I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.
Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” – there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.
no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era –
it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.
we think the answer is polar bears.
no, seriously! in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’ it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.
of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they? so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless? well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences. and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear? what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity?
and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.
you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR
every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken
It was an actual, TINY bear. Just. like a babbeh polar bear.
say what you want about woobifying villains, but i think tragic backstories and redemption via love are staples for good reason. we want to believe that people are fundamentally good, just hardened by a harsh world. that suffering earns you a happy ending. because then it means something, then pain isn’t just senseless and futile.
people don’t ‘excuse’ the actions of villains because they just don’t take those actions seriously. i think it’s a kind of projection – we forgive them because we want to forgive ourselves, and we look for the good in them because we want to see that in the world, even in people who have wronged and hurt us. because earth is a goddamn terrifying place if other humans really are evil, if they’re really monsters.
and idk, i just think it’s kind of beautiful that we all want to believe that the scariest mass-murdering motherfucker alive can be brought down by something as pure and innocent as love. that love is the answer, not violence. i don’t think that’s cheap or ‘problematic’ or a bad influence. i think it’s human, and profoundly optimistic in a way that few people are brave enough to be.
If I didn’t hold the hope that love could make a difference, my world would be cold and bleak.
People who ONLY ever like “pure, cinnamon roll” characters and try to buff away every flaw and every morally grey dimension and reduce stories to pure heroes and pure villains give me the creeps, because it seems to me like those are people who refuse to acknowledge their own capability to do terrible things, the inevitable fact that they have done things that hurt others in the past and will do so again (because that IS inevitable if you interact with other humans), who never question themselves, who think incredibly harsh standards of judgment are just fine because of course THEY would never need forgiveness or mercy.
THOSE are the people who are most likely to stomp on your face with a boot while being utterly convinced they’re doing the right thing and you deserve it. And they will never admit they were wrong and they’ll never apologize, because only bad people do bad things, and of course they’re not a bad person, so if they did it, it must have been good.
Give me friends who are honest about their own capacity to harm, who know where their own darkness lies, and can see it played out in characters good, bad, and – best of all, somewhere in between. Who understand when to rage, when to forgive, and when to just walk away. Who understand that other people, just like them, are ever-changing bundles of contradictions. Those are people I feel I can trust.
Reblogging for the amazing commentary above.
So many of my favourite movies feature villains or antiheroes who redeem themselves, and of those who don’t redeem themselves, they will often have been given the opportunity to do so and openly rejected it.
There’s a reason why Beast from Beauty and the Beast is so popular, why Darth Vader is so popular, why Terminator 2 made such a fun twist as a sequel to Terminator.
The stories where Bad is defeated by Good through Good kicking Bad’s ass can be fun, but oh god, give me the stories where Good teaches Bad how to be Good. Give me the stories where Bad CHOOSES to stop being Bad. Give me the stories where people learn and heal and get better, because those are the stories that give me hope that we can all get better.
Why is it not, the Separatist Wars, the Civil Wars, the Droid Wars, since, in order, the so called “bad guys” are the Separatists, it is a galactic civil war, and droids are the bulk of the combatants on the Separatist side. Naming it only the Clone Wars, when the clones are the soldiers of one side and not the actual instigators of the conflict, make me think that it was a spotlight on them and on the rest of the forces that were associated directly with them— aka the Jedi.
Names have powers. They shape how one thinks about things.They imply and can direct one’s thinking— without outright saying what is going on. There’s this term, “weasel word.” Wikipedia has a good start on what it is and how it’s used, but I really like this sentence in particular: “Weasel words can be used in advertising and in political statements, where encouraging the audience to develop a misleading impression of what was said can lead to advantages, at least in the short term.”
Every time Clone Wars is used, one hears clone. Well, must mean that they have something to do with it right? Of what’s the other side, nothing. Of what’s the core of the war, nothing.
Before the war was even used to completion, the impression words gave was turned against the troops.
It must have been pretty easy, after that, to phase them out of the army. After all, no-one would want clones there, when they have been the reason the last war had been named.
Brilliant point. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Jedi’s hand in the creation of the clone army was emphasized in the aftermath: the Jedi orchestrated their own downfall in their attempt at power, and thus the continued importance of a loyal, standing army to keep the Grand Order of Things.
And I mean, Dooku was a Jedi, right? Obviously he left the Order on the Jedi’s orders so he could create the separatist movement.
Don’t you love how the Empire’s propaganda essentially says that the Jedi tried to do exactly what Palpatine did do?
I have a theory that one of the reasons it’s called the Clone Wars, rather than calling it a civil war (I do wonder if on the Separatist side it was called a war for independence; I’m pretty sure that the Republic never acknowledged the CIS as an independent state), is to de-emphasize the fact that it was a civil war. Nearly all the Republic combatants that we see in the show and in RotS are clones and Jedi; those that aren’t are naval captains and admirals like Tarkin and Yularen (and a few others), and rear echelon officers like Colonel Gascon. This isn’t a war that’s being fought by the citizens of the Republic, by and large. It’s not personalized — it’s not personal. Inhabitants of worlds like Naboo, Alderaan, Coruscant, etc., can’t claim to be fighting and dying for the Republic. Someone else is doing all that. And that “someone else” isn’t someone’s husband, someone’s daughter, someone’s brother or sister, it’s the Jedi — who hold themselves apart from the rest of the Republic — and the clones, who are literally manufactured for that purpose.
So what does Palpatine do in the aftermath of the Clone Wars? No more clones. No more Jedi. Stormtroopers, pilots, and other military personnel are recruited from the peoples of the Empire. Suddenly it is personal. You might not be able to see the face of the stormtrooper beneath the helmet, but it’s someone doing their patriotic duty for the Empre. It’s someone who has a stake in the Empire fighting for the Empire, because they’re defending their families, their homeworlds, their loved ones. The clones and the Jedi don’t have any of that, as far as the average citizen knows. But a stormtrooper, a TIE pilot, an imperial officer…they’ve got a family. They’ve got a mother, a father, maybe a husband or wife, maybe siblings, children, cousins, friends. They’ve got a homeworld. You know what they’re fighting for: something that somebody, somewhere, might want to take away. You can trust them, because they’re just like you.
Or at least, I bet that’s what the propaganda says.
You can trust them, because they’re just like you, which also reinforce the “clones aren’t people” and that the war seems like a “play war"— the ones on the battlefields are clones and droids created for that.
I’d love to have a look at the propaganda of the galaxy at the time.
I really, truly hope that they let Luke Skywalker be Luke Skywalker in these next two films.
People speculate over whether he’ll act more like Obi-Wan or Yoda when really, he’s not much like either of them. (I would argue that it was the striking differences between Luke and Yoda/Obi-Wan in ESB and RotJ that allowed Luke to accomplish what he needed to accomplish.) There’s no reason to think that he would make a complete turn in his personality, even despite the similar situation he’s in. He’s older now, yeah, and he’s probably much, much sadder and wiser, too, but…he’s still Luke. He’s still the same man we saw in the original trilogy. He just has more years and experience weighing down on him now.
I want to see Luke as an old man. Jedi Master Luke Skywalker. I don’t want to see an Obi-Wan or Yoda impersonation with Mark Hamill’s face. If I walk into that theater and see that they just reduced Luke to a carbon copy of the previous Jedi Masters, I’ll honestly feel cheated.
God i just love the prequels bc they’re so good and “happy” in the first two and you get attached to Ani bc damn he’s just a cute lil thing and who wouldn’t love him?
and then you get to revenge of the sith and you’re just like oh bc you remember what happens, you know what happens to that innocent little boy and it’s just so sad
you look at Vader in a new light after you watch the prequels and you sense the sadness obi wan felt and it just sets it up so well and god i love those movies
