I Columbine

                             I COLUMBINE

It started like they all did before time immemorial, handed down to awe and fear and shock. A liminal creature from the nether world, and known as Hellequin. He preyed on girl childs caught on the turn. Their fathers fretted at the change in them. While he, alone or with others, wandered the limits of ancient villages seeking his semi-willing victims.

I have no direct experience of the things I am describing. But I have talked to grandmothers and sat in dusty libraries researching the old ways and the tales that were never written down. Sometimes I shivered with horror; on other occasions I became sceptical and the scepticism would turn to amazement and even anger.

For I am part of a fairy tale, more than that I am part of the fairy tale, the uber tale in the background. Then horror and fear gave way just a little, at first to bawdy and frolic and slapstick. Hellequin, his origins forgotten, became Harlequin. He still had a long journey ahead and I with him. At first we were caught up with many other zanies on the plains of Italy, and Bergamo was his home. He was a prankster and he carried a magic bat called the slapstick. He cast his eyes on me and made merry, and I was not averse to him though I respected my father's wishes. My father being in business had betrothed me to a certain journeyman of his, a stolid and stupid man, but girls had no choice in such things. I was a sweet dove. I was his Columbine.

From Italy our troupes, our commedias dell’ artes, moved to France and as the Stuarts reclaimed the throne of Albion, to England too. Things became clearer there. A quartet, all of whom I have already alluded to, was formed- Harlequin and myself, my father and his journeyman. This was the Harlequinade and in England commedia became pantomime. Correct me if I err but it seems to me that every pantomime, whatever its notional subject from Dick Whittington,  London mayor, to Sinbad, the sailor off Serendib, contained that foursome, the Harlequinade.

The men controlled me and I had to do their bidding. The so-called happy ending involved me running away with the roguish Harlequin and thwarting my father and my fiancé. I seemed to prefer the former; he was kinder than my father and more lively than his doltish man, but perhaps I never met the real man of my dreams. Or even needed one.    

England had colonies, an empire on which it is said the sun never set. In 1776 one of them raised the flag of rebellion having already spilt tea in Boston’s harbour. Oh the sinful wastefulness of that; English ladies needed ammonia for the shock of it. But the insurgents prevailed and for the next hundred and fifty years Brits and Europeans alike surged across the ocean looking for that better life. For the purposes of my story the best known was a waif from the erroneously styled Elephant and Castle area of South London.

Charlie Chaplin was never a full-fledged Harlequin but like many others he dabbled in Harlequinade. But look ye, the comedy that he and the others fed to us was called slapstick and we know where that came from- from Arlecchino (I still remember my Italian you see) himself. So I found opportunities across that ocean having grown bored with the fossilised storylines of panto.  The great impresario of the slapstick nouveau (and a bit of pointless French too) was called Mack, and he definitely saw amusement in the Harlequinade. For the moment (I stress that) the horrors of Hellequin have dispersed like the fogs choking the winter villages of yore.

Mack, like many of his sort, was a mean man with a contract and he lost the services of top proto-Harlequins. But he did have an eye for a gal. So I found myself in one with real flair and panache. (I won’t describe the process in detail, but I am the spirit and soul which align with the passing body). Now there were two journeymen, Harlequin a chocolate box figure sans chocolats and the other, and Columbine became the prankster. And she was always was the main character- only she was attached to all three of the other characters. She was the focal point of the whole story. In Mack’s new Westerns she was a horse-riding acrobat. She played tricks on the men, training her horse to steal their prized hats and throw them down the well. Her exasperated father sent her to finishing school back east but she ran away with a passing circus. More horseplay.

So let’s get in role. I was brought back to my furious father.

You know what I’m going to do with you, Missy he said.

In truth he was something of a bumbling idiot like the others. Like all men??!! Oh deary me what am I saying? And I digress.

But I’m too big to have my bottom spanked.

That was still the way back then but I thought I could steer the debate by giving back to him what he had previously threatened. That would surely demonstrate the ridiculousness of it. It did not work. For a start this was a fairy story and in fairy stories you can do what you like with children and young adults. All sorts of things happen to them. Wolves dress up as their grandmothers and eat them. But you must never ever harm an animal, particularly in Britain.

For another thing we were still in a era where mischief had to be punished. So if the gal had taken over the role of the scheming, prancing hero then she had to be treated just like he would be. Fair enough I have to admit. And this is all about slapsticks. It’s just doing what it says on the tin.  

And actually for us gals that was about as good as it got. The world was about to turn serious again with a house painter called Adolf. The great French actor Jean Gabin performed in a charming Harlequinade on the eve of war but it was Harlequinade Tragical not Comical. And just before, in that same dreadful decade, Bill Faulkner in America’s Deep South had written the Harlequinade Perverse where all four protagonists appear to be blood related. And the women resumed their roles as victims.

Since the sometimes subconscious aim of fairy stories is to throw light on the ways of the real world it is perhaps not surprising that the next examples of Harlequinade were horribly factual. As we became more aware of the customs prevailing in parts of Britain’s old empire (and I’m not sure we can blame the colonial predator for this one) the phrase “honour killing” became better known. As if those words were ever decent bedfellows. Subcontinent girls who took exception to their fathers’ choice of bridegroom were murdered or horribly disfigured by the father and his “journeyman” acting together.

So were the brief antics of slapstick Hollywood (and elsewhere) really as good as it gets? Is there no hope on the horizon? Is this tale of mine told in vain? And yes you will have noticed that it is told by a man. He’s just a secretary you know, nay a typist like us wimmin used to be. So don’t you be worrying about that, gals. Tee hee. And the tale is not yet fully told and even I am a little perplexed by recent developments.

But let me first shoot back into the past. The English language in common with most European and many Asian languages is part of the Indo-European family and each had its own myths and legends and fairy tales. Most of them, the Roman, the Hindu, the German, the Irish were pretty top-loaded with aggressive male gods and heroes. There seems to me though to be one exception. The Greeks. Something was going on in Greece before the Indo-Europeans (Mycenaeans) arrived. All those goddesses- Aphrodite, Demeter. Look at how Pallas Athena watched out for Odysseus on his long and eventful journey back to Ithaca.

This piece is not intended to come with a recommended reading list (!!) but perhaps we are reminded of Marija Gimbutas’s tales of the matriarchy. So we gals have had our time in the sun. Marija was an accredited historian but perhaps where history shaded into myth- and fairy tale. And was she really an historian anyway. Was she not a herstorian?

Then something truly different happened. Or rumours of something age-old began to surface in the ponds of the populus. This piece is supposed to be looking at the Harlequinade, the uber fairy tale, for traces of the female as hero, and here and there we have found them. This is the binary view of gender just as all this new-fangled (certainly for someone who can remember back to the times of dread Hellequin!) IT stuff is also binary, one or the other. If not one then the other.

I’m talking about LGBT and a few more letters too as the human body and the human mind get to grips with other possibilities. Does this alter things? You bet! Some soi-disant feminists have become rather uneasy. Is it enough to be a woman to call herself a woman- and of course take all sorts of steps in the womanly direction? But then is it enough to be a feminist to call yourself one? Oh dear what morass are we stepping through? So before we get literally bogged down in said morass let us try to reclaim the fairy tale- the Harlequinade. And perhaps for once try to pick away at some of the more baleful examples- from the subcontinent, from old Bill Faulkner from Mississippi, even from the great Gabin- and from the lurking predator Hellequin.

Let’s reclaim the Harlequinade nurtured in commedia dell’ arte and broadcast to millions as slapstick comedy. Let’s remember the fun and Mack Sennett’s girl out west. Give thanks to Pallas Athena for protecting Odysseus, the first great hero of our culture. And celebrate that multifaceted thing called gender. But above all celebrate imagination.