#princess jeongmyung

[swordsandparasols]

hello idk if you're caught up with the crowned clown but in episode 14, the queen asks the queen dowager to renounce her title and become a buddhist nun instead of being deposed and I'm wondering how the first option is safer (as the queen explains to her maid) for the king than the second? is it that one is irreversible and the other leaves a possibility for the queen dowager to be reinstated?

I’ve watched 14 but not 15.  (That last 2-3 percent to get subbed on viki always seems to be really important lines.)

It’s safer because one is voluntary and the other is forcibly removing her.  It also wasn’t incredibly unusual (though not common) for dowager queens to do so, and I think it was seen as kin of a gesture of “I’m tired and I trust you to take care of this.”

As Seonjo’s official queen, Queen Inmok was legally considered Gwanghae’s mother (despite being younger than him in history) so deposing her and confining her to a lesser palace was considered hugely unfilial.  While The Crowned Clown makes her most definitely an active conspirator who has tried to kill the king and harmed the queen, in history, she…well, she wasn’t innocent but most conspiring and plotting seems to have come later, and she also had a daughter Princess Jeongmyung, who could have also been seen as a threat to Gwanghae (and eventually was.)

In the show, Hasun and Hak San actively work to depose her against the protest of the courts but in history, it seems Gwanghae was very reluctant to act against Queen Inmok and Princess Jeongmyung, but was forced to depose Inmok and send her and Jeongmyung to a lesser palace by more powerful court officials early in his reign.  While Queen Inmok herself was probably mostly innocent at that point, it was true that her family had tried to replaced Gwanghae with her young son, so the show’sversion of the dowager hating and eventually conspiring against the king are pretty on point, it’s just that the timeline and her position at the time are altered.   At some point, Jeongmyung was thought to be dead, providing some of the inspiration for Hwajung, but I’m not completely sure where that fits in the timeline.  IT was definitely another contributing factor to  hating Gwanghae though.

What the queen s concerned about happening with deposing the Dowager Queen is what actually happens in history.  The treatment of Dowager Queen Inmok and Princess Jeongmyung ended up big strikes against Gwanghae in popularity.  When one of Gwanghae’s nephews, the future King Injo, started acting against him some years later (Injo is the basis for Prince Jinpyung, though the actual Injo would have been in his midteens at this point of The Crowned Clown in actual history, and wouldn’t become a factor until many years after Queen Inmok was deposed) he played up bigtime how terribly, TERRIBLY, his revered stepgrandma and auntie (who was some years younger than him) had been treated by that bully Gwanghae.  Even though Queen Inmok and Jeongmyung didn’t have much in the way of actual power, they were still influential, and as the only living legitimate child of the former king who was essentially forced to grow up in exile  (and had even disappeared for a time!) and had not been allowed to marry until well into her 20s, Princess Jeongmyung was pretty much a beloved tragic national figure.  A fair bit of Injo’s popularity came from effectively sucking up to them.

Whether or not he actually cared one bit about is aunt and grandmother’s plights was questionable, but he did  reinstate them into the palace and help Jeongmyung get married, and gave her lots of money and an island and she and her husband were apparently pretty happy together and had 8 kids who had a reasonably high survival rate into adulthood.

Anyway, to go back to the original question:  The Dowager Queen voluntarily becoming a buddhist nun had minimal chance of backfiring and harming the king, while forcibly deposing and exiling her (especially against the court’s wishes, as shown in the drama) would affect the king’s standing more and have a high probability of backfiring, and most viewers in South Korea heard all about how this went in history class.

[swordsandparasols]

Oh hey, I did not realize going in the The Tale of Nokdu was a “what if Prince Yeongchang lived” drama, or at least it looks like it might be.

Will this be the second show ever to remember that Princess Jeongmyung existed, or will Hwajung remain alone in that?

[swordsandparasols]

Gwanghae:  History vs The Crowned Clown

TVN’s much anticipated sageuk, The Crowned Clown has aired and…my feelings are somewhat mixed.  It’s good-certainly better than 100 Days Husband, and faster paced than the first episodes of Mr. Sunshine-but there are choices I question.  In particular, it’s taking the popular path of using violence against women to show abuses of power.  At this point it isn’t gratuitous, but if the show makes it a trend and makes it the main way to show the differences between the strong and weak in society and the palace, it could be a dealbreaker.  We’ll see how the next couple weeks go.

 The main point of this post, though, is the complicated and interesting history behind Gwanghae. The Crowned Clown is loosely based of Masquerade, a Prince & Pauper type story about Joseon’s fifteenth king, Gwanghae, who is quite the controversial figure, to the point where he’s one of only two of Joseon’s kings who was not given a posthumous title, instead sill being known by his princely title of Gwanhaegun.  (The other is Yeonsanggun, who is less controversial and more sraight up reviled.) I have not seen Masquerade (I intended to before the series started, but it didn’t happen) but The Crowned Clown is a “serial numbers filed off” version of history.  It sticks closer to history than, say, Grand Prince, or even some sageuks that don’t bother filing off the serial numbers.  The biggest divergences (outside of the core premise of the king having a performer who looks just like him temporarily take his place in the palace) are that principle figures are deaged considerably, and the size of the royal family being scaled down.  Unfortunately, this means some of the most interesting bits no longer apply.

 Gwanghae was the second son of Seonjo, with both he and his older brother being born to one of Seonjo’s consorts.  Seonjo had 23 children with 6 consorts, over half of them sons.  Unfortunately, not a single one of those 23 children were with his queen.  Fast forward some and an alarming number of those sons are reaching adulthood.  (Seonjo’s brood had a fairly decent childhood survival rate at this point.)  No crown prince has been selected and Queen Uiin unfortunately couldn’t get pregnant and produce a legitimate heir to conveniently solve the problem no matter how many temples she prayed at.  Also inconvenient was the fact that Seonjo’s oldest son, Imhae, was generally considered totally incompetent, so that easy route wasn’t a very good idea either.  

 Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on whether you’re a noble or royal with the means to head for the hills, or a commoner stuck dealing with invading armies) in 1591, the Japanese decided they would just cross over through Joseon in order to attack China, resulting in a full scale invasion.  Seonjo promptly sent a “The Japanese are coming!” letter to China and went of the defense.  IT didn’t do him much good though and in 1592, he and most of the court fled to the Ming border.  Who stayed behind?  Second prince Gwanghae, who spent the next seven years as the defacto ruler of Joseon, seeing to defenses and overseeing reconstruction.  (This is hat’s going on in the sageuk parts of Live Up To Your Name, and is the basis for the movie Warriors of the Dawn, which also feature Yeo Jin Goo as Gwanghae, but more age appropriate that time.)  After the war, making Gwanghae Crown Prince was now the easy and obvious choice.  He’d already done the job for over half a decade, after all.  Sure, he wasn’t the oldest or legitimate, both of which were generally preferable, but he was the best they had.

 Then in 1600, Queen Uiin died and Seonjo married the much much much (as in, younger than some of his kids) Queen Inmok, who promptly  gave him two legitimate children in the space of 6 years.  Princess Jeongmyung, who was no threat to the established status quo, and Prince Yeongchang, who very much was.  “What’s this?”  the court asked “A LEGITIMATE heir?  And a baby who will probably still be a kid when the king croaks and therefore easier for us to influence than that stubborn and strongwilled Gwanghae?  SIRE WE MUST HAVE A DISCUSSION!!!”  Suddenly that bit where Gwanghae effectively saved the country and did a good job ruling for seven years when they all ran off with their tails between their legs didn’t seem s important anymore.

 For better or worse, Seonjo died in 1608, when Prince Yeongchang was still a baby, and before any changes could be made regarding who the crown prince was.  This did not make significant parts of the court stop conspiring to replace Gwanghae with Yeongchang, and eventually Gwanghae was forced to send Yeongchang into exile, where he died the next year at 12 years old.  That Gwanghae either had him poisoned or one of his supporters took it upon themselves to have him poisoned on Gwanghae’s behalf  Is the generally accepted but, strictly speaking, not proven cause.  Somewhere around this time, Queen Inmok and Princess Jeongmyung are sent into exile.  As a side note, Jeongmyung was believed dead for a while, prompting the basis for the series Hwajung, which, to my knowledge, is the only show dealing with the period that acknowledges that she existed, though others have been happy to have Yeongchang secretly survive until adulthood.  The Dowager Queen and princess were also imprisoned and lived in near-poverty.  This part most likely was something forced by dominant court factions that Gwanghae couldn’t prevent, but that didn’t mean he didn’t get the blame.  Given that they believed him to be responsible for the little prince’s death, I’m sure they were also pretty happy to blame him for the situation.

 Despite the bad handling of some family things, Gwanghae ended up a pretty good king, though not popular.  He was a good politician, literary arts thrived under his rule (as long as you didn’t write Hong Gil Dong, that one went badly), he rebuilt multiple palaces that had been destroyed during the wars and redistributed lands to the common people.  He reintroduced identification cards, attempted to bring smaller political factions to the fore instead of the court being and endless battle between two dogs fighting over a bone with no other opinions getting a say, and attempted to implement systems to make taxation easier on citizens, but was unable to widely implement it, only successfully doing so in one province.  It did eventually spread to the rest of Joseon, but not until decades after he died.  Realizing that Korea could not realistically stand on the same ground as some other countries in terms of military might, he sought to strengthen foreign relations, with the Ming Empire, Japan, and the Manchus.

 During all this, though, well, he just wasn’t popular.  SOMETIMES PEOPLE JUST DON’T LIKE YOU! (And think you had the wrong mom.)  Plots were constant, causing paranoia to run high. (Given that he was later overthrown by his nephew-the much weaker King Injo-he was right to be paranoid.)  All this leads up to Masquerade, in which the appropriately aged Gwanghae seeks a double to help him avoid being assassinated.

 In The Crowned Clown, most, if not all, of this background is gone.  Gwanghae became king at 33 years old.  Yeo Jin goo is a decade younger and is playing a character the same age.  (Jang Hyuk’s Seonjo is also a good 20 or so years younger.)  Gone are the military accomplishments.  Also gone are all his siblings except for Yeongchang.  In addition, Queen Inmok is significantly older, not younger.  Yi Hun’s (this version of Gwanghae) paranoia starts almost immediately after he becomes king, including many violent outbursts.  With Yi Hun being so much younger and without the other siblings, but still illegitimate, the drama of his being crown prince while others prefer Yeongchang due to legitimacy is much more rote.  This isn’t to say it’s badly done or boring or without it’s own drama or problems because it isn’t, it’s just way less interesting and not nearly as charged as the actual history was.

 Given that this is a TV series that skews younger (and more female for the audience) than the movie, and that filing the serial numbers off  gives them more freedom with the ending, I’m guessing that we’ll eventually learn that Yi Hun’s paranoia and outbursts were at least partly due to being poisoned, and the series will end with him  becoming a better king, and the titular clown, Ha Seon, returning to his nomadic life, but with more awareness of how to fight injustice.  That or they’ll kill Yi Hun and Ha Seon will become king with only a few people any the wiser.  (It also wouldn’t surprise me if they revealed that Yeongchang’s death was faked.)  Given that Yeo Jin Goo is a much beloved former child actor-in part because of his many child and teen years spent playing the younger versions of leads in sageuks-who only very recently transitioned into adult roles, I don’t really expect a too-brutal ending.

 Incidentally, any time I’m reminded that Yeo Jin Goo is all grown up now, my reaction is along these lines:

 “He is what? No he isn’t he’s only 15.  YOUNG MAN WHY ARE YOU DOING PHOTOSHOOTS LIKE THIS BUTTON YOUR SHIRT RIGHT NOW!”

 This despite the fact that he’s always looked a bit older than his age due to having fairly broad and strong features.