The first of three sets of adaptations of episodes from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This installment, “Leaving London” (1998), adapts the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the Knight’s Tale, and the Wife of Bath’s Tale.
Casting note: Sean Bean’s in this one – and his character doesn’t die!
In the most high and palmy state of Rome
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets
From the periphery of Roman imperial power, in yesterday’s The Miracle Maker, to the epicenter, in today’s Julius Caesar (“Shakespeare: The Animated Tales,” 1994).
The way that Caesar’s cape flaps behind him reminds me of Beowulf’s similarly flapping cape back in Part 1.
Inexplicably, this adaptation changes the manner of Brutus’s and Cassius’s deaths. What happened to “Hold then my sword … while I do run upon it” – which I remember vividly from my old Classics Illustrated comics?
Even before the comics, my first introduction to this play, and to Shakespeare generally, was when my mother bought me a recording (pictured below) of speeches from Julius Caesar and The Tempest. (Oddly, the cover artist seemed to think he was illustrating Midsummer Night’s Dream. I mean, I suppose the chap with wings there could be either Ariel or Puck, but his companion can only be Nick Bottom.) Even without context, and having no idea which side to root for, I was fascinated by the exchange of funeral speeches between Antony and Brutus. (I still am!)
Yesterday I was reading through a collection of mediæval verse when, in the section on the 15th-century poet and scalawag François Villon, I came across two poems that were remarkably similar to two songs in Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera. I did some googling, and yes, this is well-known (and Brecht apparently borrowed more than just the two I’d found), but it was news to me.
Compare this Villon poem:
What though the beauty I love and serve be cheap,
Ought you to take me for a beast or fool?
All things a man could wish are in her keep;
For her I turn swashbuckler in love’s school.
When folk drop in, I take my pot and stool
And fall to drinking with no more ado.
I fetch them bread, fruit, cheese, and water, too;
I say all’s right so long as I’m well paid:
“Look in again when your flesh troubles you,
Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.”But soon the devil’s among us flesh and fell,
When penniless to bed comes Madge my whore;
I loathe the very sight of her like hell.
I snatch gown, girdle, surcoat, all she wore,
And tell her, these shall stand against her score.
She grips her hips with both hands, cursing God,
Swearing by Jesus’ body, bones, and blood,
That they shall not. Then I, no whit dismayed,
Cross her cracked nose with some stray shiver of wood
Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.When all’s up she drops me a windy word,
Bloat like a beetle puffed and poisonous:
Grins, thumps my pate, and calls me dickey-bird,
And cuffs me with a fist that’s ponderous.
We sleep like logs, being drunken both of us;
Then when we wake her womb begins to stir;
To save her seed she gets me under her
Wheezing and whining, flat as planks are laid:
And thus she spoils me for a whoremonger
Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.Blow, hail or freeze, I’ve bread here baked rent-free!
Whoring’s my trade, and my whore pleases me;
Bad cat, bad rat; we’re just the same if weighed.
We that love filth, filth follows us, you see;
Honour flies from us, as from her we flee
Inside this brothel where we drive our trade.
with this Brecht song:
or likewise this Villon poem:
Rain has unsmirched and washed us
And the sun has dried and blackened us;
Magpies and crows have carved out our eyes,
And torn off our beards and eyebrows.
We never sit for a moment;
Now here, then there, as the wind changes,
at its pleasure, without cease it tosses us,
More pecked by birds than thimbles,
Do not then be of our brotherhood,
But pray God that he wills to absolve us all! …Human brothers who live after us,
Do not have your hearts hardened against us,
For, if you take pity on us poor fellows,
God will sooner have mercy on you.
You see us tied here, five, six:
As for the flesh, that we nurtured too much,
It is already long-time consumed, and rotting,
And we, the bones, become ashes and powder.
Of our pain let no one make fun,
But pray God that he wills to absolve us all!
with this Brecht song:
I’ve used the Threepenny Opera versions from the excellent Raul Julia stage production (not to be confused with the sadly unbearable Raul Julia movie version) because the translations are more accurate than most.
Here’s another version of the “Zuhälterballade,” featuring Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper. This translation is in some respects more accurate, and in other respects less accurate, than the Raul Julia / Ellen Greene version above:
While I’m on the subject of Threepenny Opera, I can’t resist adding this performance of “Seeräuber-Jenny,” by Anne Kerry Ford. This song has nothing to do with Villon, and the translation is not terribly accurate, but Ford’s performance is amazing:
For comparison, here’s the Ellen Greene version – a more accurate translation, and an excellent performance, but not quite as excellent as Ford’s:
If I shall summon to my mind
Those olden days, then I shall find
How all the world was full of wealth:
The life of man was passed in health;
Riches and plenty flourished then;
Then fortune favoured valiant men;
Knighthood was then an honoured name
Whereof, world-wide, men wrote the fame
In chronicles that still endure;
Then law and justice were secure,
The privilege of royalty
Upheld, and all the barony
Respected in their high estate.
The cities were not in debate,
The people were subservient
Under the rule of government;
And peace, by righteousness caressed,
With charity lay down to rest.
Men let their countenance express
Their secret hearts and inwardness;
No manner of deceit was wrought,
The word was mirror to the thought;
Then love was safe from jealousy;
Then virtue was prized royally,
And vice was trampled underfoot.
Now lies the flower below the root;
The world has altered utterly,
And in one way especially:
Love has grown all discordant now.
And, for your witness, set down how
In every land beneath the sky,
With common voice which cannot lie
(Not one by one but all for all
It is that now they cry and call),
Men say their kingdoms are divided;
By hate, not love, are laws decided;
No peace is now the prize of war;
The law is double-faced, therefore
All justice now has lost its way
And righteousness is gone astray.
— John Gower, Confessio Amantis (14th century)
James Burke’s various video series on the history of science and ideas (one series of The Day the Universe Changed and three series of Connections) are among my favourite educational videos, thanks to the combination of beautiful locations, unexpected connections, and Burke’s irreverent attitude.
That’s not to say I don’t have problems with them. Burke often oversimplifies his subject matter or gets certain things just plain wrong; and even when his history is accurate, his philosophical interpretations are often highly questionable. But the shows are so generally good that I like them despite all that.
My absolute favourite of all his videos is this one, “Point of View,” about science, art, and engineering during the Renaissance:
Highly recommended! (It really makes me want to visit Florence.)
However, nearly everything he says in that video about Aristotle is wrong. In particular, Burke describes Aristotle as holding that “the Almighty handcrafted every object in existence” – but of course Aristotle’s Prime Mover does no such thing. The Prime Mover does not engage in any manipulation of material objects, but merely spends its days serenely contemplating itself, thereby inspiring the celestial spheres to imitate its eternal actuality as best they can by engaging in endless circular motion – which, in turn, by alternately heating and cooling the world below, causes the elements to keep intermixing in such a way as to make the natural order possible; but no natural object is deliberately designed.
I didn’t catch any other errors, but I might have if I were more of an expert about the Renaissance.
Some of Burke’s other videos are more problematic. Take, for example, “In the Light of the Above” (admittedly a clever title), about the Middle Ages, a topic on which he takes a rather Rand-like position, with its associated one-sidedness:
Certainly this video is enjoyable and instructive. But it also has me frequently gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair. Some examples:
a) According to Burke, Augustine rejected classical civilisation as a “load of rubbish,” and thereby “set Christian thinking into a kind of drop-out mode for centuries.”
On the contrary, in the battle among early Christians as to whether to embrace the intellectual and cultural heritage of classical Greece and Rome or instead to consign it to the ash heap, Augustine was firmly on the pro-classical side. He himself had been converted to philosophy by reading Cicero; and Platonic and Neoplatonic ideas had played an important role in helping him find his way from Manicheanism back to Christianity. So he was convinced that classical philosophy was of value to Christians – and his own philosophy incorporated Platonic, Neoplatonic, Aristotelean, and Stoic ideas. It is thanks in large part to Augustine that mediæval Christianity was so largely hospitable to pagan ideas; in effect, Augustine was the same kind of champion of the Neoplatonic tradition that Aquinas would later be for the Aristotelean tradition.
Moreover, Augustine’s philosophical dialogues, like On Free Choice of the Will and On the Teacher, were the Middle Ages’ main point of access to the Platonic dialogue form (since the only actual Platonic dialogue they had available was a fragment of the Timæus, which is more of a monologue than a dialogue), and the Augustinian model of rational, civil debate (On Free Choice begins with Evodius asking “Isn’t God the cause of evil?” and Augustine answering, not with fanatical denunciation, but with careful reasoning in a friendly and courteous manner) helped to set the norms for the civilised give-and-take of the later mediæval universities, where students were expected to be able to construct arguments for and against every major proposition, including the existence of God. (Augustine has the reputation of being a grim, censorious, puritanical, fideistic figure, but the Augustine we meet in his dialogues seems much more affable, witty, and urbane, with a firm reverence for reason. I reckon lunch with Augustine would be more like lunch with Voltaire than like lunch with St. Jerome.)
b) Burke gives the impression that the only major classical text to survive into the Middle Ages, besides some bits of Plato and Aristotle, and prior to the 12th-century influx of material from the Arab world, was Martianus Capella’s book on the seven liberal arts. In fact the early mediævals also had works by Cicero, Ovid, Horace, Vergil, Seneca, Apuleius, Lucan, Porphyry, and others.
c) Certainly the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages involved a general decline in prosperity, population, literacy, and scientific knowledge. But Burke nevertheless exaggerates the “darkness” of the period. He describes the northern tribes that invaded and displaced the Roman Empire as a “dangerous bunch of barbarian louts if you came between them and what they were after” – as if that didn’t equally describe the Romans. He also characterises the Frankish, Visigothic, etc. societies of 5th-6th century Europe as a bunch of “illiterate boozers,” and portrays them as living in hovels; one almost expects to hear one of them calling to another, “Dennis, there’s some lovely filth down here!”
Yet, as we learn from Gregory of Tours, these ignorant, hovel-dwelling, pre-Carolingian boozers managed to construct some pretty impressive buildings – one with “52 windows, 120 columns, and 8 doors,” and another “150 feet in length [and] 50 in height,” with “42 windows, 70 columns, 8 doors,” and “walls of variegated work adorned with many kinds of marble.”
They also seem to have produced some rather lovely works of art whenever they weren’t rolling about drunkenly in the mud:
d) While Aristotle did defend the knowability and value of the perceptible world, he did not say “believe only your own experience.” He thought that we should trust the “appearances” (at least defeasibly), but those “appearances” included not only the evidence of the senses but also the endoxa or “reputable beliefs,” i.e., the beliefs of the many and/or the wise.
e) Burke suggests that Greco-Roman pagan thought had a “less supernatural, more practical, hard-headed feel” than Christian thought – but this is at least misleading. As C. S. Lewis writes in The Discarded Image, concerning the confrontation between pagan and Christian thought in late antiquity:
The conflict between the old and the new religion was often bitter, and both sides were ready to use coercion when they dared. But at the same time the influence of the one upon the other was very great. … The precise nature and even, in some senses, the width of the chasm which separated the religions can easily be mistaken if we take our ideas solely from political or ecclesiastical histories …. Cultured people on both sides had had the same education, read the same poets, learned the same rhetoric. …
I have read a novel which represents all the Pagans of that day as carefree sensualists, and all the Christians as savage ascetics. It is a grave error. They were in some ways far more like each other than either was like a modern man. The leaders on both sides were monotheists, and both admitted almost an infinity of supernatural beings between God and man. Both were highly intellectual, but also (by our standards) highly superstitious. The last champions of Paganism were not the sort of men that … a modern “humanist’ … would wish them to have been. They were not lusty extroverts recoiling in horror or contempt from a world grown grey with the breath of the ‘pale Galilean’. … A world-renouncing, ascetic, and mystical character then marked the most eminent Pagans no less than their Christian opponents. It was the spirit of the age. Everywhere, on both sides, men were turning away from the civic virtues and the sensual pleasures to seek an inner purgation and a supernatural goal. The modern who dislikes the Christian Fathers would have disliked the Pagan philosophers equally, and for similar reasons. Both alike would have embarrassed him with stories of visions, ecstasies, and apparitions.
f) Burke’s suggestion that the Eucharist is “meaningless” if transubstantiation isn’t literally true would come as a surprise to most Protestants.
g) Burke describes the ideas of Abélard, William (of Conches), and Thierry (of Chartres) as though they were the product of the new texts and ideas coming into Christian Europe from Muslim Andalucia; but that influx did not begin in earnest until the mid-12th century, by which time all three of these thinkers were dead.
Burke also exaggerates their heterodoxy; none of them claimed, for example, that Genesis or the Church Fathers were “wrong” or “contradictory” – they merely claimed that, for example, certain sayings of the Fathers, or certain features of the creation account in Genesis, should be interpreted metaphorically rather than literally – which had been Augustine’s position too. In his commentary on Genesis, Augustine straight-up denied that the process of creation had taken literally seven days. So if the positions of Abélard, William, and Thierry represent rationalist subversion, why don’t Augustine’s?
h) In describing Ibn Rushd’s ideas, he makes it sound as though Ibn Rushd believed in the creation of the universe at a specific point in time, which he certainly did not. Ibn Rushd, like al-Farabi and Ibn Sina before him, thought of the universe as an everlasting emanation from God, with an infinite past.
i) Burke presents the “two truths” doctrine as something the Church embraced as a compromise position in response to Siger of Brabant’s Averroism, when in fact the “two truths” doctrine was a position the Church attributed (whether accurately or not remains unclear) to Siger while condemning it.
Okay, rant over. The episode’s still worth a watch, in any case.
I suspect the designer of this Tristram cover was a Klimt fan ….
