A Midsummer Tempest VII

Some Ongoing Points of Interest

Valeria Matuchek is a continuing character. She is a baby at the end of Operation Chaos and a teenager in Operation Luna and makes a cameo appearance as a graduate student in A Midsummer Tempest, although only in the "behind the scenes" space of the Old Phoenix. That gives her slightly more exposure than Holger Danske who stars in Three Hearts And Three Lions and cameos with Valeria in A Midsummer Tempest. We have seen two generations of Matucheks on the Earth where magic/"paraphysics" is both science and technology.

Regarding those "ten lost tribes of Israel," I think the Mormons claim that they became the Native Americans? I think also that, in Biblical terms, being lost from the sight of God means ceasing to exist? And that makes sense historically. A tribe that has failed to maintain its identity, has dispersed and intermarried, has thereby ceased to continue its independent existence. It has not gone to some place so that scholars can deduce where it has gone. Instead, it has gone out, like a switched off light.

I remember that humour was a feature of A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975) and that Puritans were often the butt of the humour. However, I am at present rereading some harrowing scenes of oppression, flight and pursuit although this line struck me as comical:

"A man, ugly, unkempt, and smelling of manure, slouched in the outer doorway." (p. 61)

A Midsummer (Night's Dream And The) Tempest

After rereading Poul Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions, the logical next step is to reread his A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975). Both are alternative history fantasies and the hero of the former cameos in the latter.

Chapter i of A Midsummer Tempest reads like historical fiction because it describes a battle in the English Civil War. Chapter ii reads like science fiction (sf) because it presents anachronistic technological advances, a railway and semaphores near industrialised Leeds and Bradford, in the seventeenth century. Chapter vi reveals that we are reading a fantasy because Oberon calls forth the Faerie folk and they refer to both Titania and Puck.

  Chapter xii reveals the basis of the fantasy, or are we back to sf? This seventeenth century occurs on a parallel Earth, an idea that can be rationalised scientifically. What differentiates this parallel is that Shakespeare was a historian, not a playwright. Thus, Faeries exist and there were clocks in Caesar's time and cannon in Hamlet's. Therefore, their world was technologically ahead of ours from an early date so that their Industrial Revolution was able to start in the seventeenth century. That single premise explains all the discrepancies. There are either infinite or factorial N universes but, in this and the related volumes, we learn of six:

the Shakespearean history;

the Carolingian romantic history where Holger Danske originated;

our history where Holger, in a different identity, saved Niels Bohr from the Nazis;

an Aztec pantheon history from which Holger barely escapes while trying to return from our world to his Carolingian history;

a history in which the effects of cold iron were degaussed about 1900, thus magical/"paraphysical" forces were technologised, World War II was against the Saracen Caliphate and inter-cosmic travel has begun;

the pocket universe or interuniversal nexus containing the Old Phoenix where Shakespeareans, a Carolingian and a "paraphysicist" meet.

A Midsummer Tempest is to be recommended both for creative imagination and for literary style, with verse and poetry disguised as prose:

" 'Mesim 'twar wise we haul our skins from heare,' panted the dragoon, 'while still they may hold wine.'
" 'And while I yet may hope to bring together men enough that they can cover their retreat...and mine,' Rupert said." (p. 6)

Rearranged as dramatic verse, that becomes:

Dragoon: Mesim 'twar wise we haul our skins from heare
While still they may hold wine.
Rupert: And while I yet may hope to bring together men
Enough that they can cover their retreat...and mine.    

A Midsummer Tempest XII

The only premise of Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest is that Shakespeare's plays were not fictions but true histories. Why then does an Alexander Dumas character, the Musketeer d'Artagnan, suddenly appear on page 126? The seventeenth century is the authentic period for d'Artagnan but is Anderson extending his premise by also including a French novelist's works?

Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which features  Shakespeare's Prospero, would certainly, if its action had moved into seventeenth century France, have encompassed d'Artagnan because the premise of that series is the co-existence of every possible fictitious character in a single history. But, so far, A Midsummer Tempest, has confined itself only to the consequences of Shakespeare's plays being histories. If d'Artagnan can cameo, then who else might be waiting in the wings?

However, a quick google search reveals that there was a historical d'Artagnan about whom at least two novelists, one of them Dumas, wrote fictionalised accounts. Indeed, Dumas' source for the character was an earlier novel. Thus, Anderson, no doubt knowing that there was a real d'Artagnan, inserts that historical character into his narrative, thus deceiving his audience into thinking that they are now reading about the hero of The Three Musketeers.

Still rereading A Midsummer Tempest, I still find its subtleties unpredictable and apparently inexhaustible.

Peter And Poul II

The previous post highlighted some parallels between A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson and The Alchemist's Revenge by Peter Cakebread. Both novels can be characterized by saying that the English Civil War of the seventeenth century is being fought in a version of history where magic works. (Such a historical difference presupposes a corresponding cosmological difference but let's not go that far right now.)

One difference between the novels (so I initially thought) was that A Midsummer Tempest also places more recent technology in the seventeenth century. But so does The Alchemists' Revenge! Reading further, I find that not all of the anachronistic mechanisms are alchemically empowered. Some of them are merely ingenious engineering - although still suspected of Satanic influence, of course.

Each of these novels is one part of a vaster fictional universe but the ways in which this is done could not be more different.

A Midsummer Tempest...
...is set in a universe where all of Shakespeare's plays were literally true. Specifically, it is a sequel to A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Further, this Shakespearean universe coexists with the Carolingian universe of Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions and with the magical universe of his two Operation... volumes. Prince Rupert meets Holger Danske and Valeria Matuchek in the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix.

The Alchemist's Revenge...
...is the "First Book of the Companie of Reluctant Heroes." Further, this series is set in the universe of the Clockwork & Chivalry Role Playing Game (RPG) by Peter Cakebread and Ken Walton. Since RPG's are interactive dramas, maybe there is some connection with Old Will after all!

In both cases...
...the fiction must be understood in the context of the history:

"...for all the differences, much remains the same as the real history. Traditional society and values are crumbling; religious and political factions vie for supremacy; kin fight kin, in a bitter struggle for England's future; and ordinary folk struggle to get by, in a world turned upside down...
"...if we were going to do history, even alternate history, we needed to get the history right, before going on to change it."
-Peter Cakebread, The Apprentice's Revenge (Swindon, 2013), pp. 214-215.

Right on.

A Midsummer Tempest II

I cannot disagree with any of Prince Rupert's confession of faith, which I here re-present as verse:

"I try to be a proper Protestant,
"Yet not cast off what's good from olden time.
"I'd liefer hear a service than a rant;
"I do not think my Romish friends are damned,
"Nor that 'tis right to persecute the Jews;
"I'd hang no helpless granny for a witch."

(A Midsummer Tempest, London, 1975, pp. 12-13)

Because, in the timeline of A Midsummer Tempest, Shakespeare was the great Historian, it follows that pre-Roman Britons knew that the Earth is round: King Lear knew of "...the thick rotundity of the world..."

But how did Shakespeare know that Lear knew that? The Puritan character, Shelgrave, argues in a circle:

Shakespeare describes English people at Troy, in Theseus' Athens, in Rome, later in Italy and in Denmark;

it follows that the English spread north, having had to leave some southern country;

but the Bible reveals that the people who spread north, having had to leave a southern country, were the ten lost tribes of Israel;

it follows that the English are God's chosen people;

therefore, "...they always kept a seed of truth alive, which flowered in the great Historian..." (p. 22);

it follows from this that Shakespeare's description of English people at Troy etc is accurate.

I bought a second hand book on Anglo-Israel theory, published at the height of the British Empire, which argued:

the "Tuatha de Danaan" people who entered prehistoric Ireland were the tribe of Dan;

the Irish/Scoti colonized the part of Britain that came to be called "Scotland" (true);

King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England (true).

Therefore:

Queen Victoria was in direct line of succession from David and Solomon;

the British are the Chosen People;

the British Empire fulfills the promise to Abraham that his descendants will be a great nation and that others will die out;

the British Empire will never end.

The argument is endlessly elaborated:

British possession of Mediterranean ports fulfills a Biblical prophecy about "gates";
the United States plays the role of "Manasseh";
etc.

Rupert's and my "Romish friends" believe that St Peter was the first Bishop of Rome, therefore that the present Pope is the direct successor of the chief disciple of the incarnation of God. Anglo-Israel theory put Queen Victoria in a similar position. As a direct successor of David, she was a divinely appointed monarch. Geoffry of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain instead traces British royalty back to Troy.

Ethiopians have claimed a Solomonic monarchy, the Ark of the Covenant and the Messiah. These are powerful myths.

Scene Settings

Shakespeare's Hamlet begins:

Act I
Scene 1
Elsinore. A platform before the castle.
Francisco at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO

After that, the dialogue starts. 

Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest begins not with a date but with a scene:

i

THUNDER AND LIGHTNING. A HEATH ABOUT TO BE BLASTED.
-Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975), p. 1.

After that, comes not dramatic dialogue but prose narrative.

A Midsummer Tempest is a sequel to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest so blog readers might like to google the beginnings of those two plays?

Accessible Texts

Yesterday my lap top went into the shop for an overnight service. Now it is back. Meanwhile, other, not entirely unrelated, reading has generated reflections relevant to Poul Anderson although placing him in a wider context.

The accessibility of a text to a reader is first a function of which language it is written in. Obviously. A Chinese or Japanese text is impenetrable to most of us here. However, there are several other factors. How long ago was the text written? Is it poetry, prose, drama or graphic story-telling? How dense or complicated is it? How archaic, obscure or specialized is its vocabulary? To which genre does it belong? What literary conventions or references does it assume familiarity with? An English text can be effectively unreadable. We have become familiar with the cliches that have accumulated within sf but imagine if the only sf that we had ever read was the pre-cliched texts of Wells and Verne.

Some Texts Referring To Fairies As Supernatural Beings Distinct From Gods, Angels Or Demons

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595 or 1596)

Edmund Spencer, The Faerie Queen (1590-1596)

Percy Shelley, Queen Mab (1813)

George MacDonald, Phantastes (1858)

Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest (1974)

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman (1989-1996)

Accessibility

I have seen A Midsummer Night's Dream performed maybe five times. (Plays are written to be seen and heard, not read.)

I have never considered reading The Faerie Queen or Queen Mab.

I have just broken off a first reading of Phantastes and turned to a rereading of The Sandman as infinitely more accessible. (Yet Phantastes "baptised" CS Lewis' imagination when he read it in about 1914.)

I made perhaps two attempts to read A Midsummer Tempest before getting properly into it but now commend it as Anderson's most literary work.

The Sandman is endlessly rereadable.

Gaiman parallels Anderson in fantasy but has written no sf. Thus, both Gaiman and Anderson rework Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. The Dreaming incorporates all myths, including Odin, Thor and Loki. Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End parallels Anderson's Old Phoenix.

Ys And A Midsummer Tempest

In Poul and Karen Anderson's Dahut (London, 1989), the central character, Gratillonius, asked about a battlefield apparition, responds:

"'Homer tells how the Gods appeared to heroes who fought under the walls of Troy...Constantinus claimed the Cross that is Christ's stood once in the sky, and in that sign he went on to make himself supreme...'" (p. 161)

Witnesses of the apparition about which Gratillonius is asked speak of an angel or of the Ysan God Taranis although the authors' description clearly identifies Gratillonius' own deity, Mithras. Because Dahut is Volume Three of a historical fantasy tetralogy in which the Gods are real, Gratillonius' reference to Homer for historical testimony is not naive but appropriate. Similarly, in Poul Anderson's alternative reality novel, A Midsummer Tempest, Shakespeare, the Great Historian, is cited as evidence that the English were present throughout the ancient world.

There is another similarity to A Midsummer Tempest. Much of that novel is blank verse laid out as prose. Suddenly, in Chapter VIII, section 2, the text of Dahut adopts a strange rhythm but here there is rhyme as well and it is easy to rearrange the text:

"Torches in the avenue and lanterns up the street,
"Night becomes a sunrise glow about their eager feet,
"Lit the way for golden youth come forth to celebrate,
"And Dahut was awaiting them within her father's gate.

"Plangency of harp and flute, the heartbeat of a drum,
"Pulsed in Ys to welcome those that she had bidden come
"Dance away all darknesses, that morning sun might see
"How brightly Dahut's dower shone - her father's victory.

"Golden shone the eagle wings and bronze the open door,
"Chariots careened within the burnished palace floor,
"Tall the sentry columns reared through incense dreamy air,
"And lamplight turned to living gold in Dahut's loosened hair.

"Silken gowns and purple edges rippled, flowed and swirled,
"Silver gleamed and amber smouldered where the dancers whirled.
"Music laughed and laughter sang around their skipping feet,
"And Dahut went before them all, the fleetest of the fleet.

"Fair the well-born maidens were and handsome were the men
"Treading out the merry measure forth and back again.
"Close embrace and stolen kiss could cast a sweet surprise;
"But Dahut was the star that shone before the young men's eyes.

"Kel Cartagi, Soren's grandson, touched her hand and waist.
"Then the dance bereaved him of her with its lilting haste.
"On she swayed to Barak Tyri, on to many more.
"So Dahut left a swathe of joy and woe across the floor.

"When the music paused a while and gave the fevered guest
"Time to cool or drink or chat or flirt or simply rest,
"Carsa strove to keep a Roman passivity
"While Dahut in a ring of other men made jubilee.

"Tommaltach the Scotian boldly shouldered through to her,
"Cowing with a wolfish grin whomever would demur,
"Ready with such words as run when bardic harpstrings thrum;
"Then Dahut gave him half a glance, and he was stricken dumb.

"Legionaries duty-freed who hastened to her call,
"Honour guard for her, their Luck, stood ranked against the wall,
"Armed and brightly armoured from the war that they had won,
"And Budic's gaze trailed Dahut as the new moon trails the sun.

"Soon the music woke again, the dance began afresh.
"Red and gold and purple twined, unrestful rainbow mesh,
"Till the western stars grew pale and silver streaked the east,
"When Dahut bade the youth of Ys come follow her to feast.

"Afterwards she led them out to breathe the sunrise air.
"Light caressed her slenderness and blazed within her hair.
"Up onto the city wall she took her company,
"And Dahut by the Raven Tower looked across her sea." (pp. 163-164)

Dream And Tempest

There is some kind of orchestral performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream on TV. 

The Dream and The Tempest are the two Shakespeare plays that link Poul Anderson and Neil Gaimain:

Gaiman's The Sandman: A Midsummer Night's Dream is about the first performance of the Dream before Auberon's court;

Gaiman's The Sandman: The Tempest is about the writing of The Tempest;

Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest is a sequel to both plays.

The Sandman and A Midsummer Tempest are each part of a fictional multiverse. Gaiman's characters meet in the Inn of the Worlds' End whereas Anderson's meet in the Old Phoenix: two free houses that are not part of any realm or domain.

The Seventeenth Century

Neil Gaiman's 1602 puts Marvel superheroes when they do not belong in early seventeenth century England. Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest puts steam trains and other anachronistic items in England later in that century. This is another unexpected parallel. A Midsummer Tempest is already obviously paralleled by Gaiman's The Sandman: A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Sandman: The Tempest.

1602 makes a major character out of Virginia Dare, the legendary first white person born in North America. This puts 1602 into the same kind of Pocohontas-related territory as SM Stirling's alternative history novel, Conquistador, although I confess to not remembering all the details of that while writing this now! (However, see Three Timelines.) I did read Conquistador twice and discussed it on this blog both times on the principle that Stirling is a worthy colleague and successor of Poul Anderson who also wrote alternative histories, e.g., A Midsummer Tempest. Some later writers focused more specifically on this sub-genre.

A Midsummer Tempest XVII

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol (New York, 2006), Manse Everard quotes A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
"The solemn empires, the great globe itself..." (p. 480)

In Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest, Prince Rupert quotes:

" '...the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself...' " (p. 185)

I think that "...solemn temples..." sounds righter than "...solemn empires..."?

It is confirmed that Jennifer's education/indoctrination did not include Shakespeare, even though in this timeline he is the great Historian, not a playwright. She had to ask who Caliban was and does not recognise Prospero's words as quoted by Rupert.

There is an ingenious sequel to The Tempest:

Prospero's magic book could not be destroyed by ordinary means so he disposed of it at sea where it sank to the seabed but was unharmed by the water;

he did not sail far because he feared theft en route so the book is close to shore where Rupert retrieves it in a diving bell;

Rupert suffers from the change of pressure when he returns too quickly to the surface but Ariel, a spirit of the air, fixes that;

an incantation from the book raises supernatural forces that help the Cavaliers to win the English Civil War.

Before Rupert descends, Ariel warns:

" '...I've no eye to scan the future...' " (p. 186)

Earlier, I thought he had displayed knowledge of the future when he said:

" '...names can be important. They should have called him Ernest.' " (p. 172)

But this is, on his part, an unintended pun. The only knowledge that there will later be a playwright called Oscar Wilde is the author's. 

While Rupert is below, Will Fairweather comments that he has:

"...naught zave tha bell, that book, an' his life's one candle -' " (p. 188)

Thus, Will lists the bell, book and candle used in exorcisms.

When healing Rupert, Ariel names the play in which he had appeared:

" '...he'll need but a few days' rest to raise the tempest of his health.' " (p. 189)

A Puritan describes Oberon and Titania as "...woodland demons..." (p. 194) The Fair Folk are not demons but a Puritan necessarily sees them as such. That explained (to me) something in Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions. There, both Faerie and Hell are with Chaos against Law. I commented earlier that Faerie twilight is not demonic darkness - even if both are distinct from divine light. However, Three Hearts... is set in a timeline where the Carolingian myths are true. It follows that, if those myths share the Puritan confusion of Faerie with darker forces, then that must be how it is in that timeline.

Rupert, Will and Jennifer fly magically back to England in a boat, as shown on one book cover. Rupert recognises the land below from much map-reading but comments that there are no borders. Will remarks:

" 'I'll buss tha swile...' " (p. 202)

Although I am Will's fellow Englishman, this statement was completely opaque to me. However, I am informed that "buss" can mean "kiss." From this and the context, I deduce that Will means that he will kiss the soil. He also comments:

" '...this messin' around in boats just ben't for me. Oh, nothin' liake it, true!' " (p. 202)

Thus, he quotes The Wind In The Willows.

 Our heroes rout five Roundheads but why is one of the five described as "The man of the book..."? (p. 206)

Is the final battle something of an anti-climax? Sure, the Wild Hunter, King Arthur and the knights of Avalon and even a moving forest overwhelm the Roundheads but we know something like that must happen so we read it without much surprise. Near the end, there are more passages of dialogue that are really powerful blank verse.

The Graphic Poul Anderson?

I am imagining graphic adaptations of Poul Anderson's works. A prose novel can be adapted as a graphic novel but how about this in a monthly or bimonthly comic book format?

The Poul Anderson Fantasy Line would simultaneously serialise:

The Adventures of Holger Danske (Three Hearts And Three Lions);
The Adventures of a Witch and a Werewolf (the Matuchek series);
The Adventures of Prince Rupert of the Rhine (A Midsummer Tempest);
"Other Universes," which would show:

an alternative timeline ("The House of Sorrows");
travel between timelines ("Eutopia");
the inn between timelines (the two Old Phoenix stories);
Danske, Valeria Matuchek and Rupert meeting in the Old Phoenix (A Midsummer Tempest, xi and xii);
Valeria addressing a larger gathering in the Old Phoenix (A Midsummer Tempest, Epilogue).

One installment of "Prince Rupert" would end with Rupert and Will about to enter the Old Phoenix. The following installment would begin after they have left it. The reader would be referred to the appropriate installment of "Other Universes."

The Poul Anderson Science Fiction Line would simultaneously serialize:

Before the League (pre-Polesotechnic League stories);
The Polesotechnic League (stories contemporaneous with van Rijn, including the first two Falkayn stories and the first two Trader Team stories - van Rijn cameos in the first Trader Team story);
The Adventures of Nicholas van Rijn.

The third, fourth and fifth Trader Team stories, two of which are novels, also feature van Rijn so they would be crossovers. The short story, "Lodestar," easily divides into a Trader Team section which would be adapted in "The Polesotechnic League" and a van Rijn section, with him meeting the Team at the end, which would be adapted in "The Adventures..."

Graphic adaptations add visuals, thus are like a continuation of the book covers: van Rijn should look as he does on the cover of Baen Books The Van Rijn Method. Simultaneous serializations offer the extra dimension of reading connected works concurrently instead of consecutively.

The Locomotive In A Midsummer Tempest

See Two Train Journeys.

I knew that I was missing something in A Midsummer Tempest but, as I indicated, it is not the same kind of train journey. Eight mounted Roundheads with hounds pursue two mounted Cavaliers, Rupert and Will. When the pursuers halloo and their hounds yelp:

"A hoot responded. Around a shoulder of the ridge, some two miles north but headed south, came a train."
-Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975), ix, p. 68.

"The locomotive puffed, boomed, spouted smoke and sparks, a black monstrosity in that serene landscape; [Rupert] had rarely seem a sight more beautiful. After it, clacked its tender and half a dozen open, empty cars. It must be bound for a colliery that the mills be kept fed." (ibid.)

OK. Good description of a steam train although obviously not a passenger train. Rupert, urging his horse to gallop beside, endures heat, vapor and fumes, then swings himself onto the engine platform, drives the driver and stoker onto their fuel tender and applies the brakes. Will joins Rupert, the driver and stoker jump off and their places are taken by the two Cavaliers who leave their pursuers standing. Their journey continues for several pages which I will have to reread.

A Midsummer Tempest IX

We are still looking for verse in A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975). I commend Rupert's italicised thoughts on p. 83 although I will not reproduce them here. Of course, verse and line endings are easier to identify when there are rhymes and the landlord of the Old Phoenix obliges us on p. 91:

"What may your wishes be? Nay, let me guess.
"Ye've fared through rain, in striving and distress.
"A bath, dry garb, hot food, a cup of cheer,
"A bed, then breakfast, ere you go from here."

Remember, Anderson wrote this as prose, complete with "The man nodded" before "What..." and "He raised a palm, smiling" before "Nay..." By omiting everything outside inverted commas and by starting a new line after every rhyme, I have extracted actual verse from apparent prose. How much of the book could be rewritten in this way, I am not sure but I have demonstrated enough here, including even a Shakespearean sonnet completely disguised and unrecognisable in the heroine's soliloquy on p. 31.

Someone said that words can be like clear glass through which we look at something else or like stained glass at which we look. Thus, A Midsummer Tempest is a stained glass novel.

Retcon

The order of writing of works that feature or mention Valeria Matuchek was:

"Operation Changeling" (1969);
A Midsummer Tempest (1974);
"Losers' Night" (1991);
Operation Luna (1999).

In these works, Valeria:

is three years old and abducted to the Hell universe;
is a young adult and a witch (training or qualified?) traveling between universes;
is listed among women who had spectacular lives;
turns fifteen and is the first human being on the Moon in her timeline.

Thus, Operation Luna "retconned" a spectacular event into Valeria's teens. Poul Anderson did not yet know about Valeria's lunar expedition when he wrote the earlier published works.

In A Midsummer Tempest, Chapter xi, "THE TAPROOM OF THE OLD PHOENIX," Prince Rupert and Will Fairweather enter the inter-cosmic inn, the Old Phoenix. Already present are a man and a woman who continue their conversation. She addresses him as "Holger" (p. 93) and he addresses her as "Valeria" (p. 94). Thus we know, or begin to suspect, that we have met both before although Valeria is considerably older than when last seen in "Operation Changeling."

Later: In A Midsummer Tempest, Valeria is "'...on a field trip, collecting material for a master's thesis.'" (Chapter xii, p. 103)

A Midsummer Tempest VI

In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck comments on humanity:

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!" (Act 3, Scene)

In Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975), Oberon comments on Puck:

" 'Forgive him, Prince. Unaging Faerie folk too oft blow rootless on the winds of time, and ripen not to wisdom like you mortals.' " (p. 48) 

Puck, as rendered by William Shakespeare, is well answered by his own King, as rendered by Poul Anderson.

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Shakespeare writes A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest for Morpheus, in return for inspiration, and Shakespeare's company first performs A Midsummer Night's Dream before the court of Oberon and Titania shortly before the Fair Folk withdraw from Earth. They might have less reason to withdraw from the alternative Earth described by Anderson? - but I have yet to reread to the end of the novel.

A Midsummer Tempest V

I missed at least one chapter-ending rhyme in Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975):

" 'Let's go inzide the church to talk o' this, that none may zee us and think aught amiss,'...'At best, tha road we tread be dangerous to England an' to Rupert an' to us.' " (p. 37)

With this post, I am probably signing off for the month of August. Family arrivals, departures and a wedding will fill the rest of today. But what a find is A Midsummer Tempest! I have said before that it pays to reread Anderson for his descriptive passages, ideas, arguments that the reader can engage with, cross-references both to his own works and to others' ,eg, Shakespeare's, Kipling's, application of scientific knowledge to the detailed imaging of other worlds and environments etc. But I had not suspected verse or poetry disguised as prose and the need for the reader to work to extract the former from the latter.

If I had lived in seventeenth century England, I would have fought for Parliament against the King (of course). The Puritan and Glorious Revolutions of that century brought Britain from absolute monarchy through a brief republic into the constitutional monarchy that we have today. Thus, we currently live under a Revolutionary Settlement although some people are surprised to hear it. That is the political issue. Religiously, it is a different matter. I would have supported freedom of worship which the Puritans wanted for themselves but not for others. Thus, like Prince Rupert in the novel, I would have opposed Puritan intolerance and iconoclasm. This struggle was eventually won. The Church of England remains established but I am free to attend a Buddhist meditation group and Pagan Moots.

Multiverse

Poul Anderson's inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix, is the setting for:

"House Rule"
"Losers' Night"
A Midsummer Tempest, xi THE TAPROOM OF THE OLD PHOENIX.
A Midsummer Tempest, xii LATER.
A MidsummerTempest, Epilogue THE TAPROOM OF THE OLD PHOENIX.

In A Midsummer Tempest, the inn is a meeting place for:

Prince Rupert from the Shakespearean universe of the same novel;

Holger Carlsen from the Carolingian universe of Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions;

Valeria Matuchek from the magical universe of Anderson's Operation Chaos and Operation Luna.

In "House Rule," the inn is a meeting place for:

Nicholas van Rijn from the hard sf universe of Anderson's Technic History;
Sancho Panza from Don Quixote;
Erik the Red, possibly from our universe.

Other guests from our universe or nearer ones include:

the first person narrator of the two short stories;
Leonardo da Vinci;
Albert Einstein;
Heloise and Abelard;
Francois Villon;
Winston Churchill;
an unnamed but identifiable Irish political leader.

Anderson wrote that he hoped to return to the Old Phoenix again...

The inn could have provided a framing sequence for a collection of new stories to display each of the different genres that Anderson wrote. Neil Gaiman used his Inn of the Worlds' End as a Chaucerian venue.

Today, I have read in Latin Caesar's and Tacitus' accounts of the Druids and their resistance to Roman rule.

Poul Anderson's Crossovers

We find that I have written many posts about fictional crossovers.

I think that some of the best such crossovers are to be found in Poul Anderson's works:

Holger Danske is introduced in Three Hearts And Three Lions;

Valeria Matuchek is introduced (indeed, is born and becomes a teenager) in Anderson's Operation Otherworld;

Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest introduces an alternative historical Prince Rupert of the Rhine;

in some chapters of A Midsummer Tempest, the alternative Rupert meets Holger Danske, now lost between universes, and Valeria Matuchek, now a graduate student, in the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix;

also in the Old Phoenix but in an Anderson short story, "House Rule," Nicholas van Rijn from Anderson's Technic History drinks with Sancho Panza from Cervantes' Don Quixote and with Eric the Red from history;

Sherlock Holmes appears in Anderson's Time Patrol series and, along with several other fictional characters, in the A Midsummer Tempest epilogue.

While in a divergent timeline, Manse Everard of the Time Patrol could have met and crossed over with a character who was a hero of that timeline. Indeed, Lorenzo de Conti, the personal causal nexus, probably meets that criterion.

Introducing The Old Phoenix

A Midsummer Tempest, vii.

I am not going to get into the mythology of magic rings except to mention that Oberon and Titania give such rings to Rupert and Jennifer. I watched Wagner's Ring Cycle in its entirety on TV but only because it was possible to follow the story in the English subtitles.

Puck tells Rupert:

"'...to speak of inns and such - My friend, if sorely pressed for shelter, think of this. There is a tavern known as the old Phoenix, which none may see or enter who're not touched by magic in some way. It flits about, but maybe ye can use his ring to find it, or even draw a door toward yourselves....'" (pp. 55-56)

This is the first mention of the Old Phoenix. See also:

First Appearances And First Meetings
Notes On "House Rule"
A Midsummer Tempest X.

Anderson wrote:

"That inn beyond every world, the Old Phoenix, first appeared in my Shakespearean fantasy novel A Midsummer Tempest. Elsewhere I have acknowledged 'its relationship to works by John Kendrick Bangs, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Hendrik Willem van Loon, Lord Dunsany, Edmond Hamilton, and others, as well as the origin of all in a common daydream.'"
-Poul Anderson, "House Rule" IN Anderson, The Armies Of Elfland (New York, 1992), pp. 64-76 AT p. 64.

There is much scope for googling here but this time I will leave it to blog readers. John Kendrick Bangs wrote about a Houseboat on the Styx which Alan Moore incorporated into his Promethea series. (Scroll down.)