earlier on the train back to london from oxford, i thought about this poem idea i have, i want to write a poem which is about (”about”) the different antonios in shakespeare, but mostly just the antonio in twelfth night, and how his love plot ends (vs like, the way viola and sebastian end up married to orsino and olivia)
so i was like, i will search for antonio + twelfth night on google books, yes, this will lead to me finding some perfectly helpful shakespeare criticism that i can browse on this train, or at the very least some homophobic nonsense
and now it’s a few hours later and i have been indoctrinated into the school of literary critics who are extremely into the idea that all antonios in medieval drama are named for/extremely inspired by st anthony, the wise fool, and who believe that there is a st anthony/st sebastian subtext to the fact that shakespeare has antonio and sebastian paired more than once.
also i now know too much about st anthony’s privileged pigs (allowed to roam freely! adorned with bells which meant both “don’t kill me” and “feed me! for i am st anthony’s!”), the illnesses that his devotees tried to cure (his Thing that he was supposed to cure started out as ergot, but apparently there was some network decay here and it ended up with his followers treating cases of syphilis, which lead to st anthony being thought of as sexually promiscuous, which, ok, but mostly i am just thinking about how his hospices had dismembered limbs hanging outside them), and the insults that other saints’ devotees yelled at his followers, mostly based on like. the pig thing.
if none of that makes sense, it doesn’t really make sense to me either. i’m not sure what this poem is going to look like. have a st anthony and various dismembered limbs for your trouble. please don’t @ me with an explanation of how he relates to sad gay antonio.
I love all of this and now I am thinking about how I only learnt last year that there were two big St Anthonys – St Anthony of Padua, who is the one that seems to be the patron of a lot of the churches named St Anthony’s that I have visted and St Anthony the Abbot, who is this one with the pigs.
I am glad that he is always depicted with his pig because I wouldn’t have discovered he existed had I not been in Belgium last year wondering “but why does Anthony of Padua have a pig?”
