Welcome to the Lucky IS Reading Giveaway Hop!The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth
(click on the link to see the cover)
The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth presents the life of King Louis XVI of France during the French Revolution and is based on the tradition dating from the seventeenth century of an unfulfilled request by Jesus Christ through St. Margaret Mary Alacoque that, to avert a future catastrophe in the realm, Louis’ great grandfather, Louis XIV, must consecrate France to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In return for this act of humility, The Lord promised to shower France with graces and blessings. Louis XIV and the kings who followed him delayed in making the consecration until, finally, on June 17, 1789, one hundred years later to the day, the Third Estate of the Estates General declared itself the National Assembly, challenging King Louis XVI and initiating the French Revolution. Louis was later stripped of his powers and sent to the guillotine to be put to death like a common criminal; France thereupon became engulfed in the horrors of the Revolutionary Terror.
As to Louis XVI, he seemed to me to be very much the stuff of tragedy, especially as conceived by the ancient Greek tragedians and as described by Aristotle in his Poetics. Louis was a man in a high position, virtuous but not eminently good, and having what may be considered a tragic flaw that led to his downfall and that of the entire way of life of a great nation, indeed of a continent. The flaw in Louis’s case was indecision and a certain sympathy with the ideas that motivated the revolutionaries, his sworn enemies.
As the tragedy of Lewis unfolds, the reader will observe that the compass or ambit of the King’s life and reign gradually shrinks. The King becomes more and more restricted or circumscribed by events and the actions of his enemies, which he might successfully have countered if he had done so early on but that become impervious to the belated actions he takes to save himself and the Monarchy.
This play, therefore, like the ancient Greek tragedies, has a religious dimension in the concepts of divine retribution and the iniquity of the fathers visited upon the sons to the third and fourth generation (cf., The Bible, Euripides, Shakespeare). I believe that the religious dimension is highly relevant to tragedy, “whose philosophic analogue,” as Graham Hough wrote, “is metaphysics.”
By way of apology for my revival of poetic diction, I should like to quote from Gilbert Murray’s Classical Tradition in Poetry. Making reference to Aristotle, Murray writes of poetic language as follows:
“[E]xpressions unknown to common life”. . .keep [the language] away from the associations of the shop, the newspaper, and the drinking saloon. . .they carry with them the atmosphere and associations of poetry. . . . [O]ld words are generally poetical: not simply because they are old, but because it is chiefly through poetry or good literature that they are known. They bring to our mind Chaucer or Shakespeare, not their average vulgar contemporaries.
Elsewhere in the book, he writes about the dancers of Dionysus, from whom tragedy is said to have developed:
The magic of Memory was at work. . . ‘waker of longing,’ the enchantress who turns the common to the heavenly and fills men’s eyes with tears because the things that are now past were so beautiful. . . . they [the dancers] liked to cling to the old words that had always been used in these songs instead of the clearer and commoner modern words, and liked them perhaps all the better when people were not quite sure of their exact meaning but only felt the atmosphere and the fragrance, and of course the actual magic, that clung about them.
I find that the imaginative use of archaic words (which, unlike obsolete words, are very much a part of the living language) brings language to life—helps one savor the usually hidden redolences of language that sleep in common speech, beset as it is by slang and what Kenneth Clark called “cliché language.”
David Lane, author of The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth, was born in Houlton, Maine, to which his Boston Irish parents had moved in the 1920s. He studied at The Cheshire Academy, a preparatory school in Connecticut, and received an A.B. in English literature from Kenyon College in Ohio, thereafter spending a year pursuing postgraduate studies at McGill University in Montreal. He was thereupon drafted into the U.S. Army, in which he served honorably in Vietnam. For more than thirty years, Mr. Lane has lived in New York City, until recently working as a scientific and medical editor. For some twenty-five years, Mr. Lane has served as Chairman of Una Voce New York, an organization dedicated to restoring traditional Roman Catholicism, especially the ancient Latin Rite superseded by the heavily revised vernacular liturgy born of the Second Vatican Council, an event that introduced sweeping changes into the Catholic Church and ignited fierce controversy that rages to this day.
http://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=978-1-61346-282-9
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18 Comments
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I really love Canadian History .
Maria medeiros recently posted…March Break
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I like Tudor history despite the number of books coming out on this period.
Mystica recently posted…SISTERS OF MERCY BY CAROLINE OVERINGTON -
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My favorite historical series is The Outlander books.
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imagining what it was like to live back then (whenever)
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I love the WW II era. The way people came together, the Battle of Briton, D-Day, etc. I fid it inspiring.
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My favorite part of history is French Revolution (World History) and The Java War (Indonesian History)
While a favorite historical story is eruption of Mount Krakatoa on 1883. -
I love historical romance. Is that acceptable? All the British empire stories and Greek myths are fun too.
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Civil war, American history is my hubby’s fav… If I won this would be for him. Thanks.
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I love reading about ancient Greece.
Michelle Willms recently posted…Nothing but Drama -
I like the story of Elizabeth Woodville, the White Queen. Thank you for the giveaway 🙂
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I love Imperial Russia and post revolution Soviet Union.
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like American history
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in the 60’s at the start of computers.
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My favorite part of history is in year 1970. Love their clothing style!
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I like the roaring 20s.
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My favorite historical period is during the 1800’s in the American west.
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Love the book looks awesome love historical anything.
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I really like the pre-civil war period in American history 🙂
