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| -by Soapsuds |
Once upon a time—so we think, at least—a British warchieftain led a decisive victory against the Saxons invading his homeland. The Battle of Mount Badon, circa 550, drove off the invaders for something along the lines of fifty years.
That's all we know, and we're not even very sure of that. We don't know anything certain about the chieftain himself. He might have been a straight-up Celt, or he may have been influenced by Roman rule. His name might have been Artos—Arturus, it would be in Latin. Or maybe not.
One battle, and not even a name for sure, and yet everyone who speaks the English language "knows" the story of King Arthur. Into this one legend, generations upon generations have poured their values and their dreams. Christianity, courtly love, the pseudo-democracy of the Round Table, the sword in the stone and the man born to unite Britain—all of these are inventions, and all were added to the tale centuries after Artos (or whoever) routed the Saxons from Badon Hill. It doesn't matter who he really was once. His story belongs to all of us now.
In particular, it belongs to Britain. Arthur's birthplace is supposed to be in Cornwall; his tomb is supposed to be at Glastonbury. Amesbury Convent is where Guinevere fled after Arthur caught her with Lancelot; Stonehenge was built by Merlin; and Merlin was born and buried in Carmarthen. And Caerleon—a real abandoned Roman fortress—why, Caerleon was Arthur's first court, before Merlin built Camelot for him. It's proof that Arthur was a Romanized Celt! The tourist can visit all these places, and the locals are happy to tell about their city's role, their role, in the King Arthur story.
In 1586, (or so the evidence suggests, at least) a boy of twenty was banished from Stratford and ran off to London to be an actor. We know that he was born in April of 1564, that he married Anne Hathaway in 1582, that he fathered three children, and that he died in April of 1616. But that's all we know for sure. In between, he was an actor. Possibly a playwright, conceivably even a director, but the evidence of the latter is sketchy and the evidence of the former not watertight. We know he took part in forming the Lord Chamberlain's Men. And we know that the Lord Chamberlain's Men built the Globe Theater.
The Globe that tourists flock to now is not Shakespeare's original. The original Globe burned down in the early 1600s. Nor is it the second Globe, rebuilt from the ashes of the first—that was closed by the Puritan government in the 1640s and later dismantled. The Globe open to tourists now, although a replica of the original, dates only from 1996.
One might think the "replica" part would cheapen the experience of standing upon that stage. Quite the contrary. There could be no more fitting monument to Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain's Men than to recreate their Globe on its original site, in the traditional style but with modern materials. To perform on its stage Shakespeare's works, interpreted in a variety of styles, from traditional Elizabethan to avant-garde.
Because that is, after all, the point of Shakespeare. The point of the Shakespeare story—the Shakespeare legend, if you will. We don't know exactly who wrote the plays—the actor Shakespeare of Stratford? Edward de Vere? Christopher Marlowe? Francis Bacon? We don't know what the plays looked like when they were originally performed. Lines and cues were distributed in individual packets tailored to each actor, and it's possible they were never collected together before the printing of the first Folio—and who knows what the Folio collector might have changed, inadvertently or deliberately? And certainly changes were made between the first and second editions. And some of the plays were revised completely during the Restoration. And every presentation of every one of Shakespeare's works, from the Restoration to the present, has in some way altered the content by reflecting the values of the time period that produced it.
The "absolute" quality of Shakespeare is irrelevant, because there is no absolute. We don't know who wrote the plays, exactly what they looked like originally, or how many changes have been made since. We no longer have access to the absolute. Like any legend that endures longer than a generation or two, the plays have been molded by all the hands that touched them. There is no longer any "right way" to perform Shakespeare—no longer any core value or any purity. And perhaps that's why they continue to endure, why they still speak to us today, why we still perform them now. Shakespeare had compatriots whose work was comparable to his own—but they are forgotten or are the stuff of English classes, and "Shakespeare" is a cultural byword.
Given all this, it is absolutely appropriate to pay reverence to Shakespeare by visiting the third Globe, built in 1996 through the efforts of an American actor.
In 1886, a struggling young physician with a sick wife and not enough in the bank to pay the bills wrote a novella for Beaton's Christmas Annual. Its main character was based on a surgeon in the hospital where the young doctor had trained—a sharp-tongued, hawk-faced old coot who claimed that diseases could be diagnosed without a touch or a test, by careful visual observation of the patients and logical inference from their symptoms.
Arthur Conan Doyle's original ambition in life was to be an eye surgeon. When he abandoned this ambition and turned to writing full-time, he intended to write historical fiction—"real" literature. But he could not decouple his fame from that of his creation, the sharp-tongued, cold-blooded detective who made the "science of observation and deduction" a byword among mystery fans. To his lifelong frustration, Conan Doyle could not get rid of Holmes. Indeed, his attempt to give the detective a hero's death met with such a clamor that Conan Doyle was forced to grit his teeth and bring Holmes back to life.
The Sherlock Holmes fad remained strong even after Conan Doyle gave up writing the stories for good. Conan Doyle was still alive the first few times Sherlock Holmes was adapted for the stage. In the seventy-five years since the author's death, the Holmes story has continued to live and evolve—through film and miniseries adaptations, pastiches, parodies, fan fiction, societies, conventions, and a lingering influence throughout the mystery genre.
Does Sherlock Holmes qualify as a legend? Well, it's a bit soon to say—barely a hundred years after the first story was told—but all the early signs point that way. There are people writing Sherlock Holmes fan fiction (some of it published), and there are pilgrims flocking to 221B Baker Street. People who don't read mysteries recognize the name Sherlock Holmes, the same way people who don't like theater know the name Shakespeare and people who don't care for epic fantasy know the name Arthur. The early signs are encouraging.
In general, the presence of pilgrims is a good indication that the story in question is an actual legend or will become one. Indeed, pilgrims are what make a legend a legend. They're the factor that changes the story one person tells into the story that is part of all of us.
Pilgrimage is really about possession. Not just knowing a thing exists, but touching it. Interacting with it. And in some way—oils of the skin, if nothing else—affecting it back. In that way, the pilgrim becomes part of the tale. A pilgrim whose prayer is answered by St. Thomas is part of the Canterbury legend. Part of The Canterbury Tales. The actor who interprets Shakespeare contributes to the canon as surely as whoever penned the original words.
Writing fan fiction—writing stories set in a universe created by and belonging to an earlier storyteller—is its own kind of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage from afar, if you will. Not just passively observing someone else's world, but entering it. Touching it. Making a mark on it, affecting it back.
That's how stories become legends, and that's how legends become absorbed by their culture. The Arthurian legend became what it is and lasted as long as it has because of all the hands (mouths?) that added to it. We don't think of that as fanfic—as cheap fawning by those who can't come up with original work. We think of it as "all those bards and storytellers and scholars from centuries ago," adding their bit to what became a glorious complicated tapestry.
T. H. White borrowed more from Thomas Malory than he invented—but it's White's interpretation that makes The Once and Future King "the" modern version of the Arthurian legend. And it's what makes the story White's. Malory borrowed more from Geoffrey of Monmouth than he invented—but his interpretation made Le Morte d'Arthur "the" classic version of the Arthurian legend, and it made the story Malory's. Christein de Troyes, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mary Stewart, and the people who adapted The Once and Future King into Camelot, Excalibur, and King Arthur—all of them borrowed more than they invented, and all of them added to the tale. The story belongs to them all.
We re-tell Arthur's story—with our own morals, every time. We re-interpret Shakespeare's plays—with our own morals, every generation. And we tell our own stories of Holmes and Robin Hood and Buffy and Star Trek and The Odyssey and ancient Rome and the way the west was won, and every time, we betray our own perspective. Every time, we tell our own stories. And we make the old stories belong to us as well as to the past.
They even belong to me. A little bit. A very little bit. I've absorbed all the different version of the Arthur story that I could get my hands on. I've written an analysis of the characters of Bedwyr and Lancelot, I've incorporated some Arthurian imagery into my own fiction, I've acted in and analyzed Shakespeare's plays, and I've written a story taking place in the Sherlock Holmes universe. So they're my stories, too... a very little bit... as well as being something "out there."
And so I went to England. On pilgrimage. I needed to see, for real, what I had already seen clearly with the mind's eye. I needed to lay my hand on the places I knew were there.
So I went on pilgrimage. I saw the Bath of Jane Austen's novels; Stonehenge and Salisbury; Portsmouth, where the H.M.S. Victory (itself a legend from a legendary war) is moored; and Wales, where the Arthur legend originated.
And I also saw London and its more typical tourist attractions: Westminster Abbey, Parliament, Trafalgar Square, St. Paul's Cathedral. All of them parts of one tale or another; some parts of tales that might become legends.
And on the very last day, I went to 221B Baker Street. My secret foolish little pilgrimage.
I left the Sherlock Holmes Museum feeling just a little—flat. The thought was something like, "Well, that was very nice, and I'm glad I saw it, and the view from the window was cool. But he wasn't there."
And hard on the heels of that thought, another: "Of course, he was never there."
This is literally true. 221B Baker Street is a museum to a fictitious character. Laying one's hand on the window frame, the mantelpiece, the writing desk, brings no chance for any communion with a lingering spirit. There never was one in the first place.
But it is also true on a deeper level. He was never there. They were never there. Not at Carmarthen, not at Stonehenge, not at Glastonbury. Not at the Globe and not in Anne Hathaway's cottage. Not in Baker Street. And not, to stretch the point a little, in cathedrals of Canterbury or St. Paul, or in St. Peter's Basilica.
St. Paul's Cathedral makes the point bluntly. Christopher Wren—the man who designed the cathedral—is laid to rest there, beneath a plain headstone. There are better translations of the inscription elsewhere, but here's what I came up with, stumbling and trying to recall to mind my two semesters of Latin: "Below lies the one who this church and dome built—CHRISTOPHORUS WREN—laboring many years not for himself but for the public good. Reader, if a monument you seek, it is around you." Whatever is rotting beneath the headstone is of no consequence now. The Cathedral is. "If you seek his monument, look around you."
That last line is the point. Arthur is not in Glastonbury, Holmes is not in Baker Street, Shakespeare is not at the Globe, and Wren is not under that stone. Nor is Peter under the Basilica. And the relative reality or fantasy of any of these figures is beside the point: no spirits haunt those places. The spirits are instead diffused outward—across cultures and years and in all directions—a cascading ripple that affects all they touch, shaping city and country and world. If you seek a monument, look around you.
Nothing is at Baker Street, Tintagel, Stratford, or any tombstone, except the legend's starting point. And the beginning of any legend is dwarfed by where it ends up, and what it gathers in the journey.
People don't tell stories of reality. Once the stories start, they have already divorced themselves from fact. Holmes never existed; Arthur and Shakespeare and Saints Peter and Thomas did, but the stories are now told of constructs, not real men; and the Holmes stories told now are adaptations. The genesis point is a fine place to lay flowers or raise a glass, but there's nothing intrinsically there. The legend isn't there. It exists, instead, in the form of the artists, philosophers, and culture it influenced—continues to influence as we continue to retell and reinterpret the story.
Maybe the point of pilgrimage is to realize how unnecessary it is.