As good luck would have it

In 1908, Kansas City art teacher and illustrator, Florence Pretz, patented the idea of the Billiken, after having claimed to have seen the mysterious figure in a dream. The Billiken is most often described as “the god of things as they ought to be”, and although his popularity, like that of the kewpie dolls with which he is often compared, has faded into some obscurity over the years, the god remains a bit like fairies, as a kind of faded token of a different kind of faith. Still the mascot of the Jesuit educational institutions St. Louis University and St. Louis University High School in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, the Billiken is is also the emblem of the Freemasonic affiliated Royal Order of Jesters, which is an invitation only Shriner group.

Alaskan Native peoples, especially those with an Inuit tribal affiliation, have also carved images of the Billiken, often out of moose antler, bone, or fossilized ivory. For many years these have been sold to the Alaska tourist trade, as both a local symbol and a potential source of good luck. It is said that the purchase of a Billiken brings good luck to the purchaser, but that receiving one as a gift brings even greater good fortune.

Of course, the world is filled with curious good luck charms, amulets, talismans, and practices thought to increase or enhance one’s luck. These charms may take any form, from bones, to medallions, to incantations.* In the Harry Potter stories, there is a potion known as Felix Felicis, nicknamed ‘liquid luck’, which temporarily makes the person who drinks it able to sense the most positive options in terms of things to do. When Harry seeks to retrieve a memory from the aging professor who has been hiding it, he consumes a vial of felix felicis in order to help him achieve his goal:

It is worth noting that Harry almost never uses magic selfishly, but tends to use it in efforts to defeat evil, to help others, and for the general good. Perhaps this is the real secret to good luck, even when it comes in potion form. Not that wanting things for ourselves is always wrong. Taking care of oneself includes not only attending to one’s own needs, but also indulging oneself on occasion. But when we navigate the world less selfishly, things seem to flow better. Expecting others to conform to some idea or norm, believe or behave a certain way, may carve a path fraught with frustration.

Paul McCartney’s 1969 song for the Beatles speaks to this, to relaxing and not dwelling on the difficult, but also to people overcoming differences. “When the broken hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.”

Contrast Harry’s idea of luck with Falstaff’s. The title phrase for this blog post is uttered by Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, and has become part of the lexicon of English in general use, although we often now shorten it to “as luck would have it”, and it sometimes can refer to ‘bad’ luck as well as good. (The idea being, for example, that even after waiting for several hours ‘as luck would have it’ the last ticket to the performance was sold to the person who was right in front of me in the queue, so I wasn’t able to see the show.) Generally, however, the phrase has come to describe a providential turn of fortune reflecting the complicated relationship between the human and the extra human realms of happenstance. As Richard Hardin puts it, “Whether in drama or narrative, a plot always takes shape as a result of negotiations between luck and contingency, between happenings by ‘hap’ or chance and those determined by a plan of events causally linked.”***

In the play, for example, Falstaff describes his ‘lucky’ escape from Mistress Ford’s jealous husband while hiding in the buck basket (the basket of dirty laundry). Unbeknownst to him, Falstaff describes this escape to the very same husband from whom the escape was made. The jealous Ford having disguised himself as ‘Master Brook’ in order to gain Falstaff’s confidence, perversely convinces the knight to seduce his wife–in order to test her faithfulness to him. Such ‘tests’ seldom turn out well in Shakespeare. Consider the ‘love test’ that opens King Lear, for example. In truth Mistress Ford has no interest at all in Falstaff beyond her plot with her friend, Mistress Page, to give the knight his comeuppance for the presumptuous and clumsy overtures that he has made to both of the wives.

As Falstaff describes the good luck of his escape to Master Ford, it becomes increasingly apparent to an audience who have also seen the actual events transpire on stage, that the escape wasn’t really an instance of good luck at all, but rather a merry prank played at Falstaff’s considerable expense:

Falstaff  You shall hear. As good luck would have it, comes
in one Mistress Page; gives intelligence of Ford’s
approach; and, in her invention and Ford’s wife’s
distraction, they conveyed me into a buck-basket.

Ford  A buck-basket!

Falstaff  By the Lord, a buck-basket! rammed me in with foul
shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy
napkins; that, Master Brook, there was the rankest
compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril.

Ford  And how long lay you there?

Falstaff  Nay, you shall hear, Master Brook, what I have
suffered to bring this woman to evil for your good.
Being thus crammed in the basket, a couple of Ford’s
knaves, his hinds, were called forth by their
mistress to carry me in the name of foul clothes to
Datchet-lane: they took me on their shoulders; met
the jealous knave their master in the door, who
asked them once or twice what they had in their
basket: I quaked for fear, lest the lunatic knave
would have searched it; but fate, ordaining he
should be a cuckold, held his hand. Well: on went he
for a search, and away went I for foul clothes. But
mark the sequel, Master Brook: I suffered the pangs
of three several deaths; first, an intolerable
fright, to be detected with a jealous rotten
bell-wether; next, to be compassed, like a good
bilbo, in the circumference of a peck, hilt to
point, heel to head; and then, to be stopped in,
like a strong distillation, with stinking clothes
that fretted in their own grease: think of that,—a
man of my kidney,—think of that,—that am as subject
to heat as butter; a man of continual dissolution
and thaw: it was a miracle to scape suffocation.
And in the height of this bath, when I was more than
half stewed in grease, like a Dutch dish, to be
thrown into the Thames, and cooled, glowing hot,
in that surge, like a horse-shoe; think of
that,—hissing hot,—think of that, Master Brook.

(The Merry Wives of Windsor 3.5.77-113)

Falstaff’s description of his lucky break sounds to us like a description of a soul boiling in oil, writhing in the agonizing heat of eternal damnation. Compare his words to those with which Hamlet chides his mother:

Hamlet Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty!

(Hamlet 3.4.91-4)****

Is this luck? No. This is the language of damnation, of being condemned for sins. The image of being boiled in grease. In oil.

At best, Falstaff’s example of ‘good luck’ is a complex intersection of providence with human wit, and wit that, in this case, stands decidedly against him. Albeit the fact that this seems lucky to him in the instance cannot be dismissed, and the contrast is part (and only part) of what makes the moment funny. What seems lucky to him, in escaping a jealous and potentially murderous husband, also results in him undergoing an ordeal that has been engineered to be unpleasant and humiliating. Plunged into the overheated stench of old, filthy, greasy laundry, Falstaff is subsequently thrown into the muddy river, and left to his own devices either to drown or save himself. The movements of fate might exist seem to coincide with the deliberations of human wit, but perception figures prominently as well.

Similarly, in Macbeth, where a man who initially appears to be good conspire with his wife to murder his sovereign in order to take his throne, such ‘fate’ or ‘chance’ perceived as luck truly bears a double edge:

Macbeth If chance will have me king, why, chance may
crown me
Without my stir.

(Macbeth 1.3.159-60)

Of course, Macbeth makes the wrong choice. Even with his realisation, even with all the arguments (that he states himself) against the murderous course of action, he decides to kill King Duncan anyway. In settling on regicide, Macbeth seems to subscribe to the idea that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,/ Which we ascribe to Heaven” (Helena from All’s Well That Ends Well 1.1.217-8). Yet, it is important to remember that in Shakespeare, this particular perspective sometimes proves misleading. In Julius Caesar, Cassius uses the same argument to urge Brutus to join the conspiracy against Caesar–a decision to turn against his friend that ultimately proves disastrous for Brutus:

Cassius  Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

(Julius Caesar 1.2.142-8)

There is some grim irony when Brutus echoes this same argument again as he urges Cassius to press their apparent advantage in the Roman civil war against Marc Antony and Octavius’ troops:

Brutus There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.

(Julius Caesar 4.3.249-54)

To the audience, it appears that Cassius and Brutus may have ‘lost their ventures’ long ago, when they first decided to murder Caesar. Murder and mayhem are never good choices in Shakespeare. Good fortune and good luck seem to come from a kind of virtuous participation in the world. Falstaff falls down, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and in the subsequent parts 1 and 2 of Henry IV (and Henry V as well, in a much briefer, but no less crucial mention) because his participation is not virtuous. For all his cleverness, for all his sheer entertainment value, for all the riotous life force that many critics note in his character, he is also an ‘old vice’, a character whose subscription to matters around him remains focused on self advancement and aggrandisement. As genuine as his affection for Hal may be, that relationship also hinges perpetually on Falstaff’s self serving considerations for his own future.

The word ‘luck’ itself is mentioned variously in Shakespeare’s work, but the word is used five times in The Merry Wives of Windsor, three of them by Falstaff. In both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Merchant of Venice the word appears three times, but it is worth noting that in Merchant, the word is used more specifically to describe ‘ill luck’ which seems to fit more with the strange discordant nature of that play.

In Dream, the word may be most notable in the incantation like lines of Puck’s closing monologue.

Puck  If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearnèd luck
Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long.
Else the Puck a liar call.
So good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.409-22)

The ‘unearned luck’ mentioned here is, by context, bad. Yet, the monologue itself also erases it. In all of Shakespeare, this may be the best example of union expressed in language. With a Harry Potter like sense of seeking good for all, the monologue transcends its simple call for applause to offer restoration, rectification, and coming together. Not only does character meld with actor here, but both also speak with the voice of the play as a whole, reaching across the boundaries of theatre, boundaries between fiction and the ‘real life’ of those in the audience, momentarily removing all the boundaries in the world.

Perhaps this is what J.K. Rowling shows us with Harry Potter’s use of felix felicis, that luck is really just the removal of boundaries. Once we remove the boundaries between ourselves and others, or even just the boundaries within ourselves, the world begins to open up for us in ways we might never have previously imagined. Here’s another clip from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in which Harry tricks his dejected friend, Ron, into thinking that he has consumed felix felicis just before the big quidditch match:

Perhaps the fault really isn’t in our stars, but in ourselves, but it may not quite work the way that Cassius thinks. As soon as Cassius uses the word ‘fault’, he already establishes borders–lines in the sand that have to do not just with responsibility, but also with laying blame. It smacks of the language of moralistic judgement which seems, ultimately, to get us nowhere.

A well known, ancient Chinese fable illustrates this idea of the fluidity of perceptions of luck:

A farmer and his adolescent son scratch out a meager subsistence in a remote area, and they have only one horse to help them plow their field. One night, the son forgets to fasten the stable door, and the horse runs away.

“What terrible bad luck!” all the neighbours wail.

“Who knows whether it is good or bad?” the old farmer responds to the neighbours who peer at him quizzically.

The following day, the horse returns, leading five wild mares into the barn. “What great good fortune!” the neighbours all cry. “Who knows?” responds the farmer.

A week later, the son is thrown while breaking one of the wild mares. His leg is broken badly and, because of the lack of proper medical care in the rural area, it remains doubtful that he will ever walk properly again. “How terrible!” the neighbours all mourn. “Who can tell?” the farmer answers.

Within a month, the country is plunged into war. The government soldiers come and conscript all of the young men to take them away to the war, but they leave the farmer’s son behind because his leg is bad.*****

Good luck? Bad luck? Perhaps one should remain as open as one can (while still keeping one’s lucky charms close at hand).

*Shakespeare’s sonnet 29 might have been included as an example of a visionary or incatatory device used to change either fortune or the perception of it. For the sake of post brevity, it is included here:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

William Shakespeare, sonnet 29

**”Let It Be”, with its opening lyric about “Mother Mary” coming to me in times of trouble, is often thought of as a religious song. However, it is worth noting that Paul McCartney’s mother, who died when he was young, was named Mary, and he has said that he was thinking of her when he wrote it.

***Hardin, Richard F. “The Renaissance of Plautine Comedy and the Varieties of Luck in Shakespeare and Other Plotters.” Mediterranean Studies 16 (2007): 143-56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41167008.

****Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Harold Jenkins. London: Thomson Learning, 2005. Jenkins’ note says that the word ‘enseamed’ “combines with others in the context to suggest the grossness of the sexual behaviour through physical metaphors of disgusting exudations.” He notes that other explanations, describing the term as one from falconry or from the woollen industry are “quite beside the point”, n.92, p. 324. Just so, it appears.

*****Traditional folktale, retold from memory. Please feel free to offer other versions or correct me on the details.