Context & Analysis
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
THE BOOK OF THE COURTIER & KNIGHTHOOD
Key precepts of The Book of the Courtier:
- "...above all else he took care to fill his household with very noble and valiant gentlemen, with whom he lived most familiarly, delighting in their intercourse: wherein the pleasure he gave to others was not less than that he received from others, he being well versed in both the [learned] languages, and uniting affability and pleasantness to a knowledge of things without number."
- "...nor was there anyone who did not esteem it utmost pleasure he could have in the world, to please her, and the utmost pain to displease her. And thus, most decorous manners were here joined with greatest liberty, and games and laughter in her presence were seasoned not only with witty jests, which governed all the acts, words and gestures of my lady Duchess, bantering and laughing, were such that she would have been known for a lady of noblest rank by anyone who saw her even but once."
- "...lovers who not only give thanks and praise for the kind looks, tender words and gentle bearing of their mistresses, but flavor all evils with sweetness, so that they call their ladies' warrings, anger and disdain, most sweet. Wherefore such as these seem to me far more than happy. For if they find such sweetness in lovers' quarrels, which those others deem far more bitter than death, I think that in loving endearments they must enjoy that supreme beatitude which we vainly seek in this world."
THE SPANISH INQUISITION
An historical overview podcast from 15 Minute History
SCIENTIFIC STATE
The world was in a major shift of scientific discovery. Major figures such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei fundamentally changed the way the universe was understood.
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
"Copernicus was a Polish astronomer, best known for his theory that the Sun and not the Earth is at the centre of the universe.
Nicolaus Copernicus was born on 19 February 1473 in Thorn (modern day Torun) in Poland. His father was a merchant and local official. When Copernicus was 10 his father died, and his uncle, a priest, ensured that Copernicus received a good education. In 1491, he went to Krakow Academy, now the Jagiellonian University, and in 1496 travelled to Italy to study law. While a student at the University of Bologna he stayed with a mathematics professor, Domenico Maria de Novara, who encouraged Copernicus' interests in geography and astronomy.
During his time in Italy, Copernicus visited Rome and studied at the universities of Padua and Ferrara, before returning to Poland in 1503. For the next seven years he worked as a private secretary to his uncle, now the bishop of Ermland.
The bishop died in 1512 and Copernicus moved to Frauenberg, where he had long held a position as a canon, an administrative appointment in the church. This gave him more time to devote to astronomy. Although he did not seek fame, it is clear that he was by now well known as an astronomer. In 1514, when the Catholic church was seeking to improve the calendar, one of the experts to whom the pope appealed was Copernicus.
Copernicus' major work 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' ('On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres') was finished by 1530. Its central theory was that the Earth rotates daily on its axis and revolves yearly around the sun. He also argued that the planets circled the Sun. This challenged the long held view that the Earth was stationary at the centre of the universe with all the planets, the Moon and the Sun rotating around it.
'De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium' was published in early 1543 and Copernicus died on 24 May in the same year."
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
List of Firsts (from NASA):
- First to investigate the formation of pictures with a pin hole camera;
- First to explain the process of vision by refraction within the eye;
- First to formulate eyeglass designing for nearsightedness and farsightedness;
- First to explain the use of both eyes for depth perception.
- First to describe: real, virtual, upright and inverted images and magnification;
- First to explain the principles of how a telescope works;
- First to discover and describe the properties of total internal reflection.
- First to explain that the tides are caused by the Moon (Galileo reproved him for this).
- First to suggest that the Sun rotates about its axis in Astronomia Nova
- First to derive the birth year of Christ, that is now universally accepted.
- First to derive logarithms purely based on mathematics, independent of Napier's tables published in 1614.
"Johannes Kepler was born about 1 PM on December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Württemberg, in the Holy Roman Empire of German Nationality. He was a sickly child and his parents were poor. But his evident intelligence earned him a scholarship to the University of Tubingen to study for the Lutheran ministry. There he was introduced to the ideas of Copernicus and delighted in them. In 1596, while a mathematics teacher in Graz, he wrote the first outspoken defense of the Copernican system, the Mysterium Cosmographicum.
Kepler's family was Lutheran and he adhered to the Augsburg Confession a defining document for Lutheranism. However, he did not adhere to the Lutheran position on the real presence and refused to sign the Formula of Concord. Because of his refusal he was excluded from the sacrament in the Lutheran church. This and his refusal to convert to Catholicism left him alienated by both the Lutherans and the Catholics. Thus he had no refuge during the Thirty-Years War.
Kepler was forced to leave his teaching post at Graz due to the counter Reformation because he was Lutheran and moved to Prague to work with the renowned Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe. He inherited Tycho's post as Imperial Mathematician when Tycho died in 1601. Using the precise data that Tycho had collected, Kepler discovered that the orbit of Mars was an ellipse. In 1609 he published Astronomia Nova, delineating his discoveries, which are now called Kepler's first two laws of planetary motion. And what is just as important about this work, "it is the first published account wherein a scientist documents how he has coped with the multitude of imperfect data to forge a theory of surpassing accuracy" (O. Gingerich in foreword to Johannes Kepler New Astronomy translated by W. Donahue, Cambridge Univ Press, 1992), a fundamental law of nature. Today we call this the scientific method.
In 1612 Lutherans were forced out of Prague, so Kepler moved on to Linz. His wife and two sons had recently died. He remarried happily, but had many personal and financial troubles. Two infant daughters died and Kepler had to return to Württemburg where he successfully defended his mother against charges of witchcraft. In 1619 he published Harmonices Mundi, in which he describes his "third law."
In spite of more forced relocations, Kepler published the Epitome Astronomiae in 1621. This was his most influential work and discussed all of heliocentric astronomy in a systematic way. He then went on to produce the Rudolphine Tables that Tycho had envisioned long ago. These included calculations using logarithms, which he developed, and provided perpetual tables for calculating planetary positions for any past or future date. Kepler used the tables to predict a pair of transits by Mercury and Venus of the Sun, although he did not live to witness the events.
Johannes Kepler died in Regensburg in 1630, while on a journey from his home in Sagan to collect a debt. His grave was demolished within two years because of the Thirty Years War. Frail of body, but robust in mind and spirit, Kepler was scrupulously honest to the data."
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
A PDF of the transcript of this podcast is included below is reading is preferred
AstroCast-110502_transcript.pdf
From HISTORY:
Considered the father of modern science, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) made major contributions to the fields of physics, astronomy, cosmology, mathematics and philosophy. He invented an improved telescope that let him observe and describe the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus, sunspots and the rugged lunar surface.
His flair for self-promotion earned him powerful friends among Italy’s ruling elite and enemies among the Catholic Church’s leaders. His advocacy of a heliocentric universe brought him before religious authorities in 1616 and again in 1633, when he was forced to recant and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.
ANALYSIS
THE CREATION OF MAN OF LA MANCHA
MUSICAL THEATRE
During a 1595 trip to Madrid, Dale Wasserman read the book (or parts) and came away convinced that this book, considered the greatest novel of all time, this “monument to human wit and folly could not, and should not, be dramatized.”
Though the story of Man of La Mancha is inspired by Cervante's Don Quixote, Wasserman was more directly influenced by the groundbreaking form of the novel in his translation of it to stage. When it opened in 1965, it followed some of the most iconic shows of the Golden Age of Broadway: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Funny Girl, and Fiddler on the Roof. Yet Man of La Mancha diverges from the norm: no dancing chorus, no intermission, serious subject matter, no flashy mise-en-scene (inspired by a famously sparse production of Marat/Sade of the time), and composition that drew on European classical and American jazz.
CHARACTERS
Sancho
Quotes from THE MAN WHO INVENTED FICTION:
“At home for two weeks, the delusional knight convinces his peasant neighbor to join him, promising him upon completion of their quest an island - which he insists on calling, in proper epic form, but its Latinate name, an insula - insouciant to the geographically inconvenient fact that they are wandering around the arid plains of central Spain, many days’ travel from any significant body of water."
This helps us to understand more specifically why Man of La Mancha includes "I Like Him", since the musicalized version doesn't include information about Sancho's incentive to accompany Cervantes
“...he is but a foil, a rube - a brilliant crafted one, but nonetheless an object of derision...At the time, the mentally ill were protected from prosecution from certain crimes, but they were not protected from abuse, marginalization, or being used as the butt of a joke for a populace starved for entertainment.”
“Sancho’s reaction to his mishap, though, is different from those that greeted all Quixote’s previous antics. Where the others treated Quixote as a spectacle, entertainment, or a nuisance, Sancho responds with compassion.”
“In the space of a few pages, what started as an exercise in comic ridicule and, as the narrator insists on several occasions, a satirical send-up of the tales of chivalry, has taken on an entirely different dimension; it has begun to transform itself into the story of a relationship between two characters whose incompatible takes on the world are bridged by friendship, loyalty, and eventually love.”
“German scholar Erich Auerbach wrote of Sancho’s attachment to Quixote, the former ‘learns from him and refuses to part with him In Don Quijote’s company he becomes cleverer and better than he was before.’”
Muleteers
Example of a conocimiento para requas for a muleteer in New Spain in the late 17th century
From this dissertation on mule trains in New Spain