GR evoking the Vietnam War?

[Paul Mackin]

On Wed, 2003-05-21 at 17:50, Dave Monroe wrote: 
> And Shakespeare never quite gets around to actually
> dramatizing the reign of ER I, yet he penned plays
> notably concerned with problem(atic)s of royal
> succession at a time when crises thereof stormed at
> either historical horizon. 

ER and out-of-favor Essex might get mention however as in

Were now the general of our gracious Empress
(As in good time he may) from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him!

Henry V, Act V, lines 30-34


Imagine if you will a slightly different scenario. Shakespeare has a
change of heart and now feels that his not-so-Good Queen Bess and her
favorite defense secretary are beginning to display  decided fascistic
dispositions and are being entirely ingenuous in claiming that the
proposed overseas war (Irish Sea) is to remove a tyrannical Irish
chieftain when in reality it's about Timber. Will has already done a
couple of drafts of a play about one of Elizabeth's supposedly heroic
ancestors. Now he must do some quick rewriting. A little addition here
and omission there will do trick. It will be important to make Henry V
far more eager than in the previous version to go to war with France.
Much of the Archbishop of Canterbury's speech will be removed, in order
to  cast doubt among Elizabeth's less gullible subjects as to her actual
pacifism. . To nail things down he will take away some of Henry's
stirring speeches at Agincourt (give them to the Welch guy) and will
drop broad hints that the king was actually AWOL on the day of the
famous battle.  Next Will turns to another play he's drafted, this one
about a member of the hated House of York, which took away  the
Lancastrian kingship. Although Will can't elevate Richard III  to the of
the good fellow he historically actually  was (he doesn't want his
theater shut down), he can at least remove the hump (what hump?) and
take out that self-pitying speech about not having a horse when he needs
one the most. Etc., etc. . . . .

 







>  Invasion of the Body
> Snatchers (the novel, the Don Siegel film thereof),
> not to mention any number of contemporay SF
> stories/movies, never quite mentions McCarthy, The Red
> Scare, the Cold War, et al., but ... and so forth. 
> Pynchon, by the way, never quite mentions JFK in The
> Crying of Lot 49, either, but he mentions Dallas
> pointedly and dramatizes his own crisis of succession.
>  This is kinda sorta the way allusion works, not quite
> mentioning whatever one is alluding to, no?  Or,
> rather, yes.  A curiouis lack of imagination on yr
> part on this topic, Terrance ...
> 
> -- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > 
> > Interesting. Ain't it? Gravity's Rainbow is as much
> > about America in the era of Vietnam and civil rights
> > as it is about Europe at the end of World War II,
> > but  P never mentions the war in SE Asia in the
> > novel. The Foreword is as much about 9-11 and
> > America in the era of 9-11 as it is about Orwell's
> > Europe, Orwell, and _1984_, but P never mentions
> > 9-11 in the Foreword.
> 
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