Creative Cancerian

Free Will Astrology is a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine. Always erudite, positive and well-written, and sometimes uncannily accurate. Of course, that could all just be confirmation bias. Nonetheless, when I read this as my horoscope the week that I begin writing a play that takes place in the WWII era, I can't help but take it as a good sign:

CANCER: "Dear Rob: Is there any way to access your horoscope archives going back to 1943? I'm writing a novel about World War II and need to see your astrological writings from back then. - Creative Cancerian." Dear Creative: To be honest, I wasn't writing horoscopes back in 1943, since I wasn't anywhere near being born yet. On the other hand, I give you permission to make stuff up for your novel and say I wrote it back in 1943. Most of you Cancerians have good imaginations about the past, and you're currently going through a phase when that talent is amplified. While you're tinkering with my history, have fun with yours, too. This is an excellent time for members of your tribe to breathe new life and fresh spin into a whole slew of your own personal memories.

The Radiant Sisters

Clearly, my blog has gone into abeyance while I work on Pleiades, but to tide you over, here's a poem, "On the Beach at Night" by Walt Whitman, that I found while doing research for mentions of the Pleiades in literature.

On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.

Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

Of note: my play is about Jupiter (Zeus) and the Pleiades, and long before I read this poem, I had planned for my play to take place in a summer house on Walt Whitman's native Long Island, with some key scenes occurring "on the beach at night."

Also of note: I found two different versions of this poem online, the one above, and a version where the Pleiades are referred to as "delicate brothers" and "radiant brothers." I had heard that Whitman compulsively revised his poems, but never seen such a clear-cut example! It seems that when the poem was originally published in Leaves of Grass in 1871, it was "brothers," but twenty years later, it had changed to "sisters." Did he revise it to make it less shocking/controversial? After all, if the Pleiades are always referred to as the Seven Sisters, it's a gender reversal to portray them as brothers, and a phrase like "delicate brothers" would have served as a big sign-post pointing to Whitman's homosexuality.

Then again, according to another website I found, the Pleiades have always had an association with homosexuality -- I suppose because they are seen as such a strong feminine influence that, when they appear in a man's astrological chart, they signify effeminacy or homosexuality? But I enjoyed this astrologer's positive re-interpretation of the Pleiades (seeing them not as victims, but "divine sisters on a voyage to true individuality and rebellion against social expectations... a reminder to those who would follow in their steps of revolution, promising that all burdens endured would lead to a greater brightness that would withstand the darkness of man's own ignorance") and his discovery of an ancient text that assigned a virtue and a color to each of the seven sisters. One of my challenges while writing Pleiades has been to develop each sister as an individual character -- when the myths don't give them much in the way of individual personality. And I get a kick out of this esoteric astrological stuff.

Playwrights and the Zodiac

I wouldn't say I have a deep faith in astrology, but it fascinates me. As much as I'd like to be able to pronounce it all smoke and mirrors, I find myself unable to dismiss it altogether. Perhaps it helps that I believe my zodiac sign (Cancer) fits my personality quite well, better than most other signs would--even if I do not possess every single Cancerian trait.

I've known for a while that two of my favorite playwrights, Tony Kushner and Tom Stoppard, are Cancerians, and I recently learned that Clifford Odets is one as well. Then I wondered if this was just confirmation bias, me taking special notice of writers who have birthdays near mine. Or do certain professions actually correlate with certain zodiac signs? So I did a quick study: I thought of as many important/influential playwrights as I could, looked up their birthdays, and categorized them by sign.

I tried to cover playwrights from a broad range of countries and time periods, so as not to bias the results in any way. This would have been easier if there were an authoritative list of "100 Top Playwrights" I could use; instead, I had to think of names off the top of my head, as well as look at a few lists of award-winning writers. Still, I believe I managed to include all of the really canonical playwrights--except for the ancient Greeks and Romans, as there is no way to determine their birthdays.

I did this for 65 playwrights before I gave up. Therefore, an even distribution would show 5 or 6 writers per zodiac sign. Instead, the distribution is notably imbalanced.

10 Aries: Beckett, Williams, Wilder, McDonagh, Rostand, L. Wilson, Fo, Ludlam, Ayckbourn, Synge
9 Cancer: Stoppard, Odets, Kushner, Behn, Simon, Pirandello, Anouilh, Letts, Soyinka
7 Libra: Miller, Wasserstein, Wilde, Havel, O’Neill, Pinter, Buchner
6 Capricorn: Moliere, Calderon de la Barca, Racine, Friel, Durang, Orton
6 Aquarius: Chekhov, Strindberg, Congreve, Beaumarchais, Brecht, Kane
5 Taurus: Shakespeare*, A. Wilson, P. Shaffer, Reza, Inge
5 Saggitarius: Mamet, Coward, Ionesco, Osborne, Lope de Vega
4 Gemini: Jonson**, Sartre, Corneille, Lorca
4 Scorpio: Shepard, Sheridan, McNally, Schiller
4 Pisces: Ibsen, Albee, Foote, LaBute
3 Leo: Shaw, Hwang, Wedekind
2 Virgo: Churchill, Maeterlinck

*Of course we do not know Shakespeare's actual birthday--only that he was baptized on April 26. So he was likely Taurus, though could have also been Aries.
**Ben Jonson's birthday is also not known for certain, though it is speculated to be June 11.

10 Aries and only 2 Virgo--that has to be statistically significant, right? (And one of the Virgos is Maeterlinck, who is little-noted these days--I included him because he won the Nobel Prize.) Are there any great Virgo playwrights--or, indeed, any other canonical playwrights--whom I overlooked?

Then I wondered if an imbalance in the distribution of birthdays in the general population could have contributed to these results. A little research showed that more babies are born during certain months of the year than others. However, the most common months for births are July through September, and the least common are March through May (source). Whereas my study shows 15 playwrights born from March 21 to May 20, and only 5 born from July 23 to September 22! Counterintuitive, to say the least.

Another odd thing is that Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn--four of the top five results--are the four "cardinal" signs of the zodiac, supposed to be the most forceful, dynamic, and take-charge of the signs. Obviously these are useful skills for playwrights, as you need to be very self-willed to succeed in this profession!