Penny Dreadful: A Few Last Thoughts

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19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Ethan Chandler, Eva Green, Ferdinand Lyle, Homosexuality, Joan Clayton, Josh Hartnett, Larry Talbot, Lycanthropy, Patti Lupone, Penny Dreadful, Polari, Simon Russell Beale, The Wolfman, Victorian England, Witchcraft

For the past couple of posts, I’ve been covering Showtime’s Penny Dreadful. There were a couple of other small points that I couldn’t really develop into full posts, so I thought I’d just put them together in one quick post.

1. Penny Dreadful riffs on Victorian science-fiction, occult, and horror stories. At least it does in theory. It’s got Frankenstein and his monster, Mina Harker from Dracula, Dorian Gray, and Josh Hartnett’s Wolfman. But as I’ve already pointed out, Frankenstein isn’t a Victorian character; he’s from the Regency period a full two decades prior to the Victorian era. And the Wolfman isn’t a particularly Victorian character either. Although there were a handful of short stories published about lycanthropes in the 19th century, the major Wolfman stories are 20th century. The earliest novel on this theme (that I know of, at least) is 1933’s The Werewolf of Paris. The character in this novel, set in the 1870s, is not a wolfman, but a classic werewolf (he turns totally into a wolf, rather than a wolf/human hybrid). But the novel helped inspire the 1935 horror film, The Werewolf of London, whose protagonist, played by Harry Hill, is the first Wolfman. Werewolf established two of the key tropes of such films, namely that lycanthropy is spread by bites and that transformation into a werewolf is governed by the moon. That in turn helped inspire 1941’s The Wolf Man, with Lon Chaney Jr. as the unfortunate title character. Maybe if we average out the Regency era Frankenstein with the Depression era Wolf Man, we get the late Victorian era. (Incidentally, Josh Hartnett’s character is eventually revealed to be named Ethan Lawrence Talbot, Lawrence Talbot being Lon Chaney Jr’s character in The Wolf Man.)
2. Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) watches her witch mentor Joan Clayton (Patti Lupone) burned to death sometime in the 1880s. In reality, the last person executed in the British Isles for witchcraft was the elderly Scottish woman Janet Horne, who was sentenced to detain Scotland, along with her daughter, in 1727. Her daughter managed to escape custody, but Janet was smeared with pitch, paraded through town, and burned alive. Laws decreeing the death penalty for witches were repealed a few years later, so the idea that a group of angry townspeople would burn Joan to death in the 1880s is pretty far-fetched.
3. Simon Russell Beale’s flamboyant homosexual Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle was one of the great charms of season 2. But he has a rather 20th century sense of self. In the last episode he refers to himself as a ‘queen’, using what so far as I know is a term that only emerged in the 1950s.He also describes himself as belonging to a ‘tribe’, but I’m not sure that a 19th century gay man would have thought of himself in those terms. If the show had been more interested in an historically accurate portrayal of homosexuality, it should have had Lyle using polari, a wide-spread British slang system used by homosexual men (among others) in the 19th and 20th century. Polari was a complex mixture of Italian, Romani, London English, rhyming slang, back slang, sailor slang, and thieves’ cant that was employed by gay men to covertly signal their homosexuality to other men and have discrete conversations about sexual activity. For example, “Vada the dolly dish, shame about her naff riah” means “Look at the attractive man, shame about his bad hair.” Although some words (like ‘naff’ in the above example) have become common British slang, polari sadly began to die out as homosexuality won a wider social acceptance in the late 20th century. If you’re interested in polari, check out this short film in which two men have a conversation in it.  (Ignore the number 4–I can’t get the auto-numbering to turn off)
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8yEH8TZUsk

Correction: In an earlier version of this post, I incorrectly wrote that Claude Rains played the Wolf Man in the 1941 movie. While Rains was in the film, it was of course Lon Chaney Jr. in the title role. 

Penny Dreadful: The Devil’s Autobiography

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19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Ethan Chandler, Ferdinand Lyle, Josh Hartnett, Penny Dreadful, Showtime, Victorian England

In the second season of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, the characters pilfer a box of objects from the British Museum. According to the show, the objects represent the writings of a 11^th century British Carthusian monk who was possessed by a demon. He began writing on whatever he could get his hands on, ultimately scratching words onto an assortment of random objects in a bizarre pidgin language derived from Latin, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, and several other languages. This hodgepodge language is referred to repeatedly as Verbis Diablo, “the Devil’s Language”. The resulting text turns out to be a sort of autobiography of a fallen angel. It’s a cool idea, but there are a few problems with it.

• There were no 11^th century British Carthusians. The Carthusian Order was founded in 1084 by the German Bruno of Cologne in the Chartreuse Mountains of France. The order didn’t arrive in England until 1181, when Henry II founded a Carthusian house at Witham as penance for ordering the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket. (Fun fact: In the 18^th century, the Carthusians gave their name to green Chartreuse liquor, which they distilled.)
• The collection of objects were apparently housed at this Carthusian monastery and then somehow manage to pass to the British Museum with the collection intact. The fact that this bizarre collection somehow stayed together is somewhere between improbable and miraculous. In 1541, Henry VIII ordered the final dissolution of all English monasteries. The result was the movable property of the monasteries was broken up and scattered. The most important example of this was the monastic libraries, which were for the most part sold off book by book. Modern historians have spent a great deal of energy trying to recreate the catalogs of these lost libraries, and a small number of books have been traced to specific monasteries. In a situation like this, it is hard to imagine that a random collection of worthless objects with gibberish written on them would somehow have stayed together for more than four centuries.
• What makes this even more improbable is that the objects the monk wrote on include a dead bird, a goose-feather quill, and a butterfly the size of a dinner plate. How the hell did any of those things survive nearly a millennium without simply rotting away?
• Verbis diablo is gibberish Latin. Verbis means ‘words’, but diablo doesn’t mean anything in Latin. In Spanish it means ‘Devil’. Proper Latin would be Verbis diaboli, “The Devil’s words”. While verbis can mean ‘language’, it’s not really the most likely way Latin would express the phrase “the Devil’s Language”. A Latin-speaker would probably use lingua (literally, ‘tongue, language’) instead. Perhaps the phrase is supposed to be a pidgin of Latin and Spanish, but that seems unlikely too, since the term seems to be a scholarly one rather than some sort of colloquialism.
• One of the phrases in the autobiography is lupus dei, “the wolf of God”. Josh Hartnett’s Ethan, whose father made him learn Latin as a child, repeatedly mistranslates this phrase as ‘the hound of God’ (the Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle makes this mistake at least once as well). It’s hard to see how anyone who knows Latin as well as Ethan seems to could confuse canis for lupus. Both words are common Latin, about as common as ‘dog’ and ‘wolf’ are in English, and the two words are about as dissimilar in Latin as they are in English. While someone looking at a wolf might mistake it for a dog, the mistake is a fairly implausible one linguistically, especially given that Ethan suffers from lycanthropy and therefore the word for ‘wolf’ probably has some special meaning for him.

 

Want to Know More? 

I got nothing.

I suppose if you want to know more about the history of Satan, you could take a look at Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan. There’s also Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages.