An "utterly memorable" Day

In trying to keep my thoughts away from that coming pesky election I noted that today is St Crispin's Day.
St Crispin is known as patron saint of shoemakers, leather-workers and suchlike.

Crispin and his (twin?) brother Crispinian were shoemakers as well as Christian martyrs, beheaded during the reign of Diocletian; the date of their execution is given as 25 October 285 or 286.

St Crispin's Day has become embedded in most minds, in Englnd at least, mainly through William Shakespeare's play, Henry V, in which the (as "1066 & All That" puts it) "utterly memorable Battle of Agincourt" took place, and Henry (via Will Shakespeare) made his oft remembered speech.

In unvarnished, unpoetic real life it's highly unlikely Ol'Henry Five ever said anything of the sort!

Information following was gleaned from shmoop.com (I wish we'd had access to this kind of help when presented with Henry V to study, as we were back in High School in England in the 1950s!)

The play was written around 1599, but it portrays events that occurred immediately before and after the Battle of Agincourt (October 25, 1415), which just so happened to occur on St. Crispin's Day, the feast day of the martyred twins, Saints Crispin and Crispinian. Like we've said elsewhere, the events in the play speak to some contemporary (Elizabethan) issues. As Shakespeare's original audiences watched Henry wage a war with France, they would have been reminded of their own long-standing problems with Spain and a recent uprising in Ireland, the Earl of Tyrone's Rebellion (1594-1603).

Henry V is a war play..... What's the play's attitude toward war? Specifically, what's the play's attitude toward Henry's decision to invade France? The answers aren't cut and dried because the tone shifts between patriotic fervor for Henry's campaign against the French and it's recognition of the horrors of warfare. On the one hand, the play celebrates Henry's triumph over the France, which seems miraculous given that the English troops were exhausted, sick, and seriously outnumbered at Agincourt. The play is also chock-full of patriotic speeches that suggest warfare is patriotic and ennobling. (The clearest example of this is Henry's famous St. Crispin's Day speech, where he insists that the men who fight alongside him will become his "band of brothers.") On the other hand, Shakespeare goes out of his way to show us the horrors of warfare, which involve brutal hand to hand combat, raping, pillaging, and endless suffering. As Exeter points out, neither side can escape "the widows' tears, the orphans' cries, / The dead men's blood, the pining maidens' groans, / For husbands, fathers, and betrothèd lovers."

Returning to St Crispin's Day, 2016: as shoemakers, in the traditional sense, are now few and very far between, their patron saints' workload in that department will have been considerably reduced, though not entirely eliminated. Western "cowboy" boots, belts, saddles especially come to mind in the USA; Spain, and maybe Mexico, still retain their leather-working traditions. St Crispin and St Crispinian have not been made totally redundant yet.

Music Monday ~ Winter's Tales

Sidling past the dozens of choices of Christmas music available at YouTube, but wishing to stay "in season", how about A Winter's Tale sung by David Essex? The song was written by Mike Batt and Tim Rice in 1982 in response to a request from David Essex. I don't know how well the song was known in the USA, my husband had never heard it before - that's not necessarily a useful yardstick, he being a jazz enthusiast (but an avid Beatles fan too).

The song's title has to bring to mind Shakespeare's play, The Winter's Tale, about a jealous king who suspects his pregnant wife of unfaithfulness, imprisons her, banishes the baby girl to whom she gives birth, causes her to be taken to some far shore by his friend. His friend is then killed by a bear. The play contains Shakespeare's most famous, and decidedly quirky, stage direction at this point: "Exit, pursued by a Beare". There's a happy ending though. In the second half of the play, 16 years later, the girl, now a young woman falls in love....and somehow everything comes right in the end. David Essex's song doesn't have a happy ending, though he does seem resigned to his lonely fate.

In Winter's Tale , song or play, the season itself isn't the lead player. Stories known as winter's tales were stories told by firelight during the long dark nights of a medieval winter. In dramatist George Peele's play of 1595, The Old Wives' Tale a woman is asked to "tell a merry winter's tale" to pass the time "trimly". These winter's tales were, it seems, something akin to fairy tales, peopled by kings, queens, princes, princesses, courtiers, peasants, lost children, jealousy, love, death...all that good stuff, but always with a happy ending.

I took the long-winded but scenic route to arrive at this Winter's Tale: the video!



David Essex is still around in the UK, acting, touring, recording. See Wikipedia here. "Essex spent six years as an ambassador for Voluntary Service Overseas, which earned him an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1999. On that he said: "That was a big day. I took my two eldest kids, and me mum even went out and bought a hat"

FOOLS AROUND

Still on the topic of Fools........for anyone with a hint of "woo" in their soul the first Fool to spring to mind is The Fool of the tarot deck. The Fool card is numbered "0" in the Major Arcana and represents a beginning, innocence, freshness, eagerness, impulsiveness, someone entering life without fear, preconception or prejudice. Nutshell description: the child within. Compare that with keywords for the first zodiac sign, Aries, and you'll find many a match!

Minus "woo", The Fool as we know it is said to have

..... emerged in medieval England in the13thC. The rigid social hierarchies of medieval society relied on these reality maintenance constructs which were closely related to traditional inversionary re-enactments of mis-rule to create a sense of release for and in the population. Although, ultimately the role was meant to re-affirm the hierarchy and strictness of the medeival system. "Fools" became a construct whose unique position in the community's power structure demonstrated the reality of secularized opportunism, relativism, and immoralism. The “fool” wore a subtextual connotation of evil, pretending stupidity, often opposing the figure of the wise or holy man in a culture's structure. In the moral/philosophical dimension, s/he is the negative inversionary counter-point to virtue and wisdom.

Above quote comes from History of Fools

I feel certain, though, that there must have been such figures, perhaps differently named, well beyond 13th century England, in earlier civilisations. What The Fool motif, in general, represents has always been a part of human nature, whether as the innocence of the tarot's version, or as the Trickster, Jester, Joker images which remain familiar to us today.

From a piece All the King's Fools by Suzannah Lipscomb at History Today website, comes a theory that indicates there was present in this medieval custom a dreadful streak of careless cruelty - but we ought to have guessed as much!

The popular myth about court fools and one that some historians have perpetuated is that they were simply clowns aping foolishness for a laugh. Yet my research suggests that many – perhaps all – court fools in the early Tudor period were ‘natural fools’, or what we today would characterise as people with learning disabilities and that explains much about their prominent position.

That court fools were ‘natural fools’ needs a little explaining. In 1616 Nicholas Breton defined a natural fool as one ‘Abortive of wit, where Nature had more power than Reason’. The legal term idiota was interchangeable with ‘natural fools’, who were characterised as incapable or insensible of their actions:........

Image identified by the The British Library: French. Detail of a miniature of King David in prayer, and a Fool, at the beginning of Psalm 52. Attribution: Master of Guillebert de Mets

So, I wonder whether figure of the Court Fool of Tudor times slowly evolved into the Court Jesters, who were not "natural fools" but persons of sharp wit and some wily wisdom?

Shakespeare mentioned Fools often, a list of his Fools is at Wikipedia, here. Best known are : Touchstone in As You Like It(1599), Feste in Twelfth Night,(1600), and the Fool in King Lear(1605); not forgetting Yorick, in Hamlet, the deceased court jester whose skull is exhumed by the gravedigger and evokes a monologue from Prince Hamlet on the effects of death:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? (Hamlet, V.i)

And from Twelfth Night

"This fellow is wise enough to play the fool;
And to do that well craves a kind of wit:
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons, and the time,
And, like the haggard, check at every feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practise
As full of labour as a wise man's art
For folly that he wisely shows is fit;
But wise men, folly-fall'n, quite taint their wit."

Kenneth Branagh and "Hamlet"

We recently watched a DVD of Kenneth Branagh's movie version of Shakespeare's "Hamlet", known in some circles as "the eternity version" because it contains Shakespeare's play in its entirety. It does tend to go on a bit! The movie was released in 1996, but wasn't available in DVD format until last year.

I'm not a great fan of Will Shakespeare, having been put off by the force-feeding of schooldays, long before his works had a chance of being appreciated by a young Twilight on any level. I've since become fond of some of the Bard's sonnets, but have never felt much affection for any of his plays. Perhaps, as a child of England, I ought to wash my mouth out!

It's a surprise, to me, that the plot of "Hamlet" is based on an old Scandinavian legend see here, and was not, as I'd assumed, purely a figment of Old Will Shakespeare's imagination!

Due to the acting and directing skills of Kenneth Branagh, and the star-spangled cast, I thoroughly enjoyed this version of "Hamlet".

I'll not write about Hamlet's astrology - that has already been done before in other astrology blogs:
AstroFutureTrends
Out The Comet's Ass
to name a couple.



A look at Kenneth Branagh's astrology then. Born 10 December 1960 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Astrotheme gives his birth time as 4.50pm.



This consummate actor and talented director had no family links to the profession. His father was a carpenter in Belfast. His family moved to the British mainland because of "The Troubles" - sectarian unrest between Catholics and Protestants which erupted into a very nasty period in Belfast's history, thanks to intervention of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and, because Northern Ireland is part of the UK, the British army. At school in England young Kenneth Branagh was teased about his heavy Northern Irish accent, so set about cultivating the elegant tones we hear from him today. He decided, very early, that the acting profession was for him. His career is interestingly documented at Tiscali here.

Via The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Royal Shakespearean Company, London's West End, movies, TV, directing - he has done it all, he portrays modern characters and those from the pen of The Bard with equal skill. He's been called "the greatest thespian of his generation". Still, I can find little to illustrate what kind of man he is. Actors who worked with him on the movie "Hamlet" speak of him fondly in the DVD's special feature section. He has the reputation of being a fun person to work with, always ready for a laugh and joke, but one who can "turn on a dime" from jovial to deadly serious and focused. In his early days he was described as "ambitious and ever-demanding, not easy to work with". I guess he mellowed, as do most of us.

Sun and Mercury in Sagittarius reflect a sunny, larger than life personality, and the "always ready for a laugh" side of his nature. Saturn and Jupiter in Capricorn, with Saturn semi-sextile Sun indicate his more serious, hardworking side, Saturn being especially potent in its own sign, Capricorn.

Natal Moon in Virgo conjoins a very sensitive point in the chart - North Node of the Moon, here's his inner perfectionist. Mars in Cancer in 1st house of self adds energy and perhaps a touch of aggression to the picture, but energy tempered by sensitivity of Cancer, which is also his rising sign. The biographer at Tiscali (linked above) called him the "Kenergiser" - a nice reflection of Mars in first house!

Venus at 00 Aquarius sextiles Mercury and adds a tendency for lateral thinking to the mix - a valuable asset to an actor/director. This is echoed by Uranus (the unexpected) in Leo trining his Sun in Sagittarius, and Neptune (imagination) in Scorpio sextile natal Moon in Virgo.

It's interesting to note that there's not a single Leo planet in Branagh's natal chart. Leo doesn't have it all its own way when it comes to life in the spotlight, a potent mix of emphasis on other signs can be just as effective as a slew of Leo planets.