About MORGAN!
My (then)
ten-year-old daughter gave me the idea to write a play about King Arthur’s
shadowy half-sister, Morgan Le Fay. We had been looking into the reasons behind
many of Arthur’s advancements, and the name “Morgan” kept re-appearing.
Finally, with genuinely furrowed brow, she turned to me and asked, “Morgan? Who
is he?”
That did it.
The more-or-less
standard literary answer to that question satisfied her curiosity, but started
me on my own quest. Simply to say she was Arthur’s half-sister, jealous for
power, blah blah blah, seemed shallow. In my reasoning, she had become a
medieval novelist’s tool, used to justify the why behind many of the adventures in Camelot - simply that and
nothing more; a cause-and-effect woman, without reasoned passion or warm blood.
That dismissal was not nearly a good enough answer for me.
So. Before I
placed the first word on paper, I started reading. For two l-o-n-g years I
devoured every jot of fact and fiction I could lay eyes upon. I also studied
actual histories – the justification of the romance of knighthood in flower,
suggesting that it all started with Arthur … which was a lie. Writers at the
time placed Arthur a good 500 years later than he actually lived.
From the start I
had been struggling with what seemed like an insurmountable problem. If I
portrayed the Arthur of legend as anything but good, I would have a minor riot
on my hands. But I didn’t want Morgan to be bad either, at least not in the
beginning. The answer came from a TV news report (Thank you CBS), examining
rumors that Americans had massacred the inhabitants of a small village during
the Viet Nam war. I instantly saw parallels. It was possible for good men to do bad things, and suddenly MORGAN had
flesh. As a small child Morgan had seen her father killed and her mother raped,
later to give birth to Arthur. It became clear – Morgan wanted justice, and,
being a woman, took the only means available to her to achieve her goals –
black magic.
So? What
happened? What went wrong?
Somewhere I
remembered reading that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That pointed me
in a direction that justified what actually happened in everybody else’s
version of the story. Further, the shadow of Adolf Hitler seems to guide her
adult years into fear, hate, and paranoia, and at the same time allowing her to
be a spell caster in more than one way.
In the end, I
think I was more kind to Morgan than others have been. I had her powers taken
from her, yet allowed her to live. I should like to think that in her final
years sanity might have been restored to a degree, and she might have found
peace of a sort.
Nope. The story
isn’t over yet. In doing all this research, I decided there are THREE plays
here. MORGAN is the second play, and there are conclusions from the first play
woven into the plot. The third play gives a final – if surprising – end to the
Arthur drama. Three plays, then – MERLIN, MORGAN, MERDOC. The third play,
MERDOC, has perhaps a dozen pages written so far. The first play, MERLIN, has
perhaps one page written – all character.
At some point I
might have the inclination to finish the trio of plays. No hurry. I have all
the time in the world.
