Musical Director of Ariel, a Contemporary Vocal Ensemble
with Beth Lister and Josie De Marco
As the musical director of a contemporary vocal ensemble with the Shakespearean name Ariel I feel I have reached a new level of corporation creation by bringing into my orbit a Facebook friend by the name of Beth Lister (she is a relative of my oldest extant friend, whom I knew in junior high school). Here you can find out why I think this is so significant. This has to be a first even in the annals of Shakespearean production: the extended family of this Shakespeare-assocated group includes what may be the single most recondite name in Shakespeare's extended circle. I sure as hell am willing to bet there was never an Enron associate named Enron! Methinks I am LIVING the role of Prospero, without a Miranda... is this some kind of sign that my Miranda rights have been violated? Or merely that I have indeed been relegated to a desert island?
To Josie De Marco, a propos the Shakespearean Ariel, in contradistinction to the Disney Ariel:
The Tempest is about a Duke who is also a wizard and who has been betrayed by his brother, who steals his dukedom from him and attempts a passive murder of him by putting him and his daughter (Prospero and Miranda) adrift at sea in what is in effect a sealed coffin. The brother expects Prospero and Miranda to die, but he wants to able to say he did not in fact kill them. There may have been some books of magic stashed away in the coffin, though when these books are later mentioned it may be that Prospero is referring to books that he wrote while in exile.
They survive, and are cast ashore on a mysterious island. There, Prospero finds an evil witch named Sicorax whom he drives out, but keeps her half-animal son Caliban (his name is an arrangement of the letters of the word "cannibal") as a slave; he is not a nice person, and constantly causes problems, Prospero tries to educate him and be nice to him but he tries to violate Miranda so Prospero gets tough with him, and that is the basis of his approach to him.
Prospero finds the spirit-familiar of Sicorax, whom the wicked witch has imprisoned in a tree. Prospero frees the spirit, who is full of magical powers and can do most anything, on condition that the spirit work for him until he is restored to his rightful place in the world, i.e., back to his Dukedom. The spirit's name is Ariel. This Ariel is not identified with any particular gender, being non-human, a fact that is mentioned many times and made clear in a variety of ways; and would have been played by a boy or a man at Shakespeare's Globe. Its nature is not romantic, and philosophically it is perhaps the least romantic character in the story. This too is made clear in a variety of ways, including in the spirit's oft-repeated remarks to be free of the story and of all chores for Prospero. But Prospero has the type of magic power that keeps Ariel around and doing his will.
All this happens before the curtain rises on the story.
The story begins with a tempest that Prospero has masterminded with the help of Ariel, in which the wicked brother's ship will be blown to the island. There are various typical stranded-on-the-island story features, such as broken-up parties that have to get back together before it is known who is actually alive (which is everybody, since this play is a comedy), but the story ends with Miranda falling in love with the Duke's son. Since Protestants don't think sex between cousins is a problem (unless they are Americans, where the law is actually secretly Catholic, as witness the fact that six of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court are Catholic) they are betrothed.
Once it is clear that the brother and Prospero will be reconciled, Ariel reminds the wizard of their bargain and Prospero frees the spirit. In a famous scene Prospero then rids himself of all his books of magic. When Sir John Gielgud made his version of this play, it was called "Prospero's Books," and is probably the most beautiful movie ever to employ nudity, of which there is a lot.
Prospero is modeled after John Dee, whom you can see briefly in the second Kate Blanchette ELIZABETH movie. Significantly, Dee was known for having one of the largest, perhaps the very largest, personal library in Europe, another way he is identified with Prospero. And he traced his lineage to an ancient Prince of Wales, and seemed to stop there with any claims to the throne, but Shakespeare's play can be viewed an attempt to put the claim before the public. It may be that this was part of a Catholic plot to regain the throne, but Dee and Shakespeare were smart enough to remain aloof from any but academic or fictional action. As I think I have told you Dee was the original double-oh-seven. He was in fact a magus and proto-scientist and when the Royal Society was formed, nominally around Isaac Newton, it was the fulfillment of a movement to coordinate the work of scientists that has been variously traced to Frances Bacon, who was by then a political liability, or John Dee, who was an "intelligencer," that is, a spy.
I hope this answers your question...
C
August 13, 2009
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To Beth Lister, after she changed her name to that from Beth Halloran
Hi Beth,
Before I say anything, let me ask you where you got the name Lister? Did you marry into it, or is it a stage name, or what? I have a reason for asking but don't want to say too much until I find out from you where you got that name... just interesting conversation...
Best wishes,
Christopher Fulkerson
August 10, 2009
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Reply from Beth Lister:
I married in to it. What's the reason? :)
August 12, 2009
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Response to Beth Lister,
Fascinating, in my previous email to a friend I was just talking about this person: John Dee, the actual original Double-oh-seven, who was one of the three men called "The Eyes of the Queen" (though nobody believes that the Queen had three eyes in any other sense) for Queen Elizabeth Tudor. Dee was the model for the character Prospero in the Shakespeare play THE TEMPEST.
Dee was a magus and proto-scientist and academic whom Elizabeth called "my philosopher," and he appears briefly in the second Kate Blanchette movie about Elizabeth. He was also what was then called an "intelligencer," that is, a spy, though his activities almost certainly had more to do with analyzing intelligence than with securing it.
In his activities that appear to have been about magic, he devised a system of magic based on what he called the Keys of Enoch, and this is now known as Enochian Magic, and there are very many books about this advanced system of magic, which he invented, and which was and is used extensively by the most famous order of magicians, called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The most famous member of this famous order was William Butler Yeats, who won the Nobel Prize for literature, and who certainly knew the Enochian system of magic very well.
Whatever else this "magical" system may be, it is I think also, perhaps primarily, an encryption system, such as was used to keep coded state secrets secure. In fact, I think this is so likely that the bit about alleged "magic" is very possibly a front, to keep the real nature of the whole thing a secret. I think it is no coincidence that the founder of the Golden Dawn, S.L. MacGregor Mathers (a descendent of the "Great MacGregor" played by Liam Neesan in the Movie Rob Roy), was a military man, who wrote books about the military until he appeared to "switch" to writing books about magic. In other words, the books about "magic" are really about cryptography, et cetera.
In the Enochian System of magic various words are put together in patterns called "magic squares;" this is further evidence that the "magic" is actually mathematical, since these squares were known since at least Roman times. There are books about them.
Dee devised the system so that one name unlocked the whole system.
That name was: Elizabeth Lister.
The reason I wanted you to tell me how you came across that name was because if you had simply chosen it out of the apparent air, I might think you had read about the name Elizabeth Lister and taken it for that reason.
In fact, it is not believed that for Dee there was a woman named Elizabeth Lister. It was a code name, and the "name" Lister probably just refers to one of the key activities of cryptographers in the days before computers; they had to make huge lists of words and phrases in order to create and decipher coded documents; this is another reason to suspect that the "magical" system is really about cryptography, and the bit about "magic" is really just a front. Any person involved with cryptography was a "lister." Another activity that cryptographers, then as now, did and do, is add up numerical values for words and interchange them to create and communicate meanings not evident to the uninitiated. Shakespeare apparently thought poorly of these people, who are called "adders;" since this was a type of snake, these "adders" were equated with the utmost in vicious evil in everyday dealings. Whenever Shakespeare mentions "adders" there is often a hint that this other meaning is possible. We know that Shakespeare's literary technique was one in which words and phrases suggested by the whole company would be contributed by everybody; Shakespeare is sometimes called a "compiler" of the bits of story that the whole company of actors would contribute. There is a book about this called "Shakespeare's Professional Career." In the movie "Shakespeare In Love," you can perceive that there is some depiction of this method, if you know what they're talking about when they negotiate what it is that they want to say in their scripts. So Shakespeare was certainly a "lister," and probably a dissembling "adder," as well.
There is a long tradition of somewhat outre analysis of Shakespeare in which not only many of these codes are found, but the very layout of the pages of the First Folio, published a few years after S died, reveals cryptic facts. Nobody has ever asked me about this, or how it was done. It is nice to be able to sketch it out here.
A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Elizabeth Lister!
Christopher Fulkerson
August 13, 2009
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Last updated 11/9/2009