Anon

[ron_drummond]

I saw Anonymous today. I liked it! Great sets and costumes. The cgi-derived evocation of Elizabethan London is fabulous -- I would have been happy if the whole movie had just wandered those streets, evocating away -- and many of the views and scenes set in the various Globe-style theaters do a magnificent job of evoking what it must have been

Comments

[kalimac]

only he seems to have lost sight of the fact that, being Elizabeth's eldest bastard, and by an unknown father no less, the 17th Earl of Oxford isn't related to the earlier earls at all.

A couple of Gospel writers seem to have lost sight of a similar problem when they included genealogies to prove that Joseph was descended from King David. So it's not a new mental blindspot.

[ron_drummond]

Good point! The fact that Jesus is quoted elsewhere in at least one and possibly both of those gospels specifically and unambiguously denying Davidic descent might suggest either that the genealogies were later additions by a careless redactor or that the authors' blindspots were even bigger than we may have at first supposed.

[kalimac]

They're trying to tell two incompatible stories at once. The Messiah was traditionally supposed to be a descendant of David, but the new story of the direct Son of God was too good to lose. So they fudged it. The aborted sacrifice of Isaac is a similar awkward fudge: one story in which Abraham sacrificed his son, one in which the same son succeeded him, so we get this strange combination in which it's both.

The Oxfordians appear not quite to have realized yet that promoting de Vere from the line of earls to the son of QE1 herself requires a similar fudge.

[ron_drummond]

I'd be fascinated to read more about the fudging of the Abraham and Isaac story; could you recommend a good commentary that specifically examines that aspect of it, the blending of the two previously contradictory stories? I would think it would require a newly-written bridge passage to smooth away the join; that kind of redaction, and the scholarship that uncovers it, or attempts to, is deeply fascinating to me. I was aware that the author(s) of the Book of Jubilees rewrote the narrative portions of the Torah to write Satan or the devil into many of the tales where he hadn't been before, and that the tale of the sacrifice was rewritten so that it was the devil, pretending to be God, who told Abraham to sacrifice his son, with the real God distracted and only noticing at the last possible moment what was happening and swooping in just in time to stay Abraham's hand. Whew! You gotta love it. And yet ultimately not nearly so compelling, even though (or especially because!) the "original" Torah version basically lets us know that

[kalimac]

The bridge passage is right there in the story. As I suggested, we have one story in which Abraham sacrifices his son, and another in which the same son succeeds him. Therefore we need an awkwardly-inserted bridge passage in which an angel shows up just in time to stop the sacrifice and says, "Hey, God was only kidding; can't you take a joke?" It's Genesis 22: 11-13.

Biblical commentators have been trying to explain God's peculiar behavior here ever since, and even more so that in the Book of Job (where we, the readers, know that the answer to Job's anguished question of why this happened to him is, "Because God and Satan were sitting around one day shooting the breeze and decided it would be fun to see how much misfortune it would take to piss you off").

[kalimac]

Oh, and have you read this?

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
by Wilfred Owen

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.