Tag Archives: Shakespeare

Ghosts, A Hurricane, and a Dash of Shakespeare

… Or the genesis of Ghosts of Prosper Key.

Stories are strange things. They grow from tiny seeds—characters, actions, imagined events. Often for me, a story really takes off only when two or more completely unrelated ideas come together. This seems to create a kind of magical tension as I wonder “How can these things fit together?”

Background

My newest novella, Ghosts of Prosper Key, evolved in this way. It is the fourth of a series, the Abby Renshaw Supernatural Mysteries, so I already knew the back story. Abby is a teenage “true magician,” student of a tradition founded by her ancestors in the town of Harmony Springs in rural Florida.

Ghost of Prosper Key Cover
Ghosts of Prosper Key is available on Amazon.

At the end of the preceding novel, Ghosts of Lock Tower, Abby has succeeded in overcoming magical challenges and dangers spawned by the occult. She is living with her grandmother and starting college. She has relationships with elders in the magical circle, as well as two guys she is interested in romantically.

Idea 1: Molly is Haunted

Abby also has a best friend, an aspiring journalist named Molly Quick. All of my readers seem to love Molly, due to her bravery, insatiable curiosity, and no-nonsense approach to things. In Lock Tower, it was also revealed that Molly has native talent as a spiritual medium.

So I wanted this story to focus on Molly.

What’s her situation? She’s in her last year of high school, applying to colleges. Like many sensitive and intelligent kids, she is scared of the coming changes, scared of growing up. These fears haunt her. Because of the subject-matter of the series as a whole, these fears manifest as paranormal events.

Molly is haunted. But by what?

Idea 2: The Setting

One thing I love about this series is that it lets me write about out-of-the-way places in Florida. A location I had visited and wanted to use as a setting was Cedar Key.

This island lies off the northwest coast of the state. The area is known as the Nature Coast, as it has little population but lots of swamps, ranches, and nature preserves. Today, Cedar Key is a remote, “old Florida” tourist destination.

But the past has a different story to tell.

Cedar Key cemetery
Cemetery at Cedar Key, site of one of the scenes in Ghosts of Prosper Key

In the late 1800s, the Cedar Keys (as they were then called) were one of the most populous areas in Florida. The island then known as Way Key was the end point of the east-west railroad and the major port on Florida’s west coast. Fishing, oyster farms, and especially timber were major industries. Because of over logging, the economy began to decline in the 1890s. Then, in 1896, the area was devastated by one of the worst hurricanes ever to hit the United States.

So, I thought: if Molly is haunted and if our heroes visit Cedar Key, the ghosts must originate there. And if there are unhappy spirits roaming the place, they most-likely lived during that great hurricane.

Idea 3: The Tempest

So now I had the main character, her conflicts, and the setting. But something was still missing. Who were these ghosts? Why were they restless?

It had something to do with that hurricane.

For research, I read the book The Cedar Keys Hurricane of 1896: Disaster at Dawn by Alvin F. Oickle. The events were both frightening and amazing. The island that is now Cedar Key was leveled, while nearby Atsena Otie Key (then known as Depot Key) was inundated by a ten-foot storm surge.

Their whole world washed away in a night and a day.

Pondering that, I suddenly thought of a famous song that the spirit Ariel sings in Shakespeare’s The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
Hark! now I hear them. Ding-dong, bell.
(Act I, Scene 2)

Sea change. The sea rising up and changing everything. That idea resonated strongly. My story had some relationship to The Tempest. But what?

Scene from the Tempest
Illustration from the Tempest source: https://shakespeareyouthfestival.com/2015/12/tempest/

As you might recall, the play concerns Prospero, a powerful magician who has lost his Dukedom by betrayal and now lives on a remote island with his daughter, Miranda (and spirits that he conjures).

Prospero raises a storm to wreck a passing ship which, he happens to know, contains the party of Alonso the King of Naples and Prospero’s own brother, Antonio, who usurped his place as Duke of Milan. Ferdinand, the son of the king, swims to shore and is found by Prospero. Put into service by the magician, he falls in love with Miranda, and she with him.

So: Molly haunted by ghosts, a powerful father and his daughter, a tempest and disaster, a love story.

My completely unrelated ideas had come together.

The story had taken off.

Denouement

Throughout the action of Shakespeare’s play winds roar; confusion reigns and disappears; love is found; moral order is restored; and all the lost characters reunite in the end.

As Gonzalo, the loquacious king’s counselor, summarizes:

…O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: In one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost, Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle and all of us ourselves
When no man was his own.
(Act V, Scene 1)

Shore at Cedar Key
Along the shore at Cedar Key

These days, of course, our own world is facing dangers and changes of every kind. Will we all drown in wreckage, or will we emerge on some better shore having found ourselves in unlikely ways?

We can hope for the best. That’s what stories are for.

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You can find Ghosts of Prosper Key on Amazon.

Or check out the rest of the
Abby Renshaw Supernatural Histories here.

Fun and Games with Shakespeare

Or What You Will

My wife and I are Shakespeare enthusiasts in the extreme. So we were delighted to discover the St. Petersburg Shakespeare Festival. Last Friday evening, a couple of blocks from the waterfront, in a courtyard between two Victorian houses, under an enormous oak tree, we watched a wonderful performance of Twelfth Night, one of our favorite plays.

We’ve seen it a number of times before, and talked about some of the puns and hidden meanings. On the long drive home over the Sunshine Skyway, we had another of those conversations.

souce: https://www.emaze.com/@ATOIZTFR/The-Sunshine-Skyway-Bridge

One thing we find interesting is the similar names of several of the characters—Malvolio, Olivia, and Viola. All share the same letters.

According to the website BehindtheName.com, the name Malvolio was invented by Shakespeare and means “ill will” in Italian. From the same site, we learn that “Olivia” was also first used in Twelfth Night, and is probably derived from the name of the olive tree. “Viola” meanwhile, is Latin for violet.

Scene from ‘Twelfth Night’ (‘Malvolio and the Countess’) exhibited 1840 Daniel Maclise 1806-1870 Presented by Robert Vernon 1847 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N00423

So if we think of all characters as being projections of the author, and recall that Shakespeare went by the name “Will,” we have Malvolio, or the bad Will. We also have Olivia, the Will who is like the olive, because she is bitter and melancholy. And Viola, the Will who is bright and clever.

Okay, those last two might be a bit of a stretch.

But then again, Shakespeare subtitled the play “What You Will”

Hmmm.

One line that’s always been a bit of a mystery is in Act 2, Scene 5. Malvolio is reading a letter left for him to find by the servant Mary and meant for him to mistake as coming from the Countess Olivia. The letter does not name him, but hints at his name by spelling out M O A I. Malvolio puzzles over whether this is meant to be him, and then reads:

“If this fall into thy hand, revolve…” and there follows the famous quote that “Some are born great, etc.”

But “revolve”? This is sometimes played on stage for comic effect by Malvolio twirling around. That’s good.

According to the Annotated Twelfth Night the word revolve means “think things over.” Also good.

But my brilliant wife discovered that if you revolve the page (turn it upside down) and look at the letters MOAI…

you get something that looks very much like “I VOW”…

…Which also fits the meaning of the text.

Hmmmm.

Herne at Yule

Now it is Yule Time. The Solstice is just past, the light starting to grow again, and Herne the Hunter is stirring in the depths of the forest.

Herne is mentioned in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor as a local ghost who haunts Windsor Wood. But Margaret Murray, in her 1931 book God of the Witches, posits that Herne is a manifestation of a much older being, Cernunnos, the Celtic horned god. (For more on this, see here).

Source///http://www.houseofwinterspells.com/1675/attributes-of-the-horned-god-during-the-dark-night-of-the-soul/

Herne/Cernunnos is the God of Nature, Lord of the Forest and of wild creatures. Because it is Nature that feeds us, he is the provider of food and therefore of life. I think of him as the embodiment of Desire with a capital D—the fire in the belly that drives us all to live.

Herne
The spirit worlds are deep and high,
In firelight and smoky air,
In sparkling stream and cave and sky,
And Herne is there.

The forest seethes in emerald light,
In tusk of boar and snout of deer;
A shaman dances in the night,
And Herne is near.

And cities race on wheels and fumes,
Computer screens where data burns,
Workers scurry through the rooms:
So many Hernes.

The human world leafs from the Tree
Because we hunters chase and yearn;
Our hunger makes the world to be,
And so lives Herne.

Happy Yule to you all, and good hunting!