Tag Archives: Wim Coleman

The Painted Moth — a short verse play about Helen of Troy

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — too?
—Emily Dickinson

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
—James Joyce, Ulysses

Helen of Troy by Evelyn De Morgan (1898, London).

Characters:
HELEN OF TROY
HELEN’S REFLECTION

The play takes place inside a tent near the walls of Troy. The Trojan War has just ended; the flicker of flames from the burning city can be seen through the fabric. Trojan women are heard moaning and weeping outside. Helen sits looking into a mirror; her reflection looks back at her, mimicking her movements until it begins to speak for itself.

HELEN.
Mirror, mirror—it’s now or never.
I’ll know soon whether I’m to live or die;
it’s up to Menelaus to decide.
When the war started, you promised
to tell me a secret whenever it ended.
Well, the war has ended.
The Greeks are burning Troy right now;
they’ve ruined the city and everything in it—
everything except this face that killed thousands of men;
time and hatred, twin warriors of ruin, have done that for them.
So keep your promise. Tell me now.

REFLECTION.
Such foolish chattering, when your life is at stake.
Get to work now, try to save yourself.

HELEN.
How?

REFLECTION.
Do you really need me to tell you?
Don’t you still have your box of pretty lies?

(HELEN opens a decorative box.)

HELEN.
Yes, everything’s been taken from me
except for that—and you.

REFLECTION.
Well, you need lies now—lies to soothe your husband’s anger
and make him believe you worth ten years of stupid carnage,
lies spread thick to hide the truth,
these acres of cracks and flaws and furrows.
Now get to work—and quickly.

(As the REFLECTION speaks, HELEN applies makeup from the box.)

REFLECTION.
First, honey and oils to soften this brittle flesh,
deep beetroot dye to brighten these bloodless cheeks,
mulberries crushed in beeswax
to make moist and red these scorched and pallid lips,
and antimony, too, to shroud these swollen eyes—
for beauty, false or true, is impossible without a pinch of poison.
And last, dabs of tinctured marjoram, myrrh, and spikenard,
so you’ll smell sweet—or to hide the scent of fear.

HELEN.
These jeweled combs and pins, this gold diadem—
they’re tarnished and need polishing.

REFLECTION.
They’ll have to do.

Menelaus captures Helen in Troy, detail of fresco in Pompeii.

(The WOMEN’S VOICES are shouting: “Kill her, Menelaus! Kill Helen! Kill her now!”)

HELEN.
My golden-haired husband has arrived.

REFLECTION.
Yes, and scented now with lilies and roses, not the sweat of battle.
Queen Hecuba and all the Trojan women still alive
beg him to put you to the sword
instead of carrying you back alive to Sparta.
They’ll soon be shipped to Greece,
enslaved or turned to whores, and all because of you.
So who can blame them?

HELEN.
Well.
The choice isn’t mine.
These gaudy lies must do their work or fail.
Menelaus, I come.

(HELEN turns to go.)

REFLECTION.
Wait.
Don’t you want to hear my secret?

HELEN.
I didn’t think you’d tell me.

REFLECTION.
I may be a liar, but I keep my promises.
Sit with me a moment.

 (HELEN sits again and starts to weep; REFLECTION reaches out of the mirror and dabs her eyes.)

REFLECTION.
Oh, don’t, my dear, you’ll ruin all your hard work.

HELEN.
Why am I to blame?
I never chose anything, any of this.

REFLECTION.
Then whose fault is it?
One civilization staggers home to lick near-mortal wounds,
another will soon lie in a heap of rock and glowing embers.
Troy and Greece alike have lost their most precious manhood—
great-hearted Patroclus slain by horse-taming Hector,
Hector by swift-footed Achilles,
Achilles by magnificent Paris,
and Paris by … oh, I have lost track.
And poor mad Ajax, killing innocent sheep
until he threw himself upon his own sword.
But last night—worse than all ten years of carnage,
women dragged from their houses and raped, their children slaughtered;
blood now pools in the streets, black and thick like tar.
Someone must be to blame.

HELEN.
Enough. Your secret. You promised.

REFLECTION.
Yes, the secret.
Tell me—where were you last evening
before the slaughter of all innocence began?
You did something interesting, I believe.

HELEN.
What does that have to do with—?

REFLECTION.
Tell me.

Depiction of the Trojan Horse on a Corinthian aryballos (ca. 560 BC) found in Cerveteri (Italy).

HELEN.
I went out of the palace to see the gift—
that wooden horse the Greeks had brought as a ruse,
standing silent in the bloody sunset.
When no one else happened to be nearby,
I touched its sides and sensed what no Trojans yet had—
the presence of some forty soldiers
waiting for the silent hour to climb out and open the city gates.
And as I walked around the horse, I pretended …

REFLECTION.
Pretended?

HELEN.
No, became Aegialia, the lovely bride
Diomedes left behind those ten long years ago;
I whispered through the horse’s ribs
of aching pleasures he’d dreamed of all those nights—
pleasures only I knew how to give.
I heard him weeping and walked on round the horse
and then became Laodice, King Priam’s daughter,
loved by the Greek Acamas before the war began,
but parted from him ever since;
I sang a little love song we used to sing together,
which made him weep as well.
And round I went again and again
until the soldiers groaned and sobbed with homesickness,
almost loud enough for someone else to hear.
Crouched at last beneath the horse’s belly,
I became patient Penelope, Odysseus’s wife,
and murmured what a fine young man his son
was growing up to be back home in Ithaca,
and what a shame it was he didn’t know his father.
But wily Odysseus alone did not weep;
instead, he forced the others to be silent.
I went back to the palace and tried to sleep
until I heard the madness in the streets.

REFLECTION.
So you became those women in those moments;
what makes you think you’re Helen now?
In fact, you’re none of them, and not Helen, either.
You’re no one at all—a cloud, a mist, a vapor,
shaped by Queen Hera in a woman’s form to trick all men;
a phantom for Paris to abduct in the true Helen’s stead.

HELEN.
No. It’s impossible. How can somebody be … ?

REFLECTION.
Nobody at all?

HELEN.
I feel pain, so much pain,
the salt-sting of tears on this cheek,
blows of time and hatred bruising my flesh,
splinters of lies stuck in my tongue,
broken shards of shame cutting my heart.
I feel it all.

REFLECTION.
Pain, too, can be a cloud, a mist, a vapor.
None of what you feel is real.

HELEN.
And the real Helen?

REFLECTION.
Hermes spirited her away when you were made—
far away for safe-keeping until the war is over
when she will be returned to her husband in Sparta
and he will never be the wiser.

HELEN.
I don’t believe this. Look at me.
I’m growing old, I’m crumbling like this city’s walls and hopes.
What need has a cloud for lotus flowers and marigolds,
lavender and chamomile and resin?
What need has a phantom for a box of lies?

REFLECTION.
What kind of illusion would you be
if you didn’t fade and decay?
The real Helen has passed these years
untouched by time, by hate, by men,
while you, her phantom, succumb to the ravages
of a woman’s vanity and pride.
And that’s as it should be.
Now go to your husband without fear,
for you will be perfect in his eyes.
The perfect woman and the perfect cloud—
they are the same thing, infinitely mutable,
ever shaping themselves to men’s thoughts and dreams,
mere reflections, phantoms of the mind.
Those weeping women of flesh and blood outside,
so full of grief, terror, and thoughts all their own—
they’ll never make their captors happy.
Someday Menelaus will sit gazing
at the real Helen by firelight wondering,
“Who is this woman? How dull and real she is!
Why ever did we fight a war for her?”
But wars must be fought.
Any excuse will do.
That’s what clouds are for.

HELEN.
They are proud, aren’t they, those men who still live?

REFLECTION.
Oh, yes. They have made the best war there has ever been.
They can think of nothing grander to do than that.

(HELEN speaks with mounting anger.)

HELEN.
Such heroes they are!
A short while ago they killed a little boy—
Astyanax, son of Andromache and Hector.
They tore him from his mother’s arms
and hurled him from high battlements to his death.
How scared the poor child must have been!
And how brave the Greeks felt killing him!
It was the last and proudest deed
of a war they fought not for treasure or glory or power,
nor even for a whore of flesh and blood,
but for nothing—no thing at all. For me! A cloud!

Astyanax torn from the arms of his mother Andromache to be killed by the Greek leaders. Painting by Rochegrosse.

REFLECTION.
Go to him now. Don’t put it off.

HELEN.
What’s to become of me when I’ve fulfilled my purpose—
when Menelaus reaches home
and holds the real Helen in his arms?

REFLECTION.
You will dissolve, of course;
you’ll disappear into thin air.

HELEN (laughing).
Oh, no, my friend, I think not.

REFLECTION.
I’m telling you the truth.

HELEN.
And I believe you—I am a cloud.

REFLECTION.
Yes, impalpable and weak.

HELEN.
A moth is weak,
but its wings seize gusts of air by the fistful
and forge from them rain and hail and wind,
cacophonous lances of fiery lightning,
surging waterspouts, torrential desolation,
downbursts of the sheerest terror.
A single moth flings its slumbering tempests awake
across the world, and I will do the same.
I may be weak, but I gather the strength of uncreation.
I’ll seize the thunderbolt from Zeus’s hand,
the earthquake trident from Poseidon,
force Hades to unlock his iron doors
and let death itself rush forth.
I’ll chase the gods away from sea, earth, and sky,
and rob the cosmos of every vestige of divinity.

REFLECTION.
A world without gods.

HELEN.
A world without meaning.

REFLECTION.
You almost frighten me.

HELEN.
My own face, frightened of me! Good!
Now what do you see when you look at me?

REFLECTION.
You have become Chaos primordial
born anew into this rotten world,
a scourge of rage and tumult
filled with hatred for this age of heroes.

HELEN.
The peaceful Aegean stretches now
between the Greeks and home
promising them a safe and easy voyage.
But the salty dregs of the deep shall rise into mountains
at my shrill clarion command
to shatter and thwart and destroy them.
Oh, I must go to Menelaus now,
this very instant! I’m ready!

REFLECTION.
No, my dear—you mustn’t hurry;
why not savor your honeyed vengeance?
You have eternity at your command;
yours is the power to turn all mortal kin
against themselves and each other, against their world,
to goad men to make mad and futile war
upon the earth, sea, and sky,
until the elements put them to the end they well deserve.
Let this moment mark the end of legends;
from now on, let the nightmare of history
wreak its patient annihilation.

HELEN.
Oh, yes—how sweet!

REFLECTION.
Besides, you mustn’t let your unwary husband
see you in this dreadful form;
he’ll flee from you, and that will be the end of it.
To work again with your box of lies.

(HELEN opens her box again.)

HELEN.
What picture shall I make of myself today?

REFLECTION.
Do you need to ask? A pretty, painted moth.

(HELEN makes herself up as women howl and flames roar.)

END OF PLAY.

—Wim

Arctia caja; picture taken by Kurt Kulac; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Aesop’s not-so-famous soliloquy …

The Lullaby Tree, my play about the life of Aesop, is available in hardback, paperback, and Kindle. It has been described as “a no-holds-barred literary and theatrical extravaganza of ideas that reels riotously between prose and verse, vulgarity and beauty, farce and heartbreak, earthiness and mysticism.” Who am I to disagree?

Like Hamlet, Aesop has a third-act soliloquy:

Exeunt all except Aesop.

I am alone—or so I say
Because I am supposed to;
You know the truth is not a thing
I’m really quite disposed to.
And flights of verse treat facts much worse
Than statements spoke in prose do.

“I am alone”: Let it be known,
I find those words most queer.
For I am standing on a stage,
Addressing you loud and clear,
While you are sitting in your chairs
Pretending you’re not here.

I am alone, I am alone,
Standing at stage center,
Awaiting someone who may be
My savior or tormentor—
Waiting, waiting, nothing more,
For someone else to enter.

I am alone; watch closely now—
Yes, you and all your chums—
This tap-tap-tapping of my toes,
This twiddling of my thumbs.
My tongue I’ll click, my nose I’ll pick,
Till something this way comes.

I am alone; so seize this time
(It really would be wise)
To hold each other by the hand,
To stroke each other’s thighs,
Or gaze and gaze, entranced, amazed,
Into each other’s eyes.

I am alone; now aren’t I
A fascinating sight?
For you can’t look away from me;
Tell me if I’m not right.
For you can’t look away from me;
Try it with all your might.

I am alone and wear a mask,
Just as all actors should.
And yet—I touch my face and feel
That it is flesh and blood.
Now touch your frozen face—you’ll find
It’s linen, cork, or wood.

“I am alone”: These words have spun
A gripping spell, it’s true;
Moments are passing, lost and gone—
Moments that you shall rue;
For when you peep in a play too deep,
The play peeps into you!

—Wim

Portrait of Aesop by Velásquez in the Prado

“The Mad Scene” — prologue to Wim’s award-winning play

Here is the prologue to my full-length play The Mad Scene, which has been aptly described as “an Our Town about the French Reign of Terror.” It was developed during 2020-21 as part of the Theatre at St. John’s Cyber Salon, hosted by Mark Erson. The parts were read by Jenne Vath, Sally Plass, Maude Burke, Shane Baker, and the late Everett Quinton; Daniel Neiden directed. The Mad Scene has yet to be produced.

The Mad Scene was awarded First Place in the Script category of the 91st Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. It was chosen for the Second Round in the Stage Play category of the 2024 Austin Film Festival’s Script Competition.

The entire text of The Mad Scene is available by clicking right here.

*

PROLOGUE

Characters:

Marie Grosholtz/Madame Tussaud
Marie Antoinette

The scene is the Madeleine Cemetery, Paris, the night of October 16, 1793.

MARIE ANTOINETTE’s head lies in the lap of MARIE GROSHOLTZ, who will later become known as Madame Tussaud. MARIE works by the light of a lantern. At first, ANTOINETTE’s eyes are closed; then they snap open.

ANTOINETTE. There is no sky.

MARIE. Madame, can you hear me?

ANTOINETTE. I never noticed it before.

MARIE. I must take your face.

ANTOINETTE. Carolina, look for yourself. You’ll see it’s true.

MARIE. I’m not Carolina.

ANTOINETTE. There is no sky. There are only stars. Oh, and a slender curved scimitar of a moon, hanging by … an invisible thread, I suppose. But tied to what? There’s nothing to tie it to, nothing to hang it from. There is no sky. (wincing) Don’t. Carolina, why are you touching my face like that?

MARIE. I’m not your sister. I’ve got to make a cast of your face.

ANTOINETTE. What are you smearing on my skin?

MARIE. Oil, so the plaster won’t stick.

ANTOINETTE. What a silly thing to do on such a night, with a moon and so many stars and no sky at all to gaze at. Look.

MARIE. I’m looking.

MA-Lebrun

Marie Antoinette, by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.

ANTOINETTE. No, you’re not. You’re looking down at me. You’re in the way of my view. But where are we? Oh, we fell asleep in the gardens again, didn’t we? I was counting clouds and you were giving them names and it got dark without us knowing it. Our dresses must be soaked through with dew. Odd, I feel so … dry. We’ve got to get back to the palace. The countess must be angry. Or beside herself with worry. Poor old thing, we’re so much trouble to her.

MARIE. We’re not in your garden in Vienna.

ANTOINETTE. Of course we are.

MARIE. No. This is the Madeleine Cemetery. In Paris

ANTOINETTE. What are we doing in Paris? Don’t touch my eyes.

MARIE. I’m only closing them.

ANTOINETTE. Why?

MARIE. Because they’re not glass. I’m covering them with plaster.

ANTOINETTE. I don’t understand.

MARIE. It’s best not to talk.

ANTOINETTE. Why not?

MARIE. The dead are usually quiet. Or at least they’re supposed to be.

Exécution_de_Marie-Antoinette,_Musée_de_la_Révolution_française_-_Vizille

Execution of Marie Antoinette, Museum of the French Revolution. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

ANTOINETTE. I’m not dead.

MARIE. Madame, you have been beheaded. You are certainly dead. Tomorrow you will be buried. It really would be best to keep quiet. You’ll upset yourself.

ANTOINETTE. You’re not Carolina.

MARIE. So I’ve been telling you.

ANTOINETTE. I’ve not been beheaded.

MARIE. You have, and it was hard to find you among so many dead, all thrown about every which way, so it’s hard to tell whose head belongs to whose body. Don’t you smell the stench?

ANTOINETTE. No.

MARIE. Death has its blessings then. I never guessed how blood and flesh could stink. It’s always such a chore, this scrounging through stench and open graves, looking for just a certain head. Your husband was even harder to find than you, and to make things worse, he was already dissolving in quicklime.

ANTOINETTE. My husband?

MARIE. But I found you. I recognized the white morning dress you wore on the scaffold, even though it was stained and caked with blood and dirt. Then your head was easy to spot, plopped right between your knees. But your face looks strange now—so thin and drawn, with a scalp of short white hair. When did your hair turn white? Oh, I hear it was after you were caught trying to escape—you and the king and your children. I can fix all this when I make your new face.

ANTOINETTE. Who are you?

MARIE. I hoped you’d remember me, madame. My name is Marie Grosholtz. I lived at Versailles nine years. I tutored Madame Elizabeth in molding wax, and I lived in her apartments and kept her company. You were very kind to me in those days, madame.

ANTOINETTE. Versailles? Madame Elizabeth?

MARIE. The king’s sister. You don’t remember. You’re confused. But don’t worry. The plaster will set, and we’ll be finished soon, and it won’t matter whether you remember or not. I needn’t tell you to keep still. You’re doing that anyway.

ANTOINETTE. There is no sky.

MARIE. I’m sure you are correct, madame.

ANTOINETTE. Oh, yes. Versailles. They tell me I’m going there. They tell me I am to become the Dauphine of France.

MARIE. If you say so, madame.

ANTOINETTE. I am to marry the Dauphin, they tell me—Louis-Auguste, some cousin I’ve never met. They say he is a clumsy boy, rather stupid, and he’s sure to grow fat, and he can’t dance at all. But then, I’m just a girl myself, and people say I am silly and I laugh more than I should and I like to dance too much. No, don’t deny it, I know that’s what they say. But he’s a boy, just a boy. I wish I could marry a man, someone wiser, someone I could trust to know …
… how to …
But it’s not up to me, is it? Nothing is up to me. And not only must I stop being an archduchess, they tell me I must stop being Austrian, and I must say goodbye to everyone I’ve ever known—even to you, Carolina, and also to Mutti—and I must forget how to speak German and speak French perfectly for the rest of my life. And when I go to France, before I meet the Dauphin in the Forest of Compiègne, I must be stripped of every scrap of my Austrian dress and be clothed anew in the manner of a French princess. Of course there will be people watching me change. It’s always been like that. I’ve never been naked alone. But in France there will be more people than ever, watching my every waking moment, and while I’m sleeping as well. I will put on my rouge in front of the whole world. It will never stop.

MARIE. There. The plaster is set. I’m almost finished.

ANTOINETTE. That pinches.

MARIE. Yes, but only for a moment, while I remove the cast.

(MARIE pulls the cast away.)

MARIE. I must leave you now.

ANTOINETTE. Where are you going?

MARIE. To where I work.

ANTOINETTE. You can’t leave me.

MARIE. I must. I’m sorry.

ANTOINETTE. I am your queen.

MARIE. France has no queen.

ANTOINETTE. Obey me.

MARIE. I must obey the National Assembly. I wish it weren’t so.

ANTOINETTE. Take me with you.

MARIE. I can’t take your head, madame. I’ll lose my own if I try. Adieu.

Madame_Tussaud,_age_42

Marie Tussaud, by John Theodore Tussaud.

ANTOINETTE. Wait! I remember! Your name is Marie! You make likenesses from wax! Elizabeth adores you! She came running to me a little while ago to show me a Virgin you taught her how to make. “Look, sister!” she said. “Look at my little wax Mother of God! I made her look just like you without meaning to, I couldn’t help it! Was that blasphemous of me, sister? Must I confess it to the abbé?” “No, sister,” I said. “No blasphemy at all …”

MARIE. Adieu, madame.

ANTOINETTE. But what will happen to me after you go?

MARIE. I don’t know.

ANTOINETTE. Oh, but you do. I’ll vanish. I’ll die. Please, I beg you. It is only by the grace and bounty of your madness that I still live. Don’t let me die.

MARIE. You’ll live again in wax.

ANTOINETTE. But will I remember … ?

MARIE. I don’t know what you’ll remember.

ANTOINETTE. Will I still be myself?

MARIE. I don’t know.

ANTOINETTE. Am I myself even now?

MARIE. I said I don’t know.

ANTOINETTE. Please stay!

MARIE. Dawn is nearing.

ANTOINETTE. We’ll watch it together!

MARIE. I must go.

ANTOINETTE. We’ll skip barefoot in the dew, watch morning burst into blossoms of light, bathe ourselves in mad mists of swirling color! We’ll worship the sun and laugh and dance like Incan priestesses!

MARIE. Adieu.

(MARIE exits, carrying her lantern.)

ANTOINETTE (dying). There … is … no … sky …

BLACKOUT.

1557px-nicolas-antoine_taunay_-_le_triomphe_de_la_guillotine

Le triomphe de la guillotine, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay

In the Name of Liberty …

Just as an individual, subjected to certain inner pressures beyond his endurance, will suddenly go mad and destroy himself or those around him, so too, apparently, can a segment of society take leave of its senses and deliver itself to the forces of destruction.

—Stanley Loomis, Paris in the Terror

These words written about the French Reign of Terror are scarily apt for America today. Perhaps that’s one reason why my yet-unproduced play The Mad Scene is getting quite a few readers these days. You can download the entire play here.

The Death of Marat, by Jacques-Louis David

Described as “an Our Town about the French Reign of Terror,” The Mad Scene tells a story of collective and individual insanity. As the Terror rages around her, the wax sculptor Marie Grosholtz (the future Madame Tussaud) uses the guillotined heads to shape her creations. Small wonder that she goes insane and holds conversations with wax figures of Marie Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, Maximilien Robespierre, and Jean-Paul Marat.

As ICE agents round up and deport alleged gang members to a Salvadoran mega-prison based on no sounder evidence than tattoos, and as foreign students with legal visas are detained and deported for exercising their freedom of speech, and as an American President wreaks lawless revenge upon his enemies, all with the sanction of far too many Americans, I’m reminded of the massacres of September 2-7, 1792, when Parisian mobs emptied the prisons of political prisoners and slaughtered them in staggering numbers.

In my play, the revolutionary firebrand Jean-Paul Marat harangues the mob:

Fools! The enemy is already here within our gates. Our prisons are full to bursting with aristocrats, priests, traitors, and conspirators, all of them lusting for revenge against every last Parisian who ever dreamed of liberty. And while you go out playing at soldiers fighting foreign enemies, they shall break out of their cells and slaughter your wives, mothers, sisters, and children.

Empty the prisons, kill every last enemy of freedom!

Kill them all before they destroy everything and everyone you love!

Vive la Nation!

Vive la République!

Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

The September Massacres took the lives of some 1200 people, including priests, monks, and nuns—a small number compared to the victims of the Reign of Terror yet to come.

As Madame Roland said before she was beheaded on November 8, 1793 …

Oh, Liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name!

Mass killing of more than 200 prisoners in the Châtelet on September 3, 1792

—Wim

The King and the Beggar Lady

An Old Tale Retold for a New Time …

This colorfully-illustrated book, now available on Amazon.com, is a new take on a tale dating to Shakespeare’s days—the one about a king who falls in love with a beggar woman. Does he woo her and marry her and make her his queen? In this retelling, the Beggar Woman turns the King’s world upside down.

From the award-winning creative team that created the cult classic The Jamais Vu Papers, this charming story-poem is written by Wim Coleman and illustrated by Pat Perrin. The King and the Beggar Lady is an announced Category Finalist for this year’s Eric Hoffer Book Awards! 

A great little book for a gift or personal collection.

… now available on Amazon.com.

Is there not a ballad, boy, of the King and the Beggar?

The pompous Spaniard Don Armado asks this question of his page, Moth, in William Shakespeare’s early comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost. Moth makes this reply:

The world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since: but I think now ’tis not to be found …

But the ballad seemed to have reappeared a short time later, when Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet. It comes up again when Romeos’ friend Mercutio mentions Venus’s “purblind son and heir”:

Young Adam Cupid, he that shot so trim,
When King Cophetua loved the beggar-maid!

So a ballad about “The King and the Beggar-Maid” was already known when Shakespeare wrote both of these plays during the 1590s. The oldest known version appeared in an anthology in 1612. It tells the tale of the wealthy King Cophetua, who disdains women and marriage until he falls in love with a beggar named Penelophon. And just as Mercutio says, Cupid is to blame for the king’s unexpected passion:

The blinded boy that shootes so trim
From heaven down did hie,
He drew a dart and shot at him,
In place where he did lye …

The ballad unfolds in a traditional fairytale manner. The King woos Penelephon, who (of course) is overwhelmed and honored by his attentions:

At last she spake with trembling voyce,
And said, “O King, I do rejoyce
That you will take me for your choice,
And my degree so base.”

And (of course) she marries the King, and they live happily ever after:

And thus they led a quiet life
During their princely raine,
And in a tombe were buried both,
As writers sheweth plaine.

The story especially inspired artists and writers during Victorian times. The poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote a couple of stanzas about the story, which was also a subject for the Pre-Raphaelite painters Edmund Blair Leighton and Edward Burne-Jones. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) took a photograph of Alice Liddell, thought to be the model for the title character in his most famous books, costumed as the beggar-maid.

If the story has fallen from fashion, it may be because we’ve become less enthusiastic about Cinderella-like tales in which a handsome nobleman rescues a poor but beautiful (and vacuous) maiden from a life of misery and turns her into a princess.

In our own version of the ballad, we decided to turn things around a bit.