The Power Template

Introduction

The Power Template

Shakespeare’s Political Plays

In 2004 a small private college was established in Cape Town South Africa. It was to be a college of leadership, a place where young people of all races who had a sufficient capacity and desire to want to excel, to take on responsibility to make a new kind of world, could come to be educated. It was not for those vast masses that only see education as a means for getting a job.  The syllabus was based upon contemporary as well as classical geo-political studies, history – from Roman history through to the end of the 20^th century, bio-politics – the study of key people whose lives had an impact on their time and place in the world, then languages, and lastly fencing to cultivate noble character. It was a paideia for the 21^st century designed to produce new men. The founder of the college was Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir  as-Sufi, whose Scottish family name of Dallas became the name of this place of  learning, unique in this time, yet seeking continuity in the historical model of the great  Mogul and Ottoman centres of higher education.

At the inception of Dallas College I was invited to teach Shakespeare & Rhetoric, an area of world literature in which I was excited about furthering my knowledge.  I was informed that the focus was to be Shakespeare’s History and Roman Plays. These plays, more so than all the others, but not exclusively so, are his political plays. I was introduced to a handful of books that I promptly ordered and which soon arrived in South Africa. There was the Essential Shakespeare Handbook, which became our basic text-book. The others were Frank Kermode’s The Age of Shakespeare and his Language of Shakespeare. There was an excellent biography by René Weis and W.H. Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare that was derived from a lecture series he gave in Greenwich Village in 1946-47, that I was thrilled with. Then there was Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare and more recently his newest book, Soul of the Age, simply the best book I have ever read on Shakespeare. It is a masterpiece and I am convinced that Bate is today the preeminent Shakespearian scholar. As I continued with my lectures new books were added, many of which I will mention in the course of this study.

There are two unequivocal characteristics to this or any study of Shakespeare’s plays. The first is that you are exposed to the highest expression of the English language. It delights and excites the mind in a way that once you have tasted it your hunger only grows as you discover more of this living, pulsating language that is the very means through which meanings are communicated and shared by human beings.  With extraordinary wit and a generosity of humour and humanity, Shakespeare has written characters that are as much alive today as they were four hundred years ago when he wrote them. The second characteristic, more specific to the actual plays that are covered within this book, is that they transmit an understanding of the dynamics of human politics:  the play for power, position and influence that has been an unfolding drama as far back as history has been recorded.

What occurs in my lectures, and is replicated in the text that is presented here, is my attempt to awaken a curiosity and concern not only about the age of Shakespeare, which holds a very important place in our world view, but also the age we live in now. There are, therefore, numerous excursions as we move from 14^th or 15^th century England to the exigency of the early 20^th century negotiations that preceded the outbreak of the First World War. We move quite freely from Prince Hal in Henry IV Part I and II (who, portrayed as a profligate prince who neglected his duties at Court, emerged through a series of life experiences that were the means by which his character was forged into the heroic Henry V) – and then on over to King Hasan II of Morocco who in his youth was dubbed by the French press as ‘The Playboy Prince’. King Hasan was under a constant barrage of attack, from both within his own inner circle as much as from outside forces, to sell off his country’s vast mineral wealth. Not unlike Hal, the king matured and was steeled into a sober and astute ruler who held fast the reins of leadership and preserved his country from the rapacious greed of disloyal subjects and foreign invaders.

There are digressions and forays into a multitude of current political affairs that find scope within Shakespeare’s vast landscape which serves as a setting for the machinations of human politics that drive the action of world events.

From English history to ancient Rome, we have the backdrop that allowed Shakespeare to portray the whole world within that Wooden ‘O’, the original Globe Theatre. It is, therefore, my intention through this exploration of Shakespeare’s political plays to make sense of the world I find myself in, and in doing so to make sense of myself within it. That that should also be awakened in others is my aim in this work.

 

Robert Luongo 

 

 

A Boston Brahmin In New Mexico

A Boston Brahmin In New Mexico

It was in the early spring of the summer of 1970 that I made my third trans-continental crossing of the United States, originating in Boston and, as they would say in bygone days, “go west young man”. My first trip was in 67’ as I hitch-hiked 3000 miles from the East Coast to the Pacific Ocean. By 1970 I had become a rather seasoned traveller along life’s highways, and this particular journey had an even more specific intention attached to it.

The preceding year, while I was living in Cambridge Massachusetts, where I kept a small studio apartment in the garret of a large Victorian at the bottom of Plympton Street near Harvard Square, I had become aware of a woman living in New Mexico who, as both an artist and story-teller, had established a puppet theatre in collaboration with the Pueblo Indians who lived in her area. That area was that stretch of territory between Albuquerque, Santa Fe and up to Taos.

As best as I can recall it was in an issue of the Tulane Drama Review or TDR as it was generally known, that I read the story of Elsie Thetford who lived in Abiquiu New Mexico and who had founded this unique theatre. The article spoke of her unusual work as well her life among the Pueblo Indians, both of which fascinated me.

Before proceeding, it is necessary to back up yet another year to 1968 when I was living in New Haven Connecticut and had become friends with a Yale Drama School student, Jim Metzner, where I had the opportunity to develop a growing interest in various forms of theatre. Besides participating in an original play written by Jim that was performed in a local coffee house over some few weekends, I also got a small part in a Yale University production that was put on by the Yale Repertory Theatre, a professional theatre company, and included a number of drama students and at least one non-student. The play was Euripides’ Bacchae, and the wild chorus was nearly all students, with my friend Jim making a memorable impression as one of the devotees of Dionysus. My bit part was that of a Roman soldier who represented law and order, and the antithesis to rights of the god. I must admit, although it was never my intention, that I rather stole the show on opening night and had to be forcibly removed from the stage. Prior to the curtain going up I did ingest a certain substance that had the overwhelming effect of awakening that Dionysian spirit in me. Somewhere in the middle of a fierce stand-off between the followers of Dionysus and the Roman Guard I removed my clothing, except of course, my excellent Roman helmet and upright stanchion that I had adorned with a flower given to me by a most lovely girl who was a member of the bacchanal. Needless to say that was my last performance at Yale and the end of my acting career. A couple of members of the New Haven Police, who for some mysterious reason were in attendance, did not, fortunately, press formal charges, although the actor who played the lead, endlessly stating how he had appeared so many times On as well as Off Broadway, was driven to fury!

But now it is one year later and I am back living in Cambridge, which would have been in late 1969, and having made contact with Ms. Thetford by writing her a letter, was to my delight invited to come and visit her if I should ever be passing by that way. And so it was that in the early spring of 1970, with a cold New England winter behind me that I set out on my odyssey. 

At some point I moved off the Interstate highway and began my way along smaller back roads, having more than once stopped to ask anyone who I saw if they could direct me to the Thetford Place. It was late afternoon but the sun was still high up in the huge New Mexico sky. I stood in front of a ‘rammed earth’ house, known as tapia in Spanish, but most commonly as pisé de terre. The front door of this modest home was wide open and only a weather beaten screen door  was in place to keep the various crawling or slithering creatures that were everywhere to be found, from coming right on in. I called out: “Hello there”, and was in very short order standing in front of an elderly woman (she was in fact 87) who said; “You must be Robert.”

Elsie Thetford was born in 1883 into an old Boston Brahmin family and in 1901, at the age of 18 was presented into society at a Newport Rhode Island summer ball. Her family were friends of the famous Newport artist John La Farge, who married Margaret Mason Perry, from the even more famous family of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, born in Kingston Rhode Island, and his most renowned younger brother, Commodore Mathew Calbraith Perry of Newport, who, in 1853, sailed into Tokyo Bay and negotiated the first US - Japanese trade agreement. In Boston Elsie’s parents were occasional guest at the home of Isabella Stewart Gardner in the Fenway,  that is when Isabella was not in her lovely house in Venice - that I did visit many years later and was actually let in by saying Robert Luongo from Boston. [That visit I made to Venice is another story altogether and concerns Henry James, who in his youth lived in Newport , and later in life was a frequent guest at the Stewart Gardner’s Palazzo Barbaro just off the Grand Canal.] Ms. Gardner, 1840-1924, is most remembered as one of the most prodigious American art collectors and, of course, by John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait of her.

And there I was, being welcomed into this charming home in the middle of the New Mexico scrub land of cacti and rattlesnakes, and the biggest sky you have ever seen. “Well how do you do Robert?” is what she said as she showed me into her modest parlour. There was an original Georgia O’Keeffe on the wall, which had been, she said, a gift, in exchange for a particular puppet Georgia loved, and seeing as they were friends and nearly neighbours, neighbours, that is, according to the American south-west where distances are thought of in a far different way.

Mid way between Abiquiu and Taos was a very small town called San Cristobal Taos where in the early 1920’s D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda spent, on two separate occasions separated by a return trip to England, a couple of years at a small homestead now known as the D.H. Lawrence Ranch. As an exchange for a Lawrence manuscript the house was deeded to Frieda and was the only property either of them ever owned. Elsie and her husband - I’ve not mentioned him yet - were once invited to meet the English couple and Elsie told me how Lawrence was then not very well and was ostensibly in New Mexico to rest and, as always, write. As he was tubercular the dry heat of summer was hoped to be beneficial.

Elsie was married in Boston in 1905 to a civil engineer and land surveyor from a prominent New England family. The territory of New Mexico, Arizona and most of Texas was pretty much unchartered Indian land and the US Government was offering a job to someone who would go there and map the area as well as build storm water drains and aqueducts to combat the raging waters from flash-flooding that could come on so quickly that a dry gulch one minute was a terrifying torrent capable of carrying away anything, from a large vehicle to cattle, in it’s rapids. And so a year or two after the couple married they set off for New Mexico where Elsie and her husband, with the help of local Pueblo Indians, built their home. In 1914 Europe was at war and in 1917 Lieutenant Thetford sailed for England as part of the US war effort to combat the ‘Evil Hun’ as Germany was referred to in the American press, quite possibly originating in any one of the many William Randolph Hearst newspapers. That I don’t really know for sure.

Elsie had been a widow now for quite some years and while she could have gone ‘back east’ decided to stay on in Abiquiu after her husband passed away. I stayed only two days, sleeping on a day bed in a small guest room. Elsie cooked for us and had no regular help, except if there were serious storms and then she said men from the Pueblo would check on her and make sure she was alright. We talked and also walked. Our walks are the most memorable things for me. Elsie carried a walking stick which, due to her age, I assumed was a needed support. As we moved along across the scrub land with cacti and sagebrush scattered out as far as you could see, with the San Cristobal Mountains rising up in the distance in the most vivid purple colour, I heard a sound I had only ever heard about. There was before us a rattler, about four foot long, and Elsie and I just stopped. She proceeded to put the walking stick out in front of her as far as her arm could reach. Faster than you can imagine, that deadly rattlesnake wrapped itself around the stick. With a strong movement of her arm Elsie flung the snake some several feet off to the side. She carried on walking and continued what she had been saying prior to our visitor coming up upon us. She smiled her wry smile, for she knew that this city boy had never seen that before.

The next morning after breakfast I thanked my host so much for her kindness and how easily she trusted me and welcomed me into her home, never once taking exception to this twenty year old fellow wearing his hair long, carrying only a knap-sack from the Army & Navy Store in which there was nothing but a copy of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, James Joyce’s Ulysses and a comb I’d bought at the Five and Dime.

            Robert Luongo

 

Death of the Poet By Mikhail Lermontov

A poem written in honour of the great Russian writer Pushkin

By Mikhail Lermontov

Death of the Poet

 

 

 

Revenge, the Emperor, revenge!

I will fall at your feet:

Be just and punish the murderer,

That his sentence in the next century

Heralded to offspring your right court,

And that the villains will see example in it.

 

 

The Poet's dead! - a slave to honor -

He fell, by rumor slandered,

Lead in his breast and thirsting for revenge,

Hanging his proud head!...

The Poet's soul could not endure

Petty insult's disgrace.

Against society he rose,

Alone, as always...and was slain!

Slain!...What use is weeping now,

The futile chorus of empty praise

Excuses mumbled full of pathos?

Fate has pronounced its sentence!

Was it not you who spitefully

Rebuffed his free, courageous gift

And for your own amusement fanned

The nearly dying flame?

Well now, enjoy yourselves...he couldn't

Endure the final torture:

Quenched is the marvelous light of genius,

Withered is the triumphal wreath.

 

Cold-bloodedly his murderer

Took aim...there was no chance of flight:

His empty heart beat evenly,

The pistol steady in his hand.

No wonder...from far away

The will of fate sent him to us

Like hundreds of his fellow vagrants

In search of luck and rank;

With impudence he mocked and scorned

The tongue and mores of this strange land;

He could not spare our glory,

Nor in that bloody moment know

"gainst what he'd raised his hand!...

 

He's slain - and taken by the grave

Like that unknown, but happy bard,

Victim of jealousy wild,

Of whom he sang with wondrous power,

Struck down, like him, by an unyielding hand.

 

Why did he quit the blissful peace of simple fellowship

To enter this society, so envious and stifling

To hearts of free and fiery passion?

Why did he give his hand to worthless slanderers,

How could he have believed their hollow words

And kindness, he, who'd ever understood his fellow man?...

 

 And they removed his wreath, and set upon his head

A crown of thorns entwined in laurel:

           The hidden spines were cruel

           And pierced his noble brow;

Poisoned were his final moments

By sly insinuations of mockers ignorant,

And thus he died - for vengeance vainly thirsting

Secretly vexed by false hopes deceived.

           The wondrous singing's ceased,

           T'will never sound again.

           His refuge, gloomy and small,

           His lips forever sealed.

          

_____

And you, the offspring arrogant

Of fathers known for malice,

Crushing with slavish heels the ruins

Of clans aggrieved by fortune's game!

You, greedy hordes around the throne,

Killers of Freedom, Genius and Glory!

     You hide beneath the canopy of law

     Fall silent  -  truth and justice before you...

But justice also comes from God, corruption's friends!

     The judge most terrible awaits you:

     He's hardened to the clink of gold,

He knows your future thoughts and deeds.

Then will you turn in vain to lies:

     They will no longer help.

And your black blood won't wash away

     The poet's sacred blood!

 

1837

 

 

 

 

 

The following notes are provided by Karim Filiakov, a first year student at Dallas College in Cape Town South Africa. The notes were originally in Russian and were translated by Karim into English.

 

This poem is a response to the tragic death of Pushkin who died Jan. 29, 1837. Lermontov was sick when he heard about the fatal duel. Lermontov learned of the last days of Pushkin’s from his doctor N.F. Arendt, who visited wounded poet.      (Karim Filiakov, Cape Town, 2010)

 

 

In this poem Lermontov expresses his outrage at the Russian aristocracy because of their attitude towards Pushkin and also in regards to his death. Pushkin's death was not accidental, but was a consequence of the relationship between himself and the Court.  According to contemporaries, Tsar Nikolay I received a copy of the poem. Lermontov and his friend – a writer and ethnographer, Svyatoslav Afanasievich Rayevski(1808-1876), who actively participated in the spreading of the poem, was arrested and prosecuted. In March, according to the sentence, Lermontov was sent to join a military regiment in the Caucasus.

 

Revenge, the Emperor, revenge! - The epigraph to the poem is taken from the tragedy of the French writer Jean de Rotrou (1609-1650) "Venceslas" (1648) and was modified by A.A. Gendre, a Russian playwright and translator.

 

The Poet's dead! - a slave to honor... - The phrase "slave of honor" was borrowed from the dedication to Pushkin's poem "The Prisoner of the Caucasus".

 

Cold-bloodedly his murderer took aim... - The killer of Pushkin was Georges d'Anthes(1812-1895), Lieutenant of the Cavalry Regiment (from 1834). He was adopted by Netherlands Envoy Baron L. Hecker, who, among other things, introduced Dantes to the salons at Court frequented by the Russian aristocracy. The persecution of the poet, which ended with the duel, was organized by this aristocracy. After the duel with Pushkin, Dantes was exiled to France.

 

...from far away тhe will of fate sent him to us, like hundreds of his fellow vagrants, in search of luck and rank... - Dantes arrives in St. Petersburg in 1833 after the War in the Vendee.

 

- like that unknown, but happy bard, Victim of jealousy wild... - a reminder about Vladimir Lensky from the Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin".

 

And you, the offspring arrogant of fathers known for malice... - This line and the ones that follow it were written later - in response to the words of those who justified the murder of the poet.