Tea at Trianon: The Historical King Who Inspired Shakespeare's Cymbeline

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, July 12, 2024

The Historical King Who Inspired Shakespeare's Cymbeline

From Ancient Origins:

To write his plays, William Shakespeare looked for inspiration in a wide variety of sources, including myths, history, and popular stories of his day. Among Shakespeare’s inspirations were two ancient British kings. Of the two kings, King Lear is completely mythical. His biography is partially based on Leir of Britain, a legendary British monarch whose story Geoffrey of Monmouth recorded in his pseudohistorical 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae (“History of the Kings of Britain”). Geoffrey's genealogy of the British dynasty dates Leir's rule to the 8th century BC, about the period of Rome's establishment.
The other king, Cymbeline, was loosely modelled on a real king named Cunobeline who ruled for about forty years in the south-east of Britain. Historia Regum Britanniae referred to him as Kymbelinus, son of Tenvantius, who was raised at the court of the Roman Emperor Augustus. Raphael Holinshed's 157 Chronicles also briefly describes Kymbelinus as an extraordinary soldier and powerful ruler whose allegiance to the Romans was so deep that he willingly paid tribute when he could have refused. By contrast, his eldest son, Guiderius, flatly refused to pay homage to the Romans. Angered by this refusal, Emperor Claudius attacked Britain. (Read more.)