When actors fight with writers

In ancient Greece and Rome, the theatre could be brutal, but it had not yet gone as far as Elizabethan London. Playwrights might serve, actors might brawl, and festivals could explode. What they rarely did was meet in a field with rapiers and leave one man dead of a six-inch wound.

The clearest military example is Aeschylus. He fought at Marathon in 490 BC; his brother Cynaegirus died there. Tradition also links him with Salamis and Plataea. He acted in his own plays. The epitaph he is said to have composed for himself mentions Marathon and says nothing about his tragedies. Sophocles held the civic-military office of strategos. That is command, not arena fighting.

Rome usually kept the professions apart. Livy records that professional actors—histriones—were not enrolled in the legions, and that a citizen who took up acting was struck from his tribe. Players of Atellan farce were an exception, because that form stayed closer to amateur performance. Actors and gladiators both carried infamia: legal disgrace. They could not hold certain offices; their testimony and marriage rights were restricted. They were adjacent low-status spectacle trades, not the same job.

Violence still gathered around the theatre. Competition was fierce. Alcibiades punched a rival chorus-producer—and, in some accounts, a chorus boy—in the Theatre of Dionysus during the Great Dionysia. Decades later Meidias punched Demosthenes in the same theatre. Those were political-religious festival assaults, not stage fights. In Rome, actor cliques and their partisans could riot. Livy and later writers describe faction feeling that ran to bloodshed, in the same register as the circus crowds. Audiences pelted performers.

Elizabethan London closed the gap. On 22 September 1598, in the fields at Hoxton—then Hogsden or Hoggesdon Fields, in Shoreditch—the twenty-six-year-old playwright Ben Jonson killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel. Spencer died on the spot from a rapier thrust six inches deep and an inch wide into his right side. Jonson was indicted for manslaughter, pleaded guilty, and escaped the gallows only by claiming benefit of clergy.

Spencer was a rising player with the Admiral’s Men under Philip Henslowe. He already had a violent reputation. In December 1596, in a Shoreditch barber’s house, he drove a still-sheathed rapier into the eye of James Feake, a goldsmith’s son, after Feake threatened him with a candlestick. Feake died three days later. There is no record that Spencer was punished.

The two men had also been locked up together the year before. In 1597 Jonson co-wrote the lost satirical play The Isle of Dogs with Thomas Nashe. The Privy Council judged it seditious, closed the London theatres, and imprisoned Jonson, Spencer, and another actor, Robert Shaa, in the Marshalsea. Nashe fled. The company broke up and Spencer had to find new work. No one recorded why they later fought. Later guesses include leftover anger over that scandal, or Spencer calling Jonson a bricklayer—the trade Jonson had been trained in and disliked.

Years afterwards Jonson told William Drummond that Spencer had challenged him, arrived with a sword ten inches longer than Jonson’s, and wounded him in the arm first. The indictment is colder: Benjamin Johnson, “yeoman,” “feloniously and wilfully” assaulted Spencer in the fields with a rapier worth three shillings and gave him the mortal wound. Spencer “died instantly.”

Henslowe wrote to Edward Alleyn four days later: “I have lost one of my company, which hurteth me greatly, that is Gabriel, for he is slain in Hogsden Fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer.”

Jonson was held in Newgate. At the Old Bailey he confessed to manslaughter. The penalty was hanging. He then claimed benefit of clergy: a medieval privilege that, by Elizabeth’s reign, any literate man could use once. He read Psalm 51—the “neck verse”: “Have mercy upon me, O God…” The court recorded that he “read like a clerk,” branded him on the thumb with the letter T, the Tyburn T, and confiscated his goods. He could not use the plea again.

While in prison he converted to Roman Catholicism, possibly under the influence of the Jesuit Thomas Wright, who worked among prisoners. He later returned to the Church of England. The same year his first major success, Every Man in His Humour, was on the stage. Enemies do not seem to have used Spencer’s death against him much afterwards. Some contemporaries thought Spencer had it coming.

Jonson had already, by his own later account, killed a man in single combat while serving in the Low Countries. The 1598 duel is the one that left a mark on his thumb and nearly ended the career that produced Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair.

Aeschylus could fight Persians and still be buried as a soldier. Sophocles could hold a generalship and still be Sophocles. Rome kept actors off the roll of honour. London put the writer and the player in the same marsh and the same field, with steel in their hands.

Today it tends to be certain drugs that spark the violence. That is not limited to actors.

When Jerusalem was Christian and the king spoke French
Lost when Lusignan eschewed defence to look strong, while Saladin united his peoples

The road to Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem in 1187 is an eighty-eight-year arc: a Latin kingdom planted by massacre in 1099, expanded along the coast, then slowly encircled as Muslim Syria and Egypt were reunited under one commander.

By late 1098 the First Crusade had already taken Antioch. The Fatimid vizier of Egypt, al-Afdal, used the chaos to snatch Jerusalem from the Seljuks and installed Iftikhar al-Dawla as governor. The Franks who reached the walls on 7 June 1099 were no longer fighting the Turks of Urban II’s sermon. They were fighting Cairo. On 15 July Godfrey’s men broke the northern wall. A massacre of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants followed. Godfrey would not take the title of king. On 12 August the Crusaders smashed a Fatimid relief army at Ascalon. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was born.

It was always a coastal garrison with a holy city attached. Baldwin I seized the ports that kept it alive — Arsuf, Caesarea, Acre, Beirut, Sidon — because Italian fleets made that possible. Inland, the Franks never had the numbers. They were a thin military caste ruling Eastern Christians, Muslims, and the remnant of a Jewish community they had all but erased in 1099. Templars and Hospitallers became the standing army the kingdom lacked. Four Latin states sat in a chain: Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch, Edessa.

Edessa fell to Zengi in 1144. The Second Crusade failed in front of Damascus and left the Franks weaker. Nur ad-Din then unified Muslim Syria and made jihad policy. Baldwin III and Amalric I tried to pre-empt him in collapsing Fatimid Egypt. They imported the man who would finish them. Shirkuh brought his nephew, Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub. In 1169 Saladin became vizier of Egypt. In 1171 he abolished the Fatimid caliphate. When Nur ad-Din died in 1174, Saladin took Damascus. By the early 1180s Egypt and Syria answered to one commander. The old Frankish trick — play Cairo against Damascus — was dead.

Baldwin IV, the leper king, bought time. At Montgisard in 1177 his small army routed Saladin. It was the kingdom’s last great field victory. Saladin stopped gambling on one raid and wore the frontier down: Marj Ayyun, Jacob’s Ford, pressure on Kerak and Montreal. Baldwin’s body failed faster than his will. Faction formed around his sister Sibylla.

Baldwin IV died in 1185. The child Baldwin V died in 1186. Sibylla crowned her husband, Guy of Lusignan. Raymond of Tripoli and much of the baronage opposed him. Raymond even made a local arrangement with Saladin to protect Tiberias. The kingdom split at the moment the enemy was ready.

Then Raynald of Châtillon, lord of Kerak, broke the truce and looted a caravan on the Egypt–Damascus road. Saladin had his pretext. On 1 May 1187, at Cresson, a Templar–Hospitaller force was cut to pieces. In late June Saladin crossed the Jordan. On 2 July he took Tiberias and trapped Raymond’s wife in the citadel. That was bait.

Guy’s host — the levy of the kingdom, the military orders, the True Cross as standard — lay at well-watered Sepphoris. Raymond said stay. Guy, pressed by Ridefort and Raynald and unwilling to look weak, marched on 3 July across dry hills in midsummer. Saladin’s horse-archers never let them drink. On 4 July, pinned against the Horns of Hattin, the army broke. The True Cross was taken. Guy was captured. Saladin killed Raynald as an oath-breaker. Captured Templars and Hospitallers were executed. The field army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem ceased to exist.

The towns fell in weeks. Balian of Ibelin knighted burgesses in a city that had almost no knights left. Saladin arrived on 20 September. Jerusalem surrendered on 2 October. Compared with 1099, the sack was limited. Latin rule in the city ended after eighty-eight years. Richard Lionheart later recovered a coastal strip centred on Acre. He did not recover Jerusalem.

That is what happened. The harder question is what need not have happened.

Had the Franks not evicted and slaughtered the Jews?
In 1099 they burned a people who had lived in the city under Muslim rule as a protected minority. They gained a reputation for holy murder and lost a population that knew the country, the languages, and the trade routes. A Latin kingdom that had protected the Jewish remnant, taxed it, and used it as a bridge to older communities in Egypt and Syria would still have been a minority regime. It would not have become loved. It would have been less isolated. Later kings allowed small Jewish return — Benjamin of Tudela found congregations — but the founding crime was never unwritten. You cannot build a durable holy city by emptying it of the people whose scriptures you claim.

Had they worked with factions of Islam?
They did, when it suited them, and they stopped when pride or panic intervened. Fatimid envoys in 1099 offered peace if Jerusalem were left alone. The Crusaders refused and then spent the next eighty years trying to manage the split they had declined to use. The kingdom survived longest when Cairo and Damascus hated each other more than they hated Acre. Amalric’s Egyptian wars were an attempt to keep that split open. They produced Saladin instead. Raymond’s 1187 understanding with Saladin was the last local bargain. Guy treated it as treason rather than as the only strategy a small state had left. Working with a faction of Islam was never conversion and never trust. It was the recognition that a coastal garrison cannot fight a united Egypt and Syria at once. When the Franks forgot that, they marched to Hattin.

Had they maintained defence?
This is the one that was still available in July 1187. Sepphoris had water. Tiberias was a town, not the kingdom. Raymond was right. Guy left a sound position to look like a king. The military orders, built to hold walls and crossings, were spent in a thirst-march to relieve a citadel that could have waited. Defence, for a state this small, was not cowardice. It was the whole art: hold the ports, hold the water, refuse battle until the invader’s coalition frays. Baldwin IV understood that in his bones. Lusignan did not. Saladin united peoples. Guy needed to look strong. Jerusalem was lost in that difference, on a dry plateau, two months before the first stone left a mangonel at the Mount of Olives.

A French-speaking court on the Judean hills was always a wager. The wager was not piety. It was numbers, ports, and the enemy’s divisions. Massacre at the founding narrowed the numbers. Refusal to live with Muslim split narrowed the time. A king who would not sit still behind water spent the last army. After that, Saladin only had to walk to the gate.

Allison Inquiry shows where questions need to be asked regarding Covid 19 response.

The questions Ottawa still will not sit for

The Allison Inquiry was not a court and did not pretend to be one. Dean Allison and Shawn Buckley said so every day: they were there to listen, not to find facts. Health Canada did not come. That absence is the story as much as anything said under oath.

What filled the room for four days on Parliament Hill was a single, stubborn pattern. The people who testified were not the cartoon “anti-vaxxer.” They were paramedics, soldiers, parents who needed a shot so a boy could play hockey, workers who took the product because the state and the employer said it was safe, effective, and necessary. They used the same phrase, again and again: they took one for the team.

Then the team was gone.

What they described is not exotic. Heart injury. Clots. Nerves on fire. A face that would not move. A young man dead on the floor thirty-three days after a first dose. Files rewritten so the word “vaccine” never appears. Serving members told they cannot speak. Families of the dead told the complete medical record is not theirs to have. Doctors who noticed a cluster found the regulator at their door instead of a research desk. A compensation scheme that exists in press releases and starves in practice: thousands of claims, a few hundred cheques, years of appeals, letters that do not even carry the claimant’s name.

That is the shared account of the people who sat in that room. It is not Health Canada’s account. Those two accounts have not been put in the same room on purpose.

The experts who were invited went further — persistence of product in the body, surveillance that cannot see what it is not allowed to count, a product they say should not still be on offer to healthy children while the injured wait. Patients mostly did not come for that argument. They came because a neurologist finally wrote the words no emergency department would, or because no one would write them at all.

Jamie Daniel’s testimony is the part that should end the pretence that this is only a quarrel about “misinformation.” She was an advanced-care paramedic and a young mother. She asked for help in hospital. What arrived was a psychologist talking about medical assistance in dying. She was not suicidal. She was in pain and she wanted treatment. If that is what “care” looks like when the diagnosis is politically expensive, then the question is no longer medical. It is civic.

Canada has a vocabulary for almost everything except this. We can debate carbon, housing, and foreign interference until the lights go out. We cannot, officially, sit still while a citizen says: I did what you asked, I am not the person I was, and the program that was supposed to catch me did not. More than thirty democracies have held some form of pandemic inquiry. Canada’s federal government has not. An MP had to rent the shadow of Parliament and fill it with volunteers.

An unofficial hearing cannot settle causation. It can do something regulators have refused to do: put the injured in the record without first requiring them to apologise for existing. Timing is not proof. Dismissal is not proof either. Both have to be tested in public, with Health Canada in the chair, with the CAF records on the table, with the compensation contractor’s books open, and with doctors free to say what they see without a college file opening behind them.

Those are not radical demands. They are the minimum a country owes people it conscripted into a medical campaign by mandate, by employment, and by moral pressure.

The alternative on offer, if we are honest about Daniel’s hospital room, is quieter and uglier: do not name the injury, do not fund the research, do not fix the scheme — and if the pain does not stop, discuss death as a service. That is not compassion. It is administrative convenience wearing a soft voice.

Allison said the four days shattered a ceiling on silence. Ceilings grow back if nobody walks through the hole. The questions are now on the record. They are ordinary questions. What happened to these people? Who decided not to look? Why does a “no-fault” program fault the claimant at every turn? Why were doctors punished for counting? Why was a mother in a pain crisis offered an exit instead of a diagnosis?

Answer them in a real inquiry, with the departments present, or admit that the policy is to stop asking. There is no third option that still deserves to be called a public health system.