Wheels within wheels

Fortuna, Ixion and King Lear

In the last post we visited Tartarus, the classical hell, and met a few of its inhabitants: notably Ixion, former king of the Lapiths in Thessaly. Readers will recall that Ixion’s big mistake was to abuse the hospitality of Zeus by attempting to seduce his wife, Hera. His lustful intentions were however discovered, and Ixion was tricked by Zeus into having sex with a cloud instead. The cloud later gave birth to the race of the centaurs; Ixion was punished for his hubris by being bound to a revolving wheel of fire in Tartarus.

Why this form of punishment specifically? Some commentators see in the wheel of Ixion the vestiges of a more ancient sun-god myth; others, including Robert Graves, suggest that the fire was a later addition, and put more emphasis on the crucifixion aspect of Ixion’s torture. Some suggest that the wheel is symbolic of the eternal nature of his punishment.

Across centuries and cultures, wheels have symbolised destructive power, whether they are attached to a mighty Juggernaut or are little and green; the most common allusion to the wheel in medieval and early modern literature, however, is in the form of The Wheel of Fortune, or Rota Fortunae. It is an allegory of the inexorable workings of fate, a metaphor which explains in simple terms the vicissitudes of the human condition: you may be a king today, but tomorrow you could find yourself on a storm-lashed heath without a crown or even an umbrella. As the cowboy said, sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you. The goddess Fortuna sometimes gives the wheel a bit of a spin, changing your luck for better or worse. When, in King Lear, Kent finds himself humiliatingly condemned to the stocks, he calls upon Fortune to Smile once more. Turn thy wheel… (Lear II, 2, 167).

Fortuna has traditionally been personified as a fickle woman: from comparison with the inconstant moon in Carmina Burana’s O Fortuna velut luna; to Frank Loesser’s Luck be a Lady: A lady doesn’t wander all over the room/ and blow on another guy’s dice. In Macbeth, Fortune is described as acting like a rebel’s whore; in Antony and Cleopatra she is a false housewife; in Hamlet, she is a strumpet, and the subject of a somewhat contrived dirty joke: on being asked how they are doing, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell Hamlet that they are neither at the top of Fortune’s cap, nor at her shoes. When Hamlet obligingly offers the feed line: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours? Guildenstern delivers the punchline, Faith, her privates we, doubtless thinking back of the net.

Back in Lear, the revolving wheel is obvious in the relationship of the half-brothers Edgar and Edmund: at the beginning of the play, the illegitimate son Edmund is aggrieved at his comparatively low status and the obvious contempt of his father, Gloucester; he contrives the exile of his legitimate brother and the downfall of his father, with the aim of inheriting his wealth and power. Edmund is now at the zenith, and Edgar at his nadir: Fortune spins once more, however, and when Edmund is mortally wounded by his brother, he accepts that the wheel is come full circle (Lear V, iii, 203).

Fortune, the stars and the gods are all at one time or another blamed for the ups and downs of the characters: Gloucester complains that as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport (IV, I, 36f); Kent that stars above us govern our conditions (IV, iii,33). But the villainous Edmund can see that this is so much nonsense. In a soliloquy, he mocks his father’s astrological explanation of Lear’s foolish behaviour towards Cordelia and Kent (I, ii, 118-135), clinching the argument with reference to his own nature: I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

There is a tension here, and elsewhere in Shakespeare, between external and internal influence, between the workings of fate and personal responsibility. As Cassius remarks in Julius Caesar, The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars/ but in ourselves… (I,ii,140f). Human agency, rather than Dame Fortune, brings about the downfall of both Gloucester and Lear: a downfall which has its origins in their own flawed characters and actions.

So when in Act IV Lear declares to Cordelia: Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound/ Upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears/ Do scald like molten lead (IV, vii 46-48) the wheel imagery is not so much (or not only) an allusion to the Wheel of Fortune, but to the punishment of Ixion. Lear recognises that the hell in which he finds himself is not a temporary downward turn, but eternal punishment for his own folly: his only consolation is that Cordelia is not in Tartarus with him.

This is not the only allusion to the story of Ixion in King Lear: earlier (IV, vi, 124-125) he describes his other daughters thus: down from the waist they are centaurs/ Though women all above.  

As we have seen, Ixion was the progenitor of the centaurs, who developed a reputation for bad sexual etiquette, such as the attempted rape of the bride at their cousin’s wedding. They symbolise the untamed, incontinent beast literally underlying civilised and domesticated humanity, and in the case of Regan and Goneril, what Shakespeare sees as a most unladylike lust, ruthlessness and ambition. Lear is explicit about the location of good and evil in women:

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,/ Beneath is all the fiends’ (IV,vi, 127-8)

The sexism of these expected gender roles is of its time; the misogyny of the language of King Lear is something else altogether, however.  From the opening scene where Gloucester asks Kent, Do you smell a fault?  in reference to the circumstances of Edmund’s conception, there is a queasy insistence on associating foul odour and burning pain with women, or more precisely, their genitalia, culminating in the extremes of

There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding stench, consumption… (IV, vi, 129f)

Some critics see in this language a description of a sexually transmitted infection: D H Lawrence for one attributed Shakespeare’s misogynistic language in Lear and other works to the “shock of his consciousness of syphilis”; Anthony Burgess in the fictional biography Nothing Like the Sun came to a similar conclusion.  When Edgar tells Edmund: The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices/ make instruments to plague us:/ The dark and vicious place where thee he got/Cost him his eyes (V, iii, 170-3) he is making the point that their father Gloucester’s sexual desires have resulted in his destruction.

Lear too, though his daughters were got ‘tween lawful sheets, is being punished for the sexual activity that created them. In his fevered mind, women are promiscuous temptresses, men are hypocritical slaves of lust, deserving of painful retribution: Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;/ Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind/ For which thou whipp’st her (IV, vi, 161-3). 

We cannot now know whether the misogyny of Lear’s language is rooted in Shakespeare’s self-disgust, or derived from a (highly unlikely) late conversion to Puritanism/Calvinism, or indeed is purely character-driven, without any resonance in his own life; but for whatever reason, the imagery of King Lear points to the female of the species as the sulphurous pit, the dark and vicious place, – Tartarus; and the male protagonist, tortured eternally on the burning wheel of his own lust, another Ixion.

Delaunay, Ixion précipité dans les Enfers 

Quem vocabis? Ghostbusting in Elsinore

It is literally Baltic tonight.  Fingers of sea mist climb the battlements and leave wet salt prints on the stone. A bare bodkin of wind pierces your cloak and presses its point against your quivering flesh. There’s no moon and as you look up at the one bright star you-ouch- stub your toe on something in the darkness.  You wish you were back in your bed under a warm sheepskin. And that’s where you were, dreaming of Wittenberg fräuleins, until just before midnight, when Marcellus shook you awake and reminded you that you said you would come out and join the night watch in case it appeared again. It’s just imagination, you had told him, but he kept going on and on about it, no no, we definitely saw it, and not just once but twice. Please, Marcellus had begged, we need an educated man, someone who’ll be able talk to it.  You had smiled at that, but with the dodgy state of Denmark presently, it was probably a good idea to keep in the good books of the military. So now here you were, frozen to the nuts on a wild ghost chase. What a way to pay off your student loan…

Who you gonna call?

In Hamlet’s opening scene, Shakespeare invented the horror movie. We begin literally and figuratively in the dark, in ominous silence - not a mouse stirring, sharing the loneliness and fear of a nervous guard, Francisco. The tension is broken by the appearance of his relief. Francisco is only too pleased to hand over to his officer Bernardo: ‘tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart he says, blurting out a hint of the terror he has endured, alone in this haunted place.

Luckily for Bernardo, he has company:  his fellow officer Marcellus, who has brought along insurance in the form of our reluctant hero, Horatio. For when there’s something strange in the neighbourhood of Elsinore, who you gonna call but an alumnus of the University of Wittenberg? Even though Horatio is sceptical about the existence of the Ghost, Marcellus wants him there, that if again this apparition come/ He may approve our eyes and speak to it. Why do they need Horatio in particular to do this? Because he has studied Latin, the lingua franca of spooks, spectres and most other supernatural beings. When the Ghost appears, Marcellus commands: Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio...

Now, such is the precarious position of classical languages in schools and universities today that we would struggle to find a student capable of engaging with a revenant on a castle battlement. Indeed, the modern youth’s exposure to the Latin language is likely to be confined to a few semi-latinate spells in a Harry Potter novel (lumos maxima, indeed: you would have thought that she could afford proper Latin)

To be fair, there is a long history of Latin muddle before the Muggles. The conjuror’s phrase hocus pocus is probably derived from hoc est corpus meum of the Latin Mass, the words mangled either accidentally through ignorance, or deliberately in Protestant mockery of the Roman Catholic belief in transubstantiation.

Whether practising wizardry, turning bread into flesh or pulling rabbits from hats, Latin has been the traditional go-to tongue, at least in the western imagination. Until the vernacular reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, it was, for some, the only respectable medium of communication with God: the Good Lord is now apparently capable of understanding English these days, however. Some authorities still believe that the judicious deployment of a few words of Latin will get His attention, in the way that a Parisian waiter will deign to notice you only if you address him respectfully en francais; thus President Jed Bartlet, in the West Wing episode Two Cathedrals, unable to discern God’s purpose in permitting the innocent to suffer, tells Him to go to hell in Latin (eas in crucem literally means get on a cross, something of a sore point with the Almighty, one would have thought).

As with God, so with the Devil. In Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe has the eponymous alchemist conjure up Mephistophilis with a blood-curdling Latin incantation: …Orientis princeps Belzebub inferni ardentis monarcha, et Demogorgon, propitiamus vos, ut appereat, et surgat Mephostophilis… (now that is a proper spell, Ms Rowling).

The precise meaning of all this Prince of the East, monarch of hellfire stuff would be comprehensible to only a tiny fraction of the audience; but all could buy into the idea that magical power was associated with the study of arcane texts – after all, hadn’t those Latin-speaking, Bible-reading priests been able to turn wine into blood and bread into flesh?

The old word for this sort of magic or occult knowledge was gramarye, which is of course derived from the same root as grammar, meaning the nuts and bolts of a language, or the book you can learn it from. Etymological digression -the word glamour is another variant of this root, and presumably gets its present meaning from the idea that magic can be used to enthral or bewitch others, that spells can dazzle the eyes of the beholder. A Glam Rocker, therefore, is etymologically a cousin of a grammarian.

Goodnight sweet prince...

It is gramarye that Potter is studying at Hogwarts, and that Bartlet employs to address his God. Gramarye is used by Faustus as a way to connect with the supernatural, a portal through which he can negotiate a deal with Lucifer for 24 years of fun-filled life in return for his soul. Despite the fact that he gets to snog Helen of Troy, this is generally considered to be a poor exchange: Faustus has wasted his knowledge on trifles. Horatio uses his learning more fruitfully, attempting to engage with the apparition to determine why it is walking the earth – does it have a message about dangers facing Denmark, by any chance? But Horatio has been dragged out of bed not only because he can use his Latin grammar to connect with the supernatural; he can also use it to disconnect. Marcellus knows that if anything goes wrong with the ghostly interaction, his scholar companion will have the wherewithal to carry out an old-fashioned Catholic exorcism.

Thus the first Act Ghost scenes of Hamlet set up a problem which will recur throughout the play, and which offers us an insight into Shakespeare’s England, where state and personal religion was still in a state of flux following the Reformation: Horatio is a sceptic, and studies at Wittenberg, a university with deep Protestant associations; when the Ghost speaks to Hamlet, it describes its torment in Purgatory, a Catholic concept rejected as unbiblical by the Reformers. Since there was no Purgatory in Protestant theology, it followed that there were no ghosts: therefore anything that presented itself as a ghost was probably a devil in disguise. The tragedy of Hamlet stems from the Prince’s inability to decide whether what he has seen is an honest ghost (I,v,138) or a devil assuming a pleasing shape (II,ii,574). Hamlet and Horatio, torn between Catholic and Protestant interpretations of their ghostly encounters in Elsinore, reflect the religious tensions racking Tudor England, and perhaps Shakespeare himself.