This quote is attributed to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, The Merchant's Tale in particular, but it does not come from there. It is found, instead, in The Squire's Tale. However, a reading of the Merchant's Tale seems to indicate that this was not an error. It might well be deliberate.
The Merchant's Tale tells of a knight named January who, on turning 60, decides to marry because women are wise and give good counsel.
Lo Judith, as the storie eek telle kan
By wys conseil she goddes peple kepte,
And slow hym Olofernus, whil he slepte
Judith and Holofernes! Fancy that! Plus, January marries a much younger woman. Clarice is much younger than Hannibal.
Incidentally, January, the month, was named for the Roman god Janus. Janus had two faces, one that looked back into the past and one that looked forward into the future. Janus was the keeper of the gate of heaven, the god of doorways and of beginnings. He oversaw the beginning of the days, months, years, and millenia. Ovid quoted Janus as saying "The ancients called me chaos, for a being from of old am I."
January looked into the past and the future. Hannibal's dream about Mischa seems to be about the past but may actually be about the future.
... moving his empty hands in its electronic field to create the music, moving the hands he placed on Clarice Starling's head as though he now directed the music. The reference to directing and Clarice Starling's head creates the image of Dr. Lecter as a puppeteer. [Thanks Dawn.]
Through impressive sleuthing, bloodandivory from the Loving Lecter site has found an image of Shingleton's Leda and the Swan and was kind enough to send me a copy. There's also a closeup of the "swan" if you scroll down. Notice the handles on the wings. If this is the painting to which Harris refers, I find it amusing that he says Hannibal delighted in this painting because there was "real heat in the fucking." It seems to me that the two participants are operating solo!
Nyx Fixx sent in a link to this site. Click on the "Hannibal Lecter" link to read Anne Shingleton's discussion of the painting and her theory of why Hannibal liked it. There's a good picture of it there plus a short endorsement from Thomas Harris. [Thanks Nyx]
The sharing of the oranges might be a twist on Adam and Eve and the apple. [Thanks to rebecca.k.malings]
Additionally, the setting for Botticelli's Primavera (see Section II) is an orange grove.
Here's a fascinating find [Thanks to Mike]. From Ted Talley's 2nd draft script for Silence of the Lambs, at the very end when he calls Clarice:
smiles into his mobile phone. He is stretched out on a lounger, on a tiled patio, languidly paring an orange with a penknife.
[Note: Dr. Quinn is Dr. Lecter. They hadn't yet gotten permission (from DeLaurentiis, I believe) to use the original names.]
Then a little later.
Then he goes into the house where Chilton is bound and waiting.
The mirror is from the Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte, a gorgeous villa built by Nicolas Fouquet, financial secretary for Louis XIV. Fouquet was successful, intelligent, generous, a lover of the arts and of pleasure of every kind. He was also an ardent and loyal supporter of the King. Every loan he negotiated for the King was backed up with his own money. In short, he was a decent man who never stopped to consider the envy and suspicion his position generated in others, especially the profiteering Colbert. Colbert was the secretary of Cardinal Mazarin, a notorious embezzler. After Mazarin's death, Colbert had the ear of the young King and managed to lay the blame for his misdeeds, as well as the Cardinal's, at Fouquet's feet. Colbert convinced the King that Fouquet was an anti-royalist and the financial ruin of France. "Just look at how he lives!" Worse still, Fouquet had eyes for the King's favorite mistress. Louis invited himself out to the Vaux where Fouquet had a wing built just for the King in case he ever decided to visit. There was a wonderful party to honor the King and Louis repayed Fouquet by throwing him in jail. The trial lasted three years. The judgment called for banishment which was tantamount to acquittal. Louis, however, overruled the Court's decision and sentenced Fouquet to life imprisonment thus silencing a number of state secrets. Because of this, many have come to believe, including Alexander Dumas, that Fouquet was the infamous Man in the Iron Mask.
At Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte there had at one time been a Galerie des Glaces, the walls of which were lined with mirrors. Glace means ice.
There is also a room at Vaux-le-Vicomte dedicated to The Muses. Each muse is represented as a young woman with some symbolic object. They are: Clio, the Muse of History, carries Fouquet's device (the squirrel) to the heavens; Polymnia, the Muse of Elegy or Sarced Poetry, holds a canvas; Erato, the Muse of Lyric Poetry, has a lyre; Thalia, the Comic Muse, holds a mask; Melpomene, the Tragic Muse, has a trophy of war; Calliope, the Muse of Oratory, has a book; Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, holds both a compass and a globe; Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance, has a lute; Euterpe, the Music Muse, has a flute. Some of these differ from the traditional, notably Clio honoring Fouquet with the squirrel. Usually, Clio is seen with a scroll or a set of books. Dr. Fell, of course, is a historian and works in the Capponi library amongst the books and rolled parchments. It isn't hard to see that all the Muses are represented in Hannibal in one form or another. But the one that interests me from Vaux-le-Vicomte is Polymnia and her canvas. Recall that Hannibal, rather than use the small screen provided, projected his images onto a hanging canvas drop cloth while reciting from Dante's Inferno.
Here are the lyrics:
A mule is an animal with long funny ears
Kicks up at anything he hears
His back is brawny but his brain is weak
He's just plain stupid with a stubborn streak
And by the way, if you hate to go to school
You may grow up to be a mule
Or would you like to swing on a star
Carry moonbeams home in a jar
And be better off than you are
Or would you rather be a pig?
A pig is an animal with dirt on his face
His shoes are a terrible disgrace
He has no manners when he eats his food
He's fat and lazy and extremely rude
But if you don't care a feather or a fig
You may grow up to be a pig
Or would you like to swing on a star
Carry moonbeams home in a jar
And be better off than you are
Or would you rather be a fish?
A fish won't do anything, but swim in a brook
He can't write his name or read a book
To fool the people is his only thought
And though he's slippery, he still gets caught
But then if that sort of life is what you wish
You may grow up to be a fish
A new kind of jumped-up slippery fish
And all the monkeys aren't in the zoo
Every day you meet quite a few
So you see it's all up to you
You can be better than you are
You could be swingin' on a star
Well, we certainly have pigs and we have Pazzi seeing his face turn into that of a jackass and we have Mason Verger who looks like something from the deep, deep ocean and has an eel for a pet.
Harris also mentions a song from a musical in SOTL, "Cash for your Trash" from Ain't Misbehavin' written 1943, perhaps appropriately, by Thomas "Fats" Waller.
The eating of Krendler's brains recalls Dante's story of Count Ugolino mentioned briefly in Section II where Hannibal discusses chewing. Count Ugolino is first found in Canto XXXII chewing on the back of the head of Archbishop Ruggieri, eating his brains and wiping his mouth on what little hair Ruggieri has left. In life, Ugolino and Ruggieri had conspired together to rid Pisa of the Guelph party headed by Ugolino's nephew, Nino. After Nino left Pisa, Ugolino enjoyed a brief period of increased influence, but then Ruggieri betrayed him and put Ugolino, along with two sons and two grandsons, in prison for treason. They were shut up in a tower, the key was thrown into the Arno and all food was withheld. After a few days, the sons died and Ugolino, mad with hunger, cannibalized them. [Thanks to James Browning]
Also note on the previous page, Harris says, "Dr. Lecter found the shine of butter sauce on her lip intensely moving. [Thanks to Diana]
Then Clarice has a revelation. The "windows in her mind aligned". She asks, "Did you ever feel you had to relinquish the breast to Mischa?" Did Hannibal eat his sister?
During all her fall from grace Starling is the one being seduced by the suave Dr. Lecter. Yet in the point of no return, during dessert, she leaves the last traces of chaste Artemis (just as she has already left Libra unbalanced, her flexible brain at its fullest, turning her back on "justice" during dinner) becoming the seductress with a grand gesture worthy of the most refined french coquette. I think it's rich that the hustling little rube passes from cheap birthstones in her upper eyes to golden cabochon in her lower ones, such a jeweled movement." [Thanks Nadia. Match. Match.] I suspect that Clavell and Harris got the notion of the Yquem on the nipple from the same source and I would imagine that source is Alexandre Dumas. I just haven't found it yet.
On second thought, perhaps the Geographer with his compass is the better choice.
I recently came across Zaillian's script for the movie and in it he has Barney looking at a Vermeer, "The Woman Holding a Balance."
That's a depiction of The Last Judgment hanging on the wall behind the woman. A mirror hangs in front of her. The woman is holding a delicate balance. It is empty. Immaterial souls will be weighed there. On the table are pearls and gems representing worldy wealth. Light from the window divides the picture along the diagonal, half is in light, the other in darkness. She is pregnant. Clarice is associated with the Scales of Justice during the dinner scene in Chapter 100.
At the end of Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal writes Clarice a letter and in it he says, "But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave." [Thanks Jaye]
In The Last Judgement, the painting in the painting, in the area obscured by Vermeer's woman, Saint Michael holds the scales.
There is an opera by Handel titled Tamerlano (and two more obscure ones, one by Vivaldi, the other by the elder Scarlatti). These operas are based on the legend of Tamburlaine the Great (Timur the Lame) who was lame in both right limbs (although some authorities say it was his left side that was affected). He was a latter day Genghis Khan and wreaked similar amounts of havoc across Europe. By reputation he was also a very cultured tyrant. His mausoleum can be viewed in Samarkand and his body lies under a huge broken slab of jade. The tomb was opened by Russian archaelogists in 1941 and they did indeed find a skeleton of a man with evidence of lameness in both right limbs. Local legend has it that if the tomb is disturbed, then Tamburlaine will awake and stalk the earth again causing murder and mayhem - which is pretty much what happened as Hitler invaded Russia around about this time. [Thanks to EGL]
Christopher Marlowe's play Tamburlaine is based on the historical Tamerlane. [Contributed by rebecca.k.malings]
Here's the prologue:
The "tragicke glasse", of course, being a mirror.
However, if one were to take up the quest today to see every Vermeer in the world, one would also come up one short. Just after midnight on March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston police officers entered the Gardner Museum on some pretense and were allowed in. They made off with 11 works of art, including one priceless Vermeer, The Concert. None of the artworks has ever been recovered.
From jygging vaines of riming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keepes in pay,
Weele leade you to the stately tent of War:
Where you shall heare the Scythian Tamburlaine,
Threatning the world with high astounding tearms
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.
View but his picture in this tragicke glasse,
And then applaud his fortunes if you please.
Following some links provided by Ron Foster, I discovered that Handel originally wrote the part of Tamerlano for an alto castrato (a man whose voice never changed). The part is now sometimes performed by a woman.
