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Rhinoceros (play)

Rhinoceros (Rhinocéros) is a play by playwright Eugène Ionesco, written in 1959. The play was included in Martin Esslin's study of post-war avant-garde drama The Theatre of the Absurd, although scholars have also rejected this label as too interpretatively narrow. Over the course of three acts, the inhabitants of a small, provincial French town turn into rhinoceroses; ultimately the only human who does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis is the central character, Bérenger, a flustered everyman figure who is initially criticized in the play for his drinking, tardiness, and slovenly lifestyle and then, later, for his increasing paranoia and obsession with the rhinoceroses. The play is often read as a response and criticism to the sudden upsurge of Fascism and Nazism during the events preceding World War II, and explores the themes of conformity, culture, fascism, responsibility, logic, mass movements, mob mentality, philosophy and morality.

Act I
The play starts in the town square of a small provincial French village. Two friends meet at a coffee shop: eloquent, intellectual and prideful Jean, and the simple, shy, kind-hearted drunkard Bérenger. They have met to discuss an unspecified but important matter. Rather than talk about it, Jean berates Bérenger for his tardiness and drunkenness, until a rhinoceros rampages across the square, causing a commotion. During the discussion that follows, a second rhinoceros appears and crushes a woman's cat. This generates outrage and the villagers band together to argue that the presence of the rhinoceroses should not be allowed. A discussion about whether they saw two different rhinoceroses or the same one twice leads to a heated argument between Bérenger and Jean, eventually causing Jean to walk away in a huff.

Act II
Bérenger arrives late for work at the local newspaper office. Daisy, the receptionist, with whom Bérenger is in love, covers for him by sneaking him a time sheet. At the office, an argument has broken out between sensitive and logical Dudard and the violent, temperamental Botard. The latter does not believe a rhinoceros could appear in France.

Mrs. Bœuf (the wife of an employee) says that her husband is unwell and that she was chased all the way to the office by a rhinoceros. Botard scoffs at the so-called "rhinoceritis" movement and says that the local people are too intelligent to be swayed by empty rhetoric. A rhinoceros arrives and destroys the staircase that leads out of the office, trapping all the workers inside. Mrs. Bœuf recognizes the rhinoceros as her husband, transformed. Despite a warning, she joins him by jumping down the stairwell onto her husband’s back. Daisy has called the firemen. The office workers escape through a window.

Bérenger visits Jean in order to apologize for the previous day's argument. He finds Jean sick and in bed. They argue once more, this time about whether people can transform into rhinoceroses and then about the morality of such a change. Jean is at first against it, then more lenient. Jean begins to gradually transform. Finally, Jean proclaims that they have just as much of a right to life as humans, then says that "Humanism is dead, those who follow it are just old sentimentalists". After transforming fully, he chases Bérenger out of the apartment.

Act III
Bérenger is at home having a nightmare. He fears transforming like Jean, earlier. He has a sip of brandy and retires to bed. Dudard visits him and they have nearly the same exchange as with Jean earlier. Only this time, Dudard is accepting of the transformation and Bérenger resists the idea and defies that he will change.

Daisy arrives with a basket of love. Both Dudard and Bérenger desire her. Botard, Daisy reveals, has also changed. Many villagers, including firemen, have begun to transform. Dudard leaves, wanting to see firsthand. Bérenger tries to stop him. Dudard turns into a rhinoceros himself.

Bérenger laments the loss of Dudard. Daisy tells Berenger that they have no right to interfere in others’ lives. Bérenger says he will defend her. He blames both himself and Daisy for aiding, through lack of sympathy, the transformations of Jean and Papillon, respectively. Daisy allays his guilt.

The phone rings, but they hear only rhino trumpeting on the line. They turn to the radio for help, but the rhinos have taken that over, too. Bérenger professes his love for Daisy. She seems to reciprocate. They attempt to have a normal life amongst beasts. Bérenger suggests that they attempt to repopulate the human race. Daisy begins to move away from him, suggesting that Bérenger does not understand love. She has come to believe the rhinoceroses are truly passionate.

Bérenger slaps Daisy without thinking and then immediately recants. Bérenger exclaims that, "in just a few minutes we have gone through twenty-five years of married life!" They attempt to reconcile, but once more fight. As Bérenger examines himself in a mirror for any evidence of transformation, Daisy slips away to join the animals.

Now alone completely, Bérenger regrets his actions towards Daisy. In his solitude, he begins to doubt his existence. He attempts to change into a rhinoceros but cannot, then regains his determination to fight the beasts, shouting, "I'm not capitulating!"

Notable Broadway Replacements
Bérenger: Ralph Meeker, Alfred Ryder

Daisy: Dolores Sutton

Dudard: Salem Ludwig

Mrs. Bœuf: Camila Ashland

Logician: Dolph Sweet

Café Proprietor: C. K. Alexander

Background and meaning
American scholar Anne Quinney argues that the play was autobiographical, and reflected Ionesco's own youth in Romania. Ionesco was born in Romania to a Romanian father and French mother. Ionesco's father was a Romanian ultra-nationalist of the Orthodox faith with few political scruples, who was willing to support whatever party was in power – while his mother was a French Protestant who came from a family of Sephardic Jews who had converted to Calvinism to better fit into French society. In the increasing antisemitic atmosphere of Romania in the interwar period, being even partly ethnically Jewish was enough to put Ionesco in danger. The Israeli historian Jean Ancel states that the Romanian intelligentsia had a "schizophrenic attitude towards the West and its values," yet considered the West, especially France, to be their role model. At the same time antisemitism was rampant in Romania. Most Romanian Jews were descendants of Ashkenazi Jews who had moved to Romania in the 18th and 19th centuries from Poland. A recurring claim of the Romanian radical right was that most Romanian Jews were illegal immigrants or had obtained Romanian citizenship fraudulently. In the 19th century, the newly independent Romanian state proved very reluctant to grant citizenship to Romania's Jews, and a volatile atmosphere of antisemitism flourished with many intellectuals like A. C. Cuza claiming the Jews were a foreign and alien body in Romania that needed to be removed.

In interwar Romania, the most virulent and violent antisemitic movement was the fascist Iron Guard (formed as the paramilitary branch of the Legion of the Archangel Michael), founded in 1927 by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. As a university student, Ionesco saw one of his professors, Nae Ionescu, who taught philosophy at the University of Bucharest, use his lectures to recruit his students into the Legion. In an interview in 1970, Ionesco explained the play's message as an attack on those Romanians who become caught up in the "ideological contagion" of the Legion: "University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, becoming Iron Guards one after another. We were fifteen people who used to get together, to find arguments, to discuss, to try to find arguments opposing theirs. It was not easy ... From time to time, one of the group would come out and say 'I don't agree at all with them, to be sure, but on certain points, I must admit, for example the Jews ...' And that kind of comment was a symptom. Three weeks later, that person would become a Nazi. He was caught in a mechanism, he accepted everything, he became a Rhinoceros. Towards the end, it was only three or four of us who resisted." In 1936, Ionesco wrote with disgust that the Iron Guard had created "a stupid and horrendously reactionary Romania".

Romanian university students were disproportionately over-represented in the Iron Guard, a fact which rebuts the claim that the Iron Guard attracted support only from social "losers". Romania had a very large intelligentsia relative to its share of the population with 2.0 university students per one thousand of the population compared to 1.7 per one thousand of the population in far wealthier Germany, while Bucharest had more lawyers in the 1930s than did the much larger city of Paris. Even before the Great Depression, Romania's universities were turning out far more graduates than there were jobs for, and a mood of rage, desperation and frustration prevailed on campuses as it was apparent to most Romanian students that the middle class jobs that they were hoping for after graduation did not exist. In interwar Romania, Jews played much the same role as Greeks and Armenians did in the Ottoman Empire and the ethnic Chinese minorities do in modern Malaysia and Indonesia, namely a commercially successful minority much resented for their success. The Legion's call to end the "Jewish colonization" of Romania by expelling all the Jews, who the Legion claimed were all illegal immigrants from Poland, and confiscate their assets so that Christian Romanians could rise up to the middle class, was very attractive to many university students. Codreanu's call for a Romania without individualism, where all Romanians would be spiritually united together as one, greatly appealed to the young people who believed that when Codreanu created his "new man" (omul nou), it would be the moment that a utopian society would come into existence. Ionesco felt that the way in which so many of his generation, especially university students, had abandoned the French ideas about universal human rights in favor of the death cult of the Legion, was a "betrayal" both personally and in a wider political sense of the sort of society Romania should be. As a young writer and playwright in 1930s Bucharest who associated with many leading figures of the intelligentsia, Ionesco felt more and more out of place as he clung to his humanist values while his friends all joined the Legion, feeling much as Bérenger does by the end of Rhinoceros as literally the last human being left on an earth overrun by rhinoceroses. In an interview with a Romanian newspaper shortly before his death in 1994, Ionesco stated how Rhinoceros related to his youth in Romania: "It is true. I had the experience of an extrême droite. And of the second hand left, which had been a radical socialist...Maybe I should have belonged to the left for a while, maybe I should have been of the left before being-not of the right-of the non-left, an enemy of the left. But at a certain moment, the left was no longer the left, at a certain moment the left become a right of horror, a right of terror and that's what I was denouncing, the terror."

In Rhinoceros, all of the characters except Bérenger talk in clichés: for example, when first encountering the rhinoceros, all of the characters apart from Bérenger insipidly exclaim "Well, of all things!", a phrase that occurs in the play twenty-six times. Ionesco was suggesting that by vacuously repeating clichés instead of meaningful communication, his characters had lost their ability to think critically, and were thus already partly rhinoceros. Likewise, once a character repeats a platitudinous expression such as "It's never too late!" (repeated twenty-two times in the play) or "Come on, exercise your mind. Concentrate!" (repeated twenty times), the other characters start to mindlessly repeat them, which further shows their herd mentality. In the first act, the character of the logician says: "I am going to explain to you what a syllogism is ... The syllogism consists of a main proposition, a secondary one and a conclusion". The logician gives the example of: "The cat has four paws. Isidore and Fricot have four paws. Therefore, Isidore and Fricot are cats". Quinney sums up the logician's thinking as: "The logic of this reasoning would allow any conclusion to be true based on two premises, the first of which contains the term that is the predicate of the conclusion and the second of which contains the term that is the subject of the conclusion". Based on this way of thinking as taught by the logician, the character of the old man is able to conclude that his dog is in fact a cat, leading him to proclaim: "Logic is a very beautiful thing", to which the logician replies as "As long as it is not abused". It is at this moment that the first rhinoceros appears. One of the leading Romanian intellectuals in the 1930s who became close to the Iron Guard was Emil Cioran, who in 1952 published in Paris a book entitled Syllogismes d'amertume. Emil Cioran severed his friendship with Ionesco, an experience that very much hurt the latter. The character of the logician with his obsession with syllogisms and a world of pure reason divorced from emotion is a caricature of Cioran, a man who claimed that "logic" demanded that Romania have no Jews. More broadly, Ionesco was denouncing those whose rigid ways of thinking stripped of any sort of humanist element led them to inhumane and/or inane views.

In the first act of the play, the characters spend much time debating whether the rhinoceroses that have mysteriously appeared in France are African or Asian rhinoceroses, and which of the two types were superior to the other – a debate that Ionesco meant to be a satire on racism. Regardless of whether the rhinoceros are African or Asian, the French characters comfortably assume their superiority to the rhinoceros; ironically the same people all become rhinoceroses themselves. Bérenger's friend Jean judges the superiority of African vs. Asian rhinoceroses by their number of horns (making him a caricature of those people who judge other people by the color of their skin) and at one point shouts at Bérenger: "If anybody's got horns, it is you! You are an Asiatic Mongol!" A recurring theme in Nazi propaganda was that the Jews were an "Asiatic" people who were unfortunately living in Europe, a message that many of the French became familiar with during the German occupation of 1940–1944. Ionesco alludes to the atmosphere of that period in his depiction of Jean taunting Bérenger over his supposed horns, and being "Asiatic". Ionesco intended the character of Jean, an ambitious functionary whose careerism robs him of the ability to think critically, to be a satirical portrayal of the French civil servants who served the Vichy government. At various points in the play, Jean shouts out such lines as "We need to go beyond moral standards!", "Nature has its own laws. Morality against Nature!" and "We must go back to primeval integrity!" When Jean says "humanism is all washed up", Bérenger asks: "Are you suggesting we replace our moral laws with the law of the jungle?"

Lines such as these show that Ionesco also created the character of Jean as a satire of the Iron Guard, which attacked all the humanist values of the modern West as "Jewish inventions" designed to destroy Romania, and claimed that there was a "natural law" in which "true" Romanians would discover their "primal energy" as the purest segment of the "Latin race" and assert their superiority over the "lower races". Notably, the more Jean rants about "natural laws" trumping all, the more he transforms into a rhinoceros.

When Romanian nationalism first emerged in the late 18th century – at a time when the Romanians in Bukovina and Transylvania were ruled by the Austrian Empire while the Romanians in Moldavia, Wallachia and the Dobruja were ruled by the Ottoman Empire – there was an intense emphasis on the Latinity of the Romanians, who were depicted as a lonely island of Latin civilization in Eastern Europe surrounded by "Slavic and Turanian barbarians". The reference to "Turanian barbarians" was to both the Turks and the Magyars who both "Turanian" peoples from Asia. This tradition of seeing Romania as a bastion of Latinism threatened by enemies everywhere culminated in the 1930s where the Iron Guard argued there were "natural laws" that determined Romania's struggle for existence, which allowed the Legion to justify any act of violence no matter how amoral as necessary because of the "natural laws". Ionesco parodied the Legion's talk of "natural laws" and "primeval values" by putting dialogue that closely resembled the Legion's rhetoric into Jean as he transforms into a green rhinoceros.

At the same time, Ionesco also attacked in Rhinoceros the French intelligentsia, a disproportionate number of whom were proud members of the French Communist Party in the 1950s. As an anti-Communist Romanian émigré living in France, Ionesco was often offended by the way in which so many French intellectuals embraced Stalinism and would either justify or deny all of the crimes of the Stalin regime under the grounds that the Soviet Union was a "progressive" nation leading humanity to a better future. Ionesco satirized French Communist intellectuals with the character of Botard, who is clearly the most left-wing character in the play. Botard professes himself to be the champion of progressive values, saying about the debate in regards to the debate over the superiority of African vs. Asian rhinoceros that: "The color bar is something I feel strongly about, I hate it!". But at the same time, Botard shows himself to be rigid, small-minded and petty in his thinking, using Marxist slogans in place of intelligent thought. Most notably, Botard is unable to accept the fact of rhinoceritis despite overwhelming evidence of its existence. For an example, Botard dismisses rhinoceritis as: "An example of collective psychosis, Mr. Dudard. Just like religion-the opiate of the people!". Despite seeing the rhinoceroses with his own eyes, Botard convinces himself that rhinoceritis is all a gigantic capitalist plot, dismissing rhinoceritis as an "infamous plot" and "propaganda". Ionesco created the character of Botard as a caricature of French Communist intellectuals who managed to ignore overwhelming evidence of Stalin's terror and proclaimed the Soviet Union to be the "Worker's Paradise", dismissing any evidence to the contrary as mere anti-Soviet propaganda. A further attack on Communism was provided by the character of the pipe-smoking intellectual Dudard. Ionesco stated in an interview that: "Dudard is Sartre". Ionesco disliked Jean-Paul Sartre – France's most famous intellectual in the 1950s – for the way in which he sought to justify Stalin's murderous violence as necessary for the betterment of humanity as a betrayal of everything that a French intellectual should be, and intended the character of Dudard who always finds excuses for the rhinoceros as a caricature of Sartre who always found excuses for Stalin.

Ionesco also intended Rhinoceros as a satire of French behavior under the German occupation of 1940–1944. The green skin of the rhinoceros recalled not only the green uniforms of the Iron Guard, but also the green uniforms of the Ordnungspolizei who enforced German power in France during the occupation. Several French critics when they saw the première of Rhinoceros in 1960 wrote in their reviews that the green skin of the rhinoceros invoked memories of the Occupation, with the Ordnungspolizei in their green uniforms and the Wehrmacht in their muddy-green uniforms. During the Occupation, the French applied nicknames to the Germans that often used the word vert, calling the Germans haricots verts (green beans), sauterelles verts (green locusts), and race verte (green race). In France during the occupation, the color green was indelibly associated with the Germans.

For the French people, the defeat of June 1940 came as a very profound shock, something that they could never imagine would actually happen. The experience of the Occupation was a deeply psychologically disorienting one for the French as what was once familiar and safe become strange and threatening. Many Parisians could not get over the shock experienced when they first saw the huge swastika flags hanging over the Hôtel de Ville and on top of the Eiffel Tower. The British historian Ian Ousby wrote: Even today, when people who are not French or did not live through the Occupation look at photos of German soldiers marching down the Champs Élysées or of Gothic-lettered German signposts outside the great landmarks of Paris, they can still feel a slight shock of disbelief. The scenes look not just unreal, but almost deliberately surreal, as if the unexpected conjunction of German and French, French and German, was the result of a Dada prank and not the sober record of history.

This shock is merely a distant echo of what the French underwent in 1940: seeing a familiar landscape transformed by the addition of the unfamiliar, living among everyday sights suddenly made bizarre, no longer feeling at home in places they had known all their lives. Ousby wrote that by the end of summer of 1940: "And so the alien presence, increasingly hated and feared in private, could seem so permanent that, in the public places where daily life went on, it was taken for granted". At the same time France was also marked by disappearances as buildings were renamed, books banned, art was stolen to be taken to Germany and as time went on, various people, especially Jews were arrested and deported to death camps.

Afterwards, many of the French learned to accept the changes imposed by the German occupation, coming to the conclusion that Germany was Europe's dominant power and the best that could be done was to submit and bow down before the might of the Reich. The more difficult and dangerous choice of becoming a résistant to the German occupation was taken only by a minority of brave people; estimates of those French who served in the Resistance varied from 2%–14% of the population depending on the historian and what one chooses to define as resistance. Many historians argued that such activities like writing for an underground newspaper, sheltering Jews and Allied servicemen, providing intelligence to the Allies or sabotaging the railroads and factories counts as resistance. Only about 2% of the French population or about 400,000 people engaged in armed resistance during the Occupation. In Rhinoceros, the characters are shocked and horrified that people are turning into brutal rhinoceros, but during the course of the play learn to accept what is happening, as just the French people were shocked by their defeat in 1940, but many learned to accept their place in the "New Order" in Europe. Dudard expresses collaborationist feelings towards the rhinoceros, saying: "Well, I'm surprised, too. Or rather I was. Now I am getting used to it". Dudard also says of the rhinoceros: "They don't attack you. If you leave them alone, they just ignore you. You can't say they are spiteful". Dudard's statements recall those feelings of the French who were initially shocked to see German soldiers, policemen and the SS marching around their cities and towns in 1940, but swiftly learned that if offered no resistance, the Germans would usually leave them alone to live their lives (provided that they were not Jewish).

Along the same lines, Bérenger wonders "Why us?", asking how rhinoceritis could possibly be happening in France. Bérenger goes on to say:"If only it happened somewhere else, in some other country, and we'd just read about it in the papers, one could discuss it quietly, examine the question from all points of view and come to an objective conclusion. We could organize debates with professors and writers and lawyers, blue-stockings and artists and people and ordinary men in the street as well—it would be very interesting and instructive. But when you're involved yourself, when you suddenly find yourself up against brutal facts, you can't help feeling directly concerned—the shock is too violent for you to stay detached." Besides alluding to the German occupation, lines such as these also recall Ionesco's youth in Romania in the 1930s. Bérenger, the hard-drinking, slovenly, kindly everyman is regarded as the alter ego of Ionesco.

In an interview, Ionesco said: "The rhinoceroses, rhinoceritis and rhinoceration are current matters and you single out a disease that was born in this century. Humanity is besieged by certain diseases, physiologically and organically, but the spirit too is periodically besieged by certain diseases. You discovered a disease of the 20th century, which could be called after my famous play, rhinoceritis. For a while, one can say that a man is rhinocerised by stupidity or baseness. But there are people—honest and intelligent—who in their turn may suffer the unexpected onset of this disease, even the dear and close ones may suffer...It happened to my friends. That's why I left Romania."

Aspects of Bérenger who stubbornly remains human and vows never to give in recall Ionesco's own youth in Romania in the shadow of the Iron Guard. Jean and Dudard both mock Bérenger for weakness because he drinks too much and believes in love which they view as signs of lack of self-control, but Ionesco said about Bérenger that the strength of the modern hero "stemmed from what may be taken for weakness". When Bérenger declares his love for Daisy, it is a sign that he still retains his humanity, despite the way that others mocked him for believing in love. Ionesco wrote during his youth, he had the "strange responsibility" of being himself, feeling like the last (metaphorical) human being in Romania, as "all around me men were metamorphosed into beasts, rhinoceros... You would run into an old friend, and all of sudden, right before your eyes, he would start to change. It was if his gloves had become paws, his shoes hoofs. You could no longer talk intelligently with him for he was not a rational human being". Quinney noted that in both French and English, the word rhinoceros is both a singular and plural term, and argued that Ionesco made people transform into rhinoceros in his play as indicating that when an individual becomes part of a herd mindlessly following others, such a man or a woman lose part of their humanity.

Ionesco chose to stay in Romania to fight against the "rhinocerisation" of the intelligentsia, despite the fact that one by one his friends all become members of the Legion, or refused to talk to him out of cowardice until the regime of General Ion Antonescu passed a law in 1940 that forbade all Jews (defined in racial terms) from participating in the arts in Romania in any way or form. Quinney argued that Ionesco's théâtre de l'absurde plays were a form of "lashing out" against his friends who in his youth had abandoned him for the Legion, and reflected his dual identity as both Romanian and French. Quinney maintained that terror felt by Bérenger at being the last human left in the world reflected Ionesco's own terror as saw his friends caught up in youthful idealism all become Legionaries while the rest were either too cynical or cowardly to resist the Legion. Quinney further argued that the Rhinoceros was an allegory of and attack on the Legion of the Archangel Michael has been ignored by literary scholars who have seen Ionesco only as a French playwright and neglected the fact that Ionesco saw himself as both Romanian and French.

Productions
Rhinoceros had its world premiere in Dusseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia on November 1, 1959 at Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. It was directed by Karl Heinz Stroux and starred Karl-Maria Schley as Bérenger, Joachim Teege as Jean, and Eva Boettcher as Daisy. On its opening night, the theatre gave Ionesco a ten-minute ovation.

On January 25, 1960, the play made its French language debut at the Odéon in Paris. It was produced by Jean-Louis Barrault and starred Barrault as Bérenger, William Sabatier as Jean, and Simone Valère as Daisy.

In April 1960, the play was performed by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in London, England under the direction of Orson Welles with Laurence Olivier as Bérenger, Joan Plowright as Daisy, and Michael Bates, Miles Malleson and Peter Sallis in the cast. The production moved to the Strand Theatre (now the Novello Theatre) that June. Following the move Dudard and Daisy were played by Michael Gough and Maggie Smith.

In 1961, the American premiere of Rhinoceros opened on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre under the direction of Joseph Anthony. It starred Eli Wallach as Bérenger, Anne Jackson as Daisy, Jean Stapleton as Mrs. Bœuf (Mrs. Ochs in this adaptation), and Zero Mostel, who won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Jean. Wallach was replaced during the run by Alfred Ryder (who also toured with Mostel on the West Coast) and then Ralph Meeker. After Wallach left the show, Mostel took top billing over Ryder and Meeker, all of whom were nonetheless billed above the play's title.

In 1996, the play was revived off-Broadway at Theatre Four, which had previously staged the musical revue Ionescopade, featuring songs and scenes based on the works of Ionesco. It was produced by Herbert Beigel for the Valiant Theatre Company and directed by Michael Murray. It starred Peter Jacobson as Bérenger, Zach Grenier as Jean (John in this translation), and Geoffrey Owens as Dudard.

The Royal Court Theatre revived the play in 2007 and starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Bérenger and directed by Dominic Cooke.

The Bangalore Little Theatre, in collaboration with the Alliance Française de Bangalore, presented Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, a play in the Theatre of the Absurd tradition. This adaptation is written by Dr. Vijay Padaki, a veteran in theatre.

In 2016 Rhinoceros was adapted and directed by Wesley Savick. It was performed by Modern Theatre in Boston.

In 2023 Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru, the Welsh-language National Theatre, toured a new production of 'Rhinoseros' translated by Manon Steffan Ros and directed by Steffan Donnelly. It starred Rhodri Meilir, Bethan Ellis Owen and Eddie Ladd.

Adaptations
Polish graphic designer Jan Lenica adapted the play into a ten-minute animated short film, which is available on YouTube.

The play was adapted to an urban American setting for a 1973 film (also called Rhinoceros) directed by Tom O'Horgan and starring Zero Mostel as John (Jean in the play), Gene Wilder as Stanley (Bérenger) and Karen Black as Daisy.

The play was also adapted for a 1990 musical, titled Born Again at the Chichester Festival Theatre, by Peter Hall, Julian Barry and composer Jason Carr. The setting was relocated to an American shopping mall. It starred Mandy Patinkin.

The 2008 comedy horror film Zombie Strippers is a loose adaptation of the play, but with zombies instead of rhinoceroses.

"Rhinocerization"
The term Rhinocerization (התקרנפות, hitkarnefut) became colloquial in Israel for getting swayed in a nationalistic fervor, or any other general sentiment. It was originally coined by theatre critic Asher Nahor in his review of the play in 1962, which was played at the Haifa Theatre. However, it seems that popular usage followed only after Amos Oz employed the infinitive verb form (להתקרנף, lehitkarnef) ten years later.

One use of "rhinocerization" was by Israeli historian Jean Ancel to describe how Romanian intellectuals were subsumed by the appeal of the Legion of the Archangel Michael in particular and radical antisemitism in general in his 2002 book The History of the Holocaust In Romania.

title: Rhinoceros (play)


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Walter de la Mare

Walter John de la Mare (25 April 1873 – 22 June 1956) was an English poet, short story writer and novelist. He is probably best remembered for his works for children, for his poem "The Listeners", and for his psychological horror short fiction, including "Seaton's Aunt" and "All Hallows". In 1921, his novel Memoirs of a Midget won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and his post-war Collected Stories for Children won the 1947 Carnegie Medal for British children's books.

Life
De la Mare was born at 83, Maryon Road, Charlton, then in the county of Kent but now part of the Royal Borough of Greenwich. He was partly descended from a family of French Huguenot silk merchants through his father, James Edward de la Mare (1811–1877), a principal at the Bank of England; his mother was James's second wife, Lucy Sophia (1838–1920), daughter of a Scottish naval surgeon and author, Dr Colin Arrott Browning. (The suggestion that Lucy was related to the poet Robert Browning has been found to be incorrect.) He had two brothers, Francis Arthur Edward and James Herbert, and four sisters, Florence Mary, Constance Eliza, Ethel (who died in infancy) and Ada Mary. De la Mare preferred to be known as "Jack" to his family and friends, as he disliked the name Walter.

De la Mare was educated at St Paul's Cathedral School, then worked from 1890 to 1908 in the statistics department of the London office of Standard Oil. He left the company after Sir Henry Newbolt arranged for him to receive a Civil List pension so that he could concentrate on writing.

In 1892 de la Mare joined the Esperanza Amateur Dramatics Club, where he met and fell in love with (Constance) Elfrida Ingpen, the leading lady, who was ten years older than him. Her father, William Alfred Ingpen, was Clerk to the Insolvent Debtors Court and Clerk of the Rules. De la Mare and Elfrida were married on 4 August 1899, and they went on to have four children: Richard Herbert Ingpen, Colin, Florence and Lucy Elfrida. The family lived in Beckenham and Anerley from 1899 till 1924. The home in Anerley in South London was the scene of many parties, notable for imaginative games of charades.

From 1925 to 1939, de la Mare lived at Hill House, Taplow.

On 7 September 1929, his daughter, Janette de la Mare married Donald John Ringwood in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, England.

In 1940 Elfrida de la Mare was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. She spent the rest of her life as an invalid and died in 1943.

From 1940 until his death de la Mare lived in South End House, Montpelier Row, Twickenham, on the same street on which Alfred, Lord Tennyson, had lived. De la Mare won the annual Carnegie Medal, from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject, for his Collected Stories for Children (Faber and Faber, 1947). It was the first collection to win the award.

De la Mare suffered from a coronary thrombosis in 1947 and died of another in 1956. He spent his final year mostly bedridden, being cared for by a nurse whom he loved but never had a physical relationship with. His ashes are buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, where he had once been a choirboy.

Come Hither
Come Hither is an anthology edited by de la Mare, mostly of poems, but with some prose. It has a frame story and can be read on several levels. It was first published in 1923 and was a success; further editions have followed. It includes a selection of poems by the leading Georgian poets (from de la Mare's perspective).

Supernaturalism
De la Mare was, notably, a writer of ghost stories. His collections Eight Tales, The Riddle and Other Stories, The Connoisseur and Other Stories, On the Edge and The Wind Blows Over each contain several ghost stories.

De la Mare's supernatural horror writings were favourites of H. P. Lovecraft, who in his comprehensive study Supernatural Horror in Literature said that "[de la Mare] is able to put into his occasional fear-studies a keen potency which only a rare master can achieve". Lovecraft singled out for praise de la Mare's short stories "Seaton's Aunt", "The Tree", "Out of the Deep", "Mr Kempe", "A Recluse" and "All Hallows", along with his novel The Return.

Gary William Crawford has described de la Mare's supernatural fiction for adults as being "among the finest to appear in the first half of this century", whilst noting the disparity between the high quality and low quantity of de la Mare's mature horror stories. Other notable de la Mare ghost/horror stories are "A:B:O", "Crewe", "The Green Room" and "Winter".

A number of later writers of supernatural fiction, including Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, David A. McIntee and Reggie Oliver, have cited de la Mare's ghost stories as inspirational. The horror scholar S. T. Joshi has said that de la Mare's supernatural fiction "should always have an audience that will shudder apprehensively at its horror and be moved to somber reflection by its pensive philosophy".

Children's literature
For children de la Mare wrote the fairy tale The Three Mulla Mulgars (1910, later retitled The Three Royal Monkeys), praised by the literary historian Julia Briggs as a "neglected masterpiece" and by the critic Brian Stableford as a "classic animal fantasy". Richard Adams described it as his favourite novel.

Joan Aiken cited some of de la Mare's short stories, such as "The Almond Tree" and "Sambo and the Snow Mountains", for their sometimes unexplained quality, which she also employed in her own work.

Theory of imagination
De la Mare described two distinct "types" of imagination – although "aspects" might be a better term: the childlike and the boylike. It was at the border between the two that Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest of the great poets lay.

De la Mare opined that all children fall into the category of having a childlike imagination at first, which is usually replaced at some point in their lives. He explained in the lecture "Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination" that children "are not bound in by their groping senses. Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons. [...] They are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again and again out of the noise and fever of existence and into a waking vision." His biographer Doris Ross McCrosson summarises this passage, "Children are, in short, visionaries." This visionary view of life can be seen as either vital creativity and ingenuity, or fatal disconnection from reality (or, in a limited sense, both).

The increasing intrusions of the external world upon the mind, however, frighten the childlike imagination, which "retires like a shocked snail into its shell". From then onward the boyish imagination flourishes, the "intellectual, analytical type".

By adulthood (de la Mare proposed), the childlike imagination has either retreated forever or grown bold enough to face the real world. Thus emerge the two extremes of the spectrum of adult minds: logical and deductive or intuitive and inductive. For de la Mare, "[t]he one knows that beauty is truth, the other reveals that truth is beauty." Yet another way he puts it is that the visionary's source of poetry is within, while the intellectual's sources are without – external – in "action, knowledge of things, and experience" (McCrosson's phrasing). De la Mare hastens to add that this does not make the intellectual's poetry any less good, but it is clear where his own preference lies.

Novels

 * Henry Brocken (1904)
 * The Three Mulla Mulgars (1910) (edition illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop [1919]), also published as The Three Royal Monkeys (children's novel)
 * The Return (1910; revised edition 1922; second revised edition 1945)
 * Memoirs of a Midget (1921)
 * Mr Bumps and His Monkey (1942) (illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop)

Short story collections

 * The Riddle and Other Stories (1923): "The Almond Tree", "The Count's Courtship", "The Looking-Glass", "Miss Duveen", "Selina's Parable", "Seaton's Aunt", "The Bird of Travel", "The Bowl", "The Three Friends", "Lispet", "Lispet and Vaine", "The Tree", "Out of the Deep", "The Creatures", "The Riddle", "The Vats"
 * Ding Dong Bell (1924): "Lichen", "Benighted", "Strangers and Pilgrims", "Winter"
 * Broomsticks and Other Tales (1925): "Pigtails, Ltd.", "The Dutch Cheese", "Miss Jemima", "The Thief", "Broomsticks", "Lucy", "A Nose", "The Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire", "The Lovely Myfanwy", "Maria-Fly", "Visitors"
 * The Connoisseur and Other Stories (1926): "Mr Kempe", "Missing", "The Connoisseur". "Disillusioned", "The Nap", "Pretty Poll", "All Hallows", "The Wharf", "The Lost Track"
 * On the Edge (1930): "A Recluse", "Willows", "Crewe", "At First Sight", "The Green Room", "The Orgy", "An Idyll", "The Picnic", "An Ideal Craftsman"
 * The Dutch Cheese (1931) (editions illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop [1931] and Irene Hawkins [1947]) (children's stories)
 * The Lord Fish (1933), illustrated by Rex Whistler (children's stories)
 * The Walter de la Mare Omnibus (1933)
 * The Wind Blows Over (1936): "What Dreams May Come", "Cape Race", "Physic", "The Talisman", "In the Forest", "A Froward Child", "Miss Miller", "The House", "A Revenant", "A Nest of Singing-Birds", "The Trumpet"
 * The Nap and Other Stories (1936)
 * Stories, Essays and Poems (1938)
 * The Picnic and Other Stories (1941)
 * The Best Stories of Walter de la Mare (1942)
 * The Scarecrow and Other Stories (1945)
 * Collected Stories for Children (1947) (editions illustrated by Irene Hawkins [1947] and Robin Jacques [1957])
 * A Beginning and Other Stories (1955): "Odd Shop", "Music", "The Stranger", "Neighbours", "The Princess", "The Guardian", "The Face", "The Cartouche", "The Picture", "The Quincunx", "An Anniversary", "Bad Company", "A Beginning"
 * Eight Tales (1971)
 * Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1895–1926 (1996): Collection comprising the contents of The Riddle and Other Stories, Ding Dong Bell and The Connoisseur and Other Stories, as well as "Kismet", "The Hangman Luck", "A Mote", "The Village of Old Age", "The Moon's Miracle", "The Giant", "De Mortuis", "The Rejection of the Rector", "The Match-Maker", "The Budget", "The Pear-Tree", "Leap Year", "Promise at Dusk", "Two Days in Town"
 * Walter de la Mare, Short Stories 1927–1956 (2000): Collection comprising the contents of On the Edge, The Wind Blows Over and A Beginning and Other Stories, as well as "The Lynx", "A Sort of Interview", "The Miller's Tale", "A:B:O.", "The Orgy: An Idyll, Part II", "Late", "Pig", "Dr Iggatt"
 * Walter de la Mare, Short Stories for Children (2006)

Poetry collections
Six poems were published by Faber and Faber as part of the Ariel Poems, for both series. They were the following:
 * Songs of Childhood (1902)
 * Poems (1906)
 * The Listeners (1912)
 * Peacock Pie (1913) (editions illustrated by W. Heath Robinson [1916], Claud Lovat Fraser [1924], Rowland Emett [1941] and Edward Ardizzone [1946])
 * The Sunken Garden and Other Poems (1917)
 * Motley and Other Poems (1918)
 * The Veil and Other Poems (1921)
 * Down-Adown-Derry: A Book of Fairy Poems (1922) (illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop)
 * A Child's Day: A Book of Rhymes (1924) (illustrated by Winifred Bromhall)
 * Selected Poems by Walter de la Mare (1927, 1931)
 * Stuff and Nonsense and So On (1927) (editions illustrated by Bold [1927] and Margaret Wolpe [1946])
 * This Year: Next Year (1937) (illustrated by Harold Jones)
 * Bells and Grass (1941) (editions illustrated by Rowland Emett [1941] and Dorothy P. Lathrop [1942])
 * Time Passes and Other Poems (1942)
 * Inward Companion (1950)
 * O Lovely England (1952)
 * Walter de la Mare: The Complete Poems, ed. Giles de la Mare (1969)
 * Ariel Poems
 * Alone (1927)
 * Self to Self (1928)
 * The Snowdrop (1929)
 * News (1930)
 * To Lucy (1931)
 * The Winnowing Dream (1954)

Plays

 * Crossings: A Fairy Play (1921) (book illustrated by Dorothy P. Lathrop (1923))

Nonfiction

 * Some Women Novelists of the 'Seventies (1929)
 * Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe (1930)
 * Lewis Carroll (1930)
 * The Early Novels of Wilkie Collins (1932)

Anthologies edited

 * Come Hither (1923; new and revised edition, 1928; third edition, reset and printed from new plates, 1957)
 * Tom Tiddler's Ground (1931; named after the children's game)
 * Early One Morning, in the Spring: Chapters on Children and on Childhood As It Is Revealed in Particular in Early Memories and in Early Writings (1935)
 * Behold, This Dreamer!: Of Reverie, Night, Sleep, Dream, Love-Dreams, Nightmare, Death, the Unconscious, the Imagination, Divination, the Artist, and Kindred Subjects (1939)
 * Love (1943)

References in books
C. K. Scott Moncrieff, in translating Marcel Proust's seven-volume work Remembrance of Things Past, used the last line of de la Mare's poem "The Ghost" as the title of the sixth volume, The Sweet Cheat Gone (French: Albertine Disparu and La Fugitive).

In 1944 Faber and Faber and one of de la Mare's friends, a certain Dr Bett, arranged to secretly produce a tribute for his 75th birthday. This publication was a collaborative effort involving many admirers of Walter de la Mare's work, and included individual pieces by a variety of authors, including V. Sackville-West, J. B. Priestley, T. S. Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon, Lord Dunsany, and Henry Williamson.

Richard Adams's debut novel Watership Down (1972) uses several of de la Mare's poems as epigraphs.

De la Mare's play Crossings has an important role in Robertson Davies's novel The Manticore. In 1944, when the protagonist David Staunton is sixteen, de la Mare's play is produced by the pupils of his sister's school in Toronto. Staunton falls deeply in love with the girl playing the main role, a first love that has a profound effect on the rest of his life.

Symposium by Muriel Spark quotes de la Mare's poem "Fare Well": "Look thy last on all things lovely / Every hour.".

References in music
Benjamin Britten set several of de la Mare's verses to music: de la Mare's version of the traditional song "Levy-Dew" in 1934, and five others, which were then collected in Tit for Tat.

Theodore Chanler used texts from de la Mare's story "Benighted" for his song cycle 8 Epitaphs.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Walter de la Mare


text:
Santa Compaña

The Santa Compaña (Spanish for "Holy Company") is a deep-rooted mythical belief in rural northwest of Iberia: Galicia, Asturias (Spain) and Northern Portugal. It is the Iberian version of the pan-European mythical motif known as the Wild Hunt.

It is also known under the names of "Estadea", "Estantiga'" (estantigua in Spanish, from Latin hostis antiquus, meaning "ancient host"), "Rolda", "As da nuite" (The Night Ones), "Pantalla", "Avisóns", "Pantaruxada"; all of which are terms that denote the presence of the dead in the world of the living. In Asturias it's prominently well-known as Güestia, which is related to the Asturian word "güeste" (host in English language).

Description
Although many different versions of the Santa Compaña can be found, the common belief is that of a procession of the dead (or a procession of souls that are in torment) that wander through the village paths of a parish beginning at midnight wearing white, hooded cloaks.

The procession is led by a living person (usually a parishioner of a particular church) carrying a cross or a cauldron of holy water (sometimes they carry both), followed by several of the souls of the dead holding lit candles. Although these souls are not always seen, the popular legend claims that the scent of melted wax can be detected on the breeze as they pass to warn of their presence. The living leader of the procession is compelled by a supernatural force (in this case, a mysterious curse) to go out every night and walk by towns, villages and forests; but will have no recollection of it the following day. By the same token, because the living person is unaware of what he/she is doing, there is no chance that they will renounce their duty in leading the Santa Compaña, as the curse that forces them to lead the procession puts them into a trance every midnight. The procession ends before daybreak and the living leader of the procession returns to their bed with no memory of what occurred, but will awake the next morning still weary, as though they did not get adequate rest. This person can only be freed of the curse if they come across another person during the procession to carry the cross or the cauldron (or both), as the curse will be passed onto that person. It is said that if the curse leader does not pass the curse onto another person in a matter of weeks, he/she will eventually grow pale, thin and sickly and eventually die, following which the curse will be unknowingly passed onto another parishioner.

To avoid receiving the curse, the person who sees the Santa Compaña pass by must quickly draw "Solomon's Circle" on the ground using chalk (a circle with Seal of Solomon inside a six-pointed star, which can be changed into a cross) and enter it, or lie face-down until the procession passes. Another way to evade the Santa Compaña is to tie a black cat in the middle of the Santa Compaña's path and quickly run away from it, or to perform diverse warding symbols with both hands such as the horn gesture (extending the index and little fingers with the rest of the fingers folded inwards) or the fig sign (which consists of closing the fist and putting the thumb between the index and middle fingers). The person leading the procession can be a man or a woman—this depends on whether the patron saint of the parish is male or female. The Santa Compaña's purpose is to announce death and its primary mission is to visit the homes where death is due.

According to popular belief, apart from the living procession leader, the Santa Compaña can't be seen but can be felt, eliciting a shiver or shudder as it passes, accompanied with a sensation of intense danger. It is also believed that those who can see the Santa Compaña are people who, when baptised by the priest of their parish, were mistakenly anointed with holy oil for the sick instead of chrism. In other versions, it is believed that they are people with special sensibilities who are able to see hidden things. Some people are unable to see the souls in the procession but can see the light of their candles, floating in the air like ignis fatuus or will-o'-the-wisp (similar to the "spook lights" in the rural USA or "jack o'lantern" in the rural UK) as they move along their path.

Origins
It may be related to Odin's Wild Hunt, or the Welsh Hounds of Annwn and the Breton Celtic westward processions of the dead to the End of the World. It is equivalent to the Irish Banshee and Breton Ankou.

title: Santa Compaña


text:
Talk:List of Bulgarian monarchs

Untitled
I have a disk full of information on the following Bulgar monarchs. Some of it is more reliable than others, however:

Kardarm (Nationalist, unreliable) Krum (researched in diffrent texts, reliable) Omortag (researched in different texts, mostly reliable) Presian (nationalist, unreliable) Boris I (fully reliable. Good authorities and a decent variety of them) Vladimir (as above, part of the Boris I story) Simeon I (Fairly reliable. Famous Tsar, a lot of info) Peter I (only one text - moderately reliable) Boris II (as above - PS: Roman was a castrated exile, never a Tsar - he renounced his untenable claims to Samuel) Samuel (fully reliable. A ton of various translated Byzantine and English texts) Gabriel Radomir and Ivan Alexander - connected to Samuel (should be reliable) Peter II and Ivan Asen II (Unreliable) Kaloyan (V. reliable. Most different accounts concur on his reign) Ivan Asen II (as above) Ivaljo (nationalist, unreliable) Teodor Svetoslav (as above) Michael Sisman (fairly reliable - about 3 varying texts) Ivan Alexander (reliable) Ivan Sisman (as above) Ivan Stratsimir (as above)

I won't commit them to mail, unless requested to do so. If you want them, please open spaces on the list for me to edit

Simon

 * The Bulgar monarchs can be changed into links by putting them in between 's . For instance, Boris I of Bulgaria. kt2 18:52 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Daccos (talk) 15:40, 19 December 2007 (UTC)==List of Bulgarian tsars cut from Tsar article ==

Please check if this article misses something from the list below. After checkin is done, please remove the list (or the verified part), so that other editors will not be bothered (but leave this notice, for history). Mikkalai 18:30, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Tsar was the title of the rulers of Bulgaria in 893 - 1014, 1085 - 1396 and 1908 - 1946

Dulo clan
 * Boris I Michael (852-889)
 * Vladimir of Bulgaria (889-893)
 * Simeon I of Bulgaria (Simeon the Great) (893-May 27 927)
 * Peter I of Bulgaria (927-969)
 * Boris II of Bulgaria (969-972)
 * Roman or Romanus (972-976)

House of Comitopuli (976-1018)
 * Samuil (976-1014)
 * Gavril Radomir of Bulgaria (October 1014 - August 1015)
 * Ivan Vladislav of Bulgaria (1015-1018)

House of Asen (the Asenites) (1186-1277, 1279-1280) In the Asenites period the country (region) was called "the Roumanian-Bulgarian empire" and had expanded it's territory to the north of Danube till the Carpathian mountains .Anyway the name of "Kaloian" is typically roumanian (Caloian-in roumanian)and the complete name is Ionut (little John- in english)Caloian
 * joint reign of Teodor (I) Peter (II) (1186-1197) and Ivan Asen I of Bulgaria (1186-1196)
 * Kaloyan (1197-1207)
 * Boril of Bulgaria (1207-1218)
 * Ivan Asen II of Bulgaria (1218-1241)
 * Kaliman I of Bulgaria (1241-1246)
 * Michael II Asen of Bulgaria (1246-1256/1257)
 * Kaliman II of Bulgaria (1256/1257)
 * Mico (1256/1257)
 * Constantine Tikh of Bulgaria (1257-1277)
 * Ivan Asen III of Bulgaria (1279-1280)
 * Ivailo the Swineherd (1277-1279)

House of Terter (1280-1292, 1300-1323)
 * George I of Bulgaria (1280-1292)
 * Teodor II Svetoslav (1300-1322)
 * George II of Bulgaria (1322-1323)

 * Smilets of Bulgaria (1292-1298)

House of Shishman (1323-1396)
 * Michael III Shishman (1323-1330)
 * Ivan Stephen of Bulgaria(1330-1331)
 * Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria (1331-1371)
 * Ivan Shishman of Bulgaria (1371-1393)
 * Ivan Stratsimir of Bulgaria (1393-1396)

House of Battenberg (1879-1886)

 * Alexander I Joseph (April 4 1879 - September 7 1886)

House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1887-1946)
 * Ferdinand of Bulgaria (1887-1918)
 * Boris III (1918-1943)
 * Simeon II (1943-1946)

I think I saw something absolutely ridiculous. When clicking on Chaka the hyperlink lead me to Shaka Zulu :):):) ha ha ha. I think that this Chaka mentioned here is a Mongol, a potential pretender for the throne of Toktu, rather than a zulu. I don`t know how to delete this link but it is a shame for wikipaedi to have such silly mistakes :):)

Has anyone ever seen any evidences for the existence of the title Khan??? I'll be more than happy to see any. --Shisharki 05:10, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Who is a tsar and who is a khan, a prince, a king?
There is a great confusion with the titles of Bulgarian rulers, who were khans, princes, kings and tsars (emperors). The confusion comes from the Bulgarian tradition, including in folklore, to call any monarch a tsar. The title of tsar comes from the name of Caesar and means "emperor". The first Bulgarian (self-proclaimed) tsar is Simeon I the Great, while the first tsar recognized internationally (that is, by Byzantium) as such (emperor) is Peter I, Simeon's son. The rulers of the Third Bulgarian state were tsars in name only, and were internationally recognized just as kings. They are Ferdinand, Boris III and Simeon II of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Prince Alexander Battenberg, mentioned here as "tsar", was just a prince. Bulgaria was a tributary principality of the Ottoman Empire in the period 1878/9-1908. 85.11.148.52 08:22, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

There never were khans, princes or kings of Bulgaria. Khan was obviously invented in 20 century; no ruler has been a prince, neither a king. The Bulgarian word for king is KRAL (КРАЛ) The title used before Boris I is actually unknown. In the Nominalia the tile used is KNAZ. This suspiciously resembles the believed to be slavic KNJAZ. Boris I and his elder son Vladimir were both KNJAZes. After that Simeon I pronounced himself a Tsar (Цар).

The title “tsar” is not equal to emperor. It is higher then king but it is lower then emperor. In the beginning equal to king was the title knjaz. Battenberg was Knjaz not a Prince. In the beginning knjaz was the offical title of Ferdinand until the independence - 6.09.1908. Since then he became Tsar.

 * The nominalia use the Slavic "knjaz". There's some evidence that suggests that "khan" was used, as described in the Bulgars article. For tsar/emperor, see that article; it meant "emperor" in the middle ages and "king" in the 20the century. Knjaz is practically the same as prince. --91.148.159.4 00:05, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Image copyright problem with Image:Simeonofbulgaria.jpg
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 * That there is a non-free use rationale on the image's description page for the use in this article.
 * That this article is linked to from the image description page.

This is an automated notice by FairuseBot. For assistance on the image use policy, see Media copyright questions. --00:18, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Ajjar
What i about Ajjar of Bulgaria? He is mentioned as the successor of Tervel in the navbox at the bototom of the article, but I can not find his name nor here nor in the Template about Bulgarian monarchs. What was his rule? May he be listed here as a disputed khan or like a khan? Waht is about him? --Ksanyi (talk) 09:51, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
 * As far as I'm aware with Ajjar he's more a myth than a real ruler. The only source supporting his presence is "Bahši Iman, Džagfar Tarihy, vol. III, Orenburg 1997.". I don't think that he should be included in the navbox, since his presence is a minority view point, not widely accepted. --StanProg (talk) 23:51, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Constantine II of Bulgaria
Why isn't Constantine II of Bulgaria on the list? --  Jack of Oz   [your turn]  00:36, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

Malasian names
Guys//i've found one thing..all bulgar khans names is a usual names in Malasia/Indonesia ..facebook will help u //exmpl https://www.facebook.com/irnik.heriawati — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.238.127.38 (talk) 02:26, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
 * :))) it's a pretty much colorful subject. bulgarian empire had tatar rulers. slavic rulers. armenian rulers. and even german rulers. that was pretty much the same with the population, which they try to present as monolithic.89.205.59.148 (talk) 18:55, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
 * not Tatar, they came to Europe much later (13th-14th century) and were of a different branch of Turkic people. Bulgars were more or less close to Huns and entered Europe with a much earlier migration, in the 4th-5th century 89.25.21.237 (talk) 15:42, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

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title: Talk:List of Bulgarian monarchs


text:
Imad al-Din Zengi

Imad al-Din Zengi (عماد الدین زنكي; c. 1085 – 14 September 1146), also romanized as Zangi, Zengui, Zenki, and Zanki, was a Turkoman atabeg of the Seljuk Empire, who ruled Mosul, Aleppo, Hama, and, later, Edessa. He was the namesake and founder of the Zengid dynasty of atabegs.

Early life
Zengi's father, Aq Sunqur al-Hajib, governor of Aleppo under Malik-Shah I, was beheaded by Tutush I for treason in 1094. At the time, Zengi was about 10 years old and was brought up by Kerbogha, the governor of Mosul. Zengi then served in the military of the Governors of Mosul, first under Jawali Saqawa (1106-1109), then Mawdud (1109-1113), and from 1114, under Aqsunqur al-Bursuqi.

Zengi remained in Mosul until 1118, when he entered into the service of the new Seljuk ruler Mahmūd (1118-1119). Upon Sanjar's accession in 1119, Zengid remained loyal to Mahmūd, who became ruler of the Iraqi Seljuk Sultānate (1119-1131).

Seljuk Governor of Iraq
The region of Mesopotamia was under the control of the Seljuk Empire from 1055 to 1135, since the Oghuz Turk Tughril Beg had expelled the Shiite Buyid dynasty. Tughril Beg was the first Seljuk ruler to style himself Sultan and Protector of the Abbasid Caliphate. Mesopotamia remained under the control of the Great Seljuks during the reign of Muhammad I Tapar (1082–1118 CE), but from 1119, his 14 years old son Mahmud II (1118-1131) was restricted to the only rule of Iraq, while Sanjar took control of the rest of the Empire.

Wishing to contain the Arab Banu Mazyad leader Dubays ibn Sadaqa, in 1122 Mahmūd II ordered a military expedition from Mosul to southern Iraq, commanded by Zengi and Altun-Tash al-Aburi under the orders of Aqsunqur al-Bursuqi. Zengi, for whom this was the first major military command, garrisoned his troops around Wasit, and was granted Governorship of the region of Wasit as an ıqta. In alliance with the troops of the Caliphate, they defeated Dubays at the Battle of Mubarraqiyya in 1123. Zengi then received in addition to his previous responsibilities the Military Governorship of Basra in 1124.

In order to counter the ambitions of Abbasid Caliph al-Mustarshid (1118-1135), who wanted to acquire world dominance, the Seljuks led by Mahmud II now waged a campaign against him. With some decisive leadership from Zengi, the Seljuks managed to take control of Baghdad and the Caliphate, pillaging the Caliph's palace. The Caliph sued for peace and had to pay a huge ramson. In addition to his possessions in Wasit and Basra, Zengi was promoted and received the Governorship for Baghdad in April 1126, receiveing the title of shihna effectively putting him in control of the whole of Seljuk Iraq. In 1227, following the murder of Aqsunqur al-Bursuqi, Zengi was named Governor of Mosul, where the Atabegdom of Mosul was formed.

Atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo
Following the death in 1128 of Toghtekin, atabeg of Damascus, a power vacuum threatened to open Syria to renewed Crusader aggression. Zengi became atabeg of Mosul in 1127 and of Aleppo in 1128, uniting the two cities under his personal rule, and was formally invested as their ruler by the Seljuk Sultan Mahmud II. Zengi had supported the young sultan against his rival, the caliph al-Mustarshid.

Zengi against Damascus
In 1130 Zengi allied with Taj al-Mulk Buri of Damascus against the Crusaders, but this was only a ruse to extend his power; he had Buri's son taken prisoner and seized Hama from him. Zengi also besieged Homs, the governor of which was accompanying him at the time, but could not capture it, so he returned to Mosul, where Buri's son and the other prisoners from Damascus were ransomed for 50,000 dinars. The next year, Zengi agreed to return the 50,000 dinars if Buri would deliver to him Dubais ibn Sadaqa, emir of al-Hilla in Iraq, who had fled to Damascus to escape al-Mustarshid. When an ambassador from the caliph arrived to bring Dubais back, Zengi attacked him and killed some of his retinue; the ambassador returned to Baghdad without Dubais.

Mahmud II died in 1131, setting off a war for the succession. As the Seljuk princes were occupied fighting one another in Persia, Zengi marched on Baghdad to add it to his dominions. He was defeated by the caliph's troops, however, and only escaped thanks to the help of the governor of Tikrit, Najm ad-Din Ayyub, future father of Saladin. Several years later, Zengi would reward the governor with a position in his army, paving the way for Saladin's brilliant career.

In 1134 Zengi became involved in Artuqid affairs, allying with the emir Timurtash (son of Ilghazi) against Timurtash's cousin Rukn al-Dawla Da'ud. Zengi's real desires, however, lay to the south, in Damascus. In 1135 Zengi received an appeal for help from Shams ul-Mulk Isma'il, who had succeeded his father Buri as emir of Damascus, and who was in fear for his life from his own citizenry, who considered him a cruel tyrant. Ismail was willing to surrender the city to Zengi in order to restore peace. None of Isma'il's family or advisors wanted this, however, and Isma'il was murdered by his own mother, Zumurrud, to prevent him from turning over the city to Zengi's control. Isma'il was succeeded by his brother Shihab al-Din Mahmud.

Zengi was not discouraged by this turn of events and arrived at Damascus anyway, still intending to seize it. The siege lasted for some time with no success on Zengi's part, so a truce was made and Shahib al-Din's brother Bahram-Shah was given as a hostage. At the same time, news of the siege had reached the caliph and Baghdad, and a messenger was sent with orders for Zengi to leave Damascus and take control of the governance of Iraq. The messenger was ignored, but Zengi gave up the siege, as per the terms of the truce with Shihab al-Din. On the way back to Aleppo, Zengi besieged Homs, whose governor had angered him, and Shihab al-Din responded to the city's call for help by sending Mu'in al-Din Unur to govern it.

War against Crusaders and Byzantine
In 1137 Imad-ud-din Zengi besieged Homs again, but Mu'in al-Din unur successfully defended it. In response, Damascus allied with the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem against him.

In the Battle of Ba'rin, also known as Battle of Montferrand) in 1137, a Crusader force commanded by King Fulk of Jerusalem was scattered and defeated by Zengi, the atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo. This setback resulted in the permanent loss of the Crusader castle of Montferrand in Baarin. Crusader King Fulk of Jerusalem agreed to surrender and was allowed to flee with his surviving troops.

War against Byzantine-Crusader Alliance
Zengi, realizing that this new expedition against Damascus was bound to fail, made peace with Shahib al-Din, just in time to be confronted at Aleppo by an army sent by the Byzantine Emperor John II Comnenus. The Emperor had recently brought the Crusader Principality of Antioch under Byzantine control, and had allied himself with Joscelin II of Edessa and Raymond of Antioch. Facing a combined Byzantine/Crusader threat, Zengi mobilized his forces and recruited assistance from other Muslim leaders. In April 1138 the armies of the Byzantine emperor and the Crusader princes laid siege to Shaizar, but they were turned back by Zengi's forces a month later.

Siege of Baalbek
In May 1138 Zengi came to an agreement with Damascus. He married Zumurrud Khatun, the same woman who had murdered her son Ismail, and received Homs as her dowry. In July 1139 Zumurrud's surviving son, Shihab al-Din, was assassinated, and Zengi marched on Damascus to take possession of the city. The Damascenes, united under Mu'in al-Din Unur, acting as regent for Shihab al-Din's successor Jamal al-Din, once again allied with Jerusalem to repel Zengi. Zengi also besieged Jamal al-Din's former possession of Baalbek, and Mu'in al-Din was in charge of its defenses as well. Zengi obtained its surrender in response to a promise of safe passage; he did not honor it, ordering that the defenders be crucified. Unlike Saladin at Jerusalem in 1187, Zengi did not keep his word to protect his captives at Baalbek in 1139. According to Ibn al-‘Adim, Zengi "had sworn to the people of the citadel with strong oaths and on the Qur’an and divorcing (his wives). When they came down from the citadel he betrayed them, flayed its governor and hanged the rest.”  He granted the territory to his lieutenant Najm al-Din Ayyub, father of Saladin. After Zengi abandoned his siege of Damascus, Jamal al-Din died of a disease and was succeeded by his son Mujir al-Din, with Mu'in al-Din remaining as regent.

Expansion and Conflict with Armenia
Mu'in al-Din signed a new peace treaty with Jerusalem for their mutual protection against Zengi. While Mu'in al-Din and the crusaders joined together to besiege Banias in 1140, Zengi once more laid siege to Damascus, but quickly abandoned it again. There were no major engagements between the crusaders, Damascus, and Zengi for the next few years, but Zengi in the meantime campaigned in the north and captured Ashib and the Armenian fortress of Hizan.

Conquest of Edessa
In 1144, Zengi began the siege of Edessa against the crusader County of Edessa, one of the four original crusader states established after the First Crusade, and captured it on December 24, 1144, after a siege of four months. County of Edessa was the first crusader state to be created and was also the first to fall. This event led to the Second Crusade, and later Muslim chroniclers noted it as the start of the jihad against the Crusader states.

Death and legacy
Zengi continued his attempts to take Damascus in 1145, but he was assassinated by a Frankish slave named Yarankash in September 1146, after the atabeg drunkenly threatened him with punishment for drinking from his goblet.

According to Ibn 'al-Adim: "The Atebeg was violent, powerful, awe-inspiring and liable to attack suddenly… When he rode, the troops use to walk behind him as if they were between two threads, out of fear they would trample over crops, and nobody out of fear dared to trample on a single stem (of them) nor march his horse on them… If anyone transgressed, he was crucified. He (Zengi) used to say: 'It does not happen that there is more than one tyrant (meaning himself) at one time.'" Zengi was the founder of the eponymous Zengid dynasty. In Mosul he was succeeded by his eldest son Sayf al-Din Ghazi I, and in Aleppo he was succeeded by his second son Nur al-Din. When Sayf died in 1149, he was succeeded in Mosul by a third son Qutb al-Din Mawdud.

title: Imad al-Din Zengi


text:
The Grand Old Duke of York

"The Grand Old Duke of York" (also sung as The Noble Duke of York) is an English children's nursery rhyme, often performed as an action song. The eponymous duke has been argued to be a number of the bearers of that title, particularly Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany (1763–1827), and its lyrics (where the duke marches ten thousand soldiers up and down a hill for no apparent reason) have become proverbial for futile action. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 742.

"The Grand Old Duke of York" is also sung to the tune of "A-Hunting We Will Go".

Words
A modern version is:

Oh, the grand old Duke of York, He had ten thousand men; He marched them up to the top of the hill, And he marched them down again.

When they were up, they were up, And when they were down, they were down, And when they were only halfway up, They were neither up nor down.

Origins
Like many popular nursery rhymes the origins of the song have been much debated and remain unclear. Unusually the rhyme clearly refers to a historical person and debates have tended to circulate around identifying which Duke is being referred to in the lyrics. The lyrics were not printed in their modern form until relatively recently, in Arthur Rackham's Mother Goose in 1913. Prior to that a number of alternatives have been found including a note that in Warwickshire in 1892 the song was sung of both the Duke of York and the King of France; from 1894 that it was sung of Napoleon. The oldest version of the song that survives is from 1642, under the title 'Old Tarlton's song', attributed to the stage clown Richard Tarlton (1530–1588) with the lyrics:

The King of France with forty thousand men, Came up a hill and so came downe againe.

As a result, the argument has been made that it may have been a common satirical verse that was adapted as appropriate and, because it was recorded in roughly the modern form, has become fixed on the Duke of York. Candidates for the duke in question include:

 * Richard, Duke of York (1411–1460), who was defeated at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460. Richard's army, some 8,000 strong, was awaiting reinforcements at Sandal Castle in Wakefield (the castle was built on top of a Norman motte). He was surrounded by Lancastrian forces some three times that number, but chose to sally forth to fight. Richard died in a pitched battle at Wakefield Green, together with between one third and one half of his army.
 * James II (1633–1701), formerly Duke of York, who in 1688 marched his troops to Salisbury Plain to resist the invasion from his son-in-law William of Orange, only to retreat and disperse them as his support began to evaporate.
 * The most common attribution is to Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany (1763–1827), the second son of King George III and Commander-in-Chief of the British Army during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. His most significant field command was during the Flanders Campaign of 1793–94. Despite the British troops having some success against the French, in the summer of 1794 the Duke was obliged to retreat into the Netherlands and he was subsequently recalled to England. Flanders having something of a reputation for being flat, the specific location of the "hill" in the nursery rhyme has been suggested to be the town of Cassel, which is built on a hill which rises 176 metres (about 570 feet) above the flat lands of French Flanders in northern France.

Apart from the ducal title in the song and the events of their lives there is no external evidence to link the rhyme to any of these candidates.

Dutch version
A Dutch adaptation of the song replaces the Duke of York with Maurice, Prince of Orange (1567–1625), whose practice of training mercenaries (completely new and mocked at first) became famous after his success in war. It is not known when the British song crossed the North Sea, but it is now well known within the Dutch scouting movement.

In popular culture
In February 2022, parodies of the nursery rhyme referencing Prince Andrew, Duke of York's reported £12 million out-of-court settlement with Virginia Giuffre had entered circulation. A version reported in the media contained the lyrics:

The grand old Duke of York, he had twelve million quid.

He gave it to someone he never met, for something he never did.

Later in May, the black comedy musician Kunt and the Gang released the satirical single "Prince Andrew Is a Sweaty Nonce" about the controversy surrounding his 2019 interview with Emily Maitlis on Newsnight. The single's verses directly interpolate the nursery rhyme.

title: The Grand Old Duke of York


text:
Talk:The Grand Old Duke of York

Taken from my own knowledge, but dates and battle scenes pinpointed by The Oxford Companion to British History (Ed by John Cannon, 2002)

Simon

Wakefield suggests that the rhythm refers to a much older battle in 1460 at Wakefield, where Richard, Duke of York (father of Edward IV of England was defeated. Anyone know which is right? Timrollpickering 00:34, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * An anon has added that Richard, Duke of York is the same Richard of York as in the rainbow mnemonic, ROYGBIV ("Richard of York gave battle in vain"). I must admit that I had thought that ROYGIV referred to Richard III, but I can see that the other Richard of York is also a possibility.  Can anyone help sort this out?  -- ALoan (Talk) 15:00, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

Additional lyrics
Can't claim a source, however we've learned this to be the second verse of the song:

''He marched them to the left.

''He marched them to the right.

''And then he marched them upside down,

Oh what a funny sight!

theeverlastingblogspot.com adds from her childhood

''The Grand Old Duke of York

Then had five hundred men

He marched them in and out of the woods

And he marched them in again

And some turned to the left

And some turned to the right

And some marched all about the woods

'Till day turned into night

The Grand Old Duke of York

His men were half asleep

He marched them through a river but The river was too deep

And some of them did sink

And some of them did swim

And some did soundly shake his hand

And bid farewell to him

The Grand Old Duke of York

Had only twenty men

Fifteen marching through a farm

Were chased off by a hen

And two were lost in a barn

And two were lost in a sty

And the only soldier that was left

Ran off and waved good-bye!

The Grand Old Duke of York

He found himself alone

He sat right down on top of a drum

And there did weep and moan

And first he shed his sword

And then he shed his gun

And then he wished that all his travels

Never had begun

The Grand Old Duke of York

He heard a bugle sound

As he buckled on his sword and gun

His heart began to pound

He saw them in rows of five

He saw them in rows of ten

And they all lined up in front of him

'Till he had ten thousand men'' — Preceding unsigned comment added by EmeraldQueen001 (talk • contribs) 01:26, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

These extra verses would have been added much later --Dr zoidberg590 (talk) 23:49, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Tune of TGODOY and AHWWG
Until recently, this article said "It is sung to the tune of "A-Hunting We Will Go". Somebody removed this about 6 months ago. Because AHWWG has no Wikipedia article, this can be a challenge. Any discussion?? Georgia guy 20:14, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
 * The reference should not have been removed merely because of the lack of a corresponding WP article. That's what red links are for: when the corresponding article does someday emerge, this one will automatically link to it. I think the useful reference should be restored, and encourage you to do so. --StanZegel  (talk) 13:55, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
 * "A Hunting We Will Go" now redirects to this page - it is linked from other articles, such as "The Farmer in the Dell". There is essentially no information about "A Hunting We Will Go" here, or on any other page I can find. Definitely a hole which needs to be filled. 68.236.190.79 (talk) 00:03, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Extra verse
I learned a third verse, which was always sung.

Oh, a hunting we will go A hunting we will go We’ll catch a fox, and put him in a box And then we’ll let him go.

Some research to substantiate this could improve the article. I wonder if it is linked to the association of this rhyme with AHWWG? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C7:E287:1901:E91F:FE4:6812:F0DD (talk) 09:00, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

Personal Opinion
Removed this:

"HG - i believe it is about Richard III. He was the last King from the family of York, and usurped the throne in 1483. In the battle of Bosworth in 1485, in which he was killed by the army of Henry Tudor, he began as what many consider the stronger of the two, and took with him ten thousand men. He began the battle at the top of the hill and fought downwards ("he marched them up to the top of the hill and he marched them down again..."). Despite his larger army and advance, he lost."

Editor might well be right, but an encyclopaedia entry doesn't start with "I believe". - Shrivenzale 19:08, 28 October 2007 (UTC) (I made this change originally from another computer and didn't have my login details to hand.)

Shrivenzale might well be right, but it should be noted that the entire article is idle speculation and it might well be eliminated altogether, as reading it is a great waste of time for anyone. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Douglas W. Reynolds (talk • contribs) 11:40, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Quotes
Expect this to get reverted again as WP:MOSMUSIC calls for song titles to be in quotes, not "inverted commas" (around here we call this mark an apostrophe). --Gadget850 (talk) 00:25, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

In British English those are quotes. Conventions are different in British and American publishing. Both are usually accepted. Because the subject is originally British I used British conventions (as I would for spelling). If it was American I would use those, particularly under the guidelines on stability of articles. See American and British English differences --Sabrebd (talk) 00:28, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

--Gadget850 (talk) 00:43, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
 * You are entering ' which is a hex 27 which is an apostrophe
 * Inverted commas or single quotes are ‘ and ’ hex 91 and 92; see quotation mark
 * I don't particularly care, but don't be surprised to see this type of edit reverted as it is not covered in the MOS
 * If you are interested in pushing this you should discuss it at WP:MOSMUSIC

Its a fair point on hex 27. I have changed them.--Sabrebd (talk) 08:10, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Origin
"James II ... marched his troops to Salisbury Plain ..." No hills on Salisbury plain - please expand upon this tenious theory to maintain crdulity. Leegee23 (talk) 19:26, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

The Most Common Attribution
I am surprised that there is no mention of the most common reason for the attribution to the Napoleonic era Duke. This has been taught to my knowledge in the British Army since my grandfather's day and was certainly taught to me. The song was a sarcastic response of his fellow officers who objected to the fact that he was a keen professional and insisted that they forego their social lives to take part in manoeuvres, which they thought pointless. He is widely regarded as the originator of formation (rather than individual and unit) training in the British Army. DickyP (talk) 13:46, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
 * It is in the article. The big picture of his statue is a clue.--''' SabreBD  (talk ) 14:01, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I didn't say there wasn't an attribution - what I pointed out the absence of the 'real' reason for the attribution to him: his significant place in the history of military training as a discipline. DickyP (talk) 15:13, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Then why not get a reliable source and put it in?--''' SabreBD  (talk ) 16:11, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
 * British army traditions are, as often as not, rarely dependable sources of attribution, and this would seem to be no exception. Frederick, Duke of York, did promote standardisation of drill procedures to allow the efficient movement of troops in large formations, but it was Major General David Dundas, the officer that devised the system, who, known as "Old Pivot,' became the butt of some officers' humour. Whether or not it is deemed likely that Army officers  would sit down to pen satirical rhymes, it is clear from the multiple lyrics and no clear date of origin that,as with all nursery rhymes, a single historical point of origin can never be determined.

JF42 (talk) 13:32, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

If it was published in 1642, then how can it possibly be about Prince Frederick, born 1763?! (Or, for that matter, James II?) 82.46.70.132 (talk) 00:03, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

==

There was a Captain Kirk He had a thousand men He beamed them up onto his ship And beamed them down again

Now when you're up, you're up And when you're down, you're down And when you're only halfway up, You're nowhere to be found! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.141.89.35 (talk) 01:17, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

American Revolutionary protest song
I have received a story that the song was sung by frustrated Continental soldiers in response to the drilling occuring after Washington engaged Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. Anyone else? 2605:A601:46D:B01:CABC:C8FF:FEA5:82F4 (talk) 02:17, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Actions
In my experience, it has often been sung with the action of the singers reversed in alternate renditions, or in renditions chosen at random (or by an undisclosed pattern) and announced by the Leader. Or reversed for half of the participants, or with either the Leader or the others moving the wrong way. In any case, the chaos is thereby increased. 94.30.84.71 (talk) 21:13, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Battle of Turcoing
Although the battle of Turcoing was a debacle, and the allied attack failed to achieve any of its goals, the Duke of York's contingent, very much a minority partner in the alliance, as Prof. Black points out, aquitted itself well, as generally was the case durng the Flanders phase of the 1793-94 campaign. It was only after the indecisive battle of Fleurus  a month later (not mentioned by Black) that the Austrians abandoned Flanders and left York facing the French in overwhelming numbers and forced to retreat behind the water defences of the Lower Rhine in Holland.

The British army remained in the field for a further six month and it was this period of retreat and retrenchment that exposed his limitations as a commander, although he was let down by the government, his Dutch and Austrian allies  and by the elements. To some extent, a scapegoat was required for the failings of the British administration and inefficient military establishment, and so he was called back to London, never to rejoin his command. Ironically, it was only after his recall, that his army was forced to abandon Holland and make an ignominious retreat to Germany a full month after he had returned to London.

It should also be noted that, not only did York not excersise overall command in Flanders, but he also commanded the British expedition to the Helder in 1799 (another candidate for the song).

It might be more accurate to excise the reference to Turcoing and simply state: His most significant field command  was during the Flanders Campaign of 1793–4. Despite the British troops having some success against the French, in the summer of 1794 the Duke was obliged to retreat into the Netherlands and he was subsequently recalled to England.

This could have had a Double Meaning
Oh, the grand old Duke of York

He "had" ten thousand men; (teasing or mocking that he'd performed sexual acts with many males)

He marched them up to the top of the hill, (to have sexual relations)

And he marched them down again. (after the act)

When they were up, they were up, (when on the hill, they were erect)

And when they were down, they were down, (and when they came down, they weren't)

And when they were only halfway up,

They were neither up nor down. (on the ascent, they were semi-erect, in anticipation.) --Dr zoidberg590 (talk) 00:09, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Remember these were marching songs for soldiers, who need to keep their spirits up, with a bit of humour.

Since there is no support for this, in any source, this idea looks to be more about you than the Duke of York. 2A00:23C7:E287:1901:E91F:FE4:6812:F0DD (talk) 07:54, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

In popular culture
Following the Settlement of the Virginia Giuffre v. Prince Andrew case a satyrical version was developed. Oh the Grand old Duke of York, He had 12 million quid. He gave it to someone he never met, For something he never did. The edit above has been moved here pending discussion. There is no agreement on the reliability of the source cited and the article only says that the parody is "alleged" and "claimed". WP guidelines require a corroborative trustworthy source in such cases. It is questionable, anyway, whether topical items such as what is alleged are encyclopedically noteworthy in themselves; it will depend on whether the item remains so after the immediate occasion. As a precedent, items concerning former president Trump that were only briefly topical have routinely been deleted on WP and were so even during his term. Sweetpool50 (talk) 14:07, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

 * I agree with you. In fact, Daily Mirror is a tabloid, and tabloids are generally unreliable. Not to mention that the whole thing was rather trivial. Keivan.f  Talk 15:12, 24 February 2022 (UTC)
 * I also agree. This is a minor jingle that somebody has made up that will be forgotten almost immediately. Wikipedia isn't the place for that type of transitory stuff. MichaelMaggs (talk) 16:17, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

The original version seems to have appeared in a tweet dated 10:35 PM · Feb 15, 2022 by Balderdashing through the sloe @notDcfcBoss. A google search dated Before 16 Feb 2022 on "The grand old Duke of York" confirms this. The wording presented was: The grand old Duke of York He borrowed 12 million quid He gave it to someone He’d never ever met and for something he never did I can well imagine that people in the royal household may either have found this themselves, had it quoted to them or have come up with it independently. Huff post makes reference to the tweet. Time will tell if this version of the rhyme develops a more noteworthy level of traction. GregKaye 17:23, 6 March 2022 (UTC)
 * It seems that the parody has now made it to the commercial sector as reported by Clashmusic.com. I've tagged the item as spam for the moment since the source and its commercial wording seems suspect. The IP editor responsible states that he "honestly" can't see a problem with it. Are there any more comments,, , ...others? Sweetpool50 (talk) 22:42, 28 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I think right now it is totally out of place. The article must discuss the actual rhyme first, and then references in the popular culture should appear at the very end. Keivan.f  Talk 22:51, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

title: Talk:The Grand Old Duke of York