Adrian Mole and The Prostate Years

I should say something about Adrian Mole's Medieval play. It was unfortunately abandoned once the cancer treatment started because Adrian simply could not direct a play with a large cast and go through chemo.

However, the play was going to be called Plague and it was going to be about the Black Death of course. Although the Crusaders are said to have brought the plague back to Europe and John's brother was the one of the biggest Crusaders of all time, Richard the Lionhearted, there is a problem. Problem is that Adrian was setting his play in the time of King John I's death (in 1216)and the bubonic plague did not reach England until the 14th century. You would not find a bishop giving a hug to a plague victim who feels marginalized because of his disfiguring lesions. He probably would not have lived long enough to whine about the isolation and he would have been lucky not to have people throw things at him to keep him away from them.

We may never know what he intended with his play. Another would be classic has gone the way of the comedy about a serial killer, that Adrian failed to produce, called The White Van.

Adrian Mole Goes All Medieval

The lack of success for his novel 'Lo The Flat Hills of My Homeland' has not deterred Adrian Mole from writing. In the latest Adrian Mole novel, The Prostate Years, he is busy writing a Medieval play with a cast of 60.

I am still reading the book so I am unable to say much about the play except that so far it seems to be about a holy monk, Abbot Godfried, who is travelling about with a basket containing the entrails and anus of King John. Since John I's heart was buried at York, a place was needed to bury his anus. I shall make a prediction that the anus is buried in Mangold Parva in Leicestershire where Adrian lives in the Piggeries with his parents.

Truth is, John I, all of him, was buried at Worcester Cathedral.

Vergil The Sorcerer

That is right. Vergil - a sorcerer. The guy who wrote the Aeneid had magical powers. At least, so it was thought in the Middle Ages.

I am reading some glosses on Aaron's Rod in Exodus and the latin 'virga' is bringing this thought to mind.

Vergil's name was misspelled in the Middle Ages as Virgil, which is partly how he became known as a sorcerer, since 'virga' is not just a rod or a cane but a wand as well. In Andrew Lang's Violet Fairy Book is a story about how Virgilius acquired his magic, that is by a spirit trapped in a hole who promised him books about magic if he would release him from his hole. The Gesta Romanorum contain several stories about a magical Virgil as well.

Of course Vergil did not help himself by calling himself Thyrsis in his Eclogues. Thyrsis or 'thursos' means 'wand' in Greek. But then, Vergil was also sometimes called 'virgo' or 'the maiden' for his modest and retiring ways.

You might be wondering why Dante would choose him to be the guide through Purgatory in The Inferno if he had a reputation as a sorcerer. It goes back to Eclogues again. The fourth poem was seen as predicting the birth of Jesus Christ.

If I ever get some free time, I will post a wizarding story from the Deeds of the Romans about Virgil.

Et In Arcadia Ego

I went to see the latest Resident Evil movie: Afterlife. It might seem like a strange thing to discuss here but, since most screenwriters have been to school, I have a point. The name Arcadia did not register with me when it was used in the last movie as a sanctuary, a place where there were people unaffected by the T-virus and society was rebuilding itself. The name Arcadia gets used for many things. In this case, it really did refer to paradise.

Arcadia is a sort of Eden in pastoral elegy. The Romans and the Greeks used it as the name for an idyllic place where shepherds lounge around composing beautiful verse in the verdant fields while the sheep gambol around them. Arcadia is a real place in Greece on the Pelopponesian peninsula. When the Renaissance rolled around and people rediscovered the Classics, Vergil became popular once more and so did pastoral elegy. It was a natural fit with the Christian world since the word pastor is Latin for 'shepherd' and the ministers of the Church were after all 'shepherds of men'. The rustic, natural world of innocence in Arcadia is a sort of Eden.

That being said, when Arcadia becomes the last decent place on earth in Resident Evil, you expect it to be a rustic sort of paradise. If one can ignore the evidence of all those airplanes and lack of signs of life, when Alice arrives in Alaska to rejoin her friends, her picking up her notebook and turning to a page on which the words "Et in Arcadia ego" are written should leave you with no doubt. Arcadia is not meant to be a paradise.

For those who do not know, this phrase is famous for being written on a tomb in a Nicholas Poussin painting called 'The Shepherds of Arcadia'. (For a glance at the painting, click here.) It is an ambiguous phrase. It could mean that the person buried in the tomb had also been to Arcadia but, since the tomb seems to have been placed in Arcadia, the general view has been that it is Death that inscribed that line - I exist even in Arcadia.

The word 'et' can mean 'and, even, also'. The verb in this phrase is understood. which is a perfectly acceptable Roman practice. The lack of a verb has lead to an amusing misunderstanding in the Da Vinci Code from the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail that it was based on. Latinists are a dying breed, it is true, but a call to any university ought to scare up at least one to check your facts. Nicholas Poussin is added to the list of mysterious members of the Priory of Sion and 'Et In Arcadia Ego' became a complete sentence that was also an anagram with a hidden message, ignoring the unstated but understood verb.

To return to the movie, since this is Resident Evil after all, you know that she will find Arcadia and the generally accepted interpretation of the phrase, that death exists even here, will ring very and savagely true. I do not want to spoil the movie for anyone but I give it both thumbs up. It might not be Shakespeare but not everything need be great art.