So I'm catching up on s3 of The Diplomat and... ARDEN. Shakespeeps, are we seeing this? Do I need to be the one to write an essay about it? I will be howling into the night for the foreseeable future.
Update: perhaps no one asked for this, but I'm still suffering about it, so here goes. Unfortunately for my emotional equilibrium, I think Arden is the name Kate and Hal picked out for the daughter they don't have.
I say "Kate and Hal." Hal was the one to suggest it, obviously. Kate -- typically one of 2-3 Kates or Katies or Katherines in any classroom from when she was annoying her classmates with reading competency to when she was raising her hand so often that her political theory professor started sighing about it -- just wanted something unusual.
Kate was also the one, I think, to broach the possibility in the first place. She's the one who called tandem postings the easiest math problem in the world. She's the one who would say that surely, between them, they could do one kid. (She would ask him, first, not casually enough, how he felt about kids. He would say that he had always expected to leave his legacy in politics, for "certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from unmarried or childless men," and Kate, never having read Francis Bacon, would tell him to shut up. He would continue to say that he had never expected marriage. That he had never expected her.)
Anyway: Arden. Kate's approval came initially, I think, because it was pretty without being too girly. To which, after a moment's stillness, her husband's comment was that of course, she didn't go to the kind of school where they read Shakespeare. She smacked him in the chest with a pillow and informed him that it was Romeo and Juliet, in the ninth grade.
I don't know how much of Arden Hal would explain, or be able to explain. He would say that it was from As You Like It, doubtless adding that this was the play where a small woman -- "as high as a man's heart" -- made that man fall incandescently and irrevocably in love with her by being kind, and proceeded to boss him around mercilessly for the remainder of the five acts. Hal would almost certainly continue to explain that Arden was the name of the forest where this man pinned evidence of his love to every tree. What he might or might not say to Kate is that Arden is also the space where the dream of a just world and a wise political system is most fully realized on Shakespeare's stage, that was also, to its audiences, a representation of the world entire. In Arden, philosophers rule wisely, and leaders are surrounded by friends whom they trust, and shepherds live and love in safety. In Arden, each refugee finds a home. In Arden, old feuds are reconciled, and new loves are born. It's the vision of a just world: not a second Eden (for its residents know exactly and precisely the stakes of loss) but something different, something more, a place of possibility and hope.
