Trumpeting, he trumped and triumphed…
Did he, has he?
Thumping his way forward,
Jumping through the hoops of word and phrase,
Razing those that blocked his ways,
He dazed the lot.
Crazed, ablaze – or not. But hot,
He took a stand
But didn’t seem to understand (and may not still)
That energy attracts a gangland:
Thinking not that crowds could form,
A swarming army,
Become a throbbing, clobbering or bombing mob:
Young we heard,
You can’t take back the caustic word
Once in the air it’s there!
So rather than lie down
Crowds gather,
Drawing to themselves an anger,
War uncivil,
Civil war
once more,
And monies that he’s vowed to earn
Will burn in costs for crowd control, police patrol.
The day that Trump was voted in
May not, in fact become a win -
For reasons manifold and sundry. 
from The Bride of Frankenstein
"Bride of Frankenstein" was the 1935 sequel to the 1931 film "Frankenstein" Both movies were directed by James Whale and starred Boris Karloff, with Colin Clive once again as Dr. Frankenstein. (The original monster was unnamed, but by 1931 it was already being given the name of its creator; the confusion was cemented by the 1927 stage version by Peggy Webling, which she had written at the request of actor-producer Hamilton Deane, who wanted to follow up on the recent success of his stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula.") Dwight Frye was Frankenstein's assistant Karl (he had been the hunchback Fritz in the original; the more familiar figure of "Ygor" was played by Bela Lugosi in the later sequels "Son of Frankenstein" [1939] and "The Ghost of Frankenstein" [1942], but he was a blacksmith with a broken neck and twisted back who reanimated the monster as an instrument of vengeance against the townspeople who had tried to hang him for grave-robbing, not a hunchback lab assistant), and Kenneth Strickfaden retained some of the machinery he had devised for the first film. Elsa Lanchester starred as the bride and also as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The sequel was intended to be an immediate continuation of the first film, and production preparations had begun shortly after the 1931 premier, but script problems delayed the project. William J. Hurlbut and Edmund Pearson eventually completed the screenplay, though it contained elements from earlier versions. In 1934, John L. Balderston (who had adapted Deane's "Dracula" for the American stage and whose unproduced American adaptation of Webling's "Frankenstein" had been the basis for the 1931 film, though he had otherwise been uninvolved in the 1931 film -- which itself had been made as a result of the financial success of "Dracula" starring Lugosi) decided to base the sequel on an incident from the Shelley novel in which a mate was created for the monster but was destroyed before it came to life; he also created the prologue, in which Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley praised Mary Shelley for her story, only to be told that she had more to say since her intention was to impart a moral lesson.
ReplyDeleteIn the simmer of 1816 Mary Shelley was still Mary Godwin (she wouldn't marry until the end of the year, after Shelly's wife killed herself). Her mother, the first feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had died less than a month after Mary's birth, and she had been raised by her father, the proto-anarchist William Godwin. By 1814 Shelley was regularly visiting Godwin and began secretly meeting Mary at her mother's grave; she was almost 17 and he nearly 22. He was from the English aristocracy; at University College, Oxford, he was reputed to have attended only one lecture but read 16 hours a day, and at 18 had published a Gothic novel and begun writing subversive poetry; the following year he was expelled for anonymously publishing "The Necessity of Atheism." Mary fell in love with Percy, whom she idealized as the embodiment of her parents' radical ideas, in particular Godwin's early view that marriage was a repressive monopoly, and he saw her as a kindred, well-read spirit; though unhappily married he fell madly in love with Mary and repeatedly threatening to commit suicide if she didn't return his affections. Penniliss, they traveled together to France, Switzerland, and Germany, then returned to England when she was pregnant. Their daughter was born two months prematurely and died soon after, whereupon Percy abandoned Mary for awhile in favor of Claire Clairmont, the illegitimate daughter of her stepmother. In May 1816, Percy, Mary, and Claire traveled to Geneva, where they were soon joined by Lord Byron, who had also had a brief affair with Claire just before his self-exile from England. The two poets strongly invigorated each other's output, and they rented neighboring dwellings.
ReplyDeleteAt Byron's insigation they decided to have a competition to see who could write the best ghost story. Percy wrote "A Fragment of a Ghost Story" and five others (that Matthew Gregory Lewis later recounted in the "Journal at Geneva"), and Byron wrote part of "Fragment of a Novel," which his companion John William Polidori later used as the basis for his own tale, "The Vampyre" (the first published modern vampire story in English). Mary's came to her in a dream a few days later: "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." With Percy's encouragement and assistance, this dream formed the basis of her first novel, "Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus," published anonymously in 1818. She was credited as the author in the revised editions of 1823 and 1831, which appeared after the success of Richard Brinsley Peake's play, " Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein."
ReplyDeleteIn Hesiod's" Works and Days" Cronus and later Zeus created and destroyed five successive races of humanity. After aiding Zeus against his fellow Titans, Prometheus ("forethought") created clay beings in the image of the gods that could have a spirit breathed into them, and taught them to hunt and the arts of civilization such as literacy, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, and science, but Zeus refused to give them fire and "the means of life" after Prometheus tricked him into accepting the inedible parts of cattle in sacrificial ceremonies while conceding the nourishing parts to humans. Prometheus defied Zeus by stealing fire in a giant fennel-stalk and giving it to humanity. In retaliation, Zeus had Pandora, the first woman, made from clay and brought to life by the four winds in order to plague mankind. He also had Prometheus chained to a rock in the Caucasus; every day his liver would by eternally consumed by an eagle. [Platon instead posited that the gods made men and other creatures with a mixture of clay and fire, and Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus ("Afterthought") distrbuted natural qualities among them. Epimethus botched the job and distributed all the gifts of nature among the animals, leaving men naked and unprotected; so Prometheus stole the fire of creative power from the workshop of Athena and Hephaistos and gave it and other civilizing arts to mankind. In other traditions, Zeus decided to destroy mankind after king Lycaon offered a boy in sacrifice; to save mankind from the universal flood Zeus vreated, Prometheus helped his son Deucalion build a floating chest for himself and his wife.]