HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!
Ever wonder what it was like to be a woman and a mother in Tudor Times? Watch this excellent documentary by Michael Wood
Watch “Shakespeare’s Mother The Secret Life of a Tudor Woman BBC Documentary 2015” on YouTube
Writing
May the Fourth Be WIth thee- here’s why Falstaff is like Boba Fett
In 1978, a “holiday special’ was released under the Star Wars umbrella. Today it is universally panned as the worst Star Wars product ever conceived. It is tonally completely different from Star Wars and it spends most of its time either in a bar on Tatooine or on Kashik with Chewbacca’s family; characters we don’t know, can’t understand, and have no influence on the larger Star Wars Universe!
The only bright spot in this tragic black hole of a time-wasting special, (at least according to most of the internet), was that this special brought back the character of Boba Fett, the cool, anti-heroic bounty hunter who is constantly deceiving our heroes. As you can see, they changed the format into a cartoon, so that’s a little bizarre, but it was nice to see an old friend in this otherwise who’s who of lame new characters.
THIS WAS NOT A NEW IDEA, EVEN FOR 1978,
In around 1598 (allegedly), Queen Elizabeth the first asked William Shakespeare to write a comedy about Sir John Falstaff, the fat cowardly comic center of the Henry IV plays. The Queen wanted to see a comedy about Falstaff in love, which Shakespeare allegedly completed in a few short weeks.
Ant the result, was the Star Wars Holiday Special of the Shakespearean Cannon.
Unlike Henry IV, which is a complex history play about rebels going up against an empire (Henry IV claimed part of France so that counts :), Merry Wives a silly comedy set in the country town of Windsor. Just like the Holiday Special, Shakespeare’s comedy has a totally different tone than the other plays that feature Falstaff.
I think Shakespeare wisely didn’t try to make Falstaff a romantic figure- that would be absolute character assassination. What he does instead is take Falstaff’s ability to sweet-talk women and his penchant for thievery, and make the play about his attempts to seduce two virtuous housewives and steal their money. Just like how Boba Fett was not changed into a good-guy to pander to audiences (yet), but instead, Lucas made him a cunning deceiver who tries to sell out our heroes to Darth Vader.
Though Falstaff himself works within the context of the play, most of the new comic characters are very dated and not very funny. Dr. Caius and the Welshman are written with outrageous accents making them as incomprehensible as alien bit players in Star Wars. Frankly, I’d rather kiss a Wookie than listen to these losers try to woo Mistress Page’s daughter. It’s like Shakespeare cut and pasted the worst scenes from Taming Of The Shrew and added a French accent.
Even more boring are the scenes at the Garter Inn- a place that must’ve had significance for knights in the 1590s, but nowadays is somewhat forgettable, (like the Cantina, deal with it NERDS!)
The one really good part of the play is this scene in Act II, Scene I where Mistress Page and Mistress Ford simultaneously receive letters of “love,” (which really means ‘I want sex and your money), from Falstaff. The ladies are incensed for a couple of really good reasons:
A. It’s Falstaff- a fat, old, penniless knight who is well known as a drunk.
B. They’re already married, and he has the pudding guts to assume they’d betray their husbands.
C. If they were to cheat on their husbands, THEY WOULDN’T DO IT WITH FALSTAFF
D. The love poem he writes them is terrible. If he wanted these virtuous wives to cheat on their husbands for someone as completely undeserving as him, he could’ve at least put some effort into it!
I would also argue that the worst thing about the Holiday Special became the best thing about Merry Wives: the songs!
The most egregious change to the tone of Star Wars that the Holiday Special made was putting in a bunch of terrible musical performances by people like Jefferson Starship (get it?) to make the special more of a variety show with the Star Wars characters slapped on top of it like a sticker on a lunch box. Now we know what it sounds like when Princess Leia sings a song that clearly required a second draft:
Luckily for Shakespeare, instead of Jefferson Starship, he got opera composer Otto Nikoli, who saved this mostly terrible play by turning it into a charming opera! Look at this duet from Act I!
A lot of the more absurd plot points of Merry Wives work extremely well as musical comedy shtick, and Falstaff himself works very well as a big basso profundo
So if you go to see Merry Wives, know that it’s not a very good play by Shakespearean standards. It’s silly, kind of pointless, and not a very good addition to the story of Falstaff, but much like the Star Wars Holiday Special, it’s sure to make you laugh:
Heaven and Hell through Shakespeare’s Eyes
Since Easter and Passover are coming up, (and we are already in the middle of Rhamadan), I thought I’d examine Shakespeare’s depiction of other worlds both celestial and infernal. As the quote above says, philosophers and poets often wonder what greets us in the hereafter, so let me be your guide through Shakespeare’s poetic renderings of heaven and he’ll, accompanied by some gorgeous artwork from HC Selous, William Blake, and others.
The whitewashed images of Shakespeare’s childhood
Shakespeare was no doubt interested in religion. He quotes from and alludes to the Bible many times in his plays. More importantly, he lived in a time when the national religion changed three times in just 4 years! When Henry VIII changed England to a protestant country, the religious identity of England completely changed:
This change was not just felt in monasteries, but in all English churches. King Henry decreed that certain Catholic traditions like Purgatory, indulgences, and praying to saints were idolatrous, and were therefore banned in the Church of England. So, when Shakespeare’s father was called to destroy the “idolatrous” images of the Last Judgement in the Guild Chapel of Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church, he had no choice but to comply. If you click on the link below, you can see a detailed description of the images that Shakespeare no doubt knew well in his family’s church, until his father was forced to literally whitewash them.
Purgatory and the harrowing of hell
Like the images on the Stratford Guild chapel, the ideas of Catholic England didn’t disappear, they were merely hidden from view. Shakespeare refers to these Catholic ideas many times in his plays, especially in Hamlet, a play where a young scholar, who goes to the same school as Martin Luther, is wrestling with the idea of whether the ghost he has seen is a real ghost from purgatory, or a demon from hell, (as protestant churches preached in Shakespeare’s life).
I’ve written before that the ghost of Hamlet’s father teases us with the possibility that he might be a soul in purgatory, the Catholic afterlife realm for those not evil enough for Hell, nor good enough for Heaven. At the height of their powers, monks and bishops sold prayers called indulgences that supposedly allowed a soul’s loved ones to buy them time out of purgatory, thus making them able to ascend to Heaven quicker. The image above is an illustration from Purgatorio, part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, where he visits the soul of
Buonconte da Montefeltro, who is languishing because he doesn’t yet have the strength to get out of purgatory and enter Heaven.
Of course, the Tudor monarchs Henry VIII and Elizabeth I abolished indulgences and proclaimed that purgatory itself didn’t exist, but ideas can’t die, and I feel that Shakespeare was at least inspired by the notion of purgatory, even if he didn’t believe in it himself.
“It Harrows me with fear and wonder.”
(Horatio) Hamlet, Act I, Scene i.
Lucifer and the vice of kings
As a young boy, William Shakespeare was entertained by medieval Mystery plays; amateur theater pieces performed by local artisans that dramatized great stories from the Bible. We know this because he refers to many of the characters in these mystery plays in his own work, especially the villains. King Herod is mentioned in Hamlet and many other plays in and many of Shakespeare’s villains seem to be inspired by the biblical Lucifer, as portrayed in Medieval Mystery Plays.
In this short video of the Yorkshire Mystery play “The Rise and Fall of Lucifer,” we see God (voiced by Sir Patrick Stewart), creating Lucifer as a beautiful angel, who then, dissatisfied with his place in God’s kingdom, is transformed into an ugly devil. At first, Lucifer mourns losing his place in Paradise, but then finds comfort by becomming God’s great antagonist.
Compare this character arc with Shakespeare’s Richard of Gloucester, who also blames his unhappiness on God, (since he feels his disability and deformity are a result of God’s curse). Richard is angry with God, nature, and society, so he wages against them all to become king.
“Then since the heavens hath shaped my body so, let Hell make crook’d my mind to answer it.”
Richard of Gloucester, Henry VI, Part III, Act III, Scene i.
“All is not lost, the unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and the courage never to submit or yield.”
Lucifer― John Milton, Paradise Lost
Journeys into Hell
Claudio. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!
—Measure For Measure, Act III, Scene i
“Methought I crossed the meloncholy flood with that grim ferryman the poets write of, into the kingdom of perpetual night.”
— Richard III, Act I, Scene iv.
The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order;
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other; whose medicinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans cheque to good and bad: but when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!
What raging of the sea! shaking of earth! Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure! O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick! - Troilus and Cressida, Act I, Scene iii.
Sources:
https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Idolatry:_Icons_and_Iconoclasm
Today in history: End of the American Civil War
Shakespeare and the Civil War are forever linked. All the major players had a connection to the Bard, and some might surprise you:
1. Did you know US Grant played a woman in a Shakespeare play!
We rarely see images of the future general and future president without his well-kept beard, but if this apocryphal tale is true, Grant might have grown a beard after he was embarrassed by the reaction of his fellow soldiers during a performance of Othello, where Grant rehearsed the part of Desdemona:
That December, officers decided to stage “Othello.” They looked for someone to play the beautiful Desdemona. Grant was urged to try out for the part. He had a trim figure and almost girlish good looks; his friends called him “Beauty.” Though the costume fit perfectly, the officer playing the Moor couldn’t look at Grant without laughing. They sent to New Orleans for a professional actress to play Desdemona. After that, Grant grew a beard to hide his girlish good looks. He was “Beauty” no more.
Civilwartalk.com
#2. President Lincoln, Shakespearean Gentleman
I’ve talked before about how, to the South, President Lincoln was as big a tyrant as Julius Caesar, and how John Wilkes Booth was determined to cast himself as a real life Brutus
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-american-presidents-and-shakespeare
What you might not know is that Lincoln’s favorite Shakespeare play was Macbeth. I find a more fitting character for the compassionate and eloquent president would be the good King Duncan from Macbeth. According to Whitehousehistory.org. Lincoln quoted some lines about the good king’s death, a few days before his own:
On Sunday, April 9, 1865, with the war over, he was returning to Washington on the River Queen from City Point, Virginia, where he had visited the front, and he talked Shakespeare to his companions, read aloud to them, and recited his favorite passages from memory. He spent most of his time on Macbeth. “The lines after the murder of King Duncan. Lincoln’s companions were struck by the slow, quiet way he read the lines:
Whitehousehistory.org.
“Duncan is in his grave;
After life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well,
Treason has done his worst; not steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing can touch
him farther.”
When Lincoln finished, he paused for a moment, and then read the lines slowly over again. “I then wondered,” reflected one of his friends, “whether he felt a presentiment of his impending fate.”
If you choose to sign up for my Outschool class: The Violent Rhetoric Of Julius Caesar, I compare Antony’s speech, (which essentially started a civil war in Rome), with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I also discuss John Wilkes Booth and his obsession with the character Brutus.
#3: Ex Confederates hid out in Shakespeare’s home town!
I was pretty shocked to learn this one, and it took a while before I found a decent amount of evidence to justify reporting on it here, but apparently a few ex confederates fled to England after the war, and took refuge at inns and houses in and around Stratford, including Royal Leamington Spa, which is a town just 12 miles from Stratford-upon-Avon.
I had scarcely become domesticated before the visits of the Confederates began, & we have now quite a little Southern Society. Mr & Mrs Fry of N. York, & Mrs Leigh reside very near us. Mr & Mrs Westfeldt also; but just now they are absent. Mr & Mrs Dugan, Mr & Mrs & the Misses
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, US Consul, 1861
Stewart, Mrs Hanna & Miss Reynolds, Mr & Mrs Clements, Mr & Mrs Skinner, Capt Flinn, & various others who are here, off & on, compose the little nest of Confederates in Leamington.
England was anti Slavery in the 1860s but they were also partners with the Confederates in the lucrative cotton trade. CSA president Jefferson Davis dispatched a number of ambassadors and negotiators to hopefully gain support from the English to help them fight the US in the Civil War.
Once President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, England politely declined to aid the confederacy militarily, but Davis’ visits opened the door for Confederates in England, and that is why they wound up living in Leamington Spa.
While they were there, some purchased English warships to become part of the Confederate Navy. Some even got married!
Sources:
1. Shakespeare and US Presidents: Whitehouse History.com
2. Civilwartalk.com
3. New York Times: John Wilkes Booth
4. Leamington History: “A Confederate Nest in Leamington.”
Resources for National Poetry Month
I’m teaching a number of clases on poetry this National Poetry Month, and I wanted to make suggestion if you want to woo a sweetheart this poetry month but don’t know where to start. So here are some resources for you you use, and some links to some of my own work on the subject:
1. Mindup.com
This website is very good at helping you organize your writing into small blocks, webs, charts, etc. This is really useful when you’re creating sonnets because it helps you set up your argument. You can even add pictures to think about the images you’re going to use in your poem!.
2. RHymezone.com
A MUST for any poet. This website allows you to find rhymes for any word.
3. Poem Generator.uk
https://www.poem-generator.org.uk/
This website is very fun and useful for teachers and students. You plug in various adjectives, verbs, and nouns and it does the rest. The sonnets aren’t great, but you do get a clear idea of how sonnets work, and that makes it very useful for students.
3. Folger.edu- How to Write a sonnet
One of the best pieces of advice I can give to an aspiring poet is to read other poets and learn what you like. The Folger has a yearly competition of student sonnets which you can read on their website, and lots of handouts and info that teaches you about sonnet form, so check it out!
https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-birthday-party-at-home/write-a-sonnet
4. My Mini lecture video: Shakespeare’s sonnets
5. My post on sonnet writing, with more resources and advice:
6. My OUtschool Classes on Sonnets and Shakespeare’s writing:
If you want some one-on-one help with writing Elizabethan poetry, consider signing up for my online classes! I teach 2 classes on writing poetry and literary devices:
Love Poetry: Shakespeare Style
This class is a live brainstorming session where I’ll teach you to use the resources I’ve listed above to craft an Elizabethan sonnet of your very own! We’ll also discuss some of Shakespeare’s own sonnets, and the enduring mystery of the Dark Lady and the Fair Young Man.
https://outschool.com/classes/d9a6c17e-7ec2-4839-8337-152da6beaeb7/schedule#usMaRDyJ13
This class is a general intro to Shakespeare’s writing. I discuss the structure of his plays and poems, and I play a fun game where I rewrite some very famous lines in iambic pentameter:
So thanks for reading this list! I hope this helps you out, and if you do consider signing up for my class, I’m offering a special discount for the Love Poetry course: Get $5 off my class “Love Poetry- Shakespeare Style!” with coupon code HTHESVFDPO5 until May 5, 2022. Get started at https://outschool.com/classes/love-poetry-shakespeare-style-k8lL9yLK and enter the coupon code at checkout.
Let thy verse flow like a river, ye merry balladiers!
New Outschool Course: Shakespeare’s Comic Plays!
I just got approved by Outschool.com to teach a multi-week course on Shakespeare’s comedies!
Get $10 off my class “Shakespeare’s Comic Plays” with coupon code HTHESEJEL310 until May 1, 2022. Get started at https://outschool.com/classes/shakespeares-comic-plays-868BR5hg and enter the coupon code at checkout.
Redemptions
Happy April Fools Day!
Chinese New Year post: China and Shakespeare
Happy Chinese New Year Everyone!
As I said in my “Is Shakespeare Being Cancelled?” post, there is a long tradition of using Shakespeare as the epitome of creative arts, especially in England. For centuries, British imperialists have justified their subjugation of other cultures by claiming that English culture is superior, and Shakespeare became an unknowing cog in the machinery of cultural imperialism.
Since it is pretty much impossible to de-throne Shakespeare, one response that other cultures have used is to elevate their own artists to Shakespearean status. People are already calling Lin-Manuel Miranda the American Shakespeare, and there have been many other Shakespeares around the globe (Feng). Thre’s nothing wrong with this; after all, every culture has its own cultural heroes and they help embody what is important to that culture, which is why it’s fascinating to ponder the question- what makes someone The Chinese Shakespeare?
One other response to cultural imperialism is of course, to reject it, and since its inception, the Communist Party has sought to exclude, belittle, and suppress access to Western imperialist art. Shakespeare was banned during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and even today the Communist Party is quicker to praise Chinese artists as being “Shakespearean,” than to praise Shakespeare directly. Just last year, President Xi Xinping officially declared that poet Tang Xianzu was “The Chinese Shakespeare.”
To be fair, Tang XIanzu was Shakespeare’s contemporary and there are some startling similarities between the themes and ideas expressed by the two poets:
China has produced some wonderful ballets, operas, and poetry so even though the government has suppressed Shakespeare in the past, the Chinese people have expressed a love of Shakespeare for over a century. As early as 1903, Chinese intellectuals started reading and translating Shakespeare and the first Chinese adaptation of Shakspeare was a rhymed ballad version of Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene written by Deng Yizhe in 1910 (Sun, 1932). Today productions of Shakespeare are very popular in China and Shakespeare has facilitated a fascinating cultural exchange between east and west.
In addition to Chinese students encountering Shakespeare in the classroom, and the popularity of theater productions of Shakespeare in China, there are some fascinating efforts for English and Chinese speaking audiences to use Shakespeare as a bridge to cultural understanding. Right now, plans are underway to build a replica of Shakespeare’s birthplace in the southern Chinese city of Fuzhou. Meanwhile in Stratford Upon Avon, the government of Fuzhou gave a statue of Tang Xianzu to be featured prominently in the garden of the actual Shakespeare birthplace on Henley Street (Woodings).
In addition, Royal Shakespeare Company Artistic Director Greg Doran, (former husband of the great RSC actor Antony Sher), has spearheaded a number of outreach projects designed to translate Shakespeare’s The Tempest into a format better suited for theater productions in China. The final show, which premiered in 2018, was not only a successful collaboration between east and western artist, but the production, with its themes of freedom and liberty, was likely to ruffle feathers in the Chinese government, according to (Yuan Yang).
In Xi’s closely controlled China, The Tempest’s themes of liberty and identity clearly carry political ideas at odds with the ruling party — “thought is free”, the sprite Ariel sings. The implicit challenge to the status quo extended from the ideas to the production itself at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing. It offered new freedoms to the Chinese actors from the centre’s in-house theatre ensemble. Under the guidance of director Tim Supple, this was the first time they had been invited to experiment with performance and alter the text.
Yuang Yang. “The Bard in Beijing: how Shakespeare is subverting China”
To sum up, every culture has been exposed to Shakespeare, and many have found ways to re-interpret him, appropriate him, and use him as a tool of cultural exchange. This is neither good nor bad, it just is. What is interesting is that China has taken Shakespeare from a tool of imperialism into a tool of both multiculturalism, and subversion of their government. Studying the way other China and cultures have interpreted Shakespeare is a window into the values of those cultures and thus helps to further build a global community.
Below is a scene from a Chinese opera version of Hamlet for your viewing pleasure!
Works Cited
Podcasts
Journals:
Yanna Sun. Shakespeare Reception in China. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 2, No. 9, pp. 1931-1938, September 2012 © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.
Qi-Xin He: China’s Shakespeare.
Shakespeare QuarterlyVol. 37, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 149-159 (11 pages)Published By: Oxford University Press. Retreived online from jstor.com.
Web:
Laurie Chen: China’s replica of Shakespeare’s birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon coming in 2022. South China Morning Post. Originally published October 2nd, 2018. Retrieved online from: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2166635/work-start-soon-chinese-replica-shakespeares-birthplace-literary.
Simon Woodings: Tang Xianzu statue Unveiled at Shakespeare’s Birthplace. Stratford Upon Avon Herald. Originally published April 27th, 2017. Retrieved online from: https://www.stratford-herald.com/news/tang-xianzu-statue-unveiled-at-shakespeare-s-birthplace-9138327/
China’s Love Affair With Shakespeare Retreived 1/29/22 from https://www.barrons.com/articles/chinas-love-affair-with-shakespeare-51585137600
Yuan Yang. The Bard in Beijing: how Shakespeare is subverting China. Financial Times. October 5th, 2018. Retrieved online from https://www.ft.com/content/cd997246-c57b-11e8-bc21-54264d1c4647
Movie Review: Disney’s “Encanto”- “King Lear” with a happy ending.
If you read my blog for an extended period of time, or if you listen to my podcasts, or if you’ve taken any of my classes online, then I probably told you the notion that I believe that you could find Shakespearean roots in just about every single work of Western and quite a few of Eastern literature. Shakespeare is ingrained in our culture and therefore a lot of his influence can be felt in almost every bit of media we take in. One of my favorite ways to illustrate this, is by looking at Disney movies, trying to prove that every Disney story is at least a little bit inspired by a Shakespeare play as you’ve seen from my comedy series if Shakespeare wrote for Disney:
I had an enormous challenge on my hands when Disney came out with the new film Encanto. Previously I’ve found it very easy to deconstruct Disney film plots and spot their Shakespearean roots: Pocahontas is Romeo and Juliet by Disney’s own admission, Aladdin is basically the Tempest, Mulan is Twelfth Night, and the Lion King is Hamlet, (as many people have pointed out).
Encanto was really really hard because it is such a fresh and original story. It is deeply rooted in Columbian culture, so trying to defend the notion that it has anything in common with the works of a 400-year-old English male playwright is a tough claim. I don’t mean to suggest that this movie is a deliberate reinterpretation of Shakespeare. That would be insulting and limiting to the breadth of the story. My main purpose with this post is to show how universal and powerful these two stories are- to pay Encanto the compliment that, like Shakespeare, the story transcends cultural and historical boundaries and tells a story we can all relate to, and this is why I am making this bold claim, that Encanto resembles King Lear, albeit with a happy ending.
Mirabelle- the Cordelia of “Encanto”
It was hard for me to realize that Encanto resembles Lear because the Lear character is not the focus of the movie; the focus of the movie is the Cordelia character, Mirabelle. If you’ve read King Lear , then you know that Cordelia is vital to the first 2 scenes of the play, and then goes offstage until Act 4 when where she is reunited with her father in prison, then cures his madness just long enough for her to be hanged. Her death is the darkest, grimmest, bleakest moment that Shakespeare ever wrote. She is the heart of the play and Lear’s failure to listen to her forms the heart of the play’s message; when an older generation clings to power and power or money or status or anything else besides their family, ultimately they suffer tremendously.
In his first line, King Lear says that he wants to give up his kingdom, conferring it to his daughters and their husbands, but what he is really trying to do is to get his daughters to say they love him and to give them the kingdom as a reward.
This deal also has more strings attached; Lear basically says: “Now that I’ve given you my kingdom, you have to house me in your castle with a retinue of 100 knights.” And the only child who really loves Lear and has his best interest in heart is Cordelia, and Lear violently renounces his parental claims on her and banishes her from the kingdom along with her husband the king of France.
The Lear of “Encanto”
So who is the King Lear figure in Encanto? Abuela Alma! Think about it, she is an older person who is spending the whole play clinging and holding on to the power that the Magic Candle gives to her. She spends the whole movie trying to protect the Encanto, and when she mistakenly believes that Mirabelle is a threat, she pushes her away. She rules her other children Papa, Julietta, and Brunowith an iron fist, and she flies into panics and rages whenever anything seems to threaten the safety of the candle. For example, when Bruno gets the magic prophecy that Mirabelle might destroy the house and destroy the Encanto, Abuela refuses to let Mirabelle talk to anybody ever and generally acts in a cruel controlling way.
Look at this passage when Lear rejects his loving daughter Cordelia. Given what I’ve mentioned- the fists of rage, the clinging to supernatural powers, and the controlling demands for loyalty and obedience from his children, whom does King Lear sound like?
Lear:
For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate and the night;
By all the operation of the orbs115
From whom we do exist and cease to be;
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee from this for ever. The barbarous Scythian,120
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be as well neighbour'd, pitied, and reliev'd,
As thou my sometime daughter. King Lear, Act I, Scene i.
As Ian McKellen explains in this interview, like Abuella, Lear clings to power, which he derives from supernatural forces, ignores people who care about him, and believes that his authority is absolute:
Trauma and Violence in Encanto and King Lear
Marxist critics believe that Lear’s power is based on violence, (like most medieval kings), and violence is actually connected to Abuela as well. Let’s not forget that the candle was forged after the faceless men with machetes attempted to murder Abuela and her whole village. The candle is Abuela’s power, but it is also a constant reminder of the violence that she escaped. It is also therefore a symbol of her trauma. Perhaps these characters became so controlling, distant, and cold because of the trauma they endured. Lear is supposed to be a king of Britain back in the pre-Christian era of the Anglo-Saxons so he must have seen countless invasions:
The former king says himself that he’s fought in wars with his “Good biting falchion” (a kind of sword). Whether they’ve seen falchions or machetes, these characters have seen violence and want to protect themselves against seeing the pain of it again, and ultimately it is their children that suffer because of it.
In King Lear, the kingdom is ripped apart between the three daughters, and in Encanto, the house is literally ripped apart by the rift between the family and Abuela. Lear foolishly tries to bribe his daughters into flattering him; promising them the kingdom if they demonstrate how much they love him. Therefore Lear demands obedience and love and expects his family to fawn on him as if they were his subjects, not his family.
Lear’s favorite daughter Cordelia refuses to take the bribe, so she says nothing. Lear is enraged and treats this small disobedience like an act of treason:
Arguably Abuella makes the same mistake. She treats her children like her subjects too and exploits their gifts in order to keep the community happy. Her fear of losing her home is the reason she pushes the Madrigals to be indispensable to the community. Think of the psychological and physical pressure Louisa mentions in her song:
As you can see in this video, Lin Manuel Miranda, who wrote the music for Encanto, was actually inspired by Shakespearean verse for the lyrics and rhythms in her song “Surface Pressure.” Whether or not he or the screenwriters were inspired by “Lear,” the fact remains that Mirabelle suffers much like Cordellia. She also can’t stand to see her sister Louisa in pain like this, so she sets out to save her family, which forces her to confront Alma. Much like Lear and Cordelia, Mirabelle and Abuela argue about how her clinging to the past is hurting her family and how the pressure she puts on them is literally ripping their home and family apart:
Sight and Sightlessness in “Encanto” and “King Lear”
Perhaps the biggest connective motif between Encanto and King Lear is the motif of sight and sightlessness. Both Lear and Lord Gloucester are blind to the danger that they’re in and blind to who their real friends and enemies are. Lear trusts his two elder daughters because they flatter him, he trusts his drunken knights who only succeed in getting him forced out of the cold. Conversely, Lear ignores Cordelia. who really loves him, as well as Kent, who is a loyal nobleman to the very end, and he ignores the Fool because he’s a fool. If he had heeded any of their advice he would not have died alone and powerless. Therefore his sightlessness is a deadly weakness.
Gloucester, the other old man character in Lear has another problem with sightlessness and is punished for it figuratively and literally. Gloucester’s bastard son Edmond deceives him into thinking that his legitimate son Edgar is plotting to kill him. The old man sends Edgar away, makes Edmund his heir, and then Edmond betrays him and gets him arrested for treason.
In the play’s most savage scene, Gloucester is tortured and his eyes are literally pulled out of his head. From this moment Gloucester finally sees Edmond’s treachery, and he laments that he “Stumbled when he saw”. Gloucester feels like he is finally able to see clearly now that he is blind, not unlike the ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex. Of course, nothing this gruesome can be shown in a Disney movie but the image of sight is constantly referenced in Encanto visually, and also through the lyrics of the songs. Even the name of the character; Mirabelle comes from the Spanish word ‘mira’ which means “to look”, and the first thing one might notice about her is her brightly painted green glasses, which constantly draw attention to her ability to see.
Mirabelle, like Cordelia, is able to see that her family is in pain, she sees that her family, the Encanto, and the house is in danger, while Abuela is constantly deluding herself and everybody else in thinking that nothing is wrong.
Through the course of the movie, Mirabelle is able to fix the various problems she sees. For instance, she sees that her sister Louisa is taking on too many responsibilities and refusing to admit that she is tired and feels weak. She realizes that her sister Isabella is tired of being the perfect golden child, that her Uncle Bruno is not the monster that the family declares him to be, (however catchy their song about him is).
Through her sight and her perceptiveness, Mirabelle is able to heal the wounds in her family, The last wounds that she heals are the cracks on her house, and her own Abuella’s wounds, the wounds that went deep through her and even deep through her house; she mends the problems that happened the instant that the candle came into being:
Once Mirabelle and Alma reconcile, they set about rebuilding the house in this song. Notice how many times the words “look,” and “see” are mentioned in the lyrics. Mirabelle re-iterates how each person in her family is more than their gifts, more than just the roles Abuella put them in, and they respond by telling her to look at her own gifts and be proud of who she is. She heals them by seeing them as they are, and they heal her by seeing her too.
It was when I realized this that I understood that this movie is what would have happened if King Lear had only listened to the people who really cared about him, and did not succumb to idle flattery. If only he did not let his pain and his trauma dictate the rest of his life. There’s a wonderful hopeful message here that family wounds can be healed if we take the time to see and address them. If you read King Lear and then see Encanto you can see both how these family wounds can be healed, and the tragic consequences if they are not.
I hope that this little post has helped you appreciate both works because they are both magnificent and they are both carefully constructed and they both tell a very simple lesson for all families. As families, we need to recognize our faults, forgive faults in others, and work together to mend the pain and suffering that we experience in our lives. Mirabelle and Cordelia show that we can all be heroes if we see the truth, and speak what they feel not what they ought to say.
FMI
https://www.rsc.org.uk/shakespeare-learning-zone/king-lear/character/analysis#king-lear
Gloucester and His Sons, PBS Learning Media: Shakespeare Uncovered: witf.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/shak15.ela.lit.gloucester/gloucester-and-his-sons-king-lears-subplot-shakespeare-uncovered/?student=true
The Shakespearean Student 