Twelfth Night and Story Tropes

It's Twelfth Night today, the Twelfth Day of Christmas (twelve drummers drumming, in case you're wondering), and the eve of Epiphany. On Twelfth Night, Christmas time is really over. Wikipedia informs me that old English traditions have it that on that day, the Christmas decorations get taken down, and anything edible on them, such as fruit hung on the Christmas tree, becomes part of the Twelfth Night feast. One last bash before going back to work. Apparently those old English peasants got quite rowdy for Twelfth Night, and everyone partied rather strenuously.

Wikipedia also says that Twelfth Night, the Shakespeare play, was written somewhere around 1601/02 specifically for one of those parties, hence the title. The play itself has, of course, nothing whatever to do with Twelfth Night, the feast, being one of Shakespeare's gender-identity-mixup stories, not a Christmas party one. It's one of my favourites of his, especially the 1996 film version directed by Trevor Nunn, with Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia and Ben Kingsley as Feste. One piece of sheer genius in this movie is the casting of Imogen Stubbs and Steven Mackintosh as Viola and Sebastian - apart from the height difference between them, they look astonishingly alike, so they are actually believable as the boy-girl set of twins which are mistaken for one another when Viola puts on her brothers' clothes and becomes Cesario.

Steve unrecognisable in a cross-dressing disguise

That's one of Shakespeare's favourite tropes, the girl-dressed-up-as-boy who becomes instantly unrecognisable and extremely attractive to other girls who proceed to fall in love with him/her. Cross-dressing, in Shakespeare's day, seems to have been a most effective disguise - or, if not in his day, in his playwright's conventions, anyway. Elizabethan audiences apparently had no problem accepting that idea, which to us today seems rather silly. Put on a pair of trousers, and hey presto, your own mother won't know you! Uh, yeah, sure. How could the viewers be so gullible?

But then, we've got any number of silly story tropes today ourselves, and we're so used to accepting them as fact that we don't blink when yet another book or movie trots them out as a plot device. The "character with amnesia" is one example: how many stories have you read or watched where a character gets a thump on the head, forgets everything including their own name (which leads to all kinds of mix-ups and difficulties) and then gets another smack on the head which instantly unscrambles their brain and brings back all their memories? I know I've seen it done multiple times in fiction. But from what I understand, that's actually not at all the way real amnesia works (especially where the curative second thump is concerned). But writers can get away with using this plot device because we all accept it as "fact". In storytelling, it doesn't matter so much what's real, but what the audience is willing to believe, and that, after all, is what fiction is all about.

Life, the Universe, the Bard and Story Tropes. Happy Twelfth Night!

Gold Rings

So I had great good intentions over the holidays. I was going to write these ongoing blog posts about the Twelve Days of Christmas, Pipers piping and Maids a-milking and all; I even had a whole post planned out about the value of Gold Rings and what-not. And I was going to wrap up with a grand finale on Twelfth Night itself, perhaps inserting a few witty references to Shakespeare's play (the storyline of which has nothing whatsoever to do with the holiday, but was probably written to be performed at a Twelfth-Night party) and waxing eloquent about my favourite version with Imogen Stubbs, Helena Bonham-Carter, and Ben Kingsley. But then time, as it is wont to do, whizzed away from me. Zzzzip.

And here we are, a whole week into the new year, a couple of days into the new semester; textbooks staring me in the face, and the demands of ordinary life just as demanding as ever. My good intentions are once again chipped away, and nothing came of them.

But, wait! Maybe I can insert something in here about gold rings. You see, on the fifth day of Christmas (aka December 29th) my true love is supposed to have given me five gold rings. And then another five every day thereafter, until you have a stash of forty of the things on January 5th, Twelfth Night.

Well, for some reason my man tends to be somewhat remiss on his seasonal ring-gifting duties. I have all of three gold rings to my name, after twenty-three years of marriage. Two of those were from him, 'tis true enough. With the third gold ring I have I'm not even sure it's the real thing - it's got no stamp in it telling its carat weight, and the "pearl" that is set in it turned out to be a fake - the sheen is flaking off, exposing the plastic underneath. It belonged to my aunt, who wore it almost always, and when she passed away I asked for the ring to remember her by. So I don't care how much actual gold is in that ring; to me, it's my aunt's ring, and that's worth more than 24-carat realness. Her love was as genuine as they come.

But my other two rings, they're real gold alright, 14k, or 585, the stamp says. (I think 585 is the parts per thousand of gold to other metals - i.e. 58.5% gold, which means the same as 14 carat.). And then there's the diamonds. Ten of them, 0.1 carat each - that means I'm wearing a full carat of diamond on my finger, no? Well, uh - no, it doesn't. Apparently decimal math doesn't apply to jewels. Ten tiny diamonds are just ten tiny diamonds, and even together they're worth a lot less than one great big one ten times their size. And then, to boot, one of them is chipped. You see that in the picture? The first one from the left, it's got a little notch chipped out of it on the top right corner. I'm not sure how long that flaw has been there - years, at any rate. I have no idea how it happened, either.

And I don't care. You see, just like my aunt's fake pearl ring, what matters with my gold rings is not the perfection of the jewels, or of the setting, or even the purity of the gold. A Turkish friend of mine used to sneer at any gold that was less than 18 carat - all Turkish gold is at least 18 carat, she said. And brides get literally loaded with it on their wedding day, in the form of bracelets and necklaces and rings; it's their widow's portion. But I'm not Turkish, and my rings are not my retirement fund. The chips and scratches and impurities, they don't matter - they just go with who I am.

Just like me, my gold rings have flaws in them, aren't perfect. There's only two (or maybe three) of them, not forty like the song calls for (or even five, if you want to go for the conservative reading of the lyrics instead of the cumulative one). And that's plenty for me, thank you. Large numbers, and perfection, are, I think, quite overrated. My ring is chipped and flawed, and so am I. I can't even write a series of blog posts during my holidays even though I've decided to do so. And maybe that's okay, you know?

Life, the Universe, and Three Gold Rings. Even though they're flawed, they still are real.

Calling Birds

So today is the fourth day of Christmas, and my house is supposed to be piled with four partridges and concomitant pear trees, six turtle doves (two every day since the second day), six french hens (two days @ three each), and now the addition of four calling birds.

I have no idea what a calling bird might be; I don't think it's referring to those girls in call centres who try to sell you on their latest cellular phone plan. (Pardon me, I have call centres on my mind. I just watched my Christmas DVD, "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel", which prominently features a call centre in its plot line. Love that movie - a whole flock of über-talented veteran British actors strutting their stuff, being funny and poignant and romantic and oh-so-very English, in India, no less - what's not to like?).

Okay, calling birds. I just googled it, and found out that in the song, "calling bird" is a corruption of the English "colly bird", which comes from "coaly bird", i.e. a plain old blackbird. Now, European blackbirds are songbirds - so, in a sense, they are "calling" birds.

Photo credit: Malene Thyssen, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Malene

It's one of the things I miss about Europe, the sound of birdsong. Here in Western Canada we have lots of noisy birds alright (don't get me started on the racket they make at 4:00 AM on a summer's morning when I'm trying to sleep!) but they don't sing. They chirp, and tweet (with their throats and beaks, not their smartphones), and cuckoo and caw and trill and make lots of other delightful birdy noises, but I have yet to hear the kind of tune that a blackbird will sing on a dusky summer's evening sitting in the tree outside your window. Blackbirds warble, in ever-varying tunes; they really sing.

So that's the kind of calling bird that one's true love is supposed to hand over, in multiples of four, every day from now until Twelfth Night, by which time one will have a full three dozen of the critters. Which, I suppose, will make the filling for one-and-a-half Sing-a-Song-of-Sixpence Pies, which are meant to contain four-and-twenty blackbirds each. And here's another mystery: if they were baked in the pie, how on earth are they still capable of singing once the pie is cut open?

Life, the Universe, and Calling Birds. Happy Fourth Day of Christmas!

The Second Day of Christmas

It's the second day of Christmas. I believe that calls for Two Turtle Doves. And yesterday, it was a Partridge. In a Pear Tree. Why a pear tree, one wonders? (Apart from the alliteration, of course. But then, why isn't it a quetzal in a quince tree, huh?) Partridges. Hmm. There's Mr Partridge in "Tom Jones" (the book, not the singer), who is accused of being Tom's father. He's the sort of chap who'd be quite liable to sit around in pear trees, being an odd sort of bird, and hungry half the time. But I don't think that's the Partridge the song is talking about.

Today also happens to be St Stephen's Day. You know, the one that Good-King-Wenceslas-looked-out-on-the-feast-of. Stephen, as you no doubt are fully aware, was the first Christian martyr; he got stoned to death because he had the temerity to be a do-gooder who handed out food and such-like to poor people on account of his strong faith in something other than what the establishment wanted him to have faith in, which was principally their authority and the bounden duty of everyone to acknowledge said authority as the be-all and end-all of life. Stephen wouldn't have none of it; he insisted on believing what he believed and carrying on with his do-goodery. And the powers-that-be didn't like that. So they decided to do away with him (silly them). St Stephen is rather a cool character, because he wasn't really all that heroic - he was just a kind, gentle man who refused to play ball with the bullies.

So I suppose the Turtle Doves are kind of apt for today's true love's gift, being the usual symbol of innocence and gentleness and so on - just like St Stephen himself.

Next up: Three French Hens, and the feast day of St John the Evangelist (St John the Baptist's Day being, of course, the summer solstice counterpoint to Christmas, celebrated on June 24th. If you listen carefully on that night, you can hear the animals speak in human language. Ditto for Christmas Eve, I think. But seeing as we've missed that opportunity for this year, we'll have to wait for Saint-Jean-Baptiste 2013 - there's always another opportunity, thankfully.).

And none of that has anything to do with Steve, who is named that just because "Steve is a nice name" (as you will know if you've ever watched "Over the Hedge").

Life, the Universe, and the Twelve Days of Christmas. Happy St Stephen's Day!