Fantasies Collide, Volume 2 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Fantasies Collide, Volume 2 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Author:Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WMG Publishing


The Scottish Play

408 Years Ago…as I usually picture it from my book-lined office in one of those pseudo-Gothic buildings at Yale. And no, I’m not telling you which one. I’m just sharing the way I think of these things when I’m sitting at my antique desk, littered with books about The Theatre and The Theater, depending on the snob level and the side of the Pond the author lives on.

I am an Elizabethan scholar, among other things, and I know real magic too, and still, this vision comes in mixed clichés.

Just saying I know better, okay?

So…

408 Years Ago:

(Or maybe 421 or maybe even 418. I mean, really, how do you know when a man made a deal with the Devil. If, indeed, he did make a deal with the Devil. And not just the Devil’s helpers. Or his handmaidens, as the case may be. Anyway…)

These three women are hanging out in their hovel in London. Because for some reason, witches can’t afford more than a hovel, even though they have more magic than anyone else, which makes no sense to me and never has. Anyway, they’re hanging out and some young playwright with the ear of the Queen shows up, believing they can give him magic powers. I mean, come on. Really?

But it’s my imagination, and it’s untamable, at least on this. Maybe because the images came into my head so young, before I knew about Elizabethan politics and Guy Fawkes and the Tower of London and beheadings and—

Anyway:

Three women. Witches. Standing around a cauldron. There had to be a cauldron, because Shakespeare describes it later in the Scottish Play and everyone from Bugs Bunny to The Simpsons have parodied it. The women circle the cauldron and they give Shakespeare magic powers.

Or they don’t give him any powers at all.

I’m betting on don’t, given what happens later.

He goes away with a sense of magic, the supernatural, and all of its dangers. He writes somewhat subversive plays about kings and abdications and strong women and hidden loves and even though he criticizes the monarchy, still the monarchy lets him perform.

Scholars believe the Scottish Play’s witches were added to flatter King James the First, Elizabeth’s successor, who wrote a book on demonology, called, of all things Daemonology. But I know there’s more to it than that. I know, because of family lore.

Because I’m descended from those witches.

Because I’m still carrying on their tradition.

I mess with the theater, but only in a good way.

Or so I would like to believe.



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