Farinata as a "liberator of the fatherland" (<b>Fig. 10d</b>).</div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQZo4ea5InHgKwXckS-39chiTC5h_g0C1bwQA9Qoj-npiAKhRIQmkyKTR9WOkvq8uNqWw1g7XACK2UzqoyWDl7UGzrSs6IfL-AwR4ZEI4ATgJFaxzJd7UbqYvqlkwOX5XMxiwT7-2n01E/s1600/10dFaricaptcolor.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQZo4ea5InHgKwXckS-39chiTC5h_g0C1bwQA9Qoj-npiAKhRIQmkyKTR9WOkvq8uNqWw1g7XACK2UzqoyWDl7UGzrSs6IfL-AwR4ZEI4ATgJFaxzJd7UbqYvqlkwOX5XMxiwT7-2n01E/s640/10dFaricaptcolor.tif" height="88" width="640" /></a><br />
One
might wonder at this epithet. Preventing destruction of some
architecture is hardly liberation. Who did this ally of a German
emperor liberate anybody from?--just the Pope and the Inquisition. In
Renaissance Florence, sentiment against the popes' secular authority
was awakening anew. In today’s' secular Italian state, it is perhaps
noteworthy that in both Florence and Verona, and many other cities,
important streets are named for Farinata.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
In
1250 Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, already suffering militarily,
died of dysentery. His son Conrad continued the fight but died in 1254.
The next heir-apparent, Frederick II's illegitimate son Manfred, was
still consolidating his power in southern Italy when the pope approved
a crusade against Ezzelino. It was led from Venice and quickly included
his traditional enemies, the Estensi and the Sanbonifacios. Most
critically, one of his own allies turned against him, Uberto
Pallavicini of Cremona. In 1259, at the age of 64, Ezzelino was trying
to capture Milan but ended up wounded and captured by the Guelph
alliance. A painting in the d'Este library in Modena commemorates the
event (<b>Fig. 11</b>; Deiss 1966). </div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-eT0iL56VGVzBuWRs1bbm4CGlYZBi02sAYP8zIt5vCR22Z-WPKWbJsTHJnT-Efj381euyb8FDR90XhPUVyZnChTKc2NqwcNt7p33CJ5l5A_f0RqXvuTJCLkS8Lj6XQZGSsMbW9nmyudA/s1600/12Cunniza&Florence.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5hg2geVJDAPIJipjsLkoiHjxSHdSacAqtfdGO6xQHuCnmcgueWysUiUlbIojEdaJUBBZ2hYZeokbRbw9upNAXbtJdklLYMXlgAI1POAuYAuOc8U9QrCCY8RyHIykzpx5gTAY9s_lVBi4/s640/11EzcaptureLARGEformat.tif" height="443" width="640" /></a>On
his deathbed Ezzelino reportedly refused all medical and spiritual aid
from the Guelphs and their priests (Prescott 1972). But in the short
run it was not the Guelphs but the Ghibelline Uberto who benefited,
soon becoming the major power in the region. He continued Ezzelino's
policies of allying with the empire and protecting heretics. He also
attained what Ezzelino had died trying to achieve, taking Milan away
from the Guelphs. <br />
<br />
By the early 1260's most of
northern Italy was in Ghibelline hands, from west of Milan to east of
Verona, and south through most of Tuscany. Even south of Tuscany in
Umbria, where the popes ruled directly, leading families protected the
Cathars, in Orvieto and other cities. In danger of losing everything,
the pope struck a deal with Charles of Anjou, the French king's
brother. His armies joined the Guelphs to defeat and kill Manfred in
1266. The Guelphs returned to power in Tuscany, and French troops paid
with Florentine money quickly took over the emperor's domains in
southern Italy, defeating and in 1268 killing Conradin, the emperor's
grandson, who had continued the fight even though still a boy. <br />
<br />
In
the occupation that followed, Florence enjoyed special monopolies in
the conquered lands, arranged by the Pope, in return for their
financing the French army. Dante, who despised the new rulers of
Florence, made a point of putting in his Paradiso Folco of Marseilles,
former troubadour and later Catholic Bishop of Toulouse, not for his
unswerving persecution of Cathars there but for speaking out against
money-hungry Florence. One illuminated manuscript of the Paradiso shows
the red Guelph lily (as opposed to the white Ghibelline lily) flying
above Florence, while the devil showers its leaders in money (<b>Fig. 12</b>).
For Folco the "cursed flower" of Florence was the florin, with which it
corrupted the Church. Sienna, Florence’s main rival during the period,
was relegated to a backwater existence from which it never recovered.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-eT0iL56VGVzBuWRs1bbm4CGlYZBi02sAYP8zIt5vCR22Z-WPKWbJsTHJnT-Efj381euyb8FDR90XhPUVyZnChTKc2NqwcNt7p33CJ5l5A_f0RqXvuTJCLkS8Lj6XQZGSsMbW9nmyudA/s1600/12Cunniza&Florence.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-eT0iL56VGVzBuWRs1bbm4CGlYZBi02sAYP8zIt5vCR22Z-WPKWbJsTHJnT-Efj381euyb8FDR90XhPUVyZnChTKc2NqwcNt7p33CJ5l5A_f0RqXvuTJCLkS8Lj6XQZGSsMbW9nmyudA/s640/12Cunniza&Florence.tif" height="282" width="640" /></a><br />
In
Verona the Guelphs had defeated Ezzelino but were unable to consolidate
their gains. Ezzelino's party, the Montecchi, not only retained power,
but chose one of his lieutenants to succeed him, Mastino della Scala.
His family reigned another century and a half. Its monuments are still
everywhere, most prominently at the della Scala tombs (<b>Fig. 13 below</b>; Santini 1998, 48), right off the main piazzas, where any visiting Elizabethan noble could hardly miss them. <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiECxILw2A-uVjF8w9fH1HOycftG7td7DAPFWpcO70_4Rua7huwkCCtZM8hyiw1wwuL4a_MAt7dZ-SMTtc1B8Zp4EaeK15_I008XTgMnMaWJ6YhgSOg64zdWXzJwVza_13RbPMY0_BG6K0/s1600/13tombs.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiECxILw2A-uVjF8w9fH1HOycftG7td7DAPFWpcO70_4Rua7huwkCCtZM8hyiw1wwuL4a_MAt7dZ-SMTtc1B8Zp4EaeK15_I008XTgMnMaWJ6YhgSOg64zdWXzJwVza_13RbPMY0_BG6K0/s320/13tombs.tif" height="320" width="150" /></a><br />
When
Mastino took over Verona in 1260, he pledged himself to end the
factional warfare, meaning he would let in the Inquisition and so end
the interdiction. But the Pope still did not do his part; apparently
the heretics were not being rounded up. A witness testified in 1273
that a large number lived tranquil lives on the promontory of Sirmione,
on Lake Garda (<b>Fig. 13a below</b>, photograph by author), including
the Cathar Bishop of Toulouse, Bernard Oliba, and a number of other
refugees from Languedoc and elsewhere (Lambert 1998). <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpY0ep2JslfsJw6dwh9dVK1rYNUrvJHkvBGkpe2YV7Tby3eHZdWiL1_TI01oNpgN16BDgS16t9EGOeHxYePqh12mJzQ7HKUWfzmpvNrylTJp5fI2Trw1xrqWuKPoAS1LEeDllOgyCz5eM/s1600/13aSirmiione.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpY0ep2JslfsJw6dwh9dVK1rYNUrvJHkvBGkpe2YV7Tby3eHZdWiL1_TI01oNpgN16BDgS16t9EGOeHxYePqh12mJzQ7HKUWfzmpvNrylTJp5fI2Trw1xrqWuKPoAS1LEeDllOgyCz5eM/s400/13aSirmiione.tif" height="270" width="400" /></a><br />
Not
only did Mastino not arrest the Cathars there, but at the start of his
reign, in 1260, he rebuilt a large castle at the narrow entrance to
Sirmione (<b>Fig. 13b)</b>, which might have intimidated the Inquisition's confraternities from taking independent action.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYghzd_lIHDcSiFJVybnwjFX5FMLspM3mFj6qoDC8aV2vcmj0ZbNwxlyQyrc4FXTpiZgL4EBdVr43lQ5qSgEe0BAeLVkqj5y12_vrLMmIhKd2UpVfHYoKHF2PK-wP50uZtQ8OOpYNBju4/s1600/13bcastle.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYghzd_lIHDcSiFJVybnwjFX5FMLspM3mFj6qoDC8aV2vcmj0ZbNwxlyQyrc4FXTpiZgL4EBdVr43lQ5qSgEe0BAeLVkqj5y12_vrLMmIhKd2UpVfHYoKHF2PK-wP50uZtQ8OOpYNBju4/s400/13bcastle.tif" height="275" width="400" /></a><br />
At
the late date of 1276, Mastino's forces finally did assist in the
arrest of 174 Cathar perfecti at Sirmione (Hamilton 1981, Lambert
1998). According to Prescott, Mastino still refused to let these
Cathars be burned; so the Pope continued the interdiction. In 1277
Mastino was assassinated riding through the main piazza of Verona; the
next day his younger brother Alberto was elected Lord of Verona in mass
assembly of the people (Prescott 1972). Prescott reports that Alberto
had 200 people beheaded for being implicated in Mastino's death, and
also had 200 Cathar prisoners burned at the stake in Verona's old Roman
arena (<b>Fig. 13c below</b>; it is now a summer theater for
Shakespeare and opera). That the two numbers are the same suggests the
Lord's effort to appear above the fray, while at the same time getting
rid of the main sources of unrest. The date was February 1278 (Lambert
1998). After that no one in political authority challenged the Pope. By
1300, the date of Dante's imaginary journey to the afterlife, the feud
between Montecchi and Cappelletti was virtually nonexistent (Singleton
1973).<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6F8qbYCecljedh0ZqJtP-zdvQxm18gwhYKWCYQaLMbNFnZaDV8bhsAIhKojwWiIe73VOYIQT6nXTrD6WR0q6c0S8iWQXu77zKKGxnJMjJ4d7e5dXGergT00VBvHPUqtVURpuqTui0ecI/s1600/13carena.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6F8qbYCecljedh0ZqJtP-zdvQxm18gwhYKWCYQaLMbNFnZaDV8bhsAIhKojwWiIe73VOYIQT6nXTrD6WR0q6c0S8iWQXu77zKKGxnJMjJ4d7e5dXGergT00VBvHPUqtVURpuqTui0ecI/s400/13carena.tif" height="265" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-2582035624724201802012-05-08T19:49:00.003-07:002014-02-24T02:14:52.276-08:00A Cathar subtext for the playI apologize for the length of the history lesson of the previous
section But I think we can recognize certain elements of the Romeo and
Juliet story. We know the warring families, or at least their
political, and some of the larger issues that would have been involved.
Shakespeare already tells us that the Prince is a Scala. Mastino or
Alberto della Scala is most likely; Bartolomeo is a bit late, the feuds
had died down by then. The Lord himself would have tried to be neutral,
although his relatives, such as Mercutio in the play, would have
obviously been friends of the Montecchi faction. <br />
<br />
Then
there is the marriage, for the sake of peace. We have already seen some
examples of that type. In addition, Prescott (1972) tells us that at
the same time as Ezzelino III married the daughter of the head of the
Sanbonifacio family, Ezzelino's sister Cunizza was married to the
Sanbonifacios' son. Two others I have already mentioned: the marriage
initiated by the Dominican monk, between Ezzelino's daughter and the
d'Estes' son, and the one in Florence, between Farinata's daughter and
his Guelph friend’s son, for four in all. An important difference
between these four and the one in the play is that the nonfictional
marriages were all public and approved by both families. Yet their
memory would have given a sense of history to da Porto's version. I
like to imagine that when Romeo says, "It is the east, and Juliet is
the sun," (I.ii.1-2) Shakespeare is punning on the name Este, "Este"
being Italian for east. In Shakespeare's day the d’Estes, although shut
out of Verona, were much in evidence elsewhere; having landed on the
winning side, they dominated north-central Italy during the
Renaissance, .<br />
<br />
For our purposes, the religious factor
is the most interesting. One side, the Montecchi, who were in power,
aided Catharism, while the Cappelletti, the various families on the
other side allied with the Pope, fought against it. Yet youth has its
own way. We might imagine, then, young people from both sides secretly
becoming <i>credentes</i>, followers of Catharism. Like Romeo, they may have
been seen returning near dawn from secret meetings, while others they
had been meeting secret lovers or just out wandering from melancholy.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqDcfXrZqWfQjNaaIwyLwT0QAMWdcRXTMs0M2jk4lMbxpRvwNFY07twJGZSW6SSv5Q9u8DvY79SCMuRRYIromcF9AaSQpNZezGgpHzR7dTndJBsF8JSI9dBn5kCDIcMbJYYQzWx9TLzSA/s1600/14oldVerona.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqDcfXrZqWfQjNaaIwyLwT0QAMWdcRXTMs0M2jk4lMbxpRvwNFY07twJGZSW6SSv5Q9u8DvY79SCMuRRYIromcF9AaSQpNZezGgpHzR7dTndJBsF8JSI9dBn5kCDIcMbJYYQzWx9TLzSA/s640/14oldVerona.tif" height="640" width="448" /></a></div>
The
house traditionally identified with Romeo is on the Ghibelline side of
medieval Verona, across the street from the della Scalas, where in the
play Mercutio would have lived. (See map, <b>Fig. 14</b>; the “Casa di Romeo,” which we saw in <b>Fig. 7a</b>, is number <b>9 </b>on the map.) A block further are the della Scala Tombs, no. <b>18</b>
on the map, one of which we also saw a photo of in the previous
section. No records still exist for the 13th century, but by the early
14th century the house was owned by the wealthy Nogarola family,
friends of the della Scalas (Pesci, 1999). It may have had the same
owners earlier. Or it could conceivably have been the house of the
Montecchi family, from which the political party had been named. <br />
<br />
Similarly, the house popularly associated with Juliet is on the Guelph side of town, south of the tombs (see map, <b>Fig. 14</b>; the “Casa di Giulietta” is number <b>19</b>). The two sides were separated by a piazza. I thought it was the Piazza del Herbe (number <b>17 </b>on
the map), but on the map it is to the east of both houses. Perhaps it
was what is now called the Piazza Independenza, “Piazza del Signori,”
number <b>18,</b> is a later addition. With its famous balcony (built
in the 19th century to satisfy popular demand, but there may have been
one earlier), this house (<b>Fig. 14a</b>) is now the most visited site in Verona. With a few adjoining buildings removed, one can still imagine an orchard. <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFAojc3ORIModJhLjBFJA_FEBwbdWHynP9kVCZqbZ830XmWlpdnv7OF7DsaeSoMTz_NQUHm_DHf4RK33fWf_qYIer49M0Y3fI-AKIbM7FWV-0MBIiE2_IqMsaohzjWyg0O89jc21eqEW4/s1600/14abalcony.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFAojc3ORIModJhLjBFJA_FEBwbdWHynP9kVCZqbZ830XmWlpdnv7OF7DsaeSoMTz_NQUHm_DHf4RK33fWf_qYIer49M0Y3fI-AKIbM7FWV-0MBIiE2_IqMsaohzjWyg0O89jc21eqEW4/s400/14abalcony.tif" height="400" width="292" /></a><br />
14th
century, records show that the house was owned then by the Cappello
family (Pesci 1999). Even today the street it is on is called Via
Cappello. According to Pesci the Cappellos were loyal members of the
"Count," the party initially led by the Sanbonifacios and later part of
the Guelphs (Pesci, 1999). Perhaps this party at some point called
itself Cappelletti, the Guelph party that Dante's son reported as
originating in Cremona. Or perhaps Dante himself took the Cappelletti
as named for the Cappello family of Verona. In any case, we can easily
imagine Romeo as a Cathar <i>credente,</i> perhaps of the Nogarolas or the
Monticolas before them, winning Juliet, of the Cappellos, to his faith
and to his heart. <br />
<br />
I am not only suggesting romances
of the fleshly variety. There were also marriages not just of the flesh but of
the spirit, between members of good Guelph families and the Cathars’
god. Skimming through a lengthy account of the Inquisition, I found a
real-life example, taken from the Inquisitors' record. In Verona "a lady in waiting of the Marchesa
d'Este, named Spera, was burned in 1270, and about the same time there
were two Catharan bishops there..." (Lea, 1877, Vol. II, 239). A few
commentators hold that she was a servant, not a lady-in-waiting, and so
not of the Marchesa's own family or social class; but her attitude
suggests a defiant dignity which an inquisitor would likely not have
associated with a servant. I was able to locate the Inquisition’s
actual words, from 1284, recorded in Latin. It is in a statement from
"the Mistress of Philosophy in Verona" ("Domina Philosophia de
Verona"). Drawing on her memory of 15 years earlier, she recalls
Spera's words:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>"Heu quam parum stati
in ista penitentia. Nam fueram facta bona christiana ab illo benedicto
Armano, qui tune temporis dicebatur esse sanctus apud Ferrariam, et
dicebatur facere miracula cum esset mortuus." Et tandem dicta Spera
permisit se comburi propter crimen hereseos. </b>(Zanella 1986, 57)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>"Oh,
how low is my state in this prison. For it is now that I am indeed a
good Christian [i.e. Cathar] from that blessed Armano, who at that time
was said to be a holy one from Ferrara, and was said to have performed
a miracle at the time of his death." And finally Spera called out to
let herself be burned with the charge of heresy. </b>[Comment in brackets by MH, who is grateful to Steven Marshall for his translation of this passage.]</blockquote>
<b>"Spera,"</b> appropriately, is Italian for Hope. From her reaction to prison as an indignity (<b>"low state"</b>)
and her demand to be burnt rather than languish, we may infer a
delicacy and an assertiveness found more often in aristocrats than in
their servants. Spera is then at least of the family or social circle
of the leading anti-Cathar family in Verona, very much corresponding to
Juliet's social position. <br />
<br />
Lambert (1998) infers that
Spera is saying she had been given the <i>consolomentum</i>, the Cathar
initiation rite. This rite, which changes a <i>credente</i> to a <i>perfectus</i>,
Cathars considered necessary to attain the blessed state after death,
as opposed to another incarnation. In this way the rite bears a
resemblance to the Gospel of Philip's "rite of the bridal chamber," or
spiritual marriage with one's angelic counterpart. Such, we have seen,
is the subtext of our play, as revealed by the imagery. Spera is
real-life prototype for Juliet if we take the drama to a spiritual
level.<br />
<br />
Spera names the one who administered the <i>consolomentum</i> to her as <b>"the blessed Armano." </b>Scholars
identify him as Armano Pungilupo, whom everyone had thought was a
devout Catholic, including his confessors. When he died, miracles were
reported at his tomb, and people asked that he be recognized as a saint
(Lambert 1998). Cathars are supposed to have joked, "The Catholics
aren't so bad; they even want to make one of us a saint." But the
inquisitors had the evidence of numerous informers; his bones were dug
up and burned, his tomb destroyed. <br />
<br />
Along these
lines, we might imagine Friar Lawrence as secretly a Cathar priest--for
Catholic priests disillusioned with their Church did, at great risk,
turn secretly to Catharism. He then corresponds to "the blessed
Armano," the secret administrator of the marriage of the spirit.
Alternatively, he could administer marriages of the fleshly variety,
performed in a Cathar ceremony, hence unrecognized by the state and
Juliet's family. Yet to Cathar <i>credentes</i> this marriage would be as real
as a Catholic one, the only difference being its secret nature <br />
<br />
This
latter supposition would explain one mystery in the play--at least it
is one to me. Why, after the marriage is consummated, when discussing
Juliet's father's demand that she marry Paris, is neither Juliet nor
the nurse bothered by the issue of bigamy? (This is at III.v.205-242;
there is no comparable episode in earlier versions of the tale). The
nurse is perfectly happy to have Juliet marry a second time. The
father's match <b>"excels the first; or if it did not/Your first is dead, or 'twere as good he were/As living here and of no use to you" </b>(III.v.222-225). Juliet is understandably revolted by the nurse's pragmatism. But something is missing.<br />
<br />
As
a Catholic, the Nurse should logically be urging Juliet to stay with
the husband she is bound to unto death, by Catholic doctrine,
especially since the marriage has been consummated; <b>"as good as dead"</b>
was not enough, with him obviously waiting in Mantua. They should have
been discussing how to tell her father the news, so that as Catholics
they can all respect the existing marriage.<br />
<br />
Well, the nurse is a kind of practical person, not bothered much by abstract rules. We already know that. So it is in keeping with her character. But there is another way of seeing her nonchalance. To the Nurse, the marriage is
not a real one because it was performed in a Cathar ceremony. It is
thus technically not marriage, for her or for Juliet's father. For him
it would merely be a shameful incident. He might seek an annulment for
her, to be on the safe side and attract a better class of suitor. The
Inquisition relates that an annulment was indeed granted a Cathar lord
in Bosnia who converted to Catholicism, when his low-born wife would
not do so (Lea 1887, Vol III.) Yet for Cathars, as we are imagining
Friar Lawrence and the lovers to be, the marriage would be like any
other contracted between two persons, even if unrecognized by
Catholics. (In Shakespeare’s England, a similar situation would have
held for the marriages that began at Lammastide, the ones valid for “a
year and a day.” These of course would not have been recognized by the
Church or civil authority.) <br />
<br />
Someone might argue,
against my theory, that Cathars would not have had a marriage ceremony
at all, because they condemned procreation: it brought, they held, pure
souls from the upper world down to evil matter, as well as tying the
married pair ever more tightly to material concerns. But the Cathars
also believed in reincarnation, to give unredeemed souls another
chance; for that, new births are required. There is evidence that at
least some Cathars believed that the whole point of souls being on
earth was to allow them to freely choose good over evil, through as
many lifetimes as it took (Lea 1887, Vol. I). (This view was also held
by the Neoplatonist Plotinus, originally from Alexandria, a major point
of origin for Gnosticism; see Sinnige 1998. It was also held by the
followers of Basilides, according to Clement of Alexandria in his
<i>Stromeita</i>, and by the Christian theologian Origin, also of Alexandria.
It could easily have been a view of other Gnostics, unreported because
nobody disagreed.) In fact, the Inquisition did record reports of
marriages performed by Cathar perfecti (Lea, Vol. III, 1887). Moreover,
at least one troubadour wrote of divorce by mutual consent followed by
remarriage (cited in Burgwinkle 1990). Since neither was permitted by
Catholicism; the second marriage could well have been one recognized by
the Cathars.<br />
<br />
Marriage between Cathar <i>credentes</i>, such
as we are imagining Romeo and Juliet's to be, could then both be valued
in itself and as a fitting image for a Cathar rite of the bridal
chamber, perhaps one in addition to the <i>consolomentum</i>. There is some
evidence of Cathars' continuing this Gnostic tradition. Bernard in his
commentary on the Song of Songs includes a polemic against the
"Toulousians." (The term "Cathar" was not yet in general use.) He
actually went to Toulouse himself and debated them. He returned
convinced that they should be burned if they did not repent.<br />
<br />
We learn
a little about the Cathars from his polemic; in which Bernard argues against
their alleged view that "only virgins may marry." What about widows and
widowers? he asks. But in what sense is it said that
only virgins may marry? Bernard seems to be forgetting Paul’s
reference to virgins and marriage, when Paul wished to present his
converts as “a chaste virgin to Christ” (II Cor. 11:2). Surely they
were not all literally virgins. The Gnostics made Paul’s wish into a
condition for the elevated state--as indeed did Bernard himself, in
writing on what is required for the “kiss on the mouth” in the Song of
Songs. The Gospel of Philip says: "A bridal chamber is not for the
animals, nor is it for the slaves, nor for defiled women; but it is for
free men and virgins" (Robinson 1988, 151). “Virgins” here are whose
spirit is wiped clean of former attachments, as though a woman
regaining her maidenhead. (It was said that Aphrodite became a virgin
each morning when she took her ritual bath.) What the Cathars must have
had, which the ancient Gnostics had also, was a specific rite that they
thought anticipated the bridal chamber in heaven. Bernard's reference
to marriage between virgins thus only goes to suggest that the Cathars
had something like a rite of the bridal chamber, one that required some
form of previous purification, normally through deeds and understanding
but perhaps a little less time-consuming in the Cathars’ last days. In
this regard, the lovers of our story could reflect the doomed Cathar
perfecti of Italy, such as Spera, burned for their marriage to a Cathar
Christ. <br />
<br />
The view that among <i>credentes</i> only virgins
may marry turns up in Inquisition documents. Books about the Cathars
frequently repeat it as fact (e.g. Runciman 1947; Lea Vol. 2, 1887).
However we must consider the context of the testimony. Lea relates that
a young monk wishes to seduce a beautiful girl. She protests that she
wishes someday to marry, and only virgins may marry. Since she is more
obstinate in her opposition to intercourse than other girls in the
parish, he brings in the Inquisition to determine if she is a heretic.
Sure enough, she names her instructor, an older woman versed in magic,
who escapes by flying out a window. The girl, who apparently has not
yet learned to fly, is burnt as a heretic. Clearly in such a context
the doctrine is suspect, and such attribution may simply have been a
means by which monks intimidated young women into being sexually
compliant.<br />
<br />
Of course it remains possible that the
story of Romeo and Juliet is simply a literary invention, with no
relationship to the Cathars. It could be argued that the tale is is
merely a variation on Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe, the tale comically
dramatized by the rustics in <i>Midsummer Nights' Dream,</i> with the simple
addition of the sleeping potion, a common literary device. Even if so,
the specific imagery in Shakespeare's version of the story remains,
which gives it a Gnostic resonance; and these are the same details that
occur in the Troubadour alba. It has been the task of this chapter to
help make us sensitive to just those details which give a work such as
Romeo and Juliet such resonance, as defined by the Gnostic texts of the
Nag Hammadi Library.<br />
<br />
Let me review the details common
to Cathar beliefs, the Troubadour alba, some texts of Nag Hammadi, and
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. So far at least, they include the
following: (1) the view that human beings attain the divine state when
they join themselves to their angelic counterparts, and also that they
may lose this state if separated; (2) A special space made safe by
special people is needed for this joining to occur. (3) The sign of
divinity is inner light, and of mortality, outer darkness. (4) The day
world is ruled by evil and jealous of the light, and will do what it
can to keep those who belong with the light separated from it. (5)
There are signs that warn one of the return of the evil day-world, even
though one may be reluctant to accept them.<br />
<br />
These
details are absent from Shakespeare's chief source, Brooke's poem, from
the other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers of which I am aware, and
also, except for the first characteristic, or in an unambiguously
secular sense, from the Italian poets from Dante on. But they are
present in Gnosticism, Shakespeare, and the troubadours. <br />
<br />
Curiously
enough, these specific features are present in at least one of the
Minnesingers, the German equivalent of the troubadours, namely, Wolfram
von Eschenbach. In Eschenbach's case, as with the troubadours, a look
at his short poems helps in deepening our understanding of Gnosticism
in its Cathar manifestation and especially its mortal struggle with
Roman Catholic Christianity during the 13th century. However since it
is something of a departure from our focus on the play, I have
relegated this topic to an Appendix.<br />
<br />Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-7520147752646695942012-05-08T19:48:00.003-07:002014-02-24T02:15:20.967-08:00SummaryTaking all in all, I have been developing a way to see in <i>Romeo and Juliet</i>
a sacred meaning which parallels the literal secular meaning. This is
as the vision of an apparently spiritual day world shown as evil and
dark. The night is the truth of that day world, what it is when seen
truly, including the god or gods of that world. Within that night we
can begin to see a different light, coming from within but seen in the
other rather than in oneself. Its truth becomes manifest when the image
experiences the angel, i.e. a person sees another person as his or her
other half. This culminates in the sacred marriage, the union of the
human with the divine, in which each human steps into the divine
apprehended in the other, becoming for that time divine as well. The
true day, or perhaps an image of the true day, appears when the two
halves of an androgynous being, two people in love as though from all
time, make one life. This is living in something like the Gnostic
pleroma, a state some will want to preserve at all costs, even of one's
life. <br />
<br />
In the course of this investigation we have
also seen how the imagery of certain art and poetry before Shakespeare
lends itself to such an interpretation as well, from the Song of Songs
to the troubadour albas. (For more on this tradition, see the
Appendices to this essay) It also lives in Shakespeare's play. Seeing
the tradition helps us to recognize the imagery and play of meanings
that animate the play.<br />
<br />
I have tried to argue that this
tradition should be characterized as Gnostic, as opposed to, e.g.,
Neoplatonic, as in the Christian Neoplatonism of Ficino. Let me
reiterate the main point. The world presented in the play is much
darker than the Neoplatonic world. For Neoplatonism, more or less good
images of the True World are everywhere in our world. But in
Shakespeare's world, conventional images of the divine are seen as evil
and ignorant; and these images rule and suppress anything else. Images
that accurately reflect the light can only shine in the darkness, and
then only briefly. <br />
<br />
Plotinus himself, the founder of
Neoplatonism, polemicized against the Gnostics for their doctrine of
the ignorant or evil demiurge. But which describes the human world
better, whether of pagan Rome or medieval Christendom, and despite the
beauty that these worlds created? Are those days really behind us? In
our own time we have had the dreadful massacres and inquisitions of the
20th century. Even the peace, as at the end of Romeo and Juliet, is a
superficial one that buries Truth, and not only in the esoteric sense
of Gnosticism and alchemy. In Jungian terms, the demiurge is the
insecure, ignorant ego with its numerous defenses against whatever
appears to threaten its control of its world. The dark acts of modern
times derive from such defenses, which still very much rule nations.
Yet descriptions in literature, by Shakespeare and others, of both the
darkness and the light, remain to give us hope.Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-29175690362189954942012-05-08T19:46:00.001-07:002012-05-10T12:01:39.894-07:00ReferencesAbulafia, D., 1988. <i>Frederick II: A medieval emperor</i>. New York: Viking Penguin, Inc.<br />
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Shakespeare, W., 1997. <i>King Lear</i> (R. Foakes, Ed.) Part of the <i>Arden Shakespeare,</i> H. F. Brooks and H. Jenkins, Gen. Eds. Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, UK: Thomas Nelson and Sons. (Original work published 1808)<br />
<br />
Shakespeare, W., 1982. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (W. Jenkins, Ed.). Part of the Arden <br />
Shakespeare,
W. F. Brooks and H. Jenkins, Gen. Eds. Walden-on-Thames, Surrey, UK:
Thomas Nelson & Sons. (Original work published 1604.)<br />
<br />
Shakespeare, W., 1980. <i>Romeo and Juliet </i>(B. Gibbons, Ed.). Part of the <i>Arden Shakespeare,</i> H. F. Brooks and H. Jenkins, Gen. Eds. Thomas Nelson & Sons, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, UK. (Original work published 1597)<br />
<br />
Shakespeare, W., 1963. <i>Pericles, Prince of Tyre</i> (F.D. Hoeniger, Ed.). Part of the <b>Arden Shakespeare, </b>H. F. Brooks and H. Jenkins, Gen. Eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1609)<br />
<br />
Sigal, G., 1996. E<i>rotic dawn songs of the Middle Ages: visiting the lyric Lady. </i>Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.<br />
<br />
Singleton, C. S., 1973, Ed. and Trans. <i>Dante Alighieri's divine comedy, Vol. II, purgatorio, part 2, commentary.</i> Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.<br />
<br />
Smythe, D., 1996. <i>A guide to Irish mythology.</i> Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press.<br />
<br />
Tapestry, 1998. <i>Song of songs: come into my garden</i> (Compact Disc). Cleveland, OH: Telarc. <br />
<br />
von Franz, M.-L., 2000. A<i>urora Consurgens: a document attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the problem of opposites in alchemy. </i>R.F.C. Hull and A.S.B. Glover, Tr. Toronto: Inner City Books. (Original work published 1957)<br />
<br />
Zanella, G., 1986. <i>Itinerari ereticali: Patari e Catari tra Rimini e Verona.</i> Roma: Nela Sede Dell'Instituto.Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-42521149606111261002012-05-08T19:45:00.002-07:002012-05-10T12:03:11.631-07:00Appendix A: The Dawn Song TraditionWe have seen how <i>Romeo and Juliet </i>conforms to the ideas of the
troubadour dawn song. But surely few in England knew such poems, even
if we grant that some nobleman coming back to Italy might hav pcked up
a volume or two published in Italy. Yet there are more familiar sources
for the same tupe of imagery. One is in the Bible: none other than the
Song of Songs itself. The other is in the work of greatest poet of
preceding centuries that England had produced, Geoffrey Chaucer.<br />
<br />
The
Song of Songs describes a woman and man who sometimes passionately
connect but also have long periods apart. She is guarded by her
brothers. He comes to her from over the mountains, and either arrives
in the morning or leaves then. She suffers the watchmen's punishment
looking for him in the city. It is a similar framework to Romeo and
Juliet, and hence has the spiritual aspects as well. That is, a
communion with a God in a special, private way that has to be hidden.
It could be something that secret Protestants under Catholic regimes,
or secret Catholics under Protestant regimes, could readily identify
with.<br />
<br />
Here are some specific passages.The following is spoken by the woman:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>My beloved is mine, and I am his;</b><br />
<b>he feedeth upon the lilies; </b><br />
<b>until the day break, and the shadows flee away,</b><br />
<b>turn, my beloved, and be like thou a roe </b><br />
<b>or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether. </b>(2:16-17) </blockquote>
Feeding
on the lilies means enjoying her favors--or worshiping her. What
follows is rather ambiguous. Before the day breaks, he turns. is this
turning toward her, so that he can be like a roe upon her "mountains"?.
Or is she merely requesting that he return to her from over the
mountains, so they can resume their lovemaking. The Vulgate had had
"revertere," meaning "return." But the King James is more ambiguous.<br />
<br />
Then later the man says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Thy two breasts are like two young roes</b><br />
<b>that are twins, which feed among the lilies.</b><br />
<b>Until the day break , and the shadows flee,</b><br />
<b>I will get me to the mountain of myrrh</b><br />
<b>And to the hill of frankincense. </b>(4:5-6.)</blockquote>
It is the same ambiguity. Is he enjoying her <b>"mountain of myrrh and hill of frankincense" </b>until the day breaks? If so, we have the makings of a dawn song like that of Romeo and Juliet or the troubadours. <br />
<br />
The Song also has its equivalent of the troubadour's gilos:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>My brothers were angry with me;</b><br />
<b>they made me the keeper of the vineyards;</b><br />
<b>but mine own vineyard have I not kept. </b>(1:6)</blockquote>
They also say:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>We have a little sister, and she has no breasts:</b><br />
<b>what shall we do for our sister </b><br />
<b>in the day when she shall be spoken for?</b><br />
<b>If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver:</b><br />
<b>and if she be a door, we will inclose her with boards of cedar. </b>(8:8)</blockquote>
The problem, for them, is the "little foxes": <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Take us the little foxes,</b><br />
<b>the little foxes, that spoil the vine;</b><br />
<b>for our vines have tender grapes. </b>(2:15)</blockquote>
For
Bernard
of Clairvaux and others of orthodoxy, the "little foxes" are
the heretics, the false prophets. Modern interpreters, such as Bloch
and Bloch (1995), simply say the lines are spoken by the woman's
brothers. Young and unmarried, she must be
protected from those would take advantage of her innocence. But how can
her true love then get to her?<br />
<br />
In another place, it is night and the man has left from her bed. She searches for him in the city:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>The watchmen that went about the city</b><br />
<b>Found me, they smote me, they wounded me;</b><br />
<b>The keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.</b> (5:7)</blockquote>
To
take away a woman's veil is to keep her confined to the home, in a
society which requires women to wear veils when they are outside. These
watchmen are again agents of the gilos, the jealous one.<br />
<br />
The
woman of the Song is the feminine aspect, conceived in ordinary in
human terms, of the inner divine, who as lover yearns for unity with
her masculine aspect. The male beloved is the masculine aspect of the
same inner divine, seeking communion in turn. It is Christ and his
Church, as the notation at the top of the King James Version says, but
Church in its highest sense. And also Solomon and his Wisdom.<br />
<br />
This
communion is only possible when the different aspects are purified of
the ego’s fears and prejudices, coming from the day world of
conventional faith What must be left behind is just the reliance on
convention; what is to be feared is just that which seeks to prevent
the stepping out of conventional paths, by the ego in the world.<br />
<br />
Gnosticism gives some grounds for this fear. The <i>Gospel of Philip</i> warns that <b>"forms of evil spirits"</b>--demons, or what Jungians would call complexes--want to <b>“defile"</b>
human men and women. In the Song what corresponds is the brothers, who
think they are protecting the young vine by keeping spirit away from
it. Against such a danger, the text says that the remedy is marriage:
if these spirits see <b>"the man and his wife sitting beside one another,"</b> then <b>"the female cannot come into the man"</b>; the same is true <b>"if the image and the angel are united" </b>(Robinson 1988, 148-149), which is what occurs in the Gnostic bridal chamber. <br />
<br />
Put
psychologically, the point is that other people, a spouse, a therapist,
or someone else in touch with the spirit, can help one to identify
one's complexes and disentangle from them. In that sense, then, the
woman’s asking the man to get away from the brothers, is for the soul
to ask that its cultivation of spirit, in therapy or elsewhere, be kept
separate and even secret from the ego-world of social existence and its
snares. Otherwise there is grave danger that the contact with spirit
will be replaced by a substitute in the ego-world. In therapy this
separation includes the well-known requirement of confidentiality. In
the Church, it is the confidentiality of the Confessional and of
pastoral counseling. The goal is faithfulness to the inner divine, not
substitution of one ego-orientation for another.<br />
<br />
This
aspect was developed especially by the Muslim ancestors of the
troubadours. Although it is highly dubious that Shakespeare knew their
work, their poetry is helpful understanding that of <i>Romeo and
Juliet</i>. For these poets, the dawn song expresses the soul's communion with a
higher god, or the one god on a higher level, than that of the
marketplace and the daytime. Here is Abu Amir ibn Shuhayd, of 11th
century Cordoba:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>When, full of drunkenness he went to sleep </b><br />
<b>and also the eyes of the watchmen were closed</b><br />
<b>I came near to him, though he was far away,</b><br />
<b>like a companion who knows whom he seeks.</b><br />
<b>I crept nearer as sleep creeps,</b><br />
<b>I lifted myself up as breathing lifts up.</b><br />
<b>I spent with him a night full of delights,</b><br />
<b>until the darkness showed smilingly its white teeth:</b><br />
<b>Kissing the white neck ;and caressing the dark-red lips.</b><br />
(Hatto 1965, 236, where the Arabic also appears)</blockquote>
Another 11th century Spanish Muslim poet, Ibn Zaydun, continues the familiar themes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>It is as if we had never lain, our union being a third with us</b><br />
<b>and good fortune closing the eyelids of our slanderer.</b><br />
<b>Two secrets in the mind of the darkness that covered us,</b><br />
<b>Until the tongue of dawn almost gave us away.</b> (Hatto 1965, 237)
</blockquote>
As to the identity of the beloved, we might wish to probe Ibn Zaydun
further about the nature of the union, the "third thing" that appears
alongside the lovers. For that, I turn to the earliest known textbook
on the cult of courtly love, by a Spanish Muslim named Ibn Hazm in the
10th century. Influenced by the Neoplatonism of the late Roman Empire,
Ibn Hazm expresses the spiritual dimensions of love in a poem:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Are you of the world of angels or merely human?</b><br />
<b>Make it clear to me, for fatigue has weakened my understanding</b><br />
<b>I see a human form, but when I think more deeply</b><br />
<b>It seems to be a body from higher spheres. (</b>Chejue 1974, 253) </blockquote>
This could have been Romeo speaking as he beholds Juliet standing
above him, a woman seems to take on angelic form when a man experiences
true love. But the song is not restrictive as to gender; a woman could
be seeing a male angel, or a man a male angel, or a woman a female
angel. Gender in these poems is typically left unspecified, except that
sometimes the word "he" is used, usually to refer to the beloved, which
may well be a generic term used to include both genders. And we do not
have to restrict the angel to an image of the beloved. Perhaps, from a
Gnostic perspective, the image is of the lover's divine twin. Or the
angel might be the third that appears in the union of the two souls.<br />
<br />
Ibn Hazm also makes the<i> Gospel of Philip'</i>s point about
separation of the lovers being a return to mortality. He says that true
love is the fusion of two souls and as such is eternal, "the cause of
itself," in the language of Plato and Aristotle. At the same time, as
caused by two souls which were once separate, the separation may come
again. Then <b>"The coming to naught of that thing will be caused by our/ Being bereft of that to which it owed its existence"</b>
(Chejue, 253). In this way, for Ibn Hazm, comes love's well-known
despair. In separation, lovers return to the world of mortality. What
is more, their whole identity has been defined by their fusion: with
the death of the fusion, it feels like the death of the individual soul
as well, as Romeo and Juliet's despair at separation indicates. Indeed,
the individual soul is not what it was, and a new identity, containing
the memory of the beloved, must be constructed.<br />
<br />
Angels are experienced in mystical Islam as beings of light; in a
similar way the beloved, too, acquires the image of light, as we saw in
Romeo and Juliet. Wolfram, and the ancient Gnostic texts. I cite
A’Sharif Mas'Ud al’Bayadi of Baghdad:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>O night, in which my moon lay embracing me</b><br />
<b>Until the dawn, without fear or caution.</b><br />
<b>His words were pearls, no need for stars;</b><br />
<b>His face made there no need for the moon.</b><br />
<b>While I allowed my ear and my eye</b><br />
<b>To graze in his charms, I was warned--the dawn! </b>(Hatto 1965, 236)</blockquote>
This dramatic naming of the dawn is what became formalized in
Provencale dawn songs, in many songs ending every stanza. In the night,
the beloved is moon, stars and glistening pearls--a being of light, in
what we might call imaginal space.<br />
<br />
I turn now to Chaucer. He wrote two dawn songs. One is in his long poem <i>Troilus and Cressida</i>. Shakespeare certainly knew this work, because he wrote a play of the same name. <br />
<br />
Troilus
is the second son of Priam, King of Troy, in love with a young
well-born Trojan lady named Criseyde (Cressida). But her father is
giving her to a Greek as his concubine, in exchange for some Trojan
warriors whom the Greeks captured. The lovers spend one night of <b>"joie"</b> and <b>"gentilesse"</b> together, with her uncle Pandarus as lookout. Then:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>But whan the cok, comune astrologer [astronomer]</b><br />
<b>Gan on his brest to bete and after crowe,</b><br />
<b>And Lucyfer, the dayes messager,</b><br />
<b>Gan for to rise, and out hire bemes throwe,</b><br />
<b>And estward roos, to hyum that koude it knows,</b><br />
<b>Fortuna Major [Jupiter]</b><b>, that anoon Criseyde,</b><br />
<b>With herte soor, to Troilus thus seyde:</b> (Hatto 1965, 533; notes his)</blockquote>
We have here the bird, albeit only the rooster. We also have the
morning star and another sign, the rising Jupiter: in short,
conventional signs of dawn. As the day breaks the lovers each speak
their part of an alba. Troilus' lines fit the tradition best. Of its
six stanzas, I will give the first and third:<br />
<br />
"<b>O cruel day, accusour of the joie<br />
That night and love han stole and faste irwyen,<br />
Acorsed be thi comyng intoTroye,<br />
For every bore </b>[hole]<b> hath oon of thi brighte yen </b>[rays]<b>!<br />
Envyous day, what list [leads] the so to spien </b>[spy]<b>?<br />
What hastow lost, why sekestow this place,<br />
Ther God thi light so quenche, for his grace?"...<br />
<br />
</b> [One stanza omitted.]<b><br />
<br />
And ek the sone, Titan, gan he chide,<br />
And seyde, "O fool, wel may men the dispise,<br />
That hast the dawyng al night by thi syde,<br />
And suffrest hire so soone up fro the rise,<br />
For to disese </b>[disuse]<b> loveris in this wyse.<br />
What! holde youre bed ther, thow, and ek</b> [also]<b> thi Morwe! </b>[Morrow]<b><br />
I bidde God, so yeve yow bothe serwe!" </b>(Hatto 1965, 534-535; notes his)<br />
<br />
<b>"Envyous day,"</b> the destroyer of night's joy, we know from Shakespeare (<b>"envious streaks"</b>)
and the troubadour songs ( the gilos 's envy of the knight, and the
poet's of the lark). Day sends his rays through the holes or cracks in
the walls. This is similar to Wolfram's "glances" sent by the day to
"spien" inside, except that now Day does not penetrate only windows,
but the smallest opening, with the same fatal consequences. <br />
<br />
With the sun's rise, the omitted second stanza of Troilus's lament
says, many a warrior goes to his death, for which reason Troilus curses
him. The sun is an ally of the temporal lord, as with the troubadours.
Then in the third stanza, he calls the sun a <b>"fool"</b>--as the
Gnostics called the demiurge and the troubadour the gilos--because as
Tithonus, the night-sun.of Graeco-Roman mythology (not "Titan" as
Chaucer erroneously says), he has had Aurora by his side all night. Now
when he rises, she leaves him for another (the day-sun, Sol or
Helios)--just as Criseyde will do to Troilus. Like Ovid in one of his
Amores, Troilus asks the god to serve himself and lovers everywhere by
just not completing his nightly course under the earth.<br />
<br />
In another poem, "The Complynt of Mars," written for Valentine's Day
(then celebrated on April 15), Chaucer uses other dawn-song motifs. I
quote from the first stanza:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Gladeth, y foules, of the morrow gray,<br /> Lo! Venuys risen among yon rowes </b>[streaks]<b> rede!<br /> ... ye lovers, that lye in any drede,<br /> Fleeth, lest wikkid tonges yowe espy,<br /> Lo! yond the sonne, the candel of Ielosye! </b><br />
(Hatto 1965, 532; notes his)<br />
<br />
(Be Glad, you fools, of the morning gray,<br />
Lo, Venus risen among yon streaks red!<br />
....you lovers, that lie in any dread,<br />
Flee, lest wicked tongues you espy,<br />
Lo! yonder the sun, the candle of Jealosy!)</blockquote>
In the gray morning Venus rises among red streaks, the same streaks in
the gray as Romeo saw, and the same morning star that the alba watchmen
saw, now called Venus rather than Lucyfer, presumably because the day
that is dawning is sacred to St. Valentine (whom some think was
originally the Gnostic Valentinus, an early theorist of the bridal
chamber). The wicked tongues are the same as in Muslim Spain, and the
day-sun burns with the same jealous fire as in Languedoc. <br />
<br />
My speculation is that the troubadour tradition spread to England by
way of Aquitane, whose Eleanor had married Henry II of England; their
son, Richard the Lionheart, was a troubadour himself. I have already
mentioned Marie de France, a poet at Henry's court. England remained in
Aquitane until the 15th century. We might imagine the noble English
devotees of courtly love passing it down, including aspects that could
not be put in writing. Chaucer in the 14th century might have inherited
this material. He certainly studied its later developments, in France
and elsewhere; for example, he translated into English the Romance of
the Rose, the major 14th century French work in the courtly love
tradition. <br />
<br />
Shakespeare's immediate source, Brooke's <i>Romeus and Juliet</i>,
shows clear signs of being influenced by Chaucer's Troilus, according
to Gibbons in his introduction to the Arden edition of the play, an
influence that continues in Shakespeare. What they all have in common
is “the idea of the shared private world of intensity created by the
lovers,” as Gibbons puts it (Shakespeare 1980, 37), in contrast to the
unstable and hostile forces around them. Yet Shakespeare adds
something: With him the traditional images of courtly love again take
on a mystical quality reminiscent of the Arabs, the troubadours, and
the Song of Songs.<br />
<br />
How did this happen? We must credit alchemy with keeping alive some of
the mystical spirit--later poets, such as Donne and Vaughan, also had
some of that spirit, as well as signs of alchemy's influence. Perhaps,
too, Muslim poetry continued to seep into
Christian lands, if only by word of mouth. It was a mystical age,
liberated from Catholic prohibitions and not yet clouded over by the
scientific world-view, which in its turn demanded, most dogmatically,
exclusivity of perspective as surely as any fundamentalism before or
since.<br />
<br />
There is one last question I want to deal with:
was there anything about Verona historically in the middle ages that
coudl have given rise to a story about forbidden worship masquerading
as forbidden love?Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-27008140917423018972012-05-08T19:45:00.000-07:002012-05-10T12:03:54.611-07:00Appendix B: the Dawn Songs of Wolfram von EschenbachThe
troubadours wrote their albas before the armies of the Pope and the
French had come in to destroy the culture of both Cathars and
troubadours. As such, their representations of the gilos are somewhat
undeveloped, not yet enriched by bitter experience of the Catholic god.
After the so-called Albigensian Crusade, the few remaining troubadours
found the old forms too obscurely symbolic to convey what they felt
must be said clearly; the preferred form was then the <i>sirventes</i>, or
"argument," some examples of which we shall see in relation to King
Lear. As things developed, the early troubadours had had good reason to
be obscure, for throughout the 13th century the Inquisition distributed
its penalties on a masssive scale, including burning at the stake, life
sentences to disease-ridden prisons, confiscation of property and the
wearing of the yellow cross by not only the offenders but their
families and succeeding generations.. <br />
<br />
Yet the dawn
song continued to grow with the times, only now in the German-speaking
lands where the Inquisition did not yet rule. The specter of the
Inquisition is particularly suggested in the songs of the Bavarian poet
Wolfram von Eschenbach (ca. 1170-1220), who also wrote Parzival, a work
permeated with troubadour values. Wolfram's dawn-songs reveal the
gilos's new fearfulness during a time of persecution. Look, for
example, at the opening lines of "An die Klawen":<br />
<br />
<b>I. "His claws through the sky he draws; “Sine klawen durh die wolken<br />
with great might aloft he soars; sint eslagen, er stiget uf mit <br />
I see him growing gray, grozer kraft;<br />
dawnlike, as if about to dawn: tagelich, als er wil tagen,<br />
--the day, --den tac,…</b><br />
<br />
<br />
The
day has claws that seek one out, the claws of an eagle perhaps, or some
other raptor, the power of one who must kill to survive. The Christian
rooster has been frighteningly transformed, and the troubadour's lark
is a thing of the past. The late troubadours (Cardenal, Figueira) spoke
of the Church as a "wolf in sheep's clothing," but that image is
commonplace next to Wolfram's bird of prey. <br />
<br />
A 15th
century alchemical illustration strangely parallels this song. It is
the first illustration in a series attached to an older text, the
<i>Aurora Consurgens</i>, or "rising dawn." A huge blue eagle stands over a
naked couple that is partially merged from the waist down (<b>Fig. 15</b>).<br />
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What kind of dawn is this? The corresponding text speaks of a "wind
from the south," a reference to the Holy Spirit (von Franz, 2000). We
recognize it from the Song of Songs, where the “south wind and the
north wind,” we have already seen, was interpreted as such in the
Geneva Bible. In alchemy the eagle indeed represented sublimation, the
process of vaporization, symbolically spiritualization. But this eagle
is a fearful one, in the face of whom the couple appears to cower. It
is hardly a dove, as the Holy Spirit was typically represented, or the
comforter of whom Christ spoke. Conceivably, it represents the
fearfulness of the ego when confronted with the need for
transformation, which is how von Franz takes it. But the hermaphroditic
pair is hardly a symbol of the ego. Incestuous coupling, although a
favorite image of the alchemist, was anathema to the traditional ego,
which the Church expressed. The eagle seems more likely that which
would seize and destroy the beginnings of transformation--or vaporize
it tied to a stake, as the Inquisition did to the Cathars.<br />
<br />
In another Tagelied, "Den morgenblic," Wolfram uses a different image to similar effect:<br />
<br />
T<b>he day thrust powerfully Der tac mit kraft,</b><br />
<b> through the windows al durh die venster warnen sanc<br />
Many locks they llocked, vil sloze si beslussen; </b><br />
<b>It did not help. daz half niht<br />
Because of this, des wart .</b><br />
<b> care became known to them in sorge kunt</b><br />
<b>.. (Hatto 1965, 450)</b><br />
<br />
The
lovers try in vain to lock the gilos out, as though they thought he was
sending his personal police to apprehend them. The gilos's forces enter
everywhere, with a thoroughness surpassing even Jehovah in his Garden.
Yahweh is now, thanks to the Inquisition's instruments of torture, a
god who unlocks the human heart with his gaze. <br />
<br />
Saville
(1972) points out that the image of light passing through window
panes-still a novelty at that time--was used by the painter Jan Van
Eyck in his Annunciation to represent visually God's impregnation of
Mary from a distance: The painter shows rays of light passing through a
window, into Mary's ear, and thence to her womb <b>(Fig. 16</b>, Paecht
1994).<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNwYAm6PGw8RMSt9F82-79qn4rzE8Ensif73trbQbIaY0OiP5vhltsk0itP5wl0e8UaREsW4NxxigCEsAjywzYWX7R8pPu3SvgJEUoO12Ii5KZzlrTgoatOB4ERF3hNCvYYyaeQsmgs2U/s1600/AAEFJXR1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNwYAm6PGw8RMSt9F82-79qn4rzE8Ensif73trbQbIaY0OiP5vhltsk0itP5wl0e8UaREsW4NxxigCEsAjywzYWX7R8pPu3SvgJEUoO12Ii5KZzlrTgoatOB4ERF3hNCvYYyaeQsmgs2U/s400/AAEFJXR1.jpg" width="148" /></a><br />
Penetration of the womb becomes less mysterious when one is
reminded that light penetrates glass. Mary’s penetration is taken as a
good thing welcomed by her-although we cannot discount irony, because
Flanders had been am important center of Catharism, which may simply
have gone underground when suppressed. (It has been argued that the
symbolism in Van Eyck’s compatriot Hieronymus Bosch should be
interpreted in a Cathar way.) In Wolfram the rays are clearly an
instrument of torture and murder. Here we can feel the same tension
that forces Romeo and Juliet apart after their wedding night, as well
as their anguish at parting. <br />
<br />
The ability of God's
gaze to pass through solid objects is also suggested in the first part
of the last stanza of "An die klawen":<br />
<br />
<b>Because of the glances that the day Vor den blicken die der tac<br />
was sending through the window-panes, tet durh diu glas<br />
for which the watchman sang his warning, und do der wahter warnen sanc,<br />
she had to become alarmed si muose ershricken<br />
for him who was there beside her; durh den der da bi ir was<br />
her little breast to his she pressed. ir bruestelin an brust si dwan<br />
The knight did not forget prowess Der riter ellens nit vergaz,<br />
though the watchman wanted to forestall this: des wolde in wenden wahters don!<br />
Leave-taking, near and even nearer urloup nah und naher baz<br />
with kisses and other things, mit kusse und anders </b><br />
<b> gave them love's reward. gab in mine lo. </b><br />
(Sigal 1996, 181) <br />
<br />
The
knight's strength is apparent in the middle of this stanza; he is not
some effeminate courtier, but a fighter, like Romeo slaying Paris to
get to Juliet's body, or Juliet plunging the dagger into her heart. For
another illustration of this same determination to be at one with the
beloved, consider this stanza from another of Wolfram's Tagelieder :<br />
<br />
<b>The sad man swiftly took his leave like this: Der truric man nam urloup balde alsus:<br />
Their smooth bright skins came nearer; ir liehten vel die slehten komen naher,<br />
Thus the day shone in. us der tac erschein.<br />
Crying eyes--a sweet woman's kiss! weindiu ougen, suezer frouwen kus!<br />
Thus they could then intertwine Sus kunden si do vlehten,<br />
their lips, their breasts, their arms, ir munde, ir bruste, ir armen,<br />
their white thighs. ir blankiu bein. <br />
Whichever painter were to portray it Swelh schiltaere entwurfe daz<br />
companionably as they lay, geselleclichen als si lage<br />
Although their joy [love] bore them many sorrows, Ir beider liebe doch vil sorgen truoc<br />
they cultivated love without any hate. = i phlagen minne an allen haz. </b><br />
(Sigal 1996, 44-45<br />
<br />
This
Tagelied's images are similar to the Gnostics' light-sparks in the
darkness: the "smooth bright (liehten) skins" and "white (blankiu)
thighs," reminiscent of Juliet's "lovers can see by their own beauties"
and the images of each as light on dark. The contradictoriness of love
(evident in Romeo and Juliet):comes out here as well: the "love without
any hate" is a joy that brings sorrows.<br />
<br />
I have not
spoken about the relationship of the watchman to the lovers in these
dawn songs, which is the subject of the intermediate stanzas. In "An
die Klawen" the Lady is the one to whom the watchman sings, and she
replies often and sharply. In answer to the watchman's warning, she
accuses him in the second stanza of disloyalty for bringing her such
unwelcome news:<br />
<br />
<b>You must shut up about such things, Diu solt du mir verseigen gar,</b><br />
<b>I order you by your loyalty to me, daz gebiute ich den triuwen din.</b><br />
<b>I will pay you well, as much as I dare, des lone ich dir als ich getar;</b><br />
<b>just to keep my companion here. So belibet hie der selle min. </b> <br />
(Sigal 1996, 38)<br />
<br />
If
the knight comes out, then he will be with the watchman, and not with
the lady; this gives her grounds for accusing the watchman of
disloyalty to her. At the same time she tries to buy off the watchman
to keep him quiet--as though a bribe could make the sun rise later! She
implies that such an expenditure is risky for her, because her lord
might question where his money went. In Stanza III, the watchman is
offended at the lady's tone and accuses her of bewitching his friend:<br />
<br />
<b>He entrusted himself to my sacred promise er gab sich miner triuwe also</b><br />
<b>that I would bring him out again; daz ich in braehte ouch wider dan.</b><br />
<b>now it is day; it was night then, es ist nu tac: naht was ez do.</b><br />
<b>and you pressed him to your breast; mit drucke an brust</b><br />
<b>your kiss won him from me. din kus mirn an gewan. </b><br />
(Hatto 1965, 452)<br />
<br />
There
is not a little jealousy in the watchman's last line. Not one to let an
accusation pass, the Lady fires back her countercharge:<br />
<br />
<b>By your racket he and I Von dinem schalle ist er und ich<br />
are ever startled: erschocken ie;/ so ninder <br />
so while the morning-star has nowhere yet arisen morgensterne uf gienc uf in<br />
over him, who came here seeking love, der her nach minne ist kommen,<br />
nor gleamed there any light of day. noch ninder luhte tages lieht<br />
You have often stolen him away du hast in dicke mir benomen <br />
from my white arms, von blanken armen, </b><br />
<b>but never from my heart.” und us herzen nieht</b><br />
(Both Sigal 1996, 40)<br />
<br />
She
is saying that the watchman often yells that it is dawn; but then she
and the knight find out that dawn was not at all near: to get the
knight back, the watchman had taken advantage of his trust. All of this
is quite amusing, but what is there underneath? My theory is that
watchman in the Provencale alba has the role of Christ, allowing
soul--the knight--to commune with spirit--the Lady (and also, for the
lady, vice versa). He is the intermediary, the messenger, between
heaven and earth, like Hermes in Greece, or the priest in any religion.
The Cathar perfecti in particular were famous for their faithfulness
and willingness to bear hardship, staying up nights to administer the
Consolomentum rites to the dying, so as to gain them admission to the
heavenly realms. Similarly in de Bornelh's alba, the watchman calls
himself the knight's "faithful messenger," with him in "loyal
companionship," suffering in the cold on the knight's behalf, and
patiently repeating his warning when the knight makes no reply to the
his entreaties. <br />
<br />
Wolfram's Lady, I think, has this
priest and this Christ confused with his imitation, the false Christ
and the false priests of Catholicism. It is the Catholics who accept
bribes to exercise their alleged influence on heaven--the infamous
practice of selling indulgences. Moreover, it is again the Catholics
who have been scaring people with talk of Judgment Day being at hand,
especially given the passing of the millennium. They are the ones who
constantly sing of Judgment Day, just to scare people, calling their
opponents, such as the Holy Roman Emperor, the Antichrist, citing lines
from the Book of Revelation and implying the nearness of Judgment Day.
The Lady is rightfully indignant at such false warnings of Doomsday.
But the Cathars, and their Christ, were never known to be influenced by
money. As for Judgment Day, the Cathars simply did not speak of it;
historically, the Gnostic Christ is famous for having said, when the
disciples asked when the Kingdom of God is to come, that "the Kingdom
of the father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it"
(Robinson 1988, 138) There is no Judgment; it is simply a matter of
seeing or not seeing what is in front of everyone already. If at some
point time should come to an end, as some Gnostic teachers seemed to
suppose, that would only be a danger for one totally in such a temporal
world, from which the Gnostic by his very way of seeing is already
partly removed.<br />
<br />Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-369321568441874951.post-52091714392743995422012-05-08T19:42:00.002-07:002012-05-10T12:05:00.160-07:00Appendix C: Comparisons of English and Other Verse<b>APPENDIX: LINES FROM ROMEO AND JULIET, </b><br />
<b>LINKED TO IMAGES IN EARLIER POETRY (A-F BELOW) AND GNOSTIC TEXTS (G)</b><br />
<br />
Rom. [seeing Jul.] O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! C1: brightness E3: bright<br />
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Also G1, G7: luminous; G4: light <br />
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear; and A6: sparks <br />
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear! <br />
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows, B4: lily. thorns E1,IV; E3:white <br />
As yonder Lady o'er her fellows shows...(I.v.43-51)<br />
<br />
Rom [to Jul.]. If I profane with my unworthiest hand (No dawn song antecedents, but the<br />
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: the classical progression from looking <br />
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand to conversing, to touching, to kissing, <br />
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. etc., with an implied comparison to <br />
Jul. Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, stages of religious experience.)<br />
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;<br />
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,<br />
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.<br />
Rom. Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?<br />
Jul. Aye, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.<br />
Rom. O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;<br />
They pray; then grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.<br />
Jul. Saints do not move, though grant for prayer's sake.<br />
Rom. Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take. [He kisses her.] (I.v.95-104)<br />
<br />
Rom. What light through yonder window breaks? C1, G4: light <br />
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. ..She speaks! C1: sun <br />
O, speak again, bright angel! for thou art E3: bright; C4, H2: angel<br />
As glorious to this night, being o'er my head,<br />
As is a winged messenger of heaven...(II.ii.25-28) B4: from other spheres<br />
<br />
Rom. [supposing Juliet's eyes were two stars]...her eyes in heaven <br />
Would through the airy region stream so bright C1: brightness, light; G1:luminous E3: bright <br />
That birds would sing and think it were not night...(II.ii.20-22) <br />
<br />
Jul. [before wedding night] Lovers can see to do their amorous rites<br />
By their own beauties... E3: smooth bright skins<br />
Come, night, come Romeo, come thou day in night. C5: moon<br />
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night,<br />
Whiter than new snow on a raven's back Raven:; sacred to Lugh E1,IV; E3: white<br />
Come gentle night, come loving black-browed night,<br />
Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die [ed. note: die: euphemism for sexual ecstasy] <br />
Take him and cut him out in little stars, <br />
And he will make the face of heaven so fine<br />
That all the world will be in love with night,<br />
And pay no worship to the garish sun...(III.ii.8-9,17-25) <br />
<br />
Jul. Poor ropes, you are beguil'd,/ Both you and I, for Romeo is exil'd. <br />
He made you for a highway to my bed,<br />
But I a maid, die maiden-widowed. C4: coming to naught<br />
Come, cords, come, nurse; I'll to my wedding-bed; G3: death came into being<br />
And death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead! (III.ii.132-137) <br />
<br />
Rom. Then mightst thou speak, then mightst thou tear thy hair,<br />
And fall upon the ground, as I do now, C4: coming to naught<br />
Taking the measure of an unmade grave...(III.iii.68-70) G3: death came into being <br />
<br />
Jul. [end of wedding night.] Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.<br />
It was the nightingale and not the lark D3,II: the bird; D4, D5: the lark <br />
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear... <br />
Rom. It was the lark, the herald of the morn, <br />
no nightingale...Look, love, what envious streaks C3: tongue;D1,D5,F1: envious; F2,rowes <br />
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east. C2: teeth; E1,I: claws <br />
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day <br />
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. C6: spies<br />
I must be gone and live, or stay and die... D1: fear; D2: villainy<br />
Jul. Yond light is not day-light, I know it, I; <br />
Therefore stay yet; thou need'st not to be gone...<br />
Rom. Let me be ta'en, let me be put to death; D3,III: gilos, attack<br />
I am content, so thou wilt have it so.<br />
I'll say yon grey is not the morning's eye... E1,I: growing grey<br />
How is't, my soul? Let's talk; it is not day. D4: the lark lies<br />
Jul. It is, it is! hie hence, be gone, away!... <br />
Some say the lark makes sweet division;<br />
This doth not so, for she divideth us...<br />
O, now be gone; more light and light it grows. A3/A7: Turn/Run away; E1,V: glances<br />
Rom. More light and light; more dark and dark our woes! C1: light; E2: cares; E3: sorrows (III.v.1-3,6-11,29-30) <br />
<br />
Capulet. [to Juliet] Hang thee, young baggage! disobedient wretch! <br />
I tell thee what: Get thee to church o' Thursday,<br />
Or never after look me in the face... D1;D2;D3,III: gilos, fear, villainy<br />
Graze where you will, you shall not house with me... Also F1:cruel day,envyous; F2:ielosye <br />
An you be mine, I'll give you to my friend; Also A2: brothers; A4: watchmen <br />
An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets, And G5, G6, G7<br />
For, by my soul, I'll ne'er acknowledge thee,<br />
Nor what is mine shall never do thee good. (III.v.161-196)<br />
.<br />
Rom. [at Juliet's tomb]. ..How oft when men are at the point of death<br />
Have they been merry! which their keepers call G4: none...torment<br />
A lightening before death. O, how may I G4: receive the light<br />
Call this a lightening? O my love! my wife! <br />
....O, here/Will I set up my everlasting rest, G4: eternal realm<br />
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars G5: angels around him<br />
From this world-wearied flesh. (V.iii.88-91,109-112) G4: none...torment<br />
<br />
Prince. Capulet! Montague! D3,VII: foolish, jealous one<br />
See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate, . Also F2, ielosye; G5,Saklas <br />
That Heaven finds means to kill your joys with love. (V.iii.291-3) <br />
<br />
<br />
<b>B. IN HEBREW: SELECTIONS FROM THE SONG OF SONGS, </b><br />
<b>2ND-4TH CENTURY B.C.E. (THE BIBLE, KING JAMES VERSION)</b><br />
(Literal translations advanced by Bloch and Bloch are in square brackets, <br />
as well as "womb trembled," in 4, from a medieval source;.)<br />
<br />
1. The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s: hir ha-shirim Ôasher li-shelomoh Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth; yishshaqueni mi(n)-neshqot pihu,<br />
for thy love [-making] is better than wine. (1:1-2) ki tobim dodeyka mi(n)-yayin,<br />
<br />
2. My mother’s children [brothers] were angry with me;<br />
they made me the keeper of the vineyards;<br />
but mine own vineyard have I not kept. (1:6)<br />
<br />
3. Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth,<br />
where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon;<br />
for why should I be as one that turneth aside [one who loses her way] <br />
by the flocks of thy companions?<br />
If thou know not, O thou fairest among women, <br />
go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock, <br />
and feed thy kids besides the shepherds’ tents. (1:7-8)<br />
<br />
As a lily among thorns,<br />
so is my love among the daughters. (2:2)<br />
<br />
5, Take us the foxes, the little foxes, /that spoil the vine:<br />
for our vines have tender grapes. (2:15)<br />
<br />
6. My beloved is mine, and I am his; dodi li wa’ni lo<br />
he feedeth upon the lilies, haro’eh bashshoshannim<br />
Until [Before] the day break [breathe], and the shadows flee away,<br />
Turn [Run away], my beloved, and be thou like a roe<br />
or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether. (2:16-17) <br />
<br />
Thy two breasts are like two young roes <br />
that are twins, which feed among the lilies.<br />
Until [before] the day break [breathes], and the shadows flee [away],<br />
I will get me to the mountain of myrrh<br />
And to the hill of frankincense. (4:5-6.)<br />
<br />
8. Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south;<br />
Blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out<br />
Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits. (4:16)<br />
<br />
9. I sleep, but my heart waketh;/ it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, <br />
"Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled; <br />
for my head is filled with dew./ and my locks with the drops of the night.”<br />
I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on?/ I have washed my feet, how shall I defile them?<br />
My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door,<br />
and my bowels moved [womb trembled] for him.<br />
I opened to my beloved;/ but my beloved had withdrawn himself and was gone; <br />
my soul failed [went forth] when he spake;<br />
I sought him, but I could not find him;/ I called him, but he gave me no answer; <br />
the watchmen of the city found me,/ they smote me, they wounded me; <br />
the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.<br />
I charge thee, O daughters of Jerusalem,/ if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him<br />
that I am sick of love. (5:2-8)<br />
<br />
10. Set me a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thy arm;<br />
for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave;<br />
the coals thereof are coals of fire, / which hath a most vehement [devouring] flame. (8:6)<br />
(Lit: [see text]: its sparks are sparks of fire, which burn with God's own flame.)<br />
<br />
11. We have a little sister, and she has no breasts:<br />
what shall we do for our sister <br />
in the day when she shall be spoken for?<br />
If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver:<br />
and if she be a door, we will inclose her with boards of cedar.<br />
I am a wall, and my breasts like towers;<br />
then was I in his eyes as one that found favor [salom, peace]. (8:8-10)<br />
<br />
12. Thou that dwellest in the gardens,<br />
The companions hearken to [All our friends listen for] thy voice;<br />
cause me to hear it.<br />
Make haste [Run away], my beloved, and be thou like to a roe <br />
or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices. (8:13-14)<br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b>C. IN PROVENCALE AND OLD FRENCH, 12TH CENTURY</b><br />
<br />
1. Watch for us, dear watchman of the tower, Gaitaz vos, gaiteta de la tor<br />
for the gilos, your evil lord, del gilos, ostre malvays seyno more envious even than the dawn enious plus que l'alba<br />
for yonder we speak of love. ` que za jos parlam d'amor. <br />
But we know Mas paor <br />
to fear the dawn nos fai l'alba <br />
the dawn, yes the dawn! (Anonymous) l'alba, oi l'alba!<br />
<br />
2. Beloved Lord Steven, go, Amicx N Esteves, via, <br />
for I shall remain yours, Qu’ieu remanh vostr’amia<br />
and if the gilos comes Que si’l gilos venia,<br />
I have great fear Gran paor ai<br />
and great terror E gran esmai<br />
that he will do us villainy. (Anonymous) Que’ns fezes vilania.<br />
<br />
3. I. Glorious king, true light and brightness, Reis glorios, verais lums e clartatz<br />
Powerful God, Lord, if you please, Deus poderos, Senher, si a vos platz<br />
to my companion be a faithful aid, Al meu copanh siatz fizels aiuda <br />
For I have not seen him since the night has come Q u’en no lo vi, pos la nocha fo venduda<br />
and soon it will be dawn. Et ades sera l’alba.<br />
<br />
II. Fair friend, are you asleep or awake? Bel companh, si dormetz o velhatz <br />
Sleep no longer, softly rise, No dormatz plus, suau vos ressidat<br />
for in the East I see the star grown bigger Qu’en orien vei l’estela creguda<br />
which brings day. I have known it well, C’amena’l jorn, qu’eu l’ai bae conoguda,<br />
and soon it will be dawn! Et ades sera l’alba<br />
<br />
III. Fair friend, in singing I call you: Bel companho, en chantan vos apel;<br />
sleep no longer, for I hear the bird sing No dormatz plus, qu’eu auch chanter l’auzel who goes seeking day through the wood, Que vai queren lo jorn per lo boschatge <br />
and I fear the the jealous one will attack you, Et ai paor que’l gilos vos assatge,<br />
and soon it will be dawn! Et ades sera l’alba.<br />
<br />
IV. Fair friend, go to the window, Bel Companho, issetz al fenestrel<br />
and look at the signs [stars] in the sky; E regardatz las estelas del cel <br />
you will know if I am your faithful messenger: Connoisseretz si’us sui fizels messatge; <br />
if you do not, yours will be the harm, Si non o faitz, vostres n’er lo domnatge,<br />
and soon it will be dawn! Et ades sera l’alba.<br />
<br />
V. Fair friend, since parting from you, Bel companho, pos me parti de vos,<br />
I have not slept nor budged from my knees, Eu no’m dormi ni’m moc de genolhos,<br />
But prayed to God, the son of Holy Mary, Ans preiei Deu, lo filh Santa Maria,<br />
To give you back to me in loyal companionship, Que’us me rendes per leial companhia, and soon it will be dawn! Et ades sera l’alba.<br />
<br />
VI. Fair friend, outside on the steps Bel companho, la foras als peiros<br />
you begged me not to fall asleep Me preiavatz qu’eu no fos dormilhos<br />
but to watch all night till day: Enans velhes tota noch tro al dia<br />
now neither my song nor my friendship pleases you Era no’us platz mos chans ni ma paria,<br />
and soon it will be dawn! Et ades sera l’alba.<br />
<br />
VII. "Fair sweet friend, I am in such a precious resting place Bel dous companh, tan sui en ric sojorn<br />
that I would not want there ever to be dawn nor day, Qu'eu no volgra mais fos alba ni jorn,<br />
for the most noble lady that ever was born of mother Car la gensor que anc nasques de maire<br />
I hold and embrace; for which reason I do not care at all Tenc et abras, per qu'eu non prezi gaire,<br />
about the foolish jealous one or the dawn." Lo fol gilos ni l'alba. <br />
(Giraut de Bornelh, d. ca. 1200) <br />
<br />
4. My love and I alone<br />
in a wood nearby Bethune<br />
Played together Tuesday <br />
All night there by the moon.<br />
Until the night turned gray<br />
and the lark arising, sang: E ke l’alowe chantait as if to say, "Lovers, away," Ke dit:”Amins, alons an;”<br />
and he responded softly: Et il respont doucement:<br />
"It isn't nearly day “Il n’est mie jours,<br />
sweet noble heart, Savourez au cors gent,<br />
so help me love, Si m’ait amors, the lark lies to us." (Anonymous, 13th c.) L’alowette nos mant. (Old Fr.)<br />
<br />
5. When I see the lark moving Can vei la lauzeta mover<br />
its wings joyfully against the light, de joi sas alas contra-l rai,<br />
forgetting itself and letting itself fall because of que s'oblid'e-s laissa chazer<br />
the sweetness which rushes to its heart, per la doussor c'al cor li vai,<br />
alas! I feel such envy ai! tan grans enveya me'en ve<br />
of those whom I see rejoicing decui qu'eu veya jauzion,<br />
that I wonder my heart mera villhas ai, car desse<br />
does not at once melt away with longing. lo cor de dezirer no-m fon.<br />
(Bernat de Ventadorn, 12th cent.)<br />
<br />
<b>D. IN GERMAN, 12-13TH CENTURY: WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH</b><br />
<br />
I. "His claws through the sky he draws; “Sine klawen durh die wolken<br />
with great might aloft he soars; sint eslagen, er stiget uf mit <br />
I see him growing gray, grozer kraft;<br />
dawnlike, as if about to dawn: tagelich, als er wil tagen,<br />
--the day, --den tac,…<br />
which means to separate the worthy man<br />
from his companion,<br />
the man I let in with such worry,<br />
whom I will bring away from here, if I can. <br />
I owe that to his many virtues.<br />
<br />
II. "Watchman, your song removes my joy<br />
and adds to my lamentation;<br />
you always bring me news that does not suit me<br />
--at dawn,<br />
always at that same time, daybreak.<br />
You must shut up about such things, Diu solt du mir verseigen gar,<br />
I order you by your loyalty to me, daz gebiute ich den triuwen din.<br />
I will pay you well; as much as I dare, des lone ich dir als ich getar;<br />
just to keep my companion here. so belibet hie der selle min.<br />
<br />
III. "He really must get out without delay;<br />
now give him leave to depart, sweet lady; <br />
& let him make love to you some other time<br />
--in secret,<br />
that he may keep his honor and his life.<br />
He entrusted himself to my sacred promise<br />
that I would bring him out again.<br />
Now it is day; it was night then, and you pressed <br />
him to your breast; your kiss won him from me."<br />
<br />
IV. “So it please you, watchman, sing and leave him be,<br />
who brought love here and love received.<br />
By your racket he and I Von dinem schalle ist er und ich<br />
are ever startled: erschocken ie;/ so ninder <br />
so while the morning-star has nowhere yet arisen morgensterne uf gienc uf in<br />
over him, who came here seeking love, der her nach minne ist kommen,<br />
nor gleamed there any light of day. noch ninder luhte tages lieh<br />
You have often stolen him away<br />
from my white arms, but never from my heart.”<br />
<br />
V. Because of the glances that the day Vor den blicken die der tac<br />
was sending through the window-panes, tet durh diu glas<br />
for which the watchman sang his warning, und do der wahter warnen sanc,<br />
she had to become alarmed si muose ershricken<br />
for him who was there beside her; durh den der da bi ir was<br />
her little breast to his she pressed. ir bruestelin an brust si dwan<br />
The knight did not forget prowess Der riter ellens nit vergaz,<br />
though the watchman wanted to forestall this: des wolde in wenden wahters don!<br />
Leave-taking, near and even nearer urloup nah und naher baz<br />
with kisses and other things, mit kusse und anders <br />
gave them love's reward. gab in mine lo.<br />
<br />
2. The day thrust powerfully Der tac mit kraft <br />
through the windows al durh die venster warnen sanc,<br />
Many locks they llocked, it did not help. vil sloze si beslussen; daz half niht<br />
Because of this, care became known to them. des wart in sorge kunt.<br />
<br />
3. The sad man swiftly took his leave like this: Der truric man nam urloup balde alsus:<br />
Their smooth bright skins came nearer; ir liehten vel die slehten komen naher,<br />
Thus the day shone in. us der tac erschein.<br />
Crying eyes--a sweet woman's kiss! weindiu ougen, suezer frouwen kus!<br />
Thus they could then intertwine Sus kunden si do vlehten,<br />
their lips, their breasts, their arms, ir munde, ir bruste, ir armen,<br />
their white thighs. ir blankiu bein. <br />
Whichever painter were to portray it Swelh schiltaere entwurfe daz<br />
companionably as they lay, geselleclichen als si lage<br />
Although their joy [love] bore them many sorrows, Ir beider liebe doch vil sorgen truoc<br />
they cultivated love without any hate. = si phlagen minne an allen haz.<br />
<br />
<b>E. IN ARABIC, 11TH CENTURY: SEVEN POETS</b><br />
<br />
1. Who is this that, rising like the dawn, / looks down and shines with the brightness of the sun?<br />
...See, the world would be dark now, / but for your light. (Ibn Gabirol, Spanish Jewish)<br />
<br />
2. My heart can take on /any form:<br />
for gazelles a meadow, /a cloister for monks,<br />
<br />
For the idols, sacred ground,/ Ka'ba for the circling pilgrim,<br />
the tables of the Torah,/ the scrolls of the Kur'an.<br />
<br />
I profess the religion of love./ Wherever its caravan turns<br />
along the way; that is the belief,/ the faith I keep.<br />
<br />
Like Bishr,/ Hind and her sister,<br />
love-mad Qays and the lost Layla,<br />
Mayya and her lover Ghaylan. (Ibn Arabi; Sells, 71-72)<br />
<br />
3. When, full of drunkenness, he went to sleep/ and also the eyes of the watchmen were closed,<br />
I came near to him, though he was far away,/ like a companion who knows whom he seeks.<br />
I crept nearer as sleep creeps,./ I lifted myself up as breathing lifts up.<br />
I spent with him a night full of delights,./ until the darkness showed smilingly its white teeth:<br />
Kissing the white neck/ and caressing the dark-red lips. (Abu Amir ibn Shuhayd, Cordova)<br />
<br />
4. It is as if we had never lain, our union being a third with us,<br />
and good fortune closing the eyelids of our slanderer,<br />
two secrets in the mind of the darkness that covered us,<br />
until the tongue of dawn almost gave us away. (Ibn Zaydun, Spain) <br />
<br />
5. Are you of the world of angels or merely human?<br />
Make it clear to me, for fatigue has weakened my understanding!<br />
I see a human form, but when I think more deeply<br />
it seems to be a body from higher spheres. <br />
<br />
...The coming to naught of that thing [i.e. love] will be caused by our <br />
Being bereft of that to which it owed its existence. (Both by Ibn Hazm, Spain; not dawn songs) <br />
<br />
6. O night, in which my moon lay embracing me<br />
until the dawn, without fear or caution.<br />
His words were pearls, no need for stars;<br />
his face made there no need for the moon.<br />
While I allowed my ear and my eye<br />
to graze in his charms, I was warned--the dawn!<br />
<br />
The night had no fault except its shortness,<br />
but is there more hideous fault than this shortness?<br />
I wish it were longer, even if <br />
I had to replenish it with the dark blood of my heart<br />
and the dark pupil of my eye. (Al-Sharif Mas'Ud al-Bayadi, Baghdad)<br />
<br />
7. On how many nights did sleep divert the blamers <br />
From two lovers who gave each other an assignation...<br />
Nothing disturbed us in the darkness<br />
But the likeness of the stars to the eyes of spies. (Ibn al-Mutazz, Baghdad)<br />
<br />
<b>F. IN MIDDLE ENGLISH, 14TH CENTURY: CHAUCER </b><br />
(annotations indicate similar images)<br />
<br />
1. But whan the cok, comune astrologer [astronomer], B4: bird Gan on his brest to bete and after crowe,<br />
And Lucyfer, the dayes messager, D3,II: star; E1,IV: morning-star<br />
Gan for to rise, and out hire bemes throwe, <br />
And estward roos, to hyum that koude it knows, <br />
Fortuna Major [Jupiter], that anoon Criseyde, D3,III: signs in the sky<br />
With herte soor, to Troilus thus seyde:... <br />
<br />
[Troilus:] "O cruel day, accusour of the joie D1,D2,D3,III: gilos; D5, joyfully; E3, joy<br />
That night and love han stole and faste irwyen,<br />
Acorsed be thi comyng intoTroye, <br />
For every bore [hole] hath oon of thi brighte yen [rays]! E1,V: glances<br />
Envyous day, what list [leads] the so to spien [spy]? D1, envious; C6: spies <br />
What hastow lost, why sekestow this place, Also H7<br />
Ther God thi light so quenche, for his grace?"... D3,I: true light, powerful God<br />
<br />
And ek the sone, Titan, gan he chide,<br />
And seyde, “O fool, wel may men the dispise D3,VII: foolish, jealous one<br />
That hast the dawyng al night by thi syde, <br />
And suffrest hire so soone up fro the rise,<br />
For to disese loveris in this wyse.<br />
What! holde youre bed ther, thow, and ek thi Morwe!<br />
I bidde God, so yeve yow bothe serwe!" (Troilus and Criseyde)<br />
<br />
2. Gladeth, y foules, of the morrow gray,<br />
Lo! Venuys risen among yon rowes [streaks] rede! D3,II: star; E1,IV:morning-star ye lovers, that lye in any drede,<br />
Fleeth, lest wikkid tonges yowe espy, C3: tongue; C6: spies<br />
Lo! yond the sonne, the candel of ielosye! (“The Complynt of Mars”) D1;D2;D3,III: gilos<br />
<br />
G. IN COPTIC AND PROVENCALE: ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL GNOSTIC TEXTS<br />
<br />
1.. And he (Adam) saw the woman by him. And in that moment the luminous Epinoia appeared and she lifted the veil which lay over his mind. And he became sober from the drunkenness of darkness...And he recognized his counter-image, and he said, "This is indeed bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh." (Apocryphon of John; Robinson 1988, 118)<br />
<br />
2..When God had created me out of the earth along with Eve your mother, I went about with her in a glory which she had seen in the aeon from which we had come forth...And we resembled the great eternal angels. For we were higher than the god who had created us and the powers with him, whom we did not know. (Apocalypse of Adam; Robinson 1988, 279)<br />
<br />
3. When Eve was still in Adam, death did not exist. When she was separated from him death came into being. If he enters again and attains his former self, death will be no more. (Gospel of Philip; Robinson 1988, 150) <br />
<br />
4. Every one who will enter the bridal chamber will kindle the light, just as in the marriages which are [.....] happen at night. That fire [....] (burns?--MH) only at night and is put out. But the mysteries of that marriage are perfected rather in the day and the light. Neither that day nor its light ever sets. If anyone becomes a son of the bridal chamber, he will receive the light....And none shall be able to torment a person like this even while he dwells in the world...The world has become the eternal realm (aeon), for the eternal realm is fullness for him. This is the way it is; it is revealed to him alone, not hidden in the darkness and the night, but hidden in a perfect day and a holy light. (Gospel of Philip; Robinson 1988, 160)<br />
<br />
5. Now the archon who is weak has three names. The first name is Yaltabaoth [sic], the second is Saklas [“Fool”--notes, Barnstone 1984, 75], and the third is Samael [“that is, blind god” --notes, Robinson 1988, 175]. And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, “I am God and there is no other God beside me,” for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come...When he saw the creation which surrounds him and the multitude of the angels around him which had come forth from him, he said to them, “I am a jealous God and there is no other God beside me.” But by announcing this he indicated to the angels who attended him that there exists another God. For if there were no other one, of whom would he be jealous? (Apocryphon of John, Robinson 1988, 111-112)<br />
<br />
6. Holy Father, Just God [Provencale "Dieu dreyturier," French "Dieu juste," just (or legitimate) God, <br />
as opposed to the other God, unjust (or illegitimate) and bad] of the good spirits, thou who art never deceived, who never errs, nor lies, nor loses his way, nor doubts: for fear of dying in the world of the alien god [Provencale. "Dieu estranh," French "Dieu etranger," another term for the unjust (or illegitimate) God], as we are not of this world, and the world is not of us, give us to know what thou knowest, and to love what thou lovest. (Cathar Prayer; Nelli 1976, 38-39)<br />
<br />
7. And when they [the archons] recognized that he [Adam] was luminous, and that he could think better than they, and that he was free from wickedness, they took him and threw him into the lowest region of all matter...And he [the blessed One, the Mother-Father} sent, through his beneficent Spirit and his great mercy, a helper to Adam, luminous Epinoia which comes out of him, who is called Life. And she assists the whole creature, by toiling with him and by restoring him to his fullness and by teaching him about the descent of his soul (and) by teaching him about the way of ascent, which is the way he came down. And the luminous Epinoia was hidden in Adam, in order that the archons might not know her... (Apocryphon of John, Robinson 1988, 116)Michael S Howardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06488567669455421279noreply@blogger.com0