Billy Don't Be A Hero
The Bard (Part 2) from AngelBio: The Eternal Life of Ginevra de' Benci (1520-2020)
Much Ado About Everything
In Part 1, we saw how William Shakespeare uses the Ginevra (Guinevere) Episode in Canto V of Orlando Furioso as structural backbone for his comedy Much Ado About Nothing-- without ever mentioning Ginevra by name. We also saw how, despite an apparent snub and a flippant title, this play would mark a major inflection point, not just in Shakespeare's artistic legacy but in the history of the European continent.
And set in motion a shift of fortunes that would eventually bring "Ginevra herself"-- as critics had described DaVinci's portrait of her-- to a New World which Ginevra de'Benci herself would only faintly hear of during her final years in a Florentine monastery whose building had been financed by a grandfather providentially named Amerigo.
Split Personalities, Dueling Narratives
Much Ado's adaptation of Canto V both splits and combines characters:
Ariodante and Lurcanio are divided into equal portions between Claudio and Benedick;
Dalinda cleaves into Beatrice and Margaret;
Rinaldo knight errant rides to the rescue of a lady sentenced to death, while doofus Sheriff Dogberry cannot get out of his own way to deliver the news that could save a lady's life;
Polinex, treacherous Duke of Albany, forfeits his head, title and holdings to the newlyweds, while the dastardly yet lovable Don John sees his justice postponed until after the honeymoon.
All of which is pretty much par for the course with Shakespeare's adaptations, which tend to let the characters--and not their histories-- speak for themselves.
Swimming For The Light
But one character whose pairing does not immediately seem to speak for itself is that of Ginevra herself, who is renamed Hero.
Even getting past the dissonance in the modern ear-- a woman named HERO???--she would have stood out for Shakespeare's audiences as well-- not only as the lone Greek in a cast of Italians, but as central character to the first ever recorded loves story.
The legend of Hero and Leander, thought to pre-date the Trojan War, is about a pair of young lovers living on opposite sides of Hellespont, that narrow strait in what is today northwestern Turkey, connecting Mediterranean and Black Seas. Known now as Dardanelles, it has always been treacherous due to the massive volumes of water coursing daily through this strategic conduit that separates Europe and Asia.
Hero, a beautiful priestess of Venus, has taken a vow of chastity and lives secluded in a high tower on the shore by Sestos, on the European side of the strait. Leander, a handsome youth from Abydos on the Asian side, spots Hero at a festival in honor of Venus, woos and seduces her with oaths and blandishments that the goddess of love and sex could not possibly bless the devotions of a woman who has sworn off both, and he might as well be the one.
The two embark on a secret summer fling, with Leander nightly swimming the Hellespont into Hero's arms, guided by the light from her tower, and departing before dawn.
When The Light Went Out
Finally the winter storms arrive, and the lovers agree to break it off until spring. Their hiatus lasts all of a week, before Hero cannot hold up any longer, and sends word by a fisherman that she needs Leander between her legs right now.
Whether that meant for him to swim the frigid currents is uncertain. Why Leander couldn't have hitched a ride back from the same fisherman is unclear. Hero's letter says she'll leave the light on, Leander spies it through the stormy darkness, and plunges into the swirling black waters without another thought.
He must have gotten at least halfway across, but sometime after that the heavy weather extinguishes the tower light, and Hero either doesn't notice or is unable to rekindle it. Leander loses his bearings and then his strength in the dark turbulence, and is drowned.
The next morning, his body washes ashore at the foot of the tower. Hero discovers him, goes mad with grief, and leaps off the tower, dashing herself to the rocks as the archetypal alpha widow beside her Leander, whom she clutches in final dying embrace. The two are buried together in a lovers' tomb.
Everyday Heroes, Just No Modern Heroes
You don't hear much about Hero and Leander these days. But from ancient times and right up to the end of the last century you did. References were everywhere— in drama, literature, music, art Roman coins and an entire class of British warships. The tragedy of these summer lovers has over time taken on mythic lineaments, but this is not mythology. People fall in love every day, and you can swim across the Dardanelles, which is less than a mile wide between Sestos and Abydos. The English Romantic poet Lord Byron took the challenge in May, 1810, and made the opposite shore-- though swimming a total of four miles, so strong was the tidal current.
But Then They Started Effing Things Up
Perhaps Hero and Leander's enduring appeal is that they are normal people doing normal things, making normal mistakes, and paying the heavy price of being normal. They are pre-Homeric, from a time before our gods, immortals and elites started fucking things up, and as such have become a kind of origins story of what we were before we started believing our own myths, when it was still all right to embrace who you are and whatever side of Hellespont you come from.
Shakespeare regularly invokes Hero and Leander in his works. From the very first lines of his very first play, Two Gentlemen of Verona, through A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, with steadily growing confidence until by As You Like It, he is offering his own Saturday Night Live riff on the motif:
Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the cramp was drowned and the foolish coroners of that age found it was 'Hero of Sestos.' But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. —As You Like It (Act 4, Scene 1)
But in 1598 as he was working on Much Ado About Nothing, something much more than a nod (and/or wink) to his muses must have compelled him to summon Hero to play Ginevra’s part-- something that must have been a lot hotter off the press than the translation of a racy Italian epic.
That was the year an ambitious poet and playwright named George Chapman started fucking things up. First, by publishing his daring translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Instead of following a dutiful word-for-word rendering of the classical Greek and its antique references, Chapman peeled back the layers of mythology and injected a normality into the language that would animate the way most English readers encountered these classics for the next century. Even two hundred years later Chapman could still inspire homage from Romantic poet John Keats-- Much have I traveled in realms of gold.
Thanks, He’ll Take It From Here
That was also the year Chapman published Christopher Marlowe's unfinished mini-epic Hero and Leander. Marlowe, who had been a friend, rival and major influence to Shakespeare through his own rise in the Elizabethan theater scene, had been goaded five years earlier by the success of Romeo and Juliet to undertake the first retelling in a millennium of the West's first romance, when he was killed under mysterious circumstances in what authorities had vaguely called a bar fight.
From the oblique references he makes to the incident elsewhere, it's evident that Shakespeare suspected foul play. But since he had two good things going with his patronage at the Court and with his receipts from the Globe, he prudently kept his mouth shut. Yet Shakespeare would have felt Marlowe's loss keenly. And Chapman's upstart move, after two okay plays, not just to publish Marlowe's unfinished masterpiece but to presume to finish it-- must have crossed a line for Shakespeare. A glove had been thrown down, and Billy literally needed a Hero.
A Tale Of Two Priestesses
In the legend, unchaste priestess Hero leaps to her death at the sight of her lover Leander washed up on the shore. In Much Ado, chaste princess Hero collapses-- metaphorically falls to her death-- at the sound of her groom Claudio accusing her before the world of being a slut.
And is left to die by all except for the priest Friar Francis, who revives her with a question that would have resonated with an audience familiar with the gospel story of Jesus turning back a mob of scribes and Pharisees about to stone a woman for adultery—by calling for the one who was without sin cast the first stone. After the stoners have slunk off, Jesus turns to the woman and asks,
Woman, where are thine accusers?"
Which Friar Francis echoes--
Lady, what man is he you are accused of?
But instead of giving Hero the chance to rewrite her story ("Go and sin no more"), the priest gives her agency by writing her out of the story-- commanding her to go into hiding, her family to go into mourning, complete with burial, monument and epitaph. Consecrating Hero as a kind of priestess after the Order of De'Benci, like Ariodante in Orlando who, though
presumed dead, is in fact no less alive, and now inserts herself into events of her choice and timing, regardless of precedent, protocol or permission. She is in truest sense of the term a free agent writing her own script. She has unfucked from her Regret Space.
Hero unwrites her own tragedy, only surrendering her agency with the removal of her veil when Claudio has agreed to wed the faceless, nameless woman who is in fact the Hero presumed dead.
Just as Ariodante in Orlando removes his helmet to reveal himself as the lover presumed dead, once Princess Ginevra of Scotland has agreed to marry the unknown knight who has championed her.
Literature’s Greatest Unforced Error?
And through the Ginevra Motif (high-value women condemned by the societies that once worshiped them), Shakespeare unwrites Chapman's tendentious ending to Marlowe's epic, that has over time come to be despised for its unwelcome moralizing in a style so dense you could cut it with a knife. The message is clear:
I can do Hero in something not about her better than you can do her in something that is.
It would become one of literature's great unforced errors: Chapman had already made his mark as superb translator and bankable playwright. But presuming to finish the masterpiece of the Bard's drinking buddy?
The awkward attempt to share the spotlight with a genius cut down in his prime would overshadow his other works, handicap his patronage, and consign Chapman to the realm of The Minor Poets. You could say with Hero and Leander that Chapman tried to swim his own Hellespont, and got sucked under by the treacherous currents.
Shit This Dad Can’t Say
You could say that.
I can’t. Not with all these resonances that I either ignored, failed to recognize or did not figure out until too late.
Like that ferry I was deckhanding back and forth across a turbulent strait not half as wide as Hellespont that summer I first saw Semoira.
Like all those counties, countries, continents and oceans she crossed just to be with me... until that midwinter’s flight I should never let her leave on.
Like that Alamo rental car turning into a mechanical Balaam's ass, leaping into oncoming traffic to avoid carrying me any closer to a sight neither of us could look upon and live.
Like that career of after-hours trying to find out what had become of her.
Signs from a universe trying to tell me something:
Chapman’s got nothing on you
And Then There Are The Wonders
Over the years I'd hear references to Hero and Leander out of the corner of my ear. But never thought about it until I started writing this piece.
Like how on earth Ginevra got renamed Hero?--Strange name for a heroine.
But the closest thing I'd heard to anyone named Leander is from the Steely Dan hit song My Old School:
Oleander growing outside her door Soon it's gonna be in bloom up in Annandale
That's the little town on the Hudson River, where BARD College (caps mine) is located, and future rockstars Donald Fagen and Walter Becker got caught in a freshman year drug bust that orchestrated by an ambitious DA named G. Gordon Liddy (Daddy Gee in the song), who would go on to lead the Watergate break-in, bringing down a President named Nixon who had been just re-elected in a landslide, in the same year another pathological liar named Biden became the junior senator from Delaware.
And as soon as those stars aligned, the song was on permanent replay in my head:
Well, I did not think the girl could be so cruel And I'm never going back to my old schooooooool!
You Cannot Make This Stuff Up
I don't remember where I first heard the meme about the number one Billboard song on your fourteenth birthday defining your life. But it became like one of those conspiracy theories: repeated enough times and you start wondering if there could be something to it.
So when I thought nobody was looking I checked to see what mine was. This was before it had been turned into a cottage industry on the internet, and you had to go to the Billboard site and manually sift for yourself.
My life-defining song turned out to be an annoying anti-war ditty that hit top slots in both UK and the US with two different groups (Paper Lace, and Bo Donaldson & The Heywoods) called--wait for it--
Billy Don't Be A Hero.
As if that wasn't enough, the song tells the story of a distraught young woman whose fiancé Billy has decided to enlist in the Army to fight overseas. She begs him:
Billy, don't be a hero, Don't be a fool with your life Billy, don't be a hero, Come back and make me your wife
Well, Billy goes off to war and first thing he does is volunteer for a dangerous mission that gets him killed. His fiancee receives the official letter telling her what a hero Billy was, and how proud she should be that he died that way.
And she was so proud, the last line of the song goes,
I heard she threw that letter away.
Can’t Make This Stuff Up
I heard she threw that letter away.
I heard she threw away our unfinished epic I’d turned into a time-travel love story for her.
I heard she gave those flowers I sent her back to the florist.
I heard she deleted that congratulations email I’d sent after seeing her on television.
No, I did not think the girl could be so cruel.
Too busy trying to be a hero, I let a 555-day summer fling started while crossing an 1800-foot wide body of water drag me under for forty years.
At least you can still find Chapman's body of work, washed up on Amazon some five hundred years later. You can't even find mine.
If I was still in my Regret Space, I could take refuge in a fate written in the stars five hundred years before I was born. But by my own admission and timeline, I never was even close to seeing this until I unfucked from Retreat, Regret, Reject, and Reset Spaces.
If anything I am grateful that I didn't have to wait until I was dead for the truth to set me free with a documentary on how I’d been a fool with my life. Or see it play on the ceiling as I’m lying there, festooned with tubes, wires, blinking lights, and breathing through a ventilator.
An Unacceptable Truth
Because the unacceptable truth until you are unfucked is this--
Even if you could go back knowing what you know now, you'd still make the same choices.
It's not that there are patterns, playbooks or fates you've been dumped into.
It's that the prophecy has been fulfilled: you are known-- your desires, your struggles, your minor wins, your major fuckups—
Nothing is new under the sun.
But what is different is that now you know fully, even as you are fully known.
You may be a failed hero, a passed-over leader, an unrecognized winner, a lonesome loser. The updated lifeboat policy applies to all men: women, children, trans, and people of color first.
Because you belong to something better, a secret society, an eternal fraternity unseen to all but those who have entered it, who cannot unsee the secrets that now no longer are hid.
And you don’t have to be a hero, see oleanders bloom, or swim Dardanelles to belong to this brotherhood. Or go back to your old school.
You just gotta know that someday this war's gonna end. And how it ends is up to you. It can end on their terms. Or you can end it on yours.
So cross your deserts--unfuck from the matrix of your upbringing, education, and conditioning-- now. Because the hour is growing late.
And if you hurry, you won’t make it in time.
Harvey Oxenhorn, is a cybersecurity consultant, founder of Malwords Weekly, and author of the upcoming book, Biography of an Angel: The Eternal Life of Ginevra de’ Benci (1520-2020). He writes The Five Stages of Unf*ck, Red Pill Journey to January 2.0. , also on Substack. Follow him on Gettr, Gab, @HarveyOxenhorn, and on Twitter @HarvOxenhorn